The Mask And The Master (Mechanized Wizardry Book 2) (14 page)

“If anything, Mr. Ronk,” the senior ‘naut said, adjusting her glasses, “I think I speak for both of us when I wish we’d met you sooner. 

“Horace!  Go get that lazy team of yours to come hear this, would you?  Like I said, Mr. Ronk,” Dame Dionne said warmly as Lundin scrambled for the side door, “we’re just wild for community feedback around here.  Now—let me get some paper—why exactly was it that our spell bombed?”

“Imagine a door,” Ronk said, perched comfortably on his stool.  With varying degrees of breathlessness (Elia), focus (Lundin) and difficulty (Willl with three L’s), the room full of Civics all did their best to imagine a door.  “You want to get to the other side.  How do you do it?  Simple; you open it and walk through.  That’s how all doors work, right?

“But consider this.  When we come across a door, and we want to open it, what’s being tested isn’t really our knowledge of doors.  It’s our knowledge of
handles
.

“Dame Dionne—can you open and close that door to the outside for me, please?”

Dame Dionne dusted off her thighs and got off of her stool, sauntering to the main door.  “Watch this,” she said, confidently.  Her rings clinked against the spherical doorknob as she turned it clockwise.  With a flourish, she pulled it open.  A passing technician in the hallway looked up briefly from a mail scroll as he went past.

“Exemplary,” Ronk said, laughing. 

“Encore,” Dame Miri cheered.  The whole team started smiling as Dame Dionne closed the door.

“Dame Miri,” the wizard went on.  She leaned back against the worktable, one knee bent, and looked at him.  “Don’t let me strain your hands, but could I trouble you to open one of these cabinets?”

“My pleasure,” she said, brushing off his concern.  The worktables had copious amounts of cabinet space built in underneath the tabletops.  Cabinet doors were evenly spaced every meter or so along each of the long sides of the tables.  Miri knelt down and grasped the small knob on the right side of the cabinet with her bandaged fingertips.  Before she could pull the door open, Ronk raised a hand.

“Actually, if you could humor me, would you open it like Dame Dionne opened her door?”  He pantomimed twisting a knob.  “After all, that’s how doors open.  Isn’t it?”

Dame Miri nodded slowly.  She could see where this was going.  Everyone craned their necks to watch as she squeezed the little knob as best she could and tried vainly to turn it clockwise.  The knob, fastened in place on a wooden peg, didn’t budge.  “Doesn’t work.”

“So how does this door open?”

She gave it a gentle pull, straight back.  The cabinet swung open.

“And this door’s different too,” Martext said, going over to the closet where the protective alchemical suits were hung.  A slightly curved brass handle, about ten centimeters long, was halfway up the door on the right side. He placed his good hand on it and pulled straight back, as Dame Miri had just done.  The door thumped against its hinges, shut fast.  Then he tried to twist the handle clockwise, as Dame Dionne had done with the doorknob.  The handle barely moved an eighth of a rotation before sticking, and the bolt inside the door didn’t move.  Finally, he pushed down on the handle, and pulled towards himself.  The bolt retracted out of the doorjamb and the closet door swept open freely.

“Exactly.”  The wizard inhaled and clapped his hands together, once.  “If you want to go from place to place, finding the doors is simple.  Working the handles is what takes practice.

“Mister Lundin, you’re right.  The spell of friendship is considered simple.  It’s an unlocked door.  But if the door for a human has a doorknob, the door for a dog might have a handle, or an iron ring.  As you see, the same movement won’t get you through.”

“How about that,” Dame Dionne murmured, fingers on her lips.

Lundin nodded vigorously, sitting on one of his hands.  “But here’s the thing, Mr. Ronk.  We tried the exact same spell the previous night, and it worked.”

“I was the object, instead of Martext,” Elia chimed in, smoothing out her braid.  “And Cort definitely liked me better afterwards then he did before.”

“Absolutely,” Dame Miri said.  “She scratched him between the ears.  I’m the only other one who can do that.”

Ronk nodded, frowning.  He gestured to Elia with an open palm.  “What was the dog’s mental state when you first met him?”

Elia’s eyes flicked from Dame Miri to Lundin uncertainly.  “Well,” Lundin said, thinking back.  “Pretty agitated, I suppose.  We’d just brought him into the workroom for the first time.”

“He hates being crated up, and I’d had him in his cage for about an hour when he met Elia.  He even snapped at me a little.” Dame Miri said.

“I see.  I noticed the hound fell asleep while your spell was casting in the presentation.  Was that the case during your test as well?”

“He definitely did some napping.”  Elia nodded.

“So when you first tried to touch him, he was in a new environment in an agitated state, snapping at everyone in range, so to speak.  And when you approached him after the spell ended, he had had more than an hour to nap and become accustomed to the smells of the place.  Is that right?”

“I—I suppose, yes.”

Ronk cleared his throat, turning to Martext.  “And consider this.  Mister Goolsby, would you say that you bear a strong resemblance to Dame Miri?”

Martext smiled tightly, brushing his hair away from his brown face.  He displayed his bandaged hand.  “A little more, now that I’ve got this,” he said, wiggling his fingers.

“Fair enough,” Ronk said, grinning as Miri snickered.  “Mangled members aside, however, in height, weight, skin tone, scent, and so on, you would never be mistaken for each other; certainly not by a dog who only has eyes for his mistress. 

“But you, Ms. Desh—if you’ll forgive a personal observation—are certainly a physical equivalent to Dame Miri in your dimensions, coloring, bone structure, and the like.”

“That’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me,” Elia said, her brown eyes shining.

“I can’t speak for your smell, of course,” the wizard went on, grin widening further.  “But I would conjecture that the drowsy dog found your presence much more familiar and, consequently, allowed you a brief moment of petting where it would let Mister Goolsby take no such liberties.”

The team digested this.  “I think I get it,” Willl with three L’s finally said, nodding slowly.  “The dog liked Elia more, and that’s why the magic worked for her and not for Martext.”

“I’m afraid not…”

“You’re saying the magic never worked at all,” Lundin said, his arms crossed over his chest.  Ronk nodded, once.  “The big breakthrough we thought we saw with Elia was just the difference between a scared dog and a calm one.”

“Magic didn’t open the door for Elia.  Cort did it himself,” Dame Miri shook her head.

“And he slammed it shut on me,” Martext added.

“For a spell to affect a non-human species, certain adjustments are necessary during the Illustration and Enunciation.  Otherwise, unfortunately, the spell stays as just so many words,” Ronk said sympathetically.

Lundin slowly rose to his feet, tapping his arm with his fingertips.  His eyes looked very far away.  “You all right there, Horace?”  Dame Dionne asked.

I’m in over my head, and I’ve put the lives and careers of half-a-dozen good people at risk so I can play wizard, that’s all
.  He tapped the felted tip of the blue conical hat on the spell box, smiling sadly.  “It’s just been a long day,” he said. 

“If I may, Mr. Lundin,” Ronk interrupted gently, standing.  Lundin turned and looked down at the wizard, who took a few steps closer to him.  “It’s a rare spell that ends with sirens and fireworks.  Even lifelong practitioners of magic have moments of doubt as to whether or not their spells worked.  ‘Did my spell create that effect, or is it just an accident of timing?’  ‘Am I the master of my environment, or simply a part of it?’”

“How do you stand that?  You give yourself to the study of something for decades, and yet even someone like you still has days where it just won’t work?  No reason?  No alternative?”

“It keeps you humble,” Ronk said, shrugging.

Something I probably could have used more of. 
A fire was in his belly again, and he pressed on, sawing through the air with his hands.  “But don’t you wizards get sick of not knowing if your work will pay off or not?  I mean, Petronauts know about failure.  Here in the labs, it’s guaranteed that the first prototype of something will be a miserable wreck.  But at least we’ve got a system for improving it, tweaking it, building confidence, increasing success rates until the final product is 99% perfect.  There’s a reliable process for getting better.  Don’t you wish that you could do the same thing with magic?”

“Yes,” Ronk said.

Lundin stopped, mouth half-open.  “Sorry.  Did you say ‘yes?’”

“That I did.”

Dame Dionne frowned at the consternation on Lundin’s face.  “He said yes, Horace.  What’s so wrong with that?”

“It’s just that I—well, from the angry mobs outside, I didn’t expect to hear a bona fide wizard say…”

“Not all of us are like Tymon,” Ronk said.  He thought.  “Most of us are,” he revised, tilting his head, “but some of us like an occasional new idea.  And, as a numerologist, I find the notion of replicable, perfectible magic to be immensely appealing.”

“Numerologist?  I thought he was a wizard,” Willl with three L’s whispered at full volume to Dame Miri.  She patted him on the shoulder with her fingertips patiently.

“I use numbers as the focal points for my magic,” Ronk explained.  “Permutations of fours for nature, nines for human fertility and health, eight for the cosmic Spheres, and so forth.  The application of numerical order to the chaos of magic has been fruitful in my career.  But your methods would tame the arcane beast even further, to the benefit of us all.  That’s why I’m here to offer you my support, if it would prove useful.”

“Won’t the other wizards be mad at you?”  Elia asked.

“They already are,” he said, equably.  “In fact, if you could show me where the back door is when we conclude our business, I’d be very grateful.”

“Want a disguise too?”  Martext said, grinning.

“Some of those glasses you all love so much, perhaps.”

Lundin and Dame Dionne locked eyes across the room.  “Mister Ronk,” Lundin said, barely containing his excitement.  The wizard turned back to him.  “If we showed you how the spell box worked, could you help us re-do the Enunciation so it works on dogs?”

“Well, certainly.”

“And when you help these brilliant techs prove that the spell box really does work, would you be willing to go on record as saying that the project has merit?  Say,” Dame Dionne rolled her eyes in a show of thinking, “in a letter to the Heralds and the Regency Council?”

“Yes, if you like,” Ronk said, a little taken aback.

“Then welcome to the Civics, Mr. Ronk,” Dionne said with a brilliant smile.  She shook his hand firmly as he looked from face to face with genial confusion.  “You’re our newest consultant.”

Chapter Eleven

At The Gates

Columbine’s feet were a mess.  She felt like each toe had its own individual ache, or cut, or scrape, or blister, and the feet attached to those poor wiggly digits were shouting at her to just sit down already. 
But I can’t sit down
, she thought blearily, trudging through the underbrush behind her sister.
If I sit down, bugs will bite me.  And so will Ariell.

“How much further?” she asked.

“I don’t know, okay?”  Ariell snapped back.  She adjusted her grip on the stonebow, stretching her long fingers wide before cozying up to the trigger again.  Her watery blue-green eyes flicked suspiciously at every tree, bush, and boulder they passed, itching to blast the first ambusher who leapt out at them.  (Mostly, to be honest, for the excuse to blow something up with a red stone again.)

“I just hope we’re going the right way.”

Ariell snorted.  “We’re going northeast, just like the Caravan guys said to do.  Look at the sun.  Look at the moss. Northeast.”

“What if we miss it?”

“Well, I don’t know, Columbine!  Then I guess we do the same thing we’ve been doing for the last six months, and we sleep outside.  Is that suddenly a problem now?”

“It’s never really been my favorite,” Columbine said.

Ariell shook her head, stepping over a fallen log in one long stride.  She stopped impatiently as Columbine clambered over it, smudging up her hands and knees.  “Spheres, I can’t wait for you to get bigger,” Ariell grumbled.  Columbine clapped her hands together to shake off the bits of spongy wood.  She kept following her sister in silence.

“You’ve gotta be like me, Columbine,” Ariell said, not looking back as she spoke.  “You’re already thinking about what it will be like if farmers in this Two Forks place take us in.  You’re already dreaming about fresh-baked bread, hot bathwater, and soft springy mattresses.”

“Yes please,” Columbine mumbled, smiling.

“Me?  I don’t even believe the place exists,” she tossed over her shoulder with a sniff.

“You don’t think Two Forks is a real place?”

“Wouldn’t be surprised at all if it was a hole in the ground.   Are you gonna trust those Golden Caravan goons just ‘cause they gave us a few things?  Columbine, please.”

“Why would they lie?”

“Because some people are liars.  The nicer a stranger seems, the more likely it is they’re lying.”

“Well, I thought they were the good kind of stranger.  And I know Two Forks is gonna be great,” Columbine said with bone-weary defiance.

Ariell barked with laughter, looking back at her sister with surprise.  “Listen to you!  My baby sister, getting a little fierce.  Can’t say I’m not impressed.”

“I’m not fierce,” she grumbled, stomping on a twig.  With a snap, it broke into pieces, one of which leapt off the ground and tumbled end over end in a very satisfying way.  “I’m just tired of walking, and I’m ready to—”

Nearby, a horse whinnied.  Ariell held up her hand for quiet immediately, and Columbine was so startled by her sister’s sudden movement that she actually stopped talking.  The girls froze, listening to the air.  A moment later, they heard the muttering of a woman’s voice, too quiet to make out any words.  Ariell pointed forward with the shooty end of the stonebow, gesturing to a cluster of vine-covered trees a dozen meters to the side of them.  The sounds were coming from that direction.