The Only Way Up the Ascent

One

Only an idiot would venture into the center of the Heap.

Being in the tunnels provides some protection, but not as much as you’d think.

A big fall changes the geography of the Heap in unpredictable ways, setting off junkslides and junkvalanches.

What seemed like a stable passage moments before can tighten up like a collapsing lung and mash you into paste.

Or (maybe worse?) it can cut off your exit, leaving you wandering desperately through a wrecked labyrinth, hoping to find a way out before something finds you.

All this is why most scavengers stick to the edges of the Heap, looking for spots where recent quakes have exposed fresh veins of junk.

You can spend every day patiently stripping out wire and steel, copper and glass, toss them in the big bins at the Malkuth steps, and get paid a bowl of mash and a couple bits.

It’ll keep body and soul together, most of the time.

Unless you get sick. Or hurt. Or pregnant.

Then you’d better hope your crew is willing to go hungry to cover your share.

Only an idiot would be a hunter, looking for Twisted, hoping to strip them of their sigils and claim bounties from the authorities.

When I explain all this to Star, he thinks for a while. His answer, audible only to me, comes through as a buzzing voice echoed in my breastbone.

[Query: only an idiot would be a hunter?]

Yup, I think back.

[Clarification: being a hunter enables you to subsist?]

Pretty much. The bakery brings in a few bits, but Somi gives away more food than he sells. Without me we’d wear rags and eat raw mash.

His tone becomes triumphant. [Conclusion: your success is a product of your idiocy. Lack of intelligence is your chief asset.]

Yeah, yeah. I roll my eyes. You’re right in here along with me, pal.

At this point a multi-limbed horror the size of a sleeping bag rips itself out of the wall and stabs me in several places.

We’re deep in the Heap. Not quite at the center, still outside Rotwurm’s territory, but deeper than most will ever go.

I’m in a tunnel a few meters across. Walls and ceiling made of junk: hunks of concrete and metal spars, big glass fragments and coils of wire.

These materials have been shoved, bent, twisted, and braided with considerable strength and infinite patience into something like a solid surface, although you need thick boots to walk on it without cutting yourself.

I have thick boots. Also a thick coat, pants, gloves, goggles, and a helmet made from the bottom of an old sink.

With a cloth wrapped around my face, there’s practically no skin showing, which is a necessity in an environment that’s about 90 percent sharp edges.

Furthermore, key areas of my outfit are reinforced with repurposed steel to protect the sensitive parts of my anatomy, which is why a spike of polished rebar glances off my chest with a screech and a rusty hooked claw fails to geld me.

A third limb, however, finds the edge of my thigh pad and sinks through leather, skin, and muscle. So that’s not great.

My opponent is half again my length and several times my weight, straddling me like a particularly unpleasant lover.

It looks a little bit like a centipede, a little bit like a worm, and quite a lot like a pile of junk that has somehow pieced itself together into a single functioning body without the benefit of a blueprint.

Its many limbs are each tipped with something unpleasant.

Here and there I see the gleam of threading wire and the rust-red surface of a sigil.

Twisted. Sigwork gone mad, the sheer will to destroy made manifest. Broken things putting themselves back together, but wrong.

The steel of its piercing limb grates against my thigh bone. The pain is really quite excruciating. Not enjoying it.

Star!

[Statement: I can only move so fast. It was you who asked me to scout ahead.]

Yeah, I think you might have missed something!

[Implication: my eyes are not perfect. Take it up with my builder.] He sniggers. [Oh, wait.]

WHAM, metal meets metal a few centimeters from my face.

Star is smaller than the Twisted, but he’s moving fast. He grabs the mechanical monster’s head—well, its front part—and twists.

His momentum pulls the Twisted up (its limb yanked incautiously from my flesh, ow ow ow) and cracks it like a whip, ass end scraping against the tunnel’s low ceiling.

Then the two of them go down in a tangle of shifting, scraping limbs.

Star is a much better design than the haphazard Twisted (he said, modestly), a basic but versatile spider shape I’ve used many times.

His compact ovoid body is wrapped in armor, reinforced on the inside with RESIST sigils that protect his inner workings.

He has eight fighting legs ending in long, sturdy blades, plus two fine manipulators folded up inside his carapace.

I put his two biggest optics in front—not strictly necessary, but I like it when he has something like a face—but there’s a ring of smaller ones as well, giving him all-around vision.

Various other handy devices are tucked away behind body panels.

Unfortunately, certain unavoidable constraints of budget and tools mean that he’s only about a third the size of his opponent.

For a moment his bladed legs tear at the Twisted, ripping through metal and wire, and some of its sigils shatter in sprays of fat red sparks.

Two of its limbs go dead, but it has many more, and as it recovers it bends its long body around to bring them to bear.

Star’s legs flip upward on their reversible joints to block, but the centipede-thing is attacking from many directions at once.

As the claws and blades slash against his armor, red light glows briefly from his interior as one of the RESIST sigils fails and its energy arcs away.

The Twisted could break Star’s shell eventually, but the Twisted doesn’t know that.

It doesn’t know anything other than the urge to destroy, and its attack isn’t getting the job done.

It shifts its attention to Star’s limbs, grabbing one with its forelegs and one with a hindward claw and yanking in opposite directions.

In a shower of red light and rending wire, both legs tear away from Star’s shell.

He scrabbles like an upturned turtle, trying to get clear, but the Twisted holds him in place with still other limbs.

Something to consider in the next design. Maybe an extra limb on his back to maximize traction in unusual circumstances…

My thoughts are a little hazy. I’ve got both hands pressed over the hole in my thigh, but the amount of blood I can feel pumping out between my fingers is frankly alarming.

[Admission: this is not going well.]

You think?

[Suggestion: do something.]

Options are limited. Head is fuzzy. I’ve got a trump card, but fuck, it’s expensive…

Maybe there’ll be a yellow in there to make up for it? Moon, let there be a yellow in there to make up for it.

Star, Bug Zapper!

His gleeful chuckle rings in my mind. A panel on his body slides open and a new limb folds out.

This one is short and ends in a stubby rod and definitely does not look like a mechanical dick, get that thought out of your head right now.

It presses against the Twisted’s hide like an awkward boner in a chaste hug.

I feel a pull on my spirit, like someone has a fishhook through my heart and gives the line a gentle tug.

Star is a runic, made of metal and wire, built around a foundation sigil at his heart.

That single meta-verb is connected by threading wire to other sigils: verbs to define effects, modifiers to shape them, nouns to direct their power.

Strings of MOVE sigils animate his limbs, RESISTS harden his armor, PERCEIVES focus his optics, while STRONG and FAST add extra oomph.

Bug Zapper is built around a single precious EXPLODE, a unique sigil that destroys itself and anything connected to it in a ferocious burst of power.

It’s connected to a SHOCK, the signifier for WIRE, and a few modifiers to tighten the effect.

When it goes off, energy floods wildly through any sigwork system in range; a runic’s foundation sigil can handle the surge, but the distributed architecture of a Twisted is uniquely vulnerable. I just hope it’s enough.

The weapon goes off with a noise like a swarm of bees taking flight.

The middle section of the Twisted goes into wild convulsions, crawling with arcs of white lightning punctuated by bursts of red as its sigils explode.

I wince with every blast—I need those sigils, moon damn it—but at least it seems to be working.

After a second or two, the lightning dies away and I hold my breath.

Twisted don’t have a foundation sigil; they’re more like a self-sustaining network of malicious power, and killing them can be tricky.

If you can take a big enough chunk out of them, though, the remnants of their energy usually bleed away. Usually.

The two ends of the centipede-thing thrash for a few moments longer. Then, to everyone’s relief, they go still. Star scrambles away from its slack grip, righting himself expertly on his now-asymmetric legs.

[Assessment: effective], he informs me. [Observation: you are leaking badly.]

“You don’t say,” I mutter aloud. I reach one bloody hand around to my pack, every movement sending waves of dizziness through me. The pain has reached an existential crescendo that scrapes at the edges of my vision. If I pass out now, I’m fucking dead.

[Query: can I assist?]

You can tell Star is really worried when he drops his sarcasm. I find what I’m looking for in my pack and yank it out, gasping.

Gonna cauterize, I tell him. Even my mental voice is sounding thick. Prob’ly pass out. You have enough legs left to strip the sigils from that thing?

[Assessment: sufficient. Query: do you have enough blood left to make it home?]

S’good question. I bring the little stick to the wound in my thigh and shove my gloved finger between my teeth. My mouth fills with the tang of copper. We’ll see, right?

Like Bug Zapper, the stick contains a string of one-use sigils, starting with EXPLODE. I didn’t build this one, so I don’t know all the details, but BURN and FLESH are definitely in there, too. Expensive piece of kit, but what’s your life worth, right?

S’ a joke. I know what mine’s worth—jack fucking shit. Makes this a pretty bad trade, all told. I’m attached to it, though.

I kick the thing off. New, hitherto unglimpsed vistas of pain open up before me for a moment before darkness closes in.