Broken Lands

The second gate was on the other side of the town. As far as Sophia could tell, it was there mostly because it was very close to the stream. She wasn’t sure why they hadn’t tried to incorporate the stream into the town’s defenses, but she was sure there had to be a reason.

Getting to the tunnel from the gate was a longer walk than going through the town, but it also didn’t require going through the town. Once they found that gate, quite a few of the townsfolk were escorted the long way around. It was better that way.

They hurried to the gate, then slipped through the small opening. There were still periodic explosions, roars, and lightning strikes towards the middle of town. Sophia tried to ignore them; while there weren’t many beavers outside the town, one very lost small Enraged Beaver had attacked Revina while they were going back for the fourth saferoom. Revina almost killed it before they returned with the townfolk; a single thrown Imbued Blade was all Sophia needed to finish it off. She needed to stay alert in case there were more.

When they got to the stream, Sophia heard water moving in the distance. A short walk led her to an odd waterfall. She gave it a long look, then realized that the reason it was odd was that it was clearly manmade; the surface that the water ran over and even the strangely square overhang the water fell from were made of bricks. There was nothing there now, but it looked like people had once deliberately used the water from the stream to do something. A mill, maybe? She wasn’t familiar enough with old water-powered tech to be sure.

Sophia measured the drop with her eyes and heaved a sigh of relief. This wasn’t going to be easy but it could work. She’d need to make minor changes to the ritual to deal with the fact that she was using flowing water, but it could work. She’d be breaking some of the rules of physics, but that was the point of the ritual, to defy gravity.

Sophia found a flat open space near the stream without any large tree roots and hacked away what little ground cover lived on the sandy soil. She was definitely lucky there; there was no way she’d be able to safely draw a ritual circle without removing the plants first. The soil was poor, which meant there weren’t many and those that were there didn’t seem to have good root systems.

Dav helped once he realized what she was doing. He worked in companionable silence for the first few minutes, but when they were about halfway through the weeding, he cleared his throat.

Sophia looked up at him, though she kept pulling out plants, including as much of the roots as she could get. Some of them had runners, which was nice in that she could get several at once and annoying because it meant they didn’t stop. At least they were all near the surface!

“You said you’re going to do a ritual?” Dav sounded a bit uncomfortable. “Is that religious? I don’t think I’ve ever asked you what religion you follow.”

Sophia shook her head. “I don’t. I mean, gods are real, but they’re not … I don’t follow any of the usual faiths. Probably the closest I get to actually following a religion is the Dungeon Deity, and that’s not really a faith. It’s a set of good practices when you’re dealing with dungeons.”

Was it really a faith if you knew they were there and had evidence? Sophia shook her head. She’d had that debate with Ita more than once. Ita always won. Apparently faith without knowledge wasn’t required as long as you did believe and followed the precepts. “Anyway, no, ritual magic doesn’t have anything to do with religion. Well, it doesn’t have to and this doesn’t. It’s manipulating the world, the same way a spell does, but it takes advantage of the properties of what you bring to it. In this case, it means I can use the energy of the waterfall and the swiftly moving spring water to throw the water in the air sort of in the direction of the town. It’s … like the water hit something solid, even though there’s nothing there. Sort of.”

Ritual magic was weird. It let you do things you didn’t have the power or methods to do otherwise; in this case, Sophia could do the exact same thing with a spellform to a small amount of water but there was no way she could move enough to actually put the fires of a town out with her mana.

“I’m not really very good with ritual magic,” Sophia admitted. “It’s not commonly used in modern magic, at least not on Earth. It’s famous in stories of course, but that just means everyone gets it wrong so it has a terrible reputation. Enchantments and runes are more repeatable and reliable anyway, so that’s what people use. I only know this because, well, it was my project the year I turned fifteen. I got into rituals and decided I wanted to prove everybody was wrong about how useless they were, so I picked a combat ritual as my project. Dad told me not to expect too much but he still taught me a lot. I don’t remember all of it, but I remember enough to modify that ritual for water.”

She risked a glance at Dav. He was pulling weeds again, but he kept sneaking glances at her. She blushed and continued talking. “I was homeschooled. Mostly, anyway; Mom did hire tutors for some of the subjects she didn’t want to teach herself, other than magic. I didn’t need tutors for magic; almost everyone who spent time at our place taught me something. I did a project each year, sometimes more than one. This was one of them. Well, it wasn’t to put water in the air; it was for sand. It sort of worked, mostly because sand got in peoples’ eyes. It was pretty funny.”

“I don’t have any stories like that,” Dav answered softly. “My childhood was pretty boring other than moving all the time, at least until my parents left the service. That’s when my formal schooling stopped; the children of soldiers get free training. The children of a dockworker and a barmaid don’t, at least not until they enlist. I was lucky, really. If Mom hadn’t worked in Waste Reclamation and gotten her hands on an old military pod shortly before their terms expired, I’d probably still be in Alinport.”

Sophia doubted it was half as boring as he thought it was. No one had a childhood that was completely boring. She was pretty sure most kids just thought it was normal. She certainly had, at least until she realized just how different her life was from the lives of kids in modern TV shows. In fact, he’d already mentioned a couple of things that sounded pretty odd to Sophia.

“I think that’s enough area; I’ll start cutting the circle into the ground now. You said something about a pod; what do you mean? What’s a pod?” Sophia canceled the Imbue Blade on her weapon and replaced it with one that was better shaped to create a precise line in the dirt. It was a hit to her mana, but that would recover. She’d need to depend on Dav to defend her while she worked on the ritual, so she left the Imbuement active on his sword. She’d have to cancel it to preserve her mana regen when she cast the ritual, but until then it could stay.

“What’s a pod?” Dav looked at her like she was crazy. “You really don’t have pods? They’re the cornerstone of modern technical society!”

Sophia shook her head at him. She had to start with the central design and work her way outwards, which meant she had to reverse the way she’d designed it. She also had to add the adaptations that would indicate that she was moving water, but that wouldn’t be until the circle that was second from the outside. The entire inner section managed the telekinesis. At least it was relatively simple even if it did absolutely have to be correct.

“Then how do you combat the Dust? Without integrated control and learning program assistance…” Dav trailed off. “You don’t have the Dust. Maybe you don’t need the help?”

Sophia frowned at the circle. She’d gotten a line off course and accidentally intersected it with another one. That meant she had to rub out part of both of them and redraw them. At least that was possible in this ground. It might make it hard to move over the top of her design but at least she wouldn’t have to completely start over if she made a mistake.

“We don’t have the Dust. I assume that’s nanites? How do they work? You don’t have a rogue AI, do you?” Sophia might be a delver but she still enjoyed science fiction movies. A surprisingly large number of them still ignored magic, assuming that societies without the Voice never discovered it. It wasn’t an insane idea; the Tsarualk managed to build ships with no magic required that were better than most magical ships. They were the home of technology the way Earth was quickly becoming a hotbed of magitech.

Dav snorted. “Depends on what you mean by rogue. It’s apparently doing exactly what it was programmed to do, just not the way the people who designed it thought it would. Something about it learning from a large data set and making connections that aren’t real. I don’t know; I have a practical education, not a theoretical one. It was supposed to create a pristine wilderness but if no one can get there, how does that help? The Dust’s idea of a pristine wilderness doesn’t have much living there, either.”

Sophia nodded. She’d seen the movies, but more importantly she’d also known some relatively young AIs even though she didn’t have one herself. “That’s pretty much what rogue means. AIs have to be taught what things mean and to doubt themselves and ask questions. They see the world differently, but really that’s true of anyone. You don’t give a baby a weapon.”

Dav shook his head. “That seems incredible. How do you keep people from just creating them and handing over things they shouldn’t?”

Sophia shrugged. “I can make guesses, but what I know is that it’s not easy and it’s watched for. Maybe it’s easier to contain when there’s also magic?”

They kept talking as Sophia scratched the spell into the dirt. It took a while, and she had to ask Dav to let her concentrate a couple of times as she checked the ritual’s pattern, but she did eventually get it in the ground. By the time it was all there, she hadn’t heard lightning from the town in a while, but the noise of the fires had only grown. She hoped that didn’t mean Arryn was hurt or dead, but if he was there was little she could do about it. She’d seen enough of the damage from his running fight to know that almost anything that could kill him wouldn’t even notice squishing her.

It was finally ready. Sophia had to use her magelight to see some of the shadowed areas, but everything checked out. It was time to cast the ritual and see what happened.

She just knew she was going to feel silly. The ritual required both movement and chanting to focus the spell. She was going to look like she was dancing and singing nonsense around a magic circle. She flushed at the thought of all that embarrassment. “Don’t laugh, okay? It’s part of the ritual. I designed it when I was fifteen.”

“I won’t,” Dav promised. He met her eyes for a long moment before Sophia looked down, then back at the ritual circle. She had to get started.