Engines of Liberty: Howling Wilderness

First chapter, for the die-hards.

The following is chapter one of HOWLING WILDERNESS, the first sequel to the Engines of Liberty trilogy. This is a standalone novel that takes place exactly fifty years after the first book, REBEL HEART.

All rights reserved, etc etc.

CHAPTER ONE

Friday, September 1st, 2034

Mount Katahdin, Maine

Sunlight hammered the top of Mount Katahdin on a cloudless day. Spectators, journalists, and the Rally staff wore wide-brimmed hats and coats in the cold, thin air, huddling close together as a pair of massive airships touched down in the clearing. Ground crews leapt out of the gondolas and tethered the ships to heavy stakes, and a few minutes later, passengers came out.

Excited murmurs rippled through the crowd. These were the champions of a dozen lesser contests, men and women with full trophy cases at home. Admirers shouted their names. Reporters clamored for a picture or a quip. Many of the riders obliged, while some held a singular focus on the immediate task of getting ready to race.

Graveheart was one of these, though he had the unique effect of making people look the other way and pretend they hadn’t seen him. He preferred this. He came swiftly down the ramp, ignoring the few who stared at him for more than a second. The fans instead watched the big names, like Ohio Pete Hamden or Clarence Bessemer. They’d bug those men for a quote for the afternoon edition, a snippet for the radio broadcast…

Hundreds of thousands of Merykans would be following the Appalachian Rally Classic across the country. The papers would make a lot of money selling interviews with the riders. There were twenty-six in all, each bearing the weight of his or her own celebrity, each trying to stand out. Graveheart didn’t want to stand out; he wanted to stay hidden.

It wasn’t like he needed sponsors. His operation was very basic, very analog, and he’d saved enough money over the years. All of that was covered. Now it was just about running the thing.

He hurried to the rear of the gondola where the ground crew unloaded several crates, each one concealing a carefully-packed machine. He inspected the numbers on the sides, looking for his precious mimic. It wasn’t out yet, and he twiddled his fingers nervously as he waited for the crew to get to it. He had just sighted the big, bold 19 on the crate when he felt a tug on his canvas jacket.

“Mister Reeves! Pepper James Killian with the Culbertson Dispatch. How are you feeling this morning, sir?”

Someone actually wanted to talk to him?

Perplexed, Graveheart glanced at Pepper long enough to assess her. Young, barely twenty winters, a full foot shorter than he, and oozing eagerness. She wore a hand-me-down mahogany blazer with a white blouse and a faded gray skirt. Her tall boots might have been nice at one point, but they were now scuffed and covered by dirt. Working class, and trying to work her way up.

Her most prominent accessory was the portable recording device in a large case, the strap slung across her chest. A black cord lead out of it to a microphone in her hand. Pepper had a thin face behind comically large reading glasses, and she wore a plain braid in her brown hair. It was hard not to think of a prey animal.

“I feel busy,” Graveheart said. He turned his back on Pepper and strode briskly after crate 19, as the crew took it to a numbered plot in the clearing.

Pepper ran after him. “Oh, wait! I’m sorry, I just…I’ve really been hoping to get an interview with you, sir! After that incredible comeback you had in the Gulf Coast Rally—”

Graveheart cut her off with a wave of the hand. “Young miss, flattery is just a pretty way to lie. Leave me to my preparations, please and thank you.”

“It’s not flattery! I…look,” Pepper jumped in front of him and whipped out a wrinkled sheet of paper—a copy of the race roster, showing a little information about all twenty-six riders. The others had lengthy paragraphs under their photos, while the photo of Mister Reeves had just two sentences:

Reeves is a member of the Brotherhood of the Brazen Serpent, of the Far West Territories. He has entered the ARC in his sabbatical year, in the Mecha Class.

Graveheart stared at the roster, then at Pepper. “Accurate, and sufficient.” He resumed walking.

“Some would say otherwise! Sir, if I may, it’s just so…terse,” Pepper said, breathing fast as she tried to keep pace, the recording box thudding against her hip. “A lot of our readers wanted to know more about the man in the snake mask, who pushed through the Cajun swamps that broke lesser men, and I was hoping—”

“Your editors made it clear that they had no interest about the Brotherhood, that must mean that the readers didn’t care either,” Graveheart said.

“Wait, what? I don’t understand.”

Graveheart paused and put his face close to Pepper’s. “Some years ago, two families from our faith departed the Ute Country and became gold miners in the Painted Mountains. You know the area?”

“Um, I’ve seen pictures. It’s in Sioux territory.”

“Oglala, not Sioux. Those families were ambushed and murdered, to the last and smallest child. The Brotherhood sought help from everyone—the government, the Lancer’s bureau, and yes, even the newspapers, to find out who did it. To publicize the atrocity and get justice. We were summarily ignored, and I wrote to the Dispatch nine times. My final petition was met with a rejection letter saying they had no interest in the story.”

Pepper gulped. “I…am sorry for that tragedy, Mister Reeves. Truly. That sounds awful. It is awful. But I…I’ve only been with the paper for eight months, I had no idea—”

Not caring about the young lady’s excuses, Graveheart resumed walking. He resisted the urge to tug at his shirt collar to confirm the mask was still tucked in. It covered his entire head in thin, black fabric, with a bronze snake embroidered over the brow.

“Why do you bear the symbol of the snake?”

Graveheart said nothing.

“Sir, I…perhaps things have changed then, because there is significant interest in the Brazen Serpent folks generally, and yourself specifically. My editor—that is, Jane Culbertson herself—sent me to cover your story. It could be beneficial for the Brotherhood, maybe in the long-term? Rumors abound as to their ways and beliefs.”

“Let them abound. Truth cares not for rumor.”

Pepper could not be deterred. “And yet a good crop is lessened by weeds, is it not?”

“Not my problem what anyone else thinks.”

“The symbol sir—was it not Lucifer in Eden who took the form of the snake to tempt Eve? Is that what it means?”

Now Graveheart stopped, wheeling around to face Pepper, staring her right in the eyes. Pepper likely assumed he was staring back; Graveheart’s mask had tinted goggles that concealed everything behind them. In like fashion, he wore long sleeves, long pants, and tight gloves that protected every inch of him from the eyes of the world.

“How well do you know your Bible, miss?”

“Well enough. I’m a Lutheran.”

“The book of Numbers. Chapter twenty-one. Look and live. That’s what it means.”

“The serpent that Moses raised in the desert?” Pepper asked.

Now Graveheart was impressed, if still inconvenienced. It wasn’t often that he met anyone who willingly discussed Scripture. People had religion, of course, but most didn’t consider the Brotherhood to be a valid faith. He was quite tired of arguing over it.

“The very same. Looking upon the brazen serpent would heal an Israelite from the venom of vicious snakes. A simple act, yet for their faithlessness many perished,” Graveheart said.

“Is it safe to say you’re a man of simple acts, then?”

“I’m a man of faithful acts. We serve those who need help and we preach truth to those who need direction. Print that in your paper,” Graveheart said.

“But—”

“This year is my Sabbatical, Miss James. And in thirty minutes I will be on the Appalachian Trail. Please, allow me to attend to my machine.”

“What will you do if you win the Prize?” Pepper called after him, microphone outstretched.

“You’ll know in three weeks.” Graveheart paid her no further heed.

Pepper took the hint and returned to the gaggle of other contenders, who were now queued up at the airship’s cargo ramp, feeding the egos of the other riders. Graveheart set to work with a crowbar, prying open his crate.

[Icon break]

“Gotta be fast, Mickey,” Samuel said. “Here, the gas cap.”

Mickey Littleton grabbed the gas cap from her brother’s hand, barely looking at him as she worked. He’d been holding the cap and a wrench at the same time, so to the casual observer it only looked like they were sharing tools. While she studied the controls on her mimic’s handlebars, she quickly replaced the cap on the fuel tank and handed the old one back to Samuel. He stuffed it in his pocket.

“You ‘member the numbers?” he asked under his breath.

“Yeah Sam, I ‘member.”

“Tell me where the first drop will be.” He turned a socket wrench on the side of the engine. Nothing needed tightening, he just wanted the noise over his words. Mickey sighed and rattled off a set of compass coordinates.

“I told you, I memorized all of it,” she added.

“Can’t rightly blame me for being skittish now,” Samuel said, a little sour.

“Don’t blame me for being peeved, neither,” she said back. By all accounts it should have been Samuel in the Classic; he was the better rider by a mile even if she hated to say so. Problem was, they had a very particular strategy this year. One that was not, strictly speaking, legal. For it to work, she had to be in the saddle and he had to be back home, scribbling magical equations into the ground.

Illegal as all hell, but desperate times pushed the law to the back of a gal’s mind.

Together they had tried to map out ten other ways of guaranteeing a win in the Classic. None of them were as reliable as this one, wherein Mickey herself was out in the wilderness, surrounded by wild men and lawless gentlemen. She was in no small part nervous, but truth be told she was also looking forward to it. Pa often said the land had gone soft, been tamed since the end of the war. Races like the Classic were the only place left for a slice of real adventure, and she did want a taste of that.

“Got your gun?”

“Yes, Sam.”

“Extra rounds?”

“Eight extra mags, heavy as they are. Will you pipe down now?”

Sam buttoned up the saddle bag on his side and made one last pass over all the screws and bolts, muttering to himself. Mickey fiddled with the straps on her goggles because they’d been too tight for weeks and she was tired of them cutting into her face. She slipped them on and pretended to test the lenses against the sun. Really she was checking out the other riders, trying to pick out faces.

Part of prepping for the Classic involved a lot of snooping on everyone else, learning as much as possible to find advantages. Knowing the riders and their mechs could be the difference between a win and a bad loss; plenty of her previous trophies came from knowing how to edge out someone else’s machine, even if she wasn’t the best rider on the track.

All of the mecha-class contenders had flown in on the same airship as Mickey and Sam. The fauna-class riders had come on the other airship, parked on the opposite end of the clearing. They were fewer in number, as Merykans tended to trust machinery over monsters.

There was a dark-skinned woman with an excited hippogriff, clearly eager to take off. Although hippogriffs were magical critters, one didn’t need magic to handle them, just a great deal of patience and discipline. The rider gently stroked the beast’s feathery mane, plucking little bits out of it.

“Make anyone yet?” Sam asked.

“Black lady, short hair, hippogriff. Can’t remember her name.”

“Holly Turner,” Sam murmured. “Dunno much about her. Supposed to be good though. Smart animal, too.”

Next to her was a white man on a well-bred horse, just a regular old horse. Norling, Mickey thought. Jim Norling. He and his family knew all the old Arab breeding tricks to get the best horses on the planet. She spotted Sylvester Trask, another black man who hailed from the rugged Kentucky hills, affixing a saddle to a bighorn ram. Chubby white man with a mustache, that would be Erich von Steuben, a Prussian on a bison. Etienne Leroux, a French mountain man on a dire moose that towered over the other fauna. One by one, Mickey checked them off.

She took off the goggles and then test-fitted her helmet while she scanned the mecha riders. She’d identified most of them on the airship during the flight up the mountain; Bryce Spencer was a Georgia Hebrew who rode a late-model drake and was constantly writing things in a notebook. Kenny Parrish also rode a drake, emblazoned with a brightly colored logo for his sponsor, Monongahela Oil and Gas.

“‘Member hearing that someone had a MOG sponsorship? It’s Parrish,” Mickey said.

Sam swore under his breath. “Bastards. He’s riding on dirty money. You get a shot at him, you take it.”

As part of the Victory Gala at the end of the Classic, the winner would get to meet the President and his councilors. Mickey wasn’t too keen on how all that high-brow politicking worked, but Pa had said that a big business like the MOG Company—mixed with a big platform like the Victory Gala—was a dangerous thing. Spirits would be riding high at the end of the Classic. The MOG boys might leverage the event to sway their way onto that very Council, with public approval.

“All them oil boys do is chew up land and spit out folks like us,” Pa said. “S’what got us all pickled up in the first place. Can’t let ‘em get any more power, Mickey Littleton. You winnin’ that prize pot is just as importan’ as them not winnin’ diddly squat, you hear?”

Mickey’s nerves started to buzz. No pressure, right? If she somehow lost this thing, it wouldn’t just be the Littleton land in trouble back home; it’d be everybody. And Parrish wasn’t the only sponsored man. The bigger names, like Rockefeller and Bessemer, had family fortunes at their backs.

She tried not to think of all eight bullet magazines in her saddlebags. Tried not to think of using them—at least not on another person. She’d done it before, sure. Didn’t mean she liked it. Maybe if she could get away with shooting their mimics…

“You see that newspaper lady?” Sam asked as he bagged up the last of his tools.

“Pepper?”

“No, her boss. Looks like she’s wearing proper pants for the first time. How many dresses can one grown-up brat own?”

Mickey scanned the crowd for Jane Culbertson. The Culbertson Dispatch was Meryka’s paper of record, dating all the way back to right after the Independence War. Jane’s grandfather had been a technomancer in those days, and if the stories were true, he’d been shot in the knee by none other than Calvin Adler himself right before his escape from Camp Liberty.

“She does look a mite uncomfortable,” Sam grinned. “Mayhap she even gets dirty for once.”

“She just likes getting the dirt on everyone else,” Mickey said. “Can’t believe anyone even reads that paper. Wouldn’t wipe my backside with it.”

“Not too loud now.” Sam glanced around to make sure nobody paid them any attention. “But yeah, if you run her off the road out in the middle of nowhere, I won’t shed a tear.”

Jane Culbertson was not only the heiress to a rich newspaper; she was deeply in bed with the owners at the MOG Company. She and her writers had been printing yellow papers for years talking about how the oil boys should push all the Appalachee folks out west onto the plains, so they could pump all the oil out of their land. ‘Progress and Fuel for the Engine of Democracy’ she’d called it. Never mind who’d lived on that land and bled into it for hundreds of years.

“She’s not why we’re here,” Mickey muttered to herself.

“Eye on the prize,” Sam agreed. “Wish there was a way you could send me messages faster ‘an the post.”

“Ain’t nothin’ for it, Sam. Just gotta stick to the plan.”

“And don’t you get caught,” he added.

The problem with their plan wasn’t that they were cheating; this was almost an expected part of the contest. Riders were extra watchful to snitch on others while they covered their own moves. There was at least one fatality every couple of years, and most of them didn’t look all that accidental. With this year’s grand prize topping out at ten thousand sterling, the motivation to win was unmatched. Things like ‘integrity’ got fuzzy at the edges.

No, the problem was that the Littleton siblings had magic, which was for the most part illegal in Meryka, unless you made your magic a matter of public record, and worked with the Lancer Bureau whenever they called. In her younger and dumber years, Mickey hadn’t seen the problem with this law, until she’d gotten old enough to see it abused on people like her. Folks were rightly suspicious of magic—they just took it too far, too often.

Mickey didn’t choose to end up with magic. Blame her folks for fallin’ in love. Pa Littleton was a telemancer and Ma had been an aeromancer, may she rest in peace. All of their sons could teleport things like Sam could, and their one daughter had ended up with Ma’s powers, controlling the air around her.

Now, with their home about to be taken by a creditor, and all other avenues closed to them, the Littleton children were shooting their last, most desperate shot to refill their coffers. They had to win the Classic, and they had to cheat, and they’d use magic to make it work. Sam would stay home and cast spells to teleport fuel into Mickey’s mimic, and Mickey would use her aeromancy to boost herself along whenever she got the chance. Slice through high winds, slow down her opponents, that sort of thing. Had their powers been switched, it would be Sam out here getting ready to ride, but the fixed facts were fixed.

As long as nobody could tell what she was doing, she had a solid chance.

Sam made one final check on the engine oil. “Ridin’ low on the dipstick. I’ll grab another can. Go talk to that Dutch guy and get my hex-keys, yeah? He borrowed ‘em and I don’t want to forget.”

“Like I speak five words of Dutch,” Mickey huffed.

“He does all right with English. Come on, it’s almost time.” Sam headed back to their packing crate in search of more oil. Mickey sighed and looked around for the good-looking blond man with the name she couldn’t pronounce.

Three more weeks, and this would all be over.

[Icon break]

Graveheart checked the shoulder hubs on his mech and topped off the gear oil, carefully pushing the caps back into place. As he finalized his inspection from nose to tail, the “face” of the machine watched him through lifeless eyes; he’d painted the front with a vaguely feline maw, and left the rest of the machine the color of the forest. There was no windscreen; it only created more drag, and he always had goggles. The low-slung chassis held a compact, powerful six-cylinder engine in a slim frame, and the four legs put the entire machine in the attitude of a cat’s crouch, ready to pounce.

All told, Graveheart was proud of his mech. There were very few manticore mimics left that still worked, and none in this condition. The old technomancers had discarded the walking models in the early days of mimic engineering. He had solved a lot of the problems they’d had, or rather, he was well-suited to endure them. In addition to the new suspension and joints, Graveheart had also modified the tail weapon, replacing the sharpened flail with a blunt counterweight that improved its cornering.

His machine was primed and ready. In a few short minutes he’d be on the trail, chewing up the earth, reeling in the miles, and getting that much closer to…

…to what? To the end? To his past? Maybe it would only leave him with more questions. What would he do once he had his answers?

Stop it, he thought to himself. He’d done this before, chasing phantoms of the future. First he had to get there. This race was his best shot at resolving his…condition. Win the Classic. Go to the Victory Gala. Meet the president’s council, and finally talk with Calvin Adler.

The General. The hero of the Second Independence War. The legendary “Screaming Eagle.” Adler was the nation’s foremost expert on magic in all its styles, the man who’d hunted and slain hundreds of renegade mages. If the stories were true, he’d drawn a Caliburnian sword from a lodestone, tamed a thunderbird, seduced a fae queen, and wrestled the Devil himself back down into Hell.

Surely most of the tales were bunk, but just as surely there had to be some truth to it. Graveheart had gone to every other person he could think of, everyone who claimed to know a single thing about magic, and nobody else could tell him how he’d ended up with his unique curse. Adler had to know something.

Problem was, Adler didn’t take visitors. Didn’t answer the post. Wouldn’t meet with anyone he didn’t already know. The man was committed to his retirement. He’d have to show up for the Victory Gala, though. Graveheart would have given anything, everything, for five minutes with the Screaming Eagle. If this had to be the way, then so be it.

Someone bumped into him from behind, knocking him out of his idle thoughts. Graveheart stumbled and turned around, ready to issue a harsh word.

He stopped himself when he recognized the offender as another rider, young, not quite twenty. She wore her short blonde hair in a tail under a red bandana, and her clothes were well-worn from mechanic’s work, dark with grease that wouldn’t wash out. She carried a set of hex-keys in one hand, and with her other hand she rubbed her shoulder, her expression pained.

“Ouch! Damn mister, you smugglin’ tools or somethin’? You done jabbed me.” She had a thick Appalachee accent, people Graveheart had met once or twice and generally tried to avoid.

“The offense was yours, miss.”

“Yeah, yeah. See you on the trail.” She brushed past him in an obvious hurry, heading for her mimic. That had to be Mary Katherine Littleton, a mecha-class contender whose bio in the Dispatch was almost as terse as his own. She was nineteen, the youngest racer by five years, and listed Mercer, Pennshire as her hometown.

The Appalachees had a reputation for lawlessness even among other Merykans. They stole engine parts, gas, food, liquor, and land from one another. Notoriously they competed in low-class backcountry races that often resulted in life-altering injuries or death.

Small as she was, she’d be no stranger to the brutality of these races. Graveheart couldn’t afford to underestimate any of his competition. The short little Appalachee girl deserved the same caution as the mountain man from Canada, or the newspaper princess. He touched the spot on his back where she’d bumped him, looking around to see if anyone else had noticed. He did in fact carry metal there. He preferred to keep that secret.

A shrill cry filled the air, piercing like a bird of prey, and suddenly the spectators started shouting and pointing at something in the sky. Graveheart looked up and froze at the sight of two huge leathery wings spread wide, rapidly getting closer.

At first he thought it was a dragon. Foolish, as they didn’t live on this side of the Atlantic, hadn’t even set foot here since the Battle of Port Atlantis. Someone in the crowd said “Thunderbird!” but this was also wrong: the creature only had two wings. It beat these wings furiously to slow its descent until its sleek body touched down hard, kicking up dirt.

A ringed wall of dust sent everyone running. The beast kept flapping its wings, adding to the confusion, and suddenly nobody could see a damned thing.

One well-dressed woman, a spectator, wailed in distress as she coughed and staggered about, blinded by the dirt. With his goggles firmly in place, Graveheart leapt over his manticore and rushed to her side, taking her by the arm and pulling her to safety as the giant monster finally calmed itself, and the dust began to settle.

“Madam! Are you well?” Graveheart asked.

She affirmed that she was, and Graveheart whirled to face the monster, which he now identified as a jaculus. He almost reached for a six-shooter on his hip, then noticed that the jaculus sported a riding harness, a bridle, and a saddle. In it there was a rider.

More to the point, another contender.

[Icon break]

Calico Hind was all smiles as he pulled his helmet off and let the breeze throw his thick hair back. He couldn’t help cackling just a little; he must have looked quite the sight to these folks, the sun highlighting his tanned face, with the leopard-spot tattoos that ran from his temples down both sides of his neck. He issued a command to Bellerophon, the jaculus, and the beast obediently crouched low, tucking his wings tightly against his rock-hard flanks.

Calico unbuckled himself and jumped the last few feet down to terra firma. He was a tall man, hard and lean with angular muscles forged in the inland wilds. He kept his wardrobe practical, mostly made of heavy textiles, with a thick riding harness buckled around his thighs. His sturdy knee-high boots had quick-releases built into them, and kept him anchored tight to his acrobatic animal when they went aloft. Theirs was a seamless partnership.

Upon his shoulders Hind wore an elegant pelt, his most prized possession. He brushed a bit of dust off, mainly to draw the onlookers’ attention to it.

“Mommy! That’s Calico Hind!”

The admiring voice belonged to a young boy, not quite ten, clutching a printed program for the Classic. Calico tipped an imaginary hat to him and his mother, who looked a little flustered at Calico’s rapid landing.

“They call him Calico ‘cause he killed a spotted northern cougar!” the kid went on. “That’s what he’s wearing!”

Calico was about to indulge the young fan with a little banter, perhaps an autograph, when another voice snapped out his name, this one not at all as friendly as the lad.

“Mister Hind! That is not how we handle beasts in popular company!”

Race officials converged on the jaculus, carrying clipboards and whistles and generally trying to shoo the spectators away. At the head of their little group was Felix Montgomery, the master of ceremonies; his father and Calico’s father had gone to the same boarding school, once upon a time, and while those men were business rivals, Calico had always been friendly with the little pipsqueak Felix. He smoothed his mustache back as Felix closed in.

“Jasper! Do explain yourself!” the master demanded.

The smile flickered on Calico’s face; he didn’t care for his birth name. He wasn’t about to argue with Felix Montgomery himself, though. He needed to be able to lean on their ‘friendship’ down the road.

“Little Felix Montgomery! Good to see you!” Calico said, pulling the man in close with a crushing hug.

Felix Montgomery sported a flamboyant earth-toned suit and a greased-up hairstyle that always pulled eyes toward it like a peacock’s feathers. A pair of lackeys hung behind him, taking notes and issuing orders to the grounds staff around them, who had surrounded Bellerophon.

“I mean it Hind,” Felix Montgomery said loudly, freeing himself from the embrace. “That was quite unbecoming. You could have hurt someone. Badly. It’s a good thing Mister Reeves was there to grab that woman. I shall have to sanction you for this!”

“Wouldn’t hurt a soul, Felix,” Calico said with a sigh. He reached over and scratched behind Bellerophon’s ear. “Just wanted to make an impression. You know how it is.”

Felix Montgomery’s anger melted away and he smiled warmly. “You’re a rogue as always. I’m sorry though, I’ll have to issue demerits. I can’t appear partial in my duties. Why didn’t you ride in the gondola?”

Calico bowed slightly with a flourish of the hand. “I submit to your authority. But come now, surely you didn’t expect me to cram my boy into that ridiculous airship? He’d have eaten half the other mounts. Besides, he’s built for endurance. His father was an Aragonese Harbinger and his mother was a rare Choctaw Scissorwing. If I don’t let him hammer the air all day, he’ll go stir-crazy.”

“Yes, I’ve heard that about him. Well…you’ll mind your landings from now on,” Felix said, suppressing his smirk a little better now. “That is a fine beast, though.”

“Isn’t he? Picked him out as an egg three years ago. Hasn’t even hit his prime yet, and there’s nothing faster in the Merykan skies, I guarantee it.” Calico grinned. He spotted Pepper James Killian in the growing crowd behind Felix Montgomery and pointed. “You there! Press girl! Print that.”

 Every idle eye soon found itself focused on Calico and his magnificent mount. A dozen people with cameras begged for pictures, and Calico all too happily obliged, posing next to Bellerophon, who was catching a quick nap. They’d look stunning in the papers, where many Merykans would lay eyes on him for the first time; an authentic wild man with a tame jaculus beneath his saddle. There was no summit beyond his reach and no beast beyond his power.

Of course, being able to ride a jaculus, people would suspect him of being a faunamancer; they always had. That was fine. The Lancers had tested him and while he carried the talent, he lacked a natural well of power to draw from, and was therefore basically a duffer.

Perfect. He wanted them to think that. Let them witness his accomplishments and chalk it up to talent or hard work, or something equally ridiculous.

He shook hands, exchanged a few greetings, and stood still for a few more cameras. Felix Montgomery’s aides made some noise about Calico getting a delayed start due to his uncouth entry, but he ignored them. The hype and buzz were worth the sacrifice.

Calico was going to win this thing. He scanned the crowd, then looked over their heads and scanned the faces of the contenders in the motor pool. A few stood out to him—Cobb, Lang, Daggett, and others. Good, they made it, he thought. Likewise he spotted Jim Norling and his horse over with the animals. His agents were in place. Now all that remained was time.

He smiled and kept waving.