Sufficiently Advanced Technology (Inverse Shadows) (12 page)

“Master!” Joshua said. “You’re bleeding!”

“I’ve had worse,” Master Faye assured him. He didn’t
sound
shaken, thankfully. A quick spell closed the cut and cleaned up the blood. “I’ve never seen anything like
that
happen before.”

Joshua nodded. Using water to spy was easy; it was already partly reflective, so all the magician had to do was cast a simple spell. The water grew warmer, but he’d never seen the bowl actually explode, even when he’d been trying to test his defences. Whoever had cast the protective spells had done a remarkable job.

“Yes,” Master Faye said. Joshua flushed. He hadn’t realised that he’d been broadcasting until his master had pointed it out. “We are facing a very unusual opponent.”

“Yes, Master,” Joshua agreed. “What do we do now?”

“We start adding other wards to the gates,” Master Faye said. “And then we start preparing our ground.”

***

Like almost every city on Darius, Warlock’s Bane was protected by a massive wall intended to keep out unwanted visitors. Joshua had questioned the point of it when he’d learned what magic could do, pointing out that a Scion could simply knock down the wall with a powerful blasting spell. Master Faye had countered by explaining that any Scion who wasted power blasting his way through the wall could be handled easily, if caught before he had time to recover. The walls were charmed to make it difficult for magic to knock them down, forcing any intruders to come through the gates, where they would be easily detected.

Joshua strode up towards the gate, remembering playing nearby as a child. The guardsmen had often shouted at the children to go away, either because they thought that the kids were distractions or because they were simply nasty bastards. Joshua’s father had certainly never had any good things to say about the City Guard. Now, he was Master Faye’s apprentice and the guardsmen deferred to him. It was a heady feeling, or it would have been if he wasn’t worrying about a mystery magician. Their unknown enemy could be lurking outside the city, watching him.

It was a chilling thought. Master Faye had spells running through the city to inform him if anyone – like Joshua – developed magic, but outside the city such spells were often unreliable. Joshua’s own magic sense was undeveloped, yet he was sure he was being watched... or was it simply his paranoia, after Master Faye had told him of their predicament? Shaking his head, he walked into the gate and stopped under the archway, looking for the perfect place to hide Master Faye’s charmed marble. Any magician who entered the archway would be detected at once.

Carefully, he pressed it into the stone and applied a simple sticking charm to ensure that it would stay there. It wouldn’t be undetectable, but Master Faye had claimed that that wouldn’t matter, not when the magician would expect them to set up traps for him. Joshua stepped back, admired his handiwork and then looked outside, towards the hills in the distance. They were just outside Master Faye’s jurisdiction, popularly believed to be inhabited by monsters and foreigners. It was quite possible that a Scion was hiding in the hills, watching their every move.

“There’s a merchant convoy coming,” one of the guards called. “Do you want to be there when we inspect it?”

Joshua hesitated. Like everyone else his own age, he loved seeing the merchants – and Master Faye hadn’t told him to head straight back home. He
could
stay; his master would summon him mentally if he were needed. Smiling, Joshua nodded and walked out of the arch, heading over to the guardhouse. A line of dusty wagons was approaching the city from the north. One by one, the carts passed through the arch and into the city, without triggering the sensor. Joshua let out a breath he hadn’t realised he’d been holding. The strange magician could easily have been hiding in the wagons.

The guardsmen invited the drivers to disembark and wait in a nearby building while they searched the wagons. None of the drivers, or their families, seemed very happy about it, but Master Faye forbade the guards to steal from the city’s visitors. If he had allowed it, he’d told Joshua once, the city would soon have had no visitors at all. Joshua caught sight of a red-haired girl being helped out of a wagon by her father and felt a sudden surge of heat, before pushing the feeling aside. Maybe he could ask her for a drink later, but his main priority was the mystery magician.

He watched the brief and efficient search of the wagons, before walking off back to Master Faye’s house. The Pillar had been working on the wards; Joshua felt their expansion a long time before he actually crossed them. Master Faye had explained that making some of the wards obvious allowed them to serve as a warning, while concealing the full nature of the hidden wards from a casual visitor. But anyone who managed to survive and prosper as a magician would be smart enough to check for other surprises before they tried to break into the house.

Inside, Master Faye was eating a large meal provided by one of the servants, clearly famished after his hard work. Joshua took a seat facing his master, who looked deeply worried. He’d seen more of the strange images in the water before it exploded into steam and, whatever they were, they had puzzled him. The spell should have worked perfectly – it had
felt
like it was working perfectly – and yet the images they’d seen had made no sense.

“Take some meat,” Master Faye said, between bites. He’d ordered Joshua to eat plenty every day, reminding him that he would need energy for magic. Joshua had never eaten so well at his father’s house. “And make sure you eat your vegetables.”

Joshua scowled, but obeyed. “I saw a new merchant convoy,” he said, as he piled the stew into a bowl and took a slice of bread to go with it. “There was no sign of a magician.”

“He would probably not deign to travel with his inferiors,” Master Faye said. “Unless he’s one of the few Scions who can tolerate the company of Minors as anything other than slaves. But that is very rare...”

“I won’t turn out like that,” Joshua said. “I was
born
to a Minor family...”

“And don’t you ever forget it,” Master Faye said, flatly. “You’d be astonished at how many other magicians pretend that they were born to magical parents. If we accepted all of the claims, we’d have far more magicians than we actually do.”

Joshua had to smile. Magicians passed down magic to their children, who tended to manifest it in infancy. Their children often became warped by the power, if they didn’t accidentally kill themselves through sheer ignorance. It was one of the reasons magicians were not supposed to indulge themselves too much with women. Or get pregnant, if they were females. Magic did odd things to children.

Master Faye had told him a story about a female Scion who had known she would never be powerful enough to seize a bailiwick for herself. She’d found the most powerful magician she could and convinced him to give her a child. Master Faye had added at that point that one version of the story claimed that she’d actually mated with a demon, but that should have been impossible. The child had been born, yet as he matured he turned into a spoiled brat with far too much power to be safe. Eventually, several Pillars had been forced to work together to kill him before it was too late. He’d never learned the maturity that came with age and experience.

And the stories of what he’d done, first out of curiosity and then out of malice, had been truly terrifying.

“We will be practising defence drills this afternoon,” Master Faye said, as he finished his stew and started peeling himself an orange. “I will be expecting you to master all kinds of charms very quickly. It might prove a distraction at the right moment.”

Joshua shuddered. Master Faye had pushed him hard, but he knew that he was no match for a Scion. The last time he’d invited his master to a duel, when he’d learned a few spells and wanted to show off, he’d been simply turned into a frog for an hour. His defensive spells had been very basic, as Master Faye had pointed out later. Any half-trained magician would know their weaknesses and how to get around them. Joshua hadn’t even lasted a minute and he’d been left with an uncomfortable impulse to snap flies out of the air for several days afterwards. The mystery magician might be far less merciful to an arrogant young brat who thought he knew magic.

“Yes, Master,” he said, reluctantly. “I’ll do my best.”

“See that you do,” Master Faye said, but he was smiling as he said it. “And afterwards, you might want to go and visit your family.”

“My siblings are scared of me,” Joshua said. His father hadn’t been much better.
He
had wanted Joshua to use his influence – as if he had any – to help his business. “But my mother would like to see me.”

He felt cold. Master Faye seemed to be expecting the worst. He could
die
– and his killer wouldn’t leave his apprentice alive. There were enough stories about apprentices avenging their masters to convince him that it would be a bad idea. Joshua might only have a few days to live. He swallowed at the thought and looked over at his master.

“Don’t worry,” Master Faye said. “With a little preparation, we can be ready for anything.”

CHAPTER
T
EN

“I confess that I am unsure of the wisdom of this,” Captain Thor said. “You would be going into danger.”

“We know the risks,” Elyria assured him. They’d spent two weeks in orbit around Darius, reaching the limits of what they could learn by remote observation. Tiny sampling missions had revealed nothing unusual about the native ecology, although it had fought back more effectively than most against hardier stock from Earth. “And we accept them.”

The Captain snorted. In many ways, infiltrating a primitive world was easy – and they could simply teleport out if matters got out of control. Darius was going to be a little more complicated, not least because teleporting would be reserved as a last resort. If advanced technology was going to be unreliable, they might not even be able to
consider
using the teleporter. The science team and AIs had worked to try to overcome the problems, but had had to report failure. A handful of experiments had proven that it would be dangerous and probably fatal to risk it.

“There is no other way to learn,” she added, firmly. He
didn’t
have good grounds for refusing her – and Jorlem agreed with her, making it harder for him to wave Peacekeeper authority in her face – but they did need his approval. “We’re ready to land now.”

They’d started learning the local language at once, using memory boosters and frequent practice to master Darius’s version of English. It wasn’t a difficult language to learn, even without the implants they’d normally use to make sure they got it right. They didn’t dare risk becoming dependent on them and then discovering they didn’t work on Darius. Mastering the local culture was far harder, but it seemed that traders were permitted some leeway, at least more than was granted to city-dwellers.
That
wasn’t too hard to understand; basic economics insisted that the smarter magic-lords treat merchants well, in hopes of earning more profit. A few hours of research had turned up a whole list of trade goods they could offer to the locals.

The mission orders had frowned upon offering the locals anything they couldn’t make for themselves, but they did permit producing items from the other side of Darius. One particular island was the only place that produced certain kinds of spices, all of which sold for vast amounts of gold in Warlock’s Bane. The remainder of their trade goods were considerably less interesting, but they should bring a tidy profit. There were so many different trading clans, often splitting up into new organisations, that no one would notice another one. Or so they hoped.

“Then we pick an uninhabited place for the first landing,” Captain Thor said, firmly. “Somewhere where we are unlikely to be detected.”

Elyria scowled. The best places to go also happened to be places where the snoops had simply failed – and there was no way that Captain Thor would allow a shuttle to fly into a Dead Zone. A single snoop was hardly a loss – the fabricator had turned out millions of them – but a shuttle, complete with passengers, was rather more serious. Besides, if it crashed near a settlement, it would be a nasty shock to the locals. They might know more about life on other worlds than anyone had assumed.

“We have a location in mind, near Warlock’s Bane,” she said. The snoops had been checking it out for several days, finally concluding that no one lived within five kilometres of the landing zone. From time to time, merchant convoys drove through the area, but they never stopped. Establishing a base there would be easy. “Once the shuttle is down, we can bury it and turn it into a proper observation post.”

It
was
standard procedure. A primitive world could be observed from close-up, without revealing their presence. It would also make a useful rendezvous point in case of discovery, particularly as the teleporter was unreliable. The AIs had been working out what technology could be considered reasonably dependable on Darius, which could be used to stock the base. And then they could move further into the field.

“Very well,” Thor said, finally. “Just remember my overall orders. If you run into real trouble, I might not be able to help you.”

Elyria nodded. “We understand,” she said. That
wasn’t
standard procedure, but Darius was a non-standard planet. A rescue mission might be deemed too dangerous for
Hamilton
, or even an entire crew of Peacekeeper Marines. If that happened, they would be stranded for the rest of their lives. There were stories about it happening, but never on her watch. Most of them were really little more than rumours. “We’re ready.”

“I hope you all look reasonably local,” Thor grunted. “These people don’t seem to be very diverse.”

That was another oddity about Darius; the population seemed to have near-uniform brown skin. Skin colour was utterly irrelevant to the Confederation – partly as a response to the Thule, who had gene-engineered yellow skin into their serfs – but primitive worlds tended to take it seriously. And, over the years, people who lived under hot sunlight developed darker skins than those who didn’t. It seemed absurd to believe that anyone could be so foolish as to use skin colour as a means of separating superior humans from inferior humans, yet the whole affair predated the march into space. Some planets had even worked hard to ensure that their children kept the same ethnic appearance.