Last First Snow by Max Gladstone Page A

pages. Lower arms, scissor-fingered, sliced scraps from their context: pictures, lines of text, a three-word excerpt from a breath mint ad. Lenses realigned to read. Every few minutes the golem paused for coffee, or for a drag from the cigarette that smoldered in the ashtray. Thin smoke rose from its tip to coil against the ceiling, a dragon pondering the paper hoard. Already the evening’s work had yielded a four-inch stack of clippings. Shifting gears, pumping pistons, unwinding and winding of clockwork and spring, opening and closing switches, all merged into the babble of a mechanical brook through a metal forest. And underneath it all, always, lay the sound of scissors parting paper.
    â€œZack,” Elayne said from the door, once she’d waited long enough. “I have something for you.”
    The cutting, and all other visible movement, stopped. The metal brook trickled on.
    She walked to his desk. Dead eyes stared up from the top clipping. A woman, her throat slit. Elayne could not read the caption of old-style Shining Empire glyphs. “You can’t add this many every night. You’d have filled the entire room with paper by now.”
    A clock wound as the shield of Zack’s head turned right and tilted back to face her. Lenses realigned for focus, and as they shifted she glimpsed the furnace inside him. “I edit.” A cello’s voice, the music of strings made words by processes she did not understand. She was only a passing student of golemetrics, which required more dealing with demons than she liked. Not that Elayne had anything against demons per se—but her conversations with them often reminded her of a vicious joke in which she herself might well be the punchline. Perhaps the demons felt the same.
    Zack hefted the clippings in one manipulator arm. “First cut, most relevant of the day’s news. So I believe now. Initial processing complete, I compare. Lotus Gang execution, or Grimwald incursions into Shining Empire territory? Method suggests Khelids, Dhistran death cult from eighteenth century, though current scholarship indicates Khelids were in fact a cover for Camlaander occupationist priests’ attempts to reconsecrate Dhistran territory to Undying Queen and Eternal Monarchy.”
    â€œOr someone knifed the girl because she had something they wanted. Or was something they wanted.”
    â€œHence: editing. Does new content fit with emergent patterns?”
    â€œAccept facts that fit the theory, throw out those that don’t?”
    A narrowing of aperture, for him, was a narrowing of the eyes. “A death may be a death, or early warning of existential threat or out-of-context problem. Nothing occurs in isolation. The world’s doom ripples back and forth through time.” That last word a vibrating chord. “Did you come to mock my methods, Elayne?”
    â€œI came to ask your help.”
    â€œYou have strange protocols for asking.”
    â€œYou’ll like this.” She unfolded the broadsheet and held it before his lenses.
    Clicks and realignments, scrape of a needle on a spinning wheel. “Simple propaganda leaflet. This political affair holds no interest for me.”
    â€œAn army gathering in the Skittersill holds no interest?”
    â€œI have no defined life span,” he said. “Nor will you, once you shed that skin shell. We are both difficult to kill. The greatest dangers to us are dangers to our world system. Therefore we may divide all threats into two kinds: global-existential, and trivial. Trivial threats deserve no time or thought. This protest does not threaten the fundamental coherence of reality. It is of no importance.”
    â€œWhat if it causes a demon outbreak?”
    â€œIt will not. Too many central decision-makers have nothing to gain from widespread destruction. Even if it did, such events can be contained—we might lose Dresediel Lex, but not the planet.”
    â€œAccidents