The Mask And The Master (Mechanized Wizardry Book 2) (35 page)

“I should keep that to myself,” she said, trying to be tactful.  To her surprise, the adults snickered more than if she’d called him a really juicy name.

“I’m gonna come right out with it, Columbine,” Mr. Haris said, his smile fading.  “Way I grew up, you don’t forgive someone until they apologize to you. ‘I’m sorry.’ ‘I forgive you.’  Simple as that.  Thing is, we don’t think Delia’s ever going to give us a proper apology… unless we make them.”

Columbine looked from face to face.  “Make them,” she said, not understanding.

“How can little old Two Forks make big strong Delia do anything?”  He ticked off items on his stubby fingers.  “No army.  No weapons.  No fancy barristers in the courts.  They even wrecked most of our Golden Caravan gear.  So what do we have?”

“A story,” Mrs. Haris said.

“A story.”  He took a step towards the table, the light dancing across the lines on his face.  “If we spread our story across the Tarmic, as far as it can go, we can hurt Delia more than one army ever could.  And a place like Delia needs to hurt before it’ll apologize.

“But it’s not just about the apology.  It’s not about pride and honor.  It’s the right thing to do.  If we don’t tell our story about what the Delians did… what did you say this afternoon?  ‘They’ll just do it again.’  Yeah?”

“I don’t remember what I said.”

“Well, take my word for it; it was memorable.”

The tall farmer nodded.  He was looking at her with a funny sort of awe in his eyes, like how a little puppy looks up to a big sheep-dog. 
But that’s backwards.  I’m a kid; they’re the grown-ups.  What do they see in me?

“If I told you, Columbine, that telling your story to other people would help make sure that no other little sisters have to feel the way you feel right now?”  Mr. Haris looked down at her, his hands in his pockets.  “What would you say?”  he said softly.

When it was time to make a decision, sometimes Columbine thought she could hear her mother’s voice, or see her father’s face.  Sometimes a memory of something on the farm popped into her head and helped her choose what to do.  After all the months of advice and yelling and teasing that Ariell had filled her life with, barely a minute went by that her sister’s words didn’t bounce through her head; even more so now that Ariell was dead.

But, tonight, no voices spoke up to help her think as Columbine looked out at those candlelit faces.  She hugged herself through the too-big robe, feeling the silence building around her.  Tonight, she was alone.

“Okay,” Columbine Fletcher whispered, her pupils wide and dark.

Chapter Nine

Sundown

The northwest wall at sunset was the place to be.  Everyone at Campos knew it.  The soldier put one hand on a rough-hewn crenellation and looked out into the trees, leaning the butt of his musket against the flagstones.  The sun was that spectacular midsummer orange, the color of a roasted pumpkin or a family campfire.  Each twig on each branch popped into view against such a spectacular backdrop, as the sun continued its lazy way down through the woods to the horizon.  The clouds were the color of polished brass on the bottom, where the sunlight hit them, and blue silk on the top, where the night was starting to press down.  Everywhere his eyes moved across the panorama was a more stunning sight than the place before.  He tapped his gloved fingers on the stone appreciatively.

“I’m going to be one of the first,” his partner said, her face turned out into the forest.

“You’re braver than I am.”

She traced a finger in the air, making a wide circle around the sun and the clouds.  “Can you imagine being able to look out and see all of it—all of it at once?”

“I can’t,” he admitted, scratching his jaw.  “It’d be too much.”

“Colonel says it’s not.  Your mind just gets big enough to handle it.”

“Look, I’m sure she’s right.  She wouldn’t have been so excited about the magic if it didn’t work.”

They both remembered the pride shining out of Yough’s face as she addressed the garrison.  She’d called a meeting that morning down in the courtyard for all the hundreds of souls making Campos their home—very rare for a leader who hated ceremony.  But she’d stood there on the steps of the fort, her voice ringing out to all the soldiers below, and she’d pointed at the ragtag Petronauts she’d ordered to stand up in front of the crowd with her.  The gorgeous one with the bandaged hands knew how to stand in front of an audience, but watching the others, with their bashful smiles and shuffling feet, was equal parts painful and endearing.

“These men and women have changed the way this fort will work.”  Yough had scanned the crowd with her bulging eyes, her jaw set.  “I don’t believe in revolutions.  I don’t believe in novelty.  I believe that ‘change’ and ‘progress’ are very rarely the same thing.

“So when I tell you that what they’ve done opens a new chapter in the way Delia’s Army will run, I hope you’ll understand that I’m serious.”

“She must have been serious, to let the ‘nauts experiment on her,” he said, picking up his musket.  They started walking again, slowly, trying to stretch out their time at the northwest corner.

“It worked, though.  You heard her talk about Greatsight.  It sounds incredible.”

“When are you getting it?” he felt a little strange, talking about a magic spell like it was a new hat or a tattoo.

She shrugged.  Her leather pauldrons made their characteristic squeak as her shoulders moved.  “I gave ‘em my name, and where I was born.  Sergeant-at-arms will tell me when the ‘nauts are ready.  Within a week, they said.”

“So, what?   A month from now, you think we’ll all sit down an hour before patrol every day so their machine can mumble at us and make our eyes bigger?”

“Could be.  You know Dwyers?  Her cousin is a wizard.  She was saying there could be spells for making us run faster; spells so we don’t feel pain…”

“Spells so we don’t need to eat.  Spells so we always obey orders.  Spells so we sing and dance whenever the sergeant claps his hands.”

“Spheres, man, tell me how you really feel.”

He raised his hands defensively.  “Hey, what do I know.  Magic that’s fast and works every time?  The Colonel’s right!  There are a thousand and one ways this is amazing for Delia—especially as long as we’re the only ones who have it.”

She tilted her head as she looked at him.  “You’re thinking about LaMontina.”

“My sister worked the Verrure campaign.”  He looked out towards the sunset, his eyes flicking from tree to tree.  “Seems to me, it starts with our guys casting good magic on us, and it ends with their guys making us burn from fifteen kilometers away.”

“That’s not how it works,” she said gently.  “They need your name.  They punch it out on big sheets or something.  Who’s gonna look up the names of grunts like us?”

“So instead Colonel Yough explodes one day, or they turn Farmingham into a rat.  I don’t know.  I honestly don’t know what makes me more nervous; the bad guys killing us without showing their faces, or the good guys using magic to turn me into someone else.”

“Are you a different person because you wear armor?  Because you carry a gun?”  She turned to face him.  “Soldiers use all the tools they can to get the mission done.  And what does the sergeant always say is the most important tool we’ve got?”

“‘Us.’”

“Us.  If magic makes us better at what we need to do, how is it different from, you know, calisthenics?  Formation drills?  Training on the range?”

“Like I said, you’re braver than me.”

“Bravery’s got nothing to do with it,” she said, grinning.  “I just want to see the sunset.”

They were looking at each other when the mortars came down.

Lundin was rifling through his trunk of clothes when the sounds started.  It was a sort of sharp thumping, like heavy sacks of grain being dropped from a loft. 
I can’t imagine why I went for an agricultural simile
, he thought, looking at the barnyard beams around him.  Their makeshift living quarters were comfortable enough, but there was a distinctly rustic feel about the barn-shaped building that his city upbringing just couldn’t quite relax into.

The next thump was even louder, followed by shouting and smaller popping noises.  He frowned, setting the two high-collared shirts down on his bed.  “Do you hear that?” he said.

Martext nodded.  They were getting ready for another officers’ dinner with Colonel Yough; this time, not as foreign hangers-on, but as guests of honor.  He turned, leaving the cravat around his neck untied. 

“Sounds like…well, it can’t be gunshots.  Can it?”

It sure sounds like gunshots. 
“Maybe it’s a drill?”

“On your feet!  On your feet!”  In the soldiers’ quarters on the first floor, they heard a thunderous voice.  The scrabbling of armor and swords clattering into place brought the din closer to home. “Full gear!  To the northwest wall, on the double!”

Stars and Spheres
.  Lundin looked down at his clothes.  He was in his nicest dress trousers, with the suspenders clipped in and already looped over his shoulders. (His rooster flask was also nestled snugly in his hip pocket, full of brandy, in case the evening called for additional celebration.)  But he hadn’t decided what to throw over the thin undershirt, and he’d unlaced his boots to black them.  It would take a minute or two to lace them back up.  He hovered over the bed, tapping his stocking feet against the floorboards.  The sane part of his mind was screaming at him to get moving, but another part was doggedly refusing to admit that the situation had changed, insisting that his choice of shirt was as important as ever. 
If it’s just a drill, you’ll feel like an idiot for rushing outside half-dressed.

And if it’s an attack, who cares how I look?  I need to be at Haberstorm Hall, to make sure the squad and the gear are okay.

Fine, then, if you’re such an adventurer. Put on something ratty and practical.

But changing out of this will take forever.  I should just throw something on over my—

You are
not
just throwing something on over those pants.  Do you remember how much they cost?

“Lundin!”  Martext snapped, standing by the ladder.  “What the flames are you doing?”

“I.”  He slapped his own face, shoving the voices away.  How long had he been standing there?  He left the shirts and snatched a pair of soft leather slippers off the foot of the bed.  Lundin hopped clumsily towards the ladder, trying to put his slippers on as he ran.  “Let’s get to Haberstorm—”

“See you there,” Martext said, unconcealed disdain in his voice as he dropped out of sight.

Lundin slowed, standing on one leg as he wedged his foot into the second slipper.
 
The slow keening of the alarm trumpets began pouring out of the central fort.  The bursting sounds in the air were definitely explosions, and the noise of musket fire, shouts, and running feet rounded out the cacophony.  And he’d just been frozen in the middle of it all, agonizing over his shirts.  He winced to think how stupid he must have looked.

He bristled a little, though, as he replayed Martext’s voice in his head. 
You don’t talk to your senior tech that way.  And how fast did he expect me to leap into action, anyway?  Am I supposed to be ready for explosions at every moment? 
Lundin scrambled down the ladder, the rungs feeling a little slippery underneath his smooth-soled shoes.  He jumped down the last three rungs, shrugging off the twinge in his ankles as he landed, and rushed outside after the Civic.

His eyes gravitated left towards the beleaguered wall.  There was a beautiful sunset taking place, from the looks of the golden light streaming up to the clouds.  But it was getting harder and harder to see it through the wisps of black smoke surrounding the bastion at the northwestern corner of Fort Campos.  As Lundin watched, a fast-moving shell arced down towards the wall and burst in midair, sending a hail of shrapnel across the top of the wall and down into the courtyard.  A soldier in dyed black leather on the walltop contorted in pain and lurched for the door of the bastion, disappearing into the brick tower.  The troops in the courtyard recoiled and shielded themselves against the fast-flying debris.  Return fire was cracking away from the gun slots in the northwest tower; just muskets so far, from the sound, firing blind out into the woods. 
And with the sunset in their eyes
, Lundin realized, the hairs on his forearms rising.  If you’d asked him before, he would have said, blithely, that the best time to attack a fortress was in the middle of the night.  But there was definitely something to be said for attacking at dinnertime, with the sun at your back to blind your startled targets.

There was a great creaking inside the central fort.  As Lundin continued to trot towards Haberstorm Hall, he saw the mighty gun ports opening on the upper levels of the fortress.  Once their cannons were in place, at least the Delians could answer their attackers back in kind.  The heavy armament didn’t seem nearly as excessive now as it had when they first arrived.

“Hey, hey!” he said, reaching out towards a passing soldier, one of the women bunked below the squad.  “Do we know what’s happening?”

“We’re taking fire, sir; just what it looks like.  Please get somewhere safe.”

“I figured that much,” he said under his breath as she hustled along, hugging her musket close to her chest. 
Everyone’s snippy today
. 
Maybe being in a siege does that to you.

Another mortar burst, out of sight this time against the outside face of the wall, just below the crenellations.  A cloud of black smoke floated skyward, and fragments of brick and shrapnel ricocheted every which way.  Lundin stumbled over his feet, most of the way to Haberstorm Hall now.  Who knew how long this pounding would go on?  The walls were holding for now, at least.  With all the scrap flying each time a mortar exploded, he guessed that the shells were the hollow kind that killed people, not the dense kind that sent masonry tumbling.  Small comfort, if it was comfort at all.  A lot of good soldiers could lose their lives if Campos’ artillery didn’t find the range and rout the bastards soon.