Page 20 of Engines of Reason

“An emissary from Lannesite.” His eyes flick from me to the witch. “To negotiate.”

Ilmoth’s eyes flash and the skin under her robe bunches and squirms. A high, thin singing, like a chorus, or tinnitus, from many places simultaneously. When I try and locate it, it’s gone, but I hear Sara mutter, as though in reply.

“You would lower yourself to treat with them,” the witch tells Sendroth. Her champion. Her reason for being. And it’s nothing like love. Not handsome Sendra come to win the heart of Ilmoth Elder. It’s that without him there’s no story. And without that …

“Wasn’t that always the plan, though?” Sendroth says. “Make ourselves strong enough that they had to come to the fire and talk? To accept they couldn’t just keep pushing. Hold to their own borders. Stop eating up the world a spoon at a time? And look, here she is. Someone who understands what we’ve got here.” And that doesn’t make sense either. How would word of their activities have reached Lannesite in time for some formal response like this? No, Lyn came here after me, when I ran away from her. And she walked into this, and is somehow making a far better job of it than I did.

Lyn tilts her gorget. The emblem there is one I can trace back to a rather menial shipboard liaison officer’s rank, suitably ornamented. How does this impact with Ilmoth, who has access to all my scholarly nonsense, but none of the context to know it as nonsense. The unspoken scaffolding my peers would have taken for granted, that allows it to hold up as any kind of coherent structure.

“My sister, Daimlesse Regent, has sent me into the world to undo some of the harm her ambitions have done,” Lyn says. “Which harm I recognise. So let us talk.” A look, to me, assessing if they’ve harmed me. “You, me, Sendroth, Nyrgoth. A parliament of magicians here in the Elder’s tower. Surely, from this high place, we can find some perspective.” Very elegant.

“But who’s the other one?” Sara says. “The little voice?”

Abruptly I need to talk to Sara, but it’s my turn to be ignored, and Ilmoth’s to speak.

Lyn has put forwards a proposal to appeal to wizards. We four, we wise ones, we can find a compromise that mere regents and brigand chiefs cannot. Works for me and also for Sendroth, it seems. No magician, barely a sorcerer, just the puppet of the witch. But perhaps not the villain, either. A man whose life got ground between the gears of history, trying to fight back. He and Lyn, standing as though it’s the pair of them—the regular, normal people of Sophos IV—opposing we mad wizards. Except Ilmoth may or may not be mad, but she’s not a wizard. She’s a vehicle for something else. Something demonic. And, within that, she’s a woman of this world, and doesn’t think as a wizard might. She knows only the way the myths go, and in the myths magicians are seldom rational creatures.

“No,” she says. “Sendroth. We do not talk. We do not compromise. We have the tower. We shall have the satellite.” Hammering alien words into her sentences, for where the local tongue won’t stretch. “Talking is for when they have some threat to hold over us. We’ve won, Sendra. We have them.”

“The whole of Lannesite—” he starts, and she cuts him off.

“We can destroy it. Cast down the walls. Make the Regent kneel. Exterminate her whole line and have you on the throne.” Fierce, her hands clutching at the air and the future, her eyes wide. “Isn’t that what you want, for what they took from you? We can do it. Not just a handful of old monsters. An army, a plague of them! We can have the world, Sendra.” Begging him to see what she sees. And, when I should find her ambition hideous, her vainglory terrifying, instead I see something piteous in her. Because she wants it for him. She doesn’t want to be the witch-queen of Sophos IV, the power behind the puppet throne. She wants him to get what she things he wants. Not for love, but because …

Because without him she is an empty vessel, sans purpose or reason.

Under cover of all that, I manage to speak to Sara’s necklace. Show me where you hear the little voice.

Her eyes go wide but I’m the only one looking at her. Sendroth Sorcerer is shaking his head, saying “That’s … too much.” A look from him to Lyn, a connection between them. The sane ones, in this little room in my tower. The thread that leads back to a regular, comprehensible world that’s not on fire. “Just put them back in their borders. Teach them they can’t just trample the world…”

Here, Sara shows me. And she’s a good student. And—I find—a child. Meaning she doesn’t approach things like I might, or even Lyn. She’s tracked dozens of little moments of signal. All the intrusions of the thing within Ilmoth. She’s trying to put them together as though they’re some sort of continuous sentence.

No, I tell her, because to me it’s monstrous. It’s the demon, prying open a way back into our world. But to Sara it’s a puzzle and she keeps trying to line all the pieces up. It’s talking to me, she tells me, and I tell her Do not listen and know she can’t help but open her ears to it. Her mind.

Sara, no. And Lyn is focused on the adults talking, and Sendroth knows nothing of it, and Ilmoth … is the source of these signals, which she sends out into the world like familiars, and doesn’t know she’s doing it.

“And would they stay there?” Ilmoth demands of her sorcerer. “How long, before the Regent raises an army, finds another wizard, comes for you? You have to destroy them, Sendra. You have to rule.” Because that’s what the sorcerer does. It’s what Ulmoth would have done, a hundred years before, had I let him. The logic of these things, ruts in history ready for each new generation to be driven down. The way these things are told.

Sara shows me what she’s found in the gaps between. I expect a signal: numbers, the complexities of machines to machines, but it’s not that. A piecemeal thing that doesn’t add up to a whole voice until you take all its distributed parts and put them together.

Hello? I send into that reconstructed channel, wondering if I will receive a blast of demon-noise, the electromagnetic equivalent of its hideous mark, of its impossible physics. What am I speaking to?

And the voice, coming back to me in my own language, in the slightly stilted and prissy tones of my own studies and reports, To whom are you speaking?

What are you? I press, and the answer returns to me, What am I?

I, the Elder, the wizard, the scientist, shiver, meeting Sara’s eyes across the room. She’s smiling, like it’s a game.

Sendroth says, “She has a way this can work. She can bind Lannesite,” and Ilmoth shoots back, “No, she can only help Lannesite bind you,” and I want to raise a hand for silence, get them all to shut up so I can work out just what Sara’s led me to. But Ilmoth is loud with rage, and I understand she’s loud because the space inside her is hollow. It resounds with the sound and fury of her, and signifies? Signifies nothing.

The demon never spoke. Or, rather, I heard its voice but the voice was alien. Not just a different language but a line of communication that admitted to no concepts or principles I could understand. This is … echo, obviously. But as though an echo was trying to speak. Tell me about yourself, I say, and I tell you about myself it replies. Linguistically correct, but iteration, not repetition.

Lyn says, “My sister will listen. Because of the power you have here. And because she is already starting to realise that the answer to dissent is not simply more force. That all you get, if you take violent control of your neighbours, are more neighbours who like you less. And because I will stand with Sendroth, in this.”

I lose the tenuous thread of the connection. “What?” I demand, and “What?” Ilmoth says, and “What?” Sendroth himself asks.

“A sister’s betrayal started this,” Lyn says. “Set Daimlesse on this path. Let it be the same to end it. The towns you took, Sendra—evicted my sister’s client headmen from—they didn’t just follow you because you had followers with swords. They were waiting for someone to give them an option that wasn’t imposed on them by Lannesite. They’d follow you still.”

“They might,” he allows. “If I offer them more than Lannesite did. Which isn’t hard. And if they believe I can win.”