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Carol leaned over the trolley. She turned the key in the ignition, and the Eisenkrieger rumbled to life. Lying flat on its back, the machine purred with a low hum that echoed inside my chest and sent a thrill down my spine.
I needed to spend more time in this secret laboratory.
“Wait!” Konstantin jumped back. “Did you disconnect the control systems from the pneumatics?”
“Obviously.” Carol looked sideways at him. “Otherwise I would never run both prototypes at once.”
“I’m guessing the interference is bad?” I asked.
Carol nodded with a grim smile. “Nearly lost one of our pilots before we figured out why. We need to get that necromancer of yours back to help.”
Konstantin clambered onto the trolley and scooted into the cockpit of the Eisenkrieger. He fiddled with something inside the second prototype, then crawled back out and leapt down from the trolley. From a workbench, he grabbed a notepad and a brass instrument that resembled a pocket watch, though the dial clearly didn’t measure minutes.
Konstantin smiled. “Today interference will be our friend!”
After he pried open a panel in the Eisenkrieger’s chest, he clipped the instrument to a wire inside and stared at the dial. His pencil scratched furiously as he jotted notes.
“Archmage Carol?” he asked. “How far is it to the other end of the laboratory?”
She shrugged. “Two hundred meters, if you start at that mark on the floor.”
“Exactly?”
Carol laughed. “Exactly. They wouldn’t build me a track for testing, so I measured one out myself.”
Konstantin stared at her like she had given him all his Christmas presents early. “Perfect! Ardis? Walk to the other end of the laboratory.”
“Yes, sir.”
I clomped down the laboratory. The archmages followed in my footsteps. Konstantin clipped the pocket watch lookalike to a wire within the guts of my Eisenkrieger and took notes on the reading. Hunching over a table, he scribbled a page of mathematical computations, frowned at the numbers, and scratched his head with his pencil.
“Never liked trigonometry,” he muttered.
Carol leaned over his shoulder. “Need help?”
He curled his arm around the paper and dragged it closer protectively. “According to my initial reading, we should be looking about seven kilometers southwest of here. So with a baseline this small, our triangulation will be primitive. But it should be better than nothing.”
Carol stood watching with crossed arms. “What’s next?”
“I need a map of Vienna.”
Archmage Carol nodded and sprinted away. She returned a few minutes later with a rolled map.
“Thank you.”
Konstantin spread the map on the table. With his tongue poking from his mouth, he sketched out a few points over the city. He circled one of them, then lifted the map and jabbed the paper with his pencil.
“There! He’s south of Vienna, in the town of Liesing.”
I had never been. “What’s Liesing like?”
“It’s an industrial area.” He frowned at the map. “A lot of factories. Abandoned, under construction. They could be keeping Wendel anywhere.”
My hands curled into fists, and the Eisenkrieger mimicked my movement. Dread pounded with my heartbeat. “We need to find him, even if we have to tear it all down.”
37
Under cover of darkness, we drove from the Academy of Technomancy with a questionably borrowed truck and an even more questionably borrowed Eisenkrieger. With Konstantin behind the wheel, I sat shotgun with my sword across my knees. I kept glancing in the side mirror at the bulk in the back of the truck.
