Legba Read online

  Contents

  Dedication

  Legal

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Jelly Comms

  Author Notes - Ell

  Social Links

  Series List

  DEDICATION

  To everyone who ever dreamed of making a dent in the universe.

  — Ellie

  LEGBA

  The Sword-Mage Chronicles 05

  JIT Beta Readers

  Brian Roberts

  A Darlene Heisserer

  Diane Smith

  Robert Brooks

  Kimberley Beaulieu

  Jackey Hankard-Brodie

  Robert Gould

  Mary Morris

  Kris Prendergast

  Chelsea Wright

  If I missed anyone, please let me know!

  Editor

  Sasha Landau

  Legba (this book) is a work of fiction.

  All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Sometimes both.

  This book Copyright © 2019 Ell Leigh Clarke

  Cover Design by Jeff Brown

  Cover copyright © ProsperityQM LLC

  ProsperityQM LLC supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

  The distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

  ProsperityQM LLC

  1500 South Lamar Blvd, 1050

  Austin, TX 78704

  First US edition, 2019

  Version 1.01.01

  The Sword-Mage Chronicles (and what happens within / characters / situations / worlds) are copyright © 2018-2019 by Ell Leigh Clarke

  CHAPTER ONE

  QX849-LF, Dead Rock, Deep Space

  Four months ago

  Legba strolled lazily into one of the cave’s larger chambers, a cylindrical vessel in one hand, a lantern in the other. The lantern threw out only a modest amount of light, and the darkness beyond was so thick that it almost had a palpable weight, yet he wandered through the cave as casually as if it were a wide, open field on a sunny day. He meandered past large outcroppings of rock, and around the familiar bunches of stalagmites, moving towards a large opening in the floor of the cave: a cavity so large that even a clumsy pilot could fly a good-sized pod through it with ease.

  As Legba approached the opening, a small desk and a wingback chair came into view, both sitting precariously close to the edge of the enormous pit. The chair was not oriented towards the desk but was instead turned towards the crater itself.

  Legba placed the lantern on the desk and sat down. He leaned back and pressed a button on the vessel’s side, and a small hole in the top popped open. He brought the vessel to his lips and breathed deeply, letting the vapor from it fill his lungs. A few moments later, he blew a billowing cloud into the empty space that lay before him.

  He smiled as he put the vessel down on the desk and peered into the darkness below him. Although he could work anywhere, this system of caverns, which he affectionately referred to as his “Space Cave,” was the spot he was most partial to. Though his corteX system obviated any need for screens, he still preferred to see information projected onto his visual field and it was nice to have a uniform space to stare into.

  Having spent much time exploring this cave system, Legba knew that it would have been impossible to find anything within the cavern more uniform than the pure darkness that he gazed upon right now. This inky depth was the blackboard on which he performed some of his most demanding calculations, and tonight’s work was set to be anything but a walk in the park.

  The old lwa took a deep, calming breath, and his visual field was immediately flooded with a dense array of variables: the components of his probability matrix. He’d long ago developed sets of recursive algorithms that considered millions of variables related to a situation, and calculated the most likely outcomes. His probability matrix had a stellar track record, predicting financial crises, scientific discoveries, and even the rise and fall of civilizations. Once, on a lark, he’d paired the probability matrix with a prose generator to produce the history of an empire 500 years before it was formed. The result would have made a fairly accurate encyclopedia entry about the empire. The only disappointment was that in the final coup that snuffed the empire out of existence, the matrix didn’t quite manage to predict the order in which the various heads of state would execute each other.

  Lately, though, the matrix had been struggling to make accurate predictions. Forecasts about events that were usually trivial, like the lifecycles of mining planets, were now wildly inaccurate. The matrix wasn’t just making errors about stock prices and population levels. The figures that it spat out were off by a few percentage points and a few million slaves, but more troublingly, the matrix was also predicting cataclysmic events that never came to pass. For whatever reason, the matrix kept insisting that entire sectors would crumble away into nothing, and yet sector after sector kept surviving beyond the matrix’s doomsday predictions.

  Much of Legba’s recent work had been focused on developing new variables to add to the matrix. Based on the errors that he was seeing, there was clearly some range of phenomena that he had not considered during the initial development of the matrix. Either that, or the universe had shifted. Dramatically.

  Although the algorithms did continually adapt themselves to improve the matrix’s predictive capabilities, its dismal performance over the last few months was a clear sign that, regardless of the cause, Legba would need to get under the hood to set it right.

  He glanced over the most recent batch of predictions, paying particular attention to the various “doomed” sectors. The new variables were gradually reducing the magnitude of these patches of chaos and error. Legba’s hope was that sufficiently sophisticated new variables would bring these untamed patches under tighter predictive control. In its most recent report, the matrix was offering better predictions for most of the universe, but there was one sector where the matrix’s predictions were still all over the map.

  As Legba assimilated the new information, he started to sing a pretty melody that popped into his mind. He couldn’t remember where he’d first heard it, or who had written it, but it had the endearing, childish quality of the species that had created it. He’d heard that this piece was not actually meant to be sung. Rather, the proper manner of execution was to sit in front of a box full of tightly stretched strings, and press a set of keys in sequence, to make a series of tiny hammers strike the strings, as though you were a simple little robot that manufactured chunks of vibrating air.

  What was that composer’s name? Rock something? Rockman? Rockmaninoff? Was that it? He glanced at a rock that lay near his feet. Maybe I just have rocks on the mind, he thought to himself.

  As he pored over the data, he raised the vessel to his mouth once more, and took another deep breath. It was becoming increasingly
apparent that this sphere of chaos was fairly localized, initially just in one sector. It seemed to move around through time, the chaos remaining restricted to a rather contained area. However, as time went by, it snowballed, expanding outwards, until the predictions for the entire system were a mess.

  As he exhaled, a smile of recognition spread over his face. His mind raced, and the array of figures parted like a curtain. Using only his thoughts, he loaded vast caches of the previous data set into a different array of algorithms. These algorithms could determine whether this sphere of chaos mapped to some real-world phenomenon, which would hopefully make the situation much easier to understand. If the chaos tracked some actual phenomenon, then perhaps the phenomenon itself would reveal the sorts of variables that remained unarticulated.

  The only drawback of this analysis was that it took entire minutes to run to completion. Given that Legba had ingested more than his share of vaporous stimulants in the last hour, he wasn’t in the mood to just sit in the dark, waiting for the algorithms to finish their work. He sat back in his chair, and the algorithms were replaced by a huge grid, each element showing a different video feed. With his swarms of drones distributed through the universe and his (usually functional) probability matrix, he could often check in on anyone who happened to be of interest at that moment. Someone like Blackfriar was easy. Unsurprisingly, logical individuals tended to be easy to predict. Shango, Olofi, and Loco were a bit trickier, but possible, guided as they were by their stumbling attempts to do good, which might waver, but that was at least something to follow. Amroth and Malleghan were much more difficult to predict, the matrix’s output for them being closer to chance than actual prediction. Legba had yet to get a full handle on the range of Malleghan’s possible courses of action, which made him and his followers that much harder to anticipate. That said, if Legba ever got verification of Amroth acting in a particularly servile manner, he didn’t need his probability matrix to know that Malleghan was around.

  Legba took another pull from the vessel. As he exhaled another vaporous cloud, his brow twitched. He returned the vessel to the desk, looked into the hole, and took a deep breath. Most of the video feeds fell away, leaving only one, whose output filled the darkness. It showed a desert landscape, with barely any signs of life. Just a smattering of xeric shrubs, a shallow, circular crater, and a flat expanse that reached out to a distant mesa that was barely visible in the video feed. As Legba’s focus wandered across the arid plain, he remembered standing at the base of that mesa, before the long walk to the crater. The last place he had opened the crossroads.

  By now, opening a rip in the space-time continuum had the familiarity and ease of playing a piece of music that one knew by heart. There was a sense of mastery and control, but also a sense of delight, of having used the very material of existence, whether sound waves or the fabric of space-time, to create a moment of evanescent beauty.

  This last act of entering the crossroads had been particularly beautiful. Yes, there were the radiating patterns of light, as complicated and stunning as dozens of simultaneous sunsets. Legba had always relished the delicate way the fabric of space-time would flutter before him, a curtain so diaphanous that it could barely be seen.

  This one stood out, though, for the intensity of the internal experience. Legba could intellectualize the event, aware as he was of the colossal magnitude of energy that would flow through him in these moments. Such an enormous burst of energy was bound to incite various physical side effects. However, in the moment, he made no effort to try to separate himself from the experience, and in this particular rupturing of space-time he really let himself go.

  Every physical sensation felt magnified by multiple orders of magnitude. On his skin he could feel not only the air, and the Brownian motion of the infinitesimal particles contained within it, but also the temporal imprints of everything that had occupied that patch of space spanning back to the beginning of time. For Legba, this was euphoric, a high unlike any other experience he had ever encountered. That said, he did recognize that this sort of experience might be so overwhelming that it could loosen and dissolve a more delicate, less prepared psyche.

  Things had calmed down considerably as he passed through the tear, onto the bridge of the crossroads. There was no horizon, so it could be very disorienting to first-time visitors. However, once one acclimatized to this fact, it became possible to enjoy the tranquility of the crossroads.

  Or, to be more precise, it became possible to enjoy the perfect balance of complete tranquility and complete chaos. In this space, an overwhelming abundance of possibilities converged simultaneously: everything that had ever happened, everything that would ever happen, and all the possibilities that would never be realized streamed through the silent emptiness of this space. Whenever Legba visited, he would dip his consciousness into this pulsing stream, seeing flashes of events like snippets from a film. It was as if he were sipping from a torrent of possibilities that slowed to a trickle as a miniscule fraction emerged into the Seen world, which would ultimately attain solidity as actual events in space and time.

  The crossroads was a place of deep and almost overwhelming quiet, of constantly flowing possibility, and Legba aimed to keep it that way. He made his rounds methodically, ensuring that no one else would avail themselves of this beautiful, powerful place.

  This last visit, however, had not been an experience of pure serenity. As he moved through the vast, empty space, he had a distinct feeling that he was not alone. He had a dim awareness of another presence. A presence that was not nearby in any spatial sense, but one that was somehow watching him attentively. Legba could feel a pair of unseen eyes; a gaze that burned into the back of his head.

  Whose, it was impossible to say. Perhaps Malleghan’s. Perhaps Amroth’s, if he’d somehow increased his powers. Perhaps even someone Legba had not considered, or met, or even heard of. Someone whose presence Legba had only felt in these still, quiet moments on the bridge.

  This was not the first time he had felt this gaze. He’d had a vague feeling of being watched on a few previous trips, but this visit was the moment when he became sure of it: I am being watched, and I must be more wary of entering the crossroads.

  And so he had left. Another tear in space-time, but the effects of this one felt muted by the melancholy knowledge that he likely would not be returning to the crossroads for some time. True, it was not quite part of the Unseen realm, a place he deeply delighted in visiting, but at least while he was in the crossroads, he felt closer to that realm.

  He stepped out of the crater, into the new calm of the desert night. Yet compared to the stillness of the crossroads, standing in the empty desert felt like standing in the middle of a freeway full of speeding, noisy vehicles. A light breeze tugged at his clothes and his hair, and the night was alive with the pulsing sounds of shrubs growing and the rumbling scrape of tectonic plates. He made the long, solitary walk, back to the mesa, unsure when he would return to the crossroads, or the Unseen realm that lay beyond it.

  The video stream of the desert began to glow a soft shade of blue, snapping Legba out of his reverie. The analysis was complete. A slight rightward movement of his eyes cast the video of the desert away, and it was replaced with the algorithms’ output. It turned out this sphere of chaos did map to a real-world phenomenon. It followed precisely the spatiotemporal path one would expect of a living being.

  His breath quickening, he searched the points of the path against the logs of his entire drone swarm, verifying whether he might have any footage of the being. Legba smiled as the results flowed across his visual field. There were a handful of hits, all from the past six months, from drones that were on autopilot, harvesting 360 degrees of visual information for no particular purpose.

  Legba selected the most recent piece of footage and played it. It was not long: the drone seemed to speed past a set of large apartment complexes. However, each individual building was only onscreen for a split second, so Legba barely saw anything. He
twisted his mouth, devising a function describing the living being’s spatiotemporal path, with the hope of picking out this particular being within the footage. He took a deep breath and ran an isolate function.

  The darkness was filled with a single frame from the footage. It was zoomed in on a single individual. It was a woman, in her late twenties. She stood on a balcony that jutted out of one of the apartment buildings, her eyes searching the sky. Legba smiled. Yes, she was very pretty, but more importantly, this clear shot of her face would make identifying her a cinch. He barely had to think as he made a quick mapping of her face, which he then used to search the imperial records system.

  Legba leaned back in his chair contentedly as an identification document filled the darkness. “Raven Black,” he said aloud. “What a strange name.” He stood, gathered up his lamp and his vessel, and walked away from the pit. A smile crossed his lips. Time to pay Ms. Black a visit.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Aboard the Chesed, Deep Space

  Shango stood in front of the main screen on the bridge, staring up at it. His hands were clasped behind his back, and his face had settled into a deep frown. The screen showed a live video feed of what lay before the Chesed: a small mass of rock, floating in a nearly empty expanse of space. The stony clump looked insignificant, like a mere chunk of debris, perhaps the result of the collision of two equally unimportant astronomical objects. He looked over Jelly Bean’s shoulder and tried to parse the cascading lines of navigational information that flooded the screen on the navigation console.

  His eyes narrowed, and he looked back at the small mass of rock. “Are you sure this is it?”

  Jelly Bean followed Shango’s gaze to the tiny rock that lay before them. “Affirmative. It matches precisely with the visual impressions that I uploaded from Bentley’s corteX.”