The Mask And The Master (Mechanized Wizardry Book 2) (6 page)

“If I were a mystery ‘naut,” Iggy said, “and I wanted a band of low-lifes to do something for me, the first thing I’d do is try to pay them in junk like this.  Make it sound all impressive and authentic.”

“‘With the claws of justice, you can slay your enemies three at a time,’” Mathias intoned, making use of his gravelly throat.

“As long as they stand close together,” Samanthi said over the rim of her glass. 

They laughed, their voices rising into the night.  Then Sir Mathias had another coughing spasm, bad enough that it brought both women to their feet.  Samanthi snatched a waterskin from her wide-open pack and brought it to her friend, a prone giant under a too-small blanket.  He took a few swallows before lying back on his side.

Iggy laid a hand on Samanthi’s back with a non-verbal
‘need anything?’
in her eyes.  Samanthi shook her head.  Iggy nodded, then made a fierce face and crushed her empty cup to her own forehead, the collapsible tin segments stacking neatly into one another.  Samanthi barked with laughter and shoved the Aerial tech away.  Iggy rode the momentum and turned it into a lazy walk across the camp site to the round, hulking bulk of Ironsides.  Without turning around, Iggy waved the Recon squad good night.

Samanthi sighed, sinking down to the ground.  She listened to the crackling fire for a long moment before patting Sir Mathias on the calf.  “How’re you doing, sir?”

The ‘naut was still for several seconds, his brown eyes lost in thought.  “You know why I’m alive today?”  he said, not looking at her.

“‘Cause you’re a virtuous, Sphere-loving champion of righteousness?”

“Because of Lundin.”

The smile sank away from her face.  She scratched the cup in her hands absently, staring at the ground.

“He’s the one who finally got the fire dousers working,” Mathias went on.

“He’s the one who junked up their design in the first place,” Samanthi murmured, shaking her head.  “The number of times I told him to toss those blueprints… but he just went through to a prototype anyway, and, sure enough, got a faceful of foam the first time he pulled the trigger.”

“That sounds healthy.”

“‘The vapors, the vapors,’” she mock-gasped, slipping into Lundin’s voice.  Mathias grinned.  “‘Quick, boss, get me a towel.’  The closest thing at hand was a certain brown-and-gold scarf, so—”

“Wait, wait.  The double-wide scarf with the gold embroidery, that’s been missing for months?”  He sat up.  “That was my scarf.”

“Well, Sir,” she said innocently, “it saved Lundin’s life.  So I guess you two are even.”

“Burn that!  Lundin wasn’t going to die from any vapors.  You couldn’t have used a rag?”

“It was an emergency.”

Mathias flopped back to the ground theatrically.  Samanthi snorted with laughter.  A log popped in the fire, sending a swarm of sparks up into the black air.  The sparks rose for a moment, shining, before their lights faded away.  She looked back down at him.  “And then he went back to the blueprints,” she said, “and he went back for another prototype, and back to the blueprints; and, finally, during the feastday prep, we got the douser on your suit, and it saved your life.” 

She exhaled sharply, feeling an unwelcome tightness in the back of her throat.  “He might be the slowest, densest, most scatterbrained tech in the world.  But whenever he actually finishes a project, it’s a damn work of art.”

The silence that followed made her sad, and being sad made her angry. Samanthi pounded back the rest of her liquor and jabbed a finger at Sir Mathias.  “And if you ever tell him I said so I’ll fill your thrusters with custard,” she growled.

“The Civics are lucky to have him,” he said.

She dug the heel of her boot into the ground sullenly.  “I’d retire before I let them send me to the Civics,” she said.  “Wasting my life in meetings and presentations?  My biggest accomplishment designing a plow that sharpens itself?  Please.”

“It’s the better place for the magic project.”

“That was my project too!”  Samanthi leaned in closer to him, her face reddening with anger.  “And Lundin was my junior tech.  Don’t you rationalize with me!  His transfer had nothing to do with Princess Naomi and what the project needs.  Lundin got booted because Kelley’s a spiteful sack of crap.”

“Don’t go there, Sam,” Mathias warned, sitting up.

“You know as well as I do—”

“Hey!  I said no.”  His brown eyes were flashing.  “
Sir
Kelley is your boss and mine.  And as long as we’re a unit in the field, there are things that are never to come out of your mouth.  Not to me.  Not to anyone.”

“Don’t tell me what to think, sir,” Samanthi said quietly, her jaw set.

“Think whatever you want.  But if you say things that make me question your commitment to your squad, your superiors, and your mission, then I have no choice but to report you.  And I’ve had my fill of that style of drama lately.”

He sank back onto his elbows.  She tossed the last few drops of applejack from her cup into the fire, where they vanished with a hiss.  “If you didn’t want to talk about Lundin, you shouldn’t have brought him up.”

Mathias rubbed his face.  “We can regret the decision that was made without being insubordinate to the people who—”

“If I wanted to be a soldier, I would be a soldier,” she shot back.  “I would have a uniform, and a musket, and better muscle tone, and I wouldn’t expect to speak my mind.  But I’m not a soldier.  I’m a Petronaut, just like you.  You may be the one who puts the suit on, but I’m the one who makes sure it doesn’t kill you.  Given that your life is in my hands every day, sir, silly me; I thought you might be interested in hearing me speak my point of view now and then.”

“In the workshop, yes.  On almost everything, yes.  But you can’t slander the senior ‘naut—”

“I don’t want to slander him, I want to punch his burning lights out!  Did it occur to you, Sir Mathias, that the scandalous talk you just heard from me was the filtered-down, toothless, strait-jacketed version of what I’ve had going inside for weeks now?  And that the reason I let it out at all was because, with the way those big brown eyes got damp when you talked about Lundin, I thought you were finally ready to be honest about how we both miss him?”

“Yeah, I miss him,” Sir Mathias said.  His voice caught in his throat.  “And I’m terrified about losing you, too.”

She looked sidelong at him, the firelight playing across her face.  “You think Kelley will go after me next,” she said.

“If you give him reason to, no doubt,” he whispered sadly.  “And then the Recon squad will get two new techs, or we’ll just get folded into the Cavaliers.  Don’t think the Board hasn’t talked about that before.  And the next time I’m in battle and somebody throws a bottle of exploding jelly at my chest, I’ll be dead.  Because my life has been in your hands and Lundin’s hands for three years now, and I don’t see how I could ever trust anyone the way I’ve been able to trust you.”

The fire was dying and the shadows were long.  A night breeze stirred the embers, unexpectedly cool, and Samanthi rubbed her hands together furiously for warmth.  She bit her lip, not looking over at the big Petronaut.  “Don’t listen to me,” Sir Mathias muttered.  “Just because I’m scared of Kelley doesn’t mean you need to toe some party line, especially in private.”

“Well,” she said, “just because I’m entitled to my hateful opinions doesn’t mean you have to hear them.  Even in private.”

They looked at each other.  Slowly, solemnly, Sir Mathias raised the sloshing waterskin up to her eye level.  Samanthi’s lips tugged upwards in a grin as she raised her empty cup and clinked it against the soft-sided waterskin.

“Cheers.”

“Cheers,” she said, quietly.

“Cheers,” Kelley said, raising an imaginary glass.

Samanthi drew away from Mathias as he started to raise himself to his feet.  Sir Kelley extended a placating hand, the firelight through his fingers casting red shadows on his pockmarked face as he called out to them from the far side of the fire.  “Please, stay down,” he said.  He tilted his head sympathetically.  “Don’t push yourself.  How’re you feeling?”

“Better, sir,” Mathias said, sinking back down onto his side. 

“What do you say, Ms. Elena, since it looks like you’re playing nursemaid?  Is he actually better?”

“He’ll live,” she said, stiffening.

“Well, drinks all around!”  Sir Kelley walked closer to them, his green eyes glinting in the light.  He crouched next to Mathias, resting his forearms on his knees.  “You know who else is going to live, Sir Mathias?  The bastard who threw that burning mess at you!  He lost a lot of blood from the ball you put in his leg, but the master of physic finally patched him up half an hour ago.  Word from the field agents is that he just woke up.”

“Is he talking yet?” Sir Mathias asked.

Kelley grinned, showing his teeth.  “Not yet,” he said.  “What do you say we go fix that?”

Chapter Five

The Pretenders Will Fall

Ovid was the smuggler’s name.  His family had emigrated to Kess twenty-five years earlier from a hardscrabble hamlet in the Flinthock Mountains.  A sob story followed about the death of his father, the breaking of the family when the mother went into debtors’ prison, long nights on the city streets before he took to crime as a way to survive.  Mercifully, the field agents cut to the chase.  Where had he acquired Petronaut claws nearly identical in design to a set deployed by a hostile ‘naut within Delia’s walls?

Lady Ceres Mitrono’s headache only grew worse as she read the answer.

“Hail to the Regents.  Pardon, Milady,” her maidservant said, piping up from the doorway.  Ceres squeezed the bridge of her nose and let out a short, explosive breath.  “Lord Portikal requests a conference with you in advance of the Regency Council meeting.”

She waved a hand towards herself impatiently;
“show him in
.
”
  The maid bobbed a curtsey and disappeared.  Ceres stood up from her desk, holding the slim sheaf of papers in her hand, and continued to read.  Her office was small; or, small for her, at least, given her height and her broad-shouldered frame.  In her days as a general, her rooms in the officers’ quarters had been refurbished immediately to her specifications, with higher doorways and more open space to accommodate her need to pace.  Now that she worked in Delia’s palace, however, chipping away at the stone edifices just so she wouldn’t have to walk through a door sideways was not so easy to justify.  Especially since she wasn’t a Haberstorm, dwelling in the castle by birthright, but one of four Regents entrusted with maintaining the status quo until Princess Naomi came of age. 
Six years away
, Ceres groaned, her mind wandering from the report.  If she felt this tired now, how could she possibly manage to hold Delia together for half a decade more?

She heard Portikal’s heavy boots in the carpeted antechamber before he came into view.  “There’s a platter of sweetrolls on the cart,” she called out in a booming voice.  “And a dish of hard-boiled eggs.  I assume,” she went on more quietly, barely glancing up from the report as he stepped into the office, “that you’re finding it as difficult as I to sit down and enjoy a meal these days.”

Lord Portikal put a hand over his paunchy stomach and waved a dismissal to the silver platters of breakfast food.  “I had spiced beef on a crusty half-loaf during the carriage ride over, and my stomach has yet to recover.  Regents of the most advanced nation on the continent, and we eat on the run like gypsies,” he fumed in characteristically saturnine fashion.

“The price of progress,” Ceres said, smiling down at him.  They clasped hands formally, their long years of familiarity making the gesture less stilted.  “A digestive?” she offered, indicating the sidebar with the report in her other hand. 

The round-faced politician released her with a nod.  He smoothed his sleek black mustache with his fingers as he trundled over to the decanters.  As Ceres continued to read, he poured himself a finger of orange liqueur and sniffed gratefully from the narrow glass.  “Will that report help settle my stomach, or set it off again?”  he rumbled.

“Knowing nothing about our enemies is what has kept me up at night,” she said.  “So, by that score, this report is a relief.  We have a piece of genuine intelligence at last.”

“Praise the Spheres.  I don’t need to tell you how frustrated I was when my long ride to Fort Campos proved entirely fruitless.  Our eastern border with Svargath is quiet as ever, with no signs of mobilization on their end.  And though I made occasions to storm at Colonel Yough now and again, her actions were difficult to reprove.  I found no genuine fault with her expanded patrols, or her intelligence-gathering.”  Portikal shot back the rest of the digestive, wincing as the bitter fruit coursed down his throat. 
Silly man; that’s why you sip it
, Ceres thought, amused.

“We knew Svargath’s involvement was unlikely.  It’s all those baby-faced clerics can do to keep their own country together.”  The sprawling theocracy over the mountains to their east was a decentralized stew of parishes whose rigid, self-policing adherence to their holy rules was the only thing binding them together.  How the nation ever accomplished anything without a central government was a mystery to Ceres;
give me a Throne to report to any day.
  But as long as their parishes still paid good coin for manufactured Delian goods, the city-state would keep doing business with them.

She went on.  “My hunch was always that criminals from the north, towards Kess, were responsible.  I’ll see your frustration with the pace of the patrols out east, and raise you the infuriatingly high cost of running six different search teams simultaneously in the Tarmic Woods.  Mixed units of field agents and Petronauts, no less, gobbling up petrolatum by the tanker full.  Overseeing them has been maddening.

“But unit four finally paid off.  They caught a smuggler with something to say.  Incidentally,” she said, flipping back to the first page, “this is the unit to which the Reconnaissance Petronaut squad was assigned.  The same ‘nauts who exposed Davic Volman as a traitor on the feastday?”