Polka

A technomancer who drains life to build machines, and the only antagonist in the saga beaten by a song.

What he looks like

Tall and lean in robes cut from the same dark metal as his tower. Gaunt, sharp cheekbones, eyes that glow with his construction's inner light. His hands are living metal "that flowed and shifted like mercury", forming geometric patterns and then tools. His teeth are "small gears that turned with mechanical precision" (ch. 93).

How he arrives

By killing everything for twenty miles. A circle of death spreads across the Ashmark Plains, grass curling inward, insects falling out of the air, cattle cut off mid-cry. At its centre a structure rises that is "part tower, part tree, part machine".

He is unembarrassed about it: "I've fed. It's been quite some time since I last had access to such abundant organic energy."

The stolen life goes into crystalline vessels, and from there into him.

What he wants

Not destruction, which he considers crude. He says so by comparing himself favourably to Akumu:

PLK: Akumu was a crude thing, all fear and fury with no subtlety. It wanted to destroy everything out of spite. I'm far more practical.

His programme is the replacement of organic life with machinery, and he presents it as philanthropy:

PLK: I don't want to destroy the world. I want to improve it. Organic life is so inefficient [...] there will be no more hunger, no more aging, no more death [...] Of course, the transition period will require some... sacrifices.

Where he came from

Centuries asleep under the plains, and the war is what let him out:

PLK: The war weakened the barriers between realms, made it easier for me to draw on the life force I needed to wake up properly. And now, with Akumu gone, there's no one left who might oppose me.

He also read up on his opposition first, "in the records I recovered from Akumu's strongholds", which means Akumu kept files.

He is a better diagnostician than a fighter

His real weapon is that he is right about Nilah. He works out her flaw during the fight and says it out loud:

PLK: The great hero's weakness isn't physical at all, is it? You're terrified of letting anyone get close enough to help because you can't bear the thought of watching them die.

And he feeds on the result: "Your guilt is feeding my constructs better than pure life force ever could."

So the arc's antagonist wins for three chapters by naming the protagonist's problem accurately, which is a rarer thing in the saga than power.

How he loses

Ch. 97. Ten million people sing, Nilah stops refusing help, and her blade grows until it spans the horizon.

His objections are the most characteristic thing about him. He does not plead or rage. He insists it cannot be happening:

PLK: Impossible! This is coordinated delusion! Mass hysteria! Organic minds are too chaotic to achieve such synchronization!

PLK: This defies every law of thermodynamics! Of physics! Of rational thought!

He is not killed. The chapter is careful about it:

His carefully constructed form began to dissolve, not destroyed but transformed, the stolen life force within him returning to where it belonged.

The tower crumbles, the dead zone becomes a garden, and the twenty miles of life he was holding go back to being alive. A man who converted living things into power is undone by having that conversion run backwards.

Blook lists him among the dead in ch. 192 and ch. 232 all the same. See ../lore/the-record-of-losses.md.

Open questions

• What he is. Never named as human, monster, or anything else, and his hands and teeth are not prosthetics as far as the text says.
• What he was doing before the centuries of sleep, and who put him under the plains.
• Whether "returning to where it belonged" means he ended. Blook counts him as a loss, and the chapter that removed him avoided the word.
• Which hero he drained in three minutes. Never named.