The Almighty Dominance (by Sunshine) novel Chapter 748

There were two hundred and fifty Black Tower branches in the United State of Magic, and that night there was nobody in any of them.

Not nobody. Twenty, at most branches. Fifty at the big ones. Caretakers and cooks and record-keepers and a duty elder who'd drawn the short straw, because every single person who could fight had been called to the field by their own tower's summons and was, at that exact moment, lying asleep on White Tower grass six hundred miles away.

At the Dunmoor branch, a duty elder named Vessery stepped out into the yard at ten past one for a smoke and looked up at the sky.

It was a clear night. Good stars.

He stood there a full minute with his head back, breathing smoke at a sky that was not empty at all, and he did not see one single thing in it, because the things in it were painted for exactly this and had been holding position above his roof for nineteen minutes.

He finished his cigarette. He went back inside.

...

Above him, one hundred and eight of them began to move.

They came out of the dark in a slow spiral, five hundred feet up, and as they moved they started to burn — not fire, light, a thin steady white at each machine's underside, and between them the light began to reach.

It found the next drone, and the next.

A line. Then a curve. Then a ring inside the curve, and another ring inside that one, until there were fifty circles turning inside each other above the roof of the Dunmoor branch, geometry laid out in light across four hundred feet of open air, every arc exact to the width of a hair because a machine holding a position does not drift and does not tire and does not have hands that shake.

It was, and there is no other word for it, beautiful.

The whole thing hung there for one second, complete.

Then it came down.

It didn't drift down or settle. It slammed — the entire array dropping flat onto the grounds at once, printing itself across the yard and the walls and the roof and the six acres around it, and then ten drones dropped through the middle of it and set magic stones into the ground at ten points, one after another, quick as a man laying cards.

The formation array flared to life, its circuits locking into place.

...

Inside, in the long hall, four people were playing cards and one of them lost his hand.

Not his hand. The cards. He'd been holding them with a small shadow-trick, the way any Black magician holds anything he's too lazy to reach for, and the trick went out like a snuffed wick and the cards went all over the table.

He looked at his own fingers.

"Something's wrong."

Down the corridor somebody was already shouting.

You do not need to be told when a cleansing goes through a Black tower. Every person in that building felt it come up through the floor and pass through them — a slow, awful, rinsing sensation, like being washed out from the inside by something clean, and every scrap of dark magic they were holding thinned and paled and went.

Vessery came out of his office at a dead run.

"Activate the defence," he shouted. "The tower defence, now, all of it—"

...

Six of them made it to the core room and got their hands on the shield.

It is a good shield. It has stood for three hundred years, it has turned back two sieges and one very stupid duke, and it works by pulling the tower's own stored dark up through the walls and closing it over the building like a fist.

They fed it. It rose. For about two seconds it was actually there.

Then the white array under the building drank it.

Not shattered it. Drank it — pulled it apart at the source and took what it was made of, and the shield came down not with a bang but with a sort of exhausted sigh, and one of the six casters sat down hard on the flagstones and started to cry, because he had felt what happened to it and he understood immediately that it was not coming back.

"It won't hold," he said. "It won't hold, there's nothing to hold it with—"

Vessery looked at the ceiling.

"Then launch the attack," he said. "All of it. Open the whole tower."

...

Here is the thing about Black Tower's outer defence.

It is genuinely, historically, the most feared thing any of the seven towers has ever built. Three hundred years of accumulation, layered into the stone: demon-work, mind-hex, hate-curse, seven kinds of contact poison, and the reason nobody has ever taken a Black branch by force is that nobody has ever gotten close enough to try.

A man who walks into that ring stops being a man about eleven feet in.

He turns on the person beside him. He claws his own face. His heart, if he is unlucky and old, simply stops. Whole companies have gone in and come apart into a screaming knot of people killing each other, and Black has never had to lift a finger past opening the door.

Vessery opened the door.

The whole ring came awake at once and rolled out over the grounds in a black wave, and it was every bit as terrible as it had ever been, and it hit four hundred and eighty machines.

Which have no minds.

No blood to poison. No heart to stop. No face to claw. Nothing whatsoever inside them for three hundred years of carefully cultivated malice to grab hold of, and the wave went over them and through them and past them into the empty fields beyond, where it made the grass die.

The drones did not slow down.

They came in through the windows.

...

After that it was not a battle. It was housekeeping.

They went room by room. Corridor by corridor. Two per doorway, methodical as a search party, and every person they found took a needle and went down where they stood — the cooks in the kitchen, the record-keeper under his own desk, four caretakers in the east stair who had linked arms and were trying to hold a landing that machines simply flew over the top of.

A young man on the second floor threw a chair.

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