Abbee grabbed the lamp off the chair and hurled it toward the open front door of her apartment. Toward the floor. She needed a diversion. A splash of fire to create a space between her and the hunters. Something dramatic. If she was lucky, Abbee might spoil their night vision.

The lamp bounced off the balcony floor with a dull clunk. It careened through the open railing. No explosion. No fire.

Abbee hoped that wasn’t a sign of how this chase was going to go. She dashed to the corner of the room and yanked her cot away from the wall. She jumped over it and tipped it upward. Turned and felt for the right spot with her hands. The pin, the pin. There. She kicked it with her foot. Abbee heard the scrape of metal on metal. Another kick, and the pin flew free. The floorboard dropped away, swinging on a hinge.

Footsteps on the balcony landing.

Abbee dropped through the opening. She heard the clack-clack-clack of a repeating bolt thrower, and thuds into the wall above her head. She fell five meters straight down. Abbee tried to time it right. Knees bent, fold, and roll, like she’d practiced. She’d never practiced at night. She’d just looked at a bright oil lamp. Abbee couldn’t see the ground in the dark.

Her toes hit first. She absorbed the impact through her legs and tucked, falling into a roll. Escaped the roll and surged forward. Abbee didn’t have time to congratulate herself on landing without breaking an ankle. She had to get clear. The Brakes were across an open field and up a hill. Too far in the moonlight. Too risky. She sprinted away from the escape hatch toward the next warehouse. Deeper into the quarry. That was risky too. I can’t be seen.

Clack-clack-clack.

Thumps into the ground where she’d stood. Abbee poured on the speed. Ahead of her, she saw the slate berm. She didn’t hesitate. Ran right across it, her boot heels slamming against hard stone. She had no choice.

Abbee got to the next warehouse. She turned the corner and looked back. Didn’t see the hunters. She guessed they’d stopped to examine Ipsu’s body. Maybe Ipsu had been wrong, and the hunters wouldn’t risk following her. Abbee knew she was fooling herself. They’d follow.

The quarry ran all day and half the night. Days were busiest. Night shift was light duty, a skeleton crew compared to the hundreds of people swarming the quarry during the day. The night crew moved material around the processing plant, filled water barrels, staged the carts used for hauling stone up the ramps, and positioned golems in the next day’s digging areas. The night shift would be done in a couple of hours. Abbee didn’t want to endanger the quarry workers by bringing the hunters closer, but New Bend was too far away across open ground. The moon was bright tonight. She couldn’t risk being seen. Couldn’t risk a mover getting line of sight on her.

Abbee spotted a golem standing motionless about a hundred meters away. It was huge. She felt awe every time she saw one of these things, and she saw them a lot. The golem faced away from her. On its back, two big barrels hung on top of one another like a backpack. Each barrel was two meters tall, a supersized version of the beer barrels Karl rolled around inside the Iron Bull.

No light. No pilot. Both the golem and its light turned on when a pilot sat in the cockpit. Pilots brought up the oil for the lights every shift. The lights indicated water levels in a golem’s barrels. Green meant the top barrel had water in it, yellow meant the top barrel was empty, and a golem with a red light was running on drops or empty. A moving golem with no light was as dangerous as a red light. The quarry had spotters, whose only job was to watch the lights.

The night shift crew hadn’t yet moved this golem. Abbee beelined for it.

The repeating bolt thrower was worrying. Abbee hadn’t seen one of those before, only heard about them. Heard about the sound they made, the clack-clack-clack. Rarer than red blades, these bolt throwers were carried only by a few hunters. Senior hunters. The ones with the most kills. The upside Abbee saw was that a mover wouldn’t need a bolt thrower.

Abbee reached the golem. Metal bands surrounded its left leg and back. Rungs bolted to the bands provided a way up to the cockpit in the golem’s head. She jumped onto the rungs and climbed. Scampered up the golem’s leg to its back. Abbee pressed herself into a shadow behind the barrels. Spared a glance for her pursuers.

Two figures rounded the corner of the warehouse. In the moonlight, she saw leather armor and helmets. Sword hilts poked up over their shoulders. They looked like House soldiers. Surviving artifact chips were rare, but the armor had defensive enchantments on the plating that lasted forever unless damaged. They each had a long metal box on one forearm. The repeating bolt throwers.

Abbee froze. Maybe they wouldn’t see her.

One hunter looked toward the processing plant. Turned their head and scanned the open field. Looked right at the golem. Abbee didn’t move. The hunter pointed at her. Both sprinted for the golem.

Abbee yelped and scrambled up the golem’s back. This was bad. The hunter who’d pointed had barely glanced at the golem. They hadn’t stopped to make a decision about what was more likely, that she had run for the processing plant, fled across the field, or gone to the golem. The hunter had known right where Abbee was. That hunter saw in the dark, or they were a telepath.

Both were bad. A telepath was the worst. Abbee couldn’t hide from a telepath. She wasn’t Ipsu. Wasn’t a refractor. She couldn’t block a telepath from her mind. They might be rummaging around in her head right now, and she’d not know. Abbee couldn’t run. She had to fight.

She reached the small platform at the base of the golem’s head. A metal band sat on the golem’s head like a circlet. Accessing a golem’s cockpit used to take two people pressing spots on either side of the hatch. The pilots had worked out a way for one person to activate the lock. The locking mechanism was attached to the circlet, along with a tall metal pole with the water level light on it. Abbee slapped her hand against the lock mechanism. Two padded prongs banged into smooth spots on either side of the golem’s head. A bright line snaked up and around in the shape of a rectangular door. The line connected back at its start, and the door slid to the side, revealing a smooth leather chair inside the cockpit. Metal arms with smooth black handles at each side.

This was beyond dangerous. Besides the dangers of the golem itself, entering a golem cockpit without a Golem Guild membership was a capital offense. If a House soldier saw her doing this, they’d execute her on the spot. She spared one more glance behind her. The hunters were coming, sprinting across the field.

Abbee squeezed around and plopped into the seat. She rested her hands on the smooth handles, like gripping broom handles. Abbee pulled the handles toward herself. The hatch slid closed. Leather bands wrapped around Abbee’s chest, hips, and each of her legs. The chair pushed her up into a standing position and ensconced her in the golem’s driving harness. A sliding pad appeared through the floor under her feet. It gave the pilot the sense that they were walking across a floor. Abbee assumed it worked like a belt drive, like the leather ones she had seen once in a sawmill.

Golems didn’t have faces. No eyes, nose, or mouth. A smooth surface where a face would be. The cockpit’s front wall was the same, but as soon as Abbee activated the chair, a view of the outside appeared on the wall. Abbee saw the field in front of her and the processing plant in the distance.

As the golem sprang to life, Abbee realized that she hadn’t checked the barrels. She had no idea if they were empty. She hoped she didn’t go the way of Alize Trei and turn into an old woman or, worse, a desiccated corpse. Something tickled her wrists. She looked down and saw mote sifting down onto the floor. She had no idea why she was emitting mote. She wasn’t injured.

Pressure squeezed her all over. Felt like getting swaddled in a big blanket. It wasn’t painful, but Abbee didn’t know what it was. Terror flashed through her. Was the golem taking life from her? No, couldn’t be. That was a pull. A tug on the spirit, people said. Some survivors of Towerfall had escaped the golems. Gotten too close but managed to get away before they had been killed. The ones who had all said it was a tug. Like something was yanking your energy away.

Abbee felt no tug. Only pressure.

She turned in her harness. Felt the golem turn beneath her. It was surprisingly quiet inside the cockpit, given how big a golem was and how much noise it made as it moved. The view slid to the left, revealing the warehouse and the hunters.

Both hunters had slid to a stop. They stumbled and sprawled on the ground. Abbee didn’t understand. She hadn’t touched either of them. She stepped forward on the strange moving pad. The golem took a ponderous step. She leaned forward a little and saw the two hunters. They’d collapsed. They weren’t moving. A steady stream of mote fell from her wrists. A lot of it. She only produced this much mote when she healed mortal injuries. Abbee had no idea why it was happening, but she wanted it to be over.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

She drove the golem forward and stepped on both hunters with one giant foot.

Abbee brought her other foot forward, and as soon as the golem returned to a standing position, she let go of both handles. The driving harness released her body. Reconfigured back down into a plain leather chair. The sliding pad disappeared beneath a metal plate at her feet. All at once the pressure left her, and the tickle on her wrists went away. Abbee jumped up out of the chair like jumping away from a striking snake.

The hatch slid back and revealed the night sky. A breeze ruffled her hair and stirred the mote on the floor. Abbee climbed past the chair and escaped the cockpit. She sucked in cool night air and let out an explosive breath. She felt her face, searching for withered skin. Checked her hands. No signs of advanced age. She’d never seen anyone who had come out of a golem older, but she’d heard the stories. Heard about what had happened to Alize. Abbee felt the same as when she’d gone into the golem. An itch spread across her wrists. Except for the mote. She rubbed her arms on her trousers. She’d have to wash her hands to get it all off.

Abbee climbed down the metal rungs and hopped off the golem, happy to get back on the ground. She walked past the golem’s foot. It was almost as tall as she was. An arm stuck out from underneath it, pressed into the dirt and bloody on one end. The arm had a repeater bolt thrower on it. Abbee hesitated. She wanted to take it. She couldn’t leave it here, but having it would get her into deadly trouble. Abbee reminded herself that she was already in a great deal of deadly trouble, and a little more wouldn’t matter.

She bent down and loosened the straps underneath the floppy arm. She pulled the bolt thrower off, careful to point it away from herself. As she was looting the arm, she felt a tug of regret that she’d covered the hunters with the golem. She’d never find out what other goodies they’d been carrying. Maybe she could’ve gotten a red blade out of this deal too.

The bolt thrower was a long, lightweight box made from dark gray metal. It had an ominous hole at one end. Abbee fought down the impulse to stick her finger in it. There didn’t seem to be any way to disassemble it. No pins, nails, or straps holding the box together. It looked too small to propel anything bigger than a pea, but Abbee knew the device shot small, heavy bolts with as much force as a normal crossbow. All she had to do was strap the thing on her arm and think about shooting someone with it, and it would oblige. The weapon never needed reloading. As far as Abbee was aware, nobody knew where the bolts came from.

“Oi!”

Abbee looked up. A man in overalls and a bright vest crossed the field toward her. A quarry spotter. He must have been in the nest atop the nearest warehouse, in the cupola. Abbee hadn’t realized someone had been up there. She swore. She wasn’t supposed to be on this side of the berm, and she definitely wasn’t supposed to drive a golem. Abbee didn’t need a witness telling anyone what had happened to the hunters.

She opened Ipsu’s satchel. Abbee couldn’t see its contents very well in the moonlight, and she didn’t have time to search it. She shoved the bolt thrower inside, closed the flap, and dropped the satchel on the ground on top of the arm, obscuring it from view. She stepped in front of the rest. Maybe the spotter had only seen her drive the golem before he’d come down from the cupola. It took a minute or so to climb down the ladder, run across the catwalk, and dismount the raised platform in the back. Maybe he hadn’t seen her step on the hunters.

The man crossed the field with urgency in his steps.

“Are you okay?” His voice sounded familiar, and as he got closer, Abbee recognized him in the moonlight. Lem Peytersen. She made a point of knowing every quarry worker’s name. As many as she could, without asking them directly. There was power in names.

Lem’s eyebrows went up, and he slowed, half-turning as if his legs hadn’t caught up with his brain’s insistence that he be somewhere else. Abbee assumed he’d recognized her. Everyone in the quarry gave her a wide berth.

“I … uh, I was just—” Lem frowned. “You know you’re inside the berm, right? Are you okay? You look okay, but—”

“I’m fine,” Abbee said. “Why?”

Lem pointed up at the golem. “That thing’s empty.”

Abbee glanced at the barrels on the golem’s back. “Must have had a little splash left.”

“You don’t get it,” Lem said. “Myles ran it down again. Third time this month. Got his pay docked for doing it. There ain’t a drop in those barrels.”

Abbee realized what he was saying. Realized why the hunters had staggered. Why it had been so easy to kill them. The golem had been sucking the life from them. She felt sick. “That’s a dry golem?”

“Yeah,” Lem said, nodding. “Bone-dry.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Abbee said. She wasn’t a refractor. She was a healer. A backward, broken healer that nobody had ever seen before, but a healer. If the golem had been dry, she’d have felt its pull. Not a pressing, like someone had squeezed her with a blanket all over her body. “I didn’t feel anything. No tug, no pull.”

“You wouldn’t,” Lem said. “That’s not how it works for the pilot. Did you feel happy? Strong? Like you could conquer the world while you were in there?”

“Conquer the world?”

Lem squinted at her. “You didn’t feel happy? Like it was the best thing in the world?”

“You make it sound like jaara dust.”

“It’s better than jaara dust,” Lem said, “or so I’ve been told. I’ve not done neither—dust or driving. But if you’re not a refractor, happiness is what happens to you when you drive a golem. It’s not common knowledge, because they don’t want people to know there’s a bigger high than jaara dust. We’d have all sorts of idiots in here.”

Abbee fixed him with a steady stare. “Explain.”

Lem swallowed. “I didn’t mean … uh, okay. The university did tests back when Alize Trei found out how to drive the things. On the quiet, but they did tests. Ever wonder why golems are out here in the quarry? This is where they did the tests. They had people drive one at the bottom of the quarry. Figured out it could cut and haul rock. They also figured out that regular drivers feel euphoric. They feel invincible. They feel great. The golem is eating them, and they feel amazing. Alize was a dry corpse when they found her, but they said she had a smile on her face. She died happy. A big fat grin.”

Abbee hadn’t felt anything like that. Maybe she hadn’t driven the golem long enough. She’d only been in the pilot’s chair a couple of minutes. A little voice in the back of her head said that had been plenty long. Something else had happened to her in there. The mote. The pressure. She wasn’t a refractor, and she hadn’t felt any euphoria. Something else was going on.

Something … something not right.

Abbee felt a growing pit in her stomach. She blinked. Focused on her breath. On her pulse.

Inhale. Exhale. Slow.

The pit faded. She didn’t need to panic on top of all her other problems.

“You felt it, then, right?” Lem asked.

Abbee’s mind raced. As soon as someone moved the golem, they’d find two flattened wizard hunters. A new story would spread like wildfire. A story Abbee didn’t need or want. The Butcher of Graywall had driven a dry golem and stepped on two wizard hunters. How had that happened? What had the hunters been after? They’d think it was her. That they’d been after Abbee for some reason. The theories around that would be intense. More hunters would come after her. Hunters were relentless. Abbee thought about Ipsu’s body in her apartment. What had he gotten her into? She wondered what was in the satchel at her feet. Wondered if anything in it might tell her what had happened to Ipsu, and why two hunters had been chasing him.

Abbee had to deal with this mess first. She’d have to move the golem and uncover the hunters’ bodies. Dump them somewhere. She’d need a cart or a horse or some other way to carry them. Not to mention Ipsu’s dead body, bleeding all over her apartment floor. The hunters would be missed. Someone would come looking. Abbee had to get rid of them all and deflect attention away from the quarry. Erase the hunters. Erase Ipsu. And after all the erasing was done, she’d have to erase Lem.

“Your name’s Lem, right?” Abbee asked.

Lem frowned. “Yeah. Why do you ask?”

Abbee bent down and retrieved the satchel. She put it on her back and moved away from the golem’s foot.

Lem glanced down. Did a double take. “Is … is that an arm?” He leaned forward. “That armor … Wait, did you step on a House soldier?”

“You saw me drive a golem tonight, Lem,” Abbee said, “and it would be better if you hadn’t. So you’re going to help make this go away. And when you’re done, you’re not going to say anything about it. To anyone. Ever. Do you understand?”

Lem’s eyes widened in panic. “You … you stepped on a House soldier with a quarry golem. This is bad. Oh, this is bad, this is bad, this is bad. We’re buggered. We’ll have the House soldiers crawling all over this place, and they’ll find—” Lem stopped. Closed his mouth. His eyes darted back and forth.

Abbee hadn’t realized Lem was in on that, but she jumped on the leverage he’d handed to her. “You mean they’ll find out about the smuggling going on in the slate roofing tiles? Yes, I know about that. And yes, you’re right. It’ll be a true shame if they discover you took a joy ride in a golem and killed two people. Brought the wrong attention to the quarry.”

“Me?” Lem said. “That was—”

“Who do you think watches the quarry, Lem?” Abbee asked. “Makes sure everything is ticked and tied?” She didn’t, and that wasn’t why she had an apartment in a quarry warehouse. But Lem didn’t know that. “Whose story will be taken as truth? Yours or mine?”

Lem’s face said he knew who was on the bottom of that totem pole. He swore. “I can go get some extra help to—”

“No extra help,” Abbee said. “Just you.” She glanced down at the arm. “Well, if you could find a wheelbarrow, that’ll make things easier.”

Lem gestured at the warehouse. “There’s one in there. For cleaning up busted tiles.”

“Good. Go get it. And find some water. I need you to move the golem.”

“Regulations say we need—”

“Hey.”

Abbee looked past the golem’s foot, toward the quarry proper. She saw several workers approaching from the other end of the yard. Shades in the moonlight. Six of them. Seven. Too many to threaten. Too many to fight. The one in the middle was shorter and wider than the rest. Abbee recognized him in the dark. Davo Bremmer, the night foreman. Abbee swore. Davo knew Abbee wasn’t in on the smuggling ring, because he ran it.

Abbee sprinted away from Lem and the stationary golem. She kept the golem between her and Davo for as long as possible. She wished she’d had a moonless night. Not much to hide behind out here. She looked back. A few shadows stood on the berm. She’d covered about a hundred meters. Another hundred, and Abbee looked again. The workers on the berm weren’t following. Abbee slowed to a stop. She knew Davo was questioning Lem. Finding out everything. The upside to Davo finding the dead hunters was that he wouldn’t welcome any interest in the quarry either. He’d move the bodies.

Abbee looked across the yard at the warehouse with her apartment in it. She thought about Ipsu sprawled on her floor. Going back was impossible. Davo’s men would see her and intercept her. There were too many to fight. Abbee touched the satchel on her back. She needed a place to lie low for the night. She couldn’t stay in the Brakes, nor New Bend. Davo would look for her, and Davo had more friends in New Bend’s gangs than she did. That meant the city proper. Abbee thought about holing up at Whimsy’s house. Discarded the idea. She didn’t want to draw any trouble to Whimsy. Plus the last time they’d talked hadn’t ended exactly cordially. Abbee knew of a place she could use in a pinch. Just had to get to it.