The Unseen Tempest (Lords of Arcadia) (9 page)

“Um, I thought we were looking for time.”

He nodded and kept flipping the pages.

“Not that I am an expert or anything, but what do you think you’re going to find in a book?”

He glanced at me and made a tsking sound, which might have been dismissive if it wasn’t accompanied by a scrunching of his nose and a wiggling of his whiskers that made me laugh. “Have you ever gotten lost in a book?” I nodded. “Completely lost track of time as you read?” Another nod. “That, my dear boy, is the time I’m finding.” He grabbed the book by its spine and began to shake it repeatedly. At first nothing happened, and I was going to say something sarcastic to him, but then small motes of glowing blue dust began to fall onto the floor. “See? Time. All the best books are filled with them.”

I watched as he shook time dust out of half a dozen books, leaving them stacked on the floor as he worked. Hawk and Ruber came over and watched him. Within ten minutes he had a small pile of glowing blue… well, it looked like dirt, but he said it was time, so let’s call it time, okay?

Taking his watch from its pocket again, he opened its cover and exposed the clock face toward the dust. The dust motes began to rise toward the numbers, and the clock hands started to spin in reverse. Only a couple of seconds later, the clock reset itself to midnight. All the time had been absorbed. “By the way, do not read those books,” Milo said, pointing at the stack. “They will be the driest, most boring thing you’ve ever read, and each second will seem like an hour as you try to get through them.” He shuddered. “Horrible thing.”

Hawk nodded at the suggestion, but I could sense from his thoughts reading was the farthest thing from his mind. He felt my mind touch his, and he looked over at me and smiled. I could feel a small but sincere “sorry” about not trusting my instincts. I smiled back at him, and for a moment our minds hugged.

Yeah, I know it sounds weird, but there are no words I know to explain it, so we mind hugged. Get over it.

“Are we ready?” Milo asked, closing the watch. “This is a one-way trip. I’m not wasting a jump just because you forgot something.” He smoothed out the front of his vest. “This whole endeavor has made me dreadfully late. I don’t intend to waste any more time.”

I erupted in laughter before I could stop myself and covered my mouth as everyone looked at me. Sheepishly I muttered, “I’m sorry, the White Rabbit just said he was late. It’s a nerd thing.”

Hawk rolled his eyes as he went over and grabbed his pack. “I need ten minutes to restock. No longer, I promise,” he added when he saw Milo begin to complain.

Milo let out an impatient sigh. “Humans.”

“So, what is your world like?” I asked him as we waited for Hawk. “Like, do you guys play croquet with flamingos and have a deck of cards as guards?”

Now, I consider myself a master of the language known as sarcasm. Not only am I a teenage boy, but I’m also a sassy gay teenage boy, so I was given my sarcasm card early in life. I’m telling you this so when I say this next part, I want you to understand I know what I’m talking about.

That rabbit looked at me with a stare that told me from this point on, he was always going to think of me as the “dumb one.” I could cure cancer, blow up a moon-sized space station, I could even figure out how many licks it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop, and that rabbit would just smile and nod because the dumb one did something semi-intelligent for once.

“No,” he answered curtly. “It is nothing like that.”

I decided to shut up until Hawk got back.

H
AWK
WAS
tossing supplies into his magical pack when he heard a noise.

He paused and waited, motionless.

And he heard it again—a faint rustling and cracking. And panting.

Putting the pack down, he crept toward the door, willing himself to be as light as a feather so he didn’t make a sound. He peered out the small window by the doorway. Only his training as a warrior prevented him from gasping when he saw a squad of goblins making their way toward the house. A pair of huge wolflike creatures walked in the lead, sniffing the forest floor like bloodhounds, and Hawk saw the wargs’ handlers, a pair of ogres, covering the rear of the hunting party. Because that was what it was.

He lost a second as his mind tried to understand how his mother’s safe house had been discovered, but he quickly stopped. There was time to think later; now he had to act. The royal symbol was next to the door frame, seemingly another decoration in a house that possessed an excess of them. Most would not have given the small seal an extra look.

He placed his palm against the seal, and it began to glow.

Hawk’s mind touched the magic that ruled the house and waited for it to acknowledge him as a member of the royal family. Seconds later, he felt the house stop and wait for his commands. Ignoring the louder sounds coming from outside, he thought a string of commands, each short and to the point, and then waited for the house to accept them. The first creatures approached the door and scratched at it. He held his breath as precious seconds passed by.

The house pushed back against his mind, meaning it was ready.

Running away from the door, he scooped up the pack and made a mad dash toward the library. Kane, Ruber, and the rabbit looked startled when he came barreling toward him. “Cast the portal!” he screamed at Milo. “Hurry!”

Hawk had to give the rabbit credit. Instead of wasting time asking him why or panicking, he began to trace a large circle on the ground with one of his paws.

Kane, already picking up the danger from Hawk’s thoughts, asked, “How did they find us?”

Hawk shook his head, dismissing the question at the same instant he pulled Kane close. The front door crashed inward, but Milo held steady and continued his spell. Once the rabbit’s paw touched the beginning of the complete circle, the center of it fell away with a whoosh of air. Where there had been a polished marble floor, a gaping earthen hole had popped into existence, falling away endlessly from them. Milo looked at the humans. “Jump.” When Kane hesitated, Hawk pushed him in. His scream faded quickly as he fell into the darkness. Hawk went next. As he jumped in, the pair of hunting wargs turned the corner into the library. The magical wolves were almost a blur as they spotted their prey getting away and lunged after them. Ruber flew into the hole, and Milo followed. The moment the hare’s ears were clear, the circle closed, leaving the unmarred marble floor.

The wargs slid to a halt as they paced around where the hole had just been. The squad of goblins and the two ogres came jogging into the library, expecting to see the prince and his friends at the very least attempting to defend themselves.

Instead, the library was empty.

“Where are they?” the goblin commander called out to the wargs. The wolves pawed at the ground and growled.

“Maybe the gem moved them in the ground again?” one of the goblin subordinates offered.

The commander sighed and took off his helm. “We’re going to need to tear that floor up and see if there is a room beneath us—”

The house began to shake around them.

“Tremor,” one of the goblins called as they all struggled to keep their balance.

One of the ogres took hold of nearest shelf of books to steady himself. He looked at his hand in amazement as it seemed to be growing larger and larger in relationship to the books.

One of the other goblins looked up and asked, “Is that wall moving?”

There was a sound as loud as thunder and then nothing but darkness as the house folded back into itself, crushing the squadron and wargs instantly. From the outside, the cabin door reappeared in place and slammed itself shut. Within seconds, the woods surrounding the cabin settled back into silence as if nothing had happened.

W
HEN
C
AERUS
regained consciousness, she was lying alone in a corner of the workshop.

Making sure to keep her light dim, she floated up, judging herself to be around 35 percent charged. It wasn’t optimal, but it was better than running dry. She waited, listening for sounds of her pursuers. All she heard was a high-pitched tone that seemed to be coming from all over the workshop. Sensing no danger, she raised her glow and gasped in shock as she saw more than a dozen of the creatures that had charged her lying inert on the floor. She was far too cautious and knew too little about the creatures to assume they were dead. Giving them a wide berth, she propelled herself toward the point in the vast room where the wavering tone was the loudest.

She found a small grill on the wall above a workbench littered with dusty, long-abandoned tools. Next to the grill was a series of small white placards mounted in a brass frame. There were four different fields where the tiles could be spun about. It read like it was a status for the workshop.

Right now it read WORKSHOP-LOCKDOWN-ALARM-WAITING ROOM. Underneath the grill, so caked in dust and dirt it was barely visible, was a single, small bulb. Caerus needed a moment’s study to realize the bulb was flashing red in time with the tone in the background.

“Obviously I missed something,” she said, thinking out loud.

A creaking sound arose from the workbench; it sounded like rusted metal grinding against itself and breaking in the process. Using a cleaning spell on the bench, she banished centuries of grime from the surface, revealing another clockwork face like the couch’s.

“W-w-w-w-what tool are you missing?” it asked, even as it extended two flexible, cable-like arms, which began picking up the scattered tools and returning them to their proper places on itself.

The sapphire was about to ask what it was talking about when she realized the bench had taken her rhetorical statement as an actual query. It was connected to the alarm panel, so she thought it might know what was going on. “What is that tone?” she asked the bench.

“A lockdown alarm has been activated in the waiting room. As per protocol, all mobile clockworks are currently deactivated until an all clear can be signaled.”

“Who can signal the all clear?” She was fairly sure she knew what the answer was going to be.

“Workshop personnel with a silver or higher key card.”

“How do I get back to waiting room?”

The bench paused for half a second. “All movement between floors has been restricted until an all clear is signaled.”

“That is not going to work for me,” Caerus commented as she floated away to examine the room she was trapped in. She passed over dozens more unconscious choppers, some in various states of disrepair. From the discarded pile of rusted parts, it looked as if the creatures had been cannibalizing themselves to keep as many in working condition as possible. Beyond them stood a huge grove of trees laden with rusted containers hanging from their branches. They were of varying sizes but resembled the ones that had been in the dumbwaiter. Though the gemling could not smell, she could detect the overpowering levels of microbes produced by rotting food.

No one alive had been in this area for decades, possibly centuries.

Arrays of mechanical arms hung suspended from the ceiling between the rows of trees. Caerus guessed they had been used to gather the ripe pails and replenish the workshop’s food reserves. The sapphire followed the arms upward, looking for their access to the elevator system. There had to be more than one shaft to supply a structure of this size. The trick was finding the hidden doors.

Upstairs, Ferra had finished her patrol of the hallway outside the waiting room, disposing of the choppers passed out there as well. The barbarian had never encountered mechanical beings such as these before, but she was sure of one thing—whatever their construction, decapitation was an effective means of shutting them off. The hallway extended until it reached a corridor, but there were no signs of any more choppers.

Taking care to stack the bodies up in one pile and the heads in another, she froze both, just in case they weren’t as dead as they seemed.

Not seeing anything else that could be considered a threat, she returned to Molly’s side, leaned down next to her, and stopped the device from whirling. As soon as the sound vanished, Molly’s eyes snapped open and she sat up. In a startled voice, she asked, “How much time did I lose?”

It was the closest to panic Ferra had heard from the clockwork girl since they had met, and it concerned her. “Less than ten minutes,” she answered softly. “They are all… taken care of.”

Molly got to her feet and looked at the two ice structures in the room. Ferra watched her as the clockwork girl inspected them to make sure there was no way the choppers could return to life and break free. “I doubt there are many more on this floor, but there will be more stored below.”

“Can we use that again?” she asked, pointing to the device still in Molly’s hand.

“Not unless we find another one,” Molly answered, tossing the device to the ground. “Each one is a one-time use, but there have to be more around.”

Ferra picked the discarded construct up and examined it. “What is it?”

“Panic device,” Molly answered, looking out into the hall. “They are installed throughout the complex in case there is a… an incident.”

“These people seemed to be greatly concerned their creations were going to turn on them.” Molly looked back at Ferra as the barbarian asked her, “Why?”

At first, Molly said nothing, acting like she hadn’t even heard the question. Then she looked away from Ferra; in a human, it would have been a gesture of embarrassment. “Tinker and Jones worked very hard to create clockwork beings as lifelike as possible. We are designed to talk, react, and even feel exactly like a flesh creature.”

When she didn’t continue, Ferra prompted her. “And?”

Molly turned back to her, and the warrior could swear she could see anger flare in the clockwork girl’s eyes. “And no one likes to realize they were brought into existence to be someone else’s slave.” Before Ferra could respond, Molly began to walk toward the door. “We need to get down to the workshop floor and find Caerus.”