Valdemar Books

by Lackey, Mercedes

  These two, Grays both, were going at it with the same concentration and will—if not skill—as the previous pair. And with a touch less aggression; not so bad a thing, since he preferred to see caution over bravado. When one finally defeated the other, he sent them to observe, rather than to the mirrors.

  The third pair, Healer and Heraldic Trainees, also bouted and retired; one went to the mirrors, the other to point practice on a ball suspended from the ceiling. The fourth pair, however—

  Well, both of them were high-spirited most times, and today, truly full of bedevilment. One was a Heraldic Trainee, the other a Bardic Trainee, and between them, the two were responsible for half the pranks that were pulled at the two Collegia. Both were slender and agile, both possessed of so much energy that their teachers sometimes despaired over trying to get them to hold still long enough to learn something, and envied their inexhaustible verve at one and the same time.

  So Alberich knew he was going to have to be sharp to keep these two within bounds today.

  If he could. Adain, the young Bard, and Mical were harder to keep control of than a bushel of ferrets today; he saw that within moments of their bout.

  The two went at each other with the same concentration and will as the first two, and a great deal more energy and enthusiasm. As a consequence, they didn’t stay inside the circle of observers, and those who had been quietly practicing found themselves scrambling out of the way as their combat ran from one end of the salle to the other.

  Alberich had heard some rumors that these two were in the habit of experimenting with new moves—well, here was the proof that the rumors were true. It looked less like a practice bout and more like an acrobatic exhibition. Very few of their blows actually connected with anything. They weren’t actually parrying each other; they were tumbling and spinning and jumping about so much that they never even got near each other with their wooden blades.

  “Stop!” Alberich roared, just as Adain, by more luck than anything else, bound Mical’s blade in a complicated corkscrewing parry—

  —and with a wild flip of his arm, disarmed his opponent and sent the wooden sword flying—

  —straight at one of the precious panels of mirror.

  Alberich opened his mouth to shout, and knew it was already too late.

  It was one of those moments when time slows to a crawl, and the coming disaster is observed in painful detail without anyone being able to actually do anything about it. Adam’s grin of triumph slowly turned to one of horror, Mical clawed the air in futility after his lost sword as it headed straight for the mirror, its own reflection seeming to fly to meet it in midair. As the heavy, weighted stick flipped over and over in midair, Alberich just braced himself for the inevitable.

  And, with a terrible crash, it came. The weighted end hit with the sound of a hundred hand mirrors hitting a pavement; the mirror spiderwebbed—and shattered.

  A profound and dreadful silence fell over the salle, broken only by a belated series of musical chinks, as a few of the shards that were left detached themselves and landed on the wreck of the rest of the mirror.

  Chink. Chinker-chink. Chink.

  “Uh-oh,” said Adain, in a very small voice.

  Chink.

  ***

  Alberich stood behind the two miscreants with his arms crossed over his chest, as they faced the desk of the Acting Dean of Herald’s Collegium. Elcarth was not alone; the Dean of Bardic Collegium, Bard Arissa, had joined him for this particular conference. While Elcarth, slight and birdlike, with an inquisitive face and mild manner, was not normally the sort of person who might inspire trepidation in a student, the look he wore today would have frozen the marrow of anyone’s bones.

  The two boys huddled unhappily in their chairs. It was the first time within his knowledge that Alberich had seen these two subdued. Their shoulders, under gray and rust-colored tunics respectively, were hunched with misery; their dark heads were both bowed, and two sets of hazel eyes were bent upon the floor.

  “What, precisely, possessed you two to demonstrate your—new fighting techniques today?” That was Bard Arissa, a slim, autocratic woman, dark as a gypsy and resplendent in her full formal Scarlets, and you could have used the edge in her voice to cleave diamonds.

  “It seemed like a good idea?” Adain suggested, in a whisper.

  “And why did you not ask Herald Alberich if you could show him these things in private?” asked Elcarth, his voice like a wintry blast from the snowstorm outside.

  “Um. He’s very busy?” Adain seemed to be doing all the talking; Mical was sitting like a stone. Alberich knew why; Mical was from a family prosperous enough to possess one or two real glass mirrors and he knew just how expensive they were, although he probably had no idea that the price increased exponentially with the size. Adain was highborn; until he came to the Collegium, he had never had to pay for anything himself in his life, and he had no idea what even a hand mirror cost, much less one of the huge panels in the salle. Mical thought he knew, and he was scared, just thinking it would cost about the same as a good horse; Alberich knew better, knew that you could buy a nice house with a garden in a good part of Haven for less than one of those mirrors.

  “Never, to my knowledge, did you inquire of me, these new moves to observe,” Alberich said from behind them. “My duty it is, to make time for such things.”

  “You wanted an audience,” Arissa said, in that same hard, sharp voice—which, given that she was a Master Bard, was certainly deliberate. And, given that she was a Bard, and so was one of the miscreants, her statement about their motive was probably correct. “You couldn’t bear not to have an audience. You wanted to show off what you thought you could do.”

  Alberich’s surmise that she had uncovered what had really driven the match today was borne out by the way that both the boys winced.

  “Well,” she continued, “you got an audience. I trust you’re pleased. You’ve made fools out of yourselves in front of that audience, not to mention the damage you did in the salle.”

  Now it was Elcarth’s turn. “Speaking of damages . . . are either of you aware of just how difficult—and expensive—it is to replace a mirror of that size?”

  Identical head shakes.

  Elcarth named a figure. Both of them went white as the snow falling outside. Even Alberich was impressed, hearing the exact cost; it made what he had paid for his stained-glass window look like pin money by comparison.

  “Now,” Elcarth continued. “Naturally, some of this is going to come from your stipends. We shan’t take all of your stipends, but you’re going to be down to less than half of what everyone else gets.”

  Mical finally said something. “But—we could never pay all that back, not even if we stayed Trainees for a hundred years!” He gulped audibly.

  “Which is why you are both going to be spending all of your free time working for the Master of the Glassworker’s Guild until he finishes the new mirror,” Arissa said flatly. “We intend for you to see why, at first-hand, such things cost so dearly. We intend for you to have a very proprietary interest in the replacement. When the mirror is finished, I trust you will have an entirely new understanding of your folly.”

  “And a new set of muscles,” Elcarth added enigmatically. “Now you may go, and reflect on the fact that you will not have any time to get up to any more clever ideas for the duration. This will be your last evening with any leisure in it, because you’ll be spending your mornings, your afternoons, and half of your evenings down at the glassworks for a while. Enjoy it.”

  As if they could, with a sentence like that one hanging over their heads. The two rose, heads hanging, and shuffled out of the room, the very image of dejection.

  Elcarth sighed once they were gone, and ruffled a hand through his hair. “I wouldn’t mind so much if they’d gone about their little project sensibly,” he said. He motioned to Alberich to sit; Alberich did so. “Consulting with their instructors, for instance. Not that all of that gymkhana nonsense
would have worked, mind you. I wonder where they got such a notion?”

  “Out of their imaginations, I suppose,” growled Arissa, sitting on the other chair. “Which are entirely too active if you ask me. Or perhaps out of some idiot play or other; the two of them are always running down into Haven to see some fool drama whenever there’s one to be seen. I presume they’re going to be put to working the bellows at the glassworks for the next moon or so? It could be worse; this could be summer.”

  “It will be summer before they see the end of their labor,” Elcarth said. “I intend to leave them down there for more than a moon. Master Cuelin tells me his apprentice is ready to go on to more complicated work, and he doesn’t have a junior apprentice to start on the bellows or do any of the other simple labor in and around the place. So our lads can serve until he gets one. It could have been worse. At least it was only one mirror panel, not two or more.”

  “How often does this occur?” Alberich asked curiously. “Assume, I must, that accidents do happen. Stupidity probably rather more often than accident.”

  Elcarth shrugged. “About once every hundred years or so. I mean, we designed the salle to minimize the possibility of an accident, and you Weaponsmasters rarely permit flying objects in the salle itself. It does happen, and it isn’t always a Trainee’s fault, though I must say that this time is probably going into Myste’s Chronicles for sheer wrongheadedness. The panels are all a standard size, and the glassworks has the dimensions in their records from the last time, so Master Cuelin won’t even have to come up here to take measurements. I can’t tell you how long it’s going to take to replace the mirror, though. The Master will have a lot of failures before he gets a success.”

  “I would interested be, to watch,” Alberich admitted. “Or at least, to hear from the Master how such a thing is made.”

  “Then deliver the criminals yourself in the morning, after breakfast,” Elcarth told him. “Someone will have to escort them the first time.”

  Alberich took quick account of his schedule, and smiled thinly. “So I shall,” he decided.

  Arissa laughed, her voice full of ironic humor. “Oh, they’ll enjoy seeing your face tomorrow morning!”

  ***

  The snow was still falling all that afternoon, into the night, and the next day, and Alberich had sent word up to the Collegia that the Trainees were to have a day-and-a-half holiday from their weaponry classes while the salle was cleaned. A small army of Collegium servants were scouring the salle floor for the tiniest slivers of glass, and would not leave until the floor had been swept several times over, then washed down, buffed and lightly sanded, so that it wasn’t slippery. The one proviso to this “holiday” was that the Trainees were to spend the class time out of doors, but with this much snow, he doubted that would be much of a trial for them. The first lot was already building a snow fort when he and Kantor left to escort the two troublemakers to their appointed labors, while snow continued to fall from a sky that was the same color as a pigeon’s breast, and looked just as soft.

  When Alberich got to the grounds of Herald’s Collegium, the two boys were waiting for him on the road that ran among the buildings, mounted, Adain on his Companion and Mical on a sorrel gelding from the Palace stables. There was a conspicuous absence of Trainees anywhere near them; they waited alone in their disgrace.

  As Alberich and Kantor approached, he observed that Adain and Mical looked just as subdued as they had last night, and even Adain’s Companion drooped a little. They kept the hoods of their cloaks well up, and aside from a soft, “Good morrow, Weaponsmaster Alberich,” he got nothing more out of them. Not that he intended to try to get them to talk. It would do them good to contemplate their sins in silence.

  Snow drifted down now as fat, slow flakes; there wasn’t even a breath of wind, and the air smelled damp. Most of the trees bore burdens of snow along their black, bare branches, and large mounds bore testament to bushes hidden under heaps of the stuff. Nothing had spoiled the pure whiteness yet, except for where the road had been cleared by the Palace gardeners.

  By midmorning, people would be out playing in it. And the two boys would be painfully aware of that. A good thing; better they should have to reflect on their sins in sorrow than congratulate themselves that today would have been a miserable one to be out in anyway.

  Alberich led them away from the Palace and toward the wall that surrounded the entire complex. They left from the Herald’s Gate, the guarded postern at the Collegium side of the Palace grounds. Outside the walls, the road hadn’t been cleared as yet. Heavy as the snow on the road was, the Companions made easy going through it, and the horse was able to follow in Kantor’s wake. By the time they got down through the manors of the highborn and the very wealthy, there were crews out starting to clear the road. Traffic was limited to a few riders and people on foot; except for a few main thoroughfares, the streets hadn’t been shoveled out yet either. Fresh snow was nearly up to the knee, and drifts blocked many smaller side streets and alleys. But people were already out with shovels and teams of horses pulling scrapers, and work was going apace.

  After all, it was in the interest of a shopkeeper to get the street in front of his place of business cleared quickly. So as they passed farther down into the commercial parts of Haven, there was more clean pavement, and more activity. And by the smoke coming from the chimney of the glassworks as they arrived, things were busy in there as well.

  Alberich dismounted and gave a hard rap on the door to the glassworks courtyard with his fist. Two of the apprentices met them at the door; one took charge of their mounts, and with an evil grin, the other took charge of the miscreants. Alberich understood the reason for the grin perfectly; the apprentice would now be put to doing something far more interesting and less labor intensive than mere manual work, while Adain and Mical took his place at the bellows. The furnaces were always going in a glassworks; the fire needed to be quite hot indeed and at an even temperature. The least-skilled job was that of keeping the bellows pumping air into those furnaces, so that the molten glass was always ready to use, cane for decoration could be melted, and glass being blown into vessels could be reheated.

  Alberich knew from his previous visits where to find Master Cuelin; in the Master Workshop. That was where he headed. The glassworks itself was a dangerous place, and he was extremely careful as he made his way through it.

  Even now, in the dead of winter, it was very warm in here. Surrounding the furnaces were stations for molding glass, for those who decorated finished vessels, for beadmakers, for glassblowers. The floor was of pounded dirt, the benches and tables made of metal and stone. There was very little that could catch fire, logically enough. It was surprisingly dark here, too; Alberich supposed there was a reason for that. Perhaps it made the hot glass easier to see while it was being shaped.

  Glass was both blown and molded here, and all manner of things were made. The most common pieces were molded disks and the thick “bullseye” glass for inferior windows, made by dropping hot glass into molds and pressing it. That was a job for an apprentice; it was relatively easy, relative being the proper word when you were talking about glass, a substance that ran like melted wax and would burn you to the bone if it got on you. Beadmakers formed their amazing little works of art on mandrels at their own little benches—or spun out long, thin tubes of colored glass to be chopped into bits and sand-polished in big drums when cool. Glassblowers formed the molten stuff into every shape imaginable, and decorators took the finished vessels and shapes and embellished them with ribbons of colored glass.

  Alberich had been here once before, when he had commissioned his window, and then, as now, it had occurred to him how like a glassworker Vkandis Sunlord was. The glass had no notion of what it was going to be; it was melted in the heat of His regard, then molded or shaped, polished, turned into something that bore little or no resemblance to the grains of sand it had been.

  Sometimes mistakes happened. And when they did, He gathered up the
broken shards with infinite patience, put them back in His furnace, and began again.

  The more conventional analogy—and the one that the Sunpriests favored—was to compare Him to a swordmaker. But it had come to Alberich that He was really nothing like a swordmaker; for one thing, the vast majority of the people He made were not creatures of war. And for another, few of them were tempered and honed. Most of them were simply made, humble creatures of common use, as perfectly suited to their lives as a thick pressed-glass window. Some were merely ornamental, like a bead. Some were honed and polished like the glass scalpels the Healers used for the most careful surgery. But they all came from the same hands, and the same place.

  Better window glass was made in the same way as mirror glass, and required a glassblower as well. Alberich had been rather surprised by that when Master Cuelin told him; it had not occurred to him that one would use the same technique that created a goblet or a vase to make a flat pane of glass.

  But, in fact, that was precisely how it was made. Glass was blown into a bubble of the right thickness, the bubble was then rolled against a flat and highly-polished metal plate to form a cylinder, the ends were swiftly cut off the cylinder and the cylinder slit up the middle while the glass was still soft enough to “relax,” and the resulting pane unrolled itself onto the plate and cooled flat. A master of the craft created a flat, rectangular pane of even thickness with irregularities so few as to be trivial.

  But of course, the larger the pane—or mirror—the more difficult the task of blowing and cutting. Something the size of the mirror in the salle was going to be extremely difficult to do.