Page 9 of Engines of Reason

She breathes life into her monstrous servants and sends them for me; I turn them to statues again. I open my eyes and meet her gaze. She is furious that I am holding her off. She resents me, not just Elder but Eldest, and what does that make her? At her back, Sendroth stands, just a man with some magic gloves. At my back stands Lyn, my apprentice, leveraging her own knowledge to ward the robots off. And Ilmoth is more than Lyn, but Ilmoth is not more than Lyn and I together.

And yet I cannot shut the monsters down beyond Ilmoth’s reach. She calls them to life over and over, and I am getting physically tired ensuring their jaws and my body don’t end up occupying the same space. I am going to need to bring this to a close, and that means doing something more than just repeatedly flicking the off switch.

I create a barrier of noise. It’s something I’ve had to do for protection, in the past. This time, instead of creating it around me to stop a signal getting in, I create it about Ilmoth. I isolate her, and the machines go still again. Properly still, her silent commands dissipating into static as they try to issue from her.

“Now, self-styled Elder—” I start—the bloody code-switching this language accrued since colonisation is a menace—and then the machines turn back on.

I go very cold. Very scared, all of a sudden. No signals have breached the wall of noise standing across the electromagnetic spectrum, between Ilmoth and her monstrous minions. Nothing has reached them, from her, and yet … I sense the very tail end of it. A signal, arising from nowhere, reaching into the machines and tearing away my bans. Commanding them into life once more. I have seen this before, this impossibility. The signal that need not cross the intervening space, from sender to recipient. When I encountered it previously, it was in a very bad place, and from a very bad thing. No other sign of the corruption here, in these machines, or in Ilmoth, but it is unmistakable.

In that knowledge and understanding, I almost get killed. The horror freezes me. Again, it is Lyn—less wise, more pragmatic—who physically hauls me out of the way of a blur of drill-heads.

Abruptly this is not just some arena for me to indulge my rusty wizardly—scientific—skills. I need to stop this now, because if there’s any chance that it’s that …

I formulate a string of commands to a robot, even as I’m giving ground. It’s inelegant, brutal even. And these machines weren’t designed with a self-destruct mechanism, but colonial tech overclocks easily and that means I can pit their systems against one another, push this, remove the safeties from that and—

An ear-raking shriek comes from the stricken machine. It fixes in place, shudders, then slips from a shudder to a vibration almost too swift to see. A moment later its main drive unit has various motive parts working in fierce opposition to one another and the machine tears itself apart. Shards of its carapace scythe into its neighbours, cracking shells and severing limbs, so that I down at least three from my single act of vandalism. I move on to the next.

Now it’s Ilmoth playing defender and me on the attack. She’s desperately trying to lock me out from her remaining drones, but I am relentless. Her techniques are admirable in attack, a versatile toolkit of electronic sneak-thievery to get past my best guards and wards, but in defence she’s smoke. I take out another and another. A piece of shrapnel whickers past me so close it nearly clips my horns. I’m so engaged in what I’m doing I don’t even flinch. Which comes across as very impressive, I’m sure, but would have looked stupid if the thing had been six inches lower.

Something erupts from one of the cracked metal bodies. I have a moment’s glimpse of it. A thing like a hand. Metal but also fleshy. Nasty; not exactly a scientific assessment but it looks nasty. It hits Ilmoth in the stomach. She staggers like she’s been shot.

There’s a ragged hole in the robes she wears. Beneath it: her midriff, mottled and scarred and … healing itself up. Where the thing went in. Into her. Into her flesh. Healing up like I can heal up, only faster.

Sendroth is tugging at her shoulder, recognising a lost battle. She screams—at him, at me, at the inadequacy of her slaves, at the fist of a thing that just burrowed into her. At all these things.

I kill off the penultimate robot. It’s already half-crippled from the demise of its fellows, off on one side going in circles. It makes a very satisfactory bang and vomits a plume of smoke into the air. Another thing scurries from the wreck, half runs, half leaps and is absorbed by Ilmoth’s flesh and what the hell even is she?

She almost gets me then, with my own devices. The last robot lumbers right up close, and I only understand at the last possible moment that she’s going to destroy it herself. Destroy it not just through mechanical sabotage but by triggering its reactor. And the old colonial machines aren’t actually that dangerous, not like my people’s. The fusion elements stop fusing the moment the chamber’s breached. But the release of stored power from the subsidiary systems will level and irradiate everything within several hundred metres. Me, Lyn, Ilmoth and her sorcerer, the bandits, Esha’s people.

I fight her for it. We struggle for the soul of the monster and she almost wins. An outcome that would rid the world of both Elders at a stroke. I think she would rather be dead than lose, then partway through the fight I think she genuinely doesn’t understand the scale of what she’s about to unleash. She’s all terrible energy against my world-weary hard-earned finesse. She’s desperate to beat me and doesn’t understand the cost.

I kill the systems surrounding the reactor. I reroute the power. I bleed the energy stores. She fights me every step of the way and it’s far closer than I’d like, but when the machine-monster dies it’s in the regular way, not the nuclear option.

Of course that means it’s still exploding, and thankfully Lyn has the presence of mind to drag me to the ground as its seams start to give, so the broken pieces and percussive force fly overhead, upwards and outwards, not into me.

When I get to my feet, the brigands are already running, Sendroth and his witch amongst them. I call her name—I need to understand what the hell she is. I make it a command, senior to junior. The look she turns on me is venomous. I feel it like a blow, even across the distance she’s put between us. And I cannot hold her. I have no magic for that. And I am not up to running after her. I am suddenly very tired. The adrenaline runs out of me, leaving me hollowed out, a hollow that my impressive reserves of bleak despondency presently begin to fill. And then I turn. And there is Lyn.

Sendra

WHEN THEY STOPPED RUNNING, there were just the four of them. Sendra told himself that was because the rest had become lost, gone the wrong way, not kept up. Running through woods. Easy to lose track of your leader. The panic of it. The confusion, heart and breath clamouring in his ears. He’d run before. After the soldiers from Lannesite had broken up his gang, before he found the trove of monsters and met Ilmoth. And before that, when Lannesite had taken the Enclave. Run and kept on running.

But Ilmoth had seemed a signal that he wouldn’t have to run anymore. That maybe it was someone else’s turn. Perhaps, in the fullness of time, even the Regent of Lannesite might be moved to pick up her skirts and flee. He, the lord of monsters.

He had never been the lord of monsters. They had been gifted to him by Ilmoth Elder, the girl from the mound. And taken away by the Regent’s pet wizard.

They were sitting out at a cave in the forest. Not the product of the natural earth. One of those weird structures the ancients had built, just slabs fitting together. You could see grooves in the walls like serpent tracks. Under other circumstances he might have asked Ilmoth, and received some incomprehensible lecture in reply. Right now, nobody was interested in a history lesson.

Blennardt was binding a gash on Kaille’s arm, left by a piece of ruptured monster. She looked over at their fourth. So much, that look said, for magic.

Ilmoth was sitting at the mouth of the artificial cave. It was dark out there, raining, a manifestation of the exact way Sendra felt right now. He’d had such ambitions. A new Enclave, towns flocking to him. A land he could be regent of, where he’d set the rules and decide what was right or wrong.

Ilmoth said nothing. Just stared.

Sendra should feel angry, honestly—either at Lannesite’s wizard or his own—but he just felt hollow. The Elder hadn’t even chased them. Looking back, Sendra had seen him just standing with the woman, Lynesse Second Sister. Nyrgoth’s apprentice, by a rumour that Sendra was absolutely in a position to confirm.

That was another throw of the dice lost, too. Because for the kin of Daimlesse Regent, Lynesse had seemed almost reasonable. Interested, willing to talk. If he’d had a chance to sit properly with her …

She was just better at hiding the rot. That was what they taught you in Ceryon Enclave. That kind of power always rotted you from within. But she’d seemed … someone he could have talked to.