The Locksmith

by Howe, Barbara;

  They all turned to look at me. I shivered from head to foot, and from more than the cold. “Your Wisdom, isn’t this dangerous?”

  His eyebrows rose. “My dear, I explained that I will control the amount of power—”

  “I meant, we’ve been trying to keep my talents secret, but won’t the Empire’s spies see this? And René, you didn’t want anyone knowing about him, either.”

  “Ah, I beg your pardon. You and René catch on so quickly that sometimes I forget what you do not know. I am remiss in not explaining that we have taken precautions to ensure neither you nor René will be identified.”

  Panic relaxed its hold on me, and I felt giddy. I leaned on Beorn so I wouldn’t topple over.

  Enchanter Paul reached over and patted my shoulder. “That’s why I am here today, Miss Guillierre. I am lending the support of the Air Office to this endeavour. Between your lock and the spells cast by three Officeholders, your secret will be quite safe.”

  I sat down and hugged myself to stop shivering. “Thank you, Your Wisdom.”

  The Warlock said, “Even if the Empire’s spies determine you are here, which is unlikely, they will not see you take any part in this exercise. They will think you are here as... For other reasons.”

  René said, “But they will see that something’s going on?”

  “Indeed, if they do not I will be sorely disappointed. I want them to see that I am training other warlocks to draw on Storm King’s power. They are already afraid of facing me alone. If they believe they may soon face other warlocks as powerful as I, they will panic, and attack prematurely. Now do you understand?”

  René and I both nodded. I said, “I’m sorry, Your Wisdom.”

  “You need not apologise. I would rather you questioned everything I did than allow me to make a mistake through carelessness. Now, René?”

  The boy studied the mountain for several seconds, then a small section directly across from us burst into flame. Another larger section of forest followed. We applauded.

  The Warlock said, “Put out, each time, what you just set afire. That will give you more practice where you need it most.”

  René groaned, but obeyed. After a dozen more tries, he started a blaze in a gush of flame so strong we felt the heat all the way across the valley. He then had considerable difficulty in putting it all out. When he finished, he stripped off his hat and unbuttoned his coat, saying, “Gosh, I’m getting hot!”

  The Warlock said, “Of course. You must use your own energy to manage the power you are drawing from Storm King. What you have used is a minute fraction of what is available. Now perhaps you begin to see why Warlocks who misjudge do not survive.”

  The boy looked up at him and nodded. The Warlock ruffled his hair. “You did well for a first try. Now, Lucinda.”

  I stood up and took a deep breath. If I couldn’t do as well as René, I had no business being here. I took the Warlock’s hand, and called up an image of my flame covering the forest in front of me.

  “Now,” I whispered. A surge of heat coursed through me like spirits burning my throat and warming my stomach. The mountainside lit up. I gaped at it.

  Mother Celeste said “Oh, how lovely.” My audience applauded.

  The Warlock laughed. “Excellent control, my dear, but you need to be a bit more forceful.”

  I had not started a small forest fire, as René had done. I had started a large swathe of small fires. A section of the mountainside was aglow, each tree holding a small ball of flame in its centre.

  “Now put it out,” he ordered. After some struggle, all the fires were out. After several more tries, each time with a larger surge of energy, I managed to create a respectable blaze, and to put it out again. My head swelled, and I laughed out loud.

  “Well done,” the Warlock said, giving my hand a squeeze. My treacherous hand didn’t want to let go.

  “Your turn, Beorn.” The big warlock spewed a torrent of flame in one long sweeping arc, getting a blaze covering most of the mountain on the first try. On his second try, he over-estimated and burned part of the forest on our side of the valley as well. His third try was perfect. After that the Warlock had him doing variations and patterns—a ring of burning trees one time, stripes across the mountainside another—to work on control.

  After many long hours cooped up in the practice room, being out in the open air was exhilarating. Within an hour we were all sweating, the bitter air no match for the heat we were producing. René and I threw snowballs at each other to cool off. The Warlock dived into a snow bank and rolled around in the snow. He came up grinning at the astonishment on my face.

  “Did you think I was not getting hot, too? I have been working the whole time, while you have worked only a third of it. This is one of the reasons I prefer to fight wars during the winter.”

  By late afternoon we had reduced the vegetation on the mountainside to smouldering ash. We reeked of smoke and were drenched in sweat and melted snow. I had shed all but my lightest dress; the men were down to their singlets.

  Mother Celeste said, “What now, Jean? Are you going to teach them to call down the lightning?”

  He pursed his lips for a moment. Were they mad? Beorn rolled his eyes; René edged towards the cover of the boulders.

  The Warlock said, “It is far too dangerous for Lucinda and René. It is dangerous for Beorn, but it would be a useful experience. We may not get another chance. Very well, let us do it. The rest of you, retreat to the tunnel and cover your ears. Now, Beorn, I am going to call the lightning first, and I want you to feel the energy flowing through me so you have a better idea what to expect.”

  CRASH!

  A bolt of lightning shot out of the clear sky and hit a boulder on the far mountainside, sending shards of rock flying and echoes of thunder rolling across the valley. René and I both flinched, and Mother Celeste put her comforting arms around us. The Warlock did it twice more, and then told Beorn to do it. Beorn looked as eager as I would have been to touch a live viper, but closed his eyes, concentrated, and sent a bolt crashing onto the mountaintop.

  “Good. Now work on better direction,” the Warlock said.

  Three more blasts, and then Beorn pulled away from the Warlock. “That’s it. I’m drained. If I try it again I’m likely to fry us.”

  The Warlock let him go. “Well done, class. Time to go home.”

  He offered me his arm. “Did you enjoy today’s exercise?”

  “Yes, sir. Very much.”

  “Good. Using power well is exhilarating, and being a warlock is all about taking control and turning one’s dreams into reality.”

  “Taking control? Unlocking turned my life topsy-turvy. Between you and Beorn and the Office, all I’ve done for months is take someone else’s orders.”

  “You underestimate yourself, my dear. Orders to another level five talent are effective only if he or she is willing to accept them. Whether you are aware or not, your own magic is at work, trying to bring about your own desires.”

  “Is it? I wish…” What did I want? If not even the Fire Warlock could avoid a war, my wishing it would go away wasn’t likely to accomplish much.

  “Be careful what you wish for,” he said, “for you will surely get it. It is well to know one’s own heart. The unacknowledged desires cause the most trouble.”

  “I wish that you can get what you want,” I said, and the hairs on the back of my neck stood on end.

  The Fortress Besieged

  The Fire Warlock gave me a shocked stare. “What I want? My dear, that is…” I had never heard his voice shake before. He took a deep breath, and after a bit went on in a steady voice. “That is exceedingly generous of you. I want an orderly succession of Fire Warlocks, and for you and them to rebuild the Fire Office to meet the changing times. I hope neither will give you cause to regret your wish.”

  I was already
regretting it. My God, what did I do? His list of wants didn’t hold anything I hadn’t heard before. I thought there must be something more.

  He hadn’t said he wanted war, but we’d just made sure it was coming.

  That must have been it. What a horrifying thing to wish for.

  The next day at dinner, the Warlock made the announcement I was now expecting. “If I may have your attention, please. I regret to inform you that an attack by the Empire is imminent.”

  Heads jerked up. There was a flurry of nervous movement and chatter all around.

  He held up a hand for silence. “I cannot say how soon it will come. It may be tomorrow, it may not be for several weeks, but we should be prepared. This afternoon I will invite the townsfolk to move into the Fortress.”

  How would Mrs Cole’s comfortable kitchen fare with a swarm of temperamental fire witches invading it? She didn’t look a bit happy.

  The Warlock said, “Conditions here will be more crowded and chaotic, but that is necessary. I hope to keep disruptions to your studies to a minimum, but we cannot avoid some distractions. I beg your patience while this state of affairs lasts.”

  A querulous voice demanded, “Keep noisy children out of the library. I have serious work to do.”

  Another scholar hissed, “Ebenezer, be quiet,” but other heads nodded, as if Ebenezer had said what they wanted to say but didn’t dare.

  The Warlock’s eyes glittered, but his voice was smooth. “Let me remind you that the primary purpose of the Fortress is to protect the lives of the citizens of Frankland, not to enable research into historical minutiae.”

  Beside me Master Thomas, the librarian, snorted. I stifled a laugh. Scholar Ebenezer was digging into the life of one of the Warlocks even I couldn’t remember.

  “However, you need not worry about your research being interrupted by unruly children. They will be housed in one of the better-protected lower tiers, and will not be allowed in the library, where there is a greater danger of being struck by flying glass.”

  Master Thomas muttered, “Thank you, Your Wisdom, for that reassurance.”

  The Warlock added, “When the Fortress is under attack, please stay away from the windows and the glassed-roofed stairs.”

  That afternoon, Beorn put us to work learning a shield spell against flying objects.

  At supper, Mrs Cole told me about the Warlock’s visit to Blazes. “The Guild Council didn’t want anybody to move until it was dead certain there would be an attack. By then it might be too late, so he went over their heads and summoned everybody to the Guild Hall. The Council members are furious, but most of the townsfolk are pissed off at the Council for dragging their feet.

  “I expect I’ll have my hands full finding places for everybody and helping them settle in. They should start arriving first thing tomorrow morning, and it’s going to be upsetting to everybody for a while.”

  As I was spending most of my time in the classroom or practice room, I didn’t see the townsfolk arriving, but in the kitchen and dining room the next day it was obvious things were astir. People I didn’t recognise came and went. Mrs Cole bustled in and out with only half a mind on dinner, and forgot the kneading. I did it by hand, or there wouldn’t have been any bread. The town’s earth witch cut a tunnel from my room to the practice room so I could come and go without provoking comment. The dinner table conversation was all about past wars, speculations about the Empire’s strength, and what to expect in an attack. Mrs Cole told me that most of the women with children were moving into the Fortress that day, bringing with them bare essentials, with the husbands and other adults staying behind to pack up and move more belongings later.

  I asked, “Is there anything I should do when an attack comes?”

  “Just do what Himself said—stay away from exposed places.”

  The first attack came that night, around midnight. I was jolted awake by howling winds and a rattling barrage against the castle walls, crashing blasts of thunder and lightning, and deafening clangs as the shutters slammed into place on the windows. The lightning was so close and frequent that it blinded me through gaps in the shutters. I bolted for the closet, to put the door between me and the windows. By the time I calmed down enough to use the shield spell, the attack was nearly over. I didn’t get back to sleep for hours.

  The scholars were in a dither the next morning, not helped by Mrs Cole’s refusal to let anyone in the dining room, where the onslaught had smashed several windows before the shutters closed. People looking for places to eat breakfast milled around in the kitchen and pantry and other rooms along the corridor, making it difficult for us to get our work done.

  René, when he appeared, rather later than usual, bounced into the kitchen saying, “Did you see him? He was awesome. He just walked along the ramparts looking like they weren’t bothering him a bit, and snapping out lightning bolts in all directions like it was nothing.”

  “René, didn’t he say ‘stay away from the windows’? It could be dangerous with all that fire and lightning and flying glass.”

  “My windows weren’t broken. I didn’t care. I wanted to watch. I’m glad I did.”

  Master Sven, who was just finishing his breakfast, gave him a half-hearted dressing down for not being careful, then sheepishly admitted he had watched the spectacle, too. “Arturos and I are going to fix the dining room windows. You might want to watch.”

  We followed him to the dining room where Arturos was already waiting, and we, and several curious scholars, stood in the doorways to watch. They wouldn’t let us come past the doors for fear the glass flying back towards the windows would hit somebody. Even René looked concerned when a shard a foot long fought to unstick itself from the seat cushion it had skewered.

  Arturos explained that it was easiest to do with two wizards or witches working together. They took turns, one of them making big sweeping motions of the wand to cast the spell to bring back all the fragments of glass from a specific window. The pieces rose in a sparkling, tinkling tower up the window until each was back in the place it had come from. The other wizard would cast the spell to remelt the fragments, and when the pane had reformed, smooth and uncracked, cast the spell to cool it off again. The rough texture of the reformed panes made the repairs obvious. Many of the windows in the Fortress looked that way. Over the centuries, they must have been broken and fixed many times.

  When they finished in the dining room, Arturos cast an aversion spell to keep anyone from getting too close while the windows were still hot. They moved on down the corridor towards the stairs on the eastern side, but Arturos suggested we go to the middle staircase to watch the Warlock fix its roof. We hurried towards the stairs, and found a crowd of scholars clustered at the top of the library tier, watching the Warlock working his way down. He had a wand in each hand, sweeping up the fragments with his right hand and sending them in a reverse cascade up to the empty window frame, then holding them there while he made the motions to melt and cool the glass in each pane with his left hand. He showed less strain by himself than Beorn and Sven had working together.

  The next day, after they had cooled down, René and I climbed on the railings and examined the roof up close. Neither of us could see that any of the panes he fixed had ever been broken. How many times had the windows been broken, that the Warlock should get so good at fixing them?

  The afternoon was more grim. A rumour spread during the morning about Warlock Nostradamus. The Warlock, looking sad and weary, confirmed it at dinner. “I have sad news. Warlock Nostradamus, the eldest of the Council members,”—he did not add ‘and the most senile’—”tried to come to my aid last night, and burnt himself badly. He died of his burns an hour ago. We will light the funeral pyre this evening, at dusk.

  “Also, it is now imperative that the townsfolk move into the Fortress as quickly as possible. Last night’s attack was only a feint to test our defences. An attack in earne
st will not leave the town untouched.”

  During the afternoon, guardsmen laid the wood for the funeral pyre on the highest point of a shoulder of the mountain sticking out to the east of the Fortress. At sunset, everyone—townsfolk, castle residents, visitors, guardsmen and their families—gathered on the ramparts. We watched the funeral procession—the other warlocks carrying the bier with the shrouded body, followed by Nostradamus’s widow, children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren—make its slow way from the castle to the pyre. They laid him on it, and the other warlocks thrust their wands into the stack of wood and set it ablaze. We watched in silence as the bonfire blazed against the dark sky, and drifted back indoors as the fire slowly burned down. Over the next three days, everyone, from their closest friends down to the rawest recruit in the guards, made their way to pay their respects to the family, now safely ensconced in a suite in one of the middle tiers.

  Two days later, in a snowstorm, we did it again for Warlock Venturous, whose bad heart gave out from the stress of moving.

  The second attack came several days later, and lasted much longer—all night, through the next day, and halfway into the next night. It sounded more ferocious, with blasts of flame and bombardments by rocks seeming to come from all directions at once. The shutters, and the windows they covered, rattled without letup. If magic hadn’t held them on, the wind would have blown the shutters halfway to Iberia.

  We walked through the corridors with our hands over our ears. There was no table talk at dinner; we ate as fast as we could, with nervous glances at the rattling windows. The flashes of lightning made it difficult to see what we were eating, as our eyes couldn’t adjust between the alternating light and dark.

  I escaped to the practice room; it was quieter there, having no windows. I carried in blankets and pillows, and read from Terésa until I fell asleep on the hard stone floor.

  When it was over, I thought I had gone deaf. All I could hear was my ears ringing.