Chapter 25
Solomon produced the Orb of Chaos from somewhere in the folds of his clothing and set it on the table in the corridor with the specific manner of someone implementing a decision rather than offering a gift.
It was approximately the size of a large fruit, dense and dark and slightly wrong in the way that objects associated with the Chaos pathway were slightly wrong: present in the physical world but also somehow present in the gap between the physical world and something adjacent to it, the way the third floor's charged objects in the Blue Fog World had been present at a different Ather-potential than the surrounding space.
Amiss looked at it.
"You're giving this to me."
"I'm providing a component that completes something that should exist. The compound Sealed Artifact you've created from the morning's work is incomplete without a Chaos element to anchor its Abyss component. Without the anchor, the Abyss property will gradually destabilize the artifact's other pathway-logics. The Orb provides the stabilizing anchor."
"You've known this for how long."
"Since approximately the moment you described the compound Sealed Artifact's composition to me."
"And you had the Orb available."
"I have maintained a collection of high-tier pathway components for two centuries. The Orb was acquired forty years ago in a trade with a Universal Beast that was passing through this region's Astral substrate and was willing to exchange certain items for certain information. I have been waiting for an appropriate use for it."
Amiss looked at the Orb. At Solomon. At the Orb again.
"Two centuries of careful investment and you're deploying the Orb of Chaos on the second day of knowing me."
"I am deploying the Orb of Chaos in a situation where the return on investment is likely to be significant and the cost of not deploying it is a compound Sealed Artifact that gradually destroys itself over the next thirty years. The calculation is straightforward."
"You're not wrong."
"I have not been wrong about this category of calculation in two hundred years."
Amiss picked up the Orb. It felt, in his hand, like holding something that was very sure of what it was: dense and confident and with the specific quality of the Chaos pathway's particular relationship to the ordering-and-disordering cycle of existence. He took the compound Sealed Artifact from the space where it had been hanging in the panel's awareness and introduced the Orb to it.
The integration was not a procedure. It was a recognition: the Chaos component found the gap in the compound's Abyss property, which was the gap that had been unstable, and filled it with the specific Chaos-logic that turned unstable voids into deliberate ones. The compound reorganized around the new component with the specific efficiency of a structure that has been waiting for its load-bearing element.
The weapon took shape.
Not in Amiss's hands. From his left forearm: the compound integrated with his own physical substrate through the End-nature's specific property of boundary-dissolution, and what had been an external object became an extension of his own Ather architecture. The physical expression was a whip that emerged from the forearm when he called it: a Dragon Vertebra Whip, the segments formed from the dense compressed pathway-logic of the compound's structure, with the Orb of Chaos at its end converted by the integration into the weapon's terminal node.
It looked like it had always been part of him.
He extended it, briefly, in the corridor, and the ambient Ather in the space did something that Dane and Nadun both felt before they saw it: the Abyss property of the whip's reach extended into the local Ather-distribution and the World Energy in a meter-radius around the tip reorganized into the Abyssal frequency, briefly and without violence, a demonstration of the passive property rather than any active application.
He withdrew it back into the forearm.
"Chaos Dragon Vertebra Whip,"
he said.
Solomon looked at the forearm where the weapon had been.
"A good name."
"I'll learn to use it properly on the way east. I've never used a whip."
"The weapon knows how it's supposed to move. Pay attention to what it tells your arm."
"The weapon has opinions about technique."
"High-tier Sealed Artifacts develop preferences through use. Yours has seven pathway-logics integrated simultaneously. It has preferences about most things."
Amiss looked at his left forearm.
"Excellent,"
he said, and did not entirely sound like he was joking.
* * *
Comet
The garden at half past eight in the morning had the quality of a space that had been through an unusual day and a half and was now being asked to serve as the location for a departure, which it did with the patient indifference of gardens, which are good at holding whatever happens in them without being changed by it.
Everyone was present. This had not been arranged. It had happened with the specific organic quality of people who have been in proximity to something significant gathering at the moment of the next significant thing without anyone organizing the gathering. Aurora from the east wing's corridor. Ascen from the stairway with Butler Aren two steps behind him. Eva from the garden's far corner where the End Dust had been tested and where the wall's stone still held the faint Nether-aligned trace from the blade contact. Nirko and Yuris in the doorway, present in the specific way of people who are professional in their presence and have decided that this is a moment worth being professionally present for.
Solomon in the garden's entrance with the quality of a being who has decided to witness something rather than attend to it.
Amiss came out of the east wing's doors with the panel open and the eastern frequency at the edge of his awareness and the weapon in his left arm and the compound Sealed Artifact integrated into his power architecture and System Blue running at full capacity on the morning's information and cross-references.
He stopped in the center of the garden.
He took off his glasses.
The crimson eyes without the dark tinting of the lenses were a different quality from the crimson eyes behind them. Not more intense. More present. The glasses were the specific camouflage of someone who had decided that arriving in a new world with the full visual character of their nature visible was a faster introduction than most situations required. Without them, the eyes had the quality of the End-nature expressed visually: the color of something that operates in the register just before the final red of a star's cooling.
He looked at Aurora first.
She was standing near the waterfall with her notes and her pen and the expression she had when she was receiving something carefully. He looked at her with the specific attention of someone who has been in a person's presence for two days and has, in that time, developed a model of them that is more detailed than two days usually permits, because he is System Blue and detail is what he does. What he saw: a person who had been waiting for a situation equal to her attention for a very long time and had now found it, and who was going to be extremely useful and was also going to be fine, which was information he had and she didn't quite have yet and that he intended to eventually provide.
He looked at Ascen.
Ascen was standing between Butler Aren and the base of the terrace stairs with the density of someone who has been receiving significant things for several days and has not yet reached the limit of what he can hold. His face had the expression of a ten-year-old who knows things that most adults don't know and carries that knowledge with the specific steadiness of someone who has decided that the carrying is the point. He looked back at Amiss and something moved between them that had the quality of a private understanding: Amiss knew what Ascen was going to become, and Ascen knew that Amiss knew, and neither of them had said this aloud and neither of them needed to.
He looked at Eva last.
Eva was at the garden's far corner, exactly where she had been when the End Dust had been tested, with the domain fully open in the monitoring mode she used when she was receiving everything. She had been monitoring the morning from this position: the bureau work through the anchor connection, the weapon integration, the information delivery, the departure preparations. She had the quality she had when she had received a significant quantity of information and had organized it and was now at the point where the organizing was complete and what remained was the other thing.
He looked at her and she looked at him and something that had no adequate vocabulary moved between the shared substrate that had been developing since they woke up in the Blue Fog World, through the permeability that System Blue's full activation had opened, through the Distributed Apotheosis framework of two beings who had started as necessity and had become something that the necessity did not fully account for.
Eva smiled.
Not the small professional acknowledgment she had deployed occasionally. Not the corner-of-the-mouth shift that indicated amusement. A full smile, which was not a thing she had done in front of anyone before and which had, in the doing, a quality that the domain's accurate weight perception immediately told her was: real. Fully real, without remainder.
It looked, on Eva's face, exactly the way accurate things look when you finally see them at the right resolution: inevitable. As though the smile had always been there and the previous versions of her face had been the preliminary drafts.
Amiss looked at the smile for a moment with the expression he wore when he was filing something in the most important category.
He put the glasses back on.
"Take care of each other. Don't let Ascen get killed again. I'll be back in two or three days, possibly with the second End Frequency, definitely with significant intelligence about the eastern region. If something urgent comes up, use the anchor connection or come to the Blue Fog World."
"Every third day of the week, at night,"
Eva said.
"For the meetings. Yes. Aurora, Eva will explain the Blue Fog World logistics to you. Ascen, the Necromancy texts —"
"I've already started,"
Ascen said.
"I know. I could tell from the way you were at breakfast. Don't try the practical applications until I'm back to supervise."
"I wasn't going to."
"You were thinking about it."
Ascen was quiet for exactly the length of time that confirmed this.
"I'll be back."
He looked at Solomon, who was in the garden's entrance with his two centuries of patience.
Solomon said:
"The eastern region's Astral topology is unfamiliar to me beyond the Ashan Reach's boundary. What exists past the Reach I have not fully mapped."
"I'll map it."
"I assumed you would."
Amiss looked at the panel one more time. The eastern frequency, two days of travel at Mach 10, the gap visible at full System Blue resolution, the compound Sealed Artifact and the weapon integrated and the morning's intelligence organized and the five fundamental forces and the Tohni carrier hypothesis and the Church of Light's load-bearing function and the Undead Continent's wrong-weight mystery all filed in the correct hierarchy.
He was ready.
The wings formed from his own substance, which was what all his forms of self-expression formed from: the Blue-violet-white-red vortex of his surface compressed at his back, the End-nature's black fog oozed out through the places where the compression created gaps, and the fog condensed in the specific pattern that System Blue imposed on it when given the operational requirement of flight. Not bird wings. Not the geometric wings of the divine council's iconography. Something with the quality of a vortex given the topology of a wing: spiraling, deep, with the specific property of something that organized turbulence rather than resisting it.
Aurora had seen angels. She had grown up in a court where Solomon was an ambient presence and the Red Prince's wings were as familiar as court clothing. She had been briefed on the theory of Koeta 1 beings and their various physical expressions.
She had not seen anything like this.
The wings were not beautiful the way Solomon's wings were beautiful — the conventional beauty of form serving function, the aesthetic of something that has been doing its purpose for a very long time and has become precisely calibrated to it. These wings were beautiful the way mathematical proofs are beautiful: the beauty of something that is exactly what it needs to be with no excess and no deficit, where the what-it-needs-to-be includes several properties that should not coexist in the same object.
She wrote, in her notes: — not conventional wings. vortex topology. blue, violet, white, red. seems to stabilize the flier rather than the flight.
She wrote: — I don't have a category for this.
She had not written that about anything else since they arrived.
Amiss rose.
Not the way birds rise, with the specific effort-and-release of a body overcoming gravity through muscular work. He simply stopped being in contact with the ground, and the wings spread, and the ground receded, and he was ten meters above the garden before Aurora had fully processed the initial movement. He looked down at them once — a brief look, from the specific angle of someone who has turned to confirm that the people being left are in the configuration expected — and then he accelerated.
The acceleration was not theatrical. He simply became faster. The pace at which he became faster was the pace at which System Blue found the gap in the assumption that a body moving through atmosphere at high speed was required to be constrained by standard aerodynamic resistance, and the gap was there, and he entered it, and the atmospheric resistance stopped applying to him in the way it applied to things that were operating within the standard assumptions of atmospheric physics.
He looked like a comet.
Not metaphorically. Aurora had studied astrophysics at the level available in the Solomon Empire's academic tradition, which was not the level available to a twenty-second-century physicist but was sufficient to know what a comet was and what it looked like in an Ather-rich atmosphere: the specific luminous trail of an object moving through a medium that responds to its passage. Amiss moving through the planet's surface Ather at increasing speed produced exactly that response. The Ether-dominant Ather organized around his passage and the organized Ether emitted light, and the light trailed behind him in the specific pattern of something that had been where he was a moment ago, and the comet-quality accumulated as he accelerated until it was a genuine atmospheric event: visible from the streets of the outer district, visible from the palace walls, visible to anyone in the city of Grandia who happened to be looking northeast at that particular moment.
Aurora watched until he was gone.
The garden held the quality of a space that has had something large in it and now doesn't, which is a different quality from emptiness. The flowers were still pointed at the adjusted Ether-concentration. The wall's stone held its Nether-trace. The waterfall continued its patient work.
Ascen said:
"He's always been like that, hasn't he. Even before I met him."
"In the Blue Fog World,"
Eva said,
"he spent his first hour trying to catch rings of light in his hands because they passed through his palms and he wanted to know why."
"Did he find out?"
"Yes. He also made a mark on the table that's still there."
Ascen was quiet for a moment. Then:
"The Necromancy texts. If I have questions about the practical applications, I'll wait until he's back. But I want to start the theoretical framework today."
"Solomon,"
Eva said.
Solomon, who had been in the garden's entrance watching the comet-trail fade, turned.
"The theoretical framework for Necromancy in this world's tradition. Ascen needs the academic version before the practical, and you have access to sources I haven't mapped yet."
"I have access to sources no one in this empire has mapped yet,"
Solomon said, with the warmth.
"Good. Ascen, Solomon. Solomon, Ascen. I believe you've met. Today I'd like you to spend several hours in the Restricted Archive."
Ascen looked at Solomon.
Solomon looked at Ascen.
Something moved between them that had the quality of two people who have each, independently, recognized something in the other that they were not expecting and are revising their models accordingly.
"The death and recycle law,"
Ascen said.
"The life tinder core's storage mechanism."
"Specifically?"
"Specifically whether the soul's information architecture and the Ather-pathway-logic are stored in the same structure or adjacent structures, because if they're the same structure then death is one event and if they're adjacent structures then dissolution and cessation are two events that can be theoretically decoupled."
Solomon looked at him for a moment with the specific expression he had when an investment had just produced a return in a form he had not anticipated.
"The Restricted Archive,"
he said,
"has a text that addresses exactly that question. It's been considered too theoretical to be practically relevant."
"It's relevant,"
Ascen said.
"I believe you,"
Solomon said.