The Emperor's Mask (Magebreakers Book 2)

by Ben S. Dobson

  But this one was very real. It gathered its legs beneath it and leapt at Tane, and he stumbled backwards with a terrified cry.

  Not fast enough. Its legs caught in his vest, and it started climbing towards his face. One of its side panels opened, and a copper-tipped wand extended on a segmented brass arm. He very much didn’t want to learn what its function was.

  “Kadka!” Tane shouted, grabbing the brass spider on his chest and trying to yank it free. Its legs undulated wildly, another hooking into the fabric of his vest each time he dislodged one. The wand-arm jabbed at his face, but he craned his neck away and held the thing just out of reach.

  Kadka palmed the spider on her shoulder in one hand and hurled it against the wall. One of its legs broke off at the second joint, and it fell upside down onto the bench below, struggling to right itself. Two more leapt onto her back to replace the one she’d torn free—they were coming from a pair of hatches in the ceiling that Tane hadn’t noticed until now. Kadka slammed her back against the wall to dislodge them, and then grabbed the spider on Tane’s chest and ripped it away with one hand. His vest tore in several places as the legs lost purchase.

  Two more spiders approached, skittering along the walls—they must have had some spell engraved somewhere that let them keep purchase on the vertical surface. Kadka raised the spider she’d just torn from Tane’s vest and threw it. Her aim was true, striking one automaton from the wall; both it and the one she’d thrown tumbled to the floor, their legs in a tangle.

  But more were coming, climbing out of their hatches and moving upside-down along the ceiling. Several had their wand-arms out, and more than a few had exposed sharp-looking three-pronged pincers at the end of similarly jointed arms.

  Kadka put herself between Tane and the automatons. “We need out, Carver!” she shouted over her shoulder.

  “I know!” But there was nowhere left to retreat, just the door behind them. Tane grabbed the handle and tried in vain to open it. It was locked, just as he’d feared.

  I should have brought more charms. He’d used the last on Irondriver, and that one wouldn’t have been any use here in any case. He needed a standard shield, something to give them time to force the door. Or maybe just something to blast it off its hinges. But he had nothing. And there were at least ten of the spider-automatons now, crawling along the walls and ceiling.

  The spiders swarmed at Kadka, advancing from all directions; one leapt down from the ceiling toward Tane, bypassing her altogether. He dodged out of the way, kicked it across the floor. Grabbing the door handle once more, he tugged at it with all his might. “Let us out! She was just looking, she didn’t mean anything—”

  Cold metal jabbed against his shin, and his whole world went away.

  Chapter Six

  _____

  “I AM SO sorry!”

  Tane awoke to an unfamiliar voice—almost certainly gnomish, by the pitch—and found himself lying on the floor with Kadka’s heavy torso across his legs. She stirred at the same moment, propped herself shakily on her elbow, and looked up at him with unfocused yellow eyes.

  “What… what happened?” Tane raised a hand to rub at his face. The movement felt sluggish, like his body was responding to commands a second too late.

  “My crawlers got you with their daze-wands,” the gnomish voice said, and now Tane recognized it as the one that had greeted them at the door. Endo Stooke. He had to be the man behind the automatons, if his reputation could be believed. “I can’t apologize enough.” His voice came from the panel by the door—the glowing silver-blue lens set into it appeared to be focused on Tane and Kadka.

  “They are… gone?” Kadka shifted her still-bleary eyes to the closed hatches on the ceiling.

  Endo spoke through the wall panel once more, timid and abashed. “I called them off. They really shouldn’t have attacked you like that.”

  “Well I suppose I’m grateful,” said Tane, “but why did they attack, if they weren’t meant to?”

  “After what happened to Ulnod…” Endo’s voice caught there, audible even through the wall panel. “Mother says she can’t trust any of the servants or guards until we know who did it. I’ve been trying to handle the wards and security myself. I haven’t… quite calibrated the crawlers correctly. Did one of you try the door, or tamper with anything?”

  Kadka looked a little bit sheepish, at least. “Tried little drawer on wall.” She pushed herself up, freeing Tane’s legs, and then stood, supporting herself against the wall.

  “Ah,” said Endo. “That’s only meant to be opened from this side. They must have seen it as an intrusion attempt. I’m going to have to tighten the wording on their control spells.”

  “They’re automatons, aren’t they?” Tane tried to stand, his legs shaking; Kadka offered a hand and helped him up. The lens on the wall shifted and adjusted its brass iris to refocus on them now that they were both standing. “I’ve never seen one so advanced. Those spells must be incredibly complex.”

  “Not so much that they don’t try to kill us,” Kadka said, one corner of her mouth lifting to show her teeth.

  Tane shrugged. “No point holding a grudge. It was an accident.” And then, in a whisper that he hoped only Kadka could hear, “We still have to get him to let us inside, remember?”

  She just grinned wider. “Who says anything about grudge? Metal spiders are magic I don’t see before. Was exciting.”

  “Even so, I am sorry,” Endo said. “I’ll add a warning into the spells so it doesn’t happen again.”

  “It’s fine, Endo,” said Tane. “It’s no wonder these ‘crawlers’ of yours need fine-tuning. They must have pages on pages of nested spellwork behind every action. That kind of magic would take an attention to detail most people don’t have. I’m impressed that they work as well as they do.”

  “Oh, it’s nothing,” Endo said through the wall panel, a shy tone in his voice. “I can show you, if you like.”

  “Does that mean we can come in?” asked Tane.

  “Oh, of course!” Endo said. “I’d almost forgotten. I have to apologize again—I shouldn’t have made you wait. Mother wants to talk to you. Please, if you would each supply a focus, I can add you to our ward exemptions.” As he said it, the little drawer below the lens—the one Kadka had tried to force open—slid out under its own power. Inside were a half-dozen small vials.

  “Convenient,” said Tane. He reached up to pluck a hair from his head, wincing at the quick stab of pain. “I’ve never seen one of these panels before. Is it your design?” As he spoke, he took one of the vials, slid the hair inside, and replaced it in the drawer. Following his lead, Kadka did the same.

  “It is,” Endo said. “I just installed it today. Without a footman to greet guests and retrieve samples, we wouldn’t have been able to let guests through the wards unless I did it myself. And Mother wouldn’t allow that. I’m all she…” His voice caught in his throat, there, unmistakable even through the panel. “It’s just the two of us, now.”

  “I’m sorry, Endo. I didn’t mean to upset you. I was just impressed by the clever design.” Tane watched the drawer slide back in, taking their divination foci along with it.

  “It’s not your fault. And thank you, but I don’t know how clever it is. There really isn’t much to it.” That hint of shyness was back in Endo’s voice. “Just give me one moment, and then I can let you in.” The lens on the wall went dark—presumably he was seeing to the wards.

  “Is nice enough, for rich boy,” said Kadka.

  “Seems that way,” said Tane. He’d imagined what Endo Stooke would be like more than once—polite and humble hadn’t been at the top of the list. “But let’s not jump to conclusions too quickly. His automatons did just attack us.”

  “Thought you don’t hold a grudge,” Kadka said, raising an eyebrow.

  “I just didn’t want him to think I do.” Tane knew that wasn’t entirely fair, but old habits were hard to break, and youthful grudges tended to linger—no matter how i
rrational.

  A click came from the inner door that had to be the lock opening, and then the lens on the wall glowed once more, just long enough for Endo to say, “Please come in.”

  Kadka didn’t hesitate, just pushed right through the door into the next room—a small entry hall with stairs leading to the upper levels of the house. Taking a deep breath, Tane followed. Gooseflesh rose on his skin as the powerful house wards allowed him through.

  Endo Stooke waited on the other side, a gnomish man of perhaps twenty. He sat in a wheeled chair of wood and steel and copper and brass, etched all over with glyphs in the lingua. Sitting up with his back straight, his head was just barely above Tane’s waist. He was brown-haired and green-eyed, with a broad, pleasant face and the large nose and small round ears common to his people. Tane had known what to expect—Endo’s condition was no secret—but even so, he couldn’t help but glance down.

  Endo’s legs ended at the knee. A dark green blanket was draped across his lap, but no feet came out below the bottom edge, and the way the fabric draped limply over the front of his chair made it obvious there was nothing there.

  Endo noticed them looking—Kadka was even less subtle about it—and self-consciously adjusted his blanket. “I understand you have some scars of your own,” he said to Tane. “I wish I could hide mine so easily.”

  “I suppose fair is fair,” said Tane. He undid the top button of his shirt and exposed his collarbone, where the scars began. They ran all down his torso, souveniers of the ancryst rail accident that had changed his life.

  “So it’s true,” said Endo. “I heard about you after they kicked you out of the University. The Gazette talked about you, the way you used the accident in your dissertation. I thought about coming to meet you, but… I never did. I suppose I was worried we’d just end up arguing over who lost more in the accident.”

  “You’re probably right,” Tane admitted. More right than you know.

  After the accident, the only thing anyone in Thaless had cared about was that a young scion of House Stooke had lost his legs. The Gazette had run dozens of stories about Endo’s injuries and recovery, ignoring everyone else who had died. No one had cared that it could have been prevented, if the men and women maintaining the train had possessed a modicum of the magical knowledge reserved—until very recently—for mages. For a long time, Tane had resented the lack of attention to the true injustice.

  And he’d resented the boy who’d stolen that attention away.

  That resentment felt petty now, looking at this shy little man and the terrible injury he’d lived with for all these years. Tane’s wounds had been severe, but the mage-surgeons had been able to put him together again. Endo hadn’t been so lucky.

  “Wait.” Kadka looked from Tane to Endo, her eyes widening slightly. “You are in same accident? Carver’s accident?”

  Endo smiled slightly. “Well, I don’t think of it as his, but yes.” He glanced over his shoulder, down a short hall that led to a closed door. “Mother is waiting. Please, follow me.” He twisted a small lever on the arm of his chair; several glyphs engraved in the copper base-plate glowed briefly, and the entire chair swiveled toward the staircase with a strange whirring noise. It had to be magically powered, but Tane had never seen an ancryst vehicle that size. The smallest ancryst engines were nearly as large as Endo’s entire chair.

  Kadka was staring at Tane with a hundred questions in her eyes, but he just beckoned for her to follow and strode down the hall after Endo.

  “The chair—did you make that too?” Tane asked, watching glyphs on the wheels and around the steering lever glimmer and fade as Endo moved.

  “I did,” said Endo. “When I was younger, I had a non-magical one. I had to be pushed around everywhere I went. I… didn’t like that very much.”

  “Is it ancryst powered?” Tane asked. “It seems small for that. So did your crawlers, for that matter.”

  Endo shook his head. “No, I couldn’t make an engine small enough. This is entirely spellwork. The crawlers too.” Which meant they moved under the power of direct spells rather than engines.

  “That must be… expensive,” said Tane. Ancryst engines turned magical energy into mechanical by using basic spells to push a piston—the translucent green stone called ancryst reacted to the presence of magic by moving in the opposite direction, which allowed simple magical fields to power complex machinery. Maintaining specific movement and control spells throughout the day would take far more Astral energy, and far more expensive gems to store it.

  “It is,” said Endo. “Very. I’m still working on making it more efficient. There are people with injuries like mine who can’t afford what my family can, and I’d like to help them.”

  “That’s… generous of you.” Tane rubbed the back of his neck, feeling particularly churlish for how angry he’d been with this man for so much of his youth.

  “How do you use stairs?” Kadka asked bluntly. Tane elbowed her in the side; she didn’t even flinch.

  If Endo was offended, it didn’t show. “That is a difficulty. I’ve worked levitation spells into the chair, but they take too much power to use very often. We’ve built ramps into the manor, but here at the townhouse… I tend to stay on the ground floor.” He reached the door and pressed his palm against a glyph-engraved copper panel beside it, set low enough for his hand to reach. The door swung open. Another bit of artifice he’d designed himself, Tane assumed. Opening a door by hand would be difficult from the chair.

  They entered a sitting room, not overly large but lavishly furnished. The chairs and couches weren’t as varied in size as in the Rosepetal manor, but they were enough to accommodate all manner of guests. In a small chair at the far end of the room sat a gnomish woman with features similar to Endo’s, her greying brown hair done up in a hasty bun. She was dressed entirely in black—mourning garb for a murdered son—and her eyes were red-rimmed from crying. In her lap, she held a small painted dragon, a child’s toy, turning it over in her hands.

  “Mother,” Endo said softly.

  Umbla Stooke looked up at the sound of her son’s voice, but her eyes went to Tane and Kadka. “You’re the ones they call the Magebreakers?” Her voice trembled.

  “We are.” Tane had to force himself to meet her eyes, and he didn’t correct her on the title. It felt more than a bit voyeuristic to be intruding on the grief of the senior senator of a great house. “I’m very sorry for your loss, Senator.”

  She didn’t acknowledge his condolences, just looked back down at the toy dragon. “Sit.”

  They did, Tane and Kadka beside each other on an overly-cushioned couch across from the senator. Endo steered his chair in beside them.

  Senator Stooke didn’t wait for them to settle in. “Endo says you want to help find my Ulnod’s killer.”

  “That’s right,” said Tane.

  “I’ve heard of you,” said the senator. Tane thought she was going to mention the rail accident, but instead, “My son was an admirer.”

  Tane glanced at Endo, who shook his head. “Not me. My brother. I’ve followed the rumors, but Ulnod… he devoured every story he could get out of the servants. He particularly liked the idea that you two had something to do with getting the University to accept non-magical students. He always felt a certain kinship for others without magic.”

  Tane and Kadka shared a look. Spellfire, that’s not what I wanted to hear. Indree wouldn’t have had any reason to ask before, but if Ulnod was an admirer… He’d come hoping to find that the message left with Byron Rosepetal’s body was just unfortunate wording, but it was increasingly hard to believe. He gave a slight shake of his head to Kadka to keep her quiet. Better the Stookes not know about the connection, if they didn’t already.

  He didn’t think they would take it well.

  Senator Stooke was eyeing Kadka with suspicion. “The way Ulnod told it, you two have caused a great many problems for the constabulary.”

  Tane raised his hands, palm out, and took a placating
tone. “Well, that’s not quite—”

  “He also said that you get results where they can’t.” The senator swallowed, and took a long, shaky breath. “I need you to find who killed him. Please.”

  “We will,” said Kadka. “Is what we do.” She offered the woman a toothy smile that was, perhaps, meant to be comforting.

  Umbla Stooke narrowed her eyes and pursed her lips in apparent distaste. When she spoke again, it was to Tane. “You’ll take the case, then?”

  Tane didn’t much like the way she’d dismissed Kadka. “My partner speaks for both of us,” he said firmly. “But we’re going to need to know more. Anything you can tell us about Ulnod or the night it happened could be useful.” He glanced at Endo. “Either of you. Things you saw or heard, even if they didn’t seem important at the time.”

  “There was nothing,” said Senator Stooke. “We didn’t hear anything, didn’t find him until… until the morning.” She blinked away tears. “By the Astra, it should have been someone else!” The senator lifted the painted dragon from her lap. “This was his favorite, when he was a boy. Even then he had such imagination, such… grand dreams. He would talk about how… how he could make things better, if he was Lord Protector. And he might have been, after Lady Abena. All he wanted was to help people. Why would anyone…” Her voice choked off, and she started to sob, wiping angrily at the tears as they rolled down her cheeks.

  Endo moved his chair to her side, and took her hand in his. “Mother, if you can’t… I can take care of this.”

  Senator Stooke looked uncertainly at her son, and then nodded. “Yes, I… You’ll have to excuse me. Endo will tell you whatever you want to know.” She stood to her full height, just over three feet and smoothed her dress with great dignity. “Consider yourselves hired. Find justice for my son, and you will be rewarded. I promise you that.” And then she strode from the room to be alone with her grief.