Elder Race(33)

I don’t get to test the theory. The moment the robot’s teeth bite, the arch comes alive. Spiny tendrils rip free of its corded substance and lash convulsively against the worker robot, hurling it away to bounce and rattle across the scaly ground. It ends up on its back before its flight units hurl it ten feet into the air, so that it comes down tilted against a bristling rise of corrupted spirals that might have been trees once. I get a battery of aggrieved damage reports and then nothing.

With the DCS up, I don’t feel the rage that stabs through me, though I can track its footsteps through my readouts. Something obviously gets to my face, though, because Lyn nods flatly.

“It failed.”

“Yes,” I admit. “The arch attacked it. I need to think of something else.”

“Do you have something else?” She seems as calm as I am, and that worries me.

“No. Not yet.”

“No words to command it?”

“It’s not like . . .” I give up. “Demons are from outside, as you said. They don’t respect my words.”

“And your familiar?” She gestures at the sky.

“It will spy for us but not act. Not its job.”

And she nods. It’s devastating, that nod. Or I recognise it would be, if I were allowing myself to be devastated right now. Lynesse Fourth Daughter, who came to the wizard’s tower because she needed to fight a demon, finally understands. Not Your sorcery wasn’t strong enough but the far truer revelation, You have run out of toys. I’ve been telling her all along there’s no such thing as magic. Now I see she believes me, and I find that I was relying on her belief in magic because I’m all out of other options and magic was probably the only thing that might have beaten the odds and come through for us.

“Then there’s just one thing for it,” she tells us all.

“No,” Esha says flatly, though Allwer is nodding slowly.

“These things are solved by two things: a strong arm and a keen blade. That is how the tales have it. There is no other way.” And I can see that, despite the admirable confidence in her voice, she is scared to death. “I will step through the door of the demon’s house and slay it. I alone. I will not ask it of any of you.”

Allwer is plainly not volunteering, and in the end Esha can just shake her head and back off. And as for me . . .

“There must be another way,” I tell her. “You cannot go through that gate. Whatever lies beyond, it is inimical to human life, even to physical matter as we know it. You would be unmade, and your sword as well. This is suicide.” And I see her rebuttal even as she opens her mouth to speak it. “Give me time, please. Let me find how I can dismantle this thing, turn it off, break it apart. Enough energy, enough force . . .” But if the robot failed, what can I do? Lyn is about to turn me down and so I draw myself up to my full height, so much taller than any of them. I drag together the full mummery she has invested me with and say, “Why did you come to my tower, if not to use my magic against the demon?”

“Magic,” she echoes.

I force myself to nod. Am I not a wizard, however I try to express it?

At last, she inclines her head. “Sunrise,” she says at last. “Next sunrise, and I will go. If you have no magic to defeat the demon by then, it will be arm and sword, and no more.”

*

I do not sleep. No great hardship compared to all the other things I’m staving off. I do not want Lynesse Fourth Daughter to go through that door. I do not believe in her stories or that this thing can be bested with any number of strong arms or swords. It’s ridiculous, isn’t it? Primitive, savage beliefs in a people who once walked the stars.

And yet I pore over the data received from my drone and from the doomed worker robot, and in the end I have no answers to the big question. They call it a demon, and I have no better term to offer. It does what it does in defiance of any scientific understanding. I can see only the effects of its presence, not the means by which it accomplishes them. How can it coordinate its parts without its signals passing through the intervening space? How does it manifest its mark, a profusion of semi-organic growth that does not have anywhere to draw sufficient mass from? Nothing about it makes sense. And I, whose power over the world resides in my knowledge of its workings, am therefore impotent.

Or not quite impotent. If the arch can be destroyed . . . But if Lyn takes an edge to it, she’ll fare no better than the robot.

We are still two hours off dawn, by my internal clock, when I have the answer. Not my first choice, to be honest. Dire enough that I don’t want to do it, actually. A really stupid idea, from the point of view of Nyr Illim Tevitch, scientist. For Nyrgoth Elder, some-sort - of - wizard - apparently, it seems almost fitting. Mythic, you might say.

I am going to make a momentous decision. Most likely it is a bad decision. Certainly it may be the last major decision I ever make. A terrible, bleak decision born of despair, surely. The decision only a man overcome by the beast that hunts him would make.

And for that reason I throw my DCS into high gear, banish every scrap of misery, love and hate, all the emotional baggage. Back to your oubliette. Grown-ups are talking.

With that artificial and antiseptic clarity I consider exactly what I am going to do, clinical as a computer. I expect the whole plan to evaporate in that harsh light. To turn out to be no more than bad ideas born of bad thoughts and self-loathing. Yet the shocking thing is (or would be, could I be shocked) that it all holds up. The chain of logic, the lack of other options. If I want this end, then I require these means. And the lack of affect I’m working under means that the usual human rejection of such dire measures doesn’t come either. Yes, my absolutely clear mind tells me. This is a workable plan. At this late hour, both sides of my nature reach across the border and shake hands on it. This is the only recourse now.