Valkyrie, Chapter III: Golem

Fort Feldkirk’s courtyard was painted in blood. It was splashed in drying fans across the bay doors of the motor pool and dribbled in the shade down the windows of the colonel’s study. It ran in the cracks between the yard’s paving stones and dripped through the sunken drainage grates. Standing in the center of the carnage, the stone golem called Priest thought of the rats looking up in confusion at the red rain coming through the tiny slits of sky their sewer home afforded them. She wondered if they might lap it from the slime-slicked stones, if the garrison’s misery might be sweetness to the fragile lives that went on undisturbed — excepting by the fort’s few mangy cats — beneath them.   

One such, a bob-tailed white tom with a milky eye, rubbed against Priest’s chipped, lichen-spotted leg and meowed plaintively. She knelt to scratch him behind one shredded ear and he pushed his cheek against her palm, purring like a tea kettle at once. His paws were red where he’d tracked through the gore on his way to her. In his wake a few of the torn bodies strewn over the stones bore the imprint of his passage. The pair of marines by the doors to the colonel’s residence watched Priest closely. 

“There’s an intestine in the gutter there,” said Alinor, pointing from where she sat perched on the hood of a still-smoking truck crushed against the fort’s western wall. A hayseed jutted from the corner of the lanky halfling’s mouth. “Must’ve been a wizard. Normal folk want you dead, we stick you, shoot you, strangle you — something respectable, reliable — and have done with it.”

Drotte, runes flickering green around their right hands and wrist, shook their shaven head. Rings of pale emerald light swept from their bare feet over the paving stones and up the walls, parting around the little island of Priest’s mageproof skin. Wisps of marsh fire rose where the dregs of spent arcana lingered. Drotte’s magehound sniffed at one such trail of vapor, the feelers on its blind snout trembling. “Ten wizards together could not do this. Nor could twenty.”

“What could, Priest?” asked Alinor.

Priest, still stroking the white tom, felt Drotte’s pulse quicken as a minute vibration in the stone. “If I ever knew I’m glad to have forgotten.”

Drotte sniffed, the afterglow of her surveillance spell flickering about her in the air. “Its designation is Dutiful Shale. Forget it’s not a person at your peril, corporal.”

Priest felt a faint sting of disappointment. She couldn’t remember how she’d been given her name, but she liked it when the arcanists who requisitioned her for field use called her by it. The garrison at Fort Prolik had treated her like one of their own, for the most part, except when it came time to dig earthworks or shift rubble. Priest didn’t mind the work. She preferred it to the field. Her warded stone skin and the bloody scroll sealed up inside her where a living woman’s heart would be made her valuable to the wizards of the Imperial College, resistant enough to the arcana they studied to be of us in their experiments. Few of them spoke to her beyond giving orders. Drotte seemed little different.

Alinor shrugged. “That quartermaster called her Priest. At the hundred and first.”

“The army is full of superstitious fools.” Drotte took a long drink from the canteen at their belt. A droplet of some thin black liquid ran down their chin and vanished when it met the high collar of their arcanist’s coat, absorbed by the dark wool. Their pulse fluttered again as a door slammed across the courtyard around the protruding bulk of the motor pool. The magehound whined and padded to Drotte’s side. 

An officer rounded the corner, a barrel-chested man with a ruff of short white hair and a pointed beard. A storm of aides followed close in his wake.  “You from high command?” he barked. “You don’t fucking look like high command. You don’t look like fucking reinforcements, either, so what in the Mapmaker’s tight little bunghole are you doing ordering my men around in my fucking fortress?” His face grew redder as he drew nearer. “Good men died where you’re-”

“Imperial Ministry of Intelligence,” said Drotte, flashing their silver badge with its license number and engraved image of a wolf’s jaws. “Colonel Renquist, I presume?”

Renquist’s flushed complexion curdled at once to a cheese-like pallor. His eyes flicked from Drotte’s arcanist’s coat to their shaved scalp to the badge vanishing back into their inner pocket. For a moment his gaze lingered curiously on the obscured lines of their hips and waist, but he caught himself in time to snap a crisp salute and come to a halt at strict attention. “Apologies, arcanist,” he said, all but going down on one knee. The men at his back followed his example piecemeal, tripping over one another in their haste to show deference. Priest thought it was funny, the way their expressions changed so quickly. Her own did so only with great effort, and even then not swiftly.

“My shuttle is berthed at the airbay in town,” said Drotte. “It requires resupply and inspection. In the meantime, I have completed my survey of the fortress grounds and require debriefing.” They held the colonel’s glance, which seemed to Priest as she straightened up, the crop-eared tom still rubbing himself on her legs, half-mutinous and half-afraid. The aides around him waited in attentive silence, perhaps to see where their loyalties would be best placed, or which of them might step into the colonel’s vacant shoes if he were to meet with Drotte’s displeasure.

The wizard’s lip curled. “You’ll do.”

The colonel bridled for an instant, hardly long enough to notice, and then nodded once. Drotte turned and stalked off toward the residence with their magehound trotting at their side. Renquist followed them. Alinor hopped down from her perch to join the strange procession.

“Golem!” Drotte called, not looking back. 

Priest cast a final glance around the courtyard. She stared at the blood that dripped through rusting grates, at the twisted wreck of the portcullis, at the bodies smashed against the cracked and crumbling walls and the others which had been slashed and blasted by some awful power beyond any mage’s ken, their flesh glistening in cauterized planes or blown out to lie in spidery skeins of empty skin and dessicated nerves across the stones. Could I have torn that gate? Maybe, and crushed a dozen of them easily, but the rest...no golem ever wielded arcana. 

She bent her head and followed Drotte, and the white tom watched her go while, eyes slitted lazily, he licked the blood from his red paws.

__________________________________________________________________________________

“Four hundred and forty-six,” the old cleric counted under his breath as he made his way up the stair, ignoring the dizzying drop on his right. His knees were giving up on him, surrendering after eighty years of more or less distinguished service. They clicked when he walked and popped like Regicide Day firecrackers when he stood. The staff doctor at Saint Eustatius of the Opened Line said he’d worn out his cartilage, that there was nothing left but bone grinding on bone. The Mapmaker’s blessings kept his blood pressure steady and his heart beating in rhythm, but even a god couldn’t ward off time entirely. 

The cleric’s name was Peter Hoff and he had been born in Lundheim three days before the century’s turn, entered the ministry at the age of sixteen, and taken his holy orders nine years later at the Church of the Hidden Trine in far Barkult just before the Kudasi lodges had ordered the missions pulled down and the Mapmaker’s clerics expelled from the republic. Now he was home, or nearly so, and climbing the five hundred steps of a monastery as yet nameless and unbuilt, its facade no more than rough notations in unfinished stone at the end of the switchback stair cut into the granite cliffs beneath Fort Feldkirk. 

There was some kind of hubbub up at the fort. A shuttle had come from Lundheim in the early morning, not long after Peter’s train, and the locked tramways up to the mountaintop had been opened. He looked back at the cables slanting from the clifftop down to Feldkirk Town, a sprawl of shingle roofs, cheap timber, and red brick in the fort’s shadow. Construction is a holy discipline, he heard old Sister Hilde snap from somewhere deep in the dark recesses of his memory. All calculation is the Mapmaker’s domain, all mastery thereof devoted service. Raise a frame and you give shelter to the needy. Sink a well and you give succor to the desperate. Mislay a brick and a child’s blood could stain your hands.

The old cleric drew in a deep breath. He stood sweating on the four hundred and fifty-first step, the monastery’s monolithic outline looming over him. It would be beautiful when it was finished. Or rather, it would have been. Ordinator Savros Keklion was one of the priesthood’s most distinguished architects, and his severe Alephi stamp was everywhere on the blueprints Peter had looked over on the train. Node Penitent was meant to be a silent bastion of serenity and contemplative seclusion, a place for the church’s best cartographers to work uninterrupted on the endless task of mapping Alkost’s crumbling shores.

Maps of a dying world. Shorelines that won’t last a century. Valleys that will all be inlets inside four decades, maybe five.

He climbed the last steps counting under his breath as his knees popped and crunched, hot barbs of pain crawling up his thighs and raking his shins and ankles. A pair of dwarves in steelweave and ballistic plate stood on the landing to either side of the unfinished temple’s entrance, huge Alephi rifles with crescent magazines and half-moon bayonets resting on their shoulders. The woman to the left of the entryway, squat and muscular with a shiny scar across the bridge of her flat nose, shot Peter a smile that might have got him into trouble forty years ago. Now he only smiled back faintly, trying to catch his breath, and then passed between the sentinels into the cool gloom of the temple’s entry hall. Mage’s lanterns lit the cut stone passage at twenty-foot intervals, just enough to maintain visibility. 

The hall let out into a vast domed atrium where a bar of dusty light fell through an oculus onto the distant flagstones. Peter’s footsteps echoed in the stillness, resounding from the curved planes of the walls. Other archways led off from the great chamber, all dwarfed as his was by its sheer scale. The parties of canvas-hooded clergymen and novices crossing the expanse of polished stone looked no bigger than so many ants. Most were dwarves, the rest humans. There were work gangs, too, and civilian engineers and architects. Peter stared out at the clamor of it all, still catching his breath

A young man in unadorned acolyte’s tans appeared at Peter’s elbow, hands clasped at his waist, rosewood sextant strung around his neck. “Welcome, father,” he said, his accent a pure borderlunder’s burr. Welkum, vadder. 

“I’m here to see the ordinator,” Peter said, mopping the sweat from his bald pate with a stained handkerchief. The atlas stitched into his robe spared him the burden of explaining himself. After a lifetime of bullheaded opposition at last, in his old age, he had consented to wear the synod’s authority. He’d had enough of fighting.

“Ordinator Keklion is with his confessor,” said the boy. “Shall I show you to his solar?” 

Peter shook his head. “To the confessional, I think.”

The boy hesitated, Peter thought, or perhaps it was only a young cleric’s nerves at being caught between superiors. Whatever it was, it resolved quickly. They crossed the atrium together, pausing a few times to let teams of draft goats hauling carts laden with broken stone and earth go by and once for a group of studious acolytes attending an old dwarven friar’s lecture on freestanding arches. The confessional hall lay five minutes’ walk deeper into the cliff face down a winding path of half-completed galleries and dormitory alcoves, some already furnished with roughspun pallets and with water closets awaiting connection to a sewage system. I wonder how they would have done that all the way up here, thought Peter. No running water, not much rain. I should ask Savros once he’s calmed down.

The hall itself was silent. Waves of incense smoke seeped out from beneath the carved ironwood doors set into the walls. The murmur of voices dulled by smoke and stone hung in the air. The acolyte made his exit and Peter settled himself on a low stone bench, groaning as he stretched his legs out with another chorus of sharp pops. The stone was cool against his back and buttocks. The familiar smells were a comfort.

How long has it been since I knelt for guidance?  

A cleric perhaps thirty years Peter’s junior stepped out of a cell and shut the door behind him, eyes downcast and gloved hands trembling. There was something strange about him, something in his mournful, pouchy face and long mustaches that made Peter think of an old dog on its last legs, mean and crazy with the pain of dying. You’re nervous, he told himself wearily as the other cleric left the hall, incense smoke swirling around the hem of his gray robes. You’re angry at yourself for being here. Reading your own worries into other people. 

It was an hour before the ordinator emerged from the confessional nearest to where Peter sat. For a moment the dwarven elder Savros Keklion looked every day of his four hundred-odd years, deep-set eyes dull and underscored by bruise-colored bags, shoulders stooped, gait dragging and slow. When he saw Peter, though, the corners of his dark eyes crinkled in a smile of welcome. The exhaustion seemed to fall from him like rainwater. “Relief itself,” he said. His voice was rough and smokey, effortlessly deep. “Have you come to tell me why my arcanists have been delayed? My bowels are in knots over —” 

Peter rose with some difficulty, the crunch of his kneecaps cutting the ordinator off mid-sentence. “I’m sorry, Savros,” he said, forcing himself to utter the words even as heartbreak crumpled his old friend’s face. “It’s finished. The money’s been reapportioned and construction officially halted. The synod thought it best that you hear it from me.”

They stood there in silence for a time. The old dwarf’s knob-knuckled hands curled into fists. A vein pulsed at his temple. For a moment Peter thought the ordinator might lose his composure, but Savros had long ago seen his family, his sworn brothers, his whole people swallowed up into a nightmare the likes of which the world had not seen since. His temper faded. His hands relaxed. “It’s done,” he growled, as though admitting it to himself. “Well, they were right to send you. I’d have brained anyone else.”

“I’m sorry, my friend,” said Peter. “It’s the war. The synod’s budgeting for missions to Verangia next spring. They want new congregants to tax.”

Savros sighed. “Join me for dinner? Let me lament to you over the carcass of my life’s work. It’ll ease your conscience.”

Peter put a comforting hand on the dwarf’s shoulder. This is who you are now, I suppose, he told himself. Bearer of bad news, keeper of the purse strings, breaker of hearts. 

“Lead on, then. Show me this dream I’ve just crushed.”

At least it isn’t war.

__________________________________________________________________________________

“We took charge of the prisoner at twenty-two hundred hours on the sixteenth of Entrue,” said Renquist, setting his teacup down in its chipped saucer. His receiving room was drab and cramped. Priest had been forced to duck and sidle through the doorway. Now Drotte and the colonel sat opposite each other at a low table, cups of coffee cooling untouched by their hands. Priest stood at Drotte’s right shoulder. Alinor and the magehound waited by the hearth. “A special IMI detachment and six Imperial marines accompanied her. Their commanding officer, Colonel Dahl, said they would bunk down with us until the dreadnought Sabertooth arrived for them. Its ultimate destination they did not disclose.”

Drotte crossed their legs and scribbled a note in a battered folio balanced on their knee. “The prisoner’s name?”

“Not provided. A raisin, hair down past her arse—” 

Drotte looked up. “A what?”

“He means an elf,” Alinor supplied, chuckling. “An older one, three centuries or more. Their skin wrinkles and darkens.”

Priest remembered traveling with elves, moving slowly through green water up to her chest, water weeds and clouds of silt and mud stirred up to swirl in her wake as skinny women with thin faces and long ears poled down waterways among great mangrove trees. They sang as they poled and joked among themselves. Frogs the size of hunting hounds watched them from the mossy roots and islets of the swamp, their booming croaks ringing over the water.

Drotte pulled a face. “We can dispense with the epithets.”

Renquist smiled a little. He seemed to take pleasure in their discomfort. “She was a little taller than human standard, hair gone to gray, scars on her face like this.” He drew his forefinger from his right eye down to his chin, crossing his mouth at an angle, and then twice from the left corner of his mouth up to his hairline. “Colonel Dahl had it — ah, her — in iron gloves. Sorcerer’s cuffs, the kind with runes cut into the metal.”

“The telegram indicated that there was an intruder not long after Dahl and his men arrived. An attack.”

“A golem. Tall as this one” — he pointed at Priest — “and three times as broad. We saw it four hundred yards out on the scarp just after midnight and the sergeant of the watch had the Echols guns brought around on it when it wouldn’t slow. Must have put a thousand rounds into it. It kept coming. Didn’t seem to care. Ripped through the gate after two tries and went straight for the prisoner. I was on the walls by then. I saw it from up there.”

I wonder if we come from the same foundry, Priest mused.

Drotte gestured toward the blood-spattered window facing the courtyard. They seemed strangely perturbed, their heart still racing, each pulse a minute vibration traveling up Priest’s body. “One golem did that?”

“No.” Renquist shook his head. For the first time Priest realized how tired the colonel looked. His eyes were pouchy, his skin a little sallow. He obviously hadn’t slept in days. “She did. The elf. Golem went through a few guards, tore those cuffs off her like they were crepe paper, and the second she had her hands free there was a light. Green beams of light. It cut through what was left of the marines, through my men, through the trucks and part of the mess hall. Eight more dead in there when the roof came down.”

“Beams of green light.” Drotte made a note, but they weren’t looking at their folio. “Once her hands were freed, did you notice anything unusual about them?”
Hands?”

Renquist looked uncertain too. Suspicious, almost. Fear of the IMI and its cold cells under the Admiralty on Elkin Hill ran deep, though. He mastered himself. “She had a mark on her right hand. A rune. Glowing. I saw it when the flash faded after whatever she did. Then she shouted, too fast for me to understand. Must have cast a spell. Runes in the air, the whole thing. Light shot up out of the courtyard under her and she was gone. The golem too.”

Drotte was sweating. They looked sick. “An invisibility field.”

Renquist shook his head. “No. We’d have heard the golem. It was like something just reached down and snatched them both into thin air.”

“Impossible.” 

The magehound perked up, sightless muzzle snuffling, sensory spines atremble.

“I’m telling you what I saw.”

“What you saw is impossible.” The wizard’s lips were growing pale. By the hearth Alinor crouched watchful and silent, mischievous grin discarded. 

Something is happening.

Priest remembered a hand of black witchwood on her cheek. Violet eyes burning in hewn sockets. A white heat rising in the ancient ink-stained paper of her organs. A long time ago.

Drotte closed their folio and swallowed with some difficulty. They reached for their coffee and gulped from the porcelain cup. It rattled when they returned it to its saucer. “And the Sabertooth?”

“Appeared at full steam and listing badly to port at oh six hundred hours on the seventeenth. She didn’t stop, didn’t answer our hails. I sent scouts up to spot her. They turned back when she crossed the Barkultish border.” 

Drotte  “You’re quite sure about the mark on her hand?”

Renquist’s sneer faded to a look of wariness. “Completely,” he said. “You may be IMI, but try to pin this on me and you’ll find I’ve friends in high places.” 

Drotte removed their spectacles, folded them, and stowed them in their robe. “Golem,” they said, their voice trembling. For a moment it seemed they might fall silent, that whatever had stirred their heart to a hummingbird’s shrill flutter might subside. They took a deep breath. Their pulse stabilized. Across the table, Renquist’s look of uncertainty began to fade.

“Kill him. Authorization Drotte, Inglis. Four five one one nine.”

Priest stepped forward and took the colonel gently by one shoulder. A blissful sense of purpose wiped all worry from her mind. She yanked him from his seat and pushed him down to his knees hard enough that one of them broke on impact with a dry, sharp pop. She hooked a massive finger in his mouth as his eyes widened in surprise and pain. With a heave of her shoulders she tore his skull from his bottom jaw and the stump of his spine. It made a sound like an auto hitting a turtle in the street. Blood spurted from the quivering gape of his throat as his heart pumped one final, futile time. His maimed tongue spasmed in the bed of his roofless mandible, which flapped uselessly against his chest.

What could do this, Priest?

The magehound was barking. Someone hammered at the door. Priest dropped the man’s face and the broken crown of his head. It hit the floor with a wet, meaty thud and rolled a little way before fetching up against the leg of a chair at the end of a short, thick trail of blood like a painter’s heavy brush-stroke.

If I ever knew, I’m glad to have forgotten.