The Mask And The Master (Mechanized Wizardry Book 2) (22 page)

A hand grabbed her roughly by the cuff of her shirt.  “Fine,” Ariell said, dragging her away.  She squirmed, but this time her sister wouldn’t let go.   “You want to fight, you little idiot?  Then we’ll fight ‘em the right way.” 

Ariell dragged her with one hand as she headed to the house where they were staying.  With the other hand, she unslung the stonebow from its loop around her back.  “Where are we going?  You’ve already got your bow,” Columbine asked, dog-trotting behind her sister.

“Yeah—but not the right ammo,” Ariell grunted.

*****

The six snipers on the roof were a mixed group; two young mothers, an old man who’d been the town sharpshooter with his bow for decades, some of Ariell’s midling hunting partners.  Errol, a pasty-faced boy, was playing powder monkey to the shooters, loading secondary guns as fast as his trembling hands could pour the powder.  It was tough keeping up a sustained volley of fire, even with the help of four other snipers on the roof of the meeting house across the square.  But they were doing well enough to force those Delian bastards to keep their heads down in the house, at least.  With more Petronauts already rushing over the stockade, and who knew how many more Delians lurking in the woods, suppressing the advance was the best they could hope for.  All they had to do was buy a little time while the security committee got their surprises ready, and then everything would change.

Errol handed a loaded musket to red-haired Mrs. Haris, taking the hot gun out of her hands.  A noise in the air caught him off guard, and he looked up.  “Watch out!”  he screamed, pointing skyward.  The flying machine was right overhead, casting a shadow down on them.

Iggy peered over the edge of Ironsides, one hand keeping the T-shaped steering bar level.  The other hand was holding a bulbous glass jug over the side of her mechanical mount.  The rounded container was as big as a good-sized jug of wine, thoroughly stoppered with a wax seal.  The green glass was deliberately thin, so it would shatter on impact.  She squinted down at the roof, far below, and tried to aim for an open space without a farmer’s head in it. 
Though if one of these lunatics gets brained, I won’t be shedding any tears.

“Iggy loves ya,” she murmured to the snipers as she let the jug drop.

Errol flopped onto his stomach, scrambling for the edge of the roof as something came tumbling down from the machine.  The shooters lost their rhythm, looking up into the sky.  A midling took a wild shot into the air, missing the machine by five meters at least.  They all covered their faces as the object—a bottle, it looked like—came crashing down onto the roof.  It burst into shards, and the old man yelped as a piece of green glass slashed the back of his hand. 

But they forgot all about the flying glass when the smell hit them.  There was no room to think about anything else.  The liquid in the bottle smelled like the vilest olfactory stew imaginable, assaulting their noses with rotting vegetables, sulfur, manure, skunk spray, and black mold all at once.  The sickly green liquid was spattered all over the roof, and in sticky droplets on their clothes and exposed skin.  They coughed and retched, only half of them having the presence of mind to hold onto their guns as they scrambled towards the ladder back down inside.  Errol leapt off the one-story roof, landing heavily on his bare feet and toppling to his side.  A few scrapes were a small price to pay for getting away from the smell sooner.

Iggy took another peek down, nodding at her handiwork. 
I can tell the alchemists that juice works
, she thought. 
Wish I had another bottle of the damn stuff. 
There were more shooters on a building across the square, and near that, a squad of toy horses trying to run down a miniature Sir Mathias.  She looked at her loaded musket, resting on its stand, and shook her head.  “Sweet Spheres,” she whispered.  “Don’t make me have to go there today.”

Iggy craned her neck over the side of her metal nest, calculating trajectories on the fly.  Those snipers looked ripe for a good scare.  With a noisy whoop, she leaned heavily on the control bar and angled into a dive.

*****

Good girl
, Dame Gaulda thought as she saw the snipers scramble off the roof after Iggy’s bombardment.  Six fewer guns was going to take considerable pressure off.  Hopefully, it would be enough to let them clear Kelley and Orinoco out of that house and make their retreat.  Xiaoden and Julie were already leaping towards the house with great bounds, ready to provide cover.  Dame Gaulda planted her feet in the middle of the dirt road just shy of the house, staring coolly at the score of angry peasants charging her with clubs and tools held high.  The Shock Trooper grabbed the cuff on her right gauntlet and gave it a sharp shove forwards.  It clicked into place, and she squeezed both hands into fists, opening fire.

Telescoping shields pulled back from her bulky epaulets, and the six launchers in each shoulder sent thin whistling disks into the air.  The Parade squad liked to use flash disks for show, adding colored minerals to the pyrotechnics and configuring them for long burn times.  The Shock Troops, on the other hand, wanted their disks to create the whitest, brightest burst possible for an instant of blinding light.  The mob slowed, some instinctively ducking as the dozen projectiles flew over their heads.  “Eyes!”  Gaulda roared for the benefit of the other ‘nauts.

The flash disks exploded with a fast-rolling series of bangs, and for a moment the town was full of unbearable light, like a great column of lightning had struck Two Forks.  Dame Gaulda averted her head with her eyes carefully trained on the ground, but even through the tinted protection of her visor, the air became white and washed out for an instant as the light flew outwards in all directions.

She turned back around, raising both arms.  The farmers were staggering and disoriented, light-blind for a few precious seconds. 
Enough time to secure our retreat
.  She chambered a tube of gel shot into each gun barrel with a flick of the wrist.

The orb-shaped rounds of gel shot were the size of wine grapes but more liquid to the touch.  Their membranous skins were thin and pliable, just sturdy enough to keep the half-teaspoon of specially formulated oil secure inside.  In the heat of the gun barrel, the membrane vaporized as the ball was launched forward.  Painstaking testing had made the membranes strong enough to last until the very instant the ball left the barrel, so the only matter flung through space towards a target was a small globule of oil.  The liquid shed velocity quickly, and had a fraction of the range of a typical musket ball.  But gel shot wasn’t made for range or penetrative power.  It was made to let a Shock Trooper dominate a crowd of combatants without killing a soul.

A woman wielding a shovel took a shot to the shoulder and spun to the ground.  A pudgy man clutched his gut as a glob of gel hit him in the stomach, and fell forward.  Dame Gaulda flicked her wrists and fired again, sending another two bleary-eyed farmers sprawling.  The other villagers, still half-blind from the flash disks, heard the sound of gunfire and felt their neighbors toppling to the ground all around them, with no idea that the Petronaut’s salvos were nonlethal.

“Butchers!”

“Spheres preserve us!”

Panicked cries filled the air as the mob dispersed, fleeing towards the center of town.  Dame Gaulda took aim and fired once, clipping a man in the back.  The farmers around him pumped their legs faster as they heard his body go down. 
That should be enough
, she thought, her brain racing with calculations.  Controlling a crowd was a razor’s edge between compassion and sadism.  The longer the fight dragged on, the greater the chance that townspeople would start being killed.  It was in the interest of Petronauts and farmers alike for the people of Two Forks to stop fighting and run as soon as possible, and it was her job to make that argument to them.  If she fought them with half-measures, bravery and passion would keep many of them on the field until they died.  So the only merciful thing for Dame Gaulda to do was to strike immediately, overwhelmingly, and ruthlessly, to erase their courage and replace it with fear.

For the sake of the battle, she had to know how far to go to create that panic.  And for the sake of her own humanity, she had to trust that she knew the difference between fear as a tool and fear as a goal.

The Cavaliers had reached the ruined house, pressing themselves on either side of the doorway for cover from the snipers.  Kelley and Orinoco emerged, covered in dirt and straw from their hasty evasive leaps but otherwise unscathed.

“Orders?” Dame Julie asked, clenching her hand around the hilt of her sabre.

“The Golden Caravan’s clearly been here,” Orinoco said.

“Maybe these hicks
are
the Caravan,” Kelley growled.  “We can’t leave until we find out what in the black flames is wrong with them.”

A spray of bullets struck the earth around them.  Dame Gaulda crouched behind a barrel on the far side of the path, filled with soil and vibrant purple flowers.  “We can’t stay long without casualties,” she called out.

“I say retreat and regroup.  Will you second?”

Kelley tapped his truncheon against the outside of his knee, considering Orinoco’s words.  He looked up, sharply, counting heads.  “Where’s—”

“Sir Mathias,” Sir Xiaoden said, pointing with his sword.  The broad-shouldered Recon ‘naut was a hundred meters away, with two horses swinging around to attack him.  A third horse was riderless, and a fourth thrashing on the ground.  One of his attackers raised her weapon, and its edges spun in the noonday light.

“Burn me!  A chain blade?”  Dame Julie started.  “Where in the Eight Spheres did these people get one of those?”

“Three guesses,” Sir Kelley said grimly.  He switched his amplification on and shouted out.  “Fall back, Mathias!”

*****

Sir Kelley’s voice was just audible over the hooves and the maddening whine of the chain blade. 
Believe me, sir, I’d love to fall back,
Sir Mathias thought, his eyes locked on the blurry edge of the weapon.  He backpedaled as the horses advanced on him, and nearly lost his balance as his back foot sank into the ground with a liquid squelch.  He pulled his boot up and looked down.  The field of little green shoots sprouting behind him was ringed with a narrow irrigation trench, and he’d just stepped right in the wet red mud.  It was sticky as clay against his boot as he scraped it awkwardly against the ground.

The woman’s eyes lit up cruelly as she spurred her horse forward, leading the other two farmers on and brandishing the chain blade.  Sir Mathias was hit with an idea.  He crouched down and scooped up a double handful of red mud.  The stuff was cold and dripping in his gauntlets.  Aiming the slop as best he could, he tossed the two sticky gobs forward; not at the farmer, but at her blade.

The first handful struck the metal handguard, splattering harmlessly down onto the saddle and the woman’s knees.  But the second connected with the whirring tip of the blade, sending thick mud coursing down the edges of the machine.  The mud stuck to the fast-moving teeth, which carried it on their breakneck path through the inner workings of the weapon before emerging on the other side.  The delicate mechanisms inside the base seized up noisily as they filled with dirt, and the mud-encrusted chain ground to an unexpected halt.  The woman’s mouth opened, bewildered, as she looked down at her weapon.  She looked up just as a hulking black shadow launched itself towards her.

Sir Mathias hit the ground after his pounce and rolled back onto his feet.  The woman was unconscious after taking his shouder to the chin.  She hung off the side of her horse with one ankle twisted in the stirrup.  The ruined chain blade clattered to the dirt on the other side of the animal.  As the two other farmers turned around to face him, raising their swords with noticeably less enthusiasm, he heard the sound of gunshots.

Mathias risked a quick glance over to the long building with the rooftop snipers, where he’d been heading in the first place.  But even as he contemplated leaving his attackers behind to deal with the shooters, there was a deep rumbling noise from far overhead.  He looked up to see Ironsides in a steep dive, plowing straight for the building.  The shooters took potshots at the flying machine; one shot, with a particularly big and nasty-looking rifle, struck home with a troublingly loud
ding
.  But Ironsides just kept coming, and the panicked shooters rolled out of its path.  At the very last moment, Iggy pulled up from her dive.  Sir Mathias could see her wavy brown hair streaming behind her as she left a knot of dispersed snipers in her wake and got ready for another pass.

Sir Mathias looked back towards the farmers as the man on horseback and the woman on foot shrieked, rushing him with mad courage. 
This, at least, I can handle
, he thought as he ran to meet them.

*****

“Come on, come on,” Kipes exhorted the others.

He hoisted the metal drum onto a ramshackle cart, arms straining with the weight.  After taking his first shot at the black-and-white Petronaut, Kipes had ducked into the storehouse nearest the gate and pulled up the trapdoor in the corner, spreading the secret compartment’s contents on the ground.  Two men and a woman from the security committee had followed him in seconds later.  They’d tried to keep their heads amid the sound of shots and screaming from outside as those Delian bastards opened fire on their friends and family.  The whole future of Two Forks was resting on them, and the others on the security committee, who’d been made custodians of the gifts from the Golden Caravan.  To dash out before they were ready would violate that trust.  So they simply gritted their teeth and worked harder.

Long hours of speed drilling had paid off.  In record time, they had assembled the tripod; cleaned out the weapon, with its jar-like mouth like a great blunderbuss; mounted it in place on the tripod; and connected the thick fabric hoses, wound around with metal wire, from each chamber of the metal drum to its proper connection on the weapon’s stock.  The top chamber of the drum was filled with some kind of air, the Golden Caravan had told them, and the bottom chamber filled with treated Petrolatum.  They didn’t understand exactly how it worked, but when they’d seen the weapon demonstrated, it had told them everything they needed to know.