The Mask And The Master (Mechanized Wizardry Book 2), page 7
Before the grudging agreement from the wizards had even begun, Bevelli started shaking her head, vigorously enough to swat herself in the face with her own braid. “I didn’t come here to see something turn white,” she said. “I own gaslights aplenty. Show me this machine does something worthwhile or I’ll raise a stink to your Board of Governors for wasting my time.”
“Hear hear,” Lord Quentonne said, brushing a hand through his golden hair.
“What, exactly, I must ask,” Lady Quentonne began in her cultured, over-articulated tones. To hear her say it, there was a great big capital ‘H’ at the beginning of the word ‘what.’ Downwind of his wife, Lord Quentonne surreptitiously wiped a fleck of spittle off his cheek as she went on: “do you assert that your little endeavor adds to the public good? Delia has no shortage of exemplary wizards. I should like to know why a single sestari more should be spent on clockwork magi, as the entire enterprise strikes me as duplicative.”
“All right,” Lundin said evenly, his mind racing. “All right! Allow us to illustrate with another demonstration—”
“But, sir,” Elia whispered urgently, rushing up to his side. “We haven’t gone through all the specifications yet. We weren’t supposed to begin the second demo until the end of the presentation!”
“I’d rather live through this than stick to the outline, thanks,” he hissed back, gently steering her away. He waved a hand to Martext and an ashen-faced Willl with three L’s (who had never seen a presentation go this badly before.) The men quickly dashed through a door in the rear of the stage, and Lundin turned back to the audience. “You’ve been very patient,” he said through a plastered-on smile, “but I think it’s time to give you a more concrete demonstration of what the spell box is capable of.”
Lundin stepped aside, and Dame Miri swept forward with the easy presence of a professional speaker. It was remarkable to watch the crowd visibly calm down when presented with a figure who knew how to take stage. Lundin watched her with admiration. He would have handed the entire presentation over to her with blissful relief, but Dame Dionne had insisted that he needed to practice his own public speaking skills. But do I have to practice them in public? he had thought, miserably.
“Picture a world, Lady Quentonne,” Dame Miri began, “where every night watchman in Delia can see in the dark and work a shift without yawning, once. Not such a bad thing, when we don’t know the next time someone unwelcome will… announce themselves in our town.” She casually raised her bandaged fingers to her bruised face, reminding everyone of what happened to her the last time some undesirables ‘announced’ themselves in Delia. The last vestiges of chatter died away into sheepish silence. Dame Miri folded her hands at her waist as she shifted her focus.
“Ms. Bevelli; your traders negotiate with a dozen mills around the city. Imagine they could get a superhuman deal every time a new contract needed drafting. Can you bear the thought of higher profits with no additional staff or expense?”
“You’re saying your box can make me money,” Bevelli snorted, interested despite herself.
“She’s saying magic can. Whether magic will depends on the ability of the wizard in question and the whims of the Mobinoji,” Tymon said, waving a dismissive hand. “Anyone who guarantees a magical certainty is a fraud.”
“And has she no notion of time?” a beady-eyed sorceress chimed in, “Unless Petronauts can make the sand in an hourglass run slower, these fantasies are laughable. ‘Every night watchman!’ We couldn’t enchant half the city’s guards in a single day, even if every wizard in Delia joined hands inside the greatest pentacle in history.”
“You won’t have to,” Dame Miri said, totally unfazed. “This routine magic; these everyday augmentations that’ll make the lives of hundreds of Delians better and more productive? You won’t have to do them! You’re right, it would take every wizard in Delia every hour of every day to cast those spells. That would be a waste of your considerable talents; it’d suck your time away from the truly meaningful, original problems that only veteran wizards like you can solve.”
Tymon’s frown only deepened, but several of the other sorcerers preened ever so slightly. Dame Miri gave her most winning smile and went on, “The beauty of the spell box is that it can cast simple magic in a tenth the time it takes a human wizard, and with a one hundred percent success rate.”
“Impossible—”
“Charlatans! Frauds!—”
“How dare you say—”
The wizards went into an uproar at the claim, but Lundin noted that Bevelli and the merchants grew thoughtful at the notion of consistently reliable magic. Even the Quentonnes showed a flicker of unambiguous interest. She’s got them in the palm of her hand, he thought admiringly.
Dame Miri gestured to the door at the back of the stage. Right on cue, Martext opened the door as Willl with three L’s wheeled a cubical cage one-and-a-half meters on each side into the space. The audience craned their necks to catch a glimpse of the unexpected entrant, but the cage was covered in a thick, dark cloth. “Don’t take my word for it; see for yourself,” she said.
Lundin steeled himself with a sharp breath and jumped back into the fray. “For this demonstration, we’d like to show you one of the simplest spells in a wizard’s repertoire: a spell of friendship. It’s the one spell we have complete at present, start-to-finish. Implanting positive feelings in a subject’s mind for a short time involves a relatively simple set of commands, which we have imprinted on this set of disks.” Elia unzipped the first pouch of friendship disks and held the perforated metal up for the crowd to see. It glinted in the sunlight, casting pockmarked shadows onto the stage. “All we needed was, well, a bad-tempered subject.”
“Luckily, I knew just the guy,” Miri said with a wry smile. She nodded to Willl with three L’s, who whipped the fabric off the cage with a flourish he’d been practicing all morning. “Meet my dog, Cort,” Dame Miri said as the air filled with raspy barking.
The Civics took a long step back as the grizzled, lazy-eyed dog bashed its muzzle against the bars of the cage. Cort was a smallish hound with a mammoth temper and a nasty mouth. The crowd murmured, leaning forward for a closer look at the four-legged tantrum on stage.
“I’ll tell you, I had to think long and hard before agreeing to put Cort up for this demonstration. After all, he’s got such a sweet disposition already,” she said lovingly as the dog leapt straight up into the ceiling of the cage, snarling. “But, in all seriousness, I couldn’t feel more confident about his safety through this process.”
“Absolutely,” Lundin said. “All that’s going to happen to Cort, over the next hour, is that we’re going to magically improve his attitude to Mister Goolsby over there. Martext, will you please demonstrate the current state of your relationship with Cort?”
Martext took a deep breath, stepped forward, and gingerly lowered his hand close to the cage. Cort screamed a litany of canine insults and got his nose wedged between the thin bars as he hurled himself at the tech, fangs first. Martext raised both hands high and stepped back, eyes flicking up to the audience in theatrical terror. Lundin pointed at Lord Quentonne, who let out a short, barking laugh at the sight. “Lord Quentonne; does it look like Cort considers Martext a friend?”
“A meal, seems more like!” The vapid lord seemed to be enjoying himself at last. Lundin felt the tension in his throat ease ever so slightly.
“Well, m’lord, when our spell is done, and you see that tail wagging as Martext scratches the dog behind the ears, I’ll come back to you and see what you think then. All right?”
“There are refreshments in the anteroom, if you’d care to wait here at the workshop,” Dame Miri said, indicating the exit. She took a quick glance at the ornate clock on the far wall; after having cut several sections of their presentation, they were far ahead of schedule. “Otherwise, feel free to go about your business, and we’ll look forward to seeing you back here at around two-thirty for some magic.”
The crowd stirred to its feet, and a handful of traders dispersed towards the door right away. Elia finished setting the disks in place inside the spell box, and closed the case delicately. Lundin nodded to her, and she flicked the off-white switch next to the wizard’s hat.
“PingduH’lethDagrissIthM’Navei—”
Words came out of the trumpet in a stream of fast-paced sound. Its voice was higher than a child’s at this speed, and even a lifelong speaker of Mabinanto would have been hard-pressed to distinguish individual words as the spell box raced breathlessly forward. The audience froze and listened to it for a moment, their awed, nervous chatter the only competing sound in the room. Lundin allowed himself an ego-stroking moment as he looked out at the mixture of curiosity, trepidation, and anticipation on the faces in the hitherto hostile crowd. I may not be able to impress them much; but at least the spell box can.
His eye fell on the middle-aged Herald off to the side of the room, in the royal white of Princess Naomi’s personal retainer. The trim, impassive woman had been silent throughout the presentation, jotting down careful notes on a scroll as she kept watch on him and his team with her piercing gaze. Lundin wet his lips involuntarily. Everyone knew that the Herald was there as the eyes and ears of the Regency Council, and Princess Naomi herself. The heir had taken a chance by declaring an interest in the mechanized wizardry project so openly. How this demonstration went, for good or for ill, could determine whether or not that support would continue.
“I can’t get a read on that Herald,” Lundin admitted under his breath. His team was clustered together next to the spell box as the crowd went about its business again. “Do you think she’s with us so far?”
“So far,” Martext shrugged. “We’ll see how she feels when that dog bites me in an hour.”
“Hey,” Dame Miri said, grinning. “Let’s have a little positive thinking. We know this’ll work; we already tested the spell on Elia.”
Elia nodded vigorously, straightening her glasses. “Before the spell, Cort snapped at me worse than he did with you. But afterwards, he let me scratch his head.”
“And he just lay there calm as a pussycat. Only other person he acts that way for is me,” Miri said.
Martext raised his hands in acceptance, a small smile on his lips. “I still think Willl should do the demo.”
“But I’m allergic to dog bites!” the blond tech’s eyes widened.
“I’ve never liked them either; maybe I’m allergic too,” Lundin mused. The team was smiling, full of energy, and ready for their hard work to pay off. Lundin clapped Martext on the shoulder, trying a little heartiness on for size.
“One hour, gang. Let’s show them all what we can do. Elia—thirty seconds until these disks end. Can you get the next set ready?”
“Yes, sir,” she said as she rushed away. Maybe I can get used to this after all, Lundin said, trying to settle the jitters in his stomach as his team went back to work.
“—CortCanusLupusFamiliarus.”
The high-pitched voice came to a jarring halt as the last pair of disks ended. The hypnotic rhythm of the Enunciation hung in the room for a long moment. Since the Enunciation was pure repetition of the name of the subject, the spell box’s drone for nearly ten minutes had been the same four words over and over, broken only by two brief silences as the disks finished one revolution and began to repeat from the beginning. Lundin still had no idea exactly how long an Enunciation was supposed to be, but they had decided that three repetitions of the disks would be sufficient. Scanning the faces in the crowd, he knew they’d made the right decision. The steady drone had put about half the audience into a dumb, trance-like state; if the spell had gone on any longer, everyone in the room would be asleep. As it was, Lady Quentonne was snoring gently in her seat, a fact which her husband found immensely distasteful. About the only people who still looked fully alert were Tymon, his harsh face alight with suspicion, and the silent Herald on the side aisle, her scroll in her lap and her stylus poised over the page. Lundin swallowed, doing his best to hide his nerves as he flicked the switch on the spell box off. The machinery inside the case purred to a halt, and he turned out to the audience.
“Sixty-two minutes and twenty-four seconds,” he said, holding up his watch, “and the spell is done. Dame Miri’s dog is different from when we started. And I don’t just mean that now he’s had a nice nap.” He gestured to the caged canine, who had been peacefully asleep for about forty-five minutes now, despite the noisy spell box. “Thanks to our spell of friendship, Cort will now have a completely different attitude to Mister Goolsby. But don’t take my word for it. See for yourself!”
He nodded to Martext. The tall man brushed his black hair out of his eyes with both hands, flicking a lightning-fast glance over to his boss. Martext’s tight smile was as inscrutable as always; if there was any outward content to it at all, it was ‘you owe me one.’ Ever since asking Martext to do this demonstration, Lundin had been feeling the exact same thing. It was as odd as it was illogical, since it was his role as senior tech to give orders, not ask his squad to do him favors he should feel grateful (or guilty) for. But there were orders, and then there were orders, and Lundin recognized that what Martext was being asked to do was far outside the daily norm. All the danger and risk of the entire presentation was concentrated on him, at this moment. And all the glory, too, when the spell works, an optimistic counterpoint piped up in the back of his head.
Lundin blinked, smiling at the unexpected positive voice. Where have you been all my life?
The Civics exchanged sidelong glances as their man stepped forward to the cage. Lundin laced his fingers behind his back where the audience couldn’t see him fidgeting as Martext gingerly unlocked the clasps on front of the cage. Cort’s filmy eyes opened at the noise, but the dog barely stirred. All eyes were on the lean, dark-skinned technician as he crouched down in front of the cage and slowly extended his hand.
Cort sniffed Martext’s long fingers for a moment. Lundin was holding his breath; silly, he knew, but he was pretty sure he wasn’t alone. Martext raised his hand a little higher and began to scratch Cort behind one gray, grizzled ear. From across the stage, Lundin caught sight of Dame Miri, her violet eyes bright with pride. And then—
A snarl. A shout from Martext. The thump of his body against the stage as he recoiled, landing heavily on his back. The clatter of the metal cage as Cort flung himself forward onto the prone man with a mouth full of dirty fangs. A sharp gasp from every throat in the room. The scuffing of chairs and boots as the audience leapt to their feet.
In a room full of noise and motion, the eye is drawn most to what’s staying still. In that brief, terrible moment before his shocked body could react, Lundin’s attention flashed, as if by magnetic attraction, to the one person in the whole room who wasn’t moving: the royal Herald, in gleaming white at the end of her row. Her eyes were locked right on his. She was utterly still except for her stylus, which, as he was watching, wrote and underlined a single word. Lundin would see that silent scribe in his dreams for years afterwards.
“Spheres, get it off him,” Elia wailed, casting around from side to side for an appropriate tool, her eyes rolling in her head like a horse. To his credit, Willl with three L’s had already leapt into action, racing from upstage and sliding on his knees towards the chaotic pile of limbs. His sleeves slid up his wrists as he wrapped his arms around the hound’s belly. He yanked backwards, eyes closed behind his glasses, and swung the dog around with a mighty heave. Cort flailed his paws madly, leaving thin white scratches in the golden stage. The dog twisted awkwardly in an effort to bite his assailant, snarling, but he only got his mouth around the tips of the man’s blond bangs.
Then Dame Miri rushed forward and shoved a leather muzzle onto the dog’s snout. She knelt in front of Cort, clamping her injured hands down onto the dog’s jaws. “Tie him. Tie him,” she yelled to Elia, who was hovering over the melee uncertainly with a leash in her hands. Elia nodded, dropping the leash and leaning down to tie off the muzzle where Dame Miri was indicating. Willl with three L’s was still hugging the dog around the midsection gamely as the old hound writhed and struggled.
Only then did Lundin master himself enough to dash forward to Martext. The lean technician was propping himself up unsteadily as Lundin knelt down next to him. His trapezoidal glasses were askew and he was breathing heavily. Martext pressed his left hand to the stage to lift himself up further and his face contorted with pain. Lundin looked down and saw the nasty punctures on Martext’s hand smearing blood on the stage.
“Don’t move, Martext; you stay put, and we’ll get the master of physic. Are you all right? Did he get you anywhere than your hand?”
“I’m all right,” he said, waving Lundin away with his head. Lundin ignored him, hands on the other man’s shoulders, looking him up and down.
“Lie back if you need to. I want to be sure he didn’t get you anywhere else—”
“Horace, leave it. Don’t worry about me,” Martext hissed, his face very close to Lundin’s. “You worry about them.”
Lundin turned his head. Their audience of two dozen looked like a horde of two thousand, with every soul in the place on their feet. A wave of sound came crashing against him, and he felt himself shrink as he took stock of the room, recoiling from the horror, fear, disgust, contempt, and outrage he saw burning out of every face. Of the mob, Tymon was the only one not looking at the stage. The bald wizard had his hands raised to the vaulted ceilings, his nasty little skull pendant beating against his chest as he laughed. White teeth gleaming in the sun, Kelley’s grandfather laughed and laughed and laughed. The Herald was nowhere to been seen; most likely, she was already headed back to the Palace with her one-word review of Horace Lundin’s most spectacular failure to date.
