Page 23 of Engines of Reason

We stand there in the heart of it, she and I, all illusions stripped away. I, no wizard; she, no witch. No person. An echo in a body given a second chance at life. In that moment she cannot bear it, and I cannot blame her. I always meddled too far. We who believe ourselves wise do not understand the hurts we do with our truths. Lyn can tell you that.

The moving star nears its apogee. The horoscope is drawn. I tell it to stand down and it tells me I am dead.

The machines are silent. Ilmoth is silent. Lyn and Sendroth look back at me, waiting. Have we won? Has my lecturing finally achieved something? Sara’s lips move.

“Who is that voice?” Ilmoth says, just quietly. Puzzled, and, overlapping with her, Sara demands, “Just tell me. I can’t understand when you’re talking all at once!” A child’s complaint. A child speaking to something terrible. But grammatically correct. Not all talking at once, but one thing, talking all at once, distributed, broken apart. Now without even Ilmoth’s thin stories to unite it.

It bursts from the witch—one of the hand-like things that I see as if through troubled water. A demon thing; a machine thing. It seems to hover for a moment, before launching from her, even as the other things within her clasp the wound closed. Arrow-like it flies. I grasp for it, but I never had the reflexes that would require.

It hits Sara like a fist, like a bullet. She makes a small, shocked sound. Doesn’t fall. For a moment there’s a terrible wound in her chest. Then it’s gone. It’s gone because it’s inside her. Lyn is screaming. I think I am, too. And Ilmoth …

Ilmoth saw, as if it were the first time. Perhaps it devours her memories of itself. She saw the thing squirm from her own flesh and strike the child. I see a maelstrom of justifications and self-deceptions whirl in her face. Fragments of identity: Elder, Ancient, Witch, victim, none of them sufficient to paper over the gaps. Her mouth opens and she lets out a shriek of self-loathing. Unable to stave off the truth any longer. That she had given up, that it came to her, that all she has is just the empty shell this thing built around her. This thing that she has gifted to Sara now. In that quiet and silence, the appalled echo of what has been done, I see the pattern of her.

Ilmoth—or the power that moves Ilmoth—is in the tower and in the monsters. Physically, the phantom hands of her, serving as loci for the signals. Each one receptor and transmitter, forming a net that is her familiar, the thing like a demon that stitches together all these stories because she needs to be complete. I cannot root it out and I cannot countermand it. And in the absence of any coherent Ilmoth to dissuade, it will send the signal to the satellite. Machine-like, following its last received instruction. I have, therefore, one option left to me. A somewhat apocalyptic one.

Honestly, in my bleakest moments, with the DCS turned off, I’ve considered it. Perhaps it’s something I should have done years ago.

Ilmoth, desperately clutching for meaning, reaches for the satellite and its power. The single stab of burning power that will obliterate Daimlesse Regent and her throne and palace and quite a lot of the heart of Lannesite Urban. And this sort of thing is exactly why my rules work, because there is a difference between Sophos IV realpolitik as traditionally practised, and how things go when someone gets hold of an orbital strike laser.

I kill my tower.

That is the course left to me. Absolutely, unequivocally. Any more temporary measures would just let her start the whole show up again. And so I switch the whole damn thing off, yank the plug. The last wizard left in the world has turned out the lights.

For a “big red button” approach, the result is surprisingly quiet. The monsters go still. The tower stops shuddering. Quiet descends. And, unseen by anyone, undetectable even by me, the satellite passes on its orbital round, untroubled. A mobile star in the firmament that, I hope, portends nothing at all.

Sara is sitting down, looking dazed. Alive, but … inhabited. Lyn, holding her, calling to me, telling me to drive it from her daughter. But I have unfinished business, and with the DCS up I can ignore the fact that this girl, my student, the child who means the world to me, has become something terrible. Instead, I wait to see if Ilmoth can still speak to the satellite. if her signals can leap the distance, demon-like, without needing any regular channel. But that leaping seems to be confined to the physical presence of her crawling familiars. Without the tower to open a channel, the satellite is beyond her reach.

“No,” she says. Not a great cry of despair, just a small word. She sits down. “I am,” she says, and then waits to see what will fill the gap. Our gazes meet, the pair of us almost equally curious.

Outside, the monsters, that had stilled in the moment of my tower’s death, rumble thoughtfully. Her familiar resides within them, the beast with many hands. They growl. They shudder. They say:

Born here, into a wild and dangerous power. Ilmoth the witch, scion of the worst magics. Placed in the world to cast down the complacent Elder and his rules. To transmute brigands into princes. To crush thrones. To upset the order of the world for no other reason than that she can.

Sendroth would probably say there’s no harm in upsetting the order of the world. I don’t feel I have any moral basis from which to gainsay him. And it’s a story. The story of Ulmoth, the outsider, the underdog, given leverage against the established way of the world by magic.

The monsters roar. I look into Ilmoth’s eyes.

“You know it’s not true, either,” I tell her. “Please. Can you help the girl? What are they, the things in you?”

Her eyes meet mine. I see she doesn’t know. She can’t. They won’t let her. Knowing, she would understand that her self-image is a fabrication, and who can live with that level of cognitive dissonance?

“I know.”

A small, brave voice. Sara, in her mother’s arms. “It was trying to tell me, but it was … in too many places. So I told it to tell me properly.”

“Tell it to get out of you,” Lyn said, and Sara shakes her head.

“It’s talking to me,” she says. “The little voice.”

The robot that came halfway through the wall of the tower shudders and flexes its limbs. Its mouthparts move again. If it destroys us, Ilmoth can fall back on those stories again, without any cantankerous scientist-wizard to gainsay them. Rather that than the raw wound behind all those torn-away stories. I can understand that. I’ve felt that way myself.

“Wait,” I tell Ilmoth, in the hope that she still has any leverage in the situation. “I know you.”

The hope in her eyes is terrible. She waits.

“There was a witch,” I say. In Lyn’s language, because my own won’t really serve this story. “She did rise to threaten the kingdom. She did have a champion whom she set at the throne. But first she studied, with the Elder, the wizard. She was his student, before she rose to challenge him. That’s how it goes, I think.” And God, it’s been a long time since I was told that sort of story. It’s been centuries, and light years.

At the same time, Sara is speaking. A singsong little voice, putting into words what that other is telling her.