373. The Bridge
Liv looked back just long enough to be certain that her father had sealed the way behind them. A wall of adamant ice wouldn’t stop Noghis, she knew, but it would slow him somewhat, and with any luck he would make enough noise breaking through it that they would hear him coming. And all of that would only matter if he managed to defeat both Keri and Elder Aira.
Arjun must have noticed her looking, for he reached out to put a hand on her shoulder. “He’ll be fine. You don’t have to worry about Keri, Liv.”
Valtteri urged his conjured bear of ice past them; the thing was so enormous that it nearly filled the corridor in which they’d found themselves. “Your husband was hunting cultists in the north before you ever met him,” he pointed out. “You didn’t worry when he came with me to Varuna, did you?”
“I worried about both of you,” Liv grumbled, but she firmly turned her back on the frozen-over doorway and followed her father. She kept her mana-wings tucked behind her back, and her blades floating just above the height of her head, parallel to the floor and pointed ahead, so that they would be out of the way. “But it’s different now. We weren’t married back then.”
Sidonie stepped down off the platform she’d assembled of her disks, and then, with a wave of her wand, pulled them up to orbit around her. “I’ve saved enough mana to follow the plan,” she said, keeping her voice low. “But after that’s done, I’m going to have to pull back. I’m sorry, Liv. It took more than I thought it would to get this far.”
“That’s fine,” Liv assured her. “I want both you and Arjun to hang back, anyway, once we find her. Leave the actual fighting to my father and I, and be ready to heal us and get everyone out after everything is done.”
This corridor was not so long as many of the tunnels built into the surface of the moon, Liv found. Those spider-webbed out from the central shaft in all directions, linking not only the waystone chamber, but also both domes and all of the rooms that Ractia’s cultists had turned into living space over the years. But the distance between the door her father had sealed behind them and the entrance to the next chamber could not have been more than forty feet, dimly lit by glowing strips of mana stone at the edges of the ceiling.
There was machinery mounted on the wall to the right-hand side, as well as hanging from the ceiling: the same sorts of cranes used by the Merchants Guild to load and unload their wagons and boats, though in this case the machinery was made entirely of metal. Some of the arms were articulated, like the limb of an Antrian war-machine or scavenger, and a few even had grasping claws with three fingers. Liv guessed that it had all been used to move machinery between chambers: after all, Ractia wouldn’t deign to dirty her own hands - or even use her own magic - for hard labor.
At the end of the corridor was another doorway, but this one was sealed by an immense metal door, much like the one Liv had had to rip through several floors above. Liv closed her eyes, when she’d crossed half the distance, and could feel what was happening on the other side. That same, odd sensation of everything being drawn away, rather than toward, a particular place.
“She’s going to be on the other side,” Liv told her father and her two friends. “I’ll tear the door down, and once we’re through, Sidonie, you can cast.”
“I’ll lead the way, then,” Valtteri said. At a pat of his hand, the conjured bear shuffled to a halt perhaps fifteen feet short of the door, giving Liv room to work.
She took a breath, inhaling power. This close to the machines on the other side of the door, the density of ambient mana matched the depths of a greater rift, and the magic flooded through her, inexhaustible. Aluth stirred, and at the command of Liv’s intent, a fist of shining blue light, veined in gold, coalesced between her and the door. She drew her arm back, but before Liv could make her punch forward, a hiss of air from the ceiling distracted her.
“Blood and shadows!” Sidonie cursed, from behind.
A portion of the corridor ceiling - a panel, apparently, which had been closed until now, and was fit so neatly into the metal around it that it was nearly invisible at a glance - had slid back, opening the corridor to a crawlspace. Antrian scavengers, just like those Liv had seen at Valegard, dropped, spider-like, down onto them. Liv had just enough time to swipe at them, and her fist of solid mana slapped one of the scavengers against the far wall with a thunderous crack. The force of the blow was so great that the scavenger hung, limbs twitching spasmodically, half driven into the wall.
That didn’t stop a second scavenger from landing on her shoulders, however, and from the cries and swears of those behind her, Liv guessed that she wasn’t the only one who’d been caught by surprise. The weight of the thing was surprising, being made nearly entirely of metal, and it bore Liv down to the floor beneath it. She let herself collapse - not only beneath the thing, but around it, into a flurry of snowflakes. Frost cracked out along the floor and ceiling, and then Liv reformed with her back to the door, beneath a solid expanse of the ceiling, facing her companions. With a thought, she sent four swords stabbing down at the scavenger that had landed on her, piercing it through the center of its mechanical body and cutting off two limbs right where they were attached.
To her horror, Liv saw that the foremost pair of limbs was equipped, not for maneuvering the creature around, but for disassembling ancient Vædic technology. She’d gotten glimpses of the scavengers at work from the wall at Valegard, but up close the assortment of spinning saws, drills, and pinchers looked like some sort of demented torture device. The thought of any of those tools being used on her body made Liv shiver.
Her father had rolled off the back of his conjured bear, taking the scavenger which had dropped onto him along for the ride. As Liv watched, the ice-construct swiped it off of him with a single blow of its immense claw. Then, the bear crushed the Antrian into the floor before bending over to rip a mechanical limb off between its clenched jaws. Liv’s father, who’d worn armor but no helm, so that the charms in his braids were free, had taken a nasty cut along his scalp from some tool or other of the crab-like thing. The slice was bleeding freely, as head-wounds tended to do, and Valtteri scrambled back away from the fighting to get his back against the wall of the corridor, where he pressed one gauntlet to his head.
Sidonie had reacted with her mana discs, and though Liv doubted the scavengers had any nightmares to fear, half the shields had kept them away, while the other half, spinning like saws, had easily cut their way through three of the Antrians. Twitching limbs, scattered across the floor around Sidonie, sparked with electricity. The glowing sigils etched into their bodies slowly dimmed, and then they ceased moving entirely.
Arjun, Liv saw, had taken the worst of the attack. Without any armor such as Liv, Keri or her father wore, and having not used anything like Sidonie’s archmage spell, he’d been borne down to the floor by two scavengers, which gripped onto his shoulders and hips with their scuttling claws. The padding of his gambeson-like tunic - the most Liv had ever been able to get him to wear - had been ripped out in great, blood-stained tufts of white wool.
Rather than use Aluth to destroy the Antrians, Arjun curled upon himself, wrapping his arms over his head to keep the scavengers from being able to get at anything vital. Liv reached out with her hand, and the shining fist she’d conjured plucked one of the constructs off her friend, crushed it, and then grabbed the other. Once none of the scavengers was moving, Arjun rolled to one side and climbed back to his feet.
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“Why didn’t you cast anything?” Liv demanded.
“Saving my mana,” Arjun panted, with a grimace. “For wounds like that.” He walked over to where Valtteri was trying to stop his scalp from bleeding, extended his wand of neem wood, and muttered an incantation beneath his breath.
“I wish you’d wear armor,” Liv grumbled. She’d said the words so many times they might as well have been a prayer.
“I’m not a ksatriya,” Arjun replied, the same response that he always gave. “I’m fine. Just a few cuts and scrapes – the gambeson took the worst of it.”
For a moment, Liv considered using Aluth to pour mana into both of her friends. In a rift, she could use as much as she wanted without ever having to worry about running out, and so it wouldn’t cost her anything to dump magic into their bodies. The only problem was that, unlike her, both of them had to put a lot of work into keeping the ambient mana from wrecking their bodies. While Sidonie and Arju had both had a lot of practice keeping mana sickness at bay over the years, in one rift after another, neither of them had the Vædic heritage that Liv did. Merely existing inside a rift would never be natural to them, and she worried that pouring mana into their bodies was too dangerous to risk.
“Is everyone ready?” she asked, taking a moment to peer up into the crawlspace above their heads. Liv didn’t see anything moving, but then again she hadn’t noticed the hatch in the first place. In retrospect, she should have expected scavengers to be around somewhere, given the nature of what Ractia had been doing here. Antrians to disassemble whatever parts the cultists had scavenged from Vædic ruins, and then the cultists would use the cranes here to move everything into the next chamber - where, presumably, Ractia and her son would take charge of things.
Her father used waste heat to melt a bit of his bear-construct's tail, and then swiped the water across his face with both hands, clearing away the worst of the blood from his scalp wound. “I’m ready to go on,” Valtteri said. “Thank you, Arjun.”
Liv looked Sidonie in the eyes. Her friend nodded, and Liv turned to Arjun next.
“Don’t worry about me,” he assured her. “We’re hanging back while you fight, anyway. I’ll only come running in if you or your father need a healing spell.”
“Alright.” Liv turned back to the door, cocked her arm back, and then punched forward. She’d never be as strong as her father or her husband, or even someone like Triss who’d spent years at swordplay - but she didn’t need to be. The fist of pure mana launched itself at the door in keeping with her intent, crumpling the metal at first contact and then continuing on, ripping the entire thing out of the wall and tearing them an opening into the room beyond.
It looked just the same as when Liv and Karina had found the chamber while flitting about the moon as bodiless spirits. The chamber was enormous, and felt more like the caverns beneath Bald Peak than the usual manner of Vædic construction. Liv wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that Ractia had blown out the walls and the ceilings to expand it, ripping out huge chunks of rock to make room for her machinery.
As Liv stepped through the ruined doorway, the hum and hiss of the machinery at work filled her ears. Compared to the stillness of the hallway - other than a few still-twitching scavenger parts - the sound was nearly overwhelming. Colors danced through the darkness, moving and blinking, casting first one machine and then another in the light of different shades. Here, green sigils scrolled across the surface of a glass panel the size of a barn door: there, a series of pipes were bathed in a red glow until they stretched up toward the top of the chamber, where they were lost in shadows.
At the center of it all were the devices that Liv had seen earlier: almost like the weapons of the Antrians, but so much larger, and with bulbous rings set about the barrels, all pulsing with sigils and light. They pointed yet at the empty center of the room - or at least, at the place which had been empty when Liv last saw the room. Now, something was there - though Liv didn’t have the slightest idea what it was.
A sphere of absolute night, perhaps the size of a grown man’s head, hovered above the floor, located precisely equidistant from the machines which were, quite obviously, fueling it’s growth. It was the blackest thing Liv had ever seen - so dark that it almost seemed to be a flat circle, rather than a round ball. The only thing that told her otherwise was that, as she cautiously walked forward, the shape of it didn’t appear to change, no matter what angle she looked from.
The scuff of her father’s boots followed her, and the claws of his conjured bear scraped across the metal floor of the chamber. Liv kept her eyes moving, scanning the shadows, and she saw that while Sidonie had followed them into the room, Arjun lingered just at the door, wand in hand and shoulders slumped. Ractia, she did not see at all - but Liv could feel her. The weight of the goddess’s presence pressed down upon her, just like it had at each of their previous encounters. What had once been crushing, however, was now only an inconvenience.
“Is it not beautiful to gaze upon?” a chorus of voices, from somewhere in the darkness beyond the light of the machines and in more languages than Liv could count, echoed. “It’s taken me almost thirty years, from the moment I awoke, but now everything I’ve done will be worth it.”
“All the people you’ve murdered, you mean!” Liv’s father shouted, spinning about so that his braids flew, sword in hand, as if she was going to come out of the darkness at any moment.
Liv let him talk. In the meanwhile, she turned back to look at Sidonie, and nodded.
Her friend nodded in return, and began to whisper an incantation. She kept her wand close by her side, rather than raise it, so as to not attract attention.
“I did what I had to do,” Ractia hissed, the many voices echoing off the metal and stone that surrounded them all. “You forget, little slave, that I did not strike the first blow. It was your people that did that, during Miriam’s rebellion. If you want to kill a god, you cannot go weeping to your mother when the god fights back.”
“That all happened over a thousand years ago,” Liv pointed out. If Ractia was willing to talk for a moment, it could only be because she was still playing for time. Her machines were not finished growing that sphere of darkness, and the longer the Lady of Blood delayed, the more time they had to work. If Sidonie hadn’t been casting a spell, Liv might have struck right then – but at the moment, the delay served her just as much as it did Ractia.
“I can count the number of Eld who fought the old gods and yet survive on one hand,” Liv continued. “And they were children at the time. All of your enemies were dead. You could have simply hid when you came back, and we’d never have even known you were here. But you didn’t – you chose violence. You chose pain. To kill people who’d never done anything to you, who didn’t even know you still existed.”
There was a moment of hesitation. “I could not,” Ractia admitted.
“What do you mean?” Liv’s father demanded. “No one forced you to attack us. No one forced your people to kill my father.”
“What your people call the Day of Blood,” Ractia said, “was not a conscious choice on my part.”
“What?” Liv exclaimed.
“It was simply an expression of my resurrection,” the Vædic lady said. “Like the great waves that follow an earthquake at sea. You think I cast a spell, as my very first act upon drawing breath again in this abandoned little world, to slaughter ants? No. You simply felt the impact of my return, and once it was done there was no point in hiding. You murderous little savages would have come for me sooner or later, regardless of what I did. So yes, I gathered my worshippers – the same ones your husband was hunting like animals, I might add. I suspect your sweet Inkeris has killed more people since I’ve awoken, with his own hand, than I have.”
Is she actually telling the truth? Liv wondered. And if she is, did it change anything? She tried to imagine what it might be like – to wake up, and find that in her sleep she’d blanketed the world in winter, freezing hundreds or thousands of people from Varuna to Isvara. Was that what it meant to have the full power of a Vædim? Was that what she had to look forward to?
“I don’t care,” Valtteri declared, without even a hint of doubt in his voice. “You are the reason that my father is dead. One of the two of us dies today.”
What Ractia might have said next, Liv would never know, because at that moment Sidonie finished casting her spell. A ripple of mana swept out over the chamber, surrounding every one of them with the Interdiction.