The Shattered Sky

by Paul Lucas

  Fortunately, Weirds were rare. In the KN's five-hundred year history, only seventeen Weird sightings have been confirmed, and most of those resulted from miscast spells. The mainstream Matrix was big enough, versatile enough, and intelligent enough to recognize and quickly exterminate their mutant brethren. No known Weird has lasted more than a few weeks.

  But how could a Weird had formed in the Tower itself without Glider or I noticing it? And the timing of it forming and the beginning of the Xique attacks was too close to be coincidental. And was it truly causing the odd, almost subsonic hum?

  "There is something going on here we don't understand," Amethyst said.

  "Duh," said Louis.

  "The Xique know something," I said. "They must. Else why would they attack us and invade the Tower? Do they know of the Weird?"

  Dumas grumbled, "too bad we can't just ask them."

  I looked at the disgusting hand sized-spider, eyes growing wide. "I think," I said, "that is exactly what we have to do."

  TWENTY-FIVE

  The origin of the KN’s “level” system for classifying Matrix spells has a rather embarrassing origin.

  When tomes from the Great Library were first translated by descendants of the captured knowledge-priests, the scholars looked upon them as founts of unending, unerring knowledge, no matter their subject. After all, who could question the wisdom of Old Earth on any subject, which were already providing them with marvels such as gunpowder, metal armor, penicillin, and paper?

  So when a hard-bound, highly-detailed fantasy role-playing game was discovered among the many books, the Borelean scholars took it for an honest-to-Shards manual on magic. Many Mage guilds adopted affectations the game outlined for wizards (witness the ornate robes, incantations, and rituals still practiced by the Necromancer and Dreamwalker Guilds, among others, for proof of this) and its level-based spell system, with harder-to-cast and more powerful spells earning higher levels, was instantly adopted. What was truly embarrassing was it took over a century for the error to be publicly recognized, but by then the level-based system was too well embedded into Mage culture to be abandoned.

  Since then the system has been recalibrated many times. At one point, there were only three levels; at another, there were several hundred. The modern system uses twenty-five levels; the first ten describe all known spells, with level one spells being the simplest and level ten being the most complex known, while the remaining levels encompass the full potential the Nanotech Matrix is theorized to possess, to be filled in as KN Magi learn more.

  --from So You Want to Turn People Into Frogs, by Lowell Colon and Dibny Strazkal, 546, Haggerty press, Borelea.

  * * *

  "Cover your ears!" Louis whispered as he began his spell.

  The long corridor ahead of us was jammed with Xique. Near as we could tell this is where a good portion of them fell back to regroup after being temporarily repelled by my people. Thanks to Dumas’ scouting, a scent-dampening spell, and the Xique’s lack of knowledge of military tactics, we were able to eyeball them from around a far corner without them immediately sensing our presence.

  Louis began mumbling quickly under his breath.

  He stepped out into the corridor just as he finished his spell, his hands immediately flashing to his ears. An ear-splitting screech like a million claws scraping on a million metal plates pounded into my skull. It felt like nails were being driven into my head just behind my eyes.

  The spell was called Shattersound. I was over fifty meters away and around a corner from where Louis directed the spell’s epicenter, where the nanites were self-destructing by the tens of billions by vibrating themselves at hypersonic frequencies. My ears were flat against my hair and my hands tightly clamped over them, yet I had to fight hard to keep from screaming from the pain. Even the humans with their dimmed senses grunted uncomfortably.

  The Xique in the corridor, who possessed a sense of hearing even surpassing a Myotan’s, had it much, much worse. When I turned around the corridor to look I saw the devastation caused by the spell. Dozens of Xique and their crèche-mates lay on the floor, either unconscious from sensory overload or writhing in agony as their ears bled profusely. If they survived they would be permanently deafened.

  The Xique nearest the spell’s epicenter were completely devastated. The soundwaves had been so intense that many around it lay dead or nearly so, as vital organs ruptured, skin burst, and eyes hemorrhaged into bloody pulps from the vibrations.

  I almost felt sorry for them.

  Almost.

  When this was all over, I had to get Louis to teach me that spell. Provided we both still breathed.

  We had consulted my husband at length, at least as much as our situation allowed, and rehearsed carefully what to say through our translator boxes to get the Xique to stop fighting and to listen to us. We carried KN-made translators with the Xique language cadged from peaceful contact with Xique tribes from various helistat expeditions.

  We had tried talking to them a number of times. But none were interested in anything except eviscerating us. Their reluctance to kill non-Myotans for some reason had disappeared. Perhaps now that they were within the Tower, they were overpowered by Myotan scents, and could only think of their enemies with such a smell in their nostrils. We kept the translators on anyway, in the vain hope we might run across a rogue Xique who would somehow have enough sanity to listen to us.

  Amethyst followed up Louis’ attack with a few well-placed lobs from the grenade launcher on her rifle, aimed at targets beyond what Louis’ spell affected. In theory, both attacks combined would give us a 100-meter-plus clear run to the room where supposedly my People were making a stand. After that, with the strength of many numbers behind us, we hoped we could finally get the Xique to listen before more slaughter ensued on both sides.

  “Come on!” Amethyst hissed as she started running. Louis looked at her dazedly. I grabbed him and pulled him forward into a haphazard dash. My legs felt wobbly. I was barely able to navigate around the dead and dying Xique in the corridor.

  Multiple spell casting is exhausting work, and Louis and I had been casting spells fairly steadily for the past hour since we entered the Tower. Amethyst wanted to save the rest of her grenades and explosive charges for when we reached my people, to give them a better fighting chance. But that meant that we had to draw upon our other source of firepower--magic--in order to reach them.

  When a string of Matrix-thought commands is completed, the nanites in a caster’s brain, which constantly monitor output for such things, instantly go into action. They network with the other nanites in the body, both by radio and benign chemical signals. The billion or so nanites in the caster’s body form both a processing network to number-crunch what needs to be done and forms a large transmitter to send electromagnetic signals to the nanites in the surrounding environment. At least that’s how human Magi explained to me how it works.

  But while the nanites might be incredibly sophisticated machines, they were still microbes and as such wore out quickly, especially if they were being used in, say, casting a lot of complex, destructive spells. A lot of them malfunction or go dead in the process. The surviving nanites have to therefore step up their own rate of self-replication to compensate.

  Both this extra work and accelerated replication generates a lot of heat the body has to deal with. When casting a few simple spells spread out over the course of the day, this effect is hardly noticed. But when casting complex spells in a relatively short time, like what Louis and I had been doing for the past hour, the accumulated heat begins to really wear on you. It’s like having a fever, or a hangover, or both. My breath came in short gasps and Louis was not much better. We had to be careful; another spell or two might push us over the edge into unconsciousness.

  Louis quickly shook off his momentary stupor and began running on his own. With his longer human legs, he quickly put a distance of several paces between us, with Amethyst several paces beyond him.

  We wer
e only a few dozen meters into the corridor when I heard the unmistakable clack-clack-clack of Xique foot-claws on metal behind us. The Xique in other parts of the Tower were converging on us, to see what that horrible sound was. That’s why we had to run; if we didn’t move fast, we might be overwhelmed.

  The claws were getting closer surprisingly fast. I swung my rifle around behind me, too late. I was swiped from the side, the Xique’ body swatting me against the corridor’s wall like a heavy club. I cried out at the impact, my weapon flying out of my hand. The creature’s crèche mates shot ahead of their master, attacking my human companions, who were just beginning to turn at the sound of my cry. The crèche-mates leapt on them before they had a chance to bring their guns to bear. Their human-made ballistic armor would probably protect them from the worst of the crèche-mates’ claws, but the hissing and frothing mini-Xique would be enough to keep them occupied while their master finished me off.

  The Xique may not know much about large-scale tactics, but small group to small group they were very effective.

  The full Xique loomed over me, shooting his clawed foot up to descend on me. I was too dazed and exhausted to take any physical action. I had seen enough of their victims to know what was about to happen. One foot claw would hold me down with the creature’s weight while the other was brought up, and with a single, powerful rake, split me open from chest to crotch.

  Suddenly a half dozen black, hairy horrors leapt onto the Xique's face, curved arachnid fangs sinking into eyes and soft flesh. One buried what looked like a philip's head screw driver into the Xique's open ear up to the handle. The Xique's horrified, panicked scream of pain reverberated up and down the corridor. It clawed at its muzzle, but the spiders had already leapt away like fist-sized fleas. It fell over, thrashing like mad. Almost as an after thought I scrambled for my rifle and squeezed off round after round into the huge hunter until it stopped moving.

  I slowly rose, glad to see Amethyst and Louis had taken care of its nasty little crèche-mates. But my relieved smile turned into a deep frown as I followed their eyes to either end of the corridor, which were jammed with Xique, slowly approaching us. The one Xique had slowed us down enough to allow the others to reach and surround us.

  There were too many even for our assault rifles. We could take many of them down, but it was doubtful all of us would ever live to meet up with my people now.

  But they weren't rushing us, like they had everywhere else in the tower. Perhaps all of their dead surrounding us finally gave them pause, let a modicum of caution trickle into their minds.

  My mind raced. Say something! It might have been our only chance. “I am not your prey!” I shouted, the translator at my belt transforming it into the squealing language of the Xique. “You are not my hunters!”

  Miraculously, the Xique hesitated in their slow approach. The closest one tilted his head to regard me queerly. He hissed and spat, and the translator said, “Who are your hunters, then?”

  I pointed at Amethyst and Louis. “They are. The humans. We are their prey.” Spirits, I hoped my husband knew what he was talking about when he told us to try this ploy.

  The Xique looked at me, at them, at me again, and at the humans again. He hissed loudly and his slowly-advancing crèche-mates instantly retreated from the humans, leaping to just behind their master. They sputtered and growled in apparent annoyance. They couldn’t understand why they had been ordered back. One tried to rush at Louis again, only to have the full Xique bat him with his two-meter-long tail, sending him sprawling back down the corridor, yelping.

  Amethyst and Louis instantly raised their weapons. “No!” I shouted. “Don’t shoot! The Xique, um, aren’t your prey! I am!”

  The Orc and human exchanged brief glances, no doubt wondering if my spell-fatigue had somehow affected my brain.

  Xique expressions were hard to read, but I could tell that the one I was talking to eyed me with some suspicion. “If what you say is true,” he asked through my translator, “then why do we never see them hunt you?”

  I glanced around. Other Xique were beginning to converge on us in a tight semi-circle. I prayed to the Sky Spirit to make my next words not be the ones that got us all killed. “Um, because we are too few yet to allow them the honor of hunting us. We are only a few hundred in this part of the world. They would deplete us too quickly, and once we were all gone, how could they honor our sacrifice for them? We allow them to help us to prosper so that one day they can hunt us without restriction, and we can feed them.”

  The creature shifted uncomfortable, thinking. Their entire world was hunting, their whole reason for living, at least according to their own traditions, was to honor the sacrifice of their Prey Gods. They respected other predators and their designated prey as long as those hunters respected them.

  Louis and Amethyst were also becoming increasingly uncomfortable with my parlay. There were now too many Xique around us for them to even have a hope of blasting through. If things turned to violence now it would be very bloody for both sides.

  I turned toward all the Xique, regarding them coldly while doing my best to squash the fear of them that still quivered in my belly. My leg wound of two weeks ago ached wildly. I turned up the volume on the translator to make sure as many of them as possible could hear me. “All of you!” I shouted through the device. “All of you are responsible for this! In attacking us, look how much you have depleted our numbers! Our hunters must wait that much longer before we grow numerous enough for them to honor us with a hunt! Why have you done this? Why do you commit crimes against those who are kindred to those you hunt?”

  The heated debate of confused Xique that erupted around us sounded like a pound of fat sizzling on a fire. They hissed and sputtered in consternation. They had not thought of us as any more than a threat to be eliminated. Now they weren’t so sure. They sure didn’t expect anyone other than themselves to understand their philosophy. I was thankful my husband had so many reports of contact with Xique from other regions on the MegaShard. Miraculously, he had really known exactly what we had to say.

  My parlay partner regarded me, his head dipping low. “Why? The sound. It drives the prey away--”

  One of his fellows tramped up behind him. “Bloodgouge, no! How do we know if we can trust this female? She may speak falsehoods.”

  I looked this new arrival right into his cold, compound eyes. Lerner had told me of a demonstration to possibly convince them, if it came to that. “You doubt me? Fine. Doubt this!”

  I turned off the translator and walked up to Louis and Amethyst, who had been watching the exchange with fascinated anxiety. They looked at me expectantly, then both opened their eyes wide as I pulled Amethyst’s knife from her hip and used it to slash open my arm. “You two have to drink my blood.”

  They both look horrified. “What!”

  I glanced nervously behind me. “Don’t question! Just do it. They think you eat us! Its the only way to convince them!”

  Amethyst nodded grimly, then bent low to lick the warm liquid flowing from my forearm. Louis still grimaced, but after a sharp elbow in his side from Amethyst, he, too, tasted my blood. I bopped him on the head. “And make it look like you’re grateful for it!”

  He grumbled a half-dozen quick curses but managed to hold down the blood in his mouth without retching as he clearly wanted to.

  I shivered. It was a ghastly act, but with a quick glance back at the Xique I could see it having an effect. The non-sentient crèche-mates were pacing about excitedly, keen at the smell of my living blood, but their full Xique masters held them at bay. I turned the translator back on. “They are not our prey,” they said, one after another. ”We must talk.”

  TWENTY-SIX

  I was getting very tired of falling unconscious at the most exciting moments.

  My eyes fluttered open. I did not know what to expect, but I looked up into a fuzzily-defined face that I thought looked familiar. From its position and the soft, warm pillow my head was nestled in, I
must be in his lap. "Lerner? Husband?"

  "No," came Cloud’s voice. It cracked a little, as if in remembrance of an old pain suddenly made fresh again.

  The fuzziness around me suddenly snapped into the crystal clarity of the world I knew. "Cloud!" I stammered. "What happened? Where am I?"

  Windrider was right beside me, applying a water-soaked rag to my forehead. Amethyst and Louis were on either side of me, Louis puffing away at an almost-consumed cigarette. He said, "you passed out after our little demonstration. Spell fatigue mixed with your injuries and blood loss must have pushed you past the edge. You fainted. Surprisingly, the Xique didn’t give us any kind of trouble when we picked you up and carried you here.”

  I found I could sit up with a little effort. My head throbbed wildly, but I managed to nod a bit. "They probably thought you were bringing me here to eat me. They would not interfere with your predator-prey relationship. They would think it was sacred to you, just their relationship to their Prey Gods is sacred to them.” The humans looked stricken by such a horrible thought, but in truth it was probably the best interpretation of events we could hope for from the Xique. “Where are they?"

  "Still out there," Amethyst said. "Shards, they’re excitable. But they haven’t attacked since your little parley with them, and near as any of your Myotan sentries can hear, they're hotly debating what precisely happened with you."

  I nodded slowly, gritting my teeth at my skull's throbbing. I looked around. Windrider changed rags, fussing repeatedly about my minor injuries. I would have many scars to show off to my children, provided Lerner and I could ever have any.