Entromancy (5 page)

“It’s done,” Gloric said, cracking his knuckles.

I read through the records, trying to ignore the fact that the little gnome had undone some of the country’s most impregnable security systems with a few clicks.

“They have indeed been trying to kill you,” the technomancer continued, “but it seems like it’s nothing personal.”

I sifted through the information, a vague map of the conspiracy beginning to form in my mind.  It coalesced into an ironic image of Karthax, hero of the Fourth Gulf War and Inquisitor General of the NIGHTs, steering the free world out of the underrace-filled darkness and into the light.  Armed with the military and magical might of the country’s strongest forces, he would need only cede to the lesser evil to complete his conquest in the name of a perceived greater good.

“He wants to start a war,” I breathed.

Tribe shifted awkwardly, a little bored.  “Can somebody please explain what you two are going on about?”

“Our good Nightpath is discovering that his bosses aren’t exactly what they purport to be,” Gloric said.

I looked through the mission notes from my briefing, putting the pieces together.

“Karthax wants to start a war,” I explained.  “The dispensary was a front to generate military support to take the fight to the revolutionaries in their own house.  I was meant to be collateral damage, my death a catalyst.”

It made a certain kind of sense.  The political and public outrage at losing a NIGHT operative in an act of terrorism could easily spark the already uneasy racial tensions into an all-out civil war.  The strategy would be particularly convincing if Karthax could show that the revolutionaries didn’t care about killing their own people, which is where the ragers came into the picture.  Thus encouraged, the NIGHT leadership and its factors in Washington would almost have to give the Inquisitor General the green light for an all-out assault on Aurichome.  It was an unthinkable proposition, given the size of the auric king’s forces and their proven tenacity in guerilla warfare, but Karthax had always been ambitious.

It was something to go on, but there were several pieces still missing.  I decided to press Gloric for more.

“The revs would never put their own people to the sword, so how did Karthax’s people get access to the dispensary or switch the intel?” I asked.  “And who was the auric assassin following us?”

The gnome slid a different keyboard into his hand, still double-typing.  A number of monitors lit up with images of Karthax in his military uniform and beret, with the assassin lurking behind him, sending a chill down my spine.  I could pick out a few words here and there embedded in several lines of code on-screen.

“The first I can’t tell you much about,” Gloric said at last.  “Something about Project Watershed, but the information is behind a wall in the NIGHT headquarters.”

“I don’t understand, Glory,” Alina chimed in for the first time, her hand resting in between Buster’s bushy ears.  “I’ve seen you get through all kinds of firewalls.”

“Not a firewall, my dear.  A real wall!” the gnome said, waggling his fingers excitedly.  “In many ways, the NIGHTs’ best protection is their isolation.  Just like their island fortress, they keep a small portion of their classified files behind a physical wall off of the network.”

“Like a safe?” I asked.

“Could be.  Could be a cardboard box.”  The technomancer shrugged.  “The important thing is that it’s off the network.  It allows them to keep some secrets, even away from their own people.”

I thought about it for a moment, spinning the different scenarios around in my mind.  “And the assassin?”

The party turned their attention as one to the images of Karthax and the assassin, pixilated but still menacing.

“There’s not much to tell,” Gloric drawled.  “Ex-Special Forces, Karthax’s pet in the war.  Now works for him in odd jobs the government doesn’t need to know about.”

“Name?”

“Which one?  He’s had quite a few.”  The gnome scrolled through a few screens of text.  “The most recent one is Agrid the Destroyer.”

Tribe snorted, his piercings jangling.  “Chump.”

I looked over at Alina, who was staring up at a short clip of the assassin unleashing the meteor spell in
They Might Be Giant
.  She wrapped her arms around her slim torso, trying not to shudder.

“His magic,” she said meekly, “what was it?”

The technomancer nodded, raising his eyebrows enthusiastically.  “Entromancy.  Very interesting application. Very interesting!”

“Entermancy?” Tribe asked.

“
Entro
mancy,” Gloric clarified.  “Uses the concept of entropy as its foundation.”

A dumb silence met the gnome’s explanation.  He looked up at us from his chair, then shook his head in resignation.

“I am so alone,” he said, tapping a button and bringing a dictionary entry onscreen.

“Entropy,” he continued.  “One. Physics definition. 
‘A thermodynamic quantity representing the unavailability of a system’s thermal energy for conversion into mechanical work, often interpreted as the degree of disorder or randomness in the system.’”

I coughed moronically.  My working knowledge of physics was not great.

The gnome sighed and continued.  “Two.  ‘A lack of order or predictability, or gradual decline into disorder.’”

“So, the assassin uses randomness to make stuff happen?” Tribe asked slowly.

“Precisely!” Gloric clapped his dark hands, excited that someone was speaking his language.  “He depends on the chaos of the universe to initiate a chain reaction that ripples through time and space to generate a desired outcome, in a kind of deterministic butterfly effect.”

We looked at him blankly, our tenuous grip on his explanation quickly slipping.

The gnome sat back in his seat, throwing his hands up in frustration.  “He makes weird motions, things go boom.”

“Got it,” I said weakly, speaking for the group.

“I didn’t see him use any ceridium,” Alina said.

Gloric nodded again eagerly.  “Doesn’t need to.  He’s playing with the very fabric of the universe.  It’s chaos!”

I stared at the image of Karthax and the Destroyer, considering the implications of Gloric’s explanation.  Ceridium was the axis upon which all magic revolved, the ingredient which made it all possible.  People who knew the science better than I did could tell you how the chemistry actually worked, but I had read enough of the history in my shadowmancy training to carry a conversation on the topic.

When the first green researchers discovered ceridium in the twenties, they had barely any idea of its application outside the creation of a renewable energy source.  In that respect, they couldn’t have done better.  It was clean, it was stable, and most importantly, it was manufacturable.  The chemical reaction they had engineered was a Philosopher’s Stone of sorts, giving them the ability to turn mostly inert ingredients into a simple blue plasma that now powered over a quarter of the world.

Corporations were the first to monetize it for the purposes of sustainable energy, but it was the loosely assembled grassroots organizations that began to find alternative uses for the element.  There were tinfoil hat conspiracy theorists who posited that ceridium was a government-seeded product intended to control the masses, alongside occult groups that believed it represented the ouroborus of nature and science and deserving of worship.  The truth was somewhere in between.

As the history would have it, ceridium was a naturally-occurring element that the human race had depleted sometime during the war-torn western Middle Ages.  Its use had been well-documented in archaic texts on the arcane arts, mostly ignored in the modern age where technology and reason took precedence over magic and fancy.  People had no use at the time for a renewable energy source, having no idea what a motor or fossil fuel would look like.  They did have a purpose for what they called blue orichalcum, which powered their spells and magical warfare.

The historical connection between blue orichalcum and ceridium was the missing link between the myths and legends present in most modern societies and the cultural memory that knew that all of the books, films, video games, and virtual reality simulators created about magic couldn’t
all
be pure fantasy.  It also explained the reference in most every civilization of the presence of other sentient beings that had declined in the later Middle Ages and beginning of the Renaissance.  Modern science had confirmed that the underrace gene was essentially present in humans, but required a catalyst - direct or ambient exposure to ceridium - to become an observable phenotype.

Most of the world was not ready for the implications of this discovery.  It meant that the long-eared, tusked, horned, or pig-snouted aurics that had begun to be born were just as human as the humans who birthed them.  And because of the vast population burst at the turn of the twenty-first century, there was no place to put them, save underground, where most of the poorer human communities had moved.  The “underrace” moniker was created, and it stuck, mostly because of the implied double meaning of inferiority.

In the fifty or so years since ceridium’s discovery, the racial makeup of the world had changed, and entire schools of magic developed, ranging from the life-affirming arts of terramancy and hydromancy to the destructive forces of pyromancy and necromancy.  The NIGHTs had spearheaded the charge on institution-led mancy research and training, dividing their quickly growing organization into its enduring three divisions, themselves based on magical skillsets.  Nightpaths and Daypaths, who gained their namesakes from the shadow and light from which their mancy originated, were necessarily subordinate to team-leading Inquisitors.  The latter straddled the line of destruction and inquest to tremendous effect, being tasked with sniffing out the most elusive of anti-government activity, and devising strategies that would then be carried out by the former.  Yet, each type of magic required the mancer’s use of ceridium, which made the assassin’s exception all the more worrying.

“Wait a minute,” Alina said suddenly, shaking me from my musing.  “If the Nightpath’s digitab was off the grid since leaving North Beach, how did the assassin track him to-” her voice cracked a little.  “To my place?”

The technomancer clicked a few buttons, wiping the screens blank.  “Hmm, has anyone synced with any of his instruments since then?  A digitab, or network-enabled vehicle, perhaps?”

As one, the Pitcher and I swung our heads towards Tribe.  I glowered, remembering him tinkering with my cruiser’s music system at the North Beach storefront.

The auric looked to one side, then the other, then back at us.  “My fault!” he said, raising a hand uncomfortably.

Gloric shook his head and grabbed another keyboard, tapping away.  After a few moments, all of our digitabs beeped.

“Should be good now,” he said.  “And don’t worry about us here.  The best they can get is a trace on the outskirts of the neighborhood.”

“Um, thanks,” Tribe said.

I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was more to the situation than Karthax’s bloodlust against the underraces and the presence of an impossibly magical auric hitman.  I vented my concerns at the gnome, frustrated.

“How do we figure out more, then?” I asked, feeling my tiredness fuel my temper.  “About why the revs are suddenly willing to kill their own people?  And this-” I waved a hand towards the empty monitors. “Project Watershed?”

If the technomancer picked up on any of my irritation, he didn’t let on.  “I can call the auric king if you’d like,” he said coolly.  Having seen what he could do, I didn’t doubt his sincerity, but I also wasn’t ready to pick sides just yet.

Sensing my reticence, he continued.  “Or, you can go and ask Karthax himself.  Or the Sigil!”

Tribe and Alina both looked at the gnome quizzically, and I felt a vain burst of pride for not being in the dark for once.

“How do we get to him?” I asked haughtily.

“Follow the missing drones,” he said, referring to the devices that had been increasingly disappearing from the city over the past few months.

“Nevada?” Alina asked.

“Reno!” Gloric exclaimed, typing at one of his virtual keyboards.

“The Sigil is in
Reno
?!” I said incredulously.  Nevada was underrace territory, loyal to Aurichome and fiercely defended.  Any air or land travel was normally diverted around the entire state.

“Sparks, to be specific!” the gnome said again, bringing up a map of the region and an image of what looked like the inside of a rustic tavern.

“I’ve always wanted to go, but who has the time?” he clucked.  “We’ll need a guide, one that can take us where we need to go and negotiate with the revolutionaries.”

He punched a button on a mechanical keyboard, and a masked figure appeared on one of the monitors, framed by a single name.

“You’re kidding,” I said, disbelieving.

“Nope!  Owes me a favor, much like I owe our pretty Pitcher here,” the little auric beamed at Alina, who smiled back faintly, tugging at Buster’s silky coat.  Gloric turned in his chair, stretching.

“Now, who’s up for breakfast?” he said.

FIVE

Dwarves and trolls are the most physiologically recognizable archetypes of the aurics, but they are no less human than the others.  What most see as genetic difference is solely morphological.

-The Sigil of Sparks

I
awoke to the cozy warmth of the afternoon sun beaming through open blinds.  Blinking through my confusion, I looked around the room, initializing my lens display and reorienting myself to my surroundings.

It took a few moments, but as the sleep escaped my body, I slowly recalled falling facedown onto a mattress in one of Gloric’s aboveground rooms, having eaten a full meal and even more magnificently, taken a hot shower.  My body ached from a dozen bruises and sleeping in the same position, head throbbing from the Oxadrenalthaline hangover.  Alina sat in the corner of the room reading a digitab, a beer in her hand.  Tribe had his shaggy head propped on Buster’s body, both sleeping peacefully.  It looked like they had made friendly with each other.

“Thought you’d sleep all day,” the Pitcher said without lifting her eyes from her digitab.

I sat up on the mattress, pinching the bridge of my nose as my head swam.  “You and me both,” I replied.

I walked over to her, steadying myself on the wall and feeling the room right itself under my feet.  She lifted the can in my direction, and I took a swig from it gratefully.  It was strong but smooth, the bitterness and alcohol clearing my head a little.

I passed the beer back to her and sat down with a grunt.  “You doing OK?” I asked bluntly, feeling unusually companionable towards her.  Avoiding getting killed together would do that to you.

Alina looked up at me with piercingly blue eyes, unreadable.  Her curly hair was pulled back under a baseball cap, tame for the moment.  “Yes.”

I could hear the pain in her voice, and felt responsible.  “If I had known that they would send-”

“I’m a big girl,” she interrupted me.  “I knew the risks when I aligned myself with Aurichome.”

I nodded.  “Sure, but they were targeting me, not you.”

“They would have come for me eventually.”  She sighed, looking away for a moment, then back at me.  “It doesn’t really matter, does it?”

I shook my head.  “We’ll fix it,” I said weakly, awkwardly putting a hand on her shoulder.

She let her gaze fall for a moment, then looked at an old digital time display hanging on the wall.

“We should get moving,” she said briskly, putting away her digitab and rising to her feet.  “Gloric said we’ll need to get to the
Lucky Snake
by sundown.”

I nodded and got up with her, walking over to rouse Tribe and the wolf.  The thief woke with a start.

“It was gone when I got there!” he sputtered, shaking in my grip.  Buster darted out from under him, bemused.

“Easy, buddy,” I said gently.  “Time to go.”

Tribe’s brown eyes focused on me, and he grinned.  “Lunch?”

We grabbed a bite to eat from Gloric’s considerably stocked kitchen, then collected the gnome from his control room.  There was a brief argument, quickly resolved, when I insisted on driving the SUV.

“It’s
my
car,” Alina stated.

“Really?” I stammered, confused.  “I thought he-”

“Hotwired it?  Yeah,” Tribe said helpfully.  “It
is
her car, though.”

I relented, and the Pitcher and thief took the front seats, while Gloric, Buster and I crowded the back.

It would take us just under two hours to make it back through the city and over the bridge into Oakland.  It was a circuitous route, but I had convinced the party to let me stop by a safe drop not far from my apartment to pick up some more supplies and a clean set of clothes.

I still had trouble believing that our guide, a wanted enemy of the state, could be found across the Bay, not ten miles as the crow flies from the NIGHT headquarters.  It was mute testament to how much information the organization purported to have on file about the so-called terrorist revolutionaries, and how little they actually knew.

“The Sigil is in Reno, and Doubleshot...is in Oakland,” I had said skeptically, looking at the masked figure on Gloric’s screen.

“Yes, under,” the technomancer said.

“We’ve been looking for him since the Chinatown incident, eight months at least,” I complained.

“Maybe that’s part of the problem,” he replied.  “He’s a she.”

Vasshka “Doubleshot” Lestrage, the monitor had read.  Known only in my circles by her moniker, and wanted in four states for as many auric insurrections.  More likely to answer with pistols than with words.  And she was in Oakland.

We made our way to the East Bay in the dying light of the afternoon, the western sun backlighting the city behind us and outlining the one hundred and forty-year-old Bay Bridge in auburn fire.  There had been no sign of company following us since we left Gloric’s neighborhood, but the technomancer set up a private gateway to the network for us just in case.

The gnome’s directions took us off the freeway and through a warehouse district abutting the east side of the water.  Large, steel-girded buildings stood imposingly around us, glimmering warmly in the sunset.  We made our way through them slowly, following Gloric’s instructions to an abandoned train station.  Alina parked us in an empty lot nearby, engaging the SUV’s security systems.

“Couple of things,” Gloric said as we walked the short block from the parking lot to the station.  His sandals flapped on the asphalt, and he had donned a ridiculously large Giants-themed backpack that bobbed with each step.  “One: address Doubleshot only by her nickname.  She won’t like hearing that you know more about her, or that you learned it from me.”

We all nervously murmured our assent.

“And two…” the gnome stopped and looked at me keenly.  “Try to look like you belong?”

I looked around at the rest of the party, who nodded knowingly. “What’s all this?” I protested.

“You look like a secret agent,” Tribe said as Gloric turned and resumed walking.

I glanced down at my outfit, tight-fitting black trousers and shirt under my large overcoat, then at Alina, who snickered not unkindly.  I resolved to keep my mouth shut for the encounter.

The gnome led us into the station, a deserted concrete building that was eerie and dark in the dying light.  Dusty route maps and departure schedules marked the red- and brown-bricked walls, graffitied almost to the point of being unrecognizable.  A broken set of turnstyles bisected the building, leading off to several sets of stairs and elevators that appeared to be out of operation.

Gloric took us through the turnstyles and to a small utility door adjacent to the elevators.  The portal was locked by a simple digital code, but the gnome disabled it quickly with a passcode and ushered us into a dank stairwell, securing the door behind us.

“We’ll take the back way,” he explained, his voice reverberating off of the claustrophobia-inducing walls. 

We continued down into the bowels of the station, stopping after two flights of stairs at another, more heavily reinforced gate.  The technomancer took a digitab out of his backpack, attempting to unlock the door’s safety mechanism.  After a few taps, the device beeped morosely.

“This stupid thing,” the gnome said irritably, punching the door with a little hand.  “Always sticks.”

He put away the digitab and produced a tiny ceridium tablet, glowing blue in the near darkness.  Pinching it between his fingers, he spoke a series of binary numbers, waving his hand in front of the doorway.  The magic left his hands and sought out the locking mechanism, disabling it with a click.

I felt my eyebrows raise in the gloom.  Technomancer, indeed.

The gnome pushed open the heavy door with a grunt and led us into a more open space that appeared to be a disused train tunnel.  Two passenger platforms sandwiched several sets of electrified rails, looking ancient but surprisingly clear of debris.  Light and sounds wafted to us from an entryway recessed into one of the platforms.

“Here we are!” Gloric said cheerily, guiding us to the bar entrance.  An arched doorway framed two swinging, wooden half-doors, with an AR sign across them that flashed
Lucky Snake
in my lenses.

We pushed our way into an underground saloon of sorts, in what looked to be a converted maintenance area.  A pastiche of tall and short tables littered the room, with low-hanging ceiling lamps that seemed to create more shadows than light. Augmented reality snake-themed graffiti donned the walls to provide some semblance of decoration, and a remodeled jukebox crooned a prehistoric country rock ballad from the corner of the room.

Lucky Snake
’s clientele looked as hard as its decor.  A motley representative of underraces and humans looked up at us as we entered the bar, dark eyes gleaming suspiciously.  I felt self-conscious in my standard issue clothing, standing out like a sore thumb in the midst of revolutionaries.

Gloric strode confidently up to the unvarnished bar, signaling the huge auric behind it for a drink.  The little gnome could barely see over the counter, but he pulled himself up onto a stool and beckoned us over.

I could feel eyes on me as we walked across the room, and resisted the temptation to use my lenses to look up records for each of the patrons.  The place was a treasure trove of rev sympathizers.

“Want anything?” Gloric asked as we joined him at the bar.  I shook my head, preferring to keep my wits about me for the time being.  Alina ordered a soft drink as Tribe went over to tinker with the jukebox.

I put my back to the bar to survey the room, trying to pick out Doubleshot from the crowd.  Most of
Lucky Snake
’s clientele had gone back to their drinking and games of chance, the low rumble of talk and dice filling the concrete room with sound.  A table of aurics towards the middle of the room was still giving us the stinkeye.  I smiled pleasantly in their direction.

“Where do we find her?” I said to Gloric out of the corner of my mouth, waving cheerily at the revolutionaries.

“Oh, she’s here,” the gnome said, collecting a handful of shots in his little hands and hopping down off the bar stool.  “Just don’t want to meet her empty-handed.”

Alina and I followed him to the back corner of the room, Buster trailing behind us and sniffing curiously.  A table of aurics and humans were in the middle of some Hold ‘Em variant, digital chips piled around their cards haphazardly.  A dwarf sat on the opposite side, her boots propped up on the table nonchalantly.  Her wide brimmed hat shaded her face in the low light, and a cigar glowed red behind her handful of cards.

Her eyes, glistening in shadow, flicked towards me.  She spoke one word, the cigar dipping.  “Scram.”

The rest of the table looked up at us, then back at the dwarf, who tipped her head curtly to the side, revealing a fringe of orange hair beneath her hat.  The card players collected their money and left, joining other tables.

“What have we here, Glory?” the dwarf asked, taking a pull at the cigar.  Her eyes never left my face.

“Evening, Doubleshot,” Gloric said affably, setting the shot glasses on the table and taking a seat.  “OK if my friends join us?”

The dwarf clasped the cigar between two meaty fingers, sweeping her hand briskly in accord.  The motion opened her jacket front slightly, revealing a thick leather vest and bolo tie, along with an enormous ceridium revolver at her right hip.  From reading through her file, I expected there to be an identical one on her left.

Alina and I sat down across from her, Buster plopping down under a chair and falling asleep instantly.  I didn’t like having my back to the door, but didn’t have much choice.

The dwarf put her cigar on its side in an ashtray, blowing out a cloud of smoke and grabbing a couple of shots.  Finally taking her eyes off of me, she tossed back the amber liquid.

“What can I do you for?” she drawled in a sooty voice, wiping her mouth with a thick hand.

“Well,” Gloric began, skipping pleasantries, “we need someone to take us to the Sigil.”

“What for?”

“It’s a long story,” I spoke, measuring the dwarf with my eyes.  She returned my gaze and held it, searching for fear or intimidation.  Not finding any, she nodded slowly, taking another two shots.

“Give me the short version,” she said.

I looked around me, making sure we were out of earshot from the rest of the room, and sped through the relevant pieces of my story, leaving out any mention of classified information.  The dwarf listened patiently, asking a question here and there for clarification.

When I finished, she crossed her arms, sizing me up first, then Alina.  Finally, she turned back to Gloric, and a ray of light caught the side of her face, revealing a flush, plump visage and round nose.

“I suppose you’re going to tell me I owe you one,” she said to the gnome.

The technomancer smiled, toying with one of the shot glasses.  “Chinatown didn’t fix itself,” he said meaningfully.  “Besides, it’ll be fun!”

The dwarf looked back in my direction, and frowned.

“This bloke giving you trouble, Doubleshot?” I felt a large hand fall on my shoulder.