The Mask And The Master (Mechanized Wizardry Book 2), page 25
“Right,” he nodded, eyes wide, waiting for orders.
“Walk with me a few minutes, Mister Lundin, and tell me what you see,” she said, a hint of softness lightening up her dour face. “And while we walk, have your squad prepare Greatsight for me.”
“Prepare…” The second part of her sentence sank in. “For you?”
“I’m impressed,” Yough said simply. “If your spell works like you say it does, then every soldier on my walls needs it. But I won’t ask anything of my command that I’m unwilling to do myself. You understand.”
“I... I do.”
“So.” She locked eyes with each of the Civics in turn. “How soon can you be ready? Do you need a few drops of blood, or…?”
“I.” Lundin saw his own shock mirrored on Farmingham’s face and the other officers’ as they muttered to each other, glancing at their commander. She wants the spell for herself, he thought, his head becoming slow and thick. Visions of Colonel Yough’s brain exploding or her eyes sealing shut—or her mouth opening and closing at random, like another tough commander he used to know—rampaged through his mind.
“No blood or anything like that, Colonel,” Dame Miri said into the silence, after glancing at Lundin. “A lock of hair, but only if you’re comfortable with that. All we really need is your full name and your birthplace. I should remind you that we’re still very early in our process,” she said, lacing her fingertips together above the white bandages on her hands. “Your request is a real honor, and we’re so glad you’re so trusting. But a few days’ more testing first would give us a better sense of any side effects, and help us iron out the wrinkles to keep you and other future subjects safe.”
Yough cleared her throat wetly and pointed to Lundin. “You’re not brave, and you took the risk. If you can take it, so can I.”
It wasn’t a boast so much as a fact, the way she said it. All eyes in the room were on him. It wasn’t just an expression; he could see all of them.
“We need a day, Colonel,” he finally said. “For my peace of mind.”
She pursed her lips. “You really aren’t here to do what I say, are you?”
Now the room was really quiet. “No, ma’am.”
Colonel Yough nodded slowly. “It’s a good thing you’re worth it, Petronaut. Otherwise I might not like that.”
“Shall we, uh, take that walk?” Lundin said, eager to move the conversation along. Colonel Yough brushed her hands on her slacks as her senior officers gathered around her. “And while we’re going, I don’t see any harm in the team punching out some Enunciation disks for you. Why don’t you, uh, give Martext your full name?”
Lundin turned towards the wall while Yough spoke to Martext, under pretense of tidying up the equipment. He was glad for the excuse to be looking at bricks instead of faces as he tried to sort out exactly what had just happened between the Petronauts and the Army here at Campos.
He felt a hand between his shoulders.“‘You aren’t here to do what I say, are you?’” Dame Miri said in a husky approximation of Yough’s voice. “‘No?’” He didn’t need to ask who the reedy second voice was supposed to be.
“What was I supposed to say?” he asked, putting disks back into their fabric sleeves with needless haste.
She turned him around. He could see each individual blue-black hair as she brushed her fingertips across her forehead. Her violet eyes looked really exceptional with Greatsight, he noticed as dispassionately as he could manage.
“Exactly what needed saying.” She grinned at him. “Dionne would be proud of you.”
He exhaled, feeling a knot in his chest loosen.
“Now don’t just stand there,” she said, shifting gears. “Seal the deal, before she kicks us into the woods.”
“Yes, senior ‘naut,” he said, bobbing his head obsequiously. She stifled a laugh as he followed the Colonel and her entourage into the hallway.
Chapter Six
Two Sermons
Columbine stopped.
The northwest gate of Two Forks was a few hundred meters away. The tips of the stockade almost shone in the sun, cones of honey-colored wood at the points of dark brown trunks. Families and horses crowded the dirty road in front of her as the villagers filed back to their homes. The scouts had swept through the town and the forest around it for a kilometer and a half, they said. For what it was worth, there was no sign of the Delians anywhere, and there was no evidence that they planned to come back for the wreckage of their flying machine or anything else. Nobody bothered to mention that there’d been no evidence they’d planned to show up in the first place. After their ordeals and two uncomfortable nights camping in the upper fields, the people of Two Forks were ready to get back to their lives as best they could.
I want to get back to my life, too, Columbine thought. But there was no way to.
“What’s wrong?”
It was Errol. Columbine squinted back at the pasty little boy, just a few years older than her. She didn’t have anything to say.
He scratched his scalp vigorously, like a dog. Dust filled the air. “Come on,” he said. “We’re home.” He strode forward down the road. She made herself follow him.
The wooden gate cast a shadow on her as she walked underneath it, and then she was inside the stockade. Columbine found herself lightheaded, and let out a big blast of air. She hadn’t realized she’d been holding her breath. There, down the path, just in front of the northern door to the cooking house, was where Ariell’s body had hit the ground. An old man with steely red hair had stopped his horse just next to that spot, looking around with bulging, tearful eyes for his own fallen someone. Columbine craned her neck. Ariell’s body wasn’t there anymore.
There were craters in the ground. There were huts with broken roofs. There were bullet holes in every wall, it seemed like. There were rows and rows of trampled crops, and even the rows that weren’t crushed were bristling with weeds and swarming with bead beetles. Amazing what just a few days away could mean.
At the eastern edge of the creekside, people were congregating. Ms. Pauma, on her horse, and the town spheric (whose name she could never remember) were facing the crowd. Columbine made her way towards them. As she moved through the crowd, other kids looked at her with wet, uncertain eyes and stepped aside. Adults who noticed her might put a hand on her shoulder or mutter a conciliatory word or two. She tried to ignore all of it as she pressed on towards the water.
“—full of things we can never understand,” the holy man was saying. He has a nice, deep voice at odds with his sallow complexion and his buck-toothed face. But people didn’t care how he looked, now. They were just letting his words wash over them. Columbine kept pushing forward.
“Why did they come? Why now? What does it mean for our future? Is there something we could have done differently, to avoid this tragic loss of life?”
A tall farmer in the front row noticed her and pulled her in front of him, kindly, holding her hands up above her shoulders. She found her balance standing on his shoes, the back of her head about level with the bottom of his rib cage. Through the crowd at last, Columbine saw the bodies at the spheric’s feet. There were four people lying there at the creekside, their arms crossed over their chests, but the only one that mattered to her was Ariell.
The spheric raised one hand to the sky and pointed the other at the dead. “All these questions sicken the soul,” he said. “We can ask them, scream them out until our voices stop. But here’s the truth. We can never know why the Spheres moved us to this point.
“All we can do now is to keep moving…and to forgive.”
There was an audible intake of breath from several places in the crowd. Below her, the tall farmer shuffled his feet.
“The Spheres move, and so do we,” the man said, a little louder. “If we keep hate in our hearts for the people who wrong us, we’re saying we hate the world itself, and the eight Spheres beyond. To forgive the Delians is to start the process of healing—”
“Is he crazy?”
“Moving on? With our dead right there…?”
“Too soon!” The crowd of two dozen was stirring, their voices turning sour. More villagers were filling in at the back, drawn by the noise. High up on her horse, Pauma gestured for them to settle down, though she was looking a little askance at the spheric herself. He had both palms raised up to the crowd.
“I know it’s hard to forgive—”
“Damn right!”
He swallowed. “Threnody 31, ‘Along the Splendid Trails,’” he called out, a little desperately. There was a new uproar from portions of the crowd, even as some joined Pauma and the spheric in singing.
“I feel my footsteps take me
Along the Splendid Trails
The sound of strife grows distant—”
“Bunch of wishy-washies,” the farmer above her growled under his breath. She felt his hands tighten against her palms, probably more than he realized.
“The pain on Earth it pales
I’m climbing to the Spheres now—”
“Kill the pretenders!”
“Never again!”
“The world I leave behind
The journey’s long but shed no tears
I walk the path divine”
There was grumbling and shoving behind her as people in the crowd pushed their way out, disgusted. The people who wanted to sing pressed closer as they left. Columbine heard the dull voices in the summer air and looked down at her sister’s pale body. The blood had crusted over on her chest, and the edges of her mouth looked wrong, rotting. Ariell wasn’t walking any splendid trails. Ariell was dead.
She started scraping at the farmer’s chest, only half-aware of what she was doing. He looked down at her, confusion on his bearded face. “Up. Up. Pick me up,” she said, something bubbling up in her throat. He lifted her effortlessly and put her on his shoulders. Columbine Fletcher twisted herself around to face the crowd of farmers.
“No!” she shrieked.
The spheric stopped singing, behind her. The villagers stopped too, looking up at the brown-eyed girl two meters in the air. Even the people turning to leave looked back. Columbine pressed her hands against the man’s head and leaned forward.
“No!” she wailed again. Her voice got stronger. “Don’t sing. Are you stupid?”
“Hey, Columbine,” the farmer said, starting to crouch. She dug her fingers into his shoulders and he stopped.
“My sister’s dead! We lost our home and our family. Now I lost her.” She ground her teeth, trying not to cry. “I made her stay and fight, and the Delians killed her. They shot her in the back.”
The crowd murmured. She saw a woman curl up to her husband and a man cross his arms over his chest. “I made her stay and fight. I was wrong.” Columbine said. She turned her head to look at the spheric. “Is it my fault that she died?”
“It’s nobody’s fault,” he stammered.
“No!” Her voice was raw. “It’s Delia’s fault!”
“Yeah!” someone said.
“Delia sent Petronauts here. Six people! Six people made the whole town run away! They hit us! They shot Ariell in the back! And then what? They left. They didn’t even want the town! Didn’t even care!”
“Bastards!”
“So don’t be stupid!” she raged. “Don’t sing. Don’t forgive them. Or guess what? They’ll just do it again!”
“Burn them!”
“Flaming Delians!”
“Listen to me!” the spheric bellowed, his voice cutting through the noise. “We can choose to look behind, to lose ourselves in pain; or we can choose to look forward—”
“My sister’s dead!” Columbine said, her eyes flashing. “And I hate Delia!”
There was a ragged roar from parts of the crowd. Columbine saw enough to notice several worried faces, too; adults in whispered conference with each other, looking at her with pity in their eyes. Then she was sinking down to the ground, the farmer’s big hands around her waist. She started to squirm, her tattered shoes scraping against the dirt. There was a shadow over her and the clop of hooves.
“Put her down, I said,” Pauma was hissing, jabbing her finger into the tall farmer’s face. “What do you think you’re doing, letting—”
“She said pick her up. Girl can talk if she wants,” he said sullenly.
“Have a kid or two, then tell me it’s good to let ‘em yell whenever they want. With me,” Pauma said, taking Columbine by the hand. She hoisted the girl up into the air with one iron-strong arm. Columbine cried, involuntarily reaching out for the saddle. Pauma swung her in position and trotted away from the increasingly messy knot of villagers, shouting for people to clear the way.
“You can’t be shooting your mouth off like that, little Miss Columbine,” Pauma called over her shoulder. Columbine bumped her chin against the farmer woman’s back as they bounced through the town square. She rubbed her jaw, blinking angry tears out of her eyes.
“I can talk if I want.”
“You think before you talk,” Pauma said. “You’re not the only one hurting. Some of us are trying to think bigger than ourselves, though. Get this town healing. Next time trash like that comes into your head, you keep it to yourself. Hear me?”
“I lost my sister,” Columbine said, unable to keep her voice steady.
“You’re the one who made her stay and fight. ‘I was wrong,’ you told me. Think she’d want you to throw yourself away fighting too? Think that makes anything right?”
She was weeping now, tired and frustrated and sore. She leaned her head against Pauma’s back, despite herself. “I don’t know what else to do.”
She felt the woman’s back expand as she sighed. “I don’t know what to do with you either. Just promise me one thing, you bull-headed girl. And I mean promise.”
She stopped the horse and turned. Her long ponytail flicked around her head, the braid as thick as a carriage rope. “You live longer than your sister did,” Pauma demanded.
Columbine looked up to the woman’s hard face. She nodded.
“Let’s find you a bed,” Pauma said, snapping the reins.
Chapter Seven
Post
It was slow flying among the treetops, but the pigeon preferred going slowly to getting eaten. Flying above the trees, where the air was clear and its wings could stretch out, had its appeal; but being in the open meant catching the eyes of every kestrel and pigeon hawk for days around. Better to descend below the canopy and wend through the branches and the leaves.
Tiredness was never an issue for the pigeon. It never ate anything except the fat stored up in its belly. It dropped down to the forest floor for a drink whenever it sniffed out water, but leapt up into the skies again as quickly as it landed. Why rest? Why eat? There would be plenty of time for that in the cage at the other end of the trip, where the hands were waiting. There always was.
A little squirrel with webbed arms was sitting in a leafy nest just below the treetop. It chittered a warning at the pigeon as it flew by. The pigeon paid absolutely no attention as it sailed below the squirrel’s branch. These animals who obsessed about territory were a little pathetic. The pigeon didn’t need to whine about a few dozen wingspans of tree space to feel good about itself, it thought smugly. It had a job.
Time was passing, there was no doubt of that. It was dark in the forest now, with just enough moonlight to navigate the branches. Usually the pigeon would sleep at times like this, it remembered. Yes, there was a faint urge to find a cozy limb, draw its head down low between its shoulders, and close its eyes for a few hours. But for whatever reason, the pigeon just kept flying. There was an odd memory of being back in the cage, in the starting place, and becoming very agitated as a voice chanted for hours and hours on end. The smell of strange smoke had been there too. On and on the voice had gone, no matter how much the pigeon beat its wings against the domed cage. But then the chanting had ended, and now, the pigeon didn’t need to sleep. These two thoughts floated through its head in sequence, not connecting to each other. It was much more important to focus on not hitting trees.
It had been light again for many hours when the pigeon wanted to stop. The treetops dropped away and the forest opened up into a clear space. Thick brown walls were below, now, and a tower ahead, but not quite as tall as the tower back home. The pigeon flew to the tower and perched on its boxy top. There were window slits on the walls below, and it could hear footsteps and voices inside the little room at the top of the tower. The pigeon did not want to go to them. It waited on top of the room, tilting its head this way and that to get a clear view of the grounds below. A pair of turtledoves already perched on the other side of the spire ruffled their feathers indignantly and snubbed the pigeon as it walked along the tower’s edge. The pigeon scratched its belly absently with one leg, mindful of the weight of the message case.
Something below. The pigeon looked, and sniffed. There was a smaller building near this tower, an oddly-shaped place with a sloping roof and a colored circular window. And at the outside corner of that building, barely visible between a row of bushes and the wall, there was food on the ground.
The pigeon launched itself earthward. It fluttered awkwardly as it neared the slopey building, shedding some momentum. There was a shallow bowl of seed hidden behind the decorative bushes—the exact same seed it loved back home. A young chipmunk was stuffing its cheeks when the pigeon landed. The mammal gasped and most of a mouthful fell from its jaws before it scurried away. The pigeon pecked at the lip of the bowl a few times, then lowered its head and began gulping down the wonderful shelled seed as fast as it could.
There were footsteps nearby not too long after that. The pigeon looked up quickly, and relaxed to see a glove on one of the hands. This was an old routine by now. The glove scooped it up, the hand flicked open the clasp on its message case and pulled out a roll of paper, and the glove set the pigeon down again. It returned to eating. The feet stayed there for a time, though the glove came off and the paper crinkled open and shut again. Then the feet moved away.
