Of Machines & Magics (5 page)

Chapter 4

The sun was an orange patch spreading across the south western horizon behind the overhead mist; the distant massif, a black silhouette against the brightness. Below the layer of cloud, the air was clear and still and smelled of life: of water-borne plants and fish, pollen from the reed beds along the shores, the myriad exhalations of animals and insects since the dawn of time.

Mal-a-Merrion’s waters were restless, however. Monstrous bergs, calving from the high glaciers, crashed into the Lake’s northern waters with monotonous regularity and sent vast and stately ripples down the length of the lake. Here, where the depth of water was unknowable, the undulations slid silently beneath the raft, rising gently and as gently, subsiding.

A soft touch upon his cheek drew Calistrope’s attention from the squid which towed them along the Lake. Turning, he followed the insect’s gaze and counted the distant specks. Black against the orange mist.

“Five, six, seven. Dragonflies?”

The ant’s carapace tilted in agreement.

“Seven,” Calistrope rubbed his prominent nose. Two or three perhaps, could be ignored; a pair coupling over the waters or males fighting for a female were not that unusual but seven … Seven must be a foraging party, uncommon in such still weather when fish were so easily caught. “We had best prepare,” he said but the insect was already gone and conferring with its fellows. “Ponderos,” he called and both his fellow Mage and Roli looked up from whatever task they were attending to in the stern. Calistrope pointed to the marauding party. “Dragonflies.”

Some minutes later the high pitched thrum of their wings thrilled the air, sunlight coruscated from the membranous wings in colors of fire opal. The dragonflies scouted the craft, darting back and forth to hover now over the stern, now above the bows

There was no warning of the sudden attack, no perceivable signal given. Two of the insects plunged towards the raft, their bodies arched to bring the blade-like stings to bear.

Calistrope’s armament was already primed—the final word of a mantra and he hurled a tight ball of incandescence at the nearer of the two creatures. Simultaneously, the raft’s pilot loosed a quarrel from his crossbow to strike the other in its side. The one insect erupted into smoky flame but the second ignored the glass quarrel lodged in its thorax and lanced an ant through its compound eye. Discommoded only and plainly immune to the effects of any poison, the ant retaliated, clamping razor sharp mandibles around the dragonfly’s neck and squeezing. A third dragonfly plummeted towards them, attacking the ant which held its fellow. Calistrope’s fireball and Ponderos’ throwing club struck together. The fire consumed it from the inside and greasy smoke vented from the insect’s joints and mouthparts, hiding the combat from view. A dragonfly’s head rolled free, spinning in chance directions as its mandibles snapped spastically.

Behind him, the Mage discovered another duel just ending. Roli was belaboring a dragonfly with a pole while an ant chewed through its leg. The attacking insect sprang into the air as its upper joint parted and Calistrope drew upon his power to send more spheres of lightning as it rejoined its three companions.

Three. There should be another …

An unnerving scream turned all heads. The fourth dragonfly had seized hold of the pilot and with a flurry of glittering wings pulled him from the pulpit. The man screamed again as he was borne off across the water, carried in a cradle of interlaced forelegs.

There was nothing the ants could do, they watched impassively as Calistrope flung fireball after fireball and Ponderos hurled whatever he could find. The insect with its piteous burden was quickly out of range and the remaining dragonflies hovered, waiting for further opportunities.

Suddenly, a strangely cold feeling overtook Calistrope, the energy field had weakened alarmingly and his weaponry was dwindling in both size and strength. “Oh,
corruption
,” he whispered dismally, “of what use am I now?”

The dragonflies seemed to sense their lack of defenses and swooped as one. An ant was killed immediately in the onslaught, pierced between head and thorax. Ponderos knocked a dragonfly from the air to float, twitching, on the salty waters until some denizen of the Lake took it from beneath. Calistrope wielded a boat hook and was holding off the last insect until he took a cut in the left shoulder. The pain was unbelievably fierce; his arm began to stiffen almost at once.

“Boy,” he called, teeth clenched against the pain of the spreading venom. “Roli, take this and help Ponderos.”

As Roli ran to his master, the ether grew thick with power once more and the Mage was able to throw off the effects of the poison. “It’s all right for now,” he said, “the magic has returned,” he flung another fireball and watched a moment as the dragonfly he had hit perished in flames.

The energy dwindled yet again and he stumbled, crippled by the return of the pain. Even as Roli tried to support him, Calistrope was knocked to the deck by a stunning blow and Roli was flung away to lie senseless in the scuppers. Distantly, Calistrope felt stiff limbs embrace him, felt himself lifted, saw the deck recede below him.

Calistrope felt disconnected from events. He watched as an ant reared up on its hind legs and brought its tail forward. A jet of clear liquid flashed briefly and the ant, spent by the effort, collapsed. The dragonfly which held him dissolved, parts and limbs falling away around him, the raft seemed to leap up at him to strike a final blow at his limp body.

When the Mage regained consciousness, there was intense pain in his shoulder and dull aches everywhere else. His eyes would not focus; his limbs were slack and refused to work. When his vision
did
clear at last, he saw two ants methodically cleaning the raft of bodies; the dragonfly carcasses had already been disposed of and now they were rolling their own dead companions to the side and over the edge.

The pain and the sharp smell of formic acid recalled those final moments to him, when he had been taken by the dragonfly and the ant had saved him, it had obviously been the creature’s last resort.
Which one of them had saved his life?
He wondered.

A harsh sound grated upon the Mage’s ears and put an end to conjecture. One of their remaining insect companions was shivering violently, producing the strident note from the joints between the bands of chitin at its throat.

Ponderos,” he called, his voice weak and low. “Ponderos, the creature is injured; it has lost its antennae.”

The other ant, partly blinded in one eye, touched feelers to the face mask of the trembling insect and the unnerving noise ceased. The two antennae had presumably, been torn off during the battle and now the creature was unable to communicate, it would be expelled by its nest sisters. Should he feel sorrow? Sorrow seemed as out of place as his earlier thoughts of gratitude, the ways of these insects were curious, even bizarre.

“Ponderos,” he said again and realized he had been leaning against the huge man’s chest all along; Ponderos’ arms supported him,

“They don’t feel pain as we do,” said Ponderos. Life and death mean little to them. Machines, living machines.”

But Calistrope still wondered as the world went out of focus again.

Calistrope’s wound continued to trouble him, the ether grew no stronger and there was little he could do in the way of self-healing. Even so, he helped in whatever way he could to restore order to the raft and in doing so, belatedly discovered why the dragonflies had attacked them.

While clearing away debris left by the battle, he found that one of the huge sacs of honeydew—the soldier ants’ only food—had been steadily leaking since they had left Sachavesku. A trail of the rich, aromatic liquid across the lake must have led the party after them; dragonflies had been known to scent honeydew from leagues away. Quickly, he sluiced all trace of the sweet, sticky stuff away and resealed two more of the bladders which had been damaged during the fighting.

One more thing he discovered: there was no way to steer the squid which had been swimming aimlessly for the past five or six hours, since the attack. The squid was controlled by long nerve fibers taken from an insect pupa and surgically inserted into the cephalopod’s musculature. No sequence of taps or tweaks or pulls provoked the same response twice running and finally, they cut the squid free and thought about sails and makeshift oars.

If their attempts had been successful, Calistrope might well have considered turning back but there were no materials on the raft to work with. The ants, for whom the Nest’s instructions were irrevocable, had other and very fixed ideas. They waited until the humans were clearly at a loss then, squatted, one to each side of the raft, and extended their three outer legs into the water. They began to paddle the ungainly craft onward.

Meanwhile, the powers of the two Mages waned steadily. Calistrope had detected such depleted regions in the ether before but why they should occur in the relatively undisturbed regions of Mal-a-Merrion’s central waters was a mystery. Neither he nor Ponderos could offer a theory to explain it.

The mist began to clear soon after the fateful battle. It lifted and dispersed until the sky became its accustomed purple-black and the sun’s bloated disc hung just above the south western horizon, giving them a sense of direction and purpose. Three more days passed before the ants, occasionally aided by one or more of their human companions, brought them to the farther shore, far up the Lake from Sachavesku. The insects sculled the craft slowly along the bank in search of a place to disembark.

Calistrope’s wound was now giving him continual pain, the poison had spread and often, he was only semiconscious. In a more lucid moment he asked one of his companions to bring him his bag. The ant—the one with the injured eye—complied and neatly snipped the drawstring with its mandibles so that the bag fell open. Calistrope groped within, withdrew a glass medallion and with difficulty, set it spinning on its edge. It wobbled, straightened up again and continued to spin but so slowly that the detail on both faces was quite plain.

“Take us northward,” he said and fixed a tiny part of his mind and remaining power upon maintaining the rotation. “If it speeds up, stop.”

Calistrope slumped back, his eyes closed, his gaze turned inward.

The glass disc spun slowly and the water lapping alongside the raft was a soothing, somnolent sound in his ears. The Mage slept more peacefully in the dark sunlight.

Images swirled around his mind, memories.

Sometimes, larger waves spread down the Lake from the north and would break viciously along the shingle, sending tongues of salty water up along the banks. The larger ones would flood into the many pools of supersaturated water, splashing salt crystals as high as the road.

The silvery glass medallion still spun slowly.

Ponderos had fashioned a travois from branches and a piece of fabric from the abandoned raft. The ant which had lost its antennae dragged the conveyance behind it with Calistrope, unconscious still, tossing and turning on it. The two ants, one speechless, the other all but blind in one eye, pressed on resolutely or stood impassively when the humans needed to rest.

A day’s length passed, another. There was little significance to the term except as a measure of time; the stars wheeled about; infinitesimally, the planets wandered among the stars, their evolutions just as minute, just as precise. Humankind kept to its own rhythms, resting when weary, eating when hungry, laboring when necessary.

However, there
was
one transition which went quite unnoticed for some time. Calistrope’s spinning disc, perched on a corner of the travois like a gyroscope, gradually spun faster. No one noticed the phenomenon until the increasing speed became audible as a rising whine. It continued to accelerate, the whine becoming a shriek, the disc becoming a milky colored sphere. Still the rotation increased, the sound rising up beyond even the insects’ hearing until it was gone, burst suddenly into a scatter of bright dust.

A minute or two later, Calistrope sat up. He rubbed his eyes and massaged his right shoulder. Peeling the bandages away, he found the flesh around the wound to be purple and swollen—his body battled against the poison. Now that the ether was stronger, he stroked the discolored skin and the angry colors began to fade, the puffiness diminished.

“Ah. That is better,” he breathed. “Much better.”

His face still looked drawn however and pinched; his hands were thin and corded, the fingers like dead twigs. He put his scabbarded sword to the ground and leaned on it as he eased himself from the travois; he managed to stand and to slowly straighten. “Another hour or two and…” he leaned, began to fall and only Ponderos’ speed and strength saved him from measuring his length upon the ground. The Mage was a great deal weaker than he seemed.

“I think,” said Ponderos, looking at the various bluffs and rocky outcrops, “I think there’s an inn not far from here. The magic has come back but Calistrope needs food and rest while he mends,” He made Calistrope comfortable once more on the conveyance and signaled to the ant to move off. It clicked its mandibles and the other hummed a double note, they moved off. “A league or so. Not far.”