The First Book of Ore: The Foundry's Edge (22 page)

“This sh-shape,” he pondered. “It, uh, reminds me of s-something. Something imp-p-portant.”

“What do you mean?” Phoebe asked.

He shook his head, frustrated. “I kn-know who m-makes this sort of h-hole, but I just can't seem to, um, place it.”

“Get the lead out!” Micah called back. “Time's a wastin'!”

“If he doesn't shut up, I swear…” Phoebe said under her breath. “Come on, Dollop. Better leave it alone.”

“So str-strange,” he said. Dollop gave the pit a last glance before hurrying to catch up, the rucksack jangling on his back.

Soon they emerged from the shadow of the crippled buildings into the arid landscape of the Chusk Bowl. The lip of the basin rose all around them, rust red and barren, sweeping up to the swaying reeds of the brasslands above. A handful of grundrulls meandered aimlessly in the distance.

The sparky trotted at Micah's heels until it realized they were leaving Fuselage, and then it began to whine and nuzzle against his leg. Micah gave the creature a final vigorous scratch behind its row of ears.

“All right boy, last one. Let's make it count,” Micah said, sucking up a piece of debris with his Lodestar. The critter unfolded his chittering mouthparts to expose its grinders and sprayed out a jolly blast of sparks. Micah aimed his weapon up in the air like a mortar and fired. The blast knocked him back on his heels as he sent the scrap sailing away. With a squeaky squeal of joy, the sparky bounded after it in a fiery crack.

“Gonna miss that pup,” Micah sighed.

They watched the sparky spring away like a crazed flea, and then turned to resume their journey. Only the Marquis's gaze remained fixed on Fuselage. Two diopters on stalks slithered in front of his signal lamp eye as he locked his stare intently on the sky above the ruins.

Suddenly, he spun and strobed a bright warning.

“Quick, obfuscate!” barked Mr. Pynch. “Down, down!”

The group huddled behind a growth of wild chusk.

“What is it?” Micah asked, but Mr. Pynch motioned for them to be quiet.

At first, it looked like a few mehkan birds in the distance, maybe more of those vetchel things. But they were flying unnaturally, hovering and tumbling, freezing in midair. Despite being miles away, the kids could make out three X-shaped aircraft. The black forms slung low to scan areas around Fuselage before reversing, spinning end over end, and returning to formation.

They were converging above the Foundry building.

“GBX-20 Shadowskimmers,” Micah whispered. “Usually used for recon.”

“Uh, what d-does that mean?” asked Dollop.

“Foundry spy drones,” Micah responded grimly.

“What it means is that they heard a big crash,” Phoebe said flatly, looking deadpan at Micah. “Like, say, I don't know, a chandelier falling, and figured they should check it out.”

“No way!” Micah blustered.

“No matter,” Mr. Pynch said as he dabbed sweat from his knobby brow with his garish green necktie. “The Marquis's exceptional opticle provided ample warning. They be too far-flung to spot us, so…”

He hesitated, watching as the drones dropped lines down, lowering dark oval shapes through the busted roof of the Foundry building. He said something in Rattletrap to the Marquis, who changed diopters to get a better look.

A gust of wind blew past, and Mr. Pynch's nozzle went haywire, spinning this way and that. He gasped.

“V-Stalkers! Run!”

The fat mehkan took off like a spooked jackrabbit with the others racing behind him. The Marquis, slowed by his heavy load, extended his legs to keep up. Every stride tripled, quadrupled in length, and soon he was in the lead.

“What…are they?” panted Micah.

“Trackers…deadly…” wheezed Mr. Pynch, his rotund form jiggling with the furious pace. “High ground…lose 'em…in the brass!”

They scrambled up the ridge, clambering desperately for footholds. Phoebe was thankful for her gloves and boots as she scurried over the spiky crumbling ore, but the oversized coveralls made her feel clumsy. Looking back over her shoulder, she saw black shapes that must have been the V-Stalkers darting through Fuselage, scaring up dust trails in pursuit.

She barreled over the ridge and into the reeds. The tall blades of brass thrashed around her, scraping along her Durall coveralls as she caught up to Micah and Dollop. Mr. Pynch and the Marquis were nowhere to be found.

“Wh-where did they go?” Dollop whimpered.

“Pynch?” Micah called out, turning in a circle.

“See!” Phoebe snapped at him.

She knew it. This was exactly what she was afraid of.

What happened next came so fast they could barely react. Mr. Pynch and the Marquis burst out of the reeds and grabbed the kids roughly. The Marquis seized their wrists and whipped off their gloves. Mr. Pynch extended a quill and jabbed it into their palms. They cried out, but the mehkans didn't stop.

“H-h-hey. Wait!” Dollop cried, too scared to help.

Phoebe fought, but their grip was unbreakable. With the Marquis's help, Mr. Pynch rubbed their bloody hands on something in his stubby mitts—a pair of orbs the size of oranges. They looked to be made of intersecting gears and segments that emitted high-pitched whirs. It was two of those little critters they had seen the day before, the ones the kids had almost mistaken for field mice. The tiny mehkans unfurled, a mess of shifting plates and pinions, impossible to tell the head from any other end. They were smeared in blood.

“Clykkas, in the brush,” Mr. Pynch hurried. “Fast as can be. Now they got your scent.” He grabbed Micah's Lodestar and shook it. “Blast 'em.”

Micah was confused at first, but a light sparkled in his eyes as the reality of the situation dawned on him. He tweaked his weapon and attracted one of the clykkas to his magnetic coil.

“Aim higher, back toward Fuselage,” Mr. Pynch urged.

Micah squeezed the trigger. With a
WHOOMF,
he sent it squealing. He snatched up the second clykka and blasted it, too. The critter's panicked screech faded as it sped away.

The five of them peered through the brass reeds and down into the Chusk Bowl. The rushing black V-Stalkers were hesitating, as if recalibrating their path. Then they scattered, bolting this way and that, zigzagging through the maze of Fuselage to seek out the blood-soaked clykkas.

“Not a moment to tarry,” said Mr. Pynch, crashing through the waving thicket like a bull. The Marquis struggled with the weight of his satchel and clung fast to his top hat as he sprinted off. Dollop was right on their tails.

Micah licked his wound. He raised his eyebrows at Phoebe in a haughty gesture that said “I told you so” before racing off.

She glanced at the gash on her hand, drops of her blood speckling the ore. Phoebe did not want to follow them, but there was no other way. Reluctantly, she crammed her glove back on and hurried to catch up.

aintaining Mr. Pynch's pace was no easy task.

“Huzzah!” the fat mehkan hollered. He fumbled through the flaps in his overcoat, withdrew a dingy silver cap, and slapped it over his nozzle. “Dis way!” He veered left and trampled a path through the chest-high brass, into a patch where the reeds looked blanched and flimsy. Instantly, Phoebe understood why Mr. Pynch had plugged his nose.

“Barf! Smells like Randy's armpit died,” Micah moaned, covering his face.

No, it's worse,
she thought. It was like month-old meat rotting in a public toilet. And it was getting more putrid with every step. They moved through a patch of growths that was like lengths of scraggly, exposed rebar. At first glance, Phoebe thought the sickly stems were covered in shimmering hairs, but a closer look filled her with revulsion—there were squiggling little maggot things growing out of the wretched metal plant, thousands of them.

“Worbweed. Guarandeed do bask our scend,” Mr. Pynch said through his capped nozzle.

The ground was blanketed with the grubs, which spurted like blisters as the kids walked over them. She could taste bile in her throat and dreaded the thought of losing her breakfast. By the time she thought to use the breathing apparatus in her coveralls, they were out of the wormweed patch. With meticulous attention, the Marquis plucked the squirming things off his tuxedo. Then he extended his legs and slipped a lens over his opticle. After surveying the land, he shrank back down and offered a jaunty thumbs-up to Mr. Pynch.

“Be apologies for de exzessive pudrescenze,” the fat mehkan
said before popping off his nozzle cap. “But it be a judicious precaution. As you can plainly observate, the occasional cavorting of me associate and I with the Foundry has its benefits, as it familiarizes us with their technical apparati. And now that we be relieved of our pursuers, we can proceed apace.”

The halo of suns was rising in the sky. Mr. Pynch shielded his eyes as he gazed up at it, oily perspiration beading his knotted brow.

“It be said that Kallorax fancied himself a god of the suns, incarnated here on Mehk to subjugate the weak.”

“Th-that's terrible,” Dollop gasped.

“Wicked!” said Micah.

“Indeed he was,” growled Mr. Pynch, lowering his tone like a storyteller around a campfire. “Legends tell that he slaughtered millions of his own subjects, incinerating them by the scores. The Citadel be a chamber of nightmares where he burned his enemies in a raging fire, until their red-hot bodies softened and melted and oozed their liquefied entrails out upon—”

“St-top, stop, stop!” Dollop said, covering his ears.

The others laughed, all save for Phoebe.

Mr. Pynch reached for his necktie to dab away his sweat, but stopped in his tracks. It was gone. At first he was concerned, but a knowing grin split his face, and he waggled a finger at his partner. The Marquis touched his chest as if to say, “Who, me?” But then he produced the tie from his pocket with a flourish.

“Bah! How'd you manage that, ya slippery fingersneak?” Mr. Pynch chortled as he laced it around his neck.

Phoebe was shocked, but the others apparently thought it was hilarious. Dollop touched his chest, and upon noticing that his dynamo was missing, laughed even harder. The Marquis plucked off his hat and reached inside it, withdrawing the golden emblem with a delighted flutter of his fingers.

“Nice!” Micah commended as the dapper mehkan returned the dynamo to a giggling Dollop.

“Gotta watch yer personables around the Marquis,” the fat mehkan chuckled. “His loosey-goosey arms can creep up on a body. Reminds me of the time we eluded Tchiock and his gang of ruthless brigands, back in our viscollia-running days down near Kholghit. T'was a good many phases ago when…”

Micah was enraptured by Mr. Pynch's blather, but Dollop was distracted as he reattached his dynamo. He muttered to himself and scratched the dent in his head, trying to work something out. Phoebe hung back to walk with him.

“Not rhyktors,” he mumbled. “They d-don't burrow.”

“Dollop,” she whispered to get his attention.

“A clutch of oudh? No, that's not it. But I—I swear I know who made that pit.” He startled as he noticed her stare. “S-s-sorry, did you say something?”

“I can't believe he robbed you like that,” she said, glancing ahead nervously. “Those two are crooks.” The Marquis looked back and beckoned, his lamp eye flashing brightly, but she and Dollop remained at a distance.

“Oh, n-no!” he giggled. “Th-that's just a little game he plays. He took my dyn-n-namo twice this rise, but he—he gives it back. I like him. He's n-nice.”

“But isn't stealing against the Way?” she asked, baffled. “Don't you think they're up to something?

“Up?” Dollop wondered. “Th-they taught me how to p-play Sliverytik, which was fun. And they offered to help me f-find my clan. For a s-small fee.”

“A fee? See what I mean?”

“But—but they're business-mehkies. And n-now they work
for us.” He shrugged. “Th-they saved us from those St-Stalker things, so they can't be on the F-Foundry's side, right?”

“Maybe,” she said.

“And—and if all they wanted to do was r-r-rob us or hurt us, couldn't they have done it last night?”

“Not with you and Micah keeping watch.”

“Wait…W-w-watch who?”

“Last night. Didn't you stay up and stand guard with Micah?”

“We both recharged. Mr. P-Pynch did all the watching.”

Something curdled inside her. She glared at Micah, yukking it up with his new pals. As they bantered, he grabbed odds and ends from the ground, tossed them up, and then tried to blast them out of the sky with ore chunks fired from his Lodestar—like this was all some kind of joyride.

Little liar,
she smoldered.

But despite her suspicions, she had to admit Dollop had a point. They never would have escaped the V-Stalkers without Mr. Pynch and the Marquis.

“C-come on, let's catch up!” he chirped and scampered ahead. “I don't wan-n-na miss one of, um, Mr. Pynch's stories.”

She took her time rejoining the group. The terrain began to change, with softer plants sprouting among the brass, reddish and waxy, swaying like kelp underwater. There were thickets of fat fanning fronds and creeping barbed-wire vines specked in iridescent bulbs. Small coppery critters that looked disturbingly like syringes poked their needle noses into the bulbs to fill up on turquoise nectar. The ore beneath their feet was becoming moist and gritty like wet coffee grounds, and the air was thick with the citrusy scent of vesper. The thought of it made her uneasy, and she slowed her pace.

“…so I vamoose quicker than a ripple-billed qintriton before they discover what I left in their trunk!” she overheard Mr. Pynch's gravelly baritone. “And that be how the Marquis acquired his most illustrious frontispiece, the first in his ever-expanding ensemble of extraordinary human attire.”

The Marquis gave his metal-threaded top hat a twirl.

“Durall be a bit pretentious for me particular predilection. I prefer a nice cotton-poly blend, but to each mehkie their own,” Mr. Pynch said, waggling his flashy necktie. The Marquis pooh-poohed him with a dismissive wave.

“I bet y'all seen a ton of action.” Micah tossed an ore rock, took careful aim, and
CRACK
. It burst apart. “Booyah!”

“Exquisite marksmanship, Master Micah,” praised Mr. Pynch. “And yes, me associate and I have persevered through many a prodigious endeavor.”

“No guts, no glory, I always say,” Micah proclaimed, puffing his chest out.

Phoebe wanted to crawl out of her skin.

“How eloquently phrased! I wholeheartedly concur. I meself have performed near twenty-seven valiant rescues of the Marquis here and—”

The Marquis's lenses stood on end, and he flared his opticle.

“Aye, aye,” the fat mehkan grumbled. “Me pompestuous associate points out that
his
tally of rescues of
meself
currently counts at forty-four. Though I maintain that at least two of those be entirely attributed to dumb luck.”

Flustered, the Marquis unslung the massive foil sack and dropped it on his partner. Mr. Pynch reluctantly shouldered the bag and spat out a stream of Rattletrap curses that made Dollop gasp. Micah laughed, tossed up another ore rock, and blasted it out of the sky.

“Two for two!” he cried, pumping his fist in the air.

They applauded him, but Phoebe just rolled her eyes.

“Impressive! We be fortunate to have a patron of such fearless talent.”

“Yeah, my pa was a sharpshooter, and so's my sister Margie,” boasted Micah. “She's ranked Apex-Seven in the army, which ain't half bad.”

“Aha! So it be an inherited trait?” Mr. Pynch inquired.

“Well, by the time I was old enough, Pa was too drunk to teach me. When he was around,” Micah said. He kicked hard at the ground to loosen up an ore rock to blast. “But Margie showed me a thing or two. So yeah, you could say it was inherited. She taught me that you never hold your breath. You gotta shoot in that one…still…second, just before you breathe in.”

He tossed up the chunk, took a big breath, and then let it out.
WHOOMF
. He missed the rock by a long shot.

“Guess you're a slow learner,” Phoebe jabbed. Micah spun to face her.

“An invaluable lesson, irregardless,” Mr. Pynch intercepted with a smile. “We be nearing Tendril Fen. Sally forth!”

“S-s-sally, s-sa…sal…” Dollop squeezed his eyes shut and pounded the dent in his head with a fist. “Sal-l-l…SALATHYL!” he screamed with joy.

They all looked at Dollop, not comprehending.

“Th-that's it! That's who made the pit back in F-Fuselage. A s-s-salathyl!”

Mr. Pynch chuckled. “There haven't been salathyls near the Lateral Provinces in hundreds of phases. They be a rarified breed, only thriving in scant pockets beneath the Ephrian plains.”

“That's because the C-C-Covenant k-keeps them secret, um, so no one expects them to at-t-tack from underground! They pop up and KA-BOOM!”

Dollop leaped into the air and flailed his arms. He looked at the others expectantly, but Mr. Pynch just wheezed out a laugh while the Marquis strobed his amusement. Micah saw this and joined in the laughter as well.

“Ah, what a refreshingly credulous young mehkie,” the fat mehkan sighed. “Whatever will you come up with next?”

“So you guys don't buy that supersecret army junk either?” Micah asked.

“Not j-j-junk! They have the lof-f-ftiest of functions!”

“Oh, tales of this ilk be circulating since time immemorial,” Mr. Pynch explained. “Although I must admit our friend Dollop here be the first I ever encountered to unabashedly advocate for their veracity.”

“Yeah, I figured they was made up.”

“Indeed, folk today believe all manners of balderdash, so long as it brings hope. They cling to any fantasy rather than face the rather disagreeable truth that the world be cruel. Especially in bleak days such as these.”

“N-n-no, they are real!” chimed Dollop, determined. “The Children of Ore helped Fuselage. Th-they are coming to s-s-save us all.”

“Aw, come on, chum. Get real,” Micah said, digging into the rucksack on Dollop's back. He withdrew the water jug and took a big slurp. “Them langyls was wiped out. Ain't no kiddie stuff gonna make it better.”

“Big words, Mr. Maddox,” Phoebe burned.

“Was I talkin' to you?”

“You're the one running around quoting a Televiewer show,” Phoebe scoffed. “Talk about kiddie stuff!”

“Quit testin' me, Plumm, or I swear I'll—”

“You'll what?”

The Lodestar quivered in his white-knuckled fist. Mr. Pynch cleared his throat and laid a hand on Micah's shoulder.

“I pray it not be overly presumptuous to interject, but I believe I ascertainate the nature of yer conflagration.” The kids looked at him. “Miss Phoebe considers me associate and I to be unscrupulous sorts, unworthy of her confidence, and Master Micah contracted us against her own behest. Be that the approximate shape of things?”