Asheron's Fall: The Power of Ten, Book Six

“She must have forgotten she was dealing with a Black Aluvian. It sounds like a fine working relationship otherwise,” Princess Kristie noted.

His dour face lit up instantly, not a shred of hesitation. “Aye, Highness, it be, be it not? The King, he be a big fan o’ me scrupulously accurate an’ timely reports,” there was an absolute tirade of rolled eyes and coughing here, which Kris and he completely ignored, “an’ the shameless cowardice o’ me scuttling scamps here. I think he has me reporting t’ the witch just t’ be a dagger in her side, belike,” he added in a low, conspiring voice, like he’d figured out some great secret.

“Proper royal politics management,” Kris agreed sagely, completely unruffled. “Does your King trust her?” she asked carefully.

“Aye. She feels betrayed an’ used by the undead, an’ no mistake about it. They used her power an’ ambition, an’ tossed her aside like a beaten whore when it were time, no hesitation whatsoever,” he confirmed readily enough, only a little surprising to hear. “She wants revenge, an’ she wants us t’ take it for her… an’ get all the credit when we do.

“Me Oaths are to the King an’ me Legion of cowardly fools, not a harridan who thinks us what don’t think magic all day be easily replaced idiots.”

I sent out the Message to her as he finished, and everyone watched with keen interest as the words softly played out.

“What? Lord Mick, how are you doing this? How are you intending to get here without the Portal? Who are these new Arrivals? Are the gates working? How did they get here? I need more-” the Message reply cut off as I waved my fingers.

He grinned widely, as did the scouts. “Mayhap she’ll chew off her crone’s nails a bit afore we get there,” he said in shameless satisfaction, clearly in a better mood now. He looked about, cleared his throat, and noted, “Now, I know it were a bit shady how we managed t’ run them off, but it seems to me we did find ourselves a small base o’ operations fer the day, an’ did have the desire to explore it fer certain minor items of interest.” His dark eyes twinkled expectantly.

“Right. Ryin, can you fetch the Wagon?” Kris did not actually ask me.

“Sitting outside the wall there.” I gestured to the north side, away from the west way the lugians had fled through on their way to the southwest, and everyone craned their heads over there, seeing exactly nothing.

The Mick bent down, picked up a rock, and tossed it over the stacked stones and boulders piled up by the Gotrok there. It bounced off something in midair, ripples spread out, and he nodded with a totally unperturbed face as the expressions of his scouts all turned shocked again, wondering just what was there. “Well, bring it in here in the lee of the Villa, an’ ye can drop the camouflage,” he said airily. “Er, how many people can it carry, lass?” he asked in an aside.

“It’s rated for ten tons, but I can put more Disks under it if needed, Lord Mick,” I replied calmly.

“Aye, that’s enough.” He rubbed his hands together expectantly. “Now, let’s see what the prior owners left behind for us t’ Burn. The new magic be calling t’ us!”

“New magic? What new magic?” one of the scouts instantly piped up.

--------

It looked like someone put an oddly-shaped blue and white club on top of a staff, then didn’t bother to enchant it as a Weapon, but as a particularly heavy and unwieldy Implement.

I could sense the mana channels on the thing were seared and scarred, and it definitely wasn’t operational. However, unlike at least half-a-dozen other trophy items down below, it was surprisingly intact.

I ran the Assay IV around it, a lot of interested eyes watching as I duplicated what I was seeing with a combined Vatic Gaze at IV in Holo before me as well.

“I see at least sixteen breaks in the patterns,” Kris spoke up without hesitation. “That’s not any Isparian design I’m familiar with." She reached over, tapped the thing with a black nail, and the Holo crystallized with her tremblesense feed, mottling and shading with what looked like bands proving to be layers of stacked alloys of different types. “This is a very interesting effect. Once empowered, those alloys provide the resonance for the inbuilt magical effects through the multiple streams. It looks like the central array was the main one to be boosted.”

“This here fine piece o’ scrap is actually o’ lugian design, one o’ their classic Casting tools, an’ a reward for passing a series o' tests from them,” the Mick stated, watching this keenly, and marking how impressed his students were at what they were seeing. “Different but the same Boosts t’ Self an' Focus, War Magic, Mana Renewal, Mana Conversion, with the one Cantrip effect… plus it empowered as Crushing Blow and Bludgeon Cleaving,” he finished his slow and careful draw from memory. “It actually were a pretty decent tool for general Casting use,” he judged calmly.

“Those little whorls are a Cantrip effect, everything else is operating in parallel with standard Isparian concepts of magic. The alloy interchange enhancing the mana flow is very novel, especially in that particular series of E-Metals. I think they focused more on control and substance than the geometry of the layers themselves, however,” I deduced.

“Oh, really?” Kris was definitely interested.

“Yes. This concept, wedded to proper gearsmithing, could have made them an Implement that could alternate between any kind of the Cleaving mechanic just by rotating the appropriate rings with the proper attuning gemstones.”

Lord Mick and his students all blinked, looking suitably shocked. “Hey, now,” he protested lightly. “Last thing we needed back then were the mages t’ be able to carry around just one overpowered toy, instead o’ a slew a’ them!”

“A slew?” Princess Kristie asked over her shoulder.

“Aye, yes. Tumerok Slayer this, Tusker Slayer that, Undead Slayer here, Mukkir Slayer out o’ me arse, Olthoi Slayer in yer face. Bloody Implements for every type o’ Weapon under the sun with Renders on ‘em, and generally the only things we melees what had Slayer effects on were pieces o’ crap only fit fer hanging on the wall, with some minor exceptions.

“A toy with Crushing Blow and potentially every Render possible worked inta it?” He just rolled his eyes theatrically, although his students remained silent. “Nae doubt I’d be using magic instead o’ straight steel this day, were that t’ have happened!”

“Well, it won’t work on magical items now, now that I can see how it worked.” I blew up the image of the internal rune structure, all blasted and frayed inside, and with a thought, replicated it side by side, but fixed it. “That look about right, Highness?”

“I’ll bow to you on the spellcraft. There’s areas of crystallization and melting internally that are throwing off the natural magic. It should look something more like this in the layout.” She fed me the details, and I replicated the material structure of it according to her design.

I tossed the thing to Kris, who caught it and promptly spun it around her fingers, working out the balance automatically. She had it whipping about herself in seconds with little effort, the brrr of it spinning impressing the scouts watching her.

“This thing has the balance of a tenpin. Whoever made it definitely didn’t want anyone getting ideas of head-thumping with it, which is remarkably short-sighted of them,” she judged coolly.

Lord Mick coughed delicately. “I got many lugian friends, Highness, but ye can’t compliment them on an excessive amount o’ originality in much matters. Frame things in the context of history an’ knowledge known, an’ they be right terrors in learning an’ mastering it. Something new that has t’ be puzzled out? They go beat on some steel ‘til us soft dirt-grubbers work it out.”

“You’re saying that most of their civilized knowledge might be given to them by someone else, or accidental serendipity which they discovered and improved on?” I asked him curiously, pausing in my study.

“Well, they do have methods fer trying out new things, like when they want t’ try new alloys. It’s all dreadfully tedious an’ efficient an’ boring as watching paint dry, an’ they’ve got walls an’ walls of texts full of their failures in a lot o’ things. One o’ the great things they left behind in Linvak Tukal were the libraries an’ records of all the things they’d done before which dinnae work, I been told.”

“That’s an extremely useful approach for a long-living, disciplined, and openly sharing society, especially if you get a lot of people working on the same problem,” Princess Kristie exclaimed in admiration. “Ten thousand people working on a problem with a million iterations can really narrow the avenue of study down fast by failing to different degrees, and then concentrating on the areas you fail in the least!”

“Aye, but that all takes time, Highness,” Lord Mick agreed patiently. “An’ sometimes, ye need a damn answer right now, an’ ain’t got time ta go through centuries of history to see where it be done before, an’ how to handle it again… especially when it never happened afore.”

“True enough,” I agreed with him. “As a support network in peacetime, however, it’s fantastic. I imagine humans frustrate the hell out of them with our ramshackle approach to things, and utterly delight them with novel discoveries so quickly?”

“I been told we test their patience in many, many ways,” Lord Mick agreed, and gestured at the Staff of Clarity. “Can ye repair that?”

“Yes and no.” I stared at the array of Runework a bit longer. “The detail work is currently beyond me, I don’t have the control to do this. The spells are a higher Scarab than I can manage at this point. Importantly, that Cleave effect won’t work as it did before.”

That got his real attention, and everyone’s really. “Aye, now?” His voice was a little depressed. “Why not, then?”

“What it somehow did is multiply the energies matching that of its resonance pattern, here, as they were going through the Staff. So, what came out of the Staff was multiple times more powerful than normal.”

Lord Mick scratched his silvered beard. “Aye, that sounds about how it were described?” he agreed.

“Well, that’s what burned out the pattern here. This Staff was empty, and even the residual energies hammered their way through the pattern and completely distorted it, resulting in microtears and fractures inside it. This doesn’t really look like it, but one good smack from a mace, and the head of that thing will probably explode.” Kris nodded once at my assessment as she set it down carefully on the Disk between us.

“There’s no way any Implement could handle that kind of load of active mana with whatever rules are in operation right now. It’s too much energy for any material to handle, and it’s inside the Staff, not outside it. You try this on a normal Implement, and it’ll slag, explode, fry, or crumble in only a spell or two, at least without some massive investment.

“Thirty goldweight of Indestructible Adamantine, perhaps...” I peered at it, shook my head, and Kris also shook her head. “The more powerful spells would still burn it out. Your Renders won’t be coming back in any historical form you know. They’d be far more limited.”

“Whoa. ‘Any form I know’ is doesn’t include forms I dinnae ken.” He was definitely interested now. “What means ye saying? They come back in some other manner?”

“You familiar with darksteel, Your Highness?” I asked Kris calmly.

She scrunched up her face. “I know the word, but it has multiple implications, so I’ll just say no.”

I nodded. “It’s not the indestructible metal of artifacting dooooom and destruction,” I drawled out, and she smirked. “The older one, associated with dwarfwork.”

“What, that got solved?” she asked, somewhat shocked.

“Well, sure. Get some crazy knucklehead artificer-smiths trying to replicate exotic materials and all the Energized fun, and yes, they can discover stuff. And, uh, go asking the right questions to Celestial patrons who might have been happy to give them some clues to guide them.”

Kris laughed huskily, clapping her hands eagerly. “So, what does darksteel do?”