Free Edge of Destiny by J. Robert King Page B

cockpit. They regained focus above, staring through the red pupils of the golem. “I can see! Through the golem’s eyes! Well—hello down there, my norn friend!”
    Servos whined, and Big Snaff’s giant hand waved beside his giant head.
    Eir waved back a little sheepishly.
    “It’s spooky to be so big.”
    “Yeah, spooky,” Zojja replied in a metallic voice.
    “All right! Gang’s all here,” Eir said as Garm loped up beside her. “Let’s get this attack going.” She led the way, striding up the stone steps that led from the laboratory. Garm followed at her heels, and behind him came the two Bigs.
    Rata Sum had never seen such an odd procession. The norn warrior Eir Stegalkin marched down the side of the ziggurat, followed by her dire wolf, Garm, who was taller than two asura stacked. Behind came two asura who were taller than five—the wide-eyed Big Snaff and the intense, young Big Zojja.
    They climbed toward the city center, the switchback stairs shaking with their footfalls.
    That morning, even the geniuses who loved to sleep in rolled out of their beds to gape at the procession.
    Master Klab, for one, staggered up from within his workshop and stood beside his ruined puffball, which was unceremoniously lashed to a stone curb. He blinked in annoyance at the mechanical parade, saving a particularly deep scowl for “Master” Snaff. “Bit of rubbish,” Klab snarled, though he couldn’t quite turn away from those strange stony heads, those carefully engineered trusses, those expertly aligned welds. Yes, Klab had recently been saved by that very golem, looking so much like Snaff’s own apprentice, but no genius wants to be beholden. Zojja showed how beholden he really was—and how much of a genius Snaff really was.
    “I hope you fall off the city!”
    But the band navigated the bridges safely on their march to the center of town, heading for a particular asura gate.
    Eir and Garm strode through, feeling the membrane of magic snap around them. The sultry air of Rata Sum gave way to the biting cold of Hoelbrak.
    Of course, the asura gate had not been constructed with twenty-foot golems in mind, so Big Snaff had to crouch and nearly crawl to get through. The air rippled around him as he passed. “I hope the Dragonspawn has a bigger door.”
    “If he doesn’t, you can make one,” Zojja replied as she shuffled through behind him.
    Then they were all in Hoelbrak, standing on a cobbled way between tents and rough-hewn lodges. The bodies of the Bigs pinged and crackled as the metal contracted from cold. Standing at their full height, the golems could peer over the thatched rooftops, past the defensive bridges that ringed the settlement, and out to snow-covered tundra and ice-choked mountains.
    “Out there is where the Dragonspawn is,” Zojja said grimly.
    “Not much longer,” Snaff assured.
    As the group marched down the lane, walls shuddered, thatch shivered, and norn came running out in all states of undress, bellowing and bearing weapons.
    “What’s happening?”
    “Earthquake?”
    “Invasion?”
    “For the love of Wolf—!”
    “We’re being attacked!”
    “Stop!” shouted Eir, lifting her hands to the crowd. “You are not being attacked. These magnificent creatures are fashioned to battle the Dragonspawn.”
    A susurrus of shock moved through the crowd, and someone shouted, “Golems can’t do the work of norn warriors!”
    “ I am a norn warrior,” Eir said, “and I am doing this work. But let me ask you this—what becomes of norn who go to battle the Dragonspawn?”
    The crowd sighed in frustration, and a nearby woman said, “The men return . . . as frozen icebrood. The women return . . . not at all.”
    “Exactly. But we are warded by powerstone magic that will block his aura.” She tapped the gray stones that shone from the epaulets of her armor. “And these warriors of steel and stone cannot be corrupted by the Dragonspawn’s power. With these provisions, Garm and I and our