Charmcaster

by Sebastien de Castell

  ‘Altariste, how could you betray me like this?’ she asked.

  He spun on her, forcing the two men escorting her to stop suddenly. ‘Betray you?’ His fists clenched. ‘All these years together, a life built together. Yet all the while you lied to me, pretended you loved me!’

  ‘I do lov—’

  ‘No. Do not dare say those words to me again!’ His jaw tightened and his breathing came in heavy gasps as if he’d been running up an endless hill. ‘I was devoted to you, Janucha. I set aside my own inventions to be your assistant, always believing that I was the luckiest of men to have the most brilliant, daring woman in all of Gitabria choose me over all others.’

  She looked at him as if a stranger had taken his place. ‘Husband, you speak as if I were unfaithful to you.’

  He grabbed at one of the front pockets of her apron, pulling out the mechanical bird. He held it up to her face, moonlight glistening down on its metal wings. ‘You claimed it was an accident. Impossible to repeat. But you knew the secret all along. You had me sketch your plans for you, document your formulas over and over and over. Every one of them a trick, a scheme meant to deceive the lords mercantile into believing you were trying to solve an undecipherable problem.’

  With everyone’s attention on the bird, I tried to break away from the guards. Before I took my first step, two of them had fire lances aimed squarely at my chest. The mechanical bird squirmed frantically in Altariste’s hand. He only gripped it tighter. Janucha tried to take it from him, but two of the guards grabbed her arms. ‘Husband, please, you will break it.’

  Altariste glared at the contraption and squeezed until it let out a pained cheep. He slackened his grip and shook his head. ‘Even now I can’t do it.’ He handed it back to her. ‘I can’t bring myself to destroy this wonder you have created.’

  Janucha gently placed the bird back in the pocket of her apron. ‘Then, husband, let us—’

  Altariste turned on his heel and set off across the bridge. The guards forced us to follow. ‘Together we could have been heroes to our people, Janucha. Legends. They would have sung our names for a thousand years.’

  ‘It would have been a song with a bitter end,’ she said. ‘There is a reason why I could not bring myself to repeat the experiment.’

  Altariste didn’t reply at first, but when we reached the far side of the bridge he stopped for a moment and chuckled. ‘All these years, Janucha, you told me I was the sentimental one, but it’s you who’ve allowed your heart to rule your head.’

  ‘Husband, where are you taking us?’

  The guards ushered us down the wide avenue and I saw our destination: the great amphitheatre where Janucha had first revealed the mechanical bird. Altariste held up a key more complex than any I’d ever seen before, and unlocked the front gate. He signalled to the guards, who pushed us inside. We were led around the circumference of the building to a thick iron door. Again Altariste produced his key. ‘All my life I dreamed of standing upon the stage of the Grand Exhibition, or better yet, standing hand in hand with my wife, the Maedra Bellegenzia, the mother of beautiful invention, as the world marvelled at some wonder we had created together.’

  He unlocked the door and pushed it open. The guards prodded us to enter and then walked us past rows of stone benches to the centre of the amphitheatre. Altariste gestured to the stage. ‘Today could have been that day.’

  It was Janucha’s expression I saw first, a mixture of dread and sorrow that not even her intellect could master. ‘My love, what have you done?’

  Altariste’s creation was so much larger and more terrifying than it had appeared when I’d looked down on it from a hundred feet above. I found myself holding my breath, trying not to make a sound for fear of waking the beast. This close, I could see the perfect circles of the metal scales along its wings, the copper tubes hidden within its fanged jaws. Would they spew fire down upon its victims? Acid? Or was there something even worse this Gitabrian inventor had devised? Would the two-foot-long claws attached to its mechanical limbs be able to tear only flesh, or could they rend stone and steel as well? And when men and women saw this monstrosity dive down from the skies, would any of them dare to fight? Or would they simply kneel and wait for death?

  ‘I have done that which you failed to do, my love,’ Altariste replied.

  Then he had the guards lead us up the stairs to the stage, and revealed that the iron dragon was the least of the horrors we were to witness that night.

  58

  The Perfect Flaw

  It was the smell that got to me first. The dry, smothering odour of ashes and the cloying stench of burnt flesh. Instinctively my eyes went to the dragon, expecting to see death within its jaws, but that was stupid. No matter how frightening the mechanical beast appeared, it was still just an assemblage of parts, of gears and pistons, armatures and metal plates. Having spent my life around spells, I could feel the tingle of hundreds of charms that had been placed on individual pieces, but the result was still a lifeless contraption – a device like any other save Janucha’s mechanical bird. What I smelled had come from Altariste’s efforts to remedy that flaw.

  ‘Why?’ I asked, staring at the dozens and dozens of dead animals littering the stage. Dogs, birds, cats – it was as though Altariste had gathered every stray beast in Cazaran, only to destroy them. Behind the dragon, connected to it by copper cables six inches thick, was a steel cage, roughly four foot square, blue sparks running along its length. Instruments and tools like those I’d seen in Janucha’s workshop lay carefully arranged on long wooden tables.

  Altariste took a coin from his pocket. ‘As a boy I marvelled at the castradazi and their antics. I always assumed it was the composition of the metals that made the coins special, but there’s more. The alloys come to life when the vibration of a spirit matches that within the coin. But to find that perfect match?’ He tossed the coin onto one of the piles of dead animals. ‘The odds are nearly impossible.’

  ‘Oh, my husband,’ Janucha said, staring at the death all around us. ‘What insanity brought you to this?’

  Altariste strode to one of the workbenches and grabbed several rolled-up sketches. He threw them at her. They fell at her feet, opening to reveal strangely beautiful designs. ‘The only insanity was yours, Janucha. For months I have slaved over your designs, trying to help you find success, but you took steps to prevent me from doing so. I am your husband, but you couldn’t stand to see me prove that my intellect could compare with yours!’

  Janucha shook her head. ‘I have always known your potential, Altariste. I kept the flaws hidden from you above all others because I knew if I didn’t, you’d one day solve the riddle. Because I knew you could not stop yourself from giving the secret police what they asked for.’

  ‘Can you not hear the madness in your words? We are contraptioneers! It is our role – no, our duty – to devise new creations for the good of our people.’ He knelt down in front of her and placed both his hands over the front pocket of her apron reverently as though she carried their child within. ‘You devised the miracle of our generation, yet you would have kept the secret to yourself. Why? To sell to some foreign master?’

  A palpable sorrow overtook Janucha’s features as she met her husband’s gaze. ‘So I could take the secret with me to my grave.’

  ‘Liar!’ he cried, rising to his feet. ‘If this were true, why did you wait so long? Why not simply kill yoursel–’

  ‘Cressia,’ I said, the truth suddenly so obvious that I wondered why it had taken me so long to figure it out. ‘The great work of a mother’s life’ Janucha had called her. ‘You were waiting for her to come home, weren’t you? That’s why you held out so long, pretending to try new experiments, to try to find the flaw in the design. But you put the flaws there.’ I pointed to the mechanical dragon. ‘You figured out the true nature of your so-called “miracle” – that it involved the imprisonment of an unwilling spirit inside your machines.’

  Janucha took the mechanical bi
rd out once again, allowing it to perch on two of her fingers. A tear slipped from her cheek to drop on one of its metal wings. ‘I … I had no idea at first.’ She stroked the bird’s chin. The creature tilted its head in response. ‘In the old texts, our forebears spoke of the experiments of the first alchemists. They believed that life could be found in the sacred metals, in the alloys of the castradazi coins. We had long ago lost the means to make those alloys, but I believed that they were the key to bringing life to my creations. What I didn’t know was the mechanism by which the alloys accomplished this: that their unique composition could bind spirits to them.’ Again she stroked the bird. ‘Cressia’s pet, Thasassa, used to keep me company in my work. When I first attempted to chemically recreate the alloys, she was … She died. Then when the bird came alive, I thought … I fooled myself into believing I had achieved that which only our ancestors had accomplished before. And I had. But it wasn’t a miracle. It was an abomination.’

  ‘An abomination?’ Altariste asked. ‘Are you mad? It is power! Power that will mean our people no longer need to bow and scrape before the other nations of this world. No, we will rule them! With the mechanical dragons, we will—’

  ‘Start a war,’ I said, cutting him off.

  ‘A war my people can win!’ Altariste said. ‘Your Argosi friends fear bloodshed? Then they should be helping us! With a fleet of living dragons, the other nations will realise there is no point in resisting us.’

  A chuckle escaped my lips, empty of humour but thick with disgust. ‘You damned fool. You think the Jan’Tep will ever submit? The mages from my country will spread out, hiding everywhere, using spells to assassinate every powerful man and woman – and their children – that they can find, in hopes of weakening their enemies. You think the Daroman empire, which has never known defeat, will suddenly drop their weapons because of some new machine of war? They have their own inventors, their own war masters. They’ll find new ways to fight and kill your dragons.’

  ‘They, like everyone else, will soon see the futility of resisting,’ Altariste said.

  ‘Have you met the Berabesq?’ I asked. ‘They’ll be convinced this is a holy war their God wants them to fight.’

  ‘Give it up, husband,’ Janucha pleaded. ‘This path leads to nought but destruction.’

  ‘Wrong. It leads to creation.’ He went to the cage and swung open the door. ‘The flaw you hid in your designs, my love, was that the castradazi coins require the right kind of spirit to come to life, one attuned to the alloys.’ Altariste looked over at me, and mixed with his insanity was a genuine sympathy. ‘Forgive me, Magizier Kellen fal Ke. I would not choose this were there any other alternative.’

  Two pairs of strong hands took hold of my arms and began dragging me towards the cage. Altariste pulled down on a lever next to it, and the hiss and roar of captive lightning began to shimmer along the copper wires that travelled to the mechanical dragon. ‘Don’t think of it as death,’ the inventor said, ‘merely a different kind of life.’

  59

  The Sacrifice

  I resisted, for what it was worth. I fought tooth and nail – literally – biting and scratching at the two men hauling me over to Altariste’s cage. Reichis would have been proud. Actually that’s not true. He would’ve scolded me for being a feeble skinbag who never learned how to tear out a human’s throat with my teeth. He’d have been right, too.

  In the end I simply let them carry me. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad, I thought. Being human hadn’t worked out all that well for me. Could I do any worse as a mechanical dragon? First thing I’d do, of course, was grab Altariste in my claws and drop him in the Cazaran Gorge.

  ‘Husband, you must stop this!’ Janucha screamed. She too tried to fight for my release, but her guards were no more courteous than mine. ‘This is murder! The bonding doesn’t unite the spirit to the machine, it destroys it. All that is left is a servant, a child-like creature that follows commands but has no true will of its own!’

  So much for my big revenge plan, I thought.

  ‘You laugh, that is good,’ Altariste said to me. I hadn’t realised I was. ‘Let us begin this journey bravely togeth—’

  An explosion echoed through the amphitheatre. The guard holding my right arm let go of me and fell to the ground, probably due to the smoking hole in his back. The guard on my left spun around to see what had happened, dragging me with him. At the centre of the aisle leading to the stage stood Cressia, holding a spent fire lance. She dropped it to the ground and picked up one of the other four she’d brought with her.

  ‘Daughter, no!’ Altariste shouted.

  One of the other guards rushed down the stairs towards her. Without so much as flinching, Cressia aimed her second lance, twisted the tubes, and fired again. ‘I am Étuza Cressia fal Ghassan,’ she said. ‘And I will kill the next man who lays his hands on my friend.’

  As rescue attempts went, it was pretty impressive. Unfortunately, by now two of the three remaining secret police had their own lances trained on her. Janucha tried to get in their way but the woman holding her knocked her down.

  ‘Heed me child!’ Altariste called out to his daughter. ‘These men and women will not hesitate to kill you if you attack again, no matter what your name. I swear to you, the boy’s sacrifice is necessary for the future of our people.’

  For a moment it looked as if Cressia might try to grab another of her fire lances, which would almost certainly have been the end of her. But then she looked up defiantly and walked to the stage. ‘He saved my life, Father. You saw him take the worm from my eye. It nearly consumed him and yet he risked himself for me.’ She walked up the stairs to stand before her father. ‘If your foul experiments are so vital for our nation, then surely my life will serve as well as his.’

  Janucha tried to rise to go to her daughter, but the woman guarding her put her boot against her back. ‘Husband, listen to the simple logic of Cressia’s words. You cannot justify murdering Kellen any more than you could our daughter.’

  ‘Has my whole family gone mad?’ Altariste demanded, shaking his fists in the air. ‘No! No, I will have no more of this! Put the boy in the cage. Now!’

  ‘I’ll show you who’s going in a cage!’ a screeching voice called out from high up in the air. To everyone else it would’ve sounded like the chittering of some animal crawling around the upper galleries of the amphitheatre. That’s why no one but me looked up to see a two-foot-tall squirrel cat, limbs outstretched and glider flaps catching the wind as he dived down from the open roof.

  Reichis crashed into the guard hanging onto my arm with the force of … well, a small but very angry animal. But the squirrel cat’s claws tore into the man’s cheek, tearing strips of flesh away and ripping a scream from his lungs. I threw myself at one of the other guards, who was trying to aim her fire lance at him. We landed hard on the stage floor, but she was more agile than I was and got out from under me, slamming her elbow into the side of my head. I struggled to get up, my vision blurry from the blow. By the time I could see straight again, it was already over.

  Reichis had very nearly done the impossible: with an injured leg and a half-dozen other wounds, he’d run all the way here from the forests outside Cazaran, climbed up the side of the amphitheatre and leaped down from the roof to attack my enemies. He’d taken out one of the guards and left Altariste’s scalp bleeding down his face. If life had been at all fair, that kind of courage would have been enough to win the day.

  But the first thing you learn as an outlaw is that life is anything but fair.

  Only two of the secret police remained, but one wore heavy gloves and was strong as an ox. She held Reichis so tightly even he couldn’t squirm out of her grip. With a sneer on her face she began crushing him. I ran to him only to find myself back on the floor, my legs knocked out from under me by the other guard’s fire lance.

  ‘Please,’ I said to Altariste. ‘Don’t let her hurt him.’

  The inventor didn’t seem as if he’d heard
me. He stared wide-eyed at Reichis. ‘Incredible.’ He put a hand on the guard’s arm. She loosened her grip and the squirrel cat took in gasps of air. Altariste, still bleeding from the top of his head, leaned over to peer at Reichis. ‘It came all this way to save you, didn’t it? This creature … When you first brought it into our home, I thought it was some kind of pet.’

  ‘Pet?’ Reichis wheezed. ‘I’m going to kill you twice once I deal with this dumb mutt holding me.’

  ‘He speaks, doesn’t he?’ Altariste asked. ‘What does he say?’

  A chill went up my spine as I realised why the inventor was now so fascinated with Reichis. ‘He’s just a dumb animal,’ I said. ‘Nothing more than that.’

  Undaunted, the inventor reached out a hand and petted Reichis’s head. ‘He is truly intelligent. I see it now.’ He smiled. ‘Were I to believe in signs, surely this would prove our endeavour was fated to be.’ He turned to Janucha. ‘Don’t you see, my love? The animal’s etheric affinity to Kellen means we can bind it to the sacred animals. There is no longer any need to sacrifice the boy!’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Don’t do this!’

  The woman holding Reichis walked over to the cage and threw him inside, slamming the door behind him. The captive lightning running through the metal bars enveloped him as the squirrel cat screamed my name.

  60

  The Mechanical Dragon

  I was on my feet and running for the cage before anyone could stop me. If I’d taken even a second to think about it, I would’ve realised what a bad idea that was. The moment my hands touched the bars the shock threw me backwards. I landed hard on the floor. The guard who’d been holding me before pointed his fire lance at me, but by this point nobody was paying attention to Janucha or Cressia.