All The Turns of Light (Paths of Shadow Book 2) by Tuttle Frank

Author:Tuttle, Frank [Tuttle, Frank]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Sizzling Lizard Press
Published: 2014-11-15T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 10

“What’s all this?” Mug asked, stirring his leaves and blinking the sleep from his twenty-nine eyes. “Mistress, have you cut a hole in the ceiling?”

Meralda nodded, mopping sweat from her face. “Technically, that’s a deck, since we’re aboard an airship.”

“Deck or ceiling, it’s still a bloody great hole, must I ask again?”

Meralda grinned and climbed onto her desk. She then reached up into the hole, struggled with something in the ceiling for a moment, and managed to pull a pair of thick cables through the opening.

“I need electricity,” she said. “For the new instruments.”

Mug gazed about the cabin.

While he’d slept, Meralda had been hard at work.

Both bicycles were disassembled. Every electric lamp in the cabin had been opened, and wires ran from their empty sockets. The leavings of the telescope project had joined the bicycle frames in the center of the room, where the lines from the lamps converged into the machine Meralda was constructing.

Four bicycle wheels turned slowly in the dim light. Chains shuttled through gears with well-oiled clicks. A single beam of white light rose up from the deck in the center of the wheels. The beam entered the remains of a jewelry box, and escaped to fall on the spinning rims from lenses set into each of the box’s four faces. Tiny shards of broken mirrors reflected the lights back toward the center of the machine, which buzzed and sparked as the wheels rotated.

“This is why we’ll never be able to keep a maid,” Mug said.

Meralda heaved and yanked, and another yard of thick black cable emerged. “I’m going to find out why I’m surrounded by household goods, and put a stop to it.”

“Well, you’ve certainly murdered a pair of perfectly good bicycles. What is that thing?”

“That thing is a four-axis balanced-load thaumeter,” replied Meralda. She leaped down from her desk. “It will show the direction, the intensity, and the temporal alignment of whatever is materializing objects about me.”

“Not to raise uncomfortable lines of inquiry, Mistress, but what if the source is you?”

“It will show that too.”

Beside the thaumeter, a coil of glowing wires wound up and around the remains of the hat rack, where they terminated in a sparking globe that hung just below the ceiling. Meralda pulled the cables to it, and set about stripping the insulation.

“And that?” asked Mug.

“A simple charge detector,” Meralda replied. She looked up at Mug and grinned. “It struck me last night, when I was talking to the Queen. There aren’t any bangs when new objects materialize. No sparks either. Why aren’t there bangs, Mug?”

Mug flew his cage close to Meralda, his eyes wide. “That’s a live wire, Mistress,” he said.

“I’m wearing rubber gloves,” Meralda said. “No bangs! No sparks! Mug, if these objects were actually transported somehow from thousands of miles away and thousands of feet below, what would you expect their reaction to be upon their release into this new environment?”

“Well, straightaway, the cat did something rude in the corner,” Mug began.

Meralda used her wire cutters as a stabbing finger.

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