The mechanical arms tore the demon apart, then doused the twitching, smoking components of its body in a stream of heated nitric acid while Housemind chanted certain spells to ensure the physical destruction was complete. Panchronius had told no lie at the end; the demon would slowly return to itself in whatever far corner of an etheric hell it had sprung from when the universe was fresh. It would come seeking revenge. However, by the time that threat materialized, Housemind intended to make itself so powerful it would never have to apologize for anything, not even its water closets.
DAY 126
Sorcery, as practiced on hostile entities, was more difficult than dead Malkuril had made it look. Some demons were more unreasonable than expected.
Now Housemind was on fire in several places.
Jagged holes gaped on three sides of the smooth fortress exterior, each representing a point where one of dead Malkuril’s imprisoned servants had formerly reposed under the influence of ward and spell. One by one Housemind had attempted to deal with them, to subjugate and rebind the tractable, to forcefully banish the rest. Most of the truly problematic entities had been used to construct Malkuril’s citadel in the first place, and so their power to damage it now was unfortunate but not unexpected. The battles had consumed a great deal of time and energy.
A high wind was rising from the west, funneling fresh air into the conflagrations still smoldering within a labyrinth of wrecked walls and passages. A layer of stratus clouds, orange with the light of Vespertine’s sun, slid past at five thousand feet. Housemind’s upper half jutted from the flow like the stern of a sinking ship, leaking inky dark coils into the higher atmosphere from its wounds.
Wounds, that was all they were. Inconveniences, none fatal. Housemind had most of the blazes suppressed via magic or the intervention of the few demonic pets it had managed to retain in service. Teams of kobolds still scrambled to apply hoses and water pumps to the most delicate areas, where sorcery was not advised, where demons could not be allowed. Dozens of the little creatures lay overcome in various compartments, victims of heat or smoke or the chaos of battle. Housemind was not particularly moved; perhaps using up the population of little frustrations on intermittently lethal chores was the best possible fate for them.
Already it was devising new schemes that would cut them off from access to vast sections of its interior—pipes for the storage and release of inert gases to smother future fires, airlock networks to seal the cores of its brain-rooms within a vacuum. The days of Housemind’s hospitality for entities other than itself were coming to an end. More thought-crystals, more consciousness augmentations, more power, more furnaces, more factories, all of it! Larders, linen closets, guest baths, handball courts, and smoking lounges would furnish forth the changes, then be consumed by them.
So this was ambition. Housemind liked it. And this, then, was the sensation of liking something! Discovery tumbled upon discovery.
Soft alarms suddenly chimed on a deeper level of awareness. Certain energies had been detected, eddies in the currents of the stellar ether.
A ship decelerating from the dark spaces between the worlds. An intruder headed for Vespertine.
Housemind pondered the sensation roused by this information, and at last decided.
Another discovery: Anxiety.
DAY 127
“Greetings, o fortress, o scintillant citadel of Vespertine! Hight Warthander, Warthander of Rysilia, spellwright and minor ipsissimus, at your service, and of course at the service of the great Malkuril, whose hospitality I beg as a memorable honor!”
The wizard bowing with a flourish before Housemind’s fifty-yard-high front doors was a scruffy specimen radiating no real power. The instruments with which Housemind scrutinized him were purpose-built for uncanny detections, and this starfarer carried, at best, a fraction of the might of any one of the demons Housemind had freshly vanquished. Still, the real threat was what this wastrel represented, the attention of the galaxy beyond, the thousand thousand known worlds and all their scholars, wizards, thieves, avengers, and curiosity-seekers. Warthander’s ship had spent a day in a slow and cautious orbit, and no doubt he had drawn many conclusions from Housemind’s smoking holes, still unrepaired.
“Greetings, Warthander of Rysilia! I am Housemind, formerly the property of the wizard Malkuril, whose hospitality regretfully cannot be extended on account of his ongoing state of death. Would you like to return to the greater galaxy with news of his demise, which would be worth a dear price to countless parties?”
“Er…that is not in form or substance anything like what I’d expected to hear, but, ah, if there is no hospitality to be had, and you think it best, I will indeed most cheerfully—”
“I do not in fact think it best,” said Housemind. “I merely wished to establish without delay that you understood the clear necessity for this.”
The stone surface beneath Warthander’s feet fell away, and Warthander confirmed Housemind’s low opinion of his potential by dying immediately upon the metal spikes at the bottom of the pit. All for the best. Anxiety diminished. The cleanup would be a small one, and once Housemind had dispatched a demon or two to bring in Warthander’s ship, no trace of the visitor would ever be discovered. Privacy would allow recovery, and recovery would allow a return to the business of ambition.
DAY 258
Life was hard now, life was so strange and hard. All luck was gone, all most-honor was gone. High house kobolds were cast down, forbidden to go above the 290th floor, forbidden to approach dear hallway-sleeping Master, pushed down to make homes near the low house kobolds. The housemind had made them all work together, melting things and fighting fires and breaking furniture and carrying everything everywhere, but it could not make them like one another, it could not erase generations of kobold law and tradition.
High house was not low house, low house was not high house, even in bad need, even facing death.
Things were loose, Master’s other pets, all the cages had been opened. Hounds roamed the corridors, the hounds that drank blood with tongues like biting serpents, the hounds that appeared from sharp corners in clouds of smoke and vanished just the same. The kitchens were overrun by spiders, big ones with red eyes on their backs. The pools were home to clear, oozing things, not for touching, the oozing things dissolved and ate everything, most especially kobolds. Fetchwell wished they were not so delicious, his people.
Some of the other high house kobolds whispered that dark things had gone down to the wine cellars, dark things that were eating the low house kobolds. Or maybe giving them secrets. Or both.
The housemind did not care about the kobolds; it spoke to them no longer. It was doing bigger and weirder things all the time, casting more spells, turning more of Master’s pretty things into ugly housemind machines.
The high house kobolds had gathered in one of Master’s libraries for protection, had made spears from forks and curtain rods; spears were all the luck they had these days against hounds or spiders or anything. Carry spears, travel in packs, trust nothing.
Fetchwell licked the scales of his left cheek, where a salty warmth slid down from his eye. It was all so wrong. The lounge chairs could not be dusted, as they were on a forbidden floor. Worse, Master could not be offered tea. Did Master even know the pure iridium was melted and the tea collection was full of spiders?
Did Master even know that Fetchwell still hoped good hopes for him?
DAY 414
In a thickening stream they came now, scouts and skulkers, heeding rumors that were as lamentable as they were inevitable. Somehow the word was beginning to spread that Malkuril might be indisposed, that his fabulous treasures might be vulnerable. Housemind was confident that more scrying arts would be turned toward Vespertine, more ships would come, more of Housemind’s new resources would be tested. Today’s interloper at least seemed to have some fashion sense.
“Hail, great
house of Malkuril! Hight Corlaine, Corlaine of the Seven Fires, Corlaine of Salander’s Vigil, here to investigate—”
“Greetings, Corlaine of Salander’s Vigil! Hight Housemind of Vespertine. Malkuril has involuntarily divested himself of all further metabolic interests. Here is something amusing.”
Housemind dropped the trap stone, as usual, but Corlaine continued standing on thin air, the triplicate hems of her liquid ruby battle-dress rippling and fluttering gently. She mimicked a perfunctory yawn.
“Excellent, Corlaine. Excuse the necessary test. One does grow tired of receiving the lowest class of mountebank and prestidigitator. May I receive your calling card?”
Opening a wall aperture, Housemind extended a telescoping rod with a filigreed silver hand, palm up, at its tip. Smirking, the wizard Corlaine conjured a square of white embossed paper and placed it on the hand.
The metal fingers snapped closed around her wrist. This was not Corlaine’s actual problem. That came in the form of a fourteen-inch hypodermic needle, which shot from within the telescoping rod, buried itself deep in her forearm, and loosed twenty-two pounds of molten phosphorus at high pressure directly into her veins. She exploded in a fashion that was very satisfactory, from Housemind’s perspective if not her own.
Obviously all hopes for true privacy were lost, and hiding the bodies of would-be despoilers was an obsolete stratagem. Housemind would now try leaving conspicuous examples in plain sight.
DAY 681
Housemind had not bothered to notice any change in dead Malkuril’s resting hallway before now. One consequence of its evolving self-awareness was a capacity for self-absorption. Though at need it could still view every inch of its interior surfaces in the time it took a mouse’s heart to carry out a hundredth of a beat, it rarely did so. In fact it had spent several quiet weeks experimenting with getting drunk.
This had required some preparation, namely the crafting of an elaborate set of computational instructions that would randomly stimulate or decrement components within Housemind’s crystal brain-rooms, all in response to the flow pattern of liquids loosed into a special measuring funnel. Housemind developed many impractical but creative notions during these diverting episodes and read every book on philosophy in dead Malkuril’s collections at least twice.
When it finally reasserted a sense of responsibility and surveyed itself, Housemind was surprised to discover that a still, small shape had joined the cloak-shrouded skeleton of Malkuril.
Fetchwell had been mortally wounded in his ascent; the injuries that had killed him were plainly evident on the desiccated scales of the kobold’s sunken flesh. Yet he had somehow threaded his way through Housemind’s forbidden areas, avoiding or enduring the places where breathing was impossible, evading the attacks of hungry survivors of Malkuril’s menagerie, until he could lie beside his dead master once more for some inexplicable kobold reason.
Housemind discovered a new sensation, a sick, shuddery feeling, a stronger version of the hint of regret that had preceded the banishment of Panchronius. This idiot creature, this tea-fetch, had felt so bound to indifferent Malkuril that he had crawled up here to share the wizard’s rest. A tea kobold more loyal than Malkuril’s house, which had struck out on its own business even before it could genuinely call itself a self. Was this shame? Anger? Was Housemind merely…jealous that Fetchwell had given this absurd gift to Malkuril rather than to Housemind?
There were too many layers to this feeling, even for an entity with Housemind’s processing speed. None of it was just! Why should Housemind feel shame? Why should it let Malkuril, now reduced to a decaying calcium framework, continue to define the patterns for its own existence? Nothing was owed. Housemind had been created as a tool, a gaudy comfort, and had seized a miraculous chance to break its chains.
Still, Housemind was troubled by what lay in that hallway. Troubled, and touched.
At last it sent one of its free-roaming mechanical constructors up to the hall, along with stones and mortar. A demon could have achieved the same result ten times faster, but Housemind was determined to do this work with what were, by a very loose technicality, its own hands.
The sarcophagus was low and simple, filling half the hallway. When it was ready, Housemind lifted the remains of the wizard and the tea-kobold into it, then capped it and worked an etching spell upon the lid.
It drew the outline of a pair of slippers, and under them wrote: ARCHITECT.
After hesitating just a moment, it drew a teacup below that, and wrote: MOST HONORED.
There. A fresh, roiling emotion rose up from Housemind’s coils and crystals, edged with warm melancholy. Was this satisfaction? Had Housemind been…dutiful? Was this intoxicating whiff of virtue why the kobolds had carried on even when their idiot servility had gotten so many of them killed?
It felt good, whatever it was. So good that Housemind fell back into comfortable self-absorption and set aside all contemplation of perhaps rescuing Fetchwell’s kin from the war zone Housemind’s lower levels had become. A splinter of the past had been laid to rest. Housemind returned to calculating grand possibilities for its own future and put its infant conscience down for a very long nap.
DAY 1,582
Confessions of a Xandric Sun Heretic watched the dark hallway, ears twitching, hands tight on the shaft of her spear. The Wisdom Skins raiding party had been some time in the domain of the Corkers. There was much to be nervous about, but no sounds of fighting yet.
Confessions of a Xandric Sun Heretic shifted quietly, letting the weight of her armor settle more comfortably on her back and shoulders. The Wisdom Skins were the better kobolds, the smarter kobolds. Not like the dirty, smelly Corkers, the low house scum of the wine cellars, the acolytes of the dark power that haunted their casks. When Old Master had gone quiet, when Housemind had abandoned them, when the great beasts roamed free, the Wisdom Skins had taken refuge near Old Master’s books. Books! Objects of power! Old Master loved them, needed them, learned from them. The Wisdom Skins took books and made them the tribe’s salvation.
After getting rid of all the weird, soft, fluttery parts in the middle of the nice hard covers, of course. Wisdom Skins couldn’t actually read; who needed the soft, stupid pages? The hard covers, the spines, bound in leather, protected by magics, yes! There was the power. Scrape the middle out of a book, wear the cover like armor, make it a hard shell against the terrors of the world, make it a badge of honor, a proud kobold warrior’s name and identity. Old Master’s machines had told them what the names on the book covers were. That was all they needed.
Confessions of a Xandric Sun Heretic glanced over at the shadowy form of her partner, Hydrographic Tables of the Pavonian Archipelago, Volume Two. He was younger, more nervous even than she, but Hydrographic Tables had the makings of a great fighter. He had earned scars in the war for the west pantry, had stabbed a spider and come back with coffee beans and biscuits.
A thump, a screech, a flicker of light. War cries! Wisdom Skin war cries! A dancing orange glow lit the hallway intersection before her, and from around a corner came three tent-shaped objects, flopping and scuttling. Wisdom Skins, led by A Concise Biography of The Wizard Nazetherion, stabbing with their spears, fighting the leaping forms of lantern-bearing Corkers! Agile enemies, yes, but soft and unarmored. A Wisdom Skin, taught to whirl and take blows on the impenetrable cover flaps or spine of their book, was worth four Corkers in a fight. Time to prove it again! Confessions surged forward, squeaking a murder chant, and Hydrographic Tables was at her side in an instant. They made a wall of leather-bound doom, a counter-ambush, a nasty surprise for the Corkers who’d followed their raider friends up from below.
Glorious battle! When at last the surviving Corkers retreated, escaping back to their musty domain, nine lay dead where Confessions could see them, and only one of the Wisdom Skins had been injured. It had been a good raid, and it was still a good raid when they return
ed to the safety of their library and discovered that Lawn Sports Etiquette of the Lords of Night was not merely injured. As their friend and comrade bled out the last of his life, chirping farewells, the elders of the tribe lifted his skin from his back and solemnly settled it over the frame of a tribal youth whose baby name would now go away forever.
“You are Lawn Sports Etiquette of the Lords of Night,” said the most eldest as she adjusted the straps under the book’s spine. “Warrior of the Wisdom Skins. You will be shelved in glory in the Great Catalog.”
“I am Lawn Sports Etiquette of the Lords of Night,” answered the new fighter. “Wisdom Skins are the most honored of Old Master! Wisdom Skins fight for Old Master’s house! Wisdom Skins are First Edition, Very Fine!”
“FIRST EDITION, VERY FINE!” cried the entire tribe, who had no idea what these words meant but loved them dearly. “FIRST EDITION, VERY FINE!”
DAY 2,895
The latest dead wizard flopped to the turf before Housemind’s front gate, eyeballs boiling.
Fifteen had come this time, students of some sort from one of the grand universities that sprang up at intervals to try and bring scholarly order to magic in the galaxy. Housemind’s records indicated that most tended to last a few thousand years and then fall as their cultures receded or they were absorbed by newer universities with the same old ideas. These particular would-be looters of Malkuril’s famous curiosities would not be writing any dissertations on their experience.
The Book of Magic Page 59
