Chapter 29 Mullayne
Mullayne
Langzu – the den northeast of Bian
Years after the Shattering, which crumbled machines and buildings into dust, intrepid inventors still tried to piece together the creations of their predecessors.
One such person, Botaieus the Clever, managed to find, through wheedling and searching and a good deal of financial output, the scattered components of a machine said to extract magic from Numinar wood.
He reconstructed it based on old drawings and diagrams. Through another series of acquisitions, he obtained a comb carved from a Numinar.
Witness statements say he started up that machine, the gears whirring to life, and without further preparation or pretense, dropped the comb into the business end. The machine groaned, grinded, and spat out a black cloud of smoke before emitting a high-pitched whine.
What happened next, as eloquently stated by his assistant, was that “He blew himself the fuck up.” Botaieus may have been clever, but he was not wise, and this unfortunate incident was used in academies in more than one realm to point to the importance of safety standards in experimentation.
Mull had always thought himself capable.
How quickly the den had disabused him of that notion.
Or perhaps it had begun in the dark, on Tolemne’s Path, where every decision he’d made seemed only to send his friends further into danger.
Stupid, ruinous Mull, with his head in the clouds, never seeing where he was putting his feet.
Or maybe it was that he hadn’t cared who he was crushing along the way.
But he had cared.
Black-ticked fur covered the backs of his hands; the end of his nose felt softer and wetter.
Every movement seemed to bring to life some fresh new horror.
Each time he thought about it, he squirmed in his chair, and every time he squirmed, he felt the newness of a tail.
He tried not to think about the fur covering his body, his face, the way two of his teeth were now so long and sharp they nearly jutted from his mouth.
No one in these caves seemed to notice his discomfort, the way his feet tapped or his chair scraped.
They’d placed him in what they’d called the archives, though they weren’t like any archives Mull had ever known.
The cavern was filled with books of every type and language.
He’d been given confusing instructions, phrases he was tasked with marking, before he passed the books on to someone else.
They’d given him books in Albanoran, in Kashani, in Langzuan.
The godkillers had questioned him right after his transformation was complete, while he still lay gasping on the floor, aftershocks of pain racking his body.
What languages did he know? What could he read?
He’d told them everything without a second thought.
The archives were filled with nooks and screens, obscuring everyone’s tasks from everyone else.
The far wall had some openings to the outside that let in light and air, though they were shuttered at night and in the early mornings, when mist cloaked the foothills.
The alcove Mull sat in was lit by a single lamp and almost entirely blocked by a screen.
An aspect of Kluehnn was painted on the dark surface, the pale-faced creature graced with three extra sets of eyes, three mouths, and two sets of wings.
Antennae-like tendrils extended from its forehead and along its back.
This aspect was shaped like some sort of grotesque caterpillar, multiple short arms and legs holding its body upright.
It wasn’t the sort of view Mull was used to when he worked.
That life felt to him now like a dream, something he could only grasp in the hours before waking.
All his woes from then felt petty – his annoyance at his older brother, his exasperation that his parents never fully backed his curiosity, the subtle pressure to settle down and marry.
He’d funded his expeditions himself, but his clan had provided the seed money for his workshop.
He’d uncovered Tolemne’s Path, but he’d had the coin to pay for those ancient tablets; his parents had paid for his language tutors.
Mull had always thought himself capable, but he’d built up small woes to be grand antagonists, enemies he had to fight and struggle past in order to fulfill his dreams.
Of course he’d imagined he could do anything he set his mind to, he thought bitterly, when he’d lived a life of such relative ease.
He paged through an old Kashani book, the dialect so ancient he barely recognized it, cross-checking with the list they’d given him of the phrases he needed to mark. He wasn’t even sure why he was doing as the godkillers had asked, except that he had nothing else to do and nowhere else to go.
He had never heard of alteration being reversed.
In all the reading he’d done, in all the research, alteration was an immutable process.
He couldn’t imagine what his clan would say if he tried to return in this new shape, his hands heavier than they’d once been, fur covering his face and body, a tail curling around his legs.
He’d not even been able to bring himself to look for his reflection anywhere.
He didn’t want to know exactly how he looked now – as if knowing would wipe clean his memories of his old self.
He couldn’t be the son of a noble clan, not anymore.
Altered existed at the fringes of Langzuan society.
There was no place for him with his family, and this was a truth that stung more painfully than his consistent failures.
He had really thought he could infiltrate this den, that he could find the information he sought and then saunter back into his old life – bereft of old friends, but still the selfsame person.
He was a fucking idiot, that was what he was.
A section caught his eye – a phrase he’d seen on the list the godkillers had given him.
The hollow inner sanctum, where the gods lived.
He took one of the painted strips of parchment and tucked it into the page.
His feet tapped against the floor, his tail moving without his consent.
He’d nearly flipped past the page when he saw something else.
Unterra exists just past the third aerocline, a place where all manner of creatures live, and one becomes lighter than air.
The third aerocline. The third. He’d never seen any mention of this in a book, and now here it was, in this old Kashani text the godkillers were asking him to mark.
He could almost feel Imeah next to him, her hand on his shoulder as she peered at the book.
“Well that’s interesting, isn’t it?” she would have said.
“There’s not supposed to be a third one. ”
Pont would have sighed from the corner. “It’s a mistake. Just a misprint.” Always the skeptic.
And Jeeoon? She would have kicked her feet up onto a table and asked when they were going to leave on their next adventure. She had to source their supplies, you see.
For a moment, it felt so real to him that he lifted a hand to place over Imeah’s. He found himself patting his own empty shoulder.
They were gone – all three of them. Jeeoon and Pont dead, and Imeah lost to the tunnels underground.
He was not dead, nor was he lost.
Gods below, had he forgotten the entire reason he’d come to the den?
He’d come here to infiltrate it. And no, he hadn’t intended to become one of the altered.
He’d never wanted that. But he was here, inside the den, with unprecedented access.
That was exactly what he’d wanted, wasn’t it?
And instead of doing something about it, he’d been puttering along, doing everything the godkillers asked of him.
He was still alive and he was here and he’d promised himself the deaths of his friends would mean something.
He could feel the rusty gears of his mind creaking into motion.
They’d changed his body, but they couldn’t change his thoughts.
Those were, and would always be, his own.
If they were asking him to mark these sections, that meant the phrases they’d given him might also be linked to other truths Kluehnn wished to suppress.
New, frantic energy surged through his veins. He’d already wasted too much time. He had an entire stack of books here, and though his understanding of older dialects wasn’t great – except Old Albanoran – there was still information he could glean.
Was there a way out of the den and back to Bian?
A way to share the knowledge he found? That, he wasn’t sure about.
But it was a problem he could manage in the future.
He might have lived a softer life than he’d realized, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t rise to the occasion when things became more difficult.
He had no journal to take notes in, so he did his best to memorize the section.
There was a third aerocline and once, a long time ago, they’d known this.
He seized another book, flipping through the pages, looking for the key phrases.
There was a bit that claimed the god Barexi had had five children with a mortal wife, another that included a description of Unterra and a fearsome creature with mottled gray fur that roamed its woods.
What were they doing with the marked pages? And why?
Mull leaned his head around the edge of his screen. He couldn’t see anyone else’s workspace, but he could hear the scratch of pens against paper, the cut of a trimming knife. Were they removing those pages? Replacing them?
Why?
“You.” An acolyte appeared from behind a screen, long, spiraling horns nearly scraping the ceiling. Her gray robes brushed the floor as she strode toward him. “What are you doing?”
“I need to go to the latrine ditch.”
The acolyte waved a hand. “Then go. Don’t linger.”
Mull set his jaw and set off toward the entrance of the archives, moving to the side to let a convert with a cart of books pass by.
He’d come down here for a reason, and he’d let despair drive him for too long.
Somewhere in this den was the tomb of Tolemne’s family.
He’d promised his dead friends he’d find it. He’d promised himself.
This alteration? This changing of his body and of his life? It was a setback, nothing more. He’d find that tomb. He’d find out why Tolemne had returned to the surface and what he’d done.
He’d find the truth.