Sir Waldo would not let Godfrey come home. He oversaw the runework on the long-range teleportation platforms that moved troops and materials from the Isles to the Continent, and no amount of trickery would let Godfrey bypass the security spells. Pleading wouldn’t work either. Godfrey needed some kind of amazing haul, something to add prestige to the family name. Unless he could steal a dragon with long-range flight capabilities, he would not see the shores of England any other way.
Until then, he was a fly in a web, stuck in this dark place until it sucked the life out of him.
Pawing around in the darkness, his fingers brushed the shaft of his wand and closed on it. He cast a quick healing spell on his stinging eyes and ears, and the sounds and sights of the forest rushed back into clear relief.
“Ungh!” Godfrey sucked in a wet breath and drew the fastest terramancy equation he could muster, mind racing as he focused on the flood of information that came to him.
That vile colonial boy and his infernal machine were long gone. Godfrey’s broom was ruined, as was Birtwistle’s. Birty was unconscious, maybe even dead, his body slumped over in the bushes to Godfrey’s right. Fitznottingham was . . . close? But he wasn’t moving, and Godfrey’s magic was fouled up by the presence of frosted iron. Had the machinist been carrying that on him?
Clever sod. Godfrey stood and brushed his clothes, wondering if he’d gotten any of the poisonous dust on his robe. Curse that renegade machinist and his. . .
Godfrey froze.
Renegade machinist.
Bob’s your bloody uncle, that would do it!
The reports stated that that the technomancers had a vast, secretive, nigh impenetrable network. Those that had been taken alive soon killed themselves with poison capsules. They were a thorn in the side of the Empire, with the potential to become much worse if they weren’t cut down in their infancy. He’d heard that they even raided the Crown’s supply farms down south. Tonight marked his first sighting of one, and he’d survived. Was there some way to catch him? Maybe Fitz’s carpet was still intact?
“Winston! Hammond!” Godfrey called. The woods swallowed his words, and equally blocked any response that might have come. He cast an illumination spell and stumbled about until he came across Fitz’s flying carpet, half-covering a fresh corpse.
Godfrey gasped. The little vermin! He’d killed Winston Fitznottingham, a badged and licensed mage of the Crown! Not only was he a machinist, this boy was a runaway murderer! Godfrey could not believe his luck.
“Catch him,” he told himself. “Catch this brat and bring him to justice, and Father will beg you to come home. Secan!”
Waving his wand about, he cast a searching spell over Fitz. The mage’s badge hung inside his robe, against his breast. Godfrey took the badge—it carried more authority than his own—and turned to take the rug. Something tugged at him though, at his mind, prodding him to search again. Frowning, Godfrey raised his wand again and uttered a second spell: “Iernes!”
A moment later, a call came back, spoken in colonial English, clear as a bell: This one’s for Baltimore.
A ghost of the words hung in the heavy forest air, laced with anger and something akin to righteous indignation. Godfrey reached out with his magic and absorbed the essence of them, trying to understand their context, and what had happened as they’d been said. There was a declaration, the feeling of victory, of retribution . . . the boy had uttered this just before killing Fitznottingham with a loud and violent weapon.
Godfrey pondered on their meaning, repeating the spell half a dozen times . . . why did this sound so familiar? This particular shade of bright red anger called to his mind. Godfrey racked his memory for the answer.
Yes! It was that brat who’d doused Fitz in filthy water, and then punched Birty. Baltimore. Godfrey had taken a reading of the boy’s emotions at the time; he’d known he was lying. He’d done it on purpose, without his parents’ approval. . .
Godfrey raced to piece it together. The son hated mages, wanted to assault them, the father said no, so the son ran away and joined the technomancers. Whether by fate or fortune, Godfrey had crossed paths with the angry duffer. He knew what opportunity looked like, and he would not let it escape his grasp.
This one’s for Baltimore. Such a tense declaration, sealed with a slaying, might as well have been a compass spell. Using his wand, Godfrey drafted a series of complicated runes in the air.
“Gesamnian!”
A hazy cloud lit up around him, the dregs of the boy’s red-hot anger. Godfrey finished his incantation with a flourish and ushered the haze into an empty potion vial. He stowed the hardened glass bottle in a sash at his waist.
Protocol dictated that he find the nearest mage precinct and file a report. Sod that. He would bag this prey himself.
With Fitz’s badge in hand, Godfrey stepped onto the carpet and ascended out of the thick woods. The bottled spell pointed straight and true, guiding him with deadly precision.
To his next encounter with the Boy from Baltimore.
And this time, the result would be very different.
~
CHAPTER 13
In the back of his mind Calvin heard one of the McCrackens say something about flying in broad daylight: you weren’t supposed to do it. Calvin’s anxiety outpaced his exhaustion, and he pushed himself to the limit. Half an hour after he escaped the mages, he came across a petroleum refinery that Peter and Brian had marked on a map, and Calvin managed to steal eight gallons of kerosene to power the mimic. Then he flew well past sunrise.
At dawn he dipped low and accidentally buzzed an Iroquois village hidden in the woods. Some of them had magic—different from the British mages but still as potent—and they lobbed arrows at him over supernaturally long distances. He escaped without further incident, flying until high noon, when he shut down on the peak of a mountain and collapsed over the hump of the mimic’s fuel tank, falling asleep instantly.
For many hours, he slept.
*
He woke up, stiff and aching, with a dull protest in his chest from the fuel cap. He twisted from side to side to pop his spine, which had tightened up like an overdried leather braid. When he dismounted to relieve himself, two sharp pinpricks in his back notified him that he had in fact been shot by the Iroquois. Frowning, he slipped the coat off and found two arrows and a tomahawk embedded in the thick material.
“Seriously?” he muttered. To the jacket’s credit, he hadn’t even felt them hit. The frosted iron had done its job. Calvin plucked out the weapons and dropped them on the ground, thought better of it, and put them in his satchel. Better not to leave extra evidence that he’d been here.
The sun dipped lower to the horizon, bathing the western sky in a rich, reddish-orange light. Calvin shrugged back into the jacket but left it unbuttoned in the front, and likewise only strung his goggles on around his head. His thoughts kept drifting back to Fitz, and how he’d killed a man for the second time.
He didn’t relish the feeling. As much as he hated Fitz and Birty, he would have preferred if they’d just up and left. But if he hadn’t finished the fight, he knew they’d have come back with worse. All he could think of was that afternoon in Tanner’s yard, when he’d worked up the guts to grab that bucket and take action.
“There’s nothing pretty about this,” he said aloud, as if lecturing himself. “I know that now. It’s this, or we keep living the way we always have.” Calvin looked down at his gloved hands, studying the worn leather across his palms. “You can do any job with the right tool. Even a dirty job.”
He chewed on his own words. Maybe it would bother him for a while. He could live with that; he couldn’t live the rest of his life knowing that he had a chance to be free, and had let it go. Father had chosen that path. Not him.
Contenting himself with this fact, Calvin took one last look at the setting sun before mounting his mimic and resuming his flight. He still had enough fuel to get to Youngstown without stopping.
*
&
nbsp; He made it by midnight. What he saw scared him.
From the sky he could see where the city had begun, near the black foothills rich with coal. The buildings changed in style the farther they moved out, like layers of an onion, their architecture having altered as the city expanded over time. At one point the place had been large, maybe even as big as Baltimore, until some terrible calamity had befallen it. Now it was a ghost town.
The moon waxed larger tonight, and without the canopy of so many trees Calvin could see much better than he had in the woods the night before. Pale blue light cast shadows on the city, and the scene smelled of ash. Buildings stood half-destroyed in a pile of bricks, their inner pylons toppled over. Roads buckled up, burnt trees stood leafless along the walkways, and not a single glass window remained intact.
What had happened here? Well, other than the mages finding the place, that is. In some spots, objects had been transfigured; stone barricades were partially converted to flower petals, or wooden shops and buildings had been reduced to piles of sand and sawdust. Behind the barricades stood discarded cannons and ankle-deep piles of spent bullet casings.
There had been an all-out fight here. Man against mage, no holding back. And the army had clearly lost.
Calvin’s heart fluttered. Youngstown had been leveled! Should he go back to Mount Vernon? Maybe between the time Jack Badgett got his intelligence and the time the McCrackens dispatched Calvin, the mages had swarmed the technomancers’ outpost . . . but no. The longer Calvin searched the rubble, hovering silently down the broken roads, the more he started to think that this damage took place a while ago. Maybe even years. The few bodies that he saw—he tried not to throw up—had decayed too much for a recent battle.
At the next intersection he turned right. A larger building stood in the center of the square, with pillars holding up a domed roof. The half-burned sign on the lawn proclaimed it to be the justice building at City Hall. The steps were clear of debris, and Calvin thought it a good place to stop and unclog the lifter fans, which had sucked up a lot of ash in the last ten minutes. He had only just flown up the main walkway when a massive pile of debris shifted on the overgrown lawn, bowled aside as though pushed by a massive hand from below, revealing a wide, dark hole that went deep underground. Two great shadows emerged from the hole, and in the weak light of his ash-covered headlamps he made out the faint silhouettes of two gryphons.
“Nope!” Calvin jerked the handlebars to the side and revved the throttle.
He sped over the grass, fighting for altitude. The lifter fans squealed in protest. Forced to stay low, he went to the end of the block and cut left, hoping the headlights would warn him of any obstacles.
He needn’t have worried; brighter lights shown down on him from behind. The noise of larger engines assaulted his ears. He felt a presence zoom overhead, reach the end of the street and drop to his level, pointing a pair of blindingly bright headlights at him. Calvin averted his eyes and wrenched his air flaps open to bring his mimic to a halt, thumb hovering over the triggers to the two belly guns underneath.
Then he realized his mistake: these were mimics, not actual gryphons.
An amplified voice boomed through the glare. “State your purpose!”
Calvin squinted hard. “I’m a technomancer!”
“What is your base of origin?”
“I’m out of Mount Vernon!” He held up the canister, still strapped across his chest.
The lights went out. Calvin blinked several times to adjust to the darkness again, and he saw the profile of a gryphon mimic, complete with pilot and gunner. The gunner, dressed from head to toe in some type of plate armor, fast-roped off the back of the gryphon and deftly maneuvered through the debris in the road to examine Calvin’s canister. “I have to give it to Major Tyler,” Calvin said, hoping he sounded official enough. “McCracken’s orders.”
“You’re cleared. Follow our six back into the tunnel,” the gunner said, pointing at City Hall. Calvin didn’t know what a six was, so he just stayed between the two gryphons.
So. There were still technomancers in Youngstown.
*
The rubble on the lawn was part of a huge hydraulic device that covered a secret door into the technomancers’ underground hideout which, Calvin soon saw, was even larger than the city above. Supported by thick stone pillars, the base spread out for what looked like a mile, bustling with activity even at this hour.
He steered the dragonling straight down a forty-foot shaft into an open landing pit with a fifty-foot ceiling. Spread out below him was an entire fleet of mimics in a variety of models, parked in neat lines, and the farther he dropped, the more came into view. The base had multiple floors and levels, like a giant bowl-shaped stadium that eventually led to an open space some two hundred feet beneath the surface.
Wherever anyone was working or standing by, they used electric lanterns and gaslight to provide illumination. Parts of the ground were paved where necessary, but by and large the floor was mostly level dirt and gravel.
Something like this has been here for a long time, and I hadn’t the slightest idea.
The gryphons flanked him during the descent, then broke off and told him to follow. Calvin stayed on their tails until they arrived at the far edge of the motor pool, where they landed and disembarked. He followed the gryphons to a huge area full of other mimics, separated by size and model. Calvin found an empty spot among the dragonlings, and his escorts parked their machines with the gryphons. One of the pilots approached him and removed his helmet. Calvin recognized him right away.
“John Penn?”
“In the flesh, kid. Three weeks into training and they gave you a mimic?”
“Yeah . . . it wasn’t supposed to be me, but another guy got sick. Actually it wasn’t supposed to be him on this thing either,” Calvin said, brushing ash off of his sleeves.
John eyed the saddle and gasped. “Jack Badgett! What happened?”
Calvin presented the cylinder. “That’s why I’m here.”
“But, Mount Vernon! Is everything okay there?”
“It was when I left.”
John nodded. He wanted to ask more, but he seemed like he had somewhere to be. “Come on. I’ll take you to the Major.”
They left the motor pool, following a colored footpath along one wall. This led to a section of the undercity that had been turned into offices and laboratories for higher-ranking TechMan officers. Calvin peered through some windows as they walked.
“What happened to the city up there? And how did you guys dig this place out?” he asked John.
“Youngstown has been like this for a hundred years. Used to be a coal mine, filled with slaves and prisoners. All of them were duffers, of course,” John said with a hint of bitterness. “They strip-mined the whole place and couldn’t go any deeper without seriously buggering the stability on the surface. After that, the King turned it into a political prison. This was where he hid the people he really hated, the ones who caused him the most trouble. People like the first technomancers.”
“But you freed them?” Calvin asked.
“Not me personally, no. Maybe ten years back, some earlier technomancers gave it a try. It didn’t go so well. They took control of the prison, but then the mages laid siege to the city. Our side had access to huge stocks of iron-based metals that they weren’t willing to surrender—too many weapons and machines could be made from it all. But they couldn’t break the siege either, so they organized a false retreat down into the mines and let the King’s forces think they’d suffocated. Burn the topside to ash, pump some frosted iron dust up through the ventilation system, and boom: you’ve got a fortress that they won’t invade unless they have to,” John said.
“Damn,” Calvin breathed, finding a newfound appreciation for the expansive space.
“Yeah. This place is one of our best-kept secrets. A lot of good men and women died down here. Now, upon their bones we build the vehicles of their justice.”
They rounde
d a corner into a hallway with a low ceiling, lit by gas lanterns. From the other end came a soldier in combat fatigues, sporting a pistol on his hip and a sturdy metal helmet tucked under one arm. His jacket looked like Calvin’s, only more worn and decorated with medals for things Calvin could only guess at. John Penn snapped to attention, though the newcomer was a good ten years younger. Calvin decided to salute as well.
“Captain Hamilton,” John said.
“At ease, Leftenant. Who’s the riffraff?”
“A new TechMan from Mount Vernon. No rank yet, it appears he was sent out before graduation.”
“I have a message for Major Tyler,” Calvin said.
John stepped in front of Calvin, blocking his view of Captain Hamilton. “My apologies sir, he doesn’t yet know protocol.”
“McCracken sent us a wet-behind-the-ears greenhorn? That’s some crap,” Hamilton said with a grunt. Calvin already didn’t like this guy, whoever he was.
“The situation sounded dire. Jack Badgett has been taken out,” John explained.
Hamilton groaned. “You’re relieved of the charge, Leftenant. You! Come with me.” He snapped his fingers. John moved aside and pushed Calvin forward.
“Do as he tells you, Adler. And don’t speak to an officer without being spoken to first.”
His pride wounded, Calvin frowned and followed Captain Hamilton back down the hall to a guarded door. The guards didn’t stop Hamilton, though; he walked right through and pulled Calvin in after him.
“Your weapons.” Hamilton slapped the top of a metal table on one side of the small room, an antechamber to another room beyond.
Calvin almost protested. Sensing that would be a bad idea, he removed the blunderbuss, the pack with the rifle, and the Iroquois weapons he’d stowed.
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