The Wizard That Wasn't (Mechanized Wizardry) (6 page)

Lundin shifted the weight, his hands throbbing as they continued their crabwalk across the warehouse.  “What was I saying?” he asked.

“Nothing.  I was enjoying it,” Samanthi said.

“Oh—right!  So!  So the Invocation is the first part of any spell.  Real consistent. There’s this text, the
pingdu calabra
, that they always say.  A few pages of text, tops.   And it connects them to the spirit world.”

“How exciting for them.”

“Part two—now this is a much longer one—is called the Illustration, and it’s what you want the spell to do.  It’s where you say, you know, ‘this is a spell that makes a person fall in love,’ or—well, ‘this is a spell that makes a person burst into flames.’”

“By the living spheres, are you insane?”  Samanthi hissed, glaring at him.  “Don’t go throwing words like that around, magic man!  There are drums of petrolatum everywhere in this place!”

“Don’t worry,” Lundin said, his face red from the strain.  He really couldn’t feel his fingers anymore underneath the generator.  “No danger in talking about this stuff.  We aren’t speaking in Mabinanto—and, anyway, speaking one part of a spell without the other parts in the right order is a recipe for instant fizzle.”

They finally reached the wagon and, with a heave and a grunt, set the generator down in its place.  Once inspected, it would be palace-bound, like the rest of their gear.  Their little Reconnaissance squad had been assigned to assist the Palace Guard, making sure nothing unexpected came in or out of the royal wing while the Princess was undergoing the First Ordeals.  A plum assignment if there ever was one.  They’d be among the first Delians (outside of palace regulars, of course) to see the Princess in her newly grown-up state, with her hair cut back and dressed like a midling, not a girl.  It would be strange to see her without the long, fawn-colored hair that shone through all her childhood portraits.

Lundin and Samanthi caught their breath, leaning against the wagon bed.  He looked at her as she watched other teams’ gear go by with an appraising eye.  “Have you heard of Mabinanto before, then?”  Lundin asked.

“If it’s not a type of alcohol I’m not interested,” Samanthi said, absently.

Lundin smiled and raised his hands in a gracious gesture.  “You know, we could talk about this later, if you want,” he said.  He prided himself on his ability to read signals from other people.

“No, you know what?  Let’s hear it all at once.”  Samanthi drummed a little rat-a-tat on the wagon with her callused hands.  “If little Princess Naomi can take two weeks of Ordeals, I can listen to you blab about magic another few minutes.  Please tell me, Horace, what Mabinanto is.”

“It’s really okay, Sam.  I don’t want to bore you.”

“For fire’s sake—!  Just bore me already!”

“Mabinanto, then!  Language of wizards.  It’s, uh—it’s kind of like Old Harutian; big compound words; straightforward grammar, thankfully.”

“I didn’t think anything about magic was straightforward.”  Samanthi tilted her head towards him, leaning back against the wagon.

Lundin started talking with his hands more, the way he did whenever his energy levels started to build up.  Samanthi stifled a snort, grinning to herself as he responded.  “That’s what I’m saying, though!  I feel like everything we all think about magic—wizards included—is wrong.  Because when I looked through Archimedia’s… uh, Kelley’s step-grandmother… when I looked through her books, at the lines and lines of Mabinanto that supposedly make up a successful Illustration, you know what it looked like to me?”  He leaned in closer.  “Code.”

Samanthi frowned, scratching her jawline with a fingernail.  “‘Code.’  You mean, like our ‘code?’ Abby’s ‘code’? How is that possible?”

“I’ve gotta show you the book.”

“We’ve gotta retool the fuel lines in Kelley’s suit, is what we gotta do,” she said automatically, but for once she didn’t feel like leaping back into the workshop right away.

“Say a wizard is doing the Illustration for a spell that—that makes hair fall out.  You’ve got to see this language.  It’s full of conditionals, it’s full of loops…  ‘If the hair is coarse, respond this way; if the subject already has hair loss, discontinue at such and such point; hair on this body part should be treated this way, repeat until X occurs; and if the subject is being magically protected, go to ritualistic phrase 18…’:

“I don’t flaming believe this,” Samanthi said, guarded and marveling at the same time.

“Maybe I’m crazy.  Maybe I’m just…”  Lundin took a moment to sort out his words.  “Maybe, because I’m a tech, I only know how to see things in terms of what I know.  I’m sure there’s nuance I’m missing, no doubt of it.  But as I read the stuff, all I could think was, ‘this looks familiar.’”

A passing Bulwark ‘naut, her visor down and her suit’s heavy boots thunderous against the floor, looked down at them as she stomped by.  They were the only people standing still in the whole warehouse.  Samanthi crossed her arms.  “What happens next?”  she demanded fiercely.

“Next in the spell?  So, okay.  You invoke magical power; you speak exactly what you want to happen, and what you
don’t
want to happen; and then comes the Enunciation.  You name your target.”

“Just like that? ‘Horace Lundin,’ and I’m done?”

Lundin shrugged.  “This is the part I’m confused by.  It sounds like it should be one line, right?  But somehow the Enunciation phase still takes a wizard hours.  It’s almost as long as the Illustration, even in spells that succeed.”

“How can it take four hours to say somebody’s name?”

“Well, they say it again and again, and they’ll say the name in different ways, and play around with it…”

Samanthi snapped her fingers, her eyes wide.  “Remember that ratty little wizard who couldn’t save LaMontina?  He called the Viscount all sorts of stupid things… ‘Graceful One.’  ‘Man of the Rearing Bull.’  It was like he was trying new names on for size.”

Lundin put his arms on his hips, thinking back to that dark tent.  “Maybe he was still thinking in Mabinanto, or at least in that mindset.  So, in the Enunciation, wizards might not say just a person’s real name, but speak dozens or hundreds of permutations on it?  Different titles and identities the person might have?”

“But why?”

“No idea.  Absolutely none.  But what I do know is that here’s where having the personal artifacts comes into play.  The blood from the leeches, in the Viscount’s case.  There’s something about having that material on hand during the Enunciation that makes a wizard more connected to his target.  However it works, from all accounts, it really makes a difference.”

“Just ask LaMontina,” Samanthi said, scratching her jawline.  She looked at Lundin for a long time, her round face thoughtful and still.  Lundin flexed the fingers on his still-hurting hand and watched her back, unsure what to say. 

Finally, she raised a fist to the height of her shoulder, and extended her index finger.  “First, a wizard speaks a rote Invocation,” she said, in a tone that was half statement and half question.  She extended another finger.  “Then she talks through an Illustration, which is just a long, spooky program that makes people’s hair fall out.”  Her thumb joined the other two.  “Finally, she speaks the name of her target until the spell works, and they call it an Enunciation.  It helps if there are leeches involved.

“You’re telling me that that’s magic?”

“That’s my theory.”  Lundin nodded.

She let that hang for a moment. “What’s your proof?”

“Well, nothing yet.  I’ll probably, uh, keep reading.  Interview wizards.  Observe them in action, see if it holds up.”

“Awfully soft, junior tech,” Samanthi murmured, her eyes narrowing.  She got the predatory look she developed any time she was facing an especially intricate problem.  “That’s a recipe for squishy data.  You’ll get a lot of confounding variables if you jump right into the real world with real wizards.”

“Sure, but it’s not like I can do magic in the lab.”

Samanthi nodded.  Suddenly, she was on the move.  “Walk with me,” she called out, without looking backwards.  Lundin trotted after her, startled.  She was already answering his question before he could get his mouth open.  “We’re going to see Dame Miri and those other showboating lightweights in the Parade squad, and we’re going to ransack their equipment.”

“What?  Why?”  Lundin frowned, trying to keep up.  “I’m not ransacking anybody without a good reason,” he said.

“
Ulraexi Pillok Mentatum Est,
Horace.  The Mind is the Key to All Things; but the right tool for the job helps too.  And your job,” she said, stopping sharply and turning to him, her eyes flashing with that predatory zeal, “you strange, bumbling, brilliant savant of a man—”

Samanthi slapped him in the chest with a resounding thump, and grinned broadly. “Your job is to build me a wizard.”

"Ow," Lundin said.

Chapter Five

The Squawk Box

“Don’t you two have a job to do?”

Sir Mathias leaned forward, both palms on the surface of the workbench, his brawny arms in evidence through the light fabric of his shirt.  Dame Miri Draker leaned forward as well, resting one hand elegantly on the table and tilting her head just so to make her blue-black locks of hair frame her face in the most striking way possible.  The Parade squad was always composed of young, brilliant, ogle-worthy recruits who were the appropriate mix of showman and scholar.  Every feastday or ceremonial event, they would be front and center with tricks and stunts, representing the promise of Petronaut technology to the masses.  This made their ‘nauts de facto ambassadors for the entire community, and meant that their technicians were constantly called upon to make devices for ever-grander spectacle.  Consequently, members of the Parade squad were as hardened as battlefield ‘nauts, and their technicians even more prolific and risk-taking inventors.  Dame Miri was just about to finish her three-year stint as the squad’s senior ‘naut, and was looking forward to retiring into the Shock Troops.

“When you said you wanted to borrow a squawk box,” she said, piggybacking off of Sir Mathias, “I thought you said you were going to treat it gently.”

Lundin frowned.  “I hope we didn’t say ‘gently,’” he said, tapping Samanthi on the shoulder with his index finger.

“I didn’t say ‘gently,’” she said, inspecting the teeth of a gear with a gloved finger.

“If we said ‘gently,’ then that was an error and I take full responsibility.”

“Horace!  Pliers!”

The two ‘nauts looked at each other as Lundin, after giving them a ‘wait here’ gesture, turned back to Samanthi and the boxy, skeletal mess of a machine they had created.  “Whatever they’re doing, they’re certainly excited by it,” Dame Miri said.

“My father always said that the more excited his technicians got in the workshop, the farther away he’d stand,” Sir Mathias told her under his breath.

“So, again, what are you doing with my equipment?”  Dame Miri called out, her trained voice projecting effortlessly across the three meters she and Mathias had just put between themselves and the hard-working pair.

“Your
spare
equipment,” Lundin corrected, hesitantly.  “You did say this squawk box was defunct, didn’t you, Dame Miri?”

“Pretty much.  It didn’t need anything too complicated, but they’re so little in demand we never made the time to do it.”

“Well, we fixed it!”  Samanthi said, brushing her hair out of her face and flashing a grin across the room.  She gestured proudly to the deconstructed cylinder next to her, its gears open to the air and a pile of pins and belts heaped around its base.  "You’re welcome," she said.

“Am I?” Miri said, watching the tech’s face and hands disappear back inside the cupboard-sized contraption.

“It’ll make music again, as per its original function,” Lundin clarified.  “But, uh.  We’re also in the progress of adapting it for, as I believe we explained earlier, arcane research.”

Sir Mathias wrinkled his nose. “You can’t be serious about making that into a wizard.”

“It doesn’t smell nearly bad enough,” Dame Miri said.

“We’ll add some dirt and sweat in the next upgrade,” Lundin said with a tentative grin.  “As far as I can tell, verbal commands are the primary mode of delivery for magic.  Spells are spoken in the arcane language Mabinanto, which is like Old Harutian; which is one of the many languages the squawk box can sing in.”

Dame Miri frowned.  The Melodimax, or squawk box, was an ingenious upgrade to the music boxes inventors had perfected decades earlier.  The squawk box began with great discs of perforated metal, whose downward-pointing pins would pluck against the tuned teeth of a metal comb as they rotated by.  The sound would travel through an intricate network of resonators to an articulated mouthpiece, complete with wooden teeth, a pliable leather tongue, and mobile ‘lips’ made of sea sponge.  The entire mouth apparatus was fiendish to look at, and was consequently kept hidden within a wide, ornate funnel on top of the machine, like the bell of a trumpet.   A second metal disc, spinning at the same rate as the first, would translate its perforated code into minute adjustments to the configuration of the mouth, shaping the aperture as pitched sound passed through.  The second disc also actuated a miniature bellows deep in the box, which would send rhythmic pneumatic bursts to the mouth to create sibilant sounds.  The Melodimax was the first mechanical singer, capable of singing intelligible songs in any language a designer cared to code into its metal disks. 

However, singing intelligibly is not the same as singing well, and the nickname ‘squawk box’ quickly caught on, for reasons anyone who had heard the Melodimax perform would readily understand.  The exhausted Petronauts responsible for the invention found that once the novelty of the device had worn off, nobles and commoners alike would never choose to hear it sing over a regular songsmith, a griot, or an entertaining drunk.  So back the machine had gone into the Parade squad’s storeroom at the warehouse; a specimen of stunning mechanical ingenuity designed to serve a need that didn’t exist.