The Locksmith

by Howe, Barbara;

  What nerve. I was—well, I should have been offended. I should—oh, my clothes were dry. “Thank you, sir,” I said, feeling foolish.

  “Besides,” he said, “The king and his noble cronies are an even more ignoble lot than usual, and have been trying the Warlock’s patience rather badly, so the four Officeholders conferred and agreed it was high time the Warlock should flex a little muscle.”

  “Oh,” I said, “You mean the Frost Maiden knew what was coming?”

  He shrugged. “Of course. In a contest between the Fire Warlock and the king, she’ll support the Fire Office, no doubt about it—not that she has much choice. The Water Office would force her to, even though she hates the Warlock himself.”

  The Warlock was waiting at the tier with the wide courtyard. I wondered again if he ever wore anything beside black or dark grey. Mrs Cole had said they were practical, considering how much time he spent in and out of fireplaces.

  He greeted us as we stepped off the stairs. “Thank you, Master Sven, for informing me that the christening was proceeding without the Earth Mother’s presence.”

  Master Sven beamed. “Of course I should have realised you would already know, Your Wisdom.”

  “I did today, but I may not always. With war coming, all guild members have a duty to report problems.” He repeated one of his favourite adages, “It is better to repeat oneself—”

  “—than to let something important go unsaid,” all four of us chanted in unison.

  “Oh no, have I been repeating myself that often?” He smiled, but his eyes looked unusually sombre. “I suppose I have. I find it hard sometimes to remember which of you children I have said something to.

  “So what did you think of today’s events?”

  I said, “It was another round in the power struggle that’s been going on between Fire Warlock and king for centuries. You won this round, but…”

  He shook his head. “No, my dear. There is no power struggle between me and the king.”

  I goggled at him.

  René said, “What?”

  The Warlock’s smile was bleak. “Does a boulder believe itself to be in a struggle with a mouse, whose claws scratch at the rock as he scrabbles over it? This is, of course, a matter of perspective. The king sees a power struggle that he is forever losing, against an obstinate and vindictive competitor. He believes he is David fighting Goliath, and will someday win if he can find my soft spot.

  “I see an untalented and unintelligent man doing more damage to himself than to the rock he throws himself against. His true foe is the Office of the Western Gate, not the Warlock who temporarily holds the Office. He cannot wrest from me power that is not mine to give.”

  I said, “But… You’re saying it’s the Office that forbids alliance marriages, not you personally?”

  They all stared at me. The Warlock looked disconcerted. That was impossible. My stomach did a flip-flop and I backed away from him.

  Arturos grabbed my arm. “Don’t fall down the stairs.”

  The Warlock said, “Why, yes. I thought that was common knowledge.”

  I was sweating again, but it was too late to take back my question. “It is. But just because everybody says something’s so doesn’t make it so. I assumed it had to be a stricture enforced by individual Fire Warlocks, not by the Office. Otherwise how could the contracts that were made have been allowed to stand?”

  Flames crackled in the Warlock’s voice. “What do you know about those?”

  Gibson’s History

  The Fire Warlock, angry with me? I would have gone backwards down the stairs if Arturos hadn’t still had a grip on my arm.

  René bounced on the balls of his feet, brimming with questions but not saying anything.

  Master Sven’s gaze flicked between the Warlock and me. “Is she right? There have been contracts?”

  The Warlock nodded without looking at Master Sven. His eyes, showing no hint of amusement, were intent on my face.

  I said, “I read about them in Gibson’s History of the Office of the Fire Warlock.”

  The Warlock gaped at me. He recovered and let out a bark of laughter. In his usual courteous voice he said, “Oh, my. Well, my dear, you continue to astound me. I commend you on your persistence.”

  I leaned against Arturos and whimpered.

  “I hope you will forgive me for frightening you.”

  “Yes, sir,” I bleated.

  “How Gibson took such stirring events and reduced them to a soporific doorstop is beyond me. That book has never been a standard text at the universities. The histories that are, are less complete and sometimes misleading, which is why you, Master Sven, were unaware of these little details.”

  The Warlock laughed again. “She may know the political history of the Office better than you do.”

  Master Sven glared at him.

  Arturos’s torso shook. Startled, I looked up. He winked at me. He was laughing? I was making a spectacle of myself. I scuttled, crablike, away from him, and away from the stairs.

  The Warlock sobered. “Lucinda, do you know what happened to those contracted marriages?”

  What had it said? I couldn’t recall any details. “No, sir.”

  “Very well then. I would rather not address this question, but with the curiosity you three exhibit, you will be more dangerous if you do not understand than if you do.

  His voice, no longer quite so courteous, held the crisp snap of command. “Lucinda, René, Master Sven, the three of you will take a break from magical theory and research this historical question instead. The details are not all in Gibson; you will have to consult several other texts.

  “This is Fire Guild business. You are not to talk about what you find with anyone other than the five of us here now. Master Sven, René, you are bound by your oaths as members of the Fire Guild.”

  The two of them exchanged wide-eyed glances.

  “Lucinda, I must put a spell on you so that you cannot talk to the wrong ears. I am sorry, as a scholar I do not want to forbid another scholar from talking about his or her research, but this is for your own safety.”

  A spell? I didn’t care. He wasn’t going to hurt me. And he had called me another scholar, as if I were his equal. I melted into a warm, happy puddle.

  “There have been nine attempted alliances. Come and talk to me when you have found them all. Now you must excuse us. Arturos and I have business to attend to.”

  The two warlocks rode off up the stairs, leaving Master Sven and René staring at me.

  René said, “He made it sound like we’re going to uncover some deep, dark secret.”

  Master Sven looked worried. “I think we are.”

  At supper that night, I told Mrs Cole about the christening. She wanted to know all the details, so we sat over our coffee for a long time, talking. On the way back to our rooms, I asked her about the Frost Maiden.

  She said, “Why don’t they get along? I don’t know. I just know that they never have. There are some hair-raising stories about fights centuries ago between the two Officeholders. Conferences involving the current pair can be quite uncomfortable, I hear. They behave better than some of their predecessors, but can hardly stand to be in the same room together. Comes from having been lovers once, I suppose.”

  The Fire Warlock and the Frost Maiden? Lovers? Impossible. Wasn’t it? Please, wasn’t it?

  She sighed. “I’m sorry. Of course, you didn’t know. That was a long time ago, back before they were the Warlock and Frost Maiden. They’re about the same age, you know, and both came into their offices during the last war with the Empire.”

  She sighed again, and said, “I feel for the poor dear. He must get awfully lonely, trapped up there all alone for more than a century. Such a virile young man, too, but after what happened to Nicole and Terésa, he doesn’t have any choice, does he?”r />
  We parted, and I brooded in my bedroom’s window seat, pondering the events of the day. How much foreknowledge did the Warlock have of his own death? Would it be soon?

  What had become of the Warlocks who had loved Nicole and Terésa, after their lovers’ deaths? I had always before thought of them only as dirty old men. Now, having seen the Warlock as flesh and blood, not just the Office, I felt only one emotion, one that I had never before imagined that the Warlock deserved: pity.

  “So what have you found?” the Warlock asked.

  We were in an alcove in the library, where we had waylaid him. After he cast a spell blocking listening ears, Master Sven read down the list of attempted marriages and their outcomes. It had taken us several days, even with Master Sven’s spellcraft and help from Master Thomas, to track all down all nine. It was a distressing list. Sometimes the Warlock had stepped in and forbidden the alliance, but in several cases that had not happened. Even so, the weddings had never taken place. One child died of a fall, another of a fever, and in the case that had come the closest to succeeding, the ship taking the princess to her wedding had foundered, and everyone on board drowned.

  René said, “It doesn’t seem right that they all died. Lots of people die young, but the royal family has an earth witch on duty all the time, right? And the Frost Maiden and Air Enchanter protect ships. They’d be keeping a tight watch on a ship carrying a princess, wouldn’t they?”

  The Warlock said, “They would. They did. But the Office of The Fire Warlock is more powerful than either of those Offices, and when the fifty-seventh Warlock met the demands of the Fire Office by sinking the ship and murdering everyone on board, the other Officeholders had no choice but to go along.”

  Was he joking? His expression showed no trace of amusement. He had become so familiar that it was easy to forget how old he was. Not now. He looked ancient—not grey and wrinkled, but timeless, like a Greek statue. Even his normally vivid eyes were cold and hard.

  Master Sven cleared his throat. “Do you know that for a fact, or could it be merely an unfortunate coincidence?”

  “His private writings left no doubt; that is an historical fact. It was his last opportunity to deal with the problem. If he had not sunk the ship the Office would have killed him, and moved on to another warlock, and another, until it found one who would stop the marriage from taking place.

  “He was, I dare say, the most evil-minded criminal who has ever held the Office. A responsible Warlock would have dealt with the problem much earlier. The conflicts between the Fire Guild and the other guilds are not one-sided. That goes for the tensions between the Fire Guild and the royal family as well. It would be good for you to remember that.”

  My heart was pounding, my hands trembling. “But, Your Wisdom, I don’t understand. I thought when innocent people died it was because the Fire Warlock made a mess of things. The Fire Office protects the people of Frankland, particularly innocent children.”

  He shook his head. “No, my dear. That is what the Great Coven wanted the citizens of the country to believe. The true purpose of the Fire Office was to consolidate and hold the territory King Charles the Great conquered. When he died, Frankland consisted of an unhappy coalition of warring tribes—Franks, Saxons, Celts, Britons—those are but a few. By all rights, we should have splintered into dozens of petty fiefdoms to be swallowed up, one by one, by other conquerors. Only the four offices held us together.

  “It has taken centuries to meld us into a cohesive country, but the role of the Fire Office has not changed with the decline of internal strife. It will, at all costs, ensure the integrity of the state of Frankland. A small, semantic difference, perhaps, from the publicised purpose, but a vital one to the lives of many people.”

  René said, “Doesn’t it have to protect the state to protect the people?”

  “Perhaps, but it has no judgement in doing so. In creating the Fire Office under King Charles’s orders, the Great Coven gave the Office a set of mandates it must follow. The primary mandate is the preservation of the physical boundaries of the country against threat of invasion, political negotiation, or civil war. The Office may respond to the lesser mandates only after the greater mandates are satisfied. The mandate to protect innocent lives is rather far down the list, I regret to say.

  “Consider a situation where we are at war, and all our harbours blockaded. If our crops failed, and our people were dying of famine, it would be only humane to surrender before the people of Frankland ceased to exist. But the Office will never allow surrender. Every last man, woman, and child in Frankland would die of starvation and the Office would still not allow another state to absorb the barren shell that remained.”

  We stared at him in shocked silence. He paused and looked at each of us in turn, making sure he had our full attention.

  “This is the secret that I cannot allow you to talk about. Only the other Officeholders and a few members of the Fire Guild understand this.

  “The lives and personalities of individual people mean nothing to the Office. Anyone who comes in conflict with one of its mandates will die a violent death. It has killed innocent people in the past, and will undoubtedly kill more in the future.

  “If Charles the Great had understood that to follow this mandate the Office could and would kill even members of the royal family he would have had the members of the Great Coven executed for treason. That was why the myth was sown that the purpose of the Office was to protect innocent lives.”

  We sat for a while without talking, digesting what he had said.

  Finally, René said, “Why were you angry that Lucinda knew about the marriage contracts?”

  The Warlock smiled—a thin-lipped smile with no amusement in his eyes. “I was shocked, because I have, against all my instincts as an historian, been trying to suppress that information.”

  I gasped. He looked at me, and his eyes sparkled for the first time since we sat down.

  He said, “I did not think that anyone living other than I had read all the way through Gibson’s opus. Congratulations, my dear. That feat alone, and your grasp of the implications of what you read, would earn you a place in the Scholars’ Guild, if I dared tell them. I regret that I cannot.”

  His praise—reward enough—went to my head like strong ale. “It doesn’t matter, sir.”

  René said, “I still don’t understand. Why do you want to suppress it?”

  “Because I do want to protect the lives of innocent children. The Office will not let me tell the king the penalty for disobedience—that an alliance marriage would doom his daughter to a certain death at a young age. If he learns about those contracts, he will think, as Lucinda did, that it is just the Warlock being obstinate, and will keep trying to evade me. I would much rather he believed the Office forbade the contracts being made in the first place, and that it is futile to attempt them.”

  He looked at Master Sven, the tension in his face ebbing. “You should read Gibson’s History. It is the definitive text on the Fire Guild’s dealings with the nobility.”

  Master Sven groaned and muttered something under his breath. The Warlock laughed.

  Other things I had read in Gibson’s History had puzzled me. Were there other mandates the Office required the Fire Warlock to fulfil, even if it meant the Warlock looked like an obstinate jerk or incompetent bastard? Perhaps I should reread it. I was not going to ask the Warlock that question.

  René said, “Were there other—Ow!” Master Sven and I had both elbowed him sharply in the ribs.

  The Warlock’s eyes twinkled. “Yes, alliance marriages are not the only such mandate. You are already bound not to disclose the secret; you need not fear to discuss what else you find amongst yourselves, or with me.”

  Need not fear? My mouth was dry and my pulse raced. I already knew which dream would come that night, the one of the shadow of the Office looming over me, poised to blot me
out. And I no longer had the false comfort of believing that because I was harmless, the Office would not harm me.

  I woke in terror three nights in a row from the dream of Storm King’s looming shadow. Even during the daylight hours, my hands shook and I gasped for breath. I’d forgotten something—something important—long ago.

  I lied to Mrs Cole when she asked what was wrong, saying I’d had word of a death in Lesser Campton. I needed help, but she would have told the Warlock. I ducked out of sight whenever he appeared.

  When Arturos came for dinner, I sobbed with relief. He and René sat talking with a couple of scholars long after everyone else had gone. I bit my fingernails down to the quick waiting for him to leave the table.

  I pounced on him as he walked out of the dining room. “Sir, do you know anything about locks?”

  Unlocking

  Arturos looked baffled. “Locks? I know a little. Not much. Why?”

  We walked towards the kitchen, René following. I asked, “How do they work?”

  “A lock has a metal cylinder with pins in it, and when you put the key in—”

  “No, no. I meant the magical kind. Lock spells.”

  “Oh, sorry. I don’t know much more about them than I know about the mundane kind. Locks are barricades to protect something. That usually has the side effect of hiding whatever it is you’re trying to protect, but not always. Most spells are about making things happen. Locks keep things from happening, and it takes a different way of thinking to get them to work than most witches and wizards can deal with, so the guild schools don’t teach them.

  “About the only other thing I know about them is that a good lock takes more energy to release—or break—than it took to set the lock in the first place.”

  We sat down at the table in the quiet kitchen. I sat on my shaking hands. “Have you ever used one?”

  “No, can’t say that I have. I tried one once when I was a student, but it didn’t work. Well, it wasn’t really a lock, just a bit of doggerel from an old children’s story. I didn’t really expect it would work, couldn’t believe it was as simple as that, and I’d’ve been up a creek if it had.”