Procurer Sayadaw was at the height of her powers when she ordered the Necropolis to be excavated. There was a demon beneath it that she wanted to interrogate.
The Order of Power employed hundreds of Procurers, whose roles were to find remnants of a lost age wherever they were hidden and return them to the Order. The Order would then distribute them among their most talented and trusted adherents.
Sayadaw’s specialty was in finding those remnants long thought lost. She found hints in old writings, allegories in folk songs, rumours on the lips of old women, and pieced these fragments together into a whole truth.
When the Order of Power recruited Sayadaw to its academies as a young woman, it impressed upon her that all advantages were earned. And so when Sayadaw had used two remnants of her own, her sharp mind honed by Ozige to manoeuvre her way up through the unwritten ranks of the Procurers, this was considered a just and moral course by her superiors. After seven years of deviousness, one-sided deals and outright betrayals, Sayadaw had been awarded a position in the office of the Judge of the Reliquary and a one-year sabbatical.
She had been a teenager when she had passed through the Realm of Sukumo and found the Necropolis. This had been during her long journey with Odavwaro from her home in Spezlaas to the Academy of the Magi in Mapkin. The ring mounted in her eyepiece had shown her that there was something hidden underneath a tree shaped into a throne, and she had devised a way to speak to it through her amulet, Scarecrow, though the conversation was limited by her lack of skill and knowledge.
Since then, the Order of Power had given her more than enough of both and she had guarded the Necropolis’ secret over the intervening years just as Odavwaro had advised her. In the first month of her sabbatical, Sayadaw had amassed the means, the budget and the ambition to make a profitable return to the fallen Necropolis and enact the plans she had been drawing for years.
The demon hung like a huge clump of quivering seaweed.
Sayadaw had hired six men from the Free Republic of Kepopeta to do the labour. They were conspicuously disgusted by the limp thing they had hoisted up into the light. The men lived outside of any Order and would not speak of this work to anyone who Sayadaw was concerned about. They had used a black powder that expanded with heat to uproot the sinister tree at the heart of the dead city in an indelicate operation that had shattered the surrounding gallery of stone statues.
They then dug with shovels and picks to uncover the bag from which the tree sprouted and had hauled it out from its hiding place of ages.
When she had first seen the bag buried beneath the tree, Sayadaw had had no idea of what she had found. But her teachers at the Academy of Magi had lectured her classes about little else than the nature and usefulness of these bags. Her provincial childhood had failed to inform her that bags like these were the hub around which all the Orders of the world spun, for they were the remnants from which all other remnants emerged. They could contain a deceptive amount of space within them, and in that space lay the treasures that gripped the imagination and obsessions of the world.
As Procurer, she had found dozens of them, and had handed each of them to the Reliquary for the Order’s nebulous purposes.
What the men had pulled out Sayadaw’s bag, the one she had waited years to dig out of the ground, was a wet mop head that dangled pathetically from a rope above the hole where a tree had once stood. She had also not known about demons when she last crossed the Necropolis but the Academy gave her access to drink from one of the deepest wells of knowledge on the subject.
She scanned the horizon to see if anyone might be walking by this silent and cursed place. The men hung back, grumbling and spitting as she approached the demon. Through her naked eye, it was only a limp, uninteresting shape, wet with something that wasn’t quite water. Through her eyepiece, it was a swirling galaxy. She produced a thick grimoire from her knapsack.
The demon tried to do as they had on their previous encounter—to hail Scarecrow and beam its enormous thoughts into her brain. But this time, Sayadaw wanted to talk to the creature on her own terms. The grimoire she had brought with her was standard-issue to the serious demon hunter. She tore the front page from its end band and thrust the paper into the hanging branches of the demon’s inverted body. They recoiled, swinging back on the rope, but she held her hand fast in the mess.
It is the curiosity of demons that makes them malleable, and they are quick to fixate on the written word. Inside the tangle of tendrils that surrounded Sayadaw’s hand and the page they held, the demon grew lines of photosensors to see and tiny luminescent glands to read by. Once they had detected text, they knitted together an internal network to translate it.
Sayadaw tore out the second page and presented it in much the same way. This page held the instructions to build an ear and a voice box. Instinctively, the demon fumbled their strands into tubes, at the base of which were knots and whiskers that rattled in the frequency range of human speech. Another tube poked out towards Sayadaw’s face; along its length was a flap of material that could make sounds when air was pushed up past it. They used this new organ to beg for help in the whistling tone of a deflating balloon.
Sayadaw urged them to be quiet as she stuffed page after page of language into their body. It was written in the governing language of the Realm of Hahhukhin, which all adherents of Power had to speak. Sayadaw was fluent but spoke with a Spez accent that made her sound uneducated. It was also a language that the men of the Free Republic would not know and never wish to learn.
When the demon had eaten enough of the grimoire to make sense, Sayadaw began the interrogation. The demon did not appear to understand it was a prisoner and, if anything, was too eager to share its thoughts, loudly.
“We are crashing! Calamity calamity! Highest alert!” they repeated over and over in their unpleasant, farting, improvised voice.
“Where did you come from?” Sayadaw barked, fighting to be heard.
The demon stopped piping and rustled in confusion. “A true cutting of False King the Third!” they spluttered, shocked. “This is what is also written at the front of every line of body-instructions inside of the body.”
Sayadaw made the human version of a confused rustle. “Why were you inside the bag?” she said, pointing to the sack lying on the ground beside her. It was not empty, even after the demon had been pulled from it.
“I must! Captain on Bridge at even all times, even crashing times,” they warbled.
This connected with the images the creature had projected on Odavwaro’s cloak years earlier: a shape that fell past the Moon towards the Earth, dropping bags and demons.
“Inside of the bag there is your ship?” asked Sayadaw.
As she spoke, the demon sprouted a black orb on a finger to inspect her face. They experimented with making lips for themselves. “Ship! Yes! Must talk to Ship? Ship is ill!” they screamed. The lips had only made them sound more horrible. “Must hear from Ship! The hearing and talking machine is over there.” They pointed a shaking branch in the direction of where Sayadaw had hidden her amulet. “Too far!” The branch fell limp under the effort.
“The Bridge is inside the bag?” she asked.
“Yes! Yes! True cuts from False King are earning seat on Bridge!” the creature said, brightening.
“And the other bags contain other parts of the Ship?” she pressed.
“Yes, all of them compartments inside Bubbles. Fabrication, Botanical Gardens, Guest Bubbles—oh calamity! The Guests must always be safe! Ask the Ship if Guests are safe?” they said, rising on a new wave of panic.
“So the Ship is composed of many bubbles, and inside those bubbles are compartments—bags like this one here?” Sayadaw asked.
The mention of this only heightened the demon’s panic, and they shook so much on the rope that the shadouf creaked. The hired men drew to attention, wondering if they should have to flee or negotiate an additional fee for the service of hacking an escaped demon to death.
Sayadaw searched for something to say to calm the demon, but invention came more easily than compassion, so instead she voiced an idea that had occurred to her many times over the years.
“If I put the bags back together, will I make the Ship well again?” she asked.
The demon stopped quaking. It appeared to think for a while.
Sayadaw repeated the question more softly, hoping that compassion and invention had converged.
“Yes. Yes. Putting the Ship together,” the demon wheezed at last. “All together, Ship knows what to do. She is calling for help, and flying the guests away to home.”
Sayadaw let this momentous new knowledge sit under her ribs. It struggled inside that cage, but she could not let it bother her now. She picked up the fabric of the bag and did something she had never been taught in school—she stepped inside of it.
It was black as pitch inside, but she could see clearly through her eyepiece. There was enough room to walk and even to wander, but she couldn’t make sense of anything she saw. She stepped out again.
When she emerged, night had fallen and the men had gone. They had taken the payment she had brought to them—steel ingots their Republic could not have manufactured in a thousand years. But the demon was still there, hanging from the rope. They asked her, with some hope, if she had found all the bits of the Ship yet.
She would be careful not to put her head too far inside a bag again.
She lowered the demon to the ground and convinced them, quite easily, to return to the safety of their bag, their Bridge. The compressed space inside of it would make time pass more slowly for the wretched thing.
As she prepared to leave, she noticed a silvery reflection among the rubble created by the explosives. She recovered a thin, curved falchion. The blade and the handle were cast from the same lightweight metal. It reflected black under her eyepiece, a sure sign that it was a remnant that she had overlooked, both on her first visit and throughout that day.
If the demon was not a liar, then the falchion was once a small part of a vast and mysterious Ship. Sayadaw was at a loss as to which part a sword could have been, and the fact that she, a talented Procurer, had spent a day within spitting distance of a remnant without realising it did support an argument that no one could possibly track down all of these pieces.
Sayadaw looked about the landscape once more and caught herself entertaining a hope that she might see Odavwaro wandering by. She snorted at this private sentimentality, tucked the falchion under her robes and hoisted the bag containing the demon over her shoulder. She went to retrieve Scarecrow, saddled her horse and then stared up at the sky through her eyepiece to consult the Earth’s magnetic field.
She would retrace the steps she had taken through the Necropolis when she was fresh-faced and empty-headed. She would return home, North, to Spezlaas.
Sayadaw’s mother was dead, and not missed much, so Sayadaw’s compass for reconstitution pointed to the Library at Kezkiisch, where Curator Ozige had prepared a modest office for her. Ozige’s workplace had been Sayadaw’s home for the most significant portion of her life. She had been made a Curator of Flora and Fauna in Thawfell that same year, which granted her access to part of the labyrinthine collections underneath the Library. Alongside the promotion, she was delighted to use her new position to help her bright mentee in any way she could.
Sayadaw arrived with a mysterious falchion to be categorised and a magical bag that had to be hidden at all costs. Ozige welcomed her in the opaque manner that the folk of Vitriol preferred, commented on the slight hunch Sayadaw had developed in her posture, and admitted that the falchion could take months of work to pin down.
This was, to Sayadaw, as hearty and affectionate a homecoming as an open fire and a feast.
Ozige found a part of the Library’s vast collection which had been ruled by a Curator who had died years earlier, but whose area of expertise was so obscure and difficult that no one had been trained to replace him. Ozige stored Sayadaw’s bag with the demon inside among one of its aisles and filed it under a crushingly boring name in an insignificant category.
“They lie,” observed Ozige among the muffled silence of the collection. “The demons can’t help but say lies. Not always to deceive, I think, but because they experience a different world altogether.” The two of them had corresponded extensively during Sayadaw’s studies, and Ozige had become a demon scholar by proxy.
“This one seemed to have never seen the surface at all,” reflected Sayadaw. “I do not believe it on its face, but I will investigate the veracity of what it said, if there is any.”
“What it said would be harmless if it was all lies,” said Ozige, working a knuckle into her cheek as she thought. “But if it were true—then it could be very dangerous.”
“Dangerous for who?” asked Sayadaw, with defiance in her eyes.
“For everybody, girl,” snapped Ozige. “The Orders have schismed over ideas of far less substance, and from every schism there spat an ocean of blood.”
“The Order of Vitriol already teaches that the remnants are the irreducible parts of an ineffable whole,” scoffed Sayadaw, with the unbearable loftiness of one who has returned to a quaint home after years in the wide world.
“That one statement can be sliced into a thousand sections of shade and detail. The Plagiarists say that each part is a copy of the next, Violette’s cult says the whole is a physical body of flesh, the Scrollhouse think it all adds up to one big book—need I go on or have you forgotten everything?”
“I remember everything that’s important,” muttered Sayadaw, a teenager again.
“Whoever walks into Council waving the piece of evidence that shows—without any doubt—that the remnants can all be put together to make a fantastic ship that sails through the sky will be ridiculed, excommunicated, then flayed alive for heresy. And as this martyr’s eyes fade, she will see the first cracks shoot up the brittle walls of the Order-house.”
Sayadaw fixed her eyes to the bag stuffed into the corner of a shelf and opened her mouth to make a retort.
Ozige knew what was coming and interrupted before it could be spoken, “And your friends in the Order of Power would cheer through the entire show! You would be doing their work for them if they knew that your intent was to shatter our Realms with heresy. They would give you all the help you needed and arm the poor fools who took up your cause with their most indiscriminate weapons!” she said, triumphant.
Sayadaw flared her nostrils and unconsciously tried to straighten her hunched back. “I will do it in secret,” she seethed.
“You will. Use the Dark. Speak in code, tell no one everything and pin nothing to paper,” sang Ozige, softening with a smile. “Your docile demon will stay here, in this forgotten corner I have no knowledge of.”
Sayadaw murmured her thanks. She stared at the bag in its forgotten corner. Her eyes copied it into the corridors of her mind, much enlarged, where she could ruminate upon it throughout all her lonely moments and silent rages of ambition that were to come.
The demon stayed in the collection for some time.
They did not know what a year was so never thought to count them. Since the autotrophic lung they had painstakingly built to turn gas into nutrients had been hacked off, they had become very weak. They extended a thin probe tendril into the environment outside of the bag and eventually stumbled across a loosely bound book. They thumbed through degraded mental databases to find a way to oxidise the tough material of its pages and release a crumb of nourishment from the paper. They found the trick of it and burrowed the tendril through the book’s decrepit spine. They sucked up enough energy to both lie very still and whisper to the Ship from time to time with their new throat and lips, though they knew full well that the Ship’s interface crystal was far outside of the Bridge.
When they had digested enough of the book to move around more vigorously, they passed the time by experimenting with new forms. They thought often of the animal that had spoken to them through the interface crystal—the one with the electromagnetic field viewing-lens clasped over one of its eyeballs. They tried to remember what it had looked like when it had yanked them from the Bridge—when it had forced them to roast in the harsh young sun and sizzling oxygenated air of the Couplet System.
It was strangely compelled to invest some energy towards changing shape to mimic the animal. They sketched out the general bilateral body plan and the various tubes but got stuck trying to work out the internal skeleton and the particular arrangement of sensory blisters. Then they ran out of book to eat so couldn’t change back. All this took several of the years that they couldn’t count.
They were just trying to figure out how to digest the wood of the shelf they were on when they felt the room lift and the walls tremble as Sayadaw opened the bag and stepped onto the Bridge.
She had changed in appearance since that day she had fed them the language made of air pressure waves. Her face was different and she had incurred some damage to her lower limbs. Some of the material of her living outer covering had been oxidised. She had a broken length of the Ship’s Navigation Ribbon wrapped around her head.
She asked them if they were still alive, which they found difficult to answer. Apparently satisfied by their response, she then touched their body with her hands which were covered in the skin of a Technician. She then wandered around the Bridge, touching all of the surfaces and equipment in a vaguely offensive way.
The demon, still without the strength to stand upright, wailed in fear as the strangeness of her presence overwhelmed them. She came back over to them and produced a desiccated hunk of spun sugars. She put it to their lips and told them that most demons could eat normal food.
They pinched off a segment and crushed it until it was in a dozen small chunks, then used the enzymes they had developed for the paper to process it into something from which it could harvest protons. It started to work almost immediately and they scarfed down the entire hunk. Then Sayadaw helped them to stand and together they left the Bridge to start a new life.
During the dilated span of that time Sayadaw spent surveying the inside of the bag, Ozige used her lofty position as senior Curator to borrow as many remnants from the Library’s collections as she could and place them into an ersatz study centred on the bag. When Sayadaw at last limped out with the demon in tow, she was met with a considerable haul. The forgotten corner of the archive was piled with magical weapons and clothing, rows of wands, obscure mechanisms and dull lumps of minerals, all packaged with the meticulous records and writings that generations of Librarians had worked for centuries to create.
Ozige heard them leave the bag from the nook she had cleared for her own use and came over to see them. She dismissed the junior researchers who had been organising it and Sayadaw was already touching as many of the precious artefacts as she could. Ozige assumed that the lumpy gingerbread man standing in polite confusion behind Sayadaw was the demon. They looked like a living drawing made by a neglected child. They were chewing on a piece of bread.
“This was the most I could do with two days,” said Ozige, glancing at the impressive trove surrounding them. “But I suspect some of this will be useful to you.”
Sayadaw nodded back, overwhelmed by the surge of barrage of information the gloves were blaring at her through her hands. Each contact she made with the items presented an unsolved puzzle. She couldn’t yet divine any solutions, but she was learning that some of them were different parts of the same larger puzzle.
“Kader has been fetching it all down here as fast as she can,” said Ozige, trying again to catch Sayadaw’s interest.
As if on cue, Kader stepped through a shelf with an armful of Divine Chronicles authored by Mordecai and set them down among the piles. Kader’s Boots allowed their wearer to walk through solid material and, although she was still suffering a heavy concussion inflicted during her and Sayadaw’s final mission together for the Order of Power, she could tread the most direct line between the furthest tips of the Library’s collections and the stash Ozige was building.
“Set them there with the scrolls,” said Ozige crisply. She intercepted Kader as she put the volumes down to check the warrior’s pulse and pupils. “You seem well enough for one more sortie—bring the object in this cabinet and then rest for an hour,” Ozige said to Kader. She pressed a tablet with a catalogue number scratched upon it into Kader’s hand.
Kader had absorbed the cryptic filing system of the Library with astonishing speed and Ozige was finding it hard not to be impressed by the woman’s grace under fire. Sayadaw seldom spoke about her colleagues unless she considered them obstacles, so when Kader had staggered into her Library with Sayadaw, all that Ozige knew about her was that Sayadaw had decided to become outlaws-in-arms together after they had set a forest on fire.
As Kader disappeared through the shelves, Ozige whirled upon Sayadaw, who tapped upon item after item in quick succession while her lips almost sounded words.
“I won’t be able to hide you here much longer,” said Ozige. “The sky over Nuiknaauiena is alive with the Judge of the Reliquary’s spies. They are combing methodically through the mess you left at Viper’s Peak.”
Sayadaw put down a Ghost Wand she’d been inspecting and scowled at the mention of her former master. She felt the sense memory of crushing one such drone in Nuiknaauiena. “The Detective was on the scene within hours, somehow, only to be chased away by Lady Kene Onnunu of Titans.”
“Lady Kene is on the Sea of Sorrows looking for the Emerald Halls,” said Sayadaw automatically, squinting through her eyepiece as she placed four rings of similar size and material into each buckle that ran across a Brightsilk Sash.
“So we were led to believe,” hissed Ozige. “And we’ve just heard this morning that Dynató Myalóz has declared the Sword to be the rightful property of the Order of Power in open court.”
“Where is the Sword?” asked Sayadaw as she used a knife to dig a humming cylinder out of an ornate Helm.
“I’ve put it in the Echo Room, just in case anybody else with a crown like Seek-No-Further is hunting for it,” said Ozige.
“There’s a Sheriff of Fury who wears something strikingly similar,” mused Sayadaw, and placed the cylinder inside the topmost ring on the Sash. The material shivered.
The demon, still standing near the bag that had been its home for longer than any human could fathom, seemed to take an interest in the shivering Sash, but stayed quiet and still while they finished eating the loaf of bread Sayadaw had given them.
“What’s more, agents of the Scrollhouse have noticed that Kader is missing and are roaming the streets outside asking very specific questions. And the Bird Keeper of the Tiergarten would very much like to know where his eagle-hawk is, and made sure to impress upon me the Order of Protection would be very angry if anything were to happen to it.”
Sayadaw sensed that Ozige was at the end of her list of bad news and held up the odd assemblage of items she had made. “I can use this to generate a Bubble that will fly. We will be able to operate it from the Bridge, which is inside the bag,” said Sayadaw. “But I need to fix the time dilation problem, and for that I need another one of these,” she said, holding up the Ghost Wand.
“That’s one-of-a-kind,” said Ozige. “Think of another plan.”
Sayadaw pressed the material of Seek-No-Further close to her skull. Properly used, it could find anything that she could form a mental concept of, but the way in which the crown preferred the image to be framed was an abstract and shifting one. “There are others,” she said, half sure of it. “The closest one is—” She batted the air to one side of her to indicate a vague direction.
“Shall I fetch you a map of the world?” asked Ozige after she watched Sayadaw struggle for a moment.
Sayadaw scowled. “It’s not far. In fact, it’s in the building.”
Ozige folded her arms. It was a very large building.
Sayadaw closed her eyes and turned to face the East wall. She tried to step towards the wall but knocked over a cuirass of crackling armour.
Ozige sighed. “You’re stumbling in the direction of the Anarat archive. They’ve brought over two dozen bags out of the desert near Leilen, mostly unsorted.”
“I need access,” said Sayadaw as she decided whether to set the armour back up.
“Not even I have access to the Anarat. It’s an active research area and only the supervising Elder is allowed in there,” said Ozige.
“Kader can get inside and take what I need,” said Sayadaw. Then she remembered where she was and who she was talking to. When she glanced back at Ozige, it was to find that the woman was alight with fire of that special heat known only to librarians.
“The help I offer to you, who earns the scorn of a fresh Order with each passing day, will not come at the expense of the Library,” said Ozige softly. “I will loan you certain items if there is merit, but you will not steal away with the intellectual endowment we built for generations yet to come.”
Sayadaw stared at Ozige for a long moment, conflicted by the strange instructions that Seek-No-Further was saying to her, the exhausting load of intuition from the demonhide gloves and a lifetime of getting her own way. There was nothing that Ozige could realistically do to stop her, but she had not pictured her life as a fugitive being empty of her advice, her letters and her shelter. She examined the emptiness of that future in her mind’s eye, then moved it this way and that to inspect its sides and corners. Seek-No-Further jumped in to try and direct her towards the future, which made her have to pause to take it off..
Then the demon spoke. They had been listening to everything with keen attention as they gnawed on the loaf of bread. “If you can’t take things from the Library, you can take the Library with you,” they said.
Ozige was startled, then appalled, by their voice. The silence of the moment between her and Sayadaw had been replaced by a completely different silence between her, Sayadaw and the demon.
The demon looked at the two women innocently.
When it was clear that there would be no further explanation, Sayadaw said, “The Library has many rooms outside of this one. We are only in one small part of it.”
The demon wobbled on their unjointed legs. “Yes,” they said. “Not all compartments are the same size, inside, but it is being said there are two dozen bags.”
“In the Anarat archive?” said Ozige.
“Yes, in twenty four compartments there is lots of space for every room,” whistled the demon.
“The rooms are just scaffolds,” said Ozige. “Without the librarians, the Library is not alive.”
“A crew? Passengers?” asked the demon, and the excitement caused them to lose their balance.
“The Library will be carved up as spoils if the Orders go to war,” said Sayadaw to Ozige. “But if the Library can become the first part of the new Ship, all of us can fly above the flames.”
“To where?” asked Ozige.
“I’m sure your staff will not be short of ideas,” said Sayadaw.
Meetings were held. The departments, sub-departments and warring factions of the Library of Kezkiisch were called together to agree upon whether they should raise the building from the ground and sail away from the danger fermenting at its foundations. The team in charge of the Anarat archive was enamoured with the idea of a mobile base of archaeological operations, and the team held considerable sway. Ozige’s rival Curators took their chance to unseat her, but she had been ready for that attempt for years.
With the war drums of the Orders setting the pace, the meetings coalesced around a decision with remarkable speed.
All the while, Sayadaw worked to piece the fragments Ozige had brought from the Library together into a new whole. The Bridge was repaired to a minimally operative condition and the space surrounding the building was twisted and folded neatly into the bags that had been brought out of the red sands of Leilen.
When Ozige came to her in the once-forgotten corner of the collection that had become an otherworldly workshop and presented the staff’s decision, Sayadaw was ready to activate the Bubble.
The few dissenters among the staff stood on the soot-soft streets of Kezkiisch and watched in muted anger and stern disbelief as the great Library to which they had given a portion of their lives rose into the air. They huffed and scowled as its brickwork, arches and interiors distorted as through viewed from one end of a hall of mirrors. The building, courtyards and several outhouses ascended, obscured behind an opalescent orb of psychic leaves, growing smaller and duller until it disappeared entirely into the sky.
The Judge of the Reliquary of Light awoke in the usual way—a homunculi flew through the rose window of his chambers, alighted on his chest and merged its memories with his own. The Judge was more of a hornet’s nest than a man on account of the robes of office he wore—a terracotta chest plate that housed sixty doll-sized creatures that could detach and take an imprint of the Judge’s consciousness into the world. He wore it even when he slept, which was in fits and starts, lashed into an upright wooden frame with straps of fine silk.
The homunculi that woke the Judge had not travelled very far or for very long. It did not bring fresh news from the situation spiralling out of control in Nuiknaauiena, or an account of yesterday’s Council of Ämetatilelël, but an alarm from the grounds of the Reliquary itself.
An orb had dropped from the sky and was hovering over the polo field.
It was almost certainly an attack on the beating heart of the Order of Power.
The Judge undid himself from his sleeping frame and slapped at his breastplate to rouse the drones he had held in reserve. He was curious as to who might wish to attack one of the most heavily armed places in the world, but he knew that answer was secondary to the matter at hand. He opened the drawer of his dresser that contained his personal armament of magic rings. He waved the most capable of his reserve drones to take its position on the dresser and fitted two rings around its wide waist—one ring for levitation and one for assassination. He pressed an up-to-date engraving of his mind into the little mandrake, then took it to the windowsill and released it among the others. He watched the swarm of drones cyclone over the gardens to cover this strange invader with a good many eyes.
The orb was ascending when the drones caught sight of it. The guards had been alerted but even among the ranks of the Reliquary Guard—which dripped with magical enchantments of the deadliest sort—flight was a rarity. The polo field was lit with useless lightning and fireballs that arced high but fell short, and the most mobile of the guards chased after the retreating sphere. When the guards on the wing came within reach of the orb’s stuttering surface, they fell, one by one, like moths at a candle flame.
The copy of the Judge operating from each homunculi recognised the pattern of the injuries—the awful spasming and the stuttered blasphemies—as the kiss of Scarecrow. The drone that had been sent to watch Procurer Sayadaw had not returned from the fallen cavern in Nuiknaauiena, and the Sword of Reflection she had promised to claim for the Order of Power had burned Viper’s Peak to the ground.
With one action, she had lit the fuse that had been trailing from the powder keg fuming in the North. He had spent those simmering months wondering what role his former Procurer would play in the drama of the sword. She had kept hidden from his homunculi and silent to his organisation. But the orb, currently ascending and untouchable, with Scarecrow somewhere inside of it, declared that Sayadaw was among the star players of the production.
The homunculi were not wired with circuits that Scarecrow could short, and so were able to approach the surface of the orb. From the outside, the exterior and interior of the Library of Keskiisch were enmeshed into one fractal. This recursive skein permitted the Judge’s creatures entry as if they were old friends, and they wormed their way into the interior of the sphere. Once inside, the walls and domes and ground of the Library resolved into their familiar form. The Judge had visited the Library in person three or four times and had kept watch over any comings and goings for most of the academic year. Those memories were faithfully reproduced in the matter that animated his homunculi. They fanned out, casting their glassy pinpricks of eyes across every nook and cranny of its stonework.
One contingent found the staff locked inside their offices and the Curators bound with sleeping rope in the depository. Another went from cell to cell in the domiciles and found nothing of interest. The ones that found their way into the collections were caught in nets strung up to receive them and crushed with an ordinary hammer.
Then one homunculus buzzed furiously over the Mordecai Auditorium, signalling to any idle ones that it had uncovered something that needed to be investigated en masse. All of the drones in the west courtyard were recruited and flowed into the Auditorium. There they saw the former Procurer Sayadaw from dozens of different angles and distances. The floor of the hall was buried under a thatch of bizarre mechanisms. The traitorous mage sat in a nest of seeing-glasses and singing devices that had been erected on the stage. Each copy of the Judge in the homunculi recognised a mastermind at wheel. Sayadaw hurled arrows of light at the first drones, which danced around her to draw the strange fire. The assassin homunculus, carrying its heinous ring and the freshest imprint of the Judge, entered the Auditorium among the cover of chaos and snaked towards its target at the core of the melee. It twisted to activate its ring, which came loose and flew ahead of the drone at many times the speed of sound.
The result was quick, precise and definitive.
Sayadaw slumped forward in her unearthly nest with a hole through her heart. The homunculi settled around her body and watched until all of her blood had drained from that hole, then flitted out of the Library, then away from the orb, to deliver their reports to the Judge.
The orb and its Library sailed away into the dawn without changing trajectory. The Judge mulled over each drone’s memories of the attack. With Sayadaw dead and the orb apparently careening away without guidance, he was pressed to organise a mission to rescue the staff of the Library. If that succeeded, it could go a long way to strengthening the deteriorating relationship with the Order of Vitriol at a crucial time. He was troubled by how few drones had returned and the parts of the building those that had returned had not explored, but not nearly as troubled as he was when he received word that the Reliquary of Light had been emptied. The accumulated work of centuries, the largest cache of documented remnants in any Realm, was simply gone.
Kader received a hero of Vitriol’s welcome at the Library, a short list of criticisms from Ozige and a thoughtful look from Sayadaw when she took Kader’s bags from her before disappearing down a corridor. Kader sat on the marble tiles and unlaced Slipsteps.
Ozige stood behind her, thought carefully about laying a sympathetic hand on her shoulder, then did so. “She thinks she did it all,” said Ozige, “because it was her idea.”
“It was mostly your idea,” said Kader to her feet. “We all talked about it together.”
“I know,” said Ozige. “And nobody else but you could have got into and out of the Reliquary during the carnage.”
“How’s the Captain?” asked Kader, with worry in her voice.
The demon had insisted on being addressed by nothing else. Their role had been the most dangerous of all.
“The Captain is unravelled but sleeping in the Auditorium. The bakery is sending them a steady stream of loaves to eat and they are regenerating like a newt. You predicted the Judge’s weapon of choice accurately, Kader. If he had elected to use something more dispersive, the Captain’s decoy might have been exposed.”
Kader cheered a fraction at that news. She had seen the Judge’s creatures strike several times during her training. She knew exactly how easily those smooth rings could tunnel through a person and leave only a body behind them. The cadets had passed the rumour around that the Judge contrived to have them all witness such things to deliver an implicit threat that would stay with them throughout their careers. Now she had all the more reason to fear the short, sharp blow that might come without warning in the night. The Judge would already have realised it was her hand that had snatched the Order of Power’s heart from out of its back.
“Where do we run to?” asked Kader.
“I think the Judge should be asking that same question,” said Ozige through the thinnest of smiles. “No tyrant from any Order will sleep well while we are up here.”
News of the raid on the Reliquary of Light spread with suspicious speed. The forces that were tearing Nuiknaauiena apart to find Bahadur’s grandmother’s sword were suddenly drawn to the smell of blood that poured from the Order of Power’s empty vaults.
If the schisms were to come, they all thought, then it would be best to be the one holding the scalpel.
Once the remnants from the Reliquary were grafted on to the body of the fledgling Ship and its compartments were filled with industry and recruits to work them, the people who lived there could no longer call it the Library of Keskiisch. As Sayadaw buried herself deeper and deeper in the office that Ozige had prepared for her the night she had returned from Viper’s Peak, an entity that resembled nothing less than an Order itself grew around her.
This new Order that sailed through the sky, unassailable and mysterious. Its adherents had a radical new approach to the remnants, the relics, the calamities and the loot. Whenever it descended upon the Earth, it brought terror or hope, but always left change in its stead. It became the herald of change—a usurper of powers great and small.
Soon the world decided to call it what it was: the Order of Cataclysm.
Procurer Sayadaw was at the height of her powers when she ordered the world to be excavated.