The Mask And The Master (Mechanized Wizardry Book 2) (37 page)

Lundin’s eyes drifted back to ground level.  The huge wolf-faced ‘naut and the smaller one with golden eyes were both looking at him, now.  The smaller one had a black hood in its hands.

He looked at Willl with three L’s, who was splayed out in a tangle of limbs, spitting into the grass.  The tech looked up at him, his gums bloody and his stupid blond bangs soaked with sweat.  Lundin blinked, and it seemed to take forever for his eyes to open again, the way Colonel Yough blinked.  An alchemical haze was taking over his vision.  “Willl,” he said, not sure if his voice was carrying or not.  “How could you do this?”

Willl with three L’s shrugged, his eyes looking big and sad through his trapezoidal glasses.  “You don’t know me very well,” he said simply.

Then the Petronaut slipped the hood over his head, and everything went black.

Chapter Ten

Captives

“Agh.”

That was all Lundin could manage as his eyes got their first glimpse of light again.  He squeezed them closed, pressing his fingers against his eyelids.  He took in a deep breath and coughed.  The hood had been removed, but his face was still damp from the poison-soaked fabric.   The stench on his skin nearly made him pass out again.  He smeared his hands against his face and wiped them on his pants, trying to get the last bits of moisture away from his nose. 

He opened his eyes a crack again.  Trees.  Bushes.  Soft, loamy ground below him.  He was in the Tarmic Woods.  But where?  How far from Campos?  The sun was gone, leaving the far-off fuzzy moons to provide as much light as they deigned to.  But there was no way to know if they were in the dead of night now, or just half-an-hour past sundown.  How far could he have traveled; and, for that matter, how had he gotten—

“Up.”

A metal hand grabbed him under the armpit and lifted him to his feet.  He staggered, his head whirling like he was on the least fun drunken bender in history.  Lundin shied away from the golden-eyed wolf looming over his shoulder.  The hand on his arm tightened painfully.  The eyes next to him were very bright.

“Who are you?” Lundin croaked.

The ‘naut didn’t say anything else as it spun him around.  Lundin suddenly realized how much pain he was in.  His back and shoulders were throbbing from what felt like a thousand different blows, and his chest was scraped and raw.  He looked down at himself and saw a criss-crossed pattern smoldering red against his neck and sternum, where the undershirt’s neckline had left his skin exposed. 
What in the world…? 
Then he caught a glimpse of the huge ‘naut’s back.  Attached at the pauldrons and the hips was a sort of black webbing, hanging loosely like a bunched-up net.  The webbing was arrayed in a series of X’s; the same criss-crossed pattern that was rubbed raw into his skin. 
You carried me here
, Lundin realized, looking up at the armored face. 
How far can you possibly have taken me?

His heart skipped a beat as he caught sight of a bit of good news.  “Elia,” he cried out, his voice pathetically thin.  There she was in the shadows, shoeless, her yellow dress rumpled and torn.  But the tech was on her feet, however woozily, as a masked female figure in reddish leathers led her by the arm.  And there was Martext, too, with a bandage around his hip, looking a little ashen.  One of the thrust-pack Petronauts was helping him hobble towards their mutual destination. 

Lundin took in the vehicle as best he could, still blinking and teary-eyed.  It was a boxy, snub-nosed thing bigger than a carriage, maybe four meters long, and plated on all sides with a dingy golden metal.  But instead of carriage wheels, it had great thick treads, their plates wrapped around a dazzling array of gears.  He’d never seen a treaded vehicle personally, but the Hauler squad swore by them for getting cargo over rough terrain. 
Tonight, I guess we’re the cargo
.

“Horace,” Elia said, swinging towards him.  “Thank Spheres.  Martext; he...”  She touched her stomach at the same place where Martext was bandaged, unable to say anything more.  Her head lolled down, her tangled hair spilling past her shoulders as the woman dragged her to the vehicle.

“You can’t do this,” Lundin said, pulling against his captor’s arm.  The woman had opened up a door and stuffed Elia inside the vehicle, out of sight.  “You can’t just take people out of the fort.  Colonel Yough will find us.”

The ‘naut just held him, silently, as Martext was tossed into the cargo cart.  As the wolf-headed ‘naut led him to the door, Lundin caught a glimpse of Willl with three L’s standing at a distance, his arms crossed over his chest.  His trapezoidal glasses were askew and his lip was swollen.  He was also decked out in chunky metal-plated boots that had to be seven-leaguers; a pair Lundin had never seen before.  A pair Willl Wythernsson’s friends must have brought especially for him.

Lundin kept his eyes locked on the blond man’s face for as long as he could, looking for any hint of apology, or explanation, or ill-feeling.  But Willl with three L’s just stood there, oddly resigned, as the huge ‘naut shoved Lundin into the golden vehicle and slammed the door.

It was black inside.  A twelve-by-twelve centimeter grating in the ceiling let in a thin, fickle column of moonlight.  There was nothing inside the dark cube except for the three of them; no boxes, or benches, or features of any kind.  Elia was slumped in a corner, mumbling something.  Martext was curled up on the floor, breathing shallowly.  Lundin stayed hunched over on his feet and scanned the walls.  They were blank, except for the barely visible outlines of the two square doors through which they’d been tossed.  Tiny lines of ghostly light crept in from the woods and drew a box around each door.

As he traced a finger along the seam, the door panel shifted and pinched the fleshy pad of his fingerprint.  Lundin grimaced and clutched his finger with his other hand as there was a loud clattering from outside, about halfway up the height of the door.  The metallic banging was followed by a clean, clicking sound.  The same sort of noises repeated on Elia’s side of the box a moment later. 
Locked in
, he thought.  Lundin pushed against the center of the door panel, and it barely budged before catching against something unyielding.  Sure enough, this was a cage.

“—due east, before they fell,” came a voice from outside.  Lundin pressed his ear against the door gently, trying not to rattle the lock again.  “I’ll scout for her; unless you need help with these ones?”

The next voice chuckled, more in acknowledgment that a joke had been offered than out of genuine good humor. 
The ‘nauts
.   It was the same deep voice he’d heard from the wolf-headed one.  “Bring the Delian back too, when you find her.”

“We’ll see.”

 “If I can carry two bodies through the woods, so can you.”

“If I had your suit, I could carry anything too.”

There was a thrumming sound ahead of them and the dark box shook.  An engine had jumped into life.  “Are you staying with me, Ulstead?” a third voice, a woman’s, shouted from ahead of him over the mechanical noise. 

“All the way,” the deep voice—Ulstead—said.  There was a shuffling of feet outside.  “Happy hunting.”  The female ‘naut, the one in the oval mask, said something back to the wolf-faced ‘naut, but Lundin couldn’t make it out.

The door on Lundin’s side lurched suddenly, and he shrank back.  He watched the panel for several long, nervous seconds before the door on the other side lurched in the same way. 
Testing the locks?
  Then something heavy—an armored fist, or the butt of a weapon—thumped twice against their cage around head height.  The engine’s rumble rose higher in volume and pitch, and the vehicle shuddered forward along the forest floor.  Lundin stumbled backwards into the rear wall, clocking his tailbone on the wood.  He stayed braced there, bent double, absolutely at a loss for what to do next.

Martext groaned in pain.  Lundin sank awkwardly to his knees and shuffled close to the tech.  “Hey there, Martext.  Are you all right?”

“Are we moving?”

“Yeah.  We’re in some kind of cargo treader, out in the woods.  Does it—are you hurt?”

Martext looked up at him, his eyes narrowing.  “Yes,” he said. 

Lundin nodded, his eyes drifting to the carpet of white bandage along Martext’s left hip.  “Yes,” he repeated.  “Did you, uh—”

“A metal splinter from when the gate blew up,” Elia said, her voice sounding hoarse.  She massaged her head with one hand.  “Pretty long…”

Lundin pointed up front, to where the driver had to be sitting.  “So they patched you up?”

“All I know is it wasn’t me.”

“Well, it wasn’t either of us.  So unless some kindly wolf cubs took you in, it must have been them,” Lundin said, scratching his knee.  A nasty bump almost sent him sprawling, and made Martext close his eyes.

“I can’t believe this,” Elia said, curled up in the corner.

“Well, hey.  Look.  They don’t want to kill us, or they wouldn’t have bandaged up Martext.  I think they’re even going to look for Dame Miri, to bring her in alive too.  You probably didn’t see Miri fly off with a ‘naut on a thrust pack, off Campos’ walls into the woods.”

“So she’s alive?”

Lundin thought back to frighteningly fast flight he saw, and the black exhaust from the thrusters drifting on the breeze.  “I sure hope so.”

Martext pressed his forehead into the floor panel.  The vibrations made his long hair shake.  “If she’s dead, there’s no way any of
us
are surviving this,” he said.

Lundin sat back on his ankles.  His right suspender was still unattached, flopping against his stomach with every bump they traversed.  He fastened it back to his hopelessly muddied pants, trying not to notice the smears of blood on the miniature teeth.  Something had to be said; the conversation couldn’t fizzle out on a sentiment like that.  But he was damned if he knew how to fill the space.

“We’ll come through this,” he began, not knowing what the next words would be until they came out.  “Let’s just.  We just have to stay positive, and take care of—”

“Horace,” Martext cut in.  “Please don’t try.”

Lundin’s words stopped, but his mouth stayed open.  Martext rolled over onto his back, pressing his hand to his side.  His eyes were squeezed shut.  “Talk as much as you want, later,” he said.  “For now, just don’t.”

Lundin nodded, not that Martext could see him.  He scooted back with his long legs and pressed his back against the rear wall.  Elia’s head was bouncing between her knees as she slept.  Martext was making his chest rise and fall with regular breaths, clearly willing himself into sleep too.  They had absolutely no need of him right now. 
Do they ever? 
he wondered. 

I’m not supposed to be the one giving orders and making speeches.  And when there’s a crisis, I want somebody else to look to; I don’t want people looking to me. 
That worked, at least, since his people didn’t seem to want to look to him anyway.  Martext had just made it abundantly clear that he had no interest in treating him like a leader right now.  However professionally the tech tolerated his orders in the workshop, he apparently wasn’t going to extend the same courtesy at a time like this.

Well, so, what am I supposed to do?  Force him to listen to my babbling and tell me how much better he feels?  I don’t want my ego stroked. 
He pulled his legs in closer, giving the resting techs more room in the cramped box. 
No,
he realized. 
I just want to be able to make them feel better.

Maybe thinking about other leaders would give him ideas. 
What would Sir Kelley do? 
He immediately revised the question. 
What would Sir Mathias do?  What would Dame Miri do, to restore the team’s spirits and go about the business of escaping? 
Lundin sorted through assorted visuals in his head.  All of them involving a combination of coherent speeches and competent fighting.  He felt the divots in his scalp from Willl with three L’s’ teeth and winced.  Lundin wasn’t feeling so hot about his abilities on either score right now. 

He ran his hands along his dress pants and watched the Civics drifting into sleep.  There was no way he was sleeping; not with so many questions going through his head.  Who were these people who’d captured them?  Why was Willl with three L’s working with them?   And what was he supposed to make of the inescapable conclusion that whoever these strange ‘nauts were, they had launched a multi-front attack on a well-garrisoned Delian fort for the express purpose of kidnapping
them
? 

“Spheres alive,” he whispered, his hands starting to tremble.  It had to be about the mechanized wizardry project.  It was the only really important thing he’d ever worked on.  But only a handful of people knew that the project existed, and an even smaller fraction knew it had any potential.  It felt a little egoistic to think that their kidnappers were actually interested in the technology themselves.  Maybe these maniacs were led by a surly wizard who heard about the demonstration back at Civic Central, and wanted to make sure the research never went beyond the mad-dog stage.  But why pick a fight with Delia’s Army to do that?

There had to be something more to the attack than just creating a diversion for their capture. 
Come to think of it, maybe there was.  When we got snatched out of the courtyard, Colonel Yough’s troops were just rushing out into the Tarmic.  By now, maybe Campos is a smoldering ruin and we’re all prisoners of war, being herded to a mossy forest dungeon. 
It was maddening not to know what was happening to Dame Miri, to Yough, to Farmingham, even to Willl with three L’s.

Lundin knew himself.  In the absence of any actual information, his brain would just keep spinning in circles until it made him seasick.

The box tilted down and jolted up again as the vehicle navigated what felt like a deep ditch.  The back of Lundin’s skull knocked against the rear wall, and he stifled an unmanly noise.  Elia stirred and opened her eyes.  She caught sight of Lundin.  He made himself smile, ignoring the ache in his head.