Precious Cargo
Verim grumbled. It was too damn hot.
The Vault Keeper emerged from the depths of Pride’s Hold, new home of the Vaults of Reckoning, murmuring to themselves beneath a heavy cowl. Their skull-mounted headdress resembled that of a goat or ram, complete with the flowing decorations and the marks of the cult of the Mystagogue, the spiritual guardians of the monolithic Grave Council. It was blistering hot, despite being early morning before the sun had even risen, but the heat of the Burning Season still dominated the days and nights in the San Saba. Sweat already trickled down their face, mixing with the face paint they used for ritual markings, making it look like they wept tears of black ash.
It was difficult to do much during the Burning Season. The entire region ground to a halt, life dominated instead with simple survival. The deadly rays of the sun could ignite dry brush, melt materials, induce lethal heat sickness in a matter of minutes, or even kill if you remained out of shelter for long. Travel was difficult, as caravan engines would overheat easily and even the mighty Oxline could not function during the daylight hours. There were even a few visible zed wandering in the desolate wasteland outside of the fortress headquarters of the Peacekeepers that they could see that were literally still smoldering, their skin charred embers from wandering unprotected the day before. The cinder-ridden zed were probably the biggest nuisance, as they would spread wildfires unknowingly, lit ablaze by the hateful sun. Even raiders hunkered down in the summer, letting their rage simmer while they survived the baking death outside.
The Vault Keeper had a curious relationship with the sun. Though they outwardly maintained the aura of the curmudgeon, they secretly reveled in moments like this.
Of course most of those of their Strain hated it, as all Lascarians would burn easily if exposed for long, a legacy of their lives under the surface. But to the Vault Keeper, the Burning Season was not only proof of life’s persistence, but a testament to the reach and power of the cycle of life and death in nature. The mere fact that humanity managed to survive in the harshest of places like the San Saba showed how even now they could transcend the limitations of the environment and thrive in the chaos of a broken world. Citizens of the San Saba had imagined all kinds of inventive means to stay cool, from simply fleeing the area until the fires waned, to hiding underground in fire shelters built for this exact purpose. Even the busy schedules of survivors in Essex switched from day to night, reducing the town an empty shell during daylight hours with only the foolhardy braving the sweltering, miserable heat.
Pride’s Hold was not much different. The walls of the fortress the Grave Council shared with the military forces of the area would only offer mediocre shelter for another hour or so, until the sun fully began to illuminate the practice yard. Though not many would dare attack during the Burning Season, the soldiers manning the walls had built completely encased towers with shaded windows that could enable them to keep watch and move about the complex through the vast network of tunnels built into the former prison turned fortress. While the surface appeared deserted, the rest of the population of Pride’s Hold sheltered underground, simply moving their daily activities below without risking death during the worst part of the day.
There was still plenty to do below, but the Vault Keeper was brought to the surface once more for an anomaly. Another relic was missing.
Ever since the Battle of Essex at the end of the war, the Grave Council had been reeling. The devastation inflicted on the city by the bombing had convinced the Council of Grave Decisions to do the unthinkable – move their headquarters away from the ruined metropolis. The vaulted halls of the Grave Bureau, their former home in Essex, were now being used as housing and shelter for the poor according to reports from Mother Mayhem. It was all part of a careful public relations campaign to keep the focus on the good the Council was doing, versus the embarrassing involvement of the Reckoners that allied with the enemy during the war.
The Vaults of Reckoning had to be moved. The Vaults were a storehouse of the worst things that mankind had found or created, kept safe from those that would abuse it for nefarious ends, but it was no longer safe in Essex. The bombing had either collapsed important tunnels or opened new entrances to the surface, and looting after the war has risked dangerous things falling into unknowing hands. The collection of necrological curiosities could do amazing miracles, or corrupt in new and unfathomable ways in the hands of the unwary.
Thankfully, Pride’s Hold had provided a reprieve. The soldiers now known as the Peacekeepers had a massive fortress that they could not properly exploit, and the Grave Council needed new real estate and a replacement for the Reckoner Legions decimated by betrayal. The actual deal had been Cassiopeia’s doing, the gentle Unborn working her magic to build connections and allies in the aftermath of the war. The Council had needed to adapt to a new world, even changing the holy Grave Tax and reserving their influence to the worst of grave crimes. Colonel Hargrave had been happy to take the Grave Council’s brass and provide them a new home, as it helped shore up their own financial needs in a time of crisis.
As Vault Keeper, Verim was responsible for carefully cataloging and moving the collection of artifacts from the vaults in Essex to their new home in Pride’s Hold. Part librarian, part priest, part museum curator, the Keeper had been a role held by the Council since they began their migration north from the Pridelands decades ago, following in the wake of the ancient Imix tribes. The Keeper was nominally outside of the internal politics of the faction, but now held the role once reserved for the Reckoners on the actual Council. Reckoner-General Solomon had pointed to the wisdom of reducing their group’s influence by electing another to the seat. Maybe it was simply Solomon evading responsibility for his travels west, but it was now the Vault Keeper’s burden to bear. Trust was in short supply, and the Grave Council needed to atone.
The transfer of relics from Essex was nearing completion, but mistakes kept creating delays. It was a slow process, as the volume of things collected over the decades surprised even them. They had a legion of Auditors to assist, and a token guard of Reckoners, new soldiers recruited from the ranks of the Peacekeepers. The Peacekeepers were downsizing, so the Grave Council had recruited a few promising recruits from their ranks. The synthesis of the two factions at Pride’s Hold was a monument to adaptation and efficiency. They would work together to secure shipments to the Vaults under the cover of darkness, the Council ruling the underground network of offices and repurposed tunnels, with the Peacekeepers guarding the surface above. The shorter hours of night during the summer had meant they were always racing against a clock to get the items safely underground, even with many hands to help.
Mistakes could be considered holy to one such as the Vault Keeper. The Blighted Grove rejected the notion of the natural world as pristine or untouched, and saw transformation where others saw decay. But mistakes of nature were one thing – mistakes in accounting were another. Verim suspected it was a personal mission to correct for the Auditors, as they buzzed like bees around this most recent shipment from Essex. Counting, recounting, and checking ledgers against the items shipped, they were running out of time to properly catalogue the items before moving them below. The shipment today had been riddled with errors that cost them precious moonlight, but they had to maintain safety protocols despite the urge to rush. Once the Burning Season was done, the Council would be able to finish the remaining transfers quickly and with more time to catch these errors.
The Vaults beneath Essex were still a mess, a betrayal that still stung the Grave Council to this day. The traitor Reckoners had hidden their crimes for years, Rampart’s loyal minions carefully replacing valuable relics with duplicates and confusing the ledgers to conceal their sin. Now, each piece needed to be verified and checked, to make sure the real item was safely in Grave Council possession. There were a frustratingly large amount of items still unaccounted for and it was the Vault Keeper’s duty to keep the record of the loss.
At first, the Council had simply moved the items from the rail shipment to a holding area underground first for cataloging, but a unique interaction between two of the relics had sparked a near disaster. There was still char from the explosion in the receiving bay below, along with the ashes of the few unfortunate Auditors that had been in the blast radius. Some of the more dangerous items remaining to transport would sap the will of the unwary, and there had been reports of others that glowed when moved, or spoke whispers in the darkness. Since then, they had catalogued the items on the surface, and staged them for safe removal to the Vaults below once they could determine their authenticity. The Auditors worked in teams now, to limit the collateral damage that occurred or if strange consequences caused other mishaps.
The Keeper hummed to themselves, a hauntingly familiar tune, and checked in with the Auditors still working on the shipment. The nearby Auditor was draping a metallic looking covering over a crate, carefully dampening the dangerous emanations from within. One of the fool Reckoners must have set it down abruptly while unloading, and something must have leaked within. Boxes from the shipment were catalogued and separated into piles, clearly meant for different destinations in the tunnels below. The Keeper noted the runic vault numbers on the shipment for later followup, using the strange language of the ancients to keep a secure ledger for themselves, but then followed the assistants to the truly worrying absence. They moved quickly to the final pallet of items from Essex.
A relic known as the Midnight Orrery was the Grave Council’s most prized treasure. It was an artifact passed down through the ages by the Imix Tribe, a gleaming brass construction of gears and shifting plates of strange materials that tracked the arcane geometries of the Mortis, or so it was believed. The more religious of the Mystagogues spoke of it with hushed tones, believing it to let them seek the balance of all things, keeping the worlds of the Mortis and reality in careful check. Verim was a bit of an outcast from their ranks, despite formally being an ancient of their order, thinking the Quiet Path more of a philosophy than a faith. Perhaps it was all bullshit and it was just a fancy set of ornaments, but the Orrery had been crucial to their recent discoveries of Necrology. Whatever the reasoning, those that attuned with the device claimed their necrokinetic sense was enhanced. It was perhaps the key to their mastery of the Mortis, and moving it from Essex to Pride’s Hold was a titanic risk.
And apparently a piece was missing.
The Orrery was a complex device. It had many moving pieces, and while the bulk of the machine had already been assembled in the Vaults below, its massive size meant it was something that would have to be moved a section at a time. Some of the rotations tracked the diurnal phases of the moon, and the movement of the five planets following the Ptolemaic theory, but others tracked the celestial or necrological movement of other unknown bodies. Some of the armillary spheres tracked other mostly misunderstood motions and geographies, while some arms tracked tellurian geometry and provided calculations that the Mystagogues suggested was the accumulation of biomass within the Mortis. Each branch of the arcane machine had a necessary function and until it was fully assembled they were missing crucial calculations held by the accessory jovilabes and lunariums.
The Orrery gave slightly better than even odds at detecting morgue collapses in advance, for the moment, though the most fanatical of the priests would simply claim that their wrong guesses or inaccuracies had been human error or misinterpretations and not simple luck. Faith was strange that way, sometimes.
They had successfully transported the Veilweaver’s Tapestry, the Jar of Massacres, the Tones of Abseth, and even the damnable toxic Skulls of the Alabaster Monks, and they had had none of these issues. There were far more dangerous radioactive weapons of the oldcestors kept below, and the Orrery was perhaps the best understood and most well known of all of the Vault’s collection. This wasn’t some forgotten weapon or gizmo stolen by the traitors, but something that had been in their possession the entire time. How could something like a critical piece of the Orrery be gone?
The lead Auditor, a man Verim thought was named Smith or something equally forgettable, approached the Vault Keeper, agitated. The whispers of his associates huddled behind him appeared braced for the worst as they delivered the news. The ledger presented to the Vault Keeper was circled in red ink, one of the destination marks smudged and unreadable.
“What do you mean it was shipped to Bravado?”
The Auditor visibly shrunk under the glare of the Keeper, and managed to squeak out a stammered excuse.
“We.. um.. I believe it was misreported because of paperwork.. Umm.. errors. The destination code put the piece on.. Umm. the wrong train.” he winced. ““It is not yet safe to travel by rail to Bravado, sire. We will need to.. umm… wait until after the worst of the Burning Season has passed to retrieve the precious cargo.”
The Keeper quickly sent for a runner, and relayed hurried messages to their counterparts below and still in Essex. They had so little time to get a message out before the sun rose, and the rest of the shipment would still need to be catalogued. Their words were heavily accented, a curious dialect of the southern Pridelands, but the authority was unmistakable. The Grave Council agents did what they did best, and got to work.
Looking at the mistaken ledger, the Keeper couldn’t help but feel like the paper was smudged a little too precisely. This wasn’t a piece that someone in Essex would have sent to Bravado by mistake. It was at least the second shipment that had been rerouted to Bravado, for some unfathomable reason. The last missing shipment had also been a priceless piece that belonged in the Vaults.
Verim harrumphed under their breath, contemplating the insinuation. They had known rogue Reckoners escaped the purge at Bravado, when Rampart had died leading the Chairman’s last bit of revenge against the tiny town. This suggested a more sinister organization than the Keeper had assumed. They would need to recheck their lists of the other missing artifacts for any similar “mistakes”.
“We do have agents in the town that we can task to keep the shipment secure and separated. It was shipped in a container that can survive high temperatures and even fire,” the Auditor explained. He motioned the Keeper to the safety and shadows of the tunnels below. The sunlight was creeping closer, eliminating the protective gloom of morning.
The Keeper spent a moment in prayer, a guttural and dark sound, pleading to some kind of higher power. The coming sunrise would bring devastation once more, but adaptation and endurance was sacred. Theirs was not the usual faith of the Mystagogue cult, but the faith of the Blighted Grove was faith nonetheless.
“We must trust in the Grove Keepers to ensure the relic through the worst of the fires. We will keep the Vigil of Rust, and trust as the Cycle wills. Life is often imperfect, empty, and fleeting. We cannot fear death, but the path of Apotheosis is not just avoiding the slavery of the Mortis, but a commitment to endure what others fear,” they prayed.
The Vault Keeper gathered themselves, stoically preparing for the path ahead. The vigil of ashes and rust was a lonely task, but something they would endure, for someone would need to see this wrong righted.
The Vault Keeper would need to visit Bravado personally.
