Zachariah sat on the roof of his workshop. He watched the city’s air as he thought
about what he had done, what he had to do, and what he could do with what he had.
He had a bottle of tea by his leg as he watched the clouds.
The improvements on the cart were coming along. He could go faster along the
ground if he wanted. It tended to scare animals with the sound, but otherwise it was
well in hand.
The flying machine was not going so well. They had an engine design from the cart
that they could adapt, but they were having problems with the weight and how the
design of the wings should go to give them lift and speed.
One of the reasons he had decided to sit on the roof was he and Bolan were snapping
at each other over every decision.
They had made progress, and the air race was still months away. If they could iron
things out, they could get a flying machine in the air on time.
At the moment, things weren’t going as smoothly as either of them wanted, and
Zachariah didn’t know how to fix that.
When he finished his tea, he would go over the plans again. Maybe he would see
something that he had missed.
He heard an expletive from below. Maybe one of the children had done something to
the neighbors. He had found they loved doing tricks when they weren’t helping him.
He pushed himself to his feet, grabbed his bottle, and walked to the edge of the roof.
He looked down in the street. He sipped his tea as he frowned at the tableau below.
One of Zachariah’s neighbors had a hand upraised. Her cart lay on its side.
Vegetables and broken eggs had been dumped in the street. Some loud language
escaped her lips as she railed on a stranger standing in the street next to the cart.
The stranger looked at her and walked away. He trailed a rod behind him as he
walked. A small spark cut into the road as he moved. He walked in a circle, then
added some lines with the rod.
Zachariah had the feeling he had seen that drawing before somewhere else. Where?
It bothered him, and his memory didn’t want to help ease his mind.
The man walked away, ignoring the ranting woman as he moved. He carried the rod
across his shoulder as he made his way down the street.
Zachariah went to the hatch he had cut in the roof so he could get up there in the first
place. He looked down in his shop. Bolan stood at the work table with a drawing in
hand. Sola sat on the floor playing fetch with Hardy. He had grown to the size of a
hunting dog.
How big would he get? Zachariah didn’t have the time to consider the answer to that
question. He had something he had to do right now.
“Bolan!,” Zachariah shouted. “I need you to go outside and help Mistress Tom with
her cart. There’s a drawing carved in the street. I need a picture of it. This is
important.”
Bolan placed the drawing on the table and jogged to the door. Knife dropped from its
nest and followed with its eight legs. He vanished into the street.
“Sola,” Zachariah called down. “I need Hardy.”
“You heard Da,” said Sola. “It’s time for work.”
Hardy extended his wings and flew up to the roof. He regarded Zachariah with his
composite eyes in a way that said what do you want, old man?
“I need you to find a man that just left here,” said Zachariah. “He was carrying a rod
made of orange material. He went east from here, but he might have turned in any
direction. I need you to find him and follow him.”
Hardy sailed into the air. He pulled his wings in and blasted across the sky like
cannon shot.
Zachariah went to the edge of the roof. Bolan had the cart on its wheels. He and Knife
were picking up the vegetables and putting them in the wooden box. He needed to get
downstairs.
The symbol was the most important thing, but he didn’t know why. He had to find
that memory and there was only one way to do it. He had to build a memory machine
with Gold Bug and hope that it showed him the right memory.
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Zachariah descended the ladder he had hooked to the hatch and secured to the floor
at the bottom. He had used the three daemons to put everything in place. He stepped
off the ladder and went to the supply room. He needed a piece of metal to give his
daemon.
Gold Bug could build wonderful things. They weren’t permanent. They only had one,
maybe two uses, before they broke apart under the strain. Anything they wanted to
use based on what the daemon did had to be built from scratch out of real parts.
Zachariah didn’t mind. It made fixing things for other people easier, and gave a
challenge to building things for himself.
“Come out, Gold Bug,” said Zachariah. “We have work to do.”
“What’s going on, Da?,” asked Sola.
“I saw something from the roof,” said Zachariah. “It reminded me of something. I
asked for Hardy to follow the man responsible in case we needed to know where he
went.”
“So what do you plan to do now?,” Sola asked. She waved a hand at her father pulling
pieces of metal for Gold Bug to eat.
“Gold Bug is going to make a memory machine so I can remember what was
important about the drawing,” said Zachariah. “Once I know why it is important, then
I can figure out what to do.”
Bolan burst into the workshop with a piece of paper in his hand. Knife skittered
behind him, mechanical legs tapping on the floor.
“Here’s your drawing,” said Bolan. “Mistress Tom said the guy you were interested
in knocked her cart over to move it out of the way for what he did in the street.”
“I feel she is lucky to be alive,” said Zachariah. He took the drawing and looked at
it. It triggered the same feeling even replicated by the daemon spider.
“All right,” said Zachariah. “This is the plan at the moment. Gold Bug is going to
build a memory machine for me. Hopefully this will tell me what I am trying to
remember. When that is done, we will consider options.”
“We might have to chase the guy down is what I am hearing,” said Bolan.
“Then you are hearing incorrectly, because we don’t know where he went, or if Hardy
caught up with him,” said Zachariah. “Now I need a chair, then we can get to work.
I’ll need the two of you to make notes about the memory. I don’t know how lucid I
will be.”
“Are you sure you want to do this, Da?,” asked Sola. “We could just ask the man after
Hardy comes back and tells us where he settled for the night.”
“He might not want to answer our questions,” said Zachariah. He turned the chair to
face the only wall clear of drawings and plans. “I wouldn’t be bothered by this if it
weren’t the memory popping up. Once I know, it will probably be something
unimportant.”
The two children looked at each other. Memories didn’t rate more than a brief
mention from the machinist. He didn’t talk about them for more than a second, didn’t
seem to care about them except as things to show him not to do things that would get
him hurt or killed.
They had never seen him so much as obsess over a memory of a treasured item in the
almost two years the three of them had been living together.
If it wasn’t about fixing a current problem, Zachariah didn’t seem to care one way,
or the other.
Now he was proposing hooking himself to a machine and finding out what a weird
drawing meant to him.
That was an abrupt change in his basic nature.
Zachariah sat down in the chair. He gestured for Gold Bug to get to work. The insect
ate all of the metal to multiply and create the process it needed to build the machine
his partner wanted. It affixed all the components to the chair, with the last being a
mask over the Riordianian’s face.
“Get ready, Knife,” said Bolan. “We’ll need drawings for all this.”
Gold Bug flipped a switch on one of the components. The mask created a light beam
that struck the wall. Pictures formed of someone walking in a street.
“That’s Riordiana,” said Sola. “That’s the old workshop ahead.”
“No wonder your father had problems remembering things,” said Bolan. Knife
produced drawing after drawing of the memory as they watched.
The point of view turned in place. A drawing marked the street at the corner of the
intersection close to the shop. One hand went up as if to rub a chin as the point of
view stared at the drawing. People, and daemons, moved back and forth in the line
of sight, as he contemplated the drawing. The point of view looked up to see a woman
on a flying insect drop down out of the sky.
“That’s my ma,” said Sola. “She’s wearing the scarf she got before she was killed.”
“He saw the drawing before the destruction of the city,” said Bolan. “The only reason
he remembered it is because he studied it because it was something new in the
neighborhood. He was probably trying to figure out what it meant.”
“Ma got her scarf a few days before she was killed,” said Sola.
The light snapped off. Zachariah raised the mask. It crumpled in his grip. He winced
at that.
“The memory was bad, Da,” said Sola. “Are you sure you want to look at the
drawings?”
“Yes,” said Zachariah. “I have to know.”
He held out his hand. Bolan took the stack of drawings from the tray and handed them
over. The boy stood back as the machinist went through the memory.
“This is not as bad as I thought,” said Zachariah. “We might still have time. Sola, I
want you to go to Ambassador Campbell’s residence and tell him what we’ve
discovered. I think alerting him that someone is trying to destroy Messer’s Reach will
get us some help. Bolan, I want you and Knife to try to destroy that drawing. We
can’t let it stay in the ground, then I want you to look for more of them.”
“All right,” said Bolan. “It’s magic. We might have to be really destructive.”
“Do whatever you have to do,” said Zachariah. “Warn the neighbors so they can move
away until this is settled.”
He walked to the door with his daemon on his shoulder.
“What are you doing, Da?,” asked Sola.
“I’m going to try to find Hardy and our mystery man,” said Zachariah. “We can’t let
him trigger that drawing if it’s the same as the one that brought that thing down on
our city. More of these people will die than ours just because they lack daemons to
help them.”
He stepped through the door and kept walking.