97 - Sign of the Raven [Cherno]

“Well, I don’t know what you plan to do from here on out, but once I wake up I’ll probably get breakfast at a market and try to do some investigative work, see if I can dig up something on Hashem’s so-called Benefactors. Or… Find some other excuse to play with this new toy. Can’t very well bring it into a serious fight without sharpening it on a handful of bottomfeeders first. Wonder how I would source a Fourth-order voidkey… Do the churches not provide for their own?”

“They certainly do, though keys are not considered grafts in the same way as body parts by the Grafting Church. Sourcing a Fourth-order key would take ah… Quite a bit. Time, money, and political sway, all of it. The gap between Third and Fourth order is substantial, considered equivalent to the leap between the strongest low-rankers and weakest mid-rankers. As a quasi-independent contractor, your best bet to acquire such a thing would be to find an artisan and have a high-quality Blank made, then clear a Hazard Zone and hope for good luck. A Gulf Key of that grade would be all the rarer.”

“Or kill someone who has one and hope it doesn’t snap before I pull it out of their skull.”

“An element of chance either way. I understand why you might desire such a key, considering Damrus and Semzar’s known capabilities, but there is still plenty of space to grow as Third-order keys go.”

“I’ll just ask Garvesh, I suppose. He ought to have some contacts that can source that kind of thing…”

Krahe sank into the sofa, looking out the safehouse’s window, which peered out over the landscape, including the river which ran near the city and the dock district surrounding it. Unlike the city core, it was all new construction. The arterial road running the whole length of the city, west to east, ran parallel to the river. A caravan of many-coloured moth-men was currently unloading goods from the single largest living thing Krahe had ever seen. It was a millipede, at least ten or even fifteen meters tall, just about able to fit onto the road, with glistening, individually separated segments that resembled huge plates of hammered armour. Various goods were simply strapped to its top and smaller vehicles, including other, smaller millipedes, hid in the shade cast by its gargantuan form. Fungal growth covered its frontmost segment, and a moth-man sat in the midst of it, connected to the great beast by a bundle of mycelium going into the back of his own head.

Beyond, to one side in the north-westward distance, towering mountains reached into the heavens like pillars, creating innumerable valleys. To the east, the land was substantially flatter, with forests dominating the horizon.

She pulled the Catalyst injector from her Kenoma Pocket, turning it around and appreciating its overdone design before, as instructed, sticking it into a vein in the pit of her right elbow. The injection, being fairly substantial in volume and needing to mix inside the device beforehand, took some time to flow in, feeling like nothing much besides a faint numbing of the aches that lingered from the operation. An overpowering sleepiness smashed into her like a brick wall, and she just barely managed to set the injector down on the table before consciousness slipped through her fingers.

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Krahe awoke to a strange feeling in the back of her head and a hollowness in her gut, yet not one she could physically place. It felt as though some organ that wasn’t actually there had distended and now yawned with empty space. What had woken her was a sound, the knocking of a beak against her window, ringing and resonating with an unearthly tone.

She was deathly certain that she saw a raven with infernal coals for eyes sitting there when she first opened her eyes, but now that she had gotten her bearings, it was gone. In fact, the window didn’t even face the outside, but a swirling, collapsing maelstrom, as if the building hung perpendicular to the side of a cliff. This, combined with Casus’s absence, made it more than obvious that this was a false awakening. She still felt a faint ache with each breath as her new ribcage settled in, and drifted off to sleep once more within moments.

Thereafter, she dreamt of the data-plane which she had trawled in her past life, that virtualized pseudo-reality which some had called things like the “matrix” or the “neo-astral”. The semi-independent network programs which inhabited much of the data-plane were the closest thing to this world’s eidolons that Krahe was familiar with. She wasn’t sure why it was this un-place had shown up in her dreams, and of all times now, but then it appeared; the Wound-like Grin, rendered in collage from garbled visual data and images of gore. It opened its fanged maw, the void filled by repeating, crudely-tiled textures made from a cartel victim’s skinless face bedecked by a scarf of his own intestines. From there, a simplistic icon of a crow emerged, slowly gaining fidelity until it became a fully realized high-fidelity model of the bird. It perched upon the Wound-like Grin’s teeth, pecking at them. A moment later, Krahe awoke to the sound of pecking on a window pane… But just as before, there was nothing there when she looked. Not even a feather.

With the dream only vaguely floating at the edge of her awareness, she blinked away the remnants of sleep and went about her morning. Casus was gone, but she found a tall glass of water on the table next to the box of Class 1 suppressant and a small ceramic dish. At first she wasn’t sure what was in it, being eight crescent shapes coated in brown sugar. The absence of one pill from the box followed by an appraisal using the Prospector’s Eyes confirmed that the banisher had prepared her pill in this way before he left.

Sighing, she ate one of them. Sticky. Aggressively sticky. The taste was strongly herbal, sour-sweet and somewhat spicy, fitting nicely with the sugar. She finished the rest while reading a hefty tome on the pseudo-continent of Xaugeth, basking in the dawning sun.