Hunter Or Huntress

They had spent hours going over just what it was they had found. It was indeed just as they had suspected; a machine for turning dragonettes, or bits of dragons that would fit in the chambers, into grav oil, with the leftover waste being discarded as water and a sort of sludge.

Edita had explained what it was they were looking at as they toured the accursed machine. Torches and lanterns had been brought into the vault to illuminate it, along with a few shelves of various books that the academics had set about taking out to examine.

At the front there was a single receptacle for one of the little canisters; they had found thousands of them in the other vault, which gave Tom a sinking feeling. On the back there were fittings for a pipe to carry away the wastewater and the bio sludge came out a chute. Supposedly the sludge would be pressed into bricks to be used as fuel. ‘Nice touch’ Tom thought grimly to himself as he rested a hand on the steely cold metal.

Thousands of grav oil capsules, most of them likely made using this thing. How many people had been processed to make it all?

“Not enough that they render you down, they also have to burn what’s left of you?” Jacky commented darkly from behind him. “Wait, does that mean these poor fucks got a chance at heaven at least then?”

“I doubt it,” Linkosta replied meekly. Her enthusiasm had evaporated the moment it became clear what they were dealing with and just what they had in their possession at the keep. They had hoped the grav oil was mined, but now that looked increasingly unlikely.

“It is still hotly debated whether the soul survives the process, though the consensus back then, I believe, was no,” Edita added, kneeling down in front of a panel and flipping down some lenses on her goggles. She was looking at the blank metal sheet, likely looking at what is beneath. “Others believed it stays with the essence, part of why it got the name.”

Tom had to think back a bit for that one. Normally he would scoff at the idea of someone having a soul, but the dragonettes seemed able to see them ascend to heaven through those stellar gates as he was pretty sure they called them. Like Linkosta had shown him.

“Wait so. Just to clarify, you’re saying there might be actual souls in those little canister things?”

“Supposedly, it is hard to verify, especially after having undergone such a procedure, but some remnants are to be expected.”

“Remnants…” Tom echoed quietly, looking at the empty slot where the cylinder would go.

“So burning the oil might let them return?” Jacky questioned cautiously, not sure it was a question she wanted to ask.

“No, I do not believe so. You may ask Paulin if such experiments have been conducted. She is an archivist,” Edita deflected as she brought forward a satchel next to her and started to take things out of it.

“Right… cause she would answer truthfully,” Jacky sneered in reply.

Tom had to agree with Jacky on this one, but at the same time the oil was worth a fortune, and they had only just started grasping at what it might be able to do. It would be a shame to lose it… but if there were thousands, or maybe even tens of thousands of souls locked away in their storage lockers right now, then shouldn’t they at least know for sure?

There was silence for a bit as Edita worked. Tom watched her as she seemed to be getting out incense sticks and burners as well as a holy symbol of some kind, which she laid in front of the panel, then the reverie was broken, as pair of footsteps approached from behind.

“Remember, the Inquisition carries the authority of the Crown and the Church,” it was the very familiar and unwelcome voice of Paulin. ‘Damn ears,’ Tom cursed as he and Jacky turned to face her.

“This machine is the work of the devils below. Attempts have been made to save the souls possibly locked within, but it proved no more use than trying to free the soul of a corpse from the land. They are lost to us. Our best course of action now is to not let their sacrifice be in vain. Wouldn’t you agree?”

Tom only answered reluctantly, looking at the womanand trying to discern if she was for once genuine. It was a game she was far better than him at. “I suppose so…”

“Very good. Now, I can assure you, this cursed thing will never work again. Edita will see to that. But I am sure there are many useful things to be learned, and things to be saved. What was the saying, Edita?”

“Don’t blame the bolt for being part of the automaton,” the artificer replied as she finished arranging what Tom now had to assume was some sort of religious ritual.

“Yes, very good. Find what is worth saving. We will destroy the rest. There is no need to keep such a thing for the future,” Edita did not reply, instead sitting still with her things at the ready. Paulin gave her usual curt nod and walked off to go about her business.

‘At least she seems genuine,’ Tom pondered, looking after her.

“Is that true, Edita? You’re gonna smash this thing to bits?”

“When we have what we may be able to use, yes. The parts that should not survive will be taken to a forge and melted down for the metal, and the wood burned. It is the way.”

“Pheew finally we agree on something… any good loot in it?”

“A lute? It does not play music… I think…I do hope it does not like music, I was always terrible at it.”

“What do you mean likes music?” Jacky questioned as Edita lit the first incense stick.

“Oh, nothing.”

Tom raised an eyebrow at the artificer, glancing towards the machine briefly. “You sure?”

“Yes. Just don’t say anything mean to it, we don’t know if it is sensitive.”

“Ahaa,” Tom let out sceptically. Then again, if earth bound engineers believed stuff like this for even an old steam engine… maybe, just maybe, there could be some truth to it when dealing with a thousands of years old alien arcane distillery machine.

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Linkosta and Edita had returned from the mines, being carried up by Baron, though it was a brief visit. Edita had needed some tools and Linkosta was after some books her father thought might prove useful. Tom and Jacky had taken the chance for a meal at the keep as opposed to down below since it was around dinnertime anyway, so what was the harm? It wasn’t as if Baron would mind the extra pair of passengers.

Knowing Tom he probably wanted to pick up some things as well before heading back down. The engineer and the artificer were sitting at the craftspeople table discussing and explaining away. Jacky had also chosen that time to reappear after another toilet break and was sitting next to Tom, much to the dismay of the rest of those at the table. For the rest of them the fish had just about worn off, and they were all hungry after the decidedly light breakfast. Jacky, though, still smelled quite severely.

Linkosta, on the other hand, had been lured over to the huntresses’ table. Sapphire thought it was probably as much to get away from the smell as anything else, but it also meant they could get some answers from her. But as Lin sat down, everyone looking at her expectantly, it had been Pho who broke the silence first.

“So, what is it you found? Go on, spill the beans.”

“Uhm…A big machine of some kind,” Linkosta began, a little uncertainly as she looked around at them all, only just having gotten her bum on the bench. “It’s for rendering, you know.”

“I’m sorry, what?” Saph asked, hoping she had misheard.

“Oh I know that one. It sucks magic out of people till they die,” Pho explained confidently, Linkosta shaking her head.

“No, no it isn’t. It is for making grav oil… it boils you down and spits out the remains. You know… like rendering skin into glue,” she clarified, clearly not overly happy to be talking about it.

“But it does kill you,” Pho tried, still taking the discussion with humor of all things.

“Yes… yes, it does kill you,” Linkosta admitted, Pho nodding contently.

“Told you.”

“You are such an arse, Pho,” Saph sighed, waiting for Linkosta to look back at her. “So what are they going to do with it?”

“Strip it for stuff apparently. It’s already somewhat disassembled so they could move it into the vault, gods know how long ago. It’s big, real big.”

“I guess Edita is having a field day then.”

“I don’t know… she seems… off.”

“What do you mean?”

“You know how she’s normally all excited and bubbly? Like she can’t keep up with everything she just can’t wait to do?”

“Yeaaah?” Saph questioned, tilting her head. The artificer could certainly be like that at times, especially when she got something interesting to work on.

“Well she’s not… She’s just sorta; getting on with it, you know? She’s been saying prayers over pretty much everything she’s taken off. I don’t even understand what it is she’s saying half the time.”

“What do you mean?” Saph questioned, furrowing her brows.

“This is heretical according to her. Even Paulin seems to think it’s some terrible thing, and went on and on about how we need to destroy it once they have what they want.”

“Paulin? Paulin thinks this thing is evil?”

“Push it off the edge right away,” Fengi added, glancing to Essy, everyone having put down the spoons by now.

“Jacky said that. Edita made a point about how they should ‘not give hell its machines back’. They want to melt it down and burn it.”

“I suppose that works,” Fengi shrugged.

“Yeah, sounds to me like they’re right for once,” Essy added, nodding. Saph was inclined to agree. Leaving such a device around surely only risked it being used. “Think of what could happen if the darklings got a hold of it.”

“They don’t have any use for it as far as we know. What would they do with grav oil?” Linkosta questioned.

“You do remember they were trying to get in to steal the grav oil, right?” Saph questioned, looking at the young mage.

“Oh right… I did forget about that part.”

“Does it even work on darklings?” Saph questioned. She knew the buggers didn’t have magics and she was pretty sure she had heard they couldn’t be used to drive magics either. But maybe they could still be turned into grav oil?

“I don’t know,” Linkosta replied apologetically. “But I want to find all that out. I’m going back down and I’m gonna stay for as long as they let me. The enchantments on this thing, you should see them. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen.”

“Yeah, gotta know your enemy and all that shit,” Pho added with an approving nod.

“Just. You know… Don’t let them do anything evil with it,” Essy tried to add, cautiously, Linkosta turning to the older huntress.

“It’s the Inquisition, Essy, there isn’t that much I can do,” Lin dismissed with a sigh. “I don’t even know what the bits they are taking off are for. Let alone what they could do with them.”

“You can go tell Major Jortun if it comes to that, if you think anything is wrong,” Essy replied, tone growing rather more serious. “He is a nice upstanding man. He will help, I am sure.”

“Right… okay okay, but I’m pretty sure he will know before me, he’s keeping an eye on everyone, especially after we discovered what the thing was.”

“Very good. Do try to help him, don’t hide anything from him. After what he did with Fengi I think we can trust him,” the older huntress added, looking towards their only copper, Fengi seeming to be lost in thought.

“I will, I will, don’t worry,” Linkosta assured her, forcing a small smile.

“You might not need to. Tom will make enough of a racket to wake Baron up if he finds out they are playing the guard for fools, or us for that matter. How’s he taking all this?” Saph added with a chuff.

“Hard to say. It’s a fascinating machine, for a dark purpose. He’s been grumbling a bit about souls and genocide. So I doubt he’s in a great mood.”

“Probably a good thing all things considered.”

“Anything we need to do up here?” Fengi questioned, breaking off the line of discussion. “Aside from flying supply, it won’t be too long before Yldril should be able to go down there. We’re doing logging runs tomorrow by wing. Then we’ll see how it goes.”

“Uhm… Maybe, I don’t know. Glira is staying down there so you get Baron and Victoria for now, ask them.”

“Fair enough.”

“We’re still gonna need that warehouse after all so we best get to it, and I doubt we can get Baron to fly logs like we did with Glira,” Saph added, looking to Fengi.

“Yeah, but Yldril is flying again now. She can bring them in faster than Jarix can saw them.”

“Then put Yldril on the saw.”

“Right,” Fengi replied with a sigh. Saph guessed she had hoped for something a bit more interesting for the black dragon to do. It might make her a little less insufferable afterall.

“It could be worse. It’s not raining.”

“You know it’s coming.”

“As is winter. It’s not gonna get any better,” Essy added in a troubled tone, looking at Fengi.

“I know I know… How long till Vulzan and Arch are back?”

“Can’t be too long, they left the capital, right?” Saph questioned, trying to remember what the timetable was.

“A few days ago, yes,” Essy confirmed, seemingly more willing to talk about that subject.

“A few more days then and we’ll have all the shit we could dream of hahaaa, oooh it’s gonna be the good life this winter,” Pho broke out triumphantly. For once Saph couldn’t technically disagree, it was going to be a very nice winter this year. Bo still shook her head though and carried on eating.

“I ordered some very nice yarn as well, to keep me busy in winter, it’s going to be fantastic… what did you all order?”

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The evening of the first day had been spent studying, categorizing, and disassembling parts of the machine. The following day while the dissasembly work continued, technical diagrams started to get drawn up as well. Manuals for its operation had been found and given over to the various academics from the capital to translate into something actually readable by normal people.

To Tom, regular draconic runes were definitely bad enough, but this stuff made next to no sense whatsoever to him just looking at it.

He had spent much of his time following Edita and assisting her however he could manage. Losev had made it quite clear he wanted no help from Tom in any way shape or form, but it did seem he had found use for Linkosta. Apuma had eventually returned to the keep to manage the influx of stuff they were bringing back home for storage, mostly translated texts.

By the start of the third day, Jacky had started going on about how they really weren’t needed down here, but Tom didn’t want to go. Edita had been showing him so many things he barely understood. She was putting in an admirable effort to explain, but he felt like a first grader being shown calculus by his older brother ‘cause he thought it would be funny.

But certain things he did understand, like the flow of magical energy used by the machine for example. It was passed along conductors much like electricity, the simplest part of the machine in theory, but an extremely hard part to implement in practice. Resistance was the enemy of any enchantment, and the extremely low resistance of enchantments the fish people had been able to produce were the most valuable part of the accursed machine. At least to the dragonettes. When questioned about where the power to drive it had come from, Edita had answered plainly. “Slaves.”

It hadn’t even surprised him at that point. He knew anything alive held magical power which could be harnessed, from the smallest blade of grass to the largest dragon. “I guess that’s what darklings were for then, ey?” Tom questioned darkly, having made the forgone conclusion long ago.

“No, darklings would be useless for this,” Edita replied as she carried on with her work, unscrewing tiny little plates of mithril covered in runes and glyphs too small to be seen without a magnifying glass.

“But… huh?” Tom muttered in reply, getting caught quite off guard by that answer.

“Darklings cannot be used to power magics. It is one of the great mysteries of their curse.”

“I see… do we have any idea why that is?”

“Only speculation. Two thousand years of records yield many possibilities. Many think the doetna made them so, precisely so the dwellers below could not use the darklings if captured. Unlike a dragonette or dragon.”

“I see… sorta smart I suppose… but how does a magical curse take away magic? Sounds a bit contradictory.”

“We do not know. If we knew how the curse worked, we could likely lift it,” Edita sighed as she gingerly lifted out the small metal card and handed it to Tom, who wrapped it up in very fine soft cloth and put it down in the small hay filled box.

Tom wondered if perhaps the real answer was that Edita didn’t know, but if she didn’t then he doubted Paulin would be willing to spill the beans to him, or maybe she didn’t know either. He doubted it truely was a mystery though.

“What if it’s like, using all their magic?” Jacky questioned as she took the lid of another storage crate, starting to get it ready to be loaded up.

“Then they would be dead, no?” Edita countered as she started to unscrew once more. “I think they are changed so their magic becomes something else, like a wrong fuel. You don’t need to make it disappear, just make it useless and then the spells won’t work”

“Sooo. Are there darkling spells then?” Jacky questioned, seemingly knowing as little as Tom on the subject.

“No…” Edita responded, looking up at the huntress and pondering that for a bit. “But even if there were, then we could not cast them now could we? Because our magic is different.”

“Oh yeah…”

“Maybe we should stick with what we do know. Where are these going?” Tom questioned, patting the soon to be full crate.

“I don’t know actually,” Edita replied chipperly, “but I would guess Galaxer is taking them somewhere. Him and Arch are returning together, right?”

“Uhm… maybe?” Tom replied. He couldn’t actually remember if that had been the plan. There had been talk of how Arch might not be able to carry everything that had been ordered, and they all knew Galaxer’s approach to getting hired on, so it was certainly possible.

“I can’t wait for what I ordered,” Jacky interjected, happy for the distraction. “ It’s gonna be the best winter ever.”

“Are we gonna be sleeping on top of boxes and crates?” Tom questioned jokingly.

“Weeell… you might.”

“Hmm… I’m putting your stuff in the warehouse.”

“No way, it’s my stuff, and that place doesn’t have a roof yet, the walls ain’t even done,” Jacky objected, crossing her arms in defiance. “Your stuff can go, you got those nice box thingies.”

“Your stuff fits in that box too,” Tom countered, crossing his arms as well and trying not to chuckle.

“Too much work… also my room, my rules.”

“I’m having Nunuk give me that room.”

“I’ll tell my mother.”

“Oh that’s just cheating.”

“Eherm,” Edita cleared her throat, sounding almost apologetic, as she was holding out the next plate for Tom. He took it off her hands and started wrapping it up tight.

“Personal log, mid to late autumn, working on a strange magic machine… We have been defeated in the battle for the bedroom. Will have to sleep on the floor, great discomfort expected.”

“Oh, do you have something which records what you say for later?” Edita questioned, looking up from her work, the notion of a possible new gadget apparently enough to draw her attention away.

“Oh no, it’s a joke… sorry,” Tom clarified as the wrapped up plate was placed down in the box.

Edita’s ears did droop a tiny bit, but she didn’t seem too upset by the accidental deception. “Oh, sorry… I would offer for you to sleep in my room, but it’s full of stuff too.”

Tom turned to look at Jacky with a shiteating grin on, the woman gritting her teeth just a touch. “No there is no need… I will make some room.”

“Oh okay… or you could ask Nunuk about one of the empty rooms up top? Tom is very important, maybe she would give you one of those rooms?”

“The family rooms? Last I checked I was a Furlong, not a Bizmati.”

“I don’t know Jacky, I kinda like the sound of Tom Bizmati to be honest.”

“Oh mum is gonna kill you if she hears that one.”

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