Slumrat Rising

It was an oddly quiet moment. The PMC soldiers were sharp and Level Three. The recording talismans, plural, covering the waiting room were pumping out Level Four Power. The Blessing of the Silent Forest could handle it. He wasn’t leaking a speck of energy, and besides. If something did pierce his shroud of unnoticibility, he had a perfect identity lined up.

Sergeant Truth Medici, Starbrite PMC, seconded from Harban. Still waiting on that back pay.

The mercenaries were not-quite-lounging. Knowing they were being watched kept them from being too casual. Even so, there was a limit to how performatively tense they were willing to be for hours a day when buried in an armored bunker inside a volcano.

Sharon, the merc with a hot date jumped to her feet grinning as the doors to the Prototype Lab opened. Truth knew he had a split second to dive through the door and had exploded into motion the instant it had started to swing open. He was in the air before he got a look at the fellow’s face. As a result, he looked like an outraged leopard as he flew through the doorway.

The guy, Mr. Hot Date, Mr. “He won’t walk right ever again, and will get weird around oranges,” was average. Totally meh. Not out of shape, but not really in shape. Not handsome, not ugly. Just meh. And yet, Starbrite had told Truth he was so hideous, women recoiled at the sight of him.

Feeling distinctly bloody minded, Truth landed in the Prototype Lab on all fours. And froze there. Incisive was giving him a gentle reminder. This was a building with High Levels in it. High Levels stationed in strategic locations. The Prototype Lab might just be such a strategic location. Given all the fixed defenses outside.

The room was very long, a hundred meters or so, filled with long black-stone-topped work tables. The back wall was not lit, but the rest of the room was washed in blinding light from big overhead lighting arrays. In the center of the front quarter of the room was an oblong box, about three meters long, two meters across and a meter and a half high.

He hadn’t the faintest clue what he was looking at. Truth took a lot of pleasure in his talisman maintenance skills, but they were never intended for high-magic applications. Carriages, building maintenance, city maintenance, street lights, locks, climate control, scry devices, that was his area of skill. The daily necessities of people and cities.

The long box was… not that.

It appeared to be made out of, or at least covered by, a dark gold material. His first guess was Orichalcum, but if that’s what it was, then it was plated and a bare micron thick. There probably wasn’t that much Orichalcum in the world. Which did give rise to the question of what could possibly be underneath that would justify coating it in one of the world’s most expensive metals.

The answer appeared to be talismans. And amulets. And cartouches, carved gems, implanted fetishes, spell formations, spell restrictions, astrological alignment elements inscribed for purposes unknown, all combined in ways he had never seen before. There were even pictures on it. Or one big picture with lots of little elements. The longer he looked at it, the less he understood.

There were logics to talisman design. Not “a” logic but “logics.” It all depended on what you were trying to do, and different manufacturers had different ways of going about it. A lot of companies ripped of Starbrite’s designs, for better or worse. Mostly just changing things up enough to keep Legal happy. This only kind of seemed to follow any of the logics he understood.

Each talisman made a degree of sense, even if he didn’t know what it did. It was just that, when you stacked a few thousand systems on top of each other, trying to figure out what they did while crouched on all fours on the polished concrete floor is a bit of a challenge. And when he squinted and let his eyes go a little burry, it really did look like a kid’s idea of a grownup lying on their back.

Truth was very curious to see what it looked like from the top. The longer he looked at it, the more the word “coffin” came to mind. Then, from some ancient depth, the word “sarcophagus.”

The technicians and mages around the box weren’t helping him understand either. They were discussing energy ratios and alignments and components he just had no concept of. Worse, they were using shorthand and slang-

“Swap Korb in seven. Knapp, Knapp, Knapp… and swap.”

“We got any number threes ready?”

“Bucket on the left has the threes. What about galz?”

“Mercury at twenty five, sulfur at sixty.”

“Who’s on Alkaliad? Melchior is up ten and needs to come down.”

There was no fuss, no chaos, no horseplay here. The reason was likely the old lady sitting on a comfortable cushion on a raised dais overseeing the construction. Cultivating, apparently, but Truth didn’t believe for a second that she wasn’t aware of everything going on below.

The lady on the dais didn’t really remind Truth of Merkovah. With a few exceptions, Merkovah seemed almost indifferent to status. He would dress casually when he was with his students. He slouched in his office, and tended to flop bonelessly as the bound demon steered his hideous carriage through traffic. Not the lady on the dias. There was nothing casual about her. You certainly couldn’t imagine surviving a breach in etiquette.

Thin face, high cheekbones, high arched eyebrows under straight black hair that flowed to the small of her back and held in place with golden pins. Dressed in a white silk shirt and flowy linen pants that reassured those sneaking glances that a certain kind of simple costs far more than the viewer would ever earn. Beautiful, though her beauty was the product of so much artifice she seemed almost doll-like. A mannequin for a private clothier, one who dealt strictly with those in the three comma club.

If you find this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the infringement.

The metaphor grew on Truth. She was a strong Seven, or even an Eight. She might even be one of the legendary C-Suite. He was looking at a humanoid appendage of the System Astrologica itself. Whoever she was, whatever thought of her own once lived in her, had been replaced by the System. No direct puppeting required, she merely thought as it wished her to think. A century or more of constant conditioning for her soul would have seen to that.

There was a soft, piney smell in the room. A little spicy, a touch sweet, it reminded him of all the pine and fir forests he had been running through. He would bet it was coming from her. The rest of the room smelled like ozone and active magical technology. The snap and crackle of cosmic energy through an almost maniacal nest of components.

Now. How to move around and investigate this… actually very large room. There were other work stations scattered on the other side of the dias. As he craned his neck, he saw gantries criss-crossing the space. Was… this room not actually directly under the other floors? Or were floors three and four shortened horizontally to make room for the vertical space of the Prototype lab? That was a very tall ceiling, serving no obvious purpose.

Maybe that was the answer- anything below the dias would be immediately in the Senior’s eyes. But above her? What would dare to look down on her? Truth might have smiled in other circumstances. The hardest slumrat in the world slowly creeped for the shadows at the edge of the wall, and got to climbing.

Strong fingers found little nooks to dig into. Quiet flexes of back and arms saw a strong body shoot upwards in perfect silence. Catch, go, throw, and catch again. Up and up the metal scaffolding. There were cranes up here, crossing the workspace below. Could the chest actually be Orichalcum? You certainly wouldn’t move it without a crane. One bolted into kilometers of basalt would be sensible. The magical power required to lift it would be outrageous.

Up on the gantry now, with a view of the whole lab. Longer than some sports fields, and about as wide across. The chest had pride of place near the entrance, but there was an entire production facility in here, with hooded alchemist furnaces burning next to the searing lights over a gem carver’s table. Everywhere, in beautiful arrays were the tiny tools the very best talisman designers got to use. A production facility for the best in the world.

Truth could name each of those tools, tell you roughly how they were used, but had never touched one. Those were for talisman designers. For the builders and makers of things. He was only ever going to be trusted with maintaining things. Simple things. If he worked very hard and proved himself. It was the very highest a rat could climb, according to his highschool.

I’m looking down on you, you bastards. I’m looking down at you all, and you don’t even know why or how. Call me a fool. Call me an idiot. But I’m still climbing. Looking at the sky and moving up. And you? You don’t even know you’re in a well.

The chest was… yes it was a sarcophagus, or it looked like one at any rate. The magical technology built into it drew a human form. Rough, stylized, but filled with subtle meaning. A man, Truth saw. Long beard, white hair, deep eyes. Haunted eyes, perhaps, or eyes that had seen many, many things. A broad forehead that remembered too much. Thin. Painfully thin. The rich robes colored with precious gems carved into talismans and spell components seemed to drape over bird bones. Thin sticks of fingers grew on the slender branches of the figure’s arms.

Maybe it was the color, the dark gold of the Orichalcum, but the figure looked sick. There was a wariness in those eyes too. Truth knew that look. It’s how people got when they were hit a lot and weren’t allowed to hit back. Not unable. Not allowed. Truth had seen that look in the mirror often enough.

He didn’t look at the picture on the box for very long. For some reason, that seemed dangerous. For roughly the same reason he didn’t look too long at the senior sitting on the dias. An alert person, in Truth’s experience, could feel the weight of another’s eyes on them. Nobody got to be a high level by being nice, Starbrite support or not. The senior would feel his attention if he let it linger. And he had an unpleasant feeling that, whoever was depicted on the box, they could do the same.

He crept along the scaffolding, looking down on the laboratory. They were fabricating components for the chest, and nothing else. Research happened elsewhere. This was a pure production facility. He kept coming back to the height of the place. Why? It’s not like there was a big door to the exterior. He glared at the ceiling, not far from him here. Nothing that suggested it wasn’t solid rock. Rock with, likely, lava burning at a thousand degrees or more on the other side of it.

So why was it so damn tall in here?

As he made his way towards the back wall, he noticed there were fewer and fewer technicians at work. The ones that were here all seemed to face the front of the room, looking towards that senior sitting near the door.

There was a protrusion on the black wall. A semi-circle extended into the room three meters deep. It was covered in lead curse tablets. Truth could tell what they were from tens of meters away. The repression and viciousness of the spells made his skin crawl. He could only imagine what it was doing to the people who worked near them. The protrusion ran all the way up to the ceiling, winding into a cube of four meters on a side. Each side, top and bottom included, was shingled in even more curse tablets.

Just looking at the thing felt disgusting. Whatever was under the curse tablets was something vile, something that needed to be not just sealed, but broken. Too busy hurting to cause mischief. Truth rated Merkovah’s “Macerating Juicer” enchantment as more elegant, but for concentrated malice, it wasn’t a patch on this monumental atrocity.

It also didn’t make a lick of sense. It was the only thing tall enough to justify the high ceiling, and it clearly didn’t exist under the mountain naturally. The lead would melt for one thing. No, this was all purpose built. Someone designed the base, designed this room and then installed this pillar of concentrated misery. For some reason. He wasn’t going to figure it out from next to the wall. There was a cross-room gantry. He crawled out over it.

As he moved, he noticed the lead tablets at the front of the cube seemed to shiver now and again. Too slow for breathing, but they came very regularly. The soft lead muffled the clattering. Over and over. Slow and very steady.

He got to the middle of the cross beam and looked over. From this angle, the curses looked like the scales of a serpent, extending down from the box and covering its long body. The box, from the front… looked like a face. A young lady’s face. The curses on the tablet seemed to shimmer and blur- the faces’ eyes blinked.

*Looking very fit for a dead man, Sergeant Medici. It seems you’ve been, heh, well, these last few years.*

Visit and read more novel to help us update chapter quickly. Thank you so much!