Anyway, the point being, even after death the bigot had a brain capable of driving action. And after death their hatred and self-loathing could be manipulated by necromancers like spiritual energy, in much the same way they had been easily manipulated by the worst politicians and religious leaders in life.
But there remained the problem of a rotting body. A rage zombie was still a stiff, disintegrating-sack-of-decay zombie.
And that’s where the thaumaturges came in.
The thaumaturges had created automatons as weapons, but with similar problems to the zombies. While thaumaturges could animate the machines and enspell basic instructions into them—as they had with the Dalek prop and other animated traps I’d faced in the sci-fi museum a few months ago—the automatons were useless for doing complex tasks or fighting wars. And simply sticking someone inside to operate the suit had proven too difficult, especially before the age of microprocessors and modern composite materials—the sheer bulk and convolution of controls and gears needed to manually operate such a beast and all its weapons proved too great, and the complexity and mass of the machines when you added manual controls reduced its speed down to that of a zombie.
But animate a ragey hate brain with necromancy, and transplant it into a mobile suit Gundoom, and you got an autozombaton. Or as they were later called, robigots.
Yet even then, there remained a problem. Using a robigot as a weapon was a bit like unleashing a pack of rabid lions in your studio apartment to deal with a mouse problem. It wasn’t likely to end well for anyone, especially yourself.
That is, until they figured out that if you also stuck someone basically decent and sane inside the contraption, not as an operator but more as a battery of magical and spiritual energies, it balanced out the ragebrain and made the robigot somewhat controllable and versatile. Somewhat.
Of course, that eventually drained and killed the fuel source. In the war that spawned the robigots, they started by using volunteers, people who were dying anyway, or condemned prisoners looking to redeem their family name or earn a small reward to leave their survivors. Problem was, they only lasted weeks, and then needed to be replaced like any dead battery, and the thaumaturges quickly ran out of volunteers. The stories of what the experience did to the minds and bodies of those inside the machines before they died was still the stuff of campfire horror tales among arcana youth.
In short (too late), robigots were fine examples of that old maxim, “Don’t just ask if you can do something with magic, ask yourself if you should.” They had been banned for good reason.
Facing the four-armed mechanical terror before us, I felt my stomach drop out at the sudden certainty that Grandfather had trapped Mattie inside the thing. I just prayed to all the gods she had not been inside long enough to suffer any damage that couldn’t be undone.
And I prayed I got the chance to make Grandfather pay for this.
“We can’t destroy it!” I shouted. “We have to capture it! Mattie’s inside.”
Sal, Silene, Pete, Vee, and I all formed a line facing the robigot, with the forest at our back.
The robigot strained against the gnomes’ vines, and they began to snap.
Silene tossed something from one of her pouches at the ground around the robigot then raised her hand, and more vines rose up, these thicker than the first. The robigot disappeared inside a writhing green cocoon.
“What is that thing?” Vee asked.
“A robigot,” I said.
“A row begot?”
“Yeah,” I said, “and I don’t think we—”
The sound of quickly spinning metal keened in the air as circular saw blades the size of compact discs emerged from the robigot’s chest, its forearms, its shins, cutting easily through the fibrous green vines. With a flex of its four arms, the robigot sent the severed vines flying. And then, the saw blades shot out of the robigot at us.
I dropped, and tracked the flight of the blades as they zipped over the heads of the gnomes and barely missed me. One grazed Vee’s arm as she shoved Pete out of its path, and one ricocheted off of Sal’s fur with a burst of sparks as Silene ducked behind him. The rest thunked and pinged into the forest behind us.
At the sight of Vee’s bleeding arm, Pete began to wolf out, his eyes going blue, his nails elongating, his hair growing out.
“Pete!” I said before he was too far gone to understand. “Go stop Grandfather! This is not a good fight for you.” Among the other things robigots were famous for, they had slaughtered entire armies of waercreatures. Pete was strong, but his teeth and claws were useless against this metal beast, or its silver-coated armaments.
And if anything happened to Mattie because he’d lost control, Pete would never forgive himself.
Pete looked from me to the robigot to Vee, and gave a frustrated bark, then grabbed Vee’s hand and together they ran into the woods.
At the same time, Sal roared and charged at the robigot.
Priapus shouted, “Retreat!” The gnomes broke in formation for the woods, following Pete and Vee in the direction of the standing stones and, presumably, my Grandfather. I couldn’t blame them. This wasn’t the fight they’d come for.
“Sal!” I shouted, and scrambled to my feet, feeling useless. “Sal, be careful of Mattie inside!”
The robigot raised one of its four arms, lifting its hand as if also motioning Sal to stop. Except a hole opened in its palm. There was a clicking and whooshing sound, and then flame roared out of the hole to envelop Sal.
Sal threw one arm over his face, and roared in pain. Not much could cut through his fur, but the flesh beneath could still be crushed or burned or frozen. He crashed into the robigot, grasping half-blind for the arm, and the breeze carried the smell of burning flesh and fur to me.
Sal yanked the arm with one hand, and punched at the shoulder joint with the other. The arm bent, and the flames trickled to a stop. Sal punched again, and again, as the robigot began to pound at Sal with its own free fists.
“Don’t hit the body!” I shouted.
The flamethrower arm broke free, and with a roar Sal pitched back, then swung it hard at the robigot’s knees. The creature wobbled, but remained standing, and then it landed an uppercut that sent Sal staggering backward several steps before he toppled onto his back like a falling tree, shaking the ground. Sal’s eyes fluttered closed.
“Saljchuh!” Silene shouted, and ran to him.
I stood there, my mind racing for a solution. Retreat seemed the only good option, but that would leave Mattie to be destroyed in the heart of that abomination. And Grandfather would destroy who knew how many other lives using this monster.
The ground under the robigot suddenly gave way, and the creature sank into a pit up to its shoulders. Then the earth collapsed in on it.
Borghild’s head rose up out of the ground behind it on a newly formed body of dirt and pine needles.
The robigot began working its way free.
I stared a second in surprise, then lurched into motion. I ran around behind the robigot, and placed my hands on its head.
Please, oh please, let my magic work.
I sensed for Mattie first. She was there, as I’d feared, in the body of the automaton. But her spirit felt strong, and bright. If being trapped in the robigot had damaged her, I couldn’t sense it at this level.
The ragey bigot brain, housed in the beast’s head, required no effort to sense. It screamed for attention.
I was happy to give it some.
I summoned up magic from the locus of my being, focused my will, and said, “Spirit, I banish you to the beyond.”
My power responded, thank the gods, rising up in me, reaching out, and—
I hit a wall. Not the kind I had before, not one built of my own guilt and self-doubt. This wall was made of layered protections: necromantic spiritual barriers, thaumaturgic shielding lining the brain’s container, and—
I withdrew just in time to avoid a nasty and possibly deadly shock from a wizard trap.
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The robigot shook its head back and forth now, and started to rise out of the dirt.
“I will crush!” Borghild said.
“No!” I said. “Wait! There’s someone inside!”
I didn’t have time to try and reach the brain past all of those protections. But there was another option.
I reached out with my magic and sent a surge of life energy into Mattie.
I sensed her energy levels rise to a state of wakefulness. If we failed to save her, maybe she could find a way to save herself.
Then the robigot’s top arms broke free of the earth with twin sprays of dirt. I flew back into the mounded earth behind it, and immediately second-guessed my decision as I scrambled through the loose dirt to get away from the living weapon. Perhaps it would have been better to let Mattie die in her sleep, even in terrible dreams, rather than awake in the horror of her reality.
The robigot lifted one arm and pointed it at Silene. A rifle shot echoed through the forest, and Silene went flying back to the earth amid an explosion of blood from her shoulder.
“NOOO!” Borghild shouted, and the earth began to tremble as she sank down into it.
The robigot swung its other arm around, and a shotgun blast exploded Borghild into a thousand fragments before she was half-submerged.
The robigot’s head rotated to look at me, and it rose up out of the dirt.
Oh, shazrobot.
34
EVEN FLOW
I jumped back onto the robigot, grasped at its head. Maybe I could create enough spiritual feedback before the thing killed me, just fry the damn thing’s brain, protections or not. I summoned up my magic, and—
A vice-like hand clamped around my head, and began to squeeze.
Blinding pain disrupted any ability to think, to summon, to fight.
I screamed, and expected death to come blasting in through the fractures surely forming in my skull.
The pressure stopped.
The robigot slumped down in the dirt, and stopped moving.
I pulled the metal hand off of my head with some difficulty, feeling the rough fingers and sharp edges taking away skin and hair. A banging noise began, and it took a second with my nearly-split-head ache to realize what it was. Mattie pounded on the inside of the robigot.
I skidded down into the crater that had formed around the mechanical monster, my feet clanging against its back, and found two small wheel locks on either side of a brass handle between its shoulders. I twisted open the locks, and pulled on the handle. A large hatch popped open and thumped down into the dirt. Mattie sat inside the machine, her arms in iron bands at her side, and more bands around her neck and waist, holding her in place.
“Mattie!” I said. “Are you okay?” I lay across the open hatch and studied the iron bands.
“I think so,” she said after a second.
“What did you do?” I asked. I thought perhaps she had sabotaged the mechanics, but she obviously couldn’t move. I yanked the skeleton key from around my neck and began opening her iron bands as fast as I could.
“I learned some of Papa G’s thaumaturgy while helping him with his experiments,” she said. “I figured out how to trick this thing into turning off for maintenance.”
“I didn’t realize you’d inherited the thaumaturgy gift.”
“Me either,” she said, and laughed. And the laugh turned into crying.
“Hey,” I said. “It’s okay. It’s over. Here we go.” I got the last band open, and reached under her armpits to lift her out. She climbed up and back, flopping out onto the hatch with me, and together we scrambled out of the crater.
Mattie threw her arms around me, and sobbed into my chest.
I held her tight, and said, “I know, sweetie. It’s over.”
She pushed back, and wiped at her eyes with one arm. “Did you stop Grandpa G?”
“No,” I said. “I don’t think so. I haven’t faced him yet.”
“Then it’s not over,” she said in that same practical tone she used when explaining what needed to be done around the house to us less organized adults.
When I’d seen how she dealt with the news that her mother had been possessed by a ghostly spirit during her conception, I’d realized that her amazing self-reliance and positive attitude were a coping mechanism much as my own constant use of humor. Now, it downright scared me. She was only sixteen. She should not be talking about fighting to stop her grandfather from destroying worlds like it was just another thing to be done: take out the trash, file the mana taxes, defeat your arch-villain grandfather.
“Mattie—”
Silene’s sudden groan of pain reminded me that there were others who needed urgent help.
“Come on,” I said, and worked my way around the edge of the robigot’s crater. Sal stirred on the ground, and Silene sat up, her face pale and covered in a sheen of sweat. She shouted in pain as she held one hand cupped under the hole in her right shoulder, her other hand digging into the grass beside her. From the pink scars and puckered flesh around the hole’s edges, I guessed it had been considerably healed already. A round slug of metal squeezed out of the closing wound, and plopped into Silene’s hand. The wound finished closing. As it did, the grass around Silene went brown, and the leaves of a nearby tree shifted rapidly from green to orange.
Then Silene slumped forward, her green-streaked brown hair falling over her face and shifting in time with her heavy breaths.
I knelt beside Sal, placed a hand on his chest and probed with my necromantic senses. His spirit was strong, but its hold to the physical body was fluttery, tenuous. He was on the verge of death. My guess was he only remained alive because of whatever healing Silene had managed before being shot herself.
“Silene,” I said. “Sal still needs your help.”
She raised her head, her hair falling back to reveal eyes sunken and bruised-looking, her normally deep tan skin slightly gray. But her eyes fixed on Sal, and she crawled across the needle-strewn dirt to him.
“Saljchuh,” she said. “Come back to me, my heart.” She placed a hand on his chest, and shuddered. “I—I have no more magic. Do you have mana?”
“Frak. No.” I looked around me. As if a mana vial might be lying around. Idiot.
“Please,” Silene begged. “Might you gift me some of your own?”
“I can’t,” I said. “Necromancers can only transfer magic from a dead body.” I looked behind me. The robigot. It wasn’t a body, exactly, but it had been designed to take magic and spiritual energy from Mattie and use that to power the living brain inside. “Mattie?” I said.
“Yeah?”
“Do you think you could find a way to extract the magic left in that thing as mana for Silene?”
Mattie looked at it. “Maybe,” she said in a reluctant tone. “I mean, Dad taught me how to extract magic from bodies. And Papa G showed me how to channel and store magic in artifacts using thaumaturgy. But—” her voice broke, and she shook herself and balled her hands into fists for a second, then said in a more even tone, “I don’t want to go back in that thing.”
“Please,” Silene said. “Do not let Sal die.”
I pulled Mattie a little ways aside, and said softly, “It’s okay. You don’t have to. I understand why you don’t want to do this. But maybe taking back what this thing took from you, and making sure it can’t hurt anybody else, maybe that will help you sleep a little better tonight.”
Mattie looked from Sal to the robigot, her jaw shivering a bit, then she gave a sharp nod. “I’ll rip this thing’s heart out.”
She marched back toward the machine.
In the distance, a wolf howled in pain.
Petey!
I looked at Silene. “If anyone else comes, I expect you to get Mattie into the woods and hide her. Please.”
“I will,” Silene said. “I promise.”
I nodded, then shouted, “Mattie! Petey needs me. Silene will keep you safe.”
“Go!” Mattie said. “I’ve got th
is.” But the quiver in her voice belied her bravado.
Gods, I wish I’d had half her heart at her age. She really was amazing, like she’d inherited the best bits of everyone in this messed-up family. I had no idea how Mort of all people had managed to father her. But I knew that even if I died here this morning, even if we failed to stop Grandfather, just the fact that Mattie was safe, that she would carry on the Gramaraye name, it made such possibilities somehow more bearable.
I took off running down the dirt path that cut between a wetlands on my left, and the rising slope of the woods on my right. The path curved around and down, until I could see two stacks of stones ahead like gateposts, and a clearing beyond. Over a wall of shrubs and tangled blackberry vines to the right of the gateway, the tops of eight or nine gray standing stones about the width of gravestones but tall as small trees became visible.
The sounds of battle grew clear—grunts and shouts and metal striking metal—and I could feel the tingle of an open portal clearly now. I halted my mad dash and moved to the side of the path to hide myself. Running with no weapons and no plan into the middle of a battle between powerful arcana and brightbloods would probably get me killed faster than being Annie Wilkes’s second-favorite author.
Do you think the Silver Court can shut down the portal on their side? I asked, then remembered Alynon wasn’t in my head anymore.
Weird how talking to yourself and not hearing voices could come to feel unusual.
I looked around, and stuffed a few rocks into my pockets, then picked up a sturdy-looking stick that might serve as a club. Captain Caveman to the rescue, when what they needed was Captain Marvel. Or even Captain Kirk. He’d at least managed to turn a stick and some rocks into a canon when fighting the Gorn.
I eased toward the stone gate markers, and saw a dead gnome next to one, his little red gnome hat riddled with burn holes. The gate stones must have had some kind of trap spell to guard this approach, and the gnome had died disarming it.
I tentatively eased a toe forward, and winced, but when no doomy fireworks went off I continued creeping forward.
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