Chicc'coargoah. In Drekalchan, chicc descended from chik, which as a location prefix became Temple City. Coar-goah translated literally as routine annoyance.
Sometimes city names needed a more figurative reading to make sense, but not this time. Temple City of Routine Annoyance suited Chicago just fine as far as Jarv was concerned.
One routine annoyance was that he couldn't just enter a public building, climb to the roof, and jump off. Not without interference. There were security guards. There were strictly delineated opening hours. Why? If a building was going to have round the clock security anyway, why did opening hours matter?
Jarv's legs were cramping from hiding behind a bush on the roof of the John Hancock Tower, one of the surprisingly few needle-spires that would let members of the public onto the open top of the building.
They'd made the area up into a small garden. Wooden decking covered the ground, with planters for small bushes and trees dotted around.
With the hearing granted by the Setae of Nix-nix-chitallias-desth, avoiding the operative the building had sent to clear the roof had been simple. She hadn't seemed to have military training. Just a civilian retainer of the building's security force, he guessed. She seemed to have been relying more on people's willingness to comply, hoping that trespassers would give themselves up just because they weren't supposed to be there, rather than any threat of force or discovery.
That was a pattern Jarv had noticed a few times since his arrival in the city. Authority relying on submission and expectation instead of enforcement.
He remembered Gabe, the beleaguered man in the electronics store, who worked in an endeavour he not only didn't own, but had no stake in. How did the owners of the establishment maintain order when the workers had full access to a wealth of extremely fragile devices? How could they dare offer even one harsh word to their workers, when the people on the shop floor held the endeavour's fragile heart in their hand?
In Drek'thelamagne the entire stock would be wrecked at the first lost temper. Here, apparently not so much.
Jarv had struggled since that day with the question of why so many of the things here were fragile. How they were allowed to be so fragile.
As he stood up and looked around the roof, he saw the same pattern reflected in the city itself. Towers of glass, Needle spires. If a tower of glass was fragility incarnate, then what was a city of them? What else, but an overwhelming fragility. An unbearable fragility.
What happened when something became unberable? Could it have become inverted? A fragility so great that it became strength. Or maybe, an assurance that there was never such a thing as fragility to begin with.
Jarv strode to the edge of the roof, looking out at the city skyline.
It was beautiful at night, he'd give it that. Stunning. Ruinous.
The building swayed slightly beneath his feet, shivering in the wind with a subtlety he might not have felt without the Setae.
He had with him Eind's draurferric generator. A steel cylinder about a forearm's length across and a hand deep, holding the stormworm scales – actual parts of the creature – whose physical properties could convert the storm energy favoured by the locals into natural draurferric energy.
One of Earth's power conduits hung from one side, plugged into the native energy storage device suggested by the staff of Lincoln Electronics.
A rubber tube emerged from the top of the cylinder, a channel for the draurferric field, ending in a metal needle which was the part that would actually emit the energy into the environment.
He also had one of the hard-wearing native belt pouches, a small bag held closed by a zipper, pulled tight around his waist by a band of the same material and an ingenious clipping device. That held his ordinary draurcraft tools. Chalk, silver suspension, paintbrush, set-angles.
In the distance the blimp floated into view, doing its rounds above the gladiatorial arena at Wrigley's Field.
The sun was not half an hour set, but the sky should be dark enough to cover his approach. There was a competition going on in the arena that night, with many spectators, but once he was on top of the balloon he should be able to work unobserved.
The blimp drifted out, then back into view. Jarv took a slow breath and hoisted the generator onto his back, pulling the strap tight across his chest.
He'd only have one chance at getting onto it. If he missed, he wouldn't be able to get back into the tower to try again. Not to mention the damage the fall might do.
The blimp slowed, banking as it slowly turned. This was the moment.
Jarv closed his eyes and looked into his soul. He sought out the Flight of the Dragonbat token.
It's passive benefit was negligible, a little more agility when moving at speed, a little lighter on his feet while falling, but when fully activated it offered a rare power.
He activated it now. The power surged, and his dress shirt bulged at the back. There was a moment of pressure, then a tearing sound as a pair of leathery wings burst through the fabric.
Jarv stretched to his full height and unfolded the wings behind him.
They each were twelve feet long, semi-real, tipped with climbing hooks. In full daylight the skin stretched between the bones was a shimmering purple, but that nuance was lost in the darkness, rendering them black.
They wouldn't give him perfect flight. The token had fallen inactive when he'd used it, and now that they had manifested, the wings would beat only one-hundred and eleven times before their energy was exhausted.
With the height and location of the tower he'd chosen, it should be enough to reach the balloon and then slow his fall when he was done.
He fixed his sights on the blimp, backed up a few steps, and made a running jump off the side of the roof.
For a jaw-clenching moment he was falling, tasting the copper of adrenaline on the roof of his mouth, and then he beat his wings. The first powerful motion arrested his fall, and the second lifted him up.
One beat. Two beats.
Passing one of the glass towers he caught sight of people moving around inside. He hadn't accounted for being spotted by the people in the buildings.
Oops.
He beat the wings ten more times, gaining altitude, lifting himself up above the sky-piercing needles, putting himself on a level with the blimp.
Thirteen. Fourteen.
He began flapping in a sudden flurry, bringing himself further up, above the blimp so that he could look down on it and approach from above, unseen and unheard.
Twenty five. Twenty six.
A flock of large white birds appeared in his path, crossing diagonally infront of him. Jarv swore, lifting his hands to cover his face as they passed by only inches away.
One swiped the back of his head, and he felt another go through one of his wings. The semi-corporeal limb wavered for a moment, costing him a few strides of altitude, before it re-cohered.
If that had broken he'd have fallen to his death, or possibly lots of other people's deaths. He hadn't accounted for birds.
He continued flapping towards the blimp, and after seventy wing beats he felt he was in position.
He spread the wings and let himself glide, flying slowly downwards towards the blimp, backed by the brightly lit green field of the arena.
It came slowly up beneath him as he flowed forward, a whale-sized shape, looming out of the darkness. Its shiny skin reflected light during the day, but now it reflected the near-darkness of the night sky.
The sides of the craft were studded by lights. Each one was just a simple point of illumination, but they were structured into a matrix that, by alternating which ones were active, images and text could be rendered out.
Jarv took a moment to read one of the messages, amused to discover it was an advertisement for a beverage.
He touched down on the blimp perfectly at its center, and immediately skidded off. The surface was wet, slick with condensation, or rain he hadn't noticed. The slip pitched him off the far side, and he spent a furious six wing beats catching himself and turning to make another pass.
This time when he touched down, he angled himself to land face-first, his whole body landing flat on the top. He skidded slightly, but his clothes soaked up the surface water, and putting more of his body against it helped him catch himself.
When he'd fully stopped he rose to his feet.
His legs were shaky under him from the unstable footing. His arms and shoulders were weak from the panic energy of the near-fall.
He'd fought battles and grappled with maddening forces, but danger had never got comfortable. However many psychological scars he carried, moments like this always took him back to the nervous core of who he was.
The sky above the blimp was clear, few clouds, the stars hidden by the ambient light shining up from the city. There were no birds nearby, and the stands of the arena below were mostly out of sight below the angle of the balloon.
Jarv carefully unstrapped the generator from his back and lowered it to the surface of the blimp. He tangled the strap around his ankle, so that it wouldn't slide off and kill one of the contestants playing on the field below.
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He unwound the rubber hose, then pushed the metal needle at its end against the skin of the blimp until it penetrated. There was no hissing sound of escaping air, which was one potential failure point dodged.
Next he reached down and pressed the control to activate the native energy storage vessel. A small dot on its end lit up, but there was no other obvious outward change.
Eind had calculated that the draurferric generator would take about two hours to charge the air inside the blimp sac with energy. Indrie had made observations of the blimp and reported that it left the city for wherever it made port at 10PM in the evening – a little over two hours from now. In theory that should give Jarv time to draw the diagram on the blimp's surface, perform the tokenization, then depart before he got trapped in whatever warehouse housed the bulbous airship.
With the Float token extracted from its soul, the airship would lose its buoyancy, but it should remain airworthy for several hours after the extraction, long enough that a failure to launch the following day should be put down to mechanical failure.
Jarv reached down and undid the zipper of his belt pouch, and withdrew his metallic chalk.
Crouching, he made a couple of experimental scrapes against the blimp's surface. Nothing.
It was like he'd expected. Whatever material the blimp was made out of – Eind had speculated waxed paper, Indrie had thought canvas – it was of the same family as the waxy plastic that the locals used for many of their devices. It was too glassy-smooth to take chalk lines.
He stowed the chalk and instead pulled out the silver suspension; silver powder saturated into glue-like fluid. He popped the cork and, using a paintbrush, began to carefully lay out the tokenization diagram.
Jarv preferred using chalk. It gave him cleaner lines, and it never ran. Painting out the diagram in these windy conditions, with the surface moving beneath him, and the threat of a missed step leading to a fall waiting no more than three feet in any direction, this was probably the hardest ritual work he'd ever done.
Between pausing to re-paint missed angles and clean up stray brush strokes, it took Jarv almost the full two hours just to make the diagram to his satisfaction.
He only had an estimate of the time that had passed, but touching a hand to the surface of the blimp gave him an impression of the concentration of energy within. It would be enough for the ritual.
There would be no way of smoothing the field inside the blimp's sac, and it would be pointless besides when the space was constantly in motion and changing by subtle degrees, but on a seasoned airship like this, Float would certainly be at the very surface of its soul.
He crawled over to the final part of the diagram and smeared the paint-stained tip of his finger in a line, making the final connection.
The diagram began to glow faintly in the gloom, and a rectangular token the length of a hand floated up out of it.
He did not recognize it. Maybe the symbols of this new world's objects were more obscure than he was used to, but he couldn't see how a wide rectangle glowing with abstract colors related to Float.
Still it either was Float, or Float was buried deeper, and tokenization was a total process. He'd have to remove it to continue.
He plucked the token and slipped it into his pocket.
The lights covering the sides of the blimp all went out.
Jarv winced and tried to peer over the side. There seemed to be more people looking up at the blimp now it was dark than when it was blazing with images and text.
He didn't have time to worry about being the focus of the onlookers, another token was forming above the diagram.
This one was Float, he was sure. A rectangular token with the image of a silver cloud on its face. He pulled it free and slipped it into his other pocket.
Carrying the tokens outside of a ritual was dangerous. It could destabilize, breaking apart into loose draurferric energy, or it could activate.
He had the token-preserving lockbox back at the base, but that worked by maintaining an ongoing ritual to keep the tokens stable. It wouldn't work for a minute outside of a draurferric field. Maybe in time they could have rigged something up with the generator, but they hadn't had that time.
The only good news in this case was that Float was fairly benign. It wouldn't catch fire, or tear his leg off, or explode, if it went off in his pocket. It might sever gravity's grip on him for a few minutes.
The worst outcome was only that they'd lose an element they needed for the gate, but that was bad enough for Jarv. If they lost this one and couldn't find a replacement – if Jarv couldn't complete his orders to open the gate – then it would be his life on the line, either way.
With the token he'd come for in his pocket, he knelt to smear the diagram. Nobody wanted Drek'thelamagny crafts to fall into the hands of the natives.
He wiped the still wet silver suspension into an unrecognizable smudge with a rag, which he stuffed into his belt pouch, then he pulled the hose out of the balloon and hoisted the generator onto his back.
Making a final check that he hadn't left anything behind, he stretched his wings out – was that forty beats left, or thirty? – and stepped towards the edge of the blimp.
He was staring out at the city when he realized something was wrong.
He was being watched. Not by the crowd below, still out of sight. Not by people in the buildings, too far away for detail. By somebody nearby. Someone who was focusing on him.
He didn't know exactly how he knew. Maybe some subtle property of the Setae, or maybe a consequence of the spiritual weight of all the tokens he carried, but he could feel it strongly, unmistakably.
He peered off the edge, then turned in a slow circle, looking out at the glowing towers around him.
There. Not in a distant tower, not in the crowds below, but squatting on the roof of the stands.
Jarv froze as he recognized what they were wearing. A black leather breastplate overlaid by steel filigree, a full helm of the same boiled leather, inset with lenses to block out flash attacks and an air filter over the mouth. It was Drek'thelamagny uniform armor. The battle armor of an Imperial Scout.
Had Indrie or Eind come to support him? Did they even have Imperial armor at the base? Who else could it be? Nobody except him had passed out through Thunder Bay for weeks.
The figure raised an object at him, and all questions were washed from Jarv's mind. The basket hilt of a sword, but with no blade. A carbine.
He'd barely registered the thought when the weapon fired. A forest green projectile the size of an apple shot out with the speed of an arrow.
Jarv tried to duck but he was too slow. The bolt caught him in the centre of his chest like a kick from a horse.
He felt his Mugos Scales token flare to life than go inactive, having done exactly nothing. Whatever the projectile was, it had pierced right through his first layer of defense.
He grunted and dropped onto his front, lowering his profile. The figure stood and darted left, running along the roof. Escaping.
Jarv rolled onto his back and checked his chest. His shirt was gone in a large circle, the edges of the fabric scorched. The skin bore a chemical wound, an irregular blotch of bright red skin that stung, and itched, and still hissed with the acid payload of the assassin's carbine.
Sharp chemical smells rolled off him, choking his nostrils with the fumes of his own burning flesh.
Of his defensive tokens, the Mugos Scales were done. Used up, and ineffective against whatever the offender's weapon was loaded with.
The Mugos Liver was still available, its passive effect countering the acid, stopping this from being an immediately fatal wound, even keeping it from breaking the skin, which might be as bad.
He could probably purge it if he triggered the fragment fully, but that would send it inactive for hours. He'd be vulnerable if the attacker shot at him again, and Jarv meant to catch them.
He rolled over with a grunt, getting up onto his hands and knees, then strained to stand.
He spotted the scout, sprinting along the roof of the stands, heading full speed for the edge.
When they reached it they stopped. Instantly. Unnaturally. They twisted in the air, dropping down to grip the edge of the roof, hanging off below, then they swung, catching their feet on the level below. They stood for a second in full view of the spectators, then repeated the process.
The scout was invested with soul fragments, then. Something to aid their mobility. Maybe something to help with their aim, given that they'd nailed him on a drifting airship with a regular carbine.
Jarv stretched his wings, making sure they were still intact, then let his head roll back and groaned as the pain from his chest briefly overwhelmed him. The acid was like a needle-toed centipede running circles on bare skin.
Before he could reconsider just purging the acid and calling it a night, he grit his teeth and threw himself off the blimp.
Seventy seven, seventy eight.
Jarv swooped over the roof of the stands where the assassin had dropped, then followed their path, letting himself drop like a diving bird.
He caught himself before he hit the ground outside the arena, landing in time to spot the would-be assassin disappear around a corner of a low building.
He set off running after them. Jarv wasn't a sprinter, but there was enough left in his wings to give him the edge, and he'd reached the same corner after less than a dozen seconds.
He needn't have rushed. The assassin was waiting for him, just out of sight. A lean figure in the all-covering black leathers of the scout uniform.
The figure raised the carbine and fired at point blank range into Jarv's throat.
Jarv fell back. The impact with the ground crushed his wings, collapsing them into clouds of draurferric energy that quickly dispersed.
He breathed, but the air wasn't passing through his mouth. He felt cold at his throat, with a pain like he was being choked by razors as the acid burned into him.
He had a vague awareness of the assassin walking away, and there was a shadow in the air that had nothing to do with the corrosive weapon.
Black smoke was pouring from the open wound in his neck, creeping up the walls of the alley, opaque and liquid, moving in ways an inert fluid shouldn't.
Where the smoke grew densest clicking sounds began to emerge, and light glinted in the dark, gleaming reflections without a source, glinting off carapace that seemed to be everywhere the darkness touched.
Jarv couldn't wait. If he left the acid to run its course in this wound, it would kill him. He triggered the Mugos Liver token, purging the lingering corrosive energy.
The relief was instant. He was bloodied, but the pain had turned cold.
He rose to his feet, wiping blood from his throat, feeling the semi-material shadow flesh left in the wake of the injury by the Blood of Nix-nix-chittalias-desth. He stared down at the retreating back of the assassin.
The scout paused, turning their head to look back at him over a shoulder.
Jarv spat a mouthful of blood out onto the asphalt and started walking forwards, outstretched hands snapping at the air.