Some ancient wizard's grand, inscrutable design had involved a one-man recapitulation of the resource infrastructure of nations; great mechanical worms chewing through mountains, digesting rock within their bellies, and depositing sorted and purified ores into vast golem-furnaces, which in turn disgorged ingots into the yawning maws of town-sized, plodding golemic leviathans, whose circular wanderings collected and ultimately delivered metals and reagents and farmed wood and crops in bulk to his fastness, where further machineries combined and consumed them to make products and byproducts, whose own streams wove together in a vast pyramidal complexification, building toward — well, whatever the ultimate point had been.
The wizard is so long dead that his alchemical factories have worn out, his rock-chewing worms have exhausted their ore veins and fallen dormant, his tree farms have burst their borders and overwhelmed their automated culling, grown wild and dense. But the slow circuit of the freight golems remains, their schedule of obedient stops at long-silent depots for dead and silent factories to load their dust-filled, empty inventories. In his absence people have, of course, long hitched rides on them.
The berserker princess and her staff are finally headed homeward, sulkily accompanied, still, by the Occlusian assassin; their itinerary set to take them aboard one such golem, and thereby all the way to their own country, relatively slowly but without great effort.
Wren is notified, shortly before they set out, that the berserker princess has requested she be loaned to the foreign kingdom and accompany them; "a training opportunity to modernise the system of political advisors," allegedly.
"Highness," she protests mildly.
"Six months as an honoured guest in my country," the berserker princess says placidly. "Almost a holiday!"
Wren tucks her hands into her sleeves. "Who do you think might have hired the Occlusians, highness?" she says politely, and the princess beams at her.
"Oh, someone among my own people," she says airily. "No need to worry. A wizard matter."
Wren opens her mouth, and the princess beats her to it, patting her shoulder.
"Not a wizard!" she says, beaming at Wren with the open and guileless face of royalty that's Machiavelling as hard as it fucking can.
"I would very much like to know, before arriving in the princess's country, who among her people paid for her to be killed," Wren says in a conversational way, when she so happens to be in secluded proximity to the Occlusian, on the great open-air deck of the walking golem.
"Your court," the assassin says, leaning on the railing and watching the landscape go by, "literally has manuals written on comparative assassination practises. And it's very firm on the professionalism of the Occlusian system, and the resulting futility of interrogation: the hand which takes the money is not the hand which holds the knife. The instructions to the hand which holds the knife never include the client, nor their motive."
"I'm aware," Wren says, very dryly; her own name adorns the covers of some of those books. "I'm equally aware that a wise assassin understands the political context of their work, to safeguard their own survival."
"What kind of wise assassin gets their head cut off?" the Occlusian retorts; and Wren puts her elbows on the railing, steeples her fingers, looks out at the hills going past, and pointedly goes hmmm.
