Chapter 37: Chapter 37 – Guardhouse

We hurtle, me screaming and Amber snarling, into the darkness where the wall used to be.

It is, at least, a different darkness. Amber’s glow blinks off the moment Zidanya’s ropes pull taut, leaving us lost in the gloom beyond the wall, out in the unconstructed and unstructured region of the nega-space under the scenario’s Sky Kingdom surface. It’s only for a moment, but it’s no less terrifying for its brevity; sable skies, so to speak, all the way to a nonexistent horizon, and below us the existential horror that is the Void Between.

I don’t freak out or anything, but it’s still beyond unnerving, the difference between that and a mere lack of illumination.

There’s no real sense of motion until we cross the threshold. Gravity reasserts itself; Amber wraps herself around me as we hurtle and we wind up slamming into the floor with me on top. (It’s not exactly a comfortable landing, given her armor, but it beats having her landing on me.) The light isn’t much brighter than Amber’s aura was, but it takes me a little while anyway to just get an emotional or mental grip on the fact that we’re no longer about to die, or no longer about to die in any of the various particular ways that we were about to die from a moment ago.

By the time I get a grip on myself, Amber has gently extricated herself from me by dint of lifting me up, putting me down to the side, and kipping up, gear and all. I’m muddled enough that I don’t really appreciate it for the sheer feat of athleticism it involves, her going from a supine position to on her feet in one smooth motion, which says a lot about my state of mind; but then it’s like a bolt of adrenaline through my system, because we’re not alone in the room.

By the time I get recombobulated, Amber’s already killed three out of the four still standing. The fourth one is giving her a bit of trouble, mostly because he’s almost as big as she is and he’s got three little shields floating around intercepting her blows to go with his one big shield and shortsword. He’s mostly threatening her with the shield, trying to hit her with it using these short, sweeping strikes as he thrusts almost half-heartedly with the sword. Her own strikes are being intercepted by the little floating shields, two or three at a time, and they’re getting blasted to the side but they keep coming back.

I don’t have any Motes up, so I reach out with something else. I spin up [Manipulate Mana] to full, or at least that’s how I think of it; there’s got to be some sort of animating impulse or spell inside the shields, or something tying them to the warrior’s will, and I reach for it. There’s a split second where I’m not sure if I’m about to get the worst, most pointless migraine of my life, but I feel something almost like the tactile feel of a spun fiber thread coming apart under fingers, and there’s a wet thunk sound as Amber’s sword drives itself through shield-man’s torso to its hilt.

Something like silence descends. I don’t even realize until it does that my ears are ringing from the bell-like slamming, hammering sounds of the brief fight, or that Zidanya is in a heap over to the side, gasping for breath and heaving on her hands and knees.

I ignore all of that in favor of doing a quick survey of the room, focusing on the entrances, just in case someone’s about to come running over to investigate. There’s two of those; if I call the wall we broke through south, there’s a door on the north face, right off of the western wall, and there’s one in the middle of the eastern wall. The one in the north face is a pretty simple affair, wood or some sort of wood-lookalike composite by its appearance, without even a latch, but the one in the east face is comparatively monstrous. It’s a dark-red wood banded with metal, with a continuous grain that suggests it’s one minimally-worked slab, and there’s three deadbolts and a metal-latticed window at around head height on me.

The deadbolts are all in the locked position, so I keep the other door visible at least in the corner of my eye and scope out the rest of the room. There’s not all that much to see; a table, four chairs around said table, a chair on the west wall, and five corpses, one mostly crushed under a wall of metal.

Right. Wall of metal.

There’s a square of wall missing from the southern wall, what with the way we broke and melted - burned? I’m not sure what the right verb is with acid - our way inside. The wall’s a square about three meters on a side, starting maybe a quarter meter off the floor and going not even halfway to the ceiling. I’m used to Fleet-standard ceiling sizes, two and either three-fifths or three-quarters depending on what century the Worldship was built and which yard built it, but the ceiling here is ridiculously tall, taller by a huge margin than the corridors and rooms we’d been seeing in earlier floors of the Temple.

That makes the eastern door, that giant slab of wood, that much more impressive, come to think of it; somehow I’d not really noticed how tall the ceilings are, and it looked just like a normal-sized door rather than the enormous one it is.

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The walls are some sort of off-red pattern, checkered with white recessed bits and rough to the touch. Well, they all look like that, but on the only one we have a cross-section of it’s only about a decimeter deep, and then the rest of the half-meter or so of wall is a wood lattice giving form to some sort of plaster and a few centimeters of that silvery-steel lookalike. My thoughts sort of drift towards wondering about alloys and composition, there’s nickel and molybdenum in a particular kind of steel that the Spirit used in large quantities that looked sort of like this steel, and I’m thinking about that but mostly I’m drifting over to where Zidanya is, footsteps a little exaggerated.

She doesn’t flinch or anything when I put a hand on her shoulder. She’s coughing more than retching now, deep, wracking coughs that make me wonder if there’s going to be blood on the floor. The spider legs are gone, which is a shame because I wanted to touch them, examine them; there’s so much that was amazing about how they moved, and obviously their limb-tip structure had to be something fascinating, between the acid - which, how? I wanted to know, still want to know - and the ability to walk up and across a sheer wall.

The spider legs are gone, and we have much bigger problems than me not getting to sate my constant curiosity. What she’s going through looks vaguely like when I almost backlashed myself to death, only worse; I think back and then look over at Amber.

“She needs water,” I say softly, “and electrolytes. Sodium, mostly.” My voice sounds strange to my ears after the recent range of cacophonous experiences we’d just enjoyed. “Can you Kazir something up?”

Amber looks at me with an expression that looks as though it can’t decide whether it wants to be a glare or a smile. She eventually, after about a second, settles on shaking her head. “Yes,” she says, which confuses me for a second before I discard the notion. “I can… Kazir something up.” Her face kinda softens, and she says, softer, “I’ll take care of her. Be ready if something happens.”

I nod at her, starting to throw a little bit of defenses up. I decide on a fire orb, something that can react even if I’m not paying attention to the door, because there’s a bookshelf on the east wall, to the south of the big door, and I’m drifting over to look at the spines.

It’s a disappointment in a way, but it’s illuminating in terms of the mundane nature of the room we’re in. Ledgers, lists of prisoners, guard rotations, authorized visitors; this is a guard house, and past that metal-banded door is a prison of some sort. There are separate ledgers for political prisoners and for criminals, I notice with a spike of now-familiar fury. There’s also a guest book, with five signatures; two flowing and curvy, one blocky and straightforward, and one scrawled illegibly.

… that’s four, I think to myself, and I look again, and again, and force my eyes to see the fifth one. It’s written in an elegant but straightforward hand, no excess curves or flourishes but smooth and almost calligraphed. I can’t tell why it was so hard to see that last signature, but there’s an easy way to test the obvious hypothesis.

Well, it should have been easy. Visor won’t come up, and I recognize the feeling as not having enough mana. I try to check why, since it’s been long enough, and my eyes narrow.

No feedback, no data, nothing.

There’ve been no notifications for a while, and I don’t see any icons anywhere, not in a corner of my vision and not around either Amber or Zidanya; I realize almost belatedly that I haven’t seen any of the floating icons since I passed out at Amber’s pylon, and I haven’t seen any of what I’d been calling HUD icons since … since Zidanya, probably.

That Voidfucking dybbuck’s curse is getting worse.

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