Page 39 of Leviathan's Song
“Selkie!” I bit out, suddenly making sense of Muriel’s magic. “I thought she might be a shifter.”
He chuckled and thanked the waiter who brought our plates. “Close enough, right?”
I just stared at him, trying not to smile. Sidney would probably beg to differ.
“What do you think you’re going to do, though?” he asked before poking at his fish.
I heaved a cleansing breath. “I honestly… I don’t know.” My mind started spiraling out through all the ‘what-ifs’ and worst-case scenarios—all the ways this could go wrong—as I bit into my meal. By the time I finished, I realized I felt much better having put some food in my stomach, but I hadn’t gotten anywhere productive in my head space. I didn’t even remember eating most of it, and Levi was quietly watching me with concern etched into his features.
“You’re doing some heavy thinking there.” He took a sip of his water and leaned back in his chair. I felt his knee bump against my leg several times under the table like he was deliberately tapping me. “Do you think you could talk some of it through with me?” His eyes looked soft and maybe even a little bit vulnerable.
I swallowed. “There’s just so much at stake here,” I told him. “Aside from worst-case scenarios of golems being used for nefarious purposes, say an assassination, or some despot inheriting one of my creations a thousand years from now, I’m not actually sure how helpful a golem from me would be to The Deep. A construct like my wasps, with practice, I’ve managed to complete in a matter of hours. A larger golem? Those can take weeks. Months even. Some of the constructs my father builds take monthswitha team helping. What if I build them something and, by the time it’s finished, the whole city is already plundered and gone? It just seems like this is a long-term project, when something is needed now, or a week ago.
“Not to mention, I still have a business to run during all this time I would spend building something I’m hesitant to unleash on the world at all. I would be fine taking the time off, but Sidney still needs an income, and I can’t leave her high and dry, let alone all the customers who have already placed orders and are depending on me. I can’t just shut my business down for a month or more and expect everything to be fine when I come back.”
Levi chewed for a minute while staring blankly in thought. “Does it have to be all or nothing?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, if building such a large object would take too long and cause too much strain on your business, what about creating a smaller one? Or several smaller ones over a period of time?”
I pondered that as an option. If the Alliance didn’t have another golemancer in their rosters and I didn’t give them a choice, they might have to accept a downgrade. Chances were high they didn’t, but it wasn’t impossible.
Levi interrupted my thoughts. “How do you control a golem? Can you tell it to only defend and not attack?”
“Kind of. I can give it a basic set of underlying guidelines that only another golemancer can change. When I hand it over to its final owner, I instruct it to allow them to give it basic instructions, but they can’t modify its original intent. The problem is, any golemancer could modify a relatively small construct. It would have to be substantially large to keep most others from modifying it.”
The sentries at my parents’ estate had been passed down through my family for thousands of years. They were so large that, if no one was born with magical strength enough to modify the massive heartstones that controlled them, they sometimes went for a generation or two without anyone in our line being able to interact with them. Not that they needed it. They’d sat, silently guarding our estate, for longer than we could remember.
My hand froze on my glass as an idea began to take root in my mind. “I need to talk to my mom.”
Chapter 14
Muriel seemed more perplexedthan I’d expected. “You want to loan us your personal sentries?”
“They belong to my parents, but yes, my mother has given me permission to loan out two of them temporarily, for use in defense of The Deep. These are heirlooms, part of our family heritage, so as you can imagine, the terms of the loan would be quite strict. But they are formidable and supposedly quite useful in combat.”
She gave a slow blink—perhaps trying to take everything in—and I shifted in my chair. “Supposedly?” she repeated.
I shrugged. “It’s been a few hundred years since they’ve been roused. No one attacking our estate has made it past the dogs.”
I heard Levi choke on a surprised laugh beside me and turned to catch him trying to turn it into a cough. His face was flushed slightly with his effort, but he couldn’t hide the wicked amusement dancing in his eyes. “Excuse me,” he wheezed.
Muriel was still staring at me, her eyes round in her face. “I see. What are these sentries, exactly?”
“Stone golems, humanoid… they basically look like very large statues. They’re both just under two hundred hands high, one is a little shorter, but not significantly.” They topped eighteen meters, by human measurement. “They’ll be a little slower underwater than something specifically built for that purpose, but they will provide a good measure of defense in the short term.”
“How short term are we talking?” She sat forward and spared a glance for Levi as he situated himself in the chair beside me. “And how soon would they be available?” she asked, returning her focus to me.
“The length of the loan would be at the discretion of my father, though my mom said theoretically they would allow them to remain in The Deep until I created something more permanent as a replacement. Or you find a suitable replacement if we can’t come to an agreement.
“As for their delivery…” I winced. “I will need to hand deliver them from Golden Laurel, since they’re too big for regular transport and too big to fit through the Gates.” Not to mention I didn’t think the government of Seattle would be too pleased to have them in the city. “My mother said she would try to contract over-sized transport, but she didn’t think it would be possible on short notice.”
“Yes, I would think not.” Muriel gusted out a heavy breath. “Where does that leave us, then?”
I frowned. “With me trekking through the Bound’s countryside for two weeks on the backs of some very, very large statues.”
“Two weeks.”
