Inconvenient Magic 01 - Potatoes, Come Forth! Read online

  Still, if he accepted at face value the assertions that this new mechanism could indeed fly, and the implication that it would be able to make a controlled voyage, it sounded like a perfect opportunity to return Sarah to her home. His investment in the project would only be his time and spells, whose value under any circumstances was miniscule.

  “How far west will you go and when will you leave?”

  Rorche smiled triumphantly. “Tomorrow, as soon as all the vapor cells are filled and secured, we shall take a shake down cruise above the city to learn her handling characteristics. Should there be no difficulties, and we foresee none, then we will depart at full light the following day, bound for the capital of the Kingdom of Alarsaria, Eyrchelle. The voyage should provide adequate proof of the mechanism, and once we have risen additional funding, we plan to establish a regular passenger and mail route between the east and west. Eventually, we expect to expand to all of the major cities.”

  Everett glanced at Sarah and received an almost imperceptible but firm nod.

  “Then, I suppose,” Everett told Rorche and Edwin, “that we should start making the olive oil as quickly as we can.”

  An ecstatic Edwin spontaneously distributed bear hugs all around.

  NINE

  “But we don’t know anything about Rorche,” Everett argued.

  “I don’t care if he’s the Mad Prince of Hweuland,” Sarah rejoined. “The air carriage represents my best chance to get back to Kleinsvench before things go totally widdershins.”

  In a surprisingly short time, Rorche’s men had presented Everett with ten barrels filled with river water. Spelling two at a time, within thirty minutes he had completed the task. He had continued to wonder to what use they would put the product, but had refrained from pressing the issue; he thought it certain that at some point, the synthesists would share the information. After a brief spate of testing, the Baronet had thanked them profusely and then had asked one of his esnes to see them out.

  “Who’s the Mad Prince of Hweuland?” Everett asked, dodging around the signpost of a darner’s shop as they made their way back to the sheltered alley near the quay.

  “Oh, I thought they told that children’s tale everywhere. The Mad Prince of Hweuland was a silly old man who fell in love with the Outer Moon and swore to have it for his very own. He does a great many strange things to attempt to capture it, but always fails. In the end, he flies away into the sky on a giant swan and is never heard from again.”

  “Oh, yes, I’ve heard that one. Only the fellow’s name was Crazy Count Cravon.”

  Sarah rolled her eyes melodramatically, “Regardless, the point is that whoever he is and whatever he’s up to, I want to be aboard when Rorche’s air carriage sails.”

  Everett shrugged and fell silent. He did not, however, cease mentally examining the afternoon’s events and Baronet Franz Rorche himself for worms.

  With members of the petty nobility -- barons, counts, viscounts, minor lords, and the like -- there was the general presumption of wealth, or at least that they had a decent income from their demesne, though Everett had heard of quite a large number of cases where aristocrats were in fact nearly as penniless as he was. Rorche had mentioned something about needing additional funding. Perhaps --

  “Everett,” Sarah prompted.

  “Yes?”

  “We’re here.” She waved her arms at the scattered trash, hardy weeds, and abandoned junk that decorated the dead end of the alley.

  “Right. So, what’s our destination? The café for supper?”

  “No, I think we should go shopping.”

  “You can’t be serious?”

  “Think, Everett. We each have only the one set of clothing that we are wearing and nothing else. We’re going to need more than that to travel half way across the continent.”

  “Well, I have the stuff in my pa—for Magic’s Sake! I left my pack on the side of the Baron’s Highway!”

  After visiting a clothier along the northern end of Garker Street, Everett had barely twenty silver left. Two sets of clothing for each of them, including small clothes and socks, and a shoulder satchel to put them in had nearly cleaned him out. Though thoroughly discouraged and still angry with himself for losing his pack, he did not permit the low state of his finances to ruin his enjoyment of what he expected to be his last hot meal for some time.

  “You mark my words,” he assured Sarah, emphatically waving a bite of sweet potato speared on his fork. “There’ll be nothing but cold rations on the air carriage.”

  Sarah had ordered the fried catfish again and she threw a pained look across the table at him over the sparse remains of her meal: three well-gnawed corncobs. The fish, fried okra, spiced new potatoes, and cornbread with honey had all vanished. Her process of consuming food could almost be termed a frontal assault.

  “Are you always this negative?”

  “I’m not being negative. I think it only makes sense to understand the potential drawbacks and hazards. For instance, if the air carriage does manage to fly, what’s to say that it won’t come crashing back to earth when we’re a hundred feet up? Mechanisms, unlike magical products, are subject to wear and breakage.”

  Sarah took a pose. “How could a man as handsome as Baronet Franz possibly build something not perfect?”

  “Now you’re just making fun of me again.”

  Leaning forward intently, Sarah looked him squarely in the eyes. “Your obvious adolescent jealousy, though it might be marginally flattering under other circumstances, is simply a waste of time and effort, both yours and mine. I’m not some immature, vapor-headed girl. I don’t swoon or pine or mope over men and you can rest assured that I am not irrational enough to become involved emotionally or otherwise with any man under any circumstances. As I've told you time and again, my overriding objective is the protection of my family and to do that I must return as soon as possible to Kleinsvench. It doesn’t matter to me whether Baronet Rorche is some evil genius with nefarious schemes or is simply just another doomed crackpot. If his air carriage doesn’t get me home, then I’ll find some other way.”

  Everett blinked. “Me? Jealous? That’s just absurd.”

  Sarah shook her head wearily. “Fine. Suppose we did sit here and enumerate all the things that could possibly go wrong. What would that gain us? We don’t have the resources to provide for any potential problems and trying to plan for them without having a clear understanding of what could go wrong is an exercise in futility. If something happens to the air carriage or some other difficulty crops up, we’re just going to have to adapt and improvise, as we already have. We’re both magickers and somehow or other we have to win through or die trying.”

  Rebuffed, Everett focused on his plate, filling his mouth with sweet potatoes. He had not actually equated his reservations about the air carriage with the conception of personal danger. A fall of ten feet could kill a man, if he were unlucky enough to land on his head. A fall of a hundred feet would very likely not leave much that the undertakers could use for a respectable funeral. Somehow, the sweet potatoes, despite being drowned in his favorite brown sugar and cinnamon sauce, no longer seemed quite as palatable.

  He caught their waiter’s eye and the plump young woman swept around to their table.

  “Ready for desert?” she asked with a not entirely professional smile.

  “Do you have any apple pie?” he asked with little hope.

  “We have a great one in season, but now all we have is blackberry.”

  As one of his rations of last resort, the thought of blackberry pie did not appeal. “I’ll pass.”

  Sarah likewise deferred desert and they concluded their meal in studied silence and departed. Everett started walking automatically toward the North Main Gate.

  “You’ve lodgings for the night in mind?” Sarah asked evenly. “Another hayshed?”

  “There’s a barn on a hill about two miles to the north-west. The homestead is vacant and falling down, but the roof of the barn is s
till in decent shape.”

  Once they had reached a secluded spot on the highway north of the city, Everett pointed out the prominent hill and its orphaned barn and transported them there straightaway. While Sarah investigated the interior, he trotted towards the half-collapsed old farmhouse. When he returned to find her eyeing a musty pile of forgotten hay in the sagging loft, he offered her a pick of his harvest, a handful of tiny crab apples.

  She shook her head determinedly. “No, thank you. Aren’t those terribly tart?”

  With evident relish, he consumed one in three surgical bites. “Incredibly sour and not quite ripe too.”

  She wrinkled her nose and made a face. “You’re quite fond of apples, aren’t you?”

  He devoured another apple and cavalierly tossed the core off the loft platform. “For me, apples are a special treat. Most of the time they're hard to come by here. I grew up on an apple farm along the eastern coast and back then I had them just about whenever I wanted them."

  Her eyes trailed across his face. "How long have you been away?"

  "Three years this last spring. There's not much opportunity for a Magicker out east so I came to the Edzedahl to get established in the trade."

  She glanced around at the windblown wrack, dust, and cobwebs that had collected in the desolate barn to emphasize her point. "Not having much luck?"

  He lifted one shoulder in an unconcerned shrug. "I get by."

  "On potatoes."

  "It takes a while to gather a clientele."

  "Have you thought about going home?"

  "No."

  "You weren't happy there?"

  He remained silent for a drawn-out moment, then admitted, "Just the exact opposite. I suppose that you could say that I have never experienced a more prosperous, contented, and secure time in my entire life.”

  Sarah looked wistful for a moment. “With the always looming threat of conflict between the Great Powers, my youth was one of continual tension and upset. I hardly remember more than a few moments of what I would consider to be peace in the first two decades of my life.”

  This comment amended a ponderous mood onto the gathering dark, and without any further conversation, they settled to sleep, reposing on opposite sides of the hay pile. At first light, they transported back to the city. A street vendor, a stocky man who did not bother to disguise his appreciation of Sarah's trim form, allowed himself to be bargained down to a price of Everett's last two silver fifty-seven for a loaf of fresh bread and a half-gallon of milk for their breakfast. They ate sitting on a bench in a tree-shrouded park at the center of a plaza, idly discussing Kleinsvench and the vagaries of passersby, then returned to Baronet Rorche’s warehouse a bit before eight o’clock.

  The first thing that Everett noticed was the unanticipated lack of activity. Except for some of Rorche’s esnes, there was no one about in the warehouse and the thicket of apparatus that had been present the day before was gone, with the tables themselves shoved carelessly into an abandoned clump along the side wall. The large mechanisms that he had expected to see belching smoke, spitting oil, and clanking as such always did, were quiet and still. When one of the taciturn young men in gray ushered them into the presence of the Baronet, they found him standing at a well-used wooden desk tucked into a corner. Drawings on drafting paper, ledgers, and stacks of handwritten notes covered the desk’s battered top in a tangled heap. With Rorche was a trim and charmingly elegant woman of indeterminate age who Everett took to be the mathematician, Millicent. Talking quietly, the pair appeared in deep contemplation of a set of figures on a clipboard. After but a bare moment, apparently receiving the clarification she required, Millicent rushed away after tossing them a quick I’d-love-to-talk-but-have-business-that-can’t-wait smile in greeting.

  “Excellent!” Rorche approved eagerly as he turned and caught sight of them. “I had hoped you would be on soon. We are far ahead of schedule and plan to launch in little over two hours. Once we had optimized the material flow, the production of our vapor mechanisms proved to be fifty percent higher than our previous calculations. Edwin was so enthused that he convinced the rest of us to work straight through the night with our other preparations and the manufacture of the fuel! Almost everyone has gone home to sleep, but you must come see the air carriage!”

  The Baronet himself appeared as fresh and energized as he had the day before. He wore the same suit of clothes, but the pressed creases in his jacket and trousers were still sharp.

  Everett had imagined how the completed mechanism would appear, but he was still taken aback when they walked outside. Casting a huge shadow over the yard, the great mass of the vapor cells, black globes two yards in diameter, hovered above the air carriage, extending high above the adjacent buildings. Rather than the loose random clump he had envisioned, the cells were confined and arranged within a compactly ordered tubular matrix by innumerable nets and lines. The cell matrix itself had been secured to the open upper deck of the air carriage at eight points along each side, with the lowest row of cells only perhaps fifteen feet from the railing. The wagons had been pulled away to the side and two low, wooden platforms erected adjacent to the side and rear doors. Resting only on its six spindly legs, the air carriage appeared barely restrained by dozens of heavy ropes. These ties led from steel rings along the underside to stakes twisted corkscrew-like into the ground. Shifting ponderously in a mild breeze, the now much more imposing craft did indeed give the impression that it could leap for the sky at any moment.

  Rorche seemed pleased by their reaction. “Come, I should show you the engines that your oil will fuel.”

  A number of Rorche’s were loading boxes and crates through the cargo doors at the stern, but only one small group of those the Baronet named “compatriots” were present and it was toward these that Rorche steered. The group, an older man, two middle-aged women, and a younger woman who was pretty in an industrious way, were in the process of securing a large, blocky mechanism to a tapered strut that protruded ten feet from the port side stern. About the size of a hogshead of beer, the mechanism rested on a metal stand with an unconnected halo of wires, cables, and fitted copper tubing draped across it. An identical mechanism, completed and covered in a slick metal shroud, had already been mounted to an identical strut on the opposite side of the air carriage.

  The older man, one of the middle-aged women, and the younger woman all shared similar sandy hair, sharp cheekbones and strong noses. All paused, wrenches in grimed hands as they attached mounting bolts, as the Baronet approached.

  Rorche introduced Everett and Sarah, using the alias she had supplied the day before, then indicated the others in turn.

  “This is Algis Coldridge, a Journeyman Mechanic who has created the engine from his own schematic, his wife Ellen and sister Josline, who are both also mechanics and whose schematics have greatly enhanced the efficiency and output of the engine, and his daughter Eylis, who is a Common Magicker with spells that affect metal fabrication.”

  As handshakes were exchanged all around, Everett, wondering where the firebox and boiler were, commented interestedly, “I’ve never seen a steam engine this small.”

  Algis grinned catlike. “But that’s the important part! It isn’t a steam engine!”

  Ellen, who was as tall as her husband but had dark hair and darker eyes, elbowed him playfully. “None of your guessing games, Algis. Everett, the engine produces torque by the sequential driving of four internalized pistons through controlled explosions of a mixture of liquid fuel and air instead of a blast of steam. This method produces a greatly increased power to size ratio. For want of better, we call it an oil fueled engine.”

  “You made the fuel from the olive oil?”

  “Yes,” Rorche confirmed. “Edwin has a formula that uses the oil, alcohol, and lye to produce a stable combustible liquid.”

  “It is quite amazing, when you think of it,” Josline Coldridge suggested. “Algis manifested the schematic when he was only twenty-three and we have been working
to build and refine it for two decades with only the vaguest conception of what it would burn. When Baronet Franz brought us together with Edwin, it almost seemed like our moment of destiny had finally arrived.”

  “It was the moment of synthesis,” Rorche corrected politely. “We all know that the great limitation of the mystical trades is that manifestations occur in isolation, without any correlation, logic, or interconnection. There must exist literally thousands of spells, schematics, and formulas whose potential cannot be realized because they depend on mechanisms, concoctions, or magical creations that are unknown at large or do not yet exist. A prime example is my air carriage. I manifested the design of the air carriage without any knowledge of its engines or the nature of the lifting vapor. Only with the contributions of other technologies, chemistries, and magics has it been possible to produce this working prototype.”

  The Coldridges, one and all, followed this discourse with the bright-eyed reverence of committed believers.

  “I gather that these will propel the air carriage?” Sarah asked, moving about to studiously examine the new engine.

  “Yes,” Josline answered. “On this shaft we'll bolt an air moving vane that I manifested. It will push air backwards to create force in a similar fashion to the way a paddle-wheel on a steam boat pushes water.”

  Sarah looked impressed. “How fast will it go?”

  “Because of the scarcity of the oil fuel, we have only operated the engines with the vanes attached for a very short period on a test stand,” Algis replied, taking a turn, “but Millicent’s calculations suggest a top speed for the air carriage under ideal conditions of twenty-five miles per hour.”

  “Remarkable!” The comment escaped from Everett of its own accord. Twenty-five miles per hour was just slower than a horse at full gallop but no horse ever bred could keep that pace for more than perhaps two miles. No land-bound steam mechanism that he had encountered had been able to best fifteen.