The Mask And The Master (Mechanized Wizardry Book 2) (31 page)

As Elia placed the voice disk on its star wheel, about two thirds of the way to the top of the machine, Willl with three L’s grabbed the articulation disk by its edges.  The patterns coded on the lower disk would control the apertures inside the spell box that molded raw pitches into vowels; the clattering wooden teeth, the leathery tongue, and the spongey lips that shaped music into consonants; and the self-pumping bellows that provided glottal stops and sibilants.  He put the articulation disk on its star wheel, about a third of a meter below the voice disk, and stepped away.  Elia picked up the thin starter stick, holding it perpendicular to the ground, and placed it into a notch on the edge of each disk.  When the starter stick was straight up-and-down, locked into the notches, it meant that the disks were both synchronized to the same starting point.  Being off by even a centimeter would ruin the whole spell; the mouth would be in the shape of a “D” when the pitch ringing out was supposed to become an “M,” and so on and so on, reducing the Mabinanto to jumbled gibberish.

Elia closed the cabinet door.  The wizardly beard on the front face of the spell box swayed back and forth.  “Beginning the Enunciation,” Martext said as Elia flicked the switch.

“HoraceArthurLundinDeliaBohockHoraceArthur—”

“This part gets a little dull,” Lundin apologized.  “The subject’s name gets repeated for three full cycles.  In our testing, that seems to be—”

“How does it work?” Colonel Yough demanded suddenly, looking over at the spell box.

“Sorry?”

“How does it work?”  She looked back at Lundin.  He frowned, not sure if she was asking about the Enunciation, or the box, or what— and then he took stock of the profoundly searching expression in her sad eyes.

She didn’t understand
it
.  Any of
it.
 And Lundin got the sense that it was very rare for Colonel Yough to sit and observe something for an hour without getting at least a sense of the mechanism behind it.  For all her quirks, the woman was obviously sharp;
so, face-to-face with something she can’t understand, and with the Princess herself relying on her to make a well-informed judgment about it, she must feel—well, about how I’d feel in this situation.

Lundin’s face softened.
  
He thought back to his first visit with Tymon and Archimedia, when every new thing the wizards told him was more chaotic and contradictory than the thing before.  The only thing that carried him through that meeting was the unshakeable trust—the cosmic core of Horace Lundin—that every single thing in, under, around, and outside the Spheres happens for a reason; and that, however mysterious that reason might be, enough time and enough determination would unlock it. 
The Mind is the Key to All Things.

Lundin leaned forward in his chair, hands clasped between his knees, just like Yough was doing.  “What makes a stone fall when we drop it, Colonel?” he said.  “What makes a magnet grab iron but not sulfur?  What keeps the earth aligned with the Spheres?  What, what, what?  It does seem funny, doesn’t it?  The exalted year 876, with more Petronauts and philosophers and naturalists and scholars out there than ever before in human history; and yet, as we reach out to the world around us, and ask it questions, we hardly ever get further than ‘whats.’  Colonel Yough, I can’t tell you what I’d give for a good, solid ‘how.’  And can you imagine getting an answer on a ‘why?’  There’d be dancing in the streets!  And if it happened in our lifetime, I’d be out there, no matter how decrepit I get.

“What I mean to say, Colonel, is that the ‘how’ of magic simply isn’t here yet.  Everything I know about magic comes from three bad sources: modern wizards, ancient books, and my own eyes.  The picture gets a tiny bit clearer every day, but it’s slow.  Very slow.  Believe me, I’m as eager to understand how this all works as you are.  But right now, I have to content myself with the few snippets of ‘whats’ I do know so far, because those little facts are the blocks we need to build up to the things we really want to know.” 

He shifted his feet.  “When you see our demonstration, in about nine minutes, you’ll have your first sight of what works.  From that point on, you’ll know almost as much as we do.  And, then, you can have a part in helping all of us get to ‘how.’  Do what you have to, of course.  I just wanted to say that if what you see today makes you want to learn more, we would all be absolutely honored to learn more with you.”

The officers had stopped eating.  Dame Miri and their techs had stopped their monitoring.  Everyone in the room was looking at Colonel Yough.   Her eyes narrowed slightly, receding into her blocky face.

“Huh,” she said.

That little pinprick of sound was enough to thoroughly deflate the mood, whatever exactly the mood was.  The officers at the table began mumbling to each other.  Lundin put on a smile, his mouth suddenly going dry.  He coughed into his hand.  “How much time left, Elia?” he called out, with completely unconvincing cheeriness.

“About nine minutes,” she said, apologetically.

“—BohockHoraceArthurLundinDelia—”

Lundin turned in his chair to inspect the spell box, as if there were some reason for him to be watching it.  He couldn’t bear to look forward at Yough right now. 
She asked you a simple question, you idiot
, he thought. 
When an Army Colonel asks you how something works, don’t talk to her about gravity and feelings and the state of modern-day metaphysical inquiry.  Tell her how it works! 

But I don’t flaming know how magic works!

You know what the wizards think.  You also know where they’re wrong; it’s all about the words, not how they’re said, on and on and on.  You know things!  And instead you put her through a dumb speech and invited her to learn with you.

Listen, you.  I thought I saw something in her eyes.  A point of connection.

Don’t ever do that again. And if you ever feel the impulse to do it again, just remember this:

“Huh.”  “Huh.”  “Huh.”

Colonel Yough’s monosyllable went into fast-paced repeat in his head, building in disdain and contempt with each repetition.  Lundin bit his teeth with his other teeth, grinding his molars together.  He may very well have doomed the mechanized wizardry project then and there, with his big mouth.

No
, he thought suddenly. 
No, brain, don’t be that way.  You can’t count yourself out before the demonstration actually happens.  Colonel Yough’s a professional.  Even if she thinks you’re a moron, if she thinks the spell box has value, that’s exactly what she’ll say to the Princess.  There are cartloads of hope just waiting to be delivered.  So burn you for giving up nine minutes too soon.

Excuse me for not seeing the cartloads of hope,
came the reply.
  Enjoy the next nine minutes.

“I hate that guy,” Lundin muttered to himself.  He swiveled back around in his chair, and found reasons not to make eye contact with the intense, sad-faced Colonel.

“—HoraceArthurLundinDeliaBohock.”

And then, unexpectedly, the drone stopped and the room was silent.  Lundin blinked.  Just like last night, it seemed he’d missed the last few moments of the spell.  It wasn’t like waking up from sleep, or becoming conscious after a blackout.  There was just a certain fuzziness in the head, and a sense of surprise that it was when it was. The other ‘nauts had said they hadn’t noticed any outward change in him towards the end of the Enunciation, in the period he couldn’t remember.  He’d just been sitting quietly, radiating impatience the same way he had been for the hour and a half prior.

Likewise, no one in the briefing room was looking at him oddly, though they were all looking at him.  Yough, dead center; Farmingham next to her; the six officers, two having wandered back to their chairs, three remaining at the snack table, and the last looking back from the window in mid-yawn, caught off guard by the spell’s end.  The techs were all around him, Martext level with his right shoulder; Dame Miri on the other side of Yough, resting her hand on an empty chair back—

I could go on all day
, Lundin thought with a grin.  The
ojing
hanging from the ceiling were a gleaming, creamy white.  They’d done it again.

“So?” Colonel Yough asked as Lundin stood up.  Dame Miri at her side grinned in recognition of the expression on Lundin’s face.  He looked over his shoulder.  Elia and Willl with three L’s were standing by the spell box, vibrating with energy.  Even Martext had a gleam in his eye behind those trapezoidal glasses.

“Thanks to all of you for your patience,” Lundin said.  “We’d like to demonstrate the spell we call ‘Greatsight.’

“Now, my eyes normally do just fine.  I don’t need stylish lenses, like all my Civic friends here.  But I would never have called my eyesight anything out of the ordinary.  Now, though?  Things are a little different.  Mister Goolsby?”

“How many silver-and-black tiles on the floor of this room?” Martext said, referring to his notebook.

Lundin looked down.  “Sixty-seven,” he said immediately.

“How tall is Lieutenant Colonel Farmingham, without his boots?”

Lundin looked forward.  “One meter, sixty-three-and-three-quarters centimeters.”  Farmingham let out a bark of laughter, his eyes widening in surprise.

“How many plates are on the refreshment table?”

“Clean or dirty?”

“…both.”

Lundin turned left.  “Three clean and six dirty, including the one Major Bawley set down when I stood up, which still has two perfectly good freshwater prawns.  You’re saving them, I suppose, Major?”

Martext grinned as Major Bawley’s jaw dropped almost to her chest.  “I came up with those questions without Horace knowing them beforehand,” the tech said.

“But, still, maybe I’ve just spent the last eighty-something minutes memorizing random trivia about the room and all of you, so I’d be ready for him,” Lundin said.  “That’s why we asked for Lieutenant Colonel Farmingham’s help for the next part.”

“Want to tell everyone what we roped you into?” Dame Miri said, with a playful smile.

“Well!”  The balding officer stood, rubbing his head, and spoke as he headed for the door.  “They asked me to pick one of the tapestries that usually hangs in Haberstorm Hall—they’re in storage now, you know—and to, uh, hide something in it.  Pinned to it, or what have you.”

“What sort of something?”  Colonel Yough asked.

Farmingham glanced at Lundin.  “I’m not supposed to say.  Mister Lundin’s going to know it when he sees it.”

As the Lieutenant Colonel ducked into the hallway, Yough slowly turned back to Lundin.  “You’re going to find something hidden in a huge tapestry you’ve never seen, when you don’t even know what you’re looking for?”

He nodded, feeling a little sheepish.  It may have been true, but it still sure sounded like bragging.

“Oh!  I’m supposed to blind Mister Lundin before the tapestry comes in,” Elia said, grabbing a length of black cloth from the tabletop.  She trotted over to Lundin, who sat back down in the chair so she could wrap the blindfold over his eyes.  “This way, we’ll all get to look at it first.”

“Quiet as you look.  Don’t give anything away,” Dame Miri cautioned gleefully as Farmingham came back, his boots thumping on the stone floor.  Two pages followed him with a long, ornate tapestry strung on a pole that they rested between their shoulders.  Miri, the techs, and the officers crowded together to scrutinize it. The woven masterpiece was over a meter tall and fully four meters long.  It depicted several moments of a pastoral scene gone wrong, where the gently lazing sheep with their pipe-playing shepherd boy in this corner were subsequently menaced by a wolf pack.  In opalescent thread in the sky, you could see the shining edges of one of the celestial Spheres above the clouds, with rather fanciful black flames burning outside the Sphere’s shell, safely kept at bay.

“So you hid something in this, Colonel—?” one of the officers started to say.

“Hush!”  Colonel Yough snapped.  “Leak any information to Mister Lundin, and it ruins the test!”

The room was utterly silent after that.  Lundin had to repress a giggle, underneath the soft fabric of the blindfold. 
Yough’s really taking this seriously
, he thought, allowing his spirits to climb just a little more.

“Ready, Mister Lundin?”  Farmingham said after a long, long pause in the outside world.

“Ready!”

Elia undid the blindfold.  Lundin blinked a few times as his eyes readjusted.  The two pages were facing him, with the intricate tapestry stretched out between them.  His eyes flicked over it, and he pointed to one of the snarling wolves.  “A carpenter’s nail,” he murmured, already moving on.  “A strand of fishing line,” he said, pointed up into the radiant cosmos at the top of the tapestry.  Lundin grinned as he looked at the sleepy shepherd’s flowing blouse.  “A campaign ribbon, blue and silver.  Is it yours, Colonel?”

“For serving in the corsair venture, nineteen years ago.  My marine days,” Farmingham said, shaking his head slowly.   “Burn me whole, that’s all three!” he broke into applause, and the other officers followed suit, as stunned as they were appreciative.  Only about five seconds had passed.  It had taken Lundin longer to report the things he’d found than to find them.

“Stars and Spheres, Horace—I hid the damn things myself, and I could barely find them again.  And then you…!  Well, it’s like you looked at the tapestry once, and you knew everything about it, just like that!”

“How to explain?” Lundin said as the pages bowed their heads and took the tapestry outside, bewildered by whatever it was they’d just witnessed.  “I know that when I go into a room, on a normal day, my eye gives me a… a sketch of what everything looks like right away.  If I want to get any detail on a part of the room, though, I have to focus there.  It’s like my whole field of vision is a big canvas—or a tapestry—but my
focus
is one little magnifying glass.

“Does that make sense?  Colonel Farmingham, you’re choosing to look straight ahead at my face now, which means you don’t really know what’s happening in the doorway, there to the side.  Sure, it’s there in your periphery, and if somebody came through the door, you’d know to turn and look.  But your magnifying glass is only big enough to focus on one part of the tapestry at a time.”