Bai checked both directions along the tunnel to be certain no one was watching before he opened the ancient passageway. It was slow to open and slow to close behind him once he stepped through, so Bai added it to his list of places that required maintenance. After a mazestorm like that one, there was no shortage of places on the list. He was finding them far faster than the remaining repair golems could fix.
That was fine. They’d catch up as long as the next mazestorm didn’t happen for a while or went in another direction, as most did.
It took two more hidden passages before he reached the auxiliary installation hub, but he didn’t have to be careful about them. No one could get in that deep. Naturally, even though they weren’t necessary, they were completely functional.
It was a relief to see that there were no repair golems in the hub. It was buried deep enough that mazestorms rarely reached it, but when they did it was bad. The auxiliary hub was at the top of the repair hierarchy because nothing else could be repaired if it wasn’t functional.
Sotis Bai even had to help, and it wasn’t sothing he was good at.
The large screen was set to the installation status, as usual. The sa areas as usual were dark, unknown; so of those were damage but even more was from the alterations made to allow people to live in the facility after the Tower fell. There was also a large section that had been dark ever since Tiwaz went to sleep with the evacuation.
Bai was awakened when a pair of hands was needed. Tiwaz was not. It was a lonely existence.
Most of the map looked like the aftermath of any other mazestorm, a sea of red covering the areas near the usual leaks and all of the sensitive areas. It was worse than usual; after a day, so of the red should have already been cleared, but very little of it was. Bai sighed and started noting down what he saw; a few monster-hunting requests in the Registry would go a long ways towards clearing out so of the worst-hit extremities and let the repair golems handle the spaces that were too delicate, specialized, or sensitive to allow the unauthorized to enter.
It was more than an hour later that Bai saw an area swap from the yellow of an in-process repair to the green of a fully functional space. That was good, but it was also strange; most of the high priority areas were the sensitive ones, and that was an unusually large space.
Bai had to dig through the nus a little before he found out what the space was: the old test farm. He was pretty sure it was where Mazehold’s Professional farrs grew most of the produce for the city, so it was good that it was undamaged, but it was odd. He’d seen the old test farm go yellow without a mazestorm; it was usually one of the later areas restored, because it required interventions the repair golems weren’t suited for to rebalance the manaflows that shifted during the maintenance.
That was enough of a puzzle for Bai to pull the repair logs and skim through them. They looked normal at first, but there was a strange entry less than an hour after the repair began.
Maintenance override triggered. Authorization: Tiwaz
Bai froze in shock. Tiwaz was awake? How was that possible? The connections were still dead! He couldn’t possibly have opened that door.
He shook himself and dove deeper into that authorization. It wasn’t Tiwaz himself; instead, it was a mana imprint with Tiwaz’s authorization appended to it. It was a deeper authorization than usual, the kind that was granted only to the highest maintenance officers so that soone could handle things even if the damage was bad enough that Tiwaz could not perform the authorization from his own location.
That ant Tiwaz was, indeed, active again. It was the best news Bai had seen since humans returned to Mazegate and woke him.
It also ant that Tiwaz had soone he judged reliable enough to trust with one of the highest possible authorizations: his own. Bai needed to find that person; they were likely going to try to repair the rest of the facility, but it was obvious they didn’t have the resources Bai did, even if they had the access he didn’t have. How was he going to do that?
The first thought Bai had was to watch for another door being opened with Tiwaz’s authority, but that was not likely to produce results. He wouldn’t be able to get there before whoever it was finished with the place and was long gone.
Maybe there was a clue in the rest of the test farm’s logs?
It took far longer than it should have, but Bai eventually realized the obvious: the farm was recovered because it was being actively managed, but the managent wasn’t through the manalines; they were still under repair until a few minutes earlier. It was being done manually, probably by the Professional farrs. That ant they could get into the farm’s observation area and follow its instructions.
A detailed look through the logs revealed that the door was opened shortly after the mazestorm and then again each morning with the sa authorization. He could et whoever was opening it by going down there!
That idea faded almost imdiately: the farm was repaired. A maintenance override was no longer needed to open the door.
That also gave the solution Bai needed. There were other people there and those sa people were probably there when the maintenance person opened the door. All he had to do was talk to the farrs and he’d know who he needed to find.
Bai looked at the rest of the display. He could copy it down, but if there was soone with full maintenance authorization, he didn’t need to. They’d be able to pull it up from any of the consoles scattered around the underground. He had to co to the auxiliary hub because he wasn’t designed to perform maintenance.
Once Bai reached the Garden, as the newcors called the farm, he barely even had to ask anything to get the farrs talking. Most of the talk was about the Garden’s monitoring room and the strange crystalline creatures that Bai easily recognized as repair golems, but it was easy to ask how they got in.
The answer turned out to be a blonde elf who could pick any lock, even a magical one. Bai wasn’t certain he believed that; it was very, very difficult to bypass any of the installation’s security and he doubted that imitating a maintenance person authorized by Tiwaz would even work.
Maybe he just didn’t want to believe it.
Bai was pretty sure he knew who the blonde elf was, too. When he got the farrs to talk about the other people who were there when the door was opened, he beca even more certain; the entire group matched. They were the latest group of Called to reach Mazehold, a team currently making a splash in the Arena. That made him even more confident; where would Called learn to bypass magical locks?
Not that he had any idea how they t and woke Tiwaz, either.
Bai pushed that concern aside; he needed to talk to them, and not at either the Arena or the Registry. Sowhere in the underground would be best, and that ant he needed to talk to their Professional escort.
Sweetfire.
Bai sighed at the thought. The man was persistent and utterly determined to learn about everything, especially about golems. Bai avoided him; he didn’t want to answer questions or, worse, have to resist being disassembled if Sweetfire figured out that Bai was a golem.
It hadn’t happened yet. It wasn’t likely to happen now.
The chance to work with Tiwaz again was worth the risk.
---------------
Creating the isolation runscript took days. It would have been faster if they’d been able to work on it without interruption, the way they had on the original, but the rest of their commitnts didn’t stop. They had to fight in the Arena and they had to make their presence known in the Registry. Jax insisted on that, but if he hadn’t, Dav would have. Disappearing was the last thing they needed right now.
Sophia couldn’t be there even as much as Dav was. She was the one who absolutely had to be seen, since she was the “enchantnt-breaker.” Her services were in high demand, high enough that on many days her earnings were higher than the entire team earned from their ti in the Arena.
They couldn’t give that up, either. They were there to learn what the Arena staff knew, and that ant they needed to be known.
Dav finished the final brush stroke, then compared the completed diagram to the one Sophia created back in Izel. It was a little bigger, but other than that it was almost identical. There were a few spots that weren’t, so he checked with Sophia before fixing them. Most of his corrections were necessary, but there were a couple that she said not to worry about; they were close enough and might not have been perfect in the original either.
They’d drawn the runescript large enough to hold everyone comfortably, since the space Sweetfire ca up with was more than large enough for that. Dav almost regretted that when it ant that they had to wait yet another day to gather everyone and actually do anything; Sophia didn’t want to deactivate the runescript until they were done with it, because there was all too high a chance that it would have to be completely redrawn.
Once they were finally ready, Dav reached out with his Psychic sh Ability to draw Mo’ra into the sh. It was worth a try, but he didn’t really expect it to work.
He certainly didn’t expect the reaction to be crying. How was she even crying? She was a sword and this was telepathy!
“Mo’ra?” Xin’ri projected across the sh. “Is that you?”
The crying stopped. “Ri-ri?”
That had to be a pet na. More importantly, it had to be a pet na for Xin’ri. Mo’ra’s awareness definitely was trapped in the sword. That was possibly the most awful thing Dav had ever seen, and he’d seen so pretty bad things, especially in his younger years.
On second thought, no, this was definitely no worse than third on the list. Dav tried not to think about the others that competed with it, but he was pretty sure this was worse than being eaten by Dust (at least you died quickly) but better than a failed nervous system calibration.
Dav shoved that mory back in the box he usually kept it in. It wasn’t useful to rember that here; he’d gotten out without getting his own brain fried and it wasn’t his fault that others hadn’t. It wasn’t like he’d deliberately avoided being found; in fact, it was the opposite. It didn’t always make him feel better.
“Are … are you all right? I an, how can you be all right, I … you’re …” Xin’ri didn’t seem to know how to ask her friend what she actually felt about her current situation.
“The good feeling stopped,” Mo’ra answered. “And then there was darkness. I thought for certain I did what the Broken Lord asked
to do and he would reward , the sa way he always did. But I don’t feel anything, it’s just darkness. Do you think he’s just being a little slow while he checks to see if I did it right?”
Dav blinked. That wasn’t the reaction of soone trapped in darkness for years; that was soone who didn‘t know sothing went wrong. He waited for a long mont for Xin’ri to answer Mo’ra, but it seed like she didn’t know what to say.
Well, he could answer her question. “No, the Broken Lord isn’t just being a little slow. You’ve done what he wanted and can’t do it again, so he isn’t going to bother to reward you.”
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