World-Ripper War (Mad Tinker Chronicles Book 3) (34 page)

Of course, all the parts had been disassembled, thoroughly cleansed of kuduk blood, and blessed before they were brought into the chamber.

“I don’t know what to say, Your Majesty,” said Kezudkan.

King Dekulon turned and smiled, then returned his attention to the daruu who were completing the installation. “You may say whatever comes to mind. This world of yours, Korr … the more I hear about it, the more I find it distasteful. This … this is how a master craftsman’s works deserve to be treated.” The king swept a hand over the whole of the room.

“Until I came here, until I saw all this—all of this, not just this one chamber—I had thought myself well off. I had no idea what had been taken from me, the years spent living a life whose upper bounds had been set by creatures with the vision of swine—gluttons of coin, and content to live in tunnels not fit for a sty.”

A tremor shook the chamber. Kezudkan looked to Kind Dekulon but saw only surprise on his face. “There should have been no tremor,” said the king. “The magma chamber to the north is calm, and Veydrus is exceptionally stable here. If you will excuse me, I must find out what has happened.” The king graced Kezudkan with a nod and hurried from the chamber with all the speed possible while maintaining an air of dignity.

Kezudkan watched him go. He did not feel it was right to give the king leave even though Kezudkan was the elder by a wide margin. Dekulon was king and would go where he pleased within his kingdom. Resisting the urge to tag along was a war between curiosity and his aching bones, and Kezudkan’s joints had been reigning champions of such contests for ages. With a long breath, Kezudkan returned to looking over the shoulders of a small crew of artisans—he could not even demean them by calling them workmen—who were putting the final pieces together. The whole lot of them was sharp as cracked obsidian, picking up on the written diagrams easily and putting together a machine they had never before laid eyes on. He had not found a single flaw in their work.

“It’s finished, Citizen Graniteson,” the lead artisan reported some time later.

“Well then, let’s have a look see,” said Kezudkan, easing himself into the chair at the controls. The aches in his back subsided as the curves of the chair supported him just where he needed it most. He let out a relaxed sigh. “Oh … maybe in just a few moments. I think I’m going to enjoy this chair for a bit.”

His respite was short lived, for the king returned like a rockslide, the Pillars of Runes and Defense trailing behind him. Whereas the king had left the chamber in a state of confusion, he had returned in a state of alarm. “Is the machine working?” he asked. The question carried the subtle undertone that it had better be.

A nod to one of the artisans got the daruu to flip the switches to light the viewframe. The webwork of copper wires disappeared, giving a clear view of the wall behind it. Of course, this was because the dials were all set to zeroes. “It seems to be, though we haven’t opened a hole yet,” Kezudkan reported.

“I wish to see the surface. There is a human city above us which seems to have been the source of the tremor.” The king did not look at Kezudkan, nor at his advisors, but stared into the viewframe, waiting.

Kezudkan grunted as he shifted himself forward to better reach the controls. It only took a few quick twists to bring them up the mile or so to the surface. The scene that unfolded before them was a tableau of carnage. Bodies lay everywhere amid the shattered ruins of the city. The rocky debris that littered the ground was clearly stonework, and there was evidence of runework on some of the unbroken faces. All of that was noteworthy, but what caught everyone’s attention were the creatures moving amid the wreckage, carrying spears or pistols.

“What are those things?” Kezudkan asked.

“I don’t know,” replied the Pillar of Defense. “Some new sort of weapon, I imagine.”

Kezudkan shook his head. “No, the little green creatures crawling everywhere. What are they?”

“Those are goblins,” replied King Dekulon. “They have plagued this region before. They live in the mountains far to the west, mountains claimed by their dragon overlords—mountains we are not welcome beneath.”

“Those things they’re carrying are called guns,” Kezudkan clarified for the benefit of the Pillar of Defense. “I don’t know what goblins are, or where they got those weapons, but I doubt they were enough to topple a wall that size. I mean … just look at it.” Kezudkan adjusted the viewframe to better make his point. The wall was a massive edifice, easily twenty feet think. To think that even with runes to reinforce it …”

“Nevertheless, something destroyed a wall that we helped those humans rebuild after the last time the goblins attempted to invade,” said King Dekulon. He turned to address the Pillar of Defense “Draklan, prepare for an influx of refugees. Zepdaan, once we have the human survivors within our tunnels, seal the entrance where the old human mines end. Make it look like ogres dug those walls.”

“What about those ogres?” the Pillar of Defense asked. “They might not all have died in the fighting.”

King Dekulon was silent for a moment. “Allow them.”

The two pillars of King Dekulon’s advisory council left the chamber. The artisans had slipped out during the excitement, leaving the king and Kezudkan alone.

“You’d risk getting involved in that mess,” Kezudkan said, “just to save some humans?”

“Not all humans are created equal,” King Dekulon replied. “Some of them are capable of nobility. You have made quite a remarkable device. Thank you.” The king turned on his heel and left Kezudkan alone with his world-ripper.

With nothing else to occupy himself, and not wanting to get dragged into involvement in the immanent refugee debacle, Kezudkan settled in to watch these goblin creatures survey the aftermath of their own victory. They were spry, nimble creatures, with limbs so thin it seemed they should snap under their own weight. That they could have smashed a walled human city reminded Kezudkan that he was in a world whose rules were not the same as the ones he knew. It was not likely to be the last surprise he received.

Poking around in the ruins, the goblins seemed to be looking for something. A few times they spotted a survivor. Their own, they carried off down the mountainside to an encampment below. The humans they found, they fired their pistols at. Kezudkan brought the viewframe closer, close enough that he could see the coil guns for what they were. They looked just like the ones that had been popping up among the human rebels of late, according to the newspapers.

“So Erefan,” Kezudkan muttered to himself. “Is this where you got the idea for those weapons you armed your rabble with?”

As Kezudkan began wandering the rest of the battlefield, something caught his eye. There was a lone figure, taller than all the goblins, dressed in a leather waistcoat and wearing goggles. A human! While the goblins had been killing all the human survivors they found, this one female human was welcome in their midst. She and one of the goblins appeared to be discussing a chuck of masonry that the human held in both hands.

The human woman stepped forward and vanished from Kezudkan’s view. He rubbed at his eyes, half expecting to see her there when he opened them, but the goblin was gone as well. He scanned the area, even reversing the angle of his view in case someone else had a world-hole open. But she was gone.

Kezudkan decided it was time to shut down the machine for the night.

It was dawn by the time Madlin and K’k’rt picked their way to the ruined wall. In the shadow of mountains whose proper name she had never learned—the goblins called it something incomprehensible—goblin soldiers searched the rubble for the wounded and sorted them according to allegiance. Goblins went to the surgeons, humans to the spear point of the end of a coil gun. The hilltop where Madlin had watched the battle was catching the first rays of sunlight. It seemed appropriate that her recent past was lit while she trudged forth into the dim grey middle world of not quite utterly dark. Her coil guns weren’t ever intended to take human lives. She tried not to watch or to hear the click-sizzle-crack of their firing.

Cadmus’s ludicrously oversized cannon had done the work of a thousand sappers tunneling beneath the wall, drilling out the foundation over a span that Madlin estimated at a hundred fifty feet. Even her optimistic assessment of the handheld coil guns would not have expected them to tear such a huge chunk from the city in so short a time. It proved to her once again that her father was a madman of the most prestigious sort. He had devised a plan to rescue her that didn’t involve whisking her away from trouble, but rather solving the problem she faced, and he had done it right before her eyes without her realizing.

I came up with the system to bring fresh air and water to the moon; he builds it into a weapon.
Madlin thought about the precision with which the two world-ripper viewframes in the lunar headquarters aligned, and wondered how long ago Cadmus had planned for something like this. At the time, Madlin had taken the exactitude as merely a symptom of his extreme attention to detail, his desire for perfection in the things he created.
Maybe if you make things well enough, it just opens more options
.

“What are you hoping to find?” K’k’rt asked as Madlin turned over pieces of broken wall. She climbed atop piles of rubble that were anything but stable, and the goblin tinker followed gamely a few paces behind her. Madlin might have felt badly for him, but she had not asked him to follow, nor was there a particular glut of sympathy left in her after the massacre.

“Evidence.”

K’k’rt chuckled. It sounded out of place amid the misery all around them. “I think Fr’n’ta’gur will take a conquered city as evidence.”

“I can’t dump a conquered city in his heap of coins and demand my payment now, can I?” Madlin snapped. “I want a chunk of wall that shows what the coil guns did to it.”

K’k’rt tugged at her sleeve and beckoned her down. Curious what he wanted, Madlin obliged by leaning close. “You and I both know that this was not the work of your weapons.”

“So?” Madlin replied. “I want to prove the guns work. You want them ripping walls to shreds; build one a quarter mile long with a three and half ton bullet.”

K’k’rt’s brow frumpled. “I don’t know your measurements. How long? How heavy?”

Madlin looked up into the pink-tinged clouds and did some quick math in her head. “A barrel roughly two hundred fifty times my height long, with a shot weighing sixteen of me.”

“Not possible,” K’k’rt replied. “You’d need the aether of a dragon to power it.”

“I can show you,” said Madlin. “Just help me find a piece of that wall we can take to your dragon.”

K’k’rt made a show of helping, but he seemed more intent on watching Madlin. He peered over some stones and prodded others with a toe. Given that he was probably the equivalent of seventy by human standards, Madlin could forgive him not digging amid the rubble with his bare hands.

Madlin lifted one promising specimen, and it came away dripping blood. Lying beneath were the crushed remains of one of the Kadrin soldiers. Dropping the stone, Madlin lost the previous night’s dinner over the ruins. She closed her eyes, willing some other image to replace what she just saw. Through bleary eyes, she stumbled away to compose herself on hands and knees.

“Here,” K’k’rt said, handing her a flask. It was goblin-sized, no more than a single swallow for someone Madlin’s size. She twisted the cap free and swished the stale, warm water around in her mouth, then spat it onto the rocks.

“Thanks,” she said, still queasy.

“And to think, your people are carnivorous. How did you ever survive to become civilized?” K’k’rt asked. “You ought to have starved in the wild. Did your gods feed you meats without telling you where it came from?”

“That’s not meat!” Madlin shouted. The effort threatened to find something new in her stomach to heave forth. “It was one of my own kind.”

“It’s meat now, even if you would not eat it. We don’t eat our own dead either, but the dragons do. I wonder … does that make us lesser creatures. The dragons accept death. Is denying it a mortal folly?”

Madlin shook her head, more to clear it than to answer the goblin’s question. “Let’s just find a rock with evidence of a coil gun’s penetration and get out of here.”

“I’m afraid there will not be a caravan back home for some days. The messengers have already left, and they would not have tolerated our presence slowing them anyway.”

“Just shut up and find a rusted rock.”