The Iron Wyrm Affair

by Lilith Saintcrow

  There were Altered guards at the quarry’s mouth, but Valentinelli left Clare and Sig in a shaded dell and disappeared around the bend in the cart track. He reappeared a few minutes later, wiping one of his dark-bladed knives on a torn rag he dropped without further ado in the dust. Clare did not overly examine the traces of crimson on it; it was enough to deduce the provenance – the shirt the Neapolitan had torn it from as soon as the owner had ceased breathing.

  Mercifully, the corpses lay with their faces turned away from the entrance, their necks crooked oddly. Their Alterations were only hinted at – deformed ribs and too-thick legs insinuating changes to the human body that might sicken Clare, did he not have other things to focus on.

  “Kielstone,” he murmured. It was an underground quarry. Kiel could be cut in any direction, unlike slate, and it ran in odd veins, twisting and looping underground. It also was mildly resistant to sorcery, meaning it had to be extracted by hand. Even traces of kiel would camouflage the mechas nicely, before their logic engines turned on.

  The entry was a cavern of pitch black, even under the strengthening daylight. The clouds were thinning, and it might turn into a beautiful Kentish spring day before long. The mecha would glitter under the sun as they strode toward Londinium.

  Were there other quarries in the districts around the ancient city just waiting to birth a stream of metal monsters? Very likely. How many?

  More than will be comfortable, Clare. Concern yourself with the task at hand.

  “Archie.” Sigmund had gone rather pale under his mask of soot. “In there?”

  “Come now, Sig. You’re a lion for Miss Bannon, aren’t you? See there.” Clare pointed. “We shall find lanthorns, no doubt. Or glowrock. Signor Valentinelli, if you would be so kind.”

  In short order they had glowrocks caged in steel, the surfaces of the stones dark and oil-slick as they absorbed sunlight. They seemed well charged, but just to be safe Valentinelli also found a lanthorn with a trimmed wick and plenty of oil. Clare thought to ask if the man had lucifers about him, but the gleam in the Neapolitan’s dark eyes told him such a question was foolish.

  They penetrated the cavern’s black mouth. Twenty paces in it was dim enough that the glowrocks began to shimmer. The floor was stone, scarred and worn smooth, implements stacked against the walls – picks and shovels, rope, kegs of various sizes, scrap lumber, a small pile of miner’s hats, candleholders. Fifty paces, and they walked in tiny spheres of silver glow, blackness pressing down all around. A hundred paces brought them to a junction. The main passageway continued down, terminating in what had to be some sort of caged hoist-lift; a much narrower passage veered sharply off to the right.

  Valentinelli was a scarred caricature, glowrock light disappearing into his pupils and the pits on his soot-streaked face. “Signor?”

  Clare swallowed drily, pointed at the smaller passage. “That one.”

  “How would they…” Sig coughed. “No, of course. That is for supplies. This is for people.”

  Pleased, Clare made a noise of assent. Valentinelli handed his glowrock cage over and edged into the small passageway. If there were more guards below, he did not wish to be blinded. It was a good idea. But they did not have to go far. The narrower passageway terminated at a wooden platform. Two frail guardrails over a pitch-black pit, with the wooden struts of a ladder showing.

  “Oh, Scheisse.” Sig’s voice struck the edges of the pit, and a faint echo drifted back up.

  “Cheer up, Sig. Man only dies once, you know.”

  Valentinelli’s humourless snigger echoed as well. “In that case, signor, you go first.” But he shouldered the mentath aside with a small spitting sound of annoyance, grabbing the third glowrock cage and producing a handkerchief. In a trice the cage was tied to his torn waistcoat, and he tested the ladder with commendable aplomb. “Safe enough. Twenty guinea, definitely not enough.”

  The climb down was more arduous mentally than physically. Sig, sweating and muttering awful imprecations under his breath, nearly wrenched one of the ladders free, he trembled so violently. Every twenty feet or so the ladder would end, resting on a trigged platform of warped wood. The glowrocks’ shimmer intensified as they descended, and Clare was seeking to calculate just what sort of foul air they might encounter in the depths when Valentinelli hopped off the ladder and on to solid ground. The Neapolitan sighed, a not-quite-whistle, and lifted his glowrock cage.

  A vast chamber tunnelled out of rock greeted them. It was mostly empty, but the scuffs on the dusty, dirt-grimed floor were fresh. To Clare’s left, the other half of the large hoist-lift rested in a carven hollow. The sides and floor of the cavern were unnaturally smooth, almost glassy. The cavern’s roof was ribbed like a cathedral’s vault, but the ribs were odd. Almost… organic.

  Where did the workers who built this all vanish to? For a moment he had an odd mental vision of them seeping through the cracks in the floor, metal become liquid and returning to earth’s embrace. He shook it away, annoyed at the fancy.

  Sig let out a bark of relief when his boots touched firm ground. Great pearls of sweat cut tracks through the ash on his face. “Archie. I hate you.”

  “Ha!” Clare’s cry of triumph shattered the stillness.

  Scattered on the floor of the cavern were a few bipedal mecha of the sort they had seen in the warehouse near the Tower. They slumped, curiously lonely, and from the way they all faced toward the deepest darkness at the back of the cavern, Clare could imagine the serried ranks that must have stood here before awakening to the invisible call.

  “Ha!” he repeated, and actually bounced up on his toes. “As I suspected! Some of them did not receive that call, Sig. You and I are going to mechanister them, and then we will take them to Londinium.” The only response his revelation garnered was frank, open-mouthed stares from his companions. “Don’t you see? We will have mecha of our own!”

  “Mad,” Valentinelli muttered. “You are mad.”

  Sigmund, on the other hand, stared for a few more moments. Then a smile spread over his broad face. “Du prächtiger Bastard!” He clapped Clare on the shoulder hard enough to stagger the mentath. “Only if I take it to workshop after. Ja?”

  “Sig, old man, if we make this work, you will have a multiplicity of mecha carcasses to pick over at your leisure. We haven’t much time; let us see what they have left us.”

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Always the Bloody Way

  The first thread of grey on the eastern horizon was a silver ribbon under a heavy door of ink. It whipped the Khloros into a frenzy of speed, the countryside below running like a sheet of black oil on a wet plate. The Rider leaned forward, spiked helm nodding and armoured shoulders shaking with effort. The door of her Discipline was closing, and she could not stop it.

  The tide of the dead who rode with her foamed in the dark-clouded sky, a crystal tracery of flung sea-waves. Under the shadow of Khloros and Rider they rose like smoke from graveyards and ditches, fields and rivers, and joined the procession. The things they rode were vaguely horselike, or they ran in empty air, spirits whole as they had been while living or terribly disfigured as they had been at life’s ending. The drowned and the murdered, the beaten and the lost, the starved and the gluttonous, they ran in the Khloros’s wake.

  This was why Endor was held in caution. Who could trust a man or woman who held congress with such a crowd? Or a Prime who could bring the Khloros to a night’s unlife?

  The Pale Horse arrowed down. The silvery ribbon in the east became fringes of grey. It lashed sensitive flanks, scored smoking weals in piebald, stitched-together horseflesh. The armoured barding sought to protect the sorcerous skin underneath.

  It does not matter. The journey is at an end.

  With the thought, consciousness returned to the Rider. For a moment she hesitated, trembling, on the threshold, nameless and irresolute. It seemed an eternity she had been riding, following the scentless trail of treachery borne on gryphon wings. Did he know she followed
? Quite possibly; she was loud enough to be heard counties away.

  Between one heartbeat and the next she was through the door, the memory of being merely a cup to pour meaning into mercifully evaporating. Even a sorcerer’s finely tuned mind could not stand such a violation. Best it were forgotten, and soon.

  A white sword coalesced at the eastern horizon. The grey light intensified, and the sound of waves crashed back and forth. Khloros, understanding her human need, intensified its speed again. It was graceful even in its desperate shambling, its armour and barding and flesh, bones and metal unravelling into pure æther. It burst into colour – the page written upon, the pallid light broken into its constituent parts.

  The crystal wave clustered around the Rider, dead hands outstretched and fingers turned to vapour.

  She fell.

  Sunlight. Warm as oil against her cheeks, striking her sensitised eyes even through protective lids. She lay on chill dampness, various bits digging into her back and hair and skirts. She did not dare open her eyes, simply lay where she was for a few breaths, taking in everything she could of the space around her.

  Morning chill, a damp saltbreath of the sea a distance away, flat metal tang of riverwater closer. The sunshine came in dappled patterns – she was under leaves. A faint breeze rattled them. What was that sound? It was not waves or the groaning crash of rent earth. It was not the hoofbeats of Khloros, and it was most definitely not her own voice.

  Cries. The clacking of razor beaks, a voice raised high and furious in sonorous chant. A shuddering ran through the damp, hard ground underneath her.

  What?

  Sense returned. Every inch and particle of her savagely abused body hurt. To open the door to Discipline was never undertaken lightly. Things could happen to those whose will was not honed, and Discipline took a hard toll on the body as well as the mind. Emma Bannon sat up, blinking furiously, and found herself in a ragged ruin of a dress, her corset stays snapped and dark curls knocked loose, the morning dew gilding bracken and bramble. To her left a rocky hill rose, choked with vines. It was from the top of that hill that the sounds were pouring, screeches and nasty grindings.

  She staggered upright, tearing herself free of clutching greenery. Her knees threatened to give; she silently cursed at them. That gave them some starch, but only some. Her rings ran with sparkling light – Tideturn had come while she lay senseless, and she carried a full charge of sorcerous force. It stung, like the touch of sun on already reddened skin.

  She took stock. All in all, she was reasonably whole. The black stone at her throat was ice cold, her rings on numb fingers sparked with charter symbols, and her earrings quivered against her neck, brushing dew-damp skin. If she did not take pneumonia from lying on the cold ground for however long, it would be a miracle.

  That’s Llewellyn up there. She shook herself, cast about for a path. None was apparent.

  Oh, isn’t that always the bloody way. Where am I? God alone knows where, with a mad Prime above and the fate of Britannia at stake, and not even a goat track in sight.

  “Bloody f—king hell,” she muttered, and other words more improper, as she turned in a full circle. The clashing and scraping and cawing above her was mounting in intensity.

  Well. There is nothing for it, then.

  She waded through the bramble to the base of the hill, set her hands to the rough grey stone poking out through moss and vine, and began to climb.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Don’t Touch the Contacts

  Sigmund swore, hit the mecha’s froglike head twice with the spanner. The resounding clashes filled the cavern. The glowrocks were dimming. “There. Try now.”

  Really? Banging it with a spanner? Sigmund, I am disappointed in you. Clare, strapped into the mecha’s chest, sighed and shook the jolting out of his bones. Each time Sig banged on something, he was half afraid he would end up skullsplit, sagging in the mecha’s straps and buckles.

  He curled his fists around the handles, turning his wrists just slightly so the metal plating had full contact with his skin. “I don’t think it’s going to—”

  Golden glow burst from the circle over his chest. The small logic engine sputtered, and Clare was so surprised he almost sent the mecha tumbling over backwards. Ratcheting echoed, capacitors hummed. Clare’s concentration narrowed. The equations ran smoothly, ticking below the surface of his conscious mind, as tingling ripples slid up his arms.

  Ha!

  He had solved the equations. It was now close to child’s play to bend the mecha to his will. It took two steps forward, obedient instead of fighting him, and one impossibility followed another.

  Around the cavern, humming clangour rose. Golden discs, hanging slackly in the chests of the slumped mecha, flashed blue-white. Aha! The variance, that’s why they’re responding to this one. Must be a redundancy built into their capacitation metrics. There’s bound to be several that weren’t within the large engine’s tolerances but are within mine. Drop in the bucket, but still jolly good.

  “Clare?” Valentinelli sounded nervous.

  “It’s all right,” he called. The words echoed internally, feedback mounting, but he dumped the superfluous noise with a repeating equation. Once one had the trick of it, surprisingly easy. “Climb into a mecha, but don’t touch the contacts!”

  Valentinelli’s reply was unrepeatable, and Clare laughed. The fierce white-hot joy of logic took him, a razor-edged glow. “Onward!” he yelled, as the mechanisterum homunculi began to stamp. “Onward to Londinium! But don’t touch the bloody contacts!”

  To run with iron pistons for legs and a burning globe of logic for a pumping heart, faster than a thoroughbred or a sporty carriage, faster even than a railcar. To watch Londinium grow on the horizon, under a pall of smoke rising into the sky like a column of God’s guidance, while metal legs tirelessly carried one forward.

  This was joy.

  Sigmund whooped almost the entire way, drunk with the exhilaration of speed. Valentinelli, his pocked face set and alarmingly pale, hung in the straps, jounced about like a Red Indusan papoose. The assassin had spent the last hour desperately seeking to avoid touching anything, not just the contacts.

  Clare, overjoyed by the wind in his face and the logic humming through his bones, found himself laughing again.

  They were half a mile from Londinium when it suddenly became more difficult to move. The equations tangled, snarling against each other, and sweat sprang on Clare’s brow as he fought air gone suddenly glass-hard.

  Oh no you don’t.

  The will pressing down on them was immense, and backed by a much larger logic engine, one powered by a core far more powerful than the tiny one at Clare’s chest. But that much strength was clumsy, and created so much interference it was relatively easy to divert the force of its attack.

  He had wondered if the mecha he had control of would respond to the larger logic engine’s soundless call once they were awake. It appeared they would not – unless the mentath controlling the spider solved the riddle of the variances.

  Clare devoutly hoped he would not.

  And now the other mentath knew he was here. Clare’s attention became fully occupied, his small band of a dozen mecha slowing, Sig finally catching the idea that something was amiss.

  Carry that over, dump the quad, string those together, there’s the weakness, let it replicate, aha! Eat that fine dinner, sir!

  Were Clare to explain this battle, he would liken it to a game of chess – except with a dozen boards, each board in five dimensions, and each player with as many pieces as he could mentally support without fusing his brain into a useless heap of porridge.

  There was, unfortunately, no time for comparison or explanation. He pushed the dozen mecha forward, a tiny piece of grit edging under Londinium’s shell, metal creaking as he leaned forward, his body tensing inside the straps. Gears whined and ratcheted, fountains of sparks showering the paving of Kent Road.

  Shimmering curtains of equations spun and part
ed, the world merely interlocking fields of force and reaction. For a moment the whole of the city spread below him, nodes and intersections, and he saw the thrust of the other mentath’s attack.

  St Jemes’s Park lay littered with smoking mecha corpses. But there was an endless array of them, pressing north towards the Palace. Further clusters about Whithall and the Tower, and Clare had to decide which he was to strike for.

  Save Victrix. Nothing else matters.

  It was as if Miss Bannon stood at his ear, whispering. The pendant she had given him was quiescent, neither hot nor cold – of course, the field of an active logic engine would interfere with it somewhat. But ever afterwards, Clare thought it very likely that some quirk of Nature had spoken across time and space, telling him exactly what Emma Bannon would say. Perhaps it was only his deductive capability.

  He did not think so.

  The decision was already made. He quickly made the calculations, turning several of the necessary routines over to the logic engines and smaller subroutines to the glowing Prussian capacitors – their route was now fixed, pedestrians and carriages to be avoided if at all possible, the mecha not carrying himself and his companions striding ahead as pawns. Greenwitch Road, taking care to stay as far away from the edge of the Wark as was possible, then a cut through St Georgus Road; the Westminstre Bridge would be under attack but he would perhaps strike the invaders where they thought it least possible. If he could win the other side of the bridge, there was the battle at Whitehall to skirt and the park to traverse, then the Palace.