Agent of the Crown (34 page)

“What for?” she asked.

The soldier shrugged. “As if himself would
tell me summat like that.”

“Suppose I’m busy.”

“Not sure you want to say no to himself,
don’t know what mood he’s in.”

The Baron wanted her at the fort. Was he
lethally upset about the guns? No, if the Baron wanted her dead
he’d have done it one of the many, many times she’d been to the
manor recently. “Give me a moment.”

He shrugged again. “Take all the moments you
want. I’m not waiting for you. You know the way.” He slogged off up
the street. Telaine ran upstairs to fetch her tools and her
snowshoes, then went to the forge.

“The Baron wants me at the fort,” she told
Ben, who immediately removed his leather gloves to take her
hand.

“You’re going?” he asked.

“I don’t see how I can say no. Morgan was
dangerous just by being Morgan. The Baron gets dangerous when he
doesn’t get his way.”

“I don’t like it.”

“Neither do I. That’s why I’m telling you. If
I’m not back by dark, come find me.”

“I’ll always come after you.” He kissed her,
fixed her with that level gaze, and added, “Don’t make it
necessary.”

The road from Longbourne to the fort had not
been broken by more than the soldier’s footprints. At the turnoff
to the manor she saw those steps joined by a horse’s tracks. She
tromped in her snowshoes over the combined tracks until she reached
the fort’s gate. Drifts of snow piled high in the corners inside,
where the soldiers had swept it rather than shoveling it out of the
fort. She resolutely didn’t look at the storage tower second from
the left.

She went toward the keep only to see the
Baron standing near the fort’s inner wall, next to the mysterious
crates she’d asked Lieutenant Hardy about weeks before. The Baron
was having a conversation with Captain Jackson, but broke it off
when he saw her. “My dear Deviser! Thank you for coming. I believe
I have a commission for you unlike any you’ve seen before. Captain
Jackson, if you wouldn’t mind?”

Jackson picked up a pry bar and levered the
lid off the nearest crate. It was approximately six feet long and
three feet deep, and if it had been narrower it would have looked
uncomfortably like a coffin. It was filled with straw the Baron
brushed away with a gloved hand. Steel and brass gleamed. Telaine,
intrigued despite her wariness, leaned forward. “I…don’t believe I
know what this is, milord,” she said.

“And well you should not! It’s part of a
larger Device.
All
of this is part of a single Device.” He
put his hand on Telaine’s shoulder in a comradely gesture; she
managed not to flinch.

“I have long been disturbed at how shut off
Steepridge is during the winter. Most disturbing is how long it
takes for the passes to be free from snow. It can be a month or
more after the last snow before it’s possible to go down the
mountain. I think, as Baron of Steepridge, it’s my duty to make my
people’s lives easier. Hence…this.” He made a sweeping gesture with
his free hand. “Miss Bricker, I have acquired an earth mover. And I
require you to assemble it.”

Telaine didn’t hide her shock. Earth mover
was a misnomer; the huge Devices could plow through anything, rock,
earth, snow, ice, their efficiency only affected by the material
they moved and the motive forces powering the Device. An earth
mover was one of the biggest Devices created to date, the most
powerful, and the most complex, requiring dozens of motive forces
and hundreds of gears and coils all working in precise unity. She’d
never seen one before and had no idea how it was constructed.

She considered telling the Baron it was
impossible, that she didn’t have the skill, that it would take a
team of Devisers to assemble it, all of which might or might not be
true. But she knew in her heart that the Baron had built her
reputation so high in his own mind that to refuse would mean
leaving this fort in no condition her friends would recognize.

She said, “Milord, I…I hardly know what to
say. This is generous of you indeed. The villages will be so
happy.”

“Oh, but Miss Bricker, it is
you
and
your Deviser’s skill upon which their happiness depends.”

“It’s an unlooked for honor, milord. I would
never have gotten this chance anywhere else.” She was sincere about
that. For a Deviser, this was a truly extraordinary
opportunity.

“We wait only on your instructions as to your
needs.”

She thought rapidly. “I’ll need a sheltered
area built. It will take so much longer if I have to have your men
dig it out after every storm. I’ll need to make sure it will fit
through the gate after it’s assembled. It would be so terrible if I
put it together and we couldn’t take it out of the fort! And I will
need specialized tools. My tiny ones simply won’t work. The smith
in Longbourne can make them for me.” How else could she delay them?
“And it will take me a few days to familiarize myself with the
Device. I’ve never seen one before.”

“I’m putting Captain Jackson at your
disposal,” the Baron said. Jackson looked uninterested in the
conversation, the Device, and Telaine herself, but he nodded at the
Baron. “He will direct his men to do whatever you ask.”

“Then…Captain Jackson, if your men could
build me a sheltered area from
here
to
here
, canvas
should do as long as the roof is sloped to let the snow slide
off…and perhaps the sides could be portable? Milord, I won’t be
able to begin work until that’s complete, so if you don’t mind,
I’ll go back to Longbourne and have a word with the smith.”

Trudging through the snow on the way back,
she alternated between cursing herself for a fool and frantically
trying to come up with a solution to this new problem. The Baron
wanted to clear the pass, all right, but it was Thorsten Pass he
cared about.

A month for the main pass to clear? If the
Baron had his own earth mover, he’d have Thorsten Pass cleared mere
days after the last snow came. The Ruskalder would pour down into
unsuspecting Longbourne and put it to the torch, and then drive the
earth mover all the way down the mountain and into Tremontane
proper with no warning to anyone. The success or failure of that
plan rested on Telaine’s ability to delay, deceive, and sabotage
without bringing the Baron’s attention, and vicious cruelty, down
on her head.

“Never realized how many tools a Deviser
needs,” Ben said, spreading out the pages of sketches two days
later. Telaine nodded, wishing she’d thought of a way to get him to
measure some of the dimensions of the new tools incorrectly. The
best she’d been able to do was to ask him to work slowly, which
would keep her away from the fort longer.

“Do you have everything you need?” she
said.

“Think so. It shouldn’t take more than a
couple of days—I mean, it’s going to take most of a week,” Ben said
with a grin and a wink. “All these fiddly little things that don’t
look like any tools I’ve ever seen.”

Telaine kissed his cheek. “Then I’m going to
work on my Wintersmeet gifts. I’ll be back later, if you want to
have supper with me?”

“Can’t imagine anything I’d like more. What
are you giving me for Wintersmeet?”

“What makes you think I’m giving you
anything? Oh—” Ben had seized her around the waist and kissed her
until she was breathless. “Oh,” she repeated, “I guess I’d better
think of something.”

“You should, because I’ve already made
yours,” Ben said.

She kissed him once more, then went back to
Aunt Weaver’s. But once she was in her room, she found she couldn’t
concentrate on her Wintersmeet gifts. Instead she fretted over ways
to delay the earth mover construction.

She almost didn’t have to pretend; the Device
was genuinely complex, and bulky, and the courtyard of the fort an
inconvenient place to assemble it. It had taken the slovenly and
uninterested soldiers most of two days just to clear a space that
would allow her to lay out all seven pieces at once. There was a
storm coming that Eleanor said was one of the big ones. That would
be another two or three days wasted. And Wintersmeet was fast
approaching, which would give her another three days, at least,
when the Baron couldn’t possibly expect her to work, if only
because the soldiers insisted on time off as well. Every day
counted.

The problem was, she could only work so
slowly before the Baron, who had watched her work so often,
realized what she was doing. Delay wouldn’t be enough. She’d have
to sabotage it instead. That was more dangerous; the Baron would
believe almost anything she told him about how long the project
would take, but he would be unlikely to believe continual failure.
Even if he didn’t suspect sabotage, he might fly into a rage at her
for the Device’s breaking down.

She hoped once she started assembling the
pieces, a strategy would suggest itself. Or…could she tell him it
had been damaged in transit? It was plausible—but he’d probably
expect her to repair the damage anyway. As a last resort, she could
simply refuse to work on it. She wondered if she was willing to let
the Baron hurt or kill her as the price of keeping the Ruskalder
out of Tremontane.

She went to the fort every day while Ben was
working on the tools, interfering in the building of the shelter as
much as she dared without infuriating the soldiers. Bad enough they
were lazy; she didn’t need them antagonistic as well. But it gave
the Baron the illusion she was accomplishing something, or would
have if he’d been there. She’d expected him to hover, had come up
with excuses that would get him out of her way, but he hadn’t been
to the fort since he’d showed her the earth mover. That made her
uneasy. Why had he waited nearly a month after the pass closed to
call her in for this?

Finally, the tools were finished, the skies
were clear, and she couldn’t delay any longer. She packed her new
tools into a large canvas bag procured from Mister Fuller and
trudged up the valley. The novelty of the snow had worn off,
particularly now that most of it had melted and what remained was
slushy and soaked through her boots to her thick wool socks.

The day was overcast, though Aunt Weaver had
assured her no snow would fall before tomorrow morning. Being
trapped at the fort for two or three days was one of Telaine’s
nightmares, even if the soldiers seemed disinclined to attack
her.

Within her canvas shelter, she looked at the
seven large pieces, laid out in roughly the places they would
occupy in the finished product. A steel plow, two shining silvery
wings swooping back from a sharp nose, ten feet across at its
widest point and about eight feet tall. Two assemblies of small
wheels constrained by tracks of iron, segmented for smooth
propulsion by the wheels over any terrain the earth mover might
encounter. Two complicated cylindrical sections like giant steel
barrels, seven feet in diameter, containing more than four-fifths
of the unimbued Devices and gears that propelled the thing. A
smaller cylinder containing a pile of spheres, unimbued motive
forces, which the earth mover would burn through almost as rapidly
as it tore through earth. And, most innovative of all, a bulbous
capsule with a hatch on the top that, if Telaine could manage it,
would hold the Device’s own source for re-imbuing the motive forces
as they were drained. In its assembled state, the earth mover would
look much like a snub-nosed wasp, or a mosquito with a stubby
silver proboscis.

Harroden might at least have included
assembly instructions
, she thought irritably. She heaved the
smaller pieces back into the boxes, rolled the cylinders to each
side, and examined the nose by walking around it. Four soldiers had
tried to lift it out of its crate without success before Telaine
suggested taking the crate apart around it. She’d worked out that
one function of the motive force was to lift the nose just enough
off the ground that it wouldn’t drag and flip the whole Device end
over end.

She knelt down behind it and reached inside,
feeling around for the copper wires that would connect it to the
next section. They were as thick as her pinky finger and had a
slick surface. One of them had come loose from its coupling;
sighing, she reattached it. As tempting as it was to begin
sabotaging the thing now, she needed to find a part that might
reasonably fail and would be complex enough to justify her
overlooking it. The nose, simple and straightforward, was not the
place to look.

She poked her head inside the cylinders
containing the gears and realized that though they looked
identical, there were tiny but key differences between them. This
was more like it. Suppressing a grin, she began attaching the wrong
cylinder to the nose. She’d “discover” the mistake later, make a
lot of noise about how stupid she was, and “fix” the thing. One
more delaying tactic. She was afraid it wouldn’t be enough.

Telaine received
an early Wintersmeet gift when a fortuitous snow storm came down on
Longbourne two days before Wintersmeet, giving her an extra day’s
holiday from her unwelcome task. Most businesses had given up the
pretense that anyone was working. Eleanor told people their laundry
could wait a few days, and besides, no one was paying attention to
clothes this time of year.

Ben shut down the forge and joined a snowball
fight with a handful of young men and women, shouting at Telaine to
participate, pelting her with snowballs until she retaliated with a
few lumpy ones of her own. Snowball fights were another of the many
things she’d never done before coming to Longbourne. Snowball
fights, cooking her own food, drinking beer, falling in love.

Disgusted by her inadequate snowballs, Ben
tackled her and rubbed her face with snow until she squealed, then
kissed her until she couldn’t breathe. Definitely another thing
she’d never done before.