Page 12 of Engines of Reason

The child of Lynesse Second Sister and Gorsaonnon Consort, the faithless, the rogue. Whom I warned Lyn about with all my wizardly authority, which she ignored. And, in doing so, I shifted in her mind from an ally into one more custodian trying to throw up walls around her.

When it fell apart. When it all came out, the truth of the man she’d married, the worst possible parts of me reared up and demanded I go and rub her nose in just how right I’d been. But even I am not so mendacious. Because, after all those harsh words between us, after I told her just what sort of grifter Gorsaonnon was, and she told me how I was bitter and jealous, and after the man was a grifter and his grifts only grew until even Lyn could not ignore it … After all that, I knew in my heart I hadn’t been right.

I am not, after all, the great social observer. Not even to the level of a second-class anthropologist. I had said all those things about the man, yes. Not because I’d actually noticed any of his misdeeds, though. He hid them from me as easily as he did from Lyn. Every word that came out of my mouth was indeed motivated by jealousy. I hated him because he took Lyn from me. And not even in a romantic rival sort of way, by then. Just because I was a lonely old man, and she was the one person I could talk to, and she wanted to spend time with her husband.

When Gorsaonnon did turn out to be a villain, I took no joy in it. All I saw was Lyn hurt, Lyn unhappy. And because I had been so venomous about the man, she couldn’t even come to me to commiserate. So she left. Left her sister, left her daughter, left me. And it was my fault.

I should have been blessing Sendroth and his witch for giving me a chance to see her again, but when I did, it just brought back all those words. My arrogance and possessive greed. And so, without Esha to mediate between us, I am running away.

And I do have wizard business at my tower. I do need to uncover the truth about Ilmoth. The witch. The demon-speaker. Not crusted over with the hideous mark of the thing that Lyn and I faced in the Ordwood all those years ago, but speaking with its impossible voice.

My tower is high in the mountains. A long trek, and a long while since I’ve made it. The ancient structure built centuries before by a fleet of construction drones that would make Sendroth’s monsters look like toys. Stocked with machines to give me every possible advantage. It brought me back from the point of death after we faced the demon. It kept me alive, stilled in time over the centuries. It contains manufacturing facilities to produce my augmented clothes and tools and whatever else I should want. If I should decide to truly abandon my profession I could take over the world quite easily, become the wizard-lord and command an entire civilization to bow down to me, the almighty Mage-Anthropologist Second Class.

There are other colony worlds out there, under our study. Perhaps that has happened. Or perhaps those worlds’ unruly populations turned up with sufficient torches and pitchforks that my fellow scholars were toppled from their ivory seats. Here on Sophos IV, though, we pretended to maintain our detachment from the local culture, which was absolutely aware of us and had made a place for us in its mythologising. We were magicians.

When I finally reach the door of my tower I feel about as unmagical as I ever have. Not that the rain has wetted me, nor the cold reached through my heated garments. My internal pharmacy has ensured that the walk was tiring but no more than that. It is the mood. Even though the DCS is active, I feel it like a great sack slung over my shoulder, that must be opened soon. The mood. The beast. Myself. Lyn.

A lot on my mind, therefore, as I stand before my own door at last. The sanctum, beyond which is all that belongs to my people. Starfarers, scholars, patronising bastards who thought my being here was a good idea.

There is a needle, protruding from beside the keypad. Blood sampling, a form of identification I do not need for the tower to recognise me. A handshake of systems, between it and my horns, and the door opens for me.

At no point do I ask myself why the needle is extended. Too much on my mind.

I am liaising with my systems as I stride into the narrow confines of my own entrance hall. An old, familiar rote of ritual as useless as half of what goes on at court. Any messages? I ask it, and of course there are no messages. Earth has been silent for three centuries and change. Hardly likely they’d get in touch now. What was I expecting? A snide little memo noting I’d set myself up as some sort of wizard and could I please stop?

I need to manufacture some aerial scouts to search for Ilmoth. Will she still be hiding behind some bandit-turned-sorcerer? There are other caches of colonial tech for her to unearth, no doubt. She’ll pick out their buried signals, however faint. I do not want to wait until this group’s new activities have grown sufficient to sound alarms within the court. I must find and talk to her, Elder to Elder, rather than as antagonists on the battlefield. Whatever she is, she is remarkable. Unique, hopefully. A terrible, existential threat to this planet, perhaps. But also a person, an individual, surely. Not just a pawn of the demon.

The demon. An unknown. I do not know if it was sapient, but it was certainly curious. It reached out and touched the world, played with the life it found there, abominably. Not evil, I think. Evil requires intent comprehensible by humans. Just a thing we had to be rid of or be consumed by. And here is Ilmoth, communicating her desires by those same impossible channels, yet just a woman, to look at her. A woman who knew my language and knew me.

Things I have not registered, as I am communicating with my systems, setting the fabricators into motion, plumbing my own records: the safeties and encryptions removed from the tower’s mind; the inlay—gold—pried away from some of the walls; the mud tracked over my floor.

What is a witch, to the people of Sophos IV? As distinct category as a sorcerer or a magician, a demon or a monster. Because these people have lost all of what their starfarer ancestors were, but their languages have a keen eye to subdivide the world. Like some ancient falconer who knows fifty words for grades and ages of hawk, they want to be absolutely clear what they mean when they label a person. A witch is a figure that turns up in myths and fireside tales. A wielder of magic who is linked to something, touched by it. Drawing power from an entity. A demon? Sometimes, but not exclusively.

I look up and she’s there. The witch. Ilmoth Elder. For a moment I think the tower has conjured her likeness—located her or found an old image of her. I even smile at my own cleverness, in phrasing my search enquiries so exactingly.

She’s in a doorway that leads to the deeper parts of the tower, the ones with the machinery, dug into the mountain. She stares at me, her face blazing with vindictive triumph. The way she looked when she thought she had me, during our duel. It will sound ridiculous for me to say, but it’s a good look on her. A woman who has mastered the world in a way that owes nothing to the usual scaffolding that society throws up. A pride in achievement that’s creditable, honestly. What, after all, have I ever achieved in my life, compared to that?

Then the other clumps in behind her. Sendroth Sorcerer, staring at me. Poised to flee, though he’d have to get past me to get out. And I realise they are physically there, inside my tower.

I make a rather querulous noise, an old man disturbed from his reverie. I reach out for my tower’s systems, intending to remonstrate with them for their slackness. What is this rabble doing inside?

That they are inside means that Ilmoth Elder—give the girl her proper title—has already found her impossible way into the tower’s systems. My systems. She found the door and its needle. She let it taste her blood, and it was the blood of Elders, and so the tower let her in. Through my horns, I connect with the tower, and she is already within it waiting for me. It hears her voice and does her bidding. The door closes at my back and will not open for me. And I fight her for command of it. In that moment, still and invisible, there is a furious tempest of commands and counter-orders as we wrestle for control of the single most powerful installation on the whole of Sophos IV.

Then there are hands on me. Actual hands, the gauntleted fingers of Sendroth on me, Nyrgoth Elder. I wait for my defensive systems to rebuke him but, through the tower’s permissions, Ilmoth has turned them off.

There is a blade at my throat. The steel edge of nothing more than a hand-forged knife. The great and powerful wizard is about to get his throat cut, and all the magic will gush out of him onto the floor. With the DCS active, I appreciate it’s exactly the right move for Ilmoth. I’m very calm about it. That’s the problem with the DCS. It doesn’t have that undignified scrabbling for survival that human emotion pushes you to. It can be rather too philosophical about things like certain death.

And yet Sendroth doesn’t strike, doesn’t want to, looks to Ilmoth for direction and she holds up her hand. Her face still shines with that hard triumph, so desperately pleased with herself that I would probably feel happy for her if I felt anything. “I have come into my inheritance,” she tells me, in my language. “I, the Elder, the last scion of my people. Or last but one.” And there is something in her face, a crack in her composure. A thing she needs from me that she should not, if she is what she says. I note it, say nothing, still trying to process what it happening, what I’ve lost. What the world has lost. I was never going to be the mage-lord in the tower, dominating the whole world with my advanced technology. But she might be, once she’s mastered what I have here.

“Who are you?” I demand, and she tells me, “You know me,” and has her people bind my hands, as though I’m just some common felon. And I have no magic to stop them.

Lyn

THE PREVIOUS REGENT OF Lannesite had been blessed with four daughters. And there was a story told about such happy circumstances. Not a story of magic, but of statecraft. That the eldest would ascend to the regency on their mother’s death, and the other three would be the dutiful siblings who bore her on their shoulders, supported her rule, made the family and the polity strong. Traditionally one to administer, one to lead the armies, one to be emissary to foreign courts. But that was just a story.

The situation then, when Lyn came back from defeating the demon. The Regent, Lyn’s mother, a strong woman, wise but stern. Stern, especially, with her own daughters. Intent on ensuring that they understood the gravity of their position and responsibilities. The same woman whom Lyn had struck sparks off so often during her childhood. Lyn, who preferred the stories with magic in them.

And the Regent had died, as paupers and monarchs must, for only wizards live forever. Died, and her shoes had been filled by Daimlesse First Daughter, who had been painstakingly crafted by maternal hands to be the very image of their mother. Continuity, strength, stability. Daimlesse Regent, ascending to the throne with a complete and rigid vice about her mind, trapped in her mother’s story of who the regent was and how she must act. Not, necessarily, who the mother had been and how she had acted, which had been more pragmatic.