Chapter 36: 34 – Serpent’s Head

It had been twice now that she hadn’t recognized someone until she heard their voice. Twice that one of her peers had foolishly allowed the essence of a beast run rampant on their forms, thinking that just because some alchemist had purged its most severe effects the beast’s essence would let itself be wielded by one unworthy - that it wouldn’t prod for resistance, and, finding none, that it wouldn’t twist its new host into a more fitting form. 

Indeed, it had been twice now - the first time when he grew disfigured, and the second time when he had paid a mutagenicist to bend his face back into a more appealing shape. No amount of cosmetic alchemy could hide the absence of self-awareness, or the animalistic stink that he tried and failed to hide with myriad colognes.

It was a scarce few more minutes before she reached the staging grounds - a great swathe of unfarmable, flattened ground. The Undercity’s streets were rarely this empty, but then, if the people weren’t here, they would be massed at the staging grounds. Fortunate was she then, that the path to the caravan’s leading vehicle intentionally cut around to avoid the massive crowds which always formed.

Finally the caravan came into view, and even having known the scale, Ezaryl still stood stunned at the grandeur of it all. It wasn’t a daisy-chain of carriages with a couple golems or tankmen to fight off the occasional beast. This… This was a small city’s worth of people, the small carriages that normally made up a caravan clustered around and trailing behind the Krishorns’ own Serpent’s Head behemoth. Many-wheeled merchant carriages the size of small houses, everliving desert-tortoises that carried their owners’ homesteads upon their backs, tracked monstrosities melded together from several smaller vehicles of both Kargarian and Ikesian origin. 

There were nearly as many customized Ikesian half-track cargo haulers as there were traditional beast-drawn carriages. 

As for the Serpent’s Head, its name fit its design. It was a moving fortress wrought of steel and cold-iron, built to carry a caravan’s worth of goods and defend it all on its own. Its shape could be likened to the front half of a merchant vessel squashed into squat proportions, then plated in metal, mounted with guns, and flighted with great sail-like wings. Its rear-end was a strange cross between a ship’s aft, a fortress wall, and a cargo loading gate. Guns bristled all over it, their firing angles covering the loading gate.

Along the keel ran two rows of so-called “Essentech Repulsors'' - arrays of propulsion components salvaged from ancient Ankhezian hovercrafts, held in place by essentia-conductive azoth-auric amalgam and fuelled by three great engines, which somehow ran on special essentia cells that only some of the people who had worked on the behemoth’s creation understood. From what little she’d seen of the lower decks, these cells seemed to display their essentia levels in clean, simple projections and even suggested corrections in easy to understand terms, entirely counter to the mysticism of Ankhezian archeotech. The top deck also had sails, that much was true, but they were auxiliary - a structure meant to protect the passengers first and provide additional lift second.

On-board armaments were… Impressive, if nothing else. Thirty breech-loading cannons spread across the behemoth’s three decks using self-contained ammunition, but compatible with standard muzzle-loading operation. There were even mortars and bombs. 

It was the Sage’s reward to the Krishorn for being the first clan to cooperate with him, to be in turn the first to receive his expertise in constructing “One-vehicle Caravan” as he called it. It was also the only of these behemoths to ever be completed, with the relatively young Ledoris clan still attempting to build upon the skeleton of what would’ve been their behemoth, using old half-baked blueprints and spearheading research to fill in the massive gaps in the design. The other clans hadn’t even gotten that much - the ultra-traditionalist and venerable Amthos possessed nothing, while the frankly shady Inza had been fortunate - or perhaps duplicitous - enough to obtain at least preliminary design documents. 

The circumstances were somewhat amusingly reversed - the Sage had come to effectively beg for an alliance offering his own expertise just so the merchant-clans would help fill in the gaps, and now the clans were left floundering trying to fill the technological abyss left by his absence.

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Ezaryl rendezvoused with her bodyguard soon after she began making her way across the staging grounds - or rather, he found and began trailing her, as he tended to do. She took the long way around the staging ground as planned, the Serpent’s Head towering overhead and crewmen waving down to her as she rounded the great ship’s ironclad hull.

The cacophony of innumerable beasts, people, and machines would’ve drowned her thoughts, were she not used to this noise. She quickly reached the rope ladder to the top deck, scaling its great height in the span of a few Fog-fuelled bounds much to her bodyguard’s audible chagrin.

Her nostrils filled with the stench of oil, metal filings, and… Fog-sailor drugs. It was an implacable smell, ephemeral and impossible to grasp. Ezaryl wasted no time in going to her cabin and dragging a couch out onto the top deck, knowing full well nobody would dare to stop her and that it would be mostly safe. 

“Whu-” sputtered her bodyguard as he finally caught up with her in climbing to the top deck. “M-my lady, you know you’re not supposed to do that! The Fog-sailing ritual isn’t safe for observation!” 

Ezaryl ignored him at first, struggling to get the couch through the door. Those bastards had a new one put in in the hopes it wouldn’t fit. She looked at him, then back to the couch, then back to him. He started to say something, and she cut him off with, “Theris, shut up and help me with this thing.”

His professional stoicism evaporated, he froze in place, and stuttered, “Y-you know my name?”

A chorus of impossibly low-pitched throat-singing began to reverberate through the decking, through her very bones and the air. All around, silvery wisps of Fog appeared and instantly vanished. It was starting.

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