World-Ripper War (Mad Tinker Chronicles Book 3) (9 page)

“Celia runs the empire anyway. He’s just around to rut up heirs once in a while.”

“
Legitimate
heirs. I don’t want to see little princes and princesses running around glowing in the aether like miniature dragons. Do you understand me?”

“As well as I understand all those classes I skip,” Dan said. He stood and gave a soldier’s salute, raising a fist to his temple, then spun on his heel and marched to the door. It always did his spirits good to hang around the School of Arms. There was better camaraderie there, with sweat and bruises and occasional blood. The Imperial Academy was filled with mincing phonies who wanted the advantages of their sorcerous birth without having to fight to keep it. If they had better food, he’d spend even more of his time among the squires.

As he quick-stepped down the dizzying heights of the spiral stair around the inside of the Tower of Contemplation, he couldn’t imagine the meeting having gone any better. Not only had he been given credit far beyond his intent to eventually seduce the empress, but he had steered Axterion completely clear of the actual intent of his meeting.

Me with Empress Celia?
He chuckled to himself. He remembered her from before she was empress, dallying with his cousin Brannis, angling to better her lot in the empire. Thinking back to those days, it was hard to imagine trying to fill Brannis’s boots. If he made a fool of himself now, he might never win her back. Better to bide his time and wait for her to come to him.

Emperor Danilaesis Solaran, First of His Name, Ruler of All Veydrus.
It was a good dream. All he needed was time and Korrish ingenuity to make it happen.

Chapter 8

“What works in one world, works in the other.” -Rakashi dar Fandar

It was not the most comfortable of hideaways, but it was sufficient for the time being. Kezudkan toured the finished living space for the first time since shutting himself away from the bustle and noise of Draksgollow’s workshops. The furnishings were sparse, just a few chairs around a table—all formed from granite—and beds in the two private rooms. The pantry and larder were stocked, a well and pump system provided water pressure for proper hot and cold water taps, and a dynamo kept the spark lights running. All the essentials were in place, including the world-ripper and all its associated controls. The cozy touches that would transform it into a home would come over time.

“That’s it, huh?” Gederon asked. “We’re on our own now?” The younger daruu was Kezudkan’s height already, and there was a strong resemblance in the nose and brow. But where Kezudkan was stiff in the joints and had the pitted skin of the elderly, his grandson’s features were smooth as sea-washed rock and moved with the grace of a sculptor.

“Indeed. Enough noise from kuduks and humans to last me years, Geddie. Why don’t you fix us something to eat while I look in on our minions?” Kezudkan turned on the world-ripper’s view frame and set it a few paces from the Draksgollow’s world-ripper.

By the time Gederon returned with a lunch of chicken-and-coal soup, Kezudkan was well settled into his chair, watching his kuduk partner search for worthwhile troves of treasure to plunder. “How long’s it going to take him to find someplace?” Gederon asked. He was a sharp lad. After his initial shock at seeing how the world-ripper worked, he picked up on the usefulness of such a device with a quickness that made his grandfather proud.

Kezudkan swallowed a spoonful of his soup, savoring the flavor of the imported Tollopese coal. “He’s getting a feel for how the humans build their cities and protect their coin. I don’t expect it will be long. Sit yourself down and stop your fidgeting. You’re not going to ossify at your age.”

The two daruu settled in to watch the events unfold as Draksgollow worked the controls of his own world-ripper.

Much as he was loath to admit it, Draksgollow’s wrist was growing sore from the search. He had been hours at the controls of the world-ripper and had nothing to show for it. Searching the countryside of what Korr would have called Garn Gel, he had found nothing but city after humble city, village after poverty wracked village. The wealth of this human nation had to accumulate somewhere, he figured. And at long last, he hoped that he might have stumbled across it.

In the view screen, the latest city he found was well up-river, farther from the sea than most humans seemed to concentrate their crown cities. The buildings were larger, better built, better maintained. Streets teemed with humans though like the rest of the human cities in the area, they were drab and broken creatures. All the same, it was the first city where there had been more than a mere token presence of armed guards. It was yet another sign that he might finally have found someplace worthwhile.

Flexing away the ache in his wrist, Draksgollow swept around the city and found the grandest of the buildings, a three-story palace of white-washed stone, ugly in the way that all human stonework tended to be—blocky, mortared, and cut with stone that never matched exactly from one section to the next. Still, it was a massive structure, and the comings and goings of a great many humans indicated that it was a hub of some sort, either commercial or governmental. Either way it was likely Draksgollow’s best chance for salvaging a profit from his day’s searching at the controls.

The view blurred through arched halls filled with humans as the kuduk tinker scanned for something besides lousy workmanship and stinking creatures. It was certainly a different building than the other seats of government he had stumbled through in his searching of Veydrus. There were offices filled with humans huddled behind desks, and humans waiting in lines to see them. It was similar to a Korrish bank or civic office. Many of the offices held small caches of coin at the ready, doling payments to the waiting humans or taking them in. It was all too small for Draksgollow’s vision of a raid. Upper floors proved even less interesting as there were fewer humans and even less loose coin stored.

The deep. Even humans were known to burrow a shallow layer or two beneath their larger buildings, and Draksgollow was not ready to give up on the structure until he’d seen whether they had a deep beneath it or not. Drifting the view frame down from the third floor like a disembodied lift, he found one.

The lower level of the structure was darker, lit by torches at regular intervals. Something seemed wrong about them. Draksgollow stopped twisting dials, and walked over to the view frame for a closer look.

“No smoke,” he muttered.

The lack of ventilation shafts had tickled some tinkering sense in his brain and pointed out the missing precaution when working with fume-spewing substances. The torches ought to have choked the halls in smoke for how many there were and how little chance for any of it to escape. Someone wanted the
look
of torches but without the unpleasant consequences. He squinted, but couldn’t make out any runes carved into either the wall or the torches themselves.

“Bloody free-runed aether-spewers,” he grumbled.

With a jitter in his aching hand, Draksgollow set himself back at the controls and followed a pair of humans carrying a strongbox. The sooner he found the vault where they stored their wealth, the sooner they could be gone. He would have been just as happy never discovering who aethered up those torches. It just was not worth the knowing. For a moment, he considered abandoning the search altogether, but then Draksgollow remembered his partner.

Kezudkan was a nuisance, too eager for gain and far too brave with kuduk lives on the line instead of his own. But the daruu was expecting profits, and if Draksgollow could not deliver them, Kezudkan would fine someone else who could. While he knew how to build the world-rippers, the crotchety old fossil was the only one who could tinker them into functioning properly; none of them ever worked when first assembled.

The humans in the viewing frame led Draksgollow down a layer farther—at least what passed for a layer among humans. The corridors were still lit by the same artificial torches, but guards were posted along the way, armed with bladed poles of the sort that had fallen into disuse in Korr along with the invention of black powder.
Easy enough, as long as whoever does the torches isn’t around
. There was every possibility that the torches were a legacy of a bygone age, kept up by aether-tenders such as he used in his own factory. There was also the chance that torch-making was a specialized skill, unrelated to the fiery mayhem that the human rune-thrower among Erefan’s rebels had wrought.

The humans with the strongbox ended their trek at an iron-bound door and were admitted by another pair of armed guards. Inside, a series of accountants of human persuasion sat piling coins and taking notes in ledgers. Promising, but not the bonanza Draksgollow hoped to find. Another door at the back of the room held more promise. Bypassing a formidable-looking lock, even for someone from Korr, Draksgollow slipped the view through to the room beyond. He grinned.

The room was filled with sturdy iron shelves, stacked with strongboxes identical to the one whose bearers Draksgollow had followed to the vault. “They even packed ‘em up for us.” He chuckled to himself, with no one else around to appreciate the comment.

Draksgollow was ready to round up his assault forces when something caught his eye—another door at the back.

The quick twist of a dial carried him through and into a larger chamber. Draksgollow’s jaw hung slack. He blinked to tell himself he was imagining what he saw, but there it was, still there after each blink. The chamber beyond the tidy little vault was the epitome of excess wealth. Mountains of gold coins formed a landscape fit for excavation. Draksgollow had been to open pit coal mines that were smaller. The chamber dropped away, forming a valley and looking like a proper Korrish deep layer. There was no telling how deep the piles plumbed below the surface. Colored sparkles caught the eye, as gemstones and craftwork trinkets mixed among the coinage. The wealth of that single room was incalculable.

It was not going to be a quick plundering. Not at all. There was no way they would remain undetected and take one one-hundredth of the wealth from the sea of gold. It was time to bring his army and cleanse the city of humans.

“Why is he going to rush into this?” Gederon asked. The young daruu stood at the viewing frame, face nearly pressed against the wire webwork concealed behind the image. “It’s not as if that much gold is going to wander away on him.”

“You see, Geddie? This is why I took you on. You’ve got a thinker in that head of yours, and not just a bunch of hot steam like Draksgollow.”

“Shouldn’t we warn him?”

Kezudkan chuckled. “Now who’s rushing into things? Let him try. As you said, it’s not as if the gold is going to sneak off on us. We’ll still know where it is. If Draksgollow fails, we’ll still have a chance for it.”

“There must be some formidable defense for the gold to have remained all that time.”

“I agree,” said Kezudkan. “I wouldn’t even be surprised if this world still had dragons.”

The view of the awe-inspiring cache was gone, replaced by the corridors of the human city’s deep. Thirty steam tanks and a hundred hired guns on foot stood ready to receive orders. Everything about them was new, shiny ... untested. The signs of military might from the humans were next to nil, but overkill was the best sort of precaution. A small group of field sergeants had been given instruction on how to handle any rune-throwers they might run into:
Keep shooting until it stops moving, then put a couple more bullets into their heads.
It was the best Draksgollow could think of.

“You lot are going through to clear out and take control of the building you will enter,” said Draksgollow. “If it’s human, shoot it. If you’re not sure, shoot it. I don’t want prisoners, and I don’t want escapees. No survivors. Understood?”

“YES, SIR.” The workshop echoed with the chorus of replies. Draksgollow felt a little shiver of power hearing so many kuduk soldiers obey him. Steam tanks rumbled as the drivers started their engines.

Draksgollow put a hand on the switch that would open the world hole. “On my mark ... FORWARD!” He threw the switch, and the view turned into a hole to Veydrus—and riches beyond measure.