Decisions are made in the breathless span of moments. For once, my mind was completely clear. The settled Sorceries, at least for the time being, no longer colored my decision making. I didn’t have the urge to just bury her in the ground with an errant thought and twisting of mana. Drowning her in a cage of conjured water didn’t really appeal to me. I could cooly and calmly process the fact that someone who had previously attacked me and also stood a good chance at killing me was begging on my front step. Screaming for mercy as if Death himself snapped at her heels.
Her pride began to break at her last words, her bloody but functioning arm slapping the door, nails scraping in desperation. They left crimson trails dripping down the stone. Several fingers were missing and one eye was swollen shut. Her unusually attractive features marred by the wounds of frantic combat.
The shrill fear in her voice freaked me out. What the fuck scares a soldier from a magically advanced civilization that storms worlds and scoops up entire populations, just so they can fight in a far-flung war? Whatever was out there definitely scared me a lot more than her.
“Oh hell yeah!” Gungnir raved. “Exactly what we needed! A lady to take care of all your worries so you don’t have to mess with me! Sweet sweet life is still within my grasp!”
“That’s not good enough!” I yelled back at Reeanth, taking full advantage of my position. “I need more than that!”
Always negotiate from a position of strength. This moment definitely qualified. I widened the peephole just enough to shove Gungnir through. I didn’t have the luxury to negotiate for anything less.
[Stall whatever it is so I can do this right]. I commanded the weapon as it morphed from a spear into a floating orb.
It zipped off mentally yelling back at me. [Only if you don’t take me apart, you bastard!].
Incoherent snarls of curse words not invented by humanity tumbled through the hamster wheel that was my brain. I needed more time, more time to think. I knew Gungnir couldn’t actually run from me, since I could just summon it back, but its existence is both a serious liability as well as the most powerful tool I had. It could probably delay just about anything we’ve encountered so far, as long as it’s careful.
Now Reeanth on the other hand… She didn’t appear to be faking, and that amount of blood with that lovely wound would require a fuck ton of dedication to DIY just to fool someone. A familiar roar shook the bolthole I was in and all the trees outside. The roar was accompanied by a strange thud, then almost instantly followed by the crack of thunder. I expanded my magical senses to feel around the area, a familiar sensation greeting the magical pulse. I knew exactly what was scaring her.
Grinning just out of her sight, I called down the enlarged peephole. “Not good enough, bitch! I remember your last greeting!” I began forcing the stone door to slowly contract the peephole with my Earth Sorcery, the promise of her salvation creeping closed.
“What do you want? Money? Power? Tools?” She pleaded, sticking her arm in the peephole to grasp towards me. “I have it all!”
“Clearly not on ya,” I replied, the tiny tunnel ever so gradually filling in. “The only thing you bring to the table is a fucking mess.” I didn’t want to be cruel, but this opportunity wouldn’t come by again.
“You can have me! Anything you want you can have.” Her sobs began to make her harder to understand.
“Nope, already taken.” I replied, obviously leaving out that my woman was a tree. Using Flesh Sorcery to tamp down on my sex drive was doing wonders for my thought process. Being able to think was such a wonderful gift, after an offer like that. “What else ya got, cause I don’t have time for whiny baggage.” She did have something I wanted, but the chances of her giving it to me willingly were small.
“What else is there? Anything, I’ll do anything!” She wept as she fell to the ground just out of sight. I looked through my mental connection with Gungnir, she was curled up at the base of the door, cradling her left side. Her left arm was clearly broken, and maybe her collar bone was too. A gnarly slash under her arm was bleeding profusely, her strength going with it. The angular runes on the remnants of her suit were pulsing red in time with her breath. “I’ll even be your slave.” She gasped, her voice getting softer.
Not what I wanted, but close enough to get me to what I did need. Again, I punted a moral conundrum off to the side. Ethics take a back seat when you’re dealing with someone who earnestly tried to kill you. I had professors in college who would argue the opposite but they ain’t here.
“Swear it!” I yelled, urgency filling my voice. I could tell through Gungnir’s sight that she was bleeding out. I could fix that easily, but not without a guarantee that she wouldn’t turn on me or give me what I needed. Betrayal brings down the mightiest kings. All it takes is one damn Judas.
“Swear it or I’ll let you get eaten! I know what’s out there, and trust me, he’s always hungry.”
[Come on, come on.] I thought to myself. [Take the fucking bait!].
I barely made out her gasping breaths.
“I, Reeanth Le’Talv, do swear by the honor of the Alpha Centauri Prime, the guard of the lost throne of Atlantis, and by my soul’s wizard binding, to serve you and your cause in all ways until I am released by your will.”
Not how I would have phrased it, but I guess good enough for the circumstances. I could see in the magical spectrum a multi-colored ethereal binding wrap around her head and her heart, constricting the quivering vein of magical light that pulsed through her system. [Looks like magic takes oaths seriously.]
I banished the stone door keeping her out and dragged her in by her leg, using Flesh Sorcery to knock her unconscious. This woman needed to live, and I had the feeling that maybe she wouldn’t be the most cooperative prisoner, even with her oath. I started working on her wounds, not even worrying about the stone door. Gungnir could handle Kong.
Now that I wasn’t listening to a dying woman’s pleas for help, I could hear the giant ape’s roars just after the crack of thunder, Gungnir playing the role of fast floating taser to keep Kong busy. Gungnir’s thoughts were off in the background of our mental link as I focused on healing Reeanth. I took a second to scan her with my Flesh Sorcery, one hand on her wounded shoulder while the other was on her forehead. Her insides were a mess. If anyone were here taking bets, I’d put money that she tried to take on the giant ape out of sheer arrogance. Half of her organs were pulped.
Fixing her broken form was actually easy. My Sorcery easily overpowered her body’s inner magic as her stores of power were clearly drained from her fight with a three story gorilla. Closing the veins causing her internal bleeding was the top priority, then I coaxed her bone marrow to unnaturally speed up blood production to replace what she’d lost. I took my time slowly banishing the pieces of shattered bone from her collarbone and shoulder while healing the total body bruising. By the time I’d gotten all of her organs working again, I’d worked up quite a sweat.
Thirty more minutes worth of work had her out of the woods but I didn’t heal all of her body. I left her complete left side in such a way that she couldn’t move her left arm at all. I mean, I could easily have fixed it, but I wanted to make sure that her oath was binding. All of humanity has heard about oaths from old fables or the concept of swearing by whatever. Our stories and myths tell us the folly and danger of agreeing to contracts with magical beings. Like, a vampire can’t come inside without being invited, or the Fae considers saying something three times a binding contract. My guess was that magic made oaths a little more permanent than what modern humans are used to.
Gungnir whipped back into the entrance of the bolthole. “Yooooo! You did it!” It celebrated, bouncing around in the air. “Got yo’self a woman!”
My glare shut it up. “All right, all right . . . '' Gungnir said, floating back a few feet, “I’ll leave it alone. By the way, Kong left, minus a few patches of fur. Tasing him in the balls worked wonders! His hollerin’ scared the crap outta this bitch. So, how’d it go? What’ya get out of her?”
I stared down at the unconscious woman, her seven and a half foot tall body sprawled at my feet. “Nothin yet.” I answered. “But if this goes well, shit might actually start going our way.”
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“Does this mean you don’t need to disassemble me?” Gungnir asked, pleading tones bleeding through our link. “I mean, without me, you wouldn’t have a space-faring combat wizard begging for your help. Kong would have finished the job without ol’ reliable me, zapping him off.”
“Fine.” I snapped, not looking forward to the next couple days. “But we have to do some kind of meditation to keep my sanity and emotions in check. Can’t seem to keep it balanced without you. And, you’re the one who gets to add her memories to Rath’s brain vat.”
“Wooohooooo!”
******
“Ya know, maybe this isn’t such a good idea.”
“Seriously, you wait till I’m about to do it and then voice your concerns? I spent like two fucking hours setting this up!”
“What if you fry her brain? What if something leaks in the wrong direction? Besides, that helmet is lame. All the powers of Sorcery at your disposal and you make it look like some Frankenstein rip-off.”
“Gungnir. If you have a better idea, then spill. If not, we’re frying the alien.”
“You know she’s not an alien.”
“A genetically advanced human with wizardry and magical battle armor qualifies. Besides, she’s a foot and a half on me plus forty pounds of muscle. A-LEEE-IIINN.”
Reeanth’s unconscious body was slumped over in a solid stone chair sitting in front of the crystal vat that was holding the dragon’s brain. Her limbs were encased in conjured iron shackles as thick as a man’s forearm while a multi-pronged crystal helmet secured her head to the back of the chair, which had wires of braided gold and silver connecting it to the vat. Gungnir was resting in the shallow divot in the front that served as its docking station. I had one hand on the orb with another on my prisoner’s head. My bright idea was to see if I could copy all the information from Reeanth and drop it into my makeshift biological computer, then have Gungnir go through it so everything would be nice and easy.
The only thing standing in my way was the fact that I wanted to dissemble my uber-weapon that housed a vulnerable slice of my soul, but the damn thing was my only hope of actually making this work. And, Gungnir randomly has good ideas that might save me from myself, like the possibility of me royally fucking this up.
“You catch more flies with honey!” Gungnir added.
“Stop.”
“Kindness is never wasted!”
“Shut-up.”
“Love makes the world go round!”
“I swear. . . “
“What is love? Baby don’t hurt me!”
My grip on the orb tightened as a tiny bit of magic crackled down my arm. “ENOUGH!” I yelled. “For the love of magic, enough!” One eye twitched as I reined the whimsical desire to bury both Gungnir and Reeanth. “I am not actually frying her, I know she’s not actually an alien, and she really isn’t my slave!”
“Wait, what?” Gungnir sputtered. “Then what’s the whole damn point?!”
“You know, for being an extension of me, you really suck at this.” I complained, rubbing at my eyebrows. “I don’t want or need her to be a slave, all I want is the information that is in her head. Besides, we don’t really know if magically binding oaths are a thing. They probably are, but that doesn’t mean I know how to make it stick. We are ignorant about magic, remember? Just because we’re powerful doesn’t mean we are educated. And guesses based on some experience are not a valid substitute for knowledge!”
Sighing didn’t help. “Think of it this way, even brilliant scientists or surgeons can die in a car crash because they don’t know the rules of the road. They can get mugged because they nodded at the wrong person in the bad part of town.”
I gestured at the bound, oversized-but-proportional woman in front of me. “She is a means to an end, the only end that matters: Knowledge. That’s what I need, ‘cause we don’t know shit. Besides, the whole point of scaring her into accepting being a slave is to make her feel better later, when I scan her brain and then set her free. She can’t be that mad at having her information copied if she is free to complain about it.”
“I know plenty of things. The brain vat is full of things! You literally don’t need her.” Gungnir pouted.
“You’re wrong, we do need her. Do you think dragons care about enchantments and futuristic weapons, beyond the fact that those things are a threat? No. I bet dragons only care about food and power, and there is more to life than that. We need that info. Stop acting like a child.” I grimaced but continued. “See, this is one of the reasons I wanted to disassemble you. You’re an immature liability with a whole bunch of useful capabilities. Too dangerous to exist, but it’s far too risky right now to be without your added power. You’re a damn child with a rocket launcher. So grow up. You’re a piece of my soul, which means you should be able to mature. Fuckin do it.”
The orb rotated in its dock so that the Chaos crystal eye was looking me in the face. “You’d really do it wouldn’t you?” Gungnir asked.
“If I have to,” I answered grudgingly. “But I don’t want to. The fact is, I need all the power I can get, but without losing myself or my life. You’re a liability, and an asset, AND a powerful tool all rolled into one annoying ball.” Shaking my head at losing a bit of focus, I turned back towards Reeanth. Using Flesh Sorcery, I put a nerve block at the base of her skull and then woke her up.
“Mornin’ sunshine!” My flat greeting didn’t inspire the happy demeanor that I was hoping for. Her eyes went wide and she began attempting to thrash around, which looked oddly funny as the only part of her that she could even move or feel was her head.
“Seriously, stop. Relax. It’s all you can do right now. I put in a nerve block so you can’t actually move your body below your neck, and I’m using Flesh Sorcery to keep you clear headed so you can understand what’s going on.” My voice had taken on a lecturing tone, both to convey my absolute control in this moment as well as to communicate the simplicity of what I wanted.
I put both my hands on her face and made her look me in the eye before I explained. “I am not going to hurt you. I promise. You were wounded, and I healed the worst of it. You swore yourself to me and I only want one thing. And lucky for you it’s not your body.”
The frantic whites of her eyes receded as her brain caught up with my words. Her heavy, panicked breathing began to slow down. “Then what do you want?” She asked, fear making her voice rough and a bit low.
“Knowledge!” I said, with one finger in the air. “I want everything you know, with nothing left out. Knowledge is power, but knowledge is also context, and I need that too. I want to know everything I would already know if I had grown up in your society. I want to know who the big players are in the big wide galaxy, what to watch out for when invading a new planet, your society’s understanding of magic and how it works, as well as what you forbid and encourage about magical research. Trust me, the list goes on.”
I removed my hands and took a step back. “Now, I’m going to have Gungnir copy everything in your brain and store it,” I said, gesturing at the now quiet orb. “I need you, Reeanth, enforced by the terms of your oath, to let this happen. That’s it. That’s all I want. And, to top it off, if you cooperate fully and willingly, I’ll finish healing your body so that you’re as good as new.”
She gulped and nodded. “How, how does this work?” She asked. “What are you going to do exactly?”
“You are going to sit there, and relax, and keep your mind open. My sentient weapon Gungnir, yes, the glowing ball thing right over there, is going to GENTLY,” I said, shooting a warning glare at the orb, “gently scan your brain and copy it and transfer the copied data into that vat, which also happens to holds the brain of dead dragon. It’s pretty much a biological computer that we’re working the kinks out of.”
“I could just answer your questions, anything you want to know - I’ll tell you!”
“Honestly, I don’t know if I can trust you, so I’m doing it my way. This way I get the feelings associated with your memories as well, so hopefully they provide some context. Gungnir will be discreet, and will erase all of your personal and private memories that don’t relate to what we need from the copied set of data.”
An hour later, we had what we needed, but not really in the way we expected. With one hand on the crystal helmet Reeanth was wearing, and the other on Gungnir, the process was kinda fucked up. I had envisioned a seamless copy and transfer of data from Reeanth’s brain up through the helmet, which served as an amplifier and transmitter, then through my body (governed by my Flesh Sorcery) to be poured into Gungnir, who would then deposit the information in the giant brain of Rath. This is not what happened.
Gungnir used my Flesh Sorcery in a totally different way. First, it did scan Reeanth’s brain, and then began using it as a template to grow another brain on top of Rath’s brain. The brain of the dragon essentially had a tumor that looked like a human brain sticking out of its side.
[What in the fucking fuck are you doing, Gungnir?] I thought at the orb. [This is not what we planned!].
Gungnir replied, [I’m not done categorizing the dragon’s brain yet, or even done stopping it from thinking that it’s still alive. So, I used some of the unused portions to make a copy of Reeanth’s brain in order to give the foreign data a safe place to be, before I get everything fixed.]
It made sense, but it was weird. [Besides,] Gungnir continued. [This way, since you have a conscience now, if you need to get at some memories that may be locked away by oaths or magic, you won’t have any problems breaking the copied brain to get to it.]
I grunted in amazement at the part of myself that had the actual brains to think of this. But of course it was the weapon and not actually me. [So this is like trying to break into encrypted data. The data can be copied no problem, but it will still be encrypted. And I won’t have to burn out Reeanth’s original brain to break the code.]
I was actually surprised that I hadn’t thought of it first. [Keep this up and I’ll keep you around.]
[Exactly! Am I smart, or am I beyond smart?]
Growing the exact copy of our resident prisoner’s brain took fifteen minutes, and the data copy and transfer took forty-five minutes. I caught random memories here and there as I monitored the flow to make sure we didn’t damage Reeanth; a secretive first kiss, the pride at being inducted into the Council of the Cosmic Knights, the frustration of the mundane task of overseeing the ‘appropriation’ of genetically damaged humans. Other parts flowing through the data stream were pure white, the packets of information concealed by a shield of magic brighter than any I had seen so far.
Then, it was over. The only reason I knew that an hour had flown by was that Gungnir kept a rough track of time. My mind was heavy. The mental exertion of acting as the magical equivalent of a Sorcery-enhanced MRI was taxing in a way I was definitely not used to.
“Gungnir, fix her. Regrow her missing fingers and heal the bruised muscles,” I said, stumbling off to my vault of canned food. I opened several cans of soup, set them in front of me, and sat in my chair, watching Gungnir through my magical senses as the orb undocked from its station and floated to Reeanth’s lap and began healing her. Bones began to grow while torn muscles knit back together.
[So, what are you actually going to do with her?] Gungnir asked through our mental link as it finished healing her. Gungnir used Reeanth’s own energy to fuel the healing so that it would knock her out. [I mean, she’s pretty hot, and you could use some extra help around here…]
[Nothing honestly,] I thought back, wolfing down the soup. [Keep her out so both of us can get some sleep. I’ll let her free in the morning after I feed her and check on the spare brain. If she were loose, free from her shackles and trying to fight, I don’t think that I’d win right now. My head hurts too much.]