366. Where Fire Touches Rock
The ancient Vædic machines were so immense, and extended across so much of the moon’s surface, that Liv was momentarily surprised that she’d never caught a glimpse of it in Master Grenfell’s telescope, so many years before. Then, her eyes caught on immense trenches dug into the rock, making a circle around the ruins, where she recognized the sigils for Sce, the word of the Erskine family.
An enchantment to conceal the entire structure, Liv thought. She could actually feel faint wisps of mana drifting away from the oversized sigils, as if the magic had only been broken recently. The strand of fire, stretching all the way from the sun here to the surface of the moon, was so massive, at this close range, that it must have been as thick as the base of Bald Peak. If she’d had eyes, instead of an immaterial spirit, they would have melted in a flash, steamed away from the heat in the power – but then, so would the rest of her body. It was easy to see what had broken the enchantment.
So far as Liv knew, no archmage had ever imprinted Sce, but she doubted, even if they had, any of them could have built an enchantment that could conceal such a rush of destructive power. The illusion must have shattered the moment Ractia activated her machines.
The Vædim had built into the surface of the moon. Two great domes, much like the one above the central shaft at the Tomb of Celris, were connected by long, fully enclosed tunnels. Like the domes, vast stretches of glass had been set into the sides of the tunnels, without any interruption by something as mundane as a wooden frame to separate panes. Larger structures branch off from the tunnels, boxy and built of the same materials as the outer shell of the ring which surrounded Liv’s world.
Like the ring, half of it seemed to have been ravaged by a great expanse of time. One of the two domes was shattered, the great curved expanse of glass rising only fifty yards from the moon’s surface, where it ended in jagged panes. Moon-dust, gray and gritty, had blown inside, coating everything, so that it was difficult to even tell what might have once been inside.
The second dome, however, was intact – and, to Liv’s surprise, the interior was so vibrantly green that looking into it was almost like gazing upon the Varunan jungle. Three towers rose from the base of the dome, and each one was absolutely draped in hanging plants. Liv passed through the glass and spiralled about one of the towers, recognizing a dozen vegetables in only a single pass: cabbages, onions, turnips, more food than she could count. A glance at one of the other two towers revealed bright spots of red where ripe berries hung, and there were so many grapes that Liv knew the air would be heavy with the scent of them. Enchanted pipes sprayed out a mist of water, dousing the green leaves and produce of the crops, and far below along the floor of the dome, Liv counted scores of long, rectangular beds. There was wheat, there a bed of melons, and on the far side she recognized an herb garden. All of it was positively soaking in the dense mana of the ancient structures.
From inside, she could see that the very glass of the dome was tinted, somehow, dark enough that only a fraction of the light from the sun-strand came through. If it had been otherwise, Liv was certain all of the plants would already be dead and withered. She wished that she had time to study the enchantments etched into the glass that dealt with that problem; at a guess, she thought the word of darkness employed by House Asuris might be a part of it.
Karina flitted in through the dome, swirled around Liv’s spirit, and then shot out. If she’d come with Keri, he and Liv would have been able to let their Authorities sink into each other, and send thoughts, words and emotions – but she and Karina didn’t know each other so well, didn’t have the bond of nearly twenty years of marriage.
Instead, Liv simply followed the other woman out, toward the enormous struts which emerged from the surface of the moon. They were taller than the Seastone Tower in Freeport, or any other structure Liv had ever seen in either Varuna or Isvara, but rather than being designed for people to occupy, both were aglow with active sigils. This enchantment Liv recognized immediately: it was a variation of the magic which could be found at any rift, to turn sun, wind, or wave into mana. The chief difference was in scale: every bit of raw, destructive heat and light that poured out from the sun was caught, consumed, and converted into a swelling mass of mana more potent than anything Liv had ever felt before.
Somewhere beneath the surface, Aluth let Liv feel the presence of immense mana batteries, nearly bursting at the seams as they struggled to contain so much magic. What Ractia needed with such titanic power, Liv could hardly imagine. She suspected that if it was meant to be turned into a weapon, there was enough mana here to scour a continent clean, or crack the moon in half. Certainly, the Lady of Blood could destroy the ring around the world, if she chose to, carving it into pieces that would fall down from the sky, one by one, and create a dozen Godsgraves at once.
Liv swooped down from examining the struts into the corridors, moving as quickly as she could manage. They needed, first, a way to get up here with an army; and secondly, as much information on what they might be facing as possible. And they needed to accomplish both those aims without running afoul of Ractia. Liv was more than willing to fight the ancient goddess on even terms, but she suspected that without her physical body she would be at a distinct disadvantage.
Liv and Karina rushed past Iravata warriors in sigil-etched steel armor, carrying great spears meant to be used from the back of wyrms, or curved swords suited to slashing down on foot-soldiers as they passed. There were former Red Shield hunters carrying spears and knives, the women’s hair dyed with streaks of purple, and at each door an Antrian war-machine stood watch, the hatches on their shoulders already open, the barrels of their weapons extended. There were even a handful of human cultists, some in Lucanian clothing and some dressed in the styles of Lendh ka Dakruim.
And after nearly twenty years here, Liv saw that not all of them, by any means, were soldiers. Mothers hurried their children down the corridors, deeper into the ruins, presumably making their way to fortified locations. Half a dozen strong men, a mix of Eld, human and Great Bats, carried crates of freshly picked fruits and vegetables away from the intact dome, getting as much of their food supply as possible out of risk.
Many of the spaces that Liv and Karina flitted through had clearly been repurposed over the years of the cultists’ occupation. Looms and leatherworking supplies, kitchens and armories, had all been shoehorned into rooms which the Vædim must have long ago used for some other purpose entirely. Certainly, Liv couldn’t picture the old gods setting aside a room for a cobbler to repair the leather souls of hunting boots. The incongruity was somewhat astonishing to her: if she’d had time to think about it, she would have expected that Ractia would activate all manner of ancient machines and enchantments to support her people. But she seemed to have mostly just set them down in an empty ruin and left them to figure things out for themselves. Though she’s never really seemed to care for her followers, other than in terms of what they can do for her.
Liv rounded a corner and nearly ran directly into Noghis. Ractia’s son by Nighthawk Wind Dancer had aged substantially since Liv had last seen him on top of Nightfall Peak: he looked like a Red Shield hunter in the prime of his life, now, carrying the muscle of a grown man and a trained warrior. His hair was woven into dozens of braids, all of which were pulled back at the nape of his neck, and he was far better equipped than the people rushing about, preparing for an impending attack.
There was just time to catch a glimpse of some sort of black armor, etched with enchantments with sigils that pulsed red like banked coals, and blades forged of the same metal, before Liv dove down through the floor of the corridor. She wasn’t certain whether Noghis would be able to sense her spirit, but she had no intention of taking the chance. She had the vague impression of Karina following her through the rock, and then they came out into a cavernous chamber full of ancient machinery.
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It reminded Liv of the great machines beneath the tidal rift, where Karis had stalked her. Everything hummed or hissed, and lights in nearly every color one could conceive of glowed from where they were etched into metal, or scrolled along glass control panels. Wires and cables ran along the ceiling, connecting one machine to another, and Liv recognized the same sort of great mana batteries she’d seen in other rifts over the years - where they hadn’t already been looted by Ractia’s cultists. Other components were completely foreign to her and utterly outside of her understanding: perhaps if Sidonie was given a month to examine them, she might have a guess as to their function.
But the center of the room was, undeniably, also the center of whatever the machines were doing. Great segmented, bulbous tubes, each anchored to the ceiling, floor, or one wall, and each pulsing with enormous amounts of mana, all pointed at one particular spot. Pulsing blue lights from inside of the tubes were just barely visible through their openings, all spaced equidistantly around that center point. And in the middle?
Some sort of distortion. Liv didn’t have any better way to think about it - it looked like the air, shimmering above hot stone, on a baking summer day. But while she couldn’t see anything in particular, her words of power screamed at her. Though she couldn’t feel any actual lightning, there, Luc told her that something was being sucked out of that shimmering place, and with Aluth she could see infinitesimal particles of ambient mana shooting away from that central point into the orifices of the machines that ringed the area. Cel told her that the temperature of the distortion was already colder than any place she’d ever visited in the entire world, and was still dropping. Even the word of time, Dā, was screaming at her in something like a panic.
A woman’s shadow fell across the floor from the entrance to the room. Ractia’s face, cast in shades of blue that flickered through other colors as the machines hummed and hissed, looked directly into Liv’s eyes.
“Haven’t found a way to get here physically?” the Lady of Blood asked, a soft smile on her lips. Her voice spoke in every language Liv had ever heard, and more besides, while her eyes pulsed red with an inner light. “I’m almost disappointed. I doubt you have a chance of defeating me using only your spirit, Livara. And without an atmosphere, or gravity, I believe you will find that spell you used against me on the mountain top to be rather ineffective. Wren brought you my message?”
She did, Liv thought, throwing the words at Ractia on the back of her Authority. Her will slammed into Ractia’s, but Liv was satisfied to see that the ancient monster took a step back at the impact. Karina, on the other hand, was flattened, even in her spirit form, against the metal floor of the chamber.
“But you couldn’t leave things alone, could you?” Ractia took a deep breath, visibly relaxed her shoulders, and stepped forward, reclaiming the ground she’d lost. “I’m not attacking you, Lady of Winter, nor any of yours. I even offered your friends a gift, to show that I’m not going to press the attack.
And that line of fire in the sky? Liv asked. Can you really tell me that won’t cause harm to our world?
“That depends on how long it takes the bridge to form, I suppose,” Ractia mused. “If I’d had a better power source, I would have used it. The process will move your star, but it will drag your world along with it, so you needn’t worry about that. There’s more threat to the moon from opening the bridge than from the plasma, so long as my mana-converters can handle the load. And then only if these cobbled together machines break during the process.”
“No, the greatest threat to all your people down on the planet is indirect.” Another step forward, even though Liv pressed against the monster in front of her. “Increased solar radiation coming down through the atmosphere - probably best to keep anyone you care about inside and out of the sun until I’m finished, though I doubt skin problems would show up for years yet.” Ractia cocked her head to one side. “You may have a rather unseasonably warm winter. Actually, I think the greatest harm is likely to come from weather events. Unusually strong storms, that sort of thing. But I doubt more than a few thousand people will die to that.”
I’m coming to kill you, Liv raged in Ractia’s general direction. I’ll break your machines and strip your enchantments. Whatever it is you’re doing here, I’ll stop it before you finish.
“You’d better be about it, then,” Ractia said. “You haven’t much time. But really, you’re better off simply letting me work. There may come a day you want to leave this backwater world, as well.”
Liv flung herself at the ceiling, but Ractia stretched a hand out, and a shield of gold mana coalesced directly in her path. A heartbeat later, spikes of the same color shot out from under the shield, forcing Liv to veer aside and dodge. Could mana actually harm her in this state? She didn’t have any intention of finding out, and so she found herself ducking, twirling, skimming around and behind and through the machines that filled the cavernous chamber as she tried to avoid Racta’s attacks.
The only thing that saved her was that Ractia’s task was made more complicated by a need not to skewer her own machinery. Whenever Liv dodged a spike or blade of gold mana, the ancient goddess had to be certain to dissolve her conjured weapon before it pierced a cable, screen, or some other mysteriously humming arcane component.
And, as it turned out, that took her entire attention - something Liv didn’t appreciate until Karina threw her spirit form off the ground and directly at the Lady of Blood, temporarily freed from the crushing weight of Ractia’s Authority. Even the goddess was surprised - Ractia actually took a step backward, raised one hand in front of her face and let loose a raw, unshaped blast of golden mana directly into Karina’s spirit form.
Liv couldn’t hear her former student scream, but she could see the woman’s spirit instantly ripped apart, and feeling the shreds of her Authority drift off, unmoored and rotting away as quickly as a burning leaf.
Even Ractia froze in that moment, as if she had neither expected nor intended to kill.
Liv let loose a scream with every part of her soul, and soared up and out of the chamber through the rock above. Karina had given her time to get away, and there was no world in which she would let that woman’s final act go to waste. She tore through the rock blind, but at an angle, so that if Ractia tried to follow her there was at least a chance to throw off pursuit.
When Liv came up, it was in a chamber completely different from the rest of the upper level. There was a sort of couch, clearly intended for a person to recline on, but with all manner of pulsing, metal cables, like a handful of wriggling snakes, all leading to where that person - Ractia? - would place themselves. What it was meant to do, Liv had no idea, but it didn’t give her a way to get her army onto the moon.
She through herself out through the metal door that sealed the chamber and into yet another hallway, taking turns at random and as quickly as she could move, desperate for something, anything that she could use -
- until she careened into a room that held a broken, ruined waystone. It was about the same size as the one at Bald Peak, neither as big as some of the larger rifts, nor as small as the personal stones that Liv had seen in places like the Well of Bones.
Someone had clearly taken a hammer or a maul, some heavy object, to the stone, breaking it into pieces much like Liv had done at Ashford, to prevent pursuit by Benedict’s forces. The difference was that Liv had crushed that waystone from beneath, while this one had been attacked from above.
Liv reached down through the shards of broken stone, feeling, on the off chance that -
The tether point was still there. Whoever Ractia had tasked with breaking the waystone had done a bad job of it, or perhaps they simply hadn’t known that there was a deeper layer of enchantments. Liv slipped a strand of her own mana around the tether, and then cast herself up and out of the ancient ruins, high above the lunar surface, swooping out past the rushing fire that linked their sun with Ractia’s machinery.
For just a moment, she cast about, seeing only darkness and stars, and then she saw it: the world, far below, a ball of green and blue and white clouds, circled by the great ring of the Vædim. Liv flung herself across the vast darkness between, and then crashed down through the clouds toward Isvara, where her body waited for her spirit to return.