The Mask And The Master (Mechanized Wizardry Book 2) (45 page)

“Mister Lundin, this is Iimar the Enchanter, my chief magician.  I think,” Torvald said, his blue eyes bright as he clapped his hands together, “that we have a great deal to talk about.”

Chapter Fourteen

Columbine’s Army

Aaren Quinn looked up as the footsteps approached.  The naturalist hadn’t paid much attention to the passing sounds in the Tarmic woods; not with such a delightful specimen of
Stycherus Flabellatos
to investigate. The fern’s dark leaves were slightly sticky through his gloved fingers.  It was a wonderful find so early into their sabbatical, and his partner, professor Joan Mannoy, was only a few meters away examining for signs of complementary insect life.  He had attributed any background rustling to her. 
Clearly, an error
, he thought, lifting himself to his feet.

“Hail,” the lead woman said, in a rustic accent and a deeply suspicious tone.  There were more than a dozen men and women behind her, in the garb of workaday wood folk.  An unusual number of clubs and knives were on display, either at their belts or openly in their hands, held low against their sides.  A midling in the rear was carrying a banner too, curled over itself in the windless clearing.  Its folds obscured whatever the design may have been.

Aaren cleared his throat and exchanged a quick look with Joan.  She dusted her hands on her breeches and shrugged surreptitiously.  “To you as well.  Safe travels,” Aaren said to the band, bowing his head.

“Are you Delians?”

“Yes,” Aaren said, frowning.

“What makes you think you can come this far north?” a man demanded.

“…I don’t understand—”

“You people go wherever you want.  You take whatever you want,” The lead woman said, taking a step forward.  The mob behind her muttered sullen assent, and a few more hands went to their knives.

“Hold on, hold on,” Joan said, standing.  She brushed a coil of gray-streaked hair away from her face.  “I’m professor Joan Malloy, and this is Aaren Quinn.  We’re naturalists, simply investigating—”

“‘Investigating?’”

“Spies!”

“We’re not spies,” Aaren said, unable to contain a derisive snort.  He picked up the black satchel at his feet, showing them the array of tongs, vials, and silk pouches they’d brought to catalogue sylvan specimens.  “We’re studying—”

A rock flew at him from the midst of the group.  He barely raised the satchel in time to block the missile, flinching at the sound of shattering glass.  His eyes widened, and he stumbled backwards.  Joan was backpedaling slowly, too, fumbling for the brass whistle at her waist.  The hope was that if something bad happened to them, the whistle would call the nearest people to their assistance. 
But if the nearest people are the ones in front of us now...

  “Get out of here,” an irate voice screeched.

“We have every right to be here,” the protest rose out of his mouth automatically.

The woman in front wrapped both hands around her club.  “Not anymore.”

As the mob dashed towards them, the boy in the back raised his banner high above his shoulders.  The handspun flag flapped open.  A blue-purple flower was embroidered on the banner, with a central trumpet set off by five more petals arrayed like the points of a star, with little hooked spurs at the end of each outer petal.

Aquelegia Ulpina
, he thought in that frozen moment. 
The
Columbine flower.  But why—

 
The question filled his head as their knives flashed.

“Halt!”

Dame Orinoco’s amplified voice filtered through the steady rumbling of the Golden Caravan’s motor.  “Easier said than done,” Samanthi muttered, taking her hands off the steering wheel and snagging a handbrake in each palm. 

“The footbrake, too,” Zig said, at her back.  He was resting his hands on the headrest of the sticky leather seat.  The low ceiling in the control room of this thing meant he had no chance of standing up straight, so he was hunched awkwardly behind her shoulders.  She could feel his breath on her hair.  Samanthi squeezed the metal brakes with both hands and kept her foot hovering over the clutch.

“You heard the Golden techs back there,” she said.  “The footbrake is useless.”

“That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use it.”

“Then tell me, Zig, what
does
it mean when something is useless?”

“Just trying to help,” he said, affronted, raising his hands.

I stalled out once with this burning clutch, and you’ve been trying to
help
ever since.  Never mind that you played lumberjack during your drive.
 Dame Orinoco had been less than pleased when Zig had almost knocked a tree on her head.  Samanthi wiggled on the uncomfortable seat, scooting herself forward and curling her arms around the controls protectively. 
Get your own
, she mentally snapped at Zig.

Slowly, with a screeching of gears, the Golden Caravan was coming to a stop.  It was pretty miraculous that the thing hadn’t died kilometers ago, given what a mammoth engine it had and how far the Golden crew had already travelled before they met up with Delia’s finest.  If the crew was to believed, they’d already taken a winding path seventy kilometers long to get to this point, travelling west from their base on their mission of charity, and looping back around east towards home.  The vehicle showed no signs of running dry, either.  The Golden Caravan had to have access to quite a good ‘tum refinery to eke this kind of efficiency out of their fuel. 
One more thing about them that makes me nervous.

“Why’d she call the halt, I wonder,” Zig mused.

Samanthi shrugged, her hands firmly locked against the brakes.  She leaned forward to peer out the front hatch.  “Burn me,” she said, recoiling as Sir Mathias’s dark helmet appeared centimeters from her nose.

“You okay?” the ‘naut said, flipping up his visor.  His brown eyes were about all she could see of him through the twisted hatch.

“Will you knock next time or something?” her heart was pounding.  “What’s going on out there?”

Noisy boots pounded on the floor behind her.  Sir Kelley squeezed his way past Zig to fit into the control room as well.  The red-headed tech raised his long arms up by his ears, trying to get them out of the senior ‘naut’s way.  Kelley paid absolutely no attention to him.  “Did I hear a halt?”

“Yes sir.  We’re coming over the last hill to the logging camp, and things aren’t looking right.  There’s an awful lot of smoke.”

“Smoke?”

“From a number of the buildings.”

They were all silent for a moment.  Outside, Mathias stifled a cough; standing next to the Caravan meant an awful lot of unpleasant fumes rushed into your lungs. 
Almost as many as when you’re driving the thing.

“Nauts are prepared to advance, Sir Kelley, with platoons in support.  Do you think this hulk should stay put or get ready to run?”  He drummed his hand on the metal hull, and the banging reverberated mightily through the control room.

“Find out what’s going on in the camp, and you tell me,” Sir Kelley said.  “I’m still in discussions with our Golden friends, and we were just starting to make headway.”  He turned and stalked back to the rear of the vehicle, where the prisoners were trussed up with a pair of musketeers in guard.

“Zig can wind up the Communicator,” Samanthi said.  “Call it in once you know what’s happening.”

“You said the buildings were smoking?  Like they’d been on fire?”  Zig said, leaning closer to the hatch.

“Could be.  Let’s hope someone just got over-enthusiastic in the mess hall, huh?”

“Be careful,” Samanthi said.  Sir Mathias flipped down his visor, flicked his index finger away from his forehead in a little salute, and vanished from her tiny square to the outside world.  Zig fumbled his way out of the room and started rummaging among their gear for the Communicator.  “You be careful too, butterfingers,” she shouted over her shoulder, leaning back in the chair.  It was just as well she couldn’t make out exactly what he said in response.

She pressed down on the clutch cautiously and shifted to neutral.  The tracks shuddered, and she eased up on the handbrakes, no longer feeling like she was holding a pack of foxhounds at the end of a leash.  Her brown eyes were a little troubled as she poked her head forward.  Sure enough, there were trails of smoke lifting up into the sky from the friendly camp below.

“Spheres,” one of the musketeers said under his breath, struggling with his powder as Mathias swept by.  There was a flutter of unsettled movement making its way through the lines of soldiers, which the sergeants were doing their best to stamp out with cajoling and chastisements.  But the disciplinarians were just as blindsided as everyone else at the sight of their base camp, their oasis in the distant northeast Tarmic, with columns of billowy black smoke rising from the familiar buildings.

“With me,” Dame Orinoco said as Mathias met up with the cluster of ‘nauts, a dozen paces away from the frontmost musketeers.  Dame Gaulda flicked her gun barrels clean, and Dame Julie drew her sabre. “Sir Kelley is keeping a eye on the prisoners?” 

“I can call in to the Caravan when we find out what this mess is.”  Mathias reported, pointing downhill with his head.

“Forward, then.”

The two lean Cavaliers rushed forward, with Sir Mathias and Dame Gaulda dogging their heels in a loose formation.  There was no outward sign of fatigue in the Shock Trooper’s strides.  How she could keep pushing herself like this was a mystery to Mathias.  It was bound to take its toll eventually, but light-handed as they were with Xiaoden and Iggy gone, and with Dame Gaulda so determined to continue pulling her weight, it was hard for Orinoco and Kelley to order the Shock Trooper to stand down and recuperate.  
Woman must have ‘tum running through her veins.
  They pressed through the trees at nearly full speed as the platoons gathered into formations increasingly far behind them.  The tree cover grew thinner, and they got their first clear view of the beleaguered camp.

The longhouse where the ‘nauts had been staying was a smoldering ruin.  The cooking house was covered in scorch marks, with a gaping hole in the roof.  The other three smaller buildings in the camp had just as much evidence of ill-treatment.  Much more troubling, there wasn’t a red-blooded Delian soul in sight; not even logsmen watching the river, hooks in hand.

“Spheres,” Mathias heard himself say, his head swirling with questions. 
What happened here?

It was two days ago they’d tracked down and captured the Caravan.  Their three prisoners—the two cringing techs who’d been inside the vehicle, and one of the brown-masked soldiers who’d been guarding them— had been cagey with information but seemed thoroughly cowed.  There was no sense of a grand counter-attack in the works, or any hint of transmissions being sent to other masked bastards in the trees.  With Sir Kelley personally monitoring them for nearly two days, Mathias felt as confident as possible that they hadn’t managed to sneak any messages out. 
And even if they were somehow able to call for reinforcements, wouldn’t they want their troops to attack us
in the field?  Why go for our camp—our theoretically secret camp? Unless—

“Do you see any hostiles?”  Dame Gaulda said.  She’d just had the same thought. 
Maybe this place isn’t deserted at all; maybe they lit the buildings up to make us nervous and draw us in for an ambush. 

“Nothing yet,” said Dame Julie, sweeping the grounds with her visor.  Sir Mathias had his gun barrel at chest level, scanning for signs of—

“East house!” Julie snapped out, her clear voice shattering through the air.  The ‘nauts shifted their attention, swords and guns at the ready.  A figure had emerged from the damaged building, raising one hand high.

“Friend!  Friend!”

The newcomer was approaching the ‘nauts.  Sir Mathias lowered his arm slightly, sidling to the right.  The four ‘nauts made a silent box around the figure, their eyes flicking out to the buildings and the forest beyond even as the logger came forward.  He recognized the woman.  She was an experienced older hand at the camp whose name he couldn’t remember, with a serious face and quick hands for raft-building.  She was smudged with soot and bruises, and one of her sleeves was torn.

“Thank the Spheres it’s you,” she said.  “When we heard the noises we thought for sure it was another bunch of locals.”

“Locals?  What do you mean?”  Dame Orinoco asked.

“We got hit by a party of idiot wood folk, who saw a Delian flag and came storming up with axes to grind,” she said, spitting into the grass.  “They said we worked for some ‘pretenders,’ whatever that means.  They said we weren’t welcome here.  And when the boss told them
they
weren’t welcome here, on private property, legally acquired, they went crazy.  Torches popped up; swords and bows flew out.  We were completely blind-sided.  We’ve never seen that kind of aggression out here.”

Regular forest folk, getting aggressive for no reason… Two Forks all over again,
Mathias thought grimly.

“A bunch of bandits, was it?” he said, flipping up his visor.

“No, no,” the logger said, shaking her head.  “Just some yokels and trappers and farmers.  Common people, you know?  They’ve lost their minds.  There were too many to fight, and we didn’t have weapons at hand anyway.  Boss called a retreat to somewhere we could defend.  He got hit with a crossbow bolt before we made our way into the cellar, but he’s still alive.  We lost a few others.  I think they got carried off.  I don’t see bodies here, anyways.  Spheres, I hope they’re all right!”

“So some rustics up here, spouting anti-Delian rhetoric,” Dame Orinoco said.  “They made insane demands, and when you tried to find out why, they got furious and started fighting?”

“That’s about the speed of it.”

“Any strange weapons?”  Dame Julie asked.  “Or masks?”

“Yeah, a few brown masks.  Different styles.  Some painted, some just bare wood.  But they all had bright yellow eyes.”  She shuddered.  “That’s Golden Caravan gear, isn’t it?”