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

Everyone grew quieter as the miles slid past. It helped that we were actually making really good speed through the triangular passage I was Shaping up with great speed, but the real reason was we started to hear and feel the hum.

“Fuck me, but that be really, really nasty, be it not?” the Mick asked softly, continually looking around as the hum grew about us. We could now hear subtle little gyrations and alterations in its constant power.

“Ley line tap, and a big one. The glitches in it are whatever they are charging up and doing to the natural flow,” I informed everyone in a Magevoice whisper. “I’m having to be very careful drawing on ambient Earthpower and not the ley line right now. Don’t use any magic, and minimize all vibrations. Sound travels a long way through stone.”

Most of them were riding along on Disks, so that wasn’t an issue. But they all took deep breaths and started using the motionless Stealth training they’d all been put through, stretching muscles one by one, relaxing and yet ready for something to happen.

Those with lightfoot could keep walking and did, but the sound of footsteps behind me vanished completely, and conversation ceased entirely.

------

Down nearly three hundred feet slowly over the course of nearly two miles, and then much more rapidly moving up. Still smooth, still ramplike, as we’d have to be moving people along these, and I didn’t want them tripping over stairs in the dark.

The hum was loud enough to be definitely annoying and a distraction, with pulses and breaks in it that were very noticeable, and sounded very virindi-like. It felt to me like something was telling the magic where to go in a complex series, but it was Spellcraft, not a language, so there was nothing to decode that I or Kris could tell.

Given we could understand virindi quasi-machine language when they scrabbled to one another, that wasn’t surprising.

“Timing,” Kris murmured behind me. “The pulses are timing something. It’s a countdown.”

I didn’t have her Tremblesense or level of spiritual awareness interacting with it. “I can’t tell via pulse frequency. Amplitude?” I asked back quietly.

“Yes.” She reached out to the walls sloping together on either side of us, tracing her fingers on the stone. “It’s built up by a decibel over the last mile, fractional increments on every third pulse.”

“We don’t know the goal, so that’s useful trivia until we get it.”

“Aye, but most timers, dinnae they count down to going boom in all the stories?” the Mick asked quietly behind us.

“You didn’t think this was going to end well, did you?” I whispered back. “Kris, what’s your coldly logical best heartless bastard scenario here?”

“The mines under the city offer useful veins through the earth they don’t have to excavate and clear, they only have to alter them into useful forms and start making grand patterns out of them. Residual minerals form useful catalysts, and there’s multiple easily accessible ley lines to tap.

“Cold heartless bastards would remove non-productive units and turn them into something productive. Then they would transform the area into something more useful to them, using a catalytic transformation of great scale attuned to the desired minerals to bring up more from the depths of the world, and incidentally trying to time it to dispose of random chaotic elements threatening them on this world.

“The desires of the lugians in this matter are naturally irrelevant.”

I could feel the half-dozen lugians behind me grimacing at the very cold-blooded plan she’d put forth.

“Axiomatics are the worst. They don’t even have any malice in this, they just don’t care about anything beside their own goals,” I explained quietly. “Organics and mortals are just chaff, interference, imperfections in their plans, to be dealt with as efficiently as possible to move the plans forward. This can mean accommodation and treating with them, or it can mean extermination. All one and the same.”

“Can we stop it?” the Mick asked for everyone.

“Yes. It’s always possible. Is it worth it to?” I looked back at them. “Our goal here is to get the civilians out, end stop. I’m not sacrificing you in a bum rush to get down to the heart of the Formation, interrupt it, set something off prematurely, and hopefully damage it beyond fixing while slaughtering enough virindi that they don’t attempt to do it again as we die valiantly under hundreds of spells.

“There’s times to die for a cause, and this is not one of them.”

“I be likin’ t’ stay as far away from such times as I can,” the Mick uttered in a light yet grim tone.

“The best way is to stop those times before they start. Of course, that just makes the other party speed them up, which is a royal pain, or make them totally secret as long as possible, which is just as bad.”

“If only there were some all-seeing divine beings around who could clue us in on the shit that was trying to kill us all and send us out to snip things in the bud,” Kris grinned hard.

“Then we’d have t’ complain about us doing all the work o’ the gods an’ them never doing anything themselves!” the Mick coughed knowingly.

“I don’t think any of us want to consider the kinds of things Mithar and His fellows up in Heaven there have to do and what they have to face down, because there’s no way we could handle any of them,” I murmured softly, and heard some subdued grunts behind me. “That’s where Faith comes in. I trust them to do what they need to do, and they can rely on us to do what we need to do. Sometimes, that just involves praying. Sometimes, it means you wade through gore and you put armies to the sword.”

“The latter times generate a lot more Karma,” Princess Kristie reminded them over her shoulder, and earned some grim chuckles for that.

“Yes. But it means that kneeling at dawn, raising your sword at noon, saluting the sun going down, and singing at Highmoon all contribute to the fight. You give your Faith to the gods, and they do something right with it.

“The gods who do selfish things with it, well, those aren’t the gods you want to worship. They may not give you a choice, but if you’re the kind to serve THEM wholeheartedly, then you’re probably one of those high karma-value problems we have to get out of the way.”

The Mick turned and wagged a finger at everyone behind him. “No betrayin’ us all t’ the dark gods fer fabulous power an’ tentacle sex an’ whatnot!” he admonished them all.

---

I stopped in place, staring ahead, and then slowly moved my head in a circle. Everyone behind me waited patiently.

“Four hundred paces to go,” Kris informed them quietly, tapping the stone gently. “Three audial nodes close by. They’ve done some diversions and alterations to the ley line formations.”

“Like spiders pulling on a web from the main lines of the old tunnels they’ve adjusted,” I agreed into the quiet. “I’m going to be making spirals and turns now, avoiding what they are doing with the magic flow. If we disrupt it, they’ll know something is happening, and likely wrench open the ground to find out what.”

I spun the tunnel sideways and up, and began to spiral into a rise to get over the diverted ley line in front of us, keeping the rise gentle enough to not throw off anyone walking it in the dark.

Up thirty feet, ahead a hundred feet, move left, spiral down ten feet, diagonally sixty feet, up, hard left again, diagonally back right…

It looked like they had a complete formation up, so I didn’t have to worry about them adding additional nodes and intercepting anything. Still, the hum was a bit more discordant once inside it, an asynchronous meshing of multiple magical flows originating sounds which were difficult to place and track as a whole right now, but whose frequency and amplitudes comprised the count-down for whatever they were doing.

----

“Legs ready.”

Kris’ order sent all the melees quietly extending their feet and scooting up to the edge of the Disks that had carried them this whole distance. Metal and leather creaked as they kicked and tensed. Weapons were quietly unlimbered, Shields propped on boots, and bowstrings tensed calmly as archers and mages moved from sitting to crouching or kneeling in readiness.

I waited for Kris to gesture, and when she did, the last foot of stone flowed out of our way, and Linvak Tukal was open before us.

No Casting. Kris and the Mick spun out in opposite directions, blending into the shadows here.

Just a glimmer of light, and I stepped out, the rest of the team coming out on the cloak-covered Disks and getting rapidly into formation.

The heavily-armored lugians still weren’t setting foot on the ground, while the archers and two support mages rose to their feet, the latter hoping they wouldn’t be needed, as any Casting was going to raise the alarm instantly.

Behind Politia, the last to exit, the wall flowed back into the same carved design it had possessed before I’d sent it out of the way.

The Mick held up two fingers as we looked out over the cavern in front of us. Kopf, Gross, and two other lugians confirmed, we were on the second tier of the city. He made a down and to the right motion, tilting his head. Kopf frowned, and corrected it to more central. The other lugians confirmed, Kopf’s partner Gross pointing emphatically right and ahead of them.

We had a very, very good map of Linvak Tukal in the Markspace, but everyone had Marks closed and quiet right now. Everyone could feel a static on their Markdoors that didn’t belong there, and knew that conferring by Mark was going to be sensed and start something bad, so we could only infer and match up inside our own heads, matching the views to the internal map as we hit waypoints or landmarks that stood out.

Visual Files were nice, but not being able to share information perfectly was annoying.

The lugians all had soft leather and cloth on their big feet in case they needed to move, but the Disks had perfect steady control that kept them from knocking their metal against the walls as they floated along. Shadowslake was on all the Armor, which made it non-reflective, non-magnetic, quiet when knocked on, and really muted the magical signature of the stuff down to just a few feet.

The city was well-lit with magical torches, but that just made areas of shadow in between areas of illumination from the torches and crystal-fed moonlight piped in from overhead.

Nighttime, about 11 pm. Curfew magnifying the effects of late night, almost nobody was moving around here. What was moving would be Gotrok patrols keeping the people in, or virindi gliding about for their own purposes.

Good enough for us.

Kris was in the absolute lead, the Mick gliding second, and I was leading the Disks in third, with everyone scanning to the sides as we followed this side tunnel down towards an egress.

Gross was dead on, the tunnel coming out into a cross way that led in a ramp towards the bottom level. As this was the outskirts of the subterranean city, there were no guards posted out here, so far from the residential areas.

The Mick pointed out the signs indicating tier and direction for everyone, and there was a quick realigning of internal maps as everyone figured out where we were. The Mick pointed down silently, everyone else did the same, and down we went, Kris the ghost, the Mick the shadow, and the rest of us just floating apparitions.