A small artifact at Mirian’s belt let out a chime and began to glow. That’s the divination ward tripped. The forward elements are here, she knew. Probably the two recon companies of the 24th Brigade. Four more companies of four other brigades would be advancing carefully but quickly around the city.
Mirian sent out a pulse of arcane energy that was tuned to her modified seeds of chaos. One hour until they activate, now. Each of the spell engines would be burning minuscule amounts of fossilized myrvite until the timers went off. Then they’d all take to the air.
She levitated to the roof of the Myrvite Studies building, and crouched down, rechecking her gear. She’d re-bound her soul so that she appeared to be Akanan, and had one of the town’s tailors make her a replica uniform. Beneath the uniform, she had all four pieces of orichalcum, as well as several pieces of steel armor over silk padding that would absorb the impact of bullets she managed to slow down. There were two soul repositories, now fully charged with myrvite souls. She’d redone the binding on her spellbook to resemble the standard issue Akanan military design, then used cloth armguards to bind her key wands to her forearms: levitation, greater lightning, magnetic shield, force shield, greater force blade, and magnetic detonation. The rest of what she needed would be in her spellbook. She was still vulnerable to magebreaker ammunition, but though those pierced force shields, magnetic shields could still slow them, if not stop them entirely.
Finally, she had two mana elixirs, an arcanometer, and several other artificer’s tools. She also could plausibly pass as a 7th Airborne engineer since she already knew their countersigns and chain of command. She doubted the other time traveler had bothered to convince an entire army group to change up their pass phrases or infiltration protocols for this sort of contingency.
Mirian had also gotten a brief refresher on Eskinar from her former tutor, making sure her accent was at least passable. The good news was, Akanans had fairly pronounced regional accents, and so someone from the western reaches of the country might plausibly speak like her. Plausibly. Ideally, she would have few conversations.
She kept herself huddled to the building roof, watching as two divisions swept into Torrviol, rapidly clearing buildings. There was some scattered gunfire as they encountered some of the civilians who had refused to flee. Some were taken prisoner.
Most were just executed.
There was something at work there that Mirian couldn’t comprehend. The Akanans were able to dehumanize their enemies with a rapidity and completeness that seemed like it should have been impossible. What do they tell the soldiers before they come here?
Soon enough, the airships came into view. Mirian cast her night camouflage spell, then levitated up. As long as she approached the airships from above, the evening light and overcast sky would still hide her.
Mirian flew into the air, letting the cold air shear away any fatigue she felt. Again, there was that strange nostalgia. For years, she’d felt like winning the Battle of Torrviol was this critical thing. Now, it was just another catastrophe, one she could ignore or embrace as needed. The wind whipped at her as the colossal airship grew in front of her. Even after all this time, the size of it felt unreal. She soared above it, then let the behemoth pass by. She could make out the people below, working feverishly on the deck. The cranes were getting ready to deploy an assault squad on top of Bainrose.
A chill ran through Mirian that wasn’t the wind. That’s why I could never get them to lift me up on the crane again, even in disguise. Troytin would have alerted them after he saw me. She watched as the soldiers donned the harnesses attached to the ropes. Meanwhile, spotters on the foredeck scanned below for any sign of resistance. He started working against me almost immediately, then. Specter probably hasn’t been a good influence on him, but he made his decision to fight early. She shook her head. Why did the Ominian choose such a fool?
The aft deck had few crew on it. Mirian picked a spot that had enough of the ship’s superstructure around it to create cover, then descended. She matched her speed to the ship’s, then landed gingerly and dismissed the camouflage spell.
Her disguise needed no illusions, and took no mana. Her auric mana was still abundant. The seeds of chaos should be deploying.
She hurried down below decks, passing two crewmen. They gave a brief, “sir,” acknowledging her rank above them, but otherwise paid her no notice. Everyone was too busy, and really, who expected infiltration while they were in the air? Of course, how can the people of Torrviol simultaneously be so nefarious they need to be gunned down and so stupid as to have no defenses or contingencies?
As the Might of Liberty dropped the first round of soldiers onto Bainrose, Republic’s Justice circled above to provide cover. That brought them down to low elevation, and it lowered their speed significantly.
That made them easy targets for the seeds of chaos. The tiny spell engines would be activating a glyph sequence telling them to seek out the biggest source of arcane energy they could detect, and to plummet towards it. As soon as the devices received the shock of kinetic energy from the crash, that would trigger another glyph sequence that would ignite what remained of the fossilized myrvite, which in turn would rupture all the glyphs and cause an explosion. It wasn’t nearly as deadly as a spellfire shell, but it would certainly do damage.
Mirian was well below decks when she heard the first crack! It sounded like a distant gunshot. Then it was followed by another. Then another.
Then the sounds came with the frequency of rain. “We’re under attack!” she heard someone shout.
Panicked calls soon erupted all over. People started running through the halls as alarm klaxons sounded throughout the ship. More explosions echoed from above, and suddenly the ship jerked to the side, slamming her against the wall.
Mirian recovered and continued to the engine room.
Two guards stood by the thick steel doors. Mirian shouted, “We’re under attack! Command’s been hit and the stabilization wings are heavily damaged. Damage control just ordered me here to give the team details so the emergency systems can keep the ship in the air.”
The guards looked worried. “What’s going on?”
“I don’t know! It was quiet, nothing sighted, then all of a sudden, spellbombs everywhere! Countersign is ‘forges of Ferrabridge,’ Captain Thalia didn’t give me anything else.”
The first guard looked at the second. He shook his head. “We can’t. Relay the message to the crew inside through comms—”
The ship shook again, and the list grew heavier.
Mirian infused her voice with as much panic as she could muster. “Comms to the engine room is down! The team needs an accurate damage report or this ship is going into the ground!”
“We should—”
“Negative. We can activate the door communication glyph array.”
“Oh. That would work,” Mirian said, and waited for the second guard to turn his back. Then Eclipse materialized in her hand.
The first guard had time to say, “What th—!” Then Mirian’s rapier was through his throat, through the spinal column, and out the other side. The blade pierced through the chain links and bone like a needle going through cloth. At the same time, she sent a greater lightning spell into the second guard, so that as he turned to face her, he was seized by electricity. He went to his knees, skin sizzling, then face planted on the ground.
Mirian checked their bodies for glyph keys, but there were none. Probably, the had to communicate an authorization code and the door only opened up from the inside. The commander of the ship might have a glyph key, but he would be on the bridge, and there were a lot of soldiers and a great deal of fire that way.
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There was always another way to open a door.
Mirian started with several magnetic detonation spells on the hinges. The door shook, but there were already alarm klaxons, and the ship was already shaking. Then she lobbed a few fireball spells behind her so that anyone coming down the hall would be slowed down or repelled by the flames.
With the door weakened and her back covered, Mirian telekinetically flipped through her spellbook to find kinetic push.
The door groaned as she pushed, the steel warping. She paused, and cast several more magnetic detonations along the frame, then resumed, heaving as her mana poured into the spell. She could just make out panicked shouting beyond the door, but the sound of metal screeching overcame it. Smoke was starting to fill the hallway, so she cast a quick filter air spell before resuming her assault on the door. With one last push, it came crashing down, shaking the hall.
Beyond the door was a massive spell engine, unlike any she’d seen before, and several engineers. She didn’t get a count, because gunfire erupted in front of her, and she had to rush to hide to the side of the hall.
As smoke rushed from behind her into the engine room, Mirian cast force shield, then magnetic shield, then ran into the room. There was more gunfire, and she used the muzzle flashes to locate her quarry, slicing up the two offending engineers with quick force blade spells.
There were three more engineers she could see, interrupted from monitoring the engine by her incursion.
“It’s just one person?” one of them asked.
“Lieutenant—what are you… what’s going on?” shouted another.
“Can we do this peacefully, or do I need to cut off a few more heads?” Mirian asked.
When one of the engineers pointed a wand at her, Mirian brought up Eclipse. The force spell—whatever it had been—dissolved on the mythril blade.
Mirian decapitated him before he could cast anything else. “Anyone else?”
The Akanans looked at her in frozen terror. She would have felt bad, but she was pretty sure none of them had felt bad about laying artillery fire down on civilians.
“Good. Go stand over there, and I won’t harm you.” The two engineers cautiously walked over to the wall, where Mirian used force shackles to bind their hands to the pipes. Then she telekinetically lifted the steel door back in place and used incineration beam to spot weld it closed. It wouldn’t be hard to take down, but it would delay anyone from coming in.
Detect life told her there were two more engineers hiding in the back.
“You two. Come on out,” she said. “Go stand with the others.” She shackled them too. Then she began to study the engine. “So how does it work?” she asked.
The engine was three times as tall as she was, and significantly longer. Though they had protective sheaths on them, she could see dozens of large vitreous crystals extending out into the walls. From the blueprints, she knew those conduits were providing arcane energy to the other subsystems.
“Please don’t kill me,” was the only response she got. “I have a family.”
“Yeah, so do all the people down there,” she said, gesturing to the floor. “Never stopped you from bombarding Torrviol or refugee convoys.”
One of the engineers went wide-eyed. “We would never—”
That made Mirian’s temper flare. “I watched you do it!” she snapped. “I was one of those refugees. I begged for mercy, and never received an ounce of it from any of you Akanans. You are monsters, all of you. Don’t pretend otherwise.” She stood in front of the engineer, eyes blazing. He finally shut up. He was trembling.
Good, she thought.
She circled the engine, opening up panels, then scribbling diagrams and summaries in her notebook.
“What do you want from us?” one of the engineers finally said, interrupting the silence.
“I already told you. I want to know how it works.” She paused. “I’m also taking advice on how that door is supposed to be opened.” Mirian used a magnetic pull to yank on a conduit assembly above her.
“God! What are you doing?” one of the engineers asked in alarm.
“Well, I’m taking apart the engine to learn how it works,” Mirian said. “If any of you have a better way…?” As far as she could tell, the Akanans were using the idea she’d thought of with four points of lift; two on the hull, and two distributed across the stabilizing wings. She’d need to study how the lift force was distributed across the wings. Presumably, the arcane force was diffused, then transmuted, but she had no idea how to do that.
Even with the clever efficiency designs, the amount of fossilized myrvite they should be burning had to be extraordinary. Her estimations on how much they’d need to take a ship this weight across the Rift Sea and inland to Torrviol—even if it was launched from the coast—was still too high. Her rough estimations told her they would need a second mass the size of the ship purely of fossilized myrvite. And while there were smaller, secondary spell engines in the ship burning the magical fuel, the main engine didn’t seem to be using any at all.
What’s the energy source?
She pulled another set of metal plates off the engine, exposing another set of complex glyph sequences.
“You have to stop. You’ll die too,” said one of the Akanans.
“I’ve died before. You get used to it,” Mirian said absentmindedly. These sequences aren’t antigravity. They’re not using levitation at all, she realized. The ship is connecting through the arcane dimension to something. The lift force is attached to that.
The two largest conduits were blocking a piece of the engine. Orichalcum wiring. Interesting. But it’s not attuned to anyone’s soul, so it won’t be a problem. She started to remove them.
“I’ll—I’ll help!” one of the engineers shouted.
“You can’t!” another shouted, though it wasn’t clear if they meant he couldn’t help or, or she couldn’t remove that section of the engine.
“What’s the energy source?”
“The leyline,” the helpful engineer said.
Mirian cocked her head. “Impossible,” she said. Then added, “for humans. You found… oh that’s interesting. Has Akana Praediar been raiding the Labyrinth’s Vaults?”
“Yes! Yes, if—”
“You can’t tell her!” another said. “We took oaths. We’re sworn—”
“—if she removes those conduits we’ll die! She’s not going to make it out of here anyways, she’s trapped in here and—yes! The spell engine connects to one of two divine artifacts. You’re not going to be able to understand how it works because no one understands how it works. All you’re going to do is kill us—”
“—Soren shut up!”
“I’m trying to save our lives and the lives of all the crew! If we just delay her—”
“Well now you’ve told her you’re delaying so—”
Mirian used a muffle sound spell on the most annoying engineer and said, “I’m fine being delayed. How do the energy dispersal sequences work?”
“It can’t be replicated anyways,” the engineer named Soren said.
“As long as you’re talking, I’m not ripping apart the engine. But if I get bored…”
Soren launched into a conceptual explanation of the engine. The analogy he used was to think of the ship as using magnetic repulsion to keep itself aloft. “The leyline is like the positive side of a magnet, and the artifact creates a field that replicates that positive side. So, repulsion. Like a magnet. Only, the arcane force has four polarizations that are constantly rotating, but somehow the artifact stays synchronized with the same energy the leyline is using. We call it the leyline tether, though since it only exists in the arcane fifth spatial dimension, we’re deducing its existence from the math behind it. Anyways, to keep the ship stable above the leyline, the trick is just to spread that field out. That’s why the ships can only fly above a leyline. It also requires constant adjustments based on the position of the ship relative to the leyline.”
“You’re going to get court-martialed,” one of the other engineers said.
Soren snapped, “For saving the whole damn ship? Also, conceptually understanding how this thing works isn’t going to help anyone build one.”
Mirian stroked her chin and gazed at the assembly. That’s a severe limitation on the airships. “Did Archmage Tyrcast find a way to replicate the field?”
The engineers were silent. Soren said, “Rosen Industries services a lot of military contracts. That’s all I know.”
Mirian nodded. She thought of the Akanan airships falling out of the sky after the Divine Monument was blown. She’d assumed it was because of the antimagic pulse, but even though it disabled glyphs temporarily, it wasn’t like the one that hit Palendurio. The airships should have been able to stabilize. But if it caused the leyline to reroute…
“You should tell Marshal Cearsia not to blow up the Divine Monument below Bainrose. It causes a leyline energy surge, which in turn, moves the one under Torrviol far enough away from the airships that they crash. You know, if you all want to live,” she said. “You might also mention that Troytin is dead, and that if Cearsia starts killing civilians, I’ll come for her fucking head. If she wants to know.”
She started to look at another sequence, but just then there was a loud crash as the steel door leading to the engine room toppled over. Behind it was the Akanan heavy response team, armed to the teeth.
Mirian grinned as she faced them, and raised Eclipse in a salute.