Four
People think that sigils are simple. Stick a MOVE on something, and it moves! Stick a RESIST on there and it gets stronger. What could be easier? To which I say, if you think it’s that easy, give it a try! Just don’t blame me when your sigwork explodes in your face.
Link a MOVE to a spar that can’t take the strain, and it’ll shatter. Get the connection to a BIND wrong and it’ll rip right out of its mounting. And if you overload any sigil, it’ll crack, and that’s all your bits down the drain.
Different types of material vary in their ability to carry sigil energy, or even specific types of sigil energy.
The ubiquitous threading wire transports the power best, but that’s only the start.
Some metal is best for strength, some for flexibility, some for power.
Use the wrong piece in the wrong place and you won’t get the effect you were counting on.
Taj, you might reasonably ask, how did you learn all this?
You sure as hell didn’t go to school or anything.
To which I answer: I had a lot of shit blow up in my face, basically.
I’ve had a knack for sigwork as long as I can remember, and Fara let me keep a few of the sigils we found in the salvage once she knew how much I liked playing with them.
I would make little toys for the other kids, constructs that marched around the room or danced or turned backflips.
It wasn’t long after that I built Star’s first body.
[Query: what is taking so long?]
Just making sure I get the connections right, I tell him. Don’t want the idiot to end up with eyes where its arms should be.
[Assessment: you have given me worse designs.]
You call that gratitude? I shift my grip on the wire cutters. Okay, here goes.
Star’s combat body—the Mark 3, as I call it—is splayed open before me with various parts and panels removed.
I’ve installed the new junctions and replaced some broken modifiers, and the basic structure is in as good a shape as it’s going to get.
The last step, unfortunately, is to pull Star himself out and replace him with “the idiot.”
Star’s problem is that he’s too smart. If I put him in the fight, he’d probably win, but everyone watching would immediately know something was wrong.
The way he moves is too fluid, too like a living thing, not at all similar to the mechanical clunkiness of bottom-tier runics.
Star can fake it while we’re wandering around town, but not in the middle of combat.
Someone would start to wonder. At best they’d try to buy him off me. At worst they wouldn’t bother asking. We pay our dues to the Clawmarks for protection, but that doesn’t help if someone else pays more. Or if it’s Uncle Claw himself who gets curious.
No, Star has to stay secret, which means no fighting in public.
In the center of his carapace is a halo of sigils surrounded by a converging tangle of threading wire.
At the center of that is a single sigil that glows very slightly from within.
His foundation sigil, the seat of Star’s consciousness.
I’ve never seen another one like it. It’s red, but rather than clay it’s clear and faceted like a gemstone.
A ruby sigil, with the character floating deep inside it, etched in gold.
It reads THINK.
I’ve seen a lot of other runics over the years, and talked to a lot of sigworkers.
It’s hard to ask questions without attracting unwanted attention, but nobody I’ve ever met has even mentioned a ruby sigil, nor that THINK could be a possibility.
You can’t just scratch any old word into clay and expect it to work, after all.
And yet, Star thinks. Sometimes I wonder if he’s truly unique; if not, I wonder where the hell he came from. I wonder if I was meant to find him in the scrap heap, or if anyone would have done.
Does it feel weird? I ask him as I start to clip through the connections. When I pull you out of your body?
[Query: would it feel strange if I sawed off your head? What if I promised to stick it back on someone else?]
You said it didn’t hurt, though.
[Confirmation: that is because I am better constructed than you.]
I wince as my leg twinges. You can say that again. Star’s foundation sigil is, as best I can determine, indestructible; no matter how badly he gets ripped to pieces, I can always patch it into a fresh body and he’ll be as good as new. Which is a lot more than I can say about myself.
When the last of the connections are severed, I pull the sigil free, take a moment to examine its brilliant facets in the light.
[Eeek: don’t stare at me naked], Star deadpans.
Oh hush.
I tuck him into my pocket. “The idiot” is at the bottom of my sack, a tight ball of sigils and wire held together in a steel cage.
It’s a standard low-end runic foundation, built around an ordinary red OBEY.
Not great, but the best I could afford. I’m hoping superior engineering can make up for any difference in speed and agility.
“Knock knock,” says a deep voice.
I startle, then immediately curse the instinctive reaction—makes me look furtive, guilty.
The man standing in the doorway of the prep shed gives me a slow smile.
He’s a big man, heavily built, with a shaven head, a close-cropped red beard, and mad little eyes in deep sockets.
On his cheek are three parallel lines, scars that stand out white among the craters and spots.
He didn’t cut himself shaving. Those scars are the insignia of the Clawmarks, the wounds they inflict on every recruit. In Rekas’s case, they’re faded, hardly visible, because Rekas has been a Clawmark for a very long time. He stands at the top of their hierarchy, below only Uncle Claw himself.
The Clawmarks are what you might call a necessary evil.
In theory, the Arbiters of the Hod Council are responsible for keeping the peace here as elsewhere; in practice, they don’t come down the stairs except in big squads to kick the living shit out of somebody.
That means the only way for the average Heaper to protect themself against thugs, murderers, rapists, and thieves is to hire a bigger, meaner set of thugs to protect you, and then who is going to protect you from those thugs? And so on.
The end result of this process is the Clawmarks, who control all the territory around Stair #3 and claim the right to extract dues for their “services” from every resident.
A modest payment and you live in safety.
(Or at least safety from everyone who isn’t a Clawmark.) Rekas, among other duties, is in charge of making sure everyone coughs up on time.
He enjoys his work a little too much. Nobody likes Rekas.
“Five minutes,” he says to me. “Are you going to be ready?”
“I will if nobody talks to me,” I mutter. The idiot’s foundation fits neatly into the socket—it ought to, I’d designed it that way—but it still needs to be wired in properly. Otherwise, as I warned Star, it might get its limbs confused.
“Harsh,” Rekas says with mock amusement. “But I like to see someone working right down to the last minute. Shows persistence.”
I try to ignore him, twisting wires together between my fingers. Not as good as proper soldering, but good enough. Good enough, good enough, everything’s always just barely good enough…
“When you see that brother of yours, tell him I’m thinking of popping round to the bakery for a visit,” Rekas drawls. “The little scones he makes are really top-notch.”
He’s doing this on purpose. Just to watch me squirm.
He doesn’t have a grudge against me in particular, as far as I know; this is just who he is, like a man who likes to let a junk-lizard wriggle in the trap for a while before tossing it in the stewpot.
Just to show that he can, and there’s fuck-all I can do about it.
The end of the wire slips up under my fingernail, punctures the thin skin there. I yelp and swear, a drop of blood dotting the sigils.
“Oh dear,” Rekas says. “Should I summon a physicker?”
Fucker. He knows I’ve barely got the bits for a bandage, much less a physicker. I grit my teeth and twist the last couple of connections together. My runic—it’s not Star anymore—twitches. I clear my throat.
“Stand up,” I tell it.
Slowly, with none of Star’s grace, it obeys, inverting its legs and climbing laboriously to its feet. It’s still upside down, and its primary optics turn sluggishly to track me.
Good enough? No way to know. I start reattaching the armor plating.
“I’ll tell them you’re ready,” Rekas says. I can hear his mocking smile.
The space around the pit is packed, as always.
Everyone loves watching runics fight; it’s one of the few forms of entertainment available for free.
For those who fancy even more excitement, Clawmark bookies take shouted bets and hand back torn scraps of paper, while enterprising children shriek offers for water and mash-biscuits. The volume level verges on painful.
Each contender has a prep shed, just a metal box to provide privacy for a last-minute tune-up.
Sigwork techniques for fighting runics are jealously guarded secrets, passed down through generations and kept in hidden manuals.
Most of it, frankly, is bullshit, but it lends an air of mystique.
When I lead not-Star outside, there’s a rising buzz of conversation all around us as experienced punters take stock of this new arrival.
It’s not my first runic fight; when I was a kid I used to clean up building palm-sized runics that would push each other out of a circle scratched in the dirt, with a quarter-bit on the line.
But it’s the first time I’ve tried for serious money using Star’s combat body.
It seemed like the obvious move, given how well he’s done against Twisted, but watching the idiot stutter forward one careful movement at a time, I’m having second thoughts.