Shivering slightly, even though the air was mild, he threw his nightshirt on over his head, closed the inner shutters of his casements, blew out the tallow dips, and lay down upon the fleeces cushioning his sleeping couch, suddenly not weary – and no longer sleepy – at all.
With a gentle in-breath, his inner sight opened on the curling silver scrolls of his arcs and the glowing spheres of his nodes – violet through blue and green down to white and silver. They still held their new positions, their proper positions, and they were subtly pulling his arcs into their proper configurations as well.
That was the difference he’d discerned in his body, the flesh and bones of which were governed by these secret flows of energea. Keir was right. The differences might be so small now that no one save he himself could see them. But over time, in his face especially, where his troll-disease was pronounced, he would come to look human again.
Until his nodes drifted anew under the influence of the truldemagar and began pulling his arcs into deformity.
He let his inner sight fade, thinking. He could not destroy the gong, the one thing in the north that might reverse the dread decline of the truldemagar. Keir was right about that too. And yet Carbraes had ordered him to do so. On pain of death.
He must injure the gong. He mustn’t injure the gong. Was there some way to reconcile this paradox?
He brought the panel in Olluvarde to mind – the one showing how the ancient smiths melded the lodestone of Navellys into the gong’s central boss, encouraging the node’s unusual energea to spread throughout its hemisphere. He thought about the structure of healthy nodes versus that of diseased ones, the pattern of each repeated, not only from boundary to boundary, but at depth. Within each lone energetic diamond in a healthy node could be found a further array of diamonds, if only you could look close enough. And within those smaller diamonds were ones yet smaller still. The structure of a healthy node had no real end.
The ancient smiths had devised a way to make the lodestone’s node larger. He was almost certain that a large node could be made smaller, with its integrity intact. Could one also subdivide it? Create two smaller nodes of identical energetic pattern? Or, even better for his purpose, one large node – slightly diminished – and one tiny node?
He reviewed his knowledge of energetic theory from the days when he studied under Korryn. He was almost certain that could work! And if it did . . . there was his solution. When the iron grew soft enough, but before he and Nathiar wrought the necessary destructive transformation, he must separate a droplet from the whole, preserving its lattice of energea intact. Once the droplet cooled sufficiently to crystallize its energea – only a moment or two – he could proceed with the dismantling of the gong’s lattice without harm to the separate miniature node.
If that were feasible, he could serve both Carbraes’ and Keir’s opposing goals for the artifact, without compromising on either. The small droplet, with its lattice of energea preserved intact, could be used to heal trolls in Keir’s hands. While the energetic lattice within the lodestone at the heart of the gong could then be torn asunder, rendering the gong’s resonance harmless as Carbraes wished.
But was that indeed his best course?
Were there any alternatives?
He envisioned stealing the gong – now, in the dead of the night, absconding with it into the wilderness – and snorted. Where would he go? Where could he take the artifact that it would be safe? How would he elude the scouts that Carbraes would surely send after him? It was a ludicrous scheme.
Could he hide the thing within the confines of Belzetarn?
Flee south with it to Hadorgol, hoping to beat his pursuit, hoping King Heiroc would welcome him back?
No, fleeing with the gong intact, or hiding it, was mere fantasy. He could not safeguard the thing unscathed. Subdividing it to preserve the healing lattice apart in a small fragment was his only real option.
But if his attempt to subdivide the node on the morrow failed, what then? Would he destroy it and Keir’s hope – which he shared – for healing trolls along with it?
No.
He would halt the subdual of the gong, giving him time to evolve another plan to preserve the lodestone’s lattice. Nathiar would be annoyed at the abort, and Arnoll bewildered. Carbraes would be seriously angry. But he was certain he could effect the delay and weather the consequences. Better that than destroying the one thing that could reverse – even if only for a limited time – the truldemagar.
With his decision made, all his weariness returned. He pulled his thistlesilk coverlet up over his legs and drifted toward sleep.
The fleeces under him cushioned his torso and limbs. His coverlet caressed his hands like warm air, soft and light. The leather hangings exuded their familiar and comforting aroma. The silent darkness of his room soothed his ears and his closing eyes. His sleeping couch was wonderful, so much more easeful than a bedroll on the forest floor.
But as he hovered there, just at the edge of sleep’s release, welcoming it, sleep did not come.
Instead, each episode in the plundering of his tally room – discovered and revealed almost in reverse order by him – arranged itself in his mind for his review, the whole sequence from start to finish.
* * *
Nearly a year ago, Theron – castellanum of Belzetarn – had decided it was time to get rid of that thorn in his side, Gael. Time to bring the smithies and their tally chamber under the castellanum’s control. Or maybe Theron had been dreaming of this ever since he took office, but only put his schemes into action when an old, cold murder by Barris came to his attention.
Whether a long-held desire or a new one, Theron blackmailed Barris into stealing tin ingots. Not too often, and not blatantly, lest Gael notice the thefts too soon. Theron planned to build up a substantial cache as evidence of Gael’s perfidy.
Nor was Barris a quiescent victim. Sometimes he refused, and Theron had to find opportunity to renew his threats against the cook, because acting on them would destroy Theron’s leverage against him.
But every four or five deichtains, Barris would steal a tin ingot from the carry sack of the chronically late scullion who transported the metals from the vaults to the privy smithy. And late at night, when most of Belzetarn slept, Barris would hand the fruits of his theft to the castellanum, who then secreted them in the clogged latrine that he insured was never cleared.
So had the pillaging of the tally chamber begun, and so it proceeded, a slow and quiet erosion of which Gael remained unaware.
But then another player entered the game.
Two moons before Gael discovered the arrears in his tallies, Nathiar – Belzetarn’s magus – visited the nearby copper mines, there to prospect a new seam of ore. He went at Gael’s behest and with Carbraes’ permission, but not all his activities were licit. For Nathiar longed to create magical weapons to counter those used by their enemies on the battlefields, although Carbraes forbade such risky experiments.
Nathiar located and mapped a rich seam of copper, but he also tinkered with the furnace on-site, ensuring it would develop a clog in its innards, which he would be called upon to clear.
Nathiar returned to Belzetarn most indirectly from the copper mines, detouring far out of his way to the tinworks, where trolls scraped graveled streams for pebbles infused with the valuable metal. He claimed to be assessing the ore content of the many tributaries, but in truth he was there merely to thrust his loyal porter Lannarc into the job of teamster, to guide the mule that carried sacks of tin nuggets to Belzetarn’s vaults.
Had Fintan – the teamster who’d accompanied the tin mule for years – broken his leg accidentally? Or had Nathiar helped that accident along? No matter. Fintan was sidelined, while Lannarc took over his duties, pilfering a nugget here and a nugget there, collecting them in a drawstring pouch with rose-shaped rivets and passing them to Nathiar in a glade outside Belzetarn.
The magus then had tin.
And when the tap in the furnace at the
copper mines developed its pre-ordained clog, Nathiar had copper as well. When sent for, just as he had planned, the magus fixed the clogged tap, of course. But he also created a secret tap leading to a hidden pocket in the earth and a plunger whose action would open the secret tap.
Gael grunted. Really the better part of the thievery had occurred long before he ever grew aware of it. He sighed and opened his eyes. Thin beams of moonlight were sifting in through the louvers of the casement shutters. The moon must have risen.
He stifled a second sigh, turned over, and resolutely shut his eyes. His limbs felt utterly relaxed, and he was sleepy. Why wasn’t he slumbering? He wanted that good night’s sleep. And he didn’t want this involuntary stream of images passing before his mind’s eye. He knew what had happened. He’d uncovered each damning deed himself.
But the tale of the thefts flowed onward, fast and furious in the next interval.
Martell, the privy smith, was late starting his work the day before Gael discovered the discrepancy in his tallies, and Martell’s lateness gave Theron fresh opportunity. The castellanum invited one of the trolls from the Hunters’ Lodge to dine in the lower great hall for a deichtain’s worth of feasting, ensuring that no one would question his anomalous presence in the tower.
The hunter looked entirely human and, like most new-made trolls, wondered if there had been some mistake. Perhaps he was no troll at all. Perhaps he might return home. Theron showed him his error. There would be no returning home for Halko, whose humanity would see him slain in Belzetarn, were his secret discovered.
Halko lurked in the passage outside the smithies, waiting until all save the trolls in the privy smithy had departed. Then he crept through the shadows unseen, and swiped an unused ingot of tin – for the castellanum – and an ingot of bronze for himself, from the counter between the privy smithy and the armor smithy, where the scullions were gathering everything to go to the vaults.
The privy notary had already made his hurried tally under Martell’s harassment, incorrectly as it chanced, since the stolen bronze remained undetected when Gael reconciled the tallies the next day. The discrepancy in the tin, of course, would be glaring. It started Gael on the track of the thief.
Yet the events of that night – the night before Gael began his investigations – had barely started. Not only had Theron invited a hunter to take supper in the tower; he’d invited the privy smith to dine at the high table itself by Theron’s side, where the castellanum could pour spiked wine into Martell’s cup. Martell had been late to his work once. Theron wanted him late again. And he was.
But yet another player entered the game during this second tardiness, that morning of the day when Gael would find his first evidence of theft. The ingots for the privy smithy arrived long before the privy smith, and Arnoll took one for his friend, the March Dreas.
Gael swallowed down a lump in his throat and turned over again, remembering that Dreas would need no more tin. How had he forgotten? He hadn’t really; he’d just been focusing on other problems, as it seemed he was focused now, stringing the thefts together in their proper order, following from one to the next.
Why? Was there some error he’d made when filling in the gaps? Would passing the entire chain through his awareness show him where he’d gone wrong? Very well. Instead of fighting the play of scenes within his awareness, he would cooperate, let that willful knowing part of him show the unknowing part whatever secret it wanted revealed.
Or at least get to the end of the sequence, when – Tiamar willing – he might sleep!
So . . . Gael had discovered what seemed to him the first theft and sent Keir madly tallying the contents of all the vaults. Which had shown that an ingot of bronze was also missing.
Keir had interviewed all the smiths and confirmed that Martell – artistic, flamboyant, and impatient with record-keeping – was most vulnerable to a thief, and Gael made arrangements to safeguard the privy smithy going forward. But not quickly enough to prevent the further theft that evening, when the hunter took yet another tin and another bronze.
Later still, Gael confronted Arnoll with the ingot he’d taken that morning. And together they unearthed the cache in the wall of the clogged latrine.
So had ended the first day of Gael’s search for his thief.
On the second day of his search, Barris stole an ingot right under Gael’s nose in the morning. But the hunter Halko was foiled by Keir’s presence in the smithy in the evening. And Gael witnessed Nathiar at his illicit forging in the hours later still.
His third day of searching started with Nathiar’s confession, followed by another theft from Barris, this time from under Keir’s nose. And then the thefts stopped, while Gael was absent from Belzetarn.
Theron was ready, with plenty of ingots accumulated and a plan to stash them in Gael’s storeroom sometime after Gael’s return, when Carbraes might be summoned to discover his secretarius with the stolen metal in hand.
Gael had turned the tables on that plan. It had been Theron caught red-handed by Carbraes, not Gael. With unexpected repercussions . . . for everyone, alas.
And there lay the whole of it, from the first theft by Barris a year ago to the last theft – also by Barris – on the day Gael left for Olluvarde.
He straightened his nightshirt, which had become twisted with all his turning over, and pulled his coverlet up to his waist. His breathing had quickened under the mental onslaught. He slowed it deliberately. Perhaps now he could sleep.
Except he seemed to have reached that uncomfortable state in which the body was weary – weary enough to almost hurt – but the mind was alert, all sleepiness passed. Was there something he had missed in all that long sequence of theft after theft? Some pertinent detail?
A vision of Keir’s face, unnaturally white, flashed before his inner eye. She’d been utterly shocked when he’d pronounced the words, “I know.’ How maladroit he’d been in his timing. His reassurance that he would keep the secret of her sex should have preceded his accusation, thusly sparing her alarm. She’d blushed when he did reassure her. It seemed an odd response to relief.
What had she been thinking?
His revelation that he knew her to be a young woman had not been the only time she’d paled. What had he said that other time, to have caused such a reaction in one usually so self-contained?
He delved through his memories once more, a more haphazard stirring than had been his journey through the sequence of thefts. Was it the first day –? No. The second? Yes, that was it.
She’d gotten a report from a smeltery scullion, who’d seen Arnoll removing an ingot of tin from the privy smithy. She was worried by it. And he’d been explaining that she need not be, that Arnoll had been acting under orders from a higher authority. Arnoll’s purloining of an ingot was no cause for worry, although the fact that Arnoll’s tin had proved to be copper, disguised by magery, was.
And then she’d blanched.
He’d assumed she was reacting to the illicit use of magery. But was she?
The very same day that Arnoll took his ingot, Keir had sought Gael’s counsel about her lingering hatred for trolls. It had been an awkward conversation – since he had wished to ignore in himself the very same concerns that Keir raised – and disappointing as well. Gael had judged she was getting past the revulsion trolls provoked in her. The repulsed looks he’d noted on her face in her early days in Belzetarn had long since ceased. And the easy way she had with the scullions, the kind authority she’d exerted in the matter of the bullied lunch boy, had encouraged him to believe she’d adjusted, both to being a troll and being among trolls.
Her troubled questions had shown his hope to be misplaced.
Keir had not adjusted. She’d merely learned to conceal her loathing.
What might that loathing have prompted her to do? Was Keir the traitor who had used magery to cast illusion on the ingots harbored in Gael’s metal vaults?
Surely not! He could not believe it of her. And yet . . . he did believe it
. His belly felt sick with it.
Unwillingly, he thought back further, to Martell’s failed scissors, forged of one-to-nineteen bronze or weaker.
Martell had been issued four ingots of tin that day, along with one of bronze and eighteen of copper. Arnoll had stolen one tin ingot in the morning. Halko had stolen one tin and one bronze in the evening. Which meant that Martell should have had two ingots of tin to work with. Half of one went to lining saucepans with tin. The remaining half went into the bronze for the day, along with the other full tin ingot – one-and-a-half ingots of tin plus eighteen ingots of copper – to create one-to-twelve bronze.
But those scissors were not one-to-twelve.
Because that last full ingot of tin was not tin. It was copper disguised as tin. The scissors were poured from bronze made of nineteen ingots of copper – not eighteen – and one-half ingot of tin. The bronze was not even one-to-nineteen, but one-half-to-nineteen or – more properly – one-to-thirty-eight.
And Keir had nattered on about half ingots and wondering how a thief could steal a half, distracting Gael from the metal ratios with her supposed confusion. Deliberately distracting him! Keir must have known all along, because she had sent the ‘tin’ ingot – which was really copper – to the privy smithy.
Hells!
Keir was the one who had done it. Keir had disguised copper as tin. And he’d wager anything anyone cared to name that Keir had also disguised tin as copper, sending it to the blade smithy, where the blades that were made with it – two-eight bronze instead of one-nine – would be brittle and shatter more readily on the battlefield.
That was why she had blanched when he explained about Arnoll’s ‘tin.’ Not because of the use of magery, but because Gael had discovered its use. She’d been operating without the least suspicion raised. But once one disguised ingot came to light . . . it was only a matter of time until the whole traitorous substitution scheme would be revealed.
And when Gael had said, ‘I know,’ she’d assumed that he knew about the disguised ingots. Not about her sex, which was a lesser secret when set against treason. That was why she’d blushed at his reassuring words.
The Tally Master Page 39