Melrose stood outside Rufus’s house. Behind him the door slammed shut with enough force to rattle the glass in the windows next to it. Melrose grinned; Rufus’s offers of payment had been entirely predictable — gold plate, precious gems, another sword — and entirely refusable. It had taken the mage-smith nearly thirty minutes to realise that what Melrose wanted was an introduction to the Duke of Palehaven and a job with him, and then, seeing his political capital about to evaporate, Rufus had nearly exploded himself. But he had acquiesced and, tucked inside Melrose’s leather cuirass was a letter of introduction to the Duke, cursed into illegibility. When Melrose returned with this Device that Rufus wanted the curse would be broken and the letter usable. Of course, he could just go and find another mage to break the curse, but working for Rufus was easier, for now, and seemed interesting.
The surprising thing about Rufus’s request was that the Device seemed to be so close at hand. Melrose had been expecting some elaborate map drawn on the skin of some poor unfortunate soul — mages seemed to have an aversion to paper in his experience, preferring the days of effort it took to tattoo some victim with the details of the spell, or the map, or whatever, and then killing and skinning the victim (not necessarily in that order) and then preserving the skin without damaging the tattoo. The whole process seemed ridiculous to him when you could take a pen and paper and write it down and then curse it, as Rufus had just done, so that only the right kind of people could read it.
Though a mage’s idea of the ‘right kind of people’ would put a racist to shame in most cases.
One and a half ‘streets’ across Dalshire was a low building that looked like a workshop. At one end were a pair of wooden double doors that looked like they would let carts in, or at least unload outside them, and the windows were small and up under the eaves suggesting that they were for letting light in but not prying eyes to see.
“In there,” Rufus had said, his eyes aglitter with greed. “That’s where they’re keeping it. Just pop in, liberate it, and come back. Once it’s here I can look after much better than they can.”
Just pop in…. Melrose shrugged as he thought about that instruction, and then sauntered up to the double doors and knocked.
Snow had mounded up in front of the doors, looking at though it had been blown by the wind into drifts and it was clear that the doors hadn’t been opened that morning. The windows, despite being shadowed by the eaves, also had snow on their ledges that looked undisturbed. No-one was in sight when Melrose looked around, and his knocking — more a pounding with the side of his fist — was loud in the winter air. He doubted that anyone nearby had missed his polite request for entry, but when the doors didn’t move and no-one called out for a couple of minutes, he repeated the knocking and waited a couple more minutes out of politeness. Then he tried to pull the doors open.
The left-hand door was bolted somehow and though the door shuddered as he put his strength into heaving on it, it stayed put. The right-hand door moved though, hesitantly as the mounded snow tried to stop it, and with the occasional scrape over stone where the ground wasn’t level. He forced it open enough for him to walk inside without having to squeeze through the gap, and then went in.
It was dark inside the workshop, and he stopped, waiting for his eyes to adjust. The light through the high windows was grey and muted and the light from the doorway behind him fell as a sharp, bright cone to his right, illuminating a splintery wooden wall and some stone flags on the floor, but little else. As his eyes adjusted though he started to make out shapes, which resolved themselves into machines of varying heights and widths and lengths. They were laid out according to some kind of plan, but Melrose could identify none of the machines or tell why they were positioned as they were relative to one another. The floor was paved with large stones that made him think of a cathedral and was well swept. In the middle of the room was a large square table with papers stacked neatly on it. Melrose nodded: this was what Rufus has described to him. He stayed perfectly still, looking around, trying to work out what Rufus had omitted when describing this place.
He found a couple of chairs positioned oddly by one machine and well away from the table, but they seemed innocuous enough. At the far end he thought he could make out the large glass jars of trapped lightning that were used to power the machines, but there was no way to investigate them more carefully without going over there. Hanging from the ceiling, above where the light from the windows fell, was a collection of metal rods that put him in mind of a spider and he made careful note of where to avoid on the floor below to avoid having it drop on him. Then he decided that maybe Rufus had told him everything he needed to know about this place.
Naturally then, the third step he took, just bringing him alongside the nearest machine, was the one that caused a bright flash of light and a cold sensation like falling into ice-water. He shuddered, fighting to breathe, flailing out with his arms. For several seconds there was nothing, just the feeling of falling, and then he seemed to slow and stop. He was still blinded by the flash, only the odd, vision-obscuring after-images dancing in front of him, and he still couldn’t breath. He tried again to suck air into his lungs and again failed. Something seemed to press against him from behind, and reflexively he reached for his sword and pulled it free from its scabbard.
Immediately he could breathe again and he panted, his chest tight and heaving. Black spots that he hadn’t been aware of receded from his vision and he could see again. The feeling of being surrounded and suffocated disappeared like frost evaporating under strong sunlight.
“Who the hell are you?” asked an annoyed-sounding voice somewhere in front of him.
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