On another mission, the team might have waited as Ontor braced the Varisian children for scuttlebutt, offering them a copper or two in return. Instead, he kept on going, past a series of deserted but locked and well-kept warehouses. He counted the buildings as he went, until they reached the one where he'd found the trapdoor. It was as he'd described it: patently new, fashioned from a metal sheet, and secured by a padlock.
Luma heard the citysong: beneath the avian shrieking and the crash of waves against coastline hid a drumbeat of metallic clanks. She ducked down to the trapdoor, alongside Ontor. The clanks, she realized, were audible to any ear. They came from below.
"Open the lock," she said, "and I'll go in and get the lay of the place."
"Are you certain?" Ontor asked.
"There could be any number of golems down there," Luma answered.
"All the more reason to go in together," Ontor said.
"There might be too many to go in at all," she said.
"Let her," said Iskola.
Ontor laid out his burglary kit, withdrew a shim, and wiggled it into the lock mechanism. The padlock clicked; he pulled it open and set it aside.
Luma pulled from her pouch a chunk of desiccated gray material. She pushed through the bird cries of White Dust Street to an under-chorus that scratched and scuttled everywhere in Magnimar: the all-but-silent prowlings and spinnings of its spider population. Cities gave shelter to spiders of all kinds. Those she sought lurked in crevices of the nearby cliff face, where they preyed on birds in their nests. By rustling mottled gray legs together, they sang to her of primal hunger, of scavenging curiosity.
Clothing, armor, gear and all, Luma vanished. An enormous crab spider, about the size of a mastiff, reared up in her place. It tested its fearsome mandibles and twitched its spinnerets. Sunlight illuminated its layer of coarse, downy hairs. Stray red tufts rose from the top of its head.
"Hideous," Arrus shuddered.
"You want her to be able to see without a light source, don't you?" Ontor said. "And it's the perfect cover. The basements and underground chambers around here veritably crawl with the things."
Arrus over-enunciated his annoyance: "I understand why she's doing it."
"A little disgust never hurt anyone," Ontor said. An odd note had entered his voice. From below, with senses altered, Luma couldn't judge his expression.
"Shut up, you prattling ..." Arrus caught himself short. "Let's get this over with."
Ontor raised the trapdoor. Luma lowered her boneless spider body to squeeze through. She passed from light into darkness, which through arachnid eyes was not so great an adjustment.
Her eight legs adhering to surfaces vertical and horizontal, Luma found her footing. It had not been so long since she'd learned this strange trick of the city, and the sensation of being inside another body, one so different from her own, still filled her with freakish wonder. Her searching forefeet sought out a wooden beam. She ran upside down, clinging to the beam, adjusting to her spider's view of the world. Objects swirled and pooled before converging into the colorless gaze of an alien hunter. Her six eyes—two above, four arrayed below—combined to create a single ever-fluid image, with blurs at the edges and sharpness in the middle. Below her she detected a lattice shape. She stopped, skittered her way down, reached out with her front four limbs until she touched the rough stone-and-soil surface of the chamber wall. A false ceiling of steel mesh overhung the chamber. Luma eased herself onto it, then moved across the metal lattice with a stalker's deliberation. It comprised a series of panels, most of which had presumably been damaged when the lab had collapsed into its basement so many years ago. About one in three had fallen away entirely; others had partially detached and now dangled down into the room. A rare few were merely bent, as if they had softened under a terrible heat and then hardened again. These Luma traversed in a series of stops and starts, surveying the chamber and its inhabitants as best she could.
The place, she saw, might better be called an excavation than a room. All four of its walls were hewn unevenly from the earth, sloping above floor level into debris piles composed of stone, earth, and scrap metal. Makeshift wood-beam supports leaned against their soft spots, fixed to platforms which had in turn been spiked into the gravelly floor. Additional beams reached across the floor at uneven intervals, keeping the ceiling in place. Crude sconces held oil lanterns which cast intersecting pools of soft yellow light across the chamber floor.
An assortment of figures stood frozen in odd positions about the chamber, as if ordered to halt in mid-movement. Two were human-sized and made of wood. The rest towered above them, their sculpted heads nearly grazing the latticed drop ceiling. One was fashioned from iron, another from glass. Another seemed to have been carved from a block of the ubiquitous marble seen in so many of the city's monuments. In the corner leaned the last of them: a bizarre assemblage of struts and cylinders, periodically interrupted by glass tubes and globes. The largest orb sat atop its metallic torso, containing a bubbling liquid and a lump of gray, wrinkled matter.
A long wooden table, legs shimmed against the floor's unevenness, occupied the chamber's northeast quadrant. Upon it lay piles of junk: the remnants of countless other golems, now in the midst of a sorting effort. Luma spotted a stone hand, buckets of glass, lengths of copper wire, various rusted fittings, and a tumble of bones. A thick tome splayed open in one corner. Though her spider vision made only a dark mush of its contents, Luma reckoned it for a manual outlining the arcane procedures of golem construction.
In the pile lay a hoop-shaped object fitting the uncertain description of Laurdin's dampening ring. From its position in the heap of assorted parts, Luma wondered if the excavators had mistaken its purpose.
The only movement came from three men, draped in filthy smocks. Gauze veils clipped to pillbox hats covered their faces. Steel sabatons, as would normally be worn with a set of full plate armor, protected their feet. Flexible leggings of a scale-like metal mesh shone dully between smock and sabaton.
One of the men stood at a remove and issued orders, the other two poking and probing at a complex device of rusted steel and pebbled iron, which occupied fully a quarter of the space, next to the long table. From its position, Luma reasoned that it had fallen onto its side during the collapse of Laurdin Iket's workshop. It jutted from the wall, still partially buried under bricks, marble slabs, and dirt.
What was once its back was now its top. Along its exposed side jutted a lever as long as an ax-handle, surrounded by a network of cogs and belts.
The workers jabbed a wood-handled brush into an assembly of interlocked saws and teeth, about ten feet in width. With nervous gestures they removed filings, shredded metal, and clumps of soil. They stepped back from it as their boss stepped to the lever. The clanking sound Luma had heard from above resounded through her exoskeleton.
A worker looked up at her. She froze. He twitched in revulsion, much as Arrus had, and returned his attention to the machine. His casual reaction suggested that Luma wasn't his first giant spider he'd seen crawling around down here. She congratulated herself on her clever choice.
The boss reached for the table, seizing a crumpled copper mask which might once have served as a golem's face. All three men gave the device a wide berth as he tossed the mask into the grinding teeth. It chewed through the mask, spitting it out as a fine dust from a chute located below the lever. The machine thrashed to a halt, sputtering acrid smoke.
This, Luma deduced, would have been part of the original workshop—a device to reduce failed experiments back to metal dust for later reforging.
After standing before the device in consternation, hands on hips, the boss reached over to the side of the device, sliding a large button in the shape of a mocking jester's face along a short track. The chewing saws reversed themselves, spitting curls of copper at the worker's feet.
As tantalizing as the mystery of the device might be, Luma could not let it distract her from less remarkable details of possible t
actical use. The wooden staircase leading down from the trapdoor bore inspection, to see if it was sound or rotten. It was, she noted, newly installed and strongly reinforced, as it would have to be to allow the golems out. It could more than support the weight of the entire team.
She crept across the false ceiling, transferred over to the beam, and crawled to the spot below the opening. Ontor had propped it open a crack with a loose cobblestone, allowing Luma to squeeze up through.
"Well?" said Ontor.
Luma cut the tie she'd made to the part of the citysong that spun webs and ate bugs, instantly resuming human form. She pulled a scrap of paper and a pencil from her pack to sketch out the chamber's details, which she described in detail. "I counted six golems and three men, all of whom might be wizards. Or alchemists, maybe. None of the golems were moving. Some might be inactive altogether, but we can't count on that."
"Did you see any loot?" Ontor asked.
"No, but who leaves that out in plain sight?"
Iskola pointed a lacquered nail at the map. "What's that?"
Luma shivered away a few lingering spidery perceptions. "Their table of salvaged parts. I don't think they have the wherewithal to build new golems. They're just discovering, repairing, and awakening those created by Laurdin the Mad."
"Did you see the dampening ring?"
"I think so. On the table. If they don't know what they've got, I bet I can guess why: they think it's a part they haven't yet pieced onto its golem."
"We need reinforcements," said Ontor.
"Nonsense," said Iskola.
"Together we're a match for the iron golem by itself," said Ontor. "On a good day. Am I right, Luma?"
"Yes," said Luma. "But Iskola has the same idea I do."
The wizard nodded. "Golems act without independent volition. Depending on the wording of their instructions, they may well return to dormancy if we take out the three men."
"How depending is ‘depending'?" Ontor asked.
"If the salvagers said, ‘kill anyone but us who comes into this room,'" Luma said, "we're in trouble. If, as is more likely, they said, ‘protect us if we are attacked,' they will stop as soon as the attack does—even if it ceases with their deaths."
"Golems are a literal-minded lot, then?"
"They lack minds of any sort," said Iskola. "They are magical devices and thus follow the laws of magic. These bend inexorably toward the smallest possible expenditure of arcane energy into the realm of matter. Thus, any instructive statement is carried out according to its narrowest interpretation."
"Pretending I understood that," said Ontor, "what happens if these clowns gave the golems the wrong set of orders?"
"If the constructs keep on going after the men are dead," Iskola answered, "we stage a retreat as orderly as it is immediate."
"And what if they said, ‘pursue anyone who kills us to the end of time'?"
"Too metaphorical, too open-ended, and otherwise unlikely. Have you any further queries, Ontor?"
His posture crumpled. "Waiting won't make this easier ..."
Arrus stepped up to outline the plan. "Iskola and Ontor will sneak in first and, crouching on the false ceiling, fire down at the salvagers. Between Ontor's arrow and a well-placed fork of lightning, we might finish them all without the golems activating at all."
Luma shook her head. "Too great a risk. The false ceiling is insecurely anchored. It might not bear your weight. And if it does, and you fail to slay all three men in a single volley, the golems can simply reach up and tear the ceiling loose. The two of you will plummet to the floor, ripe for the stomping."
"What do you suggest, then?" Arrus asked.
"Better Iskola and Ontor open fire from the stairs, then step aside for Arrus, Eibadon, and Ulisa to run in and engage the salvagers while they're still in disarray. The rest of us try to disrupt or hold off the golems and hope our close fighters make short work of the salvagers."
"Anything else?" said Arrus.
"Yes," she said, pointing to the map. "Don't let them lure you near this grinder device. If you catch a cuff or sleeve in it, we'll be burying you in liquid form."
"Sound points." Arrus turned to the others. "Never mind my plan. We'll do as Luma advises. Are we ready?"
By drawing their weapons, they agreed that they were.
Arrus lifted the trapdoor. Ontor and Iskola entered, rushing down the wooden stairs. Luma heard the thwang of Ontor's bow-string and the stentorian rhythm of her sister's incantation. Flashes of light came from below as Iskola triggered her invocation. As if in a single movement, Ulisa, Arrus, and Eibadon poured themselves into the hole. Luma followed, hard on Eibadon's heels.
By the time she got down there, the golems had already stirred into lifeless motion. One of the salvagers lay dead on the floor, a smoking scorch mark over his heart. The remaining pair had taken cover behind the table, which they strained to upend. An arrow pierced the boss' upper arm, drenching his smock with blood.
Only four golems shuddered toward them, the rest still frozen in place. One of the wooden constructs, plus those of iron and glass and the strange assemblage of tubes and struts, moved to shield the salvagers. Now that Luma could see normally again, she confirmed what she'd suspected about the indescribable golem: in the translucent globe that composed its head sloshed a gray human brain.
Arrus ducked the iron golem's blow, launching himself over the table to engage his living opponents.
The unknown golem threw a green globe; it struck the bottom of the stairs and exploded. Ontor and Iskola fled the damaged steps. Luma fell, planks giving way beneath her. She staggered up, disoriented and cut all over. Her belt hung loose, cut through by a chunk of wood. Beneath it, blood spread through her tunic. Not daring to test the wound, she secured the flapping belt by tying its end around one of the straps holding her leather hauberk in place.
Smoke from the golem's alchemical projectile obscured her vision. The scene before her registered as a series of disconnected flashes, glimpsed between greasy clouds. The wooden golem caught fire—Iskola's doing, undoubtedly. Ulisa spun through the air, saffron robes fluttering, and delivered a kick that sent the thing staggering.
Luma lost track of her position. A figure came charging through the smoke at her: the glass golem. Luma drew her sickle and landed a solid strike against its knee. The energy of the blow glanced off the construct and vibrated painfully up her own arm.
The wood golem, already charring to cinders, toppled into one of the support beams near the grinder device. The beam slid several feet, then held. The golem continued its caroming fall, landing on the device's lever and activating the machine. Its gears thumped and clanked, straining to mesh together.
Luma retreated from a wave of searing heat. Was it a spell, directed at her? She hadn't time to guess. The great glass figure pounded toward her. To evade its punch, she had to wheel back. Luma saw what it was doing: herding her toward the now-churning grinder.
She dropped her center of gravity, making herself a tempting target for a kick. The glass golem swung its leg at her. She pivoted, beckoning the citysong. Her mind went to the piers of Dockway, to the ships in the harbor, to the ropes on which cargo was lifted ashore, and then from these great ropes to a slim length of cord wrapped around her waist. With a flick of her wrist, she pulled the cord free. A few twists made it a snare, which she flung through the air, wrapping around the construct's legs. She pulled it tight.
The golem overbalanced, falling into the jaws of the shredding machine. Scooting back to avoid breathing in the inevitable cloud of pulverized glass, Luma watched as the device devoured her opponent. The machine's spout vomited a spray of glass shards.
Eibadon, fighting over by the table, saw it coming and raised his shield.
His opponent, the salvager leader, bore the brunt of the spray. Fragments blasted into his torso. He staggered to the table, where he groped for a stand containing a half-dozen glass vials. There was only one reason to do such a thing mid-fight—one or
more of them had to contain some form of healing elixir.
With a mace strike to the back of the head, Eibadon put a stop to that plan. The salvager collapsed, gasping for air, lines of blood trickling from mouth and nose. The stand of vials fell onto its side next to the hoop-shaped object Luma hoped was the dampening ring.
The iron golem took a step back. With ticking head movements, it calculated the positions of its enemies. It opened its jaws. Luma remembered what Iskola had said—these constructs could breathe clouds of toxic gas.
"Eibadon!" she yelled, shouting above the thumping of the grinder machine. Pulverizing the glass golem had taken a toll on the device, and a burning haze issued from it, filling the chamber. "Eibadon!" she shouted again. "The ring!"
The priest threw himself across the table, grabbing the device and flinging it to Luma. She caught it and ran at the iron golem, leaping up to slap the metal circle onto its chest.
The ring hissed and sparked; the iron golem froze, its jaw still gaping.
Across the room, the weird golem readied itself to stab Iskola with its needle fingers. Arrus saw and dashed for the downed salvager leader, who lay groaning near the table. He raised his sword, ready to deliver the helpless man a death blow, but before he could, the salvager expired, sparing him the necessity.
The remaining golems stopped in mid-strike, as surely as if they'd been frozen by the dampening ring of Laurdin Iket. The condition governing their locomotion had ended, returning them to the status of inanimate objects. Luma and Iskola had been correct: the instructions impelling the golems to fight applied only while a salvager still lived.
A rain of glass continued to spout from the grinder mechanism. Shards pelted the wooden support beams. Three of them shifted by inches. One snapped in two. Another responded to the growing pressure by popping loose. It flew across the room, straight for Ontor and Iskola. He pulled her down, and the beam continued on its way, crashing into another, blasting it from its moorings. The ceiling groaned overhead. Cracks rippled along its surface, bleeding streams of grit and gravel.
Blood of the City Page 11