The Wizard's Daughters: Twin Magic: Book 1 (8 page)

“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.”

Walther 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 small piece of crystal, along with the rest of it, had turned deep blue.

Not purple as with Temperance’s worn-out brain, nor smoky, as was more common with smaller automata that ran down, nor yellow or even green as sometimes occurred. Deep, sapphire blue. It was nothing he had ever seen before. And from what Walther knew of how quartz behaved in response to the Flow, it should have been impossible. Corundum could turn blue from the Flow, but quartz did not.

Even more strangely, the resonance cube was less than a year old, and he had not used it that many times. Perhaps a dozen. No more than twenty. The crystal should still have been clear with so little use.

Whatever Ariel had done had turned it blue. Somehow.

Walther understood well—or thought he did, until now—what made the cube do what it did. The shape of a person’s flow was determined by many things: their personality, their character, their intelligence. For mages, their talent for controlling it as well. That shape would evolve somewhat through life, but for the most part, it was set at birth.

The cube measured disturbances in the flows it detected through the cables. Deliberate falsehoods caused a disturbance in one’s flow, and that was why it also worked as a truth detector. But he had designed it to measure the shape of Ariel’s and Astrid’s flows and how close they were. With flows detected through both sets of cables, a resonance would be created inside the crystal, and that resonance would generate a reaction—a sound.

It should not have created light. He could see no way that could have happened, even though it clearly had.

The answer had to lie in why the crystal had turned blue. Somehow or another, there must have been an absolute torrent of energy moving through it. The crystal had exploded when Ariel had turned the knobs all the way right, putting the crystal directly between their flows with nothing to limit the resonance.

But Ariel was not that powerful a mage. She was greatly talented, to be sure, but her skills were still limited. And Erich had no talent at all. They could not have created such energy together.

At least, not intentionally. Could there, after all, been
some
sort of match between them? No, that was simply impossible. A talent for controlling the Flow shaped one’s personal flow in ways no non-mage could ever match. It would, as the saying went, have been a square peg in a round hole.

And
if
they had somehow truly matched, the cube should have done nothing, much as it had done nothing when testing Ariel and Astrid. Instead, it had exploded. So a match, no.

He returned to his chair and tried to get some rest. Whatever had happened, keeping Ariel and Erich apart from now on was likely a good idea.

For a number of reasons.

♦ ♦

Walther was not the only one lying awake that night.

Ariel had returned to her bed in tears, though they were tears of embarrassment rather than sorrow. She had humiliated herself in front of Father and Erich, and destroyed Father’s favorite invention.

How could she have been so stupid? Of course Erich could not have been her match. What had she been thinking?

She was not sure she could face Erich again, not after the things she had been imagining about him, not after coming to his room nearly naked in the middle of the night the way she had.

Erich was not a child. She was sure he had done those things in the book with other women. For her to appear at his room like that would have no doubt given him thoughts about her she desperately wished now she had not spawned.

They were thoughts she could not help thinking herself, now.

Erich’s arms and shoulders were so hard they seemed to be carved of wood. She thought about his story about his swordmaster, about the things he had made Erich do to strengthen them. Erich wore long shirts, and Ariel had not seen him bare-chested before tonight. It was a sight she had not prepared herself for.