The Wizard That Wasn't (Mechanized Wizardry) (16 page)

Dame Miri exhaled, making her decision.  She swung the flap open, bright morning sunlight spilling over her.  It was a warm, clear day, perfect for a population eager to celebrate Princess Naomi’s success in the Ordeals.  It was almost unbearable to think that a situation so grave could be unfolding in the palace on a morning like this.  The air was full of the sounds of talking, laughing, and music; it seemed that half of Delia was on the streets of Gildet, the well-manicured district just east of the Palace where the royal parade would begin that afternoon. 
Spheres willing
.

Miri flashed a big smile to a cluster of families, who cheered and waved at her.  The eyes of the fathers and the teenage sons widened and lingered on her as she walked; this was, as she well recognized, just another part of her job.  The Parade squad’s mission was to make Petronauts as flashy, attractive, and appealing as possible to the masses.  So her Parade “‘armor” was less like armor and more like a metallic cocktail dress, accented with white leather gloves that stretched to her elbows, and wedge-heeled boots with straps that encircled her tan legs to mid-calf.  Her breastplate was, in fact, functional, and the swishing plates of her metal skirt might actually serve to repel an attacker who was determined to strike her above the knee and below the waist.  But all in all, the armor was a costume to display the body beneath it, not to protect that body on a battlefield.

“—assist the Guard to the fullest, according to your means and your capacity.”

The words ran through her head again as she stopped a few meters behind Sir Sigurd.  The brawny, barrel-chested Petronaut’s costume was even less practical than hers; more of his body was covered in bronzing oil than in clothing.  Thick, studded bracers covered his wrists; a massive circular shield was slung over his back; his skirt was even shorter than hers.  Apart from his boots, the rest of his impeccably conditioned physique was openly on display, for which the whispering women in the gathered crowd were grateful.

Dame Miri struck a balletic pose, smiling brightly and making herself a frame to the stunt he was preparing.  Hands raised high, the big man suddenly poured his body backwards into a series of handsprings.  After the third, he launched himself four meters in the air (with the aid of the ranine coils in his boots) and, with practiced legerdemain, shot two unobtrusive disks from his bracers into the ground below.  He fell to earth in a sinewy crouch, like a panther leaping from a tree, just as the perfectly spaced flash disks burst, sending twin pillars of whistling white sparks high in the air on either side of him.  The crowd, leaning out of windows and packed together on the flagstone sidewalks, cheered wildly.

 “Lift,” Dame Miri called under her breath, keeping a smile on her face.  Sigurd turned and saw her as she began running towards him.  With the muscle memory of long practice, he swung his hands to her waist as she leapt, her upraised arms making a graceful arc above her back and her legs pointing ramrod-straight behind her.  He lifted her above his head, raising her two and a half meters in the air.  She curled her ring fingers and the fog jets at her waist activated, pumping out a cloud of sweet-smelling white smoke.  The artificial cloud hovered in the gap between her waist and the top of Sir Sigurd’s head, obscuring the big man’s bulging arms.  Dame Miri began to flap her long arms in smooth, symmetrical wingbeats, as if flying above the clouds.  The crowd oohed and applauded fervently as Sigurd carried her along the street, a trail of gossamer cloud behind her.

When she stopped the fog jets, Sir Sigurd lowered her to the ground and the two Petronauts bowed to the thunderous acclaim of the crowd.  Smiling brightly, Dame Miri put a hand on Sigurd’s oil-soaked shoulder and turned him away from the spectators.  “We’re going on assignment,” she said, her mouth not moving.

“Where to?  Parapet Square?”  he asked under his breath, a smile similarly fixed on his face.

“Drabelhelm.”

He looked at her, and his smile flickered.  “Dame Miri, I’ll be the first to say that the folks at the bottom need entertainment too, but—”

“Crown business, Sir Sigurd.  There’s a plot afoot against Her Highness, and a wizard in Drabelhelm is the key to the whole thing.”

His big brown eyes widened.  “By the living Spheres.  Is the Guard mobilizing?”

“And all Petronauts are supposed to help,” she said, nodding.  “Northeast Gildet puts us closer to Drabelhelm district than any other ‘nauts, and certainly closer than the Palace Guard, so we’re heading immediately to the site for reconnaissance.”

Sigurd stopped in his tracks, his mouth half open.  Dame Miri turned to face him.  “You want to be first on the scene against a wizard?”he said.

“Seconds may count today,” she said, dropping her smile.  “We’ve got a duty to the Crown.”

“Dame Miri, I hear you; but our duty today is to keep people happy, not to—”

“And how happy will Donny Q. Delian be when he hears that his Princess is dead?” she hissed, stepping in close to him.  Her violet eyes were hard, and she held Sigurd’s gaze for a long time. 

“Sigurd,” she said, quietly.  “I’ve learned a little about magic from the techs over in Recon.  The wizard will be too focused on his spell to be any danger to us.  And even if he does shift his attention to attack us, isn’t that a small price to pay if it saves Her Highness’ life?”

Sir Sigurd sighed, scratching his neatly trimmed blond beard.  “You just can’t wait to be reassigned to the Shock Troop squad, can you?”

“Counting the days,” Dame Miri said, grinning.  She squeezed his arm, her white glove coming away wet with bronzer.  “Double-time, junior ‘naut,” she ordered, dashing down the street as quickly as the milling crowds would allow.

It was more than half past nine by the time they arrived on the outskirts of Drabelhelm.  The muddy roads were crisscrossed every which way with carriage tracks.  Not enough vehicles came out here for the city to justify improving the roadway.  A handful of drunks, two here, one there, lay sprawled against the splintered fence outside a dilapidated mill.  No merchant in her right mind would locate a workhouse out here now, with the incidence of crime and vagrancy as high as they were.  And as long as jobs stayed away, and vehicle traffic was prohibitive, this isolated knot of poor souls was likely to stay just as crime-ridden and desperate as it was right now.

“Drunk on a feastday morning,” Sir Sigurd muttered, inclining his head towards the sleeping bodies.

“More likely sleeping off a feastday eve,” Miri said.  She gathered her cloak around her more tightly and pressed forward.  They’d stopped in the equipment pavilion for an instant to grab the long, inconspicuous brown cloaks.  At least to a casual glance, they might not look like Petronauts immediately. 
Keep telling yourself that,
she thought wryly, knowing that her filigreed boots and Sir Sigurd’s bare legs were plainly obvious beneath the cloaks.

“This wizard, Jilmaq, lives in a two-room hut a bit off the beaten path,” she told Sigurd.  They scanned the moldering houses as they walked by.  Most were deserted now, their occupants likely having made the long walk to the more developed areas of the city to find a spot on the parade route.  Sigurd pointed down the winding street.

“It looks like there are a few alleyways down there.”

Dame Miri nodded.  “We’ll fan out and inspect both sides of the block at once.  If we get out of earshot, use a flash disk to—”

A heavy metallic clang shattered the air, and Sir Sigurd was driven to his hands and knees with a muddy splash.  The big man grunted in pain and surprise.  Dame Miri wheeled around, her violet eyes searching, and heard the rush of air just in time to leap backwards.  Her ranine coils sent her flying wildly, skidding to a stop four meters away in front of a crumbling house.  The thick crossbow bolt that had narrowly missed her was embedded deep in a fencepost across the street.  Sigurd rolled onto his feet; the bolt aimed at his back had ricocheted off his shield, concealed by the brown cloak.  As he reached awkwardly to bring the shield to bear, a dagger spun through the air and lodged in his left shoulder, sending a burst of blood skywards.  Sir Sigurd howled, falling back to earth and clutching his wound.

“Sigurd!”  Miri shouted.  She finally caught sight of their attackers: the three drunks, perfectly alert now, standing by the abandoned workhouse fence. 
Not drunks, but guards,
she thought, her heart pounding.  One of them was cranking a new bolt into place on his crossbow; the second was stalking towards Sigurd with a fresh dagger in his hand; and the third was leveling a crossbow right at her.

Dame Miri flexed her ring fingers and a cloud of smoke billowed out where she was standing.  She ducked into the abandoned house under cover of the smoke, seeing the trail of the crossbow bolt through the vapor as it twanged through the air.  She quickly took stock of the filthy hut—a broken chair, scraps of pottery, a hearth full of ashes.  A battered fireplace poker lay next to the hearth.  She snatched it up and risked a quick glance through a gap in the rotting boards of the wall.  Two of the men were sprinting towards the house, splitting up to flank the building from front and back.  She couldn’t see the third man, on his way to slit Sigurd’s throat.

She shed the constricting brown cloak and squeezed her way lithely through a window in the back of the house, sinking into a catlike crouch among the weeds.  The roof, sloped away from the workhouse and their attackers, was covered in shingles, not noisy thatch.  Her mind working furiously, she prayed the rotting planks would support her weight and tucked the poker into the back of her skirt, parallel with her spine.  Her fingers and toes found careful purchase as she scrambled up to the roof, as quietly as she could manage.  There was no time to plan any further.  She drew the heavy iron poker, dashed the few meters across the shingles—which, miraculously, stayed solid under her feet—and flung herself off the roof to the street below.

The three men yelled as she catapulted into view, sailing through the air.  One of the men by the house wasted his crossbow bolt on a wild, hopeless shot, cursing loudly.  The man menacing Sir Sigurd with a dagger looked up to see the Petronaut falling towards him, her skin and armor gleaming in the sunlight.  And then the iron poker struck him on his jawline just below the right ear, and he crumpled to the ground with a sickening noise.

Dame Miri landed heavily on her shoulder, her body twisted from swinging the poker in midair.  But she used her momentum to roll, pivot, and flip back onto her feet, facing away from the remaining men.  She was still holding the poker in her sooty white-gloved hand.  She whirled on the two attackers as they rushed towards her, knives out. 

“Miri, duck!”  Sigurd shouted.

She flung herself to the ground unthinkingly as something hissed sharply above her head.  Dame Miri glanced upwards to see a new figure standing above her, regaining its balance after the vicious left cross that had just missed her.  She noticed the glint of three blades extending from the attacker’s knuckles before a steel-toed boot caught her forcefully in the stomach.  She gasped with pain, her eyes watering, and rolled away in time to dodge a second kick.  The new attacker was right on top of her; even with all her gymnastic skill, she barely reached her feet before a bladed fist came hurtling towards her again.  The blow rebounded off her breastplate, tearing her exposed right bicep deeply instead.  She rolled with the impact and sidestepped to the right, whirling the poker around in a wide arc and striking the backside of her adversary’s knee with all her strength.

Her assailant’s legs were swept upwards, sending the hooded figure tumbling back-first onto the muddy ground.  Dame Miri blinked as she looked down.  The figure was wearing a featureless oval mask, mottled brown like the inside of a tree trunk.  From the two holes where eyes should have been, a pair of golden lights blazed up at her instead.  The very blankness of the face was sinister, and Miri fought down a sudden pang of dread.  The shape of the pliable armor Miri could see under the fighter’s black cape suggested this newcomer was a woman.  Then she heard the distinctive whine of gears as the masked woman tensed her muscles, preparing to launch herself to her feet.

Stars and Spheres,
she thought in disbelief. 
She’s a Petronaut.
 

Dame Miri jabbed downwards at the Petronaut with the point of her poker, but her moment of shock cost her.  The woman flexed her fists, and her blade-claws ratcheted out another six centimeters.  What had been empty air was now a swarm of knives, into which Dame Miri plunged her arms before she could stop herself.  She screamed as the poker fell out of her hands, and she staggered backwards, slicing the backs of her hands open against the blades in her unthinking retreat.  She looked down, taking stock of her injuries dumbly.  Her hands and wrists were a mass of gashes, and her left hand didn’t seem to close properly.  

Something solid was thrust into her right hand, which closed around it automatically.  She looked down into Sir Sigurd’s sweat-drenched face.  “Take them!”  he shouted, gesturing at the two men, now closed to knife distance.  He’d put the hilt of the dead man’s dagger into her hand.  Muscle memory took over and Dame Miri narrowed her violet eyes, quickly taking stock of the distance.  The swarthy man on the right gurgled, his face contorted with shock as a dagger spun through the air into his chest.  He stumbled to the ground and was still.  The other man closed with her, snarling in her face.

Miri weaved away from his first thrust to her head, and bent her belly away from his next slash.  She didn’t trust her arms to function properly, so she kept them low by her side, giving her opponent as little body language as possible to read.  As he advanced again, she kicked out with lightning speed, digging her heel into the sensitive tendons where the ankle meets the foot.  His leg fell out from under him and he dropped onto his knee, grunting in pain as his knife arm swung up, uncontrolled.  She pivoted, raising her right thigh high, and flicked a toe into his exposed wrist.  The dagger fell dully into the mud, and he started to stagger to his feet.  Two quick kicks to his stomach doubled him over again, clutching his belly.  Dame Miri prepped herself with a breath, then raised her long left leg to its full extension, well above her head, and snapped it back downwards in an axe kick.  Her heel clouted the miscreant at the base of his skull and he went limp.  She was breathing heavily, and her vision was going fuzzy. 
I’m losing blood,
she thought, trying to shake her head clear.