He looked around, not knowing what to do. His training had covered such circumstances, but to actually face them, to be desperately tired and surrounded by the dead while weapons he didn’t understand hurled death over long distances, left him momentarily paralyzed. For a moment he felt his youth and inexperience so heavily that he could not even think.
The Mechanic spoke again, her voice sharp. “We need to get out of here.” Then she looked startled. “I mean…”
Alain understood her hesitation. He could not imagine spending time in her company, either, even under these conditions. “I will try to stop them while you flee. I was contracted to protect this caravan and those in it. That means I have an obligation to protect you.”
“You protect me? A Mage protect me?” The Mechanic seemed to forget her fear momentarily as outrage bloomed. “That’s—”
Hoarse shouts sounded a short distance away. Alain licked lips dry with dust. “They have reached the front of the caravan.” He had regained some control now and kept all feeling from his voice.
“Aren’t you scared, Mage?” she asked. “You sound bored. What are you planning to do?”
Alain gazed down at his hands, then shrugged, feeling overwhelmed. “I will have to stand here and fight. There is nothing else to do.”
“Yes, there is. We can run.”
“We?” The single word made no sense.
“You and me. I won’t let anyone, even a Mage, die if I can help it! I don’t leave anyone! Not even you!”
Alain, baffled by her words and feeling fear bloom inside him again at the thought of death, fell back on his earliest training. “This world is not real. Dying is but the passing from one dream to another.”
The Mechanic stared at him as if his words had been just as incomprehensible to her. “You intend dying here because you think it doesn’t matter?”
“I know it does not matter,” Alain stated in as calm and emotionless a voice as he could manage.
The Mechanic’s eyes narrowed in thought. “Fine,” she said. “Your Guild contracted you to protect this caravan? To protect me? To do that, you’ll need to stay with me. We seem to be the last two alive, and if you stay here while I go, then you’ll be breaking your contract. Now, whether you like it or not, come on!”
Alain hesitated a moment longer as the Mechanic turned to go, then followed. After so many years of obedience to authority, it wasn’t easy to shake off the Mechanic’s commands, and her argument did seem reasonable.
As soon as the Mechanic was sure Alain was behind her, she started running off to one side, beckoning him to follow. Now that he was behind her, Alain could see a large pack on her back. He wondered what it contained that could be so important the Mechanic didn’t abandon it so as to flee faster. Treasure of some kind? The elders had always said that Mechanics were ruled by greed and deception.
They scrambled over rocks and up a steep slope, dust clouds still concealing them from the bandits. Why did she insist I come with her? Why am I following her? But he stayed with the Mechanic as she climbed.
The shouts were coming slowly closer, showing the bandits had kept moving forward but were being cautious, probably because the dust kept them from seeing very far. Only an occasional crash from one of the Mechanic weapons could be heard now.
As the Mechanic reached a long ledge and swung past a cluster of rocks, some figures suddenly emerged. Two had crossbows and the third a strange weapon with a hole in the end like the Mechanic’s hand weapon. All were pointing their weapons at her.
The Mechanic had frozen in the act of bringing up her hand weapon, staring at the bandits, clearly realizing that she was trapped. The bandits had not yet noticed the Mage lagging behind her.
Chapter Two
Alain was once again calling forth heat above his hand, his own remaining strength and the residual power here both draining like water into the spell. He had a moment to realize that he could have run again while the bandits were occupied capturing the Mechanic, but rejected the idea before it fully formed.
In the time required to create the spell, one bandit's finger twitched on the trigger of his crossbow. The Mechanic might have died then, but the bandit with the strange weapon struck aside the crossbow so that its bolt flew harmlessly away. “Fool! If any harm comes to her—”
The heat above his hand peaked. Alain placed it upon a boulder directly beside the man in the center of the group. An instant later the surface of the boulder exploded with the sound of shattering rock.
The man closest to the fireball uttered a single sharp cry as he was flung sideways, then collapsed. Ripped by sharp fragments of stone, his two companions were thrown outward and fell in tumbled heaps.
Alain bent over, then fell to his knees and sagged against the nearest rock, gasping for air and hoping no more bandits lurked nearby. Fighting off a blurring of his vision, Alain managed to look up, searching for more danger, and found his eyes focusing on the dead bandits. His earlier attacks had been at a distance and he had not seen the results. Now he could see that the side of the bandit nearest where he had placed the fire had been burnt black. Trails of red blood trickled away from the other dead bandits. Alain looked away from the bodies, feeling a sudden odd hollowness at seeing men he had killed. They are only shadows, he kept repeating to himself, but the words brought no comfort. Nausea rolled through him and he was grateful that he had not eaten for a while.
Alain gradually became aware that the Mechanic was staring at him with wide eyes. She took three steps to him, going to one knee and reaching out, then stopping her hand just before touching him. Even Mechanics, it seemed, knew that no one touched a Mage without a Mage’s permission. “Are you all right?”
He struggled to nod, unable to speak for a moment.
“What did—?” Rising again, the Mechanic ran to the rock Alain had just struck, avoiding the bodies and running her fingers above the crater on its surface. “It’s hot. Much hotter than the sun’s heat could account for. Superheated steam could do this, except that there’s no way you could have a steam boiler hidden under those robes. But there’s no apparent residue, either.” The Mechanic came quickly back to him, her expression determined. This time she reached to grab one arm and help Alain to his feet. “You can’t do this without burning something, using some accelerant. What is it?”
Startled by her touch on his robes, Alain took a moment to think through what she had said. His mind couldn’t concentrate, fuzzy with fatigue and fear, so he shook his head. “I do not know your words.”
“You have no idea what I’m talking about?”
“None.” More shouts came from behind and below, where the wreckage of the caravan lay. “We had better move from here. They may have noticed the sound of my spell breaking that rock.”
“Just a moment. Can you stand?”
After Alain nodded the Mechanic let go of his arm, spun around and picked up the strange metal object longer than her arm. Alain gazed at the thing, noting that it bore a superficial resemblance to a crossbow, except that it was longer and lacked the bow portion. The metal of the weapon gleamed under a sheen of dust. A pungent smell came from the thing, sharp and almost stinging to the nostrils but with an undertone of something deep and oily. He felt an urge to examine it more closely, but since it was obviously of Mechanic make he knew that would be foolish. His teachers had warned him of the traps Mechanics placed on their so called devices.
The Mechanic held the weapon, turning it in her hands as she hastily examined it. “Standard model repeating rifle. Made by Mechanics Guild workshops in the city of Danalee in the Bakre Confederation. This one’s new. Only been fired a few times.” She looked at Alain, then tossed it onto the ground. “But the lever action has been broken, so it won’t do us any good.” Glancing quickly toward the crossbows still clasped in the hands of the other two dead bandits and then averting her eyes, the Mechanic shuddered. “I don’t want a crossbow that bad.”