Chương 24: Part 24 - Some Flawed Place in the Iron Dark

"Of course I have heard the contention that scriptsmithing is an art, but those who say such things are invariably somewhat poor artists." - Vumo Ra, possibly apocryphal. The massive stone rolled up, pausing for a moment before toppling sideways and fracturing into a few large chunks. The small crew of Aesvain gave a cheer that was equal parts triumphant and weary, and Mark clapped the nearest on the shoulder appreciatively with a dusty hand.

"That's the last one on this stretch!" he said.

"I think we're clear to move up all the way through to the plaza." He grinned, looking around at the disheveled refugees.

"You guys want to ride in the back? We've got some water, too." They perked up at the offer and followed Mark back to the truck. Jackie peered back from the driver's seat with a grin as the diminutive workers hesitantly took their seats and shared a cup from the reservoir as they stared wide-eyed around the interior.

"That never gets old," she said.

"So that's it, right? If we can get to the plaza we should be able to pick out a path clear through to the city center." Mark nodded and took a swig of water.

"That's the idea," he confirmed.

"Just take it slow, there's a lot of tall grass in the plaza. Could be ruts, rocks, whatever." Jackie snorted.

"Don't worry about me," she said, putting the truck into gear.

"They only built a paved road to a survey site if I found something that justified the expense. For me, this is a normal day at the office." She moved the truck gently forward, smiling again at the hushed noises of awe their passengers made as a result.

"You know, I'm going to miss this thing," she said.

"Of all the places I've almost died, this truck is my favorite."

"Yeah, if we ever get back I'm going to write a really nice letter to the manufacturer," Mark said, patting the dashboard affectionately.

"She's held up pretty well, even though I'm almost certain we've voided the warranty." They trundled along in silence for a bit before Jackie glanced at Mark.

"It's funny," she said, "but hearing you say that made me realize that I don't really think we're going back. Probably haven't believed it for a while now, if I'm being honest." Mark turned to look back at her, then shrugged.

"I haven't really thought about it much," he admitted.

"Been focused on other shit. I guess I figured that if we'd either work it out or we wouldn't. Besides, if it does happen it won't be me doing the heavy lifting. Maybe you and Arjun will science it out, maybe Jesse will go on a vision quest or some shit and have a revelation. Me, I'm just out here trying to keep us all from getting blowed up."

"To your credit, that hasn't happened once," Jackie said.

"Yet." The street they were following opened up into the plaza, and she turned the truck to drive slowly up the hill. Warm sunlight lanced through the windows as they rose above the confining mass of buildings and began to ascend the grassy slope in earnest. Mark turned to the back, where the Aesvain had gone very still and were holding on to their seats as they crossed the rougher terrain.

"Careful," he said, "I think if you take a bump too hard those guys are going to piss themselves."

"Oh no, the upholstery," Jackie deadpanned. She craned her neck to look down at the city spreading around them as they rose to the crest of the rise. Wind buffeted the truck sharply and drew streamers of dust from the ruins, giving the vague impression that the buildings were crumbling away to nothing before their eyes. Mark grabbed the radio handset and gave it a couple experimental clicks.

"I bet we can pick them up now that we're over the hill," he said, holding it to his mouth.

"Jesse, Arjun, you there?" A few seconds passed before a staticky but understandable burst of noise came back over the radio.

"-to press the-" Gusje's voice said, sounding exasperated.

"-just give it to-" There were a few quiet seconds as Mark and Jackie stifled laughter.

"There," Gusje said.

"Mark, is that you?"

"Yes, hi," Mark said, switching to Ceiqa and struggling to keep a straight face.

"Everything okay over there?"

"We're fine," she replied.

"Arjun and Tesu are busy examining the keystone, Jesse is resting. Tasja and I have returned from searching the building for information that may be helpful with the keystone." Mark quirked an eyebrow.

"Neat," he said.

"We're on our way down, I think the path should be mostly clear. Hopefully we'll reach you before it gets too dark."

"I'll tell Arjun," Gusje replied quickly, with a noise of shuffling and footsteps as she began walking at a hurried pace. When she spoke next, her voice was hushed.

"We found several very old items in our search. Tasja has been informing me about the differences between archaic formal script and modern writing in detail. Extensive detail." There was a lingering pause.

"If you need help with anything when you arrive-""We'll let you know," Mark promised.

"All right," Arjun said, backing up with a grim look on his face.

"I think that's about as good as we're going to get it." Before him on the stone floor of the gateway hall was one of the dull crystals from Gusje's gauntlet, removed from its socket. On either end of the crystal was a strip of electrical tape that secured a hastily modified extension cord tight against the faceted surface. The cord trailed back towards the truck, which had been carefully driven into the hall and now stood with several maintenance panels removed. Jackie looked at it skeptically.

"I still don't think this is going to work," she said.

"These crystals are designed to be charged in a kiln, not zapped. We don't even know if they had electrical power when they built these."

"You may well be right," Arjun sighed.

"But we don't have a lot of other options. Tesu said that the scriptsmiths had to build a special kiln to charge the Ce Raedhil gate because the standard sajam-powered ones didn't get hot enough." He shrugged, gesturing to the wires.

"I'm actually more optimistic about using electricity specifically because the charging requirements are so extreme. The truck batteries are three hundred volts, direct current."

"Yeah, but - oh," Jackie muttered, considering.

"You think it's all about resistance." Arjun nodded vigorously, his eyes twinkling.

"Yes, most likely. You can't charge the crystals in a fire because the heat is too low. Raise the heat and energy can get through. My theory is that the crystals' resistance to energy transfer is what allows them to retain their charge in the first place." Jackie nodded.

"The energy is trapped inside because it's not enough to overcome the barrier," she said.

"So the heat needed to charge it is just a bit hotter than the maximum temperature the interior is designed to reach. High voltage could definitely be a way around that. Just one problem, though." She gestured to the crystal.

"It's crystalline. Not generally the most conductive group of materials."

"Yes, well," Arjun said, "Perhaps if we were on Earth. As it stands I'm not willing to make any assumptions about the material properties of those crystals, and given our depressingly limited choices I figure it's at least worth a shot."

"Worst case scenario, it doesn't work," Jackie said. She blinked, then looked askance at the crystal.

"Or works too well. You know, I'm suddenly remembering that time I got the cheap knockoff charger for my phone and learned a very exciting lesson about why you shouldn't do that." Arjun winced.

"Yes, that's part of the reason we're doing a test first," he admitted, clearing his throat loudly. The others turned to look at him.

"I'm going to recommend that we all stand very far back from the crystal and get behind something sturdy."

"Are you blowing up the crystal?" Mark asked, helping Tesu to his feet so the bound scriptsmith could hobble behind the truck with the rest of them.

"Those things don't grow on trees, you know." He paused and cocked his head to the side.

"I realize I have no proof of that, but I'm fairly confident." Jackie punched him lightly on the shoulder.

"That's not the plan, but you know how plans tend to work out for us," she said.

"Just trying to see if it's safe before we go messing with the big one."

"Please try not to break the crystal," Gusje grumbled.

"I doubt the scriptsmiths will be eager to give us more in the future."

"Okay, connecting the power," Arjun warned them.

"Three, two, one-" There was a brief spark from the wire as he touched the end to the battery terminal. He held it for a few seconds before pulling it away and peering around the corner of the truck at the crystal. It appeared unchanged from before.

"Hm," Arjun said.

"Does someone want to get in the truck so they can monitor the crystal through the window?"

"Jesse's napping in there," Jackie objected.

"I don't particularly know what happens if we pop that crystal, but I'm betting it'll wake him up," Mark drawled.

"Hop on in, let us know if anything changes." Jackie complied, carefully edging around Jesse's insensate form sprawled across two seats. When she was in place Arjun resumed carefully applying current to the crystal. It took around thirty seconds before Jackie noticed a faint reddish tinge at its center.

"That's incredible," Tesu muttered.

"Kiln-charging crystals usually takes most of a day, you've brought it to a visible glow almost instantly. How did you say this power was generated?"

"We didn't," Mark replied pointedly.

"Haven't really been in the sharing mood insofar as scriptsmiths are concerned."

"Understandable, but this is a revolutionary discovery," Tesu said, growing animated.

"Do you realize how many things run on charged energy? This has the potential to dramatically expand its footprint. The benefits in sea freight alone-" Love this novel? Read it on Royal Road to ensure the author gets credit.

"Tell you what," Mark said, cutting him off.

"Let's focus on not being dead in the short term, and after we've figured that one out we'll tell you anything you want to know - within reason." He grinned at Tesu.

"That is, assuming you can play by the rules that whole time." Tesu snorted and shook his head.

"For this?" he said incredulously.

"If the guild found out that I passed up the opportunity they'd probably expel me for not helping you."

"Oh, sure, but if you ask to bring one little refugee camp through the magic portal…" Mark grumbled.

"I'm starting again," Arjun announced.

"Jackie, please keep an eye out." He connected the leads once more and the glow slowly began to intensify, building from dull red to orange and shading up towards yellow.

"How are we doing on power?" Mark asked. Arjun waved a hand dismissively, gesturing to the mammoth bulk of the truck.

"The energy in the battery packs is immense," he said.

"Even at relatively inefficient conversions-""Smoke," Jackie whispered urgently. Mark looked up at her, confused, and she turned to look at them with wide eyes.

"Guys, there's smoke, it's smoking!" she said.

"Turn it off, turn it off-" Arjun hurriedly disconnected the wires and they stood huddled behind the truck for a few tense seconds.

"Well," he said eventually.

"I think if it was going to explode it would have done so." Mark nodded and made to straighten up, but Arjun grabbed his shoulder before he could move.

"Nevertheless, I find it's always good practice to give it a few seconds after saying something like that," Arjun added. He cocked his head, listening, but there was only silence under the airy dome.

"Excellent, now we can take a look." They cautiously made their way around to the other side of the truck, where it became apparent that the smoke was issuing from the acrid, bubbling remnants of the electrical tape as they sizzled on the surface of the crystal. The crystal itself appeared to be intact, and was shining with a vibrant golden glow.

"All right, Tesu," Mark called out.

"What's your opinion, they supposed to get this hot?"

"Crystals can get quite hot if they're charged near to capacity," he answered.

"That one is very bright, so it should remain hot for some time. Eventually it will find a more stable point and become cool to the touch."

"Dangerous?" Arjun asked. Tesu shrugged.

"Well, it's very hot," he said.

"Past that, probably not. The more recent attempts at charge crystals have been less stable, but that is an original. Those have rather broad safety margins." Mark raised an eyebrow at him, but Arjun clapped his hands together with a broad smile.

"Well," he said.

"I think that went all right. It should take substantially longer to charge the larger crystal, though. I recommend that we start soon."

"Loud," Jesse complained, poking his head through the door.

"I miss anything important?"

"Nah, just hotwiring magic," Mark said.

"Go back to bed."

"I'm already up," Jesse replied, stretching.

"The asolan did the trick, I feel pretty normal now. Anything I can do to help?" Arjun shook his head.

"At this point we're just going to charge the large crystal, then probably as many of the small ones as we can without dropping the battery too low. Tasja is looking over a few things they found around the building, but much of the text is in some archaic format that even Gusje can't read so I doubt we'd be of much use."

"Jyte is still getting people situated around the square," Mark suggested.

"I think he's got everything pretty much under control but I guess we could see if he needs us to carry some stuff, open a jar of pickles or something." He jerked his head toward the door, and Jesse nodded before falling into step beside him.

"So, really," Mark said quietly.

"You good?" Jesse shrugged.

"I feel better," he said.

"Headache is gone, I'm not as tired. Groggy, yeah, but I've been napping all day."

"Yeah, poor baby," Mark snorted. The two men passed through the arched entryway to look out over the small plaza in front of the gateway hall. Before, it had been desolate and grassy, the wind whipping at a few hillocks of sand that accrued over fallen pillars or the odd natural rise. Now it was a frenetic hive of activity. Jyte had been working the Aesvain tirelessly, both the soldiers and the civilian refugees.

Boxes of reappropriated Sjocelym supplies had been moved from the fort to a few buildings near the hall, and the people had been likewise squirreling themselves away in the nearest stable structures they could find. There had been a few unpleasant surprises, and already there were injuries when the day's fierce winds caused a wall to collapse in one of the newly inhabited buildings. The worst by far, however, was discovering proof of Arjun's conjecture on the nature of the old city's dangers.

They found the bodies of those who had gone exploring for treasure laid unceremoniously in a building to the leeward side of the hall, accompanied by an even greater number of older dead that had decayed to little more than skeletal remnants. Jyte had made no comment, but Mark noted that his hand gripped his halberd with furious, white-knuckled force for a long, long while thereafter. Now, though, his ramshackle command tent was the nexus of activity in the crowded square.

They had staked it deep into the soil behind a half-crumbled wall, putting it out of the driving wind and deep into the cool shadows of the evening. The air behind the windbreak was chill and turbid with motes of dust that eddied in time with the gusts above them. Jyte saw them approach and motioned them closer.

"I've been so busy telling people where to stack boxes that I'd nearly forgotten why we came down here," he said, giving them a long-suffering look leavened with a slightly delirious smile.

"Good of you to come by, though. Any word on the gateway?"

"Some progress," Mark said.

"We figured out the charging portion, now we just need to see what happens when we fire it up." He looked around the tent, noting the haphazard stacks of documents and equipment scattered on the trampled grass.

"I'm not sure how long the gate remains open if neither end gets exploded, so your folks should be ready to grab what they can and head through. If anyone doesn't have supplies to carry then we have a few crates from the truck that should go through as well." The Aesvain captain gave a weary nod.

"I've made sure everyone is ready," he said.

"How long until you're able to make your first attempt?" Mark shrugged and scratched his head.

"Not too long," he said.

"First attempt is going to be trying to open it as-is, wherever it was set to connect when they left it. If that works and it's not in the middle of some Sjocelym city, great. If not, we're going to have to figure out how to point it somewhere else."

"I'd wager that's difficult," Jyte said.

"That's my impression," Mark confirmed, gesturing back toward the gateway hall.

"They're going over the keystone and whatever they were able to find in the area, but I get the sense there's not much to work with."

"Ah, I'd forgotten in all the madness," Jyte said, turning abruptly to grab a small stack of tattered documents and small leatherbound folios that tottered precariously atop one of the crates.

"We'd sent some men down to attend to those the scriptsmiths killed," he said.

"There's not much we're able to do but make certain they get a respectful rest, as I see it. They came back with these, said that a few of the older bodies had them hidden on their person. I'd laid them aside here on the chance they'd prove useful." Jesse took the pages gingerly from Jyte, moving them to better light. The material they were written on was oddly rigid and covered with a fine craquelure where some sort of protective laminate had deteriorated.

Underneath lay finely rendered lines of text in a stylized, ornate variant of the local script.

"Mark," he said quietly.

"These are printed. On plastic." Mark hurried over to look, sucking in his breath when he got a close look at the ragged plasticine sheets.

"Huh, no shit," he said wonderingly.

"All those years they've been telling us the stuff doesn't biodegrade. Guess they knew what they were talking about." Jesse gave him a tired look and began to carefully thumb through the pages. Some were utterly illegible, the pigments having faded or blurred into indistinct smudges. Others were only partial scraps of material, most of those collected in the leather folios.

There was the sense that some of them had been vibrantly colored before age ravaged them, or that others had been filled with neatly typed text that had since bled into a cloudy dark mass over the page. A few, though, were remarkably well preserved. One page had rows of numerals in matched sequences, another with cramped blurry text surrounding diagrams.

"We should give this to Tasja and Tesu, see if they can make anything of it," Jesse said.

"Yeah, Tasja was talking about some sort of ancient script before. I bet he's going to totally geek out at these," Mark said, holding out his hand for the papers.

"I'll take them back. I can just see Tesu going googly-eyed over these, assuming they're actually useful. Want to remind him that he and I have an understanding." Jesse nodded and handed over the sheaf.

"I've got my radio on," he said.

"Let me know if something comes up." Mark nodded and strode out of the tent, while Jyte raised an eyebrow.

"Couldn't help but notice the look on your face," he said.

"Those pages meant more to you than you've spoken aloud."

"They had… significance," Jesse said hesitantly. He met Jyte's eyes briefly, trying to choose his words.

"You know your people used to live differently, right? Before something happened in the place that is now Asu Saqarid?" Jyte grunted a short affirmative.

"Aye, before the opening of the eye. Not sure what the Sjocelym would have told you about that, but it's likely skewed from the truth somewhat. That story is our history more than theirs." Jesse frowned.

"I'm not sure I understand," he said.

"Well, let me think back on my lessons so I can tell it proper," Jyte mused.

"To start with, my folk have not always lived in Tinem Aesvai. The great city of Sahao stood on the plains to Sun's Height from here."

"Wait, Vumo mentioned that," Jesse said.

"He said it was a center of trade and learning. Never said anything about it being Aesvain, though."

"It wasn't," Jyte shrugged, "since neither were those who lived there. My distant fathers were Sahaon. When the city was destroyed it took all but the farthest scraps of land with it."

"So they went to the outlands," Jesse said, nodding." Aesvaim."

"Just so," Jyte confirmed.

"And as for the city, the plains that once lay around it were scoured bare and riven to the bones of the world. The sky wept black tears that formed a sea over the city's corpse, poisonous water with an unnatural stillness to it - which is more than one can say about the dead who rise from it. Now the arrogance of old Sahao reaches out to claim our home once again." He sneered down at the page in Jesse's hand.

"I'd wager something on the page marks it as touched by deep scriptsmithing?"

"The material," Jesse said, taken aback at the open disgust in Jyte's tone.

"It's similar to something from my homeland, although we make it without scriptsmithing."

"Bah, and for this we traded our future," Jyte spat.

"Pretty pictures and flying chariots. Trinkets." Jesse looked at the Aesvain captain and quirked an eyebrow at his sour expression.

"Are you saying you'd turn down a flying chariot?" he asked. Jyte barked a quick laugh and shook his head, letting the tension bleed out of him.

"Aye, can't deny that'd come in useful right now," he admitted.

"Don't think it's likely, though. Just legends and sailor stories-" He cut off as an alarmed shout came from outside the tent, followed by a deep, echoing boom. Jesse and Jyte exchanged a look before scrambling through the entryway into the plaza. All around them Aesvain were staring and pointing toward the south. Jesse tensed and raised his rifle, looking for ragged bodies sprinting from the shadows of ruined buildings - but none emerged.

Jesse relaxed his grip on the rifle and straightened up, warily panning his gaze across the plaza. A small flash of lightning drew his attention upward to the sky, where a thin line of gold reflected from the clouds barely visible past the crest of the hill. As he watched, however, the clouds swelled higher and higher until they revealed themselves as a vast wall of billowing dust sweeping north toward the city.

Lightning crackled and discharged as the dust roiled higher into the sky, seeming to gather deep within the cloud. For a moment the stormy wall seemed to freeze solid, and it was silent. Suddenly a massive bolt of lightning tore out from the cloud to strike somewhere in the south plains. Jesse could still see the shape of it in his eyes when the thunder hit, deep and abrupt. Jesse turned to Jyte, who was staring at the approaching storm with a grim look.

"Do your histories mention anything like this?" he asked, raising his voice over the wind. Jyte shook his head slowly.

"Can't say as they do, but that doesn't mean much. History is a tale of all the trials that folk live through, and that," he said, raising a hand to point at the swirling wall of dust and lightning, "that looks like the trial you don't."