Page 24 of Engines of Reason

Born elsewhere. Or made, or a combination of the two. Formed by a people who truly merited the labels of Ancients and Elders. Combining inimical sciences into a single artefact. They, who had encountered the demon or its world, but had been wise enough to understand it. Foolish enough to harness it, master its principles and weave it into their technology.

Sent outwards from that distant world. Arriving here. For what? Invasion, exploration, study? Demon anthropologist, second class? Except in that journey—long light years or moments of wrenching transition, it had all been lost. The reaching hands of that elder civilization, severed at the wrist, finding themselves upon a world, without a purpose. Buried amongst the relics of another time. Encountering a human being in the extremity of her need. They and she, both seeking a reason to set them in motion again. Sharing between them only scraps of myth, stories. Witches, familiars, sorcerers, Elders.

All there is. A lost familiar in search of a witch. A machine seeking instructions. I don’t know what it is, save incomplete. I don’t know what Ilmoth is, save the thing that provided completion. And now Sara, too, has her uncanny familiar.

The jaws of the robot slow until their teeth are visible, then further until they’re still. Outside, the other monsters have frozen like statues. Around us, the tower is no more than dead stone.

Everyone

Lyn

They had found the largest space possible, for Nyr’s laboratory. It wasn’t a wizard’s tower, though Lyn reckoned he actually had more room here than he had in his abandoned home. More, that was, until he’d moved in all the machines and parts he’d salvaged from the old building’s corpse. Those parts, he’d explained to her, that hadn’t been too reliant on mediation from the tower’s guardian spirit—its operating system—which he had killed to save Lannesite. An act of self-sacrifice and heroism that nobody there would even understand, let alone acknowledge.

Here he had a machine that could assist healing. Here he had some of his archives, the data recovered from the cold banks where it lay, though Nyr said such retrieval seemed hardly worth the effort. Here, too, he had such tools as he could save, that would allow him to analyse the world. Which he was currently applying himself to. Probably, she thought, so he didn’t have to talk to her.

Sara was here, too, helping him. One of the wizard’s two apprentices. The good one, people said. It fit a lot of stories, that Nyr should have a benevolent and a malign apprentice. It seemed decently mythic.

Was Ilmoth malign? Lyn studied the woman, wondering who she had been, before. It wasn’t as though this part of the world was short of the displaced and desperate. Lyn’s own sister was to blame for that, as much as anyone. Who knew what Ilmoth would have been, and what the things would have been, had they not come together in such tumultuous times?

What Ilmoth was now, was Nyr’s shadow. Hungry, intent, learning everything he taught her. She was the witch, and she would one day become greater than her master and overthrow him. That was the narrative Nyr had gifted her. A problem kicked into the future, but perhaps that future need never come. Certainly, the Ilmoth that was building herself back up around that story hadn’t gone to cackling or cursing or evil, just that dreadfully intent study. As though, if she understood enough of the universe, she would have the perspective to make herself a full person. Lyn shivered. She didn’t like Ilmoth, and she didn’t like her daughter’s fate being intertwined with the woman’s. But that was outside her power. Even Nyr said he couldn’t intervene in it.

There were drums outside, trumpets. It was time to be formal, and full, and adult, and put magic aside for a little while. After all, she had done the pragmatic thing. Made her own sacrifice.

“Nyr,” she said. “Are you coming to … bless the peace or something.”

“I don’t think,” he said, over his shoulder, “that the representatives of the Regent really want to see me here. Given this court wizard has moved courts. Only make things worse, don’t you think?”

And that was probably true, but she shifted and wrung her hands and couldn’t make herself go out there. The cord between her and the Elder pulled taut.

“Are you angry?”

He paused, and for a moment she thought he was going to deny knowing what she meant. A lie, but not one she’d call him on, and they’d just go on with it all unspoken between them.

“I have no right to be,” he said, very neutrally. “And a wizard’s wisdom does not extend to such human things as who his friend marries.” He looked up from his instruments at last, the glow of their screens paling his skin. “Lyn, I love you, and that is a word that holds a thousand things, and neither your nor my language has the vocabulary for it. I will love you as a friend, and be the richer for it.”

“And with your wards down?” she prompted.

A wan smile. “They are.”

She turned to go—the sound of formality being assembled now had a definitely expectant air to it. She turned back.

“You never said I told you so. After Gorsaonnon…” The last time they’d been in this position, her about to wed.

Nyr regarded her for a long time. “I didn’t know anything, back then,” he said at last. “I was a fool and a bad friend. And Sendra isn’t Gorsaonnon. And this is politics, anyway. A subject about which anthropologists know less than they think.”

“And now?”

He smiled, very slightly. “And now I am still a little sad, but I will put it with all the other small sadnesses of life, and be happy for you.”

She embraced him, head against his chest, his bony arms around her, then went out to meet her sister.

Sendra

Not Daimlesse Regent, of course, who refused to travel out to Edmen for this travesty. Cantiresse First Sister, though, the Regent’s right hand. Here with pomp and ceremony and a sizable retinue to bear the Regent’s greetings to her sister. Not merely sister in blood, now. Her sister, one regent to another.

Sendra found her profoundly intimidating, honestly. If he’d known this was what he’d be getting as a sister-in-law, he might have had second thoughts.

Lyn came out, at last, to stand beside him. The youngest sister. The wild one. He’d heard all the stories now. The girl who’d gone chasing wizards and fighting demons. Nyr’s apprentice. The rebel, who was standing against Daimlesse Regent. The confederation of Edmen, Minian, Brackish Way, Telm and a half-dozen other towns, united under Sendra. Under Sendroth Sorcerer and Lynesse Regent, because they had a wizard and his witch apprentices and a dozen monsters to back them. Power enough that Lannesite couldn’t just send its armies over the border. A full stop to Daimlesse’s poisonous ambitions.