Bayne

For the tenth time that day, Bayne lamented not having an assistant—someone to whom he could shout the names of tools so that those tools could appear in his hand a moment later. It couldn’t be just any assistant either. The Dwarf would have to be sharp as a freshly honed blade, quiet as the deepest cave, and shorter than him—definitely shorter than him. Once these young dwarves grew an acorn over raccoon height, they started to think far too highly of themselves.

Oh, and his assistant could be good at making sandwiches, too. But that would be a bonus, not a necessity.

He rummaged in his leather bag for the right size spanner. His new power generator was almost finished, and he was sure it was going to work. The gems they normally used to power devices that weren’t linked to the geothermal grid weren’t powerful enough for his needs, but he’d done some gem-grafting to boost the energetic capabilities of quartz. He giggled to himself as he fit the device into the headlamp on his cluttered desk. He’d torn the wires out and left only one filament in place. So far, no gem had been able to power the bulb through one filament, but if he was right, this one would.

Bayne flicked the switch and the bulb came to life, bathing the workshop in a bright white light.

“Ruby’s glory, aye!” He kicked his heels up in a celebratory dance. Screwing the housing closed and fitting the headlamp over his carrot-colored curls, he adjusted the trajectory of the light and whipped his head from side to side, up and down. The light followed and did not falter.

For the eleventh time that day, he wished he had an assistant, this time just to celebrate with.

But lighting a headlamp was only the beginning. Bayne had bigger plans for the generator.

He foraged through his belongings, loading the tools he needed into his leather satchel. When he’d finished, he tugged on a string, peeling away a leather flap in the stone ceiling that covered the long vertical tunnel which cut through the rock to the surface. Sunlight dropped into the room, pooling in a circle on his countertop. He nudged a pot full of herbs into it, pinched some basil leaves free, and added them to a loaf of black bread and the chunk of sharp cheese in his bag. An engineer’s work was best done on a full stomach.

Just as he was about to leave, his chatter transceiver came to life.

“Bayne, this is Orin, are ye there?”

Bayne turned the dial at his shoulder. “I’m here.”

“Haven’t seen any updates on the Melog Project.” Orin’s voice crackled through the device, amplified and redirected by strategically placed crystals throughout the mountain labyrinth. “According to the notes, it’s been seven days with no progress.”

“No updates doesn’t mean no progress,” Bayne replied in an even voice. An itch deep inside him begged him to announce his success with the quartz generator. But a bigger part of him wanted to wait until he could do more with the discovery.

“If ye even wipe the dust off that thing, I should see it in the notes!” Orin barked. “I can get ye an assistant if need be. Should I get ye an assistant?”

“I don’t want an assistant,” Bayne growled. He was sure Orin would choose the wrong Dwarf. Probably Truebeard. Or Plathe. What a cave-in that would be.

“Watch yer attitude, Bayne.”

He wiped his short red beard. He’d been given that advice so many times and yet he still didn’t know what it meant.

“I’ll update the notes,” Bayne said carefully.

“Be sure ye do!”

The Silverkeep Conclave governed itself as a democracy, but Orin ran the engineers like an autocrat, and Bayne was never sure how to make the Dwarf happy. In a perfect world, he’d never need to talk to Orin, or anyone else for that matter. He could just work in silence with his tools, his machines, and his gems. Bayne gathered his things and shut the door behind him.

In the tunnels, he kissed his red-ringed fingers and touched them absently to the ruby mosaics inset in the walls on each level as he ascended, ignoring the emerald and diamond ones. The air up here was warmer and thicker, smelling of vegetation since the mountain was largely earth in this region rather than stone. Bayne did not like the feeling of being so close to the surface, but work was work. He veered away from the exits that led to open pastures, trees, and farmland, opting instead for the dark, shallow, mineral-scented corridors dug poorly and without care, unadorned by deities, with only the occasional splash of orange light from a sodium lamp. At the end of one such tunnel, Bayne punched in the code on the lock and pushed open a great iron door. He looked up at his greatest achievement—the Melog Project.

Bayne thought spelling it backwards was a silly way to disguise what it truly was—a Golem.

It had taken the drillers moons to carve a chamber large enough to house the enormous Dwarf-shaped machine. His headlamp shone off its yellow breastplate, fashioned from hammered brass and fortified with steel alloy. The legs and arms were hydraulic. Its head was like a great Elemental head, but made of metal instead of stone. Bayne had replaced the broken eye-bulbs with red glass—a tribute to his favored deity. When it awoke, the Melog’s eyes would burn like hot coals.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

He pulled off his boots and wool socks, wriggling his naked toes, then adjusted the satchel around his body as he began the arduous climb up the rungs along its side. He tried not to look at how far there was to fall as he folded himself inside the metal ribs of the contraption. This was where having an assistant would truly make a difference because Bayne couldn’t be outside the golem, working on it, and inside the golem, testing it, at the same time.

If life had unraveled differently, Bayne wouldn’t be working on this project alone. Dayne would still be here. His son would be his assistant, and Bayne would teach him everything an engineer should know, and more. The fact that Dayne didn’t live with him anymore and hadn’t since he was a baby was Bayne’s choice—an engineer couldn’t raise an infant alone. Although now, fifteen rotations later, when he realized he wouldn’t recognize his son were he to run into him in a corridor, Bayne sometimes wondered if he’d made a mistake.

But there was no use ruminating on it when he had a boss breathing down his neck and work to do.

Beside him, the great circular nest of gears, hydraulic pumps, and valves was a thing of beauty. All the golem’s mechanical pieces worked even though the thing had been constructed centuries ago by the Dwarves of old. And he’d tightened the hydraulics so the liquid and parts behaved more like an orchestra than a closed system. A well-trained driver would easily be able to control the movements of the machine’s arms, legs, and hands. But it was too big, too heavy to manage without electrical support, and it was of no use with a power cord. Batteries didn’t last long enough and solar wasn’t a good option since the machines were kept underground, although Bayne had to assume they’d see the sun at some point. But the generator he’d developed had lit his headlamp with no need of the Dwarves’ electrical grid nor energy storage. And the best part—the quartz power system he’d built inside the golem worked in series, so as long as he got one generator going, it would spark the others to life.

And he had gotten it working. The light in his headlamp still gleamed.

Bayne queued up all the systems inside the golem and confirmed locomotion was disengaged. The last thing he needed was for the thing to barrel its way unchecked through the earthen walls into the outdoors where Imperials could see it. Even he didn’t need Orin to tell him that would be a bad thing.

With giddy excitement, Bayne swung himself out of the cockpit and let his toes find the narrow rail of metal curving round to the machine’s chestplate where the power generators were housed. With his first ginger step, he knew it was a mistake to do this without safety equipment, and he’d left all that down on the ground. He hesitated. The smart thing would be to pause the work to go back down and collect the leather shoulder harness and clip since he didn’t have an assistant to fetch it. But he was too excited to delay the test any longer, so he simply inched his way around the rail on the front of the giant, his ruby-tattooed fingers clinging to gaps in the casing with the confidence and precision of a Dwarf who knew his craft and said his prayers.

He hooked his elbow into a strategically placed bar before pulling open the intricate housing mechanism. The quartz generators were lined up inside, ten by ten, like blocks of ice enhanced with robotic parts—jewelry for a machine king. Bayne reached up to open the headlamp. He did not need his eyes; his fingers knew what to do. In the block of generators, one slot was empty. He pressed the generator into the open space and, one-handed, linked it to its companions with practiced precision. This was the moment he’d been working towards. When he pulled his hand free, he didn’t even realize he was holding his breath.

The generator lay still and silent, and Bayne’s heart sank as the seconds ticked by. But then the quartz generator lit up, and the others around it jumped to life one by one. The machine hummed as its gears began to spin and its hydraulic pumps took their first breath. Bayne gasped with thrill, relief, and something he couldn’t name. Something close to pride, but different. Pride was about what others thought of you. This feeling was enormous and unbreakable and private. A feeling that had nothing to do with anyone else—it was just for him.

Then the generators shut down, all at once.

“No!” Bayne struck the housing with his fist—a useless, childish gesture unbefitting an engineer of his caliber, but he didn’t care. He waited, ruby-stained knuckle pressed to his lips as he whispered a prayer. But the lights did not come back on.

It simply wasn’t powerful enough to sustain a machine of this size—that was the unpleasant truth of it. Bayne uncoupled the generator and tucked it under his short beard, clamping it with his chin as he made his way back across the narrow metal rail. He’d have to go back to his workshop and try again. Update the notes while he was at it. That would keep Orin off his back while he figured out how to boost the generator’s capacity.

His bare toes were the first to register the trembling. He thought he was imagining it. Then the entire golem began to shudder. This was a quake! He ducked as a chunk of earth dislodged from the ceiling and plummeted to the chamber floor. A glimmer of purple shone in the black dirt.

Looking down was not a good idea. The machine rocked as he gripped the handholds and fought to keep his toes from slipping off the narrow rail. He shouldn’t have skipped the safety equipment! That had been a terrible idea. The cavern walls rocked and swam around him, and he squeezed his eyes closed. If he could just hold on, soon it would be over.

But it wasn’t soon over. The machine rocked harder. Both of Bayne’s feet slipped off the ledge, and he gasped as all his weight was transferred to his sweating fingers. His precious power generator slipped free from beneath his beard and hit the stone floor with a sickening crack.

Shaking, Bayne worked his knee up to the ledge, but he felt like an insect on a patch of ice. Dirt rained down on him from above. He stared into the dead eyes of his creation. He had come so close.

His fingers were slipping off the narrow handholds, and he was too far away from both the rock ledge on his left and the safety bar on his right. He could throw himself toward one or the other, but his odds weren’t good either way. He was an engineer, and calculations came easily. He was going to fall, and when he did, he was going to break both his legs. Or worse.

Well, at least he’d get to see Ruthie again.

Something clocked him on the head, not a chunk of earth or grass. Something hard. Bayne squinted at the purple gem that had bounced off his skull into a gap in the golem’s carapace, lodging itself between a hydraulic tube and the golem’s metal skeleton. It glowed like a distant planet glimpsed through a Sky Engineer’s telescope.

The golem shuddered. A motor purred to life. Then another. And another. The hydraulic system gulped and hissed.

One of Bayne’s hands slipped off the metal rail.

I’ve had a good life, praise the Rubies, he thought, raising his gaze skyward one final time.

Two glowing red golem eyes gazed back right before his hand slipped off the rail.