Rivers Between Us
Contents
The Least God's Master[edit]
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Of course I only recall your prior incarnation's latter days, after he had already reached the height of his powers and achieved the pinacle achievement of the entire first age, that being the genesis of that most marvelous apogee of mortal achievement, that fantastic, metamorphasizing, splendid and...
A little while later... Jeddish Tarn was one of the foremost creators of automata in the first age. He was as known for his peculiar methods as his inventions. For years or decades at a time he would disappear into his manse, the Redoubt of Fruitful Contemplation, speaking to no one and shirking all responsibilities. He would return, typically during callibration festivities, to flaunt his latest creation. As I understand the story, one year he was received at a gathering and had brought his latest invention: a bird of adamant and starmetal that could sing the trees into bloom. His coterie of admirers and prospective buyers was duly impressed, until a stranger at the gathering guffawed at his creation and called it an amateurish gewgaw. He then produced his own invention, a flawless replica of a human with pure black skin and ruby eyes. The automaton proceeded to dispatch Jeddish Tarn's five automated body guards by melding with them and subsuming their intellect. Jeddish was humiliated, and he was mocked by those who moments before had praised him. He fled the gathering and retreated for a full two centuries.
As I understand it, he assumed that if pure martial glory was what impressed his peers, he would create a fortress without peer, a purely automated city that could withstand any assault, support a full legion, house and supply a city of laborers, and constantly rebuild itself after the most crushing of defeats. It was, of course, the most fabulous of...
A little while later... His creation was never truly tested. He had studied the pattern spiders extensively while creating the Infinite City, and found it necessary to carefully integrate certain fate interdiction engines into the city's essence reactor core. These extreme measures were required to accomodate the massive essence drain of the city into the very fabric of creation. However, as soon as the city was fully activated, it buried itself beneath the surface of the earth a full hundred miles before it could be shut down. After extensive study, and several false restarts were the city again began burrowing, Jeddish realized the truth. The city's fate engines had integrated with the control grid to provide a destiny aversion countermeasure. By studying the city, he predicted the usurpation.
Thus he sealed the city. He chose to face the usurpation bravely and meet his accusers, to live and die without fear or regret. He was at the banquet. Allegedly (and there are no reliable memories of the event) they attacked him with a dozen warstriders, but the war machines refused to attack, instead kneeling in a circle at his feet. The operators climbed from their machines and slew him while he laughed, cryptically saying, "Your glory will rust and fail you, but ours is infinitely renewing!"
-Seven Thousand Wonders Unfolding, Least God of The Infinite City
A Clockwork Prodigy[edit]
My wife died there. Red Flanks was her captain, but I bear him no ill will, for he too was felled by the side of his mate, the fair haired Selenn. My only shame is that I was in the forge when they made their last charge, for I have never been a warrior.
In a single day in the battle of Mishaka thousands were felled at a time, so my sorrow is not a lonely one. It is still mine. Wife, sister-in-law, and brother are all seeding the earth, slain not by the honorable edge of a sword, but by the pitiless ravages of sorcery. I wept for them for a day, but then I took our children, my own Chester and their three young ones, and I went home.
Nathan was their eldest, and he was only four. The others were too young to feel the loss as more than a nameless ache, but he knew their absence as a real thing. Perhaps that is what bound us. Every day he followed me where I went, will I or nil I. So he followed me to the forge. It was a dangerous place, and I knew this. My own son I would not allow within (and he had not the patience for the craft; he rides, and that is enough for both of us), but if I had barred the child then he would have died of his misery, sickly as he was. Thus at six he knew all of my tools, how to make a horseshoe, plowshare, or sword. In another two years he had the strength to attempt such things, if he deigned to.
His was a mind of gears and metal.
I knew when he rebuilt my bellows that I was not ready for him. He redesigned the forge so that the heat of the fire fueled a device that pumped the bellows automatically, with three speed settings as necessary. He constructed a system of waterways that traveled above the ground to provide irrigation to distant fields in our village, and when he fancied making a pair of lizard skin boots he designed a set of traps that would not harm the skin of its prey. All this he did to impress me, I knew, for he wanted me to be his father, which I am not. Even so, I tried to act the part. I knew that this adopted son had learned all he could from me, so I arranged for him to be taught in Lookshy by his ninth birthday.
I was proud of Nathan. I still wonder if I killed him.
-Gallian, Rivers' Uncle
A Cog in the Machine[edit]
I remember thinking it was funny that Darius's favorite student spent so little time in the Savant District. To be sure, Nathan always had three books open in front of him, even when he was ordering. I can read, you know, but I couldn't read the books that he had in front him. I did like to look at the pictures sometimes, and if he was in a good mood (he usually was, at first) then he would try to explain them to me. It set my head spinning for hours at a time; I'd stay up late at night thinking of ritual empowerment interlacing interfaces and automated implosion defences.
I understand people. Since I've been helping my mother, serving drinks and cleaning tables since I was old enough to walk, I've been listening and watching. I knew that Nathan wasn't happy here. He was a Murakani at heart; he never did like the curfews and the mandatory military training. Oh, he was fine with it at first, I think, as long as he could keep reading. He loved the libraries and the machines. I think he liked me too... but...
About a year before it happened, he stopped coming for a while. I asked his friend, Berren I think, what happened to him (well, he was nice) and I found out that we was being held prisoner! His uncle had been conscripted; his brother and sister had been left on their own, and he had begged leave to go and try to take care of them. His foreman, Darius, was a hard man. He refused, claiming that Nathan was too valuable to the cause and had not finished the terms of his apprenticeship; he had not fulfilled his duty.
When next I saw Nathan, he came to tell me that he would be coming much less often. He gave me this ring then, because he said I reminded him of his sister. Lucky girl! He was to no longer study under Darius, but was instead assigned to one of the salvage teams under a man named Eight. It seemed he had no more taste for his work, and had tried to leave Lookshy several times already to go to his family. I hoped that he would stay safe, and not take too many risks... many salvage teams return with far fewer members than they left with.
Only later did I learn the whole story; how he had tried to flee the team in the middle of an expedition, and the cruelty of Eight in response. I haven't seen him for months now; Berren says the whole team was... but I can't believe it, I can't even think about it. It's too horrible.
He was so quick, bright, and funny, but so sad near the end. I pray to Tien Yu that he made it out safely, that maybe in the end he escaped. I know I shouldn't; I know he tried to abandon his responsibilities, which is criminal, but he wasn't meant for Lookshy. I don't know which I want more, to see him safely again, or for him to never return.
-Elyssa, Serving-girl
The Wondersmith Reborn[edit]
I alone survived. I alone can tell the tale.
Adamant is like glass in the way that orichalcum is like lead. It can hold an edge keener than the most finely honed steel. In its natural state it is nearly invisible, and it serves as an excellent conduit for essence is sorcerous constructs. When the first blade slid out of the walls and flicked towards my wrists, I was aware of it only as a faint whisper of jade cogs and drawn orichalc wires. I twisted away from the panel for an instant, then my fingers were once more in the touch with the panel. The runes were Old Realm, but they seemed like a name. I half-remembered it, something about a sunken city... a region of earthquakes.
I traced a glyph with one finger. A few more years and I might have had my essence awakened, but there was no time then. I willed the essence to flow, sluggish in the world about me like, imperciptible and inescapable. My essence was not my own... another whiff of adamant drifted past me and opened my side, painlessly, and a damp warmth spready over my hip like a curtain of molten lead. Behind me... yes, they were screaming. Perhaps one of them was dead. This did not displease me overmuch.
Eight said something, probably a threat. Six months ago, when I first met that heartless abomination, I told him to his face that if he did not let me go then I would kill him at the first opportunity for my freedom. In response he found my family and took my sister hostage. Poor Marta, she wrote me letters to reassure me of her safety, not realizing how deeply they would wound me. I was broken to his will. Now, perhaps, she would be free. Here I was, trapped in some strange Ruin beneath a river, about to die for a beast I despised with all my heart.
Eight was not an exalted. As near as I could tell he was something other than human, perhaps with the blood of a ghost or demon in him. He was not lucky, only cruel. He was born with thirteen fingers, but had thus far lost five in various accidents while scavenging. He was ugly. One eye was twice as large as the other, and he used this to his advantage. And he was a sadist. Marta had burns on her when I found her, and I still have a lump in my forearm from when he twisted it into snapping, in those first few days. And he is dead.
Eight was yelling. My blood was pooling at my feet. The room was now singing with invisible blades. I had no essence to awaken the controls, and then I remembered. I still had my life.
I unwrapped my kerchief from my neck and mopped the blood at my feet and thrust it against the hole in my side (it was so deep I nearly passed out from looking at it). With the bloody rag in hand I traced my life across the panel. The essence of blood, primitive necromancy, did its work, and the panel, smooth and black, was lit from within by a pale white glow. The code was in fact the prayer to lost things awaiting daylight (what a strange conceit), and in a moment the room was still and silent. I stood and whispered a prayer of thanks to whatever place this was, to whatever god watched over foolish scholars like myself. A moment later, I fell to one knee from the blood loss, still oozing from my open side.
Then the blood ceased to flow; the prayer was heard. I could see it all around me now, a translucent flame of blue and gold. My party saw it too. Nine of them were still living of the twelve that entered. They were staring at me. I saw the hate in Eight's eye. He lifted his axe (the axe that had nearly cut off my leg when I joked about his fortune once) and his face twisted in a wordless snarl. The nine men picked up their fallen weapons and stepped forward.
I remembered then that the essence was mine, and with my essence and searched my own essence shard for secrets long hidden. Then the name of that place's god was on my lips, and he awoke to my call, reminding me that the defenses of this room were not so crude as to allow the death of their true master. The panel thrummed under my fingers, and the adamant sang now to my own tune now. And I had my vengeance on Eight.
I don't care about him. I would have been fine fleeing on my own, leaving him dead or alive, I didn't care. I was free. I was Murakani again. I could find my sister and my brother again. But I was also something else now, somehow separated from everything I once was, and separated from my life of hiding. Beneath the river I was reborn, and that river forever distanced me from the Nathan that fled and wept from the never-ending wars of the scavenger lands. There were rivers between us forever.
-Rivers Between Us
Epilogue[edit]
The frame was nearly completed. Struts of alloy had been welded to the chassis, wrapping snuggly around the essence collectors and mist generators in a scaled down, modestly constructed version of its first age predecessors. The clockwork efficacy servitors worked silently around him, never questioning, never speaking. Rivers Between Us worked alone in the dream and the nightmare of the subterranean fortress, the Infinite City.
“Brother?”
Marta entered accompanied by a folding servant. She was still small, like her brother, though the past year and the many preparations for the wedding had given her a deeper bloom. She was becoming a woman; her eyes no longer shined with the bright, tenuous hope of her childhood. They were somehow softer, more lovely, with the wisdom gained by living through the events of the past years. She entered wearing the same dress she had worn last time she had entered the Infinite City, but her solemn expression was so changed that she was barely recognizable as the same person.
“Ah. Marta. What are you doing in this horrible place? The Halls of Venus are not for the living, not these days.” He bent over his blueprints and began flipping through them.
“I was looking for you… you know, after the prayer, I thought you were going to start living in the Retreat again…”
“I was.”
“But I haven’t seen you… for almost three months now.”
Rivers winced and grabbed a wrench. He half ran to the project and began tightening bolts. The servitors looked at him with confusion for a moment, then began following him and loosening the bolts to the appropriate level of tension. Marta did not notice.
“Is it true… about the wedding?”
Rivers dropped the wrench. “Blast those spies. I told them to get back to work. Will they never stop watching me?”
“Oh…”
He placed both hands on the frame and leaned over it, staring at the floor. “I’m sorry. I just… really needed… uh…”
“No, it’s all right, I understand completely…” She began blinking rapidly. Her voice caught in her throat, and she found herself looking for a place to sit.
The sorcerer stood and drew his robes about himself. He stepped over to her slowly and lifted one hand to hold the back of her head gently. “There’s more, actually. Marta… sister… you have someone else to look out…”
“Will you be there?” She interrupted him breathlessly. “It’s just a couple of months away. You can wait that long, right? You haven’t finished your project.”
Rivers’ face became blank. He too had changed much in the past year; though he was still shorter than all of his automatons, his hair had grown into an unruly tangle, constantly on the verge of sweeping into his face. His round face had lost the boyish glow and feverish tinge that had flushed it for so long, the features hardening through the rigorous training of the snake style. His voice was even, almost flat when he spoke the words, as though they were a scripture written in stone since the beginning of time.
“I will always be there for you.”
