Spear of Destiny James Baldwin (free romance novels .TXT) 📖

the Spear. “What do you guys think? Boss fight, or traps?”

“I don’t hear anything, so probably traps.” Suri took post on the other side of the door. “Ready?”

I signaled her: one, two, three, and then turned into the opening and Shadow Danced through, ready to attack if anything lashed out. But there was no cancer, and no boss, either. There was only Perilous Symphony—or what was left of it.

The machine’s headless torso was splayed open like the ribs of a carcass, host to a forest of thin rust-covered stalactites. It hung from a sturdy scaffold that was also covered in mineralized salt and lime and sand, dripping constantly to the uneven, wet ground. A mess of rusted cables spilled from its guts, the ends trailing off into pools of reddish waste water. Mage lights around the perimeter of the huge silo still sputtered and flickered, their pale light dulled by the seething vortex of black noise emanating from the heart of the Warsinger.

“Holy shit,” I whispered, dropping the point of my weapon as I looked around. “We’re clear! Kind of.”

The others squeezed through. When Rin saw what was left of Perilous Symphony, she let out a yelp of dismay.

“Well, I’ll be damned.” Gar had his pistol drawn, scowling at the towering wreck. “The hell is that thing?”

“Perilous Symphony. The first fully-operational Warsinger constructed after the success of Nocturne Lament.” Rin absently pushed past me, gazing up at the rotting metal carcass. “And that is the Warsinger’s Heartstone.”

She pointed at the sucking black hole in its chest. As she did, it warped and fluxed, spitting static into the air.

“Looks like we got here just in time,” Karalti said. “Ugh… that stench.”

“Is it going to be safe to transport?” I asked, recoiling as my shoulder began to ache.

Rin let out a nervous laugh. “Umm… I don’t know if I’d want to sleep with it in my bed or anything, but as long as we don’t hang onto it for days, we should be okay?”

“Let’s grab it and whatever else you need, and let’s go,” Suri said. “This place gives me the fuckin’ creeps.”

I looked past her into the depths of the silo, searching for anything of interest. Even my darkvision couldn’t completely pierce the aura of gloom that hung over the silo. It looked and felt like a graveyard.

“Gar, could you help me?” Rin turned to him with a look of appeal. “If we have two mechanics working on this thing, we’ll get this done a lot faster. We have to get that crystal, and also see if we can identify and extract the sonic devices this Warsinger used to scream Drachan out of the sky.”

Gar looked up at the Heartstone. “Sonic weapons, eh? Like LRAD?”

“Kind of like a super-duper LRAD, yeah!” Rin waved her hands for emphasis.

“Super-duper is the technical term, right?” Karalti cocked her head from side to side, strutting around the base of the scaffolding.

“Right.” Gar rubbed his brow and the bridge of his nose. “Well, sure. How are we gonna get up there?”

“I figure we can rig up some kind of cable line and hoist you up,” Suri replied. “Kind of like a bosun’s chair.”

“Yeah! I’ll help! I’m the best at belaying!” Karalti puffed her chest out and thumped it with a fist. “But Suri’s still stronger than me, so she gets to belay Rin.”

“Right. Well, let’s get onto it,” Gar replied. “For once, I agree with Suri on something. This place gives me the heebie-jeebies, and I’m just about ready to see the end of it.”

***

With half an hour and a lot of effort, we were able to set up a kind of double Bosun’s Chair: a suspension that allowed Rin to hang in front of Perilous Symphony’s Heartstone, while Gar went up to the neck to tool around. Suri and Karalti had to lift them up and down using a belaying harness and improvised. While the four of them toiled on the Warsinger, I went to go and poke around the silo. It wasn’t long until I found something: another magitech console with a slot that was about the right size for the Spear of Nine Spheres, as well as a dial with slots that matched the keystones.

“If this place was built to construct Warsingers, they must have started working on the Caul back then, too.” I muttered to myself, scraping away dust and crumbs of stone off the front of the ‘screen’: a smooth slab of lambidium: a hard, magically conductive metal. “Let’s see what happens if we stick it in.”

I inserted the Spear’s blade into the slot. There was a ‘clunk’ as some kind of mechanism engaged,  but nothing else happened.

Curious, I looked over and around the device, searching for switches, valves, cranks or buttons. I found a valve at the base of it, still topped by a rusted spigot, and carefully gave it a twist to the left. There was a soft hiss, and the console reluctantly flickered to life behind me. Success.

I dusted myself and strolled back around, trying to figure out what I was seeing. The device projected a scroll of purplish glyphs into the air, which resolved into a magical hologram as I reached my hand out. It showed a wheel with four highlighted circles: one for each Keystone in the Spear. There were brief paragraphs of ancient script underneath it, so fuzzed out that even if I could read the language, it would be indecipherable.

“Okay… what if we…?” I flicked my fingers over one of the highlighted spheres to see if I could swipe it across, and jumped when a man-sized projection of Nocturne Lament sprung to life. Line after line of text began to rapidly spool out beside it.

“Wait. Are these the schematics?” I tried manipulating the hologram the way I would have done with an augmented reality terminal.