The Mask And The Master (Mechanized Wizardry Book 2), page 22
Samanthi was stretching her legs when they came back. The air was still warm from the sinking sun. The smell of roasting venison and griddle cakes was drifting from the mess hall. The steady pouring sound of the river draped over the logging camp, making everything just a little slower and just a little calmer. Samanthi cracked her knuckles and looked up at the treeline, enjoying the fresh air after a whole flaming day crunching data with Zig. Then her eyes drifted down, attracted by a bit of movement, and she stopped breathing.
They had expected the ‘nauts back before sundown, but not like this.
Sir Kelley was stalking in front, his visor up and his green eyes wild and darting. Sir Mathias was holding Dame Gaulda’s helmet in one hand and propping her up with the other as the Shock Trooper doggedly kept putting one foot in front of the next. Her armor was filthy, warped, and smeared with black slime from her neck to her groin. Gaulda’s face was gray, and her lips pulled back from her teeth on each agonizing step. Dame Orinoco had a limp woman slung over her back, her wiry arms and long, stringy brown hair flopping over Orinoco’s shoulders. It wasn’t until Dame Julie pressed a hand against the woman’s bare arm, her dark face full of concern through her open visor, that Samanthi noticed the loop of a pair of overalls on the prone woman’s shoulder. The body dimly registered as Iggy—but then where was Ironsides? And where was Sir Xiaoden? Samanthi’s eyes widened and the breath came back to her lungs, pumping too fast.
Everything went too fast in the jumbled minutes that followed. She was carrying a basin of water with one of the scullery men. She was depressurizing Dame Gaulda’s ranine coils. She was looking down at Iggy on the cot, her face smashed and torn and one leg at an odd angle underneath the sheet. She was wrestling Sir Mathias out of his armor as he craned his neck to watch the wounded, fidgeting and restless. She was pouring dipperfuls of water into Dame Gaulda’s mouth whenever the ‘naut finished shuddering her way through another coughing fit. She was hanging Julie’s breastplate against the armor rack when Zig set Iggy’s broken leg. She almost dropped it as the scream filled the longhouse. Time swirled past faster than the river, each moment blurring chaotically into the next. And through it all, Kelley prowled through the longhouse in his armor like a mad, hunted thing.
“I’ve splinted her,” Zig said, running his fingers through his red hair. His hand came away slick with sweat, and he wiped it on his pants. He looked down at Iggy, still and ashen on the cot. “But my field physic training only goes so far. I don’t—”
“You keep her alive,” Sir Kelley ordered, still in motion.
“I—believe me, sir, I want to, but—”
“Who knows how hard she hit that tree?” Dame Orinoco stepped in. Her hand was bandaged, and her two broken fingers tied together with a strip of cloth. “Thank the Spheres she didn’t fall to the forest floor when Ironsides went down; but getting caught in the branches like that wasn’t—”
“What else can you do for her?” he said, looking straight at Zig.
The technician swallowed. “If anything’s crushed or bleeding inside her? I’m not a master of physic! I can’t—”
“I sent a runner up to our lumberjacks,” the logging boss said, his rumbling voice sounding a little shaken. “Our master of physic travels with the loggers. She sees falls all the time.”
“When can she be here?”
“Three days? Maybe four?”
“The platoons should be here tomorrow, Sir Kelley,” Mathias said quietly from Dame Gaulda’s bedside. She was asleep, at last. “They’ll have physicians, and a better field hospital than what we’ve got now.”
Kelley threw his arms open wide and spun around, taking in the whole room. “Can anyone guarantee me that Ignatia Roulande will live through the night?”
Samanthi felt her throat tightening up. The longhouse was silent, except for the gentle rush of the river in the background. Sir Kelley’s mouth drew back into a sneer. He slammed his fist down onto a table, rocking its legs off the ground with the force of the blow, and stormed outside into the fading evening light.
Dame Orinoco flung up her good hand and turned away. Dame Julie put her hands on her hips and frowned. “What did he want us to do? Lie?”
Samanthi and Sir Mathias looked at each other across the longhouse. His brown eyes were sadder than she’d ever seen them. “I think so,” she said.
“The way your boss is acting, you’d think he lost someone tonight,” Orinico said. The Cavalier’s face was contorted with bitterness.
“We all lost someone tonight,” Sir Mathias said, straightening up.
“Please. You didn’t know Xiaoden.”
“And you don’t know Kelley,” he said, his voice hard. He followed the senior ‘naut outside, his big feet thumping against the ground.
Samanthi briefly toyed with the idea of staying in the longhouse to smooth things over with the Cavaliers. This mission had only just begun, after all, and given the seriousness of what was arrayed against them, their joint squad couldn’t afford to lose cohesion by going tribal.
Burn that, she thought as she headed wordlessly for the door. There would be time to get back to the big picture soon enough. Right now, she had to be with her people.
“Hey,” she yelled after Mathias. He looked down at her over his shoulder, and gestured with his head for her to follow. The off-white thermals he wore under his breastplate were rumpled and streaked with oil, and tight against his big torso. As she trotted up to his side, the dusky air felt good against her arms and neck. The circulation in that longhouse wasn’t worth a damn, and she hadn’t realized how warm she’d become.
“Tell me what happened out there,” she said as they walked.
“I mean, we filled you in,” Sir Mathias said absently. They caught sight of Sir Kelley, out towards the trees, facing away from them. His gleaming black suit looked out of place against the backdrop of leaves and wood, and his head was strangely small on top of the armor. They changed course to head for him. “The town was hostile. The Golden Caravan had armed them. By the time the dust cleared, Ironsides was a wreck and Sir Xiaoden was a hole in the ground. And we didn’t learn a thing.”
“And what happened to Kelley?”
He gave her that sad, scared look again. Samanthi glared back at him. “Come on, damn it,” she whispered. “What happened to him?”
“Tell her,” Sir Kelley said, his flat voice carrying easily to them. They turned to look at his back as he stood alone, still staring into the woods.
Samanthi looked back at Mathias. The big Petronaut swallowed before he spoke. “Kelley killed a girl,” he said.
The night was very quiet. “What do you mean, a girl?”
“Twelve. Thirteen? She had a sort of crossbow; the one we brought back. Anything she shot just lit up, like that.” He snapped his dirty fingers. “She’s the one who brought Iggy down, and turned Xiaoden into dust. And she would have had me, too.”
“Spheres,” Samanthi said, her mind spinning. “Did these bastards send other kids at you?”
“She had, uh. There was another girl, about half her age. Unarmed. We let her get away.”
“A dumb move,” Sir Kelley said. He turned his head in sharp profile to them. “She’ll just be back to fight us later.”
“Letting a six-year-old off the battlefield doesn’t sound dumb to me, Sir,” Samanthi said.
“You weren’t there.”
Sir Kelley turned back away from them, clenching and unclenching his right fist. A nightbird cried across the river. The silence ticked on until Samanthi took one step forward.
“I’m sorry, Kelley,” she said quietly.
His exasperated sigh was just barely audible. “I don’t want your pity, Ms. Elena,” he said, so put-upon, so sardonic. And suddenly Samanthi no longer cared.
“Burn you too, sir.”
Sir Mathias’ jaw fell to his chest. Kelley actually turned around, slowly, his mouth twisted in surprise and his green eyes getting wider. Samanthi felt the blood rising in her cheeks and behind her eyes as she spoke.
“A thirteen-year-old girl was killing your people, and you had to pull the trigger to stop her. Spheres, Kelley! When something like that happens to you, you don’t get to decide if you’re getting pity or not! The question is, are you going to be an ass about it? Pretend you’re some kind of bloodless, seen-it-all veteran who’s perfectly fine with a world where you shoot the kid before the kid shoots you? Or: are you going to get over yourself, for once, for ten burning seconds, and allow yourself to feel awful about something awful? I sure hope you pick the second choice, senior ‘naut, because I already don’t like you, and figuring out how to like you even less is going to get complicated.”
The two men just looked at her. The nightbird squawked.
“Is that how you try to cheer someone up, Ms. Elena?” Kelley asked with genuine curiosity.
Samanthi pressed a hand to her temples. No sense in getting off the honesty horse now. “I wasn’t so much going for a goal as opening a floodgate,” she admitted. Sir Mathias was looking back and forth between them, his eyes wide, ready to shield his face from the imminent explosion.
“I think I prefer your floodgates closed, if it’s not too much trouble, senior tech,” Sir Kelley said at last. He turned back towards the woods.
“Sir,” Samanthi nodded. She brushed her palms against each other, feeling oddly chipper. “Do you want to slap me in irons now, or would you mind waiting until the disciplinary hearing back home? It’s just that I don’t trust Zig to handle everything all by himself—”
“I have a niece.”
Kelley had his arms crossed over his chest and was looking straight down. A leaf blew by, right at ground level, and he stepped on it automatically. The leaf stayed pinned under the toe of his shiny black boot. Samanthi and Mathias watched him as he tapped one finger against his tricep, lost in thought. “I have a niece,” he murmured again.
“What’s her name?” Sir Mathias asked, softly.
Kelley looked back, a wary edge in his green eyes. He held Mathias’ gaze for a long moment.
“Cruzia,” he said at last.
“Cruzia.” Mathias put his hands in his pockets. “…that’s, uh—”
“The world’s worst name? Oh, I know. I told my brother he was naming his daughter after a pleasure island, or some kind of pastry. But in a thoroughly shocking turn of events, he didn’t listen to me,” Kelley said, pressing his knuckles into the palm of his other hand, “and so his chunky little baby was saddled with a chunky little name. Cruzia.
“Not a beautiful child. Not really. Not one of those charmers, you know, who turn more heads at age two than they will at nineteen. But whenever I saw her, as soon as she could run, she would run to me, like this—” he raised his hands up to the sky, as if reaching for the Spheres— “and she would say ‘Tyyyyy-mon! Tyyyyy-mon! Up!’
“And I’d pick her up; and I’d put her on my shoulders; and she would wrap her arms around my forehead, or cover my eyes with her hands; and she’d bury her face in my hair, so when she laughed I could hear it inside my head. I could feel it, like it was me laughing.”
He lifted his toe slightly. A puff of air caught the five-pointed leaf and sent it gliding over the grass just a meter or two before it stopped. Kelley watched it, scratching his jawline with a knuckle.
“Cruzia must be about thirteen, now,” he said, looking at the ground.
Sir Mathias let out a long, slow breath. “I’m sorry, sir,” he said. Samanthi leaned against his shoulder, her fingers laced together just below her waist. She nodded too.
Kelley looked at them in turn, holding his chin high. “That’s fine,” he said after a long silence. His pockmarked face was full of shadows.
Samanthi stood up straight, wiping her hands on her overalls. She jerked her thumb over her shoulder, pointing back to the longhouse. “What do you say, sir?” she offered, “How about we put our heads together to stop these firebounders before they give one more weapon to one more kid?”
Sir Kelley actually smiled. “Well, well, Ms. Elena. You do know how to cheer me up after all.”
Chapter Four
Greatsight
“I’d like to say something first.”
Lundin stood behind the antique easy chair, resting his hands on its back. Dame Miri and Elia looked up from the spell box, with its gaping trumpet pointed right towards him. Willl with three L’s paused on the stepstool with the second ojing in his hands. Martext, sitting at a wooden desk with the team journal folded open in front of him, set down his stylus mid-sentence with palpable annoyance.
“I just wanted you to know,” Lundin said, looking from face to face. His long fingers tapped against the weathered wood. “I just wanted to make this really explicit,” he started again. “To get it out there, to make sure it wasn’t taken for granted.
“I wanted each of you to know that I absolutely trust you.” He nodded as he said it. “I trust our equipment. I trust our preparations. But really, here’s what it boils down to: I trust you. You’re the best team out there. A hundred times better than a tech like me deserves. And so, as we take the plunge and start this experiment, I have no worries, and I have no reservations, because you’re the ones looking after me,” he said, his eyes happening to rest on Elia, “and I can’t think of any place I’d rather be than in your hands.”
“I think that’s a come-on,” Dame Miri said in a stage whisper.
“That was not a come-on,” Lundin said as Elia giggled, her cheeks flushing just a little. “Just wanted to say I’m proud to be working with you, and I’m confident this test is going to be absolutely great.”
“Why are you holding the chair so hard?” Willl with three L’s asked, frowning.
“I don’t know what you mean, Willl,” Lundin said lightly, unclenching his hands and giving them a little shake to get the blood flowing again. The curlicues of the wood had left white imprints on his palms.
“That’s it, that’s all I wanted to say. Please go back to work. I’ll just be here,” he said, sinking down into the chair. Its springs were pointy against his rear as he settled down to wait.
He had made the decision during that long carriage ride from Delia. With everything riding on this first demonstration, holding back any gesture that might impress Colonel Yough would be negligent, almost suicidal. That meant that there was only one choice for who would be the test subject this time around. It has to be me, he told himself again. This is the sort of thing leaders do. They take responsibility. They exude confidence. They live and breathe for their projects.
And sometimes they die from them, his head automatically filled in, despite his firm orders not to.
Lundin put on a smile as Dame Miri attached the wizard’s hat to the top of the spell box. Underneath the hat was a little pile of Lundin’s hair, donated to give the spell a stronger personal connection. As Miri set the hat down, the tip of the silly blue cone folded over on itself. It looked ridiculous on the wooden edifice, but not half as ridiculous as the mock beard Martext produced from somewhere and looped around the trumpet’s spindly stem. The salt-and-pepper beard hung down over the front face of the spell box like the pelt of a geriatric raccoon. Elia was laughing so hard that Dame Miri had to take the first pingdu calabra disk away from her and set it in place herself. Lundin kept his smile up, but his stomach was churning as the team bantered back and forth.
He wasn’t actually afraid of dying from this test. They weren’t good enough wizards to kill someone with magic, even by accident. Fatal spells were just too long and too convoluted to stumble across. He also wasn’t afraid of real failure; a true, goose egg sort of failure, the way the spell of friendship didn’t do a thing to Cort because of improper interspecies coding.
No, he was certain that the spell would do something to him. But ruling out ‘no effect’ and ‘instant death’ still left an awfully wide range of possible outcomes, and the uncertainty was what kept Lundin curling and uncurling his toes in his boots, trying to keep the fear off his face.
The goal was for something to happen to his eyes. They were calling the spell ‘Greatsight,’ which was suitably heroic and suitably vague, so they could claim that however his vision changed, it was exactly what they’d intended. Would he be able to see longer distances? Look clearly through darkness? Develop a minutely sensitive color sense? He’d crafted the spell as carefully as he could to focus on distance, expanding the subject’s field of vision. But the eye was such a barely understood marvel in the first place that it was hard to know how to go in and tweak it. The thought gave Lundin surprising comfort, as he looked down at the backs of his hands. The fact that my body works at all is magical, he thought, rotating his wrists. So having a spell cast on me just gives me a little bit extra, that’s all.
Dame Miri was standing in front of him. He looked up at her and took in a breath. She smiled. “Ready, boss?”
“Yeah,” he said, meaning it.
“PingduH’lethDagrissIthM’NaveiOrvisMalfinnio—”
The words came out in high-pitched syncopation, like a tree full of chittering squirrels. Lundin rubbed his hands against his knees and adjusted himself in the uncomfortable chair. They were experimenting with running the spell box at a lower volume. The same sponge used to make the articulating lips of the speech apparatus was now also lining the inside of the projecting trumpet, soaking up sound as the machine spoke. Though they weren’t actually sharing Haberstorm Hall with anyone, there was a constant stream of traffic past the building to the fort proper next door. A few curious officers had peeked in in the morning, paying their respects after last night’s dinner. All very friendly and welcoming, yes, but until Greatsight was a proven spell Lundin really didn’t want a single military soul in the room, forming opinions that could get back to Colonel Yough. So quieting the spell box down seemed like a prudent way to hide the fact that the magic was actually happening right now, which would probably bring the spectators in twice as fast if they knew it. Especially since it was—what, ten at night now? With much of the fort fast asleep, it seemed bad form to have their magic blaring out at full volume.
