When Ariel came in with his dinner that night, Walther was staring at the maze of cables, gears, and pulleys in Fortitude’s torso, wondering if this thing was really going to work the way he wanted and feeling for the first time in nearly a week how tired he was.
“Father?”
Walther looked back at her, meeting her eyes for the first time in several days.
“Yes?”
“How are things going? Are you almost done?”
Walther sighed.
“Yes, I think so. I am tired. I am getting old.”
“You should sleep. You have not slept in days. Come over here and eat.”
Walther rose, and Ariel set his dinner down on the side table next to the chair in the corner, where he sat to think when he was working. He followed her over and sat down.
“How have things been? I’m sorry I have been so busy. What have you been doing?”
“Erich has been a good husband. Astrid’s baby is due any day now.”
Walther was so tired it took Ariel’s words several long moments to sink in.
“What did you say?”
Ariel smiled. “I am teasing, Father. Everything is fine. Please rest.”
Walther took a few bites of his dinner and stretched out in his chair. All right, he would rest for a bit. But not long; there was more to do, and he was almost done.
When Ariel left, he was snoring loudly, dinner forgotten.
♦ ♦
Ariel hated herself for it, but her promise to Erich survived only a few days. After getting her father to rest and getting the house in order that night, she finally spilled the news to her sister. It was just too interesting a secret to keep to herself.
“He really is a nobleman?” Astrid asked when she was done.
“Well, not anymore. He was disowned, like I said.”
“Do you really believe his story?”
“Yes. It did not seem like he was inventing any of it. He did not even want to tell me.”
Astrid was quiet a moment. “So why did he?”
“We were trading secrets. I told him about the freckle.”
Astrid’s eyes widened. “Not even Father knows about the freckle. At least I think he doesn't. Why would you tell him that?”
“I don’t know. He’s interesting. And I told him about how we must marry.”
Her sister was pensive. “I don’t suppose that matters. All the mages in Köln will know that soon.”
Ariel sighed. “I should so dearly like to marry someone like Erich. What if we must marry someone like Father, who only wants to sit in his workshop until he faints? I shall die of boredom if we do.”
“I don’t think there are mages like Erich.”
Ariel had a sudden thought. “What if he’s a mage and doesn’t know it?”
“How could he not know?”
“He said his father only let him learn about swordplay. He could have a talent that he’s never had a chance to develop.”
“That doesn’t happen.”
“It could.”
“It doesn’t,” Astrid shot back. “When you have a talent, you know. Father always said that. Even when we couldn’t do anything, before deuolhud, we still knew. No one becomes a mage at his age.”
♦ ♦
But Ariel could not get the idea out of her head. She lay awake long after they turned out the little automaton-lights on their nightstands, wondering.
Was there a way to know? Astrid had said several times there was something odd about Erich, and Ariel knew what she meant. Even after she had learned the truth about his past, she had felt there was something else there, maybe something Erich wasn’t even aware of himself.
It could be a talent. Erich could be their match, after all. She was surprised to realize how much the possibility thrilled her. He was handsome. He was interesting. He knew things and had done things, exciting things. She was sure that being his wife—while it might be unpredictable and occasionally frightening—would never, ever, be boring. He was old enough that she could feel she would respect him, but not so much older that she would feel like his child.
She had to know. But she could think of no way of telling. She did not dare breathe a word of this to Father, who probably did know a way, or would be able to invent a way of knowing, the same way he had invented the resonance cube.
There was a shot down her back like a bolt of lightning.
The resonance cube. Of course!
Just as it had shown how she and Astrid shared the same flow, could it show her Erich was their match? Surely? If her flow, and Erich’s, were compatible, wouldn’t the cube be able to show her?
Whatever chance of sleep she had that night had now fled.
She hoped Erich was still awake, because she was going to have to wake him for this.
Rising as quietly as she could, so as not to wake Astrid, she left her bed and slipped out of their room. As she descended the stairs to the first floor, she could hear Father snoring away. That was good. She needed to get in there and find the resonance cube.
Tip-toeing down the hallway, she approached Father’s workshop. He had not moved since she left. If she knew him—and she had been through this too many times—he would sleep until tomorrow afternoon, if not later. She just needed to avoid waking him.
Where was it? The workshop looked as if Temperance had exploded in here rather than the entry hall. Father kept the resonance cube in the far corner, but that was now buried under brass bits of this and that. As carefully as she could, she moved things aside, looking for the familiar outlines of the cube. After several tense moments during which the whole pile threatened to collapse in a crescendo of brass, she decided it was no longer here.
Ariel stepped back, looking around. She was not certain now she would be able to spot the thing under the current mess if it was somewhere else. Fuming in frustration, she wondered if perhaps if was no longer even in the workshop. Father valued the resonance cube, unlike some of his other inventions. Would he risk ruining it by letting it get tangled up with Temperance’s broken innards?
In a flash of insight, she left the workshop and went across the hall to his sitting room. Along one wall there was a sideboard where he often stored things he was done building, but no longer needed.
Behind the third door, she found the resonance cube.
Fighting the thrill of success, she lifted it out and set it on the table between the two upholstered chairs. Now she was lacking only one thing: Erich.
As she approached his room beyond the kitchen, it suddenly occurred to her that she wore nothing but a thin nightdress. No man, other than Father—who paid it no mind—had ever seen her in such a state of undress. Her breasts were quite apparent, and the rest of her was only a little more concealed.
She paused, gathering her courage. No matter, she thought—he would be her husband soon, and she could let him see everything then.
There was a light in his room. She stepped up to it and tapped softly.
There was no response, and she tapped again, more firmly.
“Yes?”
She pushed the door open. He was lying on his bed, dressed only in his smallclothes, reading a book. His eyes widened when he saw her, and even more so when he got a better look at her.
Seeing in him wearing so little made her body suddenly hot all over. He was not quite as large as Stefan, but he had none of Stefan’s baker’s-boy softness. She could see nearly every muscle in his body.
“Ariel?”
“Yes.” She knew he would know it was her, somehow.
“What do you need?”
“Can you come with me?”
“Where?”
“Just come. I’ll explain.”
He rose from his bed, though warily, pausing to pull on his breeches. He followed her, and she led him back to the study. His face wrinkled in confusion when he saw the resonance cube.
“What are you doing?”
“I need to test you.”
“What do
you mean?”
“Please, just let me. It’s important.”
He sighed.
“You don’t need this. What do you want to know? I have told you what I can tell you, and what I cannot will not be drawn out of me by this thing.”
“I don’t need to test you that way. Just sit down.”
He glared at her a moment, but sat down.
Ariel was not completely sure how the resonance cube worked. She had seen Father playing with the knobs, but did not quite understand what they did. She suspected they had something to do with how the cube sensed the flows it monitored, much as Father’s other automata could be sped up or slowed down by twisting their controls.
One thing she had learned, though, was that the knobs and controls Father created always seemed to reduce things when turned counterclockwise, and to increase them when turned the other way.
There were four knobs on the front of the cube. Not knowing what else to do, she turned all of them counterclockwise until they stopped.
“Put on the rings.”
“Why?”
“Please.”
He slid five of the rings onto his fingers. Hands shaking, Ariel did likewise. When she slipped the first one on, she waited for the shriek she had heard when Father did the same thing with Astrid. Heart leaping, she heard nothing.
A second, then a third, then the other two. Nothing happened. She was about to throw herself into Erich’s arms when it suddenly occurred to her that she might simply have turned the thing off before they started.
Erich was staring at the cube in confusion, having missed the torrent of emotions racing through her. “What are you doing?”
“Wait.”
Trying to get control of herself, Ariel reached over and twisted the first knob a bit to the right. Nothing happened. She turned the second knob about the same distance, then the third and the fourth.
She could not hear anything precisely, but something was going on in the cube. She put her free hand on it. It wasn’t vibrating. Rather, she could somehow sense something odd inside.
Intrigued, she twisted the knobs a bit more. There was still no sound, but the strange resonance—for lack of a better term—increased.
“Ariel?”
“Wait. This is important.”
She turned the knobs again, now about halfway round. The resonance surged, but still the cube was silent. Ariel was thrilled, yet baffled. She had never seen the cube do this before. As she studied it, she suddenly realized there was something going on inside—there was a strange blue luminescence leaking out through the seams and holes for the cables.
She twisted the knobs further. The blue glow doubled, and she did not even need to touch the cube to sense the resonance now.
“Ariel, what are you doing?”
She paused. What was she doing? As fascinating as all this was, what did it mean? Father would presumably know, but she had no clue. The cube was not shrieking like it had when Father and Astrid had been connected. Did that mean she and Erich were a match? Or did it mean he had no flow at all and that she was just activating it herself, somehow? And what did the blue light mean? She had never seen any of Father’s automata give off such radiance.
Filled with a sudden desire to see what it would do—to find the answer, whatever it was—Ariel twisted the knobs all the way to the right.
For a moment, the cube became a miniature blue sun. Then all at once, it let out a piercing screech and exploded with a bang that echoed through the entire house.
Ariel screamed and threw up her arm to shield herself from the flying bits of brass. She heard Erich cursing and stumbling backward, knocking over his chair. She had only begun to regain her bearings when she heard a bellow behind her.
“By God! By all that is holy, what is going on here?”
She looked up to see her father in the door to hallway. He looked around the room in confusion, at the dangling chains on her fingers, at the lingering smoke in the air, at the fragments of brass that were not only all over the room but embedded in much of the furniture, at her state of undress, and, finally, at Erich sprawled bare-chested on the floor behind her.
“Sir,” he said angrily. “You have something to answer for here.”
“Father, no!” she exclaimed. “It was me! I wanted to test him. With the resonance cube. But it exploded.”
Her father struggled with his reaction for a few moments.
“The resonance cube?”
“I wanted to test him,” she said weakly.
He looked up at Erich, who had backed away but was still on the floor half-stunned. “Walther, you have my word,” he said. “I have no idea better idea what just happened here than do you.”
Her father looked back down at her.
“You connected him to the cube? The two of you at once?”
She felt so embarrassed and humiliated that she wanted to melt into the floor. “Yes.”
He scowled at her, wrinkling his forehead and eyebrows in a way that made her feel like a child. “Why?” he growled.
“I wanted to see,” she said softly.
Some understanding dawned in his eyes. But at that moment, Astrid appeared in the door to the front hallway looking at the three of them in complete bewilderment.
“What is going on? What was that noise?”
Father turned to her. “Go back to bed. I will explain tomorrow.”
Astrid did not move, and Walther repeated himself. “Go!” Astrid left.
Now he looked back at Erich. “You may return to bed. I need to speak to my daughter privately.”
13.
The explosion that had woken Walther from his much-needed rest was still ringing in his ears. Ariel stood by the central table in her nightdress, holding her hands tensely before her. Walther was not sure what upset him more, what Ariel had been up to or that she had destroyed an invention he was quite fond of.
“Tell me the truth. All of it. What in God’s name were you trying to do?”
Ariel fidgeted for a few moments, then said something he did not catch.
“Speak up. After that explosion you caused, I am not sure my hearing is not permanently damaged.”
“I thought he might be a mage.”
This was not what Walther had expected.
“A mage? Him?”
“Yes.”
Suddenly, he saw it. “You thought he might be a mage. So you thought you would use the resonance cube to see if he was your match. And of course, when you were both connected, the cube immediately exploded because he is not a mage and has no talent at all.”
Ariel looked up. “No. That’s not what happened.”
Walther scowled at her again. “What do you mean?”
“It didn’t explode. Not at first. At first, it did nothing at all.”
“When you put on the rings, and he did, nothing happened?”
“No. I had the knobs turned all the way down. And when I started to turn them up, it still did nothing.”
Confusion spun through Walther’s head. The lingering exhaustion she had woken him from was still clouding his brain, but what Ariel was saying made no sense.
“You put on the rings. He put on the rings. You turned the knobs how far?”
“About a quarter of the way.”
“All four?”
“Yes.”
“And it did nothing at all?”
“Not at first. But then, I could sense something. Not a sound, but a feeling. A resonance. Then, when I turned up the knobs more, the cube began to give off a blue light.”
Walther snorted.
“A blue light? That’s impossible. The resonance cube contained no illumination circuits. There was nothing in there that could have created any light.”
“But it did. And when I turned it all the way up, it was so bright. Like the sun.” Her excited mood then deflated. “At least right before it exploded.”
“That was when it blew up?”
“Yes.”
Walth
er sat down in his chair. This meant something, something important, but he had no clue what it might be. He looked around his workshop, at the nearly completed automaton, then back as his daughter.
“Know something, and know it well. Erich is not a mage, and not your match. I know that because I tested him with the cube when he first arrived, to test his character. The cube must be adjusted differently for mages and non-mages to determine truth accurately. Erich is not a mage. The flow seems to move through him oddly, I will concede, but a mage he is not.”
Ariel looked down at the floor sadly but said nothing.
“Go to bed. We will discuss this further in the morning. I cannot think anymore until I have gotten some sleep.”
♦ ♦
But Walther could not get back to sleep.
The mystery of the exploding resonance cube gnawed at him until he could stand it no longer. He went back to the study and began picking through the shattered pieces. The shell of the cube, which remained on the table, had been peeled back like a flower by the explosion. A few melted wires and brackets remained, along with a few charred pieces of . . . something.
As he examined it, he thought he could see what had happened.
The resonance cube had a sort of brain, but the crystal functioned differently from his self-directed automata like Temperance and the rat-catcher. Rather than controlling anything, the crystal merged the flows that came in through the rings and cables. The knobs were used to adjust the crystal’s position within the flow. Turned all the way to the left, the crystal was completely out of the flow, and the cube was essentially off, as Ariel had believed.
It was the crystal that had exploded. The melted bracket in the center was where it had been mounted, and from the shape of it now, the explosion had clearly begun at that point within the cube.
Looking more closely, Walther realized that the charred bits scattered about the wreckage of the cube, indeed all over the table and much of the room, were the remains of the crystal. It had been blasted into sand. But it had taken him a few moments to realize this because the sand was not clear as he would have expected. Picking up one of the larger chunks, maybe half the size of a pea, the mystery of the blue light became more clear.
The Wizard's Daughters: Twin Magic: Book 1 Page 6
