Free The Mask And The Master (Mechanized Wizardry Book 2) by Ben Rovik Page B

decibel or two, but the faces of his audience didn’t get any friendlier.  Lord and Lady Quentonne were glowering at him, their heads made small by the expansive golden ruffs around their necks.  Blonde, stick-thin, and dressed in jade damask, they looked like angry sunflowers.  Bevelli, the loudest of the merchants, was bellowing just as fiercely at her colleagues in the audience as she was Lundin, her callused hands sawing through the air in a blur.  But over where the wizards were standing was where the mood was truly ugly, with the ugliest sentiments of all coming from—
    “Mister Lundin,” Tymon said, stepping forward from the pack with a sneer, arms akimbo.  The old wizard’s sleeveless tunic showed off the wiry muscles in his bare arms, and a nasty little skull hung suspended from a red braided chain around his neck.  He sounded so much like his grandson that Lundin had to fight down a new flash of panic; it was like a thinner, balder Sir Kelley was berating him in public again.  “I await your apology,” the old man said.
    “My—my apology?”  Lundin hadn’t collected his thoughts enough yet to know what to say, yet alone how to respond to a question like that.  The audience quieted down, their focus flicking from Lundin to Tymon.  Blood was about to spill, they sensed, and they didn’t want to miss a drop.
    Tymon thrust his chin forward defiantly.  “I do not ask for one for myself; though let the record state,” he declaimed, turning to the crowd with his finger in the air, “that Horace Lundin took advantage of my wisdom and my wife to begin his irresponsible foray into the arcane arts...”
    The room went aflutter with whispers.  “What does he mean?”  “Took advantage of his wife?”  “Shameful—” “Doesn’t surprise me—” 
    Lundin stepped forward to the very lip of the stage, his temper rising.  “Listen, please,” he shouted.  “He means I went to him and his wife, Archimedia, when I was first doing research about magic.  He didn’t help me.  Archimedia did.  That’s all.”  The whispering became disappointed, with a few shrill voices hoping to keep the scandal alive.
    Tymon’s eyes flashed as he howled in fine oratorical style, “‘That’s all?’  He takes my knowledge of the magical arts; knowledge gleaned from a lifetime of experience, study, and devotion to the Mobinoji; chops it into dead fragments on his laboratory table, and sticks it into a metal shell so he can perform blasphemous acts at the flick of a switch?  And he says ‘that’s all?’  Sir, again, I do not ask for myself; but for honorable practitioners of magic the world over, by the Spheres, you will apologize for what you have done!”
    A chorus of assent came from most of the other wizards, who nodded vigorously and clapped their hands, shaking a cloud of dust off their dirty bodies.  Lundin tried to ignore the airborne dirt, stifling an urge to hold his breath.
    “What I learned from you, Mister Tymon,” he said, as calmly as he could manage, “was that there was no one way to make magic.  Your process changes from day to day and spell to spell.  And I’m sure if we compared your methods to, uh—”
    “Ronk,” a short wizard with blue-black skin said, as Lundin pointed at him searchingly.
    “—Mister Ronk’s, there, the differences would be even bigger.  Totally different approaches!  And yet, magic goes on, right?  There’s plenty of room for you to all be successful wizards, approaching magic in your own individual ways.  That’s all we’re trying to do here in the workshop; make magic in our own way—”
    “Made any magic yet?”  Bevelli called out, her brow furrowed with suspicion.
    “I—”  Lundin caught himself.  There was only so much he was willing to say in public.  “Well, as you saw in the first demonstration, when the spell box speaks magical words, the ojing , or magic detectors, respond to the presence of magic in the air.  As our