Seeklight

The villagers, a crowd of a hundred or more, were standing in a mass at the entrance to the quarry. The ones at the back of the crowd were shouting the loudest, dancing on tiptoe and clawing at the others’ shoulders as they strained to see what was happening inside the quarry’s gates. A few glanced quickly at Daenek as he approached, but didn’t recognize him in the obscuring rain. “What’s going on?” he asked the nearest ones.

“It’s the bad priest!” shrilled a hatchet-faced woman. She tugged nervously at the corners of her soaking wet shawl.

“They’ve got him trapped in a corner!”

“The what?” said Daenek.

“Where’ve you been?” growled one man suspiciously. “The damn thing’s murdered two people in the last two nights.”

“Tore out their throats, it did, right in their own beds!” The woman’s eyes rolled giddily at the thought.

Daenek edged away from the crowd. He could see nothing from here. Looking up, he noted a pair of sociologists, the rain falling through their faintly luminous bodies as they floated high over the quarry and pointed their cameras downward. Maybe from above, thought Daenek.

Scrambling up the rocky slope to one side of the quarry’s bottleneck entrance, he came to a flat outcropping where he could see the entire scene inside the quarry, and where he was hidden as well from the other onlookers.

Below him, the bad priest thrashed in the net of ropes that formed its trap. The ropes were wet and glistened like butchered animal sinews. Only a few shreds of the bad priest’s robe still hung on its tubular limbs. Its metal body gleamed under the rain, the jointed arms and legs pulling and twisting at the taut lines.

One of the dozen or so black-uniformed men—the subthane’s personal militia—threw another rope around the bad priest’s neck, then quickly backed away as the thing tried to lunge at him. Its immobile face seemed to take on a lunatic quality, the flat round scan-cells that formed its eyes blazing unnaturally. Its ringers curved and clawed at the air.

One of the quarry-workers, an enormous man with coarse black hair plastered to his forehead by the ram, stepped up to the constellation of men, ropes, and wildly thrashing machine.

The stone-cutter carried a huge pickax cradled in his hands. He and the militia captain conferred for a few seconds, and then the captain gave a signal to the others.

The man pulled tighter on the ropes, pinning the bad priest against the wall of the quarry. Its body arched as it fought against the restraints. The stonecutter stepped between the taloned hands straining to sink into the flesh of the man’s arms.

He swung the pickax and buried its point in the machine’s chest.

A small noise, metal against metal, and then the bad priest’s arms slowly folded and swung towards the ground. The scan-cells went blank. Rain gathered in the cavity and ran in rivulets along the wooden handle of the pickax.

The crowd of villages gathered at the quarry gates was silent now. Daenek watched as they cleared a little pathway among themselves. A group of priests, headed by the local bishop, came slowly through the crowd towards the gate.

The old bishop, taller than the other priests and clad in a white robe embroidered with gold threads long tarnished with age, planted his spiral-headed staff in the mud around the gate.

“We have come,” it called, its harsh voice loud enough for Daenek to hear, “to take our own back with us.”

One of the subthane’s men opened the gate and the priests filed into the area. They drew the ropes away from the metal body and, last of all, pulled the pickax from their fallen brother’s chest. A new robe was wrapped around the dead machine and they carried it away, disappearing beyond the massed villagers.

Is there a Dark Seed for priests, too? wondered Daenek.

Something that loves death? He crouched . on the little rock ledge, unconcerned with the rain pelting across his back. He had heard before of priests going bad, suddenly tearing off their robes and becoming frenzied killers of men. There were new stories every year of other villages suffering with one or more of them. The renegade machines’ own ferocity made them incautious, though, and easy to trap, if still dangerous to approach. Does everything have to break down? thought Daenek. Will all priests become murderers someday?

After a few more minutes, Daenek climbed down from the ledge. The villagers had all returned to their own homes. He hoisted the pack higher on his shoulders and started down the road.