World-Ripper War (Mad Tinker Chronicles Book 3) (13 page)

“How did you—”

“We’re the pro leagues, Kupe,” Rynn said. She gestured to the crate of bullets at Kupe’s feet. “Where you’re going, you’re not going to need bullets.”

Chapter 11

“No society has developed without the invention of tea. You can tell that humans are savages at heart by the nasty things they brew and drink.” –Kezudkan Graniteson

Kezudkan sipped at a cup of tea, savoring the nutmeg and crushed limestone. The cozy little boarding house he had commandeered had come with an elderly daruu woman who knew how to brew a proper drink. Kezudkan suspected that she doted on him because she hadn’t met a daruu her age in decades, but his own interest began and ended with the tea.

Tea was a gentleman’s thinking aid. No great thought in the history of the world had been conceived with any lesser drink. It warmed the guts and soothed the mind, instilling a calmness that allowed the world to crystallize to perfect focus. The better the tea, the better the likelihood of achieving that malleable state of mind. It had taken days of sampling to find a housekeeper who could make a cup such as the one in his hand.

That monster spoke our language.
It was the burr that had rubbed his mind raw since the disastrous encounter through the world-ripper. There were so many possibilities. The scientist in Kezudkan could not deny that some of them were implausible, but his mind refused to shake its hold of them.
It could be aware of our world, able to open holes like the machine’s. It could have studied us; we may have drawn its ire, and it knows where we live.
It was the worst scenario Kezudkan had imagined.
It could be a scholar itself. We attacked its home; perhaps its normal demeanor isn’t so … monstrous. In that case, a more subdued overture might be accepted, a chance to clear clogged pipes and sift out bad bearings.
Optimistic drivel. Only a mud-brained idiot would expect to weld up a crack such as that. Barging into a man’s—thing’s?—home with steam tanks was not the sort of thing you could mend by penning a heartfelt apology. There were plenty of other theories knocking about in Kezudkan’s head, ranging from the creature being created by daruu to being daruu itself. But the tea. The tea helped clear away discordant thoughts, and let Kezudkan see the most probably reason:
That world has daruu.

The beauty of the daruu language was its immutability. Kezudkan had read of the old human tongues. If the daruu language was carved of stone, the human tongue was scratched into the mud of a riverbank, never settled, never constant. That monstrosity that spoke the daruu language could only have learned it from an original source, whether from living daruu or from the study of their works. Somewhere beneath Veydrus, there would be deeps.

The door opened. “Care for a top-up?” Mrs. Bas-Siltson the innkeeper asked. She carried a silver tray with a teapot, a delicate steam rising from the spout and carrying with it the scent of limestone.

Kezudkan sipped the last of his cup and smiled to Mrs. Bas-Siltson. “I do believe I would. You are most kind. This was exactly what I needed.”

Draksgollow sat at the controls of the world-ripper, scanning through mile after mile of unbroken rock. “Tell me again why we’re even bothering to look?” he asked. “I thought we agreed up front that we wouldn’t be plundering from our own people, if we find them in other worlds.”

“I believe we have brethren here, yes,” Kezudkan replied, standing before the viewframe. “But I think we’ve been charging in blind.”

“Like a flanker taking the ball against three defenders, instead of passing?” Draksgollow asked.

Kezudkan twisted around to display the furrow of his stony brow. “Is that some sort of ball crashing metaphor?”

Draksgollow waved his hand back toward the view-frame. “Just forget it.”

Kezudkan turned his back and continued. “This endeavor might benefit from local knowledge. If we can find our people, they might be more than willing to tell us more about their world. Our predations might enrich us while weakening their enemies. It could be greatly beneficial to all concerned.”

“And all this is because of some tea?” Draksgollow sounded skeptical. “How do you know that creature doesn’t have the ability to puzzle out languages? Maybe it uses magic.”

“Oh, I considered that, among a hundred other theories. But I have heard nothing of creatures such as that thing visiting Korr. It is far simpler to assume that it learned our language from its own world.” It grated on even his own ears, referring to the daruu tongue as being shared by the kuduks. Kuduks never had a language to call their own, and had merely made the obvious choice, when the alternative was one of the myriad, amorphous human languages.

“And why start in Braavland, anyway? Piss poor geology for deeps. Their deeps have got five times the support structure that a nice solid deep like Cavinstraw needs. You’d think this primitive world might not have worked out how to even build one in a place like that.”

Kezudkan tapped his cane against his shoulder as he pondered. “You know … you may have something there. Perhaps a geological search might yield better results than a thorough progression through the locations of all Korr’s deeps. Let’s try one I
know
is built in stable rock—Eversall.”

“Now, you’ve hit the vein,” Draksgollow replied. He sat forward and perked up; his hands moved more briskly over the controls. There had been no attempt to disguise the kuduk tinker’s boredom.

Kezudkan rattled off the coordinates. Wherever they set up a world-ripper, he figured out their location relative to Eversall Deep before calculating all the other locations he had recorded in his log books. While it was certainly a convenient mathematical aid and the lynchpin of all his inter- and intra-world movements, he always felt a bit easier in the stomach knowing where home was. Nothing upset his digestion like being adrift, cut off from the stones that were as much a part of him as his own feet. It was a feeling he could not convey to the kuduks who worked for him. Perhaps when he found the daruu of Veydrus, they might be sympathetic to such sentiments.

Cuminol—or at least its sister in Veydrus—was at higher elevation than Eversall, so Draksgollow ended up approaching it from the sky side. When the view stopped blurring and Draksgollow left it still long enough for Kezudkan to get an idea of the place, the city was spectacular. Nothing but stone. Despite its deplorable exposure to the weather and sun, the sight warmed Kezudkan’s heart. A towering wall rose against the foothills and plains, clearly meant for defense in a world unknown to artillery.

Smooth stone. No human or kuduk hand could have crafted it so finely.
“Bring us in closer. I want a good look. How did we even miss looking here when we were searching for our gold?”

“You said it was a drain on the dynamo, as I recall,” Draksgollow replied. “You found a mountain busting at the seams with gold and didn’t look past it.”

“Indeed. It seems I was remiss.”

Draksgollow took a scenic path, showing more showmanship and artistry than Kezudkan was wont to credit the tinker. They ascended as if by cable gondola, sweeping up toward the city from the hills below. Kezudkan felt his spirits lifted by the grandeur. As the viewframe crested the wall, his jaw went slack. The buildings within were stone, the flat, ugly, blocky constructs that humans built. It was better than Korr’s humans had ever managed, but it was nothing like the elegant simplicity of the wall. The effect was magnified by the presence of a second wall, overlooking the city, built just as mightily as the first. It held back the glacial snow and ice that were absent in the upper reaches of the same mountain range in Korr. But whereas Korr’s denizens vented forges and ore smelters through chimneys in the mountain, keeping the ice from building, the inhabitants of Veydrus simply walled it off.

The city between the two walls vexed Kezudkan sorely. It was like finding a gold nugget, only to discover that it was merely a thin plating of gold over lead. Why would anyone who could build walls such as that, build a city so rudimentary?

“You gone kinda quiet,” said Draksgollow. “Something wrong over there?”

Kezudkan nodded. “Everything. None of it fits. The walls look like daruu work, but the city itself could not be. Not unless my people have designated this a children’s playground. I could have stacked stones better at five.”

“Yeah. Wasn’t gonna say anything, but you’re right. Who knows, maybe the daruu here aren’t what they used to be. Old walls, new city?”

“Ghastly thought. Bring the view nearer the wall; I want a closer look.”

Draksgollow complied, drifting the viewframe right up next to the wall, close enough to reach out and touch had the world-hole been open. “Runes all over it. Bust me, someone spent a lot of time carving that thing.”

It was true. The wall looked textured from a distance, but now that they were so close, it was plain that the whole surface was adorned with runes. Kezudkan squinted at them, trying to focus on individual patterns. Even by daruu standards, he was well-read on the subject of rune construction. But as he followed the connections, he found himself lost in the complexity. For long minutes he stood tracing a single grouping, looking for a beginning or an end, but found none. “This is beyond me,” he admitted. “It would seem that while their stonework might be a subject of debate, the runecraft of whoever built this wall is superior to anything Korr knows.”

“You can tell that from just a quick glance?”

“I could tell that as soon as I couldn’t fathom an end to it,” Kezudkan replied. “I may not be the foremost expert on runes, but I’d wager that you couldn’t fill a trolley car with men with more rune knowledge than I. This … this was done by people who rely on runes, not science, and have plumbed a depth we wouldn’t dare.”

“It’s just a wall.”

“Perhaps. But perhaps that proves the point all the better. What casual power, choosing to rune a wall to stop a glacier, rather than melting it away, or better yet, simply not building a city here. And the power of the runes. Do you have any idea the weight of ice and snow bearing down upon it?”

Draksgollow stared blankly for a moment, eyes twitching back and forth at calculations that Kezudkan could only imagine. It was mathematics the old daruu could manage himself, but it always amused him how Draksgollow ground numbers up in that tinker’s brain of his.
Just like Erefan used to do
. The memory immediately soured his mood.

“Yeah, I’ve got a notion,” Draksgollow said. “Still, you want to keep looking? I didn’t see anyone out in the streets, but we didn’t look hard, and it looks like there’s fires going. Someone’s living here.”

“Indeed,” Kezudkan replied. As Draksgollow lowered the view from the glacier wall, Kezudkan noticed a gate set into the mountainside. “Wait! Stop there.”

“What? You want to look inside the mountain?”

“These primitives have no lifts. If they have deeps, it stands to reason that they would have tunnels and ramps heading down.”

“Fine,” Draksgollow huffed through pursed lips. The view slid smoothly through the solid gate and into a tunnel beyond. The walls were roughly carved in barbaric human fashion. Kezudkan fought down the urge to order Draksgollow to stop and shut down the machine. He needed to know.

The tunnel curved around and down in a single loop of a grand spiral. Without being there, Kezudkan could only estimate, but it seemed as if they were doubling back to an area directly below the sky. The bottom of the tunnel was guarded by four human guards armed with spears. What lay beyond them caused the old daruu to overlook that distasteful fact.

They built a deep. These humans built themselves a deep.
There was no mistaking it. As in the city above, the construction was all distinctively human: drab, square, and utilitarian, with ill-fitted stone mushed together with mortar. It was, as near as Kezudkan could tell from first glance, a single enormous cavern, defying everything structural engineering said about deeps. There were a handful of pylons running floor to ceiling, big around as a thunderail engine, but by Kezudkan’s estimation, they should not have been enough to support the weight of the city above.

“Rusty blood,” Draksgollow swore. “Those buggers built themselves an actual deep. Ain’t nothing of our kind around here, mine
or
yours.”

“Agreed,” Kezudkan muttered, staring at the scene in the viewframe.

“Face it. This world’s just like ours, except here it was humans that won the great war. Your kind ain’t nothing but old walls and monsters’ memories. That thing must have been ancient.”

There was a clack, and the  viewframe went dark. Kezudkan spun—his old back protesting immediately—to see Draksgollow throw the remaining switches, powering down the world-ripper. “What are you doing?”