Lumina Brightstone's Arc

Chapter 7 of 3

By dawn the carts stood in a clearing, loaded with the enemy's spoils. Lumina walked the row of captured machines and fuel drums. Her trolls had won these prizes at the depot. But no one among them knew how to wake the machines. She had one night's lead. When the enemy found the false beacon empty, they would turn back. She needed these weapons working before then. Grok Chainbreaker heaved a drum upright and thumped its side. "Full," he said. "But we push these like ox-carts. Their fire sleeps inside, and none of us can rouse it." He wiped his chain and looked at her. "We have the enemy's teeth. We cannot make them bite." Lumina climbed onto a machine's flank. She pulled levers. She struck panels. Nothing moved. The metal sat dead under her hands. Grok tried too, forcing a hatch until his shoulders shook. It held shut. The morning wore on, and the machines stayed cold. Thalgrim Deepknower came out of the ferns. The purple elder had turned the tide at the moot stone once, and the arguing trolls near the carts fell quiet when he passed. He set a broad hand on a fuel line and traced it to a sealed valve. He did not rush. He watched the valve the way a man watches a snare he has seen spring before. "You want the fire," Thalgrim said. "You need the hands that lit it." "Whose hands?" Lumina asked. "Not ours." He turned the valve a quarter and stopped. "There is a market that trades in offworld work. Glowmire. Petra knows the way." Lumina thought of the risk. A day's march. A stranger's price. "And you trust them?" "No," Thalgrim said. "But one there speaks flat truth. Mace Edrow. He posts what will happen before it does." They found Mace at the market board, a gaunt troll in a black robe threaded with blue light. He read a warrant to the crowd for a theft not yet done. He did not soften it. He did not look up until Lumina named her need. "The machines answer to a key," Mace said. "Not metal. A code, spoken through the panel. Your enemy carries it in a light blue case. The one who holds the case gives orders to the fleet." He closed the subject and returned to his board. Lumina's breath caught. The knowledge was clear, and the price was steep. The case was not in the clearing. It rode with the enemy commander, out west, chasing the false beacon. She walked back to the carts with a plan half-formed. Her trolls could not arm themselves from these spoils alone. To wake the machines, she had to steal one blue case from the force now turning back toward her forest. The weapons were hers. The key was still the enemy's, and she had a day to take it.