Servants of the Nexus (Wayfarer Chronicles #1)

Chapter 1

The crater stretched nearly half a mile, a great gaping hole in the earth from which only wafts of steam rose. Its rim crumbled beneath Saenu’s boots, sending little avalanches of soil and ash tumbling down into the hollow. She took a step back, wrinkling her nose at the sulphur fumes and trying to ignore the pitiful weeping and mewling coming from the onlookers whose homes had been reduced to char. To ignore, not because she was heartless - though there were men aplenty who’d accuse her of that - but because it wasn’t a Wayfarer’s place to get involved. Well, it hadn’t been, once upon a time. These days, their mandate was rather foggier.
She sighed, one hand going to rest on the hilt of her sword. It vibrated beneath her touch, a solid and comforting presence. Clear up this mess: that’s what she was here for.
She chose one of the onlookers, though not at random: she needed someone with a clear head, a sense of detachment. Not that there could be a great deal of that when disaster struck a settlement of this size, but there would be strata of involvement all the same.
A young man stood at the edge of the crater, a little further around its edge. Saenu softened her stance, slumped her shoulders, took her hand off her sword - authority would draw suspicion and closed lips, but fellow gawkers were always worth a conversation - and approached him.
She needn’t have bothered with the change of pose, as the young man was too entranced by the scene of utter devastation before them to even glance Saenu’s way.
“This was all Petyr’s doing,” he announced, fairly hopping from foot to foot in excitement. “My ma always said it’d come to this.”
Not a young man after all, Saenu realised, but a child on the cusp of adolescence. Still, he’d do. “Come to what?” she asked him.
“This,” he breathed, as though he’d never seen anything so beautiful.
There was, Saenu had to admit, something strangely compelling about the vista. The crater, a perfect circle, with a bowl of black earth fused to glass in the bottom; the teetering line of wooden houses leaning over its far edge; the cloudless blue sky spanning the two. It took a certain kind of dedication to create destruction like this.
“You think he died?” Saenu asked, making the question sound like casual gossip. “Petyr?”
“I dunno.” The boy shrugged, then gestured vaguely off to the far side of the crater. He sounded suddenly dubious of his earlier supposition. “But his workshop’s way off on the other edge of town. Maybe he wasn’t even here.”
Maybe he wasn’t... but likely he was. In Saenu’s experience, it was a fair bet that any town’s notable maverick scientist was usually responsible when an event of this magnitude occurred. An event big enough to draw her attention, in other words.
Not that the people here would refer to him as a ‘scientist’, if the word or its meaning even existed here. This was a relatively marginal world, a realm still limited in technology and learning, at least compared to those at the centre of the Nexus. Marginal enough, in fact, that any power strong enough to cause that crater couldn’t possibly have been native - it had to have come from another world. Which was where Saenu came in.
After all, the place of the Wayfarers might be fragmented and confused these days, but Saenu was certain it still encompassed one thing: to protect all the worlds, all the thousands upon thousands of them - from each other, and from themselves.
She skirted the crater, staying well back from its edge to take a meandering path through the wooden houses. Their uneven walls leaned over the street like a tunnel, water dripping off the eaves to form runnels in slushy mud that had once been snow. Dogs yipped and fought in the gutters, and children in rags stood on street corners, selling scavenged trinkets and buttons to feed themselves. This world was a backwater, not modern enough to interest her, not ancient enough to feel like home. The whole place smelled of ditch water and refuse, of smoke and impoverished despair.
Petyr’s workshop was easy enough to spot. Little more than a series of interconnected shacks, it stood on an isolated plot, frost-blackened weeds surrounding it and only a slender path trampled through them. Such was the home of a man who’d chosen to set himself apart, by his work, his lifestyle, his mode of thought. The sort of man who might buy details of a weapon from another world and think it mere scholarly curiosity to use them.
The wooden door was unlatched and creaking in the wind. Saenu reached for her sword again; no need to glamour it in a world like this, at least. She shouldered her way inside, pausing to let her eyes adjust to the gloom. Dust motes floated in a stray beam of sunlight - the rest of the room was still and silent.
And what a room it was. Tools and constructs littered every surface, little things of gleaming brass and vast edifices of steel and chrome that rose to the shadowed ceiling. Papers were stacked precariously on worktop corners, pinned to the wooden walls, scattered across the earthen floor. Glass vials set on a windowsill refracted jewels of coloured light across a table strewn with broken quill pens and a spilt bottle of ink. In a distant corner, something clicked three times, whirred once, then fell quiet.
Saenu left her sword in its scabbard. The workshop was strange, yes, and likely stuffed to the gills with creations that might do her harm, but she felt no sense of danger; there was no sentience or malice in the machines, no watchers in the shadows. Instead, there was only-
She spun on her heel, raising her hand just as the club fell. There was no real strength behind the below, and Saenu turned it easily aside. Her attacked yelped, more startled than she was, and the weapon - a battered candlestick - clattered off into a corner.
“Petyr, is it?” she asked, tone conversational. “I was hoping to find you here.”
The man cringed, only creeping out from behind the workshop door when Saenu backed away. “Who’s asking?” His voice was high-pitched and nervous, with a hoarse edge as though he’d been weeping - or screaming.
“My name is Saenumandua,” she introduced herself. “I’m one of the Kin.”
By the man’s flinch, she could see that meant something to him. “Wh-what do you want? I p-paid my debt in full.”
Saenu cast another glance around the workshop. “And what debt might that have been?”
It was clear Petyr was trying to look anywhere else, but his gaze swivelled towards a bulky item on a workbench, over which a grubby cloth had been thrown. “It’s mine,” he blurted, as Saenu crossed the room. “I made it, and it’s mine, fair and square.”
“I’m sure it is.” She reached for the cloth. “But perhaps you’re wishing it wasn’t.”
The canvas flapped to the floor and for a moment there was silence, as they both stared at the object on the table. It was, in truth, fairly nondescript - simply a metal ball the size of Petyr’s head, resting in a filigree of metal struts - except that it so clearly didn’t belong in this cold, muddy world. Saenu touched the globe with her finger, setting it rolling, and rolling, and rolling in its cage, like some executive desk toy. A faint hum rose into the still air, and following it, a squeak. From Petyr.
Saenu stopped the ball with another touch. When she looked back, Petyr was huddled in his corner again. At first, Saenu thought he was sweating, despite the chill; but no, his face was damp with tears.
“What did you do?” she asked, softly now, preparing to tease the story out of him, piece by reluctant piece.
She didn’t need to bother. Petyr slumped to his knees, and the whole thing came spooling out of him. The strangers who’d come through the town, with a cart full of crates marked in some foreign script; their visit to his workshop, and honeyed words to persuade Petyr that a discerning man such as himself, an inventor, a scientist, couldn’t be without their wares. And when Petyr had seen inside the crates, peeling back the layers of protective sackcloth, he’d seen stack upon stack of blueprints scribbled on parchment, instructions for the creation of things so exquisitely engineered, so sublime, that he couldn’t help reaching for his purse.
“I only bought one chart,” he said, near choking on the words. “But I built two of them. That one and... another.”
No doubt he hadn’t understood the purpose of the devices, and in the end it was sheer intellectual curiosity that caused him to test one. To leave it spinning in a snow-bound park, whirring and whining until it had reached a pitch fit to burst eardrums and he’d been forced to retreat. And then the boom, and the shockwave that rocked the town, and silence.
At that, Saenu crossed the room again, to crouch before the quivering Petyr. “You made two weapons,” she told him - no use sugaring this bitter pill. “Weapons that belong in another world. Where those diagrams came from, they’re commonplace, petty things, tiny parts of arsenals beyond your comprehension. This world, though... Your world was simply not prepared for them.”
Petyr was listening, nodding, tears still falling.
“You knew, didn’t you?” Saenu went on. “Even as you were building them, you knew they didn’t belong here, that they were dangerous, and yet you just couldn’t help yourself.”
Petyr nodded, miserable. “The charts were so extraordinary. I’d never seen anything like them. And even when I started to guess what they were for...”
“You just had to finish, just like you had to have the blueprints.” Saenu sighed and rocked back to her feet. Her job would be so much easier if people had a little more control. Personally, she wasn’t the impulsive type.
“Wh-what are you going to do?” Petyr was staring up at her with an expression of desperate longing. “Can you fix this?”
She could, but not in the way he wanted. She was a traveller between worlds, after all, not through time. “I can’t undo what you’ve done. You, and everyone else in this town, will have to live with that.”
Petyr slumped, all strength going out of him. “The ones who sold me the charts,” he muttered, gazing at the floor, “the ones who called themselves Kin, they said-”
“I don’t care what they said.” Knowing that they had once been like her, bound to protect the worlds as Wayfarers, just made this worse. Saenu reached down and roughly pulled Petyr to his feet. “I care about what you do next. Get out there and help those people, the ones whose lives you ripped apart.”
Petyr wavered. There was no decisiveness in his face, no look of sudden determination or resolve, but he did nod and shuffle towards the door.
“And Petyr,” she called after him, as he reached to close the workshop door behind him, “next time strangers offer you otherwordly merchandise from the back of a cart, I suggest you turn them down.”
With that he was gone. Saenu wasn’t sure whether she’d got through to him, and in truth didn’t much care. If the crater that had swallowed half his town didn’t make him see sense, nothing would - she just needed him out of the way.
First, she dismantled the remaining weapon. The components had all been manufactured by Petyr, or at least in his world; objects transferred between worlds only lasted a few hours, at best. As such, there was a crudeness to them that would never be found in the originals; it was a wonder the other weapon had worked at all. Pulling apart the struts, then smashing the metal ball against the earth floor until it was irreparably dinted, was easy.
After that, she searched for the blueprints, and came up with a single sheet on which Petyr looked to have liberally scribbled around a core diagram, itself in another hand. Whoever had sold it must have memorised the original, before crossing into this world and transcribing it anew - for whilst the weapons themselves couldn’t be moved between realms, the contents of a rogue Wayfarer’s head could. Which one had it been? she wondered. Some Kin she’d been tracking for year upon year, or a fellow who’d only recently turned? It took its toll, after all, patrolling the worlds as they did - after a time, there were those who’d simply had enough, and turned to empty profit instead.
Saenu ripped the chart into pieces, despite knowing it wasn’t worth the effort. She had a bigger finale in mind.
She clicked her fingers, summoning a tiny, bright flame at the end of one digit. A simple trick, one of only a handful she’d picked up in her travels, but it had its uses. The workshop was strewn with papers and debris, which would make fire effective; it was isolated, too, from the surrounding buildings, which would make it quick and safe. By the time she stepped outside, flames were already licking at the wooden walls and filling the windows with a sunset glow.
Saenu didn’t stop to watch the workshop burn. The blueprints were gone: she’d done her job, and perhaps instilled a little more common sense in one more foolish dreamer. As for the wayward Kin who’d sold him the dream, they were likely long gone, though she’d keep her ear to the ground for a while yet.
It was as she walked away with the crackling heat at her back that Saenu felt a tugging, somewhere deep in her gut. It was a signal, of sorts, a sign that one of her many captive spirits had something to tell her. The messages such spirits delivered, simple beings that they were, tended towards colour and emotion, and sometimes indecipherable ones at that; when Saenu opened her mind to them and the missive they’d sent across the void between worlds, she experienced a sudden rush of confusion, of panic. Of fear.
With a deep breath, Saenu shut the message off. The spirits were too bewildered to know she’d received it; let them keep signalling and she’d soon be drowning in the same terror. As it was, she couldn’t help a wave of fear constricting her chest. She recognised the signature of those panicked spirits all too well. They were some of her most familiar, ones she’d shaped to her own purposes over long years.
Ones from home.