by CJ Brightley
Gizmo nodded, acknowledging the apology, but his expression was like stone. Bucket’s was carefully blank, but Amiable hadn’t earned a High Mage rank in mindmagic without gaining considerable facility at reading people. He could tell that the younger gnome was deeply offended and hurt.
“We should go,” said Amiable gently. “Mister Gizmo, so sorry to have intruded.” He steered Hope gently by the arm out of the office, and they followed Bucket back to the lab and into the little back room, where Bucket asked Amiable if he wanted tea. Nobody missed the fact that he didn’t speak to Hope.
“Thank you, Bucket, but I’ll be fine without,” said Amiable. “Don’t let us keep you from your other duties.”
The young gnome left the room, and Hope sank her face into her hands. “They’re going to hate me,” she said, her voice muffled.
“In my experience,” he replied, “you’re not only a remarkably difficult person to hate, you’re also very good at coming back from your mistakes. Don’t worry too much about it. We all trip up sometimes, and you didn’t mean anything by it.”
He got her calmed down, but only enough to decide that she needed to go home and rest, not enough to continue with the original purpose of their meeting. He insisted on taking her in his personal carriage.
“Thank you, Master-Mage,” she said at the door, “you’ve been very kind.”
“Not at all, my dear,” he said, patting her hand. “You take care of yourself. Do you need someone with you?”
“No, no, I’ll be fine. The headache amulets are working, I’m just very tired and a little emotional, and I don’t always think straight. Well, you saw that.” Her mouth turned down, and her eyes seemed to be on the point of tears.
He talked to her some more until she was calm, worked a calming spell for her to keep her that way, and left.
He still hadn’t got her promise to do the lecture series, but at least he had a possible candidate to manage the practical side of the Institute. In his experience with academics, someone like that was essential, and Mister Gizmo certainly seemed qualified. With the clerk shortage since Unification, as all the best clerks got assigned to the less-developed north, one had to recruit where one could.
4
Problems and Who Takes Care of Them
“What are you doing, Beloved?” Realmgold Determined asked his oathmate and co-Realmgold. He had just finished a chapter in his book and looked up. Victory had a piece of paper and a pen and was alternating between scribbling and leaning back in her chair and apparently thinking deeply. She wore, as always, a pure-white suit consisting of a well-cut shirt and trousers. It was known as a Victory suit, and widely imitated, though nobody else dared to wear a white one.
“This is a list of our problems,” she said.
“It seems too short.”
She smiled the small, secret smile that only he ever saw. “It’s a high-level list. I’m going through each item and deciding who I should set to solving it.”
“Meaning you or me?”
“Meaning the Clerks, the Inner Council, the Golds, the Council of Mages, the military, or my clever man. Don’t make a scarecrow and stand in your own field.”
“Where do you get all these rural sayings?”
“My old nurse.” The small, unremarkable-looking woman with whom he jointly ruled the United Realm of Koslin smiled again. She had another, commanding face for the public, assisted by a secret glamour spell she’d learned from an old Elvish book, but this was the one he loved, the face nobody else ever saw. “Do you want to come over and help me decide?”
“You and I both know how that will end.” They had not been oathbound very long.
“So, do you want to?”
“Of course I do.” He crossed from his chair to hers, perching on the right arm and looking over her shoulder at the list while he slipped his own left arm around her shoulders.
“Why is ‘dwarves digging tunnels’ a problem?” he asked, peering at the list.
“They’re digging tunnels between their holds. The conservative ones. And laying rails.”
“Rails? Like for mine carts?”
“Yes, but they seem to be using the completed ones to trade,” she said. “They’re running steam cart things over them, with goods and people in. Means they don’t have to move their goods, or their gnomes, through free territory, and they can hang onto their old ways. I don’t like it.”
“They can’t trade out of the realm that way, though, surely.”
“Well, one of my sources claims that they’re driving a tunnel under the Earth Mother’s Rafters, out to the eastern lands.”
“Those cunning little… Do you think they’ll succeed?”
“No technical reason why not, my advisors tell me. Just a matter of determination, and after the way we outmanoeuvred them last year, they have plenty of that.”
He smiled, appreciating that she said “we”. It had mostly been her, truth be told, who had blindsided the dwarves with a clarifying law that said that the way they owned the service of their gnomes was the same as slavery, and hence illegal — at least, outside their own self-governing holds.
“So they’ll be able to trade with the east and circumvent the anti-slavery laws?”
“Yes, and open up a profitable market here for eastern goods. The pack route over the Rafters is closed by snow more than it’s open, and it’s narrow and steep, so our trade with the east has never been very great.”
“What are you planning?” He saw that she had written “Clever man” next to that item on the list.
“Skyships are too expensive currently to compete with an underground rail network,” she said. “Currently. I want to ask Dignified to improve them so that we can build a commercial route to the east and compete with the dwarves, bring down their profits. Not to mention opening closer diplomatic ties with the eastern realms, and perhaps influence them to our interpretation of the first article in the Code of Willing.” Every civilized land’s laws were based on the same ancient Code, enacted after humans had freed themselves from slavery to the old Imperial Elves at the fall of the empire. Naturally, the first article forbade slavery.
“You don’t lose graciously, do you?”
“Oh, no,” she said. “In fact, I am not in the habit of losing at all.” She smiled, a different smile that Determined was just as pleased not to have directed at him. “I am also considering using the gnome underground to delay the tunnelling. Subtly, of course. Sand in the machine oil, that sort of thing.”
“‘Continuing unrest in former Denning,’” he read aloud from further down the list. “You’re not putting the military on that one?” His former realm had been the scene of civil war very recently, and it was only by uniting their two realms and sending in Victory’s well-equipped military that they had managed to put the rebellion down.
“That time has passed,” she said, “except where there is actual violence being offered. Do you remember our solution for the malcontents in the refugee camp?”
“Of course. Form a council so they’ll argue with each other instead. But you can’t make a council out of the whole former realm of Denning.”
“Can’t I?”
“What do you have in mind?” he asked, meeting her eyes, which were dancing with amusement.
“Among the political experiments in the Hundred Counties,” she said, “one of the more interesting ones has been the Assembly of Mertven.”
“I’ve heard of that,” he said. “Bunch of Silvers. Big talking shop. They try to run the county with it.”
“Yes, and Mertven is actually one of the larger and more successful counties in that unfortunate region,” she said. The Hundred Counties, to the northeast, were a byword for disunity and small-scale war, occasionally turning large-scale and ruining everyone’s economy. It was also a region in which, thanks to the lack of a strong central government, a number of political innovations had found room to flourish, or otherwise.
“You want to let the Silvers have
a try at running things?” He played the fool, knowing how much she enjoyed explaining her own cleverness.
“Of course not. We’re having a difficult enough job, and we were born to it and raised for it. No, what I want to do, with the help of a young political philosopher who’s one of my creatives, is to work out a way to have an assembly for the Silvers — and Coppers, why not? All the ones who, for whatever reason, care about what happens in the realm, gathered into one place, talking it out. At worst, we’ll have a gauge of popular sentiment and a relief valve for discontent, and at best, they might actually find some solutions.”
“Do you think that’s likely at all?”
“Well, one never knows. I find that if I place high expectations on people they will often meet them.” She smiled at him, and this was a broad smile.
“Oh, is that so?” he said, and reached out to cup her cheek with his right hand.
“Yes,” she said, leaning forward and kissing him.
They broke the kiss just long enough to activate the privacy rug, which would keep any sounds from leaking out of the room. Their servants were discreet, but there was no need to treat them to a show.
“Letter for you, Mistress,” said Rosie’s family’s butler as he entered the breakfast room.
She took the communication, on common commercial stock, and checked the return address. “Ah!” she said, as excitement and nervousness commenced a fracas in her lower abdomen. It was from Dignified’s laboratory.
She tore it open, ripping it slightly in the process, and scanned past the first paragraph to the answer. She beamed.
“Thank you, Courageous,” she said.
“Good news, Mistress?”
“The best. I am going out.” She leapt to her feet and strode to the hall to get her coat and hat.
“Very good, Mistress. Shall we expect you for dinner?”
“I wouldn’t,” she replied.
When she knocked at the door of the laboratory, the gnome Bucket opened it, as she had anticipated. His cheerful face lit up. “Mistress Industry!” he said. “The mage told me you were going to be working here. Come in.”
Well, she thought, at least one person is glad to see me.
Dignified looked up as Bucket led her back into the maze of fascinating equipment. Her footfalls, in the fashionable shoes that Mother insisted she buy, did ring rather.
“Rosie,” he said. His face didn’t change expression.
“Hello, Dignified. I’ve come to work here,” she said, stumbling over her words in her excitement.
He nodded and blinked. “Come and look at this,” he said.
She approached and peered through her spectacles at a device he had set up in what she recognised as a kind of test harness. Small girders bolted together formed a tower about Bucket’s height, which was to say just above her own hips, and at the top was a cube with the device in the centre, anchored in multiple directions with force gauges. The device itself consisted largely of a long crystal, hexagonal in cross-section and about the size of a small loaf of bread, wrapped in sigil-engraved brass. She read the sigils.
“It’s a flight crystal,” she said, switching to Dwarvish. She’d read a book about it. Two books, now that she thought about it.
“Correct,” said Dignified, in the same language. “I’ve been asked to improve it. What are your ideas?”
“Bucket,” she said, “would you be so good as to take my jacket? I’m going to need to roll my sleeves up.” She took the jacket off and handed it to him, using the mundane action to cover the excitement that made her want to jump up and down and squeak in a most unprofessional manner.
“Certainly, Mistress Industry,” he said. “Shall I requisition you some work boots, as well?”
“Please. And call me Rosie.”
When Mage Hope came in some hours later, they had established a baseline for the flight crystal and for several others of different sizes, and were in the midst of searching for the equation which would tell them how the length and thickness of the crystal affected its power. Rosie took a break and greeted the younger woman, who was looking a little better today, and thanked her for her letter. She noted wistfully to herself that even in the wake of a head injury and with a colourful bruise on her face, the mage still looked better than Rosie on her best day.
She assumed Dignified was in love with her, because it was hard to imagine how he could not be. Even when one of them was swollen partly shut, Hope’s large, dark eyes, filled with intelligence and animation, drew one’s attention to her symmetrical face and enviably disciplined hair.
Rosie had overheard comments from the stupid young Gold-class men that Mother kept trying to push onto her, or vice versa. She knew she was too tall, awkward, eccentric, that they laughed at her when they thought she wasn’t listening. Occasionally, when they knew she was.
She clamped off that line of thought and finished catching the mage up on their progress so far.
Hope frowned in thought. Rosie picked up a random object, some sort of clockwork, from a nearby bench in order to have something to fiddle with, and instantly dropped it. It rolled under the bench. This particular bench had a shelf about a handspan above the floor, laden with miscellanea, and the clockwork thing was invisible under it. Rosie bent down, but couldn’t see it.
“Don’t worry,” said Hope, “Bucket will get it. Ah, Dignified has finished the calculation.”
The discussion became technical. Rosie thought she was holding her own, more or less, though she only knew basic magical theory. She was really more mechanical than anything, but she knew mathematics up and down.
They had to keep stopping so that they could work out calculations. Or rather, so that Dignified could. Though she was a decent mathematician, he seemed to have shortcuts in his head, and Hope seemed even slower than Rosie. Despite his speed, Dignified said after the fourth or fifth time, “We need to invent a machine to do these calculations. It’s taking too long.”
Dared she speak up? After a long moment, she coughed a sudden obstruction out of her throat and murmured, “I could work on that.”
He blinked and nodded. “Sketch something up and I’ll look at it,” he said, and carried on with the calculations.
Hope muttered something about a distraction, and Rosie flushed, but she stepped out of the circle of erasable boards they had been working in and found another where the boards were clean. She assumed that Bucket must come around and erase them, and wondered how he knew which ones his master had finished with.
She soon forgot about that as she began to sketch ideas for a calculating device. Partway through, she remembered having seen a copy of Mechanical Devices Illustrated and Annotated in the planning office, and slipped off to consult it.
Mister Wheel, who she recognised by the particular chestnut shade of his hair and beard, smiled at her as she entered. “Mistress Industry,” he said. “I heard you were joining us.”
“Rosie, please. I wondered if I might borrow one of your reference books.”
“Certainly, any time. Just make sure it comes back when you’re finished with it.”
She located the book and showed it to him, and he waved as she carried the thick volume through to the lab. She was sure she had seen something in it that she could use. It was on a left-hand page, near the top, about five-eighths of the way through.
Yes, there it was: a device that could move a gear one step when the one next to it completed a whole rotation, without making each subsequent gear harder to turn as you added more gears. She continued her sketch.
She backed away, after what seemed like a short time, bumped into Bucket, and apologised.
“No problem, Mistress, ah, Rosie, I just wanted to ask you if you wanted some lunch.”
“What? Is it that late? I just got here, didn’t I?”
“I can see you’ll fit right in,” said the gnome with a grin. “Lunch?”
“Yes, I suppose,” she said. “Anything, really. Here,” and she produced some coins an
d peered at them, trying to work out how much lunch would cost thereabouts. Her experience of lunch out was mostly in the kind of places Mother took her to or that she ate at with other investors, and she had a vague idea that they were more expensive than average, but since she’d paid no attention to what anything cost at them anyway, and didn’t know how much more expensive they were...
“Oh, no, Mistress, I have a pot of soup on out the back. I’ll bring you a mug.”
“Thank you, Bucket,” she said, and was startled afresh a few minutes later when he reappeared with the mug of (excellent) soup. He had two more mugs, presumably for Hope and Dignified, and she followed him into the other circle of erasable boards. They were covered with Dignified’s spidery mathematical symbols, interspersed with a smaller amount of the mage’s neater writing.
“I think I have a design for an adding machine,” she said, when Bucket had managed to pry their attention away from the boards. “Multiplication… will be more complicated, but I thought we could start with adding as a proof of concept.”
Dignified blinked, nodded, and moved towards where she was standing in the gap between two of the boards. She stood out of his way, and then realised that he wanted to follow her and see her design, and nearly spilled her soup tripping over something on the floor as she tried to get in front of him again. Hope trailed behind.
In her circle of boards, Rosie explained her idea. She was flustered, and her explanation was disconnected, but, pushing her unruly hair back up under her hat, she managed to stumble through it.
Dignified gave one sharp nod. “See Wheel about getting a prototype made,” he said, and stalked back towards his own calculations. She looked at Hope, who shrugged and turned away, and then at Bucket.
“Is that it?” she asked the gnome.
“Apparently,” he said. “You want me to fetch Wheel in here?”
“Oh, would you? Don’t hurry, though, I need to label things.”
Wheel walked carefully around the boards, peering closely at them and stroking his beard. He said, “This doesn’t look like the Master’s writing.”