Scrap Core Chronicles (006)

[006]

Sir Corin Vale disliked being pulled from his chair for anything short of blood. The bell had rung twice in quick succession, not the soft chime for a misfile but the hard iron note for a breach. He took the south corridor at a walk anyway. The Sponsor’s Wing was a dead end with teeth. No one got past the vault faces without a token and a verse, and even he had never seen those doors open without a sponsor at hand. If some fool child had slipped a rope, the wing would pen them like a bottle.

Half the staff had clogged the antechamber when he arrived. A dozen bronze golem sentries ground against the lacquered doors, pistons whining as they worried at the frame. Trustees in frock coats shouted over one another, fingers stabbing the air to assign blame. One had the sense to shut up when Corin’s boot met the double doors. The bar bent. Wood exploded into splinters. The doors jumped inward with an echo that rolled through the galleries. Silence fell as if someone had corked the building.

The room beyond smelled of hot oil and spent wards, a bitter metal tang that crawled up the nose. Sconces burned low behind glass domes. Dozens of vault faces squatted side by side under their family crests, as untouched as he’d expected them to be.

Between Corin and those plates lay the mess. One sentry lay in a broken sprawl of messy parts as if it had been torn one rivet at a time. The other stood over an elf girl, its remaining arm clamped on her shoulder, voice grill squawking air, sparks, and nothing more. The girl thrashed under the weight and swore like a sailor.

“Let me up, you rust sod clanker. I was looking for the piss pot,” she spat. “If this pile of bolts had a brain it would know where ladies’ have their privy.”

Corin let his gaze pass over her once. Green hair streaked with soot hid under a cap too clean for her sunken cheeks. Boots cut to run rather than walk halls. Suspender buttons mismatched by color. Her cover story was a pile of scrap that had not seen a broom. His eyes moved on. Past her shoulder he took the room in a sweep. The totalled sentry. A trolley upended. A scrap chassis on the floor, and he gave the thing a nudge with his boot.

Its chest plate was open, the core cracked beyond repair.

“Clean this mess,” he said, and the antechamber stirred to life. The sentries crowded the threshold, heads ticking at his voice, awaiting assignment. “Two to the broken one. Two to the scrap one. Carry both to the machine ward. Five sweep the perimeter. You.” He pointed with the flat of his sword at the sentry pinning the elf. “Take her to the holding cells and lock her there. Then go to the machine ward for repairs. Someone call a constable.” He glanced at the bumbling idiots that’d been in a tizzy over the alarm. “He can sort the charge sheet.”

The metal heads clicked in chorus. “Orders received,” and repeated his orders in thin copies of his own tone. Adding “Confirmed” at the end.

The pinned elf added a fresh opinion of his ancestry. 

Corin paused as his eyes locked on the one-armed golem.

“Voice box is damaged,” said a librarian behind him. The man had a face like a spoon.

“I saw,” Corin said, not looking away from the one-armed golem. “Make sure we add the repair bill for the tin-heads and the door to her sentence. Judge Herst likes tidy ledgers.”

The one-armed golem shifted, the movement was a small thing. A change in the way a machine set weight from one foot to the other that felt entirely out of place. Golems moved in jerks and precise arcs. This one set its heel as if it cared whether the elf’s shoulder would bruise.

Something-

“Sir Corin.” A trustee cleared his throat as if to swell his chest larger than his coat. “An inspection of the vaults will be required. Sponsors will want confirmation that nothing was touched.” 

The retired knight filed the thought as idle. The floor under the vaults was honeycombed with runic anchors. Sometimes their disruption of mundane magic made the automata look almost human. “The vaults are untouched, as you can see,” he said.

“Protocol must be kept, sir.”

Corin did not sigh.

He walked to the nearest vault door, keeping his blade sheathed as he tapped the black metal door with the pommel. The impact made the door ring like a bell, an unpleasant sound followed by a rush of magic that tried, and failed, to latch on to him. He ignored the pissy little elf as he began to walk the row of vault doors, giving each of them a “little love tap”, repeating the deafening roar of metal and magic. The retired adventurer would’ve laughed at the idea that he’d be reduced to a glorified and well armed security concierge.

After he’d rung each door, he made a show of inspecting the runes on the metal and the stone though he didn’t know the first thing of enchanting. He did know that these monsters were rated against adamantite adventurers. Even ten of him would not be able to force one of these vault doors open.

The trustee made a noise that could have been relief.

“Nothing is touched,” Corin said. “This was a mess of the front room, not a sponsor matter.”

The librarian made a sound as if to complain that statement, but he met their gaze and waited for the words to come out. They didn’t. As usual. Sir Corin found the idea of surrounding himself with people who could not survive a stiff breeze a rather annoying thing. If the job didn’t pay so well, he would’ve been looking for alternatives by now.

He finished his round and only then noticed the inside of the room had emptied in a way his order had not covered. The team assigned to the broken sentry had obeyed. The two assigned to perimeter had taken posts. The holding cell detail should have been the one-armed machine with the girl pinned. The carcass of the scrap golem should have had four lifters under it.

He counted bodies the way he had always counted enemies one ridge over, and it wasn’t adding up. The golems he’d assigned to taking the chassis were standing by the door, but there was neither elf nor scrap golem. Suspicion tickled in the back of Sir Corin’s mind as he stepped through the broken door and glanced at the corridor. He caught the last angle of the armless golem carrying the scrap chassis over its shoulder while dragging the screaming elf with its good arm.

The one-armed sentry turned the corner without once looking back.

Corin tilted his head. He’d told the machine to take the prisoner to the cell, which it was doing. Had he accidentally made some gesture it had interpreted as needing to carry the odd mismatched chassis too? The extra cargo could be read as initiative gone stupid. Yet the part of him that had survived through monster-infested swamps nagged that something was off.

The knight’s foot hovered just through the door’s threshold.

“Sir Corin,” the trustee said, with a rising note that meant panic if the man had any imagination. “The Abrego crest. Will you tap it again? Just for my notes.”

He stopped, eyes fixed on the empty spot the sentry had occupied mere moments ago. Catching up with it would not even be a challenge for someone like him.

“Sir Corin?”

The enchanted ring on his right index kept a pale blue tone, proof that the runes keeping the golem sentries operational had not been tampered with. A voice in his head listed the ways a machine might appear clever, and all of them folded down to tricks of light and the wish to see a face in a clock. No sentry learned. No golem watched and chose. 

With a sigh, he stepped back towards the vault, laughing at his rusty instincts playing tricks on him. 

There was no such thing as an intelligent golem.

---

What I was currently feeling must have been what Tessa felt when she was panting and heaving for air. My core, me, was screaming as the current sentry chassis guzzled it for power to fuel a thousand different useless rune sequences that served no discernible purpose. I’d been forced to shut down the only working arm just to buy myself a few more seconds before we made it into one of the reading rooms. Shelves loomed like ranks of soldiers, lamplight humming, paper dust and ink mixing in a dry smell that clung to metal.

It had been a gamble, a massive gamble.

I’d remembered Tessa’s words about “not questioning it if they expect it”, and could only see one viable solution for escape: putting my core into a sentry golem and pretending to be one. I’d needed to mend the more intact one with parts from the other, but it had worked out.

What I hadn’t expected was that I couldn’t sabotage the obedience rune. It wasn’t like Kellard’s work, the runes on the sentry weren’t some crude overbearing voice hammering down on me but more like a thousand chains dragging me down. They’d kept me from tampering with them just as they had made me obey “Sir Corin”, even if I’d taken some interpretative liberties with the commands. I felt confident I would have eventually found a way to sabotage it, given time, but time was not on my side.

Thankfully, I didn’t have the slightest clue what a “cell” was, or its location, otherwise I would be pushing Tessa in a different direction until my legs gave out from lack of mana.

By the time the door had shut, I’d already popped the latch open. The heavy panel sighed on brass hinges, and the noises of the reading room dulled to a hush.

The world went dark for a terrifyingly long eternity.

Then light.

My scrap frame shuddered as the power reached out to touch every corner. Blessed simplicity of few runes and no internal noise. A clock somewhere ticked. Pipes in the wall clicked as steam settled.

I realized Tessa had changed clothes. No, not quite. She’d taken her clothes and rearranged them, somehow. Her pants now looked like baggy overalls that she was staining with oil from the sentry golem, the same oil she was applying to her hair. The cap was gone, replaced by something that hugged her head more tightly and hid her pointy ears away. The sheen of oil turned her hair the color of machine grease, and the smell of it cut through the dust.

“That’s proper freaky,” she said as she observed me for a moment. “To change bodies like that.”

The desire to point out the hypocrisy of the statement was strong. She looked like a completely different person, and she hadn’t changed her chassis. This had to be a Skill. I could not believe her pants had the design space to transform the way they had.

“Ya sure you don’t want to stick to the fancy clanker?”

“Incompatible,” was all I could say, voice module crackling and full of static from my lack of fine control. “Need. Rest.” It was an agonizing prospect, but not the first time I’d pushed myself until I was bone dry. Being at 0 MP was almost as bad as actual pain, and the sentry’s body had been consuming from my meager reserves at a dizzying rate.

“Always thought them cores were like fuel, swapped out every few days or something.” She commented while I slowly regained the ability to walk. I noticed her pocketing a few pieces off of the sentry golem. “We gotta leg it before the mustachioed man catches on.”

“Is facial hair a sign the person is male?” I asked.

“Mostly. Unless it’s one of those fuzzy species, or dwarves. That guy was a human tho.”

Another thing for the list. Far off, a bell chimed the hour. Footsteps and the dry rasp of pages carried along the corridor.

“Now you just hop on and pretend you’re dead,” she said, offering her back for me to clamber onto. It was an offer I couldn’t find any reason to deny despite very much wanting to. But right now was not the time. I did as told.

Tessa grunted, and her voice lowered again as she pretended to be “male”, keeping her head low and mumbling obscenities under her breath while walking with determined annoyance. Clerks, porters, and a guard with a sleepy yawn parted out of her way, not even bothering to look at us as she marched straight out of the building. The marble floor clicked under her boots; the lobby reeked faintly of polish and damp wool.

I feigned being deactivated, but drank it all in, trying to make heads or tails of what sort of power made us seemingly almost invisible to everyone else. Or why we hadn’t used it when entering. This strange behaviour was another thing to add to the list of things to ask, definitely near the top.

Within thirty minutes, we had hitched a ride on an open wagon leading down the street and away from the “public” library. Iron-rimmed wheels rattled on cobbles. Steam hissed from street vents. Hawkers called, and the gaslamps wore halos in the drifting soot.

“This was a giant waste of time,” Tessa growled, glaring daggers at the building, her face twisted between exasperation and something far more tired. “And coin. Fuck.”

“Why?” I asked simply.

“There’s no way I can get the appraisal Skill, it’s locked up tight, behind those big ugly doors. And I know you don’t understand this, but hellspawn’ll be dancing and throwing flowers before anyone even thinks of throwing a sponsorship my way.” She waved her arms wildly the same way she had when that moth had flown to her face, then huffed, then fell silent. The wagon boards creaked. A horse snorted, tossing steam into the air.

The decision to interrupt that silence came easily. “My voice box is the only thing I have ever designed and built, from start to finish,” I said after a moment. “During that time, I learned that some obstacles become solvable if you alter how you view them.”

The elf stared but said nothing.

I continued.

“One of the greatest problems in making a voice box is in using the right runes, and at the time I did not know many runes. I was certain of who had the knowledge I sought, but acquiring the information directly was impossible. My only option was through observing their work.” I cocked my head in the same way Tessa did when asking something that she thought was obvious. “Is it strictly necessary to get into those vaults to get the Skill?”

“It’s complicated.”

“Are we in a rush?”

She glared, turning to look at the horses and carriages that went past us. “Anyone can learn any Skill if they meet the right conditions, do the right thing in the right sequence, and of course have the slot for it. Skills have been around since before this place had roads, and Appraisal’s one of the really old ones from back when most folk were either adventurers or farmers.”

“But…” I hesitated. “Do the requirements change over time?”

“Not that I know of.”

“And this Skill existed before roads,” I repeated. “Then they did not need materials and resources that did not exist at the time, correct?”

A simple shrug. “Sure.”

“And we know all ‘merchant families’ have people with that Skill,” I added. “Does that not mean we might be able to piece together what the requirements are based on observing those who have it? Failure is only guaranteed if you stop trying. Or if you die before completion.”

Tessa’s expression didn’t change as she just stared at me. She shoved me away, then huffed. “For a clanker, you’re too optimistic by half.” A second shove. “Make that by three quarters.”

“What is ‘optimistic’ and how is it measured?”

For a moment I spotted the barest hint of a smile.