Twenty-Four
Time slips by. Three weeks till the Ascent.
With Ky’s little hoard I buy sigils and supplies from Ekkeban.
It’s a fraction of what I’d been spending a few weeks ago; he raises an eyebrow but says nothing.
(Sudden rises and abrupt falls are common among his customers, I suppose.) I take Star’s thief body to pieces and rip up my climbing gloves and kneepads for sigils and threading wire.
The result is something reminiscent of my early years, visibly janky and unstable.
It works, after a fashion, but it’s fragile without RESIST-enhanced armor. One solid hit would wreck it.
[Conclusion: then I will not get hit.] Star twirls his fighting limbs, clearly overjoyed to be back in a body at all.
That’s the idea. We’ll play it safe for now.
The relatively weak Twisted at the bottom of the bounty board pay a pittance, but I can strip them for sigils and wire.
Without even the tenuous safety net of Bug Zapper, I can’t afford to get into trouble again.
Fortunately, simple Twisted are even dumber than the idiot; all they know how to do is come straight at you in a mass of twisted metal.
Star gets the drop on them and tears them to pieces in seconds.
Back home, Ameliana returns several times to check on our wounds and (I suspect) to keep a suspicious eye on Ky.
Ky, for her part, is unfailingly courteous to everyone.
Our circumstances must seem unbearably primitive to her; I keep waiting for her to show some disgust at our pit toilets, our pathetic little tin bath, our food that’s just endless variations on mash.
But she only smiles and eats happily and tells stories about Hod to Spike.
Somi and I exchange few words, but few are needed.
He knows something must have gone badly wrong for me to have brought Ky here, and he knows I’m doing everything I can to fix it.
He doesn’t even question that I’m putting every bit I earn into rebuilding Star.
He trusts me, right at the point where I’m no longer sure I deserve it.
Because the ugly truth is that I’m not moving fast enough. The Ascent is getting closer, and at this rate Star’s new body isn’t even going to match the Mark 4, let alone be enough of an improvement to stand a chance.
When she’s feeling well enough, Ky accompanies me to the market.
She’s washed and scrubbed by now, and she wears a dress borrowed from Ameliana, taken in with a few stitches to fit her slimmer frame.
She taught Spike to braid her hair, and I spent most of an evening feeling a bit jealous of my younger sister as she ran her fingers through the long silver tresses.
Now Ky has it pinned up in a thick club-like tail, tucked away under a shapeless cap.
It makes her look more ordinary, but she still draws plenty of admiring eyes.
She asks questions about everything she sees, and I find myself blushing from embarrassment on behalf of my home.
Yes, those are pig troughs, and that’s a shit wagon.
There’s the little fountain where the whores wash their privates between clients; you can also cleanse your ass with it after you use the outhouse.
Oh look, here comes the man selling pig bladders stuffed with mash and turnips, they’re delicious.
Even Malkuth, with its tight-packed squalor, now seems like a beacon of civilization compared to this.
Ky’s curiosity seems genuine, though, and she never complains.
“Where do you get the bounties?” she asks as we weave between busy tables.
“There’s bounty boards all over.” I point to a bounty-man’s stall with its broad chalkboard, which has a list that mirrors the one in Ekkeban’s shop. “Nobody wants to deal directly with the Arbiters, so you take your kill to the bounty-man and he’ll buy it for a little discount.”
“Can we look?”
“Sure.”
We stroll over. I peer at the bottom of the list, where the ever-changing entries for my usual prey are posted.
Nothing promising since my last check, which is unfortunate; I’m starting to think I’ve picked this whole area clean of easy money.
It might be worth going after something a little more dangerous, but Star is still too vulnerable—
“What’s a rotwurm?” Ky says.
I’ve gotten out of the habit of looking at the top of the board. It never changes: Rotwurm, 200 s.
“Does that mean stripes?” Ky says. “Two hundred stripes?”
A couple of nearby hunters are giving us odd looks. “Doesn’t matter,” I mutter.
“Why not?”
I take her arm and pilot her away from the stall. “Because it’s Rotwurm. It’s been out there since before I was born. Nobody can kill it.”
“Says who?”
“Says about a thousand dead people.” I see the look in her eye and sigh. “Seriously, Ky, forget it.”
“But two hundred stripes. That would be more than we need. You could build something that would take Vripiai to pieces.”
“I couldn’t, because I’d be dead.”
“I’d come with you,” she says. “Give me a couple more days.”
“Okay, then we’d be dead. I don’t think you’re grasping the key point here.”
“What makes you so sure?”
I shake my head. “It’s a matter of size. Do you know anything about Twisted?”
“They’re like runics, but crazy.”
“That’s not exactly right. Twisted don’t have cores or foundation sigils like runics do.
With a runic, if you can get at the core, you can always kill it.
Like a person’s heart or brain. Twisted aren’t like that.
They’re”—I wave a hand vaguely—“distributed. Each bit connected to all the other bits. There’s no vital point to hit. ”
“But you kill Twisted all the time.”
“If you hit them hard enough, you can disrupt their network, and it’ll die out.
” I grope for an analogy. “It’s a bit like a fire.
Blow lightly on a candle, and the flame will flicker but flare back up when you stop.
Blow hard, and it’ll go out. You break them, rip them apart, and they lose cohesion. ”
“So—”
“But the bigger they are, the harder it gets. That’s why you need a whole team to fight a really big Twisted.
You have to hit it all together, over and over, or else it’s like trying to stamp out a fire in dry tinder.
The older the Twisted, the bigger it gets.
And Rotwurm is old. It’s got a territory right near the center of the Heap, and it doesn’t seem to mind when a block of concrete the size of a house falls on it.
I don’t even know if it can be killed. It’s like trying to blow out a bonfire. ”
“Hmm.” Ky’s brow creases in thought. “You’d need something that can output a whole bunch of power all at once.”
“Exactly. Even Bug Zapper wouldn’t be enough—”
“What about the weapon you used against Gestian?”
I pause. We haven’t talked much about exactly what happened that night; I hadn’t been sure she remembered everything well.
“That flash,” Ky says. “Very bright, all at once. I’m not a sigworker, but that sounds ideal, right?”
“That wasn’t…” In truth, I don’t know what it was. Like an EXPLODE, but not. “The light alone wouldn’t harm a Twisted. You’d have to use HEAT, or FORCE…”
“But it could work, right?”
“I have no idea. I’ve never even seen Rotwurm. All I have to go on are stories.”
“We could test it on some of the smaller Twisted.”
“Except that building the weapons would cost more than we can afford. They burn out after one shot.”
She taps her pursed lips, thoughtfully. “Maybe we can get an advance?”
“For fighting Rotwurm? Ekkeban would laugh in my face.”
Ky grins. “Let me talk to him.”
“Hey, Taj,” Ekkeban calls from behind the counter. Then, in a deeper voice, “Oh. Hello, miss.”
“Hey,” I say, but he’s not paying much attention to me.
We took a few moments in the market for some last-minute preparations.
Ky undid her braid and combed out her hair into its full breathtaking waterfall, draping it over her shoulder like a river of silver.
Her dress is still the same faded, patched thing, but she bought a red shawl from a vendor, and the contrast with the silver is striking.
She gives him a little smile, warm but shy, and pretends to be interested in some of the junk on the shelves.
I affect nonchalance and head for the counter.
“I’m gonna need some more stuff,” I tell him. “More of those reversible joints, some long spars and blades, a stack of sigils, and a few more blanks—”
“Who’s your friend?” Ekkeban says.
“Business partner,” I correct him. “Eclamia.”
“Really.” He glances at me. “Where’d she come from?”
“Search me.” I lower my voice, as though imparting secrets. “But she’s got ideas. We’re onto a big one.”
“Are you,” he says warily. “And has this business partner brought some cash with her? Because it sounds like what you need is going to add up—”
I frantically beckon Ky below the counter, and she saunters over. She’s doing some kind of thing with her hips that’s almost hypnotic. Ekkeban’s attention snaps to her, and he straightens up and tugs pointlessly at his tightly braided locks.
“I can do better than that,” she says, her voice a purr. “I can provide an opportunity.”
“Opportunity,” Ekkeban echoes.
“For investment. If you can provide financing for our little expedition, then the rewards could be substantial.” She leans forward on the counter. “And of course I’d be very grateful.”
“How, um, grateful? And substantial?”
“Five percent? For a week’s float.”
“That’s… quite generous.” Some unoccupied part of Ekkeban’s distracted brain supplies, “There must be considerable risk involved.”
“Oh, Taj is handling things.” Ky pats my shoulder, and I can’t help but thrill at the contact. “I have complete faith in him. I’m sure you do, too.”
“Complete faith?” His eyes flick to me.
I spread my hands. “Have I ever left you to hang?”
Ekkeban looks between my guileless smile and Ky’s sultry one, and sighs.
“I like him,” Ky says. “He’s sweet.”