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

“We’ve gotten quite good at that, Lady Magos!” Selena declared quietly. She and Rogar split the Roaches up to handle each direction, relay signals of tight-beam flashlights set up quickly, and they were off into the shadows, much more quietly than lugians could do.

I showed Poklio’s wife and kids the section of wall, made a counter-balancing door out of it that could be closed, and opened it up to reveal the triangular tunnel beyond. “Just follow the walls, and it will eventually take you out. It is not a short trip, however. If you get tired, lay down to the sides so that others can pass you, as there is not a lot of room.”

The miner-spy and his wife embraced, the children valiantly not showing their fear as they quickly moved into the strangely-made tunnel… and other women and children were soon following them hastily.

“We need to go connect more sections of tunnel,” Poklio advised me quickly. “It will take hours to quietly move everyone out of here, even if they carry little.”

“I notice none of the elders are coming,” I said softly, following him as he hurried back down the passageway to an adjoining tunnel.

“They will come last, Lady Magos, so as not to slow the rest of us down,” he said grimly.

Lugians had both a rich martial tradition and a lot of recent conflict with their civil war, giving them the mindset to make brutally hard decisions for the welfare of their next generation.

“One of the things I was tasked with doing was potentially saving the lore and history of the sages of Linvak Tukal. The Scrolls of Failure and the genealogies in particular were considered paramount.”

“There are a great number of them,” the miner answered slowly, as he suddenly pushed a carving and it slid out to reveal another hidden tunnel behind it. He tapped gently on the side of it, and there was another very quiet tapping in return.

A minute later, the first women were coming out of it, he whispered the directions, and she and her children were pacing quietly yet hurriedly on the right path.

“I can see I’m going to have to widen this,” I noted, following him inside, which I promptly began to do, making it wide enough for two lugians to squeeze past one another. “As for carrying the Scrolls, as long as they can fit inside a twenty-foot cube, I can take a great deal of them.”

He gave me a thoughtful glance, but his attention was dragged back by tons of stone Shaping out of our way as we followed this new tunnel around and away.

“The virindi are known to be investigating the records of the sages there, seeing if there is anything of interest. If you intend to retrieve them, there will likely be fighting involved.”

“Then best we save it until it is time to leave.”

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Poklio had an incredible memory of the city and awareness of where he was, which I backed up with my Visual File. At specific points, he pointed and we changed direction, soon intersecting other tunnels or rooms, often with surprised lugians waiting in them, all shocked to see the stone flow away and us standing there looking back at them.

The quiet evacuation of Linvak Tukal proceeded forthwith.

Headmen in each discrete area contacted their people, and the evacuees poured down into the tunnels, which ran together as I connected them and drove new tunnels. They headed first to the outskirts of the city, and then emerged long enough to find the doorway to the tunnel out and move into it in a constant and steady stream.

If an alarm went off, we’d hear it as quickly as the Gotrok would, and could be in position to cut them off much more quickly. The citizens of the city who remained, which were mostly the male miners and makers, would also boil out to confront the Gotrok if required.

The biggest wild card factor was going to be the virindi.

The lugians were startlingly good at noise discipline, not wearing metal to bang against the stones as they moved. They also had excellent endurance and none of them were carrying much, stripped by the headmen if they tried anything so foolish. They were leaving with some clothes, food, their most treasured mementos and valuables, and not a whole lot more.

They were leaving the city they’d carved out of a mountain behind, because their king said their lives were worth more than reclaiming the city. It was a great reason for doing so.

The miners and workers would be rousing soon, playing at going to their jobs soon enough. The movement of the men would actually hide the evacuation of the women and children, right up until the Gotrok realized no women and kids were going to where they were supposed to.

It meant I had to rush back across the city and immediately hook in some connecting tunnels on the way to the mines that the workers could duck into and run away into once past a certain checkpoint. The kids not going to schools or trades might be looked at oddly once their indoctrinators missed them, but that wasn’t our biggest problem.

There was a steady flow of lugians walking the long tunnel to get out of there now, and there had shockingly been no interference from the virindi. Granted, this was all being done without lots of shows of magic and no violence if at all possible to maximize the people who were evacuated, but it was still surprising.

Kris and I had no problems communicating. Bondmage and Null still had our link, and I hadn’t told anyone that I could Cast without alarming the virindi simply by pulling the magic out of her instead of the manafield. But that was going to be our surprise… and in the meantime, tapping on our Bond was the equivalent of Morse Code, and we could dit-dah-dit pretty damn fast and text one another with what we needed to say.

---

INTENSE VIRINDI ACTIVITY DOWN BELOW. IT SEEMS THEY ARE CONCENTRATING ON LOWER SECURITY INSTEAD OF UPPER. THEY MIGHT ALSO NEED THE EXTRA BODIES TO MAINTAIN CONTROL OF WHATEVER THEY ARE DOING HERE, she /texted me through our Bondlink.

So, she had gone down into the secure virindi areas and infiltrated where they were sure nobody could. It didn’t surprise me, as that was actually the plan all along.

YOU GET PART TWO DONE?, I /blipped and blopped back to her, as I was working on my own special project.

MIDDLE OF PLACING NUMBER SIX DOWN NOW. FIGURED TWO NICE SPOTS TO PUT SEVEN AND EIGHT BEFORE I BAIL, she /beeped back. THEY REALLY AREN’T GOING TO LIKE US.

THAT DAMN VIVUS SHIT GETS INTO EVERYTHING, I /agreed with her, /tapping in response. STAY SAFE. WE’RE ON THE WAY TO RETRIEVE RECORDS OF FAILURES.

IT’S ME!, she /worded back, and I just shook my head.

Ael’s Sama had a serious lack of fear, a REALLY healthy store of emotional issues, and a surfeit of what was often called the Stupidity Stat, that thing which made really smart people do something absolutely idiotic simply because they thought they could get away with it.

When you were dealing with people with superhuman capabilities, the stuff they could actually get away with was pretty extraordinary, and Rantha Hags were no exceptions to that. When Kris got her ire up, she was willing to dare some pretty insane and dangerous stuff to make sure some things got what was coming to them.

I could only imagine where she was going to place those Vivic Orbs...

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They were all looking the wrong way.

Kristie’s cloak was molded around her, disrupting any registration of an improper form. The Displacement effect was currently modified to send her visual image right into and flat against the stone , an alchemical illusion and cloaking effect of light-bending that effectively eliminated her profile against the magically-smoothed stone and Rune-channels pumping magic into that nasty combination of crystals and Formation down below her.

Purple extra-dimensional energies were humming as they built up, aetherium lighting up to open up something that was going to utterly magnify the ley line energy being drawn in here and set up something really big.

Maybe even big enough to surge all the Summon Points and pop them open again with the wave of energy.

That wouldn’t be a catastrophe, but it was going to be annoying to have to shut them all down again. Unlike before, all those points were clearly marked, and what was required to shut them down again was already known.

But, why go through that hassle again?

The crystals hanging down from the ceiling were difficult to cling to, what with the rush of energy running over them, but that was why a tight Null and a really high Ki reserve was so useful. Her Vajra gripped the very structure of the stones, the fabric of the crystals enough to give her purchase, and she once again thanked the First Rantha for protrusions up front being completely elective and making this easier to accomplish.

The brand-new Lugian Simulacra made from hollowed-out corpses, assorted Hollow Minions, and virindi in the chamber were not looking at the Formation. They were there to guard against external threats, not internal ones, and a stealther coming down their precious Mana Condenser to place a Vivic Orb inside the crystals at the very center of their work was simply not possible.

Sure, she should have been spotted right away, except the damn bastards had shit for visual capabilities, relying on off-spectra that her Darkstalker ki neutralized completely, as well as an inhuman sensitivity to magic that could include life Auras, which her Null shut down on top of that.

She was just an inert shadow creeping very slowly across the crystal, palming the Orb from her backpack. As a certain rotation in the guard patterns drew attention in the wrong directions, she flicked it down and placed it precisely between the crystals and out of line of sight. Her hand was withdrawn before any smiling or frowning masks were turned her way.

Chortling quietly to herself, she started backwards up the crystal, towards the upper mine door she’d come in through. She moved right past the Virindi Executioner that was supposed to have seen her, and slipped past it a second time during the two seconds it had removed its imperfect mask to clean it of energy residues building up inside it.

The Vivic Orbs had only one purpose: to suck in a whole lot of energy if it was released violently, then convert that energy into the fire of shattering matter. All of it would now be nicely chased with a whole lot of hungry vivus expanding into what should have been a manafield saturating with extra-dimensional energies at their thickest and most vulnerable point.

She couldn’t stop the whole thing from blowing to Hell and gone, that was a given. She was plenty sure, by the feelings from her Tremblesense of the energies running through the walls, that the virindi could blow the Formation right now and take out the whole city and everyone in it, at the very least. It might not have the transformative properties they were looking for, and might not send out a full pulse to fry any non-virindi magic using the ley lines, but it would definitely kill everyone here and likely harvest them as slaves to the Virindi Quiddity as it did so.

Making up the Orbs had been frantic enough, considering quality level had to substitute for time spent in this case, and the whole fact they didn’t have the energy to do what they wanted to was shaky.

But, hey, if the virindi were nice enough to power up the Orbs for them, what did they have to complain about?

Three taps came over her bondmage link, and she knew Ryin was about to pop up in the Hall of Sages and start gathering a whole lot of records. That was also extremely important, but first, she had to get out of here…