The Mask And The Master (Mechanized Wizardry Book 2) (32 page)

 “But
you’re
seeing the whole tapestry at once,” Colonel Yough said, sitting straight-backed in her chair.

“That’s what Greatsight does,” Dame Miri jumped in with a big grin. “For you and me, there’s a difference between looking and seeing,” she said.  “But when Horace looks around this room, he actually sees it!  All of it, all at once.”

“Doesn’t that hurt?”  blurted out the youngest officer, a doughy, dark-skinned Lieutenant.  He shifted in his chair as Lundin giggled, unexpectedly.  “Pardon my ignorance, Petronaut; it’s just that, since it’s not how the eyes normally work, doesn’t it…?”

“No, it’s a great question,” Lundin stepped in as the young man trailed off.  “I didn’t mean to—okay.  This is the beauty of magic.  It makes it possible for the human body and the human brain to stretch beyond what they’re supposed to be capable of.  Are there long-term risks?  I don’t know, we just wrote the spell.  But here and now, it feels normal.  No headaches, no eye pain.  Of course, we’ll be on the lookout for more side effects—”

“How long does it last?” said Yough, looking him up and down.  The machinery in her head was going full steam.

Lundin hesitated.  He’d been dreading this question. 
Don’t ruin it now; not when everything’s been going so well so far
.  “There’s, uh, language in the spell that will allow us to set the desired duration.  So, eventually, we’ll be able to make it last for, you know, an entire six-hour patrol shift, or a three-day mission, or less, or whatever’s needed.”

“‘Eventually?’” Colonel Yough frowned, tracing a finger in the air from his head to his boots.  “You mean there’s no duration on… this?”

“No, uh, we did set a duration.”

“How long?”

“About seven kilometers,” he said weakly.

Colonel Yough blinked in her interminable way.  The smacking of her eyelids against each other was almost audible.

“You see,” Lundin went on quickly, “in Mabinanto?  The magical language?  The only unit of time we’ve worked out is the
barendoon
, which is about eighteen minutes.  So we set the spell at three
barendoons
.  About a hour.  But the
barendoon
is also a measure of distance, and, uh, it seems like with the spell the way we’ve written it right now, the distance is trumping the time.”

“We waited an hour last night and the Greatsight was still working on him,” Dame Miri joined in.  “So we took a walk, and a little over seven kilometers later—blink blink, back to normal.”  She rolled her violet eyes owlishly, doing a remarkable approximation of Lundin’s face when the sudden change had hit him late last night.

“Exactly.  Colonel, I promise that we’ll clear this up as soon as—”

He stopped when he realized Colonel Yough was laughing.

Her shoulders bounced as the hooting sound came out of her throat, high and rhythmic.  The senior officers watched her, absolutely floored.  Lundin could see the tentative smile on Dame Miri’s face at the same time as Farmingham’s jaw dropped and Martext hugged the journal to his chest and a passing soldier glanced through the doorway on her way through the hall.  But if there was still a magnifying glass in his head, even through the Greatsight, it was focused on Colonel Yough’s beaming face.

“How’d you code these ‘
barendoons
?’” she said through her chuckles.  “‘Time?’ ‘Duration?’  Sounds to me like you made the value ‘Length.’”

Lundin laughed too, with a burst of nervous release. 
Sweet Spheres above—that was a gadget-head joke if ever I’ve heard one!  She doesn’t look mad at all!  If fact, she’s—

Then his mind caught up with him, and he replayed her joke in his mind.  “Burn me,” he said, unable to censor himself.  “I think that’s exactly what we did.”

“‘Length’ is the translation we used,” Martext said, flipping backwards in his journal.

“But maybe ‘length’ doesn’t have a temporal connotation in Mabinanto!” Elia scrabbled for her paper tablet and her stylus.

“Colonel,” Lundin said, “you may have just saved us hours of trial and error!  Just goes to show how useful it can be to get a fresh pair of eyes—”

“Two requests,” Colonel Yough said, her smile completely gone.

Lundin stopped as she stood up, her officers involuntarily straightening as she moved. 
Back to business, I suppose.
  “‘Requests,’ not ‘orders,’ because you’re autonomous agents here at the fort and, as established, this is a Petronaut project on a Petronaut schedule.”

“Right,” he nodded, eyes wide, waiting for orders.

“Walk with me a few minutes, Mister Lundin, and tell me what you see,” she said, a hint of softness lightening up her dour face.  “And while we walk, have your squad prepare Greatsight for me.”

“Prepare…” The second part of her sentence sank in.  “For
you
?”

“I’m impressed,” Yough said simply.  “If your spell works like you say it does, then every soldier on my walls needs it.  But I won’t ask anything of my command that I’m unwilling to do myself.  You understand.”

“I... I do.”

“So.”  She locked eyes with each of the Civics in turn.  “How soon can you be ready?  Do you need a few drops of blood, or…?”

“I.”  Lundin saw his own shock mirrored on Farmingham’s face and the other officers’ as they muttered to each other, glancing at their commander. 
She wants the spell for herself
, he thought, his head becoming slow and thick.  Visions of Colonel Yough’s brain exploding or her eyes sealing shut—or her mouth opening and closing at random, like another tough commander he used to know—rampaged through his mind.

“No blood or anything like that, Colonel,” Dame Miri said into the silence, after glancing at Lundin.  “A lock of hair, but only if you’re comfortable with that.  All we really need is your full name and your birthplace.  I should remind you that we’re still very early in our process,” she said, lacing her fingertips together above the white bandages on her hands.  “Your request is a real honor, and we’re so glad you’re so trusting.  But a few days’ more testing first would give us a better sense of any side effects, and help us iron out the wrinkles to keep you and other future subjects safe.”

Yough cleared her throat wetly and pointed to Lundin.  “You’re not brave, and you took the risk.  If you can take it, so can I.”

It wasn’t a boast so much as a fact, the way she said it.  All eyes in the room were on him.  It wasn’t just an expression; he could see all of them.

“We need a day, Colonel,” he finally said.  “For my peace of mind.”

She pursed her lips.  “You really aren’t here to do what I say, are you?”

Now the room was
really
quiet.  “No, ma’am.”

Colonel Yough nodded slowly.  “It’s a good thing you’re worth it, Petronaut.  Otherwise I might not like that.”

“Shall we, uh, take that walk?”  Lundin said, eager to move the conversation along.  Colonel Yough brushed her hands on her slacks as her senior officers gathered around her. “And while we’re going, I don’t see any harm in the team punching out some Enunciation disks for you.  Why don’t you, uh, give Martext your full name?”

Lundin turned towards the wall while Yough spoke to Martext, under pretense of tidying up the equipment.  He was glad for the excuse to be looking at bricks instead of faces as he tried to sort out exactly what had just happened between the Petronauts and the Army here at Campos.

He felt a hand between his shoulders.“‘You aren’t here to do what I say, are you?’” Dame Miri said in a husky approximation of Yough’s voice.  “‘No?’” He didn’t need to ask who the reedy second voice was supposed to be.

“What was I supposed to say?” he asked, putting disks back into their fabric sleeves with needless haste.

She turned him around.  He could see each individual blue-black hair as she brushed her fingertips across her forehead.  Her violet eyes looked really exceptional with Greatsight, he noticed as dispassionately as he could manage.

“Exactly what needed saying.”  She grinned at him.  “Dionne would be proud of you.”

He exhaled, feeling a knot in his chest loosen.

“Now don’t just stand there,” she said, shifting gears.  “Seal the deal, before she kicks us into the woods.”

“Yes, senior ‘naut,” he said, bobbing his head obsequiously.  She stifled a laugh as he followed the Colonel and her entourage into the hallway.

Chapter Six

Two Sermons

Columbine stopped.

The northwest gate of Two Forks was a few hundred meters away.  The tips of the stockade almost shone in the sun, cones of honey-colored wood at the points of dark brown trunks.  Families and horses crowded the dirty road in front of her as the villagers filed back to their homes.  The scouts had swept through the town and the forest around it for a kilometer and a half, they said.  For what it was worth, there was no sign of the Delians anywhere, and there was no evidence that they planned to come back for the wreckage of their flying machine or anything else.  Nobody bothered to mention that there’d been no evidence they’d planned to show up in the first place.  After their ordeals and two uncomfortable nights camping in the upper fields, the people of Two Forks were ready to get back to their lives as best they could.

I want to get back to my life, too
, Columbine thought.  But there was no way to.

“What’s wrong?”

It was Errol.  Columbine squinted back at the pasty little boy, just a few years older than her.  She didn’t have anything to say.

He scratched his scalp vigorously, like a dog.  Dust filled the air.  “Come on,” he said.  “We’re home.”  He strode forward down the road.  She made herself follow him.

The wooden gate cast a shadow on her as she walked underneath it, and then she was inside the stockade.  Columbine found herself lightheaded, and let out a big blast of air.  She hadn’t realized she’d been holding her breath.  There, down the path, just in front of the northern door to the cooking house, was where Ariell’s body had hit the ground.  An old man with steely red hair had stopped his horse just next to that spot, looking around with bulging, tearful eyes for his own fallen someone.  Columbine craned her neck.  Ariell’s body wasn’t there anymore.

There were craters in the ground.  There were huts with broken roofs.  There were bullet holes in every wall, it seemed like.  There were rows and rows of trampled crops, and even the rows that weren’t crushed were bristling with weeds and swarming with bead beetles.  Amazing what just a few days away could mean.

At the eastern edge of the creekside, people were congregating.  Ms. Pauma, on her horse, and the town spheric (whose name she could never remember) were facing the crowd.  Columbine made her way towards them.  As she moved through the crowd, other kids looked at her with wet, uncertain eyes and stepped aside.  Adults who noticed her might put a hand on her shoulder or mutter a conciliatory word or two.  She tried to ignore all of it as she pressed on towards the water.

“—full of things we can never understand,” the holy man was saying.  He has a nice, deep voice at odds with his sallow complexion and his buck-toothed face.  But people didn’t care how he looked, now.  They were just letting his words wash over them.  Columbine kept pushing forward.

“Why did they come?  Why now?  What does it mean for our future?  Is there something we could have done differently, to avoid this tragic loss of life?”

A tall farmer in the front row noticed her and pulled her in front of him, kindly, holding her hands up above her shoulders.  She found her balance standing on his shoes, the back of her head about level with the bottom of his rib cage.  Through the crowd at last, Columbine saw the bodies at the spheric’s feet.  There were four people lying there at the creekside, their arms crossed over their chests, but the only one that mattered to her was Ariell.

The spheric raised one hand to the sky and pointed the other at the dead.  “All these questions sicken the soul,” he said.  “We can ask them, scream them out until our voices stop.  But here’s the truth.  We can never know why the Spheres moved us to this point.

“All we can do now is to keep moving…and to forgive.”

There was an audible intake of breath from several places in the crowd.  Below her, the tall farmer shuffled his feet.

“The Spheres move, and so do we,” the man said, a little louder.  “If we keep hate in our hearts for the people who wrong us, we’re saying we hate the world itself, and the eight Spheres beyond.  To forgive the Delians is to start the process of healing—”

“Is he crazy?”

“Moving on?  With our dead right there…?”

“Too soon!”  The crowd of two dozen was stirring, their voices turning sour.  More villagers were filling in at the back, drawn by the noise.  High up on her horse, Pauma gestured for them to settle down, though she was looking a little askance at the spheric herself.  He had both palms raised up to the crowd.

“I know it’s hard to forgive—”

“Damn right!”

He swallowed.  “Threnody 31, ‘Along the Splendid Trails,’” he called out, a little desperately.  There was a new uproar from portions of the crowd, even as some joined Pauma and the spheric in singing.

“I feel my footsteps take me

Along the Splendid Trails

 The sound of strife grows distant—”

“Bunch of wishy-washies,” the farmer above her growled under his breath.  She felt his hands tighten against her palms, probably more than he realized.

“The pain on Earth it pales

I’m climbing to the Spheres now—”

“Kill the pretenders!”

“Never again!”

“The world I leave behind

The journey’s long but shed no tears

I walk the path divine”

There was grumbling and shoving behind her as people in the crowd pushed their way out, disgusted.  The people who wanted to sing pressed closer as they left.  Columbine heard the dull voices in the summer air and looked down at her sister’s pale body.  The blood had crusted over on her chest, and the edges of her mouth looked wrong, rotting.  Ariell wasn’t walking any splendid trails.  Ariell was dead.