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The day before, Casus had brought her a message. It was a request from Garvesh to come visit within a few days, so she had it set aside in her mental calendar.

“Since you’re here already, could you put in a requisition request at the church for me?” Krahe asked Casus.

“I have grown to dislike being treated as an errand-boy, but I understand that your situation necessitates it. Perhaps consider training Barzai to deliver messages. Until such time, though, what is the request?”

“Physical training equipment. It would be easier if I could just train in private rather than showing my face at church gymnasiums. Weights, bars, some roll-up mats. I don’t need any expensive machines.”

“Alright. Do you have space for them, or do you intend to rearrange the furniture here?”

“I bought a place.”

“Where?”

“Where do you think?”

“A below-average part of town? Out of sight and out of mind?”

“Bingo.”

“I could have it delivered to a nearby storehouse in a warded crate.”

“Works for me.” She shrugged, raising her legs and flipping forwards off the sofa onto her feet. “The house is number ninety-four on Gashward Road. Want some stir-fry?”

“Gashward?” the Banisher questioned, setting down his book and following in her stead. “You truly did find a hole. I don’t actually know where that is. And yes, I would like stir-fry. Same as last time?”

“Spicier, but more or less the same. Found these mushrooms that have a texture and flavor sort of like pork, but also contain hot pepper oils,” she said, half-mindedly setting the burner to full blast. White flame erupted from the ring, and a small bubble gurgled up through the stove’s fuel tank with shimmering white liquid swirling behind a translucent gauge.

“Are overly spiced foods another one of those foldover things for you? A matter of nostalgia?”

“You could say that,” she said with a slightly somber tone. “Everything was either spiced all to hell with synthetic filth or full of sweet corn syrup. Or both…”

A few moments and mouthfuls of the colorful dish passed.

“But stir-fry just doesn’t taste right if it’s not spicy, at least to me. Is it too much? I expected you to have a high tolerance for heat.”

Casus curiously scooped rice and individual pieces of vegetables, roots, and meat-mushrooms as he replied, “I do, but I cannot help but notice the glaring discrepancy between foods I eat in restaurants or at the temple, versus your cooking. I also cannot help but find it strange that you cook at all. I expected you to take full advantage of the city’s street vendors.”

“Who says I don’t?”

“Touché.”

***

More investigation. Another direction. Another lead. It was an awkward hour, early in the morning, when the place was all but deserted save for a small group of diehards in the lobby, trudging onward through a more than twelve-hour session of wargames. Krahe wagered that her arrha paled in comparison to the stuff they were hopped up on; she’d seen them drinking and smoking various things, as well as chewing roots of some kind.

A pile of ash and cigarette butts began to occupy some of her Kenoma Pocket as she searched through the Lost Sun Society’s library. Despite its comparatively small size, it took her far longer to go through any single row of books due to their greater substance. In a public library, she skimmed all but one out of seven or eight books, and only read into one out of fifteen, but here, every third and sometimes every other book had some thread of promise begging for Krahe to pull and unravel.

Inevitably, however, she found what she was searching for. The library’s contents were all clustered together by topic if applicable, except for one—Anathemism. These books and scrolls were conveniently scattered in weird places with most of their neighbors covered in dust and cobwebs. The anathemism books themselves seemed to be purposely covered in fake coats of these things. She referenced everything she found against the index of the library’s volumes to find that none were missing, but a few volumes had pages that were… wrong. They were there, very much so, but they weren’t the original pages.

She checked the index again.

The downright demonic-looking book in her hand, Anathemia Oscura, had been repaired recently. Pages had been found missing. The dust cover also concealed a slip with the information those pages would have contained, as well as a bounty offer from the librarian for whoever found the culprit. It wasn’t much.

This, alone, was just a grain atop a pile of golden sand that Krahe would melt down to later use for joining the shards of this case together. Her study of Anathemia Oscura yielded little headway in the case; the removed pages pertained to various obscure methods by which someone could protect themselves against anathema, as well as how one could prepare and mitigate the deleterious effects of using anathemism.

Krahe felt the mounting weight of exhaustion crawling up her back as she rolled open another scroll, and found that it was a fragment. What little of it was intact detailed the gruesome fate of some anathemists, and the similarly gruesome things that had been done to harness their unrotting corpses. It only barely began to describe the anatomical effects of bone-deep anathema burns before it cut off. She recorded everything she could from the partial scroll, put everything back where it had been, and left like a ghost. She exited into the side alley rather than out the front door.

She was sure she would find what she needed in the Temple of Records, and upon visiting that place, that hunch turned out true. Speaking with the librarian went as such:

“I came upon a partial scroll pertaining to the ultimate fates of certain extreme anathemists, titled Burning Torment Wrought in Black. Does the Temple of Records carry a complete copy?”

“That is the case, yes. However, it is in a restricted section that appears to be beyond your clearance.”

“Figures. Someone should have already put in an elevated access request on my behalf. What is the status of that?”

“Still processing. I expect that it will be no more than two or three days, so I will have the text prepared and held in reserve. If the request is approved, you may bring the proof and pick up your scroll the same day.”

Two to three days was a fair bit sooner than her next checkup with Firminus, but she supposed it was acceptable. She banished bureaucracy from her mind for now. Garvesh was waiting.

And he was, indeed, waiting, not just in the figurative sense.

“You’re an hour fuckin’ late!” he chided her when she arrived. It was a lie. She was only half an hour late, and it was only because she had to shake someone she was sure had begun following her. “Egh, fuckin’ whatever. Come into the back. This isn’t something for the front end.”

He led her into the storeroom, where two heavy-duty cases sat atop a similarly heavy-duty metal crate—one small and the other large. Alongside them, there were several pieces of chunky equipment, with black cables all around. More than anything, it felt like corporate prototype hardware. Her hunch turned out to be correct when she asked, “What is it?”

“A Mamon Coupler. For when you have a go at Hashem.”

“You know I’ve never used one, right? I’m open to the idea of using one, but I won’t bet my life on something I can’t use properly.”

“Yeah, I know, I know. I’m not stupid. I have a good reason. Let me get to it.”

After fiddling with the cases’ holeless locks, he flipped them open. Their interiors were lined in velvet, molded to fit only their contents. Furthermore, they were so densely warded it was tangible. It was not by way of paper talismans, but through protective glyphs embroidered directly into the lining, and that was just the visible layer.

Besides the audible hiss of air rushing in, Krahe also felt a more esoteric form of the same phenomenon, like the stuff inside had just come into existence the moment the seal was broken. Within the larger one was a set of partial body armor. Front and back plates for the upper chest, bracers and shin-guards with quarter-spheroid extensions to partly protect the middle joints, and sizable flat plates that she guessed had to be shoulder guards. It looked like extra plating that would be issued to some corpo death squad to wear over their standard armor. All of it was a dark, matte metal.

As for the smaller case, it contained a belt in the same starkly utilitarian design. Some of its curves, tubes, and exposed mechanics gave off the impression of an overgrown dregsteamer belt. It had two distinct slots; one contained a metal cell of some kind with a readout marked ‘full,’ while the other, on the belt’s left-hand side, was a clearly marked slot for a voidkey. Well, to call it a slot was generous. It was a circular recess about ten centimeters across and no more than two centimeters deep. Its interior was filled by twisting, etched patterns, while its perimeter was outlined by the word VOIDKEY repeating over and over, stamped straight into the metal. On the inside of the smaller case, she noticed a thin, unassuming dossier. The only text on its exterior was smack dab in the middle. Three words.

PROJECT BLACK SUN

The combination of roughshod construction and razor-sharp design had already set off alarm bells in her head. The ominously classified dossier only made her certain that she was right.

“It’s…” Garvesh began.

“A prototype?” Krahe interrupted.

“Yeah. A real, bleedin’ edge prototype. Not like that Silver Slip Key I’ve got on display. Straight from Kristoffen Heavy Ironworks. Y’know, the folks that make the dregsteamers. The Black Sun Project is their answer to the lucrative mid-ranker market. Idea is you start off with a dregsteamer and then buy one of these when you ‘ make it .’ They want their special catalyst to adapt to the user at first coupling, and then have it re-adapt to any new souldregs the user decides to introduce. Ambitious if nothing else.”

“And the armor?”

“Part of the coupler system. It’s a support framework for the suit to form around, supposed to make the end result more resilient. They also haven’t been able to make the coupler work with a full-construct framework. It was either compatibility grafts for the user, or this framework. You’re supposed to be able to customize the supports in the final version. Y’know, get your own custom armor fitted to it and shit. ‘Leasteast that’s how they plan to advertise it so they can upsell the users on overpriced premium supports.”

“Not my problem,” Krahe shrugged. “What is my problem, though, is that using a dregsteamer is bad enough. I’ve seen the state Casus ended up in. What’s the catch with this one? Is it the same side effects as a dregsteamer, but even worse? I can cope, but I’d rather know that the crash is coming.”

“High cognitive strain factor and Throughput requirements for the performance. The catalyst doesn’t even respond to some 80% of testers, and the prototypes have a habit of just burning out within a handful of uses, or even sooner if you push them too hard. This one, uh… Let’s say it had some quality control issues and got sent off for inspection. If it responds to you, I’ll make the call and my friend will have an ‘ accident ’ that destroys the unit. Hold on, I’ll plug it into the diagnostic unit.”

The unit was a chunky box twice the belt’s size with a projection eye and black cables coming out of it, one of which was connected to a similarly cubular unit with a small thaumine fuel cell. The others, Garvesh cautiously plugged into an out-of-place port on the prototype coupler’s belt, connected to the main unit with a thin cable.

As he did so, he continued speaking in a surprisingly enthusiastic manner. “I figured it would work for you, since you’ve got that funky new spine. You’ll still be fine if it doesn’t. It’s not like—Uch, this one really doesn’t want to go in. There we go. As I was saying, it’s not like the Silberblut Coupler. At worst you’ll get a splitting headache and detransform. They worked out the aneurysm problem three iterations ago. Put on the framework armor for now while I set this up.”

Krahe did as was asked of her, finding that besides belts, the armor also had quite complex internal frames that automatically shifted to fit her. She couldn’t help but smile. This— all this —from Garvesh’s spiel to the bleeding-edge prototype, was bringing back a slew of memories. She couldn’t help but notice the asymmetry in the bracers and the shoulder plates. The right bracer had lighter plating in exchange for a socket of some kind, while the left bracer and shoulder plate were both substantially chunkier, with the left bracer almost forming a small shield.

“Alright… Just a few more…” Garvesh rumbled under his breath. The lizard finally managed to get the diagnostic unit to flicker from a continuous downpour of readouts to a single floating message.

AWAITING TEST USER

“Now pull your key and slot it into the belt. You haven’t had it in for long so it shouldn’t be difficult to extract.”

Garvesh was right in that it wasn’t difficult, but it was an order of magnitude harder than Krahe had expected. It was a sickly, ticklish sensation that sent waves of shivers down her back with every centimeter. Once it was out, she felt a yawning emptiness that slowly closed up like biorepair gel rushing in to fill a wound. The Black Sun Coupler took in the key without issue, and the stamped readout around the slot shifted to form a dial with a handful of increments with the head of her voidkey becoming the selector. Donning the belt, it was somewhat loose until she buckled it in the back, at which point it shrunk to fit.

After pulling the dossier out of its box, Garvesh flipped through it, muttering, “Insert fuel cell… Release the safety switch… Connect contactor… Ah, here it is. Rotate the dial forward until it clicks once—from the first position into the second position.”

Krahe gave him an incredulous look at the wannabe-idiotproof instructions. She still did as he said. There was some initial resistance, but once it was overcome the dial spun freely until it snapped into the second position. The belt awakened, several connections clicking into place as it emitted a rising tone. It reminded her of a fusion bomb being armed.

“Now turn the dial forward until it circles back around to the first position. This should initiate the transformation since the prototype doesn’t have a cognitive trigger safety. Fair word of warning, it comes with an arm-mounted hardpoint catalyst. Like a gun that spits out a basic offensive thaumaturgy at a rapid rate of fire.”

“So that’s what it was. Should’ve said so sooner,” she sighed as she started undoing the straps of her bracers so she could swap them around. Once both bracers and shoulder guards had been switched, she finally completed the sequence. The gaped-open serpent maw that was her voidkey’s head spun around and came to a halt.

For all her effort, she found herself briefly losing awareness of her surroundings. A typical symptom of momentary nervous overload caused by abrupt integration of new hardware—a type of benign seizure. It was all too much like getting into fancy power armor and quick-booting the unit. Her spine felt like it was buzzing for a few seconds after the fact, but it soon settled down.

When she returned to awareness, she saw two things. First, a gobsmacked Garvesh. Second, the diagnostic unit spewing lines of data, yet with a distinct absence of errors. A homely HUD partly filled her sight. It even had an ultra-retro searcher reticle! Looking herself over, Krahe raised her hand to see that her bracers had not only grown, but bulked up significantly and changed in shape, including armored gloves and upper-arm guards. The undersuit, visible on the palms and in the elbows, was innocuous dark-gray, almost matte-black, looking like a dense ballistic weave. Reaching up, she raised her hand into her field of vision, and couldn’t help but notice the short barreled machine gun bolted to her forearm. It had something resembling an action but devoid of the mechanics of such a thing, with a cable shaped like an ammo conveyor snaking up her arm and under the shield-like shoulder plate. The HUD pointed out where the “gun” was aiming with a separate crosshair.

“Mirror?” she asked.

“Uh…” was the reply.

Garvesh looked around, and after manhandling some very heavy looking boxes, he hauled out an antique full body mirror in a frame of precious metals, or at least one made to look the part.

Krahe almost laughed when she saw herself in full. On her head was a helmet whose shape was only a half step from the infamous stahlhelm, and her face was concealed by a plague doctor-esque beaked gas mask with green glowing eye ports. Not even an iota of humanity shone through that ominous guise. The pattern of stark, aggressive shape language rendered in dark metal continued with the rest of the armor, though nothing quite matched the helmet’s ominous impact. The upper half of her torso had a full chest plate, while the midsection was covered by segmented, interlocked plates to preserve mobility. Her right arm’s forearm and shoulder plates were big and thick enough to act as effective shields.

A skirt of plates hung over her upper legs. Her normal pants were still there, seemingly unaltered, though with some focus she could feel the undersuit beneath them. Much like her pants, the Black Sun armor had incorporated her boots into itself. The armor’s boots were half her own, and half the Black Sun shin guards, merged and amplified into the platonic ideal of death squad doorkickers.

“I look like some activist’s rendition of a tyrannical regime’s enforcer,” she said, barely suppressing an amused chuckle.

Garvesh, caught up in checking and rechecking the diagnostic readouts, ignored the remark and said, “Do some squats.”

When she fulfilled his request, he continued. “Alright, now hop in place.”

This banal game of “simon says” continued for a few minutes before he finally, mercifully, brought out an unreasonably handsome bust of some guy and set it on a crate.

“Last test. Shoot. No need to worry about the noise, I’ve got this place warded.”

The sound of bassy thumping ripped through the storeroom, and a deluge of abnormally large Tracers flowed through the air. Flashes of orange-red colored everything. The burst lasted a number of seconds that could be counted on one hand, but half of the bust was gone by the time she was done.

The lizard looked at Krahe, then at the bust, then back at Krahe. With a somewhat accusatory tone, he said, “You know I’ve tried to smash that thing with hammers before.”

“So we can call the test a success, then.”

“The system’s throwing alerts about anathema contamination, but otherwise, yeah. I’ll turn off the safeguards for when you take it out for a ride for real. Don’t expect it to survive. Right now it’s the diagnostic unit powering it, but that cell will melt down once it’s out of juice and it’ll be a coin toss if it takes the whole belt with it. On the optimistic side, you might get five minutes out of the thing if you pace yourself.”

“Five minutes of this kind of performance are all I’ll need. Just need a Mamon Knight name, now.”

“Seriously? For five minutes.”

“You never know. I might get myself one of these once all the kinks get ironed out. I’m thinking ‘Viridaimon.’ ”

“Please do not explain the wordplay behind it.”

“Casus told you, huh.”

“Of course he told me.”

“How much do you want for it?”

“Just take the damn thing. I couldn’t source a Gulf Key no matter what strings I pulled in any reasonable amount of time, so consider this the replacement. I still have people looking for one, they’re just a bitch to find. So long as the belt’s wick gets burnt in the process of getting revenge for my cousin, I’ll consider us even.”

“How specific is that criteria? Should Viridaimon grind the assassin into paste, or is it alright if I just off her without the suit and then use it to come after her employers?”

“Ah, I don’t care,” the lizard huffed. “Keep it and try to reverse engineer it for all I care, so long as the assassin—Wait, her? Was that a slip of the tongue or do you already know who did it?”

“I have my sources.”

“Better than mine, it seems. Y’mind sharing? Could look into her some more. Promise I won’t do anything stupid. I’m not some hot-blooded whelp… I’d want to do it myself anyhow, and I’m not much stronger than Imraal in my state.”

A melancholic resignation came over him as he said that. Krahe weighed the risks, and deemed them minimal: “She’s with the Silversword Agency. A young human by the name of Eutropia.”

“I will attempt to look into her, though I expect that I will not find more than you already know.”

“Do so discreetly. It would not do for her to be on guard when I come to collect.”

“Come now. You think too little of me.” Garvesh chuckled wryly. “Take the diagnostic kit as well. If possible, run the full battery of checks before using the coupler.”

Detransforming left her feeling strange and her head thrumming with a dull ache, but grinding a couple Tabryxas between her teeth helped set her back in line. After doffing the extra support armor and packing everything up, she tried to waste no time in leaving Garvesh in peace. Her departure was delayed by an offer she couldn’t refuse. “Y’want some Machine Crab Juice? I was making some just as you arrived.”

Casus waited for her back at the safehouse. His expectant, excited reaction to the Black Sun Coupler proved that he had known about it in advance. Despite the distrustful voices niggling in the back of her head when he took to fiddling with the diagnostic equipment, she didn’t say anything.

It wasn’t long before this short time of peace came to an end.

At the end of each investigative thread, more often than not, violence awaited.

Getting access to the necessary restricted section in the Temple of Records only confirmed what she had already assumed, and built upon her suspicions beyond what she had dared to theorize.

The texts she found were more a collection of notes and letters than actual books, leading her to believe these were the originals which the Lost Sun Society’s books were based on, or at least copies of the originals. The text was recorded as “The Human Charcoal Letters.” They were dated in the time window of 4127AB to 4183AB. Over a millennium ago.

They spoke of a fate supposedly worse than death. An exceedingly rare condition wherein, over the course of an extended period, an anathemist could somehow self-mummify into a state akin to a living ember, not quite truly alive, but not quite truly dead; so-called Adustocorpus. The bodies of such anathemists could, supposedly, be split up and harnessed as power sources or for the creation of anathemic relics. The rarity of this occurring naturally was such that information was scarce prior to 4127, but cases had spiked to the extreme during the writing of the Human Charcoal Letters, and so had knowledge on the condition.

In particular, the Human Charcoal Letters spoke at length on several occult practices that all boiled down to variations of the same thing: Methods of manipulation and occult rituals designed to aid in driving someone to the point of Adustocorpus, so that they may be harvested for the practitioner’s own use. Uncensored, surviving excerpts from retrieved ritual books described the subject as “human charcoal,” hence the name of these documents. These practices were described simply as “charring,” which was obviously for the purpose of dehumanizing the victims to soothe the practitioner’s conscience.

The same chamber also contained extensive documentation on the Twin Churches’ joint effort in stamping out the individuals and occult groups which had created and used these methods. Krahe only skimmed through these records, finding not much more of use for the Lost Sun Killer Myth case. Regardless, she had gotten what she was looking for.

Upon next visiting the Lost Sun Society, she found that, curiously enough, the texts she had touched were now no longer missing any pages, and had been replaced into their proper places. Krahe asked the librarian about it in a roundabout way, who claimed to be unaware of any recent repairs to any of the texts.

On her way out, she ever so briefly glimpsed a lithe lizard. She assumed it to be Sorayah, since all the other Saurians in the Society were on the heavy, crocodilian side. One of them, a man revered as a god-like miniature painter, resembled a humanoid komodo dragon, and smelled the part too, despite his efforts.

Krahe didn’t think much of it as she randomly chose a direction away from the Society, remaining no more and no less on guard than she normally was. Of course, by any normal person’s standards her baseline was a schizophrenic level of constant vigilance. She wouldn’t have survived Crescent Jezail otherwise.

So it was to her surprise, and, admittedly, excitement, when she realized she was not only being tailed by several people but surrounded by them at that. They… weren’t great. They were good, yes, but not great. About the best one could expect from amateurs. Their outfits were too homogenous, and at least two of them wore openly visible Lost Sun jewelry. Krahe had to give them credit; they didn’t know that she could see through Barzai, or that Barzai was even there. Truly, a flying, camouflaged pair of extra eyes and ears was an immensely powerful tool.