Page 18 of Engines of Reason

IT WAS A MATTER between wizards. That was what he told himself. And if you’d asked a juvenile Sendra what a wizard would be like, he’d not quite have described either of the Elders, yet at the same time, both of them. Nyrgoth’s brooding and impenetrable allusions; Ilmoth’s arrogance and swift anger.

It seemed likely she would kill her rival, steal his magic, some such thing. That Sendra even pretended he was permitted opinions on the matter showed that he wasn’t the most suited to being either a bandit chief or a sorcerer. Growing up, his teachers would have said he was the most suited. Always skiving from his lessons, shirking his chores. The Enclave of Ceryon had been one of a dozen little communities like grit between the palms of larger states. Places where people walked a delicate line that kept them free of the taxes and the authorities of regents and headmen. Founded to teach and live by moral rules. They had survived by never having so much that someone would come take it off them. Strong walls, strong ideals and impoverished land that they scratched a living from. The history of this part of the world was full of such places. At its heart, a handful of teachers who preached the simple, self-sufficient life. And Sendra was wise enough now—after the Enclave had fallen—to understand that such places had a life expectancy anyway. A few generations saw them fall apart, turn to brigandage or become some tiny despot’s little slice of tyranny, a regency in miniature. Ceryon had lasted three generations without falling to any of these fates, and young Sendra hadn’t known any different.

They’d always thumbed their noses at Lannesite, their big neighbour. Always known that the opposing pressures of rival states would ensure that Ceryon retained its little bubble of independence. That was how it was, the froth of smaller polities like Aenterland and Edmen and Minian forming a protective skin around Lannesite’s ambitions. Until the Regent’s sister had married into Aenterland and stirred things up, and the big beast of the region had discovered there was nothing stopping it imposing its writ on everything around it. Ceryon had refused to open its gates, pay the tithes, kneel to the laws. Ceryon, halfway between Lannesite and Aenterland. Sendra reckoned that Daimlesse Regent probably couldn’t have pointed to the place on a map. The Enclave had never been an objective, in and of itself. Just in the way.

He’d been a hellion in his youth. He’d hunted, stolen a little. Snuck out and been too much in the backyards of Ceryon’s neighbours, seeing what wasn’t nailed down. After his home ceased to exist as a community, easy enough to parlay that into brigandage. And even in that he’d failed. Made just enough of a nuisance of himself that Lannesite’s people had come and smashed his camp and his gang. Again, doubtless Daimlesse Regent hadn’t even known he existed.

Then he’d found Ilmoth, beneath the mounds. Ilmoth and her monsters. For a brief moment she’d made him Sendroth Sorcerer, and the name had spread far enough to trouble even the throne of Lannesite.

She promised even more, now she had command of Nyrgoth’s tower and the old man himself at her mercy. Leaving him to stand out here at the tower’s door in the chill air, and wonder … why? Given the grand and uncanny creature she plainly was, why bother herself over his petty ambitions? Surely the Regent of Lannesite was as insignificant to her as Sendra had been to Daimlesse Regent? Yet he spoke and she listened. He styled her as his advisor, brigand-wizard, and she wore the mantle without complaint. Even now, talking about controlling the whole world, commanding moving stars, creating armies of monsters, all these were being placed at his feet, in his cause. A cause that would rupture at the seams if he forced it to encompass such gifts.

At the mountain’s foot was a town. There, he’d found people whose lives were lived on the shadow-side of Lannesite’s law. Poachers, smugglers, all doing a grand business now the Coast-people had cut off every waterway past the nation’s borders. He’d put out the word that Sendroth Sorcerer sought followers. Probably there’d be a handful gathered already, waiting for him. Vagabonds, outlaws, the displaced. Maybe even Kaille and Blennardt again, penitent over abandoning him. A man could dream. Perhaps the little village would see such a convocation of villainy as Lannesite had never known. And he would appear to them with his new monsters, with his wizard. With Nyrgoth’s head on a stick, perhaps. It would give heart to all Lannesite’s enemies, that the Regent’s wizard was dead. But Sendra took no joy in the thought. He hoped Ilmoth had some more nuanced plan than that.

Ilmoth promised much, but thus far she had delivered. The tower was theirs. And he thought, bitterly, that this could have been the greatest of all Enclaves. A place where his teachers wouldn’t even have needed to scratch at the earth, but could have lived and taught and contemplated their philosophies. Instead of which it would breed monsters to break a throne.

His gloves twitched about his hands. The magic ones, the glass gauntlets Ilmoth had given him. Soon there would be new monsters, and he reached out to see if he could feel them yet, eager for his commands. A host of arcane beasts waiting to do his bidding. Not quite yet. Ilmoth was still mastering the intricacies of Nyrgoth Elder’s tower. But there was … something.

Something outside the tower. Sendra frowned. A voice, speaking in that way his gloves could hear and his ears could not. Communicating nothing but presence, as though magical things needed to remind one another of their location from time to time. Probably there were many outgrowths of Nyrgoth’s domain amongst the rocks, here in the cold high passes.

Curious, he ambled over, breath pluming, drawing his cloak about himself. Warm enough in the tower, but out here it was bitter.

Tucked into the rocks, within sight of the tower’s door, was a child.

He blinked at her. She looked … two Storm-seasons, maybe? A long hard climb from that village where the brigands were gathering, and she wasn’t dressed like some farmer’s kid. Dressed well, and slightly strangely. A noble’s child, surely, with gold at her throat, and clothes of … of a weave he didn’t know but had seen before.

She was staring up at him. Perhaps she was afraid, but not as afraid as a lone child should have been. Her eyes flicked to his gloves, and in that same moment his gloves heard her, or some accoutrement of hers. Magic. The things of wizardry, speaking to one another.

“You’re the sorcerer,” the kid said, and “Who the hell are you?” Sendra demanded.

The child’s eyes flicked past him, and if he’d been on his game he’d have realised they weren’t alone. He was too thrown by her sheer presence, as though she was some changeling the tower had made, like those old stories about the Elders creating life from written incantations and phials of blood. Then the sword-point touched his cheek and he went still. The child watched with large eyes. Not eager to see his blood shed, but not necessarily against it, either. An observer, sworn not to interfere.

He turned very slowly. Normally he’d have held his hands out, but he didn’t want it to seem that he was invoking magic. It was her, of course. Lynesse Second Sister. Now he saw her face, the familial resemblance in the child was easy to mark. Her own sorcerous clothes were silent, but probably that was because she’d wanted to sneak up on him.

“Your own kid as bait,” he said, trying for cool, very aware of the sword. “Harsh.”

“She’s supposed to be hiding while I scout,” Lynesse said to him. “What have you done with Nyr?”

Her friend, Nyrgoth Elder. And Sendra had anticipated some grand armed response from Lannesite eventually, preferably after Ilmoth had resurrected a pack of monsters for him to use against them. What he hadn’t expected was someone just casually paying a call on the Elder because they were an old friend.

“What even are you?” he complained. Because there was an order to the world, important to none more than those who placed themselves outside it. What point being an outlaw if everyone else was just going to disregard the way things worked? “You’re the Regent’s sister. You don’t just wander the world like a…”

“Brigand?” she asked. There was a wicked look to her, catching him on the point of the argument as well as the blade.

“Good banditry needs to know where to come home to, and how the land lies. Your wizard is the prisoner of mine, princess. I might be a sorcerer and you might be an apprentice, but neither of us have any skin in that game. It’s between them.”

He was aware of the child staring at him furiously. Another bloody apprentice, he guessed, got up in magic clothes and come to see her favourite magic uncle.

“Go away,” he told them both. “Ilmoth is dangerous.” He reckoned Ilmoth wouldn’t stir herself about these two visitors escaping. They wouldn’t matter, to the witch.

Or maybe Ilmoth would stir herself, if she reckoned she could use these two apprentices against their master. He weighed that, and found he didn’t want it.

Lynesse still had him at the sword’s point, though she’d drawn in her arm so the weight wasn’t straining her. “‘Go’?” she said, thoughts plainly running parallel to his. “You’re a poor brigand, you know that?”

“What brigand I am, your sister fashioned. Blame her for the workmanship,” he told her flatly. “I just wanted to live in Ceryon. What ills I have wrought, what villain I’ve become, it’s all from your family’s quarrels.” And then, bitter, furious at her just in that instant, “I only wanted your damn sister to know what she’d ruined.”

He sat down on one of the oddly squared rocks that littered the pass before the tower’s gateway, evidence of its ages-ago construction. “You can’t guess what it’s like, to have the world so big, to be so small, that regents and powers will just crush all you ever knew and never realise. Like a bug you kill while turning over in your sleep. Listen to me, Lynesse Second Sister. Go away, please. Take your child and go. You might be my enemy, but I don’t wish Ilmoth’s wrath on you.”

She regarded him levelly for a long time, then slipped the sword back into its sheath. Sat down herself; held an arm out so that her daughter came to her.