Jim Butcher - Cursors's Fury

“I understand why we have to do it like this, sir. But the Romans had a lot more practice than we do. Are you sure this one will work?”

“Oh,” Magnus said. “As sure as I can be. The fittings are stronger, the beams thicker. It’s quite a bit more stable than the last one.”

The last engine had simply shattered into a mound of kindling when they tested it. The current model, the fifth of its line, was considerably more sturdy. “Which means if it explodes again, it’s going to throw a lot more pieces around. And harder.”

They looked at one another. Then Magnus grunted and tied the end of a long cord to the pin that held the arm back. The pair of them backed away a good twenty paces. “Here,” Magnus said, offering Tavi the cord. “I did the last one.”

Tavi accepted it warily and found himself smiling. “Kitai would have loved to see this. Ready?”

Magnus grinned like a madman. “Ready!”

Tavi jerked the cord. The pin snapped free. The mechanism bucked in place as its arm snapped forward, and threw the stone into a sharp arc that sent the missile soaring into the air. It clipped a few stones from the top of a ruined wall, arched over a low hilltop, and dropped out of sight on the other side.

Magnus let out a whoop and capered about in a spontaneous dance, waving his arms. “Hah! It works! Hah! A madman, am I?”

Tavi let out an excited laugh of his own and began to ask Magnus how far he thought the engine had thrown the stone, but then he heard something and snapped his head around to focus on the sound.

Somewhere on the other side of the hill, a man howled a string of sulfurous curses that rose into the midmorning spring sky.

“Maestro,” Tavi began. Before he could say more, the same stone that they had just thrown arched up into the air and plummeted toward them.

“Maestro!” Tavi shouted. He seized the back of the old man’s homespun tunic and hauled him away from the engine.

The stone missed them both by inches and smashed into the engine. Wood shattered and splintered. Metal groaned. Chips broke off the stone and Tavi felt a flash of pain as a chunk the size of his fist struck his arm hard enough to make it go numb briefly. He kept his body between the wiry old Maestro and the flying debris and snapped, “Get down!”

Before Magnus had hit the ground, Tavi had his sling off his belt and a smooth, heavy ball of lead in it, as a mounted man rounded the side of the hill, sword in hand, his string of profanity growing louder as he charged. Tavi whirled the sling, but the instant before he would have loosed, he caught the sling’s pouch in his free hand. “Antillar Maximus!” he shouted. “Max! It’s me!”

The charging rider hauled on the reins of his horse so hard that the poor beast must have bruised its chin on its chest. The horse slid to a stop in the loose earth and stone of the dig site, throwing up a large cloud of fine dust.

“Tavi!” the young man atop the horse bellowed. Equal measures of joy and anger fought for dominance of his tone. “What the crows do you think you’re doing? Did you throw that stone?”

“You could say that,” Tavi said.

“Hah! Did you finally figure out how to do a simple earthcrafting?”

“Better,” Tavi said. “We have a Romanic war engine.” He turned and glanced at the wreckage, wincing. “Had,” he corrected himself.

Max’s mouth opened, then shut again. He was a young man come into the full of his adult strength, tall and strong. He had a solid jaw, a nose that had been broken on several occasions, wolfish grey eyes, and while he would never be thought beautiful, Max’s features were rugged and strong and had an appeal of their own.

He sheathed his weapon and dismounted. “Romanics? Those guys who you think didn’t have any furycraft, like you?”

“The people were called Romans,” Tavi corrected him. “You call something Romanic when it was built by Romans. And yes. Though I’m surprised you remember that from the Academy. “

“Don’t blame me. I did everything I could to prevent it, but it looks like some of the lectures stuck,” Max said, and eyed Tavi. “You nearly took my head off with that rock, you know. I fell off my horse. I haven’t done that since-”

“The last time you were drunk,” Tavi interjected, grinning, and offered Max his hand.

The big young man snorted and traded a hard grip with Tavi. “Furies, Calderon. You kept growing. You’re as tall as me. You’re too old to grow that much.”

“Must be making up for lost time,” Tavi said. “Max, have you met Maestro Magnus?”

The old man picked himself up off the ground, brushing away dirt and scowling like a thunderstorm. “This? This mental deficient is Antillus Raucus’s son?”

Max turned to face the old man, and to Tavi’s surprise his face flushed red beneath his tanned skin. “Sir,” Max said, giving an awkward duck of his head. “You’re one of the people my father bid me give his regards should I see you.”

Magnus arched a silvery eyebrow.

Max glanced at the wreckage of the engine. “Uh. And I’m sorry about your, uh… your Romanic thing.”

“It’s a war engine,” Magnus said in a crisp tone. “A Romanic war engine. The carvings we’ve found refer to it as a mule. Though admittedly, there seems to be some kind of confusion, since some of the earlier texts use the same word to describe the soldiers of their Legions…” Magnus shook his head. “I’m wandering again, excuse me.” The old man glanced at the ruined war device and sighed. “When is the last time you spoke to your father, Maximus?”

“About a week before I ran off and joined the Legions, sir,” Max said. “Call it eight years or so.”

Magnus’s grunt conveyed a wealth of disapproval. “You know why he doesn’t speak to you, I take it?”

“Aye,” Max said, his tone quiet. Tavi heard an underpinning of sadness in his friend’s voice, and he winced in sympathy. “Sir, I’d be glad to fix it for you.”

“Would you now?” Magnus said, eyes glinting. “That’s quite generous.”

“Certainly,” Max said, nodding. “Won’t take me a minute. “

“Indeed not,” Magnus said. “I should think it a project of weeks.” He lifted his eyebrows and asked Max, “You were aware, of course, that my research compels us to use strictly Romanic methods. No furycrafting.”

Max, in the midst of turning to the war engine, paused. “Um. What?”

“Sweat and muscle only,” Magnus said cheerfully. “Everything from harvesting timber to metal fittings. We’ll rebuild it. Only the next one needs to be about twice as large, so I’m glad you’re volunteering your-”

Tavi got nothing more than a flicker of motion in the corner of his eye to warn him, but suddenly every instinct in his body screamed of danger. “Max!” Tavi shouted, even as he dived at the Maestro again.

Max spun, his sword flashing from its sheath with the speed only a wind-crafter could manage. His arm blurred into two sharp movements, and Tavi heard two snapping sounds as Max cut a pair of heavy arrows from the air with the precision only a master metalcrafter could bring to the sword, then darted to one side.

Tavi put a low, ruined wall between the attackers and the Maestro and crouched there. He looked over his shoulder to see Max standing with his back to a ten-foot-thick stone column that had broken off seven or eight feet above the ground.

“How many?” Tavi called.

“Two there,” Max replied. He crouched and put his hand to the ground for a moment, closing his eyes, then reported, “One flanking us to the west.”

Tavi’s eyes snapped that way, but he saw no one among the trees and brush and fallen walls. “Woodcrafting!” he called. “Can’t see him!”