Into the Works

They left the druids' encampment at dawn. Bracken gave his blessing, the circle sent them off loaded with supplies — five healing draughts among them — and Senna walked out in front to guide them north.

The ground got worse the further they went. Scrub gave way to tide-flats streaked with an oily sheen, and the crossing was slow. Aelion, Biz, and Flint all went into a fouled pool and came up coated in the stuff. It stung and it stank, but none of them were burned. Biz tested the sludge for magic and found none at all in it — ordinary industrial poison, nothing more. Then Flint knelt at a pool and cleansed it, and the water went glass-clear. Whatever the folktales say about the factory, poison is blighting the coast, and poison can be cleaned.

They crested a hill and saw it. Half-broken smokestacks stood black above the buildings, taller than anything growing on that coast. Rusted scaffolding ran hundreds of feet down the cliff face toward the sea, and the culverts along the base spewed the same oily water they had been walking through all morning. Flint's sickle began to give off a pale light.

Worm spotted an easier approach and Senna confirmed it. As they neared the factory three drones came around on patrol; nobody drew a blade — a silence laid over the group carried all of them past, clanking Randy included. Biz got low and close enough to see that the arm-mounted cannons the constructs carry are loaded with nets. For capturing, not killing.

Randy took the door. His first try did not move it. With Worm hauling alongside him the second did, and it opened loudly, the whole frame shrieking, the sound reverberating back into the building and returning to them. Then metal footsteps, getting closer.

Inside was an assembly hall the size of a market square, busy with work: chains and hooks carrying half-built automata overhead, vent-trenches in the floor breathing orange gas, catwalks crossing above. A well-made automaton started down the stairs toward them — unpitted plating, a longsword, an orange core burning in its chest — with four drones behind it. Flint's sickle flared bright at the sight of it.

That fight ran long and cost them, and they learned what these machines are made of the hard way. Poison does nothing to them at all. Fire hurts them no better or worse than it hurts anything else, however much oil weeps from their joints. Acid, radiant light, and plain force all work. Worm dropped darkness over the knot of drones around Randy, which served his own side about as well as it served theirs. Flint spent most of the fight as a giant toad, biting and grappling and swallowing drones whole to dissolve them. Biz stayed by the door and, for the first time since any of them had known him, actually healed somebody — a word of healing and everything else he had went into keeping Aelion standing. The nets came out and briefly pinned Randy and Worm both.

It ended with the well-made automaton prone and nearly gone. Flint returned to his own shape, drew his new sickle, and drove it into the glowing core. His sight went black. He blinked twice and stood in a field of lavender — then he was back in the assembly hall with the sickle in his hands, and the core detonated. Flint took the worst of it. Randy and Worm caught some. Biz and Aelion were far enough away to be spared.

Standing over the wreckage, they took stock. Biz was spent to nothing. Aelion was down to almost nothing. There were perhaps five healing draughts left between them. And out across that hall, working away, unbothered — the noise in there is loud enough that a full battle in one corner goes unnoticed — were at least three more groups of drones, with three more of the better-built ones watching from the catwalks above. They chose not to grind through it. Flint read the timing on the floor vents and led them low, under the workbenches, toward the stairway at the centre of the room that goes down.

Then Randy clattered. One bad step under a table, and the sound betrayed them again. One of the larger automata vaulted the catwalk railing, landed on a workbench beside them, and pulled a knot of the rustier workers' attention around onto all of them.