Sufficiently Advanced Technology (Inverse Shadows) (25 page)

That was odd, to say the least. Pillars ruled and commanded vast resources, at least on the scale of a single world. They even had apprentice magicians under their control. And yet they seemed to hate each other, only talking at a distance, if at all. The worst ones even seemed to wage war on their fellows. In the meantime, the Scions lurked in the badlands, developed their powers and eventually fell on the nearest Pillar. Offhand, Elyria couldn’t remember any other world that had existed in such constant ferment. Even the nastiest civil wars of humanity had ended in an uneasy peace.

Darius’s recorded history didn’t seem to go back very far at all. Elyria suspected she’d just found out why.

She looked over at Joshua as they turned off the road, heading towards the clearing. “This will be startling,” she warned, carefully. “Just remain calm and let it flow over you.”

Joshua smiled. “More startling than magic was to you?”

Elyria had to smile. “Maybe,” she said. “We’ll see.”

***

The clearing looked unchanged from the last time Joshua had been there, two days ago, although the sense of being watched was as strong as ever. Elyria jumped out of the carriage, leaving the horse standing in the middle of the clearing, and beckoned for him to follow her. Joshua dismounted and walked towards where she had stopped, looking back at him with an expression of wry amusement. He’d enjoyed showing off to her, he knew; she intended to show off a little to him. A moment later, the ground lurched and started to sink downwards.

Joshua started as they fell. There hadn’t been a single flash of magic to warn him that someone had hidden a trap there... and then he remembered that the Confederation didn’t
use
magic. A chill went down his spine as they fell further into the ground; if a society had never had magic, what could they do without it? Everything they’d seen suggested that the Confederation was actually
more
powerful than Darius’s magicians, even if they
had
caught Elyria easily. They’d never thought to ask just what sort of weapons the Confederation could use...

There was a dull thump as the lift came to a halt, revealing an object of solid metal buried under the ground. Joshua touched it almost reverently, astonished at the lack of magic running through the structure. He’d never seen anything so big made out of metal... and he couldn’t even see
all
of it. And then he jumped back as there was a hiss and part of the metal folded back to reveal a door. It was magic, it had to be magic... and yet it wasn’t. Fighting down the urge to pull defensive spells around himself, he followed Elyria into the structure, hearing a very faint humming sound for the first time. The inner room was larger than his bedroom in Master Faye’s house, but it was crammed with strange devices, all more elegant than anything a craftsman could have designed in Warlock’s Bane.

“What...” He swallowed and found his voice again. “What are these?”

“Sensors,” Elyria explained. Joshua guessed that they were something like the magic detectors they’d scattered around the city, back when they’d thought that they were being watched by a covetous Scion. “They’ll want to know as much as possible about us before letting us into the rest of the craft.”

Joshua frowned. “How can they even work without magic?”

“I honestly don’t know,” Elyria admitted. “At least for most of them, anyway. Some of them are so primitive that they rely on x-rays, others are so advanced that they may not even work here. I don’t really understand the science behind them.”

“How can you use it,” Joshua said, “if you don’t know what you’re doing?”

Elyria smiled at him. “Do you know what you’re doing with magic?”

Joshua opened his mouth to object and then stopped, thoughtfully. Master Faye had taught him all of his spells, without – yet – explaining how to push the limits of the possible. It was Scions who did most of the experimentation, ideally several hundred miles from the nearest population centre. Some magical experiments had been very dangerous to anyone too close to the caster.

“I’m not sure,” he admitted, finally. Another hatch opened up in the far wall. “Where do we go now?”

“The medical bay,” Elyria said. “They want a close look at you – and at me too, come to think of it.”

The interior of the structure – the shuttle, Elyria had called it – was strange, so strange that Joshua felt dizzy every time he looked too closely. There was something vaguely organic about the bulkheads, even though they were made of metal; bright light seemed to flare out of nowhere, without even a trace of magic. The handful of other humans he saw kept their distance, but they were all wearing strange clothes that suggested no real sense of style – or decency. One of the women wore an outfit so tight that Joshua could see her nipples clearly through the fabric. He flushed and looked away.

“They want to look at me?” he asked, more to divert himself than anything else. “Why me?”

“You have a talent for magic,” Elyria explained, as they passed through another hatch. “There’s a possibility that talent might be something genetic, something inside you...”

She broke off, realising that her words merely confused him. “We want to know what makes you tick,” she said, instead. “And then we want to see what happens inside your brain when you cast magic.”

There was a pause. “We’ve seen magicians heal people,” she added. “How do you do that?”

“We cast healing spells,” Joshua said. They entered a large, brightly lit room with a pair of comfortable seats placed in the centre. Two other humans were standing there, along with a handful of spheres that floated through the air – without magic. He had to fight down a growing sense of unreality. “The spells heal them.”

“I see,” Elyria said, after a long moment. “But what exactly do the spells
do
?”

“They heal them,” Joshua said, again. Honestly! No one on Darius would have asked such a stupid question. “What
else
would they do?”

“I think I misspoke,” Elyria said, after a moment. “Do you use the same spell on broken arms as you do on... diseases?”

“Of course,” Joshua said.

“That’s interesting,” Elyria said. “You do know that they’re actually two very different conditions? Do you even know what causes disease?”

Joshua shook his head. There were a handful of travelling doctors who had their own theories, but none of them had ever seemed very clever to him. How could there be tiny monsters in the air that carried diseases from person to person? The very idea seemed absurd.

“That suggests that you’re not actually telling the spell what to do, or at least not very precisely,” Elyria said. “You just want the magic to heal them and it does.”

She frowned. “Do you ever have problems healing people?”

“Old age cannot be held back for long,” Joshua said. “Everything else can be healed.”

Elyria smiled as she nodded to one of the chairs. “Sit down in the chair,” she said, as she took the other one. “This may take a while, but it shouldn’t really hurt.”

“We’ve decided not to use any invasive procedures,” one of the other men said. It meant nothing to Joshua. “We don’t know how well they’d work in this environment.”

“Good,” Elyria said. She reached over and gave Joshua’s hand a reassuring squeeze. “Just relax and let them work.”

Joshua glanced up nervously as a strange helmet-like device was placed on his head, sending a weird tingle through his body, and then forced himself to relax. Master Faye had tested him extensively in the first few weeks of apprenticeship and that had been thoroughly unpleasant. He had endured that and he could endure this; besides, the rewards of working with the Confederation promised to be huge. If they could rejuvenate Master Faye, who knew what else they could do?

One of the floating spheres hovered next to his arm and extended a thin needle. Joshua winced as it reached his skin, but there was no pain. A moment later, it withdrew, leaving him unsure what – if anything – it had done. The other sphere floated around his head before coming to a halt in front of his face. It was impossible to escape the feeling that it was looking at him through its featureless white exterior. The helmet on his head twitched twice and then pulled back, leaving Joshua feeling oddly relieved. It was not a pleasant experience at all.

One of the humans winked at him as he held another device up in front of Joshua’s face, before moving it down to his chest. “Don’t worry,” he said, reassuringly. “This may be boring, but it isn’t really dangerous.”

Joshua nodded, trying to fight down the terror that was starting to bubble at the back of his mind. The whole environment was so
strange
, so
different
, from anything he’d seen before that it was maddeningly disconcerting. He watched a glowing square of light appear out of nowhere – again, without a single trace of magic – displaying images that made absolutely no sense to him. The final image was a strange twisting pattern of light that was difficult to look at, but the researchers seemed to take it calmly. They seemed to be adapting to magic better than he was adapting to technology.

“You really should stop eating sweets,” one of the researchers said, finally. “Your teeth are not in very good shape, I’m afraid.”

“I know,” Joshua said. His mother had given him the same lecture, more than once, but he wasn’t really able to resist the sweets that Master Faye offered. Besides, he needed them to help power his magic. “I don’t suppose that you can heal them?”

“They could be rebuilt, if necessary,” the researcher said. “But if you just kept eating sweets, they would decay again.”

Joshua snorted. Once, Master Faye had handled a case of a man who couldn’t stop himself from drinking. When sober, he was a wonderful husband and father; when drunk, he was a monster who beat his wife and children. Eventually, Master Faye had placed a compulsion on him to prevent him from drinking. It had worked, but the man had killed himself several months later. Joshua’s master had concluded that the magic hadn’t been able to do anything for whatever had driven the man to drink in the first place.

“I just need to go into the next room,” Elyria said, as she stood up. She looked rather nervous, for no apparent reason. Joshua had seen apprentices with similar expressions after they’d displeased their masters. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

Joshua nodded, sourly, and watched her go.

“Your physical condition seems to be relatively healthy, for your environment,” one of the researchers said, finally. “Lots of bumps and scrapes that haven’t quite healed properly, some scarring from disease... other than that, you’re healthy enough. Quite a strong libido, which isn’t too surprising in a man your age. Do you have a young lady back home?”

“I’m not supposed to have a girlfriend, or a wife,” Joshua admitted. Magic compensated for most of its cost, but he would always be tempted to do more than just visit whores from time to time. “But I keep
wanting
one.”

“At your age, I’m not surprised,” the researcher said. “You’re very fertile, surprisingly so, very definitely capable of impregnating young women. And you’re strong... that’s interesting.”

He frowned. “Tell me something,” he said. “Do you try to use magic to enhance yourself?”

“Sometimes,” Joshua said, reluctantly. Master Faye had taught him the spells, but warned him to use them sparingly. “I used to be a skinny lad and the older lads picked on me.”

“Typical,” the researcher said. “Looking at this, I think you overdid it a little. And that you didn’t really know what you were doing.”

Joshua flushed. “I was younger then,” he insisted. “I know more magic now.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” the researcher said, dryly. “Right now, I’d suggest asking the boss to give you a rejuvenation treatment too. You’ve placed one hell of a lot of strain on your heart.”

He changed the subject before a shocked Joshua could demand to know what he was talking about. “I want you to do a very basic spell, right now,” he added. “Do anything you like, as long as it is visible.”

“All right,” Joshua said. “Anything at all?”

The researcher nodded. It crossed Joshua’s mind that he could turn the researcher into a small hopping thing, before he decided that would probably annoy Elyria. And he liked her more than he wanted to admit, even if she was impossibly old. Carefully, he chanted the words of a simple spell under his breath and a ball of light appeared in his palm. A second set of words and the ball of light drifted up into the air, casting an eerie gleam over the entire room. The researcher stared and then pointed a strange metal tool at the ball of light.

“Curious,” he said, finally. “Very curious indeed.”

CHAPTER
T
WENTY-
O
NE

“They made you talk,” Jorlem observed. “How did they make you talk?”

“Magic,” Elyria said, sourly. The feeling of being utterly vulnerable had bothered her more than she wanted to admit, but it would all have to go in her voice. “Did they... did they do anything else to me?”

“Nothing that we can detect,” the AIs said. “Our sensors are rather limited down here, but we believe that there will be no lasting effects. Brain scans revealed that you were subjected to something comparable to a very mild brain-stamping. Quite how it worked on your enhanced mind, however, remains a mystery.”

“Magic,” Elyria said. Jorlem shot her a sharp glance, but she pushed on regardless. “I’m serious. They don’t really know
what
they’re doing; they just make demands on the magic and it does it for them. There was no need to program a brain-probe to stamp anything into my mind; they just did it.”

“Which suggests some form of intelligence behind the magic,” the AIs said. “Maybe something comparable to the RIs that operate virtual realities for the uploaded.” There was a pause. “We do not believe that they gave you any additional... programming.”

Elyria winced. Any level of technology could be abused – and the Confederation’s technology opened up all sorts of possibilities for sociopaths who wanted to prey on their fellow citizens. The worst nightmare was subversion implants, devices that turned people into puppets operated by their masters, or reprogramming them into becoming monsters. It was something that her implants should have countered, but her augmentation didn’t work right on Darius. And if they had been able to compel her to be truthful, they might have planted other suggestions inside her mind.