by Frank Morin
“We’ll still need power stones for thrusters, and as backups in case some of the wires get cut, but by having two separate power sources in the shells, our chances of being able to do some real damage should improve significantly,” Verena said.
“And if we need to self-destruct like I did against Harley, the explosion will be even more amazing,” Hamish added.
Fighting Harley had been a remarkable and terrifying experience, one he was not looking forward to repeating. On the other hand, he had proven conclusively that Builder mechanicals could in fact stand against even some of the mightiest Petralists.
With Ilse’s Revenge, hopefully they could take on an elfonnel, or even help give the queen something to think about until Connor and the other Petralists spanked her down and ended her reign of terror.
Thinking about it all made Hamish suddenly very hungry. He decided he was actually looking forward to the big feast. Maybe the new lord wouldn’t be too bad. Even if he was, they’d be best able to deal with him on a full stomach.
10
True Friends Never Give Up
Are you ready?” Jean asked Ilse.
They sat on wooden chairs facing Jean’s desk, which was piled high with paperwork she hadn’t found time to organize and file. A couple of comfortable chairs, both flanked by little tables covered with notebooks and pencils, faced a small, cold fireplace nearby. The rest of her small personal office was covered by floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, making the space feel cozy.
Jean loved it, but did not spend nearly enough time there. She was too busy in the larger workrooms, conference rooms, and testing sites where her teams were so busy developing mechanicals and working on the school curriculum.
Ilse was lightly touching the earthen flesh that she had summoned to sheath the stump that ended a few inches below Jean’s right shoulder. As Jean focused on that scarred stump, memories flashed unbidden into her mind as they still so often did.
She stood outside of the Army gate of Merkland, her newly won army charging the rear of the attacking army. Her euphoria at commanding the mighty force evaporated as she watched Aonghus rise and viciously savage the big, burly caller who had already demonstrated such loyalty to her, despite only serving her for a few minutes.
She quailed in fear as Aonghus focused on her, his red hair aflame, his face twisted with marble-fueled madness. He snarled, “There you are, you wicked little imposter!”
Aonghus launched himself over her troops, driven by crackling flames. He swooped toward her, fire billowing from his mouth, his expression completely insane. He laughed maniacally and shouted, “Now you pay the price for everyone’s follies, Lady Jean!”
Hamish’s voice rose from her speakstone. “Run! Jean, I’m coming!”
She glanced up and saw him shooting over the wall, thrusters roaring, aiming for Aonghus’ back. The sight of him filled her with joy, but he’d never make it in time. Jean stepped away from her Healers and the fallen wounded, moving to a clear bit of ground, and turned to face Aonghus. She couldn’t outrun him, and she refused to endanger her patients.
She hoped to try speaking with him, but Aonghus formed an enormous spear of white-hot fire and threw it from fifty feet away.
Terrified, Jean screamed and tried to dodge. The spear split into many fiery shards. Those smaller spears plunged into her body, and flames boiled over her. Intense pain exploded through her as superheated air singed her lungs.
Jean snapped back to herself with a start, breathing fast, fear burning through her like remembered flames. Sweat coated her face and she couldn’t fully suppress a shudder.
Ilse gripped her good left hand, her expression compassionate. “The nightmares will fade. Until then, you must be strong.”
“Have yours faded?” Jean asked softly. Ilse’s husband Lukas had been brutally killed right in front of her by Harley’s mini-elfonnel, and Harley had shattered Ilse’s hips and the bottom of her spine, leaving her crippled.
“Not yet, but they will,” Ilse replied softly, but with determination.
Jean squeezed her hand back. She didn’t need to say more. They had spoken many times of their mutual tragedies. Ilse’s legendary determination inspired everyone. Despite her grievous injuries, she’d summoned earthen legs to regain mobility and continue fighting Harley. She hadn’t retired, but forged on, committed to honoring Lukas by celebrating all the good things they’d enjoyed together. Her bravery had helped Jean cope with her own tragedy. She in turn tried to share strength and comfort with all of her patients.
Any of their burdens could easily destroy any one of them, but by lending each other of their strength, somehow they coped and crept forward along the path toward recovery. None of them might ever recover physically, but Jean was determined to reach a day when she was no longer haunted by that black and burning day. And she would see her patients freed of their burdens too, if possible.
Ilse tapped the earthen arm she’d summoned for Jean and said, “Try it now.”
With a mixture of nervous anticipation, Jean started humming softly as she lifted her stump. The earthen arm attached to it rose weightlessly along with the movement.
It was working!
She flashed a delighted grin at Ilse, whose expression had turned to one of mixed elation and concentration. Jean shifted her pitch and the arm stopped rising, but the forearm section extended instead.
Ilse was beginning to nod, looking pleased, and Jean shifted pitch again. In rapid succession, she hummed several different notes, and each one triggered a different movement. With growing excitement, she worked through the sequence that the two of them had developed through more than a hundred painstaking tests.
This time they worked. The forearm moved forward and back at the elbow, the wrist turned and twisted, the hand articulated, and each of the fingers closed or opened on command. Jean barely believed it.
The idea for using sound to control the summoned appendage had taken weeks of other failed tests to figure out. So many people had worked so hard to help Jean find a way to mimic Ilse’s remarkable summoned legs. That singular summoning had eclipsed anything anyone had ever dreamed of doing with summonings and it allowed Ilse to move despite her crushed spine.
Jean was no Builder or Petralist, but that hadn’t stopped her friends from the ambitious goal of succeeding. At first, Hamish had suggested combining quickened stones, embedded within the summoned limb. Not a bad idea, but activating those stones proved cumbersome. The failures had mounted, and despair had threatened to crush her fragile hope.
After one particularly frustrating day when Jean felt like giving up, she had moved apart from the others and started humming to herself. She always enjoyed singing, and it seemed to calm the boys too. In that moment they all needed a little calm. As the gentle melody filled the small room where they worked, Connor’s head had snapped up.
He had looked at her with fresh excitement. “That’s it!”
So they switched their experiments to quickened serpentinite embedded in the limb to move it. It had worked better, but still had not given her the degree of precision she needed.
She had nearly resigned herself to the fact that it was the best they could come up with, which was still remarkable, but the others would not accept defeat. Ilse and Connor had spent a great deal of time discussing the process of summoning, and exactly what they could do with a summoned creature.
Those discussions were necessary, even if they had proven fruitless in helping Jean. She’d filled entire notebooks with that research and hoped to apply it to her plans to build autonomous summoned creatures with the mission to help or heal or rescue instead of killing and destroying.
To give an autonomous creature those more humanitarian missions required a greater level of sophistication in the commands used to give the automatons life. While Connor and Ilse worked on fine-tuning greater control, Ilse had discovered that she could create a summoning with the ability to move in certain ways depending on specific voice commands.
Jean had worked over the last few weeks to teach Ilse the different notes clearly enough for the automaton to accept the commands. They’d failed so many times that Jean had started thinking it was never going to work. With all of her other duties pressing down relentlessly on her time and attention, she started questioning the value of wasting more time on the failed project.
But now as she hummed, her voice rising and falling in pitch, the amazing summoned limb reacted smoothly. It was more than she’d allowed herself to dream. She laughed and gave Ilse a hug. Her new arm even managed to grip the incredible Petralist in a pretty good approximation of a normal hug with Jean humming softly to command it.
“I think this might be our most incredible breakthrough so far.” How many others could they help with such an invention?
As she released her, Ilse grinned. “I’m glad you’re a good singer.”
“Mm . . .” Jean started to respond, creating a sort-of hummed note. Without hesitation, the arm swung around and clipped Ilse in the side of the head.
Jean grasped it and pulled it down, barely remembering to hum the notes that would help it relax. Ilse chuckled as she rubbed the side of her head. “I guess the next step is to include a command to tell it when to stop or start listening.”
“Can we do that?”
“We’d better figure it out or you’re never going to be able to talk with anyone again.”
The door to Jean’s office opened and Hamish stepped through, followed by Connor and Verena. Jean leaped up to embrace Hamish, careful to use the correct notes this time and make the arm wrap around him.
He whooped with joy and lifted her off her feet, swinging her in a circle, nearly knocking Verena into a bookshelf. “It’s working! I can’t believe it.”
He didn’t even seem to notice her eye patch or the scars still marring her face, even though she wasn’t wearing the amazing helmet he and Verena had designed for her. Similar but more streamlined than the helmet he wore for his flying battle suit, it was enhanced with eight sightstones that she could activate with her keystone. They were linked to stones set in various workrooms that allowed her unprecedented ability to monitor the work of Builder teams, Althing scientists, and school researchers. It also helped cover the terrible scars Aonghus left on that side of her face.
At least her hair was starting to grow back. She didn’t let her disabilities define her, and forced herself not to let self-consciousness of her injuries make her hesitate to interact. Hamish and her other friends had impressed her by not seeming bothered by them. They saw her injuries only as another challenge to overcome together. Their support helped more than she could ever express.
Jean hummed a couple more notes to get the arm to relax, then grinned. “We just barely finished the first test.”
“I’ve always loved it when you hum. Now we’ll get to enjoy it all the time. Have you tried practicing while eating lunch?”
Jean laughed. Leave it to Hamish to try combining all the things he loved best.
Ilse said, “We have a little more fine-tuning to do, but we’re nearly there. By tonight, she should have a working arm.”
“Perfect timing,” Connor said, grinning as widely as Jean had ever seen. She knew he somehow felt guilty that he had not managed to save her arm, but it was a miracle he saved her life.
Verena gave Jean an enthusiastic hug, looking close to tears. “You can show it off at the feast.”
“Give the new lord another example of how amazing you are,” Hamish added.
“I’m sure we’ll all get along fine with the new lord,” she assured him.
Connor and Hamish scowled in exactly the same way. Hamish said, “He’d better appreciate you. You’ve been doing most of his job.”
“If he’s smart he’ll keep you on as his assistant and not get in the way,” Connor agreed.
Verena rolled her eyes. “Relax. Someone has to be appointed. Do you really think the king would make a bad choice?”
“Depends on how much he has to listen to advice from counselors with agendas who don’t understand what we’re doing,” Connor said.
Jean had heard the rumors, but couldn’t bring herself to believe the king would botch such a critical appointment. She felt a certain pride for how well rebuilding had progressed, and a sense of ownership for the city. She felt the same unease about transitioning the reins to someone new, but that had always been the plan. She just hoped she could continue serving the wonderful people she’d grown to love, although she’d welcome a lightening of her load. Maybe she’d get enough time to focus more on her personal projects.
Hamish tugged her toward the door. “Let’s go. You girls need hours to get your teeth ready to eat.”
Ilse laughed and said, “You do realize girls do a lot to prepare for a formal event, but very little of that preparation has to do with their teeth, right?”
“We need to teach better priorities,” Hamish said, tugging at Jean again.
“Careful,” Verena cautioned, extending one hand to make sure Jean remained stable.
“It’s okay. Bruno fine-tuned the leg brace today.” Jean extended her right leg so they could see the framework of slender steel rods, springs, and the clever joint that wrapped around her knee. It was Bruno’s twenty-third prototype. The clever blacksmith hadn’t given up, and the brace felt wonderful.
She hadn’t lost her right leg in Captain Aonghus’ firestorm, but it had not healed properly either. Connor, Aifric, and other Healers had tried repeatedly to fix it, but there was something fundamentally broken. Not even Aifric could explain why they couldn’t heal it. Jean could walk, but the leg gave out occasionally, and it was very weak.
Verena had offered to make her a flying chair, but as tempting as that was, Jean had refused. She worried people might think she was growing too self-important, floating around everywhere like the dread queen herself. Now with Bruno’s brace supporting her leg, she finally felt strong and stable on her feet again.
While her friends examined the brace, Jean felt herself flushing. She didn’t like being the subject of so much attention and effort when there were so many other people suffering. She had made herself accept the unprecedented level of assistance because it was clear her friends would feel more hurt if she refused them. Besides, the research they were doing for her could easily be applied to other people suffering similar ailments.
Jean slipped an arm around Hamish’s waist and allowed him to help support her. It helped him feel useful, and she loved the close contact. She grinned at Hamish and assured him, “Ilse and I will finish soon. I’ll be ready in time.”
She dearly hoped the feast proved as amazing as everyone expected. Her many teams deserved the celebration. They had performed remarkable work through the winter.
“Do you have an official title as General Jean? Wearing a new insignia along with your new arm would be perfect,” Hamish said.
Jean gave him that look that used to cow him but now just made him grin. “You know I’m not a general.”
“You should be,” Connor said. “You do have a private army, after all.”
“Please don’t bring that up tonight,” she urged. The transition to new leadership would be fraught with enough challenge without the new lord having to worry about her army.
“Lady Jean’s Legion is something everyone knows about, and you are the commander,” Ilse said gently, but firmly, a little smile tugging at her lips.
Hamish happily ignored her displeased stare and added, “You’ve finalized the rest of the command structure. You have to accept your position at the head.”
Connor grinned. “She’s just worried she’s piled up so many titles she can’t fit them all in one notebook.”
“Very funny,” Jean said sarcastic
ally. It wasn’t her fault that she was good at what she did, and that she’d been asked to help out in so many areas. Her army was definitely one area she hadn’t planned on. It just sort of happened.
Of course, now that she had her own army, she wasn’t about to give it away. The small force she had won during the battle of Merkland had swelled in numbers as more and more volunteers came forward to sign up. It was humbling and embarrassing for so many people to put their trust in her leadership when she was but a common linn from Obrion.
Her legion was growing into something wonderful. Not only were they working in tandem with Ilse and the Builders to create autonomous response summonings, but with Jean’s mastery over the keystone that allowed non-builders to activate mechanicals, her core of trusted officers were quickly becoming well-known as an elite flyer corps. Few other non-Builders were trained in advanced flight tactics, but Jean had convinced Verena and Hamish that her people should act as the first test cases.
She already had four main squadrons. Mender Flight focused on healing and reaching wounded on a battlefield. Render Flight was focused primarily on the autonomous summonings and delivering other mechanicals. Sender Flight were primarily transport flyers, supporting her other flights and the broader army as needed. And Defender Flight were her main fighting soldiers who would deploy to ensure the other flights weren’t interfered with.
Their mission was constantly evolving, though. They were becoming a unique, specially trained expeditionary force and it was one aspect of her many-faceted responsibilities that she was coming to thoroughly love. Tonight all of her teams, all of the people of the fast-growing New Schwinkendorf, all of the residents of Faulenrost, and all of their international allies would celebrate the innumerable accomplishments they’d managed through the difficult winter. Together they had raised a city from the empty valley and pushed the boundaries of science and magic faster than any other time since the Age of Discovery. Jean had helped coordinate the effort, tried to inspire people with the vision of what they could achieve, and celebrated every victory with them.
