And I didn’t think I would, even if I hacked it to pieces.
The constructs were like guns or tanks—they were tools, the fey version of machinery, not living beings. They didn’t care who used them; they didn’t care about anything. If I could figure out how they worked—
Well, maybe we’d stand a chance.
And the thing was, I’d done something like this once before, when Billy and I hijacked that golem. The clay warriors that rabbis had once made to protect their communities had been repurposed by modern mages into a combo of servant and pack mule. Only the one we’d found had been abandoned after its demon fled, rendering it a lifeless clay husk with no one home anymore.
We’d needed a tank to absorb some damage on a mission, and knew that it would do perfectly, if we could only figure out how to make it work. In the end, Billy had done the honors, taking the place of the demon, and had driven the golem around like a car. Because that’s all the creatures were: a vehicle for
the spirit trapped inside.
But they hadn’t been the original lifeless servants, had they?
Long before golems were invented, necromancers had been making their own version by binding a bit of their souls into dead bodies to reanimate them. That’s what necromancy was: the ability to use your soul as a conduit for power, allowing you to possesses and then control something else. But Rabbis hadn’t had necromancy, so they’d had to find a workaround, and it looked like the fey had done the same.
But they hadn’t used the same one.
Come on, think, Cassie! It was really hard under the circumstances, but I knew one thing: the fey hadn’t used a soul. The fey didn’t have those, or if they did, they were very different form the Earth variety. They didn’t leave ghosts, and if they could shed their skins and move around, doing possessions and the like, I’d never heard of it. And until recently, after Jonathan gave them the idea, they hadn’t used demon souls in their creatures, either.
So, what the hell was in there?
I peered at the manlikan, who looked placidly back. It gave off a weirdly Zen vibe for something that could hack its way through half an army. Like a giant reclining Buddha, watching the stupid humans and fey savage each other.
And like the enigmatic Buddha, it wasn’t giving anything away.
I reached out with a bit of power, not the Pythian variety, but mine, the necromancy that I rarely used because dead bodies skeeved me out. Not much of it, barely any at all, because I wasn’t trying to animate the thing. I just wanted to see what was inside that shaggy head.
And, suddenly, I was.
The world skewed, my perspective shifted and stayed the same simultaneously, and I suddenly had the very weird experience of looking at myself through two sets of eyes.
I saw a bedraggled, wet, freaked-out woman in a muddy bathrobe. I saw a manlikan that must have been sourced from the upper reaches of a mountain, because he had a beard made out of icicles. They had formed on some kind of moss or other vegetation, I couldn’t tell, but it was loose enough that they chimed together as it jerked its head in shock.
Because I just had.
For a moment, we simply looked at each other.
Okay, I thought. All right. What . . . what now?
Bathrobe Cassie did not appear to know. Bathrobe Cassie looked like she’d like to pass out. Go ahead; you’ll wake up dead, I told her viciously, and lumbered to my feet.
And, suddenly, I didn’t have to wonder how the fey did this anymore. It wasn’t necromancy. It was something far more . . . elemental.
I could feel it, the solidity of the earth under my feet, only it felt like it extended up through my feet, as if I had roots instead of toes, digging deep. I was connected with everything: the distant mountains, which I could hear as deep kettledrums, a barely-there rumble, but reassuring, known. The ground underneath me was a closer, clearer thrum, like a giant heart beating once every year or so, but with reverberations that I could feel even now. The artificial mountains of the city were sharper still, a bright glissando of bells instead of a drum, but somehow superficial. An ant hill that time would wear away as it did all things.
Except for earth. Earth was eternal, its song dark and deep and strong and true. Earth was what formed me, animated me, and would one day reclaim me.
Earth was me and I was earth.
I came back to myself slowly, blinking, but also certain that the fey used the same elemental magic to control the beasts that they did to create them. They sent some of their earth magic into the creatures, infusing them with their power, and binding the two of them together as I just had. Only that was the part that still confused me, because I had necromancy, but I didn’t have elemental magic, not of any kind.
But Pritkin did, I realized.
To be precise, he had all four elements, although—as luck would have it—earth was his least favorite. But it seemed to be working—at least for now. I decided to test a theory, picked up an Ancient Horror, a slimy, multitailed, squid-like creature, and ripped it in half.
It was so easy that I did it again, and again, clearing off a patch of the shield. My double vision was currently skewed a lot, because I was something like fifteen stories high now. And looking down on the tiny ward that was so thin by now that I could see every terrified face inside.
Including Pritkin’s.