The Mask And The Master (Mechanized Wizardry Book 2) (11 page)

“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.

The bearded man nodded, and the other two warriors started walking away, towards the golden carriage.  “Think about it, girls.  That’s all we ask,” he said as he unlaced two pouches from his belt.

“Where are you going?” Ariell asked.

“We’re moving on.  More people to see; more presents to give.  Careful with the red ones,” he said, handing the older girl the two pouches full of stonebow bullets.  Ariell passed the stonebow to Columbine as she tied the pouch of red stones to her waist with extreme care.

“There’s no way you’re just giving us these things for nothing.  Where’d you get this stuff, anyway?”

“We made it.”

“So are you Delians?”

He shrugged.“Maybe we’re what Delia
will
look like, someday.  Open, not closed.  Generous, not greedy.  Does that sound like an improvement to you?”

The girls stood together, saying nothing.  He grinned, flashing his strong white teeth.  He turned to go, then spun back around, remembering a final thought.  “Try heading northeast,” he said, pointing.  “There’s a cluster of farm families at a place called Two Forks, two days’ travel.  Show them what we gave you and say this: ‘the pretenders will fall.’”

“The pretenders will fall,” Columbine and Ariell repeated dutifully.

“I’m sure they can give you food and beds for a few nights.  Good luck.”

With a smile, the man reached up to his hat.  He pulled it down over his face, and Columbine involuntarily took a step backwards.  It wasn’t a hat at all, but an empty-faced wooden mask.  Where his friendly eyes had been, there were two wide holes glowing gold.

He waved as he ran past them, scouting ahead of the carriage.  The mighty vehicle roared into life, the dull purr of its engine leaping up to ear-splitting heights again.  Columbine covered her ears and staggered off the path, out of the way of the golden carriage as it rolled forward on its big belts.  Ariell followed her, putting a hand on her sister’s shoulder protectively as they watched the Golden Caravan pass them by.  The woman and the blond man were walking on the path behind the carriage, hands on their swords. They had lowered their masks over their faces too.  Columbine caught the woman looking at her with golden eyes as she passed.  She felt like she had to say something, so she raised up the orange bag.

“Thank you,” Columbine shouted over the noise of the carriage.

The woman nodded.  “Tell everyone about us,” she shouted back in her low, throaty voice.

I will
, Columbine thought, dazzled by the golden light as the Caravan headed into the distance.

Chapter Nine

Petronaut Non Grata

“Stop now! Hands off!  No magic Petronauts!  Stop now! Hands off!  No magic Petronauts!”

Lundin groaned and kept his head down as far as it would go.  The morning rain spattered against the back of his head as he hugged the wall of the Petronaut warehouse, trying to stay as far as possible from the knot of stinking wizards in noisy demonstration.  An old man and woman, mostly naked (weren’t wizards always?) were dancing themselves into a kind of frenzy while the other wizards chanted and beat on their drums.  One young woman wearing nothing but long strands of kudzu was sitting cross-legged in the street, an arcane pentacle traced around her in white chalk as she muttered to herself with eyes closed.  Those were the ones that really worried Lundin. 
I’m going to explode before lunch
, he thought, miserably.

There were only a dozen or so wizards here at the main Petronaut warehouse, with another two dozen  protesting at the Civic annex a few blocks south.  He’d be using the back door into work for who knew how long.  That was bad enough, but the pangs of sympathetic guilt were even worse as he glanced at the faces of the other techs and ‘nauts coming into the warehouse.  The ‘nauts were bewildered and indignant as whip-thin sorcerers yelled in their faces or threw runes at them.  Most of them didn’t even know about the disastrous presentation yesterday.   They didn’t deserve this.  Lundin clutched his collar closer to his face, his shoulders hunched up against the rain.  His only hope was that Delia’s magical community would lose interest in their demonstration soon.

He slipped his way inside and shut the wooden door behind him with a sigh of relief.  Lundin looked at the high ceilings and the long row of workshops on either side.  He hadn’t been back in the Petronaut warehouse since his transfer to the Civics, two days shy of two weeks ago.  The Civics had their own compound with its own storage facilities.  Ostensibly, storing their own materiele was for efficiency, because they needed specialized equipment none of the combat-oriented ‘nauts would ever make use of.  The real reason, he was sure, is that the Civics actually dealt with the public on a regular basis, and so needed a building that was halfway presentable.  The ‘naut warehouse was plenty of things; well-stocked, well-organized, a stimulating hotbed of creative chatter; but aesthetically stunning it was not.  The cavernous main hallway was always smudged with grease, along the floors and up the walls.  The high-efficiency petrolatum gaslights mounted halfway to the ceiling beamed down light so harsh it felt like physical pressure, like an older sibling’s finger poking into your forehead.  Cavaliers and Shock Troops would wander by, helmets off and gears grinding inside their suits as they shouted deafly at each other.  A knot of technicians would laugh (or cry) over a freshly inked report.  A drunken Aerial would serenade a Parade squad beauty, who would eviscerate him or her on the spot with taunts so fabulous they deserved to be said onstage. But none of it was for the benefit of the outside world.  What happened in the warehouse belonged to the Petronauts, and no one else.  And as the most thoroughly disgraced member of the most thoroughly disdained squad of ‘nauts in all Delia, Lundin couldn’t shake the feeling that he didn’t deserve to be here anymore.