Tinker's Justice (27 page)

“
Indresio ananakne ubtaio wanuzar pronetook,
” Madlin mumbled.

“
Indreithio anamakne ubtaio wanuzar pronedook,
” Anzik corrected her. “Try it again.”

“
Indreithio ananakne ubtaio wanuzar pronedook.
”

“
Anamakne,
not
ananakne
,” Anzik said.

“
Indreithio anamakne ubtaio wanuzar pronedook.
” Even thinking the strange words was tiring, and her tongue was twisting itself into knots.

“Better. Again.”

Madlin repeated it ten times more at Anzik’s insistence. She counted them, forcing herself to push through the cramping in her mouth. At the eleventh time Anzik told her to speak the words, she held up her hands. “I’m done.”

“You wanted to learn magic. You’re learning magic,” said Anzik.

“I’m not learning magic; I’m learning to repeat gibberish. Nothing happens when I say it, and nothing happens when
you
say it, so it’s not as if getting it right or wrong is the problem. Can we just skip to the actual magic part? I’m a quick learner.”

“No.”

“But I—”

“You already wanted to skip the spell primer, and I agreed. If you wanted this to be easy, you’d have started with the most basic of spells and learned to form proper thoughts in your head,” said Anzik. “But you wanted spells with immediate applicability, so I’m starting you as far in as I dare. Nothing is happening because I am teaching you the words and gestures separately. Trying it all at once would get you hurt.”

Madlin gave him a long-suffering grin. “I’m not
that
bad … am I?”

“It’s not a matter of being good or bad at it. You’re inexperienced. Imagine me blundering into your workshop and trying my hand with the machines.”

“That’s different,” Madlin said. “There’s a lot of power in those machines. Even something as simple as a drill press can tear a finger off if you get it caught in the wrong place.”

“A simple light spell, misspoken and without proper safeguards by the caster, can leave you a charred husk with ash for blood.”

“Oh?”

“Yes. Having second thoughts?”

“Are you just trying to scare me?”

“Yes, but everything I’ve said is true. I want you to understand the seriousness of this undertaking. Being exposed to Dan and to my own magic has given you a false sense of ease of what is going on. For all his faults, Dan was a virtuoso of combat spell-casting. Part of his mania was a single-minded focus on a particular result he wished to achieve. You have a mind like a magpie’s nest, filled with useless shiny objects. I need you to practice the words until you can speak them without stray thoughts intruding. Then I will teach you the path each finger must take while those words are spoken. Then I will help you learn to do both at once.”

“And there isn’t a shortcut?”

“This
is
the shortcut. If this was a traditional education, you’d start with creating candle-sized balls of light, then move on to levitating feathers.”

“I can already levitate things with runes,” Madlin said.

“An entirely different craft, I’m afraid. If you have the time to carve runes and empower them, it is the safer course. It would be years before anyone would teach you a shielding spell such as you are learning.”

“And this is the easiest spell I can learn that would help me in a fight?”

“If you want to fight, the first thing you must do is survive. Now, repeat …”

Chapter 21

“Never force a man into a corner. It’s harder to put a sword in his back.” – Rashan Solaran

“It’s like a blast furnace out here,” a kuduk soldier complained. Draksgollow ignored the comment, but privately agreed with it. He walked down the rows of unfamiliar, stalky plants, a club in one hand, pistol in the other. Like his troops, he wore a wide-brimmed hat to keep away the worst of the sun; he could only imagine how much worse it would have been without it. It would have seemed like a mistake ever coming here, if it weren’t for the fact that the land was overflowing with humans. If they could take the heat of this sub-tropical backwater, they would thrive in the fields of Korr.

“Hey now, another group over yonder,” Draksgollow said, pointing with the end of his club. The optics over one eye were set to a five times magnification, making walking awkward, but letting him spot distant humans with ease.

The nearest troops quickened their pace, shouting at the humans to stay where they were and kneel. It must have been some mental deficiency, Draksgollow decided. The soldiers knew that the humans didn’t understand a word of their language. Still, the vain effort to save themselves a chase made them try. Draksgollow wasn’t even sure it would have mattered if the humans understood them. Any free human with sense would know better than to let himself get rounded up and collared. It wasn’t as if he was running a subtle operation.

It was stupid things like the shouted warnings that compelled Draksgollow to continue going along with the raids. One day he hoped for a sense that affairs were in good hands without him, and he could put up his feet and read reports. Humans looked a lot better as columns of numbers. One column for culled, one column for captured; simple as that. He didn’t like dealing with the faces, the curses that needed no translation, the whining, the begging, the crying, the fluids that dripped and gushed and leaked. They were low, primitive creatures, obstinate for the sake of it, and dumb as a rubber hammer.

A shushing of the crops alerted Draksgollow to someone cutting across the planted rows toward him. Kep trampled a row of the stalks and pulled up short, panting. “Got about thirty of the rat-herders rounded up to the south. Had to send for more troops if we’re going to bring this lot in whole.” He took off his hat and fanned himself.

“What’s that bring us up to for this run?”

“Eighty-eight. Maybe eighty-seven if one we had to club senseless doesn’t come around,” said Kep. He took a flask from his belt and tipped it back, chugging the contents noisily.

Draksgollow nodded to himself. He gave Kep a squint and sized him up as if he had never seen him before, or was seeing him anew. “Hey Kep, think you can oversee the rest of this roundup?”

“Me?” Kep asked. He held the flask near his lips, frozen between gulps and a gasp for air.

“Yeah, you seen what’s what with these runs. Just keep the boys from doing anything too stupid. They know their bit.”

“I dunno …”

“Aw, it’s just like being shop foreman, except it outdoors and the parts put up a bit more fight,” said Draksgollow.

“I’ve seen brightsteel put up a good fight.”

“Now I know you’re just blunting my tools. Get out there and watch those clods. If you can manage to get me out of having to come do it myself, there’s a pay raise in it for you.”

“How much?”

“Mercenary bastard. Listen, I got a meeting I gotta get ready for tonight. You keep me from having to worry about some loose-bolted mix-up while I go over my speech notes, I’ll bump your pay … twenty-five percent.”

“Make it fifty.”

“You’re fired.”

“Oh, fine, twenty-five.”

“Good,” replied Draksgollow. “I’ll want a full report on my desk tomorrow morning.”

The clang of armor plates and the pounding of booted feet echoed down the tunnels. Sickly spark light flickered in a coal dust haze that threatened to clog the breather-cloths around the rebels’ faces. Kuduks shouted, trying to rally a defense, but the rebels had taken them by complete surprise. Many of the dead kuduks in their wake wore their night clothes or were half dressed, weapons having come to hand quicker than shirts in the rush to respond to the attack.

Cadmus bore the unfamiliar weight of his tinker’s armor with a sense of childlike glee. It almost didn’t seem real, taking part in a raid. It had always been the province of younger men, men whose contribution to the rebellion lay in their muscles, not their brains. But Cadmus had a fire burning inside him, a restlessness that he could not recall even from when he was the age he now appeared to be. His body
was
twenty-five again, and he had the mind of a fifty-three year old tinker to guide it. But along with the youthful body came youthful urges; along with the renewed vigor came a sense of invulnerability.

“Rescue! Rescue! Humans, call out!” one of the soldiers at the fore shouted in Acardian. All of them had either been Acardian born or had been taught a smattering of Acardian before being allowed on the raid. The kuduks of the Human Replacement Project might steal humans for their nefarious ends, but Eziel damn them before the rebels would let the kuduks keep them. And so long as the HRP kept making newspaper headlines, they wouldn’t be able to hide their captives.

A distant shout carried over the sounds of the kuduk defenses. “Down here!” The cry echoed from somewhere ahead, but the tunnels branched and twisted. It took a deeper’s ears to sort them out.

“This way!” Hayfield shouted, pointing with his coil gun. Rynn had given him command with the explicit instruction of keeping Cadmus safe. The Mad Tinker outranked anyone but Rynn—or perhaps Davlin, depending on their strength of faith—as far as most rebels were concerned. But Rynn had given Hayfield unambiguous authority over him until he was safely home from the raid. She had wanted to come personally, but even the need to protect her father was not enough to overrule the thought that both of them should not go together. Too much at risk for the rebellion. Cadmus smirked at the thought—he was in no danger.

The rebels thundered down the tunnel in the direction Hayfield had indicated. Rounding a bend, they ran into a trio of kuduks with scatterguns. Rebels shielded their faces with the armor plates on their off-hand arms as the scatterguns fired. Dull metallic
thunks
sounded from the runed steel that protected the humans. As the double-action clacking of the scatterguns signaled a reload, the rebels opened fire. In seconds, the kuduks lay in pools of blood, and the rebels were past them, trailing crimson footprints. A few of the rebels dug in pouches as they hustled along, loading more ball bearings into the ammunition chambers at the backs of their weapons.

One soldier glanced down at his left arm and saw a glow in the warning crystal near his elbow. He had taken two of the scattergun blasts, and his runes were all but depleted. The soldier raised his arm for the world-ripper technician to see, and a world-hole opened to fetch him to safety. A reserve soldier—with freshly empowered runes on his armor—came through to replace him.

Cadmus figured that three of his shots had hit. He replaced the four balls he had fired, wanting his weapon loaded to full for any encounter. He had read the reports of all the rebels’ previous raids. With a vivid and detailed imagination, he had constructed stage plays in his mind showing what those raids must have been like. But no amount of imagination could get his heart to pump like a thunderail piston, nor could it bring the smells and sounds so close and ubiquitous. He had never imagined the desperate disarray of the kuduks, the shoulder to shoulder jostling with his squad mates as they careened down the tunnels, the slick footing of fresh-spilled blood on stone.

The two kuduk guards on the humans’ sleeping barracks dropped their weapons and put their hands up when they caught sight of the rebels. Cadmus didn’t see who it was, but someone at the front of the squad dropped both of them with a quick pair of coil gun shots. When one of the pair survived the initial shot and lay moaning on the floor, Cadmus was the one who put a second shot into the kuduk to silence his cries.

“Stand back!” one of the Acardian-born soldiers shouted through the locked steel door. One of the guards likely had a key, but this wasn’t a search-for-a-key sort of raid. Hayfield swung a backhand fist at the bolt side of the door. The rune and compression spring device on the back of his glove became momentarily as heavy as a shot from the World Ender Cannon. The bolt snapped and the door slammed open.

Inside the room, fifty or so Acardian farmers huddled on blankets piled on the bare stone floor. The men were chained together along one wall, women along the other, with just enough slack that neither group could reach the other. Hayfield raised a hand in a series of signals, and a world-hole opened in the room. The squad took up defensive positions at the door as crews from the
Jennai
poured in with bolt-cutters, freeing the slaves. A few Acardian speakers offered hasty explanations of the need for haste, and that everything was being taken care of—that they were safe.

My people
. From his position at the door, Cadmus watched over his shoulder as the Acardians were ushered through the world-hole in a daze.
This is bigger than me, bigger than any of us.
He was responsible. Without his help, Kezudkan might never have assembled a working world-ripper. A plan that had started out with the goal of rescuing the twinborn of Korr had gotten a great many one-worlders killed in Korr and enslaved in Acardia. While it didn’t change his mind, that realization added weight to the guilt he felt that what he really wanted was to see his former owner dead.

As the squad finished clearing the mine, more humans taken from Acardia were rounded up and ferried through world-holes to the
Jennai
. Every time they came to a new room in the mine complex, however, Cadmus found his hopes rising that on the other side would be one of the world-rippers that Kezudkan had used for the attacks on Acardia. Every time, he was disappointed.

When the squad finally returned to the
Jennai
themselves, they had freed two hundred eleven Telluraki humans and killed thirty-five kuduks, most of them guards. When the mine was deemed clear of human occupation, they fired the World Ender Cannon and collapsed the tunnels.

It was cathartic, fighting back in person rather than letting Rynn and her underlings do all the work. But at the same time it felt hollow. Kezudkan and whatever associates he had among the kuduks would be back to slaving in Tellurak before long, looking for replacements. They needed to find and shut down the daruu’s world-rippers. Until that happened, any victory was temporary.

Draksgollow stood fidgeting in his newly tailored suit. Minute by minute, spectators filtered into the cavernous lecture hall of Klockwerk University. The lectern was piled with notes and reminders, points he would have to remember along with facts and figures for the question period that would follow his speech. The front row of the hall remained empty, flanked by ushers with flat-combed beards and tidy red uniforms that looked as if they had been ironed into place while being worn.

While Draksgollow’s mechanical appearance drew curious eyes, he was not the spectacle he once was. For months his face had been appearing in newspaper flashpops. He was a public figure now. More eyes were drawn to the easel standing to one side of him. It was covered with a drop cloth, making what lay beneath seem more mysterious than it had any right to.

Once the student seating had been filled by newspaper reporters, local business owners, the politically well-connected, and anyone else lucky enough to have gained a ticket to the event, the final spectators filed in. Entering through a side door, the members of the Central Council walked past the lectern and took their places in the front row where they had an unobstructed view. A bailiff followed behind them, closing the waist-high door that separated the seating from the area where the lecturer was free to roam.