Rebel Skyforce (Mad Tinker Chronicles) (23 page)

Madlin exchanged a glance with her father, who was watching with his fists on his hips and a glare fit to weld with. He gave a terse nod. Madlin passed the signal to the worker at the dynamo lever, who touched the brim of his helmet before putting his weight to the lever and heaving.

A high-pitched screech of protesting metal pierced the air. Hands went to ears throughout the workshop, including Dan’s and Madlin’s. The rumbling grew worse as pressure from the clutch transmitted vibrations from the great wheel through the shaft of the dynamo. The increase in rumbling didn’t stop, nor did the screeching; the clutch was burning, not catching. Smoke rose from the contact point. Voices shouted, but it was too loud to make out anything.

Madlin retreated to a corner of the workshop; others were pouring out the doors. Cadmus put one of the control cabinets between himself and the dynamo. The worker at the lever abandoned his post. Only Dan stood his ground and watched the dynamo spark to life as the clutch eventually welded itself to the flywheel and spun the dynamo’s shaft.

“There you go!” Dan shouted, his magically amplified voice booming through the workshop. “See, nothing a little—”

At that moment, the flywheel exploded. There was no fiery plume, nor a cloud of smoke, but bits of flywheel jettisoned themselves at coil-gun speeds throughout the workshop in a vast vertical circle of destruction roughly in the plane of motion that the flywheel had occupied.

Losing nearly all its mass in the blink of an eye, the flywheel no longer had the momentum to spin the dynamo at phenomenal speeds. It took a few more revolutions and stopped, the largest piece of spoke dangling at the lowest point and rocking the hub back and forth until it settled.

“Is anyone hurt?” Madlin shouted.

Dan spotted Cadmus by the controls. “We get enough lightning before this sewer log of a tinker’s toy quit on us?” Dan asked.

Cadmus stalked over. “You bloody, reckless fool! You could have killed someone.”

“My specialty,” Dan replied flippantly. He let Cadmus step within a half pace of him, never flinching back. “But you’re the tinker here, not me. If your bits and pieces couldn’t handle it, you shouldn’t have turned it on. I could have slowed it. I wanted to make sure it worked better this time.”

Madlin had never seen her father cowed. Today was not going to be the first.

Cadmus poked a finger into Dan’s chest. “Listen here, warlock. I don’t care what you call yourself. I don’t care what you can do with your mystical, ‘pulled-it-out-me-arse’ powers. If you endanger my people again, I will splatter you across two worlds. I don’t doubt you could kill me right here, but I have a twin, and he’s got most of the resources I have here. I will build another of these machines, and one night you will wake up to a half ton crate of black powder being dumped over you, followed shortly by a lit torch. Then I’ll find the coordinates for Veydrus, and I’ll scour every foot of it until I find
your
twin, and do the same to him. We clear on that?”

“Sounds like a deal,” Dan said. He stuck out his hand. “Set me up with a bed and a bath, and I’ll be back in the morning to do the job proper.” For all the world, Dan hadn’t heard a thing Cadmus had said. It was as if an elaborate string of threats had translated itself in the boy’s head to a casual discussion of the device’s failings and a contract for repair work.

Cadmus blinked and his eyes darted to Madlin. She put her hands up and shrugged. With no other course of action readily at hand, Cadmus shook on the deal.

Madlin stumbled through the door of her workshop and looked around as if she had been gone a lifetime. Everything had been as she’d left it. Her father hadn’t even let the servants in to tidy up; she found herself glad she didn’t leave food lying about. After a moment’s nostalgia, she closed the door and threw the bolt. Privacy. Oh, how she’d missed having a spot all to herself. She poured herself into the chair at her drafting table and relaxed—truly relaxed, with complete
abandon—for the first time in months. She let her father and Dan and Jamile and the stranded crew still on the island all slip away. She took a deep breath and held it a moment. Silence.

Madlin indulged herself for a few minutes of peaceful bliss, doing nothing. When she’d had her fill of nothingness, she got back to work. She took up a pencil and instruments, and set about translating Rynn’s eyeballed sketches into drawings she could send down to the machinists. She knew already the design she wanted to try first, and Rynn’s head start was enough for her to dive right in.

A few minutes into her draft, a voice startled her. “What is that going to be, I wonder?”

Madlin jumped and twisted in her chair. There was a sword pointed at her, with a grey-haired gentleman in disheveled finery and a week’s ragged beard at the other end of it. “No screaming. You’ll come to harm only if you cry out.” In the man’s shadow stood a glassy-eyed boy about Dan’s size, with greasy black curls and a peach-fuzz mustache.

Madlin raised her hands—one still holding the pencil—in the most unthreatening manner she could manage. “And you would be ...?” She had a good guess, but a wrong guess before a sword-wielding man seemed worth avoiding.

The intruder dipped his head and lowered his sword briefly. “Captain Denrik Zayne,
formerly
of the
Fair Trader
.” He tilted his head at his companion. “And my son, Jadon.”

“What are you doing in my house?” Madlin asked.

“I find myself wondering the very same thing,” Zayne replied. “I followed you through that gate your father’s machine created. It seemed a sensible gamble, since my other lane of escape was tenuous.”

Madlin glanced at the boy, who stared at her, not making eye contact. “You’re welcome. I guess.”

“Jadon, take her gun.”

The boy stepped around his father and reached into Madlin’s holster. He took the revolver between thumb and forefinger and slipped it out as if it were contagious. There was a delicacy to his touch; he drew it cleanly, neither touching Madlin nor jostling the holster. She only noticed its absence by the lack of the comforting weight on her thigh. Zayne took the weapon with his free hand as Jadon retreated behind him and wiped his fingers on his trousers.

“So what now?” Madlin asked. Something was odd about the boy, more than just a case of shyness. “If you wanted me dead, you’d have killed me already. So obviously—” Jadon kept staring in her direction, but not quite at her. It dawned on her. “Does he ever
blink
?”

The corner of Zayne’s mouth twitched. “Not often, that I’ve noticed. As for my aim here, we may have a common cause.”

A single, involuntary guffaw escaped Madlin before she could think better of it. “Sorry, but my father’s been at your throat for years. Don’t seem likely we’ve got much in common.”

“That boy warlock.”

“Dan?”

Zayne’s face darkened and twisted into a snarl. “How many Kadrin warlocks have you got stashed around here?” There was an effeminate chuckle from behind Zayne, but when Madlin checked, Jadon had already composed himself again.

“Dan’s Veydran, as far as he’s told—”

“Khesh. Kadrin is the other world’s version of southern Khesh. I don’t care to bore you with politics, but suffice it to say that his people have made life miserable for mine over much of the past two centuries, on and off. We are currently in between conflicts, and if I could be rid of that one, it would aid my old heart greatly.”

“He’s a troubled kid. Not quite bolted together right between the ears. Not sure I’m too eager to try putting a bullet in him. He seems a bit twitchy about burning things that don’t meet his approval.”

Zayne lowered his sword, and to Madlin’s great surprise, sheathed it. “I said I’d not bore you with politics, but I’m afraid I must inflict some historical context upon you. He’s told you he’s a warlock, but you don’t seem to grasp what that means. It’s not just a sorcerer, that’s what I was, before I was killed. It’s what Jadon is, both here and in the other world. A warlock is someone whose blood doesn’t race, whose mind is as rigid as ice, and as numb to feeling. A common sorcerer struggles to do battle. Intricate thoughts are dangerous when the mind is harried by fear, made jittery by excitement. Warlocks used to be so rare that generations would forget the horrors they brought. Then another would pop up—an aberration of heredity—and some king or emperor would go on a spree of wars. One such war cost my people their freedom. We were ground under boot by a warlock named Rashan Solaran. He is the great uncle of that thirteen year old madman you have running loose, destroying things.”

“So two warlocks a couple generations apart?” Madlin asked, trying to follow along as best she could.

“Two warlocks of the same generation,” said Zayne. “His cousin was even more powerful, and only through great fortune did he and Rashan Solaran destroy one another in a struggle for power.”

“Yeah, the more I hear about your world, the more it sounds like a worse piss pot than mine.”

Zayne smiled in earnest. “This is why I think we may have better cause to ally than find us at one another’s throats. The profession your father so loathes really dates back to an old grudge I carry with Acardia. It matters less to me than my son’s world, and the fate of the people I died trying to protect.”

Madlin shook her head, not in denial, but in disappointment. “I know Acardia warred with Takalia, but that was before I was born. Humans warring with humans ... it just seems ... unbrotherly.”

“Ambition. That’s the root of most of it. Humans are not the only people of Veydrus, but we dominate it. We’d contest with the goblins if they forced our hands. If the ogres wished to leave their forests and threaten our cities, we’d beat them back. But instead, we scrap amongst ourselves, mostly because the privileged few always want more than they have.”

“Your people...” Madlin swallowed. “Did they suffer? What was it like being conquered?”

“They killed our king and replaced him with a series of governors, little puffed up tyrants with all the power and none of the breeding to teach them how to rule. Much as I hate monarchs, they at least knew that much. We were ruled with iron laws, punished whether evidence showed us innocent or guilty. They took our women as their own, even young girls—”

Madlin put up a hand. “Enough. I’ve got the point.” She could picture Korr, with other humans ruling in place of the kuduks. A shiver worked its way up her spine. “These are Dan’s people?”

“He’s a shining example. Their best and brightest. Once he’s matured and fully in command of his powers, I don’t know that they’ll be able to help but send him off to war. There are certain breeds of dogs that are fit for little else but hunting and killing; it’s in their blood. Danilaesis Solaran is most certainly that breed of mongrel.”

“And you said warlocks are becoming more common?” Madlin asked. She was doing her best to get a picture of these Kadrins, slanted though it probably was by Zayne’s grudge.

A mirthless smile slid onto Zayne’s face. “I didn’t tell you the best part. They breed their sorcerers like livestock. It’s all very formal and proper, but it all comes down to getting the best blood from each generation to rut, and picking the best of that lot to try again with the next.”

Madlin felt a bit sick to her stomach. It was possible that she could picture humans treated like livestock only too clearly. It was more likely that she’d eaten too much on a painfully empty stomach. Zayne saw her discomfort, and appeared to assume the former.

“Danilaesis
is
too powerful to simply assault. At his best, Jadon can keep safe and hide from him. We need to arrange an accident for our warlock.”

Madlin hugged her arms close around her. “I still don’t know. Dan did save us more than once.”

With a shake of his head, Zayne dismissed her objection. “You can mourn a rabid dog. You mustn’t try to keep it.”

“I need time to think,” said Madlin. “Take rooms in the city, down by the sailing ship docks. No one here would recognize you except Dan—and Tanner once we get him back.” Madlin mentioned the last as an aside to herself.

“Mr. Tanner can be dealt with,” Zayne replied. “Very well. I will speak to you again when you are safely alone.”

Jadon looked expectantly at his father, who nodded once. The two of them disappeared. A few seconds later, the door unbolted itself, opened, then closed once more. Madlin hustled across the room and bolted it again.