The Mask And The Master (Mechanized Wizardry Book 2), page 10
She had replayed the events of the feastday ten thousand times in her mind. She saw herself at the center of a painstakingly laid plan, with Princess Naomi’s death virtually assured and no trail linking the business back to her. After all, what better alibi could the court sorcerer have than conducting the heir’s defense during a magical attack? She was proud of the plan, but it wasn’t the selfish thrill of a cat burglar entering a mansion with a hungry sack. She’d known, as they all had, that regicide was a grave crime, and they’d only embarked on the dark path after many long months of soul-searching. There was no following that road halfway. They’d all been committed to covering every eventuality, and anticipating every complication, because the worst possible result would be… exactly what wound up happening. Princess Naomi alive, more popular than ever; traitors exposed in the palace; and her own credibility compromised by a rival wizard.
She’d racked her brains for weeks about the identity of that magical enemy. For another wizard to spot her ruse and to decide to act against her bespoke an experienced, supremely confident magical mind. And to have the time to complete a spell against her seemed to suggest foreknowledge of her plan. But what experienced wizard, with the life of the Princess at stake, would search through his mental arsenal and decide, of all the spells in creation, to cast a spell of friendship? And to do it clumsily, no less (she had endured a thoroughly embarrassing physical tic in her neck for days after the event). It had worked, of course, but it simply wasn’t a choice any sensible wizard would have made. In all her ruminations on the events of that day, she’d never been able to piece together a reasonable explanation for her enemy’s use of that spell.
Unless, of course, it was the only spell he knew.
The babbling Horace Lundin and his machines, installed just outside Naomi’s chambers. His knowledge of ojing. His peasant devotion to the Princess. His arrogant willingness to cast magic with no understanding of the art. His animosity to true wizards like herself. The unholy speed of his ‘spell box.’ His own admission, straight to the Herald’s ears, that the spell of friendship was the only one in his repertoire.
Horace Lundin was her wizard.
Ouste found herself smiling. She’d longed to put a face on her enemy for weeks now, steeling herself for a bitter fight once she did find him. But now that she knew? She threw away all her long hours of planning with wry good humor. The challenge wasn’t going to be how to kill her adversary, but simply which option to choose.
The Petronaut had made no friends in the magical community, certainly. An arcane attack could easily be pinned on any disgruntled wizard in Delia. But lethal magic deployed again in the city, so soon on the heels of Jilmaq’s execution, would prompt a city-wide inquiry, and controlling every piece of the investigation would be impossible. There would have to be absolutely no way to trace the killing back to her. She had to assume that Lundin’s whole squad knew about her involvement in the feastday plot. That they had yet to accuse her in public was surprisingly canny, for Petronauts. They were obviously waiting to act until their case was stronger than a he-said/she-said argument they would instantly lose. Striking at Lundin too baldly could risk exposing her on multiple fronts.
No—this was a time for stillness, and subtlety. The burning in her veins had calmed down, and now her body felt firm, strong, prepared. A cliché wafted to the forefront of her mind. Kill him with kindness.
Ouste’s laughter was light, like a choir of handbells. She wandered over to the doorway and traced her fingers over the report the Herald had left. She would take this report, and deliver a recommendation to the Regents and the Heir as for how Mr. Lundin’s project should proceed. And then, discreetly, she would get in touch with her foreign friends. If memory serves me correctly, they have some influence over a certain party in the Civic Development and Improvement team, whose involvement might be useful indeed.
“Oh, Mr. Lundin,” she said, stretching high to the ceiling. Your death is going to be a work of art, and you’ll never even know it.
Chapter Ten
The Consultant
“You get used to it,” Dame Miri was saying to Martext as he adjusted the bandages on his hand. He raised an eyebrow just as Dame Dionne cleared her throat. Miri, Martext, Willl with three L’s and Elia turned to see their bespectacled boss in the doorway with a very somber-looking Lundin right behind her.
“Give us the room, would ya?” Dame Dionne said with a tight grin.
Dame Miri and the techs fled out the side door, someone belatedly remembering to push it shut after them. It sealed with a noisy click. Dionne took a few steps into the workroom, then turned and clasped her hands in front of her. Lundin closed the main door behind him and looked at her.
“So, Horace,” Dame Dionne finally began, “I’ve been hearing a lot about your presentation yesterday. Sorry I missed it.”
“Don’t be,” Lundin said, as sincere as he’d ever been.
“I’d like to know how you feel, Horace.” She had her palms together, and pointed all ten fingertips at him on the word you. “How do you think things went?”
Lundin frowned. Her voice was calm, almost expressionless. This was a new sort of dressing-down, and it made him uneasy. Is this the mom who makes her kid cut his own switch for a whipping? He had no idea what was the right thing to say to the impassive woman in front of him.
“Well, ‘disaster’ might be a little strong,” he tried, furrowing his brow in thought. “After all, Martext is already back at work…”
“Don’t be flip with me, Horace,” she said. “I’m giving you a chance to tell your side.”
He raised his hands in surrender. “We barely had the crowd’s attention to start with. Then we pumped them up to see real magic work, live, and it didn’t. I had promised Martext he’d be safe, and he wasn’t. And after the dog attacked him, I just stammered onstage in front of that crowd until Miri saved me and sent them back to their homes. I’m the newest Civic in Delia, and I’ve already done more damage to your reputation than anyone in history.” He took a short breath to work through an unexpected catch in his throat. He met her eyes, as steadily as he could. What else was there to say? “I’m really sorry,” he said, with genuine regret.
Dame Dionne searched his face. Then she sighed and (no surprise) removed her trapezoidal glasses, folding them up in her hands. “Come here,” she said, stepping towards him. She wrapped her arms around his shoulders and gave him a great big hug.
His mouth sank open, his chin resting over her shoulder. This isn’t how Kelley used to yell at me.
Hesitantly, Lundin lifted his long arms and laid his hands on Dionne’s back, with about one-tenth the force she was using to hug him. He patted her a few times, unsure what else to do.
Two eternities later, Dionne released the hug. She kept her feet planted near his as she looked up at him, a ring-encrusted hand on his arm. “Here’s the thing, Horace,” she said. “As the senior ‘naut, I have certain responsibilities, and certain things I have to do and say. But I’m also part of your family,” she said feelingly, nodding. He nodded back with no understanding why. “And I need you to know that, as far as our family bond is concerned, I accept your apology with absolutely no reservations.”
“Really?” Lundin blinked.
“Really.” She gave his arm a squeeze, smiling. “I assure you that our relationship will be just as strong—or stronger—after whatever needs to happen happens.”
There’s that other shoe, Lundin thought. It was like seeing an old friend. “‘Whatever needs to happen…?’” he said tentatively.
“I hate to be so cagey,” she said, letting go of him with a sigh. She unfolded her glasses and put them back on, brushing her blond hair out of her eyes. “But everything’s up in the air right now.
“Horace, we’ve had presentations go bust before, hundreds of times. We’ve had audiences boo and walk out and get violent. We demoed a pressurized still to a big crowd, promising to revolutionize how fine brandy is made, and wound up spraying hot cherry juice over the first two rows. Luckily, we’d also just developed a new burn cream, which it turned out was pretty darn good.
“The point is, part of life as a Civic is having things fail. Part of being a Petronaut is dealing with failure. Spheres, it’s part of life! When things foul up, that’s just an opportunity to do them better next time. It’s just data. Right?”
“Right,” he said quietly, the tension in his chest easing.
“The only time when it’s not just data is when a representative from the Throne is in the room.”
The tension leapt right back. “Ah.”
She made a sympathetic face. “You see? This one was a little high-profile, Horace. We Civics can handle a little embarrassment; but if the Regents and the Princess decides that they’re embarrassed? I hate to say it, but that’s the end.”
“The end of what?” he asked, not wanting the answer.
“The end of the project? The end of your time as a ‘naut?” She shrugged. “I just don’t know. How much I can insulate you depends on how mad they are to start with. But if they’re furious, the project simply can’t continue as it is.”
Lundin put his hands in his pockets. The sun was filtering cheerily through the skylights, casting a golden glow on the metal disks Miri and the techs had left on the worktable. The morning rain had broken, and the outside world was looking optimistic again. And he just stood there looking at the woman who was telling him his life was over.
“I’m going to fight this with you,” she said, gesturing between the two of them. “Can you help me do that?”
“What can I do?” His voice was thick. He thought about Samanthi grinning at him in the hallway, and his team looking at him for leaderly words of wisdom. Being fired twice in a month was too much to bear.
“What went wrong with the spell box?” Dame Dionne asked quietly.
“Nothing,” Lundin said, hands out to his sides.
“Horace.”
“Nothing went wrong.” His voice rose in pitch as he talked, hands spinning, words spilling out. “That’s what’s crazy. That’s what’s maddening, Dame Dionne. We did everything right, and it fell apart anyway.”
“Tell me what you did.”
“The same thing we’d tried on Elia! Night before last, that dog couldn’t stand Elia. We cast the friendship spell in the exact same way, and when we were done, she could scratch him on his flea-bitten ears. Eighteen hours later, we cast the same spell, just swapping Martext’s name in for Elia’s during the Illustration. One tiny change, carefully entered, triple-checked. And the dog bites him like there wasn’t a wisp of magic in that room.”
“One tiny change ruins the whole thing,” Dame Dionne exhaled. “That’s coding, all right.”
“Dame Dionne,” Lundin said, impulsively grabbing her upper arm. I’ve definitely been a Civic too long, a lazy part of his brain observed as he looked into his boss’ eyes. “I want to stay a Petronaut. I want to keep tinkering with machines and screwing things up for the rest of my life. But if there’s no saving my career this time, then so be it. I’ll slink off, and Delia will do fine without me. But I couldn’t stand it if this project dies.” His long face was stricken just from saying the words aloud. Lundin swallowed.
“There’s so much good that mechanized wizardry could do for… for the world! There’s no way to know how much potential we can unlock unless we keep studying it. But if this whole field dies—is stillborn right here, at the beginning—because of the mistakes I made when a Herald was watching? I won’t be able to live with myself.”
“Horace,” Dame Dionne whispered. They were standing awfully close to each other.
“I.” He forced himself to take a deep breath. “Throw me off the cliff with the Board of Governors if you have to, but please, boss. Don’t let them shut the program down.”
She stretched her arms out, palms up. “I need to know what went wrong if I’m going to defend it.”
“I don’t know what went wrong.”
“Well, Mister Lundin, that’s a problem,” she said, putting her fingertip on his chest.
“Then I’ll run some tests!” he shouted, pulling away. He rushed past her to the worktable, sifting through the piles of metal disks. Dame Dionne slowly lowered her hand from where it had been, putting on a patient face before turning around. Lundin found Illustration 5A and 5B, the first mention of Martext’s name, and held the pair of disks up to the light. “We’ll get Martext back in here, and Elia, and that old bastard of a dog. We’ll do more trials until we know why one person worked and one person didn’t. We’ll do it this minute, so when a Herald comes back from the palace with a verdict, we’ve got as much ammunition as possible to fight for the project.” He set the disks back down with a mighty crash. “Fouling up just means we do it better next time, right?” he said, with manic heartiness. “We’ll get our magic working again!”
“Hey, Horace—”
“Knock knock?”
Horace froze. Dame Dionne turned around, frowning, as the main door to the workroom swung open slowly. A short man peeked his head around the door, a mess of tight, springy curls jiggling on his head. His face and hands were so black they seemed almost a deep navy blue in the sunlit room. He looked at the Petronauts serenely, small eyes crinkling away with good humor. “Sorry to interrupt,” he said in a high, silky voice.
“Sorry, sir, this is a private meeting,” Dame Dionne said, clasping her hands in front of her with an official smile. “Just ask that receptionist out front, and he’ll get you where you need to go.”
“Oh, he already directed me here,” the man said. “If you’re busy with Mister Lundin, ma’am, I’m happy to wait.”
Dionne tossed a glance over her shoulder to Lundin, with a nonverbal “Do you know him?” Lundin had a flash back to the presentation, and a certain gentleman in the audience just to Tymon’s left. “Mister… Mister Ronk?” he said, rubbing his forehead as he thought.
“Mmm-hmm,” Ronk said pleasantly, pushing the door open the rest of the way. He was wearing a steel-gray tabard over black slacks that actually fit him. Burn me, Lundin thought, a wizard who dresses like a normal person.
Dame Dionne was looking at him. Lundin cleared his throat, gesturing to the newcomer. “Mister Ronk is a wizard. Came to the presentation.”
“Ah,” she said, turning to the wizard with a disarming smile. “Well, we’re always happy to get community feedback in the proper channels. We actually have an ombudsman desk down that hallway—”
“I know why your spell bombed.”
His gentle words stopped Lundin and Dionne in their tracks. Lundin’s eyes went very wide. “You, uh,” was about all he managed before the wizard went on, nodding encouragingly.
“Quite ambitious for a first public demonstration. I was certainly rooting for you; eager to see if you could pull it off.”
“We, uh, we weren’t trying to be ambitious,” Lundin cut in, finally getting his words back. “I mean, a spell of friendship, it’s one of the simplest we know about—”
“Human-to-human, yes. But working across species elevates it to quite a sophisticated level, as you must know,” he said with a laugh.
The room was absolutely silent. “You did know that, of course,” Ronk said with the faintest upward inflection at the end.
Dame Dionne and Lundin slowly turned their heads to look at each other. The wizard looked at each of them in turn, his forehead creasing with concern. “I’m interrupting,” he said solicitously. “Should I come back later?”
“If anything, Mr. Ronk,” the senior ‘naut said, adjusting her glasses, “I think I speak for both of us when I wish we’d met you sooner.
“Horace! Go get that lazy team of yours to come hear this, would you? Like I said, Mr. Ronk,” Dame Dionne said warmly as Lundin scrambled for the side door, “we’re just wild for community feedback around here. Now—let me get some paper—why exactly was it that our spell bombed?”
“Imagine a door,” Ronk said, perched comfortably on his stool. With varying degrees of breathlessness (Elia), focus (Lundin) and difficulty (Willl with three L’s), the room full of Civics all did their best to imagine a door. “You want to get to the other side. How do you do it? Simple; you open it and walk through. That’s how all doors work, right?
“But consider this. When we come across a door, and we want to open it, what’s being tested isn’t really our knowledge of doors. It’s our knowledge of handles.
“Dame Dionne—can you open and close that door to the outside for me, please?”
Dame Dionne dusted off her thighs and got off of her stool, sauntering to the main door. “Watch this,” she said, confidently. Her rings clinked against the spherical doorknob as she turned it clockwise. With a flourish, she pulled it open. A passing technician in the hallway looked up briefly from a mail scroll as he went past.
“Exemplary,” Ronk said, laughing.
“Encore,” Dame Miri cheered. The whole team started smiling as Dame Dionne closed the door.
“Dame Miri,” the wizard went on. She leaned back against the worktable, one knee bent, and looked at him. “Don’t let me strain your hands, but could I trouble you to open one of these cabinets?”
“My pleasure,” she said, brushing off his concern. The worktables had copious amounts of cabinet space built in underneath the tabletops. Cabinet doors were evenly spaced every meter or so along each of the long sides of the tables. Miri knelt down and grasped the small knob on the right side of the cabinet with her bandaged fingertips. Before she could pull the door open, Ronk raised a hand.
“Actually, if you could humor me, would you open it like Dame Dionne opened her door?” He pantomimed twisting a knob. “After all, that’s how doors open. Isn’t it?”
Dame Miri nodded slowly. She could see where this was going. Everyone craned their necks to watch as she squeezed the little knob as best she could and tried vainly to turn it clockwise. The knob, fastened in place on a wooden peg, didn’t budge. “Doesn’t work.”
