by Ben Rovik
He looked down at the steward, his eyes hard. “Let me tell you something, Volman,” Mathias hissed. “We know it all. We know about you. We know about the plan. And we know what you’ve done. So you can either talk to us right now, while we’re still friends; or you can wait until later, when things won’t be nearly so nice for you. Get it?”’
Sir Mathias’ heart was thumping like a piston going full steam. He kept his face frozen in a cruel sneer and looked down at the steward, waiting for Volman to laugh, slap his face, or simply leave. Sir Kelley, standing out of Volman’s view, was pressing his fingers to his lips and gaping at Sir Mathias like a man transfixed by a terrible accident.
Suddenly, impossibly, Davic Volman started to cry.
The Petronauts watched the old man’s body convulse with slow, wretched sobs. He buried his face in his bony hands, tears dripping through his fingers. “Fermi was just a boy,” he said, choking on his words. “I see his face everywhere I turn. I never—there’s no place in the Spheres for a man like me. Oh, Fermi, forgive me.”
“Right,” Sir Mathias said carefully, his eyes wide. Kelley made a frantic circular gesture with one finger, like a spinning wheel going around. “We know all about Fermi,” Mathias said. “So tell us where he is.”
“The smoking room,” Volman said, barely audible. He gestured to a thin door next to two great dark crates. “The barrel with the charcoal chips. I never meant for it to be this way…!”
Sir Kelley nodded at Mathias and dashed over to the door, disappearing from view. Sir Mathias put his hands on his hips, his mind reeling. “Since you’re, uh... Since you’re coming clean, Volman, why don’t you get it all out? Right from the beginning.”
“All I had to do was deliver the hair to Jilmaq. A crime, yes, but somehow when there was no blood on my hands, it seemed… well, it was just a plan! A means to a worthy end. But when I saw Fermi’s blood, I realized that it was Princess Naomi’s blood as well, and that I… after all the Haberstorms have done for me…!” The old man wept, anguished.
Sir Mathias was trying to make sense of it when Sir Kelley re-appeared, his face grave. Mathias left Volman crying and joined his partner in the doorway. Sir Kelley clapped him on the shoulder and gestured into the room.
Mathias craned his neck to look inside the wide barrel Kelley had opened. Visible through the black chips of charcoal was the bloated, terrified face of a boy. Sir Mathias exhaled, looking at the tangles of sandy hair smeared with blood. The two Petronauts turned back to the old steward, leaning himself against the heavy leg of a table as sobs continued to shake his frail body.
“Let’s tell the Guard,” Sir Mathias said heavily.
Chapter Eleven
The Box Squawks
Samanthi wound down the Communicator and walked back towards the Abacus, her face tinged a sickly gray. Lundin looked up from his fight with the Compiler, a stack of cards in his hand. “What’s the word?” he asked, his voice low.
“There’s a dead kid in the larder,” she whispered. Lundin’s eyes widened. “A servant. The steward killed him because he stumbled onto the fact that Princess Naomi’s braid is gone.”
“Stars and Spheres,” Lundin breathed. “It’s all true.”
“They’re telling the Guard about the murder, and then they’re going to the vault to confirm the, uh, theft. Burn me, Lundin, the Princess is as good as dead,” Samanthi said, her eyes going unfocused.
“Did the steward name names? Did he confirm that Ouste is in on it?”
“No. Well, he named their wizard. Jellmap, or something; the hack from LaMontina’s tent?”
Lundin scratched the side of his neck. “If any wizard can screw up a sure thing, it’s that guy.”
“Small favors, right?” She drummed her fingers on Abby. “But then the steward clammed up. Apparently he wants to take the fall for this all by himself.”
“As far as I’m concerned, those ojing prove that Ouste is a conspirator.”
“But we’re not magical experts. And we’re outsiders. If we accuse her without stronger proof, do you really think the Regents are gonna believe our story over hers?”
Lundin shuffled the edges of the stack of cards. Then he set the stack down on top of the Complier. “I need to see what she’s up to,” he said.
“Where are you going?” Samanthi hissed as he started walking away.
“Sorry, boss,” Lundin said, sheepishly, as he trotted towards the Princess’ rooms.
The three maids in the room visibly started when Lundin swung the door open, unannounced. One of them, a pretty brunette with close-cropped hair, dashed over to him, her white skirt billowing as she moved. “Excuse me, you can’t be in here,” she said.
“Sorry. Hello! I’m a Petronaut; I’m a technician. I was just, uh.” He tried to look past her to get a good look at what Ouste was doing. Those bright white ojing were spinning ponderously on their strings. The silver-clad sorcerer was sitting on the floor in the middle of a white-and-blue pentagram, her eyes closed. “I, uh, I fixed the fan box for the Princess earlier,” he said, standing on tip-toes to look over the maid’s bonnet. “I wanted to make sure the repair was holding.”
“Yes, it’s nice and cool. Thank you, sir. Now please, you’re not supposed to be here uninvited.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry! See, I thought because I had been invited earlier, that that meant I was still invited now, and later. But I have to be invited each time?” he asked, deliberately obtuse. Just as he thought, Ouste’s mouth wasn’t moving. That bald lady was dead silent. He shook his head, his mouth tightening.
“Yes, sir, each time you must be invited.”
“My mistake! I’ll leave you alone, then. Sorry about the mix-up. Goodbye,” he said after the door slammed in his face.
“Did you get that maid’s name?” Samanthi asked as Lundin came back to their station.
“No, she’s not my type; all business,” Lundin said, moving back to the Compiler. His hands went back to work automatically, sorting cards and feeding them into the toothy slot. “Ouste isn’t even talking,” he reported, just loud enough to be heard over their thrumming machinery. “She’s sitting there in the pentagram, meditating silently.”
“Maybe that’s her process.”
“Maybe she’s letting the Princess die,” Lundin shook his head. “It’s perfect, isn’t it? With the braid to focus on during the Enunciation, Jollmip’s spell can’t fail. The only thing that could block his magic would be a first-rate defending wizard on the other side. And with Ouste in on the plot, she can set up all the trappings of a serious defense without so much as speaking the pingdu calabra. Because non-wizards have no idea what makes magic magic, no one will ever be the wiser.”
“Kelley and Mathias know to look for Jellmap. They said the Guards will help them, and they’ll broadcast to all available ‘nauts on the street to join the hunt too.” She tossed a few cards in the Pickle, and they sizzled noisily as they dissolved. “Maybe they’ll be able to find the wizard before the spell’s done.”
“That always works great. Just ask clan LaMontina.”
“Not helpful, junior tech,” Samanthi snapped. She slapped an open palm against the side of the Abacus, creating a metallic thump. Two passing manservants stopped to look at them, carrying an ornate leather trunk. Samanthi turned her back on them. “Instead of focusing on how terrible this all is,” she said, “how about you start helping me think about what we can do?”
Lundin shrugged, hugging his arms to his chest helplessly. “I don’t know. We can’t catch the wizard in time. We’ve got the squawk box here, but there’s no way we could set up a magical Ward in time, even if we knew how. We can’t make Ouste do her job and defend the Princess. We can’t bring a master of physic in, or—”
“Hold on,” Samanthi said. She got that hungry look in her eyes that meant things were about to get exciting. “You think Ouste’s a stronger wizard than the J-guy?”
“No doubt.”
“So if she st
opped pulling her punches and actually set up magic to counter him, you think she’d win?”
Lundin frowned. “I mean, if the spell’s not too far advanced, maybe. But—“
“Tell me, junior tech, what’s the one spell that we have ready to go?”
“The spell of friendship. Samanthi, where’s this going?”
She grabbed him by the side of the head, pulling their faces close together. “We’re going to make our good friend Ouste fall in love with Princess Naomi all over again,” she whispered, her eyes shining.
It was easier said than done.
“This is the same report you gave us at 7:28,” the clerk complained, scanning over the six-page readout. Her companion, a scrawny clerk with a ridiculous bouffant hairstyle, scowled over her shoulder at the report. “Couriers have delivered two new shipments of updated crowd data to you since then,” she complained.
“Is this the same report?” Samanthi gasped, standing shoulder to shoulder with the bureaucrats. She made a great show of inspecting the paper carefully. “You know what? You’re absolutely right!”
“I know I’m right!”
“Of course she’s right,” the male clerk spat.
“We’re relying on you Petronauts to give us the latest projections. We were informed that you would make our jobs easier today.”
“Do you know what happened?” Samanthi tapped her forehead as if remembering. “That first shipment of data you talked about? Sure enough, it came in. And as we were processing it, the Compiler had a detached transverse belt. Set us back almost an hour, trying to patch it. And then, the printer press inside the Abacus had a nasty jam, and by the time we were almost, finally ready to run that new report, guess what happened?”
Samanthi stretched out her open hands to the clerks. They couldn’t guess.
“That’s when the second set of data updates came in! Talk about bad timing! So we figured, ‘why go to the trouble of printing this first set of reports, when they’re already outdated? Let’s just get cracking on this new round!’”
“So where is ‘the new round?’” the clerk asked, suspiciously.
Samanthi pantomimed tearing her hair out, laughing heartily. “Rrrgh! Would you believe that, just as we were getting going, the buffer stacks in the Abacus had a full reversal? What a day!”
The clerks looked at each other. “So when will they be ready?”
She clapped the female clerk on the shoulder. “Rest assured, I’m doing everything I can on this end to prepare the new cards,” she said. “My associate, meanwhile, is using our mobile repair apparatus to prepare the buffer stacks. Very sensitive equipment, can’t be jostled. That’s why he needed to use the storage closet for a less dynamic environment.”
They followed Samanthi’s outstretched arm, looking at the closet door where Lundin had been sequestered for more than an hour now. “How much longer will he be?”
“Not long, not long. He’s a truly exceptional worker. I always say, ‘I wonder what I did to deserve a junior tech like him?’” she said, laughing. Isn’t that the truth, she thought darkly.
“So that was a mobile repair apparatus, huh?” the male clerk said, sniffing. “It looked an awful lot like a squawk box to me. One of those singing things.”
“’A lot of people who don’t know any better say that,” Samanthi nodded, supportively. The clerk straightened up, his bouffant bouncing with indignation like the plume of an angry quail.
Inside the cramped storage closet, Lundin stood with a nervous ear to the door. The walls were lined with shelves of linens and vases, and there was barely enough room to squeeze between the shelves and the Melodimax, shoved as it was into the center of the narrow walking space. The wide trumpet of the squawk box was stuffed with a pair of lacey pillowcases in an effort to muffle the noisy, clicking, androgynous voice as it droned on.
“—li Havei ith mosk, berandriave pol sh’vaeli tob—”
The pingdu calabra was long done. Those three pairs of metal disks sat in a sleeve of their own on the shelf by the door. On the floor were two piles for the Illustration—pitch disks and articulation disks separate, of course—which the machine was slowly working its way through. Nine pairs total for this friendship spell, for an Illustration that lasted an interminable forty-five minutes or more, on top of the quarter-hour the Invocation had required, and not to mention however long it was an Enunciation took before the spell was actually considered ‘cast.’ In casting the spell on Kelley a few nights ago, Lundin had fallen asleep after toggling a ‘repeat’ lever inside the Melodimax. He had no idea how many times the machine had spoken the name Tymon Kelley Malcolm, Esq., before its ‘tum had dwindled and it had switched off. Maybe just one full revolution—five minutes—would be enough to make the magic happen. If they wanted Princess Naomi to survive Jollman’s spell, they needed to have Ouste charmed and casting for the forces of good as soon as humanly possible.
Spheres, but Samanthi was brilliant. Lundin shook his head in wonder, keeping one ear to the foot traffic outside and another on the squawk box, to make sure he’d be ready to swap in the next disks when these ones finished. Leave it to her to figure out how the one spell they had could be the perfect tool for the job. Earlier in the week, after inspecting the Illustration disks closely in the wake of the over-successful casting on Sir Kelley, they’d had a brainstorm for how to tighten up the code and keep it more narrowly focused. Punching the new disks had taken time, but he and Samanthi had decided it was worth it. Now, with any luck at all, this friendship spell would do nothing except make Ouste a loyal subject of the Crown again, full of devotion to her Princess. And it might also make her mouth move strangely for a few days. I’m okay with that, Lundin thought, fingers drumming on the next set of disks.
The portraits out in the hall had proven invaluable. Not only had Princess Naomi’s full name, Naomi Elizabeth Galidate Haberstorm, been on her portrait, but Ouste’s portrait too had been titled “Xanaka Ouste of Upper Elthenia.” That’s exactly what they’d punched into a new pair of Enunciation disks for this particular casting of the friendship spell. The full details would make the spell that much more accurate when it came to targeting in the Illustration and Enunciation alike.
“Come on, come on,” Lundin whispered, peeking into the open side of the squawk box. This pair of disks still had at least two minutes to go. There were five more pairs in the Illustration before the Enunciation even began. Another half-hour with no disasters, and maybe we have a chance to put Princess Naomi’s survival into the hands of a woman who’s currently letting her die!
“I need a new job,” Lundin said morosely as the squawk box brayed into his ear.
Princess Naomi’s eyes cracked open.
There was her ceiling, great waves of fabric stretching from one wall to the other. As she looked at them, they seemed to swim, making her queasy. An overwhelming impulse filled her to close her eyes again, but through sheer force of will she kept her eyelids fluttering, reaching out to the real world. She was covered in sweat; she could feel it all over her face, and her back. Her blood was on fire. Every muscle throbbed with the pain of it.
With a powerful effort, she turned her head, her mouth falling open and her tongue lolling out like a hound’s. It was taking all her strength not to go back inside her head, to the place darker than sleep where she had been for what seemed like months. Was it just last night I fell asleep giggling, ready for the final Ordeals and the feastday? she thought. Can that be? What’s happening to me?
Lady Ceres was there, thank the Spheres. The towering woman had her back to the Princess, in low conversation with one of the maids. Elsie? Veronica? Naomi’s vision was blurry, and she couldn’t make out any features. She gritted her teeth and scraped her fingers against the thin bedsheet to get their attention. The scratching sound was like tidal waves crashing in her ears, and she could feel the vibrations of her movements all up and down her aching arms. But Ceres didn’t even stir.
Blackness was creeping
into her vision from every side. This wasn’t like any fever she’d ever experienced. No—this was something darker, and much more wicked.
Naomi’s fingers flicked across each other, and her hand rotated at the wrist. <
Like a swimmer catching only a quick breath before being pushed underwater by the waves, Princess Naomi’s lids closed and she sank back into unconsciousness.
“—javinish s’kal mar lindish spir ith brovalia—”
Resting on the shelf across the tiny room, Lundin’s two ojing were still pulsing with white as the words kept coming. He clung to that whenever he felt his nerves getting the better of him; whether or not the plan would work, at least the spell was working. One more pair of disks in the Illustration, then Lundin would put on the Enunciation disks and have the squawk box repeat Ouste’s name for as long as he could. Once he had toggled the box to ‘repeat,’ he might even risk stepping into the outside world to see what had happened in the past hour-and-a-half. This closet was feeling awfully cramped by now. Thank the Spheres nobody seems to need sheets today, he thought, picking at the fraying edge of a duvet cover.
He was surprised not to have heard from Samanthi, quite frankly. Maybe she figured the less attention she drew to the fact that Lundin was cloistered in a closet, the better for their plan. It would be hard to convince even the most credulous observer that the chanting Melodimax was a mobile repair apparatus, and odds were good that the meddling clerks outside had only gotten less credulous as the morning drew on.
Well, they can be as sour-faced as they want, Lundin thought, yawning, as long as they stay out for another—
The door swung outwards into the anteroom. He staggered, putting his foot into the stacks of already played Illustration disks. The thin circles slid to the ground in a clatter of metal, resonating cacophonously in the tiny closet. Lundin involuntarily clasped one hand over his ear as he braced against the man-sized Melodimax with the other, balancing himself. A small war party of brocaded clerks stood glaring at him in the doorway, the men with huge hair and the women with tight bonnets. Samanthi was barely visible behind them, her face flushed and her eyes furious.