The Tally Master

by J. M. Ney-Grimm

  Gael sighed. “Pushing your limits works when it’s only for a short time, and I see the temptation in the current situation. But we don’t know how long this will take us, Keir. I hope we’ll catch the thief in a day or two, but we might not. And doing the reconciling in the evenings regularly will lead to errors. Which will then require additional time and effort to find and correct, while potentially leading us astray, because we think the error is yet more evidence of theft, when it isn’t.”

  Keir pressed her lips together. He was right, of course. But she wanted to get to the bottom of the missing metals now, even if it meant skipping sleep to do so.

  “After I locked the vaults, I did a rough reconciling of the privy smithy only,” she confessed.

  “And?” said Gael.

  “Aside from the tin ingot that was stolen en route to the smithy, the morning and evening tallies matched perfectly, with only the normal wastage.” Keir snorted. “Martell was in a hurry, once he’d started the closing down of the forge, just as he’d been at the start of the day. He would have piled everything in the scullions’ carry sacks willy nilly, making his poor notary tally pure fiction.”

  Gael nodded. “We’d assumed the discrepancies in the privy smithy were due to Martell’s lack of cooperation with his notary. And it would seem that your presence shut down the thief’s opportunity to take advantage of Martell’s sloppy record keeping, except” – Gael paused.

  “Except we still had a theft,” finished Keir.

  “Which likely means that your presence in the smithy, both morning and evening, shut down one thief, but didn’t stop the other,” said Gael.

  “Are we making any progress?” asked Keir.

  The corner of Gael’s mouth twitched. His eyes seemed to look off into some unseen distance, as though his thoughts went somewhere Keir could not follow. Then his gaze refocused. “Oh, yes,” he answered. “Not as swiftly as I would prefer, but we’ve certainly ruled out several possibilities.”

  He leaned back against the cushion behind him. “Is the kitchen still prepared to serve a supper in my chambers?” he asked. “They didn’t cease their preparations when they heard of my injuries, did they?”

  “I shouldn’t think so,” replied Keir. “No doubt rumors ran wild among the scullions, but the opteons know their business. Even did they pay any heed to the rumors, they’d check with real authority before they changed their orders.”

  “Would you check to be sure? When you depart for your own meal?” asked Gael. “I’d hate for Arnoll to arrive at an empty table.”

  “I’ll check,” said Keir. “What do you hope Arnoll will tell you about the gong anyway?”

  “Did you see it? When the regenen asked you to fetch me?” asked Gael.

  “Just a glimpse,” she said. “But one of the warriors tapped it with his scabbarded sword, when he moved incautiously, and I felt the peculiar weakness that its sounding produces. Not so strong as in the tally room.”

  She could remember all too vividly that groaning echo in the stairwell, as though Belzetarn itself cried out in agony. Followed by the strength draining from her limbs, the nausea that had arisen in her belly, and the way her thoughts congealed in her mind. Had the regenen actually ordered that they test the effects of a solid blow to the gong? Or had they dropped it?

  “Where did they find the dreadful thing anyway?” she asked. She rather wished they’d not found it, that it had remained buried and unfound – lost – forever.

  “In the Hamish ruin of Olluvarde,” said Gael.

  A jolt of shock rose through her. “Olluvarde!” she exclaimed.

  Gael frowned. “Yes.”

  “But that’s where –”

  Gael touched her wrist, where it lay on her knee. “What’s wrong, Keir?” His voice was gentle.

  “It was in Olluvarde that Carbraes’ scouts found me and brought me to Belzetarn. I –” She swallowed.

  “You need not speak of it. I suspect it was not a pleasant encounter,” he said.

  “No. No.” She drew in a deep breath. “But that’s not it. It’s what I saw there. I think it might be . . . relevant.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Gael.

  “The ruins are extensive,” she explained. “Not so much above ground. Above ground, they’re a jumble of fallen columns, collapsed walls, and broken paving. But in the tunnels and vaults below, the damage is less. And every surface there is covered with murals. In this one broad, curving passage, there’s a sequence of bas relief murals that seem to recount a legend or a history.”

  Gael leaned forward. “Tell me,” he said.

  * * *

  Standing on that smooth passage floor in Olluvarde, the cold smells of rock and earth permeating the dimness, Keiran had called up a pale silvery light with her energea, to create a splash of illumination around her in the shadowed subterranean space. Underfoot, a mosaic of black, white, and gray tiles depicted swans afloat on a river. Overhead, roses carved into the stone vaulting created the illusion of a garden pergola.

  But it was the murals on the lefthand wall that had captured Keiran’s attention.

  She studied the bas relief panel before her, a marvel of finely carved white marble. It depicted a magus of the ancients at work.

  The artist had chosen to render the curls of energea streaming from the magus’ fingers in traceries of stone, as though the viewer were looking with the inner vision of a magus, rather than the outer vision that could not see the safe blues and greens and silvers.

  The ancient magus strove to enchant a smooth pebble just large enough to fit in the palm of his hand. Vignettes incorporated in the moldings around the scene depicted arcane diagrams – perhaps instructions for the method the ancients used to manipulate energea? – as well as portrayals of life on the island. A healer at work. A spinner.

  Keiran’s footsteps echoed faintly as she moved on to the next bas relief mural, this one depicting a vast tsunami rolling across the sea to bear down on an isle with a city sprawling down the slope of its central mountain peak to its harbor. The wave seemed to tower over the small scrap of land. Keiran shivered.

  She’d been fortunate in her own crossing from Fiors to the Hamish coast. A brisk following wind had pushed her west with speed. It was only after Fiors had disappeared over the horizon behind her that she’d remembered the fishermen’s talk of a gigantic whirlpool haunted by the spirit of a murdered mer-king. But she’d encountered nothing like that, merely the expected northerly current as she drew near her destination at the dawning of the next day. She’d come ashore in a heavy sea, but the approach to the beach, although steep, had been clear of rocks. She’d arrived safely, if weary.

  The next mural showed the ancient magus again, affixing his magical stone and its twin to the gondola of a magnificent airship, while children of all ages bade tearful farewells to their maters and paters before hurrying across the gangways to board.

  Pater had put Keiran aboard a vessel of the sea, not a vessel of the sky, but he’d wept just like the paters of that threatened, mythical island. If it was mythical. Keiran had heard stories of the ancient airships, and always classed them as legend. Seeing one rendered in such loving detail – the polished wood of the gondola with its bronze fittings, the varnished oblong of canvas that shielded the airbags – made her wonder if they were merely history so ancient as to seem legendary.

  In the fourth mural, the gusting winds of a storm smashed one airship out of the sky and into the thundering sea, while another – the vessel with the magical stones affixed to its gondola – sailed untouched through the tumult.

  The next mural saw the airship docked at a mooring tower and the children disembarking, greeted on the far side of the gangway by their rejoicing parents.

  Would her pater rejoice, if she were to return to him?

  At sea, when the full realization of her troll-disease fell upon her, she’d remembered the repugnance on her pater’s face and the long time he’d left her alone on the sands of the rock
y cove. Had he hated her then? Her people hated the troll horde for the ravages done them during the ruin of Fiors. And Pater hated trolls more personally as the authors of his maiming. How must he have felt when his daughter became a troll?

  But he’d spoken no words of hate to her, there at the last.

  “I love you. I’ll always love you. Never doubt me.”

  She would trust that he’d spoken true, that he might have felt shock and horror and grief at what had come to pass, but never hatred for her, never disgust for her. He’d said he loved her, and she would hold to that.

  A faint mutter of sound murmured on the air of the buried passage as she advanced to the next carved mural – the sixth. The breeze outside must have shifted, carrying the rush of the nearby cascade to her ears.

  In the sixth bas relief scene, the mooring tower of the earlier mural lay in ruins. Beside it, the great airship had also fallen to earth, and a beautiful woman plucked the enchanted stones from its moldering gondola.

  Keiran frowned. The first five panels formed a tight sequence, depicting events that had surely followed one immediately after another. But this sixth . . . was it decades later? Centuries? Perhaps the abstract patterns carved into the walls between the murals was the writing of the ancients, telling of the events rendered in stone, but she could not read it.

  The seventh mural depicted the firing of one of the two stones enchanted by the ancient magus, transforming it into the central boss of a mighty gong. More of the energetic diagrams – like those adjacent to the very first mural in the sequence – surrounded the scene.

  Keiran, uninterested in the magical forging techniques of old, walked to view the eighth and last mural. The bas relief portrayed a battle between the troll horde and the knights of a Hamish queen. The dead of both sides littered the blood-soaked ground. The troll warriors brandished warhammers and maces. The queen’s knights charged forward with pikes. Behind the knights, a giant of a man held the magical gong, while a slighter man beat upon its metal with his mallet.

  Once again the unknown sculptor rendered the arcs of energea, curving out from the gong to fill the air. And where they fell upon one of the troll horde, that warrior grimaced in pain, his weapon falling from his grip as he sank down.

  Keiran stared at the gruesome tangle of severed limbs and broken blades beneath the dying trolls. Was this how it had been on Fiors in her grandmother’s day, when the troll horde descended? On Fiors, the trolls had won, although they had not remained to savor their victory, but passed onward to the Hamish lands.

  How might it have gone differently, if her people had possessed the wondrous gong wielded by these Hamish defenders? Could Fiors’ ruin have been averted? Would renegade trolls have avoided Fiors ever after as the place of their downfall? Would pater never have lost his leg?

  Keiran shook her head. The flint knives and spears carried by Fiors’ fighters bore enchantments of energea, but Fiors had never possessed anything like this Hamish artifact. She tried to imagine it: resonance that brought trolls to their knees.

  But she was a troll now. It would be she who fell when the mallet beat upon the brazen gong, if some phantasm were ever to bring it out of the lost past.

  As she stared, the murmur of the nearby cascade strengthened to a rapid pattering and then a pounding. This was not water she was hearing, but footsteps racing across stone, many footsteps.

  She twisted abruptly, placing her back to the wall and feeling for her hunting knife.

  A band of trolls burst around the curve of the passage in which she stood.

  * * *

  Chapter 11

  “I’ve got to go to Olluvarde!” Gael exclaimed. That seventh panel – the one in which the stone of the magus was fashioned into the boss of the cursed gong, the one which Keir had passed over – might hold exactly the arcana he needed.

  Keir’s unfocused gaze, looking into his past, sharpened abruptly. “Not now,” he said coolly.

  “Of course not now,” said Gael. Or not immediately. But soon. He itched to study the energetic diagrams adjacent to the scene of the forging of the gong. Energea remained energea, whether in the present or hundreds of years ago, or even thousands. Surely he’d be able to divine from those diagrams the method that set a living node within the gong boss. And if he learned the techniques of its creation, he could deduce the means of its destruction.

  “Gael.” Keir knew him too well. “You will be as tough and resilient as ever in a deichtain’s time. But if you should suffer a blow or a fall or anything which jars your internal organs while you are healing, you could hemorrhage and die.”

  “I’m more likely to stumble and fall on the everlasting stairs of Belzetarn than out on level ground,” Gael argued testily.

  Keir stared at him, exasperation in his gray eyes.

  Before the boy could generate further reprimands, someone knocked on the outer door in the other room. The click of the latch followed, and Arnoll’s gravelly voice called, “May I come in?”

  “Yes, do,” returned Gael, raising his voice to carry and pushing to his feet. His ankle took his weight without clicking and without pain, but his gut felt tender as his torso muscles engaged.

  Keir darted another annoyed glance at him, but said nothing, going with him into the sitting room. The shutters on both casement windows were open, and the mellow light of evening filled the space, engoldening the divans, the backless chairs, and the tripod tables, as well as the stamped leather hangings on the walls.

  Arnoll had donned one of his less ragged robes – dark amber suede adorned with jet beading – in honor of his private supper with the secretarius, and his curling iron-gray hair was freshly brushed and braided into a neat plait down the back of his neck.

  “Gael! You look a little worn around the edges.” Arnoll’s gaze stopped at the bruises Gael knew were still visible on his neck, then the smith stepped forward to grip Gael’s upper arms. “You’re well? No lasting harm done?” he questioned.

  Gael smiled. “Keir here patched me up good as new.”

  Arnoll’s grizzled brows rose. “You have healing skills in your quiver then, lad?”

  “It was my profession before I came to Belzetarn,” answered Keir, a slight distance in his manner. No doubt the boy remained irritated at Gael.

  “Good as new, eh?” said Arnoll, scrutinizing the healer and the healed. “But needing a deichtain of bedrest. Am I right, young Keir?”

  Keir’s reserve softened under Arnoll’s friendly shrewdness. “You have that precisely right, sir,” he said. “Perhaps you will add your persuasion to mine that the secretarius guard his health properly, instead of racing off to Olluvarde in the morning.”

  “Olluvarde?” said Arnoll, startled.

  Keir’s lips quirked, acknowledging Arnoll’s reaction, and then the boy started to tell the smith all about it, pausing momentarily to insist that Gael sit on one of the divans.

  Gael stayed out of the discussion, merely watching as the two conversed and reflecting that Arnoll’s ease and understanding of the young was very appealing. Unlike many in authority in Belzetarn – Theron, for one – Arnoll recognized that boys were impulsive and often illogical, but he liked them anyway, or perhaps because of it. He knew how to be firm with them, but kindly. And he protected the smithy scullions from the rigid disapproval exhibited by the tower opteons, as well as the angry aggression of the warriors.

  Barris was like that, too, setting a tone of fairness and restraint in the regenen’s kitchen that spread to influence all the offices in the annex.

  Gael admired them both, his friends Barris and Arnoll. And modeled himself after them, aiming to deal with the lesser trolls in Belzetarn – especially the young ones – calmly and protectively, looking out for their interests.

  He would have liked to have taught an apprentice magus, had the truldemagar never fallen upon him. He suspected he would have enjoyed rearing a son – or a daughter – if things had been different. As things stood . . . he would do neithe
r, although training Keir in the ways of the tally chamber had resembled the coaching of a young magus.

  Arnoll and Keir finished up their exchange with Keir’s suggestion that the smith examine the accursed gong before his meal rather than after. “That way I can ensure the secretarius is out of range of its resonance.”

  “A gong, is it?” said Arnoll slowly. “So that was the source of that infernal bellowing yesterday in my smithy.”

  “Gael wishes you to sound the thing while observing it with your inner sight,” explained Keir.

  Gael nodded, confirming Keir’s words.

  “Mind you tap it softly,” the boy added.

  “Where is it?” asked Arnoll.

  Gael pointed to his storeroom door, secured with its new padlock.

  “I’ll take the secretarius up to my chambers,” interjected Keir.

  Gael glanced sideways at him. He was certainly assiduous in his healing duties, almost worse than Medicus Piar would have been.

  “The key?” said Arnoll.

  Gael detached it from his fibula, handed it over, and then allowed Keir to usher him out onto the Regenen Stair. One and two-thirds twists up at a deliberately slow pace, they arrived at Keir’s quarters. The boy started to open his door and then had second thoughts. “I’m not convinced this is far enough,” he muttered, and led Gael up another twist, across the main great hall, and along the passage to the West Stair.

  “How will we know when to go back?” asked Gael, hiding a sneaking amusement.

  Keir frowned. “I will go back. You will stay here. Until I return for you.”

  “Very well,” said Gael gravely.

  Keir took three hurried steps and then paused, looking over his shoulder. “You will wait?” he said.

  Gael settled onto the sill of the nearest embrasure, its surface a convenient height to use as a seat. “I will wait,” he promised Keir.

  The boy was gone for some time, but Gael felt no impatience. The setting sun shone strongly through the arrowslit at the far end of the embrasure, warm on Gael’s back. He’d concealed the fatigue that merely climbing from his quarters had produced, but he was happy simply to rest.