The Mask And The Master (Mechanized Wizardry Book 2), page 23
Lundin’s brain was doing the same mental babbling it always did when he got anxious. He frowned, looking up at the dangling ojing. Sure enough, their kid leather surfaces were crawling with white in that odd, mesmerizing way, like watching a splash of cream swirl its way through a cup of black tea.
“Something wrong, senior tech?” Elia called out, standing up from her stool by the spell box.
“No, no. I don’t feel anything, but that’s expected.” And nerve-wracking. No wonder wizards carry ojing around. Without the encouragement of those things turning white, that little ‘yes, you are having an effect,’ people would be too embarrassed to ever cast spells. It was a little embarrassing as it was, for the five of them to just be sitting there looking at each other as the spell box chattered on.
“If you feel anything, shout it out,” Martext said, taking notes.
“—OrssLikiA’tielHavirImShoreaPinth—”
I feel a rusty spring in my butt. He kept the observation to himself, though, scooting forward in the chair with a grimace. Colonel Farmingham wasn’t kidding when he said they’d taken away the fancy furniture. Haberstorm Hall was still beautiful inside, with fluted columns lining the high walls and a stained-glass window of the dynastic crest sending colored sunlight down to the floor. But there were huge blank spots between columns where tapestries or enormous paintings had clearly been hanging for some time. The wall was a darker shade of gray in those places, after years with less exposure to dust and light. The cavernous hall could feel like an inviting greatroom, he was sure, with the right furniture and candelabras and a gilded pianoforte there in the corner, where guests could congregate to sing and laugh. But without any of those things it was downright monastic; and not the fun, ale-brewing monks of the Halcyon Territories either, but the self-flagellating vow-of-misery types you heard about in Svargath.
There really wasn’t anything to complain about. As a workspace, Haberstorm Hall was as roomy and functional as the pristine Civic workshop. A little art on the walls would give me something to look at in all this dead time, that’s all. Greatsight was more involved than the spell of friendship, so even with their further speed improvements to the spell box it would be about an hour fifteen before the Enunciation finally wound down. I should have brought a book, he thought, drumming his hands on his knees.
“—ArvorealaIthPingadaEmSh’maiTronnDoptari—”
Minutes crept by. They were waiting for the next set of disks to finish now. Number three? Number four? Willl with three L’s was eating some kind of vegetable, raw, crunching loudly with every bite. Martext was listening intently to the spell box, occasionally making notes on pronunciation whenever he caught something. He’d been an amazingly quick study in Old Harutian, for someone who hadn’t known the language at all a month ago, and Ronk’s linguistic tips had made his ear even better. Elia had all the remaining pairs of disks laid out on the table in order, and was quadruple-checking her work. Dame Miri was standing next to her stool, bandaged hands on her hips, looking up at the ojing.
“What do you think they are?” she said softly.
Lundin shrugged, glad to hear a non-mechanical voice. “You know, I asked Archimedia about that when she first gave them to me. She wouldn’t say. Just that they were… what was it… ‘precious.’”
“Did she make them?”
“No idea. I don’t even know if they’re a thing you make, or if they just come that way.”
“You mean, like off an ojing tree?” Willl with three L’s said, his mouth full.
Lundin started to dismiss the comment before he caught himself. He had to keep reminding himself that Willl with three—that Willl Wythernsson might have a better head on his shoulders than he let on. It’d be easier to take him seriously if he knew how to chew, though.
“Huh. Interesting, Willl. I always assumed they came from animals, but, I guess the ojing could be circles cut out of a leaf, or some leathery bark, right? But the question is, whatever the ojing come from—”
“—are they magical before or after the wizard snips them up?” Dame Miri walked to the closest one. She gingerly raised a finger to the light circle. He had a rush of irrational nervousness as she touched it, rubbing its edge between her thumb and forefingers. “Doesn’t feel any different now than it does right out of the pouch,” she said, inspecting her fingers. There was no white on them, which suggested that whatever the color change was, it was internal, structural, not some kind of secretion.
“We could ask Ronk,” Elia said.
Miri pointed at Elia in affirmation. “Write our man back home! What do you say, Horace? I mean, when we blow Colonel Yough out of the water with this demo tomorrow night, and the Army decides to move spell boxes into production? We’re going to need way more than these two ojing.”
“And requisitioning them from the wizards wouldn’t go too well,” Lundin said, scratching his cheek.
“Maybe they don’t have to be made from anything fancy,” Elia said, shifting a disk one centimeter to the right. “Maybe you just take any old leather and, you know, enchant it. Cast a spell of ojing-ing!”
“Well, here’s the thing. As far as I know, magic only works on something that’s alive. A human. A dog (sometimes). You know, something with a mind. I haven’t read anything about spells on objects.”
“Right. What would the Enunciation look like?” Miri agreed. “Does one ladle have a different name from another?”
“I don’t know about ladles,” Martext said, “but you hear myths about magic things all the time. Archest’s magic axe. Ursulli’s magic cloak.”
“Sing ye lassies, dance ye folk / for ‘Sulli and her magic cloak,” Dame Miri sang, grinning. “Great story. But don’t try to tell me it’s, you know, historical.”
Martext raised an eyebrow.
“She goes to the swamp of the land squids! She wrestles a four-eyed cat-bear with a tongue for a tail! Come on! If you’re going to say enchanting is a real thing because it’s in the myths, where are all those monsters?”
“Hiding?”
“It, um, seems to me,” Elia put in, “that the fact that we still have a concept of enchanting means that lots of people used to do it, or try to. So maybe someone still is!”
“I just want it established that, if we get molested by land squids because we go down this road, we all know who to blame.” Elia giggled and Martext grinned as Miri pointed a quavering, dramatic finger at each of them.
“Spheres, if the land squids get us, the last thing I’ll be worrying about is who to blame,” Lundin said. “Enchanting’s a good thought, guys. I’ll ask Ronk if it’s as simple as writing a spell of ojing-ing and cranking the circles out. And if it’s not that, I’ll find out what it does take to get new ojing.”
“—OrtinIthBerandisJunnEmSh’MaiDoptari—”
And, again, the only voice in the room was the high-pitched spell box, like a child mumbling her prayers as fast as she could to get back outside to play. Elia looked over at the hourglass on the worktable, its volume of sand calibrated to the current length of a pair of disks. “Another minute to the next switch,” she said.
And another hour until this is done. Lundin rubbed his face. His fear was still there, scraping at the walls of his stomach, but pure impatience was crowding out nearly everything else at this point. If the spell was going to give him eagle eyes, he wanted it done so they could document every Sphere-sainted moment of that blissful success. And if it was going to melt his eyeballs, he just wanted them melted so they could get on with the next trial. (And take him to the master of physic.)
But waiting was the only thing there was to do. And even when the spell took effect, amid all the observation, the waiting would start again. There were trying a new formulation in the Illustration this time around. Ronk had drawn their attention to a series of rarely-used durational constructions that had fallen out of favor since the heyday of Old Harue. Most wizards didn’t care exactly how long a spell lasted, since magic was, after all, subject to the whims of the Mobinoji, and trying to exercise too much control was pointless. And most people who paid for spells wanted those spells to last as long as possible. So the demand for spells with a specified duration—especially a short duration—simply wasn’t there in the magical marketplace.
But for their purposes, being able to establish a clear ending point was going to be mighty helpful. Lundin wasn’t about to go testing the Greatsight spell blindly, so to speak, in front of Colonel Yough; they absolutely needed to do a trial beforehand. But if they stuck to the self-imposed schedule, the time between this test and their demonstration was going to be less than twenty-four hours. He thought back to the friendly Sir Kelley, who had been beaming, slapping backs, and unhinging his jaw for about eight days before the spell of friendship had worn off completely. Hard to say anything conclusively from one data point, of course, but it sure seemed likely that if they didn’t try to put a time limit on Greatsight number one, he’d still be under its effects when they fired up the spell box in front of the Colonel for round two.
So, they’d worked up some language to have the test spell cut off about an hour after it kicked in. At least, he hoped it would be an hour. From the archaic texts Ronk had given them as source material, it seemed like time in Mabinanto was measured in barendoons; a barendoon, helpfully, being the amount of time it took an adult to make one circuit of the barendoon. “I have no idea,” Ronk had replied to the obvious question, his face crinkled in a smile, “but from context, walking it took about eighteen minutes.” Ronk had had some success at putting durations on his spells, but he cautioned Lundin: “A barendoon is also a measure of distance—”
“Let me guess; the length of one trip ‘round the barendoon?”
“—so just watch your inflections and you’ll be fine.”
Watch my inflections, Lundin thought sourly, resting his elbows on his knees. I’ll tell that to the wooden mouth with the leather tongue over there. If the duration language worked at all, he wouldn’t be surprised one bit if the spell cut out not after one hour but after he walked three laps around the fort. The Army would just love that. Real practical.
Time passed. He made some coffee on the pot-bellied stove and poured mugs all around for the team. The beans were old, but they’d been roasted so dark that nothing about them much mattered anymore. Mugs poured from a brewed-up pot of charcoal would have had put the same bitter, charred taste; the kind of coffee that keeps you awake less from its herbal properties and more because you don’t dare go to sleep with a mouth that still tastes like that.
“Good coffee,” Willl with three L’s said, stirring his sugar in the mug with a celery stick. Lundin smiled tightly at him and went back to the chair.
“—LundinDeliaBohockHoraceArthurLundinDeliaBohock.”
The room was suddenly quiet. Lundin frowned. The jerky rhythms of the Enunciation still seemed to be hovering in the air; he must have heard his name and his birthplace—a personal detail they were trying out to make the Enunciation more individualized— repeated hundreds of times. There was his coffee cup, empty, on the floor next to his chair. But hadn’t he just sat down to sip it? Time was blurry in his head. Maybe the team had let him doze off in the chair. He blinked, rubbing his eyes—
—and then he looked around for the first time.
“All done,” Elia said with a yawn, flicking off the spell box. The background thrum of the motors finally died down.
“Well, Mister Lundin?” Martext asked, raising his stylus. “What do you see?”
“Horace?” Dame Miri said, taking a quick step forward. Her pupils grew a little wider and a breathing minutely faster as she looked at his face. “What’s wrong?”
“Are you okay?” Willl with three L’s said, standing up from his stool at the wall.
“Just a minute,” Lundin said through the tears. There was a huge smile on his face.
*****
It was nearly one o’clock in the midsummer night as the soldier walked the inside patrol. Her sword was a comfortable weight on her hip, and the musket in her hands was packed and ready. She glanced up to the walls, and caught sight of the lazy guardsman half asleep on top of the northwest bastion. She whistled sharply through her teeth, and he straightened, looking down over his shoulder into the courtyard. She shook her head at him disapprovingly, and he pantomimed falling asleep even more deeply, with his head lolling on his shoulder. The soldier smirked and turned away.
“Halt,” she said automatically as she saw the figures coming towards her. But she caught herself before raising her musket.
“You’re still out here?” she said to the knot of Petronauts scampering through the night, jotting down notes and muttering intently to each other.
Lundin was walking in the middle of the group, eyes wide, standing up very straight. “Just out for a walk,” he said, smiling broadly.
“I already passed you once,” she said, suspiciously. “That’s a long walk you’re taking.”
“It’s a nice night,” Lundin said dreamily, looking up past the walls.
“Besides, we’re making good progress. Less than two barendoons to go!” Elia whispered, excited.
“So you think.”
“Well, look, our closest calculations say—”
Frowning, the soldier opened her mouth. Then she thought better of it. She simply nodded at them as they walked past, Dame Miri apologizing smoothly and sincerely for any disturbance they were causing. Off the Petronauts went, beside themselves with delight over something as mundane as a moonlit walk. Must be nice to have such simple lives, the soldier sighed, walking her beat through the night.
Chapter Five
Yough’s Verdict
Colonel Yough leaned forward with her forearms resting on her knees. Lieutenant Colonel Farmingham was sitting dutifully on her right side, his shiny black boot crossed over his knee and a mostly blank slate resting in his lap. The half-a-dozen other chairs lined up on the far wall of the briefing room were empty. The officers who had been occupying them were all in low conversation by the refreshment table. The clank of a fork on a dish was audible above the keening spell box as a tall, rail-thin Lieutenant dug in to his third slice of fruitcake.
Lundin felt a little cramped after spending so many work-hours in Haberstorm Hall, with its vaulted ceilings and uncluttered expanses of flagstone. The briefing room on the second floor of Fort Campos was spacious enough, especially with the long oaken table normally in the center of the room shunted out to the hallway for the time being, and the chairs pushed all the way back to the walls. The light gray tiles on the floor weren’t entirely cheerless, interspersed with a few silver-and-black ones to break up the pattern, and a few oil paintings of dogs at hunt or chickens being slaughtered livened up the walls. But the mood was still on the oppressive side. It had much more to do with the bald skepticism on the faces of the snacking officers, huddled by the table, than the space itself. Lundin adjusted himself on his wooden chair and sent an appealing glance to Dame Miri.
“Colonel Yough,” Miri said, taking the hint, “Please feel free to grab something to eat or drink. We’re just about to hit the Enunciation, so it’ll still be a few minutes before the spell finishes up.”
“About nine minutes and twenty seconds,” Elia said, counting disks and looking up from the hourglass.
“I’d like to focus,” Colonel Yough mumbled, her eyes still fixed on Lundin. Dame Miri caught his eye and shrugged. Yough had been staring at him intently for the entire spell, occasionally peppering him with questions about why he shifted this way or that, or what that expression on his face meant. Clearly, she wasn’t planning on relaxing now. At least she’s taking this seriously, Lundin thought, mustering up a smile for her.
“How you feeling there, Mister Lundin?” Farmingham said, putting on a hearty voice through his boredom.
“Just fine, sir,” Lundin said. “Like I said, there’s no pain; no anxiety; no, you know, tingling. Having a spell cast on you doesn’t feel like anything’s happening at all.”
“I wonder why?” one of the officers said, just loud enough to be heard. Another one snorted into her punch.
“That said,” Lundin went on, trying not to let his voice get testy, “something is definitely happening. The ojing prove it.”
“We designed the spell box to be big on results, not big on theatrics,” Dame Miri said. “A wizard can give you a better floor show, if you like that sort of thing. We just want our machine to get to the goal with as little fuss as possible; kind of like the Army,” she said, as if the idea had just occurred to her.
“I’d say so,” Farmingham said, nodding. Yough nodded too, still watching Lundin. The amused chatter from the officers faded away, their mood growing downright sullen in the silence that followed.
“Next disks!” Elia piped up, leaping into action. She and Willl with three L’s opened the case and removed the last disks of the Illustration, setting them gingerly on the tablecloth behind them. Then Elia picked up the voice disk for the Enunciation, with all the linguistic information coded on it in patterns of holes and bent metal. Each flick of the musical tines against the holes would create the appropriately pitched sound to approximate the rise-and-fall of Mabinanto speech. This spell box was the updated model, with a stiffer comb and more expensive alloyed disks that could withstand high-speed casting without warping or snapping. Anytime a piece of metal chipped off one of the disks, it invariably caused a disastrous jam in the gearworks below. Spheres be praised, we haven’t had a mess like that with this model yet, Lundin thought, watching them work.
As Elia placed the voice disk on its star wheel, about two thirds of the way to the top of the machine, Willl with three L’s grabbed the articulation disk by its edges. The patterns coded on the lower disk would control the apertures inside the spell box that molded raw pitches into vowels; the clattering wooden teeth, the leathery tongue, and the spongey lips that shaped music into consonants; and the self-pumping bellows that provided glottal stops and sibilants. He put the articulation disk on its star wheel, about a third of a meter below the voice disk, and stepped away. Elia picked up the thin starter stick, holding it perpendicular to the ground, and placed it into a notch on the edge of each disk. When the starter stick was straight up-and-down, locked into the notches, it meant that the disks were both synchronized to the same starting point. Being off by even a centimeter would ruin the whole spell; the mouth would be in the shape of a “D” when the pitch ringing out was supposed to become an “M,” and so on and so on, reducing the Mabinanto to jumbled gibberish.
