Wakespire (The Weirkey Chronicles Book 7), page 31
"We don't. So if you want to stay allied in the final round, you'd better work hard."
"Now you sound like my parents." Isorales shook his head. "They're much happier with me these days, but in a way that makes things harder. I'd rather not talk about it. Have you decided on your strategy for your fourth floor?"
"I've built one corner room and part of another." Theo glanced into his soulhome out of habit. "I have the materials for them, but I'm not going to fully add them until before the end so my new enhancement chambers surprise people."
"Clever. The way my walls work, I need to build the entire circumference of my soulhome at the same time or it will collapse..."
They discussed soulcrafting for a while longer, until Senka arrived. Truthfully, Theo hadn't been intending to leave at any moment. The plan had always been to spend a while on recovery until it was time to travel with Senka again. Talking to Isorales had been an unexpected bonus.
She entered and hurled a rock at him. "Come feed Senka yummies!"
"Alright, gotta take care of her." Theo groaned as he got to his feet. "We'll talk later, Isorales."
"Wait, already?" He blinked between them. "I wanted to talk to you about the Artisans' Gallery. Are you planning to attend?"
"What's this now?"
"The event where Ugustial's best soulcrafter artisans try to compete for patronage. Technically it has nothing to do with the Wakespire, but of course this year we'll get the majority of the attention..." Isorales trailed off and then shook his head. "But you need the backing of a major lineage to buy any of their wares. Sorry, I should have thought about that."
"Can we get Jadadictus backing?" Theo asked. He was actually thinking more about the timing and wondering if this was what Ractifus had suggested.
"I can't give you that permission and I don't think anyone higher up in the lineage would be willing, sorry... maybe I shouldn't have even brought it up."
"No, it's fine. Maybe you'll see us there anyway."
As Theo left the palace with Senka, he thought more about this alleged gallery than what Isorales had told him. Given his limited social experience on Noven, he hadn't even been aware of it. If entry required major backing, that suggested prestige, which in cities like this generally correlated to soulcrafting. He'd have to think about it further.
"No running around to empty caches today," Senka told him once they were out. "I've been hunting for other sublime materials based on my memories."
"Out of caches?"
"Hardly! But if I want you three to carry me around the Nine Worlds, I need to make sure you don't get yourselves killed in the next battle."
Once they were outside the city defenses, Senka guided him once more. They skated around the edge of Noven and came back down in a region that looked typical enough. But before he could even examine the mountain spires around them, Senka led him through the cloud layer. Theo switched to his gravitational senses, though it wasn't as natural as he'd hoped. His intellectual awareness of points of mass was always overlapping with strange tingling sensations over his skin.
"You actually know what we're looking for," Senka whispered in his ear, "you just don't know it."
"Did you revert to your cursed form?"
"Fumpet. Just feel out the area and search for sublime beasts."
Unlike most areas beneath the clouds, which were gentle valleys between mountains, here the cliffs descended on and on. Disoriented by the weirkey travel, Theo wasn't sure if they bored directly into the heart of Noven or if this region just had an absurdly high cloud layer. When his senses fell away into the depths he shifted uncomfortably, imagining some beast crawling from the heart of Noven...
But what he was searching for was nowhere near that deep. He noticed it almost coincidentally: annoying little flecks of mass that distracted him from examining the caves within the cliffs. It was only after trying to filter them out of his senses that he realized they were exactly what Senka had told him to look for.
"Wheel beasts can live below the clouds?" he asked Senka. She shrugged from his shoulder.
"I've been trying to remember their locations ever since you started rambling on about lighteggs. As far as I know, they're not related at all. Some people tried to interbreed them in my era and failed. But they have the same bodies and they process sublime materials in exactly the same way."
"Must be convergent evolution."
"Alright, now you're the one babbling nonsense."
Theo was curious how "convergent evolution" had been soul translated, but he was more interested in the potential rewards. He began flying closer to the caves where he felt the majority of them flying. "So we're here because they create... not lighteggs, I suppose?"
"Their name is 'darkeggs' and I'm sure it sounds pretty blunt via soul translation." Senka sighed from his shoulder. "Every word gets rendered so ugly on the other side. Noveni languages are really beautiful, in my opinion, but in other worlds it's all 'gold this' and 'light that'."
They didn't banter any further, as they instead tried to hunt for mature sublime beasts within the caverns. Once he got closer, Theo could feel the wheel beasts in better detail: just like the ones he knew, they were glistening wheels surrounding a floating core. Their behavior was a little different, including swarming at him until he warded them off with a point of anti-mass.
Senka offered her suggestions for hunting them, but she wouldn't have needed to. Just months ago, Theo had needed to rely on Guchiro. Now he had a plethora of options: many of his gravitational skills could capture the wheel beasts and even his raw speed was enough to catch them. Soon enough he managed to get his hands on a freshly completed darkegg.
"This one isn't bad." Theo hefted it in his hands and wished that he could examine it with his eyes, but she'd already warned him that could damage the shell. "I don't need this anymore, but you're thinking of it for Fiyu?"
"At minimum." Senka hovered away and grabbed one of the flying beasts he'd already driven to exhaustion. It struggled wildly as she plucked at its wings. "Your use for them actually wasn't known in my time, or at least I hadn't heard of it. They have much less dramatic uses at higher tiers. But since I've actually found a region where they haven't all been taken, I figured we should harvest more."
"Yeah, we might as well." Theo wrapped sublime cloth around the darkegg and then began hunting for perfect eggs. "Why is this region abandoned, by the way?"
"Other than the lack of ground? It's hard to build a civilization between cliffs."
"Surely some soulcrafters from nearby regions must hunt here for materials."
"Well, that might have more to do with the much nastier sublime beasts that feed on the darkeggs normally. You probably don't want to stay here too long, by the way."
Despite Senka's warning, they had time to find two more high quality darkeggs before Theo thought they had fully searched the region. That left him with three powerful but potentially useless artifacts. He wouldn't get any benefit from further saturating his soulhome, Fiyu using multiple would be overkill, and it wasn't clear if Nauda could use them at all. Still, it was a benefit he hadn't expected.
Theo used weirkey-skipping to return himself to a space above the clouds, since it felt better than hovering over the bottomless depths. He realized that Senka hadn't seemed even slightly troubled by the darkness and wondered if that was related to her curse or in spite of it.
"I'm not even done!" Senka grinned triumphantly. "I've been searching and found not one, but two sublime materials that still exist from my memories and aren't tightly controlled. You still have stone from Fithe, but you'll need bricks for higher tiers, right?"
"Unless I start building walls from dreams and pixie dust." Theo answered automatically and then wondered if "pixie dust" would make any sense. Judging from how Senka rolled her eyes, it communicated clearly enough. Normally he avoided Earth phrases he thought wouldn't translate, but they tended to slip out with Senka.
"At certain points on Noven, there are living mountains that grow powerful sublime materials. I managed to find some that aren't being mined. After that I don't have anything for you, but I think you'll be pleased."
They teleported across the world yet again and emerged in another cloudless region. As far as Theo could see, there weren't any mountains. The rises around them could barely be considered hills.
"Behold," Senka said with her arms thrown wide, "the mightiest mountains in all Noven!"
"Uh... maybe they look big to someone as small as you, but-"
"Shut it, fumpet! I insist that you start breaking apart rocks for me to eat. Like there, that one."
Ignoring her mocking, Theo cast a torsion bolt at one of the gentle hills. It proved much tougher than he expected, despite the fact that he didn't sense any strong sublime materials. He flew lower and began drilling into the top more carefully while using a gravitational field to lift away the material.
"I actually wasn't sporping with you," Senka explained as he worked. "These humble hills are actually some of the most ancient mountains on all Noven. They only appear this way because time and tide have-"
"Time and erosion ground them down, right?" Theo had already put it together. "We have those on my world too. The highest mountains are actually the newest and some of the hills were ancient mountains."
"Your world takes all the fun out of obscure secrets." Despite her scowl, Senka seemed to be enjoying herself. "It looks like you understand, then. These mountains have been building sublime materials in their cores for eons, but they're contained within layers of weaker materials and dead stone. Apparently that secret has been lost in the modern world."
Theo finally broke through to a more potent sublime material and floated lower to examine it. Instead of just one type of stone, there appeared to be powerful fragments of different types. They proved more durable than the outer layers of rock, however, and he struggled to extract many. It took bombarding the surface with rocks accelerated by gravity to get deeper.
Eventually he had about as many sublime stones as he could easily keep in his vestibule, but there hadn't been anything truly exceptional. He thought about teasing Senka over it and realized just how easily they'd fallen into that pattern. Not sure how he felt about that, he decided to stay practical.
"These are good construction materials, but nothing that could serve as a central material."
"Of course the most valuable ones are at the core, idiot." Senka rolled her eyes. "Can you really not dig deeper than this?"
"I could lift the rocks higher, but they're starting to break apart against the materials." Theo peered down at the small mountain they had cracked open to examine the surface underneath the rubble. "Whatever that dark stone is, it would make a good material for buildings in the physical world, because I don't think I can get through it easily."
"Sometimes I forget you're just an Authority. Here, let me..."
He thought Senka was mocking him at first, but when he glanced toward her, she actually had a strangely wistful expression on her face. Theo wasn't sure what she meant, so he just waited while Senka floated down to the damaged area.
She took a deep breath and began gathering cantae. A sphere began to grow beneath her... and kept growing. Theo's eyes widened as he realized that it wasn't a technique, just raw power being filtered through her curse.
At the last second, the cantae went through some kind of phase shift and became far more intense. It shot down in the same instant and impacted on the mountain, sending shockwaves in all directions. Theo barely saw it, because releasing the blast sent Senka flying uncontrollably into the air.
Slowing her with a gravitational field would have made the most sense, but Theo instinctively flew after her. Senka appeared to be unconscious after releasing the blast and hung limply in his arms. After the Archive of Misery, she had said that she would be able to perform one attack. He had been expecting a cantae bolt, not the devastation underneath him.
Because Senka was still unconscious, Theo drifted into the crater. The tough layer that he'd been struggling to break had certainly been shattered and currently lay all across the gentle hills. Theo decided to leave the rubble and focus on the center. Deeper than the rest, somewhat buried by rocks that had fallen into the crater, he could sense something far more powerful.
Lifting the rubble away was easy enough, then Theo descended to their prize. It looked like a lumpy gray rock about the size of his head, but it pulsed with cantae. He'd encountered many sublime stones that formed perfect spheres or glowed with power. This one outclassed all of them.
"Tah-dah..." Senka said weakly. "A mountainheart. Hope it was worth it."
"This is powerful. Maybe too powerful... I'm not sure I can use this in my soulhome."
"Well it's all I've got, nlermit. Be grateful."
"I'm more worried about the blast." Theo felt awkward carrying her around but she didn't seem capable of hovering, so he set her in the air and pinned her in place with an anchoring point - those had strengthened as well. "You've been capable of that ever since the Archive?"
"Apparently so. It got away from me." Senka looked weary and he saw that her eyes and nose were leaking blood like they hadn't in some time. "I can't do that again for a while... and maybe in the future I should tone it down..."
Left unsaid was the fact that the blast only represented a crippled fraction of her former power. He didn't often think about how Senka had once been a soulcrafter beyond Dominion, but as he stood in the remains of a mountain, it couldn't be denied.
It also made things awkward between them, so he switched tactics. "Don't fall asleep yet. I wanted to ask you about something called the Artisans' Gallery."
"Never saw anything like that in my time, but I heard about it while stealing blook." Senka wiped at the blood, but more continued pouring out. "It's the best way to get soulcrafters to make things for you, but you need permission. If you can't use the mountainheart... that's probably your next best bet."
Since it looked like she really was fading, Theo let her down. She promptly spat a rock into his face and skipped off, but he wasn't even angry. Not with the mountainheart pulsing in his hands.
It took some effort to get it into his soulhome, leaving both his physical and spiritual hands bloody. Within, the cantae it put off scraped against his barrier walls and would definitely destroy any room he tried to place it inside. Theo settled for packing it within the lesser sublime stones from the mountain and then put the whole thing inside one of his containment chests. That would be very useful... eventually.
In the meantime, he had decisions to make. Most likely, it was time to talk to Ractifus Terefilia.
Chapter 38
Throughout his life, Guchiro had escorted and educated many wards. The process hadn't involved this much chaperoning until Ward Fiyu had pulled him into new complications across the Nine Worlds.
Guchiro didn't mind waiting by the sleigh, strictly speaking. He had been speaking to some of the guards working for the Wakespire, as well as some of the artisans who worked on the spire itself, and all of them had given him new information that required thought. His instincts told him that an essential fact was missing: the lineagegem was a powerful enough material to be worth sacrificing social bonds, but the strategies he observed remained irrational.
Currently Associate Nauda was meeting with Unknown Ractifus Terefilia, who was one of the uncertain variables. Guchiro had thoroughly investigated him along with the other princes when he had interrupted the judgment of his ward and his senses had proved Unknown Ractifus to be a competent but unremarkable Authority. It was entirely possible that he wanted nothing more than to acquire wealth and power. If so, Guchiro did not approve of forming an alliance with him.
Judging from the manner in which Associate Nauda walked from the palace, that was what had just happened.
"We have his approval," the young Tatian woman said. "He'll give us the key just before the last Wakespire starts, but meanwhile he's opened the city to us. I have an address for some soulcrafters who can do the work we need."
"Then let us go." Guchiro listened to the address and then directed the sleigh toward the artisan district. Bright as Noven was, he'd been impressed by how it managed to incorporate sublime material crafting even at lower tiers.
It was improbable that Associate Nauda would remain silent for the entire journey. Without turning his head, Guchiro examined her again while she sat nervously. She was a talented soulcrafter and unquestionably passionate about Ward Fiyu, but those factors could only make up for so much. Standing back and letting his ward make her own mistakes was one of the most difficult decisions he'd ever needed to make.
He could feel the question working its way out of her: it started by shifting her feet, clenched the muscles through her back, and wormed its way through her jaw. Eventually she overcame her intimidation and, as had been inevitable, started a conversation.
"Ractifus did say that his permission might not be enough," Associate Nauda said. "Apparently the best artisans won't work for anyone without a high enough ranking. Have you ever been given an Authority class?"
"I had no choice but to receive one during my investigations," Guchiro said. "I am labeled an Authority 3rd class."
"And what are you really?"
It was a sharper question than he had anticipated, one of many promising glimmers in Associate Nauda. Then again, linguistic ambiguity was a more common tool across the Nine Worlds than many Ichili believed. Or perhaps she simply had observed enough powerful soulcrafters to make her own estimates. In any case, the question was worth a real answer.
"I would be an Authority, 1st class by their scale," Guchiro said. "This is nothing to boast of. They have optimized their rankings to measure the progress of average soulcrafters."
"Well, all that matters for the artisan is your official rank." Associate Nauda looked over at him, as other species couldn't help but do. "I've never gotten a Ruler ranking here because it didn't seem worth it. Is that scale the same?"
