The Fallen World

Lexandria - Part 2

     The two senior wizards spent the next half hour looking over the remaining weapons. An assorted collection of white painted tubes, spheres and pipes with strange metal projections, flaps, loops and levers all over them. Most of them had incomprehensible numbers and letters painted on every flat surface that made no sense even when read with a translation spell. When Elmias had finished showing them to him, though, there were still a few strange items of equipment left over, and Tragius now turned his attention to them. “What are these?” he asked. “I take it they’re not weapons.”

     “Indeed not,” replied Elmias. “While I was waiting to meet the arms dealers I took a stroll through one of their cities and came across a few items I thought might be useful.” He gently picked up a fragile looking wooden contraption in the shape of a cross with a pair of wheels on struts underneath and a small fan on the front. “This flies through the air, propelled by the fan which spins at great speed. You control its motion with this.” He put down the wooden thing and picked up a small black box with two small levers on it and a long length of wire pointing out from the back.

     “I see,” said Tragius doubtfully. “What good is it?”

     “On its own, nothing. It’s just a toy. But when used in conjunction with this...” He indicated the last two items in his collection. One of them looked like a rectangular mirror but the glass front was a dull grey that held only a very poor reflection. There were small buttons down one side and some strange holes in the back. A length of rope ran away from its back end, ending in a strange white block with three copper pegs emerging from it to which Elmias had tied a perspex rod with a length of string.

     Elmias ignored the ‘mirror’ for the time being, though, and picked up the other object, a black lumpy thing that fitted neatly into his hand and had a shiny glass lens on the front. “This is great!” said the wizard enthusiastically. "This thing has an eye that looks at whatever it’s pointed at and remembers what it sees.” He pointed it at Tragius, pressed a button on its side. A faint whirring sound came from it. He then pressed another button to stop the sound, and connected a rubber rope to a socket in the side, the other end of which he connected to the mirror with the window.

     "Everything it sees can be sent to this mirror through this rope," he explained. He bent down to touch the perspex rod, spoke a few magic words, and it began to glow softly as the wizard snatched back his hand. “Whatever you do, don’t touch that rod while the spell’s working on it,” he warned. “It’s a modified version of a lightning bolt spell, and just as dangerous.”

     “That box needs lightning to work?” asked Tragius curiously.

     “Yes,” replied Elmias. “It’s what they use instead of magic.” He pressed more buttons and the mirror came to life, displaying an image of Tragius’s face that lasted for a few seconds before being replaced by a couple of words in a strange language.

     “Great, eh?” said Elmias, eager to see Tragius’s reaction.

     The other wizard wasn’t impressed, though. A single spell could have achieved the same effect with much less fuss. “Get to the point,” he said impatiently.

     Elmias wilted with disappointment. “Well, what I was thinking was that we could shrink the eye until it’s small enough to be carried by the wooden bird. Then we can send it flying through enemy territory. It remembers everything it sees, and when it comes back you can see everything it’s seen on the box. Troop positions, movements, everything!”

     “Just like you can with a crystal ball, you mean?” said Tragius sarcastically. Why is he wasting my time like this? he wondered. He’s a powerful wizard in his own right, he knows you can do all this with ordinary scrying spells.