The Mask And The Master (Mechanized Wizardry Book 2) (26 page)

Lundin had folded his hands, looking down.  “This is going to cost you, isn’t it?”

“The current system of magic, for all its faults, does encourage one to take a long view,” the wizard had said.  “When a spell fails, what do you do?  You thank the Mobinoji and try again.  So if a client cancels an appointment, or my peers behave rudely, I put my trust in the certainty that tomorrow will be different from today.  When you’re in harmony with numbers, as I am, you become aware of a tendency for data to work its way back to the middle over time, no matter how extreme any one moment may be.”

“Does that mean,” Lundin had said, leaning back against the edge of the table, “that someday soon, my life isn’t going to involve royal decrees and angry mobs anymore?”

“Depends.  How many years have you spent without those things?”

“About thirty-two.”

“Then, numerologically speaking, you’re likely in for a decade or more of high drama before regression takes hold.  Of course, the more heightened your current situation becomes, the less time it will take to balance out your uneventful years.  And the more heightened your life gets in the arenas of magic, war, and courtly intrigue, the greater the chances of your premature death; which is, after all, simply a regression to the cosmic mean.”

Lundin had looked at the wizard, his small eyes shining inside the ill-fitting glasses.  “I’ll miss you too,” he said, skeptically.

“Write me anytime,” Ronk had said, beaming.

I just might
, Lundin thought, shaking his head at the memory of the old wizard.  Their cramped carriage was trundling east along the coastal road, with the low rumble of dozens of other carts and wagons filling the air outside.  Low-grade vibrations kept their bodies humming, and an occasional shock vibrated up through the wheels.  All in all, though, between the well-maintained road and the carriage’s top-notch suspension, this leg of the trip was a smooth ride.  They would make camp at a waypoint along the road tonight; the driver had told him where, but he was bad with names.  Sometime tomorrow, their course would turn north from the highway onto more rustic paths.  They’d be traversing a good swath of the Tarmic Woods before they finally got to Fort Campos.  Lundin’s teeth started to chatter in his head in anticipation of the bumpy ride to come.

He shifted on the vaguely padded bench, trying to relieve the pressure on his tailbone.  “Sorry,” he mumbled as his toe jostled against Elia’s boot.  He, Elia, and Willl with three L’s were crowded onto the same bench in the rear of the carriage.  Dame Miri and Martext were on the bench facing them, riding backwards.  The two groups of Petronauts tried to space themselves out along the benches so their knees didn’t knock together.  There were only about a dozen empty centimeters to spare in the no-man’s-land in the center of the carriage.  Lundin shifted to a new page in the ribbon-bound volume in his hands, one of Archimedia’s spell-casting journals.

Elia tilted her head, stealing a glance into the journal.  A single brown curl fell out of her bun, draping along the back of her neck.  “Still thinking about a new spell, senior tech?”  she asked, pressing her hair back into place.

“I just don’t know.  Can’t decide which one to start with.”

“I thought you’d already picked our first spell to try at the fort.”

“Yeah, but now I’m not sure we want our first trick to be inducing insomnia.”

“Not insomnia; ‘Watchfulness’
,
” Dame Miri chimed in, underlining the word with her hands.  “It’s all in the name.  With our magic, sentries at Fort Campos will stay
watchful
all night long.”

“Delia’s citizens can rest easy, knowing that her guardians will never rest,” Martext’s smooth voice oozed with sincerity.

“Natural born salesman,” Miri snickered.  “That’s good stuff, Horace.  We should use that.”

“We can’t sell it until we know it works,” Lundin said.  “I mean, when we brought up the idea with Ronk, you saw his face.  It’s gonna be complicated.”

“This is all pretty complicated,” Willl with three L’s offered hesitantly.

“I mean there’s a huge amount to account for.  What good is the spell if the guards stay awake but don’t stay alert?  What if the dreams they would have had just show up as wide-awake hallucinations?  What happens when it ends?  Will they drop and sleep for twenty hours?  If we don’t phrase the spell just right, there are a thousand and one things that can go wrong.”

“Can’t the spell go wrong, even if we phrase it just right?” Elia said.  “I mean, wasn’t Ronk saying that that’s just how magic is?”

“It’s just...”  Lundin took a breath, setting the journal in his lap.  “It’s just that we only have one more chance at this.  If we don’t completely ace this first demonstration, there’s no way Colonel Yough will get on our side.  And if it turns into a fiasco like last time, I’ll probably be named an enemy of the state.  With any luck, I’ll take the fall so none of you wind up at the gallows too.”

“Hey, Horace,” Dame Miri said, reaching over and pressing him on the knee.  She smiled warmly at him.  “We can do this.  No need to put on your drama face.”

“Right!  Even if our demo goes wrong,” Martext said, “it’s not like a wild animal’s going to bite anyone, or anything like that.”

Willl with three L’s furrowed his brow.  “Wait, Martext, but that’s what happened to you last time—”

“I think he remembers, Willl,” Elia whispered, leaning over to him.

“So,” Lundin said, trying hard to focus, “I’m thinking about working on sensory enhancement instead.”  He lifted the journal up.  “If these records are right, it looks simpler than a spell of insomnia—”

“Watchfulness!”

“—and I think it’ll have a flashier demo.  We’ll rig up a test so the subject can—I don’t know—name playing cards from across a field away with new-and-improved eyes?”

Dame Miri pursed her lips, nodding.  “Not bad, senior tech!  You’re thinking like a performer.”

“I don’t know how you people do it, working with the public so much,” he sighed.  “In the Recon squad, an audience of three was all I ever had to worry about.  Now?  I don’t even know where to start to give Colonel Yough what she wants.”

You do what
you
want
, Dame Dionne’s voice came ringing through in his head.  As the conversation drifted on, Lundin fervently hoped that what he wanted was good enough.

Chapter Two

Fort Campos

“Dame Hanah?”

Hanah looked up as the yeoman entered her study.  The arrow slit in the stone wall sent a shaft of sunlight straight towards the doorway, catching the young man’s boots with dusty golden light.  She waved his genuflections away with one hand, her too-small chair creaking as she stood to meet him.  She was not as tall as the yeoman, but her shoulders were broader and her arms and torso similarly roped with muscle.  It was a constant effort to keep her body in condition, and arthritis limited her calisthenic exertions more than she cared to admit.  But her hazel eyes crinkled with amusement as she envisioned the look on the yeoman’s face if he ever realized just how much his matronly commander was still capable of.

He held a fragment of rolled paper out to her, like a miniature scroll.  “Newly arrived from Delia, ma’am.”

Assuming the bird flew straight here, this was shipped yesterday morning
, Dame Hanah estimated, taking the scroll in her fingertips.  She unrolled the paper, recognizing the quill-strokes at once. 
My compliments to you too, dear Ouste,
she thought with a smile as she read.

A few moments later, she folded the message in half between her thumb and forefinger.  “Call Iimar, please,” she said softly as she went back to her desk.  The yeoman bowed again and left, his boots echoing in the stony corridor.  Her chair protested as she sank back down into it, eyes flickering with the speed of her thoughts.

Dame Hanah pulled a leathery map from the stack of circular tubes next to her desk and spread it out over the neat wooden surface.  The eastern Tarmic stretched out before her.  Their keep’s location was marked out with umber chalk.  She traced her finger south and east from the keep, to a larger fortified compound.

“Campos,” she murmured. 

A report was resting on top of her high-backed desk.  She leaned the stiff paper up and referred to it as she snipped lengths of red, gummed string from a thick spool. She pressed them to the map in gentle arcs extending from the Delian fort.  The latest patrols from Fort Campos had been observed further north than ever before, true; but the red threads would have to keep expanding north a good long way before there was any reasonable risk of their discovery.  What’s more, her scouts’ observations suggested that the Delians were most concerned about the security of their supply roads, in the southwest, and exploring the foothills towards Svargath, due east.  There were five times as many overlapping loops of thread in those areas as there were lonely, sporadic expeditions to the unsettled northwest.  In fact, if her reports were comprehensive, there did seem to be a bit of a corridor, a few degrees north of due west, which the Delians had neglected to patrol at all recently.  Dame Hanah placed her fingertip on the map, and slowly drew it along the bare pathway between curls of string.  She was nearly knocking on Fort Campos’ gates when the wizard arrived.

“A message from Ouste,” she said as Iimar the Enchanter swept through the door, his silken train rustling against the floor.  He pinched the edges of his robe with long fingertips and lifted the hem as he descended the three steps into Hanah’s study.  The wizard’s emerald robe was ornately embroidered with monstrous images from bygone days: a three-headed this, a bat-winged that, a such-and-such wreathed in black flames.  A train extended back more than three meters from the cowl around his neck.  By the time he was at the base of the steps, reaching out his hand to take the message from Dame Hanah, the rest of his outfit was just entering the room.  The muscular, olive-skinned wizard was dazzling in the sunlight.

He unfolded the slip of paper.  Dame Hanah pushed her chair away from the desk, looking up at him as he read.  His long-lashed eyes widened.  “Astonishing,” he murmured.  “Can this be true?  The wizard who bested her on the feastday was—”

“A Petronaut?” Hanah said, cracking her knuckles. “She must be sure, to have sent this.”

“If this ‘Lundin’ left Delia yesterday, then… where is he now?”

“Probably just a few hours from Fort Campos.”

Iimar nodded.  “Well, we should kill him, like she says,” he tossed off nonchalantly, flicking the paper back towards her.  Hanah caught it in an outstretched hand as it drifted down.  “If Ouste has an inside connection in the fort she’s willing to use up, we should prepare a message and coordinate a strike, yes?  Find a way to lure him outside the fortress walls; a quiet knife in the bushes—”

“How does a Petronaut cast spells, Iimar?”  she asked quietly.

“Well, I shold think—” the wizard began.  Then his mind finally caught up with him.  “How
does
a Petronaut cast spells?” he said, snatching the paper out of Hanah’s hand again. 

She smirked. “‘Kill him, kill his team, and destroy his machines,’” she paraphrased from the note.  “But it seems to me that Mister Lundin is someone we might want to talk to instead.”

“Spellcasting machines.  By the black flames… if such a thing is possible, can you imagine how that would help—?”  Iimar trailed off, already thinking too many steps ahead to stay in the moment.

“Iimar?” he looked at her as she stood.  Hanah pointed at the scrap of paper in his hands.  “Shall we get him for you?”

With an effort, he brought himself back to the present.  “I should love a moment of his time,” he said, biting his lip.  “But Ouste wants him wiped off the world.”

“Ouste wants what she wants, and I respect that,” Hanah said diplomatically.  “But a great sage once said there are two kinds of orders; the ones you respect, and the ones you obey.  If you think we can use this Petronaut, than a thousand Oustes can stand in line to scream at me while you interview him.”

The wizard pointed up, through the ceiling to the high tower and its single occupant.  “If Ouste doesn’t approve, do you think that—?”

“I’ll take this matter upstairs immediately,” she said.  “I’m confident I can represent our position persuasively.”

“I’ll trust you at that.”  the Enchanter clutched his collars, a little troubled.  “We could kill this Lundin
after
I talk to him,” he offered.  “I’d hate to get into a spat with dear Ouste over something like this.”

“Let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves,” Hanah said absently, looking back down at her desk.  She put one callused finger next to Fort Campos, in the narrow, empty corridor between red threads.  “Before we decide what to do with Horace Lundin and his team, there’s the small matter of how to get to them,” she murmured, immersing herself in the map.

“First things first,” Lundin said as the carriage ground to a halt.  The Civics shifted on their benches, their backsides aching and restless after the long ride.  “We need to charm the epaulets off Colonel Yough the instant we see her.”

“Will she still be a Colonel if her epaulets come off?” 

Lundin laid a hand on the tech’s arm as Willl with three L’s whispered in his ear at full volume.  “I’m planning to do a lot of smiling,” he went on.  “Unless it seems like she doesn’t like smiling, in which case I’m going to stick out my chest and go for aloof gravitas.  Unless she’s a hugger, in which case I’m going to recuse myself and pass her to Martext.”

The dark-haired technician just raised an eyebrow.  Elia stopped jotting down notes on her slate and raised her hand. “What if she’s none of those things?” she asked.

“Then she might be something worse; or she might be something better.”

“Sure you want to go out on a limb like that?” Dame Miri said with a smile, crossing her arms over her chest.

“Maybe she’s a closet gadget-head, and we’ll all get along,” Elia offered.