The Mask And The Master (Mechanized Wizardry Book 2) (8 page)

“Dame Miri,” Lundin said, his voice warm and welcoming.  “We could absolutely use an extra pair of hands.  Think you could go find us one?”

She stopped mid-nod, her mouth swinging open.  Then she threw her head back and laughed a full-throated, sparkling laugh.  Lundin grinned as she pointed a stumpy, bandaged hand into his face.  “I knew you’d come up with a new one eventually.  Don’t think I’m impressed, though.

“Now,” she said, stepping past him.  “Why don’t you tell me what you’re up to here?”

Lundin made introductions to the rest of the team, who gaped and fawned as Dame Miri shook their hands (carefully) with her customary gregariousness.  She was one of the most celebrated ‘nauts in Delia since her heroics on the feastday, and the Civic techs weren’t accustomed to having personal dealings with their colleagues in the more high-profile squads.  Willl with three L’s watched Miri with a dumb grin on his face as Elia breathlessly professed what an honor it was to meet someone who excelled in so many disciplines, from dancing to public relations to hand-to-hand combat.  Martext smiled politely and kept his cool, returning to the dusty Old Harutian workbook on the small table after greeting her.

“Here’s the breakdown,” Lundin said.  He gestured at the Melodimax in the sunlit corner, jabbering to itself in a high-pitched voice.  “Willl and Elia have been running the
pingdu calabra
disks all morning—”

“Just those first disks?”

“Right.  We’re not casting full spells, just doing an experiment.  Willl, uh.  What have you found?”

Willl cleared his throat, taken aback at being asked to speak.  He shuffled over to the squawk box, which stood next to a weathered hat rack they’d lifted from the anteroom to the workshop.  A circular
ojing
was dangling from a string tied to the hat rack, spinning freely in the air.  Its two faces were creamy white, swirling and alive.  “This
ojing
tells us when magic is happening,” he said, haltingly.  “So, uh.  There’s magic going on now.”

“Right,” Dame Miri said, encouragingly.

“So, uh.  One of the problems with wizard magic is that it takes so long.  There are so many words to say.  So we’re seeing if the spell still works if you say it fast.”

“The squawk box can speak faster than a human can, and can keep it up for longer,” Lundin elaborated.  “So we’re investigating how fast we can run through the disks before the
ojing
no longer recognize the words as magic.”

“Huh.  And?”

Elia raised her hand high, straight as a mast.  Lundin blinked, then gestured at her with an upturned palm.  “The
ojing
have continued to respond at each speed increment,” she reported brightly.  “This pair of disk took five minutes and fourteen seconds to run at the rate of standard human speech.  We’ve run eight subsequent trials, at speed increases of five percent each time. We estimate this current trial will complete in three minutes and twenty-eight seconds, and—as you see—the
ojing
show no sign of a reduced response.”

“Apply that speed increase over an entire spell, and your eighteen-disk incantation takes you an hour,” Martext said, dark eyes briefly flicking up from the workbook.

“An hour?  Spheres, you’re lucky if a wizard who starts at dawn finishes by midnight,” Dame Miri said, marveling.

“And there’s still room for improvement.  May I just say, Mister Lundin,” Elia said, stepping closer to him, “that this experimentation is thrilling?”

“I’m with you, Elia,” he said, meeting her gaze with a boyish smile.  “We’re just scratching the surface of how much dead time we can squeeze out of the process.

“In fact, Dame Miri, I’m gladder than ever that you’re here, since you know the squawk boxes so well.  We’re almost at the point where we can’t run the Melodimax any faster without the damaging the mechanism.”

“The disks are only meant to turn so fast,” she mused, nodding.  “The comb will snap without reinforcment.  And the mouthpiece will lose articulation and break, especially if you make it keep up that pace for sixty minutes.”

“So if there’s anything you can think of to beef up the workings, that’ll be invaluable.  Given what we’re seeing, my hunch is that the squawk box will hit its limits on speed long before the Invocation ceases to be, you know, magical.”

“That’s what you started over here,” Dame Miri said, walking back towards Lundin’s worktable.  The boxy shell of a second melodimax was swung open like a carcass, with its clockwork guts arrayed on squares of cloth on the floor and table.  The inner working of the wooden mouthpiece, with its sculpted horse-sized teeth and leather tongue, were especially disturbing to see spread out in the cheery sunlight.  She ran her fingertips along the edge of the fluted trumpet bell Lundin had been inspecting before.  “You’re building a stronger model.”

He nodded.  “We’re calling it the ‘spell box.’  Squawk box didn’t sound majestic enough anymore.”

Dame Miri’s eyes flicked purposefully from part to part on the worktable.  She frowned at the sight of a conical hat, in dark blue fabric emblazoned with silver stars and moons, lying among the other pieces.  She touched it with her bandaged fingertips, and looked up at Lundin.  “What’s this for?  Insulation?”

“Actually,” Martext said quietly, “it’s for style.”

“…Style.”

Lundin grinned.  “Mister Goolsby saw a woodblock print of a wizard in the Old Harutian workbook.  Great big beard, knotted wooden quarterstaff, cone-shaped hat; this fantastic archaic costume.  So, he decided our new spell box needed a hat to, sort of, complete the wizardly look.”

“I’m detail-oriented,” Martext said, his face expressionless.

“How wonderful, Mister Goolsby,” she said, her face glowing with good humor.  “I can see the hat fitting right here, next to the trumpet.  Where are you going to put the beard, though?”

“We’re still sketching that out.”

“Well, I can tell this spell box is going to be a triumph, inside and out.  When we’re done, people will be casting spells quick as you can snap your fingers,” she said.

“Lots of work to do before that,” Lundin said, sighing.  “Take it, Martext.”

Martext took off his glasses, polishing them with a shiny silver cloth as he spoke.  “Our methods may
cast
spells ten times faster than conventional wizardry, but preparation is still a stumbling block.  The spell box only speaks what’s on the disks we feed it, while your average wizard has the books and the know-how to cast a spell on demand, on any subject, for any purpose.  We can’t even attempt a new spell until we deduce the proper phrases from our very limited Mabinanto library, translate it from Mabinanto to Old Harutian, and punch, clean, and troubleshoot eighteen-plus pairs of disks.”

“Really?” asked Willl with three L’s, crestfallen.

“Really, Willl,” Lundin confirmed.  “I don’t want to tell you how many work-hours Samanthi and I put into punching the disks for the friendship spell over here; the only one in our repertory.”  Lundin tapped on a padded cylinder on the work table, more than a quarter-meter wide and nearly one high.  A muffled clang rang out as the magical disks inside bumped against each other.  “At our current level of expertise, if Lucy Q. Delian came to us asking for a blessing for her farm work, it’d take us an entire sleepless day to make the disks we’d need.”

“But at least once you have the disks, you can use them again,” Dame Miri countered.  “The next farmer who asks for a blessing just has to wait an hour for the spell to cast.”

“That’s the theory,” Lundin said, rapping his knuckle on the work table.

“Is there a drop-off in quality if you use a spell written for one occasion and try to apply it to another?”  Martext asked in his low, calm voice.

Well, the same spell that worked on Sir Kelley worked on Ouste
, was Lundin’s first response.  But he swallowed that thought and shrugged instead.  “We just need more data, which means casting more spells and taking good notes.  As for the same spell working on different subjects?  Well, the Invocation and Illustration would be the same, so it would be just a matter of taking the new subject’s name and punching out one new pair of disks for the Enunciation.  So assuming that spells are transferrable that way, any time someone requests a spell that’s in our repertoire, we’re talking, pessimistically, two hours from when the client comes to when the spell box shuts up.”

“Sounds good to me,” Elia said.  “We just keep a library of disks on hand for common spells, and work in the names of each new client as needed.  Magic for the masses!”

Lundin wobbled his hand sideways in the air.  “It’s a decent model; but, eventually, we’ve got to make the process slicker.  We’ll need a faster way to expand our library and create spells on demand.  If we’re trying to create a viable alternative to the flesh-and-blood sorcerer, we simply can’t afford to have our process be less effective, efficient, or convenient than it would be for people to pay a visit to the witch doctor down the street.  Stars and Spheres, you people don’t have to raise your hands,” he blurted out as Willl with three L’s held his hand tentatively above his shoulder.  “What is it?”

“Is that what we’re trying to do?”

Lundin frowned.  “Hmm?”

“I thought we were going to fix magic.  Does that mean creating ‘a viable alternative to the flesh-and-blood sorcerer?’”

They were all looking at him; Martext with his aloof receptiveness, Willl with three L’s with bewilderment, Elia with anticipation, and Dame Miri—the brilliant, beautiful, battle-scarred hero of Delia—watching him with real curiosity.  All four of them waiting for his answer.  No, not just his answer; his vision.  His throat went suddenly dry.  Yes, they’d all been sharing ideas and trading the discussion for the past several minutes; but in this room, he was the leader.  And this was the kind of high-concept leader moment Dame Dionne had made him terrified of.

Just be honest and answer the question.  Are we here to compete with human wizards?

There was only one answer.  “Yes,” he said.

“How exciting!” Elia said, her brown eyes flashing.  “I love a little competition!”

We’ll see if those flesh-and-blood wizards feel the same way
, he thought, smiling uneasily as his team turned to each other in earnest discussion.

Chapter Seven

Going Public

“Absolutely appalling—”

“Do you expect us—”

“—pitiful—”

“—insult to the Crown—”

“—waste of time—”

“Spheres, Horace,” Dame Miri hissed in Lundin’s ear, “Say something before they start throwing knives.”

Lundin swallowed, taking a trembling step forwards to the center of the stage.  He leaned against the spell box for stability, feeling the smoothness of its freshly polished case.  His fingers brushed against the blue felt hat glued to the top face, its cone pointing up and back at a jaunty angle.  The clouds shifted far overhead, and a shaft of sunlight through one of the half-dozen skylights struck Lundin in the eye.  He squinted, and the agitated shapes in the audience became that much more sinister to his light-blind eyes.

The Presentation Room was designed to be a soothing space;
for all the good that’s doing now
.  Natural light was playing softly off the golden wood of the stage, beaming down from the skylights Civics seemed so fond of.  The vaulted ceilings invoked the grandeur of a Spheric cathedral, with welcoming curves instead of hard-edged formality.  Nearly forty comfortable chairs (only about half of them filled today) spread back from the stage in raked rows, cushioned in plush burgundy fabric. The acoustics were marvelous for speakers on the stage, so Lundin wouldn’t have any trouble making his voice heard over the uproar.

That is, as soon as I figure out what to say...

He raised both hands high, palms up.  The din subsided a decibel or two, but the faces of his audience didn’t get any friendlier.  Lord and Lady Quentonne were glowering at him, their heads made small by the expansive golden ruffs around their necks.  Blonde, stick-thin, and dressed in jade damask, they looked like angry sunflowers.  Bevelli, the loudest of the merchants, was bellowing just as fiercely at her colleagues in the audience as she was Lundin, her callused hands sawing through the air in a blur.  But over where the wizards were standing was where the mood was truly ugly, with the ugliest sentiments of all coming from—

“Mister Lundin,” Tymon said, stepping forward from the pack with a sneer, arms akimbo.  The old wizard’s sleeveless tunic showed off the wiry muscles in his bare arms, and a nasty little skull hung suspended from a red braided chain around his neck.  He sounded so much like his grandson that Lundin had to fight down a new flash of panic; it was like a thinner, balder Sir Kelley was berating him in public again.  “I await your apology,” the old man said.

“My—my apology?”  Lundin hadn’t collected his thoughts enough yet to know what to say, yet alone how to respond to a question like that.  The audience quieted down, their focus flicking from Lundin to Tymon.  Blood was about to spill, they sensed, and they didn’t want to miss a drop.

Tymon thrust his chin forward defiantly.  “I do not ask for one for myself; though let the record state,” he declaimed, turning to the crowd with his finger in the air, “that Horace Lundin took advantage of my wisdom and my wife to begin his irresponsible foray into the arcane arts...”

The room went aflutter with whispers.  “What does he mean?”  “Took advantage of his wife?”  “Shameful—” “Doesn’t surprise me—” 

Lundin stepped forward to the very lip of the stage, his temper rising.  “Listen, please,” he shouted.  “He means I went to him and his wife, Archimedia, when I was first doing research about magic.  He didn’t help me.  Archimedia did.  That’s all.”  The whispering became disappointed, with a few shrill voices hoping to keep the scandal alive.

Tymon’s eyes flashed as he howled in fine oratorical style, “‘That’s all?’  He takes my knowledge of the magical arts; knowledge gleaned from a lifetime of experience, study, and devotion to the Mobinoji; chops it into dead fragments on his laboratory table, and sticks it into a metal shell so he can perform blasphemous acts at the flick of a switch?  And he says ‘that’s all?’  Sir, again, I do not ask for myself; but for honorable practitioners of magic the world over, by the Spheres, you will apologize for what you have done!”