The day was hot and dry, but did not feel like it. The mass of people waiting for a chance to move deeper into the center of the square only made it worse as their collective stink and breath added to the humidity in the trampled field. In the center of the packed crowd loomed a massive and slightly scorched metal obelisk, taller than any of the buildings in the city of Kember or any trees Ella had ever seen in her life.
The towering steel had smashed its way out of the sky two new-moons ago, leveling some of the hastily constructed shanties that had popped up around the edges of the cleared field where the city's children used to play their games. A generation ago it had held cattle, but the outsiders had found pretty rocks in the little holes they drilled around the time of her birth. Money and death had followed, because where money flows so too does the hunger for it.
People had gathered from all around, massing in hastily constructed shanties at the chance to dig for the pretty rocks to sell to the outsiders that coveted them. Instead of farming and ranching, many turned to digging and buying. The town she was born in had quickly become a city, overcrowded and sprawling over fields that were once farmed or grazed. Food and water became scarce, and needed to be brought in from miles around. The outsiders cared only for their own supplies, and bands of thieves roamed the countryside to take what they knew they could sell to the hungry diggers who had pockets and plastic but no time to forage or farm.
Sabriella had heard the stories from her uncle. All through her childhood she had asked him to repeat the tale of how her parents had taken her from the growing city to avoid the desperation of greed. As she pumped the bellows and he tended the sparking tower of flame, he recounted it to her over and over. How her parents had died to carry her away to where the outsiders had not yet dug their little holes. They had evaded the bandits, appeased the outsiders, yet were still unable to deliver their daughter safely to him without trading their lives. They had died from the wounds of their journey, and had returned home to the embrace of the dirt and sky before she could even learn their faces.
Things had changed since then, and seemed to never stop changing. Her uncle had raised her as best he could, teaching her his craft of pulling iron and steel from the reddish brown soil of the area. By the time she became a woman she already knew how to seek out the blackened crystals and separate them from their milky counterparts for the best quality ore, how to find value in ashes, and harvest the crumbling white stone beneath the ancient lakebed for its purity.
Despite the distance, the outsiders eventually came to their home and dug their little holes as well. They brought their money and their machines, their trinkets and luxuries, offering a trickle of industrial modernity for a mountain of turned earth and ocean of sweat and blood.
There, they did not find what they originally sought. They brought their own iron and steel and did not need their reddish dirt for their own ends. Instead, a half day's journey from where Ella had learned to separate slag from bloom and hammer steel from stone, they had found something even worse. They had discovered gold.
“We will be late! The sun is already sinking and past its height, we must hurry!” Ella’s uncle complained, tugging on the side of the basket she wore strapped to her back.
“Calm, Elder.” She shushed. “Today is a special day, some sacred day for the outsiders. Our work is not needed.”
“Sacred?” He asked, giving her a confused and worried look. “Is it harvest season already?”
“No, uncle. Not for three moons. It’s an outsider’s god that says today is special.” She explained, keeping her voice low and avoiding the eyes of the strangers that pressed close from every direction.
Her uncle, gray and hunched by years of labor, was only slightly taller than herself. The heads of the people around her blocked her view of the sprawling city on all sides. All she could see that rose above the masses was the shining obelisk that the whispers said could heal any ailment. That was why she had come here, why they had used one of their few days of rest to return to the city of her birth, why they had walked through the night to see this new holy site that had fallen from the sky.
Her uncle was sick, and growing worse. He used to be so smart, so wise and quick with his stories and answers. Now he was easily confused, and occasionally angry when reality contradicted what he thought to be true. He had lost his truth somewhere, and no matter how much she begged, prayed, or sacrificed, nothing had brought his razor wit back for long. Some days he would be fine, and she would be able to forget. On dark days he would be too scared or bumbling, more hindrance than help as they tended the vats and fires of their new craft.
She had saved up her pay since the last rainy season, and now the time had come for them to buy their way into the place that the whispers spoke of. They said you could visit the outsiders' world through this obelisk, a magical place where anything could be found and miracles were common. A place where monsters and men lived alongside one another. Where even the outsiders were humbled by the majesty and magic at every turn.
She thought it unlikely that it was really magic, and suspected that it was some kind of special market only for those who could afford it. She did not care who or what made it holy or special, only that it worked. At first, she had ignored the stories and whispers. They seemed so much like the smoke and lies the outsiders told of their own homelands. Until she had seen poor Selik carried by his brothers from the mines last year.
His legs had been smashed, unfixable even by the outsiders' sterile rooms and doctors. In their desperation, his brothers had carted him off to see if the stories were true. She had thought they were foolish, her cold heart telling her that the brother was already lost. He would be a drain, a liability, a mouth who could not work yet needed to be fed and watered as much as the rest.
When they had returned days later, Selik and his brothers running back into camp with whoops and cries of celebration, she and the other doubters had been silent and shamed. She had not been vocal like some had been about the stupidity of their journey. She had kept her thoughts to herself about the wastefulness of them leaving their labor, and the risks of travel. She held her apology just as closely, only offering the brothers a soft look and slight bow of her head in acknowledgement.
She had learned long ago to not associate too closely with the pit workers. She and her uncle worked to refine the ore and cast the ingots of the precious yellow metal, their pay was better and their work was easier. Those who did the digging and climbing in and out of the expansive pit sometimes boiled over with resentful anger against the few who worked within the camp and did not face the dangers of the pit. Still, her uncle and her seemed to be spared the worst of it. Even they knew her job was not easy, only easier.
Her uncle tugged at her arm again, his voice pleading and lowered as he eyed the crowd suspiciously “Where are we, Sabby?”
She gave him a look, unable to hide the flash of anger she felt at the nickname she disliked. “We are going for medicine. They say this is a holy place of healing.”
“But where? I do not know these people,” he insisted.
“We are in Kember, uncle. It’s okay, it is busy because of the holiday.”
“Oh, is it harvest season already? The sun is still so high.”
She sighed, and followed the conversation in another circle. Moments like these were when he showed his confusion the most, and he would speak circles around and around without ever seeing the center for what it was.
She kept speaking quietly to her uncle, and pressing forward within the crowd any time she saw a chance. Sometimes a gap would form when someone pushed their way out, sometimes people would just give up and turn around to go home, and occasionally a squabble would break out and the surrounding strangers would pull away from the violence. Any chance she got, she drove forward into the gap with her uncle clinging on to her shoulder and following at her heels like a pup with eyes freshly opened.
Three hours more they fought through the crowd, waiting and pushing forward at every opportunity. Her uncle still could not fathom that it was not time for the fall harvest but rather one of the days that the outsiders retreated into their own compounds and left the people to their own devices. They had the exchange a hundred more times, and he only seemed to grow more and more confused. He might have become angry had they been alone, but the surrounding people and strange faces served as a mute on his temper. He still recognized her today, thankfully, so he clung to her while she elbowed and shoved her way closer to the gleaming metal tower in the center of the field.
As the sun neared the distant horizon and the sweating crowd around her might start to see some shade from the low buildings, she finally pushed her way to the front row as the man in front of her was pulled over a low fence made from thick timbers pounded deeply into the ground.
Everyone screamed and shouted, hoarse voices pleading or arguing with the armed men who stalked the inside of the barricade. Her uncle gave her a frightened look, before his face flashed in anger and he shoved uselessly against a stranger that pressed against his side. Ella ignored him for now, trusting the tight grip she kept on the front of his shirt to keep him close while she watched what was happening inside of the fence.
A score of men walked up and down the line, sometimes lashing out with the butts of their rifles, sometimes pulling something from the hands of someone in the crowd, and occasionally hauling someone over the fence to bring through the darkened opening at the base of the metal tower.
Up close, the scorched steel edifice was even more massive than it had seemed when it first came into view a mile out of town. It was as tall as some of the pits were deep, much wider at the bottom than the top, with chipped and blackened supports that stretched out from the base and dug into the soil of the field. She found herself lost for a moment, wondering how someone had poured a casting of something so large. Perhaps it had been forged? No, she could see no seams or rivets, only a single smooth metallic surface that was partially blackened and smeared with sooty handprints across the section closest to the ground.
One of the soldiers came closer, gripping his slung rifle’s handle in one hand while he used the other to comb through the offerings that the people in the crowd shoved forward. She finally brought her own offering out, but saw no point in joining the screaming and shouting. She knew how to see, how to pay attention. In her years at the mining camp, laying low and dealing with the tempestuous moods of the guards and hired men, she had learned what they valued.
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While most of the others offered sacks of grains, animal heads, cuts of meat, or even fistfuls of the outsiders' paper money clenched behind strained knuckles, she put forward steel. She held her silver and gold back, and offered the blade she had spent the last month creating in her off time. Combining roasted and powdered black iron stone and white powdery borax, with long nights building mud towers as high as she could reach and pumping bellows with a foot to free her blackened hands to scoop the charcoal. Hundreds of heats, dozens of folds, followed by hours scraping and polishing, a horn handle, and costly brass rivets to hold it all together.
Just over two feet long, the gleaming steel and shiny black handle stood out and caught the fading sunlight as she pushed it forward towards the soldier. She held it by the spine of the wide chopping blade, offering the handle forward to the soldier as he came down the line. He slapped away a boar's head, and shouted something incomprehensible to a man who offered a sack of grain deemed too small. His eyes glazed right over the carved flute the man next to her was offering, and locked on the patterned steel blade of the machete she held out.
He reached out and grasped it by the handle, wrenching it away from her and holding it up to inspect it closer. He gave the blade a test swing, and the crowd around her shouted and pulled their own offered bribes back across the fence rather than offer their hands and arms as convenient tests of sharpness. The others directed nasty looks at her and her uncle, and the shouting took on a resentful tone.
Ignoring the others, Ella kept her focus. She kept her dark eyes locked onto the soldier’s as he looked at her machete again and the rippling waves and patterns that showed the different alloys she had used to forge it. He must have liked what he saw, because the next moment he had called over one of his brethren and dropped his rifle to fall slack against his side on its strap. Without wasting words against the noise of the crowd, the two reached over and hauled her over the fence.
There was a brief moment of struggle as she kept her grip on her uncle, and after a few seconds of pulling they both fell over the fence. The soldiers shouted something, one of them speaking in a language she did not understand, and continued to pull her forward. She was dragged off her feet, her knees sliding through the dry packed dirt before she managed to stand. The foreign man shouted the same thing again, his voice barely audible above the crowd, and raised a hand like he might hit her uncle for clinging to her.
She shook her head and shouted back “No!” and put herself between the two men, raising empty hands and pleading with them.
The first soldier, still holding the machete, smacked his friend in the shoulder with the blunt side of the blade. He shouted something back at the man in his own language, then they stared at each other for a tense moment. Ella remained calm, clinging to her uncle as he watched the soldiers with wide fearful eyes.
Something passed between the two, and the second man shook his head and turned back to the crowd to seek his own prize. With their squabble sorted for now, the first man refocused on Ella and her uncle. He grabbed her by an arm and hauled her forward towards the looming entrance at the base of the metal tower. They passed a squat wooden structure that had been built to the side of the entrance, where the man who had taken up her blade slapped the steel against a crude counter and pointed the blade at a fat man who sat within.
The soldier pushed them forward and past the building, and the fat man leaned out and shouted at their backs. “You must give due! Give due!”
The man who had accepted her gift turned back to face the man, again brandishing the blade she had given in a threatening manner. “I will bring it myself, not you!”
As soon as the soldier turned from them and moved back towards the counter to argue with the fat shouting man, she pulled her uncle into the darkened interior of the strange tower.
Inside was a different world, a room more massive than she thought could exist stretched above to a shining ceiling that came to a point between the multiple levels of balconies overhead. The floor was covered in dust and grit, but shining bare metal peaked out in places where scuffs and drag marks had scraped away the covering filth. Another group of men and barely clothed women sat near the middle of the space on stuffed chairs and thick woven rugs, while more rifle-toting soldiers loitered around the edges near glowing sections of wall.
Ella wondered if she was supposed to approach one of these men, or if she should move towards the small group of soldiers that were watching her closely from where they lingered on the bottom steps of a narrow stairway that curved up one side of the interior. As she hesitated, a flicker of movement caught her attention as one of the walls disappeared, snapping away to reveal a new small room and a huddled form that was quickly accosted by the guard who stood waiting.
Ella took a few steps forward, her uncle urgently whispering into her ear. “This is bad. This is a place of evil… why are we here, Sabby?”
She shushed her uncle, keeping her eyes on the guard as he grabbed the bundled man that had come out of the magical room. They kept their voices low, prompting her to move closer and skirt around the group in the middle of the huge room.
Before she could get close enough to hear, the huddled man wrapped in cloth pressed something into the guard's hands and moved away. His eyes flashed from under his hood and met hers as he moved in her direction, and she saw fear and wonder there.
She eyed the group in the middle again as she continued forward. The men in the center seemed to ignore all that happened around them, focused more on the low conversation they were having amongst themselves or their scantily clad companions. Facing forward again, she saw the guard with the missing wall wave her over. She tried to meet the huddled man's eyes again as they passed each other by.
“What did you see?” she whispered.
The huddled man looked up and met her eyes again for a bare instant, only shaking his head as he rushed past her and out of the tower. Reaching into the folds of the sash wrapped around her waist, she produced a pair of small silver beads roughly the size of the tip of her smallest finger.
Sometimes the gold they refined held other metals, and sometimes even cruel men can commit acts of charity and kindness. Most of the silver and platinum that was separated from the gold went to their overseer and disappeared, but sometimes the man would give them back the separated pearls of metal as rewards. She had long tried to understand when he might give and what she could do to see the gifts more often, but nothing she had been willing to try had seemed to sway the demanding outsider from his enigmatic habits.
She carried sixteen of the beads, made from alloyed silver and platinum of varying ratios, as well as a few larger bars of pure copper. Hopefully two would be enough to see her past this guard on the way in, and the huddled man’s actions and eyes told her it would be wise to make sure she had something else to give him on the way out.
“You bring goods to trade? What do you bring? Have you been in before?” The guard demanded in an aggressive tone but lowered volume, as if he too did not wish to distract the group in the center of the room from their leisure. He pulled her forward and pulled at the ties that secured the lid of the basket on her back.
Ella clenched her fist around the two beads, and held still as the man tore the top off of her basket and discovered the travelling gear and meager supplies it held. “We travel to see,” she replied to the man.
“Travel to see?” the man replied, roughly jerking the basket still strapped to her back as he rifled through it. “How did you get in here? You need trade and tribute!” His voice rose slightly, but he glanced towards the middle of the room and frowned when he realized he had nearly yelled.
“We must go, Ella, we must go!” her uncle whispered from her other side, his body hunched low and knees bent as he cowered behind her.
She reached over and gripped her uncle's wrist, squeezing to make him understand. He quieted and she slung the pack from her back, pulling a decorated cast iron pot that was blackened by fire on the outside and the grease of a hundred meals on the inside. She had poured that pot’s iron during the past year's rainy season, and now she handed it to the guard.
“What is this?” he asked as he took it from her, moving the hand that gripped the handle of his hanging rifle up to support the rather heavy pot.
“It is cast iron, proven and true. A pot fit for any hearth, your wife will love it,” she said, taking on the submissive but confident tone she used with her overseer at home.
“Hmm…” the guard looked over the pot again, before bringing it to his face and giving it a sniff. “Fine, fine. But bring me credit on the way back, at least fifty.” He raised the pot, causing her uncle to flinch away as he menaced them with it. “You first-timers take too long. You will get me chits from the bank to hold the credits, and bring me 50. Yes?”
She blinked, not recognizing some of the words he had used. Still, she nodded and smiled. Even if she did not understand, she did not want to let him know that. She would learn what it meant and handle it before it became a problem, that is how she had gone so long free from punishment and enemies.
“Of course! Credits and chits, I will remember,” she replied.
“Go, and do not drag your feet! We will come for you if you take too long,” he said before turning away from them and examining the pot she had surrendered more closely.
She dragged her uncle forward, and the wall snapped back into existence behind her. She could still hear the buzz of the crowd outside, and smell the smoke from the cigars and sweet-pots from those who leisured in the center of the room. All of the distractions fell to the side as she focused on the hanging contraption in the center of the room.
It looked like a monster, or a hanging carcass of one. What might be a seat was suspended a few feet from the ground, jutting out from a segmented spine of polished yellow metal and black connective pieces. Near the top was a jumble of shielded cables and struts as wide as a man's shoulders with two ominous looking hooks that were raised like a threatened spider's fangs. Behind the main mass and shoulder hooks was a sleek joint connecting a long three-sectioned arm that sprung from the back wall and held the contraption from falling to the ground. Above the joint and arm was a helm, like an electrum version of the brown and green ceramic helmets that the outsiders’ soldiers wore when they came to put down unrest or destroy a particularly aggressive and heinous group of thieves that threatened the fragile balance they maintained and dominated.
She looked at the thing with confusion and worry, before sweeping her gaze over the rest of the metal-clad room. The only other furnishing in the small space was a countertop that was bolted to the floor, and there was nothing to tell her how to use this dangerous looking machine or what it even did.
“It is a demon…” her uncle whispered, before he straightened to his full height and tried to step in front of her. She shook her head and narrowed her eyes, sighing in frustration. Of course he found his courage now that the men with the guns were behind them and the threat held still and stayed distant.
“No, uncle. It is… something else,” she replied. It had to be. She did not understand what the thing was, but knew it had to be important somehow. Why else would it be guarded so jealously? She was reeling from all of the questions that surged to the forefront of her mind as soon as she allowed herself to start to question. How long did she have before the guards would be angry? What were these chits and credits? What would it cost for this monstrous machine to fix her uncle?
She hesitantly stepped forward, holding her uncle back from rushing and attacking the thing with his stick. As soon as she made her first move, a new wall flashed into existence in front of them and nearly caused them to fall over backwards. Even she joined her uncle in letting out a cry of surprise, before quickly moving to restrain his arm as he brought his walking stick up to swing at the new apparition. He raised his stick, but before he could bring it down on the hanging window of color and light, a figure appeared. A smiling face that resembled a woman, but moved with an unsettling falseness.
“Welcome, new user, congratulations on establishing first contact! You have made the first step towards Linking your life and success to the ever expanding bubble of prosperous society and connection brought to you by our friends in the not-so-distant core worlds!”
In case you haven't been following my little authors notes during my brief hiatus, I suffered some injury that held me back from being able to easily work on this stuff. I'm happy to report that I have made a near full recovery by this point, and have been able to get back to work at my desk over the last few days. I have some catch-up stuff to do, especially with this story, and I'll work on that over the next few weeks as I get back into the swing of things.
I'll likely do what I did with my original cover and whip up something "good enough" via AI (for now, I still mean to hire an actual artist for a series of proper covers now that I'm moving closer to publishing something). I'll do my best to make that happen sooner than later too, likely within the next day or two before the next chapter goes up. After how poorly I've done so far with hiring an artist and getting proper covers made, I'm going to hold back from promising any deadlines for those for now lol
If you haven't much liked this new little story so far, there is still good news. This should only take a few months to get out of the way, then we'll jump back into the next leg of Nick and Max's adventure. I will likely do a similar thing again once I come to a good stopping point again in their story, but I'll choose a different side character to follow for that short story/novella. I'm thinking it will be someone who spends more time in the Link and less in reality, like a Player Killer or bounty hunter that specializes in Factions combat. Building a wide world so I can come back and tell the stories of characters other than Nick has always been part of the plan. For me personally, it's feeling pretty nice to venture out and explore that part of the plan.
I'm going to cut my ramble here, even though I could definitely go on. If anyone has any questions, feel free to ask them in the comments.
