Featured image: Character designs from Magical Girl Ore.
This is a section from the draft of Rag & Muffin, my next novel to appear after Dead to Rites. This passage may or may not be in the final version in this form:
Only one spot in Godtown did not swell with the cosmic beat nor touch the underside of heaven, but remained dark—a mere part of earth or perhaps of something lower than earth. That was the Talbot Refinery, which stood near the Green Line on the edge of the Elysian-occupied West End.
In the refinery, workers—mostly outcaste marjaras unable to find decent jobs anywhere else—committed the worst blasphemy known in this world: They took the Tuaoi Stones from the mines with which the Elysians had profaned the sacred Vindhya Mountains, and they performed unspeakable deeds to alter those pure crystals into something base and ignoble in order to feed them to the Elysians’ demon-possessed automata.
More powerful than any mundane science, the magic called Runetech had made the Elysians the masters of the world, but the ghosts in their machines hungered for profaned Tuaoi Stones. Thus, in the midst of the holy city, the Talbot Refinery was an outcrop of hell, and it alone could resist the flurry of religious ecstasy and exultation that beset the rest of Godtown every morning.
Just as Meru closed, Talbot’s portal, like a mouth of the underworld, opened to swallow a long string of buses containing the workmen for the morning shift. Like giant jacks dropped from the sky, anti-tank caltrops flanked the road leading to the refinery’s heavily fortified entrance. In a booth at the gate, an underpaid and overworked human babu did his best to check the workers’ and drivers’ papers, which were handed to him—with much shouting and babbling—through half-opened windows along the buses’ sides.
Looming over it all like a colossus and casting its stark and menacing shadow across this scene was an enormous machine, vaguely man-shaped. Thick, bulky armor enclosed it, and it bristled with weapons ranging from conventional autocannons and missile-launchers to rune-powered accelerators and psi-blasters. Every once in a while, one of the intricate symbols carved into the machine’s armor glowed blue or green, letting all below know that it was alive—and that it was watching them. Somewhere deep in its guts, dangling from anti-shock suspensors, was a thing that used to be human.