Inconvenient Magic 01 - Potatoes, Come Forth! Page 11

  “Yes, sir.”

  Everett smiled slightly, standing. “I’m not yet ready for the sack. I think I’ll go up top.”

  “Fine, sir. I’ll be joining you there shortly. I’ve first watch.”

  Everett nodded and exited the galley, turning right and moving forward to the first cross-corridor. He had to turn slightly sideways to maneuver through this even narrower passage, lit by a single half-power lamp, to reach the equally dim starboard side. Turning aft, he walked lightly to refrain from disturbing those behind the closed cabin doors that he passed and came to the ladder at the dead end. Climbing swiftly, he emerged through the lashed open hatch above into full darkness. Here in the open air with the mass of the vapor cells indistinctly sensed above, only vague black shapes registered to his eyes. The cells shaded the deck from the wane light of the Inner and Outer moons and the empty meadow provided no other illumination. The floor of the upper deck, formed by separated, thin wooden slats mounted on lightweight rails running the length of the roof of the air carriage, had a slight spring to it as he shuffled, carefully feeling his way, toward the bow rail.

  Summers in the coastal highlands where he had lived the majority of his life had been uniformly moderate and wet, with frequent storms blowing in off the great bay formed by the thousand-mile spike of the Kyalt Peninsula. The Edzedahl and the southern coast experienced a long, normally sweltering midyear season that lasted from May till October and though he had acclimated over the two years that he had lived here, he still relished the relative cool that sunset brought.

  When his questing hand found the bow rail, he leaned against it and let the sounds of an inconsistent breeze in an unseen distant tree line sift around him till he heard the almost imperceptible footsteps of Sergeant Tekle.

  “I’d have thought that you'd have brought a light,” he said to the esne.

  “No, sir,” Tekle replied quietly as he took a place a few paces to Everett’s left. “That'd wash out my night vision and also make me an easy target.”

  “Ah.” Then, despite relishing the quiet, but not wanting to seem impolite, Everett asked, “Have you been in Baronet Rorche’s service long?”

  “Yes, sir. Fourteen years. I signed on just after the passing of the previous Baronet.”

  “The Baronet must have been just a boy then.”

  “A stripling, sir, but quite capable of taking the reins of his demesne.”

  “Right.”

  Several moments passed.

  “I’ve a spell myself, sir,” Tekle mentioned without inflection. “I can dry socks.”

  “An Insignificant?”

  “Yes, sir. It’s more useful than it might appear, especially for a foot soldier.”

  “I think I see what you mean.”

  “If you don’t mind my asking, sir, you’re a professional magicker? I mean, that’s how you make your living?”

  “Right. I’m a Journeyman Magicker – well, Wizard, now.”

  “You do quite well, then, I suppose, sir?”

  Everett chuckled in dismissal. “Not as well as you’d think. Magic isn’t really the path to riches and glory.”

  “Oh, I well know that, sir. My Dad used to tell me the right same thing.”

  “Your father was a magicker?”

  “Indeed he was, sir. A full Journeyman with eight spells all manifested before he turned twenty-five. Most of them were an odd and unprofitable lot, though. He could barely make a go of magic. His Major spell let him make a block of ice the size of a pickle barrel.”

  “Really? Seems like ice would be a profitable commodity.”

  “It can be in summer, but not so much the rest of the year, and most folks don’t have much need of a great lot of ice. His customers usually only bought one block a week for a silver and sometimes tried to bargain him down from that price. Most of the time he worked for butchers for set wages. Out of season he was a lumberjack.”

  “Right. I know how that is.”

  “He could also summon turtledoves from thin air. Not much meat on a turtledove, though.”

  “Large family?”

  “There were nine of us. Might get two good bites from one bird, but they made a decent soup. Sometimes we had them for days straight. I’ve a brother who won’t touch fowl of any kind to this day.”

  “Magic is a hard way to make a living.”

  “Yes, sir. I’d say that was true.”

  THIRTEEN

  Sergeant Tekle raised his head over the parapet to check the top of the warehouse. “As well as I can see, it’s clear, Mademoiselle,” he told Sarah in a quiet tone. Still kneeling, she gripped the esne’s hand and slipped her other arm around Everett’s waist.

  Everett snuck a look to select a locus and then enunciated, “Beautiful Woman, come forth!”

  The three of them appeared just off the peak of the roof of the warehouse, shifting their feet and hands awkwardly to adapt to the gradual slope. Hopefully, they were out of view of the streets below and any potential wardens. All of them were dressed in dark clothing, but both moons were high in the sky and showing three-quarters full. Everett knew that they would be easily sighted.

  Tekle rose to a crouch and began to move toward the gable at the yard end. He raised and lowered his boots with exaggerated care on the tar-slathered wood, lest the sound of careless footsteps give them away to any guards that might be inside the warehouse below. When he neared the edge, he lay down and crawled forward until he could scan the space beyond.

  “No one in sight, sir,” he whispered back.

  Everett, trying to copy the sergeant’s stealth, moved up beside him. Sarah followed and settled near the two.

  The day following Everett’s halting of the air carriage, Algis Coldridge and his family had had little difficulty in repairing the starboard engine (a stray bullet had punctured the fuel line) and completing the installation of the port engine. After freeing the now unneeded goats, the crew had launched the air carriage once more. Under power, the craft moved sleekly against the wind and, by an exacting process of throttling the engines’ speeds, Aldo and Bennett had immediately steered back toward Baron Heimgelberg’s capital at a comfortable altitude of two thousand feet. Rorche had suggested, with general agreement, that their first duty was to attempt to determine what had become of the other members of their group.

  As they had neared the city that evening, the Baronet and his sergeant had come up through the hatch to find Everett and Sarah where they had sat to themselves on the upper deck. The two had just finished a bit of cold ham, bread, and some cached leftovers from the café in Eriis. Josline and Ellen Coldridge, immediately and unequivocally acknowledged by the rest of the company as the best cooks, had declared suzerainty over the galley. When they discovered that no firewood had been loaded for the compact, heavily insulated stove, they had further declared that supper would be potluck.

  As soon as their simple meal would have been done, Everett had planned to make use of the opportunity to rebuke Sarah in private, having felt, perhaps illogically, misused by her ready offer of his services to save the air carriage. However, once his stomach had been full, he had lost all interest in being disagreeable. So they had simply been sitting without speaking, taking a rest from the uproarious events of the flight from Eriis, and enjoying a magnificent sunset made all the more grand by their high vantage point.

  Rorche had had a special request to make of them.

  “My demesne is a single impoverished village and two hundred acres of mediocre vineyards on the ocean side of the Chaelle Mountains,” the Baronet had confessed. “I earn but seven hundred silver per year from my taxes and rents and most of that goes to maintain the constabulary and roads. In order to construct the air carriage and fund our operations, I have had to take a personal note with a usurer in Eriis. While I feel no great pain in association with a temporary default on the note, more than half of the proceeds of the loan remain hidden in a lockbox secreted in the warehouse. If we are to have any possibility of reest
ablishing ourselves in Eyrchelle, we must have that money.”

  Rorche’s plan had involved the transport of Tekle to a point as close to the warehouse as was possible so that the sergeant might attempt to retrieve the lockbox. Once Everett explained that his spell would require that both he and Sarah accompany the esne, Rorche had looked uncertain.

  “Will it be possible for you to transport all three of you at once? The sergeant weighs better than seventeen stone.”

  “Seventeen and one half exactly, my lord,” Tekle had amended respectfully.

  “I have been thinking about just such a problem,” Sarah had said. “Everett’s spell clearly has no Vicinity Component, since no portion of the ground beneath me nor the air around me transports, clearly ruling out the transport of items that do not have a significant connection to me, but the Associative Component seems to have no limitation whatsoever. It seems to me that I do not actually have to bear the weight of an object, but have only a firm contact and perhaps some enclosing connection.”

  “Meaning?” Everett, who had not considered this, had questioned.

  “I think that I should just need to hold his hand.”

  And, indeed, experiments had proven this to be correct. Everett had fleetingly wondered why she had not brought this up before and consequently why she continued to hold him close when the two of them transported, but he had decided that he had a good thing going and had better just keep his mouth shut.

  At that time, he had not been -- and yet remained -- unconvinced that he should enlist in Rorche’s eclectic company of synthesists, but he had accepted the necessity of aiding them in order to see Sarah back to Kleinsvench, and had quickly agreed to assist in the proposed foray before the young woman could do so for him.

  Now, hiding atop the warehouse and remembering the spine-shivering crack! of the Baronial Guardsmen’s pistols, he began to think that he had been a little too hasty.

  “The yard is clear also, sir,” Tekle said quietly. “Can you put us there next to the wall, in the corner away from the door? It would be best if we avoided the opening. The moonlight would make our silhouettes perfect targets.”

  Covering a wince, Everett eased forward until his eyes cleared the flashing along the edge. “No problem. Ready?”

  “Ready.”

  Sarah nodded.

  Everett cast.

  Once in the yard, they all straightened soundlessly and Sarah released her hold on Everett and the sergeant. Without pause, the latter sidled with exacting, stalking steps that made almost no discernable noise to the large doors. There the esne cocked his head to listen at the quiescent and apparently empty building for several long moments. Finally, Tekle leaned out to observe the dark and shadowed interior.

  Everett, listening likewise, heard nothing but the slight brush of an insincere zephyr and the muffled, distant sounds of the resting city. After several more moments that wracked Everett’s nerves, Tekle, apparently detecting no danger, waved them toward him. As a precaution, Everett caught Sarah’s hand as they snuck to join the sergeant. She glanced at him but gave no other reaction than a quick, firm pressure on his hand.

  Tekle held an exaggerated finger to his lips, received nods from them both, made a two handed “Follow me” motion, and then slipped inside.

  Maintaining a firm grip on Sarah’s hand, Everett followed, swiveling his head about to listen. The windowless warehouse was all but pitch black inside and he could see nothing but formless gray shapes where the massive mechanisms stood. To all appearances, the synthesists’ work remained undisturbed. His stomach clenching tension and the unevenness of the brick floor made his movements unsure, and he gritted his teeth at every scuff and scratching step that he made. For her part, Sarah walked beside him with the contemptuous silence of a cat.

  Tekle crept along the wall to the left. Rorche had revealed that he had secreted the lockbox inside a recess in the first vapor mechanism on that side. When they reached the end of the row, the sergeant knelt without pause and crawled beneath a large, protruding apparatus formed of concentric copper coils until only his legs remained exposed. After a few seconds, he wiggled back out, clutching the small, steel clad box, which reeked of machine oil. It was just barely larger than a shoebox and reputedly contained close to thirteen thousand, mostly in Alarsarian banknotes. The esne handed it to Sarah, who had to release Everett’s hand to hold the heavy container in both hands. To remove even the slightest possibility that it would not transport, they had agreed that she should carry it.

  Then, with a cursory look around, the sergeant whispered, “Monsieur Schael, should we return immediately or attempt to retrieve the drawings and papers?”

  Baronet Rorche had also expressed a desire to recover the documents on his desk, important schematics and records of calculations, if at all possible.

  Everett hesitated. “There appears to be no one here.”

  “We should get all that we can,” Sarah urged. “It’s not likely that we’ll have another chance.”

  By all indications, the warehouse remained deserted. Surely if guards had been posted, the three of them would have already raised an alarm.

  “Right,” Everett agreed. “Let’s do it.”

  Immediately, Tekle rounded the bulk of the vapor mechanism and led the way across the dark space, angling for the corner where the Baronet’s desk had sat.

  With an abrupt eye-blinking glare, a bank of actinic battery lighting flashed on to reveal a line of soldiers in green trousers and maroon jackets not ten steps in front of them.

  More importantly, it also revealed their leveled line of rifles.

  Everett froze. Sarah likewise became motionless and Tekle as well, though he seemed to bunch his muscles in preparation for action.

  “Be so good as to remain exactly where you are!” an officer called out. He also wore the same utility uniform, but had silver insignia on his collars. “There is no possibility that my men could miss at this range.”

  The officer stepped forward, but to one side out of the line of fire. “Greetings. My Name is Captain Erick Van Ghest of the Royal Alarsarian Army and I am acting in the name and under the legal authority of Baron Winstead Heimgelberg. I must now inform you that you are all under arrest.”

  Everett flashed a look to try to get Sarah’s attention. The two of them, at least, had a chance for escape. If he could get her to drop the lockbox and extend her hand so that he could grasp it, he could them transport to the yard and then away. Sarah, however, seemed focused only on the solders confronting them. He tensed, fearing that she would attempt to set the men on fire.

  “Please take extreme care not to open your mouths,” Captain Van Ghest added in a straightforward tone. “I must warn you that we are aware that you may be magicians and that if any of you attempt to speak at all, my men have orders to open fire immediately.”

  A cold sensation crawled along Everett's spine. He decided to take the man at his word and clamped his mouth shut. The black, yawning openings of the gun barrels had an indisputable persuasiveness all of their own. He cut his eyes back at Sarah and saw to his relief that she had relaxed and likewise pressed her lips into a tight line.

  Within moments, gagged and securely bound, the three of them were hustled to an enclosed freight wagon waiting in the dark street. Once the Alarsarians had swung open the doors, they tossed first Everett, then Tekle and finally Sarah inside with rough efficiency. When the soldiers slammed the doors shut, the space was oppressively black, with only a few cracks in the wooden sides showing any light.

  Everett got his feet under him and shifted around, bumping the other two slightly, till he found a bench and sank down upon it. As the wagon started forward with a jolt, Sarah and the sergeant found places beside him.

  The ride proved not lengthy, if bumpy and uncomfortable, and their captors dragged them unceremoniously out into another dark street. The tall brick building to which the wagon had brought them had a vaguely residential look, like some of the blocky row house
s that were common in the eastern boroughs of Eriis. Only the feeble glow of lamp light leaking around latched shutters softened its dark, forbidding facade. Immediately, the Alarsarians hustled them into the bright interior.

  The sudden change in light made Everett squint, and he caught few details as two tall, blocky Alarsarians separated him from the others. Hauling him by the arms, the soldiers shuttled him without comment into a room off the long entrance hall and slammed him down into an armless wooden chair. Then the men took stances alongside him that indicated that they intended to make sure that he did not try to leave it. His chair was the only furniture present, and cobwebs in the corners of the undecorated ceiling and some undisturbed dust on the floor along the walls suggested that the place had until recently been vacant. Paneled in lightly stained pine and about twelve feet square, the room had no windows and no other doors save the one by which they had entered.

  He sat quietly and made no move to resist. His thoughts were equally pacific; he had absolutely no idea as to how he might extricate himself from this predicament.

  After some time, two officers entered. One was Captain Van Ghest. The other had similar silver badges on his collar but also had a gold and turquoise mobius insignia embroidered on his left sleeve.

  “Thank you for your patience,” Van Ghest told Everett, as if the latter had any choice in the matter. The captain was a tall, broad shouldered man with the cultured manner of a professionally trained Royal officer. He was probably a decade older than Everett, but trim and possessed of a full head of black hair under his slouch cap.

  “This will only take a moment.” His captor then took a brass watch from a button-down breast pocket and checked the time.

  The second officer took a stance, raised his left hand to Everett as if in benediction and cast, “A revelation of magic I crave.”

  Everett felt the feather light breath of a spell actuation, but nothing else, good or ill, and he saw no sign of any visible effect, magical or otherwise.

  Van Ghest monitored his watch, while glancing up at Everett from time to time. When more than a minute had passed, the officer returned his watch to his pocket. “Thank you, Lieutenant Smythe, that will be all.”