Twenty-Four #2
“It’s insulting, honestly,” I mutter. “Do you know how long it took me to talk him into giving me a tiny bit of credit? He guards his cashbox like he’s got the secrets of creation in there when it’s me asking, but he’ll open it up for any girl who comes along?”
Ky shoots me a look.
“Any pretty girl,” I amend. “Very pretty girl.”
She grins, apparently mollified, and looks back at the little handcart I’m tugging behind us. The goods are concealed in canvas sacks, but the longer spars stick out the top, gleaming lengths of metal.
“Is that going to be enough?”
“It’ll be the same basic frame as the Mark 4,” I say. “But without the orange and yellow sigils, it won’t be as strong or as tough.”
“But your new weapon will make up for it.”
“We hope.”
“It will.” She pats my shoulder again. “Complete faith, remember?”
I haul the hoard upstairs to my room, and Star peeks excitedly out of the trapdoor.
I’ve kept him out of sight for so long it feels weird having Ky around.
Honestly it feels weird having anyone in my room besides Star and my siblings.
I get the urge to clean the place up. I hurriedly clear some space for Ky to sit on the bed while Star examines the sacks.
[Disbelief: Ekkeban agreed to your terms?]
Ky applied some extra persuasion.
[Supposition: she threatened to kill him?]
Just some human mating behavior.
He skitters across the floor, focusing his primary optics on her. Ky reaches out tentatively and pats his flat metal head.
“He really isn’t like any runic I’ve ever seen,” she says. “He’s more like a pet.”
I give a cautious grunt of agreement as I start unpacking the new gear.
I’ve heard that on the upper tiers, people keep animals just for companionship; down here it’s not uncommon to have a pig running around the house nosing for scraps, but it’s destined to end up on the table when it gets big enough.
“And he talks to you?”
That makes me pause. I’d explained, haltingly, how Star and I communicate; hard to deny it when his call had summoned me across half of Malkuth. But talking about it out loud still gives me the creeps, like I’m transgressing some vital taboo.
“Y-yeah.”
“What’s he saying right now?”
[Instruction: tell her I am impressed with her ability to murder her opponents efficiently.]
“He’s, um, really happy to meet you.”
[Displeasure: you have failed to convey the nuance.]
“Aw. Glad to meet you, too.” She pats him again, then looks over at me. “You know this is crazy, though. Runics can’t talk. Runics can’t think. They just do what they’re told.”
“Don’t ask me to explain it.” There’s no such thing as a ruby sigil, either, and certainly not a THINK. “Maybe he came from… somewhere else.” From Above; it’s the only real explanation.
“Speaking of impossibilities,” she says, pulling a makeshift chair over to the bench beside me. “This thing you’re building. How does it work?”
Our shoulders brush as she leans forward. I clear my throat. “It’s a little tricky to explain.”
“Try me.”
“How much do you know about sigwork?”
“The basics, I guess. What everybody learns.” There’s a pause, and I think she realizes that her idea of “what everybody learns” is worlds beyond the education of anyone in the Heap.
She coughs, embarrassed. “Just—you know. MOVE sigils move things. RESIST sigils protect things. Threading wire holds it all together.”
“Do you know anything about where the power comes from?”
“There’s power in the sigils, right? And when it runs out, they break.”
I nod. “Most sigwork devices work that way, just running off the sigils themselves. Runics are… a little different.”
“Right. Runics have to have a master, and they draw power from their master’s intrinsic energy field.”
“Spirit.”
“Whatever.”
“Some devices do that, too.” At least some of my devices do; it doesn’t seem to be a common approach.
Given the effects of too much drawing on your “intrinsic energy field,” I can see why.
“Okay. The EXPLODE sigil is a bit of an oddity. It releases all the energy of its connected sigils at once, putting it out along the wires to drive a single effect. So it destroys itself and those sigils, but obviously it can produce some flashy results. That’s how Bug Zapper works. ”
“Interesting.” She seems genuinely fascinated, and I find myself warming to my topic. And, admittedly, having her pressed up beside me.
“Bug Zapper is… crude, though. It just puts out enough energy to scramble nearby connections and burn out sigils. It works great against Twisted because it sort of disrupts their network.”
“Like blowing out a candle with a bellows.”
“Exactly. But if the sigils and wire are tough enough to contain the power, they don’t break and it doesn’t work. That’s what happened against Vripiai.”
“It wasn’t Bug Zapper you used on Gestian, though,” she says.
“No.” I take a deep breath. “I had a sigil blank, like this one, and I carved… something. Close to EXPLODE, but not quite. It had the same quality of releasing all its energy at once, but it channeled it through another sigil into the environment rather than just blowing it in all directions.”
“Can you do it again?”
“I think so.”
The shape of the sigil is very clear in my mind, as though it had burned itself in.
I pick up my knife—a proper carving knife this time—and start etching it into the blank.
There’s a familiar pull at my spirit, that sensation of part of me entering the clay.
I must have winced, because Ky looks at me sidelong.
“Does it hurt?” she says.
“Not… exactly.” The sensation itself isn’t unpleasant, just the implications. “I just can’t help but think how I’m burning lifespan.”
“What do you mean?”
I look back at her, surprised. “Burning lifespan. Like a workhouse sigworker.”
“I know what a sigworker does,” Ky says. “But what does that have to do with lifespan?”
Can she really not know this? “Sigworkers die young,” I say slowly, as though explaining something to a small child. “You’d be hard-pressed to find one who makes it past forty.”
“That’s not—that can’t be right.” She waves a hand. “Obviously people on Malkuth don’t live as long as they do on Hod, but it’s just… diseases, bad food, that sort of thing.”
“It’s not,” I say flatly.
“You can’t know that.”
“Of course I can.” I feel irritation rising. “The workhouse inmates have it better than we do in the Heap, don’t they? Food and medicine and so on. But they die quicker than us all the same, as long as we don’t get eaten by Twisted in the meantime. Everybody knows the workhouses will kill you.”
“If that were true, why would anyone ever take a job there? It’s not like they kidnap anyone, people volunteer—”
“Because dying at forty is still better than starving at fifteen. Or thirteen. Or ten.”
“But…” She trails off, chewing her lip.
“Fara did some workhouse work, when she couldn’t avoid it,” I say. “And some piecework, clothes mostly, and some whoring. Out of all of those it was the sigwork she tried hardest to stay away from. She made me promise that none of us would go near it.”
Ky is silent for a few moments. I worry that I’ve gone too far; does it really matter if this rich girl from Hod is wrong about the way the world works? I still need her.
“Even if all that is… true,” she says slowly, “a workhouse sigworker makes eight or ten sigils a day, for years. I don’t think that carving a handful at a time is going to… hurt you.”
“Not where it would matter,” I agree, glad to change the subject. “I never figured on making it to forty anyway, with the work I do. I just don’t like the feeling, that’s all.”
Ky nods. But she’s still chewing her lip, lost in thought. I pick up the knife again and finish the sigil, the character similar to EXPLODE but subtly different. “There.”
“You’re right,” she says when I show it to her.
“That doesn’t say explode. Although the character you’re talking about actually has more of a sense of erupt, like—never mind.
Point is that this is what you’d say if you tried to”—she waves a hand, looking for words—“tried to pump too much air into a balloon, and it popped.”
“What’s a balloon?”
“Doesn’t matter. It’s more like burst or blast.”
“BLAST, then.” I tap it with one finger. It doesn’t seem like it’s going to go off unexpectedly, at least. “With Gestian I connected it to LIGHT and some adjectives, and—”
“It made light. A lot of light. But you said that wouldn’t help against Rotwurm?”
“I doubt it. Twisted have PERCEIVES all over their body. We need something more direct.” I rummage in the bag of sigils we got from Ekkeban and come up with two. HEAT and FORCE.
Ky raises her eyebrows. “That sounds… dangerous.”
I let myself grin. “That’s what I’m hoping.”