The Wizard's Daughters: Twin Magic: Book 1 (11 page)

He had been using his lighter legs, as he did when holding court, because they looked far more natural under the blanket. The heavy legs were much more reliable, but also quite bulky and obvious. Too many downward glances at them when receiving visitors had banished them from his hall.

But the light ones often jammed like this. The chief artificer swore up and down that he and his apprentices had done all they could, that their poor reliability was an inevitable consequence of making them so light and slim. So Wilhelm had forced himself to deal with it.

Normally he could clear a jam by gently shaking and flexing the leg. According to the chief artificer, the problem was most often a cable that got stuck against one of the knee gears. There was just too little space for everything. Wilhelm tapped the knee with his fist, first gently, then more firmly. But the knee remained frozen.

He tried flexing it, but it would not move at all. A few minutes of twisting and shaking it convinced Wilhelm that something more serious was wrong. Frustrated, he tried to force the knee to bend. Though his legs had gone thin and weak from disuse, his upper body was still powerful—he worked hard to keep this so—and with a hard push, he finally got the knee to bend. But when it gave way, there was the unmistakable sound of something breaking inside it.

Now the knee bent freely—too freely. It had lost all tension, and did not respond to Wilhelm’s motions. He heard clicking and grinding noises from inside the leg, but it did not move. He had broken it.

Wilhelm cursed aloud, telling himself that with Erich unavailable, he would have the artificers all flogged for this. (Though it was an idle threat; he needed them too much.)

He dragged himself over to the dais and tried to stand on his right leg. But the weight of the broken left was too great, and the automaton circuits did not have finely enough tuned balance for it. He went over again with a crash.

He knew he could have called for help. But the humiliation of it would be too great.

Wilhelm unbuckled the left leg and cast it aside, then tried to stand again. Now he was able to get to his feet. But how to move? He could not hop on his one mechanical leg, but he might be able to limp forward if he could find something to support himself with. This was not the first time something like this had happened to him, and he had taken to keeping walking sticks in certain rooms in case he needed them. But again, his concern for appearances in this room had kept him from doing it here.

He dropped down to his knees again, and half-crawled, half-dragged himself to the nearest chair. Once he pulled himself up, he found he was able to move forward by leaning heavily on the chair and pushing back with his one good leg. Bit by bit, he made it to the side door of the audience room. He had to sit down to push the door open, but that done, he made it out into the hall.

One of his private sitting rooms was a few doors down at the point where the hall turned to the right. If he could make it there, he could sit and wait until a servant passed, and have them fetch the chief artificer without undue embarrassment.

Filling with triumphant satisfaction at his impending victory over this annoyance, Wilhelm maneuvered down the hallway to the sitting room. But just as he reached it—disaster.

A chambermaid hurrying down the hall with a bucket of dirty wash-water came around the corner and crashed into him, tripping over the chair. Both of them fell to the floor, with the bucket of filthy water unending all over Wilhelm’s court robes.

“Damn you!” he bellowed as the startled girl realized what she had done and tried to clean up. “Get out of here, or I’ll have you flogged and given the guards!”

Crying in terror, she jumped to her feet and fled down the hall.

“And get the chief artificer at once!”

Wilhelm tore off his sodden robes and crawled through the door into the sitting room.

17.

Johannes sat at his desk going over the University’s fall social events with Sigrid. Walther had asked that the girls’ coming out be integrated into it somehow if possible, since he had no residence in the city and insufficient funds to rent a large enough home for such an event. Walther had taught at the University with Johannes years ago when they were younger, and still contributed research to the School of Artificers, so it was not an unreasonable request.

For a mage, the process of seeking a mate was both social and magical. Strictly speaking, the characteristics of one’s flow determined the match, but in practice it was not quite so simple. Most mages were not willing to leave such an important decision to pure chance.

Whether or not it was possible to influence a potential match was a hotly debated point in magely academia. It was mostly accepted that there could not possibly be only
one
match for each mage in all the world, or mages would marry at far lower rates than they actually did. So that had to mean there must be a
range
of possible options somehow. The dispute was whether this range was fixed or could be affected by deliberate actions or desires. The problems inherent in studying something so sensitive and private made research in this area all the more difficult. Thus, as with most such gaps in scientific knowledge, rumor and guesswork filled in the rest.

One generally accepted feeling was that, given a potential range of matches, it was incumbent on mages who wanted to find tolerable mates to carefully control the process of finding them, lest they randomly match with the first compatible mage they came across. Conversely, those mages who felt their prospects of marrying well were low (for whatever reasons) sought to throw open the process as widely as possible. Thus, there was a natural tension between mages who wanted to be selective and those who felt they could not be.

Ariel and Astrid would be some of the most eligible female mages to arrive in Köln in quite some time. And that meant they could not simply be thrown to the wolves.

So Johannes and Sigrid were trying to decide how best to handle it. Walther had hoped he would arrive in two weeks, as they were coming by wagon and some of the terrain they needed to cross was a bit rugged. They would need some time to get situated (and Johannes needed some time to get Franz alone with the girls before anyone else got a chance with them) so the soonest that he thought they might be able to present Walther’s daughters to magely society would be about a month from now. Unfortunately, that was proving difficult.

“The most auspicious time would be around St. Martin’s Day,” Sigrid said. “There are a number of events planned.”

“That is too far off, I am afraid.” So long a delay ran the risk that the bored girls would take the process into their own hands.

“Yes, I thought it would be. There is the Equinox Ball. Would that be too soon?”

“When is that, again?”

“The 21st of September.”

Johannes groaned. It was an ideal event, except for being barely two weeks away. But there would not be another suitable occasion for at least a month. A month in which word of Ariel and Astrid’s presence would spread around the city and eager mages would come calling on Walther.

“I suppose that will have to do. Hopefully they will get here in time.” Franz would simply need to work quickly.

Sigrid nodded. “I will let the staff know. It should not be a problem. We will just need to make room in the evening’s schedule and add some verbiage to the announcement.”

“Thank you.”

Their discussion then shifted to matters of spending and staffing, and Sigrid left about half an hour later.

When she was gone, Johannes whistled and called the weasel over to him. The creature jumped into his lap and poked its head under his hand, seeking attention. Johannes idly scratched behind its ears as he thought. The animal’s proximity would help clear his thoughts.

Not all mages took familiars, as there were some tradeoffs in doing so, but Johannes on the whole found it beneficial. The right familiar helped a mage better channel the Flow, in addition to being able to perform simple tasks like delivering messages. The process of acquiring one was not unlike getting married, except that animal flows—unlike human flows—were mostly malleable, so a mage who wanted a familiar could essentially force the animal he wanted to match him.

It was even possible, in extremely rare circumstances, to take a human as a familiar. The problem, of course, was that a human familiar could not be made to match the mage; he or she had to be a match as is. As a result, this sort of thing almost always happened accidentally. It was also not viewed positively; most mages regarded a human familiar as something little better than a slave.

The only drawback of having a familiar was that the relationship went in both directions: though the animal’s intelligence was increased, the mage’s personality was often affected. Johannes had felt himself becoming more short-tempered since acquiring his weasel, but it was a trade he was willing to make.

Johannes finally lifted the weasel off his lap. “Fetch Franz.”

The weasel bounded out of his office and down the stairs. A few minutes later, it returned with his son.

“Father?”

Johannes explained what he had worked out with Sigrid.

“This means you will have only a few days to get to know the girls before the ball. You must be on your best behavior. Get yourself some new robes and a haircut. You will also need formal clothes for the dance. From what Walther has told me, the girls’ talents lean toward elemental magic, which is hardly surprising given their lineage. Between now and then, I want you to do some reading on the latest work on the subject. Be prepared to impress them.”

“Yes, Father.”

“And for God’s sake, bathe before you meet them the first time. They have been living in that town their entire lives and are surely ready for some civilized society.”

♦ ♦

Giancarlo Attendolo sat in the corner of the tavern outside Wilhelm’s castle watching his men in revelry amongst the barmaids. They were drunkenly singing an old Italian mercenary song and butchering it badly, but he did not mind. Those who remained had earned the diversion by staying with him despite the lack of pay; others had deserted him. His band was down to eight, and he had decided to divide the absent ones’ back pay amongst the ones who were left when he returned from his meeting with Wilhelm. This had been an unexpected boon, thus his men were uncommonly jolly.

Giancarlo fully expected that every whore in the tavern would be walking bow-legged by dawn, but that too was to be expected. There were only so many of them to go around, and his men had been denied for too long.

He himself did not indulge in such things. He had a wife at home in Firenze (though they had not seen each other in nearly two years) and was faithful to her. He was a pious man and took the Sixth Commandment seriously. (Though the Fifth was a different matter—business was business.)

The thought of his wife made Giancarlo homesick. He had been gone much too long. This job for Wilhelm had taken far longer than he had planned, but at least the end appeared in sight. Giancarlo had been a
condottiere
long enough not to give much thought to his employers’ motivations—only their coin—but he had felt for quite some time that Wilhelm’s obsession was not healthy. The man’s brother had been gone for a decade, and for all Giancarlo knew, no longer gave much thought to his past. This Erich struck him as the sort of freesword he knew well: a landless noble moving from job to job, earning his living on the martial training his background had given him.

When they finally caught up with him, Giancarlo would do his best to take him unharmed, not just because Wilhelm had requested it but because he understood the life Erich lived. When you made your living by the sword, sooner or later your luck would turn sour. Giancarlo would respect that, because he knew one day his turn would come as well.

Giancarlo had been a bit coy with Wilhelm. He was in fact nearly certain he knew where Erich had ended up, because the whore in Limburg had told him as much. Erich was about to flee the place in hopes of hiding out in another town further to the northeast. Though he had instead spent a month in the town jail awaiting trial, Giancarlo was sure he had gone forward with his plan. The whore had at least seen him heading in that direction.

So it was there his band was heading. They would need to pass through Köln on the way, but the route from there was fairly straight. From what he knew it passed through some difficult areas, but his band was well armed and armored, and could surely handle a few highwaymen or random ogres. They had swift horses, and with luck could reach the town in perhaps a week.

A crescendo of shouting and laughter drew Giancarlo out of his reverie. Across the tavern, two of his men had pulled down the bodices of the whores on their laps to expose their breasts, and were making a show of drinking ale from between their teats. The women were laughing and screaming as well, no thought whatsoever of their modesty.

Giancarlo closed his eyes and thought of his wife.

18.

The trip to Köln had not begun well. The evening they left, just as they reached the next town and found an inn to stay at, the skies opened up with a barrage of thunder and lighting. They ducked into the inn just as the rain began to fall. Walther secured two rooms, one for the girls and one for himself and Erich.

When they rose the next morning, the rain was still coming down, often in torrents. Ariel and Astrid remained in their room reading, while Walther and Erich sat in the ground floor tavern nursing tankards of ale and waiting for the weather to let up.

But the storm did not break, and Erich was reduced to querying others in the inn about the road to Köln. Most had not been that direction recently, some never. But two men he talked to repeated the story he had heard about the ogres. One was a caravan guard and reported they had driven the beasts off with crossbows. The other was a hunter who claimed to have spoken to another merchant in a town further up the road who had lost most of his goods when the ogres attacked his wagons.