Nyr
SHE ALMOST HAS ME THEN. Because—What? How, even? A language that nobody on this world even knows, save for a scatter of command syntax I taught to Lyn. And I certainly didn’t teach her to call me Anthropologist Second Class because it’s not exactly a compliment.
It’s Lyn who saves me, in that moment. The woman—Ilmoth Elder—has one of those clunking great construction tools about to run its mining head through the space I’m standing in, but Lyn breaks from the press of brigands around her and gets in the way.
Not fatally, or I’d not be this sanguine about things.
Her escorts are watching the machines and not her, so she squirrels out and shoves a hand at the robot miner.
My internal instruments detect the barrage of commands she sends it, activating safety protocols that override current instructions, deflecting its course, spinning it in place to the horror of everyone nearby.
The bandits are getting well clear and Esha’s people are already far back, watching with interest. I’m still basically just standing there, wrongfooted by what Ilmoth said and by Lyn being here.
Possibly this passes for wizardly unworldliness.
Then the pair of us are left at one end of a big cleared space with Ilmoth at the other and I’m recovered from the various shocks and it is on.
The one exception to my original prohibitions about getting involved.
Where the technology of earlier ages interferes with what we snobbishly decided was the proper order of things here on Sophos IV.
Notwithstanding they were a post-tech culture descended from starship-operating colonists, we wanted them to be nicely primitive and simple so we could write smug little monographs about them.
When they got hold of the technology of their actual ancient astronaut ancestors, we were allowed to take their toys away.
Looked at in retrospect, it’s an appalling policy but, though I’ve canned the rest of the rules, this one I somehow kept.
When someone rocks up with a fistful of robots, call for the wizard.
It was what got me involved with Lannesite, the first time.
Warlord Ulmoth, burning across the landscape with a horde and robots he’d liberated.
Not a thug but a very clever man. I rode with Lyn’s great-grandmother to stop him, and it was exhilarating and very, very stupid, and remains a bright memory even my gloomy mind can’t retcon into something miserable.
So this Ilmoth—let’s leave aside the language and the Anthropologist Second Class—is just one more Ulmoth. She and her pet warlord, off on a robot-assisted bender through the small kingdoms on Lannesite’s border.
The robot that Lyn scotched is abruptly back under the control of—the witch?
Can I call her a witch? The others are all moving.
Half a dozen hulking, semi-functional machines equipped with a variety of what were supposed to be innocuous tools for moving and boring and shaping earth.
But when you’re just a fragile human being, they’re terrifying weapons, industrial accidents waiting to happen.
The brigands and Coast folk watch with awe and horror as they launch into the air or stomp across the ground, tearing it up with their metal feet.
I turn them off. Colonial-era tech is an order of magnitude less sophisticated than my own people’s.
Their safeguards are child’s play to get past. I could have them dancing waltzes.
I am not a showman, though. I stand before the clattering host and send the signal to deactivate them.
I do raise an imposing hand, denying them their ability to go any farther.
What sort of a wizard would I be otherwise?
I am rather enjoying myself, in this moment.
I had left the DCS off, but the sheer adrenaline of someone trying to kill me leaves no room for the bleak moods.
Also, Lyn is here, and we’re on the same side and fighting an actual witch together and that seems a good thing given how things were left between us.
Oh God, The thoughts one has while fighting robots.
Anyway, the robots stop, and the couple that got airborne crash down, one in a manner that suggests there aren’t enough qualified mechanics on Sophos IV to get it going again.
I hear Ilmoth give a shriek of rage at my cavalier dismissal of her forces, but this is how things are when you throw antiquated tech at this world’s premier practitioner of the scientific arts. I give Lyn a look.
“Did you—” I start and she shakes her head.
“She didn’t get your speech from me.”
I stride forwards, weaving around the stilled automata.
I want to sit down with this young woman and ask her, What the hell?
I try for a rather casual greeting, but my mastery of the language betrays me, because it is very very difficult to find the right register—not insultingly casual, not patronisingly formal.
Left to my own devices I err towards the latter, so what comes out is something like, “Young lady, explain yourself!” Not exactly diplomatic. I should leave the talking to Lyn.
The witch turns the robots back on again.
This isn’t something she’s supposed to be able to do.
When I shut them down, I locked them, installed some serious security in their systems. Sendroth’s fancy gloves would not be dextrous enough to pick those locks, nor would Ulmoth be able to talk his way around them.
I changed all the command codes and made sure that absolutely nobody save me would be able to get them moving.
And yet they move. And I am right in the middle of them.
I throw my hands out, more out of an inadequate need for physical warding than anything else. Possibly it looks magicianly but every one of those things has wheeled its chattering, grinding, drilling mandibles on me and I am about to lose some fingers.
I fight her. In the unseen, unreal place that exists within and between those machines, I throw up barriers and sever the command lines she has somehow set up around my forbiddances.
I conjure more complex barriers of encryption and equation, and find her undoing them with a feverish speed.
It is a duel, an actual wizards’ duel, and I have time to think to myself, Is there no end to the ridiculous situations I find myself in?
On the physical plane, each machine lunges for me and falls still, and I move between them, a stately dance—I’d be running around like a mad thing only my legs aren’t up to it.
My eyes are closed, but each machine is broadcasting its precise location to me, so I don’t need to see them.
Partway through this I have the new revelation that she is there.
In that space, like I am. And I have an inbuilt battery of augmentations, body, clothes, horns and all, allowing me to link to these digital spaces without a magic staff or crown or all the other toys past sorcerers of Sophos IV have relied on.
I can detect the tower-crafted clothes that Lyn wears, and Sendroth’s gauntlets, but Ilmoth has none of it.
She is magical in and of herself, and that is impossible.
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.