The Mask And The Master (Mechanized Wizardry Book 2) (52 page)

He heard a creak of wood, followed by the rustling of straw and the arthritic bending of old springs.  Lundin sighed.  The others were clearly awake, which meant he had no excuse to be lounging around.  He opened his eyes and sat up, swinging his legs over the side of the cot.  He scratched an itch between his shoulder blades.  Sure enough, there was Martext, curled up in the corner chair with his notes; and there was Elia, on her back on the bed with her tablet resting against her knees—

Lundin closed his eyes.  He opened them again, as wide as he could.  He could see the two techs as plainly as before, with all their minute movements and the rhythm of their breathing; except he wasn’t looking at them anymore.  He was looking at the door, keeping them far in his perpiphery.

“Joining us?”  Martext said, sourly.

“Elia,” Lundin said, his heart thumping in his chest.  “Pick a number between one and ten and hold up that many fingers.”

“What?”

Lundin swung his hand in a hurry-up gesture.  He kept staring fixedly at the door.  Perpendicular to him, Elia frowned, swung herself to the edge of the bed (left leg first, then right), pulled a lock of hair away from her glasses, and held up a hand.

“Four.”

Her lips parted slightly, and her pupils enlarged.  “New number!  Change!”  he said.  Martext sat up in his chair as Elia fumbled with her hands.

“One.  Five.  One—you can use the other hand too, you know.  Ten.”

“But you’re not even looking at me,” she whispered, awed.

“Burn me whole.  Burn me!  Burn
you
!” Martext leapt to his feet, tossing his notes in the chair.  He rushed over to Lundin’s cot, pressing a hand against his injured side. 
Probably pulled something in that first stride, when he extended his leg too far
, Lundin thought, watching him come.

“Lundin,” Martext hissed.  “You’ve got Greatsight.”

“I’ve got Greatsight.”

“How did you get Greatsight?”

“Who gave you Greatsight?” Elia said, dashing over to Martext’s shoulder.

“I don’t know.  I don’t know,” he said, grinning.  A fit of the giggles struck him for no good reason.

“Quiet, quiet,” Martext said, putting a hand on his shoulder and stifling a smile.  He looked towards the door.  “We don’t want to make the guards suspicious.”

“At least I’ll see them coming,” Lundin said, his eyes streaming.  Elia put her hands over her mouth.

“Okay.  Seriously, senior tech,” she said a moment later, wiping her eyes, “who could have done this?”

“Iimar?  That wouldn’t make any sense,” Martext thought aloud.

“This feels exactly like back at Campos,” Lundin said.  “This is our version of Greatsight.  This is our spell.”

“So… who…?” Martext couldn’t bring himself to say what they were all thinking.

“Dame Miri,” Elia squealed.  She craned her neck uselessly to look towards the windows.  “It’s got to be her!  And if she came all this way, she’s got to have help, right?”

“Colonel Yough wouldn’t have sent her out alone.”

“Praise the Spheres, she brought help!  But why would she bring a spell box out all this way?”

“All right.  We have a good guess on the ‘who.’  No idea on the ‘how,’” Lundin said, pressing himself back against the wall.  It was a little terrifying to have their two faces, with pores and lashes and eyes and nostrils and mouths, so close to his.  “What we’ve got to figure out is
why
.”

“Right.  What is it she wants you to see?”  Martext stepped to the far side of the room, trying to get a better view of the windows from a distance.

“Does she want me to see anything?  Or is casting a spell the only way she’s got of reaching out to us?”

“Like a radio signal beaming just to you, from up to fifteen kilometers away...!”

“And she picked Greatsight because she knew it’d let us identify her immediately.  And ‘cause she knew it works.”

“Okay, so it’s a signal.  What does it mean?”

“‘Hold tight?’”

“‘We’re coming in?’”

“‘Save yourselves?’”

They looked at each other.  “We only have one choice,” Lundin said, pushing himself to his feet.  “We have to send her a signal back.”

“How?”  Elia asked.

He looked around the room without moving his head.  “I know exactly how.  And it fits right in with the escape plan I’ve worked out.”

“Hold on, what?” Martext said.  Lundin was dashing over to the pile of their dress rags in the back corner.  “You’ve worked out an escape plan?”

“Well, about forty percent of it.”

 “…Does that include the part where we escape?”

“Of course,” Lundin said, frowning over his shoulder.  “It’s just the middle bits that are a little fuzzy.  Here we are,” he said, shoving through the pile of clothes until he came to his pants, scraped and dingy.  “I’d been saving this for a special occasion,” he said, picking up the pants.

They slipped out of his fingers and fell to the floor.  Lundin bent down and picked them up again.  “Of course, this wasn’t exactly what I had in mind—”

“Horace, are you okay?”  Elia asked as the pants slid out of his hands again.

“Just a little excited, I guess.”  He took a deep breath.

Elia and Martext watched as he crouched down to the black trousers and, very carefully, grabbed the waistband with both hands and stood.  Before he was halfway up, his hands opened up and the pants fell back to the floor.

“That’s not right,” Martext said.

“Senior tech,” Elia said, scrutinizing him.  “Didn’t you say that your first casting on Sir Kelley in the Recon squad had unforeseen physical consequences?”

“Wait.”  Lundin looked down at his hands.  “You think the spell’s doing this to me?”

“Can you normally hold your pants up?”  Martext raised an eyebrow.

“That’s what suspenders are for,” Elia and Lundin said together.

“Seriously, though,” Elia said a moment later, wiping her eyes.  Martext had his face buried in his hands.  “I think we have to assume that this casting of Greatsight is impairing your ability to pick up objects.”

“But we ran the disks three times at Campos, and Greatsight never did this to me, or the Colonel!  The whole point of mechanizing magic is consistency, so you don’t get random side effects like this!”

“A fascinating riddle, all right.  Can we get back to escaping?”  Martext stomped forward to the pants and picked them up in one fist.  His long black hair swayed as he held the trousers out at arm’s length.  “I’ve got your pants.  Now what’s so important about them?”

“Right front pocket,” Lundin pointed.

“I still can’t believe you had a flask all this time,” Martext hissed, crouching by the door.

“I’m amazed they didn’t take it,” Lundin admitted.  He sighed.  The silver hip flask was just beginning to catch the sunlight.  He could see every etched line of the bedraggled rooster design Samanthi had liked so much. 
What a great gift, boss… better than you could have possibly realized
, he thought sadly.

The flask was still eighty percent full of eighty-proof brandy.  They’d torn up a strip from his ripe undershirt and rolled up one end of the white cloth tightly enough to fit into the mouth of the flask.  They’d stuffed it half down into the liquid, with the other half dangling from the opening like a scruffy white tail.  Martext held the vessel gingerly, and Elia stood at his back, holding the lit candle a quarter-meter away from the makeshift fuse.

The wait was getting agonizing.  Lundin hovered some distance away from the techs with his hands in his armpits, his foot tapping involuntarily against the stone floor.  It stood to reason that their breakfast would come at a fairly regular time each day; but without knowing what it time it was, it could be hours more before the guards gave them their morning bread. 
It feels like it’s been an hour already,
he thought, noting the progress of the sunlight down the wall as he kept an eye on the hatch.  He leaned his arm against the small table and almost knocked yesterday’s empty jug of tea over.  He righted it clumsily, turning back to the techs.   Martext shifted his weight on his feet, wincing.  The strain of holding the crouch so long was clearly getting to him. 
I’d offer to take a turn holding something, but…

A shifting of locks on the door outside.  Lundin stifled a gasp and held his breath, watching the two techs do the same.  The hairs on his arms were standing up straight.  Elia crouched down right next to Martext, and he lifted the flask a few centimeters so the candle flame was dancing just underneath the rag.  All their attention went to the hatch in the lower half of the door.

They all jumped as the hatch flipped open, and gloved hands tossed their two loaves of bread to the floor.  Elia touched the flame to the rag, and the fire instantly started crawling down towards the flask.  She backpedaled as Martext grabbed the hatch itself and held it open, perpendicular to the door. 

Lundin’s eyes widened.  He saw the fuse trickling down; he saw Martext’s muscles tensed and his teeth digging into his lip as he waited for the right moment; he saw the gloved hands of their male guard come into view again through the hatchway.  The guard swore at Martext, and shoved at his wrist through the hatch.  Just before the fuse sank into the flask, Martext let go of the hatch with one hand and thrust the flask forward with the other.  The hatch swung closed on the metal vessel and stopped there, partially open, wedging the flask in place.  There was an angry shout from the hallway as Martext turned and flung himself to the floor.

Then the brandy bomb exploded.

A connoisseur of explosions wouldn’t have batted an eye at the result.  There was only so much damage that a small volume of mid-potency alcohol could do upon combustion.  But Lundin did not consider himself a connoisseur of explosions—in fact, most of his first-hand experiences with the subject were ones he would very happily have erased from his memory.  As he uncovered his eyes, though, and took a look at the door again, this explosion gave him a flush of wild pride.

The hatch had blown off its hinges into the cell; mercifully, rocketing sideways into the stone wall instead of straight back towards him.  The door itself was charred, with a thin seam splitting up the center that hadn’t been there seconds before, but otherwise solidly in place.  That was all right, though, because as he bent down to peer through the hatch, he saw the toes of the guard’s boots.  The man was sprawled out on the far side of the hall, unmoving and (as far as he could tell) unbreathing.  Either the boom or the shrapnel had been enough to knock him out of the picture.  Lundin’s triumph was tempered by the queasy realization that they might have just killed someone; but there was less than no time for thoughts like that right now. 
You’re Sir Kelley.  You’re tough.  Do what you have to do to get your people out.

“Elia, go go go,” Lundin said, stabbing his fingers towards the hatch.  Elia let out a little breath and sprang forward.  She had the thinnest shoulders of the three of them, which meant she stood the best chance of being able to squeeze her way through the splintery hole.  She slid to her knees in front of the door and stuck her arm through before putting her face to the hatch. 
Stars and Spheres, she’s going to fit
, Lundin thought, his eyes quickly assessing the size of her body and the size of their escape route.  Martext pushed himself to his feet and Lundin took a step forward—and then Elia yelped and fell backwards into the room.

“What—” Lundin began before he saw a blur of movement through the hatch and the crack of something heavy smacking into the stone, where Elia’s head had just been.

“The other guard,” Elia panted, on her tailbone with her arms behind her.  “She’s—”

With a second, louder clattering of locks, the door flew open.  “You flaming rats,” the sharp-faced guard said, her face red with anger.  She tightened her fingers around the shaft of a very spiny metal mace, and with her other hand reached for the pistol at her hip.  Her eyes flicked past each of them but settled on Elia, mostly supine on the floor, before they narrowed into ferocious slits.

Weapon
.  Lundin took in everything within arm’s reach without moving his eyes.  He planted both hands on the ceramic jug on the table and, with every fiber of self-control he could muster, willed himself to hold on to the damn thing long enough to do some good.  He lifted it off the table and swung towards the guard, but before he’d taken a step, it slipped out of his hands and went hurtling across the room.

The guard was raising the gun towards Elia when she noticed the movement through the air.  Her lips parted, her eyes widened, and she started to raise the mace defensively when the base of the jug plowed into her face.

“Uah.”  A sound came out of her mouth as her head whipped backwards.  The jug tumbled to the floor and landed on the stones with a hollow clatter, scuffed but unbroken. 

“For the Throne!”

Lundin blinked at the high-pitched war cry.  Elia launched herself off the ground like a bespectacled puma, her fingers curled into claws.  Her pounce sent the guard sailing backwards into the hallway with the Civic on top of her.  The mace clattered away on the stones, and there was a muffled crack as a skull hit the floor.  Then, stunningly, there was only silence.

Lundin and Martext rushed forward to the doorway.  Elia was sitting up straight, her knees on either side of the guard’s hips, breathing heavily.  She twisted her neck to look back at them, her cheeks flushed with pink.

“‘For the Throne?’”  Lundin asked.

“I think it helped,” Elia said, shrugging.

He flicked his eyes to either side of the hallway.  No one was coming yet.  “Stage two.  Grab their guns, grab their weapons.  I’d help, but, you know,” Lundin said, scratching the back of his head.

“No one’s giving you a gun right now,” Martext said, glancing up at him.  He unclasped the scabbard from the male guard’s belt and held it awkwardly against his side while he pulled the man’s gun free.

“I’ll get the candle.”

“Martext, can you shoot?”  Lundin stepped out of the way as Elia dashed back into the room and picked up the still-flickering candle from the floor.  They’d arranged the three straw mattresses and their threadbare pillows in a heap against the far wall, balanced like a pyre on one of the rusty cots.  As Elia walked over to the pile of bedding, holding the candle carefully upright, Lundin pointed at the small windows overhead.  “Breaking out that one should do it.”