The Stargazer's War - Chapter 3.3

Chapter 3.3: Errands

The ostentatious doorway spat me out into an ostentatious-er departure lounge.  Hardwood—real wood—floors tapped against my boots with a satisfying knock.  Oil pantings of the fields of Ilirian hung upon three of the chambers four walls, the fourth of which—opposite my entrance—was made entirely of glass.  I paused for a breath, staring through the floor to ceiling window at the city beyond.

Two massive walls of iron and glass and light stretched out before me, an artificial ravine between arcologies.  Infrequent bridges and airborne transports intruded into the gap, concessions to the logistical necessities of the billions housed here.  At the very end, past untold homes and offices and gathering spaces, shined a sliver of the Right Eye itself, casting its sanguine glow into the manmade chasm, making silhouettes of all between me and it.

I found myself with the distinct impression of a city cleft in two for the sole purpose of allowing me this view.

It probably had been.

A cough to my left pulled me from my thoughts.  I turned to find what could only be a member of the hangar staff, dressed as he was in black slacks, a white button down, and a bowtie.  He saluted.

“Good afternoon, sir,” he introduced himself.  “My name is Jeremy.  It’ll be my pleasure to take care of you for the duration of your stay here at The Early Dew Glistens in the Starlight.  Please let me or any of my staff know if there’s anything we can assist you with.”

I walked over and shook his hand.  “Nice to meet you.  I’m Cal.  I do actually have a few questions for you if you don’t mind.”

“Of course, sir.”

I bit back the impulse to ask he dispense with the ‘sirs.’  The formality didn’t bother me nearly enough to insist he break with his routine just for my sake.  “What do you call this place when the egos aren’t listening?”

“The egos, sir?”

“Oh, you know, anyone with their head so far up where it shouldn’t be that they think giving a hangar a seven-word name is a good idea.”

“Far be it from me to question the wisdom beyond our illustriously named The Early Dew Glistens in—”

My withering glare cut him off.

He leaned in conspiratorially.  “‘Glistens’, sir.  Us lowly mortals shorten the name to ‘Glistens.’”

“Huh.”  I blinked.  “I suppose that’s better than ‘Dew.’  My money would’ve been on TEDGitS.  Makes for a pretty good acronym.”

“Alas, we’ve been disallowed from acronyms.  The third line of the poem reads ‘For any Road to Answers Stretches Shy.’”

I furrowed my brow, repeating the line under my breath a I constructed the acronym.  “For any Road to Answers…”  I guffawed.  “Oh that’s bad.  Alright, no acronyms.  Got it.”

“Would there be anything else, sir?”

I snapped my fingers.  “Oh, yes actually.  Since I’m going to be staying here for the foreseeable future, I should probably look into gainful employment.  Could you connect me with someone who has need of a vac welder?”

“A vac welder, sir?”

I grinned.  “That’s me.  There’s gotta be someone aboard this station that needs some vac welding done, right?”

“I’ll see what I can do, sir.”

“Thanks Jeremy.  You’re a huge help.”  I craned my neck to survey the room around us.  “Now how do I get out of here?”

“I can arrange a transport for you, sir.  To where shall you be heading?”

“Oh, I don’t need a private…”  I trailed off at Jeremy’s flat look.  Of course none of the public transit lines went to the sect’s personal hangars.  I sighed.  “I need to do a bit of shopping.  From a quick look at the localnet, it seems to Doro district suits my needs.”

“Doro, sir?  Are you certain?  I can vouch for neither the quality nor the safety of that particular borough.  The unaffiliated cultivators that reside there can be—”

“I appreciate the warning, but I can take care of myself, thank you.”  I watched his eyes flicker over my shoulder, where Shiver’s hilt rested in ready reach.

“I’d never suggest otherwise, sir.  However, might I recommend the Starfire Mall?  I’m quite certain the collection of sect-backed outlets there would meet your needs.”

I shook my head.  “Nah, too rich for my blood.  Doubt those sect-ers would want to rub shoulders with little old me.  Doro, please.”

Jeremy tapped three times on his holopad.  “Of course, sir.  If you’ll follow me, your transport shall arrive at bay one shortly.”

He led me from the lounge into a wide hallway lined with automated doors, each labeled with wooden placard carved with a number.  I counted six transport bays, each large enough to fit Lucy herself, let alone private transports to deliver people to and from her hangar.  At the end of the hall, a modest service door had been painted to blend in with the wall.  That explained where Jeremy had come from, I figured.  I wondered if he’d let me use the plebeian exit in the future or if I’d be doomed to personal taxis.

It took some three and a half minutes for the door marked ‘one’ to slide open, revealing a surprisingly mundane private transport.  There was no bottle of champagne on ice nor anything else ridiculously over the top, though the clean faux leather seats and lack of ads projected onto every surface very clearly distinguished the taxi from anything available to the general public.

I bid Jeremy a final thanks and stepped aboard, settling into one of the four chairs as the door shut behind me and the engines whirred to life.

I took in the view of the city while it lasted, but before long the transport turned out of the massive chasm into a open tunnel, lined first with private transport bays, then only with bare metal and maintenance walkways as the affluent city center grew distant.

I didn’t see Doro coming.  The transport didn’t deposit me in some grand plaza or boulevard.  The shops and restaurants that made up downtown Doro blended in near seamlessly with the gunmetal surroundings.  It simply flew down the barren tunnels for some twenty minutes before coming to a halt at a row of bays near indistinguishable from any other.  Some half were occupied, albeit all with larger, public transports meant to ferry people by the dozens or hundreds.  Mine was the only private car.

The ceiling in the arrival lobby sat just slightly too low for comfort, not so much that even the tallest of visitors would have to stoop, but just enough to impart of sense of being boxed in.  Cheap screens lined the walls, displaying scenes of sunny beaches and mountain vistas.  I let out a sigh.  Something must’ve gone wrong with the programming for the faux windows to show such radically different exteriors.  One of them flickered sporadically as the wiring within failed.  Another was turned off entirely.

Shaking my head, I wove through the mass of people to exit the transport station, stepping out into a broad and busy thoroughfare.  Shops flanked it, their floor to ceiling windows displaying all manner of goods from holotech to fashion, their fronts intermittently giving way to stairways or halls to parallel streets.  Planter boxes lined the center of the avenue, the flowers within neither particularly well pruned nor suffering for the lack of attention.  Synth jazz played from a series of speakers hidden in the ceiling.

The air smelled faintly of perfume, the likes of which my mind associated with the upper class shopping center back home that my parents took us to for milestone birthdays back when we still pretended to be a functional family.  For a moment I wandered, caught up in the memory.  Doro didn’t quite look the part—it was far too cramped to match the open plazas and vaulted ceilings of Wendel’s, but something about the sounds and the smells and the people matched perfectly.

I realized then that Wendel’s probably wasn’t as swanky as I’d thought growing up.  If the higher-ups at a backwater like the Right Eye considered Doro rough-and-tumble, those back home probably wouldn’t be caught dead sending a servant to a place like Wendel’s.

My reminiscing dried up as I spotted a sign for Sullivan’s Scratchings, artfully engraved and aglow with a faint stream of qi rather than electricity.  The array of rings and bracelets and watches and amulets in the window might’ve reminded me of a jewelry story were it not for the soft glow of qi drifting off the items or the decal advertising custom enchantments on the door just above the store’s hours.

A bell chimed as I stepped inside, summoning a plump woman in seemingly her mid sixties from what I could only assume was the workshop in the back.  My spiritual sense clocked her as a copper cultivator, which based on her appearance placed her real age at probably around ninety.  She didn’t smile at me.

“Welcome to Sulivan’s.  What do you need?”

“Hi.”  I flashed a grin and stepped up to the counter.  “I’ve come into possession of some enchanted items and I was hoping you could tell me what they do.”

“Nope.  I don’t deal with stolen goods.”

“Stolen?”  I scowled, realizing too late that showing up with a bunch of enchanted items I didn’t know with my prosthetic core set to ‘mortal’ looked a certain way.  I opened my mouth to explain that I hadn’t stolen anything before realizing that I technically had, and I didn’t think explaining that Lesley very much deserved to be stolen from would’ve made much of a difference to her.  Did sentient manifestations of banned technology even have property rights?

“Look, this stuff comes from off world, its previous owner is dead, and if I didn’t have it it would’ve been buried and lost forever.  Nobody’s going to come looking for these.  I promise.”

“Oh, well if you promise.”

I sighed, taking a moment to look over my shoulder and confirm the shop was empty.  “Fine.  I didn’t want to do this, but if you’re going to be obstinate…”  I reached down the collar of my shirt and turned my fake core up to bronze.

The woman’s eye’s shot open, and she snapped into a salute.  “Sir!  I’m sorry, I never should’ve insinuated you would—”

“Stop that.”  I told her.  “You were right.  I should’ve realized how it’d look to ask for a bunch of appraisals while masquerading as a mortal.”

“Why do you need my help?  Surely a man of your stature has access to—”

“I’d like to keep these quiet.”  I deposited the earring, the dagger, the onyx, and the whetstone onto the counter.  “Can you do that for me?”

She blinked.  “These are enchanted?  I don’t see any etchings.”

“They are.  Can you help me?”

She picked up the dagger, holding it to her eye as she turned it over in her hand.  “Absolutely.  It’ll take some trial and error if I can’t identify the engravings, but I have a Corrun cage and a PQI in the back.  Give me a few days and I’ll have full documentation for you.”

“Perfect,” I said, lacking the slightest idea what a Corrun cage did or what PQI stood for.  I swiped at my holopad.  “Message me when you’re done?”

“Yes, sir.”  She saluted again.  “Thank you for your business, sir.”

“Thank you.”  I reached into my shirt to turn my false core back down.  “Not a word, okay?”

“Yes, sir.”

I returned her salute.  “See you in a few days.”

I slipped out of the shop and back into the crowd, somewhat abashed at my handling of the situation.  At least she hadn’t called the cops on me.  Jeremiah really worked miracles with this prosthetic core.

The possibility remained that all I’d achieved was to scare her into quietly reporting me to the sect rather than outright refusing me, but I kept faith in the might-makes-right inherent to cultivator culture.  Even if she did turn on me, I could think of a few sect members who might be willing to help me out.

I wandered aimlessly for a few blocks, taking in the district as I got a feel for the city.  Copper seemed to be the high end for unaffiliated cultivators around here, though a handful seemed to have made it to bronze in their old age.  I was sure the non-sect cultivators had factions of their own, likely headed by irons or even titaniums, but wherever they were, it wasn’t Doro.

Curiosity piqued, I stopped at a bench to stretch out my spiritual sense, expanding past the walls and the shops and the passersby to take in the entirety of Doro, or at least as much of it as I could before the edges of my perception brushed against the outer hull and the infinite sea beyond.

My original conclusions held.  Tin and copper cultivators made up the majority of the district’s residents, with only some twenty percent still in the process of opening their meridians and forming their core.  A second fifth seemed to have eschewed cultivation entirely, likely service workers from poorer areas or children too young to embark on the dangerous process.

Exactly one individual broke the trend.  A blazing orb of light reminiscent of Charlotte’s iron core roared with life three stories above me, weaving qi into a technique so convoluted I could hardly follow it.  Whatever it was, it twirled about in a space the size of a mid-sized room.  The plethora of low-level cultivators about in a handful of clusters around the space as well as in a line down one side painted a fairly convincing picture.

Someone was casting complex magic on a bar full of people.

My eyes flicked open.  Now that was interesting.  Charlotte, Micaiah, Lucy, and my own better judgment all probably would’ve preferred I kept my nose out of other peoples’ business, but at least Xavier would’ve supported my decision to go take a look.  For all I knew, those people needed help, and I’d at this point accepted my growing inability to leave well enough alone.

I sent Lucy an update as I made for the nearest staircase on the off chance I was about to do something monumentally stupid.  She replied instantly.

Be careful.

By the time I’d read her warning, I could already hear the music.

A lone electric guitar wailed a haunting melody of melancholy longing, of wanderlust and restless souls, of a yoke cleft in twain and left to fall of shoulders newly unburdened.  Above it all sang an angelic tenor with just enough grit to imbue a touch of rawness to it.  I didn’t even read the name of the bar before stepping inside.  The people within sat enraptured, touching neither their drinks nor their meals nor their conversations as they listened.  My sole lament, as I sidled up to one of the few open seats at the bar, was that I only caught the tale end of the enthralling number.

“Reckoning will never find me,

Beckoning horizons bide me,

Leave it all behind.

Leave it all behind.

The memories may leave me grinning, 

But opportunity here’s thinning.

Cause bending rarely leads to winning,

And endings make the best beginnings.

Leave it all behind.

Leave it all behind.

Leave it all behind.

Leave it all behind.”

I felt the technique end as the singer strummed the final chord, spurring the audience into thunderous applause.  I joined, gazing across the crowd at the musician.

He stood atop a table, where he’d been sitting previously, his dark hair falling in waves over his face as he bowed with a flourish.  He wore a long jacket kept open to reveal the low cut of his shirt, the sleeves rolled up to bare his tattooed forearms.  I counted no fewer than six bracelets and a bandana tied around his wrists, an excess matched only by the three scarves, seven rings, and three belts he also wore.  A pair of worn leather boots completed his rockstar x vagrant aesthetic, the former only winning out over the latter because of the guitar strapped to his shoulder.

He straightened from his bow.  His eyes met mine.

He winked.

“What’ll it be?”

A voice from behind me forced me to turn away from the mysterious singer as I realized his spell had worked.  I’d found myself lured into the bar.  “Lager,” I answered.  “Whatever’s on tap.”

I paid half attention as the bartender listed their extensive collection before picking one at random.  Within a minute a tall glass arrived in front of me.

“Put it on my tab.”

My head jerked to the left in time to watch the musician himself slip into the chair beside mine.  He smelled strongly of cologne.  I furrowed my brow.  “Thank you…”

“Carlos Esperanza, at your service.”  He extended a hand, and I noticed he’d painted just two of his nails—his pointer and middle fingers.  

I shook it.  “I’m Cal.”

“I’ve never seen you around here before, Cal.  That’s one hell of a jacket.  Where’d you find it?”

I glanced down at my leather jacket, deciding it best not to reveal I’d taken it from the closet of the lost heir to Illustrious Sky Holdings.  “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

A sly grin stretched across his face.  “Join me upstairs and I’ll believe anything you tell me.”

I snorted.  “Does that line work for you?”  I shook my head.  “Sorry, I’ve—ah—got my sights set on someone else.”

“Ooh, a romantic, are you?  I wouldn’t have guessed.  Tell me about them.”

I scowled at him.  “Why do you care?”

“Nothing could fascinate me more than detail of love through the eyes of another.  To glimpse the ineffable mechanisms that so draw one soul to another is to grasp at a sliver of the underpinnings of fate itself.  As cultivators our very futures depend on our ability to comprehend such things.”

I raised an eyebrow at him.  “‘Our?’”

He flashed me a crooked grin.  “Oh, don’t play coy with me.  You’ve a more flawless veil than I’ve even heard of, but my song slipped right over you.  I’m sure to your handsome ears I sounded downright mediocre.”

“It was beautiful,” I blurted out the response before I could think it through.  “You have a real talent.”  My beer arrived.  I took a sip.

“You should tell the sect that.  They kicked me out, if you would believe it.”

“There’re a number of things I’d like to tell the sect, none of them nearly that nice.  Unfortunately my friends need their focus rooms, so I can’t go airing grievances.”

“Cal, my friend.”  Carlos put a hand on my shoulder.  “If I can teach you one thing in this passing moment we have together, let it be this: nobody has friends in the sect.”

“Well, they’ve been my friends for two years and members here for two hours, so I think I’ve got at least a day or two before the local politics turn them against me.”

Carlos blinked.  “Threads, that was you?  Ha!  A week out of the sect and I’m sharing a drink with my replacement.”

“Your replace… shit.  When they offered us three spots I didn’t think they’d kick people out to open them.  I’m sorry.”

“No, no, it’s hardly your fault.  Besides, my escape from military life has proven serendipitous for my spiritual and narrative development.  What an underdog story I’ll make, the brave hero removed unfairly from his position only to flourish anyway.”  He leaned in and grabbed my palm and wrist in both hands.  “It seems our fates are tied, my good friend.  Would you mind terribly if I read your cards?”

My mind spun, caught up in the whirlwind of absolute nonsense he’d just said, starting with ‘narrative development,’ blowing right past ‘good friend,’ and landing on the third piece of insanity in as many breaths.  “My cards?”

He grinned victoriously, materializing an oversized deck of cards with a flick of his wrist.  “Tarot, of course.  It’s predictive powers are spotty at best, but the sheer symbolism baked into such a small package can’t be beat.  The benefits are admittedly a bit fringe this early, but come the active stages, a strong foundation in iconographic magic makes a world of difference.”

My brow furrowed, hardly believing he was training for when his cultivation reached a level thirteen stages above his current one.  More curiously, how the hell did some rando in The Dueling Stars know anything about the active stages?  “It does?”

“Sure.  Most of combat at that level is just throwing symbols back and forth.  What else do you think Thread weaving is?”  He pulled his cards from their box.  “Here, give these a shuffle, then fan them out for me.  I’ll show you my progress.”

I hesitantly obeyed, giving the deck a few riffle shuffles and displaying it for him.  With one hand he covered his eyes.  With the other, he reached for the deck.  After a few moments of hovering about, he selected a card.

“Aaaand, there!”  He flipped it.

“The six of cups?”  I read the card before me.

Carlos sighed.  “Hold on, takes a few tries sometimes.”

He repeated the process twice, pulling the three of wands and the seven of coins, before apparently finding the card he was looking for.

It showed an image of a man in flamboyant, colorful garb, wielding a walking stick with a sack tied to it in one hand and a rose in the other.  At the bottom, the text read—

“The Fool!”  Carlos smiled at me.  “That… normally doesn’t take so many attempts.  I’ve aligned myself with the archetype enough that it usually takes at most two pulls to find it.”

“No offense, but that might be the worst magic trick I’ve ever seen.”

Carlos snapped his fingers into a point.  “It’s not the trick that’s important, but the magic.  That wasn’t qi or slight of hand or marked cards or anything of the sort, but pure symbolism.  I am enough like The Fool that naturally comes to me.  The deck makes it visible, but it affects everything.  Moment to moment, my very fate is nudging itself in subtle ways to better match the archetype of The Fool.”

“And you would want to be The Fool because…?”

“The Fool is the protagonist!” Carlos erupted with a sudden conviction.  “The intrepid hero, off to experience all the universe has to offer.  More importantly, narratively, unlike other heroes, The Fool rarely dies.  He suffers, surely, experiences the consequences of his folly, but rarely dies.”  His eyes stared into my own as if quantifying my soul.  “Symbols have power, my dear Cal, more than you can imagine.  I’ve only just begun to find my connection.  If I could align fully… you wouldn’t believe the things I could accomplish.”

“Well, you certainly sound like a fool.”

Carlos laughed.  “So shall I endeavor ’til the end of my days.”  He slipped The Fool back into the deck.  “Now, give those another shuffle, nice and thorough, mind you, and flip the top five cards.  It’s important the process is all by your hand, better results that way.  I’ll see if I can piece together any interesting symbolism from the results.”

Whether or not I believed any of his frankly insane rant, I considered myself at this point bought in enough for curiosity to take over.  At the very least it was a refreshingly new flavor of bullshit I’d encountered.  I shuffled the deck.

I set it down in front of me.

I flipped the first card.

“Worry not, good Cal, that can mean a number of…”

I didn’t hear the rest of Carlos’s assurances as he misread the shock on my face.  I didn’t meet his gaze.  

I didn’t reach for another card.

From the table, in faded paint, astride a horse as white as winter’s first snow, stared up at me a figure clad in black plate that seemed to drink of the scarce light in the crowded bar, baring in its hand a rusted blade with a thirteen-pointed star at its pommel.

At the bottom, in handwritten letters, the tarot deck at last gave me a name for the strange phenomenon that had saved us all from the nanite swarm beneath Ilirian.

Number thirteen: Death.

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