So there we were. A band of warriors, a few thousand strong, isolated on a vast and inhospitable plain, hundreds of miles from any possible allies. We had walked directly into the territory of a rival group, hoping that what guns and blades we had would be enough to frighten them into a compromise. Except, apparently, we had severely underestimated the opposition, because they not only had access to cavalry, but they had us fully surrounded.
I’d been in this situation before. The last time had been on the high plateaus of Urcos. Funnily enough, the enemy in that case had been the exact same force on whose side I now found myself, the personal band of Ikamja the Unifier, flush with Cassandran equipment as they assaulted the Zrimash treaty grounds. I didn’t have the time to ponder the irony, though, because I was already moving.
Step one was to learn what we were up against, which meant finding the high ground, so that my short human body could get its eye-line above all of the stonewose. I rushed away from the front lines, remembering that one of the huge bessel-drawn wagons was sitting somewhere back there. It must have been only a few seconds before I reached the side of the wagon and started climbing, though it felt like much longer. Several more seconds and I was halfway up the side, high enough that I could hold myself up with one arm, swing around, and discover how completely outmatched we were.
Being able to completely surround a foe was always nice, tactically, but it didn’t necessarily grant the upper hand, especially if said foe is able to form up. If every side of the formation is facing outward, then a thin stream of enemies, even coming in from every side at once, would still just bounce off. That wasn’t what we were dealing with. We were dealing with an entire army. Trying to count them was totally pointless, especially seeing as each individual warrior was mounted on falt-back, but there were almost definitely more of them then there were of us. Thousands of mounted warriors, Knights of the Great Desolation, formed a single living swarm that threatened to totally engulf us in a swirling vortex of thundering noise and shining armor.
Even though the battle had barely begun, violence was already breaking out. Many of the attackers were armed with bows, and their arrows thudded down into the midst of the defensive line even as a few of Ikamja’s less-disciplined soldiers fired back with their clockwork rifles. Those rifles were the only chance we had of edging out a victory, but even then I didn’t feel good about our odds.
I leapt off of the wagon, rushing to communicate as such to Ikamja. To her credit, she listened, apparently taking my advice into consideration. “They are trying to lure us to break formation,” she said. “Make us chase them into the rocks so they can cut us down. Which means we have a sliver of opportunity to call for a parley.”
“Exactly,” I said. “Would you mind if I stick to your side during that? If the worst comes to worst, I could probably wipe out the opposing leadership before they have a chance to run.”
Ikamja chuckled darkly. “Yes, of course. Feel free to accompany me.”
So I, along with Ikamja and a carefully selected half-dozen of Ikamja’s most trusted bodyguards, broke free from the main formation. As a show of peaceful intentions, Ikamja left behind her sword-spear, and I my karth. None of us carried anything deadlier than a short sword. Ikamja herself also had a long strip of pale blue silk wrapped around her torso, apparently a sign of peace.
For a couple of minutes, I really thought it wasn’t going to work. We stood out on the field, the falt-riders circling around us in a pell-mell of threatened violence; and yet, none of them attacked us, not with bow and not with blade. All at once, a call started to pass through the enemy line, in a language I didn’t speak, but which clearly meant retreat. The riders formed into a loose ring, keeping us contained but out of measure, while a negotiating party came forward.
The negotiating party consisted of about five stonewose, all riding on falt-back. Whereas most of the others, the warriors, were armored in iron scales, these ones were bedecked in the most elaborate outfits possible. Stonewose, being far paler than humans by nature, don’t handle sun exposure well; while Ikamja and her folk had adapted via the use of large hats, the native people of the Desolation chose to shroud themselves in elaborate layers of cloth, loose wrappings covering the entire body aside from the hands and face. Through the heavy fabric hood, the commander of the enemy force examined us with keen, narrow eyes. That she was the leader was obvious by the way her robes were bedecked in threads of gold.
She raised her hand in a sort of casual salute, then greeted us in a language that neither I nor Ikamja understood. Ikamja replied in her own language, and was again met with incomprehension. The enemy leader greeted us again in a different language, and the pattern repeated, both parties trying out every tongue they knew in hopes of finding a common ground. After several rounds of this, though, the woman in the golden robes said something I didn’t expect.
“I fail to see why you would have any reason to know this language, but perhaps…”
“I could ask the same question of you,” I said immediately, in the same tongue. It was called Old Mahasha, and it was something of an enigma. The other five languages Tersine had programmed into me, I somewhat knew the origins of, and that they were widely-spoken in some region of Imbrium or another. Mahasha, I knew the name of, and nothing else.
The woman with the gold sewn into her robes hadn’t paid me much attention, but suddenly her eyes saw nobody else. A second later, they widened even further. “A human, and one who speaks the holy tongue? Whoever you may be, intruder, you keep interesting company.”
Ikamja turned to me. “You understand her words?”
I nodded and in Rochathan replied, “She says it’s the holy tongue. Probably an ecclesiastical language, then.”
“And how do you speak that?”
“Alraune stuff,” I said. “I’ll translate as best as I can, then.”
Ikamja argued the point briefly, but she didn’t really have an alternative. Either I was going to translate, or there wasn’t going to be a dialogue at all. I turned back to the gold-robed rider and, in the spirit of cooperation, told her the gist of the conversation Ikamja and I had had.
“My name is Emma Marcus Farrier. I am an equal and ally of Ikamja the Unifier, the only one to have ever beaten her in the field of combat; and that is no easy feat when she is the one who rules all stonewose between your borders and the high plateau of Urcos.”
She raised an eyebrow. “You may know me as Tarvaka, Queen of the Final City, She Who Brings Meat And Rain, Master of Ten Thousand Warriors. Powerful and skilled though you may be, I assure you: your barbarian might will do you no avail here.”
The Final City. Primary Control was too far away for it to be related. And yet there was something about it that made me wonder.
I cleared my throat. “Needless to say, Ikamja and I do not wish for conflict any more than you do. We merely pass through your kingdom on the path to a further goal, and wish to be allowed to make our way in peace.”
“And what goal would that be, if not conquest? Why do you come armed, and in such numbers?”
I consulted with Ikamja for a moment, then continued, “For the very reason that, were we weak enough you could enslave us without risk, we would not be speaking. But I assure you, we have no quarrel with you. Our goal here is resolutely and merely to find Primary Control.”
There was a pause. Tarvaka turned to one side, then the other, briefly conversing with her retainers. “We have no knowledge of such a place.”
I sighed. “It is an old ruin of… those who came before.” Mahasha had no equivalent word to refer to the Forebearers. “An enemy of mine, and of Ikamja’s, travels to that place, and we seek her destruction. Have you, perhaps, seen an intrusion of humans into your domain lately?”
“There was a great machine seen on the border of my realm, some tens of days ago. That may be what you refer to. No matter.” Tarvaka folded her arms, squinting first at me, then at Ikamja, and then at the assembled army behind us. “Come with me, to the heart of my power. Be my guest in my city, provide proof of good intent, and I shall allow you safe passage.”
“A city?” I said, repeating Ikamja’s question. “You rule from a city? How? You are one of the Accursed, are you not?”
That got a proper grin out of Tarvaka. “As remarkable as it may be to you barbarians of the human domain, yes. But I am not here to write poetry extolling my virtue, I came here to rid my realm of a threat. Do you agree to the deal, or not?”
I turned to Ikamja and relaid the rest of the conversation to her, adding, “She’s close enough. Unless she’s a better warrior than you by a substantial margin, and I sincerely doubt it, I could probably get on the back of that falt and shank her before she turns around. “
Ikamja shook her head. “She is not like me. An army of this size is not held together by charisma alone. You said she called herself a queen?”
“Yes.”
“I believe that. And if she is a queen, then her death will stop nothing, but drive her army into an avenging frenzy. We could perhaps hold her for ransom, but… no. No.”
“We accept,” I said.
Tarvaka bowed, Ikamja returned it, and the next stage of preparations began. There was a brief kerfuffle about whether they were going to need to swear some kind of official, proper oath, before it was concluded that Ikamja’s word meant more than anything. Tarvaka returned to her army, and they retreated to a distance while Ikamja’s people slowly relaxed out of their defensive stance. When I was finally forced to return to Earth ten hours later, both groups of stonewose were settling down for the night, with the understanding that they would be heading off toward the Final City in the morning.
Just because we had made a deal didn’t mean that Tarvaka and her knights were going to stop being paranoid about potential betrayal. There was nothing nearly as tense as the initial almost-battle—indeed, the knights made sure to keep a distance of at least three-quarters of a mile—but it was obvious we were being kept contained. There were three columns of cavalry, one in front of us leading the way and one on each flank, making sure that we didn’t go anywhere other than where they wanted us to be going.
It was only two and a half days’ travel from where we encountered the Tarvaka before we got to the Final City itself. That the arrival itself happened when I was awake on Selene, instead of me just waking up in that ancient structure, was one of the few pieces of good luck I experienced during that time in my life.
The Final City, Tarvaka called it. Obviously inaccurate on its face, but the fact that it was called that raised many, many questions. Did Tarvaka simply not know about the others, assuming that the entire world outside was like the Desolation? Or did her people not consider the settlements of humanity to be cities for some reason? Or did she mean the Final City of the stonewose, of her people. But that, itself, raised yet more questions, questions about where the stonewose had come from and what had brought them to this state. Some called them the Accursed, which implied that there had been a time before the curse, after all.
Our first sightings of the Final City came the night before our arrival, though nobody realized what we were seeing until the next morning. The city’s towers were high enough to be seen for miles around, as strange points on the horizon at first, then steadily growing and growing. In the last hour of approach, the vague shapes began to resolve themselves into something explicable. The Final City was not a city of wood, or even one of stone. It was a city of shining, brilliant steel.
Humans built their cities atop the ancient, impervious spires of the Forebearers. So why not stonewose?
There were differences, of course. Humans liked to keep things divided, hollowing out the spires for industrial and bureaucratic uses and living mostly around the outskirts in buildings of brick and wrought iron. The Final City couldn’t do that, partially for lack of the sorts of transport infrastructure that humans had access to, and partially because it was fully ringed by a high wall of locally-quarried brown sandstone.
The gates were immense, controlled by an elaborate system of hydraulics and pulleys, and even though they were wide enough to admit entire crowds, it still took a solid fraction of an hour for the entire caravan to pile in behind myself and Ikamja. I didn’t mind, considering what it gave me a chance to look at.
Rapidly, all my questions about the practicality of the Final City were answered. For one thing, though Tarvaka and all of her warriors were stonewose, it became quite obvious that the bulk of the city’s three-quarters of a million inhabitants were human. Every porter who crossed our path, every worker tending the gardens, and most of the craftswomen hawking their wares along the sides of the streets were human; the soldiers and overseers were all stonewose. The stonewose ruled, and the humans worked.
Insert obvious capitalism joke here.
As much as the plight of the working class weighed on me, it was the technology on display that brought awe. The Final City was also a garden. Every single one of the immense spires was overflowing with greenery, slaked by water pumped up from deep aquifers and fed by huge arrays of mirrors. The soil of the Desolation was toxic, so the people of the Final City had rendered themselves entirely independent of it. The level of biological knowledge on display far exceeded the otherwise-medieval level of technology.
That realization didn’t come as a surprise, though, because by that point I’d already seen the automatons. Archopolids were a common sight in the cities of the coast, huge spiders of steam and clockwork, with shimmering compound eyes to take in the world as they followed their punch-card instructions. The Last City’s archopolids were somehow different. I couldn’t tell at first what was giving me that impression, but the more I looked, the more I started to see it: these ones hadn’t just been dragged up from underground and put to work, they’d been modified and repaired. There were no lurching, busted limbs, no additional guides to compensate for damaged analytical engines; every single archopolid I saw was fully intact and mostly autonomous, using their long limbs to creep from tower to tower carrying enormous loads of wood and foodstuffs. The implications were astounding; somehow, the stonewose of the Final City knew more about the function of those great automata than did the humans of Bluerose.
I was beginning to piece something together. Old Mahasha, the only shared language between myself and the Queen of this place, wasn’t related to any of the other tongues I knew. Blueroser, High Rochathan, even Rélonsine, all of them bore some kind of linguistic commonalities, similar structures that I had to assume weren’t just a coincidence. But Old Mahasha didn’t. What it did share a lot of similarities with, as I’d pieced together over the last couple of days, was the language of the stonewose. Not Tarvaka’s people, either, but Ikamja’s, the common tongue they all spoke to each other when they weren’t using Rochathan for my benefit.
The implications of that were interesting, to say the least. Because it wasn’t as though there wasn’t an indigenous human population of the area, the Jalerans, whose own language had given a decent amount of vocabulary to Blueroser as it split off from Common Cassandran. But the Jalerans clearly didn’t know half as much about the archopolids as these stonewose did, so…
I didn’t have time to finish those thoughts, because the time for a fun walk through the Final City was over. We’d reached the palace, the place where we would spend most of our time in the city, dealing directly with the one woman in charge.
Tarvaka’s palace was constructed within the same spires as every other structure within the Final City, but you could tell exactly what it was even at a distant glance. A lot of effort had gone into making the palace truly look like it was fit for a queen. Metals were in short supply in the Final City; not absent, but you could tell that anything that could be made of the bamboo-like wood they could grow there, was. The palace was maybe fifty-percent plated with brass or gold, but I couldn’t tell which one it was from afar. Brilliant paints covered much of the rest, elaborate striped and swirling patterns in blue and green, combining with the metal to produce an image like a pillar of sunset penetrating through a verdant rainforest.
It was when we arrived at the palace’s front door that things started to go wrong. A platoon of knights stood guard there, and informed us that, by direct order from Tarvaka, only Ikamja and I were to be allowed to enter; everyone else had to stay outside.
“Absurd,” I said, struggling to adjust to the fact that Old Mahasha had no profanity that I was aware of. “The entire purpose of this was to be the guests of your Queen, so that we could negotiate rights of passage. If Tarvaka doesn’t allow Ikamja to have her guards with her, but Tarvaka has her whole army, then already the negotiations are imbalanced.”
“Our Queen has given us her orders,” said the knight, leaning on her spear. “It is not our right to alter them.”
I paused briefly to consider how lucky I was that at least one of the knights here could speak what was, apparently, an ecclesiastical language. “Then we shall remain here until your Queen can deliver a more reasonable order. I would recommend summoning her quickly, so that Ikamja does not become impatient.”
I didn’t have any kind of clock on hand to determine how long it took for the stalemate to break, but it certainly felt as though I spent an entire hour waiting there in the sun. Eventually a messenger came, a human wearing nothing but plain linen aside from a single elaborate pendant that marked her as an emissary of Tarvaka. She spoke briefly and in secret to the commander of the knights, marked out by her fancier helmet, then faded back into the palace.
We were allowed to bring in exactly ten hand-picked retainers in addition to Ikamja and myself. A group of knights from the front gate escorted us inside, up and through the hallways and corridors: the aesthetic indoors was much the same as it had been outside, austere Forebearer architecture layered over by gorgeous woven tapestries and rugs, painted artworks and decorative metal foil. I could go on describing it almost forever.
Our rooms were high up in the spire, requiring the use of one of the heavy lifts to reach it. Instead of the typical steam engines used by Bluerosers to keep the lifts going, the Final City used automata manipulating tremendous pulleys, their tireless strength carrying us something like five hundred feet into the air without slowing down or making any complaint. I was a little bit surprised that there were guest rooms at all in the palace, considering a lack of any foreign dignitaries to serve as guests, but for whatever reason those rooms existed, there were many of them lining one of the hallways.
“Each room is sized for two guests,” said one of the knights, opening a door. “Who would like to stay in here?”
I relayed the information to Ikamja, who ordered two of her retainers to take it, in her own language. They nodded, then entered. The pattern repeated with the next door, and the next, and the next.
“Are we rooming together, then?” I asked Ikamja, in Rochathan.
“I would be remiss if I did not do everything I could to keep you close by my side. Even if your window of consciousness is limited.”
Unspoken was the reason why: of all her retainers, I was the best protection she could possibly have against any threat. Assuming that a fight was enough to force me to pass out on Earth, at least. So, when we reached the last door in the row, it was just me and Ikamja left, and it was me and Ikamja who entered into the chamber beyond.
I started to take in the surroundings. Two separate beds, an adjoining toilet, a small table suitable for some tea or the like. The whole place was coated in dust, as though it had gone a couple of months without being cleaned. That was about as far as I was able to get with my room examination before a sound coming from behind me wiped out all thoughts: there was a click of wood on metal, and it came from the door behind me.
I turned around on a dime, sprinting full-speed towards the door, but it was too late. I crashed into it, and it refused to open. We were locked inside the guest room.