It had been a difficult night.
"You're not an Academy mage. You're her," the injured guard said, defiant. "Bree the Bodiless. Bree the Banished. Bree the Bloody… go on, then. Kill me. Get it over with."
"And what purpose," she said, frustrated, "would that serve? Gods, they've been telling tales about me in my absence, I see. Hold still, I think I can fix this."
She opened a module drawer on her left arm, pulled out a silvery metal module marked with a quincunx of green jade inlay, snapped it into the socket on her left palm. Thin tentacles ventured out from an aperture, tasting the air, dripping with orange ooze. The guard shrank back against the side of the checkpoint tower.
"What are you going to do to me? What is that— aaaahh!"
Bree clasped her hand over the bolt wound on the injured guard's arm. Tentacles sank into flesh, writhing between her jointed porcelain fingers, probing under skin.
"Don't squirm, that's a burrowing bolt head, we don't want it burrowing any deeper. And these are preserved regeneration glands from a nesting bog kraken. They guard their eggs, did you know that? For up to two months. But the Great Bog is a miserable environment. There's parasites, and fungi, and necrotic plague, and so the damn things evolved these organs to channel mana into their eggs and young, almost like healing spells, to give them a fighting chance. Not against me, though. I killed this one and took its regeneration glands and doomed its clutch, just to get back one more thing I used to be able to do before that fucking archon took everything away from me… okay, wiggle your fingers…"
The guard's fingers moved. Bree took her hand away, satisfied. The tentacles retracted into her palm. She held an evil-looking bit of spiraled and fluted black metal between thumb and forefinger, rotated her wrist with a series of clicks, turning it around to inspect.
"Got it. All of it. Regrowth forced it out."
Her chest plate slid open. A lurid orange glow splashed across the burrowing bolt head, the hand holding it, and the face of the guard. She squeezed the bolt head, and it crumbled, not bending as mundane metal might, but falling to dust. The glow flared brighter.
"Gotta feed the furnace. Saved your arm, paid the cost; let's go, sweetheart, I need all the help I can get. Pick up your crossbow and follow me."
Her chest plate clacked shut.
"I'm not following you anywhere, traitor!"
Bree shrugged, then held out a hand. Her other one. No disembodied organs in the right hand, although anyone who'd actually seen what she could do with the thing built into its palm would no doubt prefer to hold the left.
"The bastards who killed your mates were Crimson Vanguard, the Crimson Pact's commandos. Real dickheads even by Pact standards. Drink to your squad's memory tomorrow that you all gave nearly as good as you got, because they don't normally leave any survivors. Plus, the Vanguard always sends a backup team. So, way I see it, either you come with me, and you might live, or you run and you probably don't, and really, which one of us is the traitor then, right?"
The guard glared at her through narrowed eyes, but took her hand. Bree hauled her to her feet. And then the guard ran for it.
"It's you! You're the traitor!" Bree yelled at the guard's rapidly receding back. "In case it wasn't clear from context!"
Her voice in this body was beautifully clear and melodic, but not particularly loud; it hadn't been built for yelling, and it didn't satisfy. Not that it would stop her from trying.
Something twanged behind her. A projectile of some kind bounced off her back.
"Nice try," she said, spinning around and folding her right hand down to reveal a hand-length metal spike nestled in a cavity in the mechanism of her arm, "my turn now." An internal spring released. The spike shot out, and did what it might be expected to do to a human skull.
She wiped fresh blood off her faceplate, afterward; tasted the crimson spatter with the tip of an intricately jointed porcelain tongue. It didn't taste like anything. It never did. Nothing did.
"You didn't have to come here," she said to the headless Vanguard commando at her feet. "Any other town. Or better yet, stay home, and don't murder anyone, and I could return the favor. But you came here armed, and it lives here, and I have this little compulsion to take care of it, yeah? 'HER TASK FOR THE TIME BEING SHALL BE TO SAFEGUARD AND PROTECT HER MOST RECENT VICTIM, UNTIL AND UNLESS SAID VICTIM MAY RELEASE HER FROM SERVICE, SATISFIED'," she said, in a low, mocking tone. "Lyric's horrified to even look at me, so I doubt satisfaction and release are on the table any time soon, right?"
No answer was forthcoming.
"Well, fuck you too, buddy. Time to go find your friends."
She sped along the main road, each step a leap, her torn and patched Academy cape flapping behind her. Everyone trying to get into the town had fled when the first Vanguard team set fire to the checkpoint, with their wagons if they could, on foot if they had to. She passed several wagons that stood abandoned, stopped briefly at another to shatter a yoke with her fist and free two terrified oxen.
Then she saw what she was looking for: you'd have to be an idiot to keep driving your wagon towards a burning guard tower, unless you were the rest of the second Vanguard team, with a wagon full of bad news.
Bree knelt in a ditch by the side of the road, screened from view by a thicket, and swapped out the regeneration gland module with another set of pickled arcane beast parts in a can, which did another thing she'd been able to do on her own before her body had been taken away.
The wagon was almost to her, close enough that her upgraded senses could clearly see the outline of a crossbow beneath the driver's plain black cloak. She tickled the stolen sun-serpent pyrosis organ with an internal actuator, and flame bloomed in the night again.
They came scrambling out, firing back, the snap of bows audible over the screaming of the horses. Disciplined, she had to give them that. Bolts hit her in the face and chest.
Not to much effect, of course. She'd once been Lyric's twin, an almost peerless servant automaton frame, built by her old business partner to last, but fundamentally also built to serve tea and look good in a maid outfit. It wasn't enough. It wasn't her. She'd made Coda upgrade her again and again, until Coda's own restorative compulsion had hit its limits, and the artificer told her there was nothing more she knew how to do. By then, she was strong. From there, she'd upgraded herself.
Three of them rushed her with swords. Close enough, Bree thought; she raised her right hand, opening the palm shutter, and whispered, "Nis zerat volut, ghran."
Her soulcatcher, the glowing point of twisted light in her right palm, was, in some sense, the reason she was here, stuck in this patchwork body with its almost nil astral presence. It was an instrument of more subtlety than power and it still worked for her when the rest of her magic had died. She'd upgraded it too. Now it didn't need a soul to be loosened from its mortal shell first.
Ghostly purple light streamed over them, and a moment later, they were down. She fed their torn-off souls to her furnace. Apparent time slowed to a crawl, the high ticking of her main escapement dropping to a steady thud, thud, thud. She snapped blades, broke bones, ripped through the remaining commandos with accelerated fury. The details were messy and irrelevant, forgotten as quickly as they came. The last two Vanguard were carrying a box. She took it from them and opened the lid.
The shock broke her concentration; her time sped up again. "Titan voidwasp larvae," she said, almost reverently. They'd been covered at the Academy, briefly, not something anyone was expected to encounter. The shiny purple-black grubs were from somewhere far, far away, and their eventual monstrous metamorphosis drank souls, just like she did now, but on a colossal scale. They were city killers.
"Here's the thing, little guys, even I don't trust myself with shit like you. Sorry. Protect and safeguard, you know how it is."
She fired her spike, retracted its cable, fired again, into each one in turn, until nothing was left but ichor and chitin splinters. Then she teased a last fractional burst out of her pyrosis module, playing a jet of flame across the mess, just in case.
That was it. There didn't seem to be much else to do. She checked for Vanguard survivors. One of them wasn't quite gone.
"Who… what… the fuck… are you?"
"Just somebody's discarded doll," Bree told him. "When the Pact interrogates your ghost, tell them Bree said not to come back." She dispatched him, as cleanly as she could.
For an indefinite time, there was no motion on the bloodied road, except for the dying flames, and the wind teasing her cape and her hair.
Silver radiance kindled beside her.
"Oh no, not you, don't you fucking start with me—"
"JUSTICE."
"—can piss up a rope!"
She ramped up her speed again and tried to strike the figure of a burning haloed skeleton with fire and the soulcatcher, both at once, but hit nothing but empty air. The archon was only as tangible as it wanted to be. She'd find a way to get at it someday, but it seemed today wasn't going to be that day.
"CEASE THIS."
"Get fucked."
"IT MAY INTEREST YOU TO KNOW THAT THE SUMMONING OF THE CHOSEN HERO HAS YET AGAIN FAILED."
"Not my fault the archmages can't get it up."
"THE HERO IS SUMMONED TO SAFEGUARD THE KINGDOM. THAT IS THE PURPOSE OF THE RITUAL. THE INVOCATIONS BESEECH THE DIVINE TO FILL A NEED AND PROVIDE A PROTECTOR IN THE TIME OF CRISIS."
"Okay, I don't care."
"IF A PROTECTOR IS ALREADY INCARNATE, THE DIVINE FEEL THEIR DUTY IS DONE. EVEN IF THE HERO IS UNAWARE OF THEIR ROLE."
"I jacked the Chosen Hero's soul and sold it to Coda and put it in a doll, right, I was there. So what, you're saying they can't do it again because Lyric's already here, even if it's a doll maid and not a hero? Tough shit, I guess. You met it, you know it isn't exactly hero material."
"YOUR ASSESSMENT IS CRUDE BUT CORRECT. IT IS NOT, AND IT WILL NOT BE. IT IS CONTENT TO SERVE AND TO ENJOY ITS NEW FORM. AND YET A HERO EXISTS. SOMEONE PROTECTS THE KINGDOM ALREADY, ALTHOUGH THEY DO NOT THINK OF IT IN SUCH TERMS. THEY DID SO AGAIN, THIS NIGHT."
"Wait."
"YOUR ACTIONS PRODUCED A HERO."
"Oh gods no."
"THE GODS WATCH. THE SKEIN OF DESTINY IS RE-COILED, A TANGLE REMOVED."
"I can't be—"
"JUSTICE MAY YET BE DONE. GOOD LUCK TO YOU."
Bree roundly cursed the archon in her annoyingly pleasant and musical voice, until it disappeared, and then another fifteen minutes for good measure, in case it felt like coming back. When it didn't, she started walking.
She looked back, once, to see the lights of the town. Somewhere back there, Coda and Lyric lived in their little shop. Lyric didn't sleep any more than Bree did. Maybe her once-twin was leaning out the window, one of its cute dresses ruffled by the night breeze. Maybe it was even looking this way.
"Well, let's face it, Bree," she said to herself, resigned. "You wouldn't have been a very good maid." □
- prev: We Who Serve
- next: We Who Are Far From Home, ch. 1: Bree 1
