The Mask And The Master (Mechanized Wizardry Book 2) (48 page)

The stone floor was uneven against his back.  Lundin blinked, seeing the orange shadows Iimar’s candles cast against the ceiling.

His realized his hands were pressing into his neck, and his legs were curled up most of the way to his chest.  Slowly, he let his legs extend, and touched his fingers to his face, his thigh, his back.  No cuts.  No pain.

Elia was covering her mouth with both hands, and her eyes filled the rest of her face.  Martext looked as ashen as he had at the start of their bumpy forest ride.  Lundin turned his head.  Iimar the Enchanter was gazing down at him, his hands down at his sides.  From how they were all standing, no more than a few seconds must have passed.

“To continue as my colleagues,” Iimar said, conversationally, looking over to the techs, “I only ask you for three things: diligence, courtesy, and cooperation.  If offering these things willingly is beyond you, my Petronauts, do not fret.

“It is just as easy for me to be your overlord.”

He drew himself up to his full height and locked eyes with Elia.  “Would you prefer that?”

“No, Enchanter,” Elia said, her voice catching.

Iimar held Martext’s gaze for a long time.  “And you?”

Martext dipped his head, just enough to be visible.  His eyes were smoldering inside his glasses.  “No,” he whispered.

“Marvelous!” Iimar said heartily.  “Then, colleagues, please get your tablets at the ready, and let us begin.  Mister Lundin, feel free to begin taking notes whenever the spirits move you.”

“What,” Lundin said as Iimar helped him to his feet.  His voice didn’t seem to work as well as it used to. 
What did you do to me?
he thought, foggily, as the wizard set him down outside the sand and he sank back down to the stones.

“You know better than I whatever you just experienced, Mister Lundin,” Iimar said over his shoulder, returning to the pedestal of masks.  Martext crouched next to Lundin, helping him to a sitting position.  Elia came over to him too, carrying his tablet and stylus.  With only a little difficulty, he wrapped his hands around the tools.

“With a hint of prompting, our own minds can torture us more cunningly than the cruelest sadist.  A trifling secret for an Enchanter of my stature, by the way, and one I can employ on any of you at any time.

“Shall we begin?” Iimar said, raising his arms.  The three Petronauts looked at each other.  Taking in a deep breath, they touched their styluses to their tablets.

Lundin coughed into his sleeve.  “What word did you have there?”

“‘
M’listo
,’” Elia said, tapping a fingertip against her tablet.

“See, I heard ‘
malinto
.’  And neither one makes sense to me.” He pushed himself out of the cot, pacing over to the tray of picked-over bread and beef on the table by their cell door.  There was almost no starlight from the window far above.  The only light in the room was from the candlestick Elia was holding, illuminating her wavy hair and the coarse shirt Torvald’s people had given her to change into.  They’d been allowed to keep their dress finery, at least.  For a laugh, they’d neatly folded their torn, muddied clothes and stacked them against the back wall. 
A washboard and a hot iron, and we’d be fit for a ball
, Lundin thought, chewing on a scrap of dry beef.

“If only—”  he stopped to swallow—  “if only we had those scrolls of his, to cross-reference what we think we heard with what’s there on the page, and the Old Harutian workbooks to beef up our vocabularies.  I’m sure there’s a whole phraseology exclusive to enchanting that we’ve never—”

“I cannot believe you,” Martext said, his first words in hours.  Lundin blinked and cleared his throat.

“Me?”

“Yes, you!  Horace Lundin! I cannot believe
you
,” he spat, rising to his feet by the corner chair.  “I cannot flaming believe that you’re doing this.”

“Doing what?”

“This
work
!  You’re making poor Elia stay up by candlelight so you can work for this firebound wizard!  Spheres, Lundin!  Do you want us to have disks pressed for him by the morning?”

“Martext,” Elia said, her eyes wide.

“Burn it!  Why don’t we build him a new spell box right now?  We’ve got everything we need!  Chop up the beds for wood!  Use the platter for scrap metal!  I’m sure if we’re
diligent
enough, we can show our new colleague how cooperative we are!”

Elia set the candlestick on the floor.  Shadows passed eerily through the room as she raised a hand.  “Why don’t we—”

“Were you listening to that bastard at all, Lundin?”  Martext’s voice was choked with emotion.  “If we give these people a working spell box, every one of their grunts is going to be wearing magic from head to toe.  And—burn me!—imagine their ‘nauts with enchanted suits!  Enchanted guns!  Can you—”

“Yeah, I can imagine it.”

“If they get a spell box, that means Delian soldiers: dead.  Delian citizens: dead.  Princess Naomi?  Who knows!  Am I wrong?”

“Who knows what they’re capable of—”

“Let’s not find out!” Martext threw his arms wide.  “I shouldn’t have to say that!  It should be a given that nobody in this room wants to find out what they’re capable of.  But when I see you puttering away at their problems, translating this word and that word, working to give them what they want?  What am I supposed to think?”

“What
do
you think?”  Lundin said, quietly.

“I think you’re a worse traitor than Willl.”

“Take that back, Martext,” Elia said.

“Burn you too, if you’re sticking up for him.  If you’re dumb enough to zero in on the job, like he is; to go into a little workshop bubble, and forget that there’s a world out there, and the junk we invent here is going to be used by the people who kidnapped us—”

“Horace took a spell for you today,” she shot back.  “All right?  You were stupid enough to make your snide little comments to a flaming wizard.  You’re flaming lucky Iimar didn’t take it out on you.  You should be praising the Spheres you didn’t have to go through what the senior tech—”

“You’re mad at me because of what a crazy wizard did?  Who’s the enemy here?”

“You antagonized him!”

“He’s the enemy!  What he did to Lundin proves it!”  He adjusted his glasses and tried to get his voice under control.  “These people will drain our brains and use us up.  They’re not our friends.  We have nothing to gain from working with them.  Every scrap of information we give them will be paid for in Delian lives.”

“If we don’t help them, they’ll kill us!”

“Then maybe they should kill us.”

Far off, down the hallway, they could hear a single pair of boots as a soldier walked patrol.  Each distant footstep hung just at the edge of hearing.  The rhythm stayed in their heads for several seconds after the steps went completely inaudible, leaving nothing but silence in their dark cell.

After half a dozen endless moments, Martext sighed heavily and sank back down into the creaky chair.  His face was completely obscured in the darkness.

“I want to resist them,” he said.  “I want to fight back.  But you heard Iimar today.  He can turn Overlord any time he wants, and take control of our minds, or something.  Maybe it’s a bluff.  I don’t know.  But I can’t help thinking that Delia’s better off the sooner we’re dead.”

Lundin tried to put his hands in his pockets, but his prison trousers didn’t have any.  He laced his fingers together and coughed, fighting a tickle in his throat.

“I disagree,” he said.

Martext leaned all the way back in his chair, the candlelight catching a wolfish smile just above his chin.  “Another of Horace Lundin’s world-famous pep talks,” he said, shaking his head.

“Martext—”

“I was about to get my own department.”

The technician looked up at the ceiling, the smile still touching his face.  “Dame Dionne was going to let me direct my own project.  ‘Miniaturization,’” he said, almost whispering.  “Figuring out how to get motors smaller.  Gears.  Belts.  Bulbs.  Lenses.  Vacuum tubes.  The kind of broad, varied, fundamental work that scatters seeds of innovation to dozens of projects; not just in the Civic annex, but across all the squads.  All across Delia.

“It was all worked out with her.  Six years of solid work, paying my dues, and she was ready to make me a senior tech.  On the track towards knighthood, even, running a basic research department like that.  ‘Sir Martext.’” He drummed his hands against his knees.  “‘Late Joon,’ she told me, ‘you start getting your team together.  One of the biggest workrooms in the annex is open; that’s where you’ll be.’”

“Our workroom,” Elia breathed.

“The mechanized wizardry workroom.”  Martext leaned forward again.

“Joon Thirteen, Dame Dionne tells me that there’s going to be a transfer to the Civics.  A Mister Horace Lundin has a project in tow, and Princess Naomi is amused by it.  ‘Something this Lundin guy invented, Dionne?’  ‘Well, as far as I can tell, his senior tech, Elena, probably did more than half on her own.  And they borrowed equipment from Dame Miri, the Feastday Hero.  But he definitely, probably, played a role in inventing it.’ ‘He must have been working on this project for a long time, huh?’ ‘Oh yeah, nearly three weeks.  Say, Martext, so sorry we can’t move forward on your department.  I’m going to need you to make life easy for Horace Lundin instead.  He’s going through a rough time, what with the Board of Governors firing him with cause from his old squad—’”

“Okay,” Lundin said, pleading.  He stared down at his hands.

Martext sighed.  “Look, Lundin.  It’s not like I hate you.  And, you know, I respect you more now than I did that first day.  You’re a decent thinker, you work hard, and I think you really are trying your best.  It’s just that...” he chuckled to himself.  “You had an idea that doesn’t belong to you.  You know?  Machines that cast spells.  A new world of magic!  It’s too big an idea; it’s too important to belong to someone like you.  You don’t have the brains or the personality to keep it under control.”

“Spheres, Martext!”

“I’m not saying I do,” he raised his hands towards Elia.  “Maybe no one does.  Maybe whoever came up with this idea was bound to get bounced across the world, and kidnapped, and tortured and murdered.  Maybe you never had a chance, Horace.  Your path was always going to lead you right here.”

Martext looked up at the ceiling again and leaned back, resting the crown of his head against the high-backed chair.

“All I’m saying is, I wish I weren’t here with you,” he said quietly, fatigue coloring his voice.

The candle was burning down.  The silence was unbearable.

Suddenly, Elia slammed her hands down into the mattress, two, three, four times.  The straw rustled and the cot’s old springs heaved up and down in rusty protest.  “Burn you, Martext,” she shouted.  “You think you’re the only one?”

“I’m sure I’m not,” Martext said, looking at her over his glasses.

“Damn right you’re not!  I don’t want to die; I don’t want to get interrogated; I don’t want my brain sucked out!  I never wanted to know secrets like this in the first place!  If I’d known, when Dame Dionne assigned me to this project…”

She took a deep, shuddering breath.  “I miss the workshop.  All I ever wanted was to do my part in the workshop.  Fix problems!  Make some money!  Look back at my life and say ‘I made that!’  I want my life back!” 

She ran to the door, wheeling wildly through the dark room.  She bashed the wooden planks with her fists, and kicked at their food hatch in the lower half of the door.

“You hear me?  I want my life back!  I don’t want wizards and soldiers and prisons!  I don’t deserve this!  I just want out!”

She gave the access panel a final kick with her heel.  The thin wood didn’t budge; it was hinged to open inside, not out.  Elia leaned heavily against the door on her shoulder, panting, her glasses askew.  There wasn’t a sound from the hallway outside.  Her breathing filled their cell.

“I hurt my hand,” she said in a small voice, massaging her palm with her thumb.

“Sorry,” Lundin said after a pause.

“S’okay.”

Lundin’s hands were sweating.  He wiped them against his pants and shifted his weight, his boots scuffing on the stone.

“I don’t want to die,” he said simply.  “And I don’t want either of you to die.  If we refuse to do anything with these people, they will kill us.  Or worse.  That’s why I think the best thing to do is to focus on the work; to learn everything we can from them—”

“Unbelievable,” Martext said, turning towards the wall.

“—to keep our brains alive, and our bodies.  And our spirits.  And here’s why,” he said, raising his hands before they could speak.  Lundin took a deep breath and looked into each of their shadowy faces.

“What if I told you that I was going to get you out of here?”

“I wouldn’t believe you,” Martext looked back at him, his face impassive.

Lundin looked to Elia.  She opened her mouth to say something, but gave Lundin a little pained shrug instead.  He nodded slowly.

“What if I told you,” he said, folding his hands in front of him, “that I was going to try?”

An owl cried in the forest outside, rounded and musical, like a one-note song on a wooden flute.  Elia adjusted her glasses.

“That I believe,” she whispered.

Martext said nothing.

Lundin lay on his back on the cot.  They’d blown the candle out long minutes ago, but he was pretty sure none of them was asleep.  They were sitting there in the dark, eyes wide open, staring at the ceiling from their beds, one on each wall.  The room stretched out between them; a wide gulf between three people, with nothing there to fill it.

Things said and unsaid echoed through his mind.  Martext, Kelley, Torvald, Tymon, Iimar, Ouste, Dionne, his parents, the Board of Governors; an endless army of people were arrayed against him, with an endless litany of complaints, chastisements, suggestions, directions, orders, insults, jabs and jibes.  The mental Lundin defended himself with fearless eloquence, the way the real-life Lundin never could.  But it was like digging into a mudslide with a teacup; every point scored was instantly buried by the overwhelming sense of disappointment from the figures around him.  To think, that a grown man with so little potential could create so much trouble for the people he loved and the city that sheltered him...  At a certain point, the other voices fell silent, and that whole army of figures from his past and present just stood, clustered around him, shaking their heads.  The only one left talking was the mental Lundin, whose increasingly desperate arguments and excuses only drew out a little silent pity in a handful of faces.