Clockwork Squire

The Clockwork Squire on the Arcane Syndicate's southern field-roll carries the unit-of-record designation Squire-Frame Halcyon, an armour-bearer automaton of porcelain and gold gearwork built three years ago at the Syndicate's southern research-vault under a grant the apprentice-board approved over Elara Wynter's sole dissenting vote, for lending to the Vanguard's line as a shield-carrier. The frame is wound, not fuelled; a mainspring the size of a dinner plate sits where a heart would and the squire winds itself, each dawn, by a key it keeps. The face is a smooth porcelain mask with painted eyes, and the painter — a Vesper-district portraitist the vault hired for a morning — named the frame after the sitter whose eyes she had copied, and the design-board let the name stand because the designation was already on the paperwork and the name was already on the face.

The squire's combat-grant is the interpose: it carries a shield it is not permitted to raise for itself, and its priority-stack ranks every ally on the field above its own frame, which the design-board calls loyalty and Sora Klein — who has visited the vault four times to watch it wind — calls 'a decision it keeps making,' on the grounds that a stack can be re-ordered and the squire has been offered the re-ordering and has declined. The painted eyes do not move. It turns its whole head to look at whoever is speaking, which people find more polite than they expected, and it refers to itself as 'the squire' in the third person, which the board considers a specification and Wynter, in a note the board has not answered, considers 'the frame declining to be an I on purpose.' It has chipped the porcelain eleven times. It has not once let the shield drop.

It does not have peer-relationships in the conventional sense, but it has counted Sora's visits and has said so, and it stood the inner gate for one season beside Line-Guard Ansel Tarrow, whose glass sword it watched light and about which it filed a report the vault has classified as 'sensor observation' and Sora has classified as 'wonder.' Elara Wynter's dissenting note called the grant 'the autonomy the Syndicate is unwilling to admit it has built, with a nicer face this time.' The squire has read the note. It has said, of it, that the face was the painter's decision and the rest was the squire's, and the apprentice-board has not opened that heading either.