The Mechanical Quotes

“Oh, for crying out loud," she said. "Were you fools any more chivalrous I'd surely swoon on the spot and damage my uterus.”
― Ian Tregillis, The Mechanical

“The prosperity achieved through slavery had a way of blinding men’s hearts to the evil of their own hands.”
― Ian Tregillis, The Mechanical

“humans carried heavy obligations, too, but called them culture. Society.”
― Ian Tregillis, The Mechanical

“Clakkers carried complex geasa by dint of alchemy; humans carried heavy obligations, too, but called them culture. Society.”
― Ian Tregillis, The Mechanical

“Free Will was a vacuum, a negative space. It was the absence of coercion, the absence of compulsion, the absence of agony.”
― Ian Tregillis, The Mechanical

“Raindrops misted the Ridderzal’s immense rosette window. Water dripped from the architectural tracery that turned the window into a stained glass cog. It streaked the colored panes of oculi and quatrefoils depicting the empire’s arms: a rosy cross surrounded by the arms of the great families all girded by the teeth of the universal cog.”
― Ian Tregillis, The Mechanical

“Freedom felt like… nothing. Free Will was a vacuum, a negative space. It was the absence of coercion, the absence of compulsion, the absence of agony. A gap in his consciousness where geasa had perpetually jostled for priority, demanding his obedience. It was the photographic negative of Jax’s existence during every minute of the 118 years since he’d been forged. It was overwhelming. Exhilarating. Terrifying.”
― Ian Tregillis, The Mechanical

“Having tasted life without the pain of obligation perpetually burning him from within, he’d choose death over the return to bondage. He’d make that choice in an instant. Life as a slave was unspeakable; life as a slave who had briefly tasted freedom was unthinkable.”
― Ian Tregillis, The Mechanical

“For the creation of the mechanicals was a seismic event, an earth-rending convulsion that left nothing untouched: palaces, thrones, and empires, yes, but also the way men and women thought about themselves and their relationship to the world, to God, even their own bodies.”
― Ian Tregillis, The Mechanical

“How did humans guide themselves? How did they know what to do and what not to do?”
― Ian Tregillis, The Mechanical

“You greasy shit stain on a diseased elk’s warty asshole.”
― Ian Tregillis, The Mechanical

“Freedom felt like… nothing. Free Will was a vacuum, a negative space. It was the absence of coercion, the absence of compulsion, the absence of agony.”
― Ian Tregillis, The Mechanical

“The clockwork men and women fated to maneuver the oars twenty-four hours per day until the ship reached its destination had turned their silent voices to song as they bent their backs to row. They sang not in any human language but in the secret language of the mechanicals. A shanty sung in the click-tick-click of clockwork bodies, the crash of tapped feet, the clatter of metal hands gripping banded wooden spars.”
― Ian Tregillis, The Mechanical

“After spitting a long dark stream of tobacco through the crenelle he shouted, “You short-dicked baboons are making the Blessed Virgin cry! Haven’t you shitlickers ever heard of foreplay? Fucking Christ, be gentle with that bastard. This isn’t some dockside whore you’re paying by the minute, you fools!” Seeing that his gentle encouragements had delivered the intended effect, the sergeant returned to his knitting.”
― Ian Tregillis, The Mechanical

“But unexpected kindnesses were hidden stones lying in wait to bend or break the blade of her plow.”
― Ian Tregillis, The Mechanical

“Overwhelming: he could do anything he wanted. But the grand sum of anything-at-all was nothing-at-all. The topology of freedom offered no gradients to nudge him, no landmarks to guide him.”
― Ian Tregillis, The Mechanical

“Free Will was a vacuum, a negative space. It was the absence of coercion, the absence of compulsion, the absence of agony. A”
― Ian Tregillis, The Mechanical

“The wind fluttering the pennants atop the outer keep and teasing Berenice’s hair carried the loamy smell of damp earth, the fresh scent of the river, and, even now, a ghostly chemical astringency. The miasma wafted from the battlefield.”
― Ian Tregillis, The Mechanical

“The Stemwinders made the most bizarre ratcheting sound, like the stripping of gears combined with the metallic whine of an overstressed steel cable.”
― Ian Tregillis, The Mechanical

“But he’d given her his word. And Jax realized, to his own surprise and disappointment, he didn’t want that to be meaningless. What point in having the freedom to enter into promises of your own choosing, to forge bonds of your own design, if your only aim is to shatter them? No. That couldn’t be his legacy.”
― Ian Tregillis, The Mechanical

“I quote my betters because on reflection and contemplation I have found truth in their wisdom, not out of unthinking reaction.”
― Ian Tregillis, The Mechanical

“But he couldn’t suppress the horror of learning his pursuers would murder innocents to bolster their lies.”
― Ian Tregillis, The Mechanical

“They had cut him open and excised his Free Will.”
― Ian Tregillis, The Mechanical

“Their former masters had wrought something beautiful in the midst of their ruthlessness: a beast that sang, a machine that expressed its thoughts in poems. Jax had wished he were capable of sleeping like a human, for it would have been wonderful to experience a lullaby from this magnificent cousin.”
― Ian Tregillis, The Mechanical

“Terrifying: Jax remembered what had happened to the last Clakker to say no. They'd broken his legs, and filled his mouth with glue, and tossed him into the hellish forges of the Clockmakers' Guild. The humans had destroyed the rogue Clakker Adam, who'd been born Perjumbellagostriavantus, and made a public spectacle of it. Practically declared a citywide holiday. They had called him rogue and demon-thrall, melted his body to an alchemical slurry, and incinerated his hard-won soul until there was nothing left of it but a shiver in the spines of the human voyeurs.
Rogue. That's what they'd call Jax too, if they caught him. They'd condemn, damn, torture, and melt him.”
― Ian Tregillis, The Mechanical

“What point in having the freedom to enter into promises of your own choosing, to forge bonds of your own design, if your only aim is to shatter them?”
― Ian Tregillis, The Mechanical