The Mask And The Master (Mechanized Wizardry Book 2) (28 page)

Burn me whole! 
“That’s right,” Lundin said with a pleasant smile.

“Are we really going to be ready in two days, sir?”  Martext asked under his breath as Farmingham led them on.

“You know, Mister Goolsby, I think we will,” Lundin whispered back, taking a deep breath.  “And if we’re not, then we won’t do it.  I’ll just put my foot down and tell them ‘this is a Petronaut project, and we’re not ready yet.’”

Martext nodded, his long black hair swaying against his shoulders. “And when they tell you to do it anyway, we’ll do it anyway.”

“Most likely,” Lundin said, clapping Martext on the back.  “Glad we’re on the same page.  Speaking of which—Willl!  Come here,” Lundin hissed, waving Willl with three L’s closer.  He trotted closer, brushing his long blond bangs away from his glasses. 

“First off, how do you say your name?”

“Wythernsson?”

“I would never in a million years have remembered that.  Sorry, by the way,” he said, chucking the tech on the shoulder.  “But since when are you so quick on the draw?  You saved my hide back there with that ‘Mister Lundin knows I don’t like my name’ story.”

Willl with three L’s just stared at him.  “But you do know I don’t like my name,” he said, whispering loud enough to turn Farmingham’s head, a dozen paces ahead of them.

“No, Willl, I didn’t.  I didn’t know how you felt about your name because I didn’t know what your name
was
.  (Sorry, again, by the way,)” he said quietly.  “I just… that was a really clever story, that’s all.”

“What story?”  Willl with three L’s said, tilting his head.

Lundin looked back at him.  “Never mind,” he said, patting his arm.  “Good work.  Good work,” he trailed off as Willl with three L’s turned away, visibly perplexed.

Go team
, he thought weakly as they arrived at their barracks.

Chapter Three

The Wounded

Pauma kept one hand on the reins and one hand on her gun.  Gnats were buzzing around her face, drawn to the beads of sweat at her hairline.  She ignored them as best she could and kept her eyes searching through the trees and bushes to the west.  Her horse placed its hooves carefully among the ferns as she rode her slow patrol.  She fingered the hammer of her pistol for the dozenth time.  The damn Petronauts hadn’t pursued the people of Two Forks to the upper fields yet, but if they did, she would have only seconds to react before they were on top of her.  And with the way the butchering Delians fought, she would be dead if those seconds caught her unawares.

Honestly, it was a miracle that Two Forks didn’t have more dead. Pauma dreaded what she’d see when they went back to town and took a look at the prone bodies they’d had to leave in the streets.  Some were probably just battered, or playing dead.  Others could be bleeding out right now.  Others could have been executed where they lay.  Did Petronauts take prisoners?  The farmer brushed her hand through the cloud of gnats, grimacing.  She was realizing how little she knew about soft, corrupt Delia, that hollow kingdom to the south.  But she had a feeling that after today, their little hamlet was going to be seeing a lot more of their distant, not-so-good neighbors.

A crunching sound on the breeze.  Pauma drew the horse up sharply and raised her pistol.  It was the unmistakable sound of footsteps, coming from the southeast. 
Coming from town
. 

She held her breath and scanned the woods at head height, the barrel of her gun tracking with her eyes.  The crunching was coming closer. Awfully light footsteps, for a mechanical man in full armor.  She hesitated, and then a head came into view—

“I’ll be damned,” she murmured, spurring the horse forward.

Columbine Fletcher stopped in her tracks when she heard the horse.  She stayed motionless as Pauma trotted up to her, stuffing the pistol back in her belt.  Columbine’s wavy brown hair was twisted and speckled with leaves, and her new clothes were scraped in half a dozen places. 
She must’ve been running pell-mell through the brush
, Pauma thought with a frown.  Well, who could blame the girl for being scared?

“Little Miss Columbine,” she said, as reassuringly as she could manage.  “Swing up here with me.  Why aren’t you with the other kids?”

The girl said nothing.

“You and Ariell jumped town with the other kids, didn’t you?  Where’s your sister?”

Pauma looked nervously into the woods as Columbine stayed silent, swaying back and forth on her heels.  “Swing on up now, Miss Columbine.  We can’t stay here.”

The girl finally took Pauma’s outstretched hand and allowed herself to be yanked up onto the saddle.  Columbine was clutching a little leather pouch tightly with her other hand, and wouldn’t let it go even to help steady herself against the horse.  Pauma had to drop the reins to help Columbine stay balanced as she sat the girl on the saddle behind her.  The farmer grimaced as she twisted back around.  She’d thrown something out in her back with that awkward lift.

“Stars and Spheres, girl,” she grumbled, glancing over her shoulder.  “What happened to you?”

“I was wrong,” Columbine said.  Her little voice was barely audible, even with her body pressed against the farmer’s back.  But something about it made the hairs on Pauma’s arms get straight and bushy, like a scared cat’s tail.  The farmer swallowed, not knowing why.

“Hold on, now,” she said, crouching over the horse’s neck.  The girl curled one thin arm around her stomach.  She could feel Columbine’s cheek resting against her shoulder blade.  After one last look around, Pauma flicked her heels into the horse’s flanks and sent them galloping for the upper fields.  Her jaw was tight with anger as they rode.  Something told her that Ariell Fletcher wouldn’t be joining them any time soon.

Samanthi was stretching her legs when they came back.  The air was still warm from the sinking sun.  The smell of roasting venison and griddle cakes was drifting from the mess hall.  The steady pouring sound of the river draped over the logging camp, making everything just a little slower and just a little calmer.  Samanthi cracked her knuckles and looked up at the treeline, enjoying the fresh air after a whole flaming day crunching data with Zig.  Then her eyes drifted down, attracted by a bit of movement, and she stopped breathing.

They had expected the ‘nauts back before sundown, but not like this.

Sir Kelley was stalking in front, his visor up and his green eyes wild and darting.  Sir Mathias was holding Dame Gaulda’s helmet in one hand and propping her up with the other as the Shock Trooper doggedly kept putting one foot in front of the next.  Her armor was filthy, warped, and smeared with black slime from her neck to her groin.  Gaulda’s face was gray, and her lips pulled back from her teeth on each agonizing step.  Dame Orinoco had a limp woman slung over her back, her wiry arms and long, stringy brown hair flopping over Orinoco’s shoulders.  It wasn’t until Dame Julie pressed a hand against the woman’s bare arm, her dark face full of concern through her open visor, that Samanthi noticed the loop of a pair of overalls on the prone woman’s shoulder.  The body dimly registered as Iggy—but then where was Ironsides?  And where was Sir Xiaoden?  Samanthi’s eyes widened and the breath came back to her lungs, pumping too fast.

 Everything went too fast in the jumbled minutes that followed.  She was carrying a basin of water with one of the scullery men.  She was depressurizing Dame Gaulda’s ranine coils.  She was looking down at Iggy on the cot, her face smashed and torn and one leg at an odd angle underneath the sheet.  She was wrestling Sir Mathias out of his armor as he craned his neck to watch the wounded, fidgeting and restless.  She was pouring dipperfuls of water into Dame Gaulda’s mouth whenever the ‘naut finished shuddering her way through another coughing fit.  She was hanging Julie’s breastplate against the armor rack when Zig set Iggy’s broken leg.  She almost dropped it as the scream filled the longhouse.  Time swirled past faster than the river, each moment blurring chaotically into the next.  And through it all, Kelley prowled through the longhouse in his armor like a mad, hunted thing.

“I’ve splinted her,” Zig said, running his fingers through his red hair.  His hand came away slick with sweat, and he wiped it on his pants.  He looked down at Iggy, still and ashen on the cot.  “But my field physic training only goes so far.  I don’t—”

“You keep her alive,” Sir Kelley ordered, still in motion.

“I—believe me, sir, I want to, but—”

“Who knows how hard she hit that tree?”  Dame Orinoco stepped in.  Her hand was bandaged, and her two broken fingers tied together with a strip of cloth.  “Thank the Spheres she didn’t fall to the forest floor when Ironsides went down; but getting caught in the branches like that wasn’t—”

“What else can you do for her?”  he said, looking straight at Zig.

The technician swallowed.  “If anything’s crushed or bleeding inside her?  I’m not a master of physic!  I can’t—”

“I sent a runner up to our lumberjacks,” the logging boss said, his rumbling voice sounding a little shaken.  “Our master of physic travels with the loggers.  She sees falls all the time.”

“When can she be here?”

“Three days?  Maybe four?”

“The platoons should be here tomorrow, Sir Kelley,” Mathias said quietly from Dame Gaulda’s bedside.  She was asleep, at last.  “They’ll have physicians, and a better field hospital than what we’ve got now.”

Kelley threw his arms open wide and spun around, taking in the whole room.  “Can anyone guarantee me that Ignatia Roulande will live through the night?” 

Samanthi felt her throat tightening up.  The longhouse was silent, except for the gentle rush of the river in the background.  Sir Kelley’s mouth drew back into a sneer.  He slammed his fist down onto a table, rocking its legs off the ground with the force of the blow, and stormed outside into the fading evening light.

Dame Orinoco flung up her good hand and turned away.  Dame Julie put her hands on her hips and frowned. “What did he want us to do?  Lie?”

Samanthi and Sir Mathias looked at each other across the longhouse.  His brown eyes were sadder than she’d ever seen them.  “I think so,” she said.

“The way your boss is acting, you’d think
he
lost someone tonight,” Orinico said.  The Cavalier’s face was contorted with bitterness.

“We all lost someone tonight,” Sir Mathias said, straightening up.

“Please.  You didn’t know Xiaoden.”

“And you don’t know Kelley,” he said, his voice hard.  He followed the senior ‘naut outside, his big feet thumping against the ground.

Samanthi briefly toyed with the idea of staying in the longhouse to smooth things over with the Cavaliers.  This mission had only just begun, after all, and given the seriousness of what was arrayed against them, their joint squad couldn’t afford to lose cohesion by going tribal.

Burn that
, she thought as she headed wordlessly for the door.  There would be time to get back to the big picture soon enough.  Right now, she had to be with her people.

“Hey,” she yelled after Mathias.  He looked down at her over his shoulder, and gestured with his head for her to follow.  The off-white thermals he wore under his breastplate were rumpled and streaked with oil, and tight against his big torso.  As she trotted up to his side, the dusky air felt good against her arms and neck.  The circulation in that longhouse wasn’t worth a damn, and she hadn’t realized how warm she’d become.

“Tell me what happened out there,” she said as they walked.

“I mean, we filled you in,” Sir Mathias said absently.  They caught sight of Sir Kelley, out towards the trees, facing away from them.  His gleaming black suit looked out of place against the backdrop of leaves and wood, and his head was strangely small on top of the armor.  They changed course to head for him.  “The town was hostile.  The Golden Caravan had armed them.  By the time the dust cleared, Ironsides was a wreck and Sir Xiaoden was a hole in the ground.  And we didn’t learn a thing.”

“And what happened to Kelley?”

He gave her that sad, scared look again.  Samanthi glared back at him.  “Come on, damn it,” she whispered.  “What happened to
him
?”

“Tell her,” Sir Kelley said, his flat voice carrying easily to them.  They turned to look at his back as he stood alone, still staring into the woods.

Samanthi looked back at Mathias.  The big Petronaut swallowed before he spoke.  “Kelley killed a girl,” he said.

The night was very quiet.  “What do you mean, a girl?”

“Twelve.  Thirteen?  She had a sort of crossbow; the one we brought back.  Anything she shot just lit up, like that.”  He snapped his dirty fingers.  “She’s the one who brought Iggy down, and turned Xiaoden into dust.  And she would have had me, too.”

 “Spheres,” Samanthi said, her mind spinning.  “Did these bastards send other kids at you?”

“She had, uh.  There was another girl, about half her age.  Unarmed.  We let her get away.”

“A dumb move,” Sir Kelley said.  He turned his head in sharp profile to them.  “She’ll just be back to fight us later.”

“Letting a six-year-old off the battlefield doesn’t sound dumb to me, Sir,” Samanthi said.

“You weren’t there.”

Sir Kelley turned back away from them, clenching and unclenching his right fist.  A nightbird cried across the river.  The silence ticked on until Samanthi took one step forward.

“I’m sorry, Kelley,” she said quietly.

His exasperated sigh was just barely audible.  “I don’t want your pity, Ms. Elena,” he said, so put-upon, so sardonic.  And suddenly Samanthi no longer cared.

“Burn you too, sir.”

Sir Mathias’ jaw fell to his chest.  Kelley actually turned around, slowly, his mouth twisted in surprise and his green eyes getting wider.  Samanthi felt the blood rising in her cheeks and behind her eyes as she spoke.

“A thirteen-year-old girl was killing your people, and you had to pull the trigger to stop her.  Spheres, Kelley!  When something like that happens to you, you don’t get to decide if you’re getting pity or not!  The question is, are you going to be an ass about it?  Pretend you’re some kind of bloodless, seen-it-all veteran who’s perfectly fine with a world where you shoot the kid before the kid shoots you? 
Or:
are you going to get over yourself, for once, for ten burning seconds, and allow yourself to feel awful about something awful?  I sure hope you pick the second choice, senior ‘naut, because I already don’t like you, and figuring out how to like you even less is going to get complicated.”