Rebel Skyforce (Mad Tinker Chronicles) (34 page)

One by one, Erefan flipped the switches that lit the bulbs around the frame. As he worked, human workers carried off Kezudkan’s stolen valuables: coins, guns, artwork. The daruu ignored them. He saw the pale blue light reflecting from the polished surfaces of the machine’s cabinets and the control panel, brighter with each one Erefan activated.

“If you sirs would step aside, well out of sight. Keep the guns handy, but do nothing unless I call for you.”

When the last switch was engaged, the world-ripper’s view sprang to life. The look on Erefan’s face was worth far more than all the plunder his minions carried off. The smartest human Kezudkan had ever met sat in the control chair gaping like a simpleton, eyes like a dead fish. The viewer had been painstakingly calibrated to show the reciprocal view to Kezudkan’s view frame—and Draksgollow had tack welded the dials in place to keep it there. The two men, human and daruu, saw each other as if they stood just a few paces apart. Kezudkan waved.

The next part was where Kezudkan was guessing. There was a side to Erefan that he had kept hidden until the very day of his betrayal. Kezudkan had studied the raid, the uprising, all he could find about the rebellion, trying to find out the sort of man he’d fed and clothed all those years. He hoped he had reckoned it properly. One sort of man was a coward, cautious in all things, never acting until he had all contingencies covered. Kezudkan considered himself such; cowards lived longer lives, and there was no shame in taking the wiser path. He had though Erefan to be the same, holed up safe in a workshop that many kuduks would envy, better than anything he could obtain even if he bought his freedom. A coward would have stayed and protected that. But the man who had stormed through Eversall with an army at his back was another sort: a risk-taker, an arrogant bastard who would thrust himself into danger if the payoff was worthwhile. One who trusted to his wits. One who acted. Sometimes rashly.

Impatient.

Erefan drew the gun belted at his hip. Without taking his eyes from the frame, the human tinker reached back for the switch that would open the hole and bring Kezudkan into range of his gun. Kezudkan threw up his hand in feigned terror—or at least how he thought humans did so when terrified. As Erefan closed the switch Kezudkan winked at him.

“Goodbye.”

The blast was silent. The view frame was gone in an instant, replaced by a wall of smoke. A few pieces of wrecked metal landed right at the aperture of the viewer

Kezudkan chuckled, to himself at first, but then he let himself loose and guffawed, loud enough that most of the workshop must have heard him. He laughed himself hoarse, and gave in to a fit of coughing. When that passed, he took a few deep breaths and shook his head.

“In the end, you were just a human after all. Smarter than most, but unable to escape your nature. If you’d taken the time to check, you would have found the three hundred pounds of black powder wired to the main switch.”

Twisting around to the cameraman, who stood smirking in the shadows, he said, “Go get those flashpops developed. I want to see what the settings were on those world-rippers.”

Chapter 24

“In the wrong hands, mathematics is more dangerous than gunpowder.” -Cadmus Errol

Madlin bolted from her bed, clothed, but leaving boots, spectacles, and any sense of decorum behind. She tore down the hall, bare feet slapping on the cold stone. When she reached her father’s door, only a quick grab of the handle stopped her momentum. It was no occasion for knocking; she threw the door open.

“Father!”

It was light inside the Mad Tinker’s bedchamber. Open curtains let the morning sun add cheer to half the room, while the other half clung to shadows where the sunlight failed to reach. Cadmus sat in those shadows, hunched over his writing desk, pencil scribbling at a frantic pace. He had Madlin’s habit of sleeping in his work clothes, and looked to be wearing yesterday’s. A grey scruff of prickly fuzz told that he had skipped his morning shave. The jitter of his hand suggested he hadn’t eaten.

He glanced sidelong from his work, as if even turning his eyes from it was too large a distraction. Who else called him father? Of course it was Madlin. “What? Don’t just stand there, speak.”

“I came as soon as I heard. Are you all right? What happened?”

The tip of the pencil snapped against the paper. “What happened? WHAT HAPPENED? I’ll tell you what happened. That filthy, coal-hearted bastard rigged his world-ripper to explode.” The pencil snapped in half with a crack in Cadmus’s fist. Madlin flinched. “I’ll get him though. He made a mistake he won’t have long to regret. I saw the settings on the dials. I’ll work the numbers and find where he’s hiding.”

Cadmus flung the broken pencil to the floor and took another from a jar filled with sharpened pencils. They were Korrish, fresh through the world-ripper a few days earlier. The Mad Tinker truly looked the moniker as he plunged himself into his mathematics over a scale map of Korr. Madlin edged closer, emboldened at each step by his lack of response. Over his shoulder, she read the number, speaking to her like a third person in the room. They told her that Kezudkan was somewhere in the far north, and was farther underground than the workshop in Cavinstraw Deep. More than that, Cadmus would have to complete finer calculations and make better references to the map.

Or so Madlin thought. “That bastard,” Cadmus whispered. He sat back in his chair, letting the pencil fall over his scratchwork.

“What? I’m not seeing it.”

“He’s somewhere in the Ice Furnace. Years ago—long years ago—there used to by mines all over. All abandoned now. Bastard is under our noses, next world over. Oh, he must be enjoying this.”

“Why would he know we’re here?” Madlin asked. “If he knew, wouldn’t he have done something about it.”

Cadmus put a hand over his mouth. “You’re right. I forgot. His other mistake. He doesn’t know. Thinks I’m dead.” Cadmus nodded to himself. “He’s not expecting vengeance. That’s why we can trust the numbers. You don’t false the dials if you think I’m dead, do you?”

“Probably not.”

“You leave them as they are. Make sure you got them just right. Check them twice—three times, even.”

“Cadmus!” A shout from down the corridor bore a familiar voice. Greuder showed his face in the doorway, leaning against the jamb as he panted for breath.

“What is it now?”

“What do you mean, ‘what is it?’ What’s become of you?” Greuder asked. “I heard the explosion. Some ran for the machine. I came straight this way.”

“Get used to this face,” Cadmus said, scribbling away at his equations. “It’s the only one like it you’re going to be seeing.”

“Cadmus, I’m so sorry,” Greuder said in a voice just above a whisper.

“And I’m busy. Twice as busy, I suppose. If you’re here to make me feel better, I’d feel mighty good about an assault team ready to go through that world-ripper in about half an hour.”

“You’re sure you’re—”

“I’m fine,” Cadmus snapped. “And you can tell anyone else concerned with my health and well-being that their concerns are both misplaced and belated.” When Greuder lingered at the door, Cadmus lit into him again. “Is there a problem, Mr. Greuder?”

Greuder licked his lips. “No, Mr. Errol. No, there’s no problem. I’ll get right on it.”

“He was just worried about you,” said Madlin.

“What are you still doing here?” Cadmus asked. “Scoot! Begone! I’ve got a pile of numbers that aren’t killing anyone yet. Go make yourself useful.”

Madlin backed toward the door. “Yeah. I’ll go help Greuder.” She closed the door behind her as softly as she could. Its catch made a gentle click, and Madlin fell back against the wall to let out a breath of relief. Whoever it was inside, she had never met him before. Was it a madness that had lain dormant for years, since before she was old enough to know any better? Had mother’s death boiled such rage and mania in him, all those years ago?

Madlin tried to put the conversation with her father to the back of her mind as she joined the crew at the world-ripper. She’d taken the time to dress and arm herself, the familiar old weight of her handmade revolver sitting easy on her hip. If she were going to be heading off on a raid, she’d have liked the feel of a coil gun better, but the only ones on Tinker’s Island were in pieces, unfinished. Every coil gun they’d completed had been sent to the
Jennai
to empower and put into service for the rebellion. It was an oversight she’d look to remedy shortly.

The crowd gathered outside the workshop was something she hadn’t prepared for. Guards had kept the locals and Errol Company workers from congregating outside her house, and it seemed that the whole town had gathered around the workshop instead.

“Clear a path,” she ordered, and the crowd jostled and shoved to make way for her. There was no point stopping to ask for information; if she got one answer she’d get a hundred, most of them hearsay. Answers lay inside, not out in the cold wind amid the press of bodies. She couldn’t help overhearing bits and pieces as she wove her way to the entrance, but nothing she hadn’t already heard. An explosion. Horrible sight. Tinker’s dead. Spray of blood and stone. Madlin found that the cold was making her eyes water and her nose run.

Inside the workshop, it was a worse scene than when the flywheel had shattered. Everyone inside was either twinborn, armed with a rifle, or both. They picked their way among rubble and blood-flecked debris. Madlin had expected a relative calm inside, but the chaos was merely a smaller scale from the scene outside.

“Where’s Orris?” she asked. If anyone would know what was going on, it would be him. Orris could also tell them what Kandrel was seeing in Korr. The
Jennai
was suddenly as much a concern as the Tinker’s Island, if the explosion had carried through the world-holes.

Greuder elbowed his way through the milling crowd of gossiping twinborn more concerned with figuring out what happened than helping sort it out. “He’s in a bad way. They took him up to Tucker’s house to get him patched up, since it was the shortest walk.”

“How bad?”

“Bad. More red than pink on him. A few pounds heavier for all the metal shards stuck in him. He needs Jamile, and needs her bad.”

“What about the
Jennai’s
machine. Can they open a hole to send her?”

Greuder shook his head. “Tucker mentioned it before he went off with Orris and the lot of them. Blast took out both machines. No one on the
Jennai
side was hurt because Erefan had gone through and left it unattended.”

Madlin shuddered at the fresh reminder that she was short a father. Erefan had sired Rynn, not her, but those waters were muddy enough to walk across. The loss of a leg had left an ache in her beyond the physical wound. There was no way to build a mechanical Erefan to help Cadmus recover.

“What do you want us to do?”

Madlin blinked. Of course they were asking her. She was General Rynn. Cadmus was holed up in his bedroom performing trigonometry at a global scale, unavailable to consult.

Madlin took stock of the workshop. “Get this crowd out of here. The riflemen can stand guard outside and still be ready if there’s an assault. Anyone with idle hands, shove a broom in them, give them a wheelbarrow, or get them the bloody furnace of Eziel out of my way.”

Despite the grim circumstances, Greuder gave her a weak smile. “New curses?”

“We’ve got us a preacher of the war god. The true litany’s got a bit more spice to it. Now get!”

Madlin waited as Greuder passed her orders along. She remembered when he first moved to Tinker’s Island, a chubby, congenial old man with hands that turned dough and sugar into pure decadent pleasure. Cadmus had told her that he used to be a recruiter for the cause, his best agent for sniffing out twinborn and shipping them north. She could see a bit of that in him now, as she watched him wrangle the unruly crowd into obedience. Or it could have just been that years of running a popular bakery had given him a bit of heft in the community—upset the baker and you might be breaking your fast on runny eggs and toast.

When the crowd had thinned and those remaining were the ones who took up the task of clearing debris, Madlin stepped in to assess the damage. It was a task she wished some other tinker could look to. The fragments of steel, copper, brass, and poured-stone were mundane enough, hardly worth a second look. It was the other bits, the bone chips, the shreds of cloth, the red smears and flecks and splotches—some of it might have been Powlo; some of it was almost certainly Erefan. She looked past it as best as she could to the machine beneath it all.

Cadmus had tools everywhere. There was no place in any workshop on Tinker’s Island where you could find yourself in need of a simple implement and not have one close at hand. Madlin took one of her father’s tool belts and buckled it around the waist, two notches tighter than the well-worn holes her father used. She removed the panels that protected the inner workings, starting from behind the machine where the blast hadn’t caught the world-ripper directly.

The insides of the control console were a shambles. Shrapnel had pierced the access panels on the operator’s side, causing havoc to the innards. She’d always envisioned the wires as the veins and arteries of any spark-run device. Being twinborn meant never having the dreams that trouble the one-worlders, for which Madlin was glad. Otherwise her nightmares would have been plagued with severed copper wires bleeding red blood. Madlin angled her head so that she wasn’t blocking her own light, the better to see how much of the wire would need to be replaced, and how many of the terminals were still intact. Caught up in her inspection, she leaned too close and felt a smear on her cheek as her face rubbed against the edge of a panel. She wiped it with the back of her hand, so used to getting grimy at her tinkering that she hardly gave a thought to a greasy piece of steel. When her hand came away red, she vomited.

Some tinker’s instinct got her to turn her head before she lost her prior night’s dinner and the acids from her stomach into the controls. Scrambling on hands and knees, she found a rag to clean herself up. The blood was more a worry than the vomit. The workshop was overpowered by the scent of burnt metal and poured-stone dust, but the smell of the blood clinging to her was threatening to turn her stomach out again.

Madlin climbed to her feet and turned her back to the world-ripper. She was done with it for a good long while. Blood could carry spark, so any repairs would have to include a thorough cleaning. It was pointless to get replacement parts covered in blood.

The workshop crowd had thinned down to those willing to stay and work. Workers swept up and carted out debris. They were steering clear of the world-ripper as Madlin checked it over. None of them were eager to break the Mad Tinker’s already broken toy. Her eyes caught one, two,
four
mechanics puttering about the room at menial tasks, and summoned them each by name—she knew the name of every one of her father’s mechanics.

“You lot, get that machine stripped naked, all panels open. Cut power from the dynamo. I want the insides washed out with clean water—no soap. Get rid of all the blood, the fragments, anything that doesn’t belong in there. Any part that’s damaged, if it’s a spark wire or terminal, take it out and set it aside. If it’s structural, make sure it’s not going to fall apart or damage anything else and shore it up best you can.

“Any questions?”

“Ain’t water bad for spark?” asked a mechanic named Alder.

Madlin shook her head. “Not once we let it dry. Recondensed water is best, but so long as you use pump water and not that Katamic shit, it’ll dry fine.”