The crystal-breaking devices Caris and several other engineers had created over winter operated under the same design, powered by the aether as opposed to steam. Divers had taken clarion crystal off sunken Urovan submersibles and brought the pieces to Cosian for engineers to study how the Urovans cut them. The notes of those songs had been different than the clarion crystals used on land, meant for the water rather than the air.
It had taken Caris weeks to find the difference in pitch and tone in the Urovan clarion crystals. She’d broken more clarion crystal than she’d have liked, considering they only had access to E’ridia for limited trade of the commodity these days. But the end result was worth her efforts during long winter nights.
The crystal-breaking devices engineering teams were readying to deploy into the river were set up like a filtration machine, the design meant to disguise their true purpose. Each crystal had been painstakingly cut in order to amplify their song in the water and channel the splintering spell a warden who was also a magician had come up with for use in the poison fields. She’d created the spell through trial and error over the years and these days could shatter bone from half a mile away with a flick of her brass-plated wand. It made eradicating revenants on her border route easier, to be sure.
The engineers and fellow magicians had taken the framework of that spell and applied it against the Urovan-cut clarion crystal. Caris had found the shape that worked best in creating a song that shattered the clarion crystal used in Urovan submersibles, sinking them. The devices were less dangerous to soldiers, trade boats, and barges than using water mines.
While they’d been tested as extensively as they could in a scant few months, no one knew how well they would work when pressed into the war effort. But they had to try because if the devices worked, they’d keep Cosian and its citizens safe just a little longer.
It was the small victories Caris hoped for, because they’d had so few of those lately.
“We’ll work with our engineers to get the airships loaded quickly. Caris can help coordinate that effort. You needn’t worry that Caris will be on board when they launch,” Lore said to the general.
“If that’s settled, let’s get the cargo onto the trucks and out to the airfield. You can let the soldiers at Lockwood know we’ll be coming,” Enmei said.
Clarence looked as if he’d bit into the black coriche candies favored by miners and found it too bitter for his taste. Caris knew he’d rather she stay behind Cosian’s walls and never leave the city, but she’d sworn when she took up the mantle Meleri had guarded for her that she’d never be anyone’s puppet.
“Let me know the number of people going so we can figure out the housing situation,” Clarence said.
“We can bunk in the airships if need be.”
The Ashion army had slowly drawn out of Haighmoor after the Inferno. When parliament, at the behest of the Daijal court, cut funding for the military, it had been easy to close some of the army’s production factories while secretly appropriating others in eastern provinces with the help of the Clockwork Brigade. The sleight of hand had taken years to accomplish. The foresight of Meleri and the Ashion officers who still believed in the old monarchy was the only reason they’d been able to stand against the Daijal army for so long.
Lockwood used to be a frontier factory town that handled trade by river, filled with people who knew what hard work meant. They should have been far removed from the front lines, but war had found them anyway over winter. The Urovans had attacked from the river, damaging the town’s outer wall and forcing its citizens in that residential section to retreat behind the town’s inner wall for the duration of winter.
The damage to the outer wall hadn’t been fixed quickly enough to stop revenants getting through. It had taken wardens an entire week to flush out every last revenant hiding in the residential section before they could comfortably say it was safe. With most of the citizens already pulled back, the Ashion army had chosen to take over that part of the town, with soldiers bunking up in homes behind remade walls.
The people of Lockwood had traded in their old livelihoods for the war effort, and most everyone in that town worked to support the army now. Its production factory, once used to build farming tractors, armored crawlers, and other heavy vehicles, now churned out motor carriages meant to traverse rough terrain, trucks for troop transport, tanks, and digging machines for the trenches.
Enmei headed for the door, ending the meeting with his departure. Caris turned to follow him out, with Lore staying by her side. The Royal Guards fell in around them, a constant presence Caris had taken months to get used to.
Caris pulled her brass goggles down over her eyes once they stepped outside into the laboratory’s shipping yard. She slipped her fingers beneath the collar of her blouse to touch the gold necklace that held Nathaniel Clementine’s signet ring and a pair of clarion crystal shards.
The man she loved wasn’t nobility but came from a merchant family who had lost everything due to his and his parents’ ties to the Clockwork Brigade. Daijal had seized their Clementine Trading Company, his family shipped west after being snatched up by debt collectors, and Nathaniel had been turned into arionetka. He lived only because of a clockwork metal heart, thought a traitor by many because of it, despite the alchemist manipulation wardens had provided to give him back his mind and a fragile sense of free will.
People still saw Nathaniel as a risk—to the war effort and to Caris. Meleri no longer considered him a cog, and Nathaniel was kept away from all details on the war effort. Caris had fought to keep him involved because he’d suffered more than any of them, but Meleri—and later, the military command—had been against it. Caris had abided by their wishes, and even Nathaniel agreed with them, but it still felt like a betrayal on her part.
She wished desperately that he were there with her, despite the risks. She loved him when she hadn’t thought she’d ever learn how to want someone the way her peers had back when all she had to worry about was school and her company and being a cog.
Lore glanced at her, her expression softening. “You’ll see Nathaniel tonight. He’s always waiting for you at your home, no matter the hour.”
Caris dropped her arm to her side. “I know.”
Lore hooked her elbow around Caris’, veering in the direction Enmei was headed. The warden walked with a sure stride, his field leathers distinctive amidst everyone else’s uniform or everyday clothes. He was kitted out in the typical gear of a warden, though his bladed weapon of choice was a heavy battle-axe that he carried across his back at an angle with ease. The clockwork gears hidden in the handle distributed poison across the blade for fighting revenants but were just as deadly against the living.
Caris knew the devices they were putting into use in the battlefield were needed, but they were a stopgap measure at most. What Ashion desperately needed was allies, and so far, none had answered her envoys’ calls. Solaria had closed its border in the south, E’ridia was reluctant to give aid of any sort, and they’d not had any direct outreach to the Tovan Isles since the Inferno.
Honovi,jarlto Clan Storm and a fine aeronaut captain, was doing his best to convince his country’s ruling body to break out of its insular habit. So far, theComhairle nan Cinnidheanhad yet to pay heed to his arguments despite the atrocity E’ridia had sustained to their own government fromrionetkas. Honovi knew, like Caris did, that neutrality would save no country in the face of Eimarille’s desire to rule all of Maricol.
“This way,” Lore said, tugging at Caris’ arm.
The yard was lined with trucks that were already being loaded with their precious cargo while the motor carriages were parked in a designated section. Lore led her to one of those, neither of them surprised at being flagged down by a clerk who gladly gave them an update on the loading process so far.
After Caris finished speaking to the clerk, she and Lore climbed into the back seat of a motor carriage. Maurus Nash, captain of her Royal Guard, got behind the steering wheel. He closed the door to the motor carriage with a sigh. “It’s dangerous beyond the walls even if no sighting of the enemy has occurred, my queen.”
“My parents took me beyond the walls as a young girl because our business depended on tracking the poison data from field markers for testing purposes. I’m well aware of the dangers, captain. It won’t stop me from doing my duty,” Caris replied.
Maurus said no more to that and drove off the lot, keeping his attention on the street around them, pistol ever close at hand. The remaining Royal Guards were in the motor carriages directly before and after theirs, and the vehicles drove down the cobblestone street for the main city gate, following after several trucks.
