Chapter 154: Batnac leaves for Leon
"Master," it said again, "what will you do when you find him?"
Batnac had been about to walk away, but he stopped. He had not written that question into the machine, and for a moment he did not seem to know whether he was supposed to be pleased by it.
"I will tell him my name," he said at last. "Then I will tell him the name of the man he killed. I want him to understand exactly what he took from the world before I take anything from him."
"And after that, master?"
"After that, I will do what the Association could not." He turned away. "I will bring him to justice."
He placed the old shirt carefully back into its glass case and closed the lid. Then he walked across the room toward the middle of the floor, and as he passed the shelf along the far wall, his steps slowed.
The small gray envelope sat between the spare robot arms exactly where it had been for years, with its corners slightly bent and its edges gone soft with handling. He looked at it for a moment, and he did not reach for it.
"Master," the service unit said quietly. "Shall I deliver it to anyone?"
"No." He turned his face away from the shelf. "There is nobody left to give it to."
For a few seconds, the room was silent. Then he rolled his shoulders, and the grin slid back onto his face as easily as a hat.
"Clear the floor," he said.
The robots along the walls moved at once. Wheels rolled, and legs clanked, and the cleaning units scurried away from the center of the room until a wide circle of bare steel lay open around him.
Unit Twenty-One stepped to the edge of the circle with its dozen arms raised, and its lens burned a steady, nervous blue.
"Limiters are ready for release, master. I require your confirmation."
"You know, I wrote those limiters myself." Batnac looked down at his own metal hands.
"After the second time, I told the frame that it should refuse me whenever I asked for the final stage, and I made sure that I could not talk it out of it. I wanted something to stop me from being reckless."
"What has changed, master?"
"Today I do not want to be stopped." He lifted his head, and the smile on his pale face turned wild. "Release them."
"Limiters released, master. Coolant pumps are at full capacity."
Along the walls, every robot raised its right arm in a stiff salute, because Batnac had written that into their instructions as well.
A deep, grinding sound rolled through the floor. The plates of Batnac’s chest slid apart with a series of heavy clicks, and the blue light inside him flared so brightly that every robot in the room threw its shadow against the wall.
His arms trembled. A hiss of steam burst from his shoulders, and the pistons in his wrists began to pump faster, and faster, until they blurred.
Then his body began to grow.
It happened all at once. His legs stretched, with new segments of steel sliding out of the thighs and the shins and locking into place with the sound of a hammer hitting an anvil.
His torso widened, and layer after layer of armor plating unfolded from the sides of his chest, thick and dark and ridged with vents that glowed orange at the edges.
In the space of five seconds, he rose from a little over two meters to almost four, and his head came so close to the ceiling that a tiny shower of dust fell from the metal plates above.
"Frame expansion at one hundred and eighty percent, master," Unit Twenty-One reported. "All joints are stable."
"Do not stop!" Batnac shouted over the noise. "There is more!"
A heavy clunk sounded behind his ribs, and the plates along both sides of his torso opened like the shutters of a window.
From each side, three thick mechanical arms unfolded in turn, jointed and gleaming, each one ending in a hand of long steel claws.
They stretched out and flexed, and the old arms and the new arms hung together in a row of eight, so that for a moment he looked like a great steel spider standing on its hind legs.
His face had not changed at all. On top of that enormous machine, the pale and narrow human head looked small and out of place, like a white pebble that someone had balanced on a tower.
The smile on it stretched wide enough to show his teeth.
"Master," the service unit said, "you have not yet asked me about the arms."
"Ask me about the arms!"
"Why six more, master?"
"Because two were never enough!" Batnac roared with laughter. He swung all eight arms through the air at once, and the wind from them knocked a stack of loose papers off the desk.
"I have carried this frame for ten years, and in all that time I have wanted to open my arms as wide as the sky! Now I will!"
He turned his back to the robots and bent forward slightly.
"Thruster module," he said.
A loud mechanical roar split the air. The plates along his spine slid open, and a massive pack of steel unfolded from inside his back, with two wide nozzles pointing at the floor and a ring of smaller jets set around their edges.
The nozzles flared orange. Heat rippled through the room, and several of the smaller robots were pushed back across the floor by the blast of warm air.
"Thrusters at ten percent, master," Unit Twenty-One shouted. "Please be advised that the floor is not rated for—"
"Louder!"
The nozzles flared white. A great column of fumes burst from the pack and rolled across the room, and Batnac’s feet rose slowly off the ground until he hovered a hand’s width above the steel floor.
"Thrusters at fifty percent, master," Unit Twenty-One called. "Altitude is ten centimeters. Ceiling clearance is thirty centimeters."
"Do not tell me about the ceiling!"
"The ceiling is a fact, master."
"Facts are for the Association!"
The cables along the ceiling whipped back and forth. The screens on the wall rattled in their frames, and the map of the continent shook, and the red point over Aldreth trembled in the middle of it as if it were afraid.
He glanced at his wrist one last time. The red dot in the old district had not moved, and it sat in the middle of the little map with the calm of a man who suspected nothing at all.
Batnac threw back his head and spread all eight arms wide, and his laughter rang out over the roar of the engines.
"Leon Allistar!" he shouted. "I am coming for you!"
"Master," the service unit called. "The ceiling."
"I will make you pay for what you did to him!"
"Master, the ceiling is three layers of reinforced steel, and the room above it contains—"
"I do not care!"
The thrusters blazed, and he shot straight up.
His head struck the ceiling first, and the ceiling lost.
The metal plates peeled back with a scream, the beams above them cracked in half, and the second floor burst apart in a storm of splintered wood and flying cables.
Chunks of steel the size of doors spun through the air and crashed down onto the steel floor. A cloud of dust and sparks swallowed the room, and then the roar of the engines rose into the sky and was gone, shrinking into the distance until it was no more than a thin whistle.
The robots stood motionless in the falling dust. Every one of them had turned its lens toward the huge, jagged hole in the roof, through which a rectangle of bright morning sky was shining down on the steel floor.
One of the cleaning units rolled forward, picked up a chunk of the ceiling, looked at it for a moment, and rolled away to find a broom.
A small piece of insulation drifted down and landed on the service unit’s head.
"Entry four hundred and thirty-three," the service unit said. "The master has left the house through the roof."
***
"Stop," Iris said, pressing a hand over her mouth. "Stop, I can’t read the next line if you keep making that face."
"I am not making a face," Leon said.
"You are. You look like a man who has just heard that his own cattle were stolen."
"They were stolen by a baby."
"By a baby who was only a few hours old!" Iris laughed so hard that the book shook in her hands.
"He climbed out of his cradle, stole fifty cows, made them walk backward so the tracks would point the wrong way, and then went home and got back into bed. When the god of the sun came to complain, the baby pretended to be asleep."
"Surely he had to be tired after that."
"He was not tired at all. On the same day, he also built the first harp out of a tortoise shell, and he played it so well that the god of the sun forgave him on the spot."
"All of that on his first day?"
"He was an overachiever," Iris said solemnly.
Leon laughed again, and he did not try to stop it.
They were sitting on the floor of the study in Iris’s house, with a low table pushed against the wall and a dozen old books scattered around them.
The morning sun came in through the window and lay across the carpet in a long yellow strip. A pot of tea sat between them, and neither of them had touched it since the first story.