Fractured asphalt turned to rubble under their claws. Every stride was a blunt sentence of thunder, crumpling dead stems into paste on the pavement. Lethargic crows and concerned squirrels skittered away into the fractal of trunks encroaching on the barely-maintained road. Hours blurred together into a twisting, violent fabric of eternal urgency.
Running for long periods of time blurred the boundary between June and Shard, erasing all verbal thought, pushing the limits on proxy bandwidth. They could feel the waning drizzle stick to their skin and slide helplessly down the faces of their camera blocks, the chill bifurcate into a pleasant oil temperature readout and the slow burning in their lungs. When they stared into the distance, their now-hexocular vision skyrocketed in fidelity.
The Syllable in their cargo harness seethed with active hatred, its invisible grip spiralling with grim playfulness across their joints and hearts, tugging at the hibernating grasses beside them. Moss had failed to provide a concise explanation for why they couldn’t just throw it away. That explanation was no longer needed. They could feel it sink a new hook with every passing hour, chilling blood and itching inside hydraulic motors. It would know them even if they plunged it to the center of the Earth.
Something else was astir. Vast, roiling waves of rage pulsed over the landscape, crashed into their back, foamed abstract pale as they hit the bare treetops. Roughed up low clouds shivered, anxious.
Widow’s patience was growing thin, and it seemed everything around could sense its boiling sorrow.
They were considering popping their last quickcharge bank when the thinning mist ahead began to resolve to a weaving silhouette of a truck. They picked up pace, and soon could squint the bed empty, save for a couple sacks. The driver seemed to recognize them too, slowing down a bit to let them catch up. Antenna-bristles on their shoulders sprung up, homing onto the fresh VHF spike that felt like wind under their skin.
“-ening, rattler, what’s your hurry?” - a coarse, though high, voice clicked into their mind, muffled by static. The trucker were speaking in russian with an accent thicker than theirs.
“We are heading to Cast-Iron-Cage, perishable goods delivery,” - they barked into their microphone, hoping to sound approachable, though something about their response felt off.
“Sweet Mother of Golems, what was that?! Are you hurt?!” - genuine horror flashed back in the trucker’s voice.
“What? No, we are…”
Halfway through the second sentence they realized that they were trying to use their flesh and blood throat to FSK-encode their words in ASCII. That must have sounded strange. Wincing from the effort, they bifurcated again.
“Proxy… blend,” - the half more suited for piloting flesh strained, - “Cast-Iron… Cage. Deliver… Perishables.”
“Coral’s mercy, you scared me!” - the truck came to a complete stop, cargo almost spilling over the halfboard walls, - “That’s the worst blend I heard in years, you gotta jack out, kid!”
“Danger… Managed… Possess… Countermeasures,” - they were trying to make their tone appear dismissive as they closed the last hundred meters, but the tongue felt stiff and foreign. Speakers in their sides errantly mirroring signals meant for vocal chords did not help their case.
“I’ll have none of that! Jack out, I say!” - the slight man in a grey jumpsuit clambered out of the cabin onto the middle of a road ahead, facing them, hands to the sides in protest.
They halted abruptly, still on all fours, splayed to the ground. Skidding a good dozen meters, tearing tightly packed soil open like a braking meteor, small fountains of dirt reinforcing the likeness. A second or three was spent in silence, filled only with rumbling of the engine and burning in their limbs. Then, they threw themselves back into a standing position in one fluid swing, coming to stare the human down.
His hair was long and sparse, spilling over the narrow shoulders like creeping thin roots. Brown-gloved fingers bit into the oil-stained canvas of the jumpsuit in an effort to conceal their trembling. They could tell he was scared, grey eyes darting between their own three pairs, unsure which one was in use. They could tell him all three were, but decided to not.
With a chuckle that must have screeched like metal grinding into powder, they shuffled their shoulders, and separated. It felt like two mated surfaces being pulled apart, innumerable strands of steaming, hot glue still stretching between hungrily. The front harness shot open with a violent clang, decoupling proxy bindings. The one that must have been June half-stepped, half-spilled onto the ruined pavement, assuming a similarly animalistic quadruped pose. The other half swung its quarter-ton bulk in place, hopping over the relatively fragile board wall with the fierce precision of an awakened foundry assembler. The display of autonomy elicited a gasp from the unprepared human.
“So. Be. It,” - the one made of meat responded in segmented voice, willing itself to assume a proper bipedal stance. It did not come easy. The aching extremities tingled with ghost inputs, and it had trouble compensating for a lack of a cargo rig. The task was not made easier by the driver practically dragging the body along to the passenger seat.
“How long have you been in there?!” - the old man inquired, trails of horror still present in the voice. His hands were busy all around the unresisting body, clicking fingers in front of its eyes, checking the pulse.
“Thirty. Two. Hours. Sleep. Excluded.”
“Stupid, stupid!” - the man attempted to scold, though calming down somewhat, - “Everything is a joke to you youngsters! Stupid! You all think you’re invincible!”
He ran the rest of his ad-hoc diagnostics on the object in front, and seemed satisfied enough. The one in the back was shuffling in the truck bed, getting its limbs into a comfortable position under itself. The driver didn’t take his eyes off it as he looped back around the hood and climbed up to the controls.
“Drink,” - he shoved a thermal flask into the agonizing hands beside him while the wide, soft wheels began to chew at the road beneath them once more. June obeyed, with some difficulty. Water trickled down his chin as he downed the container. The warm liquid seemed to taste of shredded summon handles and brown noise.
A few minutes passed filled with little but concerned grumbling, before the driver continued, somewhat relaxed.
“How old even are you, junk rattler?”
“Twenty. Six.”
“D’you think you’re gonna live to forty driving like this? I mean, proxy into a golem suit for two days straight, are you kidding me?!”
“Likelihood. Accept. Neural. Detanglement. Reliable. Passing. Tests.”
“You all say this, you all say this! Stupid! I’ve met demons that sounded more human than you right now… Do you know how the army hospitals call this?”
“Negative.”
“A no-wound casualty, that’s what! You know why? I’ll tell you why. If you stay in there any longer, the blasted machine will guzzle up your soul! And then your body will go crazy and lay down your own comrades, and they’ll have to scrap the suit too, or else it will run away next time they send it to battle.”
June managed a grin, now that his face finally began mapping onto himself again.
“Fortunate. We are. No soldier.”
He was asleep before the trucker’s mouth opened for a response. His dreams were sickening, reflective, folding in on themselves, multiplying the seething dark presence lodged in their shared reality into an iterated system of menace.
The dreams did not end when he woke up, shaken roughly by the driver’s hand. The engine was buzzing on idle, and the outside was lit by a uniform harsh cold-white glow. Muttering something vaguely thankful, he spilled out the crudely fashioned door and felt Shard leap to follow, stretching its legs and spinning its camera block curiously. The truck was already taking off, its owner evidently uncomfortable with remaining in his proximity. Left with no direction in the bitter evening air, he rubbed his eyes and took a good look around.
They had been dropped off at the edge of an fairly sized market square, almost empty in waning daylight and appearing all the more expansive as a result. Paved with surprisingly fresh grey stone tile, it housed rows upon rows of tin-roof stalls, illuminated by ugly little metal towers crowned with LED rings. Each ended with a little conical tin hat, seemingly the only barrier between the electrics and the elements.
Across this field of sleeping commerce, pulsing orange and white through the gloom, stood the titular Cage - a jagged quartet of pre-Word highrises, once blasted out and crumbling, now haphazardly maintained once more. Chaining them whole was what could only be the corpse of a drakeling. The demi-divine tangle-body looped through wall breaches and empty windows in an absurd cross-stitch, defying time. The whole structure hummed with agitation, movement visible even from afar. So they set off to greet it, circling around the grid of shacks.
Beyond the floodlights, the town was a patchwork of care and decay, clearly still inhabited, but maintained very selectively. Freshly paved roads and squat, clean living blocks stood right next to pre-Word ruins, long bombed-out and overgrown with hibernating plantlife. From a glance, he could not spot any pattern to how the two intermingled, choices seeming completely random.
“Yes, who else could I be talking to? Is this thing a war golem?”
The person below the armored canopy sounded pissed off by habit more than anything, not projecting immediate threat. That job was left to the obvious power imbalance between a mostly unarmored June and the detachment of Cage’s garrison presently filtering the gates.
“Technically not. Complicated to classify,” - he dodged the question, winning himself a bit more time to study the guards’ equipment.
All three’s faces were hidden by dense plating of their pale-marine powersuits, voices oddly featureless. The base machines were quite uniform, all sporting the same kind of round frontshields and squat heavy leg platform, but the choice of arms varied wildly.
“Oh, please, I’m not a spreadsheet warrior,” - the apparent squad leader sighed, spinning a heavy warpick in their gauntlets idly, - “It walks on its own. Does it fight on its own?”
“Yes,” - June admitted after a delay of consideration.
“Can you control it?”
“Well, it’s… I mean. Yes, I can.”
The squad leader turned back to face their subordinates. A quick series of arm gestures was exchanged, inorganic muscles hissing quietly with every move, though June had trouble discerning meaning or tone from them.
The guard standing immediately behind seemed agitated, shuffling in an impatient pose, integrated claws clenching around their own wrist with a scraping sound between jittery gesticulations. The last one of the group hung back, half-hidden in the gloom beneath the great canopy-corpse. Visibly unwilling to engage, they responded with little more than a shrug, before returning to fiddling with the thick steel cable of their unloaded compound ballista. The massive bolts laid carefully spread out on the packed grass next them, likely fashioned from old railroad track pieces.
The conflict seemed to resolve within a minute or two, and the person in charge of the gate turned back to the guest, clearing their throat.
“Fine, we’ll take your word for it. If it does anything stupid, you as its owner will be held responsible. Do I need to explain what ‘an eye for an eye policy’ means?”
June simply shook his head, in response as much as in attempt to stave off exhaustion. Weariness boiled behind his eyes, in his chest, in his stomach, quiet and angry, like a puddle of spilled acid. The ever-deepening reach of the Syllable did not make the feeling any better.
“Good. With that out of the way: welcome to Cast-Iron Cage, the best free trade post south of Tula Sear,” - the surface of indifference was slowly breached by a mote of pride, though also irony, before recomposing again, - “You are free to conduct business in any way you see fit, provided it is fair and does not infringe on others operating here. If you are to report a misdeed or ask for directions, anyone on the clock is all ears,” - their anxious companion turned away in an exaggerated facepalm at that last sentence.
“That is fortunate,” - June smiled, feeling relieved while Shard still scanned the guards with caution, - “Where may I find the enchanter?”
He almost walked back out, thinking the overflowing stall uninhabited, when the enchanter decided to show themselves. Like a moth abandoning its camouflaged position against bark, they fluttered closer between crude shelves packed with summon hearts and antique tables ravaged by solder burns, eyes fixated on the intruder.
“You have a request,” - they half-whispered, craning their clean-shaven head to the side, studying June with a cold curiosity. June did his best to look the enchanter straight in the eye, although the weave of tattoos on their skull was more than a little distracting. Were those meant to be flowers or eyes?
“Correct. A Syllable has tangled itself to me. I need to remove it, quickly.”
“How do you know it was bound?” - the merchant squinted. Their pose remained static, but their very presence catalyzed the air to stir impatient, leaf-like layers of patches composing their cobbled-together robe swaying with its own tempo. Through the haze of pain and sleep deprivation, the person before June blurred into some strange likeness of an anemone.
“I can feel it rifling through my abdomen right now.”
“Are you sure you need another enchanter, then?”
“What? Yes, I am, I have no idea how to talk to these things.”
For a brief second, the enchanter’s eyes widened in surprise. Stochastically organized rows of junk around them hushed with suspicion, empty hearts particularly unfond of Shard trying to peek in through a doorway far too low for its frame. Shard, on the other hand, could not get enough of the strange room, timeless surface of pseudo-metallic dragonbone reverbating under its digits as it shuffled in place, repositioning its eye cluster.
“Odd, yet not objectionable. The service is not free.”
Rather than formulate a response, June figured he would let the demon do the bartering. He squatted down on the floor, bringing briefcase-like heft of the laptop down on venerable parquet with a thud best described as gravely. The machine sprung awake before he finished opening the lid, fans’ unsteady inhale pulling trickles of dust from the air. With three keystrokes and a handle pull, the heart embedded beneath the mainboard clicked into alignment, opening an audio tunnel.
“Moss, do your thing,” - he sighed, sure enough that a demon would be available.
“1c800308c70a1OH0WAITcYOU’REfALREADYcTHERE30???” - interlaced with high-pitched noise, crudely modulated voice screeched into the room. June winced, while the host remained an icon of stoicism. Cacophony was quickly reigned in as the demon took composure, intonation exploding into a familiar human-like palette, - “Mother’s love, I was just taking a nap! Alright, um… Hi?”
Laced with a panicked undercurrent, the demon’s speech was scattered. For another second, this one way too long, the enchanter just squinted suspiciously at the display, making June all too self-conscious of the mess of tabs he’d left for the world to judge.
“Hello,” - they finally let out.
“Hi!” - the demon repeated, overly cheerful for the occasion, - “We talked on XMPP yesterday, I was…”
Her voice briefly dissolved into an onslaught of buzzsaw chords,
cryptographic object channelled into a procedural jingle. Something
beneath the enchanter’s fluffy attire barked mechanically in
affirmation. “MATCH. AISLE. 17.”. The shop’s host nodded,
now paying more attention.
“As we discussed, I can arrange a transaction of 23000 Sister-Rivers eagles, in cash package, and a certain antique. Banknotes will be collected and delivered by courier within, um… Three days, yeah, three days. I hope you took time to review my credentials?”
A new, dreadful tone had began to form underneath June’s diaphragm. He leaned on a nearby cupboard, trying his best not to destabilize it.
“I have, yes,” - the anemone responded, flatly, - “You appear reputable enough.”
No sentence followed. The silence stretched on, spotted with the whirring of fans and chatter several floors below them. Something was not going right.
“So… Do we have a deal?”
A cautious, awkward attempt.
“Normally, my response would be positive. The delay is unwelcome, but I can see the young man needs all the help he can get. However, the tide is falling, and you are proposing to pay in jelly stingers. We are much too close to shore for this, don’t you think?”
The remark was fair, and deeply concerning.
June had wondered much about the odd demon in the last few weeks. He had not considered that she might, perhaps, just be quite bad at the job she was setting out to do.
Something turned in the synthetized dusk. A single mechanical eye of a self-balancing conference camera half-assembled, now pointing at the unfortunate standoff. Then another. The furniture’s whispers were drowned out with something different. Hairs on the back of June’s neck stood up.
“Well… I could make some adjustments?” - the sentence betrayed desperation. Moss had no plan B, - “We could probably get it delivered a day early?”
“You misunderstand. Since 6 hours ago, Cast-Iron Cage no longer deals in SRF currency. The antique you promised is curious, but nowhere near valuable enough.”
Something else was participating now. June could feel it. The enchanter could feel it. Shard, beyond the draped doors, could feel it. June wanted to cry out, interrupting the demon’s decoherence, draw attention to it.
It acted before he could, bursting through Moss’ struggle, annexing the tunnel.
“There is a new offer,” - said a familiar voice with peculiar inflection. Leo’s likeness was lively yet utterly inhuman, sounding how June imagined Shard would speak if it cared to use more than a motherboard beeper, - “5 hours of footage from a recent house party at residence of a certain Alexander Anchorhand. Archive’s Riverhome signature…” - another distinct hash-melody in simple sinewave soundfont. Another affirmation from the enchanter’s unseen helper, - “Riverhome will release the data in december. Until then, you will be free to do with the information as you see fit.”
“Love? What are you-”
June’s confused inquiry was ignored entirely. The presence was almost strong enough to send violent little arcs jumping between the terrified objects filling the space. Somehow, proxy-lag between June and Shard was growing stronger again, mech’s antenna-bristles almost piercing their way out of the human’s neck. Even the enchanter failed to appear unperturbed.
“That is certainly… Promising, if true. Who might you be?..”
No identity chime followed.
“The package will be delivered to your gateway as soon as you open 19271 for SFTP. Verify at your leisure. Do you find the terms acceptable?”
The room’s many eyes converged on the merchant. Getting as close to breaking a sweat as June could ever imagine them being, the strange person rifled through something on a worn tablet. The tablet chirped and barked, lighting up their face.
“I do.”
Ural Mindworks GRANITE-12 let out a quiet click again, spring-loaded heart snapping into off state deep in its bowels, breaking the summon circuit. The three were alone again, spare for the still-shivering cupboards.
The humans blinked at each other in equal disbelief for a minute, while the machine lost interest quickly, returning to watching night mist swirl in the central well of the Cage, filtered between innumerable loops of the hallowed body and scarred walls of rejuvenated apartment towers. Each arc and bend of the beast was both a structural component keeping the stories upright and a base of a skywalk between buildings. Though they could not see the drakeling’s head from indoors, its benevolent proximity was still unmistakable, once again undisputed and soothing.
“Well… Let’s get those hooks pulled out of you,” - the enchanter smiled, finally, and waved June along into a room deeper in.