Behind the Bitmask Read online

  “I bribed my way out. In my younger days, I found my share of magical treasures. But when you want to retire from the world of covens, it doesn’t hurt so much to give some of them up.” Edgar twiddled his fingers a bit and looked either wistful or senile; it was hard to tell.

  “If I’d known how much the daemonic world had advanced during my tenure with Aux, I probably wouldn’t have retired, though,” continued Edgar. On second thought, he was definitely not senile. I’d never asked for his age, but he had to be at least 70 judging from how white his hair was and how wrinkled his hands were. We ordered our drinks and sat down at the same table where I’d once watched Azure chug a coffee fresh from the barista’s machines. Edgar seemed to like similar flavors of coffee to Azure, but he quickly betrayed his humanity by waiting for his cup to cool down before inserting a small straw and tasting it.

  “You know, I never drank coffee before you suggested it to me back in the day,” Edgar said to me, sipping his drink gingerly.

  “Well, I’m glad to hear you ended up liking it,” I responded.

  “What have you been up to these days, anyways? Besides trying to kill Sigmar, that is; Agnus told me about that.”

  What a question to drop on a poor girl who’s just trying to make her way in the world! I certainly had a lot of stories to tell about the last few weeks, but I had to decide where to start quickly, so as to avoid an unpalatable lull in the conversation.

  “Well, I finally found a copy of Unfathomable Destruction,” I told Edgar, and his eyes lit up.

  “I told you that book would change how you thought about magic! How’d you manage to get it?”

  “I stole it from Sigmar’s library. He doesn’t seem to care that it’s gone.”

  Edgar nodded at this, but otherwise let it pass without comment. “Have you been doing anything other than studying destruction magic?” he asked, taking a larger sip of his coffee.

  “I’ve been working, biding my time, accumulating power and wisdom, preparing for the inevitable battle. The usual Charlotte stuff, really. Does that sound like the girl you used to know?”

  “Yeah, you haven’t changed a bit,” he snarked. We drank in silence. Then I remembered Agnus’s story about how Edgar had slain a titan and decided to ask him about it.

  “Well, he gave you the important points, so that has to count for something,” explained Edgar. “Floating Point had too much ambition for its own good. Kind of like Sigmar, really, but not as smart or adaptable. Agnus promised me ‘unmatched glory’ if I were to somehow protect his court from Floating Point’s inscrutable machinations, and when I did finally slay the beast, he commissioned a painting. I honestly would’ve preferred cash. I’ve got grandkids who want to go to college.”

  “I’m no art expert, but it’s probably a valuable painting. But I was hoping for more information on the kill itself.”

  “It was far harder than the painting makes it look. I spent many years learning to tap into ley lines.”

  “But that’s incredibly dangerous!” I exclaimed. “I’m also pretty sure you don’t have any natural magic.” He shrugged.

  “I had to create some virtual machine software just to be able to do it safely. Ley lines are an easy source of magical power, but that does you no good if you don’t have the training to control it. One of my friends tried it back in the ‘90s. He exploded,” Edgar told me. Exploding friends and melting enemies are just the price of occult power.

  “And when you did the same to Floating Point, you didn’t explode. How?”

  “I started practicing with much lower voltages and gradually worked my way up.” Being able to manipulate electromagical currents (for want of a better word) sounded like a good long-term goal, but I wanted Sigmar dead before I was Edgar’s age.

  “Even when I augmented myself thus, Floating Point was far too large and powerful for me to kill with raw magical power alone. Luckily, though, I had the foresight to engage the titan inside its own lair, where it thought it had an infinitude of computing resources to deal with me.”

  That didn’t sound like foresight, but it seemed like Edgar was building up to something, so I let it pass.

  “You see, Floating Point’s realm was basically a giant supercomputer theoretically capable of executing arbitrary code. I was able to sneak a bunch of nasty viruses on there to basically trash the place as the titan was trying to merge with it. By the time Floating Point realized what I was doing, I’d corrupted its body beyond repair. It still nearly killed me before I managed to shatter it.” Edgar gazed off into the distance, as if he were trying to remember something important. But he probably wasn’t, as he turned back to me after a few seconds, as if he’d never been distracted.

  “Frankly, I’m not much of a killer,” he continued. He stared at his coffee for a moment. “For a few weeks after I defeated Floating Point, I couldn’t sleep properly because I kept having these nightmares where I was executed for my sins and then dragged bodily into hell-”

  In my shock, I spat out a mouthful of my coffee and nearly choked on what little remained in my mouth. Who the hell is frightened of hell after venturing into hell and overcoming the perils of hell? After I recovered, I grabbed a napkin and dabbed daintily at my lips in case anyone had seen me.

  “It sounds wimpy, but a lot of the religious folk here will tell you this isn’t the ‘true’ hell, whatever that means,” Edgar continued. “They very well might have a point. Would the biblical hell have a Starbucks?”

  “Maybe a really crappy one,” I quipped. Edgar glanced down at his pants pockets for a second, but nothing happened.

  “I digress. Since then, I’ve mostly been wandering, exploring, doing some surveying work when I need extra cash. Surveying is my new hobby.”

  “Sounds like kind of a downgrade from being a warlock,” I said. A little voice in the back of my brain then reminded me that until recently, I had spent 40-50 hours a week as an accountant. I insisted that I’d always preferred mathematics to geography in school, and then realized Edgar was still speaking.

  “You’d think so, but in my travels, brief as they might be in the long run, I have uncovered enormous wealth strewn throughout hell. Mineral, metallurgical, magical, you name it – it’s all there. The problem, of course, is that hell is exceedingly dangerous. Human ambition and titanic power combined have yet to scratch the surface of what these lands have to offer, but the rewards are beyond measure,” Edgar told me.

  “That’s an exceedingly pompous way of describing it,” I responded. “I personally would’ve expected more obscenities.” I really would’ve – at least when he lead the Aux coven, Edgar swore at me more like a peg-legged pirate, and even more when I was doing what he considered to be a good job. Today, though, he was unusually clean-spoken. Maybe something actually had changed in Edgar’s disposition?

  “Swear jar. Every time I say ‘fuck’ or ‘shit’ or ‘ass’ or whatever, I lose a quarter to some charity. I think I just bought some Somalian kid a day of rice.” Then again, maybe not.

  “So anyways,” Edgar continued, after clearing his throat, “There are a couple magical artifacts out there that I found in my travels that I left undisturbed for sheer lack of want. If you’re interested in plundering them, though, you’d better move quick. You never know when an ambitious titan might remember where they left their toys.”

  “Anything I can get my hands on?” The old and new Charlotte share a lust for magical artifacts. What can I say?

  “Oh, definitely! Provided you’re willing to assemble a party of dashing adventurers and face danger like you’ve never imagined, of course.”

  “I had to deal with Sigmar’s assassins. What could be more dangerous than that?”

  Edgar laughed at me until I managed to shut him down with a well-timed glare.

  “Okay, okay, fine! Sigmar has some dangerous people working under him, even after he lost
you, Terminal, and the one other guy. But the thing about these is that you have to be able to deal with the raw, primeval essence of hell itself. Your skills in combat, engineering, pretty much everything are no match for these places. Maybe check back after twenty, thirty years of intensive training.”

  Awkward silence. I had been hoping for something useful. Edgar finished the dregs of his drink and continued on.

  “Yeah, I know, it sounds long and tedious. You might be able to do it this year if you assemble a team of skilled magicians to help you, but even with that, I think you’d need a titan to sponsor your efforts to pull it off.”

  That left me with two choices. Agnus had already proven unwilling to officially oppose Sigmar and had yet to demonstrate any personal combat skills. Azure was similar, but we were in love. Maybe we could make war together, as well? I had a bad feeling about trying that; nothing threatened a relationship so much as a wild goose chase... But it was still the best option I had for artifact hunting.

  “You don’t believe me when I say these places are dangerous, do you?” snapped Edgar, suddenly bringing me back to attention. I was out of coffee, too, so it was probably time to wrap things up.

  “I don’t know that we’re using the same measurements for peril,” I responded. Exactly how do you measure peril?

  “Well, I hear you’ve been consorting with the dread Terminal. If you could exceed his level of spellcraft, you’d still be far from ready-”

  “What, the guy who kills people for pleasure isn’t good enough to play with your toys?”

  “Charlotte, us humans are weak as shit!” Edgar cupped his hands to his mouth in shock, but it was too late – a coin lazily drifted out of one of his pockets and then disappeared, with a little puff of smoke that could’ve easily set off the smoke detectors.

  “I mean, Terminal is clever, but judging from his public kill list, he hasn’t offed anyone more powerful than that one stupid titan...” he said after a while. To be fair, Terminal had very nearly failed to destroy Hyperion, but for his lucky aim and a splotch of cheap industrial superglue.

  “So, are you going to show me where these artifacts of yours are?” I asked. Edgar grinned at me.

  “I’ll mail you my maps if I can find them. Shouldn’t take more than a few days. I’m not going after titan artifacts any time soon.”

  We tossed our beverage containers in the trash, exchanged some final pleasantries, and I headed home. I forgot about the impending delivery until the day after, when an extremely poxy fellow whom I couldn’t firmly identify as either human or chthon dropped off a heavy package with an ominous thud. I opened it, and once I’d penetrated several layers of packing peanuts, I found myself in possession of several installments of the Rand McNally Chthonic Atlas.

  I opened up one up to a random page to find it was more annotations than cartography. Edgar had defaced the entire map with vague, expletive-ridden tracts about how various places in hell were far too dangerous for any human to consider exploring. I idly perused the rest of the pages until I saw a map with a city circled – Agnus’s court! As one of the few proper conurbations in the realm, the (almost assuredly) human staff at Rand McNally had devoted lavish attention to mapping this place and its surroundings. Edgar’s addition was a line pointing to a “place of power” a mere one hundred miles away as the crow flies, albeit with a few question marks and expletives where it passed into a mountain range.

  Was it too much to ask for a road through, or at least a navigable pass? Another, slightly shorter line pointed to another dot proclaiming the town of Las Médulas, part of the outlying territory of…well, the map said Hyperion, but given that I’d played an integral role in her death, it was just another sign that we were presumably surrounded on all sides by Sigmar’s growing empire. I turned back to Edgar’s note on the mountain range and read it.

  “Stable two-way portal to Chippewa Falls in Wisconsin here; the mountains are named after it. Could be used for transit. Illegal human-run mining operation, but they are unlikely to approach the place of power. Watch out for lakes full of Fluorinert™. There is a cache of powerful weapons here, the strongest of which is a magically-enhanced crossbow. It is guarded by chthons well versed in its power, but they are unlikely to successfully resist a titan’s invasion.”

  I immediately resolved to burn these books if Sigmar or some other malign entity were at risk of taking over Agnus’s lands. Titans already outmatched me even without a reference to all hell’s treasures on their side. I went through the book to determine whether or not there were any easier artifacts I could go after, but I didn’t find any. It makes sense – if the likes of me could acquire such powerful relics, the likes of me would beat the actuality of me to it. So my only hope was the magic crossbow.

  I needed more information, so I started combing the internet for chthonic history and geography resources in my spare time. Remember how I said this was going to be “exceptionally difficult?” I soon found out that instead of running into a digitization problem, the major barrier was instead how all the really good sources (Rand McNally aside) were in various daemonic languages I couldn’t read. I’d say it’s all Greek to me, but I can actually function in Greek, even if you’d never confuse me for a native speaker. After a few days of trying to parse things with a dictionary and free language learning resources, I gave up. It was becoming increasingly clear that I needed to be fluent in a dozen languages I’d never even heard of to follow up these leads. I tried adding machine translation to see if the speed of output would result in anything I could use. That failed, too. Babelfish is a piss-poor tool, and the results it produced were even less intelligible than my own halting translation efforts.

  Eventually, I gave up and threw a month’s worth of salary at a professional, who promptly provided me with page after page of eloquent, annotated text until his hourly rate consumed the funds I’d provided him, which I found out when his latest document cut off mid-sentence in favor of a demand for more money. What an asshole! I didn’t know how else to handle this, so after busting my ass a few hours hunting thugs for Agnus, I tossed the translator even more money so that he’d finish the job.

  The end result was a detailed report on everything that had been published about the so-called “Chippewa Mountains” and the cultists that infested them. It ended up being such a lengthy report that were it not for my desire to claim the artifact for myself, I’d have recommended the translator publish this report commercially. In lieu of that, you get the free executive summary – a chthon decided that Gene Amdahl was God incarnate – far more powerful and wise than any titan, and convinced at least a hundred more chthons (and the occasional hell-born human) this was the case before the local titan lord noticed and launched a purge.

  The survivors stole the titan’s favorite crossbow, murdered him with it, and fled to the Chippewas to rebuild their religious order anew. They also started sacrificing people to harvest their magical essence, which was then somehow used to enhance the crossbow. They rechristened it “Amdahl’s Arbalest” and immediately decided it was too sacred to actually use. Besides, the cult was growing to the point where all unwanted intruders were handily slain without resorting to the Arbalest, so why desecrate a holy relic with the blood of nonbelievers?

  A few more points from that report – first, titanicide was more common than I would’ve guessed. Second, even if these cultists had been lucky like me and Terminal, they were numerous, frothing mad, and holed up in the mountains. Edgar was right. I would have to either bury myself in books or form an army to get my hands on anything cool. Those were going to be long term projects, so once I decided that was the case, I decided to put the Arbalest hunt on the back burner. Maybe someday, I’d find an opportunity to go after it or something similarly useful.

  “In the name of the Holy Ghost, will you look at the size of those things?”

  A feeble old man in a fabulously embroidered bright red robe
and jeweled miter (read: Eastern Orthodox bishop) was staring at the security center’s big TV. What was he doing here? I’d overheard Haxabalatnar talking about an interfaith delegation of priests and laity trying to defuse a wave of religious conflict at the court. Apparently, members of a sect called the “Sons of Adam” were stirring up trouble. Either way, why was this guy watching television?

  “Are they covered in gold? This is an audacious and sinful display of avarice!” continued the bishop, and he promptly stormed out of our office in disgust, quietly reciting a rosary as he walked. We were looking at two gigantic robots that probably were covered in gold, or at least some other shiny, vaguely yellow metal. Below them, a human news anchor was interviewing another human, despite there being plenty of chthons in hell to talk to if you were so inclined. The text crawl below claimed that this was Adrian Rubovitch, and it described him as a hell-raised human. Between him and Haxabalatnar, they were becoming increasingly common.

  “You say that these giant robots are your greatest creations. Could you elaborate?” said the anchorman, waving a microphone in the guy’s face.

  “Definitely! Terrorize and Ravage are the queens of hell’s many battlefields. They are armed with cutting edge weapon systems from both the human and daemonic worlds, and they even breathe fire!” He had a thick accent that I couldn’t immediately place, but I would’ve guessed Russian.

  “I am very glad to see that they will be taking up their rightful place as glorious combatants! In the past, we have had to stoop to dishonorable ends such as prostitution in order to make ends meet!” he continued.

  Was Terrorize wearing an enormous G-string? This place is getting too weird for me. I then heard the horrible groans and screeches of barely oiled gears.

  “I don’t need none of your sass, boy. I know my body and what I’m willing to do with it,” Terrorize had apparently said, causing everyone except for Adrian to duck for cover. When the anchorman recovered from this blast of noise, he immediately asked Adrian whom his robots were fighting for.