Page 17 of Engines of Reason

“I’m none of you latercomers, arriving here on this, our, world just to sate your curiosity,” she tells me, in that archaic tongue. “But you there, you’ve stolen my title, Nyr Illim Tevitch, in letting them call you Elder. Letting them think you’re of the folk who placed them on this planet. Your people are newcomers. A doomed appendix of a world we long ago left behind.”

I’m probably not looking as impressed as she wants because I’m struggling with the language. It’s somehow simultaneously casual and portentous, every utterance full of conversational conventions and yet constipated with solemnity. Did people really speak like that, back when they first colonised this planet?

“You are…?”

“One of the true Elders, old man. The great folk who first made this world ours. Who took the life we found and tangled it with the life of Earth till we’d a world fit to live in. Our children forgot, and fell into primitive and squabbling ways. But we remained, undying, watching over them. Just as you pretend to protect the world from the old machines, so we protect the world from you, the false ones from Earth, who pretend to be wise and don’t belong. This is our world.”

The colonisers were not immortal, or even particularly great by my people’s standards. So we have always believed. We have their records; we have reconstructed their tech and languages. We are their superiors in every way. Except we are also, as a people, extremely fond of ourselves, and so what if we just misunderstood? Got it all wrong, as I, here, have mistaken so many things. We were a culture born to hubris. What if we were never the pinnacle of Earth civilization we always thought?

She laughs at me. “Which of us is Elder now, hm?”

Then Sendroth is back, his eyes wide. “Ilmoth!” he barks. “I’ve found them. Monsters, in a room below. A score of them at least. Can you wake them?”

I hadn’t even thought, but the brigands are still approaching this within their historical tradition of sorcery, meaning reactivating useable old tech.

“They are the workers that built this tower,” Ilmoth tells him, in Lans Vulgar. “No, not even that. They are the spares, replacements. I shall wake them, and each one of them shall be tenfold what any of your former monsters were. But more than that, within this tower is a forge that can build more monsters. An army of them, enough to consume the world. Is that not so, Nyrgoth Elder?”

I mean, no. Not an army. But quite a few before the stocks of fabricate are depleted. Which also means …

“Not merely builders,” she says, as though reading my mind, “Warriors. Monstrous soldiers that can obliterate whole towns with the fire of their eyes.” She grins at me and says, in that ancient colonists’ tongue, “Alas for your scholarly vows, Nyr Illim Tevitch.”

Something moves within her ragged clothing. Something writhes, as though she has an animal against her skin. It pushes to her neckline. Not against her skin; within it. I see it bunch like a fist, before it carves its way out of her. She flinches with the pain of it, but it knits her skin up behind it. Now I look, I can see old marks and mottlings that must be what’s left of similar exits.

It is a thing that seems between flesh and metal. Like a spider; like a hand. Not quite a machine, not quite a living thing, not quite … there. A twist to the heart of it, as though I can look into it and see …

I shudder. A distance within it, that pierces through the little space it occupies, and the space that Ilmoth occupies, and the world. A distance none of it can contain, yet it’s there. I have seen the phenomenon before. But not so bound. Not contained within this many-legged frame. I do not know what it is I’m looking at, save that it is like the demon.

Sendra eyes it, unhappy but without surprise or horror. When the thing flails off, he follows willingly enough. Heading down, towards the robots and the factory.

I want to throw it all in Ilmoth’s face. I want to tell her none of what she’s said makes sense. Because none of it does make sense. The old colonial machines were trash compared to what Sendroth found below us. If her “Elder” people were so grand, how could that be the case? And if they have been building their knowledge and technology ever since the colonisation—whilst letting their descendants transition into post-tech feudalism—why would my poor tower be of the least interest to them? All valid points, and I could probably get up her nose with any of them, but they are not the priority.

“Tell me,” I say, “about the demon.”

Ilmoth frowns slightly. “The…”

“The demon,” I tell her. “Within you, or allied to you, or … perhaps you conjured it in a circle of salt for all I know. Maybe that is actually a thing that works.”

“There are no such things as demons,” she tells me, as though I’m stupid. Or, no—as though I’m some credulous primitive. And I hope I didn’t sound quite so arch when I was having this conversation with Lyn all those years ago.

“What was that,” I demand, “coming out of you, just then?”

She looks at me as though I’m mad.

“The thing that…” And another one is moving, creeping under her skin, around her collarbones. My gorge rises. It’s horrible. And I can sense the distance, that other axis of space that isn’t x, y or z. The impossible depths to her. “What is that?”

“What is what?” She’s not gaslighting me, not mocking. She’s sincere. She doesn’t know.

I do something then, that I should have done days ago. I do the very basic due diligence of checking the tower’s records. It took her blood, to let her in. And her blood shouldn’t have prompted the tower to let her in, but she obviously got into my systems and persuaded it. But I saw the needle. It took her blood.

Indeed, it took both their blood, so the tower would know Sendroth and not try to expel him. Two recent samples on file, full genetic analysis and I can cross-reference them against the extant database of samples collected over my centuries of study. I can tell Sendroth’s from the Y chromosome. Beyond that, only the sampling date lets me pick out Ilmoth. Set against my records, her genetic makeup tells me nothing surprising, which tells me everything, which tells me nothing.

“What are you?” I just ask her, straight up, because I see the heredity of her and it accounts for precisely nothing. Just one more local, without any markers that place her apart in time or space. “Do you even know what you are?”

I hear the echo within her again. The other voice, like a broken moment of a radio conversation. Is it wearing her? Instead of an arch in a forest, is she the gate to where the demon is? Has it learned from our banishing of it all those years ago? And yet … the thing Lyn and I confronted was not this. Was not patient or hidden or subtle. Dear God, of all things it was not subtle! Not a thing that could come back sheathed in a human skin and talking all this nonsense about elder civilizations, comprehensible words in three languages, learning from my own damn records here in the tower and … believing each nonsense story she gives me. Crediting each word as it leaves her mouth. But what is speaking, and what moves within her, and what is in control…?

Something flickers at the edge of my awareness. My extended electronic awareness, creeping about my own tower’s systems like a mouse for fear of Ilmoth detecting me. A new presence. Not demonic, but a terrible source of anxiety nonetheless. Because I am in a very dangerous position, in a place become a monstrous threat, and now Lyn has come to join me.

Sendra