1 #5
He gave a quick nod. “I’ll be down.”
He pulled a cape over his light shirt, drew on half-boots, and belted on his sword of office before descending the tower.
At the bottom of the stair he paused for a moment to catch his breath.
The lord needed to look the part. No rushing about, out of breath.
He stood in the hall that connected the Tower to the working portion of the estate, and gathered his composure.
He stepped into the afternoon sun, calm and in command.
The guards and Household staff might rush about, but he must appear calm and in control …
whether true or not. The Tower was not far from the city wall, and just a short walk across the courtyard.
He crossed the courtyard grass briskly, then sprinted up the steps to the battlement, taking them two at a time and making a show of his vigor, while hiding the sudden shortness of breath.
Too much time at the work-table, not enough exercise.
Arriving at the top of the wall, he met the foreman. “Show me.”
The older elf, his forearms scarred with the burns from his forge and trade, nodded and replied. “This way mi’lor.” His lower-class accent blurred the words.
Haldeen followed the foreman to the destroyed Machina. Number Seventeen. He knelt to study its inner workings. “Any idea what went wrong?”
“No, mi’lor.” The foreman shrugged. “Figure something faulted in the feed system. Complex jiggery right there, and if even a bit of copper slagged up against the feed door an’ kept it from closing … then when the furnace kicked off ….” He trailed off and made a spreading gesture with his hands.
“You warned me,” Lord Haldeen replied. He felt his title slip just the tiniest bit as he looked at the wreckage. At least he hadn’t presented his new designs to the king as a fait accompli yet.
“Mi’lor, there will be an inquest,” the foreman continued, “required anytime a Manipulator dies.”
“Yes,” Haldeen replied, his voice carefully neutral. He suspected as much when the Manipulator had been slow in dropping control. “Who was it?”
“Lindoril,” the foreman replied. “The stutterer from the last class. Guardsman said she took on the whole kit by herself. Cycled up the whole twenty, though she could only get twelve out of the sheds. Didn’t wait for any of the other duty Manipulators. Given how fast the thing came on,
she might have saved the city.”
The foreman looked over at the battlement’s low tower where she had died.
“Pushed way too far. When Seventeen blew, she was already at maximum, and had no place to send the magic she was feeding it. Healer says a stroke killed her instantly. Never felt a thing.”
Haldeen kept his face carefully neutral.
His designs, turned into metal and more powerful weapons, had saved the city and driven off the monster.
One young Manipulator had taken on more than she could handle, his Machina had blown, and in a moment he went from acclaim to an investigation.
He stopped that thought and reversed it …
there was something there, perhaps a way out.
The Manipulator had been overextended, dangerously so …
perhaps he could work with that, and get ahead of this thing.
She was new. She was inexperienced. She took on more than she could ever hope to handle.
She was female, and females are prone to let emotion overcome them.
“I’ll need to prepare my statement.” Haldeen turned away, thinking furiously, and no longer concerned with the dead and dying. Back to his tower and his office. He needed to be near the Farspeaker in case—well, it was inevitable—the king called with a demand to know what happened.
He worked to compose his speech as he descended the battlement stair and started across the courtyard to return to his tower.
He stopped then and looked up at it, shading his eyes a bit.
The short run up to the city walls had left him wheezy.
He was in no state to make that climb again.
He turned instead and went to his personal suite, where he had his offices and close to where the Farspeaker had been installed.
He could relax there, and compose his speech in better comfort.
His fears cooled as he worked to perfect his speech. After all, this was just the loss of a single, new-design Machina and a newly-trained Manipulator. And a female at that!
His answer exploded in his mind, and he almost laughed out loud.
Of course! Lord Veritalin had been the one to insist on training female Manipulators in that last batch, saying they could not afford to waste a single elf that showed even the slightest ability as a Manipulator, regardless of gender or birth.
And he had argued against it, because, of course, females were flighty and unreliable, and overemotional.
Inevitably (well, look at his wife, just now!)
they let their emotions get the better of them, and blew things out of proportion, and ruined well-laid plans and disciplined action.
And so it had been here. The city was critically short of resources in every birth-class, but there were limits.
One cannot make a swimmer into a flier, just by wishing it so, and so it was here.
They should never have trained any female Manipulators, and this proved it—and it was now going to be on Lord Veritalin’s head, not his.
He chuckled, albeit weakly. At least he was pulling an ingot of gold out of the fires of destruction.
It was exhausting, however, this game of made-lord against hereditary-lords, piled on top of the stresses of keeping the city’s (and his) secrets, and the moments when his own mind betrayed him.
They were all against him—yes! Even his own wife!
Not that there was any affection between them, of course; it was strictly a contractual affair, as most marriages among the lords and the rising were.
He needed someone able to do the reams of calculations he required to tune and maintain the Gates.
She, the third daughter of a minor lordling of diminished station, with no “appropriate” partners in view, got her family’s chariot hitched to a rising star.
Together, they made a rising couple, always genial in public and generally polite in private, and the two of them with the obvious brains to legitimize the new title.
But the least she could have done was to show some gratitude.
He rubbed his forehead, wearied by the day, and waited for the Farspeaker to chime. Making others wait. A privilege of being the king.
He considered the increasing arguments with his wife. There had been a polite peace between them, but that seemed to be eroding. What had she expected him to do with the calculations he’d asked for?
He started to piece together other comments, other slights.
Had she turned on him? Was she conspiring behind his back?
Well, he didn’t think so. Not because she wouldn’t, he knew she would, but because she couldn’t.
She was surrounded at all times by his magical and mechanical spies, spies that were more reliable than flesh and blood ones were.
And while it was barely possible that she had power to negate those, she had neither the training nor the knowledge to be able to do so.
He paused for a moment of fond thought about those spies. The part he could not say out loud … the other component of the Gate experiment. Just a trickle of power from the Gate here, just enough to test and see if he could open the World Gate, and send a probe through.
This probe, different in being part machine, and part living.
An abomination to the Council, that crossed every ethical boundary in the books, but was necessary.
A probe he could give simple instructions to, and which could survive on the far world, and that should, in theory at least, be able to continue to function without the freely-available, ambient magical power of this world.
Go there, explore, and return with a sample. Simple instructions.
He leaned over the work-table, knowing that he’d put off sending it, dithering a bit.
Until he did, the exercise remained deniable, the whole experiment one firelance from being an unfortunate lab accident.
The attack, the creatures, the dead Manipulator, and the argument with his wife had all firmed his resolve. No more debate.
He would send the probe. Tonight.
And with more luck, this will give me such good results that the Council will see the need, wipe away these stupid resistances, and eagerly give me every rebellious, recalcitrant criminal that exists in the prisons to make more such creatures.
The Farspeaker chimed. The king, ready for his report. Time to stretch my wits.