"Owner?" Mikki says, several days later; it is late in the morning, and her Owner is lying in bed, face turned away from sun and work and tea and Mikki.
Mikki's voice is very small.
"Owner, if you — the elven god. Could you ask him to—"
Mikki's Owner coughs with laughter, rolls halfway over, and jerks a thumb at her own breathlessly heaving chest. "Elf is from human," she rasps. "Human perfected. God is pleased. No age, no weakess...no disease. Disease is weakness. God is not pleased. I sicken, I die...works me hard." She waves a careless hand at the scatter of fresh papers around the bed, piles of increasingly unsteady scrawl. "Takes what value I have, before I fail."
"No help," Mikki whispers.
"Sick. Weak. Worthless," Owner agrees, and makes a blowing-away-chaff gesture, which ends in another shoulder-shaking rattle, and a turned back once again.
Mikki turns her pigment stick over and over in her fingers, then nervously tucks it away in its bundle. Each step hesitant, she walks to her Owner. She lifts a hand, rests it on the elven woman's arm; then, braver, and not sent away, sinks to the bed and rests her cheek on sculpted bicep.
Woman with Blue Eyes makes a noise in her throat, and leans infinitesimally back into her.
"See," she says softly, picking up a sheet of paper from beside the pillow. A diagram of a guard-golem's workings, haloed by fresh annotation. "Perfection of form. No disease, no hunger, no weakness. But no genius." She taps a finger on her own head. "Genius," she says matter-of-factly.
Mikki shifts to stare at the diagram. "Your god wants to put...thought...into those?"
"No mess. No flesh," Owner croons, and flashes a savage smile, almost her old self. There are traces of blood framing her teeth. "I know how."
Mikki's Owner has an unparalleled mind.
"God speaks so bright." The elf's voice falls back to a husky mutter. "Write it down. Write it all down, so all elves know. Make them. These to elf, as elf to human." she touches Mikki's hair. "I die, Mikki burns it all," she adds firmly. "No help for me, no help for god!"
"Owner," Mikki says softly, sorrowfully.
"Hush," her Owner says, winces, and reaches for blank paper.
The Owner dozes uneasily, blankets a tangled mess, pillow clutched to her chest. She is turned almost face down, head propped over the edge of the bed, an uncomfortable compromise between the mucus blocking her nose and the fluid building in her lungs. Her breath wheezes and heaves. Bruise-dark dots swell beneath her skin, rise to the surface like malignant bubbles, blossom into sores. She is hot to the touch.
Blaize comes to stand in the doorway for a while, fingering the edge of a pilfered kitchen knife.
"She's dying a worse death than you could give her," Mikki says, quiet but iron, never looking back at her. "Save your effort for what comes after; or haven't you thought? They feed us."
The Yannas come, a few times, not daring to cross the threshold. "Mikki?" the elder calls, high-pitched with distress. "Mikki, you should come away."
"No," Mikki says, watching her Owner. "Why?"
Yanna falters over the answer. "Blaize says she will run away to the wild humans while the elves are sick."
"Good," Mikki says, and touches the back of her hand to the elf's brow. The Owner shudders and mumbles in her sleep; Mikki cannot tell if she is hotter, or if it is only the scribe's imagination. She dabs a wet rag around the elf's face.
Later, perhaps hours later, Mikki startles from the bedside. Her calling from the doorway eventually brings forth Little Yanna, sleepy and stumbling.
"Has Blaize left yet?" Mikki asks gravely.
The child nods, rubs her eyes, points in a meaningless direction. "She took Eno the pot-scrubber and some people," she mumbles.
"Do you know how they passed the guard-golems?"
"They went into the river, where there aren't any."
"Thank you, Yanna."
The guard-golems do not need to breathe; the Owner ordered them to ring the workshop and let none pass, even though every soldier, every priest and sorceror who's been and left, every person they met in the city, every traveller between here and the rest of the Empire, on and on and on, makes it far too late. Mikki dimly thinks she should regret the end she's sure they came to.
Mikki feels nothing.
The Owner wakes several times in the night, flailing weakly, heaving and retching and fighting in terror for air. Mikki holds her hand, lifts water to her lips, strokes sweat-matted hair.
"Mikki, Mikki," the elf sobs into her pillow.
"I am here," Mikki says gently.
By morning, the fever is higher than a human body could sustain. The Owner croaks broken, delirious fragments of elvish, trembling constantly, bedding soaked with sweat. Blood blooms across the whites of her eyes, stains her lips.
Mikki is aware, very vaguely, that other members of the household come and go, not venturing further than the doorway, but her attention cannot be spared.
"Hush," she croons to her Owner's frightened whimpers.
It is obvious that this cannot last. It is no surprise that as the day wears on, and the sun's heat climbs, the elf's breathing becomes shallower. Finally, uneventfully, she sighs; there is no following inhalation.
Mikki wrings her hands. She rearranges the bowl of water and rag on the bedside table, three or four times; there are, she realises, tears on her cheeks.
There is a small, silent crowd of humans at the door.
"Excuse me," she says, thin and shrill, and marches between them, off around the workshop's living quarters. Her feet take her, thoughts a loud but empty whirl.
It is when she finds herself beside the heartstone, piled with papers, that she puts her head into her hands and allows herself to sob.
Mikki has worked at Blue Eyes' elbow all her life, and the elf's notes are many. The scribe's hands shake as she approaches the guard-golem, but she is as sure of what she does as she can be.
It turns, brass feet stamping, and angles its blades in warning. Mikki takes a deep breath, and holds up a large sheet of paper in front of her, palm-sized symbols inscribed with painstaking care.
The golems do not read elvish, really. It is a convenience to the elves that their symbolic instructions are represented with elven characters, and that they can be re-instructed through their unblinking ruby eyes.
Mikki holds her breath. The thing clicks a few times, deep in its brass hull, and folds its scythes.
She breathes again.
The surviving elves are gathered in one of the city's great storage halls, running a makeshift hospital as best they know how. Some are still on their feet; many are near death.
They pay no mind to her quiet entance, but her by-now entourage of plodding devices draws their attention. One elf, in soldier's uniform, drags himself upright to snap at her.
It is true that humans cannot speak elvish. Their god must outdo humans in every particular; humans cannot match the elven syrinx. But with sufficient vocabulary, a fluent enough grasp, even a human can find a few sentences possible to approximate.
"I have come to fight your god," Mikki announces, and before their eyes she sketches characters into paper from her scribe's bundle. They are sick, and slow; the soldier is still unsheathing a blade to answer her impertinence when she turns the paper to show them.
Some of them, at least, understand. Their screaming starts even before she swings her arm out to the side, writing facing behind her, instructing the golems at her back; her obedient army.
mikki.....