Book 1 Epilogue
There was little difficulty in finding the other group, though a degree of drudgery. Vilena’s flight meant it was easy to find them—the implications for what would have happened if they had failed to defeat Ruthven’s brides were frightening and not considered—at which point it was only a question of catching up. Qi Zhen’s speed and Zahra’s sickness roughly cancelled out there. By the time the first, most delicate signs of dawn’s approach were discoloring the horizon, all seven were sitting in a rough circle, exhausted in body and soul, staring into the flickering red of a crude campfire.
Zahra had curled up against her sister’s side, sleeping off the accumulated fatigue that healing Sara’s hand had brought to the surface. Gilead was leaned against Vilena, but unlike for the child there would be only a hypnotic half-sleep for him. There had been a spare set of clothes waiting for him in Shati’s underbelly, men’s clothing in the 1930s fashion, white buttoned shirt and brown suspenders. Juniper had offered to transmute the Elaine disguise into something thick enough for the north of England, but he had waved her aside. The disguise, bloodstained and creased, served as a pillow to shield Vilena’s back from the roughness of the fallen log she leaned against.
The vampire’s fingers raked softly through Gilead’s hair, sending tantalizing shivers down his spine.
“So,” Vilena said, “Fourteen centuries dead, and you know how to use a sword like nobody else. Roman legionary?”
It was several seconds before Gilead found the wherewithal to reply. “Nay, no common soldier was I, but a knight. A knight of King Arthur’s court.”
“You’re joking!”
“He’s not,” Sara interrupted. “He’s really, really not. I don’t know if he can joke, but definitely not about that.”
Vilena’s lips twitched in the direction of a frown. She was no monarchist, and her time with Ruthven had only reinforced that belief. But then, Engels had been the son of an industrialist, had he not been? If worst came to worst, Vilena would have to train her darling princess in the immortal science, breaking her out of whatever aristocratic attitude remained via certain means (which I shall not reproduce here).
Vilena blushed at her own lewdness, then returned to stroking Gilead’s hair. “So what does a Knight of the Round Table do?”
“Wander,” Gilead replied. “There was always some wrong in need of righting. Some lady whose honor was in need of defense. Some beast to…”
Gilead’s eyes became shiny.
“I worked on a farm,” Vilena said. “Before… all of this. I’m a backarounder as well.”
“From what year?” Juniper asked.
“Nineteen-forty-two, when I died. The first time. The second time it was eighteen-eighty-nine.”
“Wait, that means you…” Juniper’s eyes went wide as she put two and two together. “Oh dear. I’m very sorry. I only got hit by a bus.”
Vilena made a dismissive gesture. “Bus or bullet, the separation is no less painful.”
“Your side won, by the way,” Juniper blurted out. “Hitler blew his goddamned brains out, hiding in his personal bunker, waiting for Berlin to be conquered.”
Vilena slammed a hand over her mouth to stop from waking up the entire forest with the force of her laughter. It was a silly thing to laugh about, considering it made no difference to her one way or another; but she still remembered the way the Teutons had talked about themselves. All that racial superiority and unbroken will, meeting its end in a burrow in the ground.
Meanwhile, Sara realized there was something she needed to take care of, and with Qi Zhen meditating immediately next to her, now was the time for it.
“Hey. Steel-boy. Can you hear me?”
“I am not a boy, and my frame is composed primarily of titanium, ceramic, and polymer,” Qi Zhen said by way of an answer. Their concentration disrupted, the cycling plates closed, and their posture relaxed out of the strict lotus position.
“Apologies. Titanium-girl.”
“Not a girl either.” Qi Zhen’s voice was capable of modulating itself into the most sublime expressions of anger, and they made good use of that capability.
“Whatever. Qi Zhen. Automaton. We have something to discuss.”
“Which is?”
“Our deal,” Sara said. “You helped us, even saved the vampire’s life back there. And I’m a woman of my word, which means it’s now my duty to help you to find that informant of yours.”
“Oh, of course. The good news is that the first step has already been completed. I know for a fact that you’re not the informant.”
Sara gritted her teeth. Couldn’t the damned robot have figured that out earlier? “What. Gave it. Away?”
“Your Pretension. Gem Ship has a Pretension with a long-ranged broad-spectrum sensory capability. Unless I have fatally misjudged your Pretension’s basis, yours is rather more direct.”
Sara had to admit that the logic was sound. “I guess you’re right that I wouldn’t have just told you that if asked. ‘Gem Ship’ is their codename?”
Qi Zhen nodded. “Sublime Titanium is not so stupid as to allow the names of its informants to be spread to a tertiary member such as myself. All I could find was a location and a description of capabilities.”
“So why do you want to find this informant so badly?”
“Because approximately four months ago, she sent in a report to Sublime Titanium’s main temple indicating that she had seen a breach.” Realizing that Sara had no idea what they meant, Qi Zhen added, “A report that, if true, could change everything.”
“And so they sent you?”
Qi Zhen’s fingers burrowed into the hard earth, their body clicking steadily as several of the plates across their midsection adjusted. The face, molded out of metal, made no indication of emotion.
“They ‘sent’ nobody. I volunteered to investigate on my own.”
An obvious lie, but Sara didn’t care enough to probe. Her mind wandered in other directions instead. “What do you mean by a ‘breach’?”
“Aha, now that is a worthy question!” The automaton canted back their head, gazing up past the trees and into Scrapyard’s rune-studded sky. “Have you ever wondered what lies above us? Where we are in the universe?”
“I’m sure everyone has.”
“Where I come from, in the Qinglong shard, we alone have the technology to actually investigate. Long-range scanners, rocket probes, and the like. For the most part, the air over Scrapyard forms an impenetrable dome that reveals only noise and obliterates any object which enters it. “
(It does not merely destroy that which crosses the barrier. It consumes. The fools simply do not realize what they are encountering)
“But very occasionally, there will be what we call a ‘breach’; a moment when the veil of secrecy opens just long enough for something to pass through. A coherent signal, a sample of atmosphere, something like that. Gem Ship… what she saw, she immediately recanted in the next missive, attributing it to interpretive error, hence the lack of Sect response.”
(Oh no.)
“But she saw something coherent entering Scrapyard. Something that cast off waves of electromagnetic radiation… and something that could steer itself.”
(Damn it all, damn it all! I knew I’d forgotten something!)
Sara had heard too many mad stories of potential escape from Scrapyard in her time to take this at face value. Even still, a spark of something lit up in her chest as Qi Zhen continued to explain what they knew. Not hope; but curiosity, perhaps, or the satisfaction of—
(I tore the cradle from my face, staggering away from the Observatory and into the center of the room. How long had I been watching? My eyes had lost all focus, and my skull throbbed from thirst and hunger. My balance was unsteady, and I might have fallen had not a strong, steady hand pressed against my midsection.)
(“Welcome back, sir. You have been making use of the Observatory for 105 hours, a time span in the 97th percentile for such observation sessions. I was beginning to develop concern for your physical state.”)
(It was Lemurene, my favorite of the several constructs which were my only companions in the many centuries of my quest. While the others continued their maintenance of Scrapyard and the Tower, it always seemed to fall to him to take charge of the maintenance of the Tower’s most important inhabitant. The little shit. He always spoke in a construct’s register, even and emotionless, and yet could still speak subtext. In this case, the subtext being that I should take better care of myself.)
(Not that one hundred and five hours without food or water was beyond my capabilities. Far from it. It was just that Lemurene didn’t like it when I made myself suffer unnecessarily.)
(“Thank you, Lemurene.” I scratched at my beard; the grey stubble was already beginning to curl, and for the millionth time I considered building a new cradle that would not require I keep it shaved. “Intriguing events have transpired. The seventh bearer, after so very long dormant, has at last chosen a Pretender. Apparently she was waiting for someone specific.”)
(“Very intriguing, sir. I assume this is the resurrected knight of the Round Table you were speaking of previously?”)
(I sighed. “If only it were not so but, yes, the very same. He could have done something incredible, I truly believe it. Now then, have you prepared something to make up for that calorie deficit?”)
(“Of course, sir.” Lemurene gestured to the cracked-open door into the adjacent chamber, far enough from the Observatory that I would not be tempted to lose myself once more in the Archive’s countless goings-on.)
(My hunger burst into being, and so overcome was I with the need for food and drink, and thanks for the one who took care of me, that the words that emerged—as true as they were embarrassing to say—were, “Lemurene, I love you.”)
(“I love you too, sir.”)
(I spent the next two hours consuming food and drink in small portions, the better to revitalize my old bones without putting too much strain on my organ mass. I reminisced at Lemurene, age naturally driving my thoughts towards the deep past, worlds I had not seen in two thousand years or longer, vistas no eye would ever gaze upon ever again. I shut my eyes for an hour, and when I returned to the waking world, I was prepared to return to my life’s work. This time, when I returned to the Observatory, it was not to aimlessly spy upon the most interesting inhabitants of my Archive, but to look for a threat.)
(In visible light, the Archive was a bubble of green and blue and gray amidst seemingly-infinite red. As an artifact of my original biology, I allowed myself to linger on that spectrum for a while; but there was work to be done. Infrared, ultraviolet, radio, magnetic, electrical, gravitational, a dozen other spectra besides, I analyzed my domain, searching for the pattern I now knew to be present. Then, at last, I spotted it.)
(It was in a spectrum I had not thought of for a very long time, a strange overlap between magnetism and mental energy which only exists in a small fraction of worlds. But there it was, plain as day: a trajectory, sharply angled, emerging from out of the red and pointing inwards, towards the ground.)
It was in the region known as Leedsrealm, sparse and cold, the cooling remnants of a world on the brink of an altogether stranger form of industrial revolution. The point of intersection meandered unsteadily, but narrowed in on a ruin. What remained of Castle Carbennic.
In the days since Carbennic had seen its final battle, entropy had taken hold. The bodies of the fallen, no longer possessing the aura of fear that had protected them, had been stripped of all valuables and either buried or burned. The ghosts of warriors long dead, no longer held in place by the singular wrath of the late Sir Duranore, had faded at last into memory. The marks of battle could still be seen to those who looked carefully, scorch marks in the earth, bullets embedded deep in the topsoil, but only one piece of loot remained.
The sphere that had once housed Duranore’s mind and whose projectors had generated his body lay exactly where Gilead had left it, sunken slightly into the dirt after the passing of a few rains. The presence (alien to Scrapyard, and so unreadable to me), roved invisibly around the area, detectable only in the ineffable feeling of being watched, the sudden stillness of the animal life. Then it slowed, stopped. It had found something to its liking. It dove into the sphere, and seemingly vanished, gone from the world.
(Would only that I were so lucky.)
A surge of energy burst from the sphere, bright electrical arcs further singeing the surrounding grass. Lights flickered across its dented surface as foreign influence subtly corrected flawed circuits, drawing functionality out of that which had been destroyed. The antigrav thrusters came to life, sending the sphere twisting and spinning erratically as it rose a meter into the air, two, three. With a series of crashes like a power cable snapping in half, the hard-light projectors flickered, struggling to come to life until at last they could coordinate themselves, producing the image of…
A woman, maybe a girl. Her body was vague, everything soft-edged and brilliantly yellow, more ghostly in appearance than Duranore had ever been. From the undersides of her eyes emerged her only flaw, a set of yellow-green lightning-bolt patterns that traced down her cheeks, down her sides, all the way to the soles of her feet. She hovered in the air, arms and legs bent, hair waving aquatically back and forth. She looked down, hands flying first to her stomach, apparently surprised by what she found there.
Once she had found the contours of her body, the intruder explored her capabilities, twisting into a flip, racing from side to side, shooting up into the air and gliding lazily back down. She was not familiar with this new means of existence. Then, satisfied with her range of motion, the stranger clenched her fists and focused on the reason for her presence here, whatever it was.
The stranger shot off into the sky, recklessly fast in her need to investigate this strange place. (I had little reason to believe that she was on my side. I would not let this woman, whoever she was, ruin my beloved Archive.) Carbennic Castle sat empty once again.