“Absolutely.” Calvin strapped the canister on. He couldn’t believe his luck, though he felt bad for Edsel. “What about the rest of my training? I haven’t officially finished, have I?”
“These aren’t your actual deployment orders, Adler. You’re just the only one we can spare. You’ll come back from Youngstown when you’ve delivered this to Major Tyler. Then you’ll take your exit exams,” Peter said, pushing the mimic’s key into Calvin’s hand.
Too excited to utter another word, Calvin mounted the mimic, turned it on, and felt the tiny engine thrum between his knees. The lifter fans kicked on, the mimic hovered, and he pulled the lever to retract the landing legs. Slowly rotating a hundred and eighty degrees, he saluted the McCracken brothers and floated out of the stables into the open night. He took one last look at the mansion, wishing he had a chance to say goodbye to Amelia. He would see her when he came back, though.
*
Brian and Peter watched him go, exchanging a wry smile. Wordlessly they returned to the house.
*
Calvin flew like the wind.
Moving at high speeds made the sky cold, and it bit at his exposed flesh. He fished his gloves from his pack as he flew straight over the highest trees, then strapped on his flight goggles to make good use of his eyes. The thrill of flight! Oh, how the simulator failed to do it justice, with the way everything shrank as
he rose up, and blurred as it sped beneath him. On the sawhorse, he’d held himself up using the handlebars, but up here the wind pushed against him so hard that he pulled on the controls to stay aboard. Before long he found himself pressed down against the fuel tank so as to keep his face behind the small glass windscreen, and this greatly cut down on drag.
This alone was worth joining the army.
He flew for fifteen minutes before a mechanical malfunction changed his fortunes. Without warning the mimic bucked, and a loud crack echoed across the night. The engine, which had been somewhat stealthy, now rumbled and groaned, punctuated with a repetitive bark as the motor cycled. Instantly he lost speed, and the wind-drag decreased. Sluggish and loud were two things that he did not want to be out here.
Calvin gnashed his teeth and dropped down into a sparse clearing of trees to see what could be done, mentally going through the landing motions like he’d done in the simulator. The mimic’s legs touched solid ground and he immediately dismounted, running through another checklist from Horace Whitney’s mechanical lectures.
Speed, noise, engine power. What would compromise all three of those?
The muffler.
Thankfully the TechMan engineers had found a way to temper the glass in his goggles so as to allow better vision at night. It wasn’t perfect, but he wasn’t blind. Calvin dropped to his knees and craned his neck to see beneath the seat. Sure enough, one of the elongated metal cans had ripped open along the weld. He had no desire to roar over the wilderness, drawing the attention of British and French mages, Indian sorcerers, wild beasts and worse. He had to fix it.
Nothing in his satchel would solve the problem—he had only weapons, not tools. He remembered Stitch saying something about a compartment under the saddle, and he searched for a way to open it. A button on the tail caused the seat to pop up and flip forward. Inside the compartment, Calvin found a small set of screwdrivers and sockets and a roll of something slick and silvery—a kind of adhesive tape fortified by fiber threads. The stuff was strong, though it smelled a little pungent.
He pushed the two halves of the muffler together and wrapped it with the tape. Aside from smelling, it also made a loud quacking noise when he pulled a strip free from the roll. If the muffler didn’t rat him out, this tape would!
Shaking his head, he finished the job, threw the roll back under the seat and fired up the motor. Better. Not as loud, and he’d gotten some of the power back.
He had just risen above the tree level when a mirror on his handlebars showed three silhouetted figures coming up on his tail: one mage on a flying carpet, and two on broomsticks. A night watch! Blast, but those mages were everywhere!
Damn it all!
Calvin opened up the throttle and raced into the night. As soon as he dared, he reached around and loosed the blunderbuss, assembled and loaded, from his pack. He strung the strap across his torso and fished around in his pack for his pistol. He didn’t have the hostler buckled to his waist, but the mimic’s saddle had one built in, and he stuffed the loaded weapon into it. It was the best he could do while still flying at full burn.
Another glance in the mirror confirmed that the mages were keeping pace. His heart pounded against his ribs. Blood drummed in his ears, and the night chilled his sweating skin even further until he shivered down to his toes. In the back of his mind, he wondered if this was how Jack Badgett had felt right before he bit it.
~
CHAPTER 11
No instrument on the mimic’s dash kept track of distance. One dial told him his airspeed, another his engine speed, and a third his fuel level. This last one ran dangerously low, and yet the mages dogged him late into the night, not gaining, not falling back. Errant curses flew past him, missing his head by inches, and the occasional one bounced off his dusted jacket.
The weather turned ugly. Clouds smothered the moonlight, and even with his tempered night lenses, Calvin was close to blind, yet he could see curses zipping past him, streams of light that transfigured the clouds into menacing shapes. Feral dogs, winding serpents, and poisonous spiders lashed at him as he sped by. Panting, Calvin hunkered down and willed the little machine to go faster somehow.
The mages didn’t give up. Calvin was running out of options, time, and fuel. He couldn’t turn because they’d gain on him. He couldn’t fight them in the air; they’d be more maneuverable, and they outnumbered him. He had to engage them in a place where numbers and agility mattered little. That meant the woods.
Below him, the trees were as thick as weeds in spring. No way could he fly through them, not at any speed. He’d rip the mimic to pieces before he got thirty feet. Even on foot he’d have his work cut out for him. That didn’t mean he was completely out of options, though. Slowing the mimic to quarter speed, he dropped down into a patch of trees that looked like it had been damaged by a storm; roughly forty feet off the ground there opened something like a hole in the woods, and he brought the mimic to a stop midair between two tall spruce trees.
Two anchors hung beneath the pegs where his feet rested. Setting the mimic to hover, he released the anchors, pulled out several yards of cable and cast them out to his sides. A flip of a switch on the dash reeled the spools in tightly, and the anchors found purchase on the trees around him. Once it was secured, Calvin shut off the mimic, pocketed the key, and kicked a rope ladder down to the ground. He tied off one end around his saddle horn and scurried to the forest floor, keeping one eye on the sky. He touched down as the mage trio closed in on his machine.
“Please, let this work,” he whispered.
Voices. They were talking. He held his breath and strained to hear.
“Oi! Where’d he go?” asked one of the broom-riders.
“He’s skitted off then?” asked the mage on the carpet. “No, he’d not leave this ‘ere for the takin’. Little duffer’s ‘roundabout somewhere!”
Those voices! Calvin had to cover his own mouth to keep from making a sound. He couldn’t believe it. After three weeks and so many miles from home . . . he knew these mages. He’d know them anywhere.
Fitznottingham, Birtwistle, and their apprentice.
A special flavor of hatred churned in his gut. This whole mess he was in had started with them; of course it would finish that way. He gripped the strap on his chest, drawing on the proximity of his blunderbuss for reassurance. In the dark, he waited.
“Leoht!” Fitznottingham stabbed at the shadows with his wand, and little red flares spat from the tip like fireflies. The flares raced through the trees and cast everything in a haunting light, but the mages must not have seen him
. They kept dropping lower, scanning the area.
“He’s scampered!” Birtwistle said, his words slurred. Hell, even now he was drunk.
Fitznottingham groaned, equally sauced. “Not a chance, Stay here, I’ll use a terramancy equation. Let the dirt snitch on the little tosser.”
Calvin’s neck tingled, the fine hairs bristling in fear. Something was familiar about those words. What had Rusty said? If a mage used one of those equations, they could see beyond the limits of their own senses. That must have been the strange light-spell Fitz had cast over his farm prior to lifting the family savings from their strong box. That was how he’d known where to aim his summoning spell.
The moment Fitz casted that equation, he’d know exactly where Calvin was.
But Stitch had a solution for that, Calvin thought. He bit his lip and formed a hastily devised plan.
Winston Fitznottingham stepped off of his fine woolen carpet. Calvin held his breath as he watched the mage move away from Birty and the apprentice. When Calvin judged the distance to be right, he retrieved a clay pot grenade from his satchel, sparked the fuse, and hurled it at the two broom-riders hovering some five feet overhead. Then he squeezed his eyes tight, covered his ears, and ducked behind a stout tree.
The grenade went off, and thudded in the night with a deep, concussive blast. Calvin still flinched despite himself, and his ears rang almost as though his hands hadn’t been there. In the closeness of the dense wood, it might as well have been five grenades. But what hurt him would hurt the mages even worse. Calvin unstrapped the blunderbuss and stepped out to survey the damage.
Both wizards had been un-broomed by the blast. The apprentice’s legs stuck out from the underbrush, twitching about,
and Birtwistle lay face down in the decaying foliage, unmoving. His broom hung in a high branch above him, its shaft broken in the middle.
Calvin lingered too long in observing his handiwork; from behind him a curse hurtled through the trees and struck his dusted jacket, shattering on contact and shoving him down. A drunken Fitznottingham crashed toward him on foot,
wand out, spouting curses in Saxon, most of which kept Calvin off-balance. His first instinct was to go for the pistol, but he’d left it in the saddle overhead. The rifle was too long to use in these trees, and besides, it was still in pieces in his pack.
You idiot! He still had the blunderbuss in hand. He brought it up to bear, but then Fitz’s red light spells converged and rushed Calvin’s eyes in an attempt to blind him. The tempered goggles didn’t darken in time; Calvin closed his eyes and blindly rolled forward, coming to his feet again on Fitz’s right. If Fitz had been sober, Calvin had no doubt that he would be dead, or ensnared, or transfigured into a woodland vermin.
But Fitz wasn’t sober, and Calvin wasn’t helpless. Opening his eyes, he let out a mighty roar and raised the blunderbuss over his head. Fitz tried to do something with his wand, but Calvin brought the butt of the weapon crashing down on Fitz’s skull. Fitz cried out and staggered back, his light spells wavering. In all this, he managed to keep a firm grip on his wand, though he didn’t point it at Calvin. He raised the tip and summoned more light, enough to bring daylight to the pitch black wood.
“Hammond! Godfrey!” Fitz gnashed his teeth and pressed a palm to a red welt on his forehead. Calvin stepped back and cradled the blunderbuss against his right side, finger on the trigger.
“They’re done, Fitz,” he said.
Forgetting his pain for a moment, Winston Fitznottingham studied Calvin’s face, confused.
“How do you know my name?”
Calvin’s heart raced, pumping fire through his veins. This was it. This was the moment John Penn had promised him weeks ago. He’d left his home, left his family behind, for a single shot at standing toe to toe with the mage that had accosted them for years. Here he was, realizing his dream, and Fitz didn’t remember him.
He had a moment to fix that.
Calvin raised a hand to his head and palmed the leather cap that covered his hair. He hooked his thumb under his goggles, and in one smooth motion, swept it all off. Fitz’s eyes grew wide.
“You’re that Adler child! You ran away!”
“And here I am. This one’s for Baltimore,” Calvin seethed.
He let loose with the blunderbuss. Fitznottingham’s final expression would be burned into Calvin’s eyes for hours to come. The blast threw Fitz back into the trees. He was dead instantly, and his magical light spells died with him, returning the forest to a realm of shadows, save for dusty streams of moonlight that penetrated the canopy. Calvin could hear nothing over the ringing in his ears. As far as he was concerned, he didn’t have to.
The score had been settled.
Mechanically he slung the blunderbuss back across his torso. This kill had been easier than his first. He’d known Fitznottingham, known what a piece of crap the man was, and Calvin knew plenty of people who had grief from the wayward mage. Now it was done.
He staggered through the forest back to his mimic. Casting a final glance at Birtwistle and the apprentice—both still as death—Calvin nodded to himself and climbed the rope ladder, breathing easy once he was back in the saddle. There, he ignited the engine, pulled up the anchors and set a course for the nearest known oil refinery, feeling an uncanny calm in the wake of it all.
~
CHAPTER 12
As Godfrey Norrington stirred in the bushes, he became all the more aware that he was painfully far from home.
This had bothered him before, but tonight set a new low standard. He doubted he could get any lower than this, lying on the ground in some unnamed forest in King Charles’ empire. Meryka! Of all the places to suffer in exile, they had sent him to the worst hellhole by some distance. Surely Godfrey’s crimes did not deserve so savage a punishment.
To boot, they’d placed him under the tutelage of two inept, inebriated gits who failed spectacularly at their jobs—so much so that they’d been demoted from municipal police duty to rural perimeter patrol. Word had gotten around to the higher-ups that Fitz and Birty had sparked a confrontation with the locals, and somebody had stood up to them.
Godfrey had been there on that day. The local—a shepherd’s son—hadn’t only caused a little mischief, but then too many people had seen him get away with it. The example had caused problems. Baltimore needed ever more surveillance; two mages had died, six more had been assaulted, and by last count, four criminal duffers were still at large. Fitz and Birty were reassigned, to be replaced by sturdier mages.
Somehow in their demotion, they’d kept their assignment over Godfrey. It seemed the fates were curious to see just how far Godfrey could fall. He wondered how much longer he could go living this way before he decided to swallow a spoonful of arsenic and have done with it all.
Thorny branches pricked at his skin through his shirtsleeves, and Godfrey struggled to disentangle himself from the hostile foliage. Pain took a new bite out of him with every movement. In his heart of hearts, he knew he’d been injured badly. That bright flash, then the loud bang, and his world had spun like an enchanted saucer. His thoughts swam through a thick, ethereal ooze in his throbbing head, trailed by disjointed sounds and images. He should really get up. He should check on Fitznottingham and Birtwistle.
He found it arduous to convince his body to move.
Bested by some brat with a toy that went boom.
Brat. Such an ugly word. His own father and mother had used it on him too many times back home in Birmingham. Their faces swirled around him, tormenting him, taunting him for his weakness.
You’re a pox on our house, boy, Father had said. Get comfortable over there in Meryka. You won’t be coming back.
Sir Waldo Norrington talked a lot about what level he was on, but it was a joke. He’d been born no better than anyone else—a near crime in Britain—and worked his way up the social ladder until he’d landed a seat in Parliament, in charge of a subcommittee that oversaw a transatlantic teleportal network. Now he shov
eled his portly mass into a wig and robes every morning, looked in a mirror and told himself he was important. Bah. Father represented the weakest district on the island. He pretended not to hear the whispers of his colleagues, believing that if he acted the part long enough, others would buy the farce as well.
This had frustrated Godfrey to the point of acting out just to crack his father’s shell. His deeds were petty at first; he’d started by insulting people at Father’s parties, then upgraded to vandalism and boisterous outbursts at the theater. These were harmless enough, but when Sir Clive Brimble had stumbled upon Godfrey in a bout of slap-and-tickle with his daughter Hannah—on the desk in Brimble’s home study, no less—a line had been crossed. Brimble was Father’s chief rival in Parliament, representing a competing faction. Though Godfrey tended to ignore the particulars of governmental proceedings, he knew he’d thrown a bad spell.
Rather than suffer the embarrassment of an uncouth son, Sir Waldo had exiled Godfrey to the Merykan colonies, where he was inducted into the Royal Mage Corps against his will. Perhaps Father had thought that policing the colonials would build character and purge Godfrey’s rash behavior. Godfrey had feared as much before coming to Meryka—anything that “built character” was another name for a spectacular waste of time.
He’d always heard that Meryka was a land of deported undesirables, prisoners, and ignorant laborers, but nothing had prepared him for living among their class of people. Shaking them down for extra crowns had been fun while it lasted, before Fitz and Birty had managed to properly bugger that up as well: the Department of Magical Espionage had discovered that the so-called “technomancers” had recruited a dozen people from Baltimore, a crime that might have been prevented if the senior mages had been doing their jobs. Fitz and Birty’s dereliction had been their downfall.
Godfrey wasn’t made for this. He desired power, command over subjects, and the respect of his peers. He had already learned from his father that being the king of bilge rats still made one a bilge rat. Even if Godfrey were to excel and rise to the top of the Royal Mage Corps, what would it matter?
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