The Vicada Wandering Troupe (1)
Vicada, master of the Vicada Wandering Troupe, could feel that something in Etna City had shifted.
Heat was the first thing to reach him.
For a city planted at the foot of a volcano, the warmth wrapped around Etna was cooling, little by little, and the sky gave the change away more plainly than anything else. The livelier the mountain, the drearier the heavens grew.
It was the ash Mount Etna breathed out. As Vicada remembered it, the sky over the city had been tolerably clear for the better part of a year. Now a heavy gray cloud, thick with filth, hung low overhead.
The volcano's active season?
Anywhere else, an awakening volcano meant disaster. Here, the story ran the other way. The stirred power of the earth fed mana to the whole city and swelled the yield of its fossil resources—a bumper year, if one were speaking of farms. Vicada let out a sigh salted with regret.
Once a local economy found its feet, goods meant for fleeing reality lost their shine, electronic narcotics among them. This circuit's take was going to be miserably thin.
"I'll have to weight the show toward the circus."
He pressed a button on the gauntlet at his right hand. The thing was a wearable computer, built to manage the magical body-modifications implanted in his own flesh—the enchantware.
A drug solution shot straight for his spinal cord and rinsed his worries clean. Happiness welled up. The light had not changed by so much as a shade, and yet the world seemed to shine. Vicada was swimming in that joy when a noise rang through his skull. The wearable computer was warning him that the solution was running low.
Meconion...
No narcotics maker in the region could match her. Her quirk of loathing the new age's electronic drugs was beyond Vicada's understanding, but then spirits were fickle creatures by nature, weren't they? She was half spirit herself, so of course she had inherited the temperament. For the first time in a long while, he made for the green paradise of the ash-gray city.
"Good day to you."
What met him was not the green-haired Alraune half-blood. It was a dubious-looking man in a suit.
Had the place changed hands while he was gone? Where was Meconion?
Vicada answered with a calm he did not feel. Clearance for him and the troupe had come from Geryones. That crew was greedy, yes, but pay them and they made little trouble, and they did the work they were paid for. They were nothing like tyrants of the Lernaean Magic Tower's stripe.
Surely the Phytoes Magic Tower hasn't stirred out of decades of silence. Even if Kaicl had shown his face again, he would never reach into a drug den on the outskirts. A man who already held wealth and power enough had no reason to come slumming in the underworld.
Had Lernaean swallowed Meconion's cavern, then? That seemed entirely possible. Still, flash Geryones's pass and they would scowl and step aside. They were only fierce inside their own four walls.
"Forgive the late introduction. I am Ortes, of Hydra Inc."
"Hydra Inc.?"
A name he had never heard. It had not existed when he came through two months ago. Some upstart power, challenging Etna City's old three-tower order?
"We were granted leave to enter by Lord Geryones."
Whatever else they were, a new power that had not yet set its foundations would not pick a fight that might flare into open war with the powers already here. Vicada meant to use Geryones's authority as a shield and walk back out of the cavern.
"I'm aware."
Aware?
"That fellow Geryones escaped us a few days ago. The Phytoes Magic Tower appears to have lent a hand. He hasn't shown his face anywhere inside the city, I'm afraid. I took the liberty of looking over the entry roster he issued."
What is he saying?
Two months, at the outside. A power that had put Geryones down and grown formidable enough for the Phytoes Magic Tower to feel threatened?
"Do you suppose Geryones is hiding somewhere inside the city, or has he fled beyond the walls to pull himself together?"
The man with the serpentine, narrow eyes was looking at the troupe as an outside party come to help Geryones escape.
"No—n-no, it's a misunderstanding! We haven't the means for that, or the will!"
"A misunderstanding?"
Those thinly opened eyes curved into a pleasant arc.
"And what misunderstanding would that be?"
A man skilled at leaning on authority until the other party bent. The threat was sharp enough to burn the high clean off him, and Vicada's nerves stood up on end.
Blurting, with no sense of the room, that they were not of Geryones's crew would be the worse move. The man would only catch the loose thread—His crew? I never said any such thing... How curious—and set a blade to Vicada's throat.
What was he supposed to do? How did he walk out of this alive?
Vicada called the cavern's mood back to mind. The faces inside were no different from before. If Meconion were dead, her regulars would never have sat quiet.
"Meconion! Meconion can vouch for who we are! We paid Geryones money and got nothing in return—so why would we stake our lives for him?"
Ortes nodded.
"Director Meconion. So he says?"
From deeper in the cavern, an Alraune half-blood steeped in weariness came walking out.
"The two of you may talk this through between yourselves."
Ortes had left the room, but Vicada did not open his mouth lightly. Assuming the man was not listening in on this conversation would make him a fool.
"What in the world is going on? And what is Hydra Inc. supposed to be?"
Meconion answered that bewildered tone with a thin sneer.
"A monster outfit that ate the Lernaean Magic Tower. We barely survived it ourselves."
She laid out for him what had happened in Etna City across a little more than a month. Lernaean had fallen. The underworld had been brought under one roof. Geryones had lost, escaped with nothing but his life, and Kaicl of the Phytoes Magic Tower had returned.
"You picked a rotten time to come back, Vicada. Right in the middle of the three towers gearing up for war."
"Damn it! Word on a backwater city like this doesn't even make the rounds on the ether net. If I'd known, I never would've come! You could've at least tipped me off!"
"Didn't you hear me? I'm a director under Hydra Inc. They've got the leash on me."
"Damn. What the hell is that guy?"
Meconion shrugged. Watching her shudder at the mere thought of Ortes, Vicada felt an unpleasant kinship.
"I've only got one piece of advice. Just beg. Tell them you'll show them anything they've a mind to see."
"But listen. Inside our troupe—"
Illicit drugs at a dangerous grade. Poisons most magic towers had branded outright illegal. And slaves, kept on hand for particular uses.
"Ha. Worth more than your life?"
"......"
"The Lernaean Magic Tower's tastes meant narcotics were never banned in their territory, and Hydra Inc. has been too busy putting on weight to bother with the law. They can't invent some legal quibble and squeeze anything more out of you."
"Mmm..."
"I know, because I've been through it. The bastard's cracked, but he keeps his word to the letter. If Geryones isn't in your troupe, he'll send you off with a consolation purse."
Vicada made his intentions plain: they could look anywhere they liked, from the vault to the bunks, so long as they let him live.
Ortes's reply was brief.
"I'll be paying a visit shortly."
An inspection, unannounced. Vicada clicked his tongue and left the cavern.
Meconion watched him go, then asked, "Do we really have to take the long way around like this? Wouldn't it be simpler to just tell them that if they've got a sacred relic, we'd like a look?"
"There are several reasons."
Ortes, who had somehow produced tea in the meantime, held a cup out to her. Meconion drank, and the unexpected fineness of it drew a sound of genuine pleasure from her.
"Well. You actually brew a decent cup."
"The president is particular. The first reason is rumor."
As Vicada himself had said, word traveled poorly in a quiet town like Etna City. Even on the ether network—the mages' internet, if one wished to call it that—Etna had always been a silent city.
"Vicada will carry news of the tension here. From the Ten Towers' point of view, no matter how much mana we gather or what else we do, it will look like nothing more than a quaint little spat among the lesser towers."
They had needed a loose tongue to spread Hydra Inc.'s staged war, and Vicada had happened to suit.
"And the second?"
"They have nothing to hide from me. Geryones isn't with them, so of course they don't. They won't try to conceal a thing, if only to avoid looking suspicious for no reason."
"You think if you'd asked for the relic up front, they would've hidden it?"
"Believers in the gods are hardly common in this age. Being knocked from place to place would have been their ordinary life. Come at it head-on, and they would have curled inward."
Meconion studied Ortes with doubtful eyes. He had staged this whole tiresome play over the uncertain chance that they might hide something?
Ortes was thinking of the arcane units the Ten Towers operated in secret—eradication squads raised to root out the primitive priests who still held divine power, the orthodox heirs of the old gods' doctrine. If a devotee of Bacchus truly rode with the Vicada Wandering Troupe, and if that devotee had heard even a rumor of those squads, the relic would have been hidden without question.
An hour or so passed before Ortes rose.
"Well then. Shall we go and have a look?"