The Mask And The Master (Mechanized Wizardry Book 2), page 8
Come on, optimistic side, Lundin said to his own brain as he started to lift himself to his feet. Feel like helping me turn this around?
Sorry, Horace, the cheery voice replied. You’re skunked.
Chapter Eight
The Golden Caravan
Columbine Fletcher clutched her sister tight as the noise grew louder. There was a branch jabbing into her back, but she didn’t dare start shifting or the whole bush might move. If the carriage heading their way through the Tarmic Woods spotted them, there was no telling what would happen, but it was bound to be bad. Besides, Ariell got mad at her if she moved too much. She could tell from a quick glance up at her sister’s scowling face that Ariell was already close to clocking her for hugging too tight. I can’t help it, the protest rose up in her throat automatically. Well, you’d better, Ariell’s surly response came back, so routine Columbine could hear it in her head word for word, because if you don’t grow up fast, you never will.
The noise on the forest path was getting even louder. She could hear the noisy squeak of wheels, but not the sound of horses; just an ever-increasing roar. “What is it, Ariell?” she whispered into her sister’s back, unable to stop herself.
“Shut it,” Ariell hissed, thumping her on the thigh with the butt of her knife. Columbine fought down a yelp, biting her lip as tears filled her eyes. Ariell exhaled sharply, turning her head for a better look through the dense bush. As she turned, her head recoiled and her hand flew up, covering her eye. She’d bumped into a pokey little twig, eyeball-first.
“Spheres, flames, burn everything,” she swore, lashing out at the bush with the chipped knife. Scraps of bark and a few pea-sized leaves drifted to the ground. Ariell grimaced, massaging her eye with her hand.
“Are you okay?” Columbine asked, relaxing her grip. She peered around to look into her sister’s face.
“Give me a flaming minute. You’re small; you look out there and see if you can see anything.”
Columbine nodded vigorously. Very carefully, she turned around on her hands and knees, brushing a branch at face level aside. It was good to move, and have that prickly branch out of her back. But she was scared, facing the forest path like this. It was better to just keep her face buried in Ariell’s body, where there was nothing to see and nothing to focus on except staying still until the sound was gone. But Ariell needed her to grow up fast, and part of growing up fast was ignoring the fact that you were scared and doing something anyway. So Columbine Fletcher crawled half a meter more to the far side of the bush, where only a thin, jagged screen of leafy wood concealed her from the forest path beyond. She opened her eyes wide and scanned the woods.
“Come out.”
Columbine shrieked at the sound of a man’s voice. Ariell’s gonna hit me again, she thought instantly, covering her mouth with both hands. But she couldn’t help it. The quiet words had been so close by—
“It’s all right. Come out.”
“Run, Columbine!” Ariell shouted, her voice shrill and cracked. Her sister backed out of the bush awkwardly and stood, scraping her arms on the twiggy branches and sending a cascade of tiny green leaves to the ground. All Columbine could see was her thin legs as she took a kind of fighting stance. Then Columbine turned away, crawling forward on her belly and banging her elbow as she extricated herself from the bush. The sky was cloudy overhead, and the tall trees cast no shadows on the beaten-down grass of the path. Columbine sobbed for breath as she scrambled to her feet, ready to run.
But there was the man in front of her, a warrior in red and dark brown leather. He was tall, with a close-cropped beard and a thick body and a great big sword at his side. He stood in her way with his hands on his hips. He had a strange, flat brown hat like an oval on top of his head, fastened around the back of his skull with a thin cord. Columbine wheeled around and saw her sister on the other side of the wide bush, knife held high in both hands, one eye red and watering. There were two adults standing by her, a man and a woman in the same oily leather with the same brown hats. Their hands were at their sides, and their fingers were resting on their great big swords. There was nowhere to run.
“Back off, you bastards,” Ariell screeched, jabbing the knife towards the grown-ups. The thin blond man just tilted his head a little bit. The short-haired woman didn’t move at all.
“Why were you hiding?” she asked in a really low voice.
“I said back off!”
“Just let us go,” Columbine said. All three adults looked at her. Ariell did too, her eyes red and wild. Columbine felt her throat getting tight like she wanted to cry, so she spoke quickly to get through it all. “We didn’t do anything bad, we were just hiding. Just please let us go and we’ll never make trouble anywhere.”
Her sister’s jaw dropped open, too dumbfounded and enraged to speak. Columbine felt her cheeks heating up, and she looked down into the dirt. But then the man next to her spoke again, and he sounded like he was smiling. “Do you make a lot of trouble?”
“No,” Columbine said, looking up. “Just enough to get by.”
The bearded man and the woman looked at each other. Their faces were soft. “Where will you go?” the woman asked.
“Don’t tell them anything, Columbine,” Ariell warned, holding the knife in a white-knuckled grip.
“Where there’s food,” Columbine said, honestly.
“No home?”
“No.”
The bearded man nodded. “Stay here,” he said, turning away. Columbine could barely hear him over the roaring noise. She turned to look down the path, and saw a carriage made of solid gold.
It can’t have been solid gold. There wasn’t enough gold in the world for something that size, she was pretty sure. But it was huge, and it was beautiful. The golden carriage was as long as a farmer’s cart with a four-horse team besides; a great long body, covered in curved golden metal sheets. Its front was a big snubby triangle like a wide, proud nose held high in the air, down to the two thin hatches that looked like nostrils just below the peak. The body of the machine was a long, gleaming box that tapered down into a triangular tail the same size and shape as the nose. There were pipes dotting the machine’s back, and a dome like a turtle shell in the middle of the roof. It didn’t have any wheels. Instead, there were a big belts that wrapped longways around either edge of the machine, made of thin rectangular plates strung together. As the belts spun, the vehicle trundled forward, rolling easily over the bumps and rocks in the forest floor. It ground to a halt as the tall warrior walked towards it, raising a hand. That roaring noise they’d been hearing seemed to come from inside the machine, somewhere around where the tail began. Smoke was coming out of a pipe on top of the machine; thin gray smoke you could hardly see.
Columbine had heard of rich farmers down in Delia who had machines like this they rode around their fields, so the machine did all the plowing while they sat inside on cushions. But never in a million years did she think she’d see such a fancy vehicle herself; especially not driving through the Tarmic Woods as easy as on a fresh cobblestone street.
“Now, Columbine! Run!”
Columbine’s attention turned to Ariell as her sister lurched towards her, leaping over the bush. She almost cleared it, catching her bare feet on the outer branches. She stumbled, flailing dangerously with her knife hand to keep her balance, but managed to stay upright. Columbine watched her dumbly, still dazzled by the sight of the golden thing a hundred meters away. Ariell grabbed her roughly by the shoulder, yanking Columbine closer. As they turned to run, though, the thin blond man was in their path, his face very calm and his hand still on his sword. Columbine looked over her shoulder and saw the woman walking closer to them too.
“There’s no need to run,” she said. “We’re going to help you.”
“Burn you,” Ariell spat. “Nobody in these woods helps anybody but themselves.”
“Sometimes, they do.”
“You really think Dame Hanah would authorize this?” the blond man spoke for the first time, looking at the woman. His mouth was twisted and sour, and Columbine took an instant dislike to him.
“She said ‘everyone we meet,’ yeoman,” the woman said, her voice a low warning. “I think she would insist we do this.”
“What are they going to do, Ariell?” Columbine whispered.
“They’re gonna kill us or make us servants, which is why you always run and you never talk,” Ariell growled back. The older sister rubbed at her eye furiously as another particle of bark made its presence felt. “You’re really burned things up, Columbine. When are you gonna learn that nothing good happens when—”
“Who’s got a birthday?”
Ariell shut up, and Columbine froze. Very slowly, they turned to face the bearded man, standing in the path between them and the golden carriage. He had his hands behind his back, and raised his eyebrows as he looked at each of them in turn. “Got a birthday coming up?” he asked, matter-of-factly.
“What do you care?” Ariell asked, curiosity almost getting the best of her suspicion.
The man shrugged. “You must be about twelve,” he said, squinting at Ariell. Then he looked down at Columbine, who inched closer to her sister. “And you can’t be more than seven. So whose birthday is closer?”
“We don’t know,” Columbine said quietly. “We were both born in the summer, and we haven’t seen a calendar since the bad men burned daddy’s farm.”
He just looked at her for a moment. “Tell you what, then,” he said, nodding. “Let’s keep it simple. Here’s a little something for each of you to celebrate the day you came across the Golden Caravan.”
The Golden Caravan. Columbine turned her head up to Ariell. “You said it wasn’t real!”
“It’s not,” Ariell scoffed, looking uncertainly between the three adult faces. “It can’t be.”
“What’s your name, older sister?”
“…Ariell.”
The man took a few steps towards them, and Ariell and Columbine instinctively drew closer to each other. He brought his left hand out from behind his back, and their eyes widened. “Think you could use one of these?” he said, holding up the stonebow.
Ariell looked over the weapon with hungry eyes. It looked like a small crossbow, its stock about half a meter of strong dark wood. The metal arms at the business end of the stock were upraised from the straight wood, like a bird frozen with its wings at the top of a wing-beat. The swooping tips of the bow were connected back to the stock by two pairs of cross-trees, carved like the legs of a fancy chair. As they watched, the man lifted a lever embedded in the top of the stock and pushed it forward until a little hook snagged the two thin strings at rest near the opposite end. He pushed the lever back down effortlessly, bending the metal arms ever so slightly as the strings tightened into a wide ‘v.’ Columbine squeezed her sister’s arm.
The man held the stonebow out at arm’s length to Ariell, holding it by the front of the stock. With enormous trepidation, she took from him and let her hands slide into position, one underneath the stock and one inside the trigger. “You’ve used one of these before,” he said.
“Hunting rabbits with my dad,” Ariell murmured, looking the weapon over. “But ours had a big dip here,” she said, tracing her finger in a curve through the air underneath the bow.
He nodded. “A straight stock will give you more power. The lever’s a new design, too; it’ll do more of the work for you.” The man reached into a pouch at his hip and brought up two pea-sized stones, one a dark gray and one a dull red. “The gray ones are normal stones, for hunting. The red ones are so you can protect your sister.”
“What are they?”
He smiled. Moving carefully and casually, he slipped the red sphere into the fabric thong between the two tensed-up strings. Then he backed away from Ariell and her loaded weapon. “Shoot that bush,” he said, pointing. A dead, scrubby bush thirty meters away shook like a ghost in the summer breeze.
Ariell raised an eyebrow at him. “Shoot it?”
“Imagine it’s a strange man with presents in the forest who won’t let you run away,” the bearded man said, with an air of coming up with something on the spot.
Ariell blinked, then gave him a little snort. Columbine dusted off her hands as she watched Ariell raise the stonebow. Her sister was a great shot. Usually, she came home from her hunts with Daddy with more birds or rabbits than he’d been able to bring down. Her mouth watered at the thought of roasted pheasant on a slow-turning spit. It felt like forever since they’d been able to trap an animal and get some meat.
There was a surprisingly quiet ‘thunk’ as Ariell pulled the trigger. Then the bush exploded.
Columbine shrieked again, and covered her mouth with both hands, her eyes wide. There was a hole in the dirt where the bush had been, and a spray of charred twigs covering a great big circle around that. But the bush itself was one hundred percent gone. She looked at Ariell, who was staring out into the woods, her mouth hanging open wide.
The bearded man cleared his throat. “Like I said, not for hunting.”
“I…I… but…”
As Ariell stammered, the man gestured to the short-haired woman, whose eyes were smiling even if her face stayed serious. He handed her whatever it was he had in his other hand, still behind his back. The woman turned to Columbine. “And this one’s for you,” she said in her throaty voice, holding both hands out with palms up.
“I blew up a bush,” Ariell said, still a few steps behind.
Columbine shook off her surprise and crept forward, peering into the woman’s hands. There was a funny little pouch there, the size of a beanbag but see-through, filled with an orangey syrup. A little silver disk, smaller than a ha’penny, was floating in the syrup. She looked up into the woman’s eyes questioningly. “Feel it,” the woman encouraged.
Columbine poked the little pouch with a fingertip. It was squishy, and a little cool, and went right back to its original shape when she pulled her finger away. The woman reached out and gently touched Columbine’s hands, opening them up so they were together, palms-up to the sky, just like hers had been. The lady’s hands were rough, but her skin was warm. Columbine had a flash back to her mother’s hands on her face, rough after a day of chores but more soothing against her skin than the softest, silkiest cloth ever would have been.
The woman put the orange bag into Columbine’s hands. “Now just hold it,” she said. Then she pressed down on the little silver coin with one finger. The coin wasn’t flat after all; it was a really shallow saucer, curving up at its edges just a little. When the lady pressed it, it sort of popped inside-out inside the pouch—
And the pouch got hot.
Columbine was so startled she nearly dropped the bag. “Hold it, both hands,” the woman said, cupping Columbine’s hands around the rapidly heating pouch. It was warm, so warm! But not burning hot, or boiling hot—just that wonderful temperature of a campfire the right distance away.
“What’s wrong, Columbine? What is that thing?” Ariell barked, tromping over to her with the stonebow in her hand.
“It’s warm!” she told her sister, swinging her hands around for Ariell to feel. “It was cold, and now it’s warm!”
“Imagine one of those in your blanket while there’s a rainstorm overhead,” the woman said as the sisters touched the orange bag, marveling. “Or holding one in your hands after a blizzard, before frostbite can set in.”
The bag felt different in her hands, and Columbine looked down. There were crystals forming inside the orange syrup now, like too much sugar at the bottom of a teacup. And the syrup seemed to be getting more solid even as she watched. She looked up at the woman in alarm. “When it goes solid, it’ll stop being hot. But then if you put it into a pot of boiling water, the crystals will melt back into liquid,” the woman said, nodding. Columbine nodded too, trying to follow along. “Once it’s liquid, just press the little disk until it pops, and it’ll heat up for you again.”
“Magic,” Columbine breathed.
“Not magic,” the bearded man shook his head. “Just a tool. Say, girls; what if I told you that they’ve had things like this down in Delia for years? Bullets that explode? Bags that keep you warm?”
“Who cares about Delia?” Ariell said sullenly. “Rich city types have more than we do. What else is new?”
“What if I told you, though, that even the people in Delia don’t know about things like this? What if I told you that there’s a tiny little group of greedy inventors, called Petronauts, who spend all day every day making toys like this? And that these Petronauts keep all their toys to themselves, so even rich Delians don’t get to use them?”
“That’s weird, I guess,” Columbine said.
“It is weird,” the woman said. “If you lived in Delia, what would you do about it?”
“I don’t know. Maybe I’d ask the King to make the inventors share the toys.”
“Oh, but Delia doesn’t have a King!” the man said. “Or a Queen either. They have a Princess, just a little bit older than you,” he inclined his head to Ariell, who was hefting her new stonebow suspiciously. “But the Princess doesn’t get to decide what happens in Delia, because there’s a group of mean old men and women who are running the city instead of her.”
“But she’s the Princess,” Columbine pointed out, outraged.
The man raised his hands, like he agreed but there wasn’t anything he could do. “They’re called the pretenders, because they pretend to be leaders but they’re really just in the way.
“Girls. You two are homeless in the forest, trying to get by. How many more people do you know who are like you, scrabbling just to survive? Is that fair, when there are tools in Delia— amazing, almost magical tools—that could make the lives of everybody in the world better, safer, and happier… if only a few greedy Petronauts and a few greedy pretenders would share them?”
There was silence for a moment. The orange pouch was hard as a river rock now, full of crystals. Columbine’s hands were still glowing with heat. They hadn’t felt this good in months.
