Combustion, Ignition

Of all things Lugae hated -- a long and storied list of things that encompassed, at times, all of heaven and earth and the nations of man in between -- the greatest was a mystery that defied solution.

It had always galled him that even with his high position in the court of Damcyan -- even after he had supplied them with a revolutionary new engine that had enabled the creation of a prototype hovercraft and practically guaranteed the technological superiority of Damcyan before Baron had suddenly begun to darken the skies -- even then, he had never been allowed even a glimpse of the Crystal of Fire, the very power that held the kingdom together at the root. That honor was reserved for the royal family alone, as if they had earned the right.

Though Lugae tried to keep himself above such petty emotions as jealousy and revenge, he had to admit that standing in the ruins of Damcyan's crystal room less than a year after they exiled him was extremely gratifying.

Still encased in its mirrored dais, the Crystal of Fire bathed the glass tiles of the shrine in red and orange light. The heat pouring off the artifact left a visible shimmer in the air, like the desert at midday. Lugae imagined the thing hooked into a massive engine -- perpetual combustion, requiring no fuel and never stopping in its inexorable propulsion. It should be in the center of a war machine, not in a damned church. Damcyan's king and queen were sentimental idiots, he thought, and the world was better off now that they were both dead.

According to Lord Golbez's information, which seemed to always be unerringly correct, the Fire Crystal was the only one in the world that could not be handled safely by a human being. Lugae had assured Golbez that he could devise a suitable containment system for it -- in fact, it was quite possible that he'd done enough modifications to his own physiology that he could pick it up himself without any damage that a few hours in the lab couldn't fix -- but Golbez apparently had something simpler in mind.

When Golbez explained that he was summoning the Archfiend of Fire, Lugae had expected some kind of ritual, at least -- a summoning circle, a word of power, anything. Instead, Golbez tapped his foot impatiently, with a resounding ring of metal on tile, and a column of vivid red-and-purple flame erupted from the ground with little fanfare. The color was unnatural, a mix more akin to a painter's palette than even the most outlandish product of natural combustion. Lugae blinked in the sudden flood of light, and it was a moment before he could make out the figure that emerged from the flame.

Lugae had seen the Archfiends of Water and Earth -- the monstrous turtle with a grin that lingered in one's nightmares, and the shambling corpse who kept himself swathed in bandages that could not quite hold back the effluvia of putrefying flesh and gnawing maggots that swept in his wake. Why Golbez kept the creatures around, Lugae could not understand -- he had demonstrated many times that he could build a zombie at least as durable and strong as Scarmiglione, and why Golbez would rely on a shapeshifter when given two weeks and enough tools Lugae could give him a corpse-puppet of the king that Golbez could operate directly was a mystery to him.

Rubicante, however, was different. Lugae shoved his goggles down onto his nose to get a clearer look at the newcomer -- looking directly at him was just on the edge of being painfully bright, like staring into the sun just as it was dipping over the horizon. Lugae could make out a human-shaped outline, a full several heads taller than Golbez's already massive height, wisps of smoke trailing off the shoulders of a glimmering mantle that rippled without wind, vibrant red and orange sparking into patches of searing white and blue heat -- the sort of colors that Lugae had only seen in flames produced under perfect laboratory conditions.

Lugae sucked in a breath that burned dry in his throat. Rubicante might be been an abomination like the rest, but unlike the others he was magnificent.

"Rubicante," Golbez said, inclining his head ever so slightly. It was the most Lugae had ever seen Golbez acknowledge anyone in greeting.

"If you are going to call me up to carry your spoils," the Archfiend boomed, his voice echoing off the shattered walls, "you could at least address me by my proper title." The Archfiend looked around, his mouth hidden by his mantle and his brows drawn into a tight expression of mild disdain. Lugae bristled. The bombs had been his handiwork, after all, and he got the distinct sense that they Archfiend of Fire was unimpressed with the display.

"As though I would summon you for a task unbefitting your majesty," Golbez said, dryly. "As it happens, I have a second purpose in mind as well. Doctor. Step forward."

Golbez was not the sort of person you disobeyed. Lugae shuffled forward and looked up at the massive Archfiend. His cloak fell from his shoulders to his feet, leaving charred stripes where it touched the ground. Of Rubicante's body, nothing could be seen. Had it not been for the tiny glimpse of clawed, bare feet between the jagged points of the mantle's hem, Lugae might have though Rubicante was nothing but an empty shroud. The Archfiend barely acknowledged Lugae's scrutiny at all.

"Doctor Lugae will be assisting you in securing our next target, in preparation for our final revival of the Tower," Golbez went on, apparently not considering Lugae capable of properly introducing himself. "Consider him your chief strategist."

"I do not require the assistance of a mortal," the Archfiend said. His cloak rippled as he spoke, revealing a thin sliver of ruddy ankle and shin before encasing him fully once more.

"If you please," Lugae snapped, in spite of himself, "I invented the explosives that decimated this tower and I personally mixed the nerve gas that slaughtered nearly the entirety of Damcyan's standing garrison in a single shot. I am not a 'mere' --"

"Yes, you see, he has qualifications to spare," Golbez said. "I don't think you quite understand, Rubicante. The Doctor can operate the machinery we will find inside the Tower, and besides that he will be a valuable asset against Eblan. I have not brought you here to argue. Remember the terms of your contract."

Behind his cowl, Rubicante's expression was enigmatic. Lugae stared up at him, searching his face for some sign of emotion -- of approval, of hatred, of anything. It was blank. The cape rippled again as though the entity beneath was breathing, and Lugae caught a second glimpse of fire-red flesh, for a little longer this time. Save for the color, it looked human enough. He wondered if that flesh would yield solidly to a scalpel, or if it would part harmlessly around the knife like so much smoke.

"On the occasion of meeting an Autarch," Golbez said, a bit of archness creeping into his voice that never failed to make the hair on the back of Lugae's neck stand on end, "it's customary that you kneel."

"I think, sir," Lugae said, pushing his goggles back up on his forehead and glaring at Rubicante with a look of defiance, "that I will stand instead."

Conquering Eblan was not the hardest part of their task. Separated as they were by the shadow of the mountains from anyone who wished them ill, the Eblanese expected no war to reach their shores. The legendary assassins and spies that Lugae had heard tales of as a boy had been reduced to a bare handful, their skills blunted by a lack of targets upon which to practice it. Still, they were in the way of Golbez's great plan, and he could not run the risk that they might pull together in the face of a true threat. They had to be eliminated -- of that, there was no question.

Rubicante found the matter distasteful, and left the details largely to Lugae. He outfitted Golbez's monstrous troops with canisters of experimental gas and bolted reinforcing armor directly to their skeletons, while Rubicante brooded and occasionally came to watch him impassively as he worked. Sometimes -- randomly, as far as Lugae could tell -- he would offer healing magic to speed Lugae's efforts...or at least what seemed like healing magic, though it did not match Lugae's working understanding of it. On these occasions, Lugae would watch bone and sinew twist itself back together with awful fascination. The process was opaque -- no words of power, no chanting, and only a few gestures hidden beneath the impassable barrier of Rubicante's mantle. It infuriated Lugae that he might never understand what Rubicante was doing when he healed wounds.

He split his annoyance evenly between his immediate superior and the vast enigma of the Tower's alien machinery, and the Tower yielded its secrets much more readily.

In the end, Rubicante led the charge as he had been asked, but Lugae could not resist seeing how his plans would turn out first hand, and was at Rubicante's side when they first attacked. If Rubicante was grateful, he made no sign, and Lugae felt a gnawing in the pit of his stomach that her recognized, abstractly, as disappointment.

Lugae had been forced to retreat to attend to their artillery quite soon after the fighting started, but that was the damnable thing about ninja -- you weren't really any safer in your own encampment than you were on the battlefield, and it only took one of them to kill you.

They murdered her, eventually, but Barnabas had been forced to carry Lugae back to the Underground. Lugae lay on the floor of his makeshift laboratory in the newly-opened Tower for what seemed like ages, rasping orders to Barnabas, who could barely understand what he was being instructed to do, poor thing. Eventually, the flesh-robot had assembled a tidy pile of medical supplies, but by then Lugae lacked the strength to even reach for them. The irony was sickening.

Rubicante was not a subtle creature in many ways -- he could never sneak up on you, because you felt the heat of his presence long before you saw or heard him. It was impossible to ignore, like a furnace suddenly roaring to life in your immediate vicinity.

"Autarch," Lugae rasped. "Autarch, please." He hadn't used Rubicante's proper title in weeks -- he called him "General", since it seemed to gall him, if only slightly.

The massive Archfiend kneeled beside him. Even kneeling he was fully as tall as an ordinary man. Lugae blinked through the haze of heat and tried to guess if Rubicante was feeling charitable.

The metal floor of the Tower conducted heat with surprising rapidity, and the panels beneath him began to warm. Lugae wondered, wildly, whether or not he'd be cooked alive if the Archfiend took his time in fixing him.

"Did you fight with honor?" Rubicante asked him. "None of your cruel tricks? No traps, no poisons?"

Lugae gritted his teeth. "Barnabas beat her down after she knifed me. She had ten times the military training that I had and I throttled her with my bare hands. Is that honorable enough for you?" His voice rose to a desperate pitch -- half infuriated, half begging. Lugae screwed his eyes shut against the pain and waited.

Rubicante's touch was like being seared with a firebrand -- a white-hot arc of pain across his forehead where the Archfiend's massive fingers pressed into his temples, a soothing healer's gesture turned to torture. Lugae bit back a scream of mixed agony and relief as Rubicante's healing magic shot through his body like lightning, racing white-hot down his spine.

Under the searing heat, Rubicante's touch felt much like a human being, Lugae thought wildly -- the solid press of bone beneath the softness of flesh. The sort of flesh that may yet yield to a scalpel after all.

Rubicante's hand lingered down the curve of Lugae's face before withdrawing. Lugae could still feel the sticky pool of blood beneath him, but the wound itself had closed.

Rubicante was gone in a burst of flame before Lugae could say another word. Barnabas pulled him to his feet, and Lugae shrugged out of his bloodied lab coat.

It occurred to him after a moment that in order to touch him, Rubicante had to have opened his mantle, even a bit. Of course, Lugae's eyes had been closed. He had come within a hair's breadth of solving that enigma but in the end the pain had been too much for him.

Lugae hated a mystery, and he hated Rubicante. If he could have torn the cloak off the Autarch's shoulders, he would have, but he'd settle for laying bare whatever twisted form he was trying to hide.

Stripped of its element, the Archfiend's touch had been that of a mortal man. Lugae would see it dissected and cataloged.

In the days following Eblan's fall, Lugae found himself doing an unconscionable amount of waiting. He tinkered with the alien machines inside the Tower of Bab-il, but it was slow going -- they were constructed of slick white metal that Lugae had never seen before and that did not bend easily to a hammer, and their inner workings were a labyrinth of wires and black-box power cores of opaque purpose. Lugae spent most of his time in the room that housed a mechanism that was clearly intended to be a cannon, though it had no obvious firing mechanism and no apparent ammunition. It was aimed, quite conveniently, at the dwarven castle that squatted on the horizon like a monumentally ugly toad; Lugae sat straddling the cannon with a wrench in one hand and Barnabas's control remote in the other, wondering if it could shoot far enough to wipe the damned thing off the map.

It was high time he should sleep, but now was clearly not the time. Three hours ago, he'd caught a pair of stragglers from Eblan who'd broken into the Tower, or rather Barnabas had -- they'd gotten all the way to the Underground before they'd triggered the somewhat more sophisticated alarms that Lugae had set up around his personal sanctum. A syringe full of psychotropic drugs had revealed them to be no one less than King and Queen of Eblan -- in stark contrast to Damcyan where the royal family were essentially vestigial good-for-nothings, Eblan always ceded its crown to its finest warriors.

He'd put the pair under heavy sedation and locked them in his laboratory while he decided what to do with them, and his mind was racing so fast he could not sleep. The possibilities were nigh endless.

Of course, it would be this moment that Rubicante chose to pay him a visit. The Autarch of Flame had taken to visiting more often, checking on Lugae's progress with what appeared to be occasional bouts of genuine interest. Lugae had never managed to tell him that his scrutiny did more to hold him back than speed the wheels, even when he didn't make arbitrary pronouncements that limited the scope of Lugae's studies. This method of killing was honorable, this one wasn't. Doing this to the living body of a soldier was acceptable, but doing the same thing to the corpse of an enemy was blasphemous.

The Archfiend never announced his presence -- whether or not he was welcome was simply not a concern. He walked into Lugae's cannon room as though he had every right to interrupt his work, leaving small eddies of flame in his wake.

Lugae glanced towards the barred door to his laboratory and tried to think of something to say.

"Autarch," he said, by way of greeting. He'd used the title ever since Rubicante had healed him -- it had become automatic, and anyway avoiding it no longer got a rise out of the Archfiend. Rubicante's head whirled around -- away from the laboratory door, towards where Lugae sat leaning over the cannon's barrel. Lugae noticed that Rubicante looked angry -- no, furious. A strange sight for such a normally impassive creature. Lugae could not resist probing further, driving salt into whatever had wounded his superior. "What's troubling you?"

"Golbez has taken a captive," Rubicante said, and Lugae sucked in a breath involuntarily. Whatever he did, he couldn't possibly let Rubicante know he was harboring captives of his own. He slid off his perch on the cannon's barrel, to better occupy Rubicante's attention.

Rubicante began to pace back and forth, his cloak swirling around his ankles and lapping at the panels on the floor. The gap in Rubicante's white-hot mantle showed nearly the full expanse of his leg as he walked -- blue and red in patterns across his flesh, powerful muscles moving beneath his marked skin, just flashes before the mantle closed over them again. Rubicante was saying something about Lord Golbez's honorless tactics, his needless cruelty towards his enemies, but Lugae could not tear his eyes from that glimpse of Rubicante's bare skin. He imagined digging his fingers into the flesh of his thigh until he hit bone -- if there even was bone beneath that muscle -- and could almost feel the blisters his blood would raise on the inside of his arm and the curve of his hand.

Rubicante stopped after a moment. Lugae looked up at him, staring into his impassive eyes, smoldering in his ashen face like a pair of dying stars in the night sky. Rubicante glanced towards Lugae's laboratory again, and Lugae stepped forward, hand outstretched, desperate to seize on any distraction.

"Doctor" Rubicante rumbled. His head moved slightly, indicating he was following Lugae's gaze. The mantle rippled again.

"Autarch Rubicante," Lugae said. "I--" he stumbled over his words, trying to think of something, anything, that would divert the Archfiend's attention.

"My patience for the subterfuge of mortals has been worn thin, Lugae," Rubicante said, drawing his cloak of flame closer about himself. "I see how you look at me as though I am one of your specimens under glass. Say what you have been meaning to say."

Lugae licked his lips as he took another step foward. His mouth felt as dry as paper, and the words tumbled from his lips like pebbles beginning a landslide. "Forgive me. Autarch," he said. "It's only that I wish--"

"To see what lies beneath my mantle," Rubicante finished for him, flatly.

Lugae's mind raced, thoughts crowding into his head, jostling for attention. "It's in my nature as a scientist to want that," he said, imagining Rubicante pinned to his operating table, his flesh flayed back to reveal a very human set of inner workings. "That which is unknown does not sit well with me." He finally closed the distance between them and could practically feel the powerful expanse of Rubicante's thigh pressing against him, burning him with its merest touch.

Rubicante's hand emerged from behind the curtain of his cloak. Lugae swallowed, hard. This had started as nothing more than a diversion, but the image of Rubicante finally laid bare, the archfiend who played at gallantry and who had placed a thousand limits on Lugae's own scientific inquiry as though he were some high-minded monarch and not a perverse creature of darkness whose very presence tainted the elements around him, finally exposed and vulnerable to Lugae's whim--

"Everyone who has seen beneath my mantle has died," Rubicante said. He reached out and placed a hand on Lugae's head, and Lugae swore he could smell the acrid stench of burning hair. "I am grateful for the work you have done here, Lugae. Is that how you wish me to show my gratitude?"

"I'll take my chances," Lugae said, his breath coming short in the heat.

"Then kneel," Rubicante said, his hand sinking lower to settle on the back of Lugae's neck, fingers trailing searing lines down the curve of his spine. "And perhaps you shall be the first I do not slay."

Lugae's legs buckled under him, and he fell to his knees on the hot metal floor.

The next official report Lugae delivered to Golbez in writing -- he could manage barely more than a harsh whisper, and even that was painful on his seared tongue. Rubicante had vanished as suddenly as he arrived, and Lugae had been left to storm silently around his laboratory, brandishing syringes and bonesaws. He left the Eblan royals un-sedated so he could hear the exact pitch of their screams as he worked.

The burns that coated the palms of his hands, the blisters that scored across his tongue down to the back of his throat, these would heal. The knowledge that he had knelt before the Archfiend, that stripped of his mantle Rubicante was not vulnerable and naked but as tyrranical and overwhelming as a firestorm…that would not go away. It galled him, gnawed at the pit of his stomach with a pain worse than the damage wrought by Rubicante's fiery touch.

In all his long and storied career, Lugae had never found a mystery that deepened the more he saw of it, until now.

Doctor Lugae took his scalpel from Barnabas's enormous outstretched hand, and the King of Eblan's screams echoed in the vastness of the Tower of Bab-il long after Lugae had severed his vocal chords entirely.