Paul Kidd - The Council of Blades

"Sire, I do believe that is your daughter on the balcony."

"Like enough." Mannicci scarcely cared enough to confirm it with a glance. "Her room is just above."

"Aaaaaah." Ilego swiveled snake-bright eyes toward his prince. "A pretty girl, by all accounts."

"I'd like to see whose accounts. I'd like to hire him." Prince Mannicci stirred laggards from his baggage train with a prod of his mace. "He'd be inexpensive to keep; such a man would like his meat very plain."

"But surely, my lord, she has spirit?"

"In a sense," said Mannicci. In truth, he rarely bothered to think about his sole offspring's character. Spirit in a daughter was considered about as desirable as dorsal guidance feathers on a prize-winning merino ram. "I believe she is a quiet girl-though much troubled by rats."

"Rats, my lord?"

"So I am told."

Prince Mannicci had neither the time nor inclination to bother himself about his daughter. His first spouse had died young; Mannicci's choice of a second wife had done much to line his own coffers, but very little to increase his domestic bliss. He knew he really ought to beget himself a son; unfortunately, Ulia Mannicci was the finest contraceptive device known to the Blade Kingdoms.

At his side, Gilberto Ilego turned his horse to face the palace balconies.

"You are hard on the girl. There are tales, my lord, of princesses whose beauty launched a thousand ships." Ilego faced his monarch with a bow. "Perhaps your own daughter might aspire to such a thing in her own small way. "A thousand troops, perhaps?"

Prince Mannicci dug his heels down and halted his mighty horse, creasing the corners of his eyes as he let his mind explore the flavor of Ilego's schemes.

A welcome diversion came in the form of a skinny youth dressed in the velvet finery of the royal court. The young man hovered nearby, wide eyed as a blushing beholder; he kept a leather portfolio clamped tight against his heart, as though he were using it to keep his internal organs from erupting out through his chest.

Prince Mannicci regarded the boy with a heavy frown; eye contact apparently won him a friend for life, and the youth instantly lunged forward and performed something that might possibly be mistaken for a bow.

"My lord! M-my lord prince." The boy almost choked himself on his own tongue as he hopelessly addled a carefully prepared speech. "Sir-I merely wished to say how… how invigorating your kingdom seems. How fresh, how inviting, how active!"

Insanity in a man so young seemed such a pitiable thing; Prince Mannicci leaned back in his saddle, cocking an ear toward Ilego, who duly leaned forward to whisper quiet words.

"It is one of the young gentlemen from Lomatra, my lord."

"Oh. Oh, yes." Aha-the prospective groom! Mannicci felt a sudden surge of interest. "Lorenzo Utrelli, I presume?"

The boy took the prince's smile as instant encouragement.

"My lord? My lord, I wondered if I might speak with you awhile? That is-I wonder if I can show you…"

At this point, the leather portfolio flipped open; cramming the wad of papers into the bole of a tree, Lorenzo inserted himself between the two older men and proudly spread out a parchment smothered in designs.

"My lords-I have ideas! Concepts, theories and designs the likes of which the world has never seen. Designs that will thrill you, my lords. Thrill you to the core!"

Prince Mannicci, ever the diplomat, wearily prepared himself to be bored. In contrast, Blade Captain Ilego stroked his mustache and cast an amused eye across the boy's diagrams.

"Say on, lad. Say on. It cannot be any less entertaining than the parade."

Finding himself with an audience at long last, Lorenzo seated himself in the crutch of an olive tree and used a green twig to point out the salient points of his inventions.

"Look you, sirs. I have been studying basic natural phenomena with an eye to making these phenomena work with us-for us." Paper fluttered as the boy avidly flicked through page after page of incomprehensible scrawls. "Ah! For instance… here-do you see? I have been experimenting with the forces that make solid objects fall."

A drawing appeared; a drawing showing a very badly rendered stick figure dropping objects from a tower. Lorenzo unleashed his excitement in measured little chunks, marking each point with a sharp wave of his olive twig.

"Now, consider the downward path of a falling object. Let us take two items identical in weight. A pound of feathers, and a pound of lead. Which of them will fall more slowly?"

"A pound of feathers." Mannicci suddenly found that he approved of the boy's logical mind-a reasonably desirable trait in a potential son-in-law. "What is your point?"

"Aaaah-but why do the feathers fall more slowly? The answer is, simply, air resistance! The feathers present a broad face to the air, thus slowing their descent due to the viscous qualities of the air itself."

Sitting cross-legged in his tree, Lorenzo made his points stab forward one by one.

"So, how is this phenomena useful to us? Well firstly, we have discovered that narrow objects fall more swiftly. I feel this may be useful for making some sort of aerial dart, or what I call a 'bomb.' But, certainly more valuable than that, I believe I can now create a fall-breaking machine! A device made from cloth that will slow the speed of a man's descent through the air, allowing him to alight as safe as if he were a pixie."

This declaration was met by a confused silence from the two armored noblemen. Loath to break the lad's enthusiasm, Prince Mannicci nevertheless felt it behooved him to give the boy unkind news.

"But my dear-um…"

"Lorenzo, my lord. Lorenzo Utrelli Da Lomatra!"

"Yes, quite…" The boy had the innocent, doelike eyes of a pet fawn unaware that it was being massaged with marinade. Prince Mannicci heaved an unhappy little sigh. "Yet, you must ask yourself, Lorenzo, just why you feel such a device to be useful?"

"Think of it, my lord. We could use my fall-breakers as a safety device… say, for the riders of hippogriffs."

"But our hippogriff riders are already provided with magical protection for such a case." The prince indicated an overflying squadron with a pained wave of his mace. "A one-use ring of feather falling, in point of fact…"

"But at massive cost, my lord! Think of the savings offered by a mechanical device."

The lad's mechanical device seemed to require a huge amount of silk, a fact which rather negated any claims to cheap production. Lorenzo felt his audience's interest waver, and desperately flicked on to other plans.

"Wait, my lord! If the sciences of the air don't interest you, then perhaps the study of heat? Surely a man of your education will be interested in this." Lorenzo turned a gaze so powerful and full of fire upon the older men that they involuntarily fell back. "I have here a design for a drill that uses heat to bore a hole through steel!"

Gilberto Ilego leaned forward with a look of cold concentration on his face. Lorenzo immediately stumbled onward with his inept sales technique.

"You see, my lords, the combination of these two chemicals creates an intense blaze of light. This light, I intend to focus using lenses like… like…" The boy's thoughts instantly conjured up an image of a short, freckled girl. "… like the lenses used in eye spectacles! This produces a beam of light-of heat-which can melt even the toughest steel.

"Imagine the benefits to industry, my lords! Handgun production would cheapen; we could use fire beams to drill holes into pure steel bar-stock! Smoke powder weapons would surely come into their own. We can use the beams to scribe delicate engravings… perhaps even to cut the finest mechanical parts…"

Captain Ilego viewed the drawings with a frown.