“Then they are wrong.” There was more passion in that statement than in everything else William had said to him put together. “By the seams is a phrase used by Stitchers. It references the seam of a construct, the place where its Weaver’s concentration was weakest. If a Stitcher takes a construct ‘by the seams,’ he has taken control of it, completely enough to dissipate it at a stroke. The term has been in use since the Nine—”
“Furies, Faces, and Kindness above,” came the voice of Candlestick Jack. The Weaver appeared in the doorway a moment later, grinning widely. “Your talent for getting in over your head borders on the uncanny, lad. Best not get Will into a talk about language if you have plans for the week.” Jack stepped inside the threshold and made a face. “Bloody Furies, Will. What did you do to this room?”
“It needed sanitizing,” William said.
“The boy wasn’t even bleeding when I got him here!”
“That smell you detect,” William said primly, “is the boundary between recovery and sepsis. There is a reason your Lyonshire surgeries only return three patients for every ten they take in.”
“So long as you’re not sending my students into a coma, you can keep bragging about how successful your surgery is,” Jack said, tipping a significant look at Ashes. “The boy looks fit to keel over. How’d he do?”
“I found his performance sufficient,” William said. “He succeeded in plucking an aether thread without aid and caused nothing to explode. Altogether, a strict improvement over the last student you foisted upon me.”
Jack rolled his eyes. “Rejoice. I’m taking him off your hands.” He led Ashes into the hallway. “Didn’t turn your ears to lead and make them fall off, did he?” he muttered.
Ashes grinned. “Neh. I figure I could’ve done without the Ivorish lesson, though.”
“You’d never believe it’s not his first language, would you?”
“He’s not from around here?”
“How did you guess?” Jack asked drily. “Was it the accent, or the general impression of his being fundamentally different from all sane humanity?”
Ashes laughed. “The first one, mostly.”
“Will’s technically a citizen,” Jack said. “Foreign parents, but he was born inside city limits and has the iron name to prove it. He’s as much a Denizen as I am, so far as the law’s concerned.”
Jack led him into the parlor with the great window, where Ashes saw with some surprise that it was nearly evening. They passed through the intangible wall, down the stairs, and into the workshop. The Artificer moved quickly to the cabinet at the back of the room.
“I’ve got a present for you before you head home for the night,” he explained as he pulled out a long-handled silver key and unlocked the cabinet. He moved his broad shoulders to hide the inside from view, though not before Ashes caught a glimpse of a dozen phials of liquid light on the top shelf. When Jack turned back to him, he was holding a small stone circle, the same Ashes had found in the sewers.
“This is yours,” Jack said.
“What is it?”
Jack gave him a strange look. “It’s called an optic, or a seeing-stone,” Jack said. “Another tool of the trade, though not one you’re likely to find in the average Artificer’s lab.”
Ashes held the stone to his eye. Through the circle, the workshop was transformed. The shelves shone with gold and silver lights brighter than the lamps. Where there had been blank stretches of wall, now there were doors. Ashes looked at Jack, and saw brilliant lights in the man’s coat, as if he were smuggling stars in his pockets.
“Seeing-stones reveal Artifice for what it really is,” Jack said. “It makes Weaving disappear, makes Anchors damn near impossible to conceal.” He smirked and passed a hand over his face, and his features shifted subtly: his jowls became heavier, his nose short and brutish, his eyes a bright, searing green. Ashes looked at him with the seeing-stone again, and squinted. Through the lens, Jack’s face looked the same, except that it shone like a miniature sun. “Doesn’t play nicely with Stitching, though.”
“What the hell was that?”
“Stitching, lad,” Jack said proudly. “It’s the only sort of Artifice that can really keep you hidden.” He pointed at the seeing-stone in Ashes’s hand. “Those are not terribly common, but there are Artificers out there who’ve got their hands on one. If you’d rather keep your face entirely to yourself, Stitching is the way to do it. It works against Iron Knights, too.”
Ashes laughed, but Jack gave him a flat look. “Something funny?” the man asked.
“Iron Knights are a fairy tale,” Ashes said.
“Are they really?” Jack said drily. “Bugger and damn, I’ve wasted so many years devising ways to keep them off my scent. Iron Knights are just as real as we are. Not as powerful as they are in the stories—they can’t destroy your Artifice just by touching it. But they can see through it. Their eyes are seeing-stones. They’re too single-minded to trick. They’re strong enough to rip your head off your shoulders, and humorless enough to do it. You meet a man with moonlight where his eyes should be, mind your manners and be very, very obedient.”
Iron Knights were real. Blimey would have a fit.
“Why are you giving it to me?” Ashes asked.
“I don’t need an extra,” Jack said with a shrug. “And where optics are concerned, finders are very much keepers. They’re old, old magic. You found it, it’s yours, no matter that you’ve been an Artificer for hardly two nights.”
Ashes pocketed the stone. “Thanks,” he said.
“Don’t mention it,” Jack said. “Besides, I’m not done playing gift-giver yet. Hold out your hand.”
Ashes looked at the man skeptically, but obeyed, presenting his palm.
“Make sure you don’t close your eyes,” Jack said. “You’ll miss the exciting part.”
Jack held his open hand beneath Ashes’s. A ball of light appeared above Ashes’s palm and began to spin, and as it spun it grew larger, until it formed a luminous maelstrom. Jack twitched a finger downward, and the light dove into—through—Ashes’s bare skin. The boy could have sworn he felt something cool and ephemeral rush through him, and wondered how much of it was simple wishing.
“There,” Jack said.
“There what?”
“You’re a Stitcher,” Jack explained. “And I intend to teach you Weaving. Your magic doesn’t know how to Weave naturally, so my magic has shown it how.” He grinned broadly. “Technically, I only have to touch you and Weave at the same time, but there’s no spectacle in that.”
Ashes looked at his hands. He didn’t feel any different.
“It’ll be some time before you can do anything impressive, of course,” Jack said. “Think of it as your muscles needing to bulk up.”
“I— Thanks,” Ashes said.
“Again, really, don’t mention it,” Jack said. “To anyone, ever. The Guild would chop off my lovely hands.”
Ashes laughed. “Told you already, Jack. I can keep a secret.”
Jack grinned at that, but when he met Ashes’s eyes it was with a serious, calculating gaze. Ashes kept his face studiously blank, though he wondered if Jack had seen him last night in the opium den. He had been well hidden, but still . . .
“I’m sure you can,” Jack said.
THE next three weeks passed in a blur. Ashes came to the Rehl Company shop every morning at ten o’clock, entering by the back way when no one was looking. His lessons were many and varied, and every night he returned to Batty Annie’s feeling like his brain was swathed in thick cotton.
Mondays, Wednesdays, and Saturdays he spent with William. This practice made sense in theory, since Ashes was theoretically a Stitcher. It took Ashes fewer than three lessons to start wondering if, perhaps, something was wrong with that theory. He was certainly no Weaver; moving raw light felt like trying to pick up a house by his fingertips. But Stitching was, if anything, even harder.
William started every lesson with an exercise to revi
ew basic principles: binding Anchors so that illusions appeared when they were touched or breathed on or held horizontally; or finding a construct’s seam; or molding an illusion that had solidified. Even the easier exercises took Ashes nearly twenty minutes. William informed him, in his dispassionate way, that none should have taken more than five.
When William was not tonelessly reminding him about basic principles—of which there seemed to be thousands—he was correcting his grammar. “Enunciate.” “Yes or no. Eh and neh are neither charming nor, in fact, words.” “Do you. Enunciate.” Against his will, Ashes felt his command of the language sharpened by pure frustration.
The Wisp’s pale face showed emotion only rarely, but Ashes could sense the man’s disappointment like a constant stench. His eyes bored into Ashes’s fingers when he worked. He guillotined words with his teeth when he reminded Ashes of simple things. He assigned exercises with what would have seemed like vindictive pleasure, if it had come from anyone else; but the Wisp gave no sign he enjoyed seeing Ashes bind and rebind one construct to the same Anchor in eight different ways or peel aether out of outdated illusions. William’s cool distaste only angered Ashes more. At least if William were vindictive, Ashes could have hated him guiltlessly.
But, in truth, Ashes was frustrated, too. After three weeks of constant practice, there was no significant improvement in his skill. He was a little faster at reconstituting, and could make minute adjustments to congealed constructs. The only discipline he had any knack for was finding seams, but even that he could only do if he watched it being Woven. The most impressive skill—making illusory changes to the real world—resisted him entirely.
On Tuesdays and Sundays, he studied with Juliana. These days were marginally better, since Jack’s wife always brought food to their lessons, and he never tired of looking at her. Even more encouraging, she seemed to enjoy having him around, though it was difficult to be certain that he wasn’t simply receiving Ivorish courtesy.
Her subject matter, however, could not have been more hateful. She taught him drawing, anatomy, and a smattering of alchemy’s foundational principles. All three subjects made him want to beat his head through a wall. His fingers, sly enough to tease a neckerchief out of unsuspecting pockets, were utterly confounded by pencils and inks. The other two subjects consisted entirely of memorizing tables upon tables of information, and the occasional use of arithmetic. He had a quick memory, but the sheer volume of material made his head spin. On the occasions when he begged for a respite, she switched to Ivorish customs: courtesies and manners and traditions Ashes would need to know if he ever pretended to be someone of a great rank. Those lessons were even worse.
Thursdays and Fridays belonged to Jack. Initially Ashes had been excited, if wary: he ached to shape light on his fingertips. He would even endure unorthodox teaching methods for it; between their first lesson and the myriad stories he’d heard about trickster teachers, Ashes was willing to bet that Jack would run him through a host of mundane exercises only to reveal that they were all, somehow, fundamentally important to Artifice. Ashes was ready, even eager.
By the second week he realized the stories were full of trash.
Jack’s lessons, rather than containing the merest mention of Artifice or light-shaping, mainly involved subjecting Ashes to a series of arcane games. The connection between the exercises and Artifice was tenuous at best; it seemed Jack’s sole aim was forcing Ashes to think faster. He would uncover a table full of objects and give Ashes thirty seconds to memorize the arrangement, colors, and shapes of the pieces, and then quiz him on it, often with trick questions about items that hadn’t been on the table. He would mention something offhand at the beginning of the lesson, and demand that Ashes repeat it word for word at the end. He told Ashes to read long, complex passages from books while Jack did his best to distract him—by creating flashes of light, or yelling, or insulting Ashes’s mother, or throwing whatever he had on hand—and if Ashes dropped or mispronounced a single word, they started again from the beginning.
Jack’s favorite game was having Ashes play pretend. Pretend you’re Lord Trevilian. Pretend you’re from Boreas Glades. Pretend you’re an Iron Knight. Pretend you’re drunk and need to see a medic. On these occasions he would make minute adjustments to Ashes’s posture, speech, voice, expression; frequently he Wove new faces for Ashes to wear while he pretended. Sometimes he asked questions about what Ashes, as someone else, thought about a particular topic, or asked his reasoning behind a given action. On one memorable occasion, he made Ashes play out an argument between a priest and a heretic entirely on his own.
On the third Thursday, after fully five hours of this educational terrorism, Jack handed him a phial of liquid light.
“Do not waste it,” he said. “We’re going to play Distract Me.” This was Jack’s name for the read-aloud-while-I-throw-things-at-you game.
Ashes eyed the phial carefully. “What’s the light for?”
“You’re not reading today,” Jack said with a slight smile. “Today it’s real magic.”
The objective was to dole out a tiny measure of the liquid light and keep it in a tight ball. Ashes would change the color of the ball according to Jack’s instructions, but only if Jack said “The Ladies say” before he called out the color.
With an effort, he made the light hover above his palm while Jack took up position, and at the first “Ladies say,” turned the ball blue.
Immediately Jack began his onslaught. In his periphery, Ashes glimpsed brilliant flashes, miniature supernovae that lit the entire workshop in varying shades of purple, blue, red, and green. He was so focused on the ball of light he hardly noticed them, until Jack called “Ladies say violet. Mauve. Silver. Ladies say blue. How did your mother feel about goats? Very fondly, judging by your face.”
Jack clanged the more durable metal Anchors together, and overturned a table, and threw a Gilder-glove that hit Ashes in the face. “Ladies say green!” He called Ashes a variety of colorful names, then cursed every Face, individually, in wonderfully inventive ways, and shouted so loudly Ashes was sure folk heard it on the road. “Gold! By the way, I’ve figured out why you stink so. I think you must’ve been born in a privy. Your mum must’ve been very confused.” He gathered light around his hands and flung it in the boy’s eyes. “Ladies say white!”
And, when Jack finally stopped, the ball of light still hovered over Ashes’s palm, revolving slowly, pale and fragile but as glitteringly white as a diamond. Jack eyed it, and muttered something about how Synder would have done better.
On Friday, Jack gave him another phial of light and told him to make himself a face.
“What kind?” Ashes asked.
“The kind you wouldn’t mind being caught in,” Jack said. “We’re going out tonight, you and I. Something I want you to see.”
Light, Ashes decided, was ornery. If he remembered correctly, Blimey had said ornery meant it behaved like Ashes did with grown-ups, and that was exactly what light was like.
He had been sitting at Jack’s worktable for four hours. The first face had come out misshapen and strange, with skin of a mottled color. For fully an hour, he’d tried to Stitch it into something more tenable, and all he’d managed to do was make the skin slightly smoother and the shape less monstrous, which was to say it had boils, pockmarks, and horns instead of boils, pockmarks, horns, and sharp edges. Discouraged, he’d reconstituted the thing and started over.
The second face looked vaguely more human, but still undeniably demonic. On the third face, his attention slipped, and the Weaving burst with a flash so bright it left trails in his eyes. It took him fully twenty minutes to gather the light back together, and he lost at least a quarter of it.
Noon had nearly arrived. His forehead was damp with sweat, and his fingers ached. His most recent illusion floated in front of him, and if his exhaustion hadn’t been evident in his eyes and his body, it was evident in the work. The face was all angles and sharp lines, harsh and frightening; the
eyes were too large and the teeth too long for the mouth. It looked to have been carved from obdurate stone by an unskilled, talentless apprentice. Which, he thought, was very nearly accurate.
He let out a heavy breath as he Anchored the face onto a pole in the center of the table, a temporary home to keep the construct from evaporating. Though, looking at it, evaporation might well be the best destiny for this thing.
The magic ought to have come more easily than this. Story heroes always took to their magic innately, didn’t they? Jack had told him that some people took months and years to do the simplest things, but he’d been talking about Gilders. Ashes was canted. It should have been easier than this.
He ran his hand through the illusory face, feeling the threads against his fingertips, and prepared to rip the thing apart again: no one, at least, would be able to say he’d given up. He shaped his mind and perspective, preparing to be invisible, and then he heard a footstep behind him.
He jerked backward, and his senseless legs, unpredictable even a month after the witch-healing, overbalanced. He tipped backward and crashed to the floor.
“Oh my goodness!” someone said.
He rolled to his side and forced himself to stand. Fire lit in his cheeks.
The newcomer was an Ivorish girl with a heart-shaped face and eyes sharp enough to cut glass. “Are you all right?” She took three quick strides toward him before he stepped back reflexively. She halted, looking at him with concern.
“M’fine,” Ashes said. His blush could have boiled water. “I was just— I, erm. Hullo.” He tried to gather the stray pieces of his confidence back together. This was difficult to do while exhausted, embarrassed, and confused.
“I didn’t mean to startle you,” the girl said. “I do apologize for that. Juliana said you’d be in here.”
Ashes swallowed and tried to reorient himself. Something about the girl gave him pause. “Who’re you?” he asked, though he felt pretty sure he knew.
“Synder.” The girl glanced around Ashes, at the mangled, sharp-featured face he had made. “Previously Jack’s only student.”
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