“When’s this handover?”
“In about thirty minutes, down in an old underground ossuary. But you can’t go straight to me - Andrik has spies everywhere. Head for the University District and go to the morgue.”
“The morgue?”
“Trust me. I’ll guide you once you’re there (^c^).”
The University District, in the north, was much closer to Vulkan Keep than the International District - less than a ten-minute ride between the city gate and the target. I still had 55 minutes on the timer. Cutthroat heaved for breath as I vaulted to the ground, squawking in confusion when I abandoned her without tying her to anything and ran for the morgue.
I clattered down the stairs, pushing past a startled doctor and his assistants. “Okay, I’m here. What do I do?”
“Go down the main stairwell and turn right. At the end of the hall, you’ll see a pair of copper double doors with a bas relief of Saint Minos on them. That’s the entry to the chapel. Run through the chapel and take the last door you see on your left. Don’t panic - remember, Archemi is a game. OUROS doesn’t give quests that players can’t possibly accomplish.”
“You’re assuming OUROS gave this quest. Ororgael gave me the Spear of Nine Spheres quest, remember?”
“Yeah, but Michael isn’t here.”
Panting, I cut down the right-hand corridor. It wasn’t long, and I saw the doors Rin had described. “I think Andrik is part of the Cult of the Architect. I think that’s why and how he’s king. It’s how he’s getting away with shit like staking key NPCs and beating players to death.”
“What?! Why?”
I pushed the doors open into a simple, rectangular stone chapel, where a startled priest in blue robes was holding a service for a very dead old lady and her grieving family. They stared at me in open-mouthed shock as I ran by them, checking over my shoulder to see if I had a tail. Sure enough, there was a long shadow quickly approaching down the hall – a shadow cast by someone or something I couldn’t see. “In a minute. Door on the left: what next?”
“Ummmm, go in the door furthest from the chapel on the left. That’s the embalming room. There are two doors there - you need the one to the right. Then you go down some stairs. There should be a metal door - you want to go in there. It’s the crematorium.”
“Why the fuck am I going to the crematorium?”
“Because my map says there’s a trapdoor there that leads into the Lethos Cellars,” she replied. “Tell me about Andrik?”
“When we met Ignas, he told us Andrik betrayed him after he learned that his little brother was in some cult.” I cut through the door, pushing past a trolley with a sheet covered body, and took the door to the right. This one was able to be locked from my side - I slammed the bar down, and kept running. “He didn’t know what cult, because he couldn’t remember anything about it: the symbols he saw, the shrine Andrik had to his ‘god’… they were wiped from his memory. All Ignas remembers is that he was disturbed by it. And have you seen the Taltos city entry bug?”
“The screwy NPC code? Yeah. NUMFETCH errors aren’t too uncommon. Those happen when an NPC… umm… oh.”
“When an NPC umm-whats?”
“Well… NPCs are generated via the radiant AI system, right? Sometimes, ATHENA creates a non-viable NPC, so it’s, umm, digested and replaced. The NUMFETCH error happens when the system tries to replace an NPC with a copy, but the original NPC hasn’t been deleted properly. I guess… that could also happen if an NPC was hacked and partially replaced, and the system wasn’t sure how to handle it?”
“Oh. Fantastic.” I felt a thrill of fear, because I was a fucking ‘NUMFETCH error’. And that begged the question – who might have hacked me? “So, not only is there something screwy about Andrik, but Karalti and I were attacked by a big ambush of Ilian mercenaries - well, sort of mercenaries. They were fanatics. We pinned a guy to interrogate him, and he killed himself rather than talk.”
“Oh my god (@__@)!”
“He was carrying a brooch,” I said, pulling up in front of the metal door. “The Ryuko company logo, kind of. My guess is that this is Ororgael’s little ‘Cult of the Architect’ joke at Ryuko’s expense.”
“Oh no. That’s not good.”
“No, it’s not. Andrik is probably sucking Baldr-and-or-Ororgael’s cock as we speak.” I wrenched the door open, and a blast of heat engulfed me from inside. “I’m not sure OUROS has as much to do with this as it should.”
“Right. Okay - are you in the crematorium?”
“Yes ma’am.” There was a woman in a leather capelet and plague mask there, and she stared at me dumbly as I slammed the door behind me and dropped the crossbrace to lock it.
“The trapdoor is... umm... drat... where did I see it…?”
Frantically searching the room, I spotted it - a thin seam, visible by the reddish light of the roaring furnace where the city of Taltos burned its dead. “Found it.”
There was a booming rapport on the front of the door. “Open up! We have an emergency! A fugitive is on the loose in the morgue!”
I Shadow Danced past the bewildered morgue worker and felt around the crack for the entry into the trapdoor. I found it, and just as I was hauling it up, I saw the NPC run to the door and start to lift the crossbrace.
Common sense told me to rush over and kill her before she let my pursuers inside. My conscience told me that if I did, I was no better than Andrik, Kanzo or Baldr. As usual, my conscience won out.
I raised my voice. “Hey! Stop that! Back off from the door, now!”
The Morgue Worker looked back uncertainly. The people - or whatever those shadows had been - banged a second time.
“I work for the King. Trust me - don’t let anyone inside. They’re monsters.” I saluted to her, opened the hatch, and dropped inside.
It was perfectly black in the musty basement below. I fumbled a torch from my Inventory and lit it, revealing a basement cluttered with pipes, old mortuary equipment, parts for the crematoria roaring overhead, and stacks and stacks of compressed charcoal. “Okay - I’m in. Where to now?”
“Great! Head north: you should find a grate that leads down into the undercity ruins. Cut back, then follow the left-hand tunnel down and then head toward my marker. We’re going to keep moving toward the ossuary.”
I checked my map. “I don’t see a marker.”
Oh - wait a second. Let me turn tracking back on /(.__.)|”
“Wait? You can turn player tracking on and off?”
“Sure you can. Just think ‘player tracking off’ when you’re in your HUD. Sorry - I thought you knew (=^__^=).”
Dammit - that would have been useful any number of times in the last month. Annoyed, I called my mini-map and waited until Rin’s golden arrow pin appeared. The passages were mapped out for me. “What’s an ossuary, anyway? Some kind of bird?”
“It’s a mausoleum where the bones of the dead are interred. Don’t worry, though: just follow my marker. Be careful to announce yourself when you get close. I haven’t told Kanzo you’re coming.”
Upstairs, I heard the squeal of metal and raised, angry voices - male and female.
“Fuck.” I hissed through my teeth, and followed her directions, the torch in one hand, my spear in the other. There was now only 45 minutes left on the clock. “Hold on, Karalti.”
Rin’s marker was moving. I found the grate she was talking about, kicked it out, and extinguished my torch before sliding inside. It was a tight fit, armor scraping against the sides of the mossy drain. As I neared the end, a familiar damp, cold, stale smell wafted to my nostrils - the smell of the Lethos Cellars.
I dropped out of the end of the drain into knee-deep, slowly moving water. It wasn’t a sewer channel, because it was clean. The tunnel looked quite a lot like an old mine shaft, with stone supports holding up a gently curved ceiling. Water ran and dripped everywhere, slowing me as I waded forward. I was wary of monsters... this seemed like the perfect place to hide everything from fish-men
to slimes and giant maggots.
When I reached a dry tunnel, I clambered out, shook myself like a dog, then started to run. I was a hot panting mess by the time I broke out into a circular chamber stacked from floor to ceiling with old bones. This had to be the ossuary.
“Okay. I’m here. Kind of.” I checked the map - Rin wasn’t far away now. “I’m heading up on your position.”
“Alright - we’re almost at the meeting site. I’m glad this meeting is going ahead for your sake... but I’m sad it’s going ahead. Kanzo is desperate to get his juchi bastard back.”
“Don’t call her that to her face, or this whole thing is a bust.” I ground my teeth, hurrying through the halls of bones, and peered around a corner to see torches gleaming barely a hundred feet away. The flickering light they cast bounced off a vaulted ceiling overhead, like an underground church. I moved my head from side to side, focusing my eyes, and zoomed them in to see Rin idling by Kanzo’s taller, tenser form. When she spotted my light, she waved to me.
I only advanced when I was reasonably sure this wasn’t some kind of ambush. As my circle of light joined theirs, I got a good look at the Slayer of Taltos for the first time since almost killing him. Compared to how he’d been during our tussle near the orphanage, he was a mess. His clothing was torn and patched, and his silver mask had a giant crack running through it. Whatever magic allowed Mercurions to see through them without eye holes apparently still worked, because his face tracked me as I approached.
“Long time no see, Mister Slayer.” I swallowed down the dark impulse to leap on the man and throttle him. “Nice bombs. I really enjoyed getting blown up, arrested, and forced into being here today. How’s the murder business going?”
“Spare me your snide lecture, sang’hi. I’m not proud of what I’ve done.” Kanzo drew himself up arrogantly. “I did what I had to do for my daughter’s sake.”
“Like bombing Main Square back into the stone age?” I asked. “You know that the Volod and Voivode weren’t there, right? Or are you just killing any human in your path right now?”
Kanzo’s hands clenched into tight fists. He took a step forward, light rippling in an uneven wave across the surface of his mask. “You self-righteous-!”
“Hector, Kanzo, please.” Rin put herself between us, facing Kanzo. “Call a truce for now at least, okay?”
I put my hands up. “Sure. I’m a big boy. I just want Kanzo here to know that the only reason I’m not tearing his dick off and choking him with it is because the Volod is holding the most important people in the world to me hostage, and it’s all thanks to his uncontrollable urge to breed.”
Kanzo rattled something off in the clicking-and-snapping language of the Mercurions, only to be sharply rebuked by Rin. Whatever she said got him to back down, but he continued to radiate fury, like a grumpy little sun.
That was enough poking the bear for today. I sized them both up, leaning on my spear. “How did you two manage to find each other so quickly? Seems like you weren’t telling me and Suri something important, Rin?”
Rin flushed a vivid, deep blue. “I... I was going to, before we got blown up and arrested. When I escaped the workshop, I went into the Cellars. I... umm... I ran into some monsters, and I died. I’m not very good at fighting, especially just by myself. When I respawned, I woke up in Kanzo’s camp. I think it shocked him almost as much as it shocked me. Well, it happened this time, too.”
“Andrik is almost as much of an animal as this King of Cats,” Kanzo muttered. “Beating my poor little Rin to death.”
“You feel alright now?” I asked her, brows furrowing.
“Yeah. I don’t really remember the whole ‘being beaten to death with a spear’ thing very well. But because of this, I decided to multiclass into a Mage Path...” She trailed off, spotting something behind me.
I turned my head slightly to adjust my blind spot. Directly behind me, two torches were bobbing up and down in the darkness. One torchbearer was tall and broad-shouldered, the other painfully thin. My keen vision picked up the shadows of at least five Meewfolk who split into the shadows in the doorway, moving on silent, padded feet.
The arrogance left Kanzo’s body: his shoulders loosened, his fingers uncurled. He came up beside me, enmity forgotten. “Ebisa! Ebisa, is that you!?”
I grimaced at the raw pain in his voice, keeping an eye on the quest timer. I had just under fifteen minutes left before I had to be out of here and back on the way to the castle. I took the ruby and clenched it in my fist.
“I need to speak to the King first,” I said quietly. “I’m on a time limit.”
“I haven’t seen my child in over three months!” Kanzo hissed back.
Rin turned on her Craftmaster. “Be quiet!”
Kanzo flinched like he’d been slapped. “Rin-?”
“I don’t want to hear it.” Rin turned her nose up at him and, to my surprise, reached out and clutched my arm as the King of Cats and his lieutenant drew near. They were both cloaked and hooded. Ignas was wearing a bandit bandana across his lower face. Ebisa had broken with the red theme today. She was dressed head to toe in black leather, with a matte-gray fox mask that was nearly invisible in the darkness of the underground.
“Well, look who it is.” Ebisa was entirely inscrutable except for the acid tone of her voice. “Dragozin. ‘Father’. And you... you must be Rin. I’ve heard all about you, though I never had the chance to meet you.”
“I’m pleased to finally meet you, too.” Rin put her hands together, palm to palm, and bowed gracefully from the waist. “And I’m sorry we were never introduced... or I would have spoken earlier.”
Ebisa crossed her arms. “Of course you weren’t. That would have meant Kanzo would have had to admit his abject failure as a craftsman, and no self-respecting narcissist could ever bring himself to do that.”
Kanzo advanced a step, reaching out to her. “Ebisa… how can you say such a thing about me? I’ve been worried to death since you were-”
“Kidnapped?” Ebisa turned her attention back to Kanzo. “Only in your wildest fantasies. This man has been more of a father to me than you ever will be. This is Ignas Corvinus, the true king of Vlachia, and I am working for him.”
Kanzo pushed his own mask up with a trembling hand. His beautiful face was wide with shock and pain. “Working? You work for this… this sang’hi?”
“Yes. And by extension, so do you.” Ebisa drew herself up, looking down at him.
“You used me?” Kanzo’s voice shook as he took a step forward. “You made me kill those humans?”
“Yes.” Ebisa moved back away from him. “Because when I escaped that accursed containment tank and your laboratory, I ended up in Cat Alley. And there, I tried to find my way by contacting other juchi, other bastards. And you know what happened? They were so disgusted that they tried to kill me. The other bastards thought I was an abomination!”
“You’re not an abomination! You’re my miracle!”
“Yours?” Her whipcord body tensed. “Is that why you locked me away in a vat?”
“You weren’t going to be contained for long! It was a temporary measure until-”
“Months.” Ebisa reached back and pulled a dagger from her belt. “I was in that vat for months.”
“Because you weren’t breathing properly on your own!” He retorted. “How can you blame me for creating you, nurturing you, teaching you? I gave you everything I could!”
“You created me as a plaything to gratify your own vanity, and you expect me to be grateful?”
Kanzo regarded his ‘daughter’ bleakly. “Every Mercurion alive was created for one single purpose, Ebisa - cannon fodder. That’s all our taboos are for: they ensure that the same body-plans are made over and over again. Short-lived, uncreative, inflexible cannon fodder for a war that has been raging two centuries. But you? You are something new, something better. You can live longer, be cleverer and have a memory better than any Mercurion in known history. You don’t have to be… a
n…”
“Outcast?”
“No! You have the potential to be the greatest artificer this world has ever known. You can show them we can be better!”
“And maybe that’s not what I want to do,” Ebisa replied. Every word landed like a whip crack. “Maybe I like working for Ignas. Maybe I care more about politics and community and the welfare of Vlachia’s people than I do about showing your enemies that I’m ‘better’ than they are. Maybe I enjoy my chosen Advanced Path. Did that ever occur to you?”
He sighed. “And here I thought I’d created an improved design… a person capable of learning all I have to pass on. But you’re bitter, twisted, like every juchi I’ve ever observed. I have failed.”
Before I could interrupt, Rin swelled up like an angry kitten, stalked over to Kanzo, and slapped him so hard that his head snapped to the side and he stumbled.
“You jerk!” she shrilled.
“Look, I’m sorry to interrupt the family reunion, but I have something really important and time-sensitive to give His Majesty.” I said. “Sire, your brother has demanded to see you. He gave me this, and told me it has the coordinates for a meeting so that he can expose you as being someone other than his brother. Which seems kind of dumb to me - unless he plans to lure you into a fatal trap. Point being, if you don’t go there at the appointed time, he’s going to execute me and Suri, send my dragon back to Ilia to become a broodmare, and declare a pogrom on the Mercurions and Meewfolk. We have to act - there’s no more time to sneak around in the shadows. And if you can prove your identity, I’m sure you’re going to have the support of Janos Lanz and the new Forgemaster.”
I held out the ruby. Ignas and Ebisa looked at each other.
“How unfortunate. He is not here in person.” the man said. He removed his half-mask, and my heart sunk. This guy looked like Ignas, walked like Ignas... but he wasn’t quite Ignas.
Archemi Online Chronicles Boxset Page 71
