Free The Wizard That Wasn't (Mechanized Wizardry) by Ben Rovik Page A

minutes in the morning, before stumbling from his apartment in the Toss down to the warehouse to deal with gear for the feastday.)  Before leaving, she’d specifically given him her blessing to try the pingdu calabra without her presence.  Rather, she’d told him, “A program never works the first try.  If you can’t wait until morning to get started poring over six square meters of metal to figure out which little perforations need re-punching, you’re a bigger masochist then I took you for.”
    “I guess I am, Sam,” Lundin said aloud as he took the first pair of disks in hand.  He crouched down by the open Melodimax and gingerly dropped the pitch disk onto its needle, balanced over the long comb that would pluck the perforations and produce sound.  Below the pitch apparatus was the second drum which controlled articulation, the movements of the mouthpiece, and the timing of the bellows to modify the pitches into speech.  Lundin set the companion articulation disk on its needle, and used a stick, held to notches on the edge of each disk, to line up the two up at their appropriate starting points.  With a degree of trepidation, Lundin swung the side panel of the Melodimax closed.  It latched with a click, hiding the intricate gearwork and painstakingly pressed magical disks from view.  The squawk box didn’t look like much from the outside; just a bulky red-brown cabinet with a wide, weathered trumpet emerging from its top like a piece of unfortunate sculpture.
    There was a single, yellowing switch on the near corner of the box.  Horace Lundin held his breath and flicked the switch.
    “Pingdu h’leth dagriss ith m’navei,” a voice blared out, far louder than he’d expected.  Lundin recoiled and caught himself against a table, his heart pounding.  He listened, fascinated, as the voice continued at an even pace over the audible whir of the squawk box’s generator and the muffled click-clacking of the wooden teeth hidden within the trumpet.  The squawk box was either a very high tenor or a middle-of-the-road alto, with a clipped, percussive quality.  Phrases of what may have been flawless Mabinanto filled the room in a high drone, punctuated by higher pitches and unexpected drops.  Lundin leaned back against the table, catching his breath and staring at the motionless, unhurried machine.
    “Well then,” he said, uncertainly, as the words kept spilling out.
    By Dame Miri’s reckoning, each of the pairs of Mabinanto disks would take about five minutes for the squawk box to recite at a normal human pace.  So Lundin would need to swap out these disks for the second part of the pingdu calabra in just a few minutes—and would have to do it quickly, or risk letting the magical energy invoked by the first part of the spell dissipate from an overly long gap in speech.  Or would he?  Archimedia said that sometimes wizards would meditate or dance in silence for long portions of a casting, if that was what the spirits called for.  So maybe going too quickly would ruin the spell.  But if there was a middle ground between too fast and too slow, how was he possibly supposed to know what it was?  Thirty seconds?  Forty-five minutes?  How do wizards have any idea how to do this? he thought, fingers resting nervously on the next disk.
    “—horask h’ins sh’mai destaravi calabra ith gorunda—”
    Maybe wizards start gesticulating just to have something to do while they say the words , Lundin thought.  He found his canteen and took a long swig of water, swishing the liquid back and forth in his mouth.  The Melodimax kept intoning away, the rise and fall of its words becoming increasingly hypnotic.  Lundin tried to stay focused, but between the relentless pace of the speech, the language barrier, and his sleep deprivation, it was almost impossible to stay attentive to the individual words.  Wait , he thought suddenly, even if I wasn’t falling asleep standing up, how am I going to know if this