363. The Fountain and the Bridge
I did what you asked, Ractia. I gave Liv your message. Now keep your half of the bargain.
The currents of mana carried the words to her, where Ractia had been waiting on her couch. When she opened her eyes and sat up, the cables pulled, scraping along her neck and shoulders like snakes made of segmented metal, rather than scales.
“Excellent,” she whispered, in a tongue not spoken by any living thing in the entire star system. It was the language that she had spoken as a child, when she had been called by a different name, and it had been dead for millenia.
Ractia allowed her physical body to dissolve into a cloud of red vapour. The cables, with nothing to connect to, fell down onto her couch. She hated the feeling of her mind dulling, and how her memories became blurred and indistinct without a connection to the supplemental memory banks. Still, for this, it would be safer to actually touch the waystone.
At a thought, the great blast doors opened, and she slipped out into the corridor, past the two Antrian war-machines who protected her sanctum at all times. Along the left side, windows more durable than steel opened onto a view of the gray, empty plains, utterly devoid of life and atmosphere, which made up the surface of the system’s only moon. The installation, which had escaped the violence and destruction of Miriam’s rebellion, was currently in full sunlight, and miles of panels spread out on a series of frames, anchored to the underlying rock. Every bit of light collected was used to grow the mana which suffused the installation, enough to not only power all of the machinery, but also to raise the ambient density to a level comfortable for one of the Vædim.
On the right side, however, a succession of doors and passageways led deeper into the installation. The interior, Ractia knew, was where the great vertical gardens where her children grew their food were located; the water recycling and reclamation enchantments, and the magic that regulated the circulation of the air, so that her children and the plants were kept in balance. If not for careful maintenance routines, the Gardens of the Moon would have developed their own unpredictable weather patterns: mist crawling through the corridors, perhaps, or rain falling upon delicate machinery.
There were dormitories, as well, where the followers that she and Noghis had evacuated from Nightfall Peak lived. Though two decades was little more than a snap of the fingers to an existence which spanned millennia, it had been enough for the terrified children, carried here on the hips of Red Shield women, of human cultists, to grow to adulthood. The Eld, of course, were a different case entirely. The Iravatan youths who saw Ractia coming down the corridor were still enjoying that long, golden childhood with which she and her brethren had blessed them. They called out in excitement, and scurried along in Ractia’s wake. By the time she had arrived at the waystone, she had acquired not only a following of her worshippers, but also her son.
The wounds Noghis had suffered during the fighting at the sapphire mines in the Ratn Parvat, as the humans had named the mountain range, had healed up nicely, leaving only the barest scarring: faint white lines on his skin, where the blades of the ksatriya had tried to end his life. If he hadn’t been protected by scales at the time, or hadn’t returned so quickly after being injured, it might have been different - but a short rest on the medical beds had set the young man right again in no time at all. His hair was neatly braided, once again, in the same fashion his father’s had once been. She could have used Nighthawk now, to protect her - but any chance of that was gone.
“Is it time, Mother?” Noghis asked, falling into step at her side.
“My offer has been accepted,” Ractia said. She knelt down on the white stone, stretched out a hand, and touched her skin to it. Mana flowed out of her body and into the stone, and from there into the network of which it was only a portion. Her mind followed the mana, extending throughout the entire system of interconnected stones, searching for - ah.
“There,” Ractia murmured. “A bit more than a single drop of blood, Wren Wind Dancer.” The spell itself she had worked out well in advance, before she’d even made the offer. She’d done it while connected to the machines that expanded her mind, allowing the intricate circuitry, flashing with mana, to do the work which was in all honesty beneath her. Let Tamiris and his ilk spend all their time crafting enchantments and spells from scratch; Ractia was more than happy to leave that kind of labour to others.
She’d been certain to hold the spell in her mind, as well, while she disconnected herself from the memory banks built into the installation. Now, Ractia sent her magic through the waystone, using the pre-existing network as a vehicle to conduct her intent, her mana, and the words she needed all the way down to the surface of the planet below. She allowed her attention to linger just long enough to be certain that nothing had gone wrong.
There was the cocoon - an elaborate construction which was connected directly to Ghveris’s organic heart and lungs and brain. It had been a bit of a puzzle: after all, she couldn’t very well leave bits of glass, tubes, and who knew what else inside his new body as it grew. But in the meanwhile, she had to keep what organs remained alive, and that meant moving both blood and oxygen. The cocoon would not only do that, it would protect him while a new body grew. The same spells which had aged both Noghis and the second generation of Ractia’s bats rapidly, hastening their growth from child to adult, now latched onto the genetic information contained in Ghveris’s blood, and went to work.
Satisfied, Ractia withdrew her awareness and rose. Her good, dutiful son reached out to take her arm - as if a goddess might actually need his help to stand! But she took the offered arm, more to give the boy something to do than for any other reason.
“It is done,” she declared. “The Beast of Iuronnath will walk once again, free of his prison of enchanted steel. Whether that brings him happiness or not, I suppose we will not remain long enough to know.”
“I cannot say I understand why you would give such a gift to them,” Noghis grumbled. “They both turned against you, and fought at the side of our enemies. If they’d been able to, at Nightfall Peak, they would have killed both of us.”
“It is a gift that benefits us, as much as it does the two lovers,” Ractia explained. “That cocoon will not fall away in an hour. Ghveris has been removed from whatever assault the Lady of Winter might intend to launch on us - and unless I read her wrong, Wren Wind Dancer will remain at the side of her lover, until his recovery is complete. If we are truly fortunate, the girl will leave her healer from the east there, as well, to watch over the process. That means that with a single spell, I have removed as many as three of her closest companions.”
Noghis chewed on that for a moment. “I do not like it, but I believe that I understand,” he admitted, finally. “To the control room?”
“Yes,” Ractia said, turning away from the waystone. “But that stone must be destroyed, immediately,” she commanded. “Have someone see to it, so that they can’t use it to bring an army here.”
Her son lingered behind her for just a moment to give orders to one of the Antrians, then hurried to catch up as Ractia strode back out into one of the interconnected hallways. Word that she was on the move had spread all across the Gardens, by now, and as she made her way ever inward and then down, toward the control room buried beneath the lunar surface, Ractia’s followers called out to her.
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“Is it time, Great Mother?”
“Has the exodus come?”
“Will they attack us again?” one young mother asked, her infant cradled in her arms.
Ractia paused. She would answer them once, and that would have to be enough, for she had more important matters to attend to. In a thousand languages at once, she spoke. “It is time, my children,” she announced, raising her voice so that it echoed through the corridor in both directions. “The machines we have laboured so long to assemble will now do their work, and open the bridge I have promised you. As to whether our enemies will try to stop us -”
Very deliberately, she hesitated. “I have done what I can. I have given them a gift, and asked them to stay away. Even now, one of our Antrian war-machines shatters the waystone, so that they cannot follow us through it. But I have learned not to underestimate my enemies, and to always assume the worst of them. Prepare to defend yourselves.”
That set them all to moving, her children and her worshippers. Ractia had never been a commander, nor even truly a warrior - but there were those among her followers, even now, who fancied themselves as such. Her son was among them. They would, she was absolutely certain, make plans to hold the Gardens of the Moon against an assault. Whether they could muster any resistance capable of holding the Lady of Winter back for more than a few moments, Ractia regarded as a truly dubious prospect. Still, the machines would take time to work, and even the slightest delay might conceivably mean the difference between success and failure - between losing this shard of herself, or not.
She left them to it.
The control room was buried under hundreds of feet of lunar rock. There was a shaft, complete with a mana disk, to carry both Ractia and her son there from the surface. All of the enchantments recognized her Authority instantly: she had spent nearly twenty years making certain that, among other things, she had utter and complete control of everything here, in her last refuge. The doors opened without any conscious thought on her part, and the lights came up.
All of the new machinery had been connected, at Ractia’s orders and based upon plans made thousands of years earlier, to these central enchantments and controls. Sigils in half a dozen bright colors lit up the screens, scrolling past to every side of her as she stepped into the center of the chamber. They told her the precise balance of carbon dioxide and oxygen in every chamber and every hallway of the installation, and how much water was currently in the storage tanks. The projected yields of the current vegetable, grain, and fruit crops, and the mana density - every piece of information she might conceivably require to shepherd her people here was at her fingertips.
Ractia reached out to one of the glass panes and swept aside a report on the genetic viability of her current crop of worshippers. With a series of quick, sure movements she called up the controls. A tap, and the entire facility began to rumble. Another, on the lefthand screen, called up a view of the lunar surface, where great clouds of gray dust puffed up a hundred yards or more into the air.
“I’ve watched them being assembled, and it’s still difficult to believe the size of them,” Noghis admitted.
Two great lengths of enchanted steel and mana stone emerged from the surface of the moon, driven by great engines at their bases. Each one was set with enormous sigils, arranged into intricate enchantments of staggering complexity. Without her connection to the mind-expanding processors and memory banks built into the Gardens, Ractia’s mind couldn’t hold all of the functions together in a coherent whole.
But the primary sigil, the word of power which was most important to what she was doing, was Vær. Immense waves of mana poured into the two struts, lighting up the sigils until they glowed so brightly that any organic eye would go blind at the sight. The screen automatically reduced the glare to a safe level, but even then Noghis had to squint and raise his arm as a shield.
Mana shot out from the moon toward the yellow star at the center of the system. The enchantments targeted precisely chosen locations on the surface of the sun, raising the localized temperature. In response, the star released an enormous flare of plasma. The eruption fountained out from the star like an elongated arm, stretching toward the moon.
Ractia flicked sigils onto her screens, tapped, flung them away. Everything took time - time for the mana flung by her colossal enchantments to cross the vast, empty distance between the moon and the star; time for the eruption of plasma to fling itself back.
Luc, Savel, Ais, and two dozen supplementary words flared to life. The initial function of the struts was done, and now she needed to switch them over into a collection routine - lest the unspeakable power at the heart of a star simply scour the entire surface of the moon clean. With her left hand, Ractia prepared every mana battery they had salvaged, from a hundred rifts and ruins across the surface of the world below. She still wasn’t certain whether it would be enough: to convert that much heat into mana, and then to hold it, was a monumental task. If she’d had Antris, she would have felt more confident.
“You said that it would be obvious the moment we began,” Noghis gasped. “That not even our enemies on the planet below would be able to miss what was happening. But I still never imagined this.”
“It takes more power than you can conceive of to open a bridge,” Ractia muttered, her long fingers flying back and forth between the control screens. A single mistake now, a single failure in the construction work that stretched back decades, and every one of them would be destroyed. “When your ancestors came here, we all worked together to create one, and we had the advantage of the great ships to use as power sources.”
“And the ones who fled?” her son asked.
“I have no doubt that Bælris and Veitha worked together,” she said, with a scowl. “And I wouldn’t put it past my former husband, that bitch Sitia, and their brat of a son to have helped. When the three of them left, they probably used the same bridge - but if they did, I couldn’t find a trace left of it. They must have destroyed it on their way out, so we had to begin all over again, from nothing.”
The fountain of star-matter hit the struts. The plasma should have destroyed anything it touched, but instead, the enchantments consumed the foremost edge of the eruption. Ractia watched her control screens, and with a flick of her forefinger and thumb, called up the readings on all of the batteries. One after another, they began to fill with mana.
“It’s working,” she whispered, and in spite of herself, Ractia began to smile.
“We can leave, then?” Noghis asked.
“We can.” Ractia nodded. “I can finally get out of this insignificant speck, this little rock orbiting a dying star on the edge of a crumbling galaxy. I still can’t believe they’d actually leave me here, stranded. But it doesn’t matter now. I’ll tell Arvatis and Sitia exactly what I think of them when we see them again.”
“Where will we go?” her son asked.
Ractia turned to him, and the look in his eyes was that of a child who’s been given the gift he’d hardly dared to hope for. Her poor, stunted son who’d been forced to grow up far too soon, with hardly any childhood at all, so that he could fight to defend his mother. Ractia promised herself that she would make it up to him, once they’d escaped.
“Inward,” she said. “Toward the galactic core. As far away from the coming oscillation waves as we can get, on the very edge of the event horizon. There’s enough power there to keep us alive for thousands of years more. When a universe dies, it happens slowly, my sweet boy. That’s where the Atavist was headed. That’s where we’ll find more of our people.”
“But,” Ractia cautioned him, “it will take time for the bridge to open. Time, and power - and we’ve just told everyone on that cursed planet beneath us not only where we are, but that we’re making our move.”
She reached out and took her son’s head between her hands, looking directly into his eyes. “She cannot be allowed to get to us,” Ractia said, nearly hissing the words. “We are so, so close to being free. When Livara comes, throw everything and everyone we have in her path. Do whatever it takes to stall her, to slow her down, to grind her troops away to nothing.”
“The waystone is broken,” Noghis said, but Ractia shushed him.
“Do not underestimate her. She will come. Use the mana cannons, the Antrians, the wards, the bats, shove a weapon into the hands of every man or woman, human or Eld, and set them in front of her!” Her hands were trembling against her son’s face.
“We promised to take them with us,” Noghis pointed out, a shade of doubt creeping into his voice. She couldn’t allow that. “They’ve been working for the exodus for years.”
“And they have fulfilled their purpose,” Ractia told him. “There is nothing else they can accomplish in their small little lives so important as keeping that woman from reaching us. She will come to kill us, you understand that?”
“Then I will stop her,” the boy promised. “No matter what I have to do, she will not get to you, Mother. I swear it.”