Stormblade 4 C26: The Inner Council (2)

26 - The Inner Council (2)

Jessie sat in the guild’s kitchen, staring at her computer. Ellen and Kade were both there, too, as they ran through a last-minute set of contingency plans for her mission into the Ghostmarket. She wasn’t worried about it at all, though. The GC had agreed to her conditions for visiting the Crone’s world, after all, and Mind Maiden Enolda had agreed to theirs. It was all going to work out.

Instead of paying attention to Kade and Ellen’s stress-worrying, she was talking to her friends. They had an operation to run and a limited amount of time to finish their briefing.

J-Dawg: So, you both know what you have to do?

User295: I’m solid, don’t worry.

J-Dawg: And you, Yreanne?

User295: Yeah, Yreanne, you good?

Yreanne: I’m good. I mean, this won’t be easy, but I can do it. You’re sure it’s the right move, though?

J-Dawg: Absolutely.

Yreanne: Okay. I’ll have what you need when you’re back online. Unless something goes wrong.

User295: So, three days from now?

J-Dawg: I won’t be gone that—

Yreanne: Mean!

J-Dawg: Oh. Not funny, but that’d be acceptable. Just do the high-risk stuff in the next couple of hours, yeah?

She didn’t wait for a response. There was a GC councilperson and two S-Rankers downstairs, waiting for her. The computer clicked shut, and the conversation—just like every conversation in the secure environment B0bb1 had built—wiped itself. She took a deep breath and looked at Kade. “You’re sure you don’t want to come?”

“I’m sure. I’ve got my own work to do, Jessie, and this is your show. The people downstairs know where I stand already.”

“Alright. Good luck out here.”

“Good luck in there,” Ellen said. She stood and hugged Jessie. Then Kade did the same thing.

He adjusted the tie around her neck a little bit, raised an eyebrow, and nodded. “You’ve got this.”

Jessie turned and wheeled herself toward the elevator to the Desert Wind building’s lobby. It was time for the Governing Council to meet their new business partner—and it was time for her friends to do their thing.

◄▼►

Councilman Anders was the first wrinkle.

Jessie facepalmed the moment she saw him, in a suit that looked too small for him, standing in the lobby—with Sarah Cullman and Terrel Young. The Spark of Life and Portal Tyrant were fine. They were part of the conditions everyone had agreed to: no more than two S-Rank delvers. But Nathan Anders was also an S-Ranker, and even though he’d been retired, he’d also been fighting in Phoenix for the last several days of the siege.

“I don’t think this is going to go over well,” she said.

“I’m not here in my capacity as a delver,” Anders said with a shockingly cheeky grin. “I’m here as the leader of Phoenix’s Governing Council. I have to be involved in the negotiations, right?”

She sighed. Then she nodded. “I’ll let you meet Mind Maiden Enolda. She’s here as a representative of the Crone, and she can decide whether your gambit works or not. Just, uh…be respectful, okay?”

“She’s a monster, right?” Terrel Young asked.

“Yes, and no. She’s an avatar of a being powerful enough to destroy Earth just by being here, so you’d better be on your best behavior,” Anders said.

“You read Ellen’s briefing,” Jessie said.

“I did. Let’s go.”

Jessie led the three S-Rankers to the elevator, and they headed up to the gym level. She hurried them through where a few E and D-Rankers were training, feeling the eyes not on her but on them as more firepower than had ever been in this gym moved through at a crisp walking pace.

Then she stopped in front of a place where more firepower than had ever been on Earth before had, briefly, made an appearance. “She’s in here.”

“Great. Let’s go,” Terrel Young said.

Jessie nodded. She pointed at the door. “I’ll be right behind you three.”

The door hissed open, and the Governing Council’s finest found themselves face to face with Mind Maiden Enolda. The puppet woman was collapsed in a corner, her wooden limbs jumbled in a pile, but her carved, painted eyes locked onto Jessie as she rolled into the room. “Mistress Gerald, thou hast returned. Who art these people? Power radiates from all three—thy promise was for only two champions.”

“Mind Maiden Enolda, this is the Spark of Life, the Portal Tyrant, and Councilman Nathan Anders. He’s the leader of my city, and he’s not here in his capacity as a delver.” Jessie waited.

Mind Maiden Enolda rose to her full height, dress hanging from her wooden body and arms hanging at her side. Her head lay almost on her shoulder for a moment, then snapped upright as an invisible string tightened. “Very well. Mother Mine doth accept thy new conditions. Thy world’s ambassadors are accepted. Open the gateway and enter Mother Mine’s domain.”

“Thank you,” Jessie said, trying not to roll her eyes. She pulled the moonlight core out of its bag and hit the lights. The portal to the Ghostmarket surged to life, burning bright enough to sear her eyes all the way to her brain, then flashed dark.

When her vision returned, they stood in a clearing in a forest that was both familiar and foreign, and a bent, moonlight-colored woman with jet-black eyes and wrinkles on her wrinkles hobbled toward them, leaning on her cane. “Hello, dearies. Miss Gerald has told me much about your world, and I look forward to discussing what I can do for you—and you for me.”

And, just like that, negotiations between the Crone and Phoenix’s Governing Council began.

◄▼►

I didn’t stick around after Jessie left.

Instead, I kissed Ellen on her forehead and closed my eyes. “I’ll be back soon. I promise.”

“I believe you,” she said.

Then I stepped through the gold portal that had appeared the moment Jessie left the kitchen, and readied myself for an encounter with the God of Thunder.

“You did good work, kid,” he said the moment I stepped into his world. I stared at him; he was in his lightning knight form, sitting on a square chunk of the floor with his spear leaning against his shoulder. “I’m proud of you for figuring it out.”

“I need a favor, and you owe me,” I said in response.

He blinked. Then he stared at me, one eyebrow raised. “I owe you a favor, Kade Noelstra? I disagree.”

“I thought you might. But you still do.”

“Enlighten me, then,” Eugene said skeptically.

“I’m not sure I can. You know more than I do about the, uh, politics of being an SS-Plus-Ranked monster. But I’ve met a few other Paragons like you now, and both of them operated very differently from you. The Crone rules through transaction, and according to Jessie, she’s struggling against the inevitable. Fateweaver Cruix seems to be willing to offer their power to anyone they can in exchange for…I’m not sure. They’re both very different from you. And then there’s what Tallas told me about you needing me to fail at the tournament but wanting me to succeed.”

“Go on.”

“Okay. There’s a fourth Paragon like you, Cruix, or the Crone. Whoever they are, they’re opposed to you in a way the Crone isn’t. You’re direct rivals, and you made a mistake. You needed me to lose to keep your part of whatever agreement you made, but you wanted me to win to stop that other Paragon. Am I right so far?”

“Yes. Mostly. That fourth Paragon is backing our enemy on your world, and they work against us at every turn. But they’re not your concern right now. Focus on what you’ve achieved. Kade Noelstra, you are by far the most interesting pupil I’ve had in the last thousand years or more.”

“Thank you.” I took a breath. “I won, and I did it without asking you for any more strength than I’d earned. My ascent to A-Rank had nothing to do with you giving it to me, and everything to do with me earning it. I figured out how to beat Deborah without you, too. You’ve kept your word in whatever bargains you made, and I’ve made your position better without your help.”

“Also correct.”

“So you owe me. And you already know what I want.”

“I do. You want the shadow mage.” Eugene laughed. “You do remember that I was willing to throw her away before your fight with Yalerox, right? I’m not exactly fond of her. She’s corrupting your journey down the Stormsteel Path.”

“Yes, I do remember. And yes, she’s causing deviations. But even so, the payment I’ll accept is Ellen’s core, restored to a similar state as mine.”

The God of Thunder stared at me. I glared back. Then he nodded slowly and stood up. “Follow me.”

He led me through his portal world, into one of the floating towers that surrounded the flat we usually talked or sparred in, and up a curving, narrow stairway. We stepped through a too-small door, shuffling in sideways, and I stared at the machine that Eugene had used to reforge my broken core.

It was just as skeletal and torture equipment-looking as it had been the first time. Copper tubes, bronze needles, and portal metal everywhere. A mix of alchemy, chemistry, and surgery, all wrapped up in an insectlike body that hung from the ceiling like a cocoon. It was almost menacing. The reforging process had been painful, and this machine had caused all of that pain. And Ellen…

“She doesn’t like pain. Not at all.”

He was right. But there were only three options. Either Ellen kept pushing until she broke her core, she stopped for months and let me get ahead of her, or we attempted this procedure. “She’ll survive it. This is what she wants. She’s strong, and she can take it if she has to.”

“Then find me a viable core for her to use. A-Rank or higher—to match her core or better it. The machine won’t work without it.”

Right. I’d forgotten about that part. Queen Mother Yalerox’s core had powered my core reforging process, and even now, some small remnant of it was still inside of me. But I didn’t have a shadow core for Ellen. “I will.”

“Good. Now, on to our next subject, Kade.” The God of Thunder led me back to the stairs, and we continued to climb. As we reached the tower’s summit and stepped out into the blue and red sky, lightning formed spiderwebs overhead. One moment, Eugene was in his knight’s form. The next, the full strength of the God of Thunder surged into the air to circle around the near-permanent bolts of electricity in his thunder dragon body.

“Kade Noelstra, you’ve reached A-Rank. Next is S. You’ve been told that a bottleneck exists between the two ranks. This is true, for you as well as for your fellow Earth delvers. But those bottlenecks don’t exist for the same reasons. Your path is different than theirs, and so are your trials.

“The mage you talked to believes that S-Rank is a function of your moral worthiness. This is a lie. It’s a simple question of power.”

“So S-Rank can be acquired by brute force?” I asked.

“Absolutely, but not in the way you’re thinking. Think of power as sand in an hourglass. If the hourglass is flipped, that sand flows from one side to the other. The natural state of the world is for all of that power to be in whichever side of the glass is down, correct?”

“Right.”

“And there are only so many grains of sand in that hourglass.”

“With you so far.”

“So, if all the power in the world is distributed, there are only two options for gaining more for yourself. You can either hunt down powerful enemies and take their sand, or you can wait for something to tip the hourglass over and hope you catch some of the power as it trickles back down. Your S-Rank friends may not realize it, but all the work they do to be worthy of that rank is simply grasping at falling sand when others disrupt the hourglass.”  The God of Thunder’s massive eye stared at me. “Do you understand?”

“I think so.”

“In a way, your rival Deborah is more worthy than the sand-catchers,” Eugene said. “She went and found a source of power. The others, whether they know it or not, wait for it to come to them and fight each other to be the first to catch it. That’s why your trial to reach S-Rank will be different than theirs.”

“What causes the hourglass to tip?” I asked. The storm overhead doubled in strength, then doubled again, lightning surging into Eugene’s body as he ignored it.

“The Crone would call it the inevitable,” he said. “Your sister can tell you more about the disruptions that flip the glass, though. In the meantime, gain strength. Position yourself to take sand from another—whether from me or from someone else. But know that, if the hourglass tips, you’ll need to be ready to catch sand like the others. It’s not a weakness they’re showing. Just a lack of personal strength and imagination. Don’t fall for their trap, but don’t be too rigid in the other direction.”

The golden portal opened, and I walked back through it.

◄▼►

Jessie wasn’t really part of the negotiations.

Neither were the Spark of Life and Portal Tyrant. All three of them stood, watching, as Nathan Anders and the Crone talked.

“So, in principle, you agree with my terms?” the Crone asked. Jessie forced herself to pay attention as the old, moonlight woman eyed the Phoenix Reborn with a raised eyebrow. “The Phoenix Council will participate in the Ghostmarket, with their main products the weapons your factories produce and the Paragon cores you’ve been squirreling away?”

“We’re willing to sell the cores,” Anders said. “Not the guns.”

“A shame. A true shame. But not surprising if you know the value of those weapons. They threaten to upend the balance of power in this universe—and the process of rebalancing would only benefit those who were ready for it. The cores, then. I find that acceptable.”

“We agree to sell a certain percentage of our stockpile,” Anders interrupted. “Not all of them. They represent too much value in pushing our delvers to the pinnacle of power.”

“Ahem.”

“The pinnacle of what we believe possible for us,” Anders said. Jessie tried not to snort. She was with three of the strongest beings on Earth, and even though all three were putting on a brave face, she could tell they were outclassed in every way by both Enolda and by her mistress, the Crone.

The negotiations were dragging, though. The Crone didn’t seem interested in overwhelming Councilman Anders, and the Phoenix Reborn had to play from a position of weakness he wasn’t familiar with. It was turning into a slow, dragging mess—and that mess benefited Jessie more than anyone else.

She was just bored.

Every minute that dragged by was another minute for User295 and Yreanne to worm their way into the GC’s databases, setting up spyware to passively monitor their records and keyloggers to capture their passwords. Jessie didn’t want the ability to change those records. She didn’t care if she could use the data that spyware found to influence people or unlock doors that were closed to her right now. She just wanted the information.

And she didn’t trust herself to break into those Inner Council databases without being found out. She’d been clumsy in the past, and she’d paid for it. Yreanne and User295 were great at what they did, though. They’d be able to set up the spyware—especially if the negotiations kept being this slow.

“Very well. I will accept access to, at the very least, twenty percent of your current stock of Paragon cores and ten percent of future cores, with that value to be determined later.” The Crone stood up and stuck out a hand, and Anders shook it. Then she cleared her throat. “The agreement is made. The Ghostmarket accepts your grains of sand as a bulwark against the inevitable. Pleasure doing business with you. You can hash out the rest of the details with Enolda. I have work to do.”