Page 10 of Engines of Reason

The other brigands hadn’t become lost. He knew that. Even Irkon, so good at losing his way. When your sovereignty was over opportunists, outlaws and thieves, you had them at your back only so long as you won. They’d seen his power dismantled almost casually by a single man. The Elder, horned inhuman, had destroyed all his poor monsters.

He was expecting it, when Blennardt stood. She had her cloak about her, and her fancy gutbow tied up in its waxed bag. “Well-so,” she said. She did him the favour of meeting his eyes. “The privilege, it was,” she told him. “An adventure. But…” Then Kaille was standing, too. Shouldering the half-empty pack she’d salvaged.

“No,” said Sendra, because Kaille had been with him since the start.

“It’s over,” she said flatly. “You saw. It doesn’t matter what we have. They’ll always swat us, the moment they hear us buzz.” Her face was ugly, vicious, defeated. Sendra watched the pair of them, knowing his eyes were begging, and that it only made him weaker. Watched them skirt round Ilmoth and head out into the night, where a good pair of legs might put distance between them and Lannesite’s reprisal.

He found his own legs standing him up. “Right,” he said, and knew that he was going to run after them. Be just one more troublemaker in a world of trouble, until they stretched his neck for it. Be nothing, in a world that didn’t know his name.

“No,” said Ilmoth. She had turned from the darkness and her face was coldly savage. “It’s not over.”

It looked pretty damn over to Sendra. He couldn’t even muster a spark of hope at her words. Her eyes sought his, and he was shocked to see pleading there. She was not someone who begged. She was Ilmoth Elder, mother of monsters. Except right now her children were dead and Ilmoth needed him. The bridge between her uncanny power and the world of human things.

“All right then,” Sendra said, making his voice as casual as he could. Wringing it dry of defeat and the destruction of his monsters. “Speak.”

“It’s not over between me and the Elder,” Ilmoth said.

“It looked over,” Sendra said tiredly. “He beat you, Ilmoth. No slight to you. He’s the Elder who brought down Ulmoth, thirty Storm-seasons ago. He’s been alive since the ancient times. He was always going to come and kick down whatever we built. Lannesite is jealous of its magic. But speak.”

“It’s not magic,” Ilmoth said flatly. One of those remarks she made, so evidently contradicted by everything she was or did. “He’s just the heir to a people who gifted him with toys. Toys outside and in. I know him. He is just an old man. A scholar.” And then some other words for what the Elder was, in that language she’d used speaking to him, the tongue of magicians. “I am as old as he,” she said. “And I have not grown old. I can beat him.”

He could find more followers, start gnawing at the edges of Lannesite’s power, but without monsters, without magic, he would only ever be a bandit. Not even enough to draw the ire of Nyrgoth Elder. Not enough to bring the Regent’s youngest sister to negotiate. He could already feel the Lannesite historians putting the final punctuation to his story, a man who would never rise to trouble their pages again.

“Speak,” he said a third time. There was power in that, wasn’t there? Commanding a wizard thrice, some such nonsense.

Ilmoth’s eyes gleamed, and he saw something move beneath her skin, below her collarbone. A knotted lump shifting there, like a fist pressing outwards. Not the first time he’d seen the trick; not something anyone could look on with equanimity.

“I have it,” she said. “Go with me and we will destroy the power of the Elder. More, I shall give you such gifts as no sorcerer ever had, Sendra.” There was a hunger in her voice. “I am going to claim my inheritance, and those who stand with me shall be lords of the world.”

Lyn

THE FIRST LEG OF their journey back to Lannesite Urban was on the Coaster barge. Awkward, diplomatically. Lyn hadn’t looked for the assistance. She’d have walked, just as she’d walked to Edmen when word of Sendroth Sorcerer had come to her. That had been most of her life since she’d fled home. Not a penniless vagrant, given the gorget she carried demanded lodgings anywhere Lannesite writ ran, but not a settled life. Each night a different roof over her, a different minor official put to the trouble of accommodating the Regent’s roaming troubleshooter. Lyn had done her best to be her sister’s ally in the provinces. She’d written letters, mediated feuds, dispensed justice, all the small things her station permitted. Made things better, where she could. Refrained from making them worse, where that was an option. She only wished her sister shared her attitude towards the wider world.

She’d been assuming Nyr would want to monopolise her attention, given how long it had been. Given how wrong it had gone, and how right he had been about it. Intolerably so, literally. She’d fled because she hadn’t been able to tolerate just how right he was, how wrong she’d been. All those arguments between them, the accusations she’d flung, scorning his vaunted wisdom, and in the end to look in the mirror and know she was a fool. A public fool. She’d have been the shame of her family if another sister hadn’t already claimed that coveted title.

Once there was a girl who told a story about herself. As a child, as a young woman, she’d been the idiot daughter who didn’t understand her sober responsibilities. Her mother’s despair, her sisters’ mockery. Except she’d gone into the world of children’s stories and fought a demon and brought home a magician, and suddenly she was Lyn who did the impossible, wizard’s apprentice and wonder-worker.

When her fall came, it was the most miserably mundane business, such as any woman might find herself embroiled in, and she’d walked into it because she was still living in stories. That was what stung. She could have endured a curse or sorcery, the failure of some great and arcane ambition. But not such a tedious and oft-told story. And Nyr had warned her and she hadn’t listened.

He wasn’t coming to her with his I-told-you-so though. He lurked in the cabin Esha had provided, and brooded. His mood was on him, and he hadn’t been using that inner shield of his to fend it off. She knew exactly how to help him with that—be there, at the edge of his notice, not intruding but lending strength. Have an ear for when he wanted to talk, a silence for when he didn’t. Be his friend. But she feared what he would say, from the depths of his bitterness, so she was not as good a friend as she should be.

She’d rather take time with Esha, but that, too, was awkward. Here, amongst the Coasters, there was little privacy. Esha had pawned a lot of her credit with her people, just agreeing to carry the Regent’s sister without fee. So they danced around one another, kept a politic distance, because the deck was a public space, the town square of the Coast-people. One more thing Lyn’s sister had ruined for her.

She could almost sympathise with Sendroth Sorcerer, honestly.

No, she could sympathise with him. Because he, too, was an ordinary person who’d walked into a story, and when you’d done that, the world was never the same. Never quite real in the way it had been before. Because you knew there was so much more to it. The world of the invisible, under and around and through the mundane. The world Nyr had taught her of, composed of electromagnetic waves and command strings and a people, her ancestors, who’d travelled between stars. The incantations that allowed Sendroth’s gloves to command his monsters to action and let her reach into their cold, angular minds and make them still and dead again.

She was a princess; Sendroth was a brigand. Perhaps those distinctions were less important than both becoming a part of that other world. Like Nyr. Like Ilmoth, whoever she had been. She found in herself a strange need to find Sendroth Sorcerer again, to speak as an equal, initiate to initiate. To understand his path and how it had changed him. Thus to learn about how she herself had been changed. Other than Nyr, who could she talk to about such things? And Nyr’s perspective was so far from her own, and his ability to put his mind into words came and went with the tide of his moods.

The first two days, she sat out on deck, brooding every bit as much as Nyr in his cabin, and no happier for doing so under the sun. And at the end of all that—because unlike Nyr she would not just sink herself into her miseries—she sought him out. Knocked at the door of his cabin, and then again, and called his name because he’d not be of a mood to answer the first rap.

He did answer, as though he could indeed be conjured with his name. Stared at her. Stepped back. Didn’t invite her in or tell her to go away. He was, she could see, in the teeth of the beast, as he’d once said. And she’d thought he meant an actual creature, but the beast was within him. Honestly, this last year she’d inherited one of her own. Perhaps it really was something that came with magic.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” she cautioned, straight off. He stared at her, then broke into an awkward laugh.

“You came down here,” he got out, “to tell me that you don’t want to talk.”

“About it. But we need to talk about other things. The witch.”