Tag: alkali jones and the lost devil-city

Had to get into edits on GHOSTS ON AN ALIEN WIND first before I could work on this.

We all had wandlights, but Jim was the first one to activate his. “Wow,” he said as a ball of light blossomed over his head. “Is this an Old American ruin?”

I casually looked at the ceilings and walls. “No,” I told him casually. “This is all twenty-fourth century work, using contemporary materials. See the mosaics on the wall? The colored inlays are salvaged plastic, and have a Sonoran influence. Besides, this part of the continent was technically part of a different country before the Discovery.”

“Technically?” Le asked. Unless it was Ev. Down here it was dark enough to make telling the two apart difficult. “I thought the Old Americans ruled from the Pole to the Canal.”

“It’s complicated,” I admitted. “They directly ruled the middle part of the continent, but the countries north and south of them were technically independent. Imagine the regional hegemony the Imperium Orci has over its client-states and you won’t go far wrong.”

I have decided to stop fighting this and accept that this is a novella, so Part I is going up the Patreon this month at a suitable cliffhanger and Part II will drop next month. Realistically, this could end up being 15K words, which is considerably more than the official deal anyway.

So, I guess you want to hear about the traps.

Traps are an exaggerated problem in this line of work. If you’re still living in your basic ruin, it’s not really a ruin, and there are no better traps than ‘twenty guys standing guard’ and ‘you are actually just robbing me, you know’ to keep us salvage archeologists out of your storage space. If it’s an abandoned ruin, then there’s nobody to do maintenance or reload the giant stone ball once it’s crushed some poor idiot who can’t estimate weights properly. As for the oldest ones? The Old American sites? They didn’t use anything worse than alarm bells. I mean, they didn’t even use pits full of spikes, and everybody does those. You get the feeling that they were just better people, back before the Discovery.

That being said, we ended up having a trapped corridor between us and Bigwave’s Coronet. And this wasn’t the better-safe-than-sorry kind of anti-theft design, either. Whoever made this was feeling pretty mean.

I should set the scene first. The sinkholes that swallowed Merida (catchy title, that) had been remarkably expansive. We were finding entire blocks of collapsed buildings down here — and by ‘we’ I mean me, Jim, and Ev. Turns out Le and Ev were twins with a knack for always knowing where the other was, and what she was feeling. That was coming in handy down here; Le was topside with Bigwave, and Ev was leading us along below. It was more useful than it sounds, since between the two groups we could usually keep going in the right direction. Expansive sinkholes or not, there were a lot of twisty tunnels down here, and they all looked alike.

I needed to spend too much time figuring out how the story will go. But at least I have!

Turns out there was no point: none of the halflings wanted to touch a single artifact in the site. “We’re just here to build a landing strip,” he told me. “We ain’t about to go screw around with magic crap.”

“Good,” I told him. “There’s bad sorcery down there. The kind that makes you queasy after a while.”

“That’s just sorcery, Prof. Nasty crap, all around. If it was up to me, it’d stay down there, too.”

That puzzled me. “So why are you helping dig it up?”

“Why do you think, dude? Cash.” Jim kicked at a loose clod of dirt, as if he wanted to cover up the hole to below with it. “The Whisper Council figures we can sell magical crap by the wagonload up north, and you’ll pay good money for it, too. Newhome can use it too, you feel me? We ain’t like those assholes up in the Protectorate, making boots and wands for the War.” Jim snorted, and lit another cigarette. “Ha! The way things are going, there won’t be no War soon. It’ll suck to be them, then.”

Macguffin!

“Sort of.” Bigwave pulled out a sketchbook and pencil from his satchel. “Here, let me draw it from you.” He was only okay at drafting, but I got the gist: the Coronet was a circlet, with four narrow bands ascending at each ‘corner’ to connect at the top. “There may be ornamentation,’ he told me. “I don’t know: I’ve only seen sketches myself.”

“Right, I get that. It’s really here, though?”

Bigwave nodded. He reached into his satchel again, this time taking out a leather-wrapped oval shape. “Oh, yeah. Now that we’re so close, I can use this jewel to track the Coronet. At least, it should work…” he trailed off as he unwrapped it with slightly trembling fingers.

Unwrapped, the ‘jewel’ was a smoothed and polished piece of mahogany obsidian, and one of the better examples that I’ve seen. It gets its name from the red veins and blotches that travel through the stone, just below the surface; the orcs call it ‘sanguis mali,’ or ‘evil-blood,’ but the stuff is both perfectly natural, and morally neutral. This example was particularly pretty, and possibly even valuable — but it wouldn’t be worth that much on the hidden market. 

Then I got a taste of the power coursing through the iron, and I reassessed my professional opinion. Mahogany obsidian is good for temporarily taking a magical charge, but pieces able to store magic in it for any length of time are considerably rarer. This one smelled full of sorcerous energy, ready to be used, and I wondered where Bigwave had gotten it from originally. It was the sort of item you associate with a real mage, not an adventurer like Bigwave.

Exposition!

or a moment, I thought he might still balk at actually telling me anything, but he nodded brusquely and called to the halflings. “Le! Ev! Could you go topside, please?” He waited until they did, then turned back. Even then there was hesitation, but Bigwave visibly clamped it down. “What we’re looking for is an…”

“…Old American helmet, or crown, or maybe a really heavy circlet,” I finished for him, just to see him gawk at me. “I’m a trained professional, Captain Bigwave. That means my guesses really are educated. What you said was light enough to be worn, about the size of a human’s head, and made out of stainless steel. Greater Hershey only started making that stuff in bulk again fifteen years ago, so it’s got to be Old American.”

Bigwave sighed. “Henderson’s Burdensome Coronet started as an Old American helmet, yes.” He cocked an eye at me. “You don’t recognize the name?” he asked, honestly sounding surprised.

“The artifact name? No.” I shook my head. “Although it sounds like something out of the First Age. Especially since ‘Henderson’s’ in the title. Half the artifacts on the hidden market claim to be the personal salt shaker or whatever of the first Supreme Archmage.”

Back to this!

Continue reading 06/22/2023 Snippet, ALKALI JONES AND THE LOST DEVIL-CITY.

We’re at the Lost City! Promising.

Getting to Mérida was four days of hot, sticky weather; boredom, punctured by the odd swarm of packs of birds too vicious to stay away, and too stupid to realize they were nine inches tall; and bugs that smelled worse than they looked when you popped one under your foot. But it was fast. Ten miles a day wasn’t just better than anybody had done, up to now; it was actual progress.

It was starting to worry me. Mérida wasn’t the Holy Grail of salvage archeology, but people in my field have been taking slaps at finding the place since the 28th Century. The Thornwood’s just too hard to get through by land, a featureless mass of tangled woods from the air, and any mage powerful enough to be able to burn a hole through is powerful enough to be fighting in the Great War. I really did believe that Bigwave had an angle to get us through, but I didn’t expect the way to be this easy.

The halflings didn’t pick up on this, probably because they weren’t used to Adventurers, salvage archeology, or Lost Cities. Even Jim shrugged the issue off. “So it’s an easy run,” he told me as we packed up for the last couple of miles of the trip. “I’ll work for pay, but I’ll half-ass it for pay, too. Customer’s always right, right?” He spit (one other thing the Thornwood was, was dusty). “Besides, once we get there, up goes the flare, and the rocriders know where we are. Once we build ‘em a landing nest, we’re done with the job and can all go home.”

Surprisingly easy to write. So far.

Even the Newhomers noticed, and they were new to the business. “What’s going on here, Doc?” Jim Moonein asked me, as we stripped our gear down to what we’d need for an extended hike in the brush. “Bigwave, he owe the other stepladders money?”

“What, out here?” I replied, more heartily than I felt. I had wondered the same thing, you see. “If there’s a human bill collector following us, they’d be pretty damn dedicated. Besides, I got paid in advance.”

Jim snorted. “Yeah, so did we. Our House’s got our quest gold already, nice and safe.” He gave a quick look around, mostly I think to see where Bigwave was. When Jim talked again, he kept his voice low and even. “But this ain’t a normal quest, amirite? Stepladders don’t solo like this, and you’re too cheap to spend your own gold. No offense.”

“None taken,” I replied evenly as I pulled out a smoke, offering the pack to Jim. “Snake-skinned, not stepladder, remember? — You’re not wrong, though. Humans love using other people’s money. Between you and me, I figure the guy’s looking for something in particular. As long as he gets it, he won’t give a molt about anything else. If he doesn’t get it?” I shrugged, and took a drag. “He might be inclined to make things get messy.”

Yeah, we’re going with this.

Alkali Jones and the Lost Devil-City

Wilds of Newhome
(State of Yucatan, Mexico)
3040 AD

I would have felt sorry for the human, except that he was an ass.

That’s a weird word, etymologically speaking, since the Old American word that it’s derived from either means “donkey,” or “place where the crap comes out.” I’m not sure which version best fit Captain Bruce Bigwave; he was stubborn as a jackass, and as full of crap as any humanoid I’ve ever met. If I had realized how bad he was going to be on this expedition, I would never have let him hire me for it. I’m a professional salvage archeologist. I have expectations of my employers, and Bigwave wasn’t living up to them.

Case in point? Right now we had stopped for a bit to “look at the map,” which was Euphemism for “letting the human get a break from the sun.” I’ll be fair and admit that he needed it; by now Bigwave was going through zinc-oxide at an almost comical rate, and his woad-paint was practically a clown mask. He didn’t look at all like the conspicuously civilized (and carefully coiffed) Confed adventurer who had hired me a month ago. 

Still, any sympathy I might have had for his suffering under the relentless Yucatan sun had long since evaporated, like perspiration from my borrowed sweat glands. It wasn’t that Bigwave whined. Proud descendants of a hundred generations of Californian warrior-kens didn’t whine. No, he just thought about whining, hard enough that the birds and beetles in the forest around us could hear. I almost thought about calling him on it, except that the actual whining would probably have been worse.

Did Bigwave have any laudable qualities at all? Sure. He was the money. In the field of salvage archeology, that virtue covereth a multitude of sins.