“What did you do back there?” Warren said.
“What?”
He took a step closer. “You heard me. What did you say? You took down my war truck, and you knocked out both these golems.”
“That wasn’t me!” Kádár waved her hands. “The golem did it all on his own. I definitely don’t have that kind of power.”
Disgusted, she squatted beside the unconscious field operator. “I can’t believe none of those guys stopped to check on this man.” She knew enough about first aid to guess he was all right, just knocked out. “I’m going to move him out of the way, just to be safe.”
She worried, moving an unconscious man, but she didn’t want anyone too close to that Chino-French machine. Some golems were equipped with a self-destruct, even Imperial models. It was impossible to tell merely by looking. Kádár dragged the man toward her desk.
Benchley cocked his head at her.
“Look after him, okay?” she asked. His head bounced, almost as in reply. In fact, it nearly looked like a nod.
She went back to the sledge, where Warren still stood. She put her hands on her hips. “Going to help me?”
“I’m not going anywhere until my truck can move, and I don’t think it’s going anywhere right now.”
She spared a glance at the horse-like golem. Its eyes were dim, half their usual brightness. The thing had gone into its rest mode. “It’s sleeping,” she snapped. “It probably needs to re-spool its order scroll and restore its animus. They need rest, too.”
She turned her attention back to the task at hand. The red golem made her nervous. The long arms, the intensely armored construction: this was all new design. The Chino-French had been stealing Imperial technology for years, but this was the first original creation she’d seen. She scrambled up on the sledge to get a better look. She had to push aside the cold hands of the Imperial golem to really see the red golem’s face. The long crack running up its skull exposed something strangely damp-looking. What kind of magic were the Chino-French using? Some kind of alchemy, maybe?
She reached out to its cheek and wriggled a finger into the crack. She pulled out her finger, now stained red. She sniffed it and made a face at the copper smell.
“Is that blood?” Warren asked.
“Sure looks like it.” She leaned forward and gripped both sides of the cracked clay head. It creaked in protest—then snapped open.
Kádár stumbled backward.
“Holy shit!” Warren grabbed her shoulder. “Is that what I think it is?”
She forced herself to move close enough to look at the pink thing. Her stomach twisted. “It’s definitely a brain, and I’m pretty sure it’s human.”
“What does that mean?” Warren’s voice had climbed in pitch. “How does that even work?”
“I don’t know,” she murmured. She held her hand over the brain, not touching it, just trying to feel what kind of magic had bound it in place. A faint aura clung to the organ, a sense of pain and darkness.
She shook her head. “I wish we had a ceramic wizard in the unit. They’d be able to get a lock on the magical system. This just feels…evil.” She sat back on her heels. “I had no idea human energy and magical energy could even mix. The applications are incredible.”
He leaned over Kádár’s shoulder. “There’s something blinking at the base of the brain.”
Kádár peered at the tiny light. “Self-destruct!”
Warren’s arms closed around her, throwing her backward, but it was too late. A blast of white filled the hangar, blotting out the golems, the sledge, the world. Kádár clamped shut her eyes, but she was only falling. Falling into the brightness.
* * *
And then black. She blinked hard. Her head wobbled as if her neck had been replaced with spaghetti. Her stomach flipped over at the slight motion. Everything hurt, and her head wouldn’t stop moving. A horrible pealing like the world’s largest bell rang in her ears.
She tried to sit up, but her body was pressed tight against a wall of ceramic. Kádár forced herself to breathe deeply and look around. She lay on the floor of the hangar, everything gray upon gray. She pulled herself to her feet despite queasiness. A set of softly glowing eyes appeared in the gloom, and with it, the faint outline of a broad, horned head.
“Benchley?” She reached out with tentative fingertips to stroke the clay machine’s warm arm. It felt surprisingly soft and supple.
“Kádár. You’re okay.” Warren’s voice sounded nearby.
“Because you saved me. Good thinking, Sarge.” She blinked again, struggling to find him. “Where are you?”
“Here,” he whispered. She could barely hear his voice through the ringing in her ears.
The voice came from the ground. Kádár dropped to her knees beside his shape. She was beginning to see colors now. There was much, much too much red.
“Oh, shit. I’ll go get help.”
“No. I’m not going to last much longer.”
Kádár shook her head. “I can’t let you die like this. You saved my life!”
“That’s an order, Gefreiter. Plus, the infirmary’s probably retreating.” The thin shriek of artillery fire penetrated the ringing in her ears. The ground shook beneath them.
“We’re under attack,” she gasped.
“For a while now,” he said. He coughed, and a bright bubble of blood popped on his lips.
“We’ve got to get out of here,” she said. “If there are as many war golems out there as that leutnant said, this whole base is dead.”
Artillery screamed again, and the ground bucked beneath Kádár’s feet. She pitched forward as the far side of the hangar exploded in blue-and-gold light. She could feel herself screaming, but she couldn’t hear anything.
The earth went still.
Kádár managed to lift up her pounding head. This second explosion had been worse than the first, but at least she hadn’t hit her head again. She tried to take stock of the damage.
One half of the golem repair hangar no longer existed. A crater stood less than half a meter to her right, blue smoke rising out of it. The spot where her desk had stood—where the field operator had lain—was gone.
Twilight sky winked down at her, streaked with the fire of a hundred fighter balloons. “Oh shit,” she breathed. “The animus chest. The fucking French blew it up. Benchley—” she began, but the war truck was no longer at her side. The golem’s shoulders sprawled across her legs, his empty face turned to the ceiling.
“No!” She shook her head. “Warren?”
He didn’t answer, but his breath gurgled in his throat.
“Don’t die!” she barked. She tried to wriggle out from under Benchley, but nothing happened. She couldn’t even feel her toes. She felt around her waist, her hips. She must have fallen on something, and the weight of the golem pressed her spine down on it. She was paralyzed. A cry caught in her throat.
“Warren, I can’t move. They’re bombing us. We’re all going to die,” she said. “We’re all going to die.”
“Fuck,” he said. “You’ve got to get out of here.”
“I’m trapped. Benchley fell on me. I think I’m hurt.” She eyed the big war truck golem. A tiny light flickered in his eye sockets.
“Benchley?” She held her breath. If she could get him up and running, maybe he could carry them out of this place. There had to be some Imperial squadron retreating to safety. They could help her.
The light flickered, then went on again, but dimmer than the light of a birthday candle. “Damn it,” she breathed. “He’s still alive, but his animus is failing. There’s no way he’s going anywhere.”
“You…can do it.” Warren choked on the words. He didn’t have much time left.
“If I could get him another animus sphere, maybe. But there’s none left.” Tears stung her eyes. She didn’t bother wiping them away.
“Blood,” Warren gasped. He jerked once, twice, and then went still.
Benchley suddenly lifted his head. His
eyes flashed and flickered, lighting up the ruins of the hangar, the barrels of clay, the crumbled remains of injured golems. Shards of red ceramic lay all around like bits of frozen blood.
Blood.
The French were using it. The locking spell used it. If she knew more about magic, she could modify some of the power spells to give Benchley a boost. She bit her lip.
Benchley blinked at her. The light in his eyes was going back out.
She wasn’t a wizard or a witch or even a real ceramicer. She had just enough training to handle clay and pack a pre-made animus sphere into a golem’s body. She could never do it.
Up in the sky, something exploded in a burst of magnesium whiteness. A few Imperial red-and-gold balloons shimmered in the brightness, but only a few. The unit was losing. They were holding the most distant inches of Amero-Hungarian soil. No one would know what happened if the French won. She and Warren wouldn’t even get a proper burial.
A sudden fierce fire burned in her chest. Those assholes weren’t just going to take out her entire unit and all her golems and let them be forgotten. She wasn’t going to let that happen.
Kádár reached deep within her, searching for the golden warmth of her talent. It wasn’t always easy to find, but today it burned with molten heat. She had never felt so much power inside of her, such strength.
She stretched her fingers to Warren’s cooling body. Blood covered every inch of it. She twisted her palm in the stuff. It felt damp, lifeless. She shook her head. That wouldn’t work. She needed living blood.
There was only one place for that.
She fumbled along the ground for a chunk of broken ceramic. She gave a dry laugh. This wouldn’t even hurt.
She plunged the shard into the top of her leg. Blood, hot and sticky and pulsing with life, poured out. Kádár gasped. With her senses shifted into the magical spectrum, she could see the energy in it, not the blue-and-gold of word-powered magic, but a white hot liquid gleaming that spilled out of her thigh.
She had to get it onto Benchley. She twisted the knife to widen the hole and jammed her fingers down into the wound. Blood covered her hand, soaked into her uniform. A wave of dizziness washed over her. She was losing a lot of blood.
She strained her dripping fingers toward Benchley’s chest. The way he was lying, his scroll hatch faced upward, a neat round opening at the base of his throat. She couldn’t get at his animus sphere, hidden away in his armored chest, but she could at least get her blood inside that hatch. The living liquid seeped inside him.
“Come on, Benchley. Open your eyes.” She tried to remember the words of power, any command that would make him reboot, but her training felt very distant. Her head spun. “Please,” she whispered.
As if he could understand her. As if common human politeness could have any effect on a being made of magic words and clay.
His eyes lit up like a light bulb.
She laughed. “Come on, Benchley. Let’s get out of here.”
Slowly, the big bull-like golem pulled himself to his feet. Blood ran down his shoulders and streaked his sides. He cocked his head, and she heard his order scroll spooling in his chest. He looked around the hangar.
“No,” she breathed. “Please! Don’t go! Whatever your orders are, please don’t go!” She fell backward as another wave of dizziness washed away the last of her strength.
The golem suddenly brought his fist down on a cask of clay. From the ground, Kádár stared at him. She couldn’t understand. That couldn’t be in any of his orders. He dug into the clay with his blunt white fingers.
Black dots clustered at the edges of Kádár’s vision. Blood still poured out of her leg; she would black out any minute. Black out and then die. She didn’t even have the strength to cry.
Benchley’s horns reappeared, his golden eyes bright. He bent over her. She watched his fingers stretch the logos-enriched clay over the gash in her leg and up onto her back. A sudden warmth filled the lower half of her body.
“I can feel my toes,” she breathed.
He snorted and scooped her into his arms. He paused a moment to stare at Warren’s battered body, then got to his feet and stepped into the night. He marched into the tree line and away from battle, following the tracks of Kádár’s retreating unit. She pressed her cheek against the golem’s warm chest, feeling a hint of her own living energy moving inside him. He was alive. The golems had felt alive to her, but Benchley was really alive now—because of her blood and her magic.
She closed her eyes, feeling the thrum of magic, a different kind of magic, pulsing in her legs and spine. It was part of her now, too. She and Benchley were both hybrids now, neither fully human nor fully golem. She risked a glance at her leg. It didn’t look so bad, even if it meant her army days were done.
Benchley looked down at her, his eyes incandescent with power. Something reverberated inside him, a dull rumbling like steam building up inside a teapot. And then paper poured out of his scroll hatch, steaming shreds of all his old orders. By all the rules of golem construction, he should fall down, go still, shut down, but bits of paper kept bursting out of him, and he kept walking.
Under the glow of moonlight and the flash of artillery fire, it was like a ticker-tape parade just for two injured veterans. Kádár smiled and wondered where they would go without orders, without words of power.
Lightweaver in Shadow
Gray Rinehart
Across the fog-shrouded valley, from the depths of Rellam Wood, Varrikar war drums welcomed the day. Their deep, resonant blasts echoed off the fog itself.
Tyrol shifted at the sound, his boots still heavy with inch-thick mud that seemed to glue them to the hilltop. He strained to see the signal from Captain Hallern’s position on the right flank. The thin shaft of light wavered through the mist, Milligan’s shapes less distinct than they should have been: sloppy, even considering the fog. Tyrol had to concentrate hard to interpret. “Cavalry formed, infantry in place, sir,” he said. “Enemy positions consistent with scouting. Archers ready…no visible targets yet.”
“Damnable fog,” Marshall Innolik said. “But we’ve used it to our advantage so far, eh?” His horse snorted when the big man stood up in the stirrups, as if that extra height might give him a clearer eyeline down into the mist-darkened valley.
He reseated himself and went on, in that voice that sounded like the murmur of a turning grindstone, his rhythm matching the Varrikar drums a bit too closely for Tyrol’s comfort. “Do we trust the reports? Make the push now? Confuse the bastards? If we wait too long, will they have time to set their lines?” No one responded; they all knew the marshall answered his own questions, in his own time.
The wind shifted, blowing from Rellam Wood, and Tyrol caught the scent of oily smoke from the darkwood incense the Varrikar burned before battle. He choked a little as the smoke bit the back of his throat. Each heartbeat rattled the thin armor of his breastbone, and he guessed that up and down the line his Dvornian brothers had the same hammering inside, urging them to move, to charge, to fight. He touched the hilt of his sword—his father’s once—as if it might support him, and fingered the putty-filled indentation where a red stone had been set, long ago traded away by his mother. His hand itched to draw the sword, to join the others in the front ranks, but at fourteen he was too young and too small, even if he were not a lightweaver.
“Weaver, signal the captain to begin the first phase: release his cavalry to maneuver,” the marshall said.
As if he were about to caress a porcupine, Tyrol opened the lantern’s shutter and began stroking the light. The first time he had tried—when he realized that he had his mother’s gift of manipulation—he had reached too far into the fire to grasp its light; at times like this, the flesh-memory of the blisters on his hands washed over him. He grasped for the heart-memory of his mother tending his hand, and made sure he kept his fingers free of the lantern flame.
Tyrol looked toward the distant hill where Captain Hallern waited. With quick, deft movements,
as a common man might tie up a package with string or a musician caress the strings of a lute, he gathered vapor and twisted the watery air to concentrate and shift the lantern’s light. His signals went direct where he aimed, which for now meant to Milligan to pass on to the captain.
Milligan’s reply was succinct. “Cavalry released, sir,” Tyrol reported, trying to keep the sudden exhaustion out of his voice. He stepped away from the lantern just long enough to grab a cold sausage. As the peppery meat began to revive him, he wiped a dribble of grease from his chin.
A couple of paces away, Kelflen rubbed the tip of a drum stick over the drumhead. The whispery sound cut through Tyrol, and his chest seemed to clamp down on his heart. Anticipation shrouded him; he supposed it shrouded them all—Kelflen, Ghilly the piper, the marshall’s advisors and hangers-on, the men on the field below—as effectively as the fog.
Tyrol closed the shutter on his lantern. It had oil enough to last until midday, unless he had to send very many more messages.
The anxious moments piled on one another until the marshall said, “Sound the general advance. We will serve them our best, and see how they like it.”
Kelflen beat out the familiar rhythm. Seconds later, Ghilly’s drones and chanter joined in.
Tyrol barely heard their army’s distant drums and pipes echo the call, so effective was the fog at swallowing the sound; yet the Varrikar drumbeat still came through. Then, as sudden as a pot boiling over, came the distant, inconsistent sounds of infantry and cavalry charging, weapons clashing, innumerable triumphs and dreadful pains delivered to men and beasts.
The fog hung over the valley, and the battle continued unseen.
* * *
The noise of the battle shifted from right to left and right again. Tyrol messaged Captain Hallern twice more, but the troops could not achieve a breakthrough. Kelflen and Ghilly continued to play out signals to the wider army.
A nearby scream of pain and alarm from the slope behind them cut through the pipe-and-drum call.
Tyrol glanced away from Captain Hallern’s position and forgot to look back.
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