“The good news is they have a weak point,” Fell said.
“Glowing runes?” I asked.
“Yes. Even a scratch or a smudge will disable them. The bad news is that it isn’t sensible to go after them individually. The very bad news is that the Sisters are elementalists. They specialize in natural forces. Not every rune there is the same. Pay careful attention.”
I looked.
The dolls and mannequins moved as their individual joints allowed, many clustering around Fell’s car, which was idling a block away from the garage. Some moved on all four limbs, like spiders, some facing the ground, others facing the sky. It was hard to keep track of ones I’d looked over and ones that were just moving in particularly awkward ways.
I was more than a little put off by the fact that they seemed to be moving steadily in our general direction, in fits and starts. It made me feel like taking the ten seconds to look over the things would cost me somehow.
Sure enough, though, the runes differed here and there. Each was outlined in the same way; they were drawn inside a circle with rays extending outward. What was in the middle fell into four or five different sub-groups.
“The one in the red dress, that looks like it walked out of a display case? The rune in the center of its face is a variant of the fire rune. I would not be surprised if it happened to violently blow up if you got too close to it. There are a lot of them around the car. There are others with breeze runes… they move a little faster in general.”
“Can I use presence to try to stall them?” Rose asked. “If I had enough power behind my words, could I order them to blow up, all the way over there?”
“Maybe,” Fell said. “I doubt it. They aren’t being controlled by anything except some very basic impulse. Not words.”
“What then?” I asked. “Does it have something to do with that sun shape the runes are drawn inside?”
“Ah. Yes. Reaching out,” Fell said. “You make something warm and you drive it to seek out other warm things. In this spirit world, there aren’t many things that are truly warm. It’s only a reflection of the physical world.”
“Breeze runes,” I said. “Could that also mean breath?”
Fell glanced at me.
Silently, we turned to look at the mannequin-vessels.
Only a handful were moving with any meaningful velocity. Slowly and steadily. The detonation runes.
“What is it?” Tiff asked.
I watched as the things staggered and crawled forward.
I held my finger to my lips.
We watched as they gradually slowed, until they were moving at a glacial pace.
“Shhh,” I said.
The vessels roused once more. A few seconds of movement.
Fell gestured, and we took a collective step back.
Another subset of dolls moved toward us as a mass, faster than any of the rest.
Easily twenty steps for, what, five of ours in total?
I took one step back, independent of the rest of the group, and each of the dolls and mannequins from that group moved four or five steps in our direction.
How long ago had they deployed?
Why hadn’t they segregated more?
Much like the elements that had been used in the awakening ritual. Breath, explosion, ground… air, fire and earth.
Air-imbued vessels to pursue us by a half-step for every breath we took, two or three steps for every word we spoke.
Fire imbued vessels to steadily seek out our warmth. Slow, inexorable, and Fell suspected they would blow up if they got too close.
Earth-imbued vessels to track us by our footsteps.
There were two other kinds.
The ritual had used a representation for water.
I could make them out, now. They were limp, arms dangling at their sides. When the wind blew harder, they shifted slightly, willows bending in the breeze.
It was ominous. As a general rule, the ones that more often didn’t move so far.
When those ones moved, how far would they go?
There was also the fifth group. They moved steadily, but not toward us, as a rule.
“Metal or wood?” I asked, pointing.
The question bought us a moment’s pursuit. Had the vessels been uniform in size and shape, I imagined it would be a march, a dozen hard feet hitting ground at the same moment. But they weren’t. It was a shuffle.
“Metal,” Fell said, quiet, “Never wood, post-industrialization. Dying element.”
Did Rose notice? Had she drawn the same parallel?
Her attention was elsewhere. Focused on Maggie.
What was going on there?
“Move carefully,” I said, keenly aware of how much ground each word cost us. “Strategically.“
“Drat that,” Maggie said. “Cut the Gordian knot.”
I glanced at Fell.
“How hard can you cut?” he asked.
“Pretty fucking hard,” Rose said. “Ready?”
Each word was another three feet of lost ground.
It sucked, but this was the closest thing we had to training wheels, to see just what she and Maggie had put together.
“Go,” I said.
Rose went. She released Midge with a loud cracking sound. A breaking window.
Three hundred pounds of inbred muscle and fat appeared on the street, amid the shower of shards.
And with the act of magic, the water vessels woke, closing the distance to us in heartbeats