Chapter 1 - Part 5

The house wizard led her down a long, spiral staircase, deep into the ground. Chubat could tell me how deep we’re going, she thought, suddenly missing the surly barbarian. No doubt he was carving something on a piece of stone while he watched the forest. Chubat had helped her deal with a fear of enclosed spaces. While the fear was no longer crippling, it was still there.

“You’re keeping them here like prisoners?” she asked the young wizard. If he was even twenty-two she’d bed a goblin. A pimple stood out on his chin.

“Hm? Oh no!” the young man exclaimed. He held a glowing wand in his left hand, which unlike his right hand was ungloved. Pienna presumed it was to show off the Cannith dragonmark that wound from his palm onto the backs of his fingers. “We just have to worry about industrial espionage,” he continued, with just a slight catch in his voice.

Right. Another five minutes of walk led them to a hallway with holding cells. The holding cells were very recessed, and the steel facing was very thick. Rather than a door with a slot these were like cage facings. The bars were thicker than her arm, the locks a complex set of panels. These cells were clearly meant to keep things in, not out.

She noticed that the warforged reacted to the light of the wand that the wizard held. Some came forward curiously, others shrank back in fear. “They do not have darkvision?” she asked. All magically manipulated objects could see heat, according to what an artificer had told her once.

“No, no, regular sight, they have half-organic eyes, after all,” the wizard said absent-mindedly. He was looking at the numbers over the cells.

“Dwarves have organic eyes and they have darkvision,” she told him. “So do orcs, goblins, giants, and aberrations.”

The wizard merely shrugged and kept walking.

Many of the cells were vacant, and some had graffiti that she could not really make out. One small cell had graffiti on the floor by the cage. It read “Alive.”

“How many are down here?” she asked.

“Nineteen,” he answered promptly. “Two for eccentricities, five for insubordination, and twelve for dangerous behavior.”

“We’re all dangerous, you pompous fleshwad!” came a snarl from one cell. “We all are more dangerous than you know!” That warforged was manacled to the wall, and he had several gashes in his body lining. His composite plating glistened with a mithril sheen.

“That one can’t stop raging,” the wizard said. “Can’t shut it off.”

“Won’t shut it off!” snarled the warforged in the manacles as they left him behind. “Won’t!”

“A golem that rages,” Pienna said, her soft voice aimed at the wizard’s ears.

“Ma’am, they’re not precisely golems,” the wizard began.

“Have you ever operated a creation forge?” she asked him. She had stopped walking.

“Ma’am, we really ought to –”

“My cousin has given you orders to answer my questions, has he not?”

The wizard swallowed. “Yes, yes I have. They’ve trained all of us.”

“How many?”

“How many…?”

“How many forges have you operated, do they all operate the same way?”

“There are only three of this type – uh, only three, Ma’am.”

Oh no you don’t. “What type?”

The young wizard grew pale and swallowed. “Ma’am, if I violate House Secrets…”

“If you cross Du’Bray…”

He thought for a moment, then looked at her askance. “I would die if you tell an outsider of this.”

“I have sworn to protect all natural life. You may rely on me.”

He thought about that. “Alright, we have several types of warforged. Smaller scouts, larger battering models, extremely large mobile siege engines – titans, we call those, and earlier programmables that were very, very basic. We’ve had no problem with any of those in terms of violating their programming, other than expected glitches in any mass-production line. These warforged, they’re – well understand, these are the most popular warforged, because they can reason.”

“Reason in what way?”

“Any way. Tactics, mathematics, interrogations, mobilization. There are entire companies made of warforged with warforged captains that give requisition sheets and reports to humanoid commanders who just sign them like a rubber stamp. You give them a goal, they figure out how to do it. We developed one warforged that could disguise itself as good as any intelligence agent, it could even pass as a half-elf with the right make-up and prosthetics. We dropped it off in a city and gave it a year to do its job.”

“An assassination? I don’t expect you to tell me who.”

“Yes. An assassination. The warforged was out of contact for six months, getting its own materials and resources. Supervisors began screaming about losing resources and having the enemy cut the unit apart for House secrets. Then the warforged returned with her head – uh, the target’s head – in a sack. It had, in the process, become a trusted member of a criminal gang.”

He’s talking about the decapitation of the daughter of the Queen of Aundair’s financial advisor, Pienna realized suddenly. No one knew who had ordered the hit, the financial advisor in question had wanted to tax House Cannith for every warforged that operated against Aundair. “So they became your biggest sell, but you only have three forges?”

“That I know of,” the wizard admitted. “The schema for the forges are not fully understood. They were discovered by accident, and with every new forge there is a strong risk of malfunction. More improperly working forges were made than properly working forges. We really don’t know why. All of these warforged came from forges that were thought to have been working properly, but perhaps they do not.”

“But the main forge that the schema are copied from is still in Xen’drik,” she said.

“What?” He looked shocked.

“Never mind, forget I said that. I thought you knew.”

“Xen’drik, that explains so much! Now I understand why –”

“I said, forget I said that,” she stated again, adding a growl that she had picked up from her friendly jaguar.

“Uh, yes, yes I will,” he said. “Ma’am.”

“What is your name, anyway?” she asked him.

“Robil, Ma’am.”

“Robil, I need to conduct several psychological experiments with these warforged. I’m going to start with the one who started this latest incident, and then tried to stop it.”

“4311XD, Ma’am, I was taking you to him.”

She chanted, and a globe of light appeared, emanating from a circlet of liveoak that rested upon her brown and gray curls. “I will go to him myself. I want you out of this place, for I will trust his responses more with you gone.”

He hesitated, then nodded and departed. As he passed the raging, manacled warforged his footsteps picked up, and he was gone.

She waited, listening to the dark. The warforged shuffled occasionally. One or two seemed to sigh.

She then turned, and continued down the hallway.