As a child, Rann had loved his mother’s bedtime stories, the folktales she had learned growing up in the villages of the windblown western steppes. Stories of shapeshifting tricksters and starcrossed lovers, hermit sorcerors and eagle-eyed hunters. He had thrilled at the names of the old heroes, and hated the demonic villains with a child’s earnest fury.

Some stories, though, had simply terrified him, leaving him sleepless and trembling in the darkness for hours. Those had been the tales of monsters, and the western steppes had no shortage of those. Flesh-eating hags, demon wolves, revenants that drowned wicked children in pools of ichor. Worst of all were the stone-skinned giants, who slept for a thousand years until moss grew on them like a green cloak, only to wake in a sudden mindless fury and tear whole villages apart. In his recurring boyhood nightmares, one of those giants would sweep away the roof of his little house in an explosion of shattered wood and clay, and reach inside to rip him from his bed.

His mother was ten years dead now, taken by a winter pneumonia. But it was her hushed voice that came to mind when he saw what was in the chamber.

An army of colossal grey figures stood row on row in the dim light. They were spaced around twenty yards apart from one another, rank following rank into the far distance, where the shadows swallowed them. Their numbers were hard to gauge. To Rann’s eyes, there looked to be hundreds, at the very least. A sudden, jarring vertigo stole over him as he registered their size, their dreadful reality.

They stood easily forty feet tall, straight-backed, their massive arms slack at their sides. Their slate-grey skin had a dull gloss to it, similar to the black structural material, more like abraded stone than metal. Their long limbs were flawlessly smooth, almost aerodynamic, but mountainous in their thickness and solidity. Their joints merged seamlessly with their immense torsos as though sculpted from flowing magma. Between their hulking shoulders, their heads were angular, eyeless things like blunt beaks or hatchet blades, rising hideously out of their great necks. Their huge hands – six-fingered, Rann noticed – were curled into sledgehammer fists. Double-jointed legs ended in splayed clawlike feet. Their stance somehow gave a sense of both gigantic, immovable weight, and of patient, controlled readiness.

The Salvator equipment arrayed near the cavern’s entrance looked pitifully crude by comparison. Several of the nearest giants were festooned with thick bunches of cables that wrapped them like creeper vines, and ringed with kinegraph cameras and dead spotlights on steel stands. Squat boxy machines were lined up in front of them, covered in brass switches and dials, linked by snaking cables of their own. Rann recognised them as analytical engines, similar to the codebreaker he’d seen in the encampment. Thick sheafs of inkstained papers were piled on low metal tables next to them, along with slide rules and cases of bulbous vacuum tubes. Overturned folding chairs and dropped ceramic mugs lay strewn on the floor. The Salv scientists had evidently abandoned this place in a hurry.

Had they fled in fear of the approaching army, or of the monsters they studied?

“He Above,” Iva breathed, as she took in the sight.

“Not He,” the prisoner said. He laughed; a hateful, manic sound. “They. They Above.”

“Shut it,” Wace grunted, shoving him hard with the muzzle of his rifle. The man flinched, then laughed again. He turned and fixed Rann with dark bloodshot eyes.

“They are up there, heretic. They are waiting for us to return to them. This world is nothing. A speck of dust. It was never our home.”

“I said shut your fucking mouth,” Wace snarled, brandishing his rifle for another jab, but Rann raised a hand curtly to stop him. Even if the Salv was lying, he wanted to hear some explanation for the impossible things lined up before them. Something rational to which his mind could cling.

“They brought us here, long ago, as a test,” the Salvator continued, nostrils flaring. “To see if we would stay pure. Would abide by their commandments. When we forgot, when we blasphemed, they left us on this rock as primitives. To die and decay, to wallow in our failure, until we could prove our worth to them.”

“Who?” Rann said, staring numbly at the rows of silent giants. Like the chamber floor beneath them, the figures showed not a speck of dust, even in the hollows and curves where dust would normally have gathered. He had a vision of them standing here in the noiseless dark, year after year, century after century, while peoples and kingdoms squabbled and died far above. Waiting with perfect, inhuman patience.

“Our makers. Our race. Us.” The Salvator’s eyes gleamed. “They are us! They are what we were, and what we could be again, if we were not chained to this ball of filth with the subhumans-”

This time Wace moved to strike the man with the butt of his gun. The Salvator flinched back, raising his bound hands to shield himself. “Wace, as you were!” Rann shouted. Geddan, moving with surprising speed for such a big man, managed to catch Wace’s arm in mid-swing.

“You heard the sergeant,” the Forester rumbled. “Keep your head.”

Wace spat and glared hard at Geddan. Then, muttering a curse, he lowered his gun and backed off.

“Geddan, you guard him,” Rann said. Geddan nodded, positioning himself between Wace and the prisoner, his rifle held low but ready. Rann turned back to the Salvator. “You. Talk. You’re saying these things are from...some other world?”

“The stars. Our true home.” The officer looked at Rann with naked venom, his former sullen demeanour gone. “Ours. Not yours. You are the corruption they sent us here to root out. Your kind are why they left us here. Their gifts would never wake for you.”

“Enough of this bullshit,” Iva said, breaking out of her shocked silence. Her tone was revolted, but her expression spoke of tightly-controlled fear. “Nilen is dead, you fucking puppet. Nobody believes your nonsense any more.”

“Nilen!” the officer barked contemptuously. “Nilen was an idiot. He rejected the truth we uncovered. He was blinded by his obsessions, his holy war. If he’d waited, given us time to finish our work, these legions would have awakened by now. We would have crushed you, and rejoined the ancients in their glory.”

“These are weapons, then?” Rann gestured at the towering figures. The more he looked at them, the more they seemed primed to move, to surge forward in a grey avalanche. He doubted the reinforced barriers at the chamber entrance would hold them back for even a second.

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“Machine warriors. Each an army unto itself, nigh-indestructible. They hide entire arsenals within them. A single one could tear this mountain open and sweep your mongrel hordes aside.” The officer’s grin was savage with hate. “And that is the merest glimmer of the power our makers wield. Our surveys found more caverns, kilometres under the island, with wondrous forms inside them. Great ships to travel between the stars, fuelled by the annihilation of matter. Energy weapons that could shatter a moon. Automated factories to build more. The power to conquer this world, to conquer a thousand worlds. Your apostate kingdom would be less than the dust beneath their feet.”

“Lies. All you Salv fucks ever do is lie,” Wace cut in. “This is what you were hiding down here, all this time? Broken machines? They might as well be statues.”

“They will wake!” the Salvator retorted. He took a step forward, and Geddan raised his rifle menacingly. “They will. We are so close. This chamber is just one of many. Our experts are still at work, deeper in the rock, deciphering the ancients’ language. Probing their systems with atomic radiation. We will find the key.”

“We’re clearing your holdouts one by one,” Rann told him. “Your experts are dead, or will be soon. There’s nowhere left for them to hide. You’re too late.”

“You know nothing. We will dig deeper, out of your reach. The best of our soldiers still live. We will hold you as long as we must.” The Salv quivered as he spoke, sounding on the verge of mad laughter. Or panic.

Rann understood now what had been in the man’s eyes all along. Underneath the hate and scorn, the Salvator was afraid. His defiance had been false from the start; he had led them down here in the genuine hope the giants would rise up to rescue him. Perhaps he had envisioned a divine intervention worthy of Nilen’s sermons, a host of avenging angels marching forth to save the faithful.

But the Almighty had not saved Nilen. And these buried things were not angels.

“Your soldiers are corpses,” Rann said. He was surprised at the lack of emotion in his own voice. It was like listening to someone else speak. “We killed them on our way in, and you know it. Whatever these things are, they belong to the crown now.”

“There will be no crown,” the Salv spat. “Our machines will trample your false king into the dirt. His head will rot on a spike, and you and your darkskin dogs can rot with him. We will cleanse this world for our makers.”

Rann looked at the trembling, wild-eyed officer. He looked at Wace, and Geddan, and Iva. He looked at the silent, motionless monsters that filled the chamber. When he spoke, it was not with anger, but with a profound, bone-deep weariness. He was sick of that rasping voice, sick of hearing such poison. He wanted to leave this cold alien tomb and never return.

“The war is over, Salv. We’re going to take you back up to the surface. You will be returned to Greater Kauln and tried for treason. Maybe they’ll find a barrister who can argue for you without choking on his words. If you’re lucky, you might spend the rest of your life in the work camps.” He thought of the young conscripts lying against the wall far above, their blood pooling on the cold concrete. “More likely, you’ll hang. Either way, I don’t think your machines will care. Seems you’re beneath their notice.”

“No. No, we will wake them.” The Salv shook his head, jaw clenched, the cords of his neck tensed and prominent. There was no reason left in his gaze. “We will destroy you.”

“No,” Rann said tiredly. “You won’t.” He gestured for Geddan to take hold of the man.

Geddan strode forward, and the last of the prisoner’s hauteur vanished. He jerked back as if electrocuted, out of Geddan’s reach.

“Get back! Subhuman filth, get away from me!” he yelled, staggering backwards. His expression was one of berserk terror and fury. He twisted round to face the nearest of the great figures in its web of cables and cameras. “Wake! I order you! Kill these vermin! Kill them all!”

The Salvator half-ran, half-stumbled towards the machine. His shaking hands were outstretched in entreaty, or perhaps in prayer. The steel wire of the cuffs glinted between his wrists.

“Wake, machine!” he pleaded. His voice cracked mid-syllable. “Kill them!”

Rann brought his rifle up, and saw Wace and Geddan raising theirs, but it was Iva who fired first. Her bullet caught the officer low in his back, knocking him forward onto his knees. He raised his head once more, looking up at the silent, unmoving giant. “Kill them,” he coughed feebly.

Then a second shot opened the top of his shaven skull, spraying out a fan of red, and he fell on his face. There was a twitch, a spasmodic kick of his leg, stillness. The echo of the gunshot faded to nothing.

Rann glanced aside. Wace’s rifle was smoking.

A moment later, the floor shuddered again; the black material compensating for another bomb-caused landslide, a mile above their heads. Rann thought he saw some of the giants twitch fractionally, a reflexive adjustment to maintain their posture, but it might have been merely a trick of the light.

“He was lying, wasn’t he, sergeant?” Iva said, after a long uneasy silence. “He’d lost his mind.” She sounded like she was trying very hard to convince herself.

“Yes, he had,” Rann replied. “But these...” He eyed the rows of hulking shapes, stretching away to gloomy infinity. They had not moved an inch. “I don’t know what they are. He thought they were real.”

“Even if they are,” Wace said hesitantly. “They’re just something the Salv built. A failed experiment. Not some...gift from the Almighty.”

“They Above,” Rann murmured, low enough that only he could hear it.

He approached the thing that the Salvator had tried to awaken, stepping over the sprawled corpse and the thick cables that linked the analytical engines to the suspended cameras. The giant loomed over him, tall as a house, statue-still. He put out a hand, very slowly, to touch the surface of its massive leg.

It was impossibly smooth, with no grain or roughness at all. His fingers slid off it like it was slick ice. It wasn’t like any metal he had ever known. And though the air in the chamber was cold, it was warm to the touch, as if it had been lying for hours in noon sunlight. Or as if it had some great incandescence, a sun of its own, burning deep within it.

He glanced up with dread in his eyes, expecting the thing to stir and rise roaring at his touch, like the giants in his mother’s stories. Its angular skull, eyeless and blank, seemed somehow to stare back.

It didn’t move. He withdrew his hand, his fingertips tingling strangely. When he turned back to the others, they saw something in his expression that stilled any questions.

Rann took a deep breath. “We should go back up,” he said. “Dauman’s technicians will need to see this place. And we have more caves to clear out, if he was telling the truth.” He nodded at the Salvator, whose blood was being absorbed by the black surface beneath his shattered head, draining away without a trace. Rann wondered if, in time, the man’s body would be swallowed whole.

“More of these loony fuckers to kill,” Geddan grunted. “Suits me.”

“I’m carving Lidaro’s name in the next one we meet,” Wace said, but for once his bravado sounded hollow and nervous.

They walked back to the hallway, their footsteps booming in the emptiness. The great figures mutely watched them go.

At the gap between the barriers, Rann stopped to regard the silent machines one last time. Their ugly hatchet skulls, their massive fists, their armoured skin concealing unknowable weapons. Something like tanks, he supposed, tanks that walked. But so far beyond anything the kingdom could build, beyond all the science of Aede, that they might as well have been gods. Each an army unto itself, the Salvator had said. And there were hundreds of them down here. Maybe thousands.

A distant, wordless horror rose up in his chest. He pictured monstrous figures clawing their way out of the corpse-littered mountainsides, casually bulldozing the encampments, sinking the battleships in the bay with terrible ease. Those same monsters wading ashore in Greater Kauln, smashing the king’s proud armies aside. Levelling city after city with mechanical thoroughness, not out of hatred or vengeance, but simply because that was their purpose. Killing until there was nobody left to kill.

They could have turned the war, he realised. With these things, the Salv could have won, even with Nilen dead. It would all have been for nothing.

“Come on,” he heard Iva call from the hallway.

He turned to rejoin her, bracing himself for the climb ahead.