Phasewalker – II

Through the slight distortion of her spyglass lens, Kirris watched two well-dressed members of high society hand their ticket stubs over. An attractive galdar wearing a feminine demi delicately recieved them, and after comparing the numbers they bore to figures in a heavy ledger, smiled prettily and welcomed the guests. The two humans – no surprises there, they invented high society after all – grinned and advanced onto the railinged walkway beyond the galdar, stepping softly as it flexed in the fast wind.

The walkway, of course, was attached to the gondola of a luxury airship.

Wonders of this “Age of Steam”, as many were now calling it, the airships were powered by steam-driven propellers, their huge rubbery envelopes filled with a gas lighter than air, which Kirris supposed provided only slightly more buoyancy than the vacuous heads of the people she was watching. She snorted in amusement and lowered her spyglass. It was high time she found someone to listen to her shrewd observations, but she’d make do with infiltrating a well-to-do airborne gala instead.

Having seen no other socialites on their way, and with the galdar host nodding in a satisfied manner at the ledger, Kirris embraced the Aether. She reached for the purple resonance inside her… and the walkway, the galdar, and the airship all vanished. But only because she was now inside of it, a sharp violet smoke dissipating around her.

Her surroundings were replaced with lush carpet and soft walls, aluminium framing everything that could be framed. A disgusting show of wealth in her opinion, but let them try and figure out who was richer while she snuck around and took what she wanted. The sound of crisp, purposeful footsteps alerted her to the galdar stepping onto the walkway. Kirris darted along the corridor to her right, keeping low to avoid being seen through the windows. When she came to a mahogany door that led deeper into the beast, she jumped upwards, peering through its round glazing, using her ethereal ability to step inside without even trying the handle.

Its grimy metal shelving and close walls suggested that this was a room for the hosting staff. In the relative gloom, Kirris unfurled a piece of paper, and studied the badly drawn diagram. It detailed the layout of the airship, the Razorwind apparently, as well as showing a couple of suggested ways of reaching the viewing room, where her prize was located. Rubies and emeralds were nothing compared to some of the tech that was being invented of late.

She followed the dashed line on her map, crouching into the shadows of the maze-like employee area, keeping still when she heard voices or the clanking of some trolley laden with grossly opulent foodstuffs. The hum of the engines had only just started up by the time she reached the viewing room.

Thick blue curtains that could be drawn across its centre were currently tied to the sides, allowing an easy view of the thick steel bars that partitioned it. On this side were doors leading into the warren she had emerged from, and one that led into some kind of ball room, through which the sounds of hoity-toity laughter and a string quartet drifted. But she had not come skulking just to find a side way into the entertainment.

No, what she couldn’t tear her eyes from was resting on a central narrow pedestal on the other side of the bars. It resembled the dreamcatchers that had recently flooded the markets due to some expansion of imperial land across the ocean, but it was all thin metal wires, none with the same colour or gleam, and had a strange backlighting to it. Purple, the same exact shade that she experienced when phasewalking. This was an Aether-trap.

As she appraised it, the shadows around her seemed to… solidify.

Lessons – I

“Now, since most of us here are intellectuals, can anybody tell me how one can deduce if a creature is or is not sentient?” Professor Ennis clasped his hands together as he surveyed the lecture hall. The two dozen or so people scattered about on wooden seats didn’t know him yet, but soon they’d be able to tell when he was issuing a challenge.

An eager galdar in the front row raised his – the professor berated himself silently – vis gauntleted hand. The usage of a gender neutral pronoun with regards to the galdar had been a long time coming. After all, an antiquity might well be bonded to a male demi and identify as feminine, masculine, or neither feminine nor masculine, or anything else ve might like. But it still took some getting used to. His plumage twitched in involuntary apology, which prompted the galdar to attempt an answer to his question, ve must have taken the twitch for an invitation.

“Surely,” ve said, stone gauntlet waving gently in the air as ve spoke, “the prolific use of tools and language are sufficient to define sentience?” Ennis smiled; that was word for word the answer he had given as a student all those years ago. He raised a scaly finger.

“Well phrased,” he said, pausing for unnecessary but enjoyable effect. “But what about the uggar of the Hardodarian rainforests? We would, or rather should, all agree that those lizards use tools in many aspects of their life, and their verbal communication with one another was recently proven to be as – if not more – complex than what we are speaking today. And yet would any of you call an uggar sentient?” His class chuckled as one, leaving him feeling smugger than he knew he ought to.

An etherling sat against the left wall raised one hand even as she furiously jotted down notes with two of her others. He nodded to her.

“Use of the Aether?” she said, her tone making it clear that this was a wild guess.

“Again, not an awful suggestion,” he replied, “But you must always search in your minds for the counter-argument, the falsification. Here, one practically screams out at us.”

“The demis,” said the galdar, clearly pleased with verself.

“Precisely. If anyone were to seriously, with weight of evidence to back them up, suggest that demis possess sentience beyond that which the antiquity bestow upon them, why, that would paint a very bleak picture of the galdar, would throw into question the whole demi-antiquity relationship! Just to be clear, nobody is suggesting that, not here at least,” Ennis added, earning an understanding smile from the galdar who had spoken.

“No,” he continued, turning to write on the blackboard in tandem with his speech, “sentience is now well-established as the capacity to feel, experience, or perceive subjectively…”

The professor allowed his mind to wander as he spoke the very familiar words, distilling his first impressions of his new class. On the whole, he decided it would be a good year.

Solar Union

Elya raked a hand through her hair, despairing, as the assault continued. Unrelenting, the barrage worsened, firing nails with unerring accuracy into society’s new coffin. Unbelievable. Had it really come to this? It was almost a case in favour of pseudo-neo-fascism, though of course she didn’t really subscribe to that school of thought.

On the flexi-screen in her hands, a man’s lips quivered with emotion as his announcement was relayed across the Solar System, live translation allowing her to understand his Terran Standard words. In a few hours, every human to have ever been washed with Sol’s light – excluding a small number of asteroid miners in the farthest reaches of the Kuiper Belt – would have heard the news.

“…again, I repeat: just hours ago, the Terran Confederacy voted in favour of leaving the Solar Union. Already a tsunami of economic crises has flooded the system, their effects only restricted by the maximum speed of light. Aphrodite, the first and largest of the Venusian settlements, met with disaster merely minutes later, when separate riots prompted by celebration or anger caused each and every defence against the planet’s heat and pressure to be overwhelmed, resulting in significant destruction across the city. It is estimated that upwards of 16 million are dead, with a further…”

Mouth hanging open, Elya became vaguely aware that she was going into shock. She looked away from the screen, out of the thick glass of her ceiling. Normally she felt joy and pride when her eyes fell on Earth, its white-streaked blue a testament to what humanity had become and what it had overcome. But now…

Somehow enough Terrans had been convinced that they would be better off without the benefits of all the other bodies in the system, the ones that they had peopled and broken and helped and befriended. The populace of Earth had voted in favour of turning their backs on their cousins, on their kin, and for no real reason. They had cited overcrowding, conveniently forgetting the Population Wars of the early 21st Century. They had demanded fair treatment in the face of terminally ill off-worlders receiving treatment in Earth’s hospitals. They had cried out against their government sending money to sustain the very water-mining stations that slaked their thirst.

More words bombarded her from the screen that had dropped into her lap. No less than three Martian kingdoms at war. Research stations in Saturn’s rings colliding as they were abandoned. Selene, the lunar city-state she lived in, declaring martial law. Her eyes filled with tears as the sounds of actual explosions began peppering the bombshells dropped by the newsreader, but she found herself unable to look away from the planet of her ancestors. As the political commentary replaced the news, as comparisons were drawn to the famous EU referendum of 2016, her room shook, and the glass before her eyes cracked.

Alarms blared, and klaxon-like voices began declaring the percentage of oxygen left in the building. But it didn’t matter. Selfishness and foolishness had won the day.

Humanity had strolled to the door of widespread catastrophe and knocked.

They had knocked loudly.

Kilam

Kilam grinned, which could only have looked foolish to the onlookers. Pitchblende daggers held at the throat were no joke, after all. Her sparring partner, Woe, was unblinking as he held the olive green blade edge a hair’s width from her skin. She could almost see thoughts churning beneath the pale scales of his scalp, trying to figure out what he could have possibly missed. It never grew old, letting him stand on the edge of victory before snatching it away from him.

To be fair, there was no way he could have known she had a fake tooth full of an acid she’d spent months building resistance to. She bit down, hard, cracking the tooth. A now familiar tingling filled her mouth, and she spat. Her corrosive saliva caught him across his cheek, only his aradi reflexes rescuing him from blindness.

In an instant he was spinning away from her, a combination of elegance and practicality that she couldn’t help but admire. Even in their first few sessions, when she had hated him, twinges of respect and admiration had seeped through. The guy could move. Unfortunately for him, years spent honing each other’s skills meant she could react fast too. She wouldn’t boast aradi-like reflexes, but she moved faster than the average human.

As soon as he disengaged, she hurled one of the small ceramic pots from her belt. It shot through the air before shattering against the hard-packed earth precisely where Woe’s feat of acrobatics ended. He coughed and spluttered to fight the acrid yellow smoke that rose up around his perfect landing, even as he tried to wipe her caustic spittle from his face. Kilam prepared to launch a sedative dart at him, but as if pre-empting her next move, a booming voice filled the Arena.

“Return to starting positions!” The adversaries sped back to opposite sides of the large oval-shaped pit, Woe giving her a wink with one of his large pupilless eyes. He had fought well, far better than her. She had been hoping to save the tooth trick for another day.

“You have attained the rank of Practitioner, this day!” Woe fell to his knees and bowed his head, body language that meant huge gratefulness and surprise to many adari. To many humans too, come to think of it. “Alchemist Kilam, congratulations!”

She heard cheers rise up around her as the words sunk in. Her, not him. An alchemist, not an edgebearer. No alchemist had been raised to Practitioner for decades! But that meant…

Woe didn’t meet her gaze. He hadn’t been raised alongside his partner, which meant only one thing. The edgebearers would hurt him. And she wouldn’t be allowed to stop them.

True Harlequins

“These aren’t your fancy party type of harlequins that I’m talking about, with their mute tongues and their supremely ordinary faces. You know the ones, they hang around the nobility wearing their perfect white masks, when really they’re mage-warped assassins with a bag full of alchemist’s tricks. Everyone knows they’re real, don’t be a fool!

“But I’m not talking about them; I’m talking about the real deal – the inspiration. The ones that stay silent under interrogation because of their impressive mental fortitude. The one who take pride in flawed masks daubed with bright colours. The ones who wield khopeshes longer than your arm.

“Huh? Oh, you know, those elongated sickle-type weapons. Half the time used like an axe and the rest of the time like a sword. No? I thought they were common knowledge. Them traders up from the Coarse Sea use them.

“Anyway, there I was walking the glades, and I saw not one, not two – I’ll be cursed, not even three! A whole troupe of them, if that’s even the right word. Normally if they allow you to see them then you’re as dead as Belor, and I saw upwards of twenty. Twenty! Turns out they were all headed in one direction, real focussed on it, towards the canyon a few leagues out to the west if I’m right. Didn’t pay me any attention beyond a quick glance to see if I was a threat or not. Good thing I didn’t have my halberd with me, eh!

“Alright, alright, laugh all you want, but I could have been one of those adventuring types easy. Nah, they weren’t heading for any of the known ritual grounds that they have; I know these lands like I know the embrace of my own brother. What? Oh, yeah, we’re the best of friends. I suppose you’d have had no way of knowing that…

“Regardless, you mark my words. Something big is going to happen, and soon! The true harlequins are the harbingers of change – no, I said it right! I’ve had a few ales, sure, but I know what the right sound of words is! – harbingers of change they are. I reckon we’ll have us one of those worldfalls soon, or some sort of terrifying creature will move into the area that’ll cost half the gold in the city for a group of adventurers to clear out.

“Draconic invasion? Please, what could a dragon want with our city? We wouldn’t be on the map if the King’s grandfather hadn’t taken a lover from these parts, or whatever it was he did. Just steer clear of that canyon, or the harlequins will pay notice to you. And that means being slaughtered and having your blood used to make some of their dyes.

“Yes I’m telling the story again! Because it was strange, and because it means something, that’s why! Mark my words. Mark my words…”

***

The harlequins ceased their chanting as one, the drone ending abruptly and without hesitation, each individual in perfect unison despite being in the middle of a refrain. The troupe leader stepped forwards, mask off, her lips turning upwards into the kind of smile that would set the hearts of common men racing – were it not for the keen fierceness that lit her eyes.

“The words have been spoken according to prophecy! Chaos comes!” she said, her voice carrying down the canyon, though she hadn’t raised it.

“Chaos comes”, the harlequins intoned, as the world veil tore.

Duerlic

The two avians landed on the clifftop, their huge chest muscles flexing and unflexing as large jointed wings tipped with hands were folded along their backs. They cocked their heads to one side and then the other, nervously, if Duerlic’s understanding of their body language was correct. Beside him, Andar’s fists clenched and his jaw became set. Hopefully he’d be able to bottle up his hatred, this meeting was important after –

“You defiled a sanctuary!” shouted Andar. Duerlic groaned, and sought strength as he made soothing noises. “No, Duerlic! These worm-eaters killed thousands! All of that history lost, all of that culture gone! It was their time to integrate tomorrow!” A finger pointed accusingly with each sentence, switching its target at a whim. One of the avians hopped back at the slur, blue plumage quivering, clawed feet digging small furrows in the dirt.

The other opened its beak – her beak – and spoke in a high, trilling voice. “If you are so sure it was us, then why did you agree to meet?” Each of the words was clipped, and the inflection made little sense, but Duerlic never ceased to be amazed at the avian’s capacity for human language. Humans mostly had great difficulty mimicking the melodic warbling that was avian speech.

“I came because I felt it my duty,” retorted Andar. “Seeing you now, I know it in my heart that you Feathered” – the way he said the honorific sounded so like a curse that they flinched – “are responsible. The next time we meet will be on the field of battle.” He spat, and gestured that he was leaving.

Duerlic found he was unable to reach out a placating hand, and suddenly became aware of the long arrow shaft emerging from his chest. He tried to speak, to tell Andar that it wasn’t the avians, that it was all a ploy, but only grunts came from his throat. He collapsed, hearing shouts as hands, bird-like and human both, grasped at him. Please don’t think it’s them, Andar. Please don’t.

The last word he heard, before the darkness closed in, was ‘war’.

Turzas

“You failed us, Turzas, Fourth of the Angim Chapter of the Selenic Defence,” intoned the High Exarch of Angim. His voice rasped, and his off-blue robes fit poorly, yet somehow he managed to maintain the dignity and poise expected for a man of his standing. How his coarse, nasal speech had ever allowed him to gain such power was anybody’s guess. It was an effort not to spit at his feet, as instinct compelled, but Turzas had that right no longer.

Abruptly, she realised that the powerful man had raised a white tuft of an eyebrow ever so slightly. He must have spoken, and she’d been too lost in her appraisal of him to hear. Curses on her threshold, a thousand-fold! The same pensiveness had gotten in the way of her rightful ascension to Second of the Defence. If she couldn’t learn from her mistakes then she had never deserved to be appointed even as a Fifth Assistant all those years ago. Perhaps the branding was fitting, the marks forever confining her to rise no higher than her current appointed position.

The High Exarch continued, his words bouncing around the high-ceilinged stone chamber, underscored by the roar of the furnace. Its heat was maintained by some of the Low, their scars a hideous pattern across the entirety of their bodies, including – she suppressed a shudder – their faces.

“…allowed moonlight – that hideous defiler and maker of death – to touch the hallowed walls of a coppersmith.” Turzas tuned back in to hear the High Exarch pronounce her crime. She hoped it wasn’t the second time he had done so, and bowed her head in acceptance of the transgression, averting her eyes to the floor. No stifled gasps came from the circle of witnesses that precisely lined the walls, which meant her hope had not been ill-founded. “The punishment will now commence.”

As one of the Low walked towards her, the appropriate brands held high, hot ends down of course, the High Exarch pulled her face up and looked deep into her eyes. She felt them widen in shock, and this time the gasps from around the room were forthcoming. Even the Low hesitated, despite their lack of such rights.

“You will change everything,” he rasped quietly, so that only she could hear. “You will be Highest. It has been seen.” Then, louder, fear setting tremors in his voice as he disrobed, “I, High Exarch of Angim, shall accept the punishment in place of the transgressor.” The Low stopped entirely, sweat that had nothing to do with the heat forming on his scarred brow. The gasps gave way to muttering, angry and scared. No Exarch, let alone a High Exarch, had done such a thing in all of recorded history.

He nodded to her, the tiniest of movements, and turned to face the Low, casting his undergarments atop his precious robes. Turzas collected herself, recognising that the nod instructed her to proceed with the ceremony, silently thanking him for the reminder. Meekness sloughed off of her.

“The punishment will now commence,” she said, voice as haughty and cold as she could manage. No sooner had she finished the sentence, than the Low stepped forwards, pushing hot metal against the former High Exarch’s chest, sizzle almost as loud as the scream.

As was her duty, she watched.