Miles was late for the meeting.
As his platform touched down at the entrance facility, he could already see Fran waiting by the check-in structure. The three people with her were looking increasingly annoyed as she spoke to them using a lot of mid-paw gestures.
Task was there as well, standing well away from Fran and her adventurers, looking desolate and confused, and apparently not knowing which party he was meant to be joining.
Miles’ platform had barely touched the ground before he was off it, running toward Task.
He paused just long enough to speak to him.
“Hi, Task. Sorry I’m late. We just need to be over there.” Miles gestured toward Fran, then started heading in that direction.
Task fell in behind. “Apologies. I didn’t mean to be here before you.”
“No. It’s okay. I’m late. I got held up.”
Miles checked Task over as they hurried to the gathering point.
He noticed that the apprentice had made some preparations for the dive.
He was still wearing his skirt of woven brown fabric, but he was now also wearing a piece of iron-gray armor across his stomach, a pair of metal bracers, and he was carrying a round wooden shield the size of a dinner plate.
From his studies, Miles knew that the main Hurc heart was in the lower abdomen, where the stomach would be in a human. It was relatively unprotected, only covered by a plate of hard fibrous cartilage, and he wasn’t surprised to see Task wearing partial armor that protected the area.
There were probably limited threats that could be stopped by a wooden shield, but that was Task’s business. The apprentice didn’t seem to be carrying any weapons.
Fran turned to look at them as they approached, focusing on Miles.
“Glad you made it,” she said, sardonically.
Fran San-san-quirren looked the same way as the last time Miles had seen her, a gray-furred Eppan wearing a black synth trench coat over a garish yellow jumpsuit, the whole outfit covered in belts, straps, and small clip-on bags.
The pair of wildly different pistols Miles knew she carried were out of sight inside her coat, but she’d added a new weapon to her collection, a compact wide-barreled weapon like a stubby rifle that hung from the side of her backpack.
“Sorry,” Miles said, to Fran, but also including Task in the apology. “I didn’t realize so many platforms would be out of order from the storm. It took a while to get service.”
“Well, I guess you’ll know next time.” Fran turned to her clients and gestured at Miles for their benefit. “This is Miles, the healer I lined up for you all. I’ve dived with him before, he can patch up all your cuts and scrapes and whatnot. If it’s anything serious, let me know, and I’ll see what I’ve got in this old bag of tricks.”
Her group was made up of three humanoid sapients of the same species. Fran’s message had said they were called ‘The First People of Ashalai’ but in his medical books, they were just referred to as the Alpha Ashalai.
Each of them had two arms and two legs, as well as thick tails that swept down and rested on the floor. They were all hairless, and had faintly patterned skin that ranged from cloud-white to sand-yellow. They had large eyes and only a pair of raised slits in place of a nose, so couldn’t have passed for human, but they were closer than ninety percent of spiral species.
Their biology was reassuringly familiar, too.
They were a biochemistry C-13 species, which was basically C with a long list of exceptions. They had active blood vessels instead of a heart, but they had a stomach, a lung, and a liver-like accessory organ. They had an internal sense organ Miles wasn’t able to get the gist of, and three confusing multi-function blobs, but they were basically Miles’ biological neighbors.
“Hi,” Miles said to them. “I’m Miles, a Tier One healer. I’ll be helping to manage healing for Fran. This is my friend Task. He’s a mage, too.”
"Hello," Task said.
Fran pointed at them in order, starting with the tallest, yellow-skinned sapient, followed by the two smaller members of the group.
"Rolian, Sailish, Lanet. I got that right?" she said.
"Yes, greetings," Sailish said, seeming a little put off by Fran's tone.
Rolian was over six feet, with pale yellow skin and curling horns the color of burned charcoal. He was wearing soft fabric clothing that reminded Miles of a judo gi and a sling bag that hung at his back. There was a brass medallion dangling around his neck, covering enough of his chest that Miles wondered if it was a kind of armor, and he was armed with a straight sword that was almost as long as he was tall.
The black blade of the sword looked like it had been cut from some kind of giant insect.
Sailish was a little shorter, at about six feet. She had no horns, only a pair of blunt bony protrusions. Her white skin seemed to flow into the layered garment she wore, something like a long scarf that was wound around her body and secured with strategic pins. On her left hip, she wore a long dagger and a short dagger, and there was a harness on her back holding some kind of long uncomplicated rifle with a yellow metal barrel.
The third member of the group was the shortest of them. Five feet tall with white skin and the same attire as Sailish. Lanet had no horns, just smooth skin on the sides of their head, and they didn't seem to be carrying any equipment. As Miles inspected them, they also seemed to be humming with magic.
Miles didn't recognize their tradition. To his senses, it felt like a bright star, hot and dense.
Lanet's eyes snapped to Miles a moment after he sensed their magic, and the expression didn't seem particularly friendly.
“We were in time for the start of the cycle, but let’s see,” Fran said.
They passed through the entry procedures quickly, and were on a platform floating over the crater within a handful of minutes.
The rain misting their transport platform seemed to dampen Fran’s spirits, and it put Miles in the same mood, but there was some light conversation as they queued down to their level three entry point.
“The battles this world offers are legend,” Rolian said, gesturing at the landscape around them. “Hordes of creatures, a king’s ransom in treasures. Tell me, Fran, have you fought any worthy foes down here?”
"Oh? Sure, a few,” Fran replied. Miles thought she was humoring him. “When you get down below about level thirty, the spaces get bigger and the critters living down there do too. You only need to run into a craver once before you start feeling different about underground lakes."
Sailish spoke up, next. “On the moon of Red-Waiting we faced a Mist Corrupter. It was plaguing one of the cities of the Second People, and we alone had the fortitude to face it down. Rolian dealt it a decisive blow, and I pierced its brain with a shot from my sky-forged fire lance.”
Miles looked from Rolian’s sword to Sailish’s rifle. The rifle seemed like it might incorporate spiral tech, but neither were particularly advanced compared to Fran’s pistol or even his own striker.
“What kind of tech base do you have on Ashalai?” he asked, hoping it wasn’t a rude question.
If he was guessing right about the kind of society they came from, then he wasn’t sure what kind of answer he’d get, but he trusted whatever translation tools they were using to bridge the communication gap.
Sailish gave no sign that she was offended. “We lacked the means to visit even our closest moons before the Ending and the arrival of visitors from the sky. Now we have access to sky-forged tools and weapons, which we use to assist our mages.”
No advanced technology, Miles guessed. He’d known in advance that there were some cultures in the spiral who’d bowered without having significant levels of tech, but they were rare, and he’d never encountered anyone from one of them before.
“It was nigh on one hundred years ago that the skywyrms came, bringing their philosophy and technology,” Rolian said, wistfully.
“Gilthaens,” Fran corrected.
“Ashalai was never the same,” the man went on. “How petty our problems seemed. Wars, villains, saints, all of it. We were cast as children in a play that stretched beyond the heavens.”
“How did your world even have a bower break, if you didn’t have technology?” Miles asked.
On Earth, the prevailing theory was Earth’s bower had been the result of large-scale zero point energy extraction, but the cause differed from iteration to iteration. Some worlds knew for certain that a specific grand technological project or astronomical event had triggered the collapse.
Sailish spoke up to reply. “Our historians think it was the fault of Lord Daivish the Sinister. At the time of the Ending, he had construed a new magic, one that he hoped would allow him to move an entire army across continents and drop them directly into his enemy’s strongholds.”
“Subspace tunneling, most like,” Fran said, staring off into the drizzle. “Mess with the fabric and you’re liable to get tears.”
“The scar of his spell still mars our world today,” Sailish said. “A ravine of chaotic land through which no living thing can pass.”
“Yeah, you fucked with your space alright,” Fran muttered.
“I’m glad it happened,” Lanet said into the silence that followed. Their tone sounded bitter.
Rolian and Sailish shot Lanet shocked glances, but didn’t respond.
“We didn’t know it, but we were small,” Lanet went on. “We’re still small. When we measure ourselves against the stars, we have our chance to be better.”
“Uhuh,” Fran said. “We’re coming up on our entrance now.”
The platform touched down just inside a corridor that jutted from the crater wall like an outflow pipe from a house. There was just enough space for the circular disk to lodge in the corridor, and they all stepped off.
There was a door blocking the way, but it wasn’t even locked. Fran opened it with a single tap of its access panel.
The first few rooms they passed through looked like hangars, wide open spaces with concrete floors and ribbed metal ceilings fifty meters or more above them.
There were no ships or personal transports, unfortunately.
Fran identified some tanks as holding reduction fuel, but the kind of ships that burned it weren’t common and it was dangerous to store, so she said it wasn’t worth salvaging.
They broke open an equipment cabinet that turned out to contain rebreather devices for type B biochemistry which Fran quickly bagged for resale, and a row of lockers held flight suits that looked designed for geometrically impossible beings. They left them alone, Miles feeling slightly unnerved.
Toward the back of the third hangar, they found a trolley full of levitation units that Rolian declared they should divide up between them.
Fran made what Miles assumed was a rude gesture behind her back with a mid-paw, out of his sight, but she didn’t argue with Rolian giving away the salvage. Miles thought they probably weren’t worth enough to argue about it.
The levitation units were low-powered versions designed to attach to cargo bins, not much more than a handle bolted to a clamp, but Miles still amused himself with his as they walked, holding it at his side and seeing how much of his weight he could balance on it. Moving it around felt like dragging an unusually heavy balloon, buoyant in the air, but with the inertia of a brick.
The three large hangar rooms were connected by huge hangar doors, big enough for moderate-sized ships to fly through, for all that there probably wouldn’t ever be a ship down there, but the third hangar ended in one of the normal dungeon doors, unnecessarily tall and weirdly narrow.
“Anyone want to take a crack at this one?” Fran asked, like she was a tour guide offering to let them have a go on an interactive installation.
Task looked around at the others. When nobody stepped forward he spoke up. “Apologies. I will try, if you don’t mind?”
“Knock yourself out,” Fran said.
Task stepped up to the door, looking it up and down. He brushed his hand against it, like he was feeling for something, then stepped back.
Miles felt magic growing within the apprentice almost immediately.
Like Master Oron in the Enclave, Task's magic had the feel of surging water, but while Oron's had been a wave, Task's use of the tradition felt like water bubbling up from a spring.
The apprentice raised his hand and spoke. The word seemed to rush across the room before crashing against the door.
Miles felt a complex knot of meanings in the sound. Open and Yield and You've been closed for long enough already.
The door mechanism stuttered for a second, like it was falling over itself to comply, and then the door rolled open.
“Okay. That works,” Fran said.
She took a step forward toward the door, then stopped. Miles came up behind her, peering past her through to the next room.
Visible through the doorway was a strange cityscape.
The ground was paved in huge slabs of stone forming roads and sidewalks that stretched out for hundreds of meters before disappearing in fog.
On either side of the road were rows of solid stone buildings four or five stories tall, with faces that were dotted with dark rectangular windows, bare and open, cut out of the stone in random sizes and at random orientations.
Doorways almost at ground level yawned open on pitch black interiors, and all Miles could see of the insides of the structures was that the walls of the room stood at odd angles.
The height of the ceiling above them was hard to guess. The ceiling — there had to be a ceiling — was lost in the mist that hung across the streets, and the only illumination came from two bright circles of light in the false sky, one white, one red.
"What in my father's name?" Rolian said, stepping through the doors into the deserted city.
Sailish and Lanet followed next, not waiting for an instruction from Fran.
Miles glanced at Fran, looking for a cue on how they should proceed. She wore a concerned expression, and seeing it, Miles found the feeling contagious.
Task only had eyes for the chamber up ahead, staring through the door with an awed expression
Fran stepped through a second later, moving to the front of the group as if trying to regain control of the situation.
“Yeah, impressive, isn’t it,” she said. None of the concern of a second ago showed in her voice. “We in the community call this an environ. It’s probably some real place that got reflected into the dungeon wholesale. There might be some viable salvage here, or maybe not, it’ll depend on the place it’s trying to copy.”
“Why does it copy places?” Miles asked. “What’s the point?”
Fran went up to one of the buildings, splitting her attention between peering through the door and reading off the screen strapped around her wrist.
“Well, that’s one of the big questions of the place, isn’t it. Maybe it’s an automated system dreaming its way through sensor data. Or is it habitat tech trying to build us a place to live? Maybe it’s some kind of physical data storage. I’ve read about a million theories on the caucus boards, not getting into what the academics think.”
Their group walked a few meters further into the city.
Behind them, the door back to the hangars was set into a huge stone wall that stretched off to the left and right, disappearing into the fog that blanketed the place.
Seeing such a huge world-enclosing wall next to a city that otherwise might look like it was outside was jarring and dizzying to Miles, like walking through a scale model built by giants.
In the lull of silence that followed, Miles switched between Eyes of the Emigre and Eyes of the Altruist, staring out into the mist as far as he could. He trusted Fran to keep them updated on their surroundings, but found it reassuring to check for himself.
“What are the caucus boards?” Miles asked after a few seconds, following Fran as she hopped up onto the ledge of an almost-ground floor window.
Fran peered inside, saw something that interested her, and hopped through. Miles clambered up to the window after her.
She was going for a long stone coffin-like box positioned toward the back of the chamber.
Feeling the knot in his stomach rise briefly to his throat, Miles checked the box with Eyes of the Altruist, but the magic didn’t reveal any glowing lights other than Fran.
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“What was that?" she said absently, looking down at the box. "Oh. The caucus. Sure. It’s a multi-user comm exchange. You can send messages, start topics, ask questions. If anyone knows and they’re feeling charitable, they can answer. There should be one under 'Ialis Caucus' if you’re searching on the Exchange.”
An internet forum? Miles thought.
Fran grabbed the top of the stone chest and pushed, sliding the top a few inches to the side. She peered through the gap into the interior.
“Huh.”
“What is it?” Miles asked.
Out in the street, their clients were inspecting some kind of collapsed obelisk, a rectangular pillar of stone that looked like it had been standing at a street corner, but was now lying across the road.
In the room, Fran pushed the lid the rest of the way off, sending it tumbling to the ground with the sharp thump of dropped stone.
She reached into the chest and lifted out what looked like a flat rectangle of metal, four feet long and maybe six inches wide. It was a dull copper color, reflecting the light from the window, but not showing any reflection.
“Huh,” Fran said again.
She manipulated the piece of metal in her hands, turning it, putting stress on it. Finally, she put the piece down on the edge of the chest and turned her attention to the device on her wrist. She spent a minute operating it.
“I can’t find this metal’s profile in the database. Weird one. This is worth taking, I think.”
Miles leaned back out of the window, calling to the group of Ashalai, who were arguing next to the obelisk.
“Hey! Hey, sorry to interrupt. We have some potential salvage in here.”
The three sapients looked at each other, but only Lanet broke away to come to the building. They hopped up and through the window.
Miles scanned the city with Eyes of the Altruist before turning back to look inside the building.
Fran hefted a bundle of the short metal planks, standing them against the wall.
Lanet approached, pulling a piece from the stack onto its edge. They lifted it a few inches off the ground, showing obvious strain, before putting it back down with the others.
"What are they for?" Lanet asked.
"Likely not 'for' anything," Fran said. "They're here as a mistake, like as not, or a messed up version of something that made more sense in the real place. Seems strong though, reckon it's going to be worth something as scrap."
Fran had a coil of synth fiber rope hanging from her pack. She unclipped it as she spoke and started tying it around the bundle of scrap. She wrapped it at both ends, leaving a long piece between the two knots that she slipped over her shoulder when she came to pick it up. The weight didn't seem to bother her at all, as they performed a quick but fruitless search of the rest of the building.
Back on the street, they met back up with Rolian and Sailish.
“Rolian believed this was a territory marker for groups living in the city,” Sailish said, indicating the collapsed obelisk. “Unfortunately the meaning of the text eludes us.”
Fran spent no more than a second scrutinizing it. “Doesn’t mean much to me, either, it’s something that got messed up in the copy, I’d guess.”
The faces of the obelisk were engraved with a border of blocky geometric text that ran around the outside of each side. It had cracked horizontally at some point, interfering with Miles’ translation ability, but part of the text was still readable.
‘Ymn Quarantine Zone - Ymn Quarantine Zone - Ymn Quarantine Zone.’
“It’s the same phrase over and over,” Miles said in the silence. “Ymn Quarantine Zone. Ymn would be the name of the city, I think?”
Task crouched by the obelisk, running his hand across the engravings, like he had with the door.
“Huh. Wonder what was happening in the original place. My language pack’s pretty good, so it must’ve been somewhere off the map.” Fran stopped speaking suddenly, and spent a minute working on the scanner strapped to her wrist. She looked up. “Just checking for reflected pathogens. This place is pretty sterile.”
They left the obelisk behind, continuing to walk through the city.
Having seen the stone chest in the house, Fran was able to calibrate her scanners to look for them, and she led them to four more as they wandered through the deserted cityscape.
One of them had been empty, but two held sheets of a dull silver fabric of a size and shape that made Miles think they might have been alien tents, or maybe uncut sheets that were meant to be refined later on.
The fabric also had properties that interested Fran, and they’d bundled them up into rolls that Miles and Task had been burdened with.
As they walked, Miles let his mind wander to the events of that morning. He was still thinking about the fake call on the cell phone-like device he’d found in the forest room, and Fran seemed like she’d seen enough of the dungeon to have an opinion on it.
After the last stone chest that Fran had been able to locate, Miles found a chance to leave Task’s side and move up beside Fran.
He matched pace with her and spoke in a low voice.
“Hey, Fran? Have you ever got a call from a dungeon comm device?” Miles asked.
“What the hell are you talking about?” Fran replied.
Miles felt a little shocked at her tone. Something about the strange stone city seemed to be making her irritable. She was distracted, splitting her attention between the party ahead of them and the city around them. Miles felt like a distant third consideration.
Having raised the topic, he kept on anyway.
“On my last run I found a replica comm device from my home planet,” Miles explained. “Normally they make calls, send messages, normal comm stuff, but this one was dead. I thought it was just a mangled piece of tech. I heard the dungeon makes things like that sometimes.”
“Yeah, so it does,” Fran said. “They look like they could be the real thing, but you’ll open them up, and the insides will be all messed up. Screen wired straight into batteries, components stuck into the case, weird non-tech stuff plugged into ports…”
“Well, I got a call on this one.”
Fran didn’t seem too interested. “Okay, then it works. I’ll bet it’s picking up signals from another device.”
“That’s…”
Miles struggled with how to explain the depth of how unlikely that was. As far as Miles knew, he was the first human on Ialis, and even if he wasn’t, nobody else was going to be bringing a cell phone out here. A lot of advanced pre-bower electronics wouldn’t even work properly outside of Solar space.
“They’re not like spiral comms,” Miles said. “They don’t work on their own. They need radio towers and computers we don't have out here. There’s no way it could be picking up just some random signal.”
The cell phones of old Earth had a range measured in tens of miles. He wasn’t picking up signals from a planet trillions of miles away.
Fran seemed extremely uninvested, either because she had a low opinion of Miles, or because something about the dive had put her in the wrong headspace to feel curious about it.
“Kid, with the tech Ialis makes, we just don’t know how it’s working.”
Miles was still conflicted between giving up or making another effort to convince her that it wasn’t normal.
He was just about to try again when a noise rang out from somewhere to their left.
A long, pure, brassy note, like a horn, but with enough minor variation to sound somehow biological. Halfway between an air raid siren and whalesong.
The entire group stopped, turning to look in that direction.
There were places where the streets cut through buildings, but nothing was lined up, and all they could see were rooftops.
“What was that?” Sailish asked. She sounded excited.
Miles thought that excitement was the exact opposite of what they should be feeling after hearing something like that in a place like the dungeon.
Fran looked spooked. That upset Miles as much as the noise. She was meant to be an experienced self-reliant diver.
“That’s our signal to leave, I reckon,” Fran said.
“Leave?” Rolian said. “But we only just arrived.”
“That we have, but this place has started reminding me of a story I heard once, and I don’t like that sound at all.”
“What story?” Lanet asked, speaking for the first time in several minutes.
The trumpet sound came again. It was closer, and it’d changed direction.
The wall with their entrance was still just visible through the mist behind them, a vast barrier of stone, and the source of the noise sounded like it was getting closer to it.
“Tell you what, walk out with me now and we can reschedule this one, free of charge,” Fran said. speaking to the party. “Doesn’t feel like a good day for diving any deeper.”
She started walking back in the direction of their entrance. She’d drawn her silver pistol, and was looking across the city to the right, in the direction of the sound.
Miles shared a look with Task. The apprentice looked calm and placid, in contrast with how Miles felt, but Miles’ met his eyes and saw agreement. They both started following after Fran.
Miles looked back as they set off. Their clients were conferring behind them, not yet committed to leaving.
He spent a few seconds wrestling with whether it was more important to stay and look after the clients, or to listen to Fran as his employer, or to prioritize his own safety in the face of the obviously correct decision to leave. He picked the second option, obeying Fran, though if she weren’t there, he suspected that he might have picked the latter.
After about twenty seconds of deliberation, the adventurers apparently decided Fran was right and started following, quickly catching up.
“What story?” Miles asked as he came alongside Fran, repeating Lanet’s question.
Fran glanced at him before replying. “About a fixed location. A room with stone buildings that doesn’t get recycled. I’ve heard it called the Ruins. The story was something about a deep diver’s team getting killed off, and him the only one escaping. You get a lot of ghost stories from the deeper levels. It’s just old-timer talk, but I do well by being cautious.”
A moment later, Miles caught sight of something moving beyond the buildings up ahead. A glimpse of gray skin on something tall enough to be seen over the twenty-meter-high rooftops.
The top of a head?
“There’s something—” Miles started.
“I see it,” Fran said, interrupting.
Behind and to the left of Miles, magic surged up, and he turned in time to see Task casting a spell. This time when the energy surged, the word he spoke seemed to wash out over all of them.
Miles was pretty sure that the word meant ‘Endure’, ‘Rebound’, and ‘Against strength, defense is fair’.
The brassy, piping call came again, just as the thing stepped out into the street ahead of them.
Twenty feet tall, but no more than a foot wide. It had corpse-gray skin stretched over its entire body, a pair of legs as thin and bony as Miles’ wrists jointed in several places at different angles, and a head like a deformed pencil eraser. There were horizontal slits down the left side of its head, like vents or gills, opening on a black space beneath its face. It didn’t have any other features. No arms, no clothes, no mouth.
As it came into view it blasted another trumpet note that made Miles’ insides feel like water.
“Let’s find another route outta here,” Fran said sternly, turning the group and heading back in their original direction.
Miles and Task followed without urging.
“It’s monstrous,” Sailish shouted behind them.
Fran, Task, and Miles were running headlong away from the thing. Miles cast a look backward at the others, and slowed to a stop. Their clients weren’t following.
“Fran,” he called. When she glanced back he pointed at the stationary adventurers.
Rolian had taken a stand, his sword drawn, his back straight. He stared at the thing like he was challenging it.
Sailish was there too, her rifle drawn and aiming down the open street.
“Ah hell.” Fran brought them to a stop, raising and aiming her pistol at the thing.
Lanet was the only one of the three adventurers running. They came to a stop by Fran, their shoulders trembling.
In this distance, Miles could just hear Salian shouting.
“Come! Test your strength against me.”
The tall creature was already advancing on the Ashalai, though Miles didn’t think that had anything to do with the challenge.
It moved in stop-start motions, bursts of scuttling speed separated by seconds of motionless silence.
When it reached where Rolian was standing, he swept his sword at it in a low slice, aiming to cut through its lowest joints.
The second the sword touched the thing, the weapon vanished from Rolian’s hands. There was a loud cracking sound in the same instant. The ruins of a black sword, now nothing but fragments, had perforated the stone wall of a nearby building.
Rolian staggered backward, unbalanced from his weapon being knocked from his hands at insane speeds.
Sailish took aim with her rifle and fired. A forking beam of yellow light emerged from the barrel, spearing through the air toward the towering figure. The beam hit, and then glanced off. The reflected light scorched holes through stone walls, before Sailish let the beam end and lowered the gun.
The spindly giant took a step forward and made contact with Rolian.
The same thing that had happened to his sword happened to the man, except that the pieces didn’t travel as far.
The giant kept moving, faster, scuttling through the cone-shaped smear of purple that now decorated the road, leaving purple footprints on the street as it headed straight for Sailsh.
Sailish was making a wailing noise as she turned to run.
Miles was already running. Fran and Lanet were around him, Lanet quickly outpacing them, with Task a little way behind, apparently struggling in the straight sprint.
Task had dropped the roll of cloth he’d been carrying as well as the shield he’d brought with him, but he was still flagging.
Fran stopped for a second, giving him a chance to catch up while she aimed her pistol at the giant.
Miles slowed with her. He didn’t think his striker would do anything against the monster, but he let himself fall into Eyes of the Altruist and concentrated on bringing up the ringing tone of Strike the Disharmonious.
Nothing.
The giant didn’t seem to have any internal structure at all. That had to mean that it wasn’t alive, or that it was opaque to the magic.
Strike the Disharmonious also failed. He managed to bring the note of the spell up, but when he focused on the giant, he didn’t hear harmony or disharmony; the sound disappeared completely, and only returned when he looked away.
Fran lined up her shot and fired. The thin beam of energy was right on target, piercing the giant’s head, but it didn’t seem to have any effect. The shot wasn’t reflected this time, but the giant continued its scuttling stop-start motion forward.
Fran resumed running, tapping on her scanner bracelet even while her feet were drumming against the ground.
“I can see a way down,” she said through heavy breathing. “We’ll drop down a level and find a route to that level’s exit.”
Sounds good, Miles thought. In that moment almost any alternative would have sounded good.
The giant took a step and was suddenly thirty meters ahead of where it had been. It had made a jump that was too fast to see, or it had some other way of moving. It did it again a few seconds later, now no more than a stone’s throw behind them.
Task was struggling with the escape the most out of all of them. Dropping behind, Miles focused on summoning his magic for Temporary Enhancement. He put his hand against the small of Task’s back as he recalled the litany.
In himself, he is complete. In a Harmonious world, he is allowed to remain complete. He is that which he is.
Miles focused on Task’s Speed, the ability of his body to respond and react quickly. He imagined that ability being taken to the logical conclusion, being made into a paragon of itself, and willed that truth through the hot energy that splashed across the Hurc’s back.
Task took off as if Miles and the others were standing still. He quickly pulled out ahead, then realized how much progress he was making, and glanced back for direction.
As they’d sprinted through the city, the buildings had changed slightly. They were no longer entirely open. Windows were covered in meshes of the same coppery metal that Fran was still carrying on her shoulder. The doorways were now blocked by doors, rectangles of the metal that ended in curved peaks.
Fran was pointing at a closed door ahead of them.
Task was the first to reach it, running into it with the expectation it would swing open, then bouncing off when it remained shut. He stood off against it, and Miles felt magic rising in him.
Task had his opening spell cast in the time it took the rest of the group to reach him. When the word reached the door, it didn’t swing open so much as fall inwards.
They all fell through the doorway into the darkened interior of the room behind.
Miles paused, resting against the interior wall, breathing heavily and wondering if Hasten Renewal would help him recover from being winded.
He glanced back out of the door and let out a choked scream when he saw the giant was less than five feet away from them, just outside.
“Down the chute,” Fran ordered, pointing at a section of the room where the floor seemed to disappear at the far wall, leaving a deep, black passage dropping away at a nearly vertical angle.
Miles ran up to it, looking down. “You’re joking.”
Instead of answering, Fran grabbed the levitation unit she’d salvaged from the hangar rooms, flipped the switch, and dived feet-first down the hole.
Lanet went next, flaring with a starburst of unfamiliar magic, before she disappeared into the dark.
Miles and Task were left standing at the top of the chute. Miles struggled to get his levitation unit free from his belt, while looking Task up and down.
“Do you have your lev unit?”
“Apologies! I dropped it.”
Miles flipped the switch of his, feeling it hum to life with its unnatural lift.
“Okay. I guess, hold on to me.”
Task wrapped his arms around Miles’ shoulders, while Miles held as tightly to the device as he could and stepped out over the edge.
They’d only fallen a few meters, when the door struck the stone wall above them with a sound like thunder. The wall exploded with the speed of the impact, fragments of rock raining down on them, followed by the metal door itself.
Miles had no way to protect himself. Rocks struck his head. A corner of the door hit his shoulder as it fell past them, pulling a grunt of pain out of him.
He somehow kept hold of the levitation unit’s handle.
Together, they fell. Not quickly. The levitation unit exerted a constant upward force, trying to keep them at a consistent level. Its force wasn’t enough to keep both of them aloft, but it slowed their fall to the speed of a slow run.
Lanet had dropped straight down and had vanished in the darkness. Fran was nearby, descending a lot faster. The extra weight of scrap metal she still carried was probably overloading her levitation unit.
Task clung on to Miles, an arm around his shoulder and one around his back. The protective stomach plate the apprentice wore pressed into Miles through his robe, and Miles’ own sweat-slicked skin must have made him a hard thing to keep hold of.
Struggling to hold both their weight, Miles focused on the Temporary Enhancement spell. He didn’t have a way to touch himself to deliver the spell, but the senior harmonizer at the Enclave, Master Curious, had suggested he didn’t need to.
He recited the litany to himself, focusing on his own completeness and his own strength.
At the crescendo of his core’s rotation, he felt warm energy wash out from it, not along his arm, but into his body. The pressure on his arms seemed to lessen, and they drifted downwards without any danger of Miles losing his grip.
Fran soon outpaced them, disappearing into the darkness after Lanet.
As they fell, Miles could feel Task shaking against him. The apprentice had seemed fine in the city above, but catching glimpses of his face from inches away, Miles thought he looked terrified.
Pretty soon they passed into pitch darkness, and Miles couldn’t see even an inch in front of his face anymore.
The fall lasted what seemed like minutes. The first sign of it ending was a patch of glowing shapes far below.
Miles had switched to Eyes of the Altruist as soon as the light had faded, and it was clear that he and Task weren’t going to be doing much talking. He’d wanted to make sure they weren’t falling through a spider nest, or into the maw of some kind of massive creature.
Instead, what he saw below them was a cluster of shapes he quickly identified as Fran and Lanet.
They grew larger as Miles fell, and soon he could see them with his regular vision, lit up by a bead of light that Fran had stuck to her trench coat.
The landing was rough on Miles’ ankles, and Task ended up on his back, but they weren’t badly hurt.
Miles bent over, breathing heavily, stretching his hands out on his thighs. Task was on his rear end, with his back to a wall.
As soon as he’d caught his breath a little, Miles looked past Fran to see where they’d landed.
The shaft had opened in a stone ceiling, dropping them onto the cliff at the end of a long, underground ravine. The narrow crack stretched out below them, mostly dark, but lit at random points by dull red glowing stones. It was cold, the damp air cutting through Miles’ new clothes and fogging his breath.
It was hard to remember they were still in the artifact at all, and not in the natural underground caves of a planet.
Fran sighed, seeing Miles and Task landing safely.
“Welcome to level four,” she said, dryly. “We’ve got a minute. Take a breather. We’ve still got two hours until the next shuffle.”
Below the sheer cliff face, the dark ravine had no sign of doors, or any of the familiar dungeon construction.
Fran seemed more relaxed, now, but Miles didn’t feel like they could even spare a minute.