The Unseen Tempest (Lords of Arcadia) (6 page)

“We aren’t?” Hawk asked under his breath.

Milo looked up at me with those damn eyes, and I held up a finger for him to wait a second. Turning back to Hawk, I pushed him out of earshot. “What in the hell is wrong with you? When did you become a bunny killer?”

“Don’t let his form fool you. He is not a rabbit. He is a royal spy.”

“Messenger,” Milo corrected from across the room. When we both stared over at him, he pointed to his ears. “Sorry. I can’t help it. And for your information, I am, in fact, a rabbit. I was born to this form, not flipped.”

I looked at Hawk and he looked at me as we tried to figure out what that meant. Ignoring it, Hawk glared at me. “This is a diplomatic negotiation.”

I tried not to scoff in his face. “No it’s not. It’s called intimidation, and trust me, it doesn’t work.”

He countered with “Like hell it doesn’t!” I was pretty sure he had heard my mental scoff and was pissed.

“It doesn’t. You threaten him to do something for us, and he will be waiting for the first second he can screw us over. You know how I know that? Because if you kidnapped me and forced me to help you, that is exactly what I would be doing. Stop thinking the Arcadian way is the only way to do things.”

Without waiting for him to answer, I walked back to the where Ruber was still holding the rabbit captive. “Drop the shield, Ruber.”

To his credit, Ruber didn’t ask me if I was sure. He just paused for a moment and then dropped the field.

“Look,” I said to the terrified rabbit. “I get why you bit me, and I’m not mad. Don’t do it again, but I am not mad. This entire thing is a mistake, so let’s start over again. You put the watch away and listen to what we have to say. After that, you can choose to help us or not. The choice will be all yours.”

“We aren’t letting him go,” Hawk called out.

I shot him a glare and then looked back to Milo. “Forget him. I swear to you, hear us out, and if you want to leave, you can leave.”

His ears were pressed flat against his head, and he still had that feral, crazy look in his eyes, but he slowly closed the watch. “Put your hand out again?” he asked.

“He’s going to bite you again,” Hawk warned.

I looked into the rabbit’s eyes, and all I saw was fear. Slowly I extended my hand out to him. He sniffed it a couple of times, and I clamped my mouth shut to not laugh as his nose tickled my palm. After a few seconds, his ears rose a bit, and he proclaimed, “You smell trustworthy. I will listen to what you have to say.” He slipped the watch into his waistcoat pocket and folded his paws across his chest. “You have my undivided attention.”

I looked over to Hawk and gave him an “I told you so” smirk. He just shook his head and stared away, mentally telling me that this was my plan, so it was my responsibility now.

I began to explain to Milo what Puck had done.

C
AERUS
WAS
not easily startled.

Part of her poise came from the reserved way in which her people held themselves. Some of it was the result of training as part of the royal family. Royalty does not indulge in public expressions of emotion. But the honest truth was that most of her calm manner arose from the fact her race was nearly indestructible. She was thrown to the ceiling of the elevator as it hurtled hundreds of feet down the dumbwaiter shaft and received not a chip from the impact.

She thought briefly of trying to stop her fall but came to the conclusion that whatever lay at the bottom of the shaft had a better probability of containing an entrance to the workshop than the small greeting room did.

Seconds turned into minutes, and minutes began to add up when Caerus realized she might have misjudged how deep the shaft was.

She had just finished that thought when the car ended up smashing itself into the floor of the shaft. Caerus’s gem body ricocheted around the small compartment until her momentum was spent. When she was able to steady herself, she was surprised to find the dumbwaiter car still completely intact. She flicked on a green beam and scanned the walls for a brief moment.

“Not good,” she muttered to herself as she detected no way to open the door from this side. Doing some calculations, Caerus realized that whatever substance the walls were made from was more than capable of withstanding her strongest blasts. That meant brute force was a waste of effort.

Taking her time, she began to examine the dumbwaiter’s door with meticulous care, making sure she hadn’t missed anything in her initial scan.

On her third pass over the virtually invisible seams, she found the slightest of cracks, most likely created by the elevator car’s crash. It was microscopic, but it was there. Without Ferra’s ice to expand it, Caerus knew she had no chance of widening it. She probed the crack one more time, measuring exactly how large it was down to the micrometer. She projected an image of her own body next to it and began a series of magical calculations that would have confounded any earth-made computer within seconds.

All members of the Crystal Court were trained in the Arts before being allowed to choose their branch of knowledge to examine. Because of their life spans, the gems studied magic for centuries, which was barely a year to them. Though not as adept as a trained Weaver, their knowledge of the Arts was unsurpassed in the Nine Realms. Runes of power flashed around the projected image of Caerus’s form as she reviewed the spell in her head.

Satisfied she had figured the precise amount of arcane energy needed for her task, she positioned herself next to the microscopic gap and pronounced one word.

“Shrink.”

The room’s dimensions ballooned around her as she shrank. The once-microscopic crack became more and more pronounced until it looked to her like a jagged crevice on the side of the wall. From her new perspective, the seams of the door were readily visible; in fact, the entire chamber was covered with details that would have been impossible to detect with a normal field of vision. She could see the fine machine grooves on the dumbwaiter shaft and the infinitesimal gears built into the corners that once made the car move up and down. To the naked eye, the dumbwaiter walls seemed smooth, but as she grew smaller, she could see it was filled with mechanisms that controlled its actions.

The strain of maintaining her size was beginning to tell on Caerus, so she flew into the inky blackness that resided inside the crack.

Logically, Caerus knew the span of the crack could be measured in grains of sand, but as she flew into the blackness, she felt as though she was descending into a trench deep on the ocean’s floor. She used impulses of energy to make her way through the gap, not pausing even as she wondered what would happen if her spell failed. What would give first, the strange substance of the elevator door or her own body? As the gap shrank around her, she realized she did not want the answer
that
badly. The faster she flew and drained her reserve of arcane energy, the faster the shrink spell wore off.

Until it was a race.

What had been a trench seconds earlier was now a small crevice that shrank more quickly as she raced through it. There wasn’t even time to calculate her chances; instead, she simply pushed herself faster as the sides of the crack began to press against her body. Sparks flew as the edges of her body made contact with the crack, and she rotated herself to keep from getting stuck. She flew and flew, trying to banish the images of a tomb from her mind.

The shrink spell sputtered and headed toward failure, and her body began to expand.

“Is this where I die?” she asked herself as she used the last of her strength to push forward. Oddly, she was more disappointed by the fact she had let Ferra and Molly down than she was afraid of her own demise. One more pulse, one more….

Caerus shot out of the crack like a bullet, a glowing green bullet that hit something in the dark and went careening off.

The explosive sound of metal crashing on metal echoed throughout the chamber as the sapphire lay on the floor, automatically pulling on her depleted energy reserves in order to float again. The thunderous sound of metal crashing down was deafening; she must have started a reaction when she slammed into whatever she’d hit in the dark. Oddly, the noise seemed to move away from her, echo a little, and then go silent. After about a minute, she was able to float upward and tried to extend her glow outward to see where she was.

There was nothing but black in front of her.

Caerus allowed her light to dim as she summoned up what little remaining energy she possessed. Shouting, she called out, “
Flare
!” A fiery meteor shot out from inside her and arced high into the air, illuminating the area as it went. She could see the arched ceiling of some kind of complex above her, and as the flare started its downward trajectory, more of the area came into view. As it began to fall, she could see the tips of metal trees, covered in dust and rust from centuries of neglect. The flare hit the ground, and she could see that under the trees there were things moving. Forms with huge, misshapen metal faces connected to clockwork bodies that possessed wheels for hands and feet, and they were moving toward her. She barely had time to take in the scene when the flare died.

Leaving her in the darkness once again.

F
ERRA
PACED
the small waiting room, trying to keep her temper under control as she fought the feeling of helplessness at being locked in the room.

Molly watched her patiently, knowing there was more on the barbarian’s mind than just being locked in. Their relationship had been slow going at best, partly because most of their time had been taken up trying to find the workshop, but mostly because of Ferra’s cultural upbringing. The Articus natives frowned upon any relationships that strayed from the normal boy/girl pairing, claiming same-gender relationships were abominations to Logos.

Molly had heard those kinds of beliefs before.

As a clockwork companion, she was designed to understand and accept any kind of relationship she encountered, though she was the first to admit her affection for Ferra was not just programming. The blue-skinned woman was unlike any person Molly had met before, and she found herself more and more drawn to her. There had been so much unsaid between them lately than actually spoken out loud, but Molly knew pressing the point would only cause Ferra to retreat further.

“So tell me why they would think your kind would revolt?” Ferra asked as they waited.

Molly considered the question for a moment; the sound of her internal gears whirring was the only sound for a few seconds. “Clockwork beings are ruled by a series of main gears, all of them dependent on being kept tightly wound.” Ferra nodded, having witnessed her companion regularly tighten her gears since they had met. “I possess seven main gears, even though only six are currently working. Some of the earlier models managed to get by with as few as three, and I have heard some clockworks had as many as eleven. Each handles a specific function that translates into human actions.”

“Thought, action, speech, compassion, coquettion, and etiquette,” Ferra rattled off. “I am well aware of your springs, Molly. What does this have to do with starting a revolution?”

The clockwork girl paused, which was her equivalent of sighing. “There are other springs we possess that are meant to never wind down.”

“Like?”

“Like a morality spring. It is a main spring that regulates if we are generally good beings or not. It is rare, but there are tales of models whose morality springs wear out or actually break, and when they do, the clockworks find a life of servitude to be beneath them. The failsafe was made to prevent these rogue clockworks from ordering others to rebel as well.”

Ferra asked her next question carefully. “You talk like it has happened before.”

Before Molly could answer, the floor shook beneath their feet, and the faint sound of a distant explosion could be heard from the dumbwaiter shaft. Both girls stood still, listening for follow-up noises. The couch’s eyes flew open as its normally cheerful voice transformed into something darker and more ominous. “The workshop has been breached,” it intoned. “Defenses have been enacted. The workshop has been breached. Defenses have been enacted.”

Ferra clenched her fist, and an ice spear formed in her grip. “What does that mean?”

Molly looked around the room nervously. “It means Caerus triggered some kind of alarm in the workshop.”

“What does it mean by defenses?” Ferra asked as a screeching sound began beyond the southern wall and quickly grew louder.

Molly paused, cocking her head as she tried to identify the sound, which grew in volume, and a metallic squealing began to fill the room. “What is that?” Ferra screamed over the din.

Molly uttered one word that was filled with a lifetime of fear and dread. “Choppers.”

Before Ferra could ask her to elaborate, the sound of metal cutting metal blasted through the room, and the southern wall began to vibrate. Ferra moved between Molly and the wall as the tips of a buzz saw cut through the metal barrier, throwing sparks everywhere. The line lengthened as the seconds went on.

The couch continued to intone, “The workshop has been breached. Defenses have been enacted,” as the choppers cut through the wall.

A
TER
WOKE
up in a bed, which was not what he had hoped: he had hoped not to wake up at all. Centuries of training kicked in, and he listened and looked around him before attempting to sit up. He rose slowly, never moving his gaze from the elf seated in the shadows, watching him silently. “I’m alive,” he said, ignoring the twinge of pain speaking brought to his jaw and the greater pain disappointment caused in his heart.

“For now,” the other elf stated, his voice thick with emotion. Ater remembered the tone well, even though the last time he had heard it was centuries before.

“It’s nice to know the Elven Code of Life is still as malleable as I remember.”

The grim-faced elf jumped from his seat and lunged across the room, at the same instant he pulled his dagger and pointed it at Ater’s neck. “Dark elves have turned their backs on Koran! You aren’t protected by the Code, and you know it! So don’t speak to me about the Code unless you are willing to do it while holding your tongue in your hand.”