Page 8 of Engines of Reason

The robots roared.

Lyn had been waiting for it. Around her, a thrill of fear and equal anticipation went through Sendroth’s people. Nyr, too, had been forewarned, thanks to her. He sighed, his stance communicating, I’d really hoped things wouldn’t get this far. Nobody could be as beset by ennui as a centuries-old wizard.

She mouthed into her collar, Be careful, and saw him glance at her, smile slightly. A look that said, You care? And of course she cared. He was her friend, despite everything, Despite her not being ready to see him again. Honestly, she was absurdly thankful for the whole sorcerer-bandit-warlord business because it gave him somewhere else to turn his arch regard.

The girl had come out, now. Ilmoth Elder, self-styled. Nyr regarded her. She was not tall, like he was. She had no horns, nor wore spirit-woven garments with magical incantations running through the threads. She had a power, though. Lyn felt it speaking from within her, beating like her heart.

“These beasts are mine to command, Nyrgoth,” she said. “You shall not have them.”

Lyn could not discern the signals then, just a great buzz of activity within unheard space as the robots searched for instructions. One by one the metal beasts shuddered and stamped, their cutting mandibles or grinding teeth flexing and closing.

Nyr’s eyes were narrow. “You are the one who styles yourself ‘Elder’,” he said, eyes flicking briefly to Lyn in acknowledgement of the warning. He said it a particular way, garnishing the word with suffixes that plainly said the girl was no such thing. A superior speaking to not only an inferior, but a braggart, a liar. And probably Nyr hadn’t meant it to come out quite so scathingly. He struggled with the language still.

She looked to Ilmoth for the rage of the young dismissed by the old—a familiar feeling from Lyn’s own youth. Instead, the girl’s face set hard. “I am Ilmoth Elder, and I know you, old man,” she said.

Nyr shrugged as though to say that, as he was the sole survivor of an antique age, and the world’s greatest magician, this was hardly surprising.

“Lannesite’s tame conjurer,” Ilmoth declared. “Ancient, moribund, heartless.” And she used a strange word for that, qualifiers of without emotion and the core of you torn out. Both of which could be literally true, of Nyr. And he hadn’t registered the nuance, because he never did. On the electromagnetic magical plane, Lyn felt the two of them explore each other’s reach, raising walls of interference and counter-signal about the rumbling monsters. Neither striking just yet, but sending out their insubstantial scouts and armies to out-manoeuvre the other.

“Impressive.” Nyr was frowning at last. “Accomplished. You are the one who’s taught this man his business. Or … no, given him gifts to raise him up as a sorcerer. So where does your own mastery come from…?” Thinking in words, as he sometimes did. And in his own language, too, so that Lyn could just about follow his meaning but it must have sounded like incantations to everyone there.

“Where does yours, save your privileged inheritance,” Ilmoth replied in the same tongue. Nyr’s eyes went wide a second later, and she added, “Anthropologist Second Class,” as though it was a curse, and the monsters roared into motion.

Nyr

SHE ALMOST HAS ME THEN. Because—What? How, even? A language that nobody on this world even knows, save for a scatter of command syntax I taught to Lyn. And I certainly didn’t teach her to call me Anthropologist Second Class because it’s not exactly a compliment.

It’s Lyn who saves me, in that moment. The woman—Ilmoth Elder—has one of those clunking great construction tools about to run its mining head through the space I’m standing in, but Lyn breaks from the press of brigands around her and gets in the way. Not fatally, or I’d not be this sanguine about things. Her escorts are watching the machines and not her, so she squirrels out and shoves a hand at the robot miner. My internal instruments detect the barrage of commands she sends it, activating safety protocols that override current instructions, deflecting its course, spinning it in place to the horror of everyone nearby. The bandits are getting well clear and Esha’s people are already far back, watching with interest. I’m still basically just standing there, wrongfooted by what Ilmoth said and by Lyn being here. Possibly this passes for wizardly unworldliness.

Then the pair of us are left at one end of a big cleared space with Ilmoth at the other and I’m recovered from the various shocks and it is on.

The one exception to my original prohibitions about getting involved. Where the technology of earlier ages interferes with what we snobbishly decided was the proper order of things here on Sophos IV. Notwithstanding they were a post-tech culture descended from starship-operating colonists, we wanted them to be nicely primitive and simple so we could write smug little monographs about them. When they got hold of the technology of their actual ancient astronaut ancestors, we were allowed to take their toys away. Looked at in retrospect, it’s an appalling policy but, though I’ve canned the rest of the rules, this one I somehow kept. When someone rocks up with a fistful of robots, call for the wizard.

It was what got me involved with Lannesite, the first time. Warlord Ulmoth, burning across the landscape with a horde and robots he’d liberated. Not a thug but a very clever man. I rode with Lyn’s great-grandmother to stop him, and it was exhilarating and very, very stupid, and remains a bright memory even my gloomy mind can’t retcon into something miserable.

So this Ilmoth—let’s leave aside the language and the Anthropologist Second Class—is just one more Ulmoth. She and her pet warlord, off on a robot-assisted bender through the small kingdoms on Lannesite’s border.

The robot that Lyn scotched is abruptly back under the control of—the witch? Can I call her a witch? The others are all moving. Half a dozen hulking, semi-functional machines equipped with a variety of what were supposed to be innocuous tools for moving and boring and shaping earth. But when you’re just a fragile human being, they’re terrifying weapons, industrial accidents waiting to happen. The brigands and Coast folk watch with awe and horror as they launch into the air or stomp across the ground, tearing it up with their metal feet.

I turn them off. Colonial-era tech is an order of magnitude less sophisticated than my own people’s. Their safeguards are child’s play to get past. I could have them dancing waltzes. I am not a showman, though. I stand before the clattering host and send the signal to deactivate them. I do raise an imposing hand, denying them their ability to go any farther. What sort of a wizard would I be otherwise?

I am rather enjoying myself, in this moment. I had left the DCS off, but the sheer adrenaline of someone trying to kill me leaves no room for the bleak moods. Also, Lyn is here, and we’re on the same side and fighting an actual witch together and that seems a good thing given how things were left between us. Oh God, The thoughts one has while fighting robots.

Anyway, the robots stop, and the couple that got airborne crash down, one in a manner that suggests there aren’t enough qualified mechanics on Sophos IV to get it going again. I hear Ilmoth give a shriek of rage at my cavalier dismissal of her forces, but this is how things are when you throw antiquated tech at this world’s premier practitioner of the scientific arts. I give Lyn a look.

“Did you—” I start and she shakes her head.

“She didn’t get your speech from me.”

I stride forwards, weaving around the stilled automata. I want to sit down with this young woman and ask her, What the hell? I try for a rather casual greeting, but my mastery of the language betrays me, because it is very very difficult to find the right register—not insultingly casual, not patronisingly formal. Left to my own devices I err towards the latter, so what comes out is something like, “Young lady, explain yourself!” Not exactly diplomatic. I should leave the talking to Lyn.

The witch turns the robots back on again. This isn’t something she’s supposed to be able to do. When I shut them down, I locked them, installed some serious security in their systems. Sendroth’s fancy gloves would not be dextrous enough to pick those locks, nor would Ulmoth be able to talk his way around them. I changed all the command codes and made sure that absolutely nobody save me would be able to get them moving. And yet they move. And I am right in the middle of them.

I throw my hands out, more out of an inadequate need for physical warding than anything else. Possibly it looks magicianly but every one of those things has wheeled its chattering, grinding, drilling mandibles on me and I am about to lose some fingers.

I fight her. In the unseen, unreal place that exists within and between those machines, I throw up barriers and sever the command lines she has somehow set up around my forbiddances. I conjure more complex barriers of encryption and equation, and find her undoing them with a feverish speed. It is a duel, an actual wizards’ duel, and I have time to think to myself, Is there no end to the ridiculous situations I find myself in?

On the physical plane, each machine lunges for me and falls still, and I move between them, a stately dance—I’d be running around like a mad thing only my legs aren’t up to it. My eyes are closed, but each machine is broadcasting its precise location to me, so I don’t need to see them. Partway through this I have the new revelation that she is there. In that space, like I am. And I have an inbuilt battery of augmentations, body, clothes, horns and all, allowing me to link to these digital spaces without a magic staff or crown or all the other toys past sorcerers of Sophos IV have relied on. I can detect the tower-crafted clothes that Lyn wears, and Sendroth’s gauntlets, but Ilmoth has none of it. She is magical in and of herself, and that is impossible.