The Mask And The Master (Mechanized Wizardry Book 2), page 5
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?”
“Remarkable coincidence,” Portikal mused darkly, “when so many others failed to find anything. Is this squad loyal?”
“Seem to be.”
“We thought the same about Volman.”
“Come off it,” Lady Ceres snapped good-naturedly. “Just because you’ve got gas doesn’t mean everyone is a traitor. Now calm down and listen. Our people were eavesdropping on a knot of Kessian smugglers when they spotted one of the men—a no-account named Ovid—wearing a piece of Petronaut hardware.”
Portikal stopped preening his ruffled feathers and snapped to attention, his intelligent eyes alight. “Another foreign Petronaut? With the same armor, and the claws?”
“Not a Petronaut; just a goon equipped with a few surprises. Claws on his right hand and a bottle of something explosive, which nearly killed one of our ‘nauts.”
“What are you saying?” Lord Portikal frowned, moving to Ceres’ side to inspect the report over her shoulder. His chubby fingers traced through the text as he read, lightning-fast. “This man wasn’t armored like a ‘naut, or intelligent like a ‘naut, and yet he was arrayed with Petronaut tech?”
“Enough to be dangerous.”
“How did he get it? Did he steal it?”
“No, unfortunately.” She sighed, her headache worse than ever. “It was a gift from the ‘Golden Caravan.’”
Lord Portikal stared at her blankly. “Which is?”
“After appropriate persuasion, Mister Ovid told our agents about some people who are becoming very popular among the forest-dwelling communities. The Golden Caravan seems to be the folk name they’ve been given, more than what they call themselves. But they travel the woods in golden carriages. Mechanical, not horse-drawn. They seek out knots of smugglers, or gypsies, or reclusive peasant families, and they give them two things. First, Petronaut weaponry—”
“Sweet Spheres…!”
“—and, second, a message. ‘The pretenders will fall.’”
Portikal wiped his face with his hand. “This meeting is wreaking havoc on my digestion,” he moaned. “Please, Ceres, will you tell me who these ‘pretenders’ are?”
Lady Ceres’ gray eyes were clear and sad as she focused back on the report. “My dear friend,” she whispered, “that means us.”
“That’s treasonous talk, Mister Ovid,” field agent Alstor said, her voice low and firm. The smuggler shrugged, his arms bound to the thin tree behind him. The only light was from the torches on either side of Ovid, planted on stakes in the ground. He was sweating profusely. The Joon night would have been unpleasant enough for him without the fire’s radiant heat so uncomfortably close. Still, Mathias couldn’t bring himself to feel much sympathy as he watched the interrogation, brawny arms crossed over his chest. Samanthi’s face was set in stone too, at his side.
“Can’t be treason,” Ovid said, his mouth twisting upwards. “Delia doesn’t rule me.”
“Big difference between living outside the law and signing on to a rebellion, Mister Ovid,” Sir Kelley said, just as quiet and sinister as his partner. He and the field agent were making quite an effective tag-team. “I’m hearing you say that the Regents of Delia are ‘pretenders’ and that you want them dead. You’ve got awfully strong feelings about a kingdom that doesn’t rule you.”
“Kingdom. That’s right. A kingdom.” Ovid leaned forward, sweat dripping off his angular face. “Seems to me a kingdom should have a king. Not a band of four crooks who take turns sitting in the Haberstorm Throne.”
“The Regency Council rules only until Princess Naomi Elizabeth Galidate Haberstorm comes of age, Mister Ovid,” Alstor said. “I’m glad you’re so concerned about the propriety of the succession, but I promise we’ve got it under control.”
“And, again, I don’t see why a Kessian low-life like you cares so much about what happens in Delia. What makes you so political?” Kelley pressed.
“It’s the Golden Caravan, all right?” Ovid hissed out after a long silence. “I sign on to what they say, they give me good stuff. Simple as that.”
“What’s the Golden Caravan?” Samanthi whispered.
“I have no idea,” Sir Mathias replied under his breath. “But I guarantee you it’s going in our report.”
The smuggler scowled as he adjusted his weight. His bandaged leg was trembling beneath him, and his wrists were chafed raw from the rope. The torchlight made his eyes glow as he strained against his bonds, leaning forward even farther towards his impassive interrogators.
“My gang’s been scraping by for a year and a half,” he said, his voice full of bitterness. “There’s no getting ahead in picking up a few pelts here, a few coins there. We need something big to change our situation. The Golden Caravan? They gave me those claws. They gave me potions strong enough to take down that big guy of yours. Me, a Kessian low-life, knocking Delia’s best and brightest flat on his back, one-on-one. How’d you like that, huh?”
“Take a look at yourself again and tell me you what makes you think you came out ahead,” Alstor said, raising an eyebrow.
Ovid grinned. “Talk all you want. I’ve got you people scared.”
“You’ve got us scared.”
“You Delians keep your Petronaut junk locked in a workshop, where only ten people even know what’s been invented before it shows up on the battlefield. That’s how you like it. All the power stays in the hands of the powerful.
“The Golden Caravan doesn’t think that way. They think it’s about time the toys the powerful invented for themselves start trickling their way down to the common man.
“You know those farmer rebellions you’ve been stomping down all year?”
Sir Mathias thought back to the angry men and women in Verrure, fighting LaMontina’s troops long after it was obvious their situation was hopeless; the defiance that hung on in some of their eyes as they were beaten down and led to the cages, to cool their heels in Delia’s dungeons for a few months.
Ovid ran his tongue over his bruised lips. “When the peasants you love to beat down are fighting back with explosives and fancy metal suits, instead of slings and pitchforks? We’ll see how long the crook regents and their stooges hang on to power then.”
Kelley and Alstor exchanged a look. Sir Kelley stepped forward, his pockmarked face wreathed in shadows. “This Golden Caravan of yours, Mister Ovid. You think they’re peasants? You think they’re made up of common men?”
“They’re looking out for us, at least,” the smuggler threw back defiantly.
“They gave you a set of claws that didn’t fit, pointed you towards Delia’s city walls, and told you to overthrow our government? You call that looking out for you?” Sir Kelley spread his palms upwards. “You’re right, Mister Ovid; I am scared. I didn’t realize people as dumb as you lived in my backyard.”
“There are lots more like me,” Ovid said, raising his head high. “You have no idea how far their message has spread.”
“Not until you tell us, we don’t.”
“Can’t give you numbers if they’re too big to count.” he said proudly. “There’s an army of common people forming, with weapons you goons never thought you’d have to watch out for.”
“And there’s just as big an army of people like your smuggler friends tonight; the woman and the big man who wanted nothing to do with your war against Delia,” Alstor mentioned. “You guys would have killed each other if we hadn’t stepped in. You should thank us.”
“I don’t have anything to say about them. And I don’t have anything more to say to you. It’ll be death to the pretenders before the year is out; and you stooges will go along with them.”
Alstor put a hand on Kelley’s shoulder, and he nodded. “Here’s the thing, Mister Ovid,” she said. She clasped her hands behind her back and sighed, walking towards the captive with measured strides. “You’re not the one who gets to decide when you have nothing more to say. And when you brought up this Golden Caravan, you became interesting to me for the very first time. So how about we keep chatting? After all,” she whispered, her nose almost touching his, “the night is still very young.”
Ovid gave a juicy cough, searching her face.
“What say we give them some space?” Samanthi whispered, a little anxiously. Sir Mathias nodded. There were some things he didn’t want to see either, especially right before trying to sleep.
As they turned away, Sir Mathias winced and put a hand to his chest. It was past time for him to get back to his bedroll; the master of physic would be irate that he’d been up and moving for this long already. They began the slow trek towards the main campfire, away from the torchlight, their minds working in silence for a moment.
“Crazy bastard,” Mathias finally said. “A ‘Golden Caravan?’ People driving around the Tarmic Woods, giving out free weapons to idiots to spread revolutionary zeal? That can’t possibly be for real, can it?”
“One bright point, at least,” Samanthi said, looking at him guilelessly. “Next time our scouts see a golden carriage driving through the forest, they’ll know it’s important.”
He snorted, leaning against her shoulder. The low drone of cicadas masked their laughter as they helped each other through the shadowy woods.
Chapter Six
The Feastday Hero
“Afternoon, senior tech,” she said, violet eyes creased in a smile.
Lundin looked over his shoulder, cradling the fluted trumpet mouth in his hands. “Dame Miri!” he called out, lines of worry vanishing from his forehead for the first time all day. Martext, Elia, and Willl with three L’s looked up from their work as Dame Miri Draker strode through the door, her boots a rhythmic counterpoint to the high-pitched chatter from the squawk box in the corner. Lundin set the part down on the worktable and rushed to meet her, his bright smile faltering as he looked at the black-haired woman.
All of the Parade squad’s assignments boiled down to one directive: to spend their three-year tour being as beautiful as possible. Between Dame Miri’s natural attributes, and her consummate professionalism as senior ‘naut of the Parade squad, it was so commonplace to see her at her breathtaking best around the workshops that it went (almost) unnoticed by the techs and ‘nauts otherwise inclined to notice such things. Right…just like Samanthi ‘almost’ wouldn’t notice whenever Sir Sigurd wandered by, all oiled up, Lundin thought with a brief flash of amusement.
In a way, being beautiful was her duty. But all Petronauts felt a broader duty too: to protect the state that had funded and protected them for generations. On the feastday, Dame Miri chose to follow the higher duty and throw herself into the search for Jilmaq, dispatching a posse of thugs and an unknown Petronaut in the process. Her choice had been instrumental in keeping Princess Naomi safe, winning the Throne’s gratitude for herself and her squad. She had performed that duty outstandingly well. But close-quarters combat was not conducive to staying gorgeous.
Lundin felt a flash of sad anger against Delia’s unknown enemies as he took her in again. Spheres knew that the lovely woman had come by her current imperfections honestly. The wide bruise on her cheek was still smoldering and purple from where the foreign ‘naut had put a boot into her face, and her right bicep and both her forearms and long-fingered hands were swaddled in bandages. Razor-sharp claws had torn her limbs up badly. Last he heard, the masters of physic were painfully certain her left hand would never be back to normal. Lundin tilted his head, feeling an outpouring of sympathy his mouth couldn’t match with the right words. They stood face-to-face near the door, across the room from the whispering, bespectacled Civics. “How are you feeling, Ma’am?” he finally managed.
“Oh, fine; but my guitar playing’s gotten worse,” she said, frowning quizzically at her mummy-wrapped hands. Surprised, Lundin barked a single laugh, covering his mouth before more could escape. Dame Miri grinned, brushing a strand of black hair out of her eyes.
