by Ben Rovik
“Does Naomi want to ascend to the Throne?” Ouste’s voice was flat, her blue eyes fixed on the girl.
Ceres shifted her weight, her trouser legs rustling against each other loudly in the still chamber. “Princess Naomi is the heir. She will be Delia’s queen.”
“If she succeeds.” The sorcerer turned to face Ceres, folding her hands together. “If she survives,” Ouste whispered.
“Bite your tongue, wizard.” Lady Ceres would not look at the other woman, her throat growing suddenly tight.
“Lord Torvald nearly died.”
Ceres frowned, thinking back on the golden-haired youth. “Lord Torvald underwent the Second Ordeals and was found lacking. Custom dictated he be removed from the succession and banished, along with his shame. Her brother’s failure is immaterial to Naomi’s journey.”
“A strong, hardy boy like him, with every virtue a king might crave: banished.”
“A necessary action.”
“‘Necessary.’” The wizard tasted the word dubiously, like a bad piece of meat. “So Delia may be the center of technology, the center of progress, the center of experimentation and advancement. But when it comes to our monarchy, all that matters is tradition, no matter how barbaric. Maybe the peasants would not be testing their might in rebellion if they knew their government was willing to change with the times.”
Lady Ceres stomped forward, not trusting herself to respond. Ouste’s thin hand on her arm stopped her, and she whirled around. “Tell me, Lady Ceres,” Ouste said, with new urgency, “that you truly think this child—this child—can endure where her brother could not.”
The weary lines deepened on the regent’s face as she gently pulled her arm away. “She has no choice,” Ceres said.
Ouste watched as the towering woman made her way across the bare room, approaching the Princess with surprisingly delicate steps. Naomi looked up at Lady Ceres from the floor, her thin legs curled over each other in a meditative pose. Thirteen years old, Ceres thought sadly, bowing as the too-pale face turned up to her. Ceres raised her hands. “Step by step, a journey of ten thousand paces,” she said, her voice catching on the ceremonial language. Her fingers fluttered along with her words. “A waypost in a barren field; the earth cracks for want of rain.”
Princess Naomi’s brown eyes fell, and her head drooped. Her golden hair stuck up in jagged peaks where the shears had hacked their way through. Lady Ceres, despite herself, shot a quick glance back to the court wizard. Ouste stood with her arms crossed over her silver robes, her pale eyes revealing nothing.
Naomi’s hands began to move in her lap, almost imperceptibly. Ceres squinted to make out the words as the girl made the signs of her reply, fingers flicking in the only language she would ever speak. <
Ceres set her jaw. She walked to the tall black cabinet and slid open a drawer half-a-dozen centimeters across. She removed a black leather pouch and slid the drawer closed. Lady Ceres turned back to the Princess before her quick mind could estimate just how many drawers were remaining in the Cabinet of Ordeals.
Naomi’s head was still hanging against her chest. Ceres pulled the drawstring on the pouch and, gingerly, with gloved fingers, removed a translucent circular disk bigger than a two-sestari coin. Reflected sunlight against the red ceiling cast a troubling, bloody shadow on the disk of salt. There were four others like it in the pouch.
“Your Royal Highness,” Ceres said, getting the heir’s attention as gently as she could. “Are you ready?”
After a painful pause, Princess Naomi looked up at the regent. She nodded, once, and opened her mouth.
“Everyone has a moment,” Lundin elaborated, tightening the knot, “when—I suppose—a switch gets thrown, and suddenly you’re on. And whatever your function is, you start doing it; you start blasting forward, full speed ahead. You’re like a machine, finally put to work. And you just do the task you’re made for. You don’t know how it’s going to turn out, but you trust that whoever put you together knew what they were doing, and that they made you good enough to do what you have to do.
“It makes you wonder what you were doing with yourself beforehand, though. What is a machine doing before it’s turned on? Nothing—well, except gathering mold and falling apart. So if a person—hypothetically—can look back at his life and see the moment where he switched on, does that mean his previous thirty-one years were spent amassing a world-class mold collection? That everything up to this new point was a total waste?
“But you wouldn’t say a machine was wasteful, or aimless, or lazy, just because it was turned off. After all, it wasn’t the machine’s idea to be switched off in the first place. Machines love to work; that’s what they’re for. So this hypothetical person can’t be blamed either for having been ‘off’ for a few decades, while he waited for the powers-that-be to flick a switch.
“Or maybe he can be blamed, because he’s not a machine. He’s a man; a mediocre man. He came to academy late, floated through the middle of his class, watched opportunities pass by in front of his nose because raising a hand to grab them felt like too much work. Maybe the powers-that-be didn’t switch him on because he was finally ready; maybe they turned him on because they were sick of waiting for him to flick his own switch. So to speak,” Lundin revised hastily, coughing.
“But does it even matter exactly why it’s happened? Why worry about the past, when there’s so much in the here-and-now to focus on? All our Mister Hypothetical knows is that being switched on makes him feel good.”
The tarnished copper cone on top of the Melodimax gaped blankly at Lundin. He looked down at it from his perch on the stool, suddenly feeling the silence of the otherwise empty workshop. “And a little chatty,” he said, scratching the stubble on his chin.
He hopped down from the stool, looking up at his handiwork. Archimedia had invited him back to the Harborfront hut yesterday to discuss his progress and give him some new resources, including a rough fabric sleeve with a pair of ojing inside. The technician had immediately recognized the pale circular disks he’d last seen hanging in LaMontina’s unhappy tent, eleven days ago. They weren’t bone-white now, but a neutral tan, like kid leather. “The ojing respond to magical change,” Archimedia explained. “The spells you weave in their presence will color them white. Magic from external sources, whether drifting by in passing or there to compete with your spell, will appear as patches of black.”
“How do they work?” Lundin asked, inspecting the ojing with what he hoped was the proper reverence.
She actually patted him on the knee. “You are very enthusiastic, and thoroughly incapable of understanding the answer. Right now, that is,” she added, softening the blow.
“What are they made of, at least?”
“Something precious.” Archimedia lifted the other ojing up, showing him its surface. It was smooth, but not featureless; gentle whorls and lines crisscrossed its face. “If you insist on studying them further, first draw your attention to the patterns created during a spell. What appears pure white is in fact alive with motion.”
The two ojing that Lundin had hung from the low rafters in the workshop were not alive with motion now; their leathery surfaces were static in the absence of magic. But when the magic happens… Lundin turned to the Melodimax, with its scuffed wooden case and its side panel swung wide open to the air. If the magic happens, he thought more soberly.
With Dame Miri’s help, and Archimedia’s notes, he and Samanthi had adapted the squawk box’s mouthpiece to speak Mabinanto instead of Old Harutian. At least, so they thought, none of them having a damn idea what they were really playing with. Lundin was seized with a pang of anxiety as he looked at the stacks of perforated metal disks they’d run through the presses over hours and hours of painstaking labor. Would any of it work? When the disks were inserted into the squawk box, they’d speak some words, all right—theoretic
ally, the entire pingdu calabra was ready to test. They’d even completed about two-thirds of the Illustration for a spell of friendship; one of the simplest, least invasive spells he’d found in searching Archimedia’s journals. It might take four or five more hours to lay out and press the remaining disks they thought they needed, and that was if no major errors happened. And then they would test the spell on one of Dame Miri’s dogs, an old, blind, neutered curmudgeon named Cort. The dog was not long for this world, and after a good deal of deliberation she’d agreed to volunteer him for the enterprise. The dog was sour-tempered, and hated new faces. If he showed any signs of a sunnier disposition after the spell, there would be beer and Kessian bubbly all around (surreptitiously, where Sir Kelley wouldn’t be able to find it.)
That was the plan; a small chance of modest success, and a thousand and one ways to go completely bust. They didn’t even know if the squawk box worked yet, or if it really could speak Mabinanto. Archimedia was dubious, to say the least, that a mechanical being could ever channel magical energy, or that the verbal component of a spell would suffice to create an arcane result. The whole notion of mechanizing this process hinged on Lundin’s premise that the contortionist showmanship magicians practiced was extraneous to the business of magic. But maybe magic was, by nature, a chaotic, full-body, spur-of-the moment process utterly dependent on inscrutable spirits. Maybe a hundred generations of magic-using humans the world over were right, and Horace Lundin was completely wrong.
His eyes were stinging, and he felt lightheaded from lack of sleep. He looked around the empty workshop, dark except for his one gaslight. Lundin tapped a finger against the half-dozen cold metal disks that made up the pingdu calabra. “I need to know, I need to know,” he muttered.
Samanthi had finally gone home to get some sleep about two hours ago. (Lundin had slept for about ninety minutes in the morning, before stumbling from his apartment in the Toss down to the warehouse to deal with gear for the feastday.) Before leaving, she’d specifically given him her blessing to try the pingdu calabra without her presence. Rather, she’d told him, “A program never works the first try. If you can’t wait until morning to get started poring over six square meters of metal to figure out which little perforations need re-punching, you’re a bigger masochist then I took you for.”
“I guess I am, Sam,” Lundin said aloud as he took the first pair of disks in hand. He crouched down by the open Melodimax and gingerly dropped the pitch disk onto its needle, balanced over the long comb that would pluck the perforations and produce sound. Below the pitch apparatus was the second drum which controlled articulation, the movements of the mouthpiece, and the timing of the bellows to modify the pitches into speech. Lundin set the companion articulation disk on its needle, and used a stick, held to notches on the edge of each disk, to line up the two up at their appropriate starting points. With a degree of trepidation, Lundin swung the side panel of the Melodimax closed. It latched with a click, hiding the intricate gearwork and painstakingly pressed magical disks from view. The squawk box didn’t look like much from the outside; just a bulky red-brown cabinet with a wide, weathered trumpet emerging from its top like a piece of unfortunate sculpture.
There was a single, yellowing switch on the near corner of the box. Horace Lundin held his breath and flicked the switch.
“Pingdu h’leth dagriss ith m’navei,” a voice blared out, far louder than he’d expected. Lundin recoiled and caught himself against a table, his heart pounding. He listened, fascinated, as the voice continued at an even pace over the audible whir of the squawk box’s generator and the muffled click-clacking of the wooden teeth hidden within the trumpet. The squawk box was either a very high tenor or a middle-of-the-road alto, with a clipped, percussive quality. Phrases of what may have been flawless Mabinanto filled the room in a high drone, punctuated by higher pitches and unexpected drops. Lundin leaned back against the table, catching his breath and staring at the motionless, unhurried machine.
“Well then,” he said, uncertainly, as the words kept spilling out.
By Dame Miri’s reckoning, each of the pairs of Mabinanto disks would take about five minutes for the squawk box to recite at a normal human pace. So Lundin would need to swap out these disks for the second part of the pingdu calabra in just a few minutes—and would have to do it quickly, or risk letting the magical energy invoked by the first part of the spell dissipate from an overly long gap in speech. Or would he? Archimedia said that sometimes wizards would meditate or dance in silence for long portions of a casting, if that was what the spirits called for. So maybe going too quickly would ruin the spell. But if there was a middle ground between too fast and too slow, how was he possibly supposed to know what it was? Thirty seconds? Forty-five minutes? How do wizards have any idea how to do this? he thought, fingers resting nervously on the next disk.
“—horask h’ins sh’mai destaravi calabra ith gorunda—”
Maybe wizards start gesticulating just to have something to do while they say the words, Lundin thought. He found his canteen and took a long swig of water, swishing the liquid back and forth in his mouth. The Melodimax kept intoning away, the rise and fall of its words becoming increasingly hypnotic. Lundin tried to stay focused, but between the relentless pace of the speech, the language barrier, and his sleep deprivation, it was almost impossible to stay attentive to the individual words. Wait, he thought suddenly, even if I wasn’t falling asleep standing up, how am I going to know if this works or not? There’s no way for the squawk box to print an error report. If it hitches up, we won’t have the foggiest idea why or where. Lundin cursed under his breath, rubbing his eyes. He was getting ahead of himself. There was no point in running the disks if they hadn’t figured out how to measure the results yet. He should follow Samanthi’s example and go get some sleep. He set down his canteen and shambled over to the squawk box, a flicker of motion up in the rafters briefly catching his attention—
Lundin stopped dead in his tracks. The ojing were turning white.
But not just pure white. He dragged a stool noisily over across the floor and leapt up on it quick as a monkey to get a look at the leathery circles. Each ojing was still about three-quarters tan, the neutral color they’d been when he hung them. But playing across the center of each circle was a blot of white, like a splash of spilled paint, identical on each face of the disk. And the blots were shifting before his eyes, like the amorphous creatures a naturalist might find in pond water with her microscope. Now a tendril would reach out this way; now a curve would contract on that side; now the odd shape would lurch a centimeter towards the ceiling or floor. The white patches were forever in motion, and even the area covered by white was not static but rippling, like the surface of a saucer of milk bumped by a clumsy foot. Even more exciting, Lundin was certain that the area covered by white on each ojing had grown in the brief moment he’d spent watching.
“—liki a’tiel havir im shorea pinth—”
Lundin looked down at the squawk box, blandly reciting the words of arcane creation. “You’re magic,” he whispered. There were tears in his exhausted eyes. “We made you do magic.”
“Mister Lundin.”
Lundin looked to the doorway, where Sir Kelley stood with his arms across his chest. Nearly midnight, and Kelley still looked as crisp and precise as he did at midday, with his jacket pressed and his boots blacked to an onyx shine. Lundin scrambled off the stool with a hasty bow to the squad leader. “Sir Kelley; glad to see you. Can’t believe you’re up so late! You’ve got to see this—”
Kelley cupped a hand around his ear. “What? I can’t hear you, Mister Lundin,” he said, theatrically.
“Sir, please come see! It’s the ojing, the, uh. They’re turning white!”
“—arvoreala ith pingada em sh’mai tronn doptari—”
The Petronaut shook his head and shrugged his shoulders, though his pockmarked face was tight with anger. “You’d better turn it off!” he shouted, pointing at the Melodimax.
Lundin hesitated, looking up at the ojing. “Sir Kelley—”
“Turn it off, Mister Lundin,” he said, dropping the sarcasm.
The single gaslight over Lundin’s station cast long shadows on the walls of the workshop. The silhouette cast by the trumpet of the squawk box seemed to reach out forever, touching the shutters to the outside world. Swallowing hard, Lundin flipped the single off-white switch. The androgynous voice abruptly stopped, though the thrum of the generator took several seconds to wind down into silence.
He looked up at the ojing. There were still patches of white on each disk; the magic hadn’t faded away instantly. “Sir Kelley, look, look up here,” Lundin said, with hands outstretched, as the Petronaut strode across the workshop towards him. “Now, it’s not necessarily conclusive, but those white patterns suggest that a mechanized Invocation seems to gather magical energy just as a—”
“You’re fired,” Kelley said flatly.
Lundin looked back at his superior, slowly lowering his arms. The senior ‘naut stared right back. “Sir Kelley,” he began softly, “I know I’ve been—”
“Insubordinate. Deceitful. Obsessive. Irrational. Negligent. Seditious. Self-serving. The list goes on, Mister Lundin, but the primary thing you’ve been, since this magical mania first blew up your skirt in LaMontina’s tent, is wrong.
“It’s okay to be wrong, Mister Lundin. Not recommended, but unavoidable from time to time. But to be undeniably, jaw-droppingly, humiliatingly wrong; and then to shirk your duties and badger your fellow Petronauts into shirking their duties too, wasting valuable equipment and manpower in comprehensive exploration of your wrong-headed wrongness, during a feastday season where the failure of one individual in the Petronaut community would reflect that failure on all of us in a very public way? That, Horace, is a new species of bad behavior.”
“I’ve kept up with all my tasks,” Lundin said, his voice thick in his mouth.