SANITY LINE
Crucea Mors
“Nothing has changed,” she said. “Business as usual.”
Dagonovich was, in spite of his reputation compared to the rest of Team Kether, and the way Vidcund would later come to see him, easily the most prone to rebellion of all the “ab-human agents” assigned to that particular working group. It came, he supposed, from a reasonably high intellect, paired to a philosophic outlook and a stubborn streak. It was usually something he kept in check, but today he was indulging in his favourite form of rebellion – being lazy. The bosses might have called the situation normal, but the sky was brown with the dust of Kraterburg, Kether was taken off of standby duty and placed on the active roster, and nobody seemed to know yet exactly what had happened, or what would happen.
Faced with a future that potentially would make nuclear winter seem a tropical honeymoon by comparison, Dagonovich had elected to go with his vice – the escape of written fiction. Humans had a rich literary tradition, as he'd discovered. He particularly liked the myth-cycles and fairy tales from the area near the border between the monurban Dean “Empire” and the greater Union as a whole. Cultures mixed heavily there, between the Zaxti's pragmatic superstition and the more fanciful, grand mythology of the Deans themselves. Often, these exposed avenues into something approaching truth more closely. The Zaxti on the coast of the Grand Strait, for example, had a myth of a merfolk city near a sunken island at one point in the straits where the seabed was unusually variable and the currents particularly unpredictable.
No such island had ever existed, but Dagonovich had spent several summers at that very same city when he'd first begun the Long, Slow Change. It was a pleasant enough place as his mother's people went, but lacking in modern conveniences like a well-brewed cup of chai.
“What've you got simmering today, hmm?”
Dagonovich looked up from his volume, shifting imperceptibly under the seeming-boundless expanse of towels he had heaped over himself. Cold blooded, the power rationing so far as heating was concerned was irritating him immensely. Valkoinen stood in the doorway, soft and warm as ever. She was a mystery to him – he could tell there was something off about her – but for the most part he stayed in her good graces and she seemed to favour him above the others. He smiled back, adjusting half-moon reading glasses that balanced precariously on what was left of the receding bridge of his nose. “I'd be lying if I said it was entirely work-related. You ever hear of the Crocea Mors story?”
“No. Sounds Dean.”
“It is. As I understand it, anyway. The story deals with two rival kingdoms, in the usual Dean way. The Brass Kingdom – taken to mean the Dean Empire, I guess, back when it actually controlled land – fought a war against another, rival kingdom, from much further away. Some myths name the kingdom and some don't. The names are inconsistent, which is fascinating. It suggests the whole thing was apocryphal.”
“You're about to tell me you don't think so.”
“Every legend has a kernel of truth to it,” Dagonovich said, setting the book aside. “Now, as I understand it, there was a mighty warrior among the aggressor kingdom, by the name of Verus, though again, accounts sometimes differ. Verus was entirely undefeated in battle, of course.”
“Of course.”
“There was a Dean Counterpart, who most accounts ascribe to being some early member of the House of Sussex, who was a similarly powerful warlord full of personal bravado and daring, but of greater humility than Verus. The two fought on the battlefield, and Verus proved the lesser warrior. Our early Dean warlord took Verus's weapon for his own and preceded to clear the battlefield of foes in spite of his own injuries.”
“An invincibility weapon? The Spear of Longinus perhaps?”
“A sword... the crocea mors.” Dagonovich smiled slightly. “Such a silly tale... but it strikes me that every culture seems to have a similar one.”
---
“Excuse me, Professor. There's a video call for you. Should I accept it?”
Malvolio lifted his head from the stack of open books upon which it was resting, raking his fingers down the left side of his face as though that would dispel his growing sense of exasperation and stress. More and more, he desired a state of endless sleep. It was preferable, he supposed, to his waking paranoia.
He glanced to the blackboard behind him – full of the half-emerged pattern of the Alabaster man, and sighed. “I'll take it in the conference room. Who is it?”
“I believe they said Dragonoff, or something like that.”
Malvolio disfavoured the young man serving as his aide with a frown in his passing, taking his coat from the hook by his office door as he swept down the hall. The Saffron Academy was run off the family estate. There was more history in these walls than in most of the texts in the lower-level curriculum. That, he thought, was probably the source of his growing sense of dissatisfaction with his students and companions. If there was a new academic year, there'd need to be changes to the curriculum.
Everyone was happy to meddle in centuries-old affairs, but nobody seemed inclined to take sufficient regard for history.
The video call was already up on screen in the conference room. As per usual, the man on the other end had the kind of grainy quality that was surely meant to mask the fact his face was being live-animated, probably by motion capture. Malvolio had long wondered what kind of disability Lysander Dagonovich meant to hide with such a practice. “Dr. Dagonovich. Sorry to keep you waiting.”
“Not at all. Your associate implied you were all very busy. All packed up and ready to go exploring, as I understand it.”
Lysander tried to hide his sources too well and too often. Malvolio had known for years he'd had at least one or two members of his school – probably members of his inner circle – reporting their activities to Agency. With Agency as a major sponsor (funding, directly or indirectly, almost half of their archaeological field work), it was entirely likely that most of the Academy's equipment was spying on them as well. “Our academic year was sort of pulled out from under us, Les. Taking the DNR studies is a financial decision.”
“Ah, yes. You were the Coultier with business acumen... but you're also the curious one.”
Malvolio's shoulders sagged. He wasn't sure which was worse – the obviousness of the bait or his willingness to take it. “You think one of the sites deserves my attention more than the others?”
“One of the Razeland sites, yes, the Distant Valley site.” Dagonovich beamed. He took great pleasure in his own cleverness – Malvolio, being the smartest person in the conversation, had little patience for it, folding his arms in place. “Our own preliminary study of various reports on the site lead us to believe it is a site of continual settlement and abandonment. Records study from the Lipan oral tradition state that the site was “discovered” by the Le Croix band during the days Alaurea lead it as chief.”
Malvolio frowned slightly. “Someone in your research department isn't doing their homework, Les. Alaurea was the earliest Lipan ruler. Her unification of the Le Croix band catalysed the foundation of all the other Tribal Dynasty families.”
“I'm well aware of that,” Dagonovich countered, frowning. “She was a contemporary of Acumen. By all accounts, there should have been no permanent settlements anywhere in Razeland until Acumen founded Enotekka. But this Distant Valley site was supposed to have been old when Alaurea's runners found it.”
Malvolio sighed. He was hoping for something genuinely interesting from Agency's appointed handler. These sorts of jobs – contradiction-hunting – usually resulted in little more than patching the plot-holes of history. That was admirable work in and of itself, but rarely lead to the sorts of breakthroughs that made the Saffron Academy unique among institutions – or Malvolio one of the most powerful men in the Union.
Dagonovich seemed to consider Malvolio's melancholy for a moment, before perking up himself. “It gets weirder. There are reports that a war-band attacked in the night and drove the Le Croix out. The settlement wasn't retaken again for ten years, until after Acumen became the first Trade Queen and the Lipan could band together to take it.”
Malvolio frowned again, but this time, there was a spark in his eye, a slight twisting of the corner of his mouth that showed he'd finally taken the bait he was being fed. “The Lipan should have been alone on Razeland for the next two hundred years. If they reclaimed the city after Acumen's ascendency, there should have been nobody to take it back from.”
“Weird, isn't it?”
---
Malvolio found himself somewhat surprised at the busyness of the Volar Crossing terminal, the principal crossing of the Great Strait. It had been his understanding that the upheaval in Kraterburg had not caused the closure of the Underpass – the mega-structural sub-sea tunnel that allowed train and automobile traffic to cross between Zvanesburg Port and Enotekka on the far side.
Then again, he began to notice that he seemed to be among the lightest travellers. Most, he realized, waiting in the pedestrian boarding area, had significantly more luggage than his roller-bag and laptop case. Lipan were in greater numbers than he'd otherwise have expected – singletons, young couples, and whole families. Belatedly, it dawned on him that many were headed to Enotekka to resettle. The Lipan, or at least these Lipan, were prepared to abandon Zaxti.
The thought brought his unconscionable sense of anxiety toward the future back to the foreground, and he stared out the picturesque windows, up the Strait, toward what he knew to be a brand-new Bay, and wondered what his world was coming to. Depending on which university or think-tank booked the simulator time, forecasts ranged from the start of a new ice age, to a mild nuclear winter, to a depression in the global mean temperature that would quickly be salvaged by mankind's continuing insistence on carbon dioxide overproduction. Nobody's crystal ball showed the same future, and even his own Faculty of Permutative Analysis couldn't agree among themselves what the future held, and that was literally their goddamn job.
“Ah, Professor Coultier, I presume?”
Quite suddenly, the stool beside his at the lounge bar was occupied, and Malvolio turned his head slightly to acknowledge the newcomer, who he didn't know from Moses (and, not being so famous as his elder siblings, this was a rarer event). She was tall, vaguely androgynous of figure and feature, with a face memorable mostly for its memorability and a shock of blonde hair that skirted the line between professional and punk. Naturally, he liked this lady in white immediately. “And you are?”
“A friend of Dr. Dagonovic's,” she responded, before ordering a club soda from the bartender.
Malvolio sighed. Travelling was, on its own, a stressful enough prospect, when dealing with service overcrowding and inclement weather. Some well-meaning admirer or contemporary scholar would have been a welcome distraction. Instead, he got to play more Agency spy craft – his least favourite sport. “Do Lysander's friends have names?”
“Sometimes,” she admitted, and set her laptop bag down on the counter between the two of them. “He thought I might be lucky enough to catch you with these, before you headed off to your dig-site.”
Malvolio checked the bag casually, lifting the flap with a brush of the hand, timed to coincide with reaching for his drink (a hellish combination of cranberry and ginger ale). The bag contained a few thin volumes in the distinctive black vinyl slip-covers of the National Library Special Resource Collections. “Hard to get material from Special Reference on Loan,” he muttered.
“Les. has some pull,” his companion admitted. “These volumes are from the W.A. Keeping Memorial Collection. He believed they would be relevant to your present project. Whatever the hell that is.”
The woman got up and stalked off, with drink in hand, and Malvolio quietly slipped the volumes into his own mostly-empty bag, ready for his use at a later time. In all the years since past, he'd lost count of the number of times he'd requested – and been refused – access to the Keeping Collection. It was only fitting that now, when he could have cared less, he'd finally had a glimpse at it.
---
From time to time, there were moments in life when you would look around you at the ongoing situation and suddenly realize you were living out a scene from a movie, and that reality was as fantastic as cinema, and that the most basic activities could suddenly become “unreal”. Such moments were more frequent for some than others, and for Malvolio, yet another of these startlingly lucid moments could be found in viewing the work-site from his elevated administrative tent on a ridge above the main dig, waiting for the coffee to brew over.
Here he was, in the 21st century, an archaeologist. Unearthing a settlement not touched in at least eight hundred years or so, with spades and trowels working beside hydrogen-fired backhoes and ground-penetrating radar, and the two most useful tools at his disposal were a collection of old, mouldering books for him to pour over, and a parcel of foci used in the arcane practice of Metametric Episticanistry – pendulums of various materials, a couple sets of spectacles with differingly-treated lenses, and even the occasional gaze through an honest-to-god amber spyglass.
This was, of course, why his special Academy existed, and why they were trusted by Agency for the sometimes dangerous work of archaeological expeditions, but standing here with the ruddy sands of the northern Razeland Dessert blowing through the camp, jacket abandoned and breast pocket of a double-breasted vest stuffed with a notebook and a pen with precisely-formulated ink, Malvolio suddenly had a thrill of the other.
Since his arrival on site, the excavation and recovery of the City in the Valley was proceeding by leaps and bounds. Eight centuries of windblown sand and decaying mountain had to be removed. That had to be done carefully, and systematically. Before, ground-penetrating radar had been doing much of the work. Now, however, that Malvolio was on site, whole swaths of “definitively clear” ground could be excavated. As if by magic, the lower-ranking students and hired help said, Professor Coultier could douse out the city.
Little, so far, had turned up by way of complete buildings. What had was consistent of thirteenth-century Lipan architecture – small-stone masonry structures with plastered walls (and, to be fair, mostly destroyed). There were signs of a large temple complex in the portion of the valley closest to where the two “arms” of the mountain met each other, but Malvolio had placed the work under strict orders not to excavate that area until the nearer reaches were cleared.
Dousing and calculation had only taken them so far, however, and fair-minded as he was, Malvolio would have liked to give credit where it was due. The works from the W.A. Keeping Collection he'd been granted had been instrumental in providing the raw material for his methods to process. Together with nibbles of trivia garnered from The King in Yellow: Act I as annotated by the redoubtable (and, as it turned out, fearsome) Prof. Donovan Kline, and the Comte d'Erlette's Cultes des Ghouls, the more salient information offered by Russel's Guide to Interdimensional Entities, Vol I; and, of course, the best modern kirilianographic techniques, he'd managed to piece together some understanding of at least the outer part of the city – the more modern resettlement which was further down the valley. Layers of wind-shifted earth blocked out the kirilianographic measurements needed for more precise excavation and mapping of the temple complex, which was part of the reason why it wasn't time to excavate so far up the valley just yet.
The young professor was gazing in that direction when the cry had gone up from somewhere behind him. The site was hardly a quiet location to begin with, but as with all things, it became, eventually, easy to discern the usual commotion from an unusual crisis.
He strode purposefully down a bluff toward the gathering of a crowd around an excavator, the cab of which was swaying slightly due to what appeared to be an altercation happening within and without it. Folk had clambered up either side, attempting to separate the combatants. Repeated shouts by foremen and faculty failed in intervention in either respect.
Malvolio's voice carried high above the din of the fray, the tone flat and even, quite unlike a shout in any respect save the volume. “That will do.”
Slowly, hesitantly, those outside the cab clambered down, and even the combatants paused. One younger man – the aggressor, going by the fact that he was dressed for an academic role rather than operating heavy equipment, was alone in failing to step down from the vehicle at once. Malvolio did not need to raise his voice again – such was the power of glamour – and a path parted for him as he approached, swung himself up onto the track of the vehicle using a handhold, and looked the entirely out-of-line young man in the eye.
There was not much of a gap in physical age, but in this moment, it became clear to both that there was a vast and likely uncrossable gap in spiritual age. Malvolio's persistently grey hair had been the butt of many a joke, as were his sometimes anachronistic affectations, but it was in moments like these that the hidden wellspring of over-maturity he contained bubbled up to the forefront.
“What happened?”
The student's voice, cracked and anxious, likewise contrasted strongly with Malvolio's immediate sense of presence and coolness. “We have to excavate. We can't keep waiting.”
Malvolio held up a hand gently – working a subtle bit of magic, making it physically harder to be excitable in his presence. The gesture was the completing bit of work he'd begun with a muttered incantation as he slid down the scree, activating deeper calculations from his notebook. Thus, in even so casual a use of magic, the Weight of Consensus was circumvented while the laws of ritual, form, and cadence were maintained. “Why is this so urgent?”
“I was reading. I found it in your notes, and I know now it's important. We can bring back the King. Finally.”
Malvolio's ears prickled, and he brought his fingers together into a closed fist, passing through another arcane lock – a mudra, if you like – and the man immediately collapsed, falling forward into Malvolio's waiting hands even before he could snap, which was his usual way of covering for such acts of hypnosis. He had a good hold on him, but nonetheless called for help, quickly handing him off to the others who came to get him.
“Get him out of here,” he said, more urgently than he had been speaking thus far. “Medivac to Enotekka for heat stroke.”
The Professor lingered on the scene only as long as was required to be sure that everyone had taken the situation well in hand, and then he hurried up the slope again to the open-sided tent under which he had been conducting his studies. He went through the collection of books carefully, and there, open on the desk, was the annotated King in Yellow.
Malvolio closed the book without looking anywhere near the pages – in point of fact, he looked some distance to the left quite urgently. To handle such delicate subjects as those presented from Keeping's collection took a special degree of care. Some, like the Play, were true cognitohazards, even in incomplete, heavily-commentated form.
Granted, some kind of psychotic episode stemming from reading only the first act of the play told of a deeper, underlying condition... but still. It was a point to ponder.
To be safe, however, he made a quick inscription upon the case in which he had been keeping the books. Any other curious souls were going to need more than a casual understanding of locks to get at the books again.
---
The week that followed was largely uneventful to uneducated bystanders such as myself. The Saffron Knights, their leader included, were surely excited by the ongoing progress, as were the excavators who rarely got to undertake such work, but the archaeology students, for whom unearthing ruins was routine, hardly saw the cause for the Saffron Academy's excitement.
The whole thing stemmed from a discovery just two days before, with the excavation of the upper section of the settlement, the promised temple grounds included. Unearthing such a temple-complex was exciting in and of itself, but it bore a feature Malvolio could not recall having seen before, and his own puzzlement was scintillating to his students and fellow-faculty. First Malvolio got confused, then he would get obsessed, and then he would understand – to arcane archaeology what Gandhi had been to passive resistance.
He was puzzling over the most unusual feature from a new – but still elevated – position, further up the hills that framed the valley. He was bereft of his usual vices, having decided the best inroads to the eventual shortages of food the Kraterburg Eruption would lead to being to simply swear off his luxuries until rationing took effect or the universe proved kinder than all evidence suggested.
Five pillars stood at the entrance to the temple ground, and further excavation around them was revealing they had been erected in place of buildings demolished not at all long before. Their arrangement was peculiar – he had sketched them out twice before sending a UAV up to photograph them from above, and sure enough, there was no discernible pattern to their arrangement. No constellation that he was familiar with, nor a geometric figure, nor even some old character of any of the multiple alphabets used in the Razeland over history's long years. The pillars were broken, long crumbled, in fact, and the tops themselves completely vanished, as an inventory of the rubble showed.
“Progress, Doctor Oppenheimer?”
Malvolio tilted his head slightly as he swivelled it around to face the voice behind him. “Makes about as much sense as desert glass, doesn't it?”
Miranda Frost, Dean of the Knight's College (the specialist subset of the Saffron Academy which studied “practical arcanistry”, forming a sort of semi-faculty body that staffed such expeditions as these), folded her own arms. “Maybe the Lipan were just shit at geometry.” When Malvolio failed to appreciate her joke, she folded her arms. “You should go check on Liam. We're getting low on hydrogen again anyway.”
“Should have rented diesel gear,” Malvolio grumbled, standing up immediately from his seat. “... All right. I'll be back. Keep the temple off limits until I get back. Curious lot we've brought with us this time.”
In spite of the heat, he slipped his blazer back on, and replaced his sun glasses before stepping out of the shade. “... And you know what they say about that, Mira.”
Miranda gave a slow nod, saying nothing, while she folded her arms to study the columns herself for a while.
---
“He's doing well, all aside? The Hawk Basin is not kind.”
Malvolio shrugged casually in response. “The doctors tell me his dehydration was relatively minor. There's no fever or any sign of lasting damage apart from his violent behaviour.”
Locke nodded slowly. The chef and the professor had been friends for some time now – the former having provided a considerable amount of funding, quietly, to the Academy over the years, and in typical reciprocating fashion, Malvolio had invested in more than a few of the chef's projects, both on and off the books. The young man – scion of the powerful Le Cruset clan of Lipan – had also been a sponsor of Malvolio's older brother's career in the Tournaments. Like most of his family, he seemed to have his fingers in more pie than was fair.
The chef casually flicked a bottle opener from his pocket, lifting the top off a bottle of mead which he handed to the other from across his kitchen counter. The house still very much looked freshly moved. A recent divorcee, Locke had become famously antisocial, ending a career that had constantly verged on celebrity status by firmly driving a wedge between himself and anyone else. Hired help included, of course. “I was surprised to learn that the College of Judges was still willing to fund archaeology. No offence, but you aren't my idea of an essential government function.”
Malvolio frowned slightly, gesturing his thanks before taking a draw from the bottle. Sweet. Tart. Cranberry. Odd choice in the heat. Locke was having trouble adjusting to the fact he was no longer a citizen of Kraterburg. “Who says it's a government-funded expedition?”
“You Coultiers are deeply stupid,” countered the chef, drawing on a mostly-silenced family rivalry that dated back to Unification, “but not so stupid as to waste money digging for trinkets in the desert when we can soon expect it to be easier to buy a car than a case of tomatoes.”
Malvolio chuckled warmly, sipping from his drink, and seeking a redirection of his friend's curiosity. “Alright, fine, so I'm a shameless government shill. So's the Merchant Fleet.”
The traditional tribal sparring over, Locke popped the cap of his own bottle. “... Must be good trinkets. And the only reason you'd stick around in this hellhole is because you found something weird. So dish.”
Carefully, Malvolio laid the scene, striking a balance between information enough to seek the answers he wanted, and avoiding a tabloid leak that would screw him out of whatever reward the Academy had coming with NDA penalties. He explained the three different eras of construction, the vaguely alien nature of the middle era (relative to what was known of Lipan architecture in the relevant time period), and a variety of other things. Not that he need worry about the chef leaking his secrets to the press for a quick buck.
Locke was holding bigger secrets for Professor Coultier than this. The Lipan considered the situation, digesting what Malvolio revealed to him with thoughtful nods and quiet sips of mead. “... I mean, it's obvious, right? Some Zaxti thing?”
“It's too early, and the five pillars...” Malvolio trailed off, not even sure why the idea was significant to him yet, let alone why it should be to Locke.
“Well, I mean, the Rains memorial in Anfangsburg has Eight Pillars. So maybe it's not the Zaxti at all. Maybe there's some secret Terrik expedition to the Razeland nobody knows enough about to teach.”
“Yeah. Maybe.” Unconvinced, Malvolio drained his glass. He could afford only the one drink – the expedition could no longer be without his supervision.
---
“Productive meeting?”
The pair had not spoken at all for nearly an hour. They had time to cross Enotekka even its pedestrian-clogged state, arriving at the private airstrip from which the helicopter they'd chartered launched and landed. They had time to board this helicopter, and it was only now, halfway back to camp, that either had chosen to say a word.
Malvolio blinked twice, forcibly clearing himself from the half-entranced state of thought which he had put himself in. He turned his gaze slowly back to Miranda – his clandestine partner, and second-ranking faculty member. “... What meeting?”
“With Chef LeCruset.”
“Oh,” Malvolio returned his gaze to the window ahead. “No. Thoroughly wasted.”
The ride continued in silence. For Malvolio, the growing anxiety was a new sensation. In the past, he had only encountered a fear of failure – failure to attain this station, that grade, those friends. He was not particularly given to attachment to people (the lone exception being his late mother), nor to himself (he was famously lax in his own protections). Neither could he be said to be especially given to levity, mirth, enchantment, or any other state apart from quiet focus. He was personable, yes, when he had to be, but to him the sensation was always very much the player on a stage, a state which he found uncomfortable.
Now, though, there was a very palpable anxiety. An unsourced anxiety, which revolved in some way around the camp, since that was where his thoughts kept returning. He'd puzzled on it since he'd noticed it, just after leaving the Chef's new apartment. What had been said that rubbed him so severely in the wrong direction? What conclusion had his animal mind drawn and then dropped, unwilling to pass it along the higher functions of the Human?
His thoughts kept returning to the camp, to the three-period architecture's narrative resonance, the five broken pillars in the entirely-novel quarter, whose little remaining detail offered up some significance that hinted at an impossible fifth culture in the archipelago. Some other tribe, neither Dean nor Zaxti, Terrik nor Lipan, which had come from nowhere and then subsequently vanished into nowhere.
His thoughts kept returning to the camp, where, from the horizon, a thin column of dark smoke was rising into the sky.
---
The camp had devolved into a skirmish, and before there was time to analyze things, Malvalio's hand was forced to action. Some of the conflicting party converged upon the specially levelled and engineered square the craft intended to land upon. Faced with the need to immediately take action or turn back, and not inclined to find himself unexpectedly grounded between here and nowhere, the Professor turned intention to reality.
He had hurled himself from the door of the helicopter, and returned to earth like a lightning-bolt, the accompanying concussion flattening whatever little opposition there could possibly have been. Battle thus joined, he stalked among the people in the valley. Those who wore the uniform of the Saffron Academy – in particular the small contingent of Saffron Knights who provided security – rallied behind him. Those who opposed fell. He spoke to no-one, vocalizing only those words which would shape the ardent fields around him, conjured, beckoned, and directed by the mudras formed by his hands, gestures, and the aether-summoned blade in his right hand.
Rumour, reputation, innuendo, and the power of a famous name had conferred Malvolio an air of the swashbuckler. While he was far from the best swordsman in the family, or even especially remarkable in that respect, it was his capacity and willingness to twist the arcane to his needs that had won the day.
That, and self-serving loyalty of his companions. Miranda met him under what was left of his tent – singed from where he had provided proof lightning did in fact strike twice, and what was left from that encountered tattered from the passage of arrows when the skirmishers had tried to take the position back from him. Glass crunched underfoot – some from broken equipment, some freshly minted and still sulphurous from Malvolio's particular skill with turning the arcane energies latent to the world into electrical potential.
The air still reeked of ozone, and Miranda feared to touch him, lest that crackling potential that distorted his hair or set tension across his clothing be unintentionally discharged into her. She didn't speak, or gesture, or otherwise signal her presence. He'd heard her, and was ignoring her on purpose.
It took time to come out of his peculiar battle-fugues properly, and with some small scattering of action still taking place near the excavated pillars, where the fighting was the fieriest, he might not have even been trying to.
His breathing regulated itself, slowed to breath-cycles of a few seconds, and he eventually stretched. “... Nice sword.”
She looked at the weapon in her hand. To her eyes, it was crude, inefficient. Heavy, owing to the bronze, and the greater density and quantity of metal needed to make a sufficiently robust weapon. So close to the Roman Gladius in design that it could not have possibly been made here. “... I figure, I see you jumping out of aircraft, pulling swords from your coat-tails, it's time to find a weapon. It was in the relic cache. Not too hard to get, there. The fighting was thin.”
Malvolio nodded, holding out a gloved hand, so that he could accept the hilt of the weapon when it was passed to him. He examined it closely – taking in the way it resonated with the field around him, the dark bell-tone trapped within it that spoke of craftsmanship more skilled than mere form would suggest.
However their attackers – both the human and inhuman – had arrived... whoever they were... this was what they had come for.
There was a droning in the air – helicopters on the horizon, evocative of a governmental response. The only people that had those kinds of resources these days were the government, or, like the Knights, had government backers. If some enemy wanted the sword so badly, that was one thing. For Malvolio and his people to fight brutally to protect it, knowing or not, and then have Dagonovich's goons show up and take it away, that was unconscionable.
He transferred both weapons to the same hand, giving Miranda a knowing look as he draped his coat over the hands and the swords. A beat later, he withdrew the coat with a flourish, quickly slipping it back on properly.
“Should do stage shows, with a trick like that.”
“Real magic takes the fun out of it, dear. You know that.”