36
It’d been a while since Milo had spent much time in the little cubicle assigned to him. Mostly, he only used it to crawl into when exhausted and sleep.
But even though the physicians had used magic to stabilize and then heal the damage to his head, they still recommended he spend a few days in his room.
“Don’t move around,” his doctor told him. “Head wounds are the worst. We think we’ve healed them, but your brain starts leaking outta your ears when you’re too far away to get help. Just stick around your room. Ket will check on you regularly.”
And that’s what happened.
Every now and then he’d look up to see the little woman with blue hair standing in the doorway. “You alright, kid?”
“Fine.”
“Good, good. Don’t go walkies.”
“I’m not.”
For the first day, she’d kept Tania and Selma out of the room. She couldn’t keep Click out, though, and the little golem had managed to wrestle his workpad through the ducts to Milo.
He patted his faithful little construct. “Good job.”
It let out a whir of gears and shivered under his touch.
Then it scrambled back into the ducts to continue its mission.
The workpad was helpful. And a paper and pencil was equally helpful.
Milo spent his time reviewing the rifle’s design. He knew the sudden burst of power must’ve done something, but he wasn’t sure what. He guessed one of the spheres must’ve ruptured partway through the explosive discharge.
Or the energy had simply overloaded the cooling coils.
But that shouldn’t have caused it to explode.
No, the more he thought about it, the more he was convinced that there was a limitation to how much mana the rifle could discharge. The dwarves would have set it like that. So, when he’d tried pumping more mana than it could handle, it reached its limit and the compressed mana had to go somewhere.
What this told him was the cartridge wasn’t necessarily a bad idea.
He just had to figure out how the dwarves limited the power the rifle could use and remove that component.
But if he did that, maybe something else could go catastrophically wrong.
Maybe they had a reason for limiting it.
He sketched out the full design of the rifle, hoping that the act of drawing it out would give him some more insight.
On the second evening, Tania slipped into his room.
She kicked the door shut behind her and scowled. “She’s cracked in the head, I tell ya.”
“Who?”
“Who’d ya think?” She threw herself onto the edge of the bed and crossed her legs angrily. “That blue-haired dame.”
“Ket.”
“She’s got eyes in the back of her head, Milo. She hasn’t let me see you at all.” Tania turned to him, her eyes wide. “How are ya feeling? Is everything peachy? Ain’t no screws loose, are there?”
“No, I don’t think so.” He put his workpad away and smiled at her concern. “How are you and Selma? You got hit hard.”
“We’re fine.” She gave her arm a shake. “I think something’s rattling in my arm, though.”
“I’ll have a look when I get out of here.”
“And Selma’s complaining about her hip.” Tania’s eyes narrowed. “But I think she’s angling for you to touch her up down there.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
Tania dug into her robe and pulled out a small folder. Tossed it down next to him. “We got this put together, though. Everything we can find so far on Fergus and the Paddstones. There’s a lot more going back, but we figured you only wanted to know recent stuff.”
He scooped up the folder and cracked it open.
It was more in-depth than he’d expected.
“Huh,” he said. “He started out as an arcanomancer?”
“Yep.” She’d obviously read it all. “He was rated level three when he was a kid. His daddy was real disappointed. And he weren’t much good at learning magic, so took a while to get himself on track.
Arcanomancy’s the simplest magic, right?
He stuck to that until he got better as he got older.
He was twelve when he started on cryomancy. ”
“Hmm.” Milo shuffled through the papers. The writing was neat and crisp. Easy to read. He found a few observations and smiled. “He’s insecure? Are we talking the same guy?”
“Oh, yeah. He’s really down on himself, for sure.
Kinda makes me feel sorry for him. If he weren’t such a jerk and a creep, I mean.
” She tapped her chin. “I think he’s got himself a bad case of daddy issues.
Old Man Paddstone is a legend. He was rated level nine.
But everyone believes he might be more than that. ”
Milo felt a brief spark of jealousy.
If he’d been rated higher, would his life be better?
His eyes flicked to Tania. To her smile. To her legs.
Maybe not.
Maybe he was right where he was meant to be.
“You trying to get a look at my coochie, Milo?”
“No,” he said. “I was just thinking.”
“About my coochie?”
“No. About what it’d be like to be level nine.”
“Because I can show it to you if you want.”
“I’d rather you showed me what you found on the other thing.”
“Party pooper.” She sighed. Then pulled out another file.
The handwriting was different this time.
Still neat, but a little more delicate. “I dug through the library. There is reference to what you saw. A big old core. The first time was back in the War of Kings before the mages had created the Republic, they were outnumbered by the collective armies of the five kingdoms. They were around until the mages won and pulled them all under the Court.”
“That’s why we celebrate Liberation Day…”
“They won by using a weapon they called the Leveler.”
“Leveler?”
“Yeah. On account of it giving a mage enough power to level mountains. Literally.”
“Huh.”
“It’s described in there as a staff with a shining red orb on top like a big old cherry. Do you like cherries, Milo? I could give you one.”
“Sounds like what I saw.”
“The second time it was used was in the Great Split.”
“When the Court split in two.”
“And went to war.” She shook her head. “Those stories are crazy, Milo. The things them mages did to the world…”
“It was a dark time,” he said. He’d read some books on the Great Split. The mages had struggled for almost fifty years before the Court finally managed to track the last of the rebels down.
And kill him.
“Well, the Court used the Leveler again. There’s a story where they wiped out an entire city with it.
Just thinking about that sort of power gives me the heebie jeebies, ya know?
” She gave him an apologetic look. “They don’t call it the Primal Core, but it really does sound like what you saw, right? ”
He closed his eyes, trying to remember the core he’d seen.
It had been floating in the air above a pedestal.
That suggested it was suspended inside a ward. Trying to remove it would trigger an alarm.
But that wasn’t Milo’s concern.
What was troubling him was Fed had said he needed permission from the Prime to build better golems and equipment. And Fergus had referred to something called the Primal Core.
Both had to be related.
But how did that relate to the massive core he’d seen?
The more he thought about it, the more he was almost sure the red core wasn’t the Prime. Because there were different kinds of cores.
Machine Cores, which provided power. And Machine Intelligence Matrixes which worked as the virtual brain of the golem.
Both looked the same, so mages would confuse them.
Fergus seemed to think the Primal Core would bestow great power on a mage, increasing their mana capacity by so much that it could make someone like Milo capable of being a mage. That suggested the Primal Core was a powerful Machine Core.
Which aligned it with the thing called the Leveler, which was sitting in the Vaults behind the Dungeon Hall. In their desperation to save his life, the mages had carried him through the vaults as it was the quickest path to the Infirmary.
He didn’t think there was more than one core the size of the Leveler, so he was tempted to think it was the Primal Core.
But Milo couldn’t get permission from a Machine Core for anything.
It was little more than a mana battery.
He’d expected to find a Machine Intelligence Matrix instead.
“It’s not helpful?” Tania asked.
“It is,” he said, though his words didn’t sound too convincing. “It just raises more questions than answers. I wish I knew what it was I was looking for. Fed is hopeless. He just tells me the Prime is the Prime.”
She nodded.
She didn’t know anything at all about the Prime. That information wasn’t in her Matrix.
“Well, then we ain’t got no choice,” she said. “Looks like our next caper won’t be in a dungeon.”
He lifted his gaze and held hers. “You’re thinking what I’m thinking?”
“Only if you’re thinking about the best way to peep under my robes and get a good gander at my coochie.”
“That’s not what I was thinking.” He sighed.
“Sure you were, Milo.” She took hold of the lower hem of her robe and raised it up to show her panties. “I mean, you were thinking of lifting it, right?”