“It is home for them,” Dahli replied. “Too often it is safer to return home to a known danger than be a stranger seeking help in an unfamiliar land or world. These people may not have returned willingly. The people of the neighbouring worlds may have forced them to. Or they have become the servants or slaves of someone willing to risk the return of the machine army for the promise of owning good land.”
“Is that Kettin’s plan?” Tyen wondered. “Clearing land to give as rewards for her followers?”
Rielle sighed. “Land for food, perhaps, but not the resources her people took.” She shook her head. “Was it really necessary to kill every person who couldn’t escape, just for the materials to make machines?”
Dahli shrugged. “No, but it does eliminate the chance of rebellion. Refugee and scout reports tell us the invasion of each world, the mining of resources and the building of war machines is controlled by just a few sorcerers. When you consider that weaker sorcerers are attracted to mechanical magic because it doesn’t require much, a large mob of locals could pose a threat to them. Or a strong local sorcerer.”
“If Kettin’s sorcerers are that weak, how do they leave the world they invaded once all the magic is gone?” Tyen asked.
“Stronger sorcerers may be transporting them out,” Dahli replied. “Or gathering magic to give to them before they set out to attack a world.”
Rielle shuddered. “How do they live with themselves after all the killing?”
“By passing on the blame, I’d say,” Dahli guessed. “It isn’t them doing it, it’s the machines. They are just following orders.” His lips thinned. “In some of the worlds I visited while looking for Zeke, I found that inventors had worked with local people to run the mines and machine factories. But then I found worlds in which the locals had rebelled as they realised all their resources were being taken and they weren’t getting paid. After that I only found devastated worlds.”
“So the inventors decided the best way to avoid trouble was to kill everyone,” Rielle said.
“Or their strategy changed when Kettin joined them,” Tyen added.
Dahli looked at him and nodded. “We’re only guessing. If we are to learn why, we must find worlds occupied by Kettin’s followers and question them.”
“Reading their minds will do.” Tyen held out his hands, but Rielle’s attention lingered on the people below, her expression hidden by the scarf draped over her head.
“Should I restore this world?”
“Perhaps later?” Tyen suggested, while at the same time Dahli firmly said, “No.”
Rielle turned to Dahli. “Why not?”
“Only you can do it. If there are any inventors still here, or they return in the next few hours, they will know you’ve been here very recently and will alert Zeke’s captors to a possible rescue attempt.”
She nodded and took Tyen’s hand. “I will come back, when I can.”
As Dahli took Tyen’s other hand, Tyen pushed out of the world. Skimming rapidly across the world, he took them down into the fresh ruins of a city to a circular area surrounded by a wall – a common formation for an arrival place. Sure enough, a path in the place between led away.
The next world was as empty and devastated as the last, but the one after had not been conquered. It was covered in a vast ocean, with countless jagged islands – many of them active volcanoes – emerging from the water. A thin spread of magic surrounded it, but none of them detected any minds.
“Either she didn’t bother with this one because there are too few accessible resources to steal, or we’re off course,” Dahli muttered.
Tyen decided to continue rather than backtrack. The next world had been conquered, as had the one after. The following world had not been attacked. It was as dry as the ocean world was wet, with small communities clustered around the few reliable water sources. A moderate amount of magic remained, so they stopped to scan minds outside a small city.
“They call the conquest the Scourge here,” Rielle said. “Look to the garden. It’s the city’s main gathering place. The Scourge, and why it didn’t reach this world, is a favourite topic of conversation.”
Tyen did as she suggested, finding two old women musing over their world’s good fortune. They were surprisingly well informed about which worlds in the area had been devastated and in what order. To their understanding, the attacks had come in simultaneous invasions spreading like a wave across several worlds rather than one after another in a line.
“Interesting,” Tyen murmured. “It’s as if several armies advanced side by side. That means the trail is wide. It will be easier to follow.”
Rielle nodded. “I wonder how wide.”
Dahli grasped one of her hands and one of Tyen’s. “Let’s find out.”
He waited until Tyen had nodded and Rielle had drawn in a deep breath, then took them through more worlds, heading at an angle across the sweep of worlds the city dwellers knew had been conquered. In most of the defeated worlds they didn’t need to seek signs of devastation, since arrival places were usually in cities or other types of populated areas – places always targeted by the invaders. When their path took them to an arrival place away from civilisation – or the remains of it – they had to skim up and over the landscape to search for signs that Kettin’s machines had been there.
The further they travelled, the deeper the hollow in Tyen’s gut grew. Each conquered world suggested that Kettin’s front line was larger, suggesting a bigger and bigger army. Whenever Dahli found a world that had been spared, he continued on to check the next, to see if they had reached the extent of the army’s reach. Each time they found the following world had been invaded.
After thirty conquered worlds, Dahli stopped and looked at Tyen and Rielle thoughtfully. “I can see by your faces you are as disturbed as I am by how many worlds Kettin’s forces can invade at the same time.”
Rielle’s expression did reflect Tyen’s dismay. “Let’s find the front line rather than try to discover its size,” she suggested. “The closer we get to her army, the better chance we can read the mind of one of her followers. Then we’ll learn its true size, and perhaps where Zeke might be, too.”
“Wherever Kettin’s followers are, the worlds will be dead,” Tyen reminded her.
She grimaced in frustration. They had discussed this problem before they’d left. If they released magic in order to read minds and one of Kettin’s sorcerers was close enough to sense them doing it, they would reveal their presence.
“We won’t learn anything if we never take any risks,” Dahli pointed out.
“I’ll take us.” Rielle dragged in a couple of deep breaths, then pushed out of the world. It faded to white rapidly, then another emerged. They found some survivors and returnees in a few worlds. It was tempting to approach and ask questions, but without the ability to read minds it was unlikely they’d understand the language the people spoke.
Gradually the signs of invasion and destruction grew fresher, until they were finding still-smoking ruins and newly arrived refugees. Many hours had passed since they’d arrived in the world in which Dahli had been attacked a half-cycle ago. They stopped to eat and rest. While Tyen and Dahli could have continued on, using pattern-shifting to erase weariness and hunger, Rielle was clearly exhausted. She accepted gratefully when Tyen offered to heal away her weariness.
When they set out again, with Tyen moving them, it was not long before they found a world the machines had invaded a handful of days before. He skimmed higher and created a platform of still air for them to stand upon above the highest walls of the city they’d arrived in. It was cold and windy, so he extended his shield around them and heated the air within.
A now-familiar scene of devastation lay below. Dahli pointed towards the horizon.
“There is something too consistent about the smoke coming up over there,” he said. “It could be a foundry for making machine parts.”
Rielle nodded. “Let’s check it out.”
Dahl
i took them back into the place between worlds and skimmed towards the column of smoke. It rose from the outskirts of a ruined city. Most of the metropolis had been smashed and burned, but the smoke was coming from an enormous chimney built into an intact building that reminded Tyen of the Grand Market in Doum. Machines marched out of a wide entrance to form rows in nearby fields.
Dahli brought them into the world high above.
“Can we get closer, do you think?” Rielle asked.
Dahli glanced at Tyen and raised an eyebrow.
Tyen shrugged and nodded. “As you said, we won’t learn anything if we don’t take any risks,” he replied.
“Let’s wait until dark,” Dahli said, looking around. “It’ll be night soon. I don’t know if the machines would be less likely to detect us, but it improves our chances that humans won’t.”
As they waited, they watched the machines emerging from the foundry. It was not a steady stream, but an irregular regurgitation of metal and movement. Each machine joined others of its kind in the area around the foundry, forming orderly lines. All appeared to be behaving without instruction. Tyen altered his eyesight so he could see them better, trying to guess what purpose each machine had.
“Tyen,” Rielle said after a while. He looked up to find he could see every pore and hair of her face.
“The sun has set,” she told him.
He looked around, surprised, only to wince at the painful brightness of the sky at the horizon. Concentrating, he changed his eyesight nearer to normal vision, not so sharply focused but retaining an ability to see well in the dark.
“Take us down, Dahli,” Rielle said.
The stilled air supporting them began to drop, slowly lowering them towards the foundry. They landed softly on a roof formed of long planks laid horizontally. Tyen lay down and placed his eye to the crack between two of them. He could not see much, but a little careful application of magic allowed him to carve a wider gap.
He heard Rielle and Dahli stretching out beside him as he took in the scene below. Machines filled the floor of the foundry, ranging in size from huge smelting contraptions to tiny constructors. All worked tirelessly at their different tasks, making parts, then assembling them into new machines.
A lone man watched over it all. He paced slowly through the foundry, occasionally stopping one process or starting a new one.
He yawned several times as he did this.
“He’s not ageless,” Dahli said. “Or he’d not be sleepy.”
“There is a little magic here,” Rielle said.
Tyen extended his senses and confirmed her words.
“Generated by creativity?” Dahli asked. He turned to Tyen. “Can machines be Makers?”
“I doubt it,” Tyen replied. “But I can’t say it’s not possible.” He bent to look below again. “It might be the overseer.”
“Hmm,” Rielle disagreed. “What he is doing is not that creative.”
“Machines need magic to operate,” Tyen said, thinking aloud. “Perhaps the overseer is releasing some for them to use.” The man was approaching the area where new machines were nearing completion. He checked each, dark radiating lines springing from him as he did. Rielle sucked in a breath.
“Stain,” she whispered.
Tyen was puzzled by the word until he recalled that the dark void where magic was absent was called “stain” in her world. “Soot,” he murmured. She met his gaze and smiled grimly.
Tyen focused on the overseer. The man’s name was Pelli. He was reflecting that he was good at his job now. He’d had enough practice at organising machine replication that, if the information scouts gave him was correct, he could extract a world’s resources and convert it to new machines in as short a time as was physically possible. The trouble was, unlike in the early days, the machine makers now worked separately. Nobody was here to appreciate his efficiency, and he couldn’t compare his progress with the others’. He hadn’t even laid eyes on Kettin for maybe a sixth of a cycle. A masked face rose in his memory. Only when Kettin’s messengers checked to see if he was ready to leave a world did he see another colleague, and they understood too little of mechanical magic to appreciate the work Pelli did.
As the man’s thoughts turned back to the process of making machines, Dahli hissed. “We won’t learn much from him.”
Tyen frowned. “I could learn something about how these machines work,” he said. “And he seems like a man who would like to boast about his achievements.”
“You want to talk to him?” Rielle asked, a crease of worry between her brows.
Dahli nodded.
“He seems the type who would be easily persuaded to divulge details about Kettin’s army.”
Rielle met Tyen’s gaze briefly, communicating a different kind of worry. “And if he proves harder to persuade than you expect? I won’t have you treat him too cruelly, Dahli.”
“This is war, Rielle,” Dahli replied gently – more a warning than a rebuke. “I won’t torture him, just nudge him into thinking about what he wants to conceal.”
She looked at Tyen again, one eyebrow rising. Tyen searched Dahli’s mind and saw no intention to harm Pelli. He nodded. “It’s worth the risk, if we can learn more about how Kettin’s armies work.”
“And when we’re done with him?”
“We’ll put him somewhere his colleagues won’t find him for a while,” Dahli replied.
“How do we get close to him without the machines detecting us?” Rielle asked.
“We wait until he goes somewhere free of machines, then enter it from the place between worlds,” Dahli said. “Since he’s not ageless he needs sleep, and for that he’ll want somewhere quiet. Or at least quieter than this building.”
The wait was long, but not tedious, since Tyen could watch Pelli working through his thoughts. In the overseer’s mind there were three main kinds of war machines: machines to attack with, machines to defend with and machines that could repair or construct more machines. In the early days some inventors had competed to find new and more horrible ways in which a machine could kill, but Kettin was not interested in their sadistic games. Neither did she particularly care about avoiding deaths. People were a nuisance and best removed. He suspected if machines could travel between worlds by themselves, and didn’t need supervision now and then, she would eliminate the inventors and captains too. All that mattered to Kettin was conquering worlds as quickly and efficiently as possible.
What she wanted to do then, Pelli could not guess. He hoped this was all leading to something better for the worlds, because he doubted he’d have the courage to leave Kettin’s service if it wasn’t. Most of those who had tried to leave had been hunted down and killed. He assumed the rest were in hiding. He had no idea where he’d hide, if he had no choice but to flee.
Pelli continued his supervision until he could no longer keep his eyes open, then slipped away to a small, miraculously intact house a few blocks away and collapsed onto a bed. Dahli took Rielle and Tyen’s hand and skimmed down to the city, through the roof and into Pelli’s bedroom.
As they emerged, Tyen stilled the air around them. Someone like Pelli was bound to have rigged up a defence of some sort. Nothing happened until they stepped away from each other. Then a piercing alarm filled the air. It was silenced a moment later as Dahli smashed the machine making it.
Pelli groaned, decided that some small vermin animal had set it off, and rolled over, intending to go back to sleep. Then it occurred to him that vermin couldn’t have turned the alarm off, and he forced himself into a sitting position. Perhaps it had run out of magic. He opened his eyes and created a light.
And blinked stupidly at Dahli, Tyen and Rielle.
“Where’s Kettin?” Dahli asked.
No specific location entered Pelli’s mind. The captains would know, he thought. That’s who I’d ask if I wanted to find her.
“Where are the captains?”
Patrolling the conquered worlds.
Dahli took a step clo
ser. “Where are the inventors she imprisoned?”
Pelli flinched away from him, tugging at the bedclothes to free his legs. “I don’t know.” But he thought it likely they were in Kettin’s base world, at the centre of the worlds she had conquered. Which was about thirty or forty worlds away.
A sense of the arrangement of worlds and armies unfolded in his mind. The front line was a ring, moving steadily outwards from Kettin’s world. Tyen looked at Rielle, whose expression of horror reflected his own. If the outer edge of it had moved outwards by thirty or forty worlds in the last half-cycle, how big was the circumference? How many worlds lay ruined within that ring?
“Please don’t hurt me,” Pelli said, his voice a whimper.
“We won’t,” Rielle promised. She sat on the edge of the bed and managed a small, sympathetic smile. “We can see you wouldn’t be here if you thought you had an alternative.”
“No, I wouldn’t,” Pelli replied. A voice in his mind disagreed. He did like being part of something big. Something remarkable, if deadly. Like many of Kettin’s followers, he didn’t think much of the Restorers. Then he realised these sorcerers could read his mind, and he hung his head in defeat.
“So, what are we going to do with you?” Dahli asked.
Pelli slumped even further. He did not want to fight them. He barely held enough magic to leave this world. Even if he won, he’d be trapped here.
“You’re right,” Tyen said. “You would lose a fight. So why bother fighting? Join us. We’ll take you somewhere you won’t be quickly found. Then we’ll come back here when our business is finished and set you free.”
Pelli looked up at Tyen as he considered.
“We can protect you,” Rielle assured him.
The sorcerer turned to frown at her. “Who do you work for?”
She opened her mouth but paused as Dahli shook his head. “For peace,” she said.
Maker's Curse Page 30