The Constructs' Apprentice

[Gnomezilla]

The strangers' leader and greatcoat-clad follower strode in and headed straight to the back of the workshop, leaving his gang to loiter around the workstations, rap on armor plates with fists, test the weights of chains on the hoists, and generally make a nuisance of themselves. One of them cocked a club over her shoulder and sauntered to where the child was assembling gear sets too small for adult hands. "Hey, kid," she smirked, "you like candy?"

The child nodded her head as the other strangers sniggered.

"Well, so do I, but you'll have to do, huh?"

They all cackled, the strangers, but mechanics muttered low in their throats, looked up from their work, and edged their hands towards pry-bars and hammers. Just before the first pickaxe was raised, the air whistled with the passage of a bullwhip, and the fingers almost lost their grip on the club.

"Annie, quit harassing the other little orphans," growled McCabe, and the other wastrels turned their cackling against her. She flexed her fingers, mottling with blood and bruises, to be sure they still worked, then folded all but one back around the haft of the club. The leader of the strangers didn't deign to notice it. "We're done here. Let's go."

They smirked, but slid out of the workshop in seconds regardless. Soon Hoffman emerged from his private workstation and in deadly controlled tones asked after McCabe, but too late.

The child trotted after Hoffman in a hurry. Inside the walled-off section of the workshop, the spare greatcoat had been cast aside, leaving Ryle to stand alone, with a .50 hole drilled through meat and machinery. She frowned. He had certainly been in full repair when McCabe checked him out from among the available constructs. It was because of that tophat wearing jerk who ambushed them when he didn't think she was trailing him, she was certain of it.

 

[Series 1 of the battle narratives: Child in the New World]

[Interlude: Sin Eaters (March Community Contest 2016)]

[Series 2 of the battle narratives: The Constructs' Apprentice]

[Gnomezilla]

A hunter buzzed to life and slipped out of the workshop, and Hoffman returned to taking soundings of the bullet hole through Ryle's torso. The child stayed out of the radius of command while watching. She drew all the most horrible chores now, as apprentice, and some of those involved tending the abomination. There were, she'd begun to learn, nonverbal commands for him, as well as addressing him by name and giving a direct battlefield order. If she stood within Ryle's personal space and mimed an action, he could be coaxed into mimicking the motions of life. It made maintenance easier.

Hoffman raised and flexed his arm, and Ryle did also. He observed the scorched ends of muscle fibers distort the wound and pull away from exposed metal as the arm flexed, reached out for a pen and pad of gridded paper, and saw the child. His eyes narrowed. Instead of the gridded paper he removed a page from an account book, jotted down some numbers and a few remarks, pulled some scrip and 'stones from a pocket, and folded them into a neat self-contained packet. "Child," he said. "I've forgotten to pay Howard Langston for the work he has done for us. Take this to the Weeping Head fountain, and wait. As long as you must. It will be night-time before you return here."

She wanted to ask what the hunter was going to do once it caught up with McCabe. She wanted to watch him repair the gunshot wound, and maybe help, if he needed her tiny hands to adjust machinery he'd have had to manipulate with probes and tweezers. She wanted to know how he knew how to fix flesh--it couldn't be the same as welding metal, could it? She wanted to figure out why Hoffman didn't just make Ryle move, the way he'd told the hunter what to do. She wanted to learn more of the gestures that pure constructs ignored but that Ryle would obey.

"Yes, Mr. Hoffman."

The child left, packet secure in her overalls pocket, the top curve of the Guild's mechanics' crest just visible on the mended adult-sized shirt tucked beneath. Constructs obeyed, and so could she.

 

The Weeping Wellhead had been dedicated on the old site of the Weeping Rock, in honor of the pipefitters and miners who'd died while digging the lines from the main water supply to the site of the former spring to the fountain's stonework. It hadn't taken much time for the 'Well' to be erased from its plaque (it was a Union neighborhood and the spirit of propaganda ran deep) and eroded from the speech of those who drew their water there. Every so often a local artist would try to attach a mask and make the Weeping Head a literal feature, but the locals themselves vandalized every one. Gushing water filled buckets much faster than artistically falling tears did.

The child perched on the seat already worn into a comfortable hollow, and waited. Children came, and sailed leaf-and-twig boats in the pool at the fountain's base, scowled at the child when she wouldn't play too, and left. Older girls came, filled buckets, told the child to run home to her soft bed, and left. Older boys came, washed off the day's grime from face and hands, growled at the child not to try taking their jobs, and left. She pulled up her knees to her chin, and wondered when they'd all turned so mean, and not long after that why the steady flow of people had stopped altogether, and whether that was a familiar sound of tiny numerous construct feet tapping the pavement or whether she was just lonely--

"Minta, my dear! What a pleasant surprise."

They were construct feet. Steam arachnid feet! And toolkit feet. And Howard Langston arachnid feet. And feet of some kind of construct she didn't know, as restless as the steam arachnids but built like dancers. And human feet too, Joss' steel-toed boots and Ramos' polished shoes.

And Ramos had remembered her name, which she hadn't meant to tell him.

The child nodded but didn't get up.

Joss looked to Ramos for guidance, but Howard Langston cut in. "It's Ok, kid. We all know why you're waiting here, and nobody fights here. We don't fight around drinking water. Everyone needs to drink."

Someone chuckled, behind the nearest buildings.

"Everyone?" said a male voice, and a pair of zombies with bold sculpted blood-clotted hair and katanas leaped into view, almost too fast to be properly undead. "Everyone living, I think you mean."

"Now technically," cut in another male voice, "every one of them did used to drink. When they were alive. But now they're dead, and so they're not drinking. Furthermore, every one of you will be dead very soon, and then you won't be drinking either, so to my view of things we are going to win this little grammar--"

"--grammatical--" cut in both the first unseen voice and Ramos.

"--argument, so what's the use in not fighting, I ask you," droned on the second voice as he too ambled from behind the buildings. The child stared at the squat man in the squashed hat as he struck a patch of exposed dirt with his shovel. So that was what the second voice behind the wall in that one fight looked like. She kept on looking, and saw the owner of the first, complaining voice step forward and gesture. Out of the patch of disturbed earth fog rose and coalesced into the shape of a boy-child.

"Trouble, boss," sighed Joss. "You want to, or should I?" He tipped his axe-hand toward the toolkit.

"I will..." Ramos murmured, then addressed the girl. "Dear child, Hank's right. The living shouldn't fight around drinking water. Let the constructs go remind Nicodem and his dogsbody about that, mm?" The coryphee whirled across the open area while the toolkit reached out to the steamborg with sharpening stones. "Get behind us, quickly. I wouldn't ask you to further jeopardize Hoffman's opinions of you, and your fighting alongside us certainly would."

Her resistance crumbled on the spot. Had everyone heard about how bad she had been? She hopped to her feet and trotted back behind...oh, of course, the brass arachnid. It must have told Ramos everything, too.

She watched Ramos pull down lightning out of nowhere, tangle it into a knot of confusion and metal, and pull it apart while pulling himself into the lightning's circle, and reassemble the metal into arachnids before it ever hit the ground. The brass arachnid attended to one set of the steamborg's conduit claws while the toolkit finished with the other. Howard Langston grinned fiercely and flexed all his limbs. "Pay attention," he shouted back at the child, "and tell him what I do when I'm allowed some Malifaux-be-damned autonomy!" All that flexing flowed seamlessly into a charge which flung him into and through the punk zombies. Joss whooped and surged forward also, and when a banshee of blood burst forth from the dismembered zombie his axe was already swinging into it.

[Gnomezilla]

The steamborg hefted the last of the bodies and hurled it away from the fountain. "That'll keep things clean," he remarked with satisfaction, as the thrice-dead corpse sailed over a low wall. "Now," he added, and thrashed his conduit claws until the shabby man constricted in them turned even redder, "go splash some water on your boss' face, wake him up, and both of you get out of here. We don't fight around drinking water!"

Howard Langston dropped Mortimer nearly a meter and a half, smirked when the shabby man landed with a grunt and wheeze, and herded him to the fountain. The child had already taken one of the communal mugs over to Joss. He was clumsy with his left hand still, but took the wooden mug and drank not long after she had first held it to his lips. Meanwhile the masters were woken by a swift cupful of water apiece upended over their heads. The steamborg left Ramos alone to haul Nicodem to his feet and shove him away from the area before Mortimer regained enough of his wind to start chattering again. Joss handed the mug back to the child and helped Ramos to his feet.

"Thank you," said Ramos. "Now, I believe she was just about to hand something over to me, when we were interrupted?"

She looked over at the returning steamborg and ignored Ramos' outstretched hand. "What's that word you said when you told me to pay attention?"

Howard Langston set down the mugs, then shrugged. "Which? Look, give that to Ramos, he'll just have me hand it over if you give it to me." Like her getting paid by Hoffman, she realized, and relinquished the packet before perching on the fountain's edge. "Oh. Of course you wouldn't know what autonomy is. You work for the Guild after all." The men all grinned at that. Ramos' fingers unwrapped and counted the scrip and 'stones, deft as one of his arachnids, while his eyes glanced over the writing. "It means Ramos here trusts my own judgment to press the attack the right way in the right time, and he doesn't just," the steamborg clenched a fist and a conduit claw at the same time, "grab hold of my machinery and march me around like a Malifaux-be-damned puppet!

"I hate that." Ramos handed the loose sheaf of scrip over to another conduit claw, which opened a hatch approximately where a trousers pocket would have been if the arachnid legs had still been human ones, and stowed it away. "Yeah, I get paid for it, I know what I signed up for, if I really cared about it I could crush him into--"

"Hank..." Ramos warned him.

"--whatever. But it's not right. A man should be able to walk free, trust his own judgment."

He blazed, then, in a moment of human nobility. Which effect was spoiled by Joss remarking, "I remember that part, but it's the end of his usual new year's speech to the Union. You're months early," and gesturing at their leader who now had neither 'stones nor notes in hand.

"It's the truth," Howard Langston countered, still blazing. Joss tilted his axe-hand and left hand together as though looking into his palms, and then met the other man's eyes and nodded agreement.

The child hugged her knees again, trying to wrap her thoughts around the twin peculiarities: that there were people who were also construct enough that Hoffman could make them obey (except for Ryle), and that they didn't like it at all. She didn't know if Ryle would like it or not, but if he didn't, was that why Hoffman wouldn't? And did he even know that they didn't like it? The steamborg had said to tell him, but the steamborg talked back to Hoffman plenty already. She had heard them argue in the middle of battles. And then the steamborg had gone and attacked what Hoffman was telling him to attack anyway....

Ramos watched her think. When she approached that moment of realization, he spoke to her. "Minta, my dear. I have questions. Joss. Langston. Go patrol the perimeter, you won't want to hear this." They left in opposite directions while the child uncurled, not realizing she was glad to not have to think that next idea in front of others. "He," Ramos avoided even saying Hoffman's name at that moment, "wrote to me asking for advice about the bullet wound. Please don't be startled; I did much of the original construct work. He was terribly wounded, worse than our friend over there even.

"Now, can you point on yourself and show me where the entry and exit points were?" She pointed to both spots at the same time, with fingers spread a bit to show the size of the wounds. He circled around to study the exit point. "That's not good, not good at all, far too close to the spinal bearings....He made him flex his arm, of course. Did he make him touch his toes? No, of course not. How to substitute?...I suppose having him bend at the waist would do. I toughened the intervertebral ligaments, just to counterbalance the normal loads, but that's nothing against that flintlock, it had to be--"

"Are you going to write this down for him please? I don't understand. I can't go back and tell him that I didn't understand."

"--certainly, dear child," he responded, but immediately slipped back into his observations.

Later, as twilight darkened the area, he did stop and write down some recommendations, before dispatching Joss to accompany her back to the workshop. And so, she had gotten tired again, and he had picked her up and carried her again. So she was resting against his shoulder and nodding off when that delayed idea struck her, and made her tense up every muscle ready to flee. No, she wouldn't have to go back and tell Hoffman that she didn't understand....

"What's wrong, kid?...Oh no. Oh, don't do that. Not on the machinery. Kid, you're going to make it rust if you keep on...I can't find you a hanky, I'm carrying you, my hands are full! I'm going to have to put you down to get a hanky. Let go...Ok, don't then, but you're going to have to stop crying..."

[Gnomezilla]

Whatever woes she wanted to voice died on her lips once they arrived at the workshop and found the guardians swiveling their heads to watch the pair approach. The child touched Joss' mouth to warn him to silence, whispered something about sleep which was inaudible after all that weeping, then slipped out of his arms and between the constructs to open the door. He saw, before the doors were shut again from within, the nearest of the rows of constructs begin to track the child instead of him, and her crouching alongside one of the alerted hunters to lean against its forward shoulder, and that hunter curling itself around her, head and tail, to fence her off from the world.

 

He must have awoken again and gone home after that, for when the child woke up the next morning and peeked into the private workstation with the note in hand, Hoffman looked as tidy as he did on most other mornings, but she still felt the need to rub her own eyes in sympathy with the weariness in his.

"'Scuse me please," she started, tipping her head up to watch the work with the fine manipulator arms and magnifiers, glues and tubing, curved needle and ultra-fine wire. "I got the recommendations. And a question."

Hoffman ignored her until he had tied off all the stitches in that layer of muscle. Fine wires had been threaded from one side of Ryle's bullet wound to the other, following the direction of the muscle, and the scorched bits cut away, and some kind of narrow bluish-red tube just on top of that layer had been patched and a clamp removed. It wasn't like welding metal at all, but somewhat like other construct work. "Unfold it so I may read it. I mustn't touch anything that hasn't been boiled clean, not while doing this sort of maintenance." She did, and held the paper up above her head so he would not have to bend to read it. "Interesting...I'm done reading, child, put that away."

She folded up the note, put it in her pocket, found the wrapped sweet which had brought the question to mind, and took it out. "Mr. Hoffman? You said I couldn't take advice unless I asked you about it first...."

"What did Ramos say?" Hoffman asked, after she trailed off.

"He didn't," she replied, and paused again, and looked at the toffee to gather up courage. Then she hurried on, "Can I kiss Ryle?"

"No. Who suggested it?"

"She didn't exactly," the child said still in a hurry, "but she said I should give mine treats if it's been behaving, and she gives out the treats with kisses--"

"Who suggested it?" he repeated.

"--Lupe. The witchling handler that went along with us. We were shooting down the sick gamins. She was getting sniffy about Ryle, and I said I was a construct handler, and--"

"Child." Hoffman paused in his work to give her a look that made her step back a pace. "That was a witch hunter. They hunt and burn all that they do not understand, and they do not understand constructs, and they do not understand what I do." When that sank in, she backed up another two paces in horror and bumped into the wall. "Prepare one of each of the constructs. No, make that two hunters, the wardens aren't to be relied upon for this. I'll want the harpoons. I need all of the constructs and the attendant ready to challenge them the minute I can spare my attention. You will be staying here." It was not a question.

The child ran from the room to carry out his commands.

 

Even with that forewarning, and that of Johan slipping into the workshop to inform on the approaching witch hunter patrol, the constructs and Hoffman were barely ready in time. Sonnia didn't shout like Perdita, but relied on her sharp accent to cut through the din of her chattering patrol. "Hopkins, left flank! Guitirrez and your creatures, right! By the order of the Guild, all workers stand down or be cut down! You, show them I mean what I say." She pointed her sword from the far side of the street, and the lantern chained near it flashed light across the lifted paired claws of one of the Guild's executioners.

"Keep at your work, men," Hoffman countered from the open doors of the peacekeepers' bay, "the constructs and I will handle this misunderstanding."

The child pressed her nose against a second-story window to watch the street. Inside, the mechanics moved uneasily but obeyed Hoffman. Johan, on the other hand, took one look at the oncoming wave of authority and stepped up beside the guardian. The construct raised its shield squarely between Johan's hammer and Hoffman.

Sonnia's voice rose again. "Guitirrez! Your report, your honors."

She watched the slow hip-swaying stroll of the witchling handler--Lupe, with that unmistakable overly-wide grin!--herding her stalkers forward as her fingers played over the runes on her greatsword. The child counted Crab-back, and Bird-down, and a third stalker which swayed from the knees like a plumb-bob gone mad as it was pressed nearer the knot of constructs. Lupe drew her sword and pointed it at Hoffman. "I, Guadalupe Guitirrez, bring evidence against you."

"Witnessed," Hopkins called.

"Use of a magic most unlawful."

"Witnessed."

"Written by the hand of a demon!"

"Witnessed!"

Lupe grounded the point of her greatsword in the dust, and leered. The swaying stalker shivered so much that the motion began to split the knot of constructs in two. Or--the child squinted to better see through the thick wavy glass--the hunters and watcher were buzzing with Hoffman's own energy, and sidling away from the main pack under cover of that stalker's fit.

Hoffman kept his voice level. "Sonnia, you know well that I do not have anything of the sort."

"You should ask what I know," Sonnia retorted, and held up a tome nearly crumbling to dust in her grip. "This went missing from my library, and I only had it returned once someone looked through your office. Oh no, Hoffman. I didn't forget. It was found with you once," and here she merely waved the lantern to one side and the hunter and watcher in line with its arc exploded, "and if necessary it will be found with you again."

He frowned at the book. "Keep the cursed thing and go. There's nothing for you here."

Lupe snickered. "Oh, that's not the cursed thing. The cursed thing's right there in front of you. Don't you know it? Don't you feel it? She does." The handler tapped a different rune, and the stalker near the constructs clasped at her chest and shrieked. Above them, the child flinched to hear that sort of shriek untempered by the fans of the abomination's breathing apparatus. "She built abominations. And that reminds me! She!" Lupe snapped her fingers. "Don't resist, and we may spare your little bright-haired brat."

Samael (to the silent and sincere relief of Hoffman, and perhaps of the executioner as well) interrupted at this point with a salvo of shots into the peacekeeper. "He's accused and witnessed. Just bring him in. You can lecture him then."

[Gnomezilla]

The witch hunters had performed their ritual questioning and withdrawn, leaving the drained forms of accuser and accused within a single figure-eight ouroboros of runes. Even then all the constructs balked at overstepping or overshooting the lobe of the binding circle which had been drawn in the dust around Hoffman, but not the one which encircled the witchling handler. Both circles glowed and spat fire and stopped the child's foot when she tried to kick the writing away. She glared at the hunter and the guardian by turns but they would not move. In between trying to make them move, she glared at Lupe who also lay in the dirt with empty, staring eyes. So she had a wet, red brand at her neck now, for the accusation which could not be proven, for the waste of the witch hunters' time. Served her right!

After long minutes Hoffman--unbranded--focused his vision. The child's mental pushes on the guardian finally took hold, and it stepped across the handler's binding circle, bent its knees, drew back its shield, and shoved Lupe into the crossed lines of runes between accuser and accused. The handler's body jackknifed from head to heel when both binding circles discharged their fire against the living being, and the ouroboros faded. The child stepped across where the runes had been, but the guardian was closer and shockingly swift for a construct of its size, and it hauled Hoffman to his feet.

 

Why'd he say, then, it wasn't her fault, when it very obviously was? Hoffman was terrible at lying, too. The child knew he didn't believe it either.

She'd gone to the workstation, and sat herself on top of the workbench beside Ryle, and propped up a scrap of polished armor plating for a mirror, and gotten to work. It hurt. But she'd managed to get one stitch done before Hoffman returned, and snapped the manipulator arms forward, and cut the needle and wire out of her lip before the child could react. She'd tried to tell him it wasn't working, she couldn't stop talking to people, it was too her fault they'd come to question him. But he wasn't understanding, and that's when she'd lifted her eyes from the workbench and blurted out a great idea.

"Can't you put some machinery in me too? And then order me to stop talking? So I don't keep on getting you in trouble."

Also he was terrible at a comforting pat on the shoulder. It burned like guilt. Maybe the energy of the witch hunters' questioning hadn't been wholly earthed yet. She wriggled her shoulder, then twisted her lips, then decided that squirming was a bad idea no matter what.

"Never..." They'd both looked at the half-mended Ryle, then. Hoffman never looked back at the child after that. "...You'd be an amalgamation, then, and I'd destroy you. No. Stay as you are, even if you do prattle on. Now, leave, and polish off whatever scorch marks the witch hunters have left on the constructs. I'm not finished with maintenance." He set his jaw, and applied small clamps to the abomination, stretching the skin and superficial muscles surrounding the entry wound.

 

He invited her to the next excursion, days later, having left the fully mended abomination in the workstation. "If he is left immobile for some time, the skin may contract over the repairs, and heal smooth," he'd said, and then, "and we shall be away from the workshop for awhile," and nothing more.

Hoffman clacked along after a hunter. He'd touched its logic engine, and now it stalked through the streets. The child stared hard at the hunter for awhile before the smell of the districts went from unfamiliar cleanliness back to familiar necrotic stink, and she realized he'd set it to unwind its mechanical memory, retracing the steps it had taken when McCabe had checked it (and Ryle) out from among the available constructs.

He was hunting Ryle's shooter. He found another.

 

Perdita looked down her gunsights. The child glared back.

"Out of the way," growled Perdita. "Hoffman's here to do something stupid. I'm getting tired of dealing with it." Off to her right, Francisco snorted agreement, with added remarks under his breath about Perdita not knowing the half of it. "I will not let him."

"You already didn't let him and he's not," the child snapped. Behind the child, Hoffman was already prying bullets out of the upper manipulators of his walking frame.

She looked down at the child playing guard-dog between the masters, and sighed, and did not shoot. Instead Perdita said, "Why aren't you with Sonnia, Guild girl? Why him? He's a weak, little-minded--"

"--but he's got clockworks! Clean, shining clockworks, and they're his..."

Perdita focused on Hoffman as his manipulator arms joined in on the task of removing bullets, and twisted her face in disgust as the child kept on fawning over how constructs were better than the dirt of the street, with additions about how her master must be clean and shining too, since the machinery allowed themselves to be ordered around by him....

Finally she interrupted, "Constructs, constructs, constructs! I'm sick of constructs. Don't you have people to talk about?"

"Um. Nope?" The child looked back at Hoffman, who nodded once then returned to the recalibration of hasty welded repairs. "Ok, one. And we're going to go find who shot Ryle. And we're going to have a good long talk with him." She kicked the dirt, and at the jaw which had flown off of the hunter when Papa Loco stuffed dynamite down its gullet.

Again Perdita held her shot, even though the metal barely missed her shins. In fact, since the child had said 'nope' her expression had gone thoughtful, and gotten more so. "That's what he's here for? Revenge?" Her brothers sniggered, and passed a remark among themselves the girls couldn't overhear. "That's good enough." She took her pistol off-target, and gestured down the street they'd been walking down when the ambush hit. " 'Cisco, keep her here. We'll leave soon." Perdita scowled again, and left the child behind.

Hoffman looked up when the shadow of Perdita fell over him, into Perdita's all-knowing eyes, over the sudden pressure of the pistol over his suddenly racing heart. She leaned down to snarl into his ear.

"You are very lucky I know you. That I know you are not that particular kind of filth--" He began to croak a protest at her tone, but winced against the gun being jabbed against him, and fell silent. "--who would find a child who worships the ground you walk on--" Trying to twist and stare at the child in surprise was also rewarded with pain. "--and tear her soul out. But you would still take her into battle--"

"I can't stop her," he began to protest, and felt pressure on the trigger begin to tug at the hammer. He diverted the forces, but the barrel was still pressed against his body. Even if diverted, if those forces flowed into the bullet and the powder charge...

"Of course you can. Fool." She followed that with some untranslated, punning elaboration on exactly what degree of fool he was. "You order her back, she'll go back. You order her to stand here and be shot, she'll stand here and be shot. Children don't question their heroes! For some foolish reason she's picked you for one. Tell her to go with me, while you take your revenge. Abuela's in the city too, we'll talk." Perdita booted Hoffman away with an upraised foot, rocking him back as far as the walking frame would allow him to. "Tell her, and go. We've got things to ask about."

That thoughtful expression returned to Perdita's face as Hoffman gave the child her new orders. There were several questions to ask about this idea of children in service to the Guild, and only a mother--or a grandmother--might know the answers.

[Gnomezilla]

The hunter twitched and fired its harpoon at nothingness. Hoffman realized it had begun to replay its last fight, and halted the construct. It was an open area of collapsed construction at least, and he wouldn't suffer for the lack of a watcher, but he still felt the mistake in not bringing a second set of eyes. With trepidation he sent the hunter out to circle the area instead, prowling for Seamus.

 

Perdita and the child met Abuela at the tobacconist's shop, bickering over the price of the half-hogshead to be sent to Latigo for the workers, and meanwhile sampling some better stuff for the family.

"[The nephilim wasn't enough of a pet for you?]" said Abuela to Perdita, and then, "This is no good," to the tobacconist, all without removing the pipe-stem from her mouth.

"[She's worse off than some, grandmama. This one's so lost she thinks Hoffman's a friend.]"

At that the child interjected, "You leave Mr. Hoffman alone," without understanding anything else of the Spanish.

"Get me a pipe from that barrel. Not off the top. No wet leaf." Abuela jabbed the pipe across the counter, pointing with it, and received it filled with a fresh sample. "[Then get her a doll, Perdita.]"

Perdita sniffed the air. "[For what? Target practice?]"

"[Girls aren't all like you, some of them play with their dolls as dolls. So she's alone. Give her something to hold, and play house with. She'll get more family out of it than she will out of him.]"

"[Family?]" Perdita snorted, and lay down enough scrip on the counter for a sample of her own. "[If she's his, it was a virgin birth. No, she's just lost, grandmama...]"

"[Put her back where you found her, Perdita. You're not keeping her. You have a pet.]"

"[Who said I wanted to? Take care, grandmama.] We've also got shopping to do, come with me." She rolled the paper without looking, and lit it, and left with the child following after.

 

Elsewhere in the city, at a saloon well off the main streets, Howard Langston leaned on the porch rail and finished off another beer. The ceiling was too low for him, but the beer and the seclusion was worth the inconvenience for him, and the protection of his presence was worth it for them. Strange things walked those streets, but not while the steamborg and his accompanying constructs were present.

Usually. Tonight something lurched past on a course the straightness of which belied his footsteps, with a rough-looking steamfitter and his great hammer trailing him: Ryle, and Johan.

Howard Langston frowned. Ryle out on his own meant trouble and there were standing M&SU orders to not let it happen. Thus, Johan. However, beyond that--

Hank had once asked Ramos, not long after he awoke, how long he had been unconscious. "The repairs took days," Ramos had told him, "but you've been unaware for weeks." He had spent more weeks and many beers puzzling that one out, but after he did, had started to seek out some of the Union's reading rooms for the sheer joy of being able to think and reason. He discovered books that had never interested his practical mind before, ideas whose value could not be weighed in a steam hoist. And after that, whatever Ramos asked of him, he gave, in acknowledgement of the moral debt the steamborg could never repay. Not to Ramos, at least.

He left enough scrip to cover his tab in the empty glass, and then he and the smaller constructs pursued the pair further into the city.

 

In the toy shop, behind barred windows warded against Neverborn with garlic and then made sweet-smelling again with roses, a young lady behind the dolls' counter was having a difficult time making a sale.

"Perhaps little miss would like a fancy pram to go with her dolly?" she giggled, watching the child test the wheels on a clockwork carriage, but then cut in with "Don't touch that!" as the child dropped to her stomach and wormed underneath.

"But it's squeaking, you forgot to oil it," came the protest from beneath the carriage.

"My lady! Get your daughter out from under that pram immediately!"

Perdita whirled around, her hair nearly upsetting the spinning rack of wooden snap-guns, and pinned the shopgirl with a glare. "My what?"

The child stuck a hand out from underneath and spun one of the carriage's larger wheels, hard. It squeaked loud enough to drown out the shopgirl's accusation at first, but the noise dwindled faster than the wheel slowed itself, and the sniffy tones of "--disobedient daughter" were all too audible.

When the child wriggled free and stood up, she found herself between the two, as Perdita between clenched teeth laid out who she was, and of what family, and even if there were such a thing as an Ortega disobedient daughter it would be cherished and respected by everyone who met it.

The shopgirl refused to turn her back on Perdita after that, and so had to select one of the most expensive dolls from the glass-topped display counter, despite the scanty amount of scrip the gunslinger had flung down.

 

"No, Ryle! Back to the workshop, Ryle. You've got to stay still."

Not even Hoffman's shouts deflected the abomination's march across the barren area. He looked all around to be sure they weren't about to be ambushed, and his eyes fell upon a slick of gun oil fresh on his waistcoat. Curse Perdita! But not now. Now was the time to get Ryle to retreat before he lifted his arm and tore out the repairs. "Ryle, go back!"

Too late. Others appeared at the outskirts, also tall and looming...Hoffman couldn't repress a sigh of relief to identify Howard Langston and the lesser constructs of the M&SU, and Johan as well. "How," said the steamborg as he outpaced the rest of the group and caught up with Hoffman and Ryle, "does he move that fast? Johan says he got left behind halfway here."

"All you long-legged half-constructs take those long steps. Should chain him up, it'd be easier than chasing him," added Johan himself, as he too joined them, but he took a step backwards at their stony expressions, and lifted his hands in defeat. "...It was just an idea."

"What are you doing out here without any constructs?" asked the steamborg, after a quick look around.

"I was hunting Seamus," Hoffman said, and cast his mind outward, and added, "I fear he may have found the hunter first."

Johan once again looked at Hoffman's expression, and bit back another piece of sarcasm. Instead he asked, "What are you going to do once you find him, then?" But he couldn't quite resist, and added, "Go chase that purple skirt again?"

"No. I intend to hurt him very badly, if not kill him. He has...created a great deal of work for me, and I do not appreciate it."

Johan looked briefly shocked, but then chuckled half to himself. Howard Langston only extended a conduit claw to shake on the deal. "No freebies--but I'll call it a perk if you let me have the first swing at him."

Hoffman acquiesced, and counted out the soulstones.

 

The child and Perdita sat at the table of a tea shop, all painted in white and pink. Perdita sighed, put her elbows on the table and her chin in her hands, stared at the tiny porcelain cup of what the tea shop had sold her claiming it was coffee, and sighed again. The child squirmed too, but happily, to test the squishiness of the cushion (pink, naturally, and ruffled at the edges) that brought her up to the level of the table.

"Thank you for the dolly, Miss Perdita," she said, and lay it down on the table and watched its weighted eyes shut, and tucked it in under one of the tea shop's napkins.

"It's Miss Ortega. Please," Perdita said, and sank further into the tabletop trying not to be seen.

"Ok, thank you for the dolly, Miss Ortega. How come you're not happy? It's a nice dolly. Did you want one too?"

She straightened herself, then. "...I don't like all these girls' things. Dollies, and doilies, and...pink. This was Abuela's idea. I think it was her idea of a joke. On me. Do you like them? All of this..." Perdita reached for the fancy card which had been tucked into the second box, with the doll's accessories. "Do you like this 'precious object to take care of, realistic sleeping, bottle-feeding, wetting', I can't believe someone thought that was a good idea, people are idiots, 'clockwork powered grasping hands, music box with simple words and lullabies...' "

Perdita stopped as she noticed the blush which had started at "clockwork-powered" deepen to a rich red on the child's face. About a minute later the child gulped, and slowly answered, "...I think I got a clockwork dolly already, Miss Ortega...but thank you for the dolly, I didn't have a baby one...."

 

When Seamus and Mortimer strolled into the area, arm in arm over the top of the copycat killer's stack of hats, thoroughly drunk, and bragging about the week's finds to one another, Johan had already herded Ryle away from the open ground and the steamborg already lay in wait. All they saw were Hoffman, ringed by the toolkit and gamin, and a small swarm of steam arachnids. "Oi, Sybelle," hooted the copycat killer, "it's your favorite customer!"

Madame Sybelle stomped after the men, and every few strides without pausing cracked her whip through the bodiless shape of a hanged man. The hanged flailed with its insubstantial rope; Sybelle roared scathing remarks and countered every strike. When presented with the sight of Hoffman and his protectors, though, they let the argument drop. "Worm," Sybelle growled, and gestured, "come get your worm food," and a rotten belle lurched out of nothingness to stand beside Sybelle and flash a rotten smile.

Hoffman stepped towards her, not flinching when the hanged flogged him, nor when Seamus elbowed Mortimer and muttered, "Told yer he liked 'em big and ugly". He halted in front of Sybelle.

She clawed half of his waistcoat into her fist, finishing the ruining of it that the gun oil had begun. "Miserable worm," she boomed, wrenching him forward and breathing grave stink down into his face, "what did you bring for me today?"

He looked her in the eye, and answered, "A diversion."

Howard Langston struck, and men's heads began to roll in the dust.

[Gnomezilla]

Seamus hadn't hit the hunter after all. When Hoffman's order to halt dropped away, it kept on retracing its footsteps from its previous command.

Hoffman had gotten himself further entangled with the whip as he chose to shut off the stabilization of the walking frame, and tore more coils away from Sybelle's thigh as he and the metal crumpled to the ground. The barbs dug in, and she screeched in surprise as much as pain to find herself tethered to the machinery. By the time she had wrenched the whip free of the manipulator arms and out from under Hoffman himself, the steamborg had fled in one direction and the abomination in another. She looked back and forth between them and howled for Seamus to shoot one of them down, but Howard Langston had already dealt with him.

 

"Wooooh, this one's more like it!--"

"What, another one? Here? Ain't this someone's happy hour!--"

"Two minutes of joy, and fifty-eight of apologizing?--"

Perdita, without bothering to set down the boxes under one arm, put a bullet through the nearest pin-up calendar. The mechanics nearest the wall with the (now headless) Stephanie the Steamfitter went silent altogether, while a half-completed catcall collapsed into a sad slide-whistle noise. Further into the workshop they started to mutter more hostile remarks under their breath, until Abuela drew her own shotgun upon the mechanics inspecting and repairing her steam-chair. "You marry her? No? Then shut your dirty mouths."

The child, a few steps behind Perdita, looked back and forth between the groups. The last time the mechanics had been yelling those kinds of things, they had been yelling them at Hoffman, and were very gleeful. But now Perdita and Abuela were here, and Hoffman was not, and nobody was making noise now, and nobody was happy. She hugged the doll tighter to her side.

 

The hunter stopped behind a pile of debris left by the flooding of what was now a small shallow creek, and inspected the scene. McCabe stood alone, bleeding, in the middle of a circle of Freikorps, snapping his whip at any which tried to bring their knives into range. "It was a misunderstanding, I told you!" he shouted at one of the anonymous masks. "If he tried to bill you again for it, that's not on me."

"McCabe," Von Schill boomed, "We know better. We know you. Either you pay us the balance due, in soulstones not scrip, or we can fire again."

++A FACTUAL ERROR.++

"What's that?"

++WE CAN DO BOTH. WE CAN FIRE AND THEN HE CAN PAY US WHAT IS OWED.++"

"Lazarus, he can't pay us once he's dead," a Freikorps specialist said, but then added, "as unlikely as it is that he'll pay us now."

"Seventy-two percent unlikely," chimed in the Freikorps librarian, taking advantage of the pause to fill in more details of her sketch of the fight. She added a splash of redder watercolor to better illustrate McCabe's rancorous smile, and corrected herself, "Seventy-eight percent, and rising."

McCabe's smile froze in place, and he said, "I'll die before I pay you another 'stone. I promise you that." Even as he spoke, he dropped the whip, drew his strangely illuminated sabre, and hurled himself between Von Schill and the specialist, trying to punch through the circle.

The hunter watched the fight end. Now lacking a target to point its steps toward, the reversed program set it to retrace the path it had just taken.

 

"[They didn't say such awful things to you, did they, grandmama?]" Perdita helped the steam-chair turn in the scanty space available. There were several tool chests narrowing the aisle, which the mechanics had looked at, and hadn't moved.

Abuela waved off the helping hand, and started the chair from a standstill, and cackled with brief laughter. "[It'd be a treat! No, Perdita, not yet. The chair starts easier now, see? No more of those damned jerking starts to throw off my aim. Now roll me along.]"

She did, with the child walking alongside once the gaps between workbenches widened. Abuela leaned over, pried the doll out of the crook of the child's arm, replaced it onto the child's other shoulder. "You hold a doll this way," she said, and grabbed and moved the child's hands to support it. "[Perdita, what do they call Cojo? If he didn't have a name?]"

Perdita thought for several seconds. "Gorilla."

"Yes. Hold it like that, not like a gorilla. [How much did it cost?]"

"[More than I gave her, I think, grandmama. One of those soft city girls, you know the kind. All I did was talk plain truth to her and she hurried us out of there.]" Perdita looked at the end of the doll's box. "[There's what it cost. I didn't even spend fifty though, not even with the stop for coffee and--]" She sighed. "[--tea and cakes. The girl wanted to give the doll a welcome home party. Grandmama...why?]"

Abuela set the chair's brake outside of Hoffman's darkened office. "[Has that child said one word about machinery since you took her to the toy shop?]", she said, and watched the realization and relief dawn on Perdita's face. "[That's why. It'll get her thinking about what she's supposed to do in life, which with any luck you'll do one of these years. I don't have any great-grandchildren to spoil, do I?]" The calm melted off of Perdita in moments. "[Now read off that doll's full cost to me, and the coffee and the tea and the cakes. That's all getting taken off of the repair bill. I'm running a ranch, not a charity for lost children.]"

Perdita's incipient explosion was delayed when Ryle stomped past them all and back into the private workstation. They watched him go past in mutual silence. The child's hands slackened on the doll and she hurried after the abomination; Abuela tut-tutted and looked toward the workshop entrance; Perdita's eyes and rage refocused from Abuela to Ryle, and she strode out of the workshop altogether.

 

"Ryle! You're back! Mr. Hoffman said you weren't supposed to move! He didn't make you move. Where'd you go?" She skidded to a halt as he settled himself back beside the workbench. The doll almost went flying, and unconsciously she tucked it back into the crook of her arm, somewhat like a gorilla--and gasped for breath as Ryle copied the motion and swept her up into a crushing hold. The child kicked, squirmed, and finally wriggled past the gun to more malleable flesh nearer the elbow joint. "Ow! I'm sorry Ryle. I didn't really mean to like the dolly more, it's only new. Perdita got it for me. See?" She tried to pull it loose and hold it up, felt Ryle's arm shake beginning to copy the motion, and stopped. "Don't do that! You're my clockwork dolly. I promise. But don't move your arms please. You got lucky you didn't rip out the stitches."

The child inspected the repairs from centimeters away: the stretched pallid skin plucked up into ridges where Hoffman had handled it with hemostats, the zigzagging scars distributing stresses so that a single overloaded metallic stitch would not tear through that skin, the traces of blood itself nearly purple instead of vivid red and not nearly enough of it for such a deep wound. It left a lot to wonder about. So she did, gradually leaning against a shoulder even broader than Joss's. At one point, she yawned, and while her mouth was open "you're kind of cold" slipped out, but she drifted to sleep otherwise unaware.

 

Not long after that Hoffman halted in the doorway and looked into the gloom, at the sight of the child sprawled on Ryle's shoulder fast asleep and open-mouthed. She must have been drooling, too, but he couldn't see it. Nor could he see the unhealed wound--she was lying across it. Nor could he tell that Ryle's skin was breaking under the extra weight, as it must be, nor that it simply wasn't right that anyone would willingly touch--

Abuela's voice behind him jabbed into him in a way the stock of her shotgun had not, even though the backs of his kidneys were full of fresh aches. "She plays pretend with him, then? Answer me." The shotgun stock jabbed him again.

"...Yes." He swallowed.

"Good. Kids play. I made her play. You thank me later."

"Thank you?" Hoffman reached out and touched the hunter behind them both with his mind. If she dared to offer grandmotherly advice about Ryle...

Abuela nodded. He could hear the brim of her hat swish with the motion. "You want her grow up like you, alone? Stay here all her life? No? You make her play. You find other children and you make her play, you buy her a doll and you make her play!" She chuckled, then, changing tack. "I bring the doll, you buy it for her, no? Very fancy, very expensive."

[Gnomezilla]

She woke with a shriek, falling, and struck metal and tile almost hard enough to knock herself unconscious again.

"Your services will no longer be required. Your contract is ended." The child writhed on the floor trying not to cry aloud, clutching at her head, which had struck Hoffman's iron-shod foot as she tumbled. Blood showed through her fingers. The mechanical attendant stepped over and past her, pulling Hoffman face to face with Ryle. The abomination's arms rested by his sides, as though they had not been upraised seconds before. "Do not return here after this shift has ended. Not after you--" He cut himself off, and sent the mechanical attendant to the other side of Ryle. She felt the little construct buzz as he borrowed the sight of its soulstone eye, inspecting the entry and exit wounds at the same time.

She whimpered and kept her eyes squinted shut, and did not see Hoffman shudder and reach out to note the warmth marking Ryle's skin where she had been resting, and even if she had would not have noticed how the skin over the warmed entry wound had relaxed and smoothed itself down compared to the gray folds lapping the exit wound.

When next he spoke, minutes later, the cold rage was gone. "Child. What did you do to him?"

The child sat up, pushing aside a broken doll's limb, and tipped her head so she could look up at him with the half-open eye on the uninjured side of her head. "I didn't--" She shook her head no, whimpered again with fresh pain, quietened herself. "Ryle picked me up. I don't know how I made him do that but I'm sorry. I tried to get down but that made his arms move more. And you said no moving his arms so I was stuck...." The child looked at the floor instead, beginning to blush, and went on. "...I was talking to him, like he really understood. I think I took a nap, too."

Hoffman hadn't bothered to look down at her. That was just as well: she couldn't see the effect the last confessions had on him. What had flickered across his expression was not kind. " 'Playing pretend'," he echoed, half to himself, bitterly. Then he took one deep breath, and held it, and when he let it go his expression and tone of voice were level once more. "Child. This...'playing pretend'...will be part of maintenance until all the wounds have healed. If you have questions, ask them of the mechanic who was apprentice before you. If he cannot answer them, ask permission of me only to consult Ramos, and I will write out permission. Do not bother me with the details of maintenance," he emphasized.

"Yes, Mr. Hoffman." The child kept on holding the side of her head as she stood. The blush had started it bleeding again.

"Good. Now sweep up that doll so that no one will step on it by mistake. It was rather expensive. It can be repaired." Hoffman absently rubbed a spot on his lower back, and winced.

 

Some days passed as she repaired the doll in between her duties. Her blanket had been moved into the private workstation, and she sat atop the workbench to go to sleep sitting up, on alternate nights leaning against one side of Ryle's back as he stood by the workbench, or starting the night leaning so against his chest but waking up draped over his arm or shoulder. It wasn't the soundest way to sleep, and she yawned through most of the days, even after she caught the mechanical attendant's arm against her upper teeth, or worse yet yawned right as a coolant hose which was threatening to burst finally did. As she got more bruised and haggard, though, Ryle improved. The skin, pressed flat and kept warm, adhered to the repairs instead of sagging loose, and soon the stitches sank in until they were only splinters of metal, invisible until the light hit them. The child grew to like the routine, and sometimes sat by the abomination and chattered to it while she held bits of scrap metal to the broken doll and tried to light the soulstone torch off of her hand.

"It's Ok, you don't have to turn, I don't have to lean front to back, it's not sleepy time. What's this?" She patted the mark of Ramos set upon the abomination. "Wish you could tell me. Hoffman doesn't tell me anything at all. I don't think he even likes me." She welded the doll for a little while, until the flame died out and she could not reignite it. "I don't know why. I didn't do anything bad. Except that one time. And..." She looked around, stood up on the workbench, whispered into the machinery that was his ear. "...He wasn't right. The downers did help. I don't want to hurt you with the scrubbing brush but you've got to be scrubbed. But not now." She sat down again and gently grasped the doll's left wrist and waved its arm. Its original clockwork activated with the motion and the tiny metallic fist curled shut and opened again. "See? I do too like you best. They didn't sell any dollies like you though. So I'll make one!"

 

Though she did not understand why she knew it to be a good idea, whenever Hoffman was scheduled to inspect Ryle the doll was hidden away well before he arrived.

Instead of the mechanical attendant, this day, he followed a mobile toolkit. The child sat on the workbench, which had become almost a permanent seat of hers, yawned, and saw Hoffman very nearly smile while he looked at where the wounds had gaped before. "You have done well," he told her, and she sat up straight with pride. "The hunter has brought me information that McCabe has been spotted in the Quarantine Zone, speaking with the Freikorps. You are from there originally, are you not?" Her smile faded, but she nodded. "Good. You will guide me there. The peacekeeper will protect us, as will some others."

 

Not an hour later, he and Howard Langston were lost. Not geographically: the child had led them and the other constructs through the rubble with ease, to an open patch of earth doing duty as a warehouse of heaped, bulky, nearly worthless goods. But the men, now, were not part of the negotiations.

The other child had leaped down from the pile, katana drawn and held in a two-handed grip, and screamed out "Wahlaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaau!" in unmistakable tones of challenge. That was normal. That was to be expected. What wasn't expected was the child alongside the constructs screaming back "Wah liaaaaaaaaaao!" and darting past the men with daggers drawn. The girls, added together, probably still weren't half as old as he was, but the grown women behind the student had halted also and let the children negotiate. 'Negotiations' had meant screaming into each other's faces for at least ten minutes. Hoffman listened as they built up a pidgin between them. The student of conflict was speaking tonal syllables in perfect Little Kingdom accents, the workshop child was echoing the same words but was using more vowels that were not tonal. There was a syllable that was a question mark, another one that may have been an exclamation point since the girl saying it usually jabbed her finger at someone when she said it.

"You talk chop so ah!!!!" the workshop child repeated, and all but stabbed the student of conflict with rapid repeated pokes to the chest before pointing straight back at Hoffman.

"It's over, whatever it is. Time to fight," observed the steamborg, and readied himself to charge.

One of Hoffman's manipulator arms waved him to silence. "Wait. I don't believe 'chop' was English, they haven't spoken it in quite the same fashion."

Before Howard Langston could ask what Hoffman meant by that, the student of conflict straightened herself to military readiness, sheathed her katana, and spoke--in perfect colonial British English, only betrayed by the occasional rising tone.

"You are in the territory of the sisters. What is your purpose? Why do you bring excessive forces?"

Hoffman straightened himself as best he could, and answered as formally. "We are in pursuit of Lucas McCabe and have brought sufficient forces to bring him in for questioning."

"In the name of the Guild?" The hand which rested on the katana's hilt tipped it at the steamborg and steam arachnids in turn.

Hoffman nodded once to Howard Langston, who answered for them both, "No, this is private. He's too slippery to wait to make it official."

She turned and shrieked more of the pidgin back at the women behind her. All Hoffman could pick out was 'McCabe'. Howard Langston instead watched the workshop child listen, go tense, and turn to stare at the peacekeeper. "Trouble!" he barked, and once again readied himself to charge. This time Hoffman did not restrain him.

 

Even now, Hoffman thought, it might have been avoided, had the Viktorias not jumped to conclusions. But then, he added to himself, jumping was one of their specialties, after all.

All the same, it was quite satisfying to watch them attempt to dismantle every arachnid of the swarm. Every time they had almost succeeded, he fed another piece of scrap metal to the mass, and tiny legs reinstalled it against severed stumps. Howard Langston was entangled with a ronin whose forehead was scarred from his first, nonlethal strike; the peacekeeper had been similarly tangled with a Freikorps librarian, but she had exploded its flamethrower fuel line with such force he had been forced to shield himself from the shrapnel. The child had been livid, as she had just finished bolting additional plating onto its knees, and now was focused on the swarm but so far doing nothing to help. Well, she had the right idea at least. He pressed his will against the arachnid swarm, and they chained themselves together into a little siege tower, tall enough to reach the forehead of Viktoria of Blood and mark her as well, and then to strike with every claw of every spider in the tower.

[Gnomezilla]

The sisters did not hold grudges. Once the constructs and their apprentice had proven their toughness, the student of conflict pointed out the direction in which McCabe and his wastrels had last been spotted, then ran off through paths too overhung with leaning debris for a full-grown human to pass through, let alone the steamborg.

 

The Freikorps patrol, forewarned, greeted them almost with friendliness. Only Lazarus locked his single soulstone eye upon the other constructs, glaring first at Hoffman and the Guild's constructs, then at Howard Langston and those of the Miners' and Steamfitters' Union.

"--Haven't seen the welsher since," Von Schill shouted at the end, "but we can mostly agree on safe passage of the Guild which are chasing McCabe."

" 'Mostly' agree?" Hoffman echoed.

They both looked at Lazarus. "It's the best I could do, given prior commitments," Von Schill admitted, "and I couldn't guarantee safe passage for anyone who wasn't Guild either. No good reason for it. As long as you don't break--"

A shot whistled through the air.

"--the truce. You people bring 'shoot first and ask questions later' to an art form. Well, brace yourselves."

 

The child once again darted away from the main fight and around a wall, waving and shouting to the woman in the strange mechanical suit which was not a construct. "Hannah! Hi again! Why are you fighting, she said she was going to get us safe passage?!"

"You look terrible, child, they haven't been treating you well," Hannah remarked, reaching down to brush the hair away from the bruise on the side of the child's head. "And that was a women's agreement, between the sisters and us; the librarian and I aren't attacking you."

"That's not fair! You're helping them! I saw her cast some kind of magic at Von Schill!" The child turned to stare at the metal gamin and urge it to shield Hoffman.  The Freikorps librarian next to them flipped another page in her binder and started another drawing, with Hoffman and the gamin cowering behind a low wall, and the watcher straining to fly away with a head clutched in its claws.

"Lazarus," Hannah called, "Have you got a clear shot on that watcher?"

++AT PRESENT, I DO. HOWEVER, IT WILL FLY AWAY BEFORE I CAN RELOAD.++

"What's his problem?" the child said. "What'd that hunter ever do to him that he had to blast it so hard?"

The maimed hunter in question leaped at the women, but misjudged the leap with its single remaining eye. If the Freikorps librarian hadn't panicked at the sight and tried to flee, it would have overshot them all. Instead, she dashed into the arc of its descent, and the battle drawings slid out of the binder once the hunter and librarian hit the ground, binder and papers alike bouncing and scattering over the area.

Hannah lifted up one hand, and the soulstone powered suit mimicked her gesture. "He hates the Guild for what it did to him, what it still can do to him. Watch me, and you'll understand." Hannah passed her hand in front of her face, sideways. Hoffman turned to watch the inexplicable gestures of the construct-which-was-not, and when the soulstone suit opened up a crack between its fingers Hoffman found himself, against all recommendations of the witch hunters, staring into Hannah's eyes. The child watched his expression go blank, his jaw slacken, mouth half-open. "Observe," Hannah said, and slewed the suit around in a spin more Hoffman than Hannah, and while Hoffman blinked as he was freed from her stare, she locked her eyes on Lazarus and moved her finger over the blank pages of her own notebook.

The child gasped. Lazarus quivered as though Hoffman had reached out to make him obey.

++I WILL NOT FORGIVE THIS!!!++

But Hannah asked neither forgiveness nor permission, and forced Lazarus to fire. He poured his rage into the grenades, far more than was necessary to shoot down a single watcher. Multiple shells burst over the area, but the Freikorps in their suits did not flinch or flee. After the noise of the explosions had faded away, Hannah spoke. "You see, he was no construct. He was human, but they made him less than human...."

Whatever else Hannah was going to add, the child didn't stay to hear it. Instead she flung herself at Lazarus and kicked him in the metallic shins, and with every kick crying out in pain and jealousy:

"Not fair! Not fair! Not fair!!!!!!!!"

 

"Hold fire!" Von Schill shouted. Another bullet streaked through the Freikorps, off the right flank, where Hoffman's constructs were not. He leaped after the shooter, and noticed the flat top of a top hat interrupting the jagged line of a falling wall. "Hold all fire! Wastrel sighted! One of McCabe's bodyguards sighted!"

Hoffman followed the metal gamin over to the Freikorps. "Now do you believe I hadn't brought any gunners of my own?"

"Of course not. You're still Guild." Von Schill holstered his own gun. "There's your lead, though. Get out of here and I might be able to hold Lazarus back until you're safely away....Now that I think about it, what's holding him back now?"

They both turned to see Lazarus slash his bayonet down against Hannah, only to have her sweep the flat of her hand across her notebook in a gesture of erasure: Lazarus vanished. The child, interrupted in yet another kick at Lazarus' shins, stomped her foot and began to weep, loud and angry.

"...Or that could happen," Von Schill added, after a few seconds of silence. "Get going. We'll add your damages to what McCabe will pay up once you drag him back here. Deal?"

"Agreed," said Hoffman.

[Gnomezilla]

"You run along now, and be quiet about it," the Freikorps librarian said, and propelled the child back toward the constructs with a pat on the shoulder before turning back to the chief archivist. Meanwhile Hannah fitted a mouthguard which left her lips parted and wrapped a strap around her hand. "We can't catalogue if there's interruptions."

Hannah settled herself into the suit's harness, lay her hand upon her book, and closed her eyes. The meditative trance swept over her in seconds, muscles all stilled but held in readiness, a pencil strapped to her hand and poised over a loose sheet of paper. Her eyes twitched under their lids, her arm pulled her unresisting hand leaving pencil marks on the page, and, after half a minute, her tongue began shaping disconnected words. She mumbled through the mouthguard but the librarian set down the transcriptions without trouble.

"Now, Lazarus. Talk about Lazarus," the librarian prompted, shaping every syllable with care.

"Firebase...broad. Without flesh. I have it, he hasn't...Control..."

"Control. How did you control Lazarus? You must say."

"Lazarus is all mind, my mind, his...The flesh does not stop me. All metal..."

The child frowned, realizing then what stolen knowledge Hannah and her note-taker sought to catalog. As she left she glared at the scrap metal which had once been the hunter. The pile rose into the air as though trying to explode into shrapnel, but failed and fell back to earth clattering. Hannah's eyes snapped open, and the child smiled to herself to hear the Freikorps librarian's ladylike curse.

 

The arachnid-legged constructs and Hoffman parted ways, then. "Let him take you out of the quarantine zone," Hoffman had told the child, "then return to the workshop. Prepare another watcher and hunter, and a warden for the arrest of McCabe. I have his track now. I will intercept him. Bring them all to me." She had nodded, and obeyed, and now struggled to keep up with Howard Langston's pace. He did not step slowly, nor send constructs and child ahead to scout the best paths, and she resented it. But it was not wasted time altogether.

Watching his conduit claws sway to the rhythm of his torso instead of the pace of his construct feet, she saw what Hannah had struggled to express. When the living flesh moved itself, the construct body part did not resist. Joss moved like that too, and Ramos, the entire body moving in mechanical harmony as the living parts controlled the metal. Hoffman was different: his construct moved him, and he surrendered to it altogether; his body chose not to fight for control. Ryle, though...his movements were not in harmony, and now she realized that the construct repairs inside him forced their own rhythms upon his muscles and skin. Ryle was different. Ryle was an abomination....

 

Not far past the wall of the Quarantine Zone, at the steamborg's rendezvous point, they concealed themselves to better overhear an argument which was walking towards them.

"Nothing! Not one wink!" The child recognized Francisco Ortega's voice, raised in vexation. "What is wrong with that nurse? Has she been blinded?"

"Get rid of that coat, that's the problem." She peeked through the boarded-up window to see McMourning pluck at the fancy cuff of Francisco's sleeve, and the gunslinger pull it angrily away. "They aren't fond of fancy clothing, you see. They're mad about bare skin, every one of them. Why, if I didn't cover up with this," he tugged at his own lab coat, "I'd never be able to get any work done." Beside her, Howard Langston stifled a snort of disbelief, which was nonetheless drowned out by Francisco's own laugh--and Joss's.

Ramos strode forward as though he had expected to meet the Guild men there all along. "Good afternoon, Dr. McMourning! Not too many dead to collect today, I would hope!"

"Well, can't complain," replied the coroner, "there's no sense in leaving them out here to be picked over by every would-be resurrectionist in the city. I do wish they'd die a bit closer to the center of Malifaux, though. It's a long walk back even with the help." He nodded at one end of the street where a death marshal picked over a collapsed shed with a pair of feet sticking out from beneath it, then to the other where an austringer held out a disheveled raptor for the nurse to examine. Francisco, meanwhile, bristled at being referred to as 'help'. When Howard Langston stepped out of hiding and over to Ramos, he turned his anger outward and unsheathed his dueling sword with a hostile grin.

"You. We fight now, no?"

Howard Langston, in his turn, grinned and raised his construct claws while cracking his knuckles together. "Always."

And then, as ever, they tried to murder one another, ignoring the protests of their respective leaders.

"You'll excuse me, then, but I have to stand behind my people," Ramos concluded, and sent electrical energy dancing around them all in a protective circle.

"And you'll excuse me for solving the problem--watch where you're aiming those lightnings!--a bit more directly," retorted McMourning, as he hopskipped over the lowest circles of energy and into the melee before either combatant realized the duel had expanded into a brawl.

[Gnomezilla]

[We played the Fight Night scenario from Crossroads. Fun fact: it is literally possible to score all your strategy points on turn one. As the one who got crushed, I strongly recommend reading up on your opponent's models' Tactical Actions before trying it. ALL of them.]

She only watched the brawl long enough to spot a gap in the combatants' attention, and escaped. Hoffman had given her orders, and he did not trust McMourning, and she did not trust Ramos.

 

A mechanic relieved her of the scrap metal she'd brought back to them from the hunter, a proof of the truth of her message. She left them behind and let herself into the private workstation, and dug into the pile of clean shop towels where she'd made a hiding place for her doll. The child tucked it into her arm, sat in the soft hollow where the doll had been, and confessed to it, "...I'm scared.

"It's Ok to sneak through the city when it's just me. But I'm going to be bringing constructs too. I can't hide all of them! We're going to the q-quarantine zone, and--and somebody's going to grab us--" She whimpered, then looked through the doorway, to where the mechanic was prepping the requested constructs. "I should've asked for a peacekeeper too. Howard Langston went home with Ramos. Mr. Hoffman's going to need another construct."

The child looked down at the doll and the metallic fist welded onto its arm, and then up at the inspiration for the repair.

"...He's going to need another construct that the mechanics don't help keep track of...."

She walked over to Ryle, held up the doll, and moved the doll's arm. Ryle copied the motion, even to the flexing of his own metallic fingers. The child watched him, and tried to figure out whether he was fully repaired. Ramos had said something about ligaments, but she didn't know what those were. Hoffman had been trying to measure something about the motion, but that was on the wound which was no longer there. And, she now knew, he would never look right when he moved, because his construct parts were always fighting his flesh.

She watched the inhuman motion a few times more, then shook her head, and put the doll away again. "You've got to work." Then she straightened up, and gave the order in her best imitation of Hoffman's tone. "Ryle, follow me. Protect me."

The child marched out to the main workshop, hoping she did not go alone.

 

She marched through the rubble with Ryle still following, hands tied in front of her, eyes burning with angry tears. To have threaded through so much of the quarantine zone safely, and then to be caught, not even by one of the quarantine zone's inhabitants--

"Hey, you ladies are missing out. I could be a lot more entertaining with my hands free."

--but by McCabe himself! The one who had gotten Ryle shot! She had been so infuriated that when the cries broke out from the derelict buildings not far from them, she had only listened, and not translated the pidgin for him--

"McCabe, you know me for a reasonable man, who respects you."

"What're you getting at, Sidir?"

"Shut up. Now."

--and let the Viktorias and their ronin encircle and capture them all. They marched according to their station, their hands bound, a woman with a well-used sword keeping step with every living prisoner, and another with a hammer like Johan's pacing alongside the unfettered Ryle. The student of conflict lifted her hands briefly up to the level of her shoulder, holding an imagined katana horizontally, with its imagined point aimed at the child. It was not enough to threaten the child and set off Ryle, but the message was clear: do nothing. Instead she only listened to the women chatter, secure that no man understood their dialect, and learned what she could. They bet for and against McCabe's someone, wagered on their someone, called McCabe an overgrown boy and Sidir a beast, argued whether they should sell the constructs or release them and deny ever having seen them, asked if the student was ready to graduate to being a ronin (she did not smile at this but the look in her eyes was pleased, and the child couldn't help but smile too) if the child would take her place (she stopped smiling), wondered whether Luna would make a good meal or not....

 

They re-entered the patch of dusty ground which served as a warehouse, all but the pure constructs which were blocked by crossed daitos. The child risked a quick look and failed command back at them all, even at the cost of the student snapping, "You kena?"

"No lah," the child sighed, and turned back into the Viktorias' lair.

The student sniffed, and pushed the child ahead of her to a heap of climbable boxes. Up they went, to stand at the top and look down on a cleared scuffed circle of ground. Taelor had split Ryle off from the rest of the procession, and held him at bay with the relic hammer while a ronin affixed a chain loop to his belt and anchored him to a bolt driven into a slab of rock. Further off, McCabe and Sidir now grumbled under the guard of a man in black, while the Viktorias flanked and herded forward a bulging nightmare of spilled guts and bullfighters' barbs.

"What's that?" gasped the child.

"Killjoy, he kena you ah!" The student of conflict rummaged in the nearest box and withdrew a paper bag, pulled out a stick of horehound candy, broke it in half, and offered the smaller piece to the child.

Killjoy was tethered similarly to Ryle, and the instant the ronin nodded all four women leaped out of the area. The combatants' chains strained but did not snap, as they leaned into the chains and tested the ranges of their restraint. The ronin clustered on a different heap overlooking their own Guild prisoners and gossiped not in the pidgin but in their native tongue; Taelor plonked herself down, across the clearing, next to a Freikorps librarian and punched her joyfully in the shoulder as she tried to sketch the scene; the Viktorias leaped alongside McCabe and Sidir, and spoke together to them both. It was not the well-honed English which the student sometimes chose to use, but understandable enough. "Place your bets."

"Well, ladies, I'm a bit short on scrip at the moment--"

Sidir cut him off, again. "We bet our freedom. You know how this ends."

"That wasn't very interesting," said the Viktoria on McCabe's side.

"I think it's refreshing," said the Viktoria on Sidir's side.

"I agree with her," Sidir added.

McCabe opened his mouth to reply, but his Viktoria crammed a twist of fabric into it. "McCabe bids his silence. On Killjoy."

Upon their heap, the child watched the twins snicker, and said, "I accept, and I bid the freedom of the constructs. On Killjoy." She took the piece of candy and started slurping on the end like a straw.

 

It was a dirty fight from the first goad. McCabe snuggled up to a Viktoria and, under the guise of trying to paw her, sawed his bonds against her sword until they parted. On the instant, he snatched the gag from his lips, shouted "Take this!", and flung a small glowing bottle down to Ryle, then a smaller dark badge all the way across to the death marshal sitting at the feet of the ronin. Sidir and the death marshal shot to their feet at the same time, Sidir intercepting the other Viktoria's sword with his wrists to cut himself free and jumping down almost into the circle, the death marshal sprinting through the combatants' circle as Killjoy roared and charged at him, the cleaver sinking into the rock itself, leaving a fine gouge. Even as Killjoy wrenched and wheeled and raised his cleaver against Ryle, the death marshal loosened the coffin's cradle so it swung to the front of his body, but he did not slow down. The Freikorps librarian scrambled atop another heap to safety, but Taelor was too slow: there was a green flash as the box slammed into the woman, and Taelor was engulfed. Sue fired at the death marshal, but only agitated Luna, who then lunged for his throat.

The Viktorias ignored the chaos, screaming with laughter at first as Killjoy's cleaver dented and sliced Ryle's gun-arm into uselessness, but when Ryle recoiled at the same time as Killjoy's last blow and the combined forces wrenched the bolt out of the rock, their laughter climbed up into a cry of rage. "Cheating!" they shouted, and leaped off of the pile, splitting, rebounding, cuffing Sidir as they passed him on either side, to cross katanas behind Ryle and hurl him back toward Killjoy.

And the child clutched the candy so hard it snapped in her fist, whispering, "Block with the gun again, Ryle. It's easier to fix, that way. I'll get you out of here, I promise. Just have to take another couple of hits..."

[Gnomezilla]

The children, the only stoic witnesses in that shouting warring arena, were the only other ones to see Killjoy latch onto Ryle's ruined gun, twist, and hurl him over his shoulder to the ground. They barely even blinked as the dust cloud billowed up and over them, and over the cheering Viktorias as well. The construct handler tipped her head toward where the constructs still stood at attention. "Let me tell them to go," she said, "I won the bet." The student crunched the last of her candy, then hopped down from the pile with the child sliding after, and led her to the entrance to the lair while three-sided arguments broke out between the Viktorias and McCabe and Sidir. The child did not immediately follow. Instead she wormed her way into the middle of the arena, just out of reach of Killjoy, and detached Ryle from his chain. They then waded straight through the masters and other henchmen, turning arguments into cries of "Where do you think you're going?" when the student waved the ronins' blades aside and let them out.

McCabe was first and fastest to sprint after them, and so was able to dive out of his prison before the ronin recrossed their daitos--and to find himself surrounded by a larger circle of pure constructs, headed by Hoffman. "McCabe," Hoffman greeted him, in no friendly tone at all, and the entire circle of constructs took one step forward.

The treasure hunter checked himself, and stepped backward, talking all the while. "What a shame. I would love to go back to Guild headquarters, but I just can't right now." The circle closed in on him and Ryle and the child. "I'm already booked for this evening." Ryle was absorbed into the circuit, the child staying by his side; McCabe melted back into the Viktorias' lair as the ronin, mouths twitching with repressed mirth, once again unblocked the entrance, not for his benefit but for that of their leader standing just beyond them. "Can't disappoint these two lovely ladies--"

Viktoria of Ashes muted him again mid-sentence, while Viktoria of Blood wrenched McCabe's arms behind him and pinioned them. Ashes kept an eye on Hoffman, who did nothing to interfere. Taelor escorted Sidir to the entrance, walking behind him, paying more attention to what his robe suggested about the man underneath than to preventing his escape. Sidir chafed under the scrutiny but, unlike McCabe, had the wisdom to keep quiet.

"Come to ransom them?" asked Ashes. "I'd be happy to get rid of this one," and Blood shook the muffled McCabe to emphasize the point, "but happiness won't fix the armor he sliced open with that glowing saber of his."

"I could mend it for you," offered Hoffman.

"Cash only," Blood affirmed.

"Leave Sidir with me as security," Hoffman countered, "and I'll forfeit to you my finder's fee for McCabe. It isn't an official Guild bounty." He didn't smile, but his tone was light and conspiratorial as he glanced at the mercenaries' symbol graffito'd nearby: payment sub rosa, and therefore tax-free, unlike those of the Guild which clawed back half its posted bounties or more. Even Taelor rolled her eyes at the clumsiness of the gesture. Were they not professionals, with a nose for profit?!

 

Clumsy or not, the deal had been struck, and Sidir was released to the custody of Hoffman. The men rested in the shade of a round tower, some silo five hundred years old perhaps, while the child climbed up its rough-cut stone bricks and the constructs patrolled around it.

Sidir watched without curiosity as Hoffman and his manipulator arms removed scraps of metal from his pockets and reassembled them into a round shell. "When McCabe comes back," he said, leaning back and addressing the empty air, "you will be the first to be shot."

Four screws were set firm in their places all at once, and the reassembled mechanical attendant unfolded itself from the spherical shell one limb at a time, as Hoffman tucked away his own metallic extensions. "When McCabe comes back, I will settle accounts with him," he countered.

"When McCabe comes back, I will have died of boredom," added a third voice further away, thin, yet somehow still thick with sarcasm. "Very fine job you've done here, gentlemen, you've managed to arrive well before the corpses have."

"Knowing your job, that's what I call it, sir, when we arrive ahead of need, anticipating the needs of the community...." The fourth voice was doughy, and rolled over-elaborate phrases around in its mouth and stretched them out into a never-ending rope of chatter.

The outlines of three more men came into view beyond the circle. The child looked down at the tops of two hats and one untamed shock of hair. The hair was on a short and chubby body, and looked as though it were kept in check by the round-bladed bonesaw its owner carried: Sebastian, from the coroner's office. One hat was mashed down on a body not as short but just as wide: Mortimer. The other, cleaner hat sat on a body taller and thinner and far cleaner than the others: Nicodem.

Sidir hitched up several layers of cloth and scratched himself and watched the procession of constructs walk uninterrupted. The trio of strangers flickered in and out of sight behind the machines. "You can just leave," he said, once again addressing the empty air.

"Now that would be a waste of effort, and I see you are a man to appreciate efficiency of motion, so you'll appreciate that walking over there to wait until one or both of you turn into corpses, and then walking all the way back, would be a complete waste of--" Mortimer's voice died in his throat as Ryle passed by and, without breaking step, reached over and squeezed his windpipe before releasing the shabby man.

He smoothed out his robe again and addressed Hoffman directly this time. "Not bad," Sidir said, while undead creatures began to cluster behind Nicodem and his cohorts and lean on the constructs' perimeter.

"I've only just started," Hoffman muttered, and touched a movable ring girdling the mechanical attendant's shell. The child watched the smallest construct scuttle through the line of its brethren, into the melee, and the perimeter which had been bending inward under the pressures of the undead suddenly snapped back out to its full diameter.

 

It was a series of small aggressions, but never a battle. Toshiro roared defiance, and Ryle again circled through the area, reached out and crushed a windpipe, and the encouragement stopped. A punk zombie slashed down at glints of metal, but those were only distractions reflected off of non-essential surfaces. Sidir eventually stretched, got to his feet, and emptied the magazine, but only over the heads of the crowd, in mockery of Mortimer's shovelfuls of rot also having flown too high. Hoffman clacked along the inner perimeter of the circle, magnetically dragged by whatever construct he was repairing at the time.

Nicodem looked down in annoyance at the mechanical attendant at his feet which refused to crumble into rust no matter how many times he tried to accelerate its decay. "I am dying of boredom," he announced. "Good day, sirs. Sebastian. Mortimer." He wheeled about and walked away, and the two others (Mortimer still feeling the new, thinner shape of his mangled throat) eventually wandered after him.

[Gnomezilla]

Hours passed. Hoffman set the watcher atop the tower, next to the child napping in the afternoon sun, and every so often borrowed its sight. Sidir slept also, having arranged some boards and bricks into a primitive lawn chair on the shady side of the tower. The constructs stepped out of the circle one by one, beckoned by Hoffman, were repaired, adjusted, and sent back out to resume their patrol. Tap out a dent, increase the flow of coolant, clean, oil, survey the area from up high, mop away sweat from forehead, repeat, all through the hot hours...

He hoped he had just heard thunder far away, a summer storm moving in to relieve the heat. The watcher scanned the horizon. No clouds. Just rumbling in the distance, the faintest drop in temperature, and the slightest change in Sidir's breathing.

"...What's so amusing?"

Sidir feigned sleep. The heat, without a breeze, faded away.

The child sat up with a start and leaned over the tower's edge to watch the warden step out of the circle and aim its claw at Sidir. He never appeared to wake, but when the claw slammed into his makeshift lawn chair the man had already slipped through the circle of constructs. "I told you, when McCabe arrives you will be the first to be shot. Forgive me. I am old, I forget things, you were not the first. Fortunate for us both that he remembers." He nodded toward the silent rider approaching, then turned and strolled away.

The pale rider did not return his gaze. The marshal of bone turned his mount to pace alongside Ryle one full circuit of the constructs' walk, and the chill went with him.

Hoffman found his voice again. It did not quaver. "No."

The rider stopped. The constructs kept marching. Slowly it extended the arm which was not welded to the gun, and did not pull its hand back again until it overflowed with soulstones. Still, it did not leave.

The child felt the watcher beside her buzz at Hoffman's touch, saw it swivel its head and, at last, pinpoint the direction of the rumbling, and focus its lenses.

Beneath her, Hoffman spoke again to the pale rider, as self-assured as before. "Lucas McCabe makes the thirteenth."

The rider's hand shut over the fistful of stones.

 

They had heard McCabe's gang approach long ago, but still were surprised when they shot into the area, riding self-propelled wheeled machinery which stank of hot leaking oil, followed by a pack of hounds gone feral. It was not the battle between horses which the child had expected, either: McCabe himself had secured the biggest and loudest of the vehicles, and now wheeled around the open space, tugging on a hand lever which somehow made the rumbling noises even louder.

McCabe watched Hoffman watching his vehicle, and laughed, raucous enough to be heard over the exhaust pipes. "Can't grab hold of it, can you? I heard you were coming after me. Didn't think I'd hand you a freebie, did you?"

"Freebie?" hooted one of the other riders, a girl whose seat was balanced inside a single giant wheel. A man in coarse clothes rode behind her, one arm around her waist and the other pulling out a pistol. " 'Zat what you're calling it now?"

"I never paid for it in my life!" shouted another, who'd chosen to strap a more comfortable seat to the exterior of her giant wheel. Riding as counterweight to her was a man in a death marshal's duster, with an uncovered face.

Hoffman let them shout themselves silent. McCabe touched the throttle again. Hoffman let that sound die away as well. Then he spoke. "Lucas McCabe, you have caused me a great deal of trouble."

McCabe laughed. "Weirdest warrant I ever heard."

"It isn't a warrant."

He laughed again. "Now, anyone else, I would think you've finally learned to improv. But not you. No way--"

"It's your sentence."

McCabe stretched one foot down to the pavement and leaned the motorcycle to that side, the better to listen.

"Lucas McCabe. For allowing a senior Guild operative to be fatally shot, only for the purpose of proving your trust to a most wanted resurrectionist--" The girls interrupted to snicker, but the man riding behind one girl dismounted, while the one counterbalancing the other wheel looked away from McCabe and the fight which was to come. "--and concealing the evidence, leading to the near death of said Guild operative--" The pistolero threw several soulstones at the wheels of McCabe with a curse and let himself through the constructs' perimeter, taking up his guns again beside Hoffman. "--the sentence is death. It may be served by whoever sees fit."

The pale rider's mount lifted its head and flared its nostrils, scenting the air, until it locked upon McCabe. McCabe eyed it uneasily and shifted his weight back over the motorcycle seat. "Are you out of your mind, Hoffman? A rider? You called up a rider over your pet abomination?!" He gunned the motor. "To hell with you! Girls! Run him down! Run them all down!"

 

The child leaned over the tower to see, but didn't climb down to help. She wasn't afraid. Not really. Not like McCabe who was circling the tower to keep it between him and the pale rider and its unwavering focus upon him. But each time she had seen Hoffman this angry he had almost thrown her out of the workshop altogether. She could learn. She could obey. She could stay out of his way.

Just beneath her, Patti swore as the warden's claw shot underneath her seat and clamped down on the great wheel. Behind her, the lone marshal tipped down his hat. He didn't seem dismayed at being locked out of the fight to come.

"Hold on and grab this!" Elli threw a short chain out from under her seat, which Patti hitched under hers as Elli pulled back on one control stick. The second great wheel slid into a skidding turn, wrenching Patti's vehicle slowly into a turn as well. They both scraped across the flagstones, leaving dark gray smudges as they spun faster than they moved, until the instant both wheels were pointing the same direction. At once they accelerated together and charged as one toward the pale rider, cutting off his path to McCabe. He grinned, yet still turned his motorcycle around the tower to dart into a fight on the opposite side.

The hunter had harpooned the lead dog of the pack, an amalgamation (the child loosened a small stone from the mortar and hurled it down at the dog's smokestack--what'd he think he was doing flaunting one of those in front of Hoffman?), and the hunter's claws now flailed at the mechanical end of the dog only, as its living jaws were locked on the hunter's neck joints. The hunter dug in, and reached living flesh under the plating, and tore into it. Still, its own shoulder plating had been dragged away by the dying pup, leaving the soulstones of its mechanism exposed. McCabe aimed his motorcycle for the weak point, and not only finished the beheading of the hunter beneath his wheels, but wrenched two soulstones loose from their mountings before their energies faded.

The watcher spread its wings, then, dove from the tower, and rose again with the severed head of the hunter, before two other, unmodified dogs dragged it back down to earth. A third dog hung back from the dogfight and looked to McCabe for its orders. McCabe glanced toward Hoffman. This was a mistake, as it meant taking his eyes off of Ryle. The dog and Ryle lowered their heads and ran, one with animal grace, the other lumbering. Ryle hit his target first. The machine crashed onto its side, yet McCabe flew clear before his leg could be pinned by the falling motorcycle. He didn't appreciate it, nor did he appreciate the hound leaping past the warden and mechanical attendant, dodging the pistolero's shots, to latch onto Hoffman's leg, tear free a chunk of trousers and blood, then close its jaws on metal.

Hoffman ignored the sudden pain and insistent pulls upon his leg. He only saw Ryle, flailing as the treasure hunter bluffed him into turning the wrong way, becoming ever more entangled in McCabe's whip as his spins tightened the coils....

The child didn't need to feel Hoffman reach out and take command of Ryle. She saw it. He moved like an athlete, then, instead of an abomination. His right arm even curled around an imagined ball as his left arm stretched out to knock McCabe aside. The treasure hunter flew again, but this time he was swept off of his feet instead of something taller, not falling supine but leading the arc of his fall with his head. The tower was waiting for him. His skull collided with it, and he dropped to earth, and lay still. Ryle, too, became still, a machine once more waiting for its next command.

Hoffman turned his head away, became aware of the dog still gnawing on his frame, and without hesitation pointed his torch at it and burnt it until it let go. The pistolero swore and grabbed at Hoffman's shoulder, pulled him halfway around, looked him full in the face--and let go and stepped away. He muttered more under his breath as the warden trampled the hound's head, but did not raise objections with Hoffman again.

The chill approached, and with it, silence. The pale rider passed under the shadow of the tower, passed the pistolero who fell silent and Hoffman who stared as though he would take command of it, passed Ryle who did not react, passed the dogs which quit worrying the watcher's broken body and scurried away. It stopped by McCabe's body and fingered the smear of blood upon the side of the tower.

Hoffman nodded, once.

The pale rider's mount sank to its knees, and with its one good hand the marshal of bone hauled McCabe onto the spiked pad behind its saddle. The mount rose again with McCabe's arms and legs dangling off either side of its body. Hoffman watched it ride way until it could be not be seen among the buildings of the quarantine zone. Sound returned to the area along with the afternoon's heat, and the pistolero swore at length and turned away from the scene. Hoffman ignored him. He stepped over to Ryle and bent his head, saying something brief the child pretended not to hear. All the silences around Ryle were a rule of the workshop. She understood those rules, now.

[End The Constructs' Apprentice. Goodbye, my Sacramento Malifaux group. I'll miss you all. Thank you for teaching the game, learning the game, and letting me work our battles into a narrative.

Series 3 of the battle narratives: Making of a Mechromancer (Divergent Paths event)]