H - 107: That's Clever (Patreon)

“That’s fantastic!” Vadarlshi cheered, actually hopping up and down in excitement; in her larger form as she currently was, this would probably have made the floor shake were it not made of Timestone. “Okay: shield wall, archers behind, skirmishers and mages positioned to flank!”

At her command, the squadron of Phantom Legionaries currently arranged on the floor before her vanished into mist, streaming in the space of seconds to re-position themselves as directed: a wall of shields, bristling with spears, blocking off the space between two of the whirring Timekeeper structures they were using to anchor their new formation. Two smaller squads were arranged to the sides at an angle, in wedge shapes.

“Perfect!” Vadaralshi exclaimed, bounding about again. “Give me two hedgehogs with pikes one formations’ distance apart!”

The Legionaries swirled into mist again, resolving into two square formations in the center of the floor, each sprouting a forest of polearms.

Vadaralshi actually squealed in delight, folding in her wings to roll around on her back like an excited puppy.

“Ralshi, they’re not performing monkeys,” Kaln said reproachfully. “Soldiers, don’t feel obligated to do tricks for her.”

“Pants! Don’t you get it?” Vadaralshi bounded back upright, staring at him and literally salivating in excitement. “Look how fast they can reposition themselves! Do you not understand what this means? An army that can assume any position on the field, in any formation, instantly! I know we’ve been talking about how Amar-Daraash wasn’t that great in actual combat, but they weren’t ghosts then! Holy shit, there is no conventional force that could stand up to this!”

“Not to mention that they’re…selectively tangible,” Vanimax added, craning his neck around another Timekeeper sculpture where he’d been watching this from the side. “I’ve seen them using solid tools while unable to be touched otherwise. Imagine soldiers who you can’t touch, but their weapons can touch you.”

“Max!” Vadaralshi whirled on him, now projecting the same reproach Kaln had just pointed at her. “What were you doing to the poor guys that made them show you that?”

“What? Nothing!” He reared up in affront, scowling. “I pay attention, that’s all! Haven’t you seen them moving while cleaning? And while they were clearing out all the bones?”

“This raises some questions about what exactly happened around the end of Amaar-Darash,” Pheneraxa mused, also watching from nearby. “I can’t claim any particular insight into the minds of the Hegemony’s ruling class, but if I were punishing someone, I don’t think I would turn them into the ultimate fighting force. Maybe there was more going on than the surviving accounts record? If only they could talk to us.”

“Speaking of talking!” Vadaralshi crowed, bounding back over to the two hedgehog formations, which did not react to her movements. “Guys! What’s your range limitation? Like, how far can you re-position yourselves like that?”

Another streak of mist whipped up to her, resolving into the form of the Commander holding up his regulation manual with a page open.

Vadaralshi lowered her head to peer at the page, squinting. “That just describes formations. I know what the formations are, I was asking about range.”

He flicked a few pages, holding up a different one.

“Regulations for supply trains? Bro, that does not get closer to answering the question.”

“Hey, don’t pick on him,” Pheneraxa protested. “It’s not his fault, you know what the curse is like.”

“Right, you’re right, sorry,” Vadaralshi agreed, bobbing her head to the ghost. “Kaln’s right, I’m not trying to make you jump through hoops or anything. Sorry, Commander. But man, suddenly I’m really anxious to see if Aunt Emmy can fix that for you.”

“After seeing this,” Vanimax added, “I almost find myself hoping the Missari try something. I have a feeling the outcome of that would be…satisfying.”

“Yeah, that’s a very you thing to want,” Pheneraxa scoffed.

Her brother sighed. “I know, I’m not being serious. Just…can you imagine? It’s gonna happen eventually. The first people to pick a fight with us who don’t end up fried by dragonfire are in for a rude surprise.”

“That won’t be the Missari,” Vadaralshi said, now pacing in a circle as if still too wound up to sit still. “You heard Mother, if they actually attack us they’ll contract local adventurers. Shamissar’s military doctrine is purely defensive. They’re actually pretty good with guerrilla tactics, but their irregulars train to make Missari territory impossible to hold if invaded, I dunno how well they’d do against even the bandits if they landed in Dragonvale.”

Kaln had already fallen silent, and was now just standing at the head of the stairs near the table, watching them. He continued to do so, listening to the drakes’ amiable bickering. It was such a balm to him, the difference in tone from how they’d been before; they didn’t squabble any less, but they hissed less often and the thread of affection running through their antics was constant, now.

As much as that always lifted his mood to see, he still felt unsettled. It wasn’t as if there was any ambiguity as to why. His consorts had departed only minutes ago; aside from the fact that he simply missed them, the lair was now notably less defended, at exactly a time when they expected its defenses to be called upon. It was exactly that worry which had prompted Vadaralshi to accidentally discover the true extent of the Phantom Legion’s capabilities just now.

That, of course, was reassuring… But given who and what was arrayed against them, Kaln could not help but worry. Not that he could say how, exactly, but he felt certain the Entity would also know exactly of what the Legion was capable, and would have planned accordingly.

He glanced at his Darashi materials spread out on the table. As much as study called to him, he had not been able to still his mind enough to focus.

Another puff of mist streaked up, offering a tray of snacks.

“Thanks, Spooky, but I’m not a stress eater,” Kaln said with a smile. “I’m… I think I’m just gonna stretch my legs a little.”

Ordinarily that would mean a stroll around the Timekeeper city beyond the library, but they were locked down and needed to remain so. Instead, he turned his back on the drakes still exercising and chatting with the ghosts below, and strolled back into his own huge chamber.

It certainly didn’t lack space to stroll.

Passing back inside, Kaln peered around, seeing no sign of anyone else present except the blue-green streak of Spooky zipping along the entire length of the room in half a second to return to the kitchen, where Zhiiji was undoubtedly already at work on lunch. There was no sign of Percy, either, but she could very well be asleep. Percy napped a lot during the day, undoubtedly due to spending a significant portion of every night awake and outside with her telescope.

Despite his intention to walk, Kaln found his steps slowing. He gradually ambled to a halt, slowly turning in place to gaze around the room.

This place really was…bare. Huge and echoingly empty. He’d been meaning to do something about that; it was odd how he kept getting distracted, since he had little to do these days aside from spend time with his family and study Darashi. But then again, maybe that wasn’t really a puzzle. Kaln wanted to do those things—especially the family part. Chores just didn’t appeal when he could be eating Zhiiji’s delicious cooking, hanging out with the people he cared about, or exercising his brain.

Well, he was here now.

Focusing his mental grip on the wards, Kaln began to sort through the contents of Atraximos’s hoard, looking for decorative objects. Immediately that brought a grimace to his face. There were certainly plenty of such things, but… Ugh, everything was so tawdry and tacky. Kaln had most certainly not grown up around gold and jewels, but he had absorbed Izayaroa’s opinions about such things via her writings, and to this day still believed ostentatious displays of expensive ornaments showed a lack of character. Gold where gold did not belong characterized the tastes of people who had acquired power and wealth in a way which had never required them to deserve it. And naturally, that was exactly the aesthetic which predominated the hoard of Atraximos.

For all his violence and cruelty, in the end he really had just been a big, stupid magpie.

It wasn’t completely hopeless, at least. Kaln found a matching set of plant pots of black marble adorned relatively tastefully in silver. Actually quite a selection of them in various sizes. For a few minutes, he moved them about with the wards, setting up various patterns of pots throughout the room. Some of them were large enough to contain small ornamental trees, and finally he arranged rows of those between the door and the kitchen area to mark off a broad avenue, and set up pleasingly symmetrical arrangements of the smaller ones along the walls and around the structures. Later, when she was back, he’d ask Emeralaphine about magics to easily grow decorative plants indoors.

There were four long benches that had apparently come from a tower or dome or something, as they were curved in a manner clearly meant to be arranged along rounded walls. Highly polished redwood and—of course—gold, which was just so grotesquely tacky… But he made it work, setting them up in a circular formation around a point in the very center of the room, and covering them with some whole lengths of crushed velvet in various colors which were in the bowels of the hoard for some reason. Had that ridiculous old lizard just carried off a fabric merchant’s train at some point? Kaln found a few relatively tasteful pillows to further soften them, and then set up a mismatched selection of the least atrocious end tables he could find against the arms of each bench.

Atraximos had a huge marble fountain that magically produced and recycled its own water; it was carved into the shapes of nude, buxom nymphs cavorting in the basin, splashing each other with vessels from which the sprays of water flowed. At least it was just white marble, no gold or other nonsense. He placed this in the exact center of the room, making a nice little centerpiece for the seating area, and then moved some of the smaller plant pots nearby. Vadaralshi’s commentary on the nymphs would be entertaining, at least.

All right, this place was starting to look more like a place. Odd how the room seemed larger, not smaller, when there were orderly things inside it to give it structure.

Kaln discovered just the thing to finish off the arrangement: there were great lengths of wide, regrettably gilt-edged but otherwise respectably severe blue carpet which ended up being of the perfect dimensions to form walkways linking his new fountain seating area with the kitchen and the front door. Kaln laid them out, then moved the flanking power pots closer to their edges to mark formal walkways. It overall could’ve done with less extravagance, but standing back to admire his handiwork, he found the effect pleasing. The vault was actually starting to take shape now!

And then a terrifying sensation slammed into his awareness out of nowhere, disrupting his concentration on the wards.

Kaln froze, going rigid, and spun in place, staring in the direction from which it came. He was, of course, only looking at a stretch of Timestone wall, but out there…beyond it…

“Commander!”

He remembered, just barely in the nick of time, to pitch his voice low; Percy might be asleep but Zhiiji had huge ears, and he didn’t want to start a panic. The ghost materialized before him, saluting.

“There’s a dragon approaching the lair,” Kaln said, eyes fixed on an undistinguished section of the Timestone wall marking the direction in which he sensed it. “An unfamiliar one—larger and more powerful than any of the drakes. Probably less so than any of my consorts, but… There is no way it’s a coincidence they’re here now. Can you send scouts to… Augh, I don’t think that’ll work. All I’m working with is an instinctive sense, I can’t give you any meaningful measurement of distance and barely a direction.”

He trailed off, trying to think as fast as he could. This kind of thinking was gratingly unfamiliar; never had Kaln been so uncomfortably aware that he wasn’t a strategist.

“Okay,” he said slowly, narrowing his eyes in concentration. “All right, I have one idea. I can teleport to any point along a straight line as long as there’s a dragon at the other end of it. I’m going to jump out there, just close enough to have a look at what we’re facing without coming under attack, and jump back using the drakes—”

Mist swirled as the Commander shifted to stand directly in front him—in front, and a bit too close, even before the ghost held out one arm with a palm directly in Kaln’s face.

Kaln came to a halt, blinking. The Commander had never behaved so peremptorily toward him; the shock of it completely aborted his train of thought.

Which, ironically, was just what he needed to get a look at what he’d been thinking from a new angle.

“No,” he whispered, “no, of course not. Obviously not. The Entity is after me, going out there alone would be idiotic. Sorry. And…thanks, Commander. I almost lost my head for a second there.”

The ghost saluted and fell back to standing at attention.

Kaln inhaled deeply, trying once again to think this through. “Okay, I don’t want to frighten anybody, so we’d better…wait… Why was that my first reaction?” Grimacing in annoyance, he rubbed at the bridge of his nose. “Ugh, no, keeping it quiet is a librarian’s instinct. I’m not one of those anymore. Everybody deserves to know what they’re facing—even Zhiiji has probably been in more fights than…at least Pheneraxa. I’m…sorry, Commander. I guess it’s pretty painfully obvious that I’m out of my depth, here. I have some decent practice at managing people, but my entire military experience consists of having a spouse who’s good at that stuff, and she’s been teaching me martial arts, not strategy. It’s almost as frustrating as it’s gotta be for you, not being able to communicate properly.”

The ghost drifted a pace closer, reached out, and greenish light subtly flared along his arm as he solidified it. The Commander laid a hand that, for the moment, looked like fully formed if translucent flesh upon Kaln’s shoulder, gave it a single squeeze, and then released him and drifted back, letting himself go incorporeal again.

“Thanks,” Kaln said with a smile. “All right. First, we need information. I can give you, I’m afraid, literally nothing except a direction. Can you do anything with that?”

The Commander held up one hand, and immediately puffs of mist came streaking in, resolving into the form of five ghosts standing at attention alongside him. They were in their modified uniforms resembling traditional Valefolk butler and maid outfits with several military embellishments, but as Kaln blinked at them in surprise, they shifted into light armor.

“I will take that as an affirmative,” he said. “All right. Remember that this is a dragon we’re talking about, and they aren’t just big and hard to kill. Any dragon who survives to adulthood is functionally an archmage; it’s more likely than not that this intruder will have means of dealing with undead. Try not to let yourselves be seen and do not under any circumstances engage the target; if you are discovered, retreat immediately. Above all we’ll need you back here with whatever you’ve learned. And… Commander, since you guys are currently unable to relay detailed information to me, I am granting you an additional measure of autonomy, here. Take and interpret whatever you learn from your scouts and apply it in whatever way you judge best to protect our home.”

The Commander and the scouts saluted in unison.

“Be safe, be quick, and be back,” Kaln said gravely, and turned to point once again at the wall. Unless he was completely turned around, that would be a line that went somewhere north of Boisverd. “They haven’t moved much since I first sensed them; they’re probably probing our defenses. Proceed with extreme caution. Godspeed, troops.”

The five ghosts saluted him, then zipped away straight through the wall. Apparently even Timestone wouldn’t contain ghosts; that seemed worth knowing.

Kaln heaved another deep breath and scrubbed his palms against his trousers once. “All right. Now I’d better go bring the others up to speed. Something tells me it’s going to require all my attention to keep Vadaralshi and Vanimax from trying to go on the attack. I don’t suppose Spooky can prompt Zhiiji to…”

He trailed off, going still. The Commander, who had been floating alongside, turned to face him directly. Slowly, Kaln straightened his spine to its fullest extent, raising his head as if to scent the air, or hear a distant tune.

“Do…you feel that?”

The ghost hesitated, then fell into parade rest, hands clasped behind himself.

“It’s not…another dragon,” Kaln murmured, frowning as he tried to concentrate. “What is that? Is it magic? I’ve never directly sensed magic, so maybe…but no, why would I be able to? I’m only connected to…”

His eyes widened as he understood.

“Divinity.”

He remembered, now that it had come back to them. The sensation that he had come to dismiss, to let fall to the background of his awareness. Of the watchful reticence of the Nine, away in Rhivaak; of Hii-Amat’s much smaller and warmer presence in the nearer distance; and suffusing the whole region so completely that he was no more conscious of them than the air, the four main gods of the Evervales.

And the sensation it caused, now that one of them had affixed their attention fully upon Kaln.

She saw him see her. And then it grew beyond attention, to an exertion of power.

“Of course,” Kaln whispered. “The Entity works by manipulating others to do its bidding. Sovereign Savasmittar, another uninvolved dragon, and a local god. Oh, that is a good play.”

It was in this inopportune moment that Kaln gained a greater understanding of the relationship between divinity and magic: magic was energy that responded to conscious command, while divinity was the shape of existence itself. He learned this because he was standing in the middle of an enormous and intricate magical ward network under his control, which should have reacted to protect him, and watched it simply…bend out of the way, as a being vastly more powerful than he reshaped the world through sheer will to open a corridor to him.

Actually it was funny—studying this effect up close, he saw how she had to work around the structure itself. Something about the materials of the Timekeepers was impervious even to the will of a god, utterly fixed in reality like nothing else and impossible to bend. The same was not true of magic. Seeing this, Kaln understood that there was no ward or shield or charm that would’ve helped. No magic could prevail against a deity.

Good to know.

“Commander,” Kaln said tersely, “high alert. This is no longer watching for it, we are actively under attack.”

The ghost saluted and then, to Kaln’s surprise, shifted position to plant himself between Kaln and the direction from which the immensity of a goddess’s attention was now fixed on him.

“Don’t do that!” Kaln barked. “You’re undead, a deity could unravel you! Commander, whatever is about to happen, I need you to protect my family.”

That corridor, that channel created through reality by the influence of the deity, suddenly blazed with magic—enabled by divine will to slice right through the wards without them reacting at all. Magic that came directly from that dragon he was sensing. Except…

That was like no dragon Kaln had encountered; no dragon’s mind, anyway. He was only able to perceive their emotional states, not their actual thoughts, and this creature…didn’t have any. He felt its focus, felt what it was doing, but there was no intent or will behind it. As if it were a machine powered by a dragon’s soul.

Then everything was driven from his awareness by pain unlike anything Kaln had ever imagined, much less experienced.

He was being compressed into an atom, sliced apart down to his molecules, blended and stretched and crushed and without even the body to scream—

And then that part, at least, was over. He slammed face-first into something hard and cold, gasping. Blinded, nauseous, momentarily deafened.

Kaln slumped against the oddly curved surface on which he rested, feeling himself gradually come back together. A confusing haze of light was slowly swimming into focus; the high keen of tinnitus faded, and the fuzzy noises that had been hidden behind it began resolving themselves into…voices.

He blinked, inhaled. Everything hurt. He was…

He was in a bubble?

Kaln lay face-first against a smooth wall of curved glass, threaded through with filaments of bronze. His body creaked so badly it almost seemed audible as he raised his head to look around.

No, not a bubble. A bottle. It was rounded, but there was a neck, off to one side, leading to an opening… An opening too small for a person to fit through. An opening onto which a person he’d never seen before was screwing a bronze cap.

Wait—not bronze. He could tell by the way light reflected from it. The filaments were the same stuff.

Timesteel.

Kaln was inside a Timekeeper bottle bigger than a carriage, a work of utterly impermeable material with an opening through which he was too large to escape.

“…via conjuration? A living person? Court Mage, the Flock will not be made accessory to such cruelty!”

“It was my impression that you understood who and what we are dealing with here, priestess.”

“And was it your impression that I would care? Or that I do not know what it’s like for a living thing to be physically conjured? By the Shepherd’s mercy, Lady Cora! At least give him—”

“I am the conjurer here! If you would stop and think for a second, it would occur to you that my willingness to break such a foundational rule is a sign of how dire this situation is!”

Whatever had just happened to him had been utterly excruciating and clearly left some lingering effects, but Kaln was getting himself back together fairly rapidly. It was a little like being hungover, except orders of magnitude worse and lasting a fraction of a percent as long. At any rate, he straightened enough to get a look at his new surroundings.

The bottle of invincible Timeglass in which he was now housed sat in the center of a square chamber of unadorned stone which was brightly lit despite the lack of torches… Oh, of course, the Timeglass itself was glowing. It had that odd quality of putting off light yet not hurting the eyes when stared at directly, no matter from how close. Five people were present, in the middle of an argument. And laid out on the floor nearby…

Kaln did not know enough about magic even theoretically to analyze what a spell circle would do, but he knew enough to recognize one. This one was big and elaborate, scrawled upon the stone floor in multiple colors of chalk, and arranged all over it at carefully-marked locations were the glossy red shapes of dragonscales.

The scales, specifically, of Atraximos the Dread, which as Tiavathyris herself had informed him, had been left all over the Evervales what with one thing and another over the last six hundred years.

One of these people—the one who had just finished screwing the cap back on his prison, if he had to guess—was the Court Mage who’d been referenced. Another, he could see, wore the robes and carried the formal crook of a priest of Anessima the Shepherd.

Magic to mimic the signature of a dragon, the invocation of a deity to slice through his defenses, and magic again to…apparently conjure rather than teleport him into this bottle.

“Oh, that’s clever,” Kaln said aloud.

The Timesteel cap on his bottle was not solid, but a grille of metal filaments arranged in complex patterns. It was enough to admit air, thankfully, and though the voices from outside his prison were muffled, he could hear them clearly enough. To judge by the way the argument cut off at his words, apparently the reverse was also true.

“I am pleased you are impressed, master godling.” The woman who stepped forward to address him was rather short, with brown hair beginning to show gray at the temples. Overall Kaln would have described her as “matronly,” with a roundish build and rather severe taste in clothing. She also held her spine straight as a spear and fixed him with eyes as cold as they were intelligent. He suspected he might have figured out who this was, even were she not wearing a simple golden crown. “Now with that out of the way, let us discuss your immediate return of my daughter.”