“You have something better?”
“Not me. But I might have heard something.”
“What?”
“Well…” Alos spread his small arms. “I’m not one to spread gossip, but I might have heard a rumor that Selxix has acquired something very special this year.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. It is just something I heard.”
Selxix was a sentient spirit, said to have been one of the hundred or so spectators who had been in the crowd at Gregson’s Lot that day. She was also the club’s original founder. She had recently allowed a long-time human member called Tomar to help out with the running of the club. A few grumblers had suggested she was starting to lose interest, but Paul would like to see any of them maintain the level of enthusiasm she had shown for the last thousand years. Paul didn’t know Tomar well. He seldom participated in events, with the exception of the big end-of-year re-enactments when he tended, but not always, to play Thrurm. He had been on the club’s books for longer even than Alos, who, as the saurian liked to remind everyone, was otherwise the club’s longest-serving fully material entity.
“Are you both looking forward to the battle?” said Mica.
“Always,” said Paul. “Will you be there?”
Mica hesitated.
Paul opened his mouth to try and tempt her when Alos caught his eye and bid him to be quiet. A wave of shushing and quiet elbowing was making its way around the tables. One of the krxix scuttled over to the music box and obligingly dialed down the volume. Tomar strolled across the members’ lounge, a cross between an aging rockstar and a retired holoflash presenter from an obscure channel, as if he had just wandered in from a larger convention in an adjoining suite. An oldish-looking man, he was dressed in a smart gray suit jacket over a black T-shirt emblazoned with the logo of the rock group, Supermassive, and a tie.
Paul wondered who or what the man was outside of the club.
No mere mortal should have been able to make any part of that combination work.
“Hallo,” he said, hands up as though held amiably at gunpoint. “Hallo. Hallo.” And everyone, whether human, elf, goblin, martian, saurian, or robot, or preternaturally chatty krxix seemed to understand and quieten down. “It’s good to see everyone here. We’re a few down on last year, but we’ve some new faces as well.’ He nodded at Smiles, grinned at Mica. “And plenty of old ones still here.” He looked wryly over a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles. “You all know who you are.” Paul chuckled. He wasn’t the only one doing so. Alos was hissing breathily, little arms wrapped over his chest. “As you know, the 1021st anniversary of the Battle of Gregson’s Lot is coming around. And while Selxix and I have always endeavored to stage a better event than the year before, this year, as some of you will no doubt have already heard, we have decided to go all out with something extra special.”
He glanced towards the back wall where everyone’s winter coats hung.
Waited a moment.
Gave an embarrassed smile.
“Ahem. Any time now, Selxix. Please.”
Another second of nothing elapsed. The vaultheads laughed uncertainly.
One of the coats suddenly inflated, and the laughter turned into gasps.
It was a woman’s coat, ankle length, cut to a human’s silhouette, dark green, with a deep hood and a fur trim. It fluttered down from its peg, filling up with emerald-colored light even as the coat tied itself up and pulled the drawstring tight to seal much of that light within. It drifted towards the nearest table, to more nervous laughter and light applause as those sat nearby scraped their chairs out of its way.
Tomar presented it with both hands.
“Selxix, ladies and gentleman.”
Once the applause had died down, Selxix’s coat extended an arm. There was no hand at the end of it, just the outline of a shimmer, but in it, held as easily as Paul might hold a cup, was a small, pyramidal piece of delicately inscribed æmber.
Paul gasped in wonder.
“What is it?” murmured Mica.
“It’s a replica of Ralleigh’s Key. It’s amazing. The best I’ve ever seen.”
“It’s perfect,” said Alos.
“And, as if that weren’t good enough…” With a showman’s flourish, Tomar drew his hand from his jacket pocket to produce a complimentary piece of æmber. The fine detail of the inscriptions notwithstanding, they were identical. “As you know, the Battle of Gregson’s Lot was abandoned before its conclusion. But both Ralleigh and Thrurm had with them an æmber key, forged and ready to be imprinted once the conditions to unseal the vault were met.” He brandished the piece of æmber. “This is Thrurm’s own, actual, key–”
“Oh, Boundary above me…”
Paul reached for the wall, suddenly afraid he might stumble. Alos was holding onto him. In that moment, neither cared.
“I have been holding onto this key for a long, long time,” said Tomar. “Since before Selxix admitted me to this venerable old club. I was waiting for the right moment to unveil it, and now…” He gestured to Selxix’s floating coat.
“No,” Paul cried.
Alos raised his hands towards his mouth.
“Now we have Ralleigh’s Key as well!” said Tomar.
Before Paul knew what he was doing, he was applauding, louder and harder than he had ever applauded anything in his life. He was an otherwise sensible man of thirty-seven years, but he jumped into the air and whooped. The presentation of the keys had galvanized the entire room. Whether it was some mysterious form of energy that flowed from the æmber or whether it was the other way around – Paul and his friends somehow empowering it – he did not know. He felt it fill him. Warm him. It gave him a voice that was stronger than his own, and he cheered with it, one long note in a standing ovation.
“Soon,” Tomas said, without seeming to need to raise his voice, grinning from ear to ear, “we will fight the most authentic vault battle since Thrurm and Ralleigh themselves faced each other across Gregson’s Lot.”
“Raymon D’arco will be there!” Paul shouted.
“And Taurex Vor!” cried Alos.
“And Ribongun Red!”
“Beep Beep Beep!”
“And Hardpan!” shouted Mica.
The old man spoke for several minutes more.
Paul didn’t hear any more. The words were irrelevant. The feeling was what counted.
The morning, suddenly, was inconsequential.
Soon, the vaultwarriors of Archon Thrurm would be going to battle.
Paul stamped his feet on the icy concrete and hugged himself. He huffed out a cloud of steam. He drew his wrist from his armpit, tugged up the doublet sleeve and, shivering, used it to wipe the condensation from the glass face of his watch.
11:39.
He covered his wrist again, hunched his head further in towards his shoulders and vigorously rubbed his arms. He’d thought long and hard that morning about wearing a heavier coat, before deciding against it.
He’d do this properly or not at all.
“Beep, beep, beep.”
The robot’s flat top was buried under a small mountain of snow. Just a pair of antennae poking out.
“Right!” said the small white lump shrouded in trench coat. “The battle was fought on a bright day! A bright, hot day! I have seen the pictures!”
“It’s the mechanists in Micro-Research Facility 87θ,” said Paul. “Tinkering with the climate.”
“Do you think the First Among Us will have to shift the calendars again?” said Mica. A deep heat radiated off the sylicate’s shiny black crust and the vaultwarriors, even Smiles, were huddled surreptitiously close around her.
“I doubt it,” said Paul. “They’ll just wait for another experiment gone awry to knock the seasons back where they’re supposed to be.”
“I hope so!” said Ribongun. “It is hard enough to keep track of the battle’s proper anniversary date as it is!”
Paul checked his watch again.
11
:42.
He eased his weight from foot to foot.
Gregson’s Lot had been a parking lot 1021 years ago. It was still a parking lot now. The mythical “Gregson”, sadly, had been long since lost to history. A few hover trikes and ground-scooters were parked in bays, just as it had been in Raymon’s day. A thick white curtain of snowy sky obscured the famous glass and chrome skyscrapers of Hubcenter, and muted the garish displays of the Brobnar Clashzone and Central Stadium to a cold, neon smudge and a distant grind of noise.
He checked his watch.
11:44.
“Beep, beep.”
“I know I’m not making it move any faster.”
“Who’d leave their vehicle parked where a vault battle’s about to be fought?” said Mica.
Paul’s lips twitched, somewhere between an unconscious shiver and a smile.
She hadn’t called it a re-enactment, a nerdgathering, or a geekstival.
She’d called it a vault battle.
“I’m glad you decided to come,” he said.
“That Tomar…” she said, with a rumbling sigh that left Paul feeling awkward. “I’ve never met an organic who can speak the sylicate language like that. He spoke like a poet.”
Paul frowned.
He couldn’t remember Mica ever speaking with Tomar al–
“The weather hasn’t dampened our enthusiasm, I see.”
Paul bit his lip as Tomar crunched out of the snowfield behind them.
The old man was wearing a flannel jacket over another Supermassive t-shirt. His white jogging shoes were ankle deep in snow. A bobble hat with floppy ear flaps was his solitary concession to the cold. For some reason the snow just didn’t seem to settle on him. The flakes seemed to drift aside at the last moment rather than fall where he was standing.
He nodded towards Paul.
“Raymon D’arco.”
Paul took a deep breath and straightened.
“We’re ready,” he said.
With great and terrible seriousness, Tomar brandished the key. Although it had never been imprinted with the emotional resonance required to unlock the vault, it was still æmber. It radiated power, its shape and color shifting to mimic the feelings of those in its vicinity towards that power. Under Raymon’s regard it became the blue of open skies, of piracy and freedom, and feelings of nostalgia and want welled up in him so powerfully he could barely breathe.
“With this key shall I open the vault and liberate its treasures,” said Tomar. “But to do that I will need you, my vaultwarriors, to vanquish the forces of the Widow and imprint upon it the emotion required to unlock this vault.”
No one, except perhaps the Archons themselves, knew what it would actually take to activate their key and win the vault battle. That was part of what made them such thrilling spectacles.
Tomar – now Thrurm – lowered his face and raised up his hand.
Paul shivered with anticipation.
“But wait. I sense my rival’s approach. Ralleigh has forged her own key, and brings minions of her own to challenge me. Only one can activate their æmber and claim the vault for their own. I give you this last chance to go home to your lives. Or you can stay, and fight for me.”
“Stay and fight!” Paul cheered.
“Stay and fight!” shouted Mica and Ribongun together, deep voice and high.
“Beep, beep!”
Smiles blinked furiously.
Paul checked his watch.
11:53… 11:54.
The snow between Ribongun’s feet exploded as a laser bolt struck it.
The goblin screamed, igniting their jetpack and rocketing into the air.
They screamed some more.
Paul left his jaw behind as he tilted his head to watch his friend go.
“Spire…” he mumbled. “I had no idea that that actually worked.”
The other vaultwarriors hadn’t been around long enough to see this as spectacular, and scattered. X-TRM-N-8 shook snow off its back like an aluminum war-dog and rolled sideways into the snow on its large wheels, emitting an increasingly shrill sequence of expletive “Beeps” as it struggled to de-ice its shutters and deploy its arsenal. Mica – Hardpan – lumbered on into the lot, further shots puffing up snow and ricocheting off cars as she advanced.
Only Thrurm seemed unmoved by it all, as awesome in his potency as any real Archon would have been. The æmber in his hand changed from blue-white to silver to gold and exponentially brightened, illuminating the old man’s upper body fully, as well as a sphere of blizzarding snow. Paul averted his eyes from its sudden battle fury.
“GO!” Thrurm shouted, in a voice that had become so powerful that the ground shook with it and the snow around Paul broke up in midair. Paul wondered how he did it. “VANQUISH THE WIDOW’S VILLAINOUS DOGS, AND THE WEALTH OF THE VAULT WILL BE MINE TO SHOWER UPON YOU.”
For a moment, it was so realistic that Paul could have choked on his own enthusiasm.
Drawing his E-RAYzer, he ducked low and hurried after Hardpan.
The sylicate was about thirty paces into the lot, the Widow’s sniper laying down some heavy fire. The shooter was nothing more than a muzzle flash in the distance. Paul grunted as he worked out the distances and angles in his head. Outside of the battlefield. Technically cheating, then. But hadn’t that always been the Widow’s style.
“That’ll be Mittlerad!” Raymon yelled. “Arbitrator Taurex’s cmizz sharpshooter.” The cmizz were just about the only race arrogant enough for a saurian to tolerate as equals. “A T9 Teleblaser! In the parking garage adjoining the lot.” Hardpan continued her relentless advance, high-power beams blasting off chips of duricrust and punching dents into her torso.
The unbelievable realization occurred to him.
The weapon was real.
“A T9 would knock out a Sanctum Shieldship – get down!”
A single laser beam struck her hard. Bits of rock exploded from her shoulder. The force spun her around and threw her onto the front of a car. She rolled off the dented hood, just as the vehicle’s tamper alarm began to screech and a Pulsar stun cannon ratcheted up from a concealed rack in the roof. The pintle weapon tracked, and for want of an obvious vandal in its fire arc began blasting wildly. Electrical bolts spasmed across the lot like a laser shower at a music festival. Paul threw himself flat as one snarled across him. Another fried a truck parked about a hundred feet to his right. X-TRM-N-8 rolled into a lightning bolt without looking. Its entire rack of indicator bulbs exploded. Smoke coughed from its grille. The robot rolled to a complete stop with a piteous whine and sagged onto its wheels.
“No!” Paul yelled.
“The greater the struggle, the greater the prize,” came Thrurm’s voice. “We are far from finished yet, D’arco.”
Paul could no longer see the old man for the snowstorm and the slashing of weaponsfire, but his voice inspired something in him to bring up his E-RAYzer and fire back.
The shot vaporized the car.
He looked at the ray pistol in his hand in horrified amazement.
His mouth hung open.
“Damn…”
It had never done that before.
A laser bolt smacked into the ground beside him. He dropped and rolled to the side, confident that he was as good as invisible unless the cmizz was packing seriously upgraded vision. He crawled towards the spot where Mica had gone down, as the sniper switched his Teleblaser to automatic and mowed the area with fire.
If nothing else, he had the elf’s attention.
“Yaaaaaaarrgh!”
Ribongun was still screaming as their homemade, suddenly one hundred per cent functional jetpack carried them on a smoky parabola towards the multi-story garage on the other side of the lot, their arms and legs flailing like those of a panicked krxix. The goblin recovered something of their wits only as the cmizz turned her fire on them, the Teleblaser’s turbocharged blasts bending around their prism field. The battery packs webbed to their chest gave off steam.
“Yaaaaaaa
rrgh-ha-hahaha!”
Drawing his own brace of pistols, he returned fire, the noisy, Bromdar-built bangpowder weapons finally forcing the cmizz from her vantage.
“A good play, Thrurm, but did you think it would be that easy?”
Selxix’s emerald brilliance was a distant beacon in the snow.
Paul could not say why, or how, but her energy looked different. Purer. Darker. Less contained. She sounded different too. He had never heard her speak before, for starters. Even at past years’ battles, she had always reprised her original role as a spectator.
“I know all your so-called tricks.”
A pair of human skeletons with mechanical metallic wings flapped out of the snow. Raymon shot at them as they passed overhead. The range was too great for his E-RAYzer and they continued creakily after Ribongun.
Skeletimps.
He’d not seen anything like them in a vault battle since…
Not since…
“Boundary above,” he muttered. “I’m fighting a real Archon.”
A bullish roar dragged his attention to where it had been before Ribongun’s dramatic overflight had distracted him.
Hardpan was hauling herself off the ground, one shovel hand to her shoulder, chin blunted where it had smacked the hood of the car.
The roar wasn’t from her.
A massively up-armored ankylosaur pounded from the snowfield towards her. Cars a hundred feet away rattled with his footfalls. Dropping her hand from her shoulder, Hardpan smoothly unshipped her sharpoon and fired. The already cold air shrieked as it was drawn into the big gun’s hoppers, hyper-frozen, and twanged from the track at twice the speed of sound. The ankylosaur dropped its head, icicles blasting off its heavy plate, and then rammed Hardpan’s midriff. The sylicate weighed as much as twenty human men, but the running ankylosaur lifted her off the ground like a dummy, carried her about twenty feet and slammed her into the side of a parked truck.
Paul’s breath caught in his mouth.
The Archons wouldn’t allow any of them to come to lasting harm.
Would they?
“I’m coming, Mica!” Paul yelled.
He advanced on the ruined truck, gun up, the wrecked vehicle bucking like a wounded animal as the two combatants pounded one another with bone gauntlets and stone fists.
Tales From the Crucible Page 26
