Chương 291: Make it stop

Today my literature lecturer is holding forth on literary themes, specifically on the themes about change versus the status quo. Tiviti is sitting behind me, braiding my hair. There is no question of me obstructing her view, I'd have to be standing in my seat to block her eye-line. We're both paying more attention to the class than usual, despite the comfortable touch and grooming. I find myself disappointed with everything the teacher is relating about the literary themes of change and stasis.

Predictably, Hearstwhile literary traditions have a very positive view of the status quo and a great distrust for anything that might change what people have gotten used to. Part of the cultural heritage that leads to people objecting to any new ideas. All I can do to counteract that is to provide counter-material to demonstrate that change is good. The obvious irony is that any of that counter-material would be, regrettably, new. And so unlikely to reach people who distrust anything new.

And I need people who crave novelty, who look for social mobility, and who think of newness as a chance to improve the social order. And as I listen to the lecture I realize that I really should have tried to bring Don Quixote to this world. I know what it's about, but I don't know it well enough to try to write it out. Maybe I could have included it as a short story in a compilation? I don't remember the story of it, if there was an overarching plot.

I know that it's about an old guy who is proud of his historical noble roots, and he can't cope with the way the world is changing, the way that economies and political power shifts with new developments. Teachers always tell you it's a satire but never explain what the joke is. In a couple years I'm going to want people to see that, I think.

Once railroads and telegraphs start bringing this far-flung kingdom closer together, all the petty players that held dominion over their petty patch are going to start getting squeezed, hard. Maybe I can try writing something like that. Or hire someone to write it. About some landless baronet that sees a train and grabs his lance to fight the dragon. And then gets mowed down by the machine-guns we're installing on all of them. The end.

"You giggled," Tiviti said, nudging me.

"It was a chortle, at the most," I said.

"I am not a giggler." I need to find some space and see if I've got a good maniacal cackle. Then I'll finally know if I'm really villain material or not.

"So what are you chortling at?" she nudged me again with her strong slender fingertip. She went back to braiding my hair.

"Just thinking about the future, and how some people are going to have a hard time adjusting to it," I said.

"Some funny situations. Something to look forward to."

"Like ha-ha funny? Pratfalls, slapstick?"

"The impotent rage from the dispossession of the entitled." Tiviti tugged a little harder as she did the next fold.

"Everyone knows you're smart, you don't have to keep doing that."

"Gonna be a lot of folks that expected their lives to be easy and they're gonna get so mad when suddenly they have to live in the same world as everyone else," I explained. See? That's so many more syllables? I used big words but only a few of them, Maybe I talk like an overcompensating snob, but it is more efficient my way! I tugged off my ring and glanced through it. The coin was flat on the table. I had a portal open before I even was out of my seat.

"Finish-this-later-thanks-for- the-talk- bye!" I yelled as I disappeared into the blinding white glare. My half-braided hair flapped behind me as I leaped. I jammed the ring back on my finger and lunged out the other side, onto the front stoop of the Ebonder manse. I knocked a lot harder than is considered polite but under the circumstances I'd say I was remarkably restrained because I wanted to plow right through like a battering ram." Step away from the- Oh, Princess Harigold.

How may we be-" said the housekeeper, who was holding a crossbow with glowing mana runes and this is the first time I've ever learned that those existed.

"Hi. It's on. Where is he?" I said, staring at the crossbow that had all of my respect right now. My reticle informed me that I did not want her to pull that trigger. But that did not make me any more patient, so I was feeling a little conflicted. The housekeeper frowned.

"Well, after your previous business call, the marquis has clarified that you are to be given an address if you arrive during certain hours." She handed me a card with an intersection scrawled in thickly-laid ink. Hardly my favorite way to navigate- a card like this would be perfect to hand off to a carriage driver and have them guide the way at their own pace. But it's nearly useless for anyone who flies or teleports.

There are distinct advantages to having methods that nobody else has, but the downturn is that I cannot rely on other people's methods and communications. So it was just plain good luck that I knew of a restaurant just two blocks down from this place and for just once someone else was giving me useful directions on my own without me having to scout a place out ahead of time.

I was glad to be out from in front of that crossbow as I dropped through the ground and into primordial void, and from there into the air twenty feet over the street. I pushed off and jetted overhead past carriages and wagons and lots of pedestrians. I saw a couple people pointing up at me and saying something to each other. I could not hear them, not at this height and speed, but it probably was not "it's a bird". And they don't even know what a plane is.

The directions was just for the intersection, the cross-streets, with no numbers or names to identify which building. This has me confused and frustrated for only a second- the four buildings here were a chandler, a charity outreach facility, a shop full of novelty porcelain figurines, and the Roadaway Crating Depository. Impatiently I banged on the door there, my fist rattling the door on its hinges. A face I've seen before appeared in the crack as the door opened just a foot.

A woman in black leather with a dangerous demeanor, one of the four kidnappers who had absconded with Belisa over a week ago.

"Is it now?" she asked me. The first words any of those four had ever said in my presence.

"It's going down," I told her.

"My scrying device said that he's making his move, but I don't know what his move is." She stared at me. I would rather have had the housekeeper with the crossbow trained on me again.

"Come inside." The marquis was not on-site. Nor was his wife, or anyone I knew to relate to. I am pretty sure that nobody else in this building rated higher than a lord or lady, so I'm five or six steps of fealty higher than any of them, and clearly nobody here cared. This building was a warehouse converted into a deathtrap with a prison cell in the center. All entrances barricaded save one, and piles of crates and stones arranged into waist-high barricades to assault any intruders.

And, there was a dazzling array of wards in the place, sigils scrawled so densely that it became truly decorative, a softening texture across the stone walls and wooden floorboards.

"Where's Amnie? Terald and Vanda? The mana-warriors that the marquis was hiring for this job," I clarified.

"They're on another assignment to free us up for this job," she said. I was not best pleased with that answer, it seems like Septimus does not trust the people I recommended. I am going to have to hire them back when this job is done, they deserve better than that. The woman gestured me over towards a makeshift kitchen. Not much more than a camp kitchen laid out in the corner, heating sigils for cooking and cooling sigils for storage.

This was the only time I'd seen real printed magic used for something as trivial as refrigerating sausage and heating up canned beans. Even in a Duke's household, we got by with root cellars, iceboxes, and wood-fire stoves. The Academy uses natural cooling and heating. Hell, the magister's college uses kitchens with mundane stoves and storage.

The fact that someone's paying scrivener's fees for things like that just so these operatives won't give away their presence with smoke from a stove, or need to leave the premises to visit a cold-storage room, tells me a lot. If nothing else convinced me that the Marquis is treating this like an elite Special Forces operation, this would be the moment that I realize what kind of resources and attention is being put into the job.

While I admired their hotplate and minifridge, the woman moved to her associates who were spread around the room, all in low voices. I'm much better at preventing eavesdropping than I am in performing it, so I have no idea what it is they said. But they checked their weapons, tightened straps, and adjusted their sightlines. A general cinching of tensions and heightening of readiness. I could see the outline of their battleplan here, and it did not have a Natalie-shaped space in that strategy.

There was no part of it that needed my input or action, and I don't think there were many places for me to stand that wouldn't be in someone's way. So I moved myself out of the way. I don't think they needed any roof coverage, but they did not have any roof coverage, so that was something I could do that gave me the chance to be involved without getting in their way. Besides, the Ebonder special ops team kinda freaked me out.

There was something I read once, an account written up about someone who came face to face with a wolf. The wolf didn't want to kill them, but it also didn't not want to kill them either. That's the impression from those Ebonder warriors. That whether they killed me or not was not part of a moral calculation. If I step in a bear trap it will break my leg. If I put my hand in a fire it will burn my skin.

If I make the wrong move around the Marquis's warriors, then whatever is left of me will be put in a shallow grave. So I sat on the roof and tried to be more inconspicuous than someone should be, sitting on a rooftop in a bustling industrial part of the city. Not as hard as it sounds, since most people don't look up, and those that do will assume someone on a roof has a reason for being there.

And also there was a huge distraction about a block away, as a broken-down magic-driven carriage came clattering and screeching down the road. I invoked the essence of the eagle and got myself a good look. A rather nondescript carriage with no horses and no traces, shuddering on warped axles and wobbling wheels, was riding up on curbs and clipping other carts. It was not observing traffic laws or right-of-way and was bashing its way along in a truly unsafe manner.

Carriages are expensive, even a small and stripped-down riding carriage is a significant purchase, a well-to-do family would treat one as an investment in the future. Private ownership of one is like a vacation house, there's a reason that most carriages you see on the streets are owner-operated cabs-for-hire, a professional investment.

Private carriages tend to be dressed up as ostentatious luxuries, with livery and banners and filigree decoration and maybe some gilding, because a few ounces of gold is a fairly small flamboyance after buying an entire carriage. Also, livery and filigrees make it harder to steal and sell a carriage. Getting the sigilry to move one of these things is an even bigger investment. Most people that do, will do so to save money in the long term.

Pay a small ransom to a scrivener today, and save yourself seventy or eighty years worth of feeding and caring for carriage-horses. The other reason to get a sigil-driven carriage is for performance, to do what a horsed carriage cannot: mostly going very fast or going a very long distance. Exceeding the normal limits. So, basically a big ol' souped-up hot rod. And if you see one of those without the flame decals and spoiler, you're seeing a performance machine that is deliberately undercover.

But to see one of those driven like a rented mule is almost unheard-of. After all, sigils can drive the carriage, but they can't make it fundamentally not a carriage. Horses or no, it is a vehicle with wooden wheels banded in iron, with a lathe-turned axle, leaf-spring suspension and a big top-heavy box. They're not made with ball-bearings, machined parts, high-tech alloys, self-administering synthetic oil, or a 'check engine' light. And they are not made to be run at sixty miles per hour for a full week.

Normally after a few hours of operation, a driver would walk around the vehicle and see what needs a tap, what needs a shim, what needs a nail. The roads here are harsher than a pitted gravel path on earth, and there are no pressurized rubber tires, so every vehicle is effectively riding on the rims. Riding them continuously with no repairs is just not done, because a small fix here, a nail or a turn or an adjustment, can stop a small problem from escalating.

A wobble now is a rattle in an hour, and a broken axle tomorrow. And you especially don't do that to a vehicle that starts as an investment equivalent to a summer home, magically supercharged.

So what is coming down the street right now is the equivalent of a super-secret spy car made to look like a regular model despite having a high-performance engine, limping down the street with half its paint, no windows, busted tires, the squealing of a bad timing belt, pouring radiator smoke with broken-out headlights, and maybe slightly on fire. This is a Rolls-Royce coming out of a demolition derby.

That's why everyone is staring at it- the owner had even sprung for the self-guiding features, there is no driver in the top bench, but the carriage has so many points of failure that the programmed directives are unable to compensate, and while I watched it hitched over and steered itself into a wall. The frame cracked, the undercarriage sagged, and it gave up the ghost. It could not have been more finished if all four wheels fell off.

The door was kicked open from the inside, and a screaming corpse came sprinting out at high speed, robes flapping around it. Fleshless feet struck the ground with painful noises, and its limbs pumped like a trained athlete despite having only dried-jerky muscle on its bones. People had stared in bemusement at the failing carriage, but a sprinting lich made the pedestrians scream and flee. The lich was screaming too, which may have been the oddest thing about this whole odd sight.

I was sitting, jaw-dropped, trying to take all this in. I did not react right away because I was just baffled at this incredibly bizarre chain of events. Meadwhite the lich did not need air to run full-tilt down the street straight towards me. But he did need air to yell. So with each heaving lungful of air, he shouted " Please make it stop!"