One metal limb rose and flicked at the air like a giant whip, its lash a loud crack that set eardrums vibrating. The next time it came up it seemed thicker, its movement more animated. The crack was just as loud but its tone was deeper, heavier. It thrashed again, catching a Red Monk over the top of the head, sending it spinning across the ground. And this time the limb had grown thick with new, muscled flesh.
Blood misted the air around the limb. Blood that rose, drifted in, not dropped and sprayed out. New, fresh blood, borne of nowhere natural. It gave the machine renewed life.
It thrashed at the air again and again, the cracks merging into a thunderous roar, tearing the sky as it pursued its victim across the hillside. The machine’s base was hidden in the dark heathers and bracken, but its newly enfleshed limb rose high and proud, finding the Monk that had scurried away, pulling back and flipping it forward so quickly that the whiplash ruptured its body. The machine had lifted the Monk so high that his discharged insides were richly lit by the sun for a second before they spewed down into shadow.
“They’re growing, ” Kosar said.
“They’re coming back to life,” Hope said. “And there’s more. Don’t you see what’s happening? Look over there.” She pointed up at the ridgeline where the Monks had first appeared. One of them was trapped there, not even allowed to enter the valley, unable to fight its way past a small, thrashing thing that hissed and spat across the ground. Thin silvery limbs spun behind it, throwing up clots of earth and grass. The Monk went one way and the machine followed, lashing at its legs and feet, drawing blood, bringing it down. The Monk’s sword flashed out, sparks flew, and the machine fell back, but it left some of its twisting limbs in the Monk’s face. The Monk stood, swayed, stepped forward… and the thing was there again.
“I don’t see,” Kosar said. He was confused enough by all of this, without the witch trying to create more complications. Besides, most of his thoughts still lay beyond this valley, down in those grim gray woods.
“That’s no fighting machine,” Hope said. “These down here, maybe. They have blades and clubs, and other things we’ve yet to see, I’m sure. But that one up there is a domestic aid, if that. But whatever it is, it’s still fighting the Monks. It’s back from a long sleep, and it’s back for a reason.”
“I don’t care,” Kosar said. He had to raise his voice above the cacophony of battle. He looked around, hefted his sword, ready to use it should any of the Monks come at him.
“You should care,” she said. “It’s back to protect you.”
“No it isn’t. It’s the boy, always the boy. Not me, not you, not this sleeping librarian we’ve carried with us halfway across Noreela.” Kosar glared at the witch, and though her tattoos seemed to writhe around her mouth and her eyes glimmered with menace, he did not break his gaze. “And not A’Meer, out there in the woods. Magic did nothing to protect her then. It doesn’t care.”
Hope turned her back on Kosar and returned to her vigil over Rafe.
“Kosar,” Trey cried. “They’ve changed tactics! Look, over there, past that outcropping.” He pointed with his disc-sword, indicating a hump of dark green rock protruding from the gentle slope. Beyond there was a blur of battle. A splash of red, a spray of sparks as metal clashed, screams and screeches that could have been animal or machine.
“What?” Kosar said.
“There are five or six Monks there,” Trey said. “They leapt down from the rock and took on the machine at its base. But there are others crawling past. See them?”
Kosar squinted, and as he cast his eyes left to right he saw movement along the ground. Slow, careful, methodical. “They’re sacrificing themselves,” he said.
“Ten die to get one through,” Trey said. “Even at those odds, we’re finished.”
Kosar felt the subtle vibrations within his sword growing by the second. Perhaps it was in tune with the awakening ground, or the battle raging around them. Or maybe it was simply picking up on his own anger. He looked at Trey and offered the miner a grim smile.
Trey, yellowish skin seeming to revel in the dusk, grinned back. “We may yet have a fight on our hands,” he said.
“Hope,” Kosar said, “some of them may yet get through. Do you have anything that will help us?”
The witch looked up from where she knelt next to Rafe, and for a second her expression was one of pure menace. The thief caught his breath, startled, wondering what he had disturbed. He glanced down at Rafe but the boy was unconscious, fists turned into the ground. A luminescence still fluttered around the joint between human and land.
“Help?” the witch said. “You have magic helping you, what more do you want?”
“It’s helping, but they’re still getting through,” Kosar said. “The machines can’t stop all of them. If they kill a hundred and one makes it past, we still probably won’t survive. I’m not a warrior, Hope, and neither is Trey. Do you have anything that might help?”
The witch looked down at the boy, moved her hand across his body from forehead to the tips of his toes, closed her eyes. When she opened them again that menace had returned, but it faded into a deep, dark sadness.
“I have nothing,” she said.
“Maybe the magic will help us until the end,” Trey said. “It stands to reason. Whatever Rafe is doing to make all this possible would be pointless if one Monk got through and killed us all.”
Kosar wished he could share the miner’s sudden optimism.
As daylight waned, it seemed that the magic was finding its feet with greater relish. The rusted and rotten bones of dead machines continued to lift themselves from the loam, and within seconds they were clothed in a thin layer of flesh or a liquid covering of molten stone. Fluid flowed in from all around, appearing from nowhere to give the machine back its blood, enclose its old skeleton even as the skeleton itself was solidifying once more. Layer upon layer was built up and around the remains, shifting with new movement, and not always blood and flesh. Wood and stone in one place, water and flexible glass in another, magical new forms of machines arising from the sad remnants of old.
Kosar hefted his sword and kept watch for shadows that should not move. He thought of A’Meer in the forest and tried to imagine her remains, what they would look like, gray forest creatures darting across gray leaves and making away with moist pickings to feed their colorless broods. There had been such pride in A’Meer’s life, and there should have been more purpose to her death.
He hated the fact that she was dead, and he hated the reason more. Glancing back at the boy lying on the ground Kosar caught the witch’s gaze and held it for a second before glancing away. There was something about her eyes that he had never liked.
“It just better be worth it, that’s all,” he said. Hope did not reply.
“Oh, what in the Black…?” Trey whispered. “Look. Up there, on the ridge, the sun’s still just kissing it. Look!” He pointed with his disc-sword, but Kosar had seen them already.
Monks. Dozens of them, maybe hundreds. Perhaps they had been lagging behind the forward group, running from farther afield in answer to whatever call had brought them here. Now they formed an almost solid red line across the ridge between the valley and the forest, bloodred and ready to pour down and flood the machine graveyard.
“If your magic’s still got something up its sleeve, now is the time,” Kosar said, directing his comment to Rafe without turning around. Across the valley the sounds of fighting continued, though they were more sporadic now, metal on stone and the cries of Monks being killed by the magic they so despised. Breathing in, Kosar smelled red.
As the wave of enemy began to flow down from the ridge, the first Monk broke through the barrier of reanimated machines and lunged for Kosar and Trey. Steel clashed. And three dark shapes high up caught the setting sun.
LUCIEN MALINI WASbloodied and torn, yet not all of the blood was his own. As he entered the valley, the Shantasi bitch already drying on his sword, he sensed the stink of magic being wrought. It was not something he had smelled before, but the way it pricked at his nostrils, ran in bloody rivulets down the back of his throat, made him sick to the stomach. Yes, this was magic.