Lyn
THE TOWER SHOOK. NYR’S TOWER, that had been built, not by the ancients, but those more powerful still.
The tower that was magic in the world, to anyone within a rumour’s flight of Lannesite land.
Nyr had cried out. He was on his feet, grasping towards something up above.
She sensed a maelstrom on the wizard’s plane, where their invisible voices sped and cried.
A battery of unseen lightning between the tower itself and the sky.
There was a shriek and a rumble from deeper in the tower, below their feet. Sendra’s eyes were wide. “The monsters,” he said. “A whole cave of them. They’re waking. Ilmoth,” he shouted. “Ilmoth, stop!”
“I am the Elder!” the witch cried out. “This is my inheritance!”
“You are not!” Nyr told her. “What are you? What is in you. Ilmoth, who were you?”
Which was more than Lyn could parse, right then. She had her hands on Sara, pulling her daughter away from the magicians, towards the door of the tower.
A word lodged in her mind. Monsters.
She found them—their own distinct voices. Six, a dozen, twenty. Signals announcing that they were active and ready for service, like polite workers should. To her mind it sounded like many voices howling within the earth.
There was nowhere within the tower for monsters to issue from. The interior of Nyr’s domain was cramped, closed. Her mind caught up with her just before she could hustle Sara into the outside air. With sudden understanding she hauled the child back.
The rock beyond the threshold exploded outwards, chunks of it thundering down the slope of the mountain and starting fresh rockslides wherever they landed. Dust fountained into the air, darkening the sun. The first monster emerged from its long sleep.
She knew it, or its kind. One had trailed Nyr on their way to face the demon, and carried the pair of them back to his tower after they had called the satellite’s fire down.
That had been aged and battered, though.
This one gleamed new, springing into the air and hanging there without wings.
Twin rings on its back distorted the world around it, holding it impossibly suspended in space.
Its jaws, that were a dozen metal cutters and claspers, flexed and spun.
Intellectually she knew they were just testing functionality, but it looked like a promise of mutilation to human eyes.
Another crawled out of the hole it had left, extended its rings and lifted into the air.
A third was following, and her necklace told her of the voices of those queueing below.
A whole bestiary that had been sleeping for centuries, now woken by the witch’s call.
Enough monsters to tear down every wall in Lannesite, perhaps the world.
Not the lumbering things that Sendroth had been master of, but elegant, gleaming, deadly.
Workers, she thought. Only workers. And yet the merest labourer of Nyr’s people was more than all the armies of her own.
Lyn! Nyr’s voice, coming from her neck, and Sara’s, too.
Listen to me. I am—A rough pause, and she knew he was fighting on another plane, even as he spoke to her.
I am trying to undo a rather big problem, right at this moment.
I can’t do anything about the robots. His people’s word, the god-like workers the Elders commanded.
I’m stripping them of their security filters, do you understand me?
I’m setting them to take commands from anybody. If you can—
“I’ll do,” Lyn told him, or at least spoke and hoped the words were carried to him. She clutched Sara to her as the first of the monsters dropped down, its teeth tearing at the open doorway of the tower.
The door slammed shut. Did I do that? she wondered.
No, Sara had. Sara, who had heard the same words from Nyr, and taken them to heart.
Who had been learning at the wizard’s knee since she was old enough to talk.
Sara, who’d grown up a child of a different tale, as though Nyr had snatched away her daughter and replaced her with a changeling of his own people.
That should give us a moment’s peace—she thought.
But the girl twisted in her arms aid said, “No, you don’t have to!
” and the tower’s metal door crumpled like cheap tin.
The workers had built this place. They could tear it down.
The whole gate was ripped free, trailing the snakes and guts that had connected it with the rest of the tower.
She saw one monster rise up with the prize in its jaws, and the next seamlessly took its place.
Too big to force its way in, but it set about the doorway with a will, carving the opening wider with effortless strength.
She sent her commands to it. Stop. Sleep.
Go away. It shuddered, reversed, its mouthparts cycling.
Another took its place. She tried to speak to all of them at once but the witch’s unseen influence was dancing from one to another, undoing everything that Lyn did.
No, not even the witch. Malevolent sparks seemed to dance from one machine to the next, doing the witch’s will even as she focused on her battle with Nyr.
She even saw them in blurs and scuttling shadows, leaping from monster to monster, animating each with fresh intent.
Every monster she warded off was replaced by more.
Others out there seemed to be fighting one another, the shrill of tools and the shriek of tortured metal piercing in the ears.
The sky was occluded by dust and black smoke.
“No!” Sara shouted. “Not like that!” and Lyn didn’t know what she was talking to.
“Nyr,” she said, “I can’t hold them back—”
The wall fell in, beside the door. A fresh monster’s head rammed through it, nothing but a glittering maelstrom of diamond teeth.
I … came Nyr’s taut voice, can’t … help right now. Lyn. The satellite is … almost overhead. I can’t … let her … And then his actual voice, out loud. “Ilmoth, listen to me!” And, through Lyn’s necklace again, What is she? Lyn, I think I’m going to have to do something desperate.
The monster carved its way through the wall, thrust itself in.
Lyn was still trying to hold the doorway, where the possessed workers buzzed and clustered, chewing at the stone, clinging to the outside of the tower.
Every command she gave was obeyed, but only momentarily.
She heard an echo, patiently reversing each instruction, setting the monsters back to their destruction.
The witch’s familiar spirits, speaking within the monsters.
Sara, speaking back. And they would not have it. Whatever she was telling them, it was anathema to them. The thing that moved the monsters was hurling them, not just at the humans in the tower, but at Lyn’s daughter, desperate to silence her.
She caught up Sara and hauled her back, and the monster thundered through the wall entire, tearing its own wings off in its desperation to get inside.
Dust flooded the air, lining every throat with grit.
Lyn fell back, sending a furious volley of instructions and forbiddances to hold the others at the door, trying to locate the monster right before her in the conflicting tempest of signals that filled the room, as blind to its electromagnetic presence as she was to its physical one.
In her arms, Sara fought her as though desperate to throw herself into the monster’s maw.
Those spinning teeth lunged. Lyn turned her back to it, cradling Sara against her, for all the good it would do.
She felt a new barrier cast up before it, like a wall of iron its teeth couldn’t bite. She opened her eyes against the grit, craned backwards to see what it was.
Sendroth Sorcerer, standing between her and the robot in the clearing air, hands out as though he had suddenly come into his true power.
Nyr had opened the things to all commands, and apparently that meant the brigand’s gauntlets as well.
And he was Ilmoth’s ally; perhaps that meant they’d be slower to harm him than Lyn.
She put a hand to his shoulder, so he’d know she was there.
“I am trying to hold them,” he got out, between clenched teeth.
And of course he had never studied Nyr’s language or his science.
To Sendroth, sorcery was all it was. He had magic gloves to command monsters and he was using them as best he could.
It would work until Ilmoth—or the thing that was her ally—found a way around the logic of it.
Yet it seemed to bind them even more than the logic chains she’d been using, the science of it.
As though the robots themselves believed in magic.
“Just talk to me,” Sara shouted. “I can help you!” Speaking to that thing only she could hear.
From behind the barrier Sendra’s gloves created in the minds of the monsters, she set to dismantling their will, setting them against one another, flying them off on impossible, endless quests. Hearing Sara talking to herself, to the little voice. To the echo that inhabited the witch.
Nearby, Nyr cried out in despair, and she felt the end of an age break around them.