What the Sentries Mended

The last records left the party in the chamber of devouring, with the trap silenced and the pieces on the floor not yet explained. The next ones begin in the same place, and with those pieces.

Taeon looked through what was left of the dead. Somewhere in it he found an insignia, and knew it, and could not say from where. The note is short: Recognize an insignia in the viscera, but can't ID it. He does not draw it, or describe it. I have read that line many times and I am still not sure whether he expected to place it later, or whether he was only recording the discomfort of almost knowing.

Then he tended to the living. He used the healing of his discipline, the touch the order teaches for closing wounds, and he put a good deal of it into someone. The records don't say whose wounds they were. The Skreesire had hit hard, and there were several to choose from.

They went on into the sleeping quarters.

It was one connected space rather than a set of rooms. There was writing on the walls, and painted phrases that did not resolve into sense: garbled, the notes say, as though copied by someone who did not know the language or no longer cared. There were shelves and stands holding small and middling objects. There was strange iconography, and there were sculptures and altars. Somewhere among it all was an armoury.

— People sleep where they worship only when they have stopped telling the two apart. I don't know that this is true of whoever lived there. It is what the room suggests.

To the south-east stood two humanoid figures, metallic and plainly made. Someone read them for magic and found none. Taeon knew them for what they were: patrol-class sentry robots, built with weapons in them, made to do physical harm, able to mend themselves, and with a known weakness to a well-placed blow. He said so before the fight began.

The fight went the way his description said it would. One strike, carried on energy rather than on force, got through. Others, meant to break through plating, slid off it. And partway through, one of the machines began to repair itself while the party watched. There was a control panel on the south-east wall. Nobody was sure it had anything to do with the robots, and nobody stopped to find out.

The Field Canon has a section on such things. Its later additions take his notes from this room almost line for line.

ON SENTRIES — made guards that hold a post (later additions)
A made guard is not a beast. Do not read it for fear or hunger.
Test it for magic first. Absence of magic narrows the problem.
Name the pattern before engaging. Patrol-class units carry their weapons inside them.
Plating turns force more readily than energy. Choose accordingly.
They mend. A wounded unit left alone returns to the line.
Do not spread damage across two. Finish one.
A precise blow does more than a heavy one. They are built for heavy ones.
A control panel near the post may command the guards, or may not.
Do not assume. Note it, and return to it after.
Search the post only when both are down.
(Kopalo, from field notes; the sleeping quarters.)

— the Field Canon, on Sentries, later additions

The Canon has turned his uncertainty about the panel into a rule, which is what the Canon does with most uncertainty. His own note just says not sure. I prefer it.

Both robots went down. The notes mark it with a line of dashes, the only emphasis on the page, as though he had set his stylus down to breathe.

Then they rested. Eight hours in a place full of altars to something they had not yet named, with a panel on the wall that nobody had touched and an insignia he could not place. The last line is a reminder to himself: Check the room next time.

He did not search it that night. He slept first. I have come to think that was its own kind of judgement.