Chapter 43

“Relic worlds stand as a testament to how far it is necessary for us to go to defend ourselves against the Eidolon menace. They show sophisticated culture, technology and magic existed across the universe and has come into being over and over again throughout its expansion, yet each of them fell. There is no threshold that a people should not cross if it rids them of the Eidolons. No price to great.”

—Requiem For the Vanished, Luvid Hagen

With the area ahead of them already scouted, the remainder of the outer circle that they had to traverse proved to be relatively quiet. There were a few more signs of fighting, where Abbas’ team had come through, but even that seemed to be sparse. Here and there, when they listened, they could still hear the water that the fiend had summoned, dripping down through the gratings into the layer below, but they had little time to stop and listen. The blind spot that Bael had raised in front of the enemies’ eyes would only last a short while, and now that they were getting closer to the center of the station, where the core had to lie and the defenses would be at their thickest, the danger of encountering more of the Whitehall troops was climbing. They were trusting that Malachai had someone monitoring the scrying devices, and it was entirely possible he wouldn’t have bothered, arrogant as he seemed to be in his abilities. All it would take would be a random patrol to bring the whole Citadel down on them.

The room where the intelligence dossier they were meant to collect was stowed was not immediately off the corridor, but rather through a series of rooms and doors that Sylvas probably wouldn’t have even realized were there if not for the map and his gravity sense. The outer chamber looked much like any of the other dilapidated mage’s studies that filled so much of the ring, the books long gone to mold and dust and the shelves not long to follow. But behind the reading desk where the ashen remains of some book or another now lay, there had been a construct like a fireplace, which could be ducked through to enter the room behind. There was even less left in there that was recognizable. Sylvas assumed it had been some sort of living quarters for the mage that worked here, but there was very little to prove it. A frame that might have once been a bed had rotted into a black rectangle on the floor. The carpets that had covered the iron gratings beneath their feet had turned to mulch. Squishing through with each step.

Yet even that chamber wasn’t secretive enough for what the Ardent had planted here to be retrieved. The map, and Sylvas gravity sense, showed another chamber beyond the one that they were in, but there was no helpful opening this time. Kaya manifested a blade and pulled back before Ironeyes caught her elbow. “No destroying the place, remember.”

Kaya grumbled. “Wasn’t going to destroy it. Just… remodel a bit.”

Time had robbed the walls of their art, both paintings and tapestries long worn away, but the engraving of the metalwork of the bulkhead remained, and in it a pattern. Shapes and curves etched into the joining points between the panels that before today Sylvas probably wouldn’t have been able to place, but which now seemed all too obvious. The aion words used in spells of necromancy were hidden here. The same shapes bound into the constructs that had been attacking them all along.

Every one of the sigils was familiar from the constructs now that Sylvas knew what he was looking for. All of them but one. He touched a fingertip to the black gem on his gauntlet and drew out a tiny speck of death mana, pressing it to the unfamiliar spell-form.

With a lurch, the wall which had looked so solid a moment before snapped up and down out of their way, the jaws of some great beast opening.

“What was…”

“Just a lock. Made by the people who… made this place what it is.” Some other type of mana might have worked, something similar to death, or simply enough chaotic mana poured in to overload the mechanism, but the fact that this lock had been made, apparently by the natives of Strife, to respond to death mana made Sylvas begin to question many things.

He’d wondered at first why the Ardent hadn’t seized this place as their base of operations above the planet, given how much bigger it was, and how much easier it would have been to run, but now he was starting to think that the addition of necromancy hadn’t been made by them to turn this place into a training ground. Just as they’d done with the ruins down on the surface, the Ardent had found this place ready built, and turned it to their purposes without changing a thing. Whoever had lived here, back when living was still something someone could do on Strife, had been a necromancer, just like Malachai.

The chamber they’d unveiled was a private study, more intact than the rest by virtue of having been locked away. There were boot-prints through the dust that had been left there, to the desk and back, and sitting atop that desk was a bland manilla folder containing their objective. Sylvas let out a sigh of relief before stepping in to pick it up. He was too slow. Kaya dodged in ahead of him and snatched the folder up, flicking it open. “Let’s see what we’ve got here…”

It took only a moment before she let out a groan of dismay.

“Vital intelligence?” Bael asked. She handed the folder over and he flicked through. “Ah. Quartermaster Chul’s subscription to a fishing magazine. It appears we have several back issues that I believe she is waiting for.”

“Fishing magazines?” Gharia’s tail flicked with anger.

“It’s just an exercise.” Kaya chuckled. “Did you think they were going to plant actual vital intelligence on this stinking rathole?”

This was their objective. An illusory glow had surrounded the folder, and now it faded, yet Sylvas still couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something more here. He looked slowly around the chamber, trying to let his eidetic memory soak it all in, to let his mind piece together what was missing.

It wasn’t his eyes that were confusing him, but he closed them all the same, letting his gravity sense stretch out. “There’s another secret room.”

They all turned to him. Kaya looking oddly giddy, “What?”

“Beneath this study, there is a secondary chamber, a repository of some sort? There’s an empty space with a vacuum inside to preserve the contents.” He held out his hands flat above the floor, as though he might be able to sense something more like that. “I think it was welded shut, or sealed somehow?”

The Ardent recruits looked to each other, Ironeyes shrugging his shoulders. Gharia casting annoyed glances down at the floor. Bael said, “It is not a part of our mission to explore sealed sections of the Citadel.”

“You aren’t curious?”

“Curious? Perpetually my dear fellow. But there is a time and place for curiosity.”

“What’s sealed down there has been there since Strife fell. You don’t know any cousins who might be interested in the contents?”

“You make a persuasive argument.”

“Might be skipping the part where one of you stanzbuhr works out how to open it.”

“Simple enough.” Bael crouched down extending his elegant fingers. “I shall identify the enchantment and… there’s nothing here.”

“Huh?” Ironeyes cocked his head to the side, like a dog.

Bael looked perplexed too. “There is no room beneath this one, I am scrying it, and there is nothing but solid metal below.”

Sylvas closed his eyes, reached out with his gravity sense and… “I can feel the empty space.”

Gharia’s sneered, in as much as someone without lips could sneer. “Guess we’ve worked out why nobody else ever found it.”

“How can you sense it and nobody else can?” Ironeye’s brows beetled.

“Well I imagine it is because nobody else has our dear friend’s affinity and paradigm.” Bael looked at Sylvas curiously. “The rarity of it means that whoever was hiding this… whatever it is, failed to account for it in their masking.”

“None of which helps us open the damn thing.” Sylvas grumbled.

Kaya sauntered over. “I could always just…”

“Didn’t I just say,” Ironeyes growled. “No property destruction?”

Bael looked between the dwarves and sighed. “Alas, I am inclined to agree with Kaya in this case. I believe that a direct application of force may be our best option.”

Kaya clapped her hands together. “I can do you one better!”

They had all become accustomed to her new embodiment. The liquid metal that flowed out of her and took the shapes that she demanded, but what they didn’t know was that her power wasn’t limited to the conjured stuff. She laid her palms flat on the metal grating of the floor and it rippled at her touch. With a twist of her wrists, she had the whole grating off and flowing up and around her arms, then she dug in deeper, reaching down beneath the level of the floor into the metal beyond, gathering it all up and making it fluid before drawing it onto her body.

As she punctured the vacuum seal of the chamber below, they were all rocked forward, and Kaya would have taken a nose dive directly in if it weren’t for Ironeyes hand on the back of her belt restraining her. With one good tug, he removed her from the gap, along with all the metal flowing around her, that she discarded in a heap of slag in one corner of the room. “Pretty cool, right?”

Bael patted her on the shoulder absentmindedly, “Most impressive.”

The chamber beneath them was built much like every other part of the citadel, albeit to a smaller scale. The walls were lined with books that looked as good as new, and alongside them were a scattering of artifacts in sealed containers, every one of them radiating enough death mana that it made Sylvas uncomfortable just being this close to them.

Seeing their hesitation, headstrong Gharia dropped herself in. “Diaries. Spell books. Blueprints. Battle plans.” She glanced up, “We’ve got it all.”

“I believe that my cousin may actually lose all reason when presented with such a bounty.” Bael couldn’t restrain his smile.

Unbothered by the age of the tomes, Gharia began gathering them off the shelves and tossing them up. Bael dropped his fishing magazines in a frantic grab for the books. “Those are rare and ancient!”

Gharia mumbled something in Najashi that the translation spell struggled with, but which Sylvas suspected meant, “As is your mother.”

With the shelves plucked clear of books, Gharia turned to the artifacts. “We taking them too?”

Sylvas forced a smile onto his face. “Let’s just leave them for someone with the right containment equipment, right?”

With a litheness that would have surprised many, Gharia leapt, rebounding off the chamber wall to gain height before arriving back in the hidden study. The books had been sorted into piles and bound by type by Bael, as if that made up for the way that they’d been manhandled. And he was now slotting them carefully into his own bookbag. Presumably the kind of bag of holding that did not require opening up Cold Storage by yourself.

Noticing what was being trodden on, Sylvas retrieved the all-important dossier of fishing magazines and passed it across to Bael to file away too.

“All right,” he said once the magazines vanished, seeing everyone’s attention shift over to meet his. “We need to plan our next move.”