“You have too many friends, Sunny.” Lidea leaned a little harder against the railing of the cart, stretching against the balls joint of eir shoulder until it relaxed with a pop. A bunch of older injuries had been kicking up, lately.
“Acquaintances,” Sunny replied. “Well enough to know I’m reliable, not too well they don’t like me.”
“Either way, they always seem to come out of the woodwork at the most convenient times.” Lidea ran eir finger along the back of Sunny’s collar, fingertip tracing the crease of his neck.
“It’s the mercenary guild. Everyone knows everyone. Bunch of gossips.” Sunny leaned down into the cart bench, settling up against Lidea’s side. Eir arm came around and dropped gently on his shoulder.
The job Sunny had picked up for them had come through Beni, a career mercenary he knew through the guild. It was escorting a low-frequency magic detection device to an archaeological dig out in the Latolan hinterlands. Backroad and jungle escort was its own genre of job with various degrees of complexity and danger. This particular variation was one of the low-risk ones that didn’t require fully armed guards.
Banditry in the jungles of Latolan was risky, as a rule. Magi-tech didn’t have the black market resale value to make it worth it.
It was the logistics around magical technical artificery that required babysitting. Like the magical ink infuser at the print shop, they had been reduced to the role of a warm body. A failsafe in case of magical breakdown.
Ey let the toe of eir boot strike the large canvas and metal box as ey brought eir foot over. At least it meant they got to take a cart all the way out there instead of having to walk it.
Looking at the contract, they were also staying for a week to “offer non-specific practical magical assistance as needed to the archaeological research team.” Probably hauling and toting. A little magical elbow grease. If a magician could do something with a flick of a staff, that was always going to be preferable to more hands-on strenuous means.
“What company is Beni with?” Lidea asked.
“Graymalkin. That’s Bullet Montgomery’s group.”
Lidea had had the pleasure of meeting her. She was sensible. Pragmatic. A personality to match the nickname. Enjoyed the letter of the law more than most of her contemporaries, so she also knew how to fold it into whatever shape she needed.
Beni would probably be equally sensible, so there was some hope that she had arranged for a sensible job.
#####
Latolan roadhouses had a certain, strange charm to them. They were only partially subsidized by local taxes, so you still had to pay a small fee. Not nearly as much as a night in private, professional lodging, but money changing hands added a lovely inn-keeping quality to the whole affair.
They were also always busy.
There were two country highways that concentrically circled the city. Within that wagon wheel, the major arteries of the city tapered down into ambling creepers between the outer edges of urbia and the first rim highway. If they weren’t covered in vines or otherwise washed out, it was a long day by fast horse cart along one of these roads between the official city limits and the farthest highway. That’s where the roadhouses were, a single building to serve anyone who had to come through that intersection. The first stings of the cold season were crawling in, so a surge of season-change traffic pressed against the small cluster of buildings.
Their cart driver—a human with a “D” name they were both magically inclined to forget almost as soon as they heard it — pulled into one of the cart staging areas. Lidea dropped to the ground with their bags while Sunny positioned the large crate onto the lift that would bring it down from the bed of the cart.
“Who are we meeting again? What’s his name?” Lidea looked out over the little pseudo-townlette. This was the biggest of the Latolan roadhouses, the lodging joined by a few outbuildings selling food, supplies, and repairs. It was the sort of job where you made all your money during several significant pockets, and had to make it last all year. Not terribly different from how they both managed their own funds.
“Sallah,” Sunny replied. The crate moved over the ground with a crunch and a lilt, rugged wheels picking up bits of rock as Sunny pushed it along. “His name’s Sallah. I don’t know him, but Beni said he’d know us.”
“Oh, I don’t like that at all.” Lidea also put eir hand on the crate, but didn’t really contribute any additional force of note. “If we’re going to be taking him with us the rest of the way, I would have liked a little more information ahead of time. You need to ask more questions about who we’re working with.”
“He’s a scientist, Liddy. He’s not going to murder us in our sleep.”
“We just won’t see it coming.”
Sunny chuffed at em then put more force into moving the cart, getting them down the front drive a little quicker.
The people coming in from the wilderness back to the city would still be a few more hours, so the crowd gathered downstairs was probably on their way out. Stopping for the night before they ventured out into the great unknown or continued down the ring of highway.
The jungle would take the composure out of all of them soon enough.
They had messaged ahead, but the front clerk was still sorting out rooms for the night. It was a delicate balance of humors. Groups of Monster Hunters and guild mages could be layered on top of each other if logistics required it, but the two sides would pick fights with each other if they were in too close of a proximity for too long. Some Revenant Knights in between could buffer the hostilities, but they didn’t travel to the same degree everyone else did. More of an honor class. One would think a bunch of professional adults could keep their shit together, but when alcohol started flowing, things became more complicated.
The tavern on the first floor met them with a low roar, thick tables peppered with people eating dinner.
“Oh, that’s them!” A gravelly, high-pitched voice rose above the rabble, and Lidea knew immediately it was for them. Ey looked out over the flittery crowd to find the source.
“Sallah’s a drakkaken,” Lidea said with just the slightest sigh of relief, laying eyes on a dragon-man at a far table waving at them dramatically.
“That’s…huh…” Sunny found him, too.
“I didn’t think the men were allowed to leave,” Lidea said.
Sunny shrugged.
They worked together to get the crate through the crowd and settled on the end of the bench near Sallah. He was short and square and scaled; his physique covered in layers of pastel cotton broadcloth. The drape wasn’t flowy, so the outer calf-length tunic fell straight and heavy over the top of his pants, the bottom tucked tightly into boots to keep the wet out. A scarf was tied up over his flat head and around his neck, disappearing down into the collar of his tunic. The face that stuck out from his veil had a square snout and large, damp eyes that closed independently of each other with a wet clicking sound.
This visible skin was a mottled cerulean blue with orange splotches arranged in what almost looked like an orderly fashion, a sort of brickwork of patterning. His voice cracked and kept hissing for half a moment after he stopped talking.
“Beni’s description was apt. Sit.” He patted the bench next to him. Lidea was the first to acquiesce and Sunny joined after a second of hesitation.
Sallah gestured down the table to the men he was sitting with. They were from the League of Monster Hunters, one human, one ariesian with tan horns that angled back before turning up.
Lidea tried not to dislike Monster Hunters. They performed a valid function in the grand scheme of things. Draconid leather armor to withstand bites from draconid teeth while working the Miraalan wilderness. A buckler on a lead that could short-circuit the electro-magic charge of certain seafliers. Boots and pants treated with a chemical that would stun a pixie catcher before it could sting you with its venomous thorns. A throw able hammer-axe for anything else. A lot of them were also veterinarians and wildlife rescuers, specifically focusing on animals with complex magical energies. Both the “monster” and “hunter” part of the name barely applied and referenced a series of sloppy translations.
The human founders saw magic as a danger, though. Thought people shouldn’t be allowed to possess inherent skills that others physically couldn’t do anything about. They had started the League under the pretense of eventual anti-magic law enforcement. They’re mistake, so to speak, was letting in ariesians, forgetting just how active their “passive” magical auras could be. Underestimated the effect even the weakest cal-ten-rah had on another person’s neurochemical release. Their failure to do research had changed the path of the League, and the shift had played out over the last hundred years.
The original ethos, though, festered under the surface, growing in compound in its members the longer they were in the organization. Lidea knew the history, and was disinclined to let it go.
These two were young enough to be one of the newer, progressively better generations.
Sallah pointed to the human. Curly black hair with a coarse beard and tan skin.
“This is my husband, Roman. That’s his teammate CeeCee.” Sallah tapped his thick, clawed fingers on the table. Across from each other, Sunny and Lidea both paused, both making sure they had heard all those words in the right order before moving on down the conceptual trail.
There was nothing preventing Monster Hunters from getting married; they usually just didn’t while they were still active in the field. On top of the usual difficulties that came with being a wanderer-by-trade, they had higher death rates than everyone else. That scared off potential romantic partners.
And that was the least weird part of the whole thing.
Sallah waved at someone else I the room, then turned back to the table.
“It’s a vegetable soup tonight,” he said. A little bowl of brown, speckled eggs sat in front of him. He popped one into his mouth, tiny sharp teeth crunching down loudly through the shell. The raw innards sloshed down his throat with a dire, wet sound.
“So you’re who Beni tricked into this?” Sallah said. “You must be the last people in the universe willing to put up with Thresh.”
“I’ve heard the name but never met him,” Sunny said.
“I have no idea who you’re talking about,” Lidea said.
“Well, that explains it.” Sallah ate another egg. A bowl of soup each appeared in front of them, delivered in a blur by an older woman. “Do either of you have any morning prayers you’ll need to do before we leave?”
“Just the usual,” Sunny hedged and Lidea shrugged along with the half-lie. Theoretically, they both grew up with structured prayers around times of day and certain activities. Starting a journey was supposed to be one of them, but they never bothered. Sallah nodded.
“I’ve got my dawn prayers, but I’d prefer to be on the road before then.” Sallah ate a piece of leafy lettuce this time.
“We can always stop at dawn,” Lidea said. “It’s not that big a deal. AllMind prayers aren’t that long, are they?”
“Not for males, no.” He tapped his fingers. “That’s fine, then.” He ate the last egg. “Alright! Well, now that I know you’ve made it, I’m going to turn in.” Sallah swung out of the bench. Roman gave a nod to CeeCee then followed behind.
The three of them sat there in silence, eating their soup. CeeCee cleared his throat.
“I…uh…I try to give them as much time as possible together before I go up. But it’s not always enough, if you catch me.” He tapped his spoon on the side of the bowl. “If I need to crash with you two, would I be interrupting anything? Or…if I am interrupting, if it’d be a welcome one?” He winked there, giving a small pulse of his cal-ten-rah as a joke. Lidea rolled eir eyes at him, then realized Sunny was looking at em with a quizzical note.
“When we have our room, we’ll give you the number,” Lidea said, watching for any changes to Sunny’s expression. “We’re boring, but you can borrow some floor.”
CeeCee nodded, digging back into his bowl.
#####
Lidea felt eir brow scrunch down tightly as ey stared at the back of the cart driver’s head, the uneven, unindustrialized open landscape below them causing eir body to shake and vibrate. The effort was enough to form tears on the edge of eir eyes, and ey had to blink them off. Sunny’s face settled close to eir ear.
“Stop trying to remember their name. You’re going to give yourself a headache.” Sunny’s lips pressed to the space below eir ear briefly then pulled away.
“It doesn’t bother you? At all? Why even give a name to begin with if the magic is just going to shake it all off?”
“You get used to it,” Sallah said from the other side of the cart. He bit through a small loaf of a dense, bread something that smelled like sulfur. It felt like he was constantly eating ever since they stopped for morning prayers. Not meals, just a constant grazing on things he kept pulling from his bag.
“This is why I don’t stay on Latolan,” Lidea said. “Eveything had ten weird extra layers of nonsense.”
The Latolan outer-city cart drivers were inmates, prisoners from the local penitentiary serving for non-violent crimes. It gave them a job with a wage, knocked some years off their sentence, and reduced recidivism to almost nothing because they got to stay a part of the world. Lidea had had a nice little conversation with both of their drivers, so far. Ey had the memory of positive feelings, at least. The details never broke through to long-term memory, though, the result of a magic-pulse from a choker strapped loosely to their neck.
There must be a reason for it. Probably something ey could ask around about if ey found the right person. But it had to be isolating for them.
“What exactly do you do, Sallah?” Lidea asked, forcing emself away from the more unsavory topic.
“Paleoethnobotany,” Sallah chirped. “I’m also a plant behaviorist, but that’s really only useful on Latolan.”
“You from here?” Sunny asked. He would normally have let Lidea carry the conversation through the usual pleasantries, but a drakkaken — especially a male one — was decidedly weird enough even he felt himself wanting to pry.
Sallah nodded.
“Down past Shop Dollar. Grew up a temple minder.” Sallah took another bite of bread. “I spent three years in the courting pool without being picked even once by a woman. Can you believe that? Handsome boy like me. Look how vibrant by blue is.” He flicked his fingers around his face and chuckled. “Now five years is usually when people start wondering what’s wrong with you, and you have to prove the value you bring to a coupling.”
“No thank you,” Sallah said emphatically. He gestured to Lidea. “You know what it’s like. If you’re not useful to the grand design, eventually they stop paying attention to you.”
“That’s true,” Lidea admitted. “No elf is freer than one who can’t make more of them.”
“Now, it’s not like it’s a problem if I’m not taken by a wife. It happens. You find your place in society and get used to all the side-eyes and smirks.” Sallah clicked his teeth. “Or you do like me and get permission to stay on campus while getting your advanced degree and just never go back.” He shrugged. “Then you meet your husband, the Monster Hunter, while doing fieldwork for your dissertation.” Sallah ate the next bite of bread with more gusto. “There, now you have the more interesting highlights of my biography and can stop clutching your throat about it.”
“You must get a lot of questions,” Lidea said.
“Not as many as you’d think. People are generally obnoxiously polite.” Sallah hummed. “Or afraid. They keep spinning on what would get a drakkaken kicked out. Jokes on them. If you do something grievous enough to warrant something as extreme as exile, you’re more likely just be returned to the AllMind so it can recycle your energy.”
He clacked his teeth then went back to taking his notes. Neither Lidea nor Sunny wanted to confirm that “recycling” was what they thought it was. It was more pleasant that way.
#####
There weren’t any modern roads once you left the outermost ring of highway, just the embedded stony whispers of whoever lived on Latolan thousands of years ago. An experienced cart driver, however, could find the ghosts of other carts that had come before them or trace more level areas through the open landscape. Their driver was capable, bringing the narrow, one-horse cart deftly over the terrain. It was only when they had to break into the jungle that they struggled. It was here that Sallah showed what a “plant behaviorist” could actually do.
“Come on, my darlings. Scoot over.” Sallah had tied his overdress between his legs and rolled his pants up, exposing his thick, perpetually bent legs and soft boots. His stumpy tail made the shade of an outline under his clothes in this formation. He dragged a collapsible staff through the dirt ahead of the cart. With the hooked end, he picked up heavy vines, hauling them away to create something of a path.
Sunny walked between Sallah and the cart, scanning the ground for anything that might trip them all up. The machine they were carrying came with a sequence of mechanical parts that bored down into different materials and took samples. There was cushioning in the case, but if the cart pitched too dramatically and knocked the cart hard enough, one of those delicate mechanical parts could snap without leaving any exterior evidence. He could probably fix it, but there were so many cascading difficulties with that he’d prefer to keep it from happening altogether.
Lidea stayed in the cart, legs hanging off the back of it. Behind them, vines started moving in immediately to recover the ground behind them. Looking out through the jungle to the side, the willow trees stacked like brickwork, making the distance view hazy with mist and greenery. Directly behind them, though, the trees had maintained an aisle just wide enough for a small cart. Their spindly forms had pulled away from each other, leaving a sloping valley of vegetation behind.
As ey watched, one tree leaned into the path, breaking the shape of the pathway, sticking out from the surrounding clusters. A few of the thin trees nearby shuddered. The tree that had fallen out of place creaked back into line with the others.
Lidea rolled eir shoulders.
There were things about Latolan ey was never going to fully understand no matter how long ey kept an apartment here.
They pulled in to the site by evening, working extra slowly through the last half of the day. They crossed a short, hex-cell flexible metal fence, pulling part of it aside for the cart to move through. The plants pushed at the grid, trying to move over and into the clearing beyond. Sallah lifted one of the yellow bulbs draping over the fencing and offered it a piece of meat. It took it in its spiky mouth and retreated down into the brush. The plants along that length of fence retracted a little.
Neither of them were completely foreign to archaeological dig sites. When you traveled cross-country, you were apt to come across one in some backwater. In the days before they learned how to lock the gates into place, they opened semi-randomly, spilling people out across worlds. There was a whole cottage industry around studying and tracking the movement of these Palaeolithic migrants through the connected worlds. The ruins scattered through what they had explored of Latolan were the oldest, some pre-dating civilization on every other world. They were the only clue to whoever had lived and died here long long before the rest of them ever found the place.
This dig was small, only just getting its teeth in the ground. Coming down a gentle slope from the jungle, the tents were arranged in an orderly square, u-shape courtyard in the middle for easier access. A campfire and stove for cooking were set away from the entrance into the ring. The color of the tents was coordinated to some sort of key, but the only one they recognized immediately was broad neon orange and red stripes for medical and other emergency supplies.
“Sallah, my dear! You’ve brought my machine and the mages to go with it.” A dark figure moved toward them from the back flap of one of the tents.
“Goddamn it,” Lidea whispered to emself. Sunny heard eir and smirked.
With a name like “Thresh,” ey should have guessed he was a trenglate. It was nothing against trenglates. Not at all. Trenglates, like drakkaken, were magic-void, but it took a more constant, passive approach. Instead of being able to break it apart and push it out of an area on request, trenglates were constantly breathing it in. Sucking the magic out of every room they walked into.
Sunny swore he couldn’t feel it. Even other greenwitches ey had talked to about it said ey was being dramatic. Ey knew what ey felt.
Thresh met them as they made it halfway down the hill, and he moved into the ring of one of the upright lamps. He was just a shade taller than Lidea, but trenglates tended to hunch, top of their spine dragged down by a bulky polecat head. Under the sweater and slacks, he was painted in scales starting from the top of his head between his round ears, down his back, then around his arms and legs, leaving the belly and inside parts of his anatomy exposed. The scales were tan, thick, overlapping keratin plates, ranging from half an inch to three inches across depending on where they were on his body. The exposed skin (face, neck, and hands) was just a little lighter with a slight red undertone.
His three-fingered hands ended in claws, and they came gently around Sallah’s in a soft little bundle. They pressed snout to snout, muttered some things to each other, then pulled away.
“Scholar Thresh Ar-Teck,” he introduced, “You’re Grand Master Artificer Childress.” Thresh reached for Sunny first, and they exchanged handshakes. Even if he couldn’t feel it at a distance, touching Thresh skin to skin sparked a quick shock of magic as it moved between them. They both felt it, and Thresh pulled his hands away quickly.
“Pardon,” he apologized. He didn’t shake Lidea’s hand, instead just sort of holding them out flat.
“Do you prefer the full Elven or alternate version of your title?” he asked em.
“Either way,” Lidea replied.
“Well, I’m not overly fond of Traditional elven, so Alpha Eliadea.” He nodded.
“Lidea,” ey corrected.
“Did Beni introduce us with our full titles?” Sunny rehung himself on the back of the cart and signaled they should all guide it down the hill. Thresh hopped to and took a position on the side of the cart.
“Beni gave me your dossiers when she said she found someone for the job. I didn’t realize you were more comfortably acquainted than that.” Trenglates had three broad accents when speaking Illurian to an eerie specificity. The one that Thresh used sounded like the echoing twang on a brassy string instrument. The “i’s” were wide and the “o’s” were short.
“Beni, darling,” Thresh called across the field, “your comrades take umbrage with me using their formal names and titles.”
“I didn’t realize she was here, too,” Lidea said.
“Mmhm.”
From the same tent Thresh had emerged, a human woman ducked under the flap and worked her way up the hill to meet them. She was of average human height, wide hips, full bust, and soft stomach. In the evening light, there was a peachy tinge to her bronze skin and a red cast to her dark brown hair. She had cropped her hair short into a bob that grazed her round chin and was probably sharp-edged about six weeks ago. When she got closer, she revealed a splash of freckles and light epicanthic folds over her eyes.
She stood with a tilt to her gait, hands on her hips. Whatever mercenary-grade armor she had been wearing, she was currently down to a shirt that opened loosely over her bosom, pants rolled up to the knee and unlaced boots.
Beni was completely and fully human if her aura was reading accurately.
“They’ll get over it,” she said, dropping her own hands on the cart to drag it downhill. “I see you all survived without Sallah talking you to death.”
“Good to see you, too, Beni,” Sallah said from the other side of the cart.
They managed down the hill and hauled the machine out into a blue-toned tent. Inside was packed with other equipment. They rolled the crate up next to a foldable table that was stacked neatly with some handwritten notebooks and a small box already filled with used film canisters.
Thresh brushed his hands.
“We’re all five of us in one tent. Diggers in another. Cutters in a third. Let me introduce you to everyone, then I’ll give you the brief in the morning. If I’m tired, you must be exhausted.”
“I already know everyone.” Sallah stretched. “I need to do prayers. I’ll find the tent later.” He touched his nose to Beni’s cheek, tapped his snout to Thresh’s, then flicked off into the darkness back toward the cart.
Thresh made a tsking sound at his back, then moved toward the door of the tent. Beni pulled up next to him and tucked her hand into the curvature of his claws. They walked out clasping hands. Lidea paused, found emself, then dropped eir hand into Sunny’s. Sunny tilted his head in consideration at their clasped hands.
“So everyone’s just dating, now, I guess,” Sunny said softly.
“Are we dating?” Lidea asked.
“My tongue was in your mouth last night before CeeCee showed up,” Sunny said even quieter.
“You know that doesn’t inherently mean anything,” Lidea retorted. Sunny squeezed eir hand. Hard. Ey squeezed back. “After this job, we’ll settle it. Assuming we’re not eaten by a plant.”
#####
Usually tents were rough-sleeping, but these were made for long-haul work. There were actual cot beds, raised off the floor a foot, washed-out rugs, and little hammocks for their bags. The only real issue was Beni’s minor night terrors. A lot of mercenaries had them. Thresh would soothe her back to sleep quickly, and they all got on from there. As long as they weren’t having loud, boisterous sex, everything was fine.
“It’s the scales I keep thinking about,” Lidea said into eir morning oatmeal, little more than a whisper.
“You’re going to embarrass me.” Sunny was getting genuinely annoyed with Lidea’s discomfort, and ey couldn’t really blame him. Ey didn’t even really know why ey felt the way ey felt. Ey didn’t know what ey felt. It was a constellation of feelings ey’d never had before, so putting words into them was failing at every turn. Ey felt like the only thing ey had to hold on to was sarcasm.
“I’ll stop,” ey said.
By breakfast, they had met all the members of the dozen-person manual labor crew, a combination of ariesian, stone elf, and human. All of them had varying degrees and advanced technical certifications of their own. Four were dedicated “cutters” working in rotating shifts. Their entire job was to monitor the encroaching jungle and push it back from the camp.
“Okay, so let me show you some photos.” Thresh sat at the table in front of them, rocking the table with his weight. He flicked on the lantern so they could see in the pre-sunrise darkness. “These were taken by a drone flyover.”
“What the fuck is a drone?” Lidea asked.
“It’s one of the newest things from Purvailan.” Thresh clacked his hands together. “A radio-controlled, toy-sized plane that can take pictures.”
“So, a balloon camera?” Lidea asked.
“You can control this,” Thresh clarified.
“You can control a balloon camera. You just have the little…fan…things.” Lidea made the motion with her hands of managing the control levers of the small, flying contraption.
“You are ruining my fun,” Thresh decided with a click of his teeth, then tapped his fingertips across the unrolled pictures.
“Go on, please. I’m sorry.” Lidea gestured gently through the length of eir fingers. Thresh growled at em lightly and pulled some glasses out of his shirt pocket.
“This wasn’t a particularly interesting site when they first found it. They just put it on the map and added it to the research queue. We did another survey earlier this year, and that’s when we got these pictures. From another angle, it’s multiple sites stacked on top of each other.” He started sketching on the pictures with the tip of his claw as though either of them fully understood what they were looking at.
“The main architecture is late fourth age, probably some of the last of the Latolanian buildings. There’s evidence to suggest they didn’t finish one of them.” Thresh’s voice rose and fell, flowing with the music of storytelling. “The next settlement came along during the fifth age. Then another and another, throughout the interstitial years. Newest thing I found was this one pottery shard.” He held out his hands to make the vague shape of a triangle.
“I don’t have the full setup to confirm tool marks or spectroscopy or any of the like.” Thresh’s voice rattled as he put together his caveats and diversions. He shook them free with a wiggle of his head. “But a little on-site, cursory examination, some of these artifacts only predate Latolan gate-lock by maybe a couple hundred years.” He clicked his fingers together in excitement.
“Um,” Lidea hedged. “That’s cool. Yeah.” There had been a lot of settlements during the interstitial years between the mysterious fall of the Latolanians and Latolan gate lock. It was how gate divers knew what they were looking at when they came through.
Sunny saw the trail that Thresh was laying down, though, if only because he knew how the machine they had brought worked and the kind magic it detected.
“You’re looking for evidence of a stable gate we don’t already know about,” Sunny guessed. Thresh gestured in the affirmative.
“Oh….okay.” This was an area of magicology where Lidea found emself faltering more often than ey would like. “So did you call in gate scientists?”
“Want to confirm before I bother someone in the government.” Thresh waved off the concern with a flick of his claws.
“That seems really stupid,” Lidea objected.
“Sunny works in lower frequencies,” Thresh said simply, continuing to set the idea aside with his hands. “Beni seems assured that he’ll be perfectly able to soft-verify my results.”
“That’s not the point,” Lidea said.
“Yeah, I should be able to do that,” Sunny said, standing up with his empty bowl. The machine was still in the tent, and he motioned toward it. “Let’s get to it.”
The core of the dig site was visible from camp, but it required a small trek down another slope to get to it. There was more unexcavated architecture disappearing off into the jungle.
The Latolanians had made it up to black gunpowder before vanishing to some inexplicable outside force, and researchers had, so far, failed to crack the writing. This left a lot of gaps that might never come together.
This fourth era ruin was the remains of huge, sturdy pillars aligned opposite each other in even rows. There was evidence of walls and ceilings, but large portions had been knocked away by time, plants, and weather. The interior of the buildings were floored with crushed stone that clinked like ceramic and might have been tiles at one point. The “outside” flooring was more intact, large red paving stones that were better designed to survive outdoor environments. The layout mirrored the arrangement of guildhalls around Tower Watch Plaza with the large meeting areas inside.
The assistants had dug out maybe a city block of area. Along the border, one cutter kept prodding the jungle back into place with a long, thin rod. Sallah moved up and down the site, taking pictures with instant film of the plants crawling up and draping over the exposed pillars. He labeled the photos then tucked them into a notebook as he went.
Lidea stayed back against one wall as Thresh took Sunny further into the middle of the dig site with the rolling crate. They had kept an alley in the wire gridding that marked the site, and they parked in the middle of it.
“Have you ever worked with something like this before?” Thresh asked, unlatching the case to set the machine up. The crate turned into a stand when oriented a given way, and Thresh positioned the machine over a gap on the hinge side of the crate.
“Just pin testers to check for lattice integrity. Nothing this big.” Sunny ran his hands over the thing, prodding the insides with little varying pulses of magic. Most of the machine was inside an opaque plastic case that hid the more complex machinations. These kinds of things used to be made of wood, lacquered in special anti-magic oils so the natural conduction of wood didn’t get in the way of the mechanics. The invention of petroleum plastic almost solved the problem, but it came with too many sticky caveats. Then Purvailan had cracked bio-plastics, and they were slowly introducing it as old machines wore out.
Inside, Sunny sensed gears clutched to gears, the centers inlaid with mineral circuits. The gears were attached to bars. The bars were attached to pivots and ball joints. Thresh shooed his hands away and pried open the side of the exterior to reveal a series of switches and flicking dials behind glass plates. One of these was a pressurized lever that unfolded into a hand crank. Thresh narrated as he went, starting with the lever.
“Drop this, and it engages the boring drill. Crank down, and you should hear and feel it.” Thresh gave a few rotations, then gestured that Sunny should continue if he wanted to. He jumped at the chance, muscling into the motion.
It was overly easy, at first, no resistance to tell him the drill was moving. He peeked underneath to watch the narrow drill emerge from a slot in the bottom. When it hit the dirt, it started to grind, requiring most of his strength. It would be easier if they could wet the ground before, but that might throw off frequency readings.
“Okay, now you have to get it all the way down,” Thresh continued to explain. “You’re listening for a really loud click. This machine can do the readings with the drill extended (as opposed to bringing it into a collection unit), so once it’s locked in, I’ll throw this switch. That should give us frequency and decay readings. We can then lock that reading in with this switch, then”—Thresh reached for another panel on the side of the machine and pulled out a small handheld device that attached to the machine with a cable—“you can send that number to this normal over-air frequency gauge. Then you can do the…beep beep thing.” He waved it through the air like the dowsing rod it was.
“Though I’ve never had to do that myself. I don’t know why you would when you’re looking for ground currents.” Thresh shrugged and clicked it back into place.
“It’s not a complicated add-on,” Sunny grunted, locking the drill into place with one final crank. Thresh flicked the switch, the machine buzzed, and they settled into waiting, Thresh falling back to sit on a piece of sideways architecture. He dusted some dirt off his pants.
“We didn’t get much of a chance to talk last night,” Thresh mused. “How long have you and Lidea been married?”
“We aren’t…married.”
“Oh! I’m sorry.” His hands made a series of nervous gestures mid-air. “That was indelicate to assume. Is there another word you two prefer?”
“What makes you think we’re anything that would need a special word?” Sunny paced a tight circle in the dirt. Thresh threw his hands up in frustration.
“I get so tired of being oh so terribly polite just for it to bite me in the ass because you human-types are so hung up on the vernacular of your relationship structures. Trenglates don’t have this problem. We don’t start the process of settling into our long-term partnerships until middle age, and by then we have our shit together. It is not my fault that you share a bed but don’t have a name for what you are. So you don’t get to be snappish at me.”
Sunny opened and closed his mouth on a few different possible responses.
“Well what’s Beni to you?” he asked sharply.
“My girlfriend. Easy. In Unified Karket it’s ‘one whom I provisionally share a household intending to be lifelong partners.’ We tend toward long cohabitations and short engagements.”
“You…live together? Does she not have her apartment at the mercenary guild hall? That’s where I ran into her, last.”
Thresh snapped his jaw.
“That I will admit is a little more complicated.”
“So you’re a hypocrite. Got it.”
“That’s not —“ The machine buzzed and dinged at them. Thresh shot up to look at the dial readout. “That is the hallmark of low-frequency gate magic.”
#####
Lidea sat on the edge of the pit, legs dangling against the interior wall of the dig site, feet a few inches from the ground below. Ey had moved on from watching Sunny doing something on the machine to two nearby ariesian grad students. They chatted in a language ey didn’t immediately recognize as they took pictures and brushed away dirt. Ey kept trying to see what Thresh saw in terms of these layers and layers of settlement.
Ey could see the leftover buildings. That made sense as the oldest part of this whole thing. When one of the grad students pointed it out to em, ey found the patterns of old firepits. Those were the newest, and ey understood how they came to that conclusion. It was all the rest of it that was bothering em. Ey didn’t like not knowing how things worked.
“Hey.” Beni approached from the side and dropped next to em.
“Hey,” Lidea replied. Beni tapped her hands on her knees.
“This isn’t really your thing, is it?” Beni asked.
“Yes and no,” Lidea shrugged. “The historical mystery is fascinating. I just want it to already be figured out then delivered to me in an amusing article in a niche magazine. I’m not a puzzle person.”
“That’s kind of how I feel about it,” Beni said. “I’m not smart enough, I think. Need something hit efficiently or someone to live in the jungle for six-months on condensation, call me up. Otherwise, I don’t really know what I’m doing.”
“Why are you out here, then? Just spending time with Thresh?”
“Yeah, mostly.” Beni took a drink from her flask, then offered it.
“Is it actually water or booze?” Lidea asked, taking it from her.
“Fruit water. I promise. Hydrate during the day, get drunk at night.”
Lidea huffed a chuckle, took a sip, then handed it back. Beni took another drink herself.
“I have a surgery coming up, and there wasn’t really time to fit in a new contract. So I figured I’d just take some time off doing whatever.”
“Nothing too taxing, I hope,” Lidea said, trying to tap around it gently. Ey figured, though, if Beni brought it up, she didn’t mind talking about it.
“Fucked up ankle. Broke it a few years ago while I was out on a long job. Didn’t realize, kept walking on it, healed up badly. It’s turning into a problem, though. Got in with a great goblin orthopedic surgeon here on-world, though.”
“Is specifying a goblin important?” Lidea floated the question, trying to get a sense of who Beni was. Beni crinkled her eyebrows at em.
“If someone’s going to be cutting me open and fiddling with my insides, I’m aiming for a goblin first. They can fix anything. I will take the hit for being speciest or whatever.”
“No, I was just curious.” Lidea rubbed eir hands on eir pants, palms itchy. “What’s the recovery time for something like that? Thresh going to take care of you?”
“Something like twelve weeks, and don’t get me started. It’s a whole fucking…thing…” Beni stared into the middle distance and drank from her flask absently.
“If you want to talk about it…” Lidea offered. Ey could sense it, the energy bursting from Beni’s body. She clucked.
“That’s the thing about my circle of friends: they’re all also friends with Thresh. Some of them before me. So it’s difficult to find someone to vent to.”
“Well, I don’t know him for shit, so bitch away.”
“No…no I’m just stressed. We have a pattern that works for us because we both travel so much. If I stay home to recuperate, that messes the pattern up.”
“I’m sorry. If I were available, I’d come play nursemaid.”
“Yeah, well, if he ends up getting himself killed because of this dig, you might have to.” They both shared a sensible chuckle.
“Hey, so,” Lidea said, “now that we’re clearly best friends, can I ask you a question that might be kind of…personal?”
“From behind,” Beni said. “That’s how you avoid the scales. Or if you wear thigh-high socks, you can do it on your back. On doesn’t really work.”
“Alright. Okay.” Lidea nodded. “Also, what about the uh…shape? It splits, doesn’t it? So it’s like…two?”
“You get used to it,” Beni smirked.
#####
“So what does he think is down there?” Lidea asked as they took a quick stroll around the edge of the camp.
“That’s why he wants to go down there and look,” Sunny replied excitedly. On their third day at the site, Sunny ha pulsed out a cavity below the ruins that ground-penetrating radar hadn’t detected. He had taken to archaeology quickly, helping Thresh map out trails of low-frequency magic.
He had started acting strangely, though.
“I don’t like the idea of you going down there with him. At least not without a bigger crew of engineers or whatever. Feels like we’re running a skeleton crew.
“I won’t do anything dangerous. I promise.” Sunny grabbed eir hand and squeezed.
Sallah was sitting at the back flap of their tent as they approached, and he held up a finger to his mouth for silence. As they got closer, they heard what was he was listening to. Beni and Thresh were arguing. A lot of it was in Unified Karket, a language neither of them spoke, but then Beni broke through with Illurian.
“You can’t do this again,” she insisted. “Call this in and send it up the chain of command. Let government researchers in on this.”
“Since when do we let the government tell us what to study, huh? And how to handle ourselves.” Thresh let something hard slam down on the table. “I’m not letting them have this until I know exactly what it is. When did you become a rule-follower? “
“Last time they just benched you. This time they’ll actually throw you in prison.”
“What’s a few years in minimal security. I can take it.”
“Maybe I can’t!”
They were both silent after that for a moment. Then Thresh shifted into Karket, and they lost the thread of the discussion. Sallah shifted away, half-crawling then back onto his feet away from the tent. Sunny and Lidea followed.
“What the hell was that?” Lidea asked.
“Thresh found something again. I don’t know what. Something he thinks is important.”
“That ‘again’ is pretty heavy there,” Sunny pointed out. “And ‘last time.'”
“Hey, I was there for the last one,” Sallah said. “There might have been an inquiry, but we all did what we needed to do. I’m sure whatever this is, it’s fine.” He flexed his claws in agitation.
“What are we in the middle of, Sallah?” Lidea demanded.
“Nothing. At worst…you were following someone else’s lead. You didn’t know the procedure. At best, you’re part of whatever the next big discovery is.”
#####
The argument was still happening as they all tucked in for the night, Thresh and Beni in a cold war they didn’t put words to. The next morning, well before they knew if the fight would continue, they all woke to shouting.
One of the cutters was running through the camp, screeching for help.
Someone was dead.
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