S Farrell - A Magic of Dawn

At least, that was the theory. Her last, far cruder, version had nearly worked, as she’d told Karl. Nearly-she still bore the scars from that experiment. The barrel of the device had been too thin or the metal flawed or her hole bored at a slight angle. The explosion of the black sand had caused the barrel to rupture, spraying the room with metal fragments, one of which had cut a deep gash in Varina’s arm-two hands higher and it would have hit her face, a hand to the side and it might have penetrated her chest. She could’ve been blinded or killed-that’s what she hadn’t told Karl.

With the thought of his name, the pall threatened to return, and she forced herself to smile at Pierre and pretend. “Pierre, I should have had you craft this long ago. This is far more elegant than the contraptions I was making myself. All this lovely work. It’s just.. . What if it breaks like the last one?”

“Then you can tell me what I need to do to make the next one work better, eh?” He grinned again. “Go on. Try it. I’m dying to see.” His eyes widened suddenly as he realized what he’d said. “A’Morce, I.. .”

Varina smiled at him, touching his hand. She shook her head. “I don’t know,” she told him. Until now, she’d conducted all her experiments alone. The other Numetodo knew that she was experimenting with some kind of device to deliver black sand, but no one-not even Karl-had known the specifics. “Pierre… it’s dangerous. If…” Excuses. That’s all they were. She didn’t want him to be there; she could see from the way the lines of his face fell that he understood that.

He frowned. Shrugged. “Whatever you wish, A’Morce,” he said. He moved to the door of the room; almost, almost she called out to him, feeling guilty, but the lethargy that had wrapped her for the last several days made her sluggish and slow, and she did not.

The door closed behind him.

She was in a basement room of the Numetodo House on the South Bank, one of the several laboratories there. Her laboratory. It was here that Varina, years ago, had ferreted out the formula for making the Tehuantin black sand. It was here that she had worked on developing the Westlander magic as well: the physically-demanding ability to enchant an object to hold a spell. She had spent many long hours here. Too many, she thought sometimes. It sometimes seemed that her entire life had been spent here. Alone, most of that time. Every mark, every scratch on the furniture, every stroke of paint on the walls reminded her of the past.

Varina had set the room carefully: at the longest end stood a fabric-filled dummy, wearing a set of old, battered plate mail Commandant cu’Ingres had given her. At the other end, she’d placed a table with a heavy wooden vise. One of the things she’d learned in the course of this experiment was that the device would recoil when the powder was set alight. During one of the experiments, she’d injured her wrist when a version of the sparkwheel had slammed hard against her hand when fired. Since then, she’d used the vise to hold the various incarnations of sparkwheels, using a string tied around the trigger mechanism to set them off-it was that arrangement that had probably saved her from further injury when the barrel had shattered on the last one.

She took Pierre’s sparkwheel over to the table. Gently, carefully, she filled the pan with black sand. She’d prepared paper “cartridges” with more black sand and a lead ball; she tamped that into the barrel. She folded a cloth around the barrel-“It’s so beautiful I don’t want to scratch it in the vise,” she would have told Pierre, had he been there-and clamped it down, making certain it was aimed directly at the dummy’s chest. She cocked back the pyrite clamp and tied a string to the trigger. She moved behind the table, holding the string.

The barrel of the sparkwheel pointed ominously at the mail-clad dummy. She tugged the string.

The wheel spun, sparks flew. There was a loud bang and white smoke poured from the end of the barrel and the pan. From the other end of the room, she heard a distinct, metallic ping.

Varina waved at the acrid smoke. She peered at the dummy: in the middle of the chest plate, a dark hole had appeared. Varina shuffled over to it as quickly as she could, leaning over to examine it. There was a hole as thick around as her index finger, the edges torn and pressed inward. She put her finger into the hole-she could not feel the bottom of it, and the hole expanded as it burrowed into the dummy’s stuffing. Somewhere deep in there, pieces of the lead ball were buried. Varina realized that she was holding her breath.

A sword cut would have been turned by this armor. An arrow from a bow would have rebounded. A bolt from a crossbow might have penetrated it, but not so deeply.

It worked. Had that been a garda standing there, he would be on the ground, bleeding terribly and perhaps dead…

She could imagine it, and it wasn’t a pleasant vision; she’d seen too many people die in battle. She straightened. She went back to the table, looking closely at the sparkwheel in its vise. It appeared whole and unaffected, the barrel still straight and untouched except for a smear of black soot around the end. There were soot marks around the pan as well, but otherwise the weapon appeared to be intact. Varina unclamped the vise, picking up the device again. She held it out at arm’s length, sighting down the barrel at the dummy.

Well, old woman, there’s the obvious next step, if you want to take it… It sounded like Karl’s voice, chuckling as he admonished her. The rememberance brought tears to her eyes, and she had to stop for a moment and fight back the grief. She laid the sparkwheel on the table, and after a few moments, began to refill the pan with more black sand and tamp another paper cartridge into the barrel. She picked up the weapon, pulling back the pyrite clamp to cock it. Her hands were trembling slightly as she aimed the weapon. She brought her other hand up to steady it as she sighted down the barrel. She wondered, for a breath, if she was being reckless and foolhardy, if she should wait and repeat the experiment as before, but even as the thought came to her, she pulled the trigger, closing both eyes as she did so.

The report of the sparkwheel was terrible, and the weapon bucked in her hand, though not so terribly as she remembered. She lowered the weapon, peering at the dummy. Yes, there was a second hole in the armor, this one on the other side of the chest plate and higher.

Someone knocked on the door of the laboratory. “A’Morce, are you all right?” a voice called faintly.

“Yes,” she said. “I’m fine. Everything’s fine.”

She sat in the single chair in the room, cradling the sparkwheel in her lap. It was warm, and a thin trail of smoke still wafted from the barrel. She stared at it: her creation.

Anyone could wield this. It takes little skill and a few moments to learn. With this, anyone could kill another person from a distance, even a garda in armor. She had always been able to imagine possibilities; Karl had always said that was what had made her a good researcher for the Numetodo. “You have imagination,” he’d told her. “You can see possibilities where no one else does. That’s the best magic of all to have.”

The line of research that had produced the sparkwheel had been due to that kind of serendipity-she’d been experimenting with a new mixture of black sand, a few years ago. She placed a small amount of the black sand in the bottom of a narrow metal container; she’d tamped it down with a stone pestle; she hadn’t noticed that the pestle was cracked, and that she’d left behind a chunk of the pestle in the container. She used a fire spell to set off the black sand… and the fragment of pestle had been propelled out of the end of the container to slam against the ceiling of the laboratory. The gouge in the wooden beam was still there, above the table. She’d realized then that might be another use for the black sand than simple unfocused destruction.