All The Turns of Light (20 page)

“Tower,” Meralda said, collapsing into her chair. Mug rested on her desk, all his eyes on the glass. “What is it?”

“I do not know,” said Tower. “In an effort to prolong communication, I have been investigating alternative methods of signal transfer using the Glass. One hour and eight minutes ago, I observed what appeared to be a transmission, originating within the Realms, directed to a location a few hundred miles distant from your current location.”

Mug swiveled each of his brown eyes toward Meralda. “This cannot be good.”

“Can you show it to me?” asked Meralda.

“I can,” said Tower. “It contains visual and audible components. I have removed the spoken components, in case they are active trigger words.” Goboy’s Glass shimmered before filling with fire or something like it. The roaring of a great beast blended with a howl and a cacophony of screeches that rose and diminished but never fell silent.

The burning embers flashed, and in that flash, Meralda saw the unmistakable outline of the
Intrepid
silhouetted against the fires. The howl rose up, raging and calling, and as it rose the
Intrepid’s
image grew until Meralda could see the lights in her portholes and the turning of her fans.

Then it was gone. The fires, the cries, all of it, gone in an instant.

A cup of steaming tea appeared at Meralda’s right hand. She picked it up and sipped before speaking.

“The words. Vonat?”

“Yes,” said Tower. “An unfamiliar dialect, though. I will continue to search for such communications. Caution would be advisable.”

The Glass flashed, reflecting the room once again.

“Caution, he says,” muttered Mug. “We’re aloft in a huge silver airship. We’re the only thing out here other than water and sky. How cautious can we be?”

“Nameless,” Meralda said. “Faceless. Attend, please.”

The crows landed atop the frame of Goboy’s Glass.

“You heard?” asked Meralda.

Aye,
said one.

“I want you to begin a patrol,” Meralda said. “With the
Intrepid
as a center point. How far away could you detect another airship, or a sailing vessel?”

The crows conferred briefly with a series of hops and flaps.

Fifty of your miles,
said one.

“That’s not good enough,” Mug snapped.

Then take to the skies yourself, construct,
a crow said.

“Silence,” Meralda said. “Begin a surveillance at once, please.”

The crows hopped.

If we spy a vessel, or an airship,
asked one,
Shall we sink it, or cast it from the sky?

“Not at once,” Meralda said. “But do report to me immediately.”

Thy ways are strange,
croaked one.

“More patrolling and less commentary,” Mug said. “Impudent roosters.”

The crows cawed and leaped, and were gone.

“It’s only fifty miles of warning,” Mug said. “Better than nothing, Mistress. Or is it Mrs. Donchen now? I simply cannot keep up with your active social life these days.”

“Oh, shut up,” Meralda said.

Mug laughed. “You’re smiling, Mistress! You tried to hide it, but I saw it! He asked you, didn’t he? Right there behind the
Jenny
, silver midnight moonlight streaming in. You know I’ll need a room of my own when we all move into that lovely little cottage off Handmade Way.”

Donchen knocked and spoke. Meralda pointed and glared at Mug, who laughed and flew off the desk.

“Tower’s news?” Donchen asked as he hurried inside.

Mug recounted Tower’s report as Meralda supplied corrections and pointed out numerous embellishments.

Meralda nibbled at a slice of cheese. “The staves say they can only maintain a fifty-mile patrol,” she said. “Anything moving fast enough to have caught up with us will be on us before we can even try to run.”

Donchen nodded. “I’m sure you already have a solution.”

“I requested larger telescopes in the fore and aft viewing salons,” Meralda said. “But of course there wasn’t time. The ones we have are barely suitable as toys.”

Donchen wiped at his lips with a napkin. “I have some small knowledge of optics.”

“We could use one of the spare coil buss tubes as a body,” Meralda said.

“I can easily fashion a mount of some sort out of yonder hat rack, and the base of that lamp,” replied Donchen, his quick grey eyes darting about Meralda’s nearly-full cabin.

“The lenses,” Mug said. “I don’t believe we’ll find precision ground glass lenses aboard, and we can hardly make a pair out of spectacles and soup bowls.”

“Air in a static matrix,” said Donchen.

“I was thinking water,” Meralda said. She found a scrap of paper among the debris surrounding her and began to sketch. “Water, formed into this shape, held perfectly still.”

Donchen leaned over and smiled. “You could change focal length and dispersion simply by changing the shape of the confined volume,” he said. “No need for a complex focusing mechanism, although if we require such I believe I can form one out of a serrated meat knife and a pair of shoe horns.”

Mug circled about, his eyes on the drawings.

“No doubt about it,” he said. “You two were made for each other.”

Within moments, Meralda was out the door, heading for the
Intrepid’s
cargo bay, with a stop by the galley on her way back.

Donchen remained, and began fashioning a three-legged stand for the telescope, using whatever lay about that caught his eye.

Mug remained at his side, watching him work.

“There’s something I’ve been wanting to ask you for a long time,” Mug said at last.

Donchen smiled. “Ask.”

“Is Donchen your first name? Your last name? Both? Neither? I need to know how to address the wedding invitations, you know. I handle all those sorts of things.”

Donchen grimaced as he used a knife to pry off the legs of a small oak end table. “My full name was Don’chen Shingma Donlo Mingasha,” he said. “Now that I am disowned, I am simply Donchen.”

“I suppose Mistress won’t mind if you go by Donchen Ovis after the nuptials,” Mug said. “There’s a walking cane in the corner that might be just what you’re looking for.”

Donchen grunted and went off after the cane. “So you believe we are planning a wedding?” he asked.

“I do,” Mug replied. “Are you?”

“If it was so, would this trouble you, friend?”

Mug buzzed to a halt. His eyes swiveled to fix on Donchen. “Everything changes, doesn’t it? Sooner or later.”

“It does,” Donchen replied. He put down the cane and mopped his brow. “Life is change. But not all change is bad. Meralda will always love you. You will always be at the center of her life and her home.”

Mug spoke softly. “Even with you there?”

“Even with me there, should that come to pass.”

“So no getting Mug a room of his own a block away? No shutting him downstairs and only speaking on alternate Tuesdays?”

“No. The center only. I would never break apart a family. I would be honored, though, if I were to one day be included.”

“Not any doubt about that,” Mug said. “I see a tool kit! Under the party dress. I believe it includes wrenches.”

“Excellent!” Donchen retrieved the tools, and rubbed his hands together in glee. “Look at this,” he said, holding up an ornate lace bag. “Opera glasses! Perfect for an eyepiece!”

Meralda returned, dragging a duffel bag filled with tubes, wires, and every latching wand and holdstone she could carry.

“Welcome back, Mistress,” Mug said. “Let’s you, me, and the husband-to-be all build a magic telescope.”

* * *

The cabin door closed softly as Donchen snuck away. Meralda fell wearily on her bed.

Mug was silent for a long time.

“I am truly happy for you, Mistress,” he said, just as Meralda drifted off to sleep. “Truly, I am.”

Meralda began to snore.

Mug regarded the ungainly thing Meralda and Donchen had built.

It was tall and bulky, and it was not lovely. Parts that hadn’t quite fit had been hammered into place. Exposed cables and conduits hung from end to end. Some hissed and leaked mist, while others glowed and dripped slow, cold sparks.

But they’d aimed it at Goboy’s Glass, and Mug had put his eye to it, and he’d been able to look at the
Intrepid
and see clear detail from more than three hundred miles away.

It worked. “You’re not pretty,” muttered Mug sleepily. “But I guess I can forgive that.”

Chapter 10

“What’s all this?” Mug asked, stirring his leaves and blinking the sleep from his twenty-nine eyes. “Mistress, have you cut a hole in the ceiling?”

Meralda nodded, mopping sweat from her face. “Technically, that’s a deck, since we’re aboard an airship.”

“Deck or ceiling, it’s still a bloody great hole, must I ask again?”

Meralda grinned and climbed onto her desk. She then reached up into the hole, struggled with something in the ceiling for a moment, and managed to pull a pair of thick cables through the opening.

“I need electricity,” she said. “For the new instruments.”

Mug gazed about the cabin.

While he’d slept, Meralda had been hard at work.

Both bicycles were disassembled. Every electric lamp in the cabin had been opened, and wires ran from their empty sockets. The leavings of the telescope project had joined the bicycle frames in the center of the room, where the lines from the lamps converged into the machine Meralda was constructing.

Four bicycle wheels turned slowly in the dim light. Chains shuttled through gears with well-oiled clicks. A single beam of white light rose up from the deck in the center of the wheels. The beam entered the remains of a jewelry box, and escaped to fall on the spinning rims from lenses set into each of the box’s four faces. Tiny shards of broken mirrors reflected the lights back toward the center of the machine, which buzzed and sparked as the wheels rotated.

“
This
is why we’ll never be able to keep a maid,” Mug said.

Meralda heaved and yanked, and another yard of thick black cable emerged. “I’m going to find out why I’m surrounded by household goods, and put a stop to it.”

“Well, you’ve certainly murdered a pair of perfectly good bicycles. What is that thing?”

“That
thing
is a four-axis balanced-load thaumeter,” replied Meralda. She leaped down from her desk. “It will show the direction, the intensity, and the temporal alignment of whatever is materializing objects about me.”

“Not to raise uncomfortable lines of inquiry, Mistress, but what if the source is you?”

“It will show that too.”

Beside the thaumeter, a coil of glowing wires wound up and around the remains of the hat rack, where they terminated in a sparking globe that hung just below the ceiling. Meralda pulled the cables to it, and set about stripping the insulation.

“And that?” asked Mug.

“A simple charge detector,” Meralda replied. She looked up at Mug and grinned. “It struck me last night, when I was talking to the Queen. There aren’t any bangs when new objects materialize. No sparks either. Why aren’t there bangs, Mug?”

Mug flew his cage close to Meralda, his eyes wide. “That’s a live wire, Mistress,” he said.

“I’m wearing rubber gloves,” Meralda said. “No bangs! No sparks! Mug, if these objects were actually transported somehow from thousands of miles away and thousands of feet below, what would you expect their reaction to be upon their release into this new environment?”

“Well, straightaway, the cat did something rude in the corner,” Mug began.

Meralda used her wire cutters as a stabbing finger. “Static discharges! Thaumic discharges! We should observe both, in every case. There should be flashes, and bangs. There aren’t.”

“So what does that tell us?” asked Mug.

Meralda shrugged. Her red eyes dimmed slightly. “I’ll know shortly,” she said.

Lights flashed in the corner. Mug darted toward the boxlike affair as the lamp affixed to the top began to flicker. “That looks like Bean’s Luminous Divider,” Mug said. “The one that finally measured the speed of light.”

“It should,” replied Meralda. “The basic workings are the same.”

“That business over there, by your berth. Is that a thaumic elasticity thingamajig?”

Meralda beamed. “It is a perfect reproduction of Malt’s Primal Etheric Elasticity Oscillator,” she said. “We can measure the most basic magical constant even more accurately than Malt ever could.”

Mug’s eyes swept the cabin. “Has the ever resourceful Donchen been a participant in all this?”