The Mask And The Master (Mechanized Wizardry Book 2) (4 page)

One of the smugglers stabbed his finger towards the ground, leaning in closer to the woman he was speaking to.  As the man moved his arm, a long metal cuff slid down his wrist.  Mathias frowned, tilting his head for a better view.  It covered more than half of his forearm, but hung loosely, like a bracelet.  The thin man unconsciously pushed it back towards his elbow with his other hand, continuing to speak and paying no attention to the ill-fitting accessory. 
Strange thing to be wearing, out here in the forest. 
It looked so awkward Mathias had trouble believing it was decorative, but what practical purpose could a too-big bracer on only one arm serve?

The woman moved to a bundle on the ground and untied it with a sharp yank.  Craning his neck, Mathias caught a glimpse of gleaming black fur underneath the oilcloth.  Judging by the height, there were maybe three dozen pelts in the stack.  A heavyset man was arranging another cloth on the ground as she rifled through the poached skins.  The thin man with the cuff crossed his arms over his chest, visibly impatient.  The woman lifted about a third of the skins from the stack, holding them away from her body, and set them into the other cloth.  As the heavyset man tied up the new bundle, the woman put her hands on her hips and barked something to the whole group.  “...want to kill yourselves, then go ahead!” came drifting up the hill to Mathias.

 The thin man closed the distance with the woman, his finger in her face.  Every hand went to a weapon as the rest of the smugglers eyed each other.  Far from being a unified group, it was clearly two against four now.  The woman and the heavyset man wanted their cut of the furs, and the others weren’t inclined to give it to them. The heavyset man had a nervous hand on each of the pistols in his belt as he stood behind the woman, carefully watching as the guard let his musket drift towards the pair.  The thin man gestured angrily at the smaller bundle of furs, then pointed south with one long finger.  Mathias unconsciously drew closer to his tree as the man’s finger pointed essentially right past him, but none of the smugglers even looked up.

The woman raised her palm.  “... to Delia?  Now?” her voice rose, as she looked the thin man and his three cohorts in the eye, one at a time.  She dipped her head and rocked back on her heels with mock casualness, and her mouth moved through a slow series of words.

It must have been an insult—and a good one—because suddenly the air was bristling with guns and swords, and the heavyset man was frantically trying to cover four enemies with two weapons. 
Spheres,
Sir Mathias thought, shifting his weight. 
These idiots are going to kill each other before we learn anything!
  The arguing man and woman squared off against each other impassively.  He extended his arm past her, pointing at the furs with an air of finality.  His metal cuff slid out of place again, jangling down at the base of his wrist.  With a lazy motion, she lifted a gloved hand from her hip and flicked the metal bracer, hard, with the backs of her fingers.  There was a metallic impact, then a brief chattering sound—

And three claws ratcheted out of the cuff.

Just like the blades on that ‘naut in Drabelhelm! 
Mathias’ eyes went wide, his body tensing up.  This band of thugs just became a thousand times more interesting. 

He shot a quick glance across the hillside to Sir Kelley, who was looking right back at him, his body language reading the same anticipation.  Kelley pointed to the northwest, then raised two fingers and indicated the two of them. 
Iggy will create a distraction; then we go in
.  Sir Mathias nodded, and Kelley blew three quick chirps into his signal whistle.  The sound blended right in among the scattered birdsong in the forest; as Mathias glanced back towards the smugglers, none seemed to have even heard it.  The thin man was sputtering, grabbing at his wrist as he tried to get the blades to sheathe themselves again.  The woman laughed, deliberately disregarding the weapons all around her.  She turned her back on the thin man and walked towards the share of the furs she’d taken.  Furious, he drew back his bladed arm for a blow.

Then a flying saucer came hurtling towards him through the trees.

The smugglers stared up at it, momentarily dumbfounded as the Aerial squad's impossible machine plowed through the low-hanging branches to their northwest, more than three meters off the ground.  It exhaled a noisy stream of air as it flew, the raspy sound clearly audible to Mathias now, about two hundred meters distant.   The machine was a platform, the bottom third of a hollow cone, ringed with inward-sloping walls.  Its circular base was nearly a meter thick, concealing the mighty propeller inside, and the slanted walls rose up another meter.  Its pilot, Iggy, was crouched out of sight as the machine, visibly tilting in the direction it was flying, powered through the air twice as fast as a man could run.  The exterior of the floating platform was covered with interlocking panes of dull grey armor, studded with hundreds of rivets.  Sir Mathias couldn’t help but smile at the sight of their implausible cavalry, charging headlong towards the frightened smugglers.

Go get ‘em, Ironsides,
he thought.

A chaotic volley of shots rang out from at least five guns, sending puffs of white smoke into the air.  Most of the shots went wide, but the guard’s musket ball connected with Ironsides, sending the floating platform into a drunken wobble as it barreled forward.  Half the smugglers toppled to the ground in fear as the machine flew over their heads, far too high to collide with them.  The thin man raised his arms involuntarily to shield his face, and the force of the air column beating down on him drove his own claws into his cheek.  He hollered in pain, sinking to his knees and pressing his other hand to his face.  The claw-blades hanging by his side were tinged with blood.  Ironsides continued gliding through the air past the disoriented mob, leaving a trail of twigs and splinters in its wake.  Only one of the smugglers had the presence of mind to reload, already pouring powder into her pistol for a second shot.

That means we’ll get you first,
Mathias thought, stepping out from behind the tree.

“Drop your weapons, by the Throne of Delia!” he bellowed.  He fired, his shoulder rocking back with the familiar recoil of the gun in his arm.  The smuggler spilled her powder as she leapt backwards from the shot at her feet.  Then Kelley raced past her in a blur, his metal arm extended, clotheslining her into the dirt.  Mathias lowered his arm and started to run towards the fray as quickly as he could without toppling his heavy suit over on the steep hill.

Mathias watched as the heavyset man drew a massive hunting knife and leapt at Kelley, blade slashing towards the ‘naut’s chest.  Sir Kelley flung his torso backwards and the point of the knife scraped along his armor, just below his pectorals.  He kicked the smuggler in the stomach, his armored greaves knocking the wind out of the big man.  In a fluid motion, Kelley drew his black baton from its loop on his back and brought it down in a great dark arc onto the man’s wrist.  The knife dropped from his shattered grasp and he crumpled to the ground.  Then Mathias noticed the other woman looking at him from behind the gaping barrel of a blunderbuss. 
She was the only one who didn’t fire at Ironsides
, the ‘naut realized belatedly, swinging his arm up and hoping he could get a shot at her before—

A flurry of gunfire rang out from the west and the woman contorted in agony, bleeding from her shoulder and her leg.  Mathias shot a quick look over at the squad of Delian field agents, advancing into the clearing in two disciplined lines.  He caught the eye of the freckled agent who’d been working with Samanthi, the barrel of her pistol still smoking.  She nodded at him, a curl of auburn hair peeking out of her skullcap and the edges of a smile on her mouth.  Then she grabbed her powder horn and tended to her pistol with the utmost professionalism.  Sir Mathias stifled a smile of his own and picked up the pace, charging across nearly flat ground now towards the terrified two smugglers still standing.

Two?  There should be three left...

“Mathias!  East!”

Sir Kelley’s harsh voice launched him into action.  The thin man was fleeing east, stumbling through the woods with his bloody claw-arm trailing behind him.  Those claws were the prize of the whole operation; there was no way the smuggler could be allowed to escape.  Sir Mathias left the other smugglers behind as Kelley and the agents swept down on them, and broke east after the escapee.  He raised his arm as he ran, gun barrel tracking the man’s legs, but the smuggler was leaping through the underbrush like a rabbit and reliable aiming was impossible.  The Regents would want this man alive.

“Stop, in the name of the crown!”  he shouted out.  The ranine coils were pumping in his legs and his strides got longer and longer, erasing the distance between them.  A beetle splattered against the faceplate of his helmet with a wet noise and a smell like a spill in an apothecary shop, but he didn’t even slow down.  The smuggler struggled through a dense patch of ferns, suddenly turning north and disappearing from view around a rain-smooth boulder.  Mathias jumped, the wind whistling in his earholes as he flew skywards.  He landed on the peak of the boulder, looking two meters down at the smuggler on the other side.  The man had stopped, fiddling with something on his belt.  “You can’t run—” Sir Mathias began, raising his arm.

“Death to the pretenders,” the thin man wailed, the claw-marks on his face red and wild.

He hurled something through the air at Mathias, his long arm swinging jerkily. Sir Mathias sighted along his wrist and fired, coolly, clipping the smuggler in the thigh.  The thin man crumpled to the forest floor, and then a small black bottle broke against the Petronaut’s chest, and he burst into flames.

The heat was incredible.  Sir Mathias slapped his breastplate unthinkingly to beat the flames out, and his gauntlet came away sticky and flaming.  The temperature against his chest rose astonishingly with each passing second.  The fire was dripping down his stomach towards his groin.  He scraped at it with both hands, his body acting automatically while his mind retreated in shock, until both hands were engulfed in flames.  The heat of his armor was growing unbearable; beneath it, he could feel the layers of thick cloth padding against his skin starting to curl and scorch, and smell the smoke as they went alight.  Staggering on top of the boulder, Mathias looked down at his breastplate.  Some jellied substance was clinging to it—a dark black slime—and everywhere he had spread the ooze on himself, he was a roaring flame.  If he didn’t put the fire out soon, it would find its way along the fuel lines to the petrolatum bladders against his lower back.  If that happened, this boulder would become a crater, and Sir Mathias Mascarpone would be ten thousand bloody morsels for ten thousand hungry vermin on the forest floor.

Fire douser
, his mind finally weighed in. 
Left arm.

Mathias raised his left arm, fumbling with flaming fingers for a safety ring on the outside of his tricep.  He got his thick fingers around the ring and pulled, a long string ripping free from his armor.  With the separator gone, two chemicals began to react in a rarely-used chamber on his left shoulder, and a hidden epaulet expanded with retardant lather.  He pressed his middle and index fingers into his palm with all his might, and white foam erupted from a nozzle at his wrist.  Mathias bathed his right hand in the foam, then turned it on his stomach.  The chemical stench, on top of the smoke and the pain, nearly dropped him into a nauseous stupor, but he held his breath and kept spraying.  The flaming jelly hissed with each fresh spurt of foam, and a portion of the lather liquefied from the heat, turning into useless white soup that ran down his armor onto the stone.  But ultimately the flame subsided and the jelly, smothered in a cloud of foam, was no longer radiating heat into his body.  Sir Mathias collapsed onto his back, lightheaded and throbbing with pain.  The whole ordeal had lasted twenty seconds.

The fire douser works
, he thought blandly, his mind far away. 
I remember in testing, the nozzle would always get clogged.  And then...

And then Lundin fixed it
.

He looked up into the overcast canopy as a rush of wind shook the supple branches above.  There were footsteps from the west, and the breathy roar of Ironsides as Iggy wheeled the machine around for another pass from the east.  He could hear the smuggler groan once in the dirt below.  He was still alive, and he hadn’t run away.  Mathias had done his job. 
And Lundin did too
, he thought. 

As Sir Kelley and the field agents caught up with the two prone men, Mathias’ eyes were full of tears.  “I owe you one, Horace,” he murmured to the blustery sky.

Chapter Three

Mister Leader

“I used to speak Svarish,” Willl said, adjusting his trapezoidal glasses.

“
Obe Ippe Grubeld Jundermunt!
” Elia offered, nodding with each word.  “I speak Grubeld wonderfully.”

“That’s.”  Through the pockets of his smock, Lundin dug his nails into his legs.  It was as close as he could get to the primal scream he wanted to let loose at his new Civic teammates.  He made himself nod, keeping his voice calm.  “That’s wonderful—”

“
ost jundervul—
”

“—but all I asked was if any of you speak—”

“
sprich—
”

Lundin pointed a warning finger at Elia as he continued. “—the one and only language I asked for, which is Old Harutian.  Know it?  Even a little bit, from school?”

“
Vom klassen?  Noe,
” Elia said with a theatrical frown on her heart-shaped face.
 
Martext and Willl had the kindness to just shake their heads.

“Okay,” Lundin said with forced heartiness, turning his back on his new team.  He stared at the immaculate worktable, his eyes going unfocused.  His fingers twitched in his pockets.  “Then we’ll start at square one,” he said, barely audible.