Warsinger - Chapter Six

I went back to the Count's Suite to decompress after sorting out which quests I wanted to farm out, and which ones I wanted to do myself after we bought Suri home. My ears were still ringing as I let myself back into the cool musty quiet of Lord Bolza's old living quarters. The Ducal Suite was an apartment within the Inner Keep, and it hadn’t been touched since Ashur had vacated it. Double doors opened into a spacious living area, with a fireplace, seating and a small polished wooden dining table. The furnishings were comfortable, if not well-worn. Like the rest of the castle livery, the apartment was decorated in green and silver. The chairs were upholstered in heavy, soft green leather. The duvets and curtains were green, heavily embroidered. The towels in the bathroom were the color of new spring leaves. A huge portrait of the old Voivode and his family hung over the fireplace, staring aloofly across the dark, silent parlor. Every person in the picture, including the cute little lap dinosaur grinning in Bolza’s daughter’s arms, had died in the invasion.

The apartment had its own ornate black marble bathroom complete with floor-set tub, all of it currently non-functional because the bathtub was full of sand. Nasaku vampires had to sleep in sand to regenerate and get the Well Rested buff. I wasn’t looking forward to it. At the back of the living area was a short hallway with two bedrooms. The larger single room had slept the countess and their children, and still contained the soft feather beds the kids had used. The second largest was the private bedroom of the Count, dark and grandiose, with a four-poster bed and a wall of trophies, awards, and paintings. It had two wings: to the right was the tiny bedroom used by the Count’s valet; to the left was his study, which by itself was about the size of the sweaty little studio I’d rented in L.A.

The Ducal Suite was easily the most luxurious place I had ever stayed in, the kind of home I never even dreamed I could own. 

I hated everything about it.

Grimacing, I slunk to the only room where I felt remotely comfortable: the study. Even that made me feel like a burglar prowling through someone else's home. The Voivode's papers were almost where he had left them, spread out over his desk. There was a pistol in the top drawer, unloaded, and a bowl of half-eaten pistachios sitting on the desk next to a half-smoked pipe. A quill rested beside to a dried-out inkwell. When the Demon and his horde had stormed his city, he'd abandoned his desk and run to take charge - and had never returned. I shuffled the papers and nuts aside to clear some space, adjusted the fancy plush office chair to the right height, and tipped it back to put my feet up on the desk. I took a second to reach out telepathically to Karalti. She was out burning off some steam, hunting the agile deer in the hills to the north of the castle.

"Fuck." I sighed into the still, dark air. "Hey, Tidbit: don't go too far, okay? We're still leaving for Dakhdir tonight."

"Don't worry! I'll be back before highmoon," she trilled. She sounded much more cheerful than I felt. "I just remembered I hadn't eaten in a while. Thought it might be a good idea to get a snack before we wing it three thousand miles, you know?"

"I sure do. See you soon." I switched back to my own thoughts, tuning her out, and sighed again. "Alright, Ms. Kingdom Management System. Let's finish those tutorials."

The screens appeared as commanded. I unequipped my armor and stripped my shirt. While Navigail fired up the tutorials, I dropped down and did clap pushups until my arms burned.

The tutorials were comprehensive. They walked me through the intricacies of resource allocation and setting up supply chains, maintaining relationships with the other lords and ladies of my province, setting and collecting taxes, and even a brief overview of different kinds of governments. I'd been pretty apolitical for most of my life, mostly because I had to pay taxes, but wasn't allowed to vote. I also got a crash-course in the different '-isms' to be found in Archemi. Vlachia was an Absolute Monarchy, in which the Volod had full executive power and his primary vassals - including me - acted as his advisors. Ilia, until recently, had been a military junta that was transitioning to a Constitutional Democracy, ala revolutionary France or post-civil war England. I'd expected to be bored, but found myself getting sucked down the Wiki hole of fantasy politics once the tutorials were over. Meewhome, Tungaant, and Gilheim were different flavors of Theocracy. The Meewfolk were led by a divinely-appointed Queen who operated as an absolute monarch, with priestesses instead of nobles as her vassals. Gilheim, one of the nations allied with Vlachia, was ruled by an authoritarian council of clerics who worshipped the same god and goddess pair they did in Ilia, Lyric and Kyrie. Tungaant was led by three abbots of each of our major deities, who acted more like supreme court judges than kings. I was about to check out Zaunt when my HUD purred - I had an incoming vid call from Rin.

"Hey girl, how's it going?" Hanging by my knees from the railing of Bolza’s four-poster bed, I grinned at her as the window jumped to life. It wasn't just Rin in the frame: she was sitting shoulder to shoulder with her main squeeze, Ebisa: easily one of the most dangerous women in Vlachia. The King's Assassin was masked, as usual, slouched in a red sleeveless hooded jerkin that left her thin, dull grey arms bare. By contrast, Rin was an adorable little shortstack, with an open heart-shaped face, pearly silver skin, and big blue-on-blue eyes that currently blazed with worry. Like all Mercurions, both women had intricate glass winglets instead of ears. Ebisa's were made of soldered stained glass in many different shades of red. Rin's were prismatic and angular, glinting blue and gold by torchlight. 

"Hector... are you upside down?" Rin asked. 

"Blah! It is I, Count Dragozin!" I mimed pulling an invisible Dracula cape over my face. "And yes, I am. I'm practicing my acro-bat-ics."

Ebisa tutted, crossing her arms. Rin laughed, high and tinkling.

"How are you?" She asked, gently. "And... is Suri...?"

I sighed. "Suri's a work in progress. We leave tonight, but I had to sort out shit in Myszno before we can leave. A huge mob turned up at the castle. We've got double-digit quests, and we have to be in Taltos in five days’ time."

Rin winced. "Oh no. That's not good. Do you even have a way to find her?"

"Vash gave us the idea to use Cutthroat," I said. "She's been trying to run toward the south ever since Suri died and respawned. I made a harness so Karalti can carry her. We're going to use her like a radar."

"Oh! That's right! She's Suri's bonded mount!" She clapped her hands together. "That should work pretty well."

"Yeah. You take a look at that attachment?"

"I did." Rin's delicate filigree brows furrowed. "It's... ummm... well..."

She looked to Ebisa, who shrugged nonchalantly.

"It's definitely weird," Rin continued slowly. "And you're right, it gave me a bit of a scare. But... to be honest... I have no idea what it is, or who could have sent it."

"You can't read the code?" I asked.

"Coding was always just a hobby for me," she replied. "I learned the basics, you know... but I’m not a programmer. I was an environmental artist and modeller."

"Oh." Right. I'd forgotten that.

"What I CAN tell you is that it looks kind of like it was written in Python?" she said, wincing. "Kind of. If I had to make an educated guess, I'd say this was something to do with A.I coding. There's some... umm... sigmoid stuff and some variables that refer to some kind of database in there, and that's something I associate with A.I. The people who'd know what they were looking at are, umm, well..."

"Dead," I filled in.

"Yeah." Rin deflated, looking down at her hands.

"Who would have known? No one currently in the game?"

She made a face. "Well, Michael would know, but he's busy possessing Baldr Hyland and trying to rule the world. Anyone on the OUROS programming team would be able to interpret this. Dinesh Jagind, Steve - your brother Steve, that is - Nicolas Bostov, Jacob Ratzinger..."

"Right." I sighed. "Well, it scared the shit out of me. I have no idea who could have sent it."

“I don't think it's anything to worry about. My hunch is that it's an auto-generated report of some kind," Rin replied. "There's no admins for the game to send automatic reports to, right? So it might have run into a small error in your locale, fixed it, and tried to send the report to a moderator. When it didn't find one, it sent the report to the player who was in that locale. I know that OUROS has the capability to fix and report on things. That's why the orbital servers were viable... OUROS doesn't need human input to fix itself."

"Huh." I glanced at my left shoulder. Early on in the game, I had glitched through a piece of broken wood in a wrecked airship. At some point, the wood had disappeared and left a triangular black scar on my body, a void where the flesh had never grown back. It was still there, unchanged. "Glitches happen, I guess. But I've had a couple happen to me, and never received anything like this before."

"OUROS is adapting to the lack of Earth contact," Rin said. "Creepy, but it's actually a good sign for us."

"I sure hope so." I reached up to grasp the railing, unhooked my knees, and dropped down onto the bed. "Anyway - how are things going in Litvy? Do you think you'll be able to repair the Warsinger?"

"No." Ebisa spoke up for the first time. She had a rough, gravelly voice, like she gargled whisky and barbed wire for breakfast. "The repairs are beyond our expertise."

"Even with Kanzo's memory stone in her, Ebisa can't make heads or tails of it." Rin reached for her hand, squeezing it. "And neither can I. It's almost... biological."

"It's not. It is a machine," Ebisa said. "But it is a very complex machine, even more anatomically complex than a Mercurion body."

I scooted forward to the edge of the bed and rested my elbows on my knees. "Dammit. It would have been great to have one to deter Baldr. What's the plan for it, then?"

"Well, we're going to study it," Rin said. "And try and figure out how it was operating by itself. We're going to research everything we can about the Warsingers, but there's only a few people who could possibly know anything about their mechanics."

"The Grandmaesters of Zaunt." Ebisa nodded curtly. "The reigning families of the Achto Tlaxican, the Great Houses. They are the only ones who might know how to repair, maintain, and animate these machines. ‘Might’."

"Yeah, and there's a problem with that," Rin added. "The civil war."

I frowned. "What is the civil war on Zaunt all about, anyway?"

The pair of Mercurions looked at each other. Rin turned back to me. "It’s complicated, but, well, the short version is that the country is split into two factions: North Zaunt and South Zaunt. The North is ruled by the Phaedra, who are... how would you describe them?"

"Religious zealots," Ebisa growled. "The Phaedra trace their ancestry back to the Mercurion they are named for, who was widely considered to be the greatest Artificer ever crafted. They worship dragons as their liberators, and despise the Aesari, who created us to fight a war that was won aeons ago. They have a prophecy that the Mercurions will inherit the world when the Drachan return and are defeated once and for all. By contrast, the houses of South Zaunt are secular, descended from Phaedra's estranged wives. They divorced Phaedra after he went mad during the forging of the Caul of Souls and founded their own Houses and lineages. They believe every Mercurion crafted by Phaedra's line is insane and must be exterminated, and that the Caul of Souls must be preserved at any cost. The Phaedrans consider the Houses of the South to be illegitimate juchi."

"Yeah. And they're both fighting for control of the most important resource in Zaunt," Rin said. " Pat’xhi Man’takak. The Cavern of Blossoming Flowers."

"I’m guessing that isn’t the Mercurion botanical gardens?" I arched an eyebrow.

"No. It's a huge well of Seid - mana - near the center of the Zaunt mainland." Rin nodded. "And... now I think of it, it might even be one of the Dragon Gates."

Great. I thought back to my own main world quest - the one I still hadn't accepted - and sighed. "Who's in control of the Cavern right now?"

"No one. The Cavern is the center of Zaunt’s no-man's land." Ebisa gestured with one hand.

"Okay. So, are there any good guys in this fight, or are they both equally shit?"

The assassin shrugged. "The North is a totalitarian cult led by a single figurehead, the sixty-sixth Phaedra, who claims to be continuously reincarnated through his descendants. The South is somewhat more politically liberal, but they have a contempt for human life the north does not. The Phaedra consider themselves saviors of all humans, Meewfolk and Lys. The Southern Houses believe we Mercurions are the pinnacle of sentient life. They see your kind as fodder for the mines, the Caul, and for sangehti'tak."

I groaned, and rubbed my eyes. "So what you're saying is that getting the Warsingers serviced is going to be a nightmare."

Rin let out a nervous giggle. "…Yeah."

"Alright. Well, good to know." I stretched my hands out and grimaced. "Sorry to cut this short, but I have about twenty quests to tag and assign before we fuck off to Dakhdir. When I've got some time, I'll give you a call back. Hope you guys are doing okay in Litvy."

"We are!" Rin's face lit up. "Soma is super into the Warsinger. He's trying to figure out how the engines work, so he doesn't really have any time to be... well... Soma. By the way - Karalti can teleport now, right?"

"Yeah."

"If she brings you here before you guys fly south, I have new gear for Suri!" Rin bounced on her seat, waving her fists. "And... I uhh... I was wondering if there was anything you wanted or needed? We have a lot of resources here, so my crafting skill and EXP are going WAY up..."

"Not unless you can get me a motorcycle," I joked.

"A what?" Ebisa asked.

"I'm kidding. Don't worry about it. We need paved roads before that becomes a thing." I waved her off. "Let me think about it. I don't want to burden you with-"

“Wait.” Rin held a hand up. "You're not burdening me with anything, okay? Inventing stuff is how I advance in this game. If you give me ideas or projects to do, it benefits me as well. Plus, now you're Voivode, you get to allocate all the resources of the province, right? Having you as a patron is an Artificer's dream. Ask me for anything, and if I can make it, I will."

"Oh. No worries, then. I'll have a think about things I could use while Karalti and I are flying," I said. "She and I are working on a mobile combat style, so maybe there's some tech she and I could use for that?"

"I bet there is!" Rin bobbed her head. "Okay, I have to go too! Good luck finding Suri!"

Ebisa chuckled, and looped an arm around Rin's waist as the smaller Mercurion concentrated for a moment, and then the video cut and vanished.

Man. I sure did miss having someone to hug like that. But because I didn’t, I opened the KMS Quests window and tried to distract myself instead.

I couldn't fault Ryuko on their Content Management architecture. We still had a few registered Heroes from the war, and I was easily able to call up their profiles and assess their suitability for taking on quests:

Available Heroes

· Istvan Arshak

· Zlazlo ul’Tiranozavir

· Lazar Skaliz

· Lord Franz Zediwitz

Recruited: 10

Total Available: 5

Unavailable

· Suri Ba’Hadir (In absentia)

· Taethawn the Bleak (Traveling)

· Ur Robert Gehlan (Assigned to Quest: The Wolves of Fall)

· Commander Timofey Lostra (Assigned to Quest: Border Crossing)

· Count Lorenzo Soma (In absentia)

· Vash Dorha (Injured; 50% HP)

Things were looking grim, but now I was Voivode, I could also call in NPC heroes from other counties. When I checked the rosters available in the KMS rather than my Combat Management System, it seemed a little better. Calling on outside help required me to pay for a messenger and wait a few days for the message to be delivered and the hero dispatched to the quest. The quality of the NPCs the county lords would send depended on my level of renown, and there was a chance they would reply to me by asking for a favor, or by issuing me a quest of their own. Given that my Renown with Myszno’s nobles was at the low end of ‘okay’ and – according to my sheet – other nobles would act competitively toward me, them calling in favors was likely.

[You are assigning the following quests: ‘Triage at the Border’, ‘Manticores – In MY Swamp?’; ‘The Whispering Marsh’; ‘Whatever a Man Soweth’, ‘Capture the Fort’, and ‘Where Children Toil’ for a projected cost of 3000 olbia. Is that correct?]

“Yes,” I confirmed.

[Quest dispatches confirmed!]

The last thing I had to do was assign Engineers to survey Karhad’s water system in preparation for The World Beneath. That quest, along with a few others, carried hefty Renown and Build Point rewards. I needed as much of both as I could get. Gold was about to become an issue, but all of it could wait.

I reequipped my armor and sat on the edge of the bed with the Spear across my lap for a while, watching the faint traceries of black and red mana pulsing through the metal like embers. The Spear now had a sense of… gravity. A presence. Rationally, I knew it was just a fancy magic weapon, but I could swear that, as I looked down at it, that it was somehow looking back at me. 

Rutha’s decision to give me the Spear had bought me and her both a lot of hardship. That one action had already changed the world in ways no one could have predicted two months before. It was one thing to play a bunch of games and stories about people getting drawn into world-shattering plots, and quite another to be at the center of one. But as I said to my friend all those years ago, “It is what it is, man.”

I opened my personal quests menu, and pulled up The Second Drachan War.

“Accept quest.”