Slumrat Rising

The dim twilight was no hindrance to Truth- he watched the needle fly towards the wards through the magnifier. It hit the ward… and went straight through. He lost track of it there, but he didn’t see anything bouncing off the flesh of the flower. He bounced out of his spot as soon as the needle vanished, this time running three kilometers away before going to ground. He waited, watching, holding his breath. Every nerve strained.

The trees rustled. Were the birds coming? Or was it the wind? The cries of animals, the chirping insects- was the net closing in? He forced himself to be still and watch. He forced himself to breathe, long and slow. Forcing himself to relax and wait. An hour later, there was still no reaction. Nor an hour after that. He crept closer. The woods were lousy with the surveillance critters, but not many more than there had been this morning. It seemed that the second needle had slipped through unnoticed.

He didn’t collapse on his back and start laughing. He really, really wanted to, but he didn’t. He chose life instead, and evacuated. He had his proof-of-concept. He would fall back up the mountain, settle in for the night, and prepare. Then, tomorrow, he would set about cutting a flower.

________________________________________

Truth stretched as he made his way back into the woods around Happori village. He knew the stiffness was in his head. His muscles, tendons, and fascia were all supple enough to make a contortionist weep with envy. Didn’t matter. After spending the night on the dirt with no blanket, he felt stiff.

He was probably sleeping more than he needed to, physically. That didn’t matter either. He needed the mental rest. He looked up at the cheery sun through the light-dappled, tender leaves of spring. Today would be a good day. He would make sure it was.

He smelled the soft loam, smelled the trees, and the wind as it wound around the mountains. Tasted the spring air, clean and sharp and herbal. Yes. Today would be a good day. He climbed up a tree and picked a spot on that towering flower that didn’t have a lot of surveillance birds around it. He took his time, putting three needles into it.

At five kilometers, the degree of spread was significant, but that was fine too. Precision wasn’t important here. He climbed down again, taking the time to savor the feeling of the bark under his hands and how the strength in his body made moving effortless. Then, it was off to the next location.

It was a thirty-kilometer hike through pathless mountain woods, hiding from surveillance, avoiding traps and patrols, and doing his best to leave no trace. He had to get uncomfortably close to the village to find a decent shooting angle from the downslope side. It still managed to be quietly pleasant. He really had no way to test that this would all work out how he hoped it would but… screw it. He had enjoyed a revelation last night.

It was important to kill Borges. It was. He was clearly a crucial piece of whatever puzzle Starbrite was assembling. Killing him was The Job. On the other hand, the stated reason he was killing Borges was to pull attention and resources away from Harban and the System Astrologica. A goal he could achieve by other means.

That’s all the assassination was- a means. The end was something else entirely. It wasn’t worth killing himself over. It wouldn’t save his siblings. It wouldn’t save Etenesh or Jember. It wouldn’t get Merkovah his dreamed-of revenge. Dying here would be a terrible waste.

The thought was incredibly liberating. He could do his best… within the bounds of whatever he considered reasonably safe. The Job couldn’t demand more of him than that if he didn’t let it. Once he realized that, things snapped into place.

No one person, no matter how blessed, skilled or sneaky, was going to crack in days the fortress Starbrite had spent years building. They were waiting for someone exactly like him. So he would change the rules. He would hit them with something, some things they couldn’t prepare for. And if he got very lucky, he could pick off Borges afterwards.

He listened to the twitter of undead birds in the trees, feeling the wind on his skin. Yeah. It was a good day. He made a full loop around the village and the research station. The station hung in the sky, the vine or root hanging down to the earth below. It was like you were on the bottom of a pond, looking up at the lilly floating on the surface. It was beautiful. It was simply beautiful.

Once he finished the loop, he made his way back towards the village. He popped by Dr. Borges's house just to see if he was home. He was not. Truth didn’t take it to heart. He knew he wasn’t that lucky. Still, he’d more than kick himself if he didn’t at least check.

He found a children’s playhouse in a backyard and managed to shove most of himself into it. It wasn’t very comfortable, but it did provide almost total cover from the endless surveillance. He meditated for forty minutes or so, just to top up a bit.

Figuring there was no time like the present, he went out and got himself a seat on a roof. You could see the research station from anywhere in town, so any house was as good as another.

It came down to jank, Truth had concluded. You take two things that don’t exactly work how you need them to and combine them into something that does what you need it to in a shoddy, inefficient way. Jank was a sign of poor quality, sure, but it was also a way of life. It might be “poor quality,” but it did work, and now you had a tool or functionality you didn’t before. He pulled out his homemade… well, under-a-tree-in-the-woods-made talisman control amulet. If he got this right, the result should be pretty spectacular. He pressed the glass “gem” and waited.

And waited.

And waited.

After five minutes, he had the thing flat on the roof while he looked through the etchings, making sure everything was connected properly. Amazing how often it was something simple like that. It wasn’t that simple. The amulet looked fine. He fished out one of the customized needles he had been shooting into the flower, looking over the incredibly detailed spell tracery on them. They looked right, but clearly, there was something stopping the trigger from reaching the needles. Could it be interference from some built-in defense on the research station? But there shouldn’t be any with what he was trying to do.

His fond feelings about the power of jank flew away, as he desperately wished he had a proper work bench and a stack of technical manuals to work with. He was a maintenance tech, not a damn talisman designer. This wasn’t covered in his vocational classes.

After bashing away at it, he tentatively concluded that it wasn’t working because the needles were too far apart to start the cascade, and he needed a big cluster to get them going. Except he had used most of his customized needles already, going around the damn huge flower. The good news is that heavy needlers held in excess of a thousand rounds per big box magazine, and he had plenty of ammo left. The bad news is that it was still a complete pain in the ass to etch the damn needles. Silently swearing, Truth got to work.

Once he had made a few dozen, he ran a quick test and found no less than ten that were broken. Truth swore even more and fixed them. Two were still broken. He destroyed them carefully. They might not be cursed in the technical sense, but a certified talisman maintenance tech knew the practical side of such things. These were cursed and must be destroyed.

Evening was settling in, and as expected, only a handful of people came down from the research station and made their way back to the village. Truth made a last, quick, trip to check, and no, Borges hadn’t popped home for a bite of dinner. He took a final moment and forced himself to appreciate the sunset. It had been a lovely day, and he should try to hang on to that feeling.

He managed almost three whole seconds of looking at the light show before spinning around and shooting the thirty-odd modified needles into the flower holding up the research station. This close, grouping wasn’t a problem. Just to make sure none of them hit each other, he put them all in a roughly one square meter area. Should be plenty. And if it wasn’t? Well, back to the damn, thrice-cursed drawing board.

Some part of this must be working, the needles were getting through the wards and not triggering the alarms. Briefly praying to the God Etenesh thought he was, he squeezed the activation amulet again.

There was a conspicuous lack of anything happening again. He waited for it. Reminded himself that these things took time. It would be weird if anything happened immediately.

A blizzard of birds took off from their roosts on the vine and started swirling around the flower. Truth smiled, then jumped to the edge of the roof, reached under, and ripped out the recording talisman. He needed proof. A quick factory reset later, he set the talisman up on the ridgeline, aimed at the sky-lily. Just in time, too.

A heartbeat later, swarms of heavy needles smashed down into the village west of the base. Some unspelled, most coated in acid, or electricity, or heated to a thousand degrees. Sprays of acid started washing down the torn-open homes and shops as garbled alarms sounded and bright lights stabbed down. Then the needles opened up on the south side, wards snapping up and out, then up again. The air crackled and seethed as the defenses were created and demolished within seconds.

Golems fell out of hidden hatches in the base of the flower. Truth hadn’t spotted them at all. Dozens of them, hundreds of them, pouring down like pollen. Security teams on flying platforms came rushing out too- must be the rapid response squad.

There was a heavy thump. Truth couldn’t see what it was from here, but it must have been important. There were so many wards popping up and vanishing it looked like a rainbow caught in a hurricane. The random magic discharges were playing hell with all the bound spirits, Truth knew. To say nothing about what he had actually done.

One of the petals was strobing magenta. He had no idea what that was about.

It was the power of jank. Truth nodded sagely to himself as billions of wen in precision-engineered, professionally manufactured and installed magical technology tore itself apart. You took things that kind of worked, mashed ‘em together, and blew shit up. It wasn’t just him that did it, either. People spent entire careers making the best jank they could.

Take, for example, the Siphios Office of Temple Security. Using magic, using cosmic rays, to recreate the anti-magic of the anti-theists? That was the dumbest thing he had ever heard, and the fact that it basically worked was a continuous wonder to him.

Or the fact that needler rounds were designed to be used with spells cast on them. They held onto magic like nobody’s business and were childishly easy to enchant if you had good eyes and a steady hand for the carving. And a ton of patience.

Or that Incisive had absolutely no problem imprinting needles with the effect of being sharp and stealthy. The invisible bite who’s poison isn’t felt until far too late. Sure, the spell wasn’t intended to work like that… probably… but it could be made to work like that.

As petals started dripping streams of fire onto the base below, Truth could only regret that he didn’t understand Cup and Knife well enough to add it into the mix. It sounded like an evacuation alarm had gone off. Sensible. Truth lay flat on the roof and settled in with the heavy needler. He was only a bit more than a kilometer away. Shooting up was always harder than shooting down, but he reckoned he could manage. Didn’t have to make the head go Pop if the magic cloud the target was standing on suddenly disappeared for “no reason.”

Oh, was the flower starting to tilt over? Not long until it fell, then. Truth felt the grin stretching across his face.

“Squeak, Squeak motherfuckers. Run for me.”

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