Dragon Core

by Sain Artwell

  “No way.”

  “Yep. The way I heard it is the oldblood clans have been paying for the clanless awakened masters to poison the water-pipes, and now the Ministry is rounding them up in secret. Finally our Sovereign has a good reason to scrap and melt all those useless pompous no goods who’re mooching off our and his hard work! Right? Good riddance, I say. About time, I say. Too many awakened think that just ‘cos they’ve mastered their vestiges they can own us and lead us. It’s ridiculous. Just ‘cos they’ve got wings and whatnot or make their fire dance, they think they’re all of a sudden more important than—”

  Sofi opened the door and hopped off. “Please be understanding, it seems the traffic has cooled solid. I really must be moving on, or else I’ll miss my interview. Stars bless you!”

  “Wait! I didn’t catch your name! Maybe we could…” the man shouted after her, but Sofi was quick on her feet after resting for almost an entire day.

  She threaded between the traffic—hired coaches, private coaches, route shuttles, cargo wagons, and even a few single-person metal-steeds. Quite a number of others had had the same idea as her, and were wading the traffic on foot. So many, in fact, that by the time Sofi reached the end of the bridge, a crowd clogged the gaps between the wagons.

  “…enge me, if you dare,” said a woman with a firm voice.

  “Staining my claws on your blood isn’t going to replace my slave,” answered a calm sounding man.

  Sofi jumped to get a glimpse of what was happening. One firewagon’s engine was spread all over the bridge in bolts and pieces, and the passenger cabin had toppled over. A stained hump of orange gore lay a few feet away from it, and in the middle of a clearing stood two young awakened masters.

  Precious metals jingled along the woman’s long drooping ears. Coal-black scales covered her five horns, limbs, and long tail, which stood tense behind her back. As for the man, bejeweled necklaces and armbands hung on his gray chest, and two black wings were folded against his back. Intricate burning-ink tattoos decorated their faces and mostly nude bodies, supposedly indicating clan, family-tree, rank, and stars know what else the oldbloods thought was important enough to paint on skin.

  With some effort, Sofi managed to climb on the railing of the bridge for a more consistent view.

  The man pointed at the metal grating stained in blood. “No. I shall have you pay in flesh. Submit to my will, and I shall waive this crime.”

  The woman placed claws on her hips and guffawed. “And I shall repeat myself: Challenge me to a duel, if you dare.”

  “Do you truly wish to be humiliated here, younger cousin? In front of an audience of our lesser peers? If so…” The man clenched his claws almost theatrically. Tendrils of black smoke began to spill from his lips. “I, Jivan of Nvmosk, the Dancing Cloud of Death, shall grant it.”

  “And I, Elenoushk of Nvmosk, the Abyssal Blaze, as the stars as my witness, shall answer your lowly taunt. Rejoice Jivan, today you shall become my slave!” The woman laughed.

  Her eyes grew from amber to warm-lava yellow to blinding white. A thin line of air between her eyes and the man shimmered for a blink.

  The man jumped into flight, seemingly the very same moment when the space he’d previously occupied combusted in an explosion. He exhaled a serpentine cloud of choking fumes, which wrapped around them both. From there on, all Sofi could see were occasional flashes of bright eyes, exploding air, and fancy insults.

  After witnessing Alron, a battle between two awakened looked somewhat like two children squabbling.

  Some woman dressed like a middling labourer shook her head in despair. “What an inconvenience.”

  Sofi’s thoughts exactly.

  “We’ll be stuck here all day,” someone else moaned.

  Stars, wasn’t that the truth! There was no telling how long this would take, or how it could escalate. Sofi needed to get around the duel, and quick. She scoped the uneven ledge of protruding bolts and beams outside the railing. They should be sturdy enough to support one petite wyrmkin like herself.

  Carefully, she climbed over the six-foot railing and back down. Beneath her loomed a loose network of bridges and platforms and cables, with plenty of room in between to fall two miles straight down into the mines.

  Sofi swallowed. One limb at a time, she began to inch forward.

  Others got the same idea, and soon a conga-line of climbers followed her, eager to get to work. It all seemed like a good idea, until the male awakened master impacted with the railing.

  The bridge groaned. Metal beams slipped from Sofi’s sweaty grip.

  Falling, she screamed and flailed, catching onto fabric. It tore as Sofi slipped off the ledge, plunging into her death. At the last moment, she caught onto a pant-sleeve.

  The emptiness below turned her heart into a rapid-pulse engine.

  “Help! Help me up!” Sofi shouted.

  The man whose pant-sleeve she clung to kicked her, snarling. “Let go! You’ll make us both fall! I need to get to work.”

  “HELP! Help! Somebody!”

  “Release me! I’m late for work!” A boot cracked her face. Warm liquid gushed to fill the inside of her nose, and the sleeve ripped further.

  The next time the foot came, Sofi opened her mouth, bit down with the fury of a rabid duct-rat, and dug her claws in his leg. The man howled in fury and agony. He said something incomprehensible, but was unable to kick, and couldn’t get rid of Sofi, not with her teeth lodged in his foot.

  Then, a woman next to him began to kick the guy and try to make him fall.

  “Stop! Get that girl off of me, don’t kick me! I might fall!” begged the man.

  Sofi could taste the irony all the way in his shoe. Briefly, she pondered if Mlevanosk’s Friends would be able to find her body and use it even if she fell.

  “STAND DOWN, AND IDENTIFY YOURSELVES,” crackled a voice amplified by a voicepipe.

  The kicking stopped. Sofi kept her teeth securely embedded in the man’s foot. Swinging beneath the bridge, she only saw glimpses of what was happening through the holes in the grating.

  A bright crimson cloak fluttered between two hulking figures of blackmetal and hissing pistons—hollow sentinels. Praise the stars! Redcloaks had arrived!

  Sofi loosened her bite-grip, and shouted. “Help! Help! I’m being murdered!”

  “Quiet!” hissed the man above, “Unless you want both of us to be—”

  A mini-cannon boomed on a sentinel’s shoulder. The man’s head was replaced by empty space and a smoking neck. His corpse slumped against the railing.

  No one among the lesser folk dared to so much as peep after that. The awakened masters laid their case upon the redcloak with as much finesse as one might expect (that is to say, their clamoring was one step short of spitting fire). Sofi didn’t catch the details of how the fine awakened folks got their wheels aligned, nor did she care, when the red-tinted eye-sockets of a redcloak’s blackmetal mask peeked at her through the holes of the railing.

  Sofi attempted her most subservient and law-abiding smile. “Just trying to get to work, sir-ma’am.”

  “Haul her up.” The redcloak spun on her heels, leaving the task to her sentinels.

  A blackmetal claw powered by pneumatics reached to pick up the headless man, and by proxy Sofi.

  She was hoisted on the bridge to face two eleven foot giants of military grade blackmetal plating, internal machinery equal parts pneumatics, imbued vestiges, and unforgivably dark secrets of surgery and sorcery. Various cannons and bladed limbs protruded from their hunched frames, more reminiscent of oversized magma-shrimp trudging along on four unnaturally long limbs than the wyrmkin they once were. Staring into the red ocular device of the hollow, Sofi pursed her lips as it set her down.

  A few more days, and you’ll all get your rest. Hang on a few more days, my love.

  “You, come with me. I’ll have you explain yourself.” The redcloak’s signature heel-long hooded cloak of hardened scales clinked as she marched straight
for the Cold Slab. She picked up a voicepipe device attached to an amplifier on her belt. “SITUATION HAS BEEN RESOLVED. DISPERSE, AND CONTINUE WORKING UNDER THE BENEVOLENCE OF OUR GLORIOUS SOVEREIGN.”

  Sofi recognized that voice and suppressed her smile. She caught up with her co-conspirator.

  “Have you lost your bolts?!” Nje hissed under her breath, “Getting yourself into a traffic accident without so much as a word to the high Friends. And now you come to see her without giving us time to handle work transfer notices? You’re risking everything.”

  Sofi had to take running steps to keep up with Nje’s long legs. “He is here, but there are complications. I must speak with her at once.”

  “Cannot be done. Ivar has the shift today, and he’s one step from being compromised. Rasdrev suspects him already. I’ll take you to the jail, and process you as a witness for the duel between the two awakened. You’ll make your report to the high Friends, and proceed from there. We have time.”

  “We don’t,” Sofi snorted out of desperation. “Apologies, but we really don’t.”

  Round lenses of Nje’s mask gleamed like reflections of her fiery tone. “What did you do?”

  “It’s not about me! He is not some sentinel who will sit idle, and wait for a command. We were ambushed, and if he thinks we can’t save her, he will take matters into his own hands.”

  “Explain the reality of our situation to him. Surely he’s not grown so senile from isolation as to entirely overlook the battalions of sentinels, awakened masters, and the half million soldiers armed with metal and machine,” Nje snarled. “Handle him. That’s what you’re supposed to do, is it not? I will arrange a meeting with the high Friends at once.”

  “Nje, that man won’t care for the high Friends’ schemes and plots.”

  Nje gestured for her hollows to wait and stomped to a side alley. Her voice raised in a lecturing tone as they walked. “You were meant to manage him. You had soaked in her memories from the vestige and were privy to their past, so that you could manipulate him. Did we waste all our efforts and bring aboard a half-feral warrior to ruin everything?”

  Sofi’s nose twitched. Smoke tickled the back of her throat. “I’ve done all that’s been asked of me.”

  “You…” Nje brandished a single claw at her aggressively. Then turned, groaned, and spat a few expletives.

  To be perfectly honest, Sofi was done with the conversation. High Friends of Mlevanosk could go snort soot, along with everyone else who’d forgotten why they praised her name. For Sofi it was less about overthrowing the sovereign than it was about setting free her savior, and ensuring Mlevanosk had an opportunity to bring change more permanent than some paltry revolution.

  “Nje, he is a dragon wearing a paper-thin skin of a man. He’s a walking explosion, and not the sort an engine can convert into spin-energy. Either we do as he says, or we watch him do his way anyway.”

  Nje folded her arms and tapped her elbow. Sofi didn’t need to see the face behind her mask to know she was displeased. Displeased with a century long plan going awry the moment it hatched, and displeased with being in the position to decide if she should let it slide towards the unexpected.

  Sofi swiped sweat from her brow, and glanced at the looming facade of the Cold Slab stretching thousands of feet high towards the City’s domed blackmetal sky. “Nje…” she began.

  The redcloak lifted her claw. “Fine. Go, just go.”

  Sofi cast her a look of surprise.

  “Go inside already,” Nje said, speaking fast as if dispensing orders, “Take your report to Mlevanosk, and do what you must. I’ll handle the high Friends.”

  “Thank you.” Sofi nodded, and began towards a nearby serf’s entrance. She was inside before Nje had left the alley, and kept a brisk marching pace through the dimly lit tunnels of metal and stone.

  Corridors of Cold Slab, like those of many of the first grandtowers of Blackmetal City, were, rather than a product of consistent design, a product of generations of architects attempting to salvage the designs of their beheaded predecessors. Cramped servants’ ladder-tubes intersected cavernous chambers, where chirurgeons’ assistants sorted through rows and columns of tables with a dead wyrmkin on each. Shuffling through the ill-lit maze, Sofi could hear the sounds of hatchlings bawling, though in all her years working for the Cold Slab, she’d never been able to determine which room it came from.

  She had to pass five security points on the way. Sofi wasn’t at all concerned by leaving her mini-cannon behind, stripping for inspection, nor by submitting herself to be probed by a senior labourer—a nice older woman who warmed her fingers before sticking them in. It was all routine by now.

  Donning the thin black labourer’s gown, and her tools, Sofi entered Mlevanosk’s vault.

  A sudden wash of chilly air scented with pure alcohol raised her skin to pin-prickles. Catwalks encircled the central platform within the spherical chamber, where a hundred individual machines joined by a thousand tubes sustained the flow of fresh vis and nutrients to an egg-shaped tank reinforced by a blackmetal frame. Within its bubbling white confines floated Mlevanosk’s brain.

  Fleshy black tendrils bound it in place, connecting her to the bottom of the machine, where the tendrils interfaced with the machine by either sorcery or technology so obscure it might as well have been from the stars.

  “Ivar,” Sofi whispered, her voice barely audible over the bubbling of fluids.

  A wyrmling of thirteen summers startled at her voice and dropped a brush. Ivar’s wide amber eyes snapped to her, then jumped around the room as if scanning for intruders.

  “Sofi? You weren’t supposed to be back yet,” he whisper-shouted back.

  Sofi walked to where he’d been cleaning filter cylinders of a flow stabilizer. “I know, but I need to have a word with Mlevanosk. Get the stimulant ready.”

  “There’s only so much left in my cabinet. I was caught rationing. If I use more now, they’ll notice it for sure.” He looked down, as if it was his fault.

  Sofi sighed internally, already feeling the guilt. “Please be understanding, I wouldn’t ask if it weren’t of utmost importance.”

  “They’ll find out…” Ivar frowned, picking up his fallen brush.

  She rubbed his shoulder tenderly, wasting precious moments in choosing words with which to reassure the boy that he wouldn’t be executed if he were to be found out. In the end, she said, “The legend is awake, and among us. I swear, this’ll all be soon over. All we can do now is to play our part in the design. Do this, and Mlevanosk will be one step closer to delivering us.”

  Ivar’s face hardened and he nodded sharply. “For Mlevanosk.”

  He marched to the control panel, produced a metal cylinder containing the precious stimulant, and pressed it into a matching indent. “How much do you need?” Ivar asked, hand on a switch.

  “A few minutes. Ten droplets should suffice.”

  Ivar turned a switch ten ticks. A stream of purple fluid trickled into Mlevanosk’s tank, dissipating. Lights flickered across the tendrils binding her brain, as the nerve branches fired up. Feeling a tingle of the nerves in her own stomach, Sofi activated the communication systems and lifted the voice-pipe to her lips.

  “Mlevanosk, it’s Sofi. Good news, Alron and Fei are in the city,” Sofi spoke in a hush, while Ivar was still moving to take his position by the door.

  A hoarse voice distorted by machinery replied, “Welcome back, Sofi. Was the journey arduous?”

  Sofi let out a smiling sigh, as a wash of relaxation blew over the anxious pool brewing within her. “So, so. The two of them are a bit much for me to handle,” she admitted, and proceeded with a report of the important details: An estimate of Alron’s strength, Fei’s mental state, and how the daughter’s appearance had shaken them. “…and so, should we prepare for the procedure? You’ll be able to do much more with them than I.”

  “It would be premature. There are preparations I must make,” said Mlevanosk.

  Sofi d
id not pretend to grasp the complexity of Mlevanosk’s machinations, and simply agreed.

  Mlevanosk continued, “It is time to reassemble my stolen vestiges. If you have not yet enslaved my claw, you must do so at once.”

  “Uh… I shall attempt it, as you wish. But I am not certain I can enslave it.”

  “Alron will guide you through it.”

  “Am I to attempt enslaving the rest too?”

  “No. The rest are required to complete my masterpiece, which will allow me to once more stand by his side. It will make Rasdrev’s greatest fabrications seem like hatchling’s toys. Memories imprinted in the claw will guide you in its assembly, as well as in preparations for the final procedure. Begin by retrieving my skeleton from the main spin-core of Death Machine Industries’ grandforge. With Fei’s assistance, it should not be difficult. The other Friends will organize a distraction for you. Once you’ve obtained my bones, retrieve my morphcore from the Ministry of Metal. You will find it in the possession of Yutin of Nvmosk, the patriarch of Nvmosk, and the reigning chancellor of the Ministry…”

  “Sofi!” whispered Ivar. “Someone’s coming! Hide, quickly!”

  “…The rest of my vestiges are currently in…”

  “Mlevanosk, I need to hide,” Sofi hissed into the voice-pipe. “I’ll be back in a flicker.”

  Despite her sore muscles, Sofi hurried off the catwalk, and slid into a hiding spot beneath the machine with practised ease. As the main door to the vault clinked open, dread caught her breath.

  Of all the possible wyrmkin who could walk in on them, it had to be him…

  Six-arm-long blackmetal horns poked through a heavy gray hood. Nine glassified wyrmkin eyes set in a sheer blackmetal mask whirred, jumping from point to point. Soundless and seemingly motionless, he glided in like some nightmare from a children’s fable. Behind his hunched back, the robes dragged as if concealing the tail of a slug.