No, no, the beast wasn’t here. It couldn’t be, because she was doing exactly as it had ordered. Exactly.
Half a dozen guards blocked the way back down the stairs, but even they wouldn’t prevent her from fleeing if necessary. If these Ivaslanders were keeping a rancor in the tower, she’d gather up all her obsidian and escape this wretched kingdom.
And promptly (probably) die.
She breathed in through her nose and out through her mouth, ordering her hummingbird heart to slow.
All she had to do was help them finish their mal-device. That was the only thing it had demanded of her. And if she could do this, she could do anything. She could take the crowns of Embria and Caberwill, and Ivasland, too, while she was at it; the southern kingdom clearly needed a much stronger leader, and she could deliver the improvements they were desperate to attain.
Just one step at a time. First, the mal-device.
“It does smell rather bad,” the queen was saying. “That’s why we moved this laboratory up here, where the wind can whisk away the stink. On still days, though…” She wrinkled her nose.
Abagail pushed open a door at the top of the tower.
“Your Majesty!” A trio of young men stopped what they were doing and bowed. No, they were two young men and one young woman; her hair was cropped short and she wore trousers like the boys, but she was much prettier than either of them. She looked at Hanne, appraisingly. Appreciatively?
Hanne smiled at her.
The girl dropped her face to hide her own smile.
“These are our malicists,” Queen Abagail said. “Bear, Barley, and Mae. The rude one is Barley.”
One of the boys—the scrawnier of the two, who wore glasses and had crow’s feet around his eyes from squinting—frowned. Barley, presumably. “I think you mean Mae is the rude one.”
The queen ignored him. “These are the best malicists in all Ivasland. They’ve been working on the project since its inception. They know everything there is to know about trapping and moving malice.”
“Pleased to meet you,” Hanne lied. “I’m Hildy Boone. I suppose you’ve been told I was coming.”
“Just yesterday,” Barley said. “But we don’t need your help.”
“We’re glad to have you,” said Mae, the girl still looking at Hanne in a way that left no doubt she saw through the embedded road grime and weeks of starvation. Even in this state, Hanne was the best-looking person in this room and everyone knew it.
“This is where we’re developing the device.” Queen Abagail motioned around the workroom, indicating all the cluttered tables and shelves packed with bits of metal and wire, alembics and books, bottles and tubes of strange substances, and many other unidentifiable objects. A large sheet of paper, crisscrossed with lines, rested on a table near the trio of researchers, weighed down with a handful of small cogs. A diagram.
“It doesn’t look like much,” Hanne said. “And everyone here is awfully young.”
The queen’s lip curled in annoyance. “I’m sure the machine will look more impressive when you finish it. As for the abundance of youth, well, Bear, Barley, and Mae are rising stars in their fields. We chose to employ students for this task rather than professors, due to the freshness of their thoughts and their openness to this work.”
Something in that sentence made Mae visibly flinch.
How interesting.
“It’s an honor to work with all of you,” Hanne said finally.
Hopefully, with the rancor’s knowledge branded into her mind, finishing the machine wouldn’t take long. The faster she did this, the faster she could leave. Besides, it seemed entirely likely that her absence was causing problems for Embria and Caberwill. She wasn’t certain how long she’d been missing in regular time, but even a few days could have dire consequences for the kingdoms and their alliance.
And if those brutish Caberwillines had harmed Nadine, Hanne would kill them all.
Finally, after a significant look Hanne’s way, Abagail left the laboratory.
“All right,” Hanne said when she was alone with the malicists. “Let’s get started.”
* * *
The machine wasn’t large—only the size of a stack of books, plus the bulb protruding from the top. The metal plates that would hide the machine’s innards were unscrewed and lying on the table, giving Hanne a good look at the tubes and wires that ran inside.
“We’ve had two main hurdles,” Mae explained.
Hanne nodded absently, still looking over the machine while she wore her best judging face. She needed to learn about it without revealing that she had very little idea of what she was seeing. The rancor had told her only what the device required in order to be complete, but if Hanne wanted to bring the design to her own people, she needed to understand it. Certainly, she could try to steal the diagram, but in the hour she’d been in the lab, Bear and Barley watched her with suspicious eyes, and Mae…Mae just watched her.
Mae pointed to an opening covered by a fine metal mesh. “The biggest was drawing in malice from malsites without absorbing other matter as well. We tried several different filters, but eventually settled on a system that takes in everything and allows only non-malice to exit through the valve over here.” She pointed to the other side of the machine. “This way, the bulb fills up, and everything that isn’t malice is forced out by pressure.”
“Yes, that seems logical.” Hanne tried to remove the filter to get a look at it, but it was soldered into the machine. Chances of her being able to identify what it was made from were slim, anyway.
“Of course, that means we need a containment bulb that can withstand pure malice. It’s so corrosive that it disintegrates every material we’ve tried.” Bear motioned at a series of glass and metal bulbs on a shelf. Most were blackened and eaten away from the inside. “We even tried obsidian, but not surprisingly it weakened the malice. Without full potency, it’s useless as a weapon.”
Well, that made perfect sense. Why weaken a weapon against one’s enemies? Hanne hadn’t been giving Ivasland enough credit, she realized. They could be as ruthless as anyone.
“All that said, we’ve had measurable movement of malsite pellicles when we’ve placed a device just inside.” Bear grinned widely.
“Just in the bipermeable pellicles, of course,” Mae added.
“Unfortunately,” said Bear, “the basic nature of unipermeable malsites prevents us from using those, unless we can somehow draw all of that site’s malice into the machine. Otherwise, the machine can go in—”
“But it can’t get out.” Hanne bit the insides of her cheeks to keep her expression neutral. “Yes, that’s how unipermeable malsites work.”