2. N #2
and when the Monster had seen the Skydancers, it had fled.
Haldeen stitched that thought together carefully.
The Monster had fled once it saw the Skydancer.
Once the Skydancers went south … they could not go north, and could not help the farm station.
He felt the world drop below him. Perhaps the Monster didn’t flee.
Perhaps it had accomplished its task. It had tied down the city’s reserves long enough for its mates, friends, whatever they were, to overwhelm the farm station.
He closed his eyes and opened them again, blinking slowly.
Has anyone else figured that out? How long until they do?
Will they? In his memory, no one had ever even considered the idea that the Predators had any more intelligence than an animal. Should I say something?
Moragen, Lord Sanitation, and the lowest ranking of the lords appointed, gave him a jab in the ribs.
“Buck up, old son,” he whispered cheerily, “the piece he took out of your behind will stop bleeding in a bit. Could be worse, you know.”
Moragen grinned at him, the smile of someone happy the arrow had missed him.
“I can tell him about that new valve you designed, if you like? It really makes the waste flow.”
Haldeen gave him a queasy look, while thinking furiously.
Moragen had made his decision for him, and he had no desire to place himself under the king’s blade a second time today.
Better to gather his data, and get proof, more evidence …
something he could lay out line by line, show the patterns.
They don’t see it because they don’t want to …
because it would mean that we are truly going to lose …
that the shrinking circle will continue …
that there is no way out. Dumb Predators …
we could mostly, almost handle. Smart ones, though …
. He paused that line of thinking. “I wonder what changed?” he said aloud.
“Shhsss,” said Moragen. “I think I’m next. My turn in the barrel.”
The king turned his gaze on Moragen, who remained sober-faced as he gave the only good news in the entire session.
To the fellow’s credit, he didn’t smirk, or look smug, and he did give Haldeen credit for that new valve.
The king’s eyes flickered back to Haldeen for a moment but his gaze remained opaque.
“One wonders,” the king said aloud, after Moragen had finished, “Why Lord Redamil Artificer did not supply this new valve.”
“Lord Haldeen offered one to us to test, Majesty,” said Moragen. “I ….” He made an elaborate shrug. “I guess Lord Redamil doesn’t have time for little things like valves for the sanitary system, but Lord Haldeen’s always trying to make things flow more smoothly.”
The Lord Exchequer gave a small cough. “And cost, Majesty. The prices for the Lord Artificer’s time have continued to escalate. Even simple jobs cost ten times what they did a few years back. We’re learning to make do as the cities look to themselves first. I daresay,
my Lord Gatekeeper’s valve is good enough, and didn’t cost us the metals the Lord Artificer would have required.”
Haldeen almost choked. The reason he’d designed the valve in the first place was because his tower was at a choke-point in the system, and he got tired of smelling sewage.
And it was much more unpleasant when there was the—thankfully rare—backup in the system.
But here was Moragen, making himself an unexpected ally, and giving Haldeen a tiny nudge in the direction of the much more prestigious title of “Gatekeeper and Artificer.”
He caught Moragen’s eye, and surreptitiously locked thumbs with the fellow for just a moment.
I owe you, said the gesture, acknowledging the new relationship.
The king managed a smile that shared close kinship with his more usual frown …
. “And my Lord Gatekeeper is once more taking up tasks outside his purview. Make sure you spare some time for your appointed job, Haldeen. You remember that one. Keeping the Gates working?”
He did manage a ghost of grin. “Still, the sewage isn’t backing towards the King’s Tower anymore, so thank you both. And on that note, gentles all, we are concluded. Once around the table, and home for dinner?”
Haldeen sat in his place as the Council’s report concluded. The loss of the last outstation farm, the depletion of the firelances which would not be replaced soon, even his touchy Machina … they were getting weaker. Something needed to change.
He would do it. He would send the probe tonight, while the city slept and the draw on the population took much less of the city’s ambient magic.
Eight hours later, in the middle-watches of the night, he sat on the bench in the Gatekeepers’ Lab, and reviewed his wife’s calculations one final time.
The fussy writing with the neat columns and balanced equations showed her mind at its strength, in the details, where precision mattered.
Here their alliance lay, reduced to its essentials; he might be the thinker, the plotter, and the planner, while she produced the ever so precise numbers that made the Gate alignments possible.
He felt alone tonight, and for a few moments, wished that he and she had found a way to be more than civil to each other.
Andaleisia was not unattractive, and had an amusing laugh, and told a good story, and shared a passion for the calculations that made the Gates work. Perhaps in a different world ….
He shrugged the maudlin thoughts away, aware he was stalling.
He put the sheaf down, and stood facing the Gate, and the cages.
He began the process of bringing the small Gate to life.
Her best work had been in figuring out how to mesh a small short-range Gate, the one he’d been given to test temporary transit points, with the World Gate.
His experiments verified that the World Gate remained intact when his city fell, but remained unpowered and forgotten by all … except him.
He used the control rod to shape the ambient magic around him, reciting the incantations and making meticulous passes with the tip of the wand to bring the runes and sigils to life in the precise order she had mapped out.
He used a trickle of his own power, just enough to start the flow, and shape it, then drew in the ambient magical energy that lay all about.
Sensitives would feel the magic move, and ambient alarms all over this part of the city would be chiming softly, but the sheer scale of what he was doing would keep his work from being pinpointed.
The Gate took a lot of Power, and he was moving a lot of magic, but he was taking it in tiny sips from everywhere.
He completed the process of bringing the Gate to life. Now came the tricky and painstaking part, meshing it with the World Gate a hundred leagues away. Physical distance had a small effect, bigger still the World Gate’s orientation, almost 70 degrees oblique to the small Gate he manipulated now.
He poured more power in, drawing down the ambient magic quickly enough for the lights in the lab to flicker and dim, then saw the gate begin to flash and coruscate as the World Gate came to life.
The heart of her calculations lay in the energy transfers, using the small Gate both as a connection and a power-source, while being oblique to the runes at the far end.
Tricky calculations and just so recitations.
He continued to feed the small Gate ambient magic, grimly aware that he leveraged energies far beyond what he could safely manage.
If this goes badly, they will be cleaning up my remains with a mop and a cloth. And burying me in a bucket.
The Gates locked in place … and aligned.
The Gate flashed once, cycling through the rainbow, and settled into the steady shimmering and heartbeat pulse that marked tuned Gates.
Her calculations, with his know-how and nerve, had pulled it off.
Whoever … whatever stepped through the small Gate here, would pass through here, through the World Gate …
and to somewhere. Presumably the Gate still connected to the new world he had originally located.
Though after a century, who could say? Still …
if nothing had disturbed that Great Gate’s tuning, it should still be set to the destination it had held when it had been shut down.
And abandoning all those Machina on the other side.
What a waste. Though … without a means to power them without them going rogue, as they had the last time, the only way to bring them back would be to physically haul them back one at a time.
Perhaps with a winch that could be powered from this side … .
And there I go, losing my focus.
He checked the Gate stability one final time, and went onto the task that really frightened him. The Probe.
He kept the work-table between it and him and touched the control to enable it.
It uncoiled and stood; seven feet of killing machine and bio-organism.
Its gray scales shimmered in the flickering light, and he caught its scent, something like a mix of musk and dry paper.
It regarded him with dead-black eyes devoid of pupil, and went through its start-up protocols, shifting its weight and stretching its muscles.
He had designed it, built it, melded it from magic, combining machine parts and living tissue.
The memory of the rogue machinery in the other world lay too close to the surface of his memories.
That failure reminded him that this one could dismember him in an instant if it malfunctioned, somehow slipped its controls, or simply misinterpreted something he told it to do.
The surgery to reduce the criminal’s brain to mush left just enough to run the body, and execute commands, matched to a boosted strength, size, and feral speed that made it tough enough to explore what was on the other side of the Gate.
And the fact that it used its own muscles and organs to move and observe meant the amount of magic it needed was miniscule compared to a real Machina.
Not to mention that it was, within limits, self-guiding.
He tested the battery. The small module would draw power from the Probe’s own life force, providing the energy needed to feed it the commands it would follow, and work around the appalling lack of magic that the initial scouts reported the last time they had opened the Gate.
Mostly living, machinery where needed, powered by a small magical module.
A straightforward solution to a complicated problem.