by Ben Rovik
A flurry of gunfire rang out from the west and the woman contorted in agony, bleeding from her shoulder and her leg. Mathias shot a quick look over at the squad of Delian field agents, advancing into the clearing in two disciplined lines. He caught the eye of the freckled agent who’d been working with Samanthi, the barrel of her pistol still smoking. She nodded at him, a curl of auburn hair peeking out of her skullcap and the edges of a smile on her mouth. Then she grabbed her powder horn and tended to her pistol with the utmost professionalism. Sir Mathias stifled a smile of his own and picked up the pace, charging across nearly flat ground now towards the terrified two smugglers still standing.
Two? There should be three left...
“Mathias! East!”
Sir Kelley’s harsh voice launched him into action. The thin man was fleeing east, stumbling through the woods with his bloody claw-arm trailing behind him. Those claws were the prize of the whole operation; there was no way the smuggler could be allowed to escape. Sir Mathias left the other smugglers behind as Kelley and the agents swept down on them, and broke east after the escapee. He raised his arm as he ran, gun barrel tracking the man’s legs, but the smuggler was leaping through the underbrush like a rabbit and reliable aiming was impossible. The Regents would want this man alive.
“Stop, in the name of the crown!” he shouted out. The ranine coils were pumping in his legs and his strides got longer and longer, erasing the distance between them. A beetle splattered against the faceplate of his helmet with a wet noise and a smell like a spill in an apothecary shop, but he didn’t even slow down. The smuggler struggled through a dense patch of ferns, suddenly turning north and disappearing from view around a rain-smooth boulder. Mathias jumped, the wind whistling in his earholes as he flew skywards. He landed on the peak of the boulder, looking two meters down at the smuggler on the other side. The man had stopped, fiddling with something on his belt. “You can’t run—” Sir Mathias began, raising his arm.
“Death to the pretenders,” the thin man wailed, the claw-marks on his face red and wild.
He hurled something through the air at Mathias, his long arm swinging jerkily. Sir Mathias sighted along his wrist and fired, coolly, clipping the smuggler in the thigh. The thin man crumpled to the forest floor, and then a small black bottle broke against the Petronaut’s chest, and he burst into flames.
The heat was incredible. Sir Mathias slapped his breastplate unthinkingly to beat the flames out, and his gauntlet came away sticky and flaming. The temperature against his chest rose astonishingly with each passing second. The fire was dripping down his stomach towards his groin. He scraped at it with both hands, his body acting automatically while his mind retreated in shock, until both hands were engulfed in flames. The heat of his armor was growing unbearable; beneath it, he could feel the layers of thick cloth padding against his skin starting to curl and scorch, and smell the smoke as they went alight. Staggering on top of the boulder, Mathias looked down at his breastplate. Some jellied substance was clinging to it—a dark black slime—and everywhere he had spread the ooze on himself, he was a roaring flame. If he didn’t put the fire out soon, it would find its way along the fuel lines to the petrolatum bladders against his lower back. If that happened, this boulder would become a crater, and Sir Mathias Mascarpone would be ten thousand bloody morsels for ten thousand hungry vermin on the forest floor.
Read The Mask And The Master,
A novel-length Mechanized Wizardry adventure!
Available at Amazon
Table of Contents
Map
The Wizard That Wasn’t
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
About the Author
Other Petronaut Tales
Sample Chapter from The Mask And The Master