It made it harder to play her role. The camaraderie and easy contact was seductive. She had entertained idle thoughts of defection, despite her determination to focus on other things. If she hadn't been a skilled watercrafter, she would have left tears on her pillow each night-but even that much would have jeopardized her cover, so she willed them away.
Just as she was doing now, as the litter finally descended into the sizzling, steaming heat of late summer in Kalare. She had to look calm and professional for her master, and her fear at the mere thought of failing him made a rush of terrified, acidic vertigo whirl through her. She clenched her hands into fists, closed her eyes, and reminded herself in a steady rhythm that she was his most valuable tool and too successful to discard.
It didn't help much, but at least it gave her something to do during the last few moments of the flight, until the rich, vaguely rotten vegetable stench of Kalare made its way into her nose and throat. She didn't need to look out the window and see the city, as busy at dusk as at dawn. Nine-tenths of the place was worn, muddy squalor. The enclosed litter descended upon the other tenth, the splendor of the High Lord's Tower, landing upon the battlements as such litters did many times each day.
She took a deep breath, calmed herself, took up her papers, raised her hood to hide her identity from any observer, and hurried down the stairs to cross a courtyard into the Tower proper, the High Lord's residence. The stewards on duty recognized her voice and did not ask her to lower her hood. Kalarus had impressed upon them his will regarding Rook's visits, and not even his guards would dare his anger. She was hurried directly to the High Lord's study.
Kalarus sat at his desk within, reading. He was not a large man, nor heavily built, though perhaps a bit taller than average. He wore a shirt of light, almost gauzy grey silk, and trousers of the same material in dark green. Every single finger bore a ring set with a variety of green stones, and he wore a steel circlet across his brow. He was dark of hair and eye, like most southerners, and modestly handsome-though he wore a goatee to hide his weak chin.
Rook knew her role. She stood beside the door in total silence until Kalarus glanced up at her a few moments later.
"So," he murmured. "What brings you all the way back home, Rook?"
She drew back her hood, bowed her head, and stepped forward to lay the missives upon her master's desk. "Most of these are routine. But I think you'll want to read the topmost document without delay."
He grunted and idly reached out, toying with the paper without unfolding it. "This had better be earthshaking news, Rook. Every moment you are gone from your duties to Gaius risks your cover. I should be unhappy to lose such a valuable tool over a foolish decision."
She fumed with anger, but kept it inside and bowed her head again. "My lord, in my best judgment, that information is an order of magnitude more valuable than any spy, however well placed. In fact, I'd bet my life on it."
Kalare s eyebrows lifted a fraction. "You just did," he said quietly. Then he opened the paper and began to read.
Any man with Kalare's power and experience concealed his emotions and reactions as a matter of course, just as Rook hid her own from the High Lord. Anyone with sufficient skill at watercrafting could learn a very great deal about a person from those reactions, both physical and emotional. As a matter of course, the most powerful lords of Alera trained themselves to restrain their emotions in order to foil another's crafting.
But Rook did not need to make an effort to read the man with crafting. She had a knack for reading others, honed over the years of her dangerous service, and it had nothing to do with furycraft. She could not have picked out any single change in his features but was perfectly certain that Kalare had been startled and badly shaken by the news.
"Where did you get this?" he demanded.
"From a palace page. He overslept and had to sprint for the windport. As we are friends, he asked me to deliver his messages for him."
Kalare shook his head. "You believe it genuine?"
"Yes, my lord."
The fingers of his right hand began a flickering, twitching, trembling motion, drumming quietly on the desk. "I would never have thought Gaius would make peace with Aquitaine. He hates the man."
Rook murmured, "Gaius needs him. For now. Necessity can trump even hatred."
Her heart fluttered as that last phrase left her mouth tinged with a featherlight portion of bitter irony. Kalare did not notice. His fingers twitched even faster. "Another year to prepare, and I could have crushed him in a single season."
"He may well be aware of the fact, my lord. He seeks to goad you into premature action."
Kalare frowned down at his fingers, and they slowly stilled. Then he folded the message, over and over again, eyes narrowed. Then his lips parted, baring his teeth in a predatory smile. "Indeed. I am the bear he baits. Gaius is arrogant and always has been. He is certain that he knows everything."
Rook nodded, adding nothing.
"He is about to learn that this bear is a great deal larger and more dangerous than he believed." He stood up, jerked on a summoning bell's cord, then beckoned and caused his furies to open a nearby chest and to toss a dozen rolled maps onto its surface. "Pass the word to my captains that the time has come. We mobilize and march within the week. Tell your people to put pressure upon the Cursors again."
Rook bowed. "Aye, my lord."
"And you..." Kalare smiled. "I have a special assignment for you. I had thought to attend to it personally, but it would seem that I must take my vengeance by proxy."
"The Steadholder?" Rook asked quietly.
"The bitch from Calderon," Kalare corrected her, a dangerous edge in his voice.
"Yes, my lord. It will be done." She bit her lips. "My lord... if I may?"
Kalare gestured at a door on the other side of the study, a solar for reading and entertaining intimate guests. Rook crossed the room and opened the door upon a spacious chamber with thick carpeting, richly furnished.
A small girl with glossy black hair sat on the floor with a young maid, playing with dollies. When the door opened, the child's caretaker glanced up, rose, bowed to Rook, and retreated without another word.
"Mama!" shrieked the child in glee. She rose and rushed over to Rook, who caught her daughter up into a tight hug. "I missed you, Mama."
Rook squeezed tighter, and awful, bitter tears escaped despite her determination not to weep. "I missed you, too, Masha."
"Is it time, Mama?" her daughter asked. "Do we get to go to the country and have ponies now?"
"Not yet. But soon now, little one," she whispered. "Soon, I promise."
The little girl looked up at her with enormous eyes. "But I miss you."
She hugged the child close to escape the pain in her eyes. "I miss you, too. I miss you so much." Rook sensed Kalare's presence behind her, in the doorway to the solar. She turned and faced him without looking at his eyes. "I'm sorry, little one. I can't this time. I have to go now."
"B-but you just got here!" Masha wailed. "What if I need you and I can't find you?"
"Don't worry," Kalare told Rook in a smooth, gentle voice incongruous to the hard glitter in his eyes. "I'll make sure my faithful retainer's daughter is safe. You have my promise on that. I value your loyalty very highly."
Rook turned away, putting her body between Masha and Kalare. She hugged the weeping little girl as a trickle of bitter, furious, terrified tears washed over her face.
She heard Kalare turn away and walk back into his study, chuckling under his breath. "More than he bargained for. Far more indeed." Ehren sat at the rickety desk in the open-walled bungalow, sweat dripping off his nose and onto the accounting ledger before him and beading into droplets upon a leather slave's collar that would streak infrequently down his thin shirt. The Sunset Isles could grow hideously warm in the summer, though thank the great furies that it was finally beginning to wind down. Bugs swarmed around Ehren's head, and tiny swallows darted through the wide-open wall windows, snatching at them. His hand cramped every few moments, forcing him to set aside the quill pen he used. He had just laid it down when a cadaverously thin man strode through the door.
"Ehren," he snapped, the name viciously snarled. "By the bloody crows I didn't buy you to sit around staring out a window."
Ehren's frayed temper made the thought of breaking the fool's neck rather tempting-but a Cursor did not allow such personal matters to interfere in his duties. His job was to remain invisible in the Sunset Isles, watching and listening and sending reports back to the mainland. He picked up the pen again, ducked his head, and said in a meek voice, "Yes, Master Ullus. Sorry. Just resting my fingers."
"You'll rest them in a gibbet if I see you lazing about again," the man said, and stalked over to a low cabinet stocked with dirty glasses and bottles of cheap rum. Ullus immediately set about the task of making the glasses dirtier and the rum more worthless, as he did most days, while Ehren continued to labor on the impossibly incomplete accounts ledger.
Sometime later, a man came into the room. He was not large, but had the lean, seedy look Ehren had come to associate with the pirates who would terrorize merchant shipping before slipping back into the myriad hiding places in the Sunset Isles. His clothing showed much wear and exposure to salt and wind and sun, and he wore mismatched bits of finery, the decorative trophies of a successful pirate.
And yet... Ehren frowned and kept his eyes on the ledger. The man didn't carry himself like a pirate at all. Most of them tended to be as ragged, undisciplined, and unkempt in mannerism as in appearance. This man looked cautious and sober. He moved like the best professional fighters, all relaxed awareness and restraint. Ehren judged that he was no pirate at all, but a cutter-an assassin who would trade death for gold if the price was right.
Ullus rose to his feet and rocked unsteadily back and forth on his heels. "Sir..." he began. "Welcome to Westmiston. My name is Ullus, and I am the senior trade manag-"
"You are a fence," the man said in a quiet voice.
Ullus dropped his mouth open in a facade that would not have convinced an intelligent child. "Good sir!" he exclaimed. "I do not know where you have heard this slander, but-"
The man tilted his head slightly and focused his eyes on Ullus. Ehren's master was a drunken fool, but neither too drunk nor too foolish to recognize the danger glinting in the man's eyes. He stopped talking, shut his mouth, and swallowed nervously.
"You are a fence," the stranger continued in the same quiet tone. "I am Captain Demos. I have goods to liquidate."
"Certainly," Ullus said, slurring the word. "Why, just bring them here, and I should be glad to give you fair value for them."
"I don't care to be cheated," the man said. He drew a piece of paper from his pocket and tossed it at Ullus's feet. "This is a listing. You will sell them at my price or buy them yourself before I return in three weeks. I will pay you a tithe as commission. Cheat me a single copper ram, and I'll cut your throat."
Ullus swallowed. "I see."
"I thought you would," the man said.
Ullus picked up the list and read it. He winced. "Captain," he said, his tone cautious, "you'll get a better price for these farther east."
"I do not sail east," the man said.
Ehren sighed and dipped his quill, focusing on looking bored, miserable, and surly in order to disguise his sudden excitement and interest. Westmiston was the westernmost human settlement in the Sunset Isles. The only civilization west of here all belonged to the Canim. Their main trade port was ten days sailing from Westmiston, and at this time of year, about eleven days back.
Three weeks.
Captain Demos was carrying something to the Canim.
"Come," Captain Demos said. "Bring your slave and a cart. I sail within the hour."
Tavi pulled on the rope until he thought his spine would snap from the strain. "Hurry!" he said through gritted teeth.
"You can't rush true learning, my boy," said the old man from where he knelt at the mechanism's release pin. Magnus fussed and grunted over the device for a moment, then crudely forged metal scraped on metal. "Research is the essence of academia."
Sweat broke out over Tavi's whole body. "If you don't get that pin in soon, the arm is going to slip and throw you halfway across the Vale," Tavi growled.
"Nonsense, my boy. I'm well out of the way. It will shatter like the last one." He grunted. "There, it's in. Easy does it."
Tavi slowly relaxed his hold on the rope, though his hands and arms screamed for relief. The long wooden arm of the device quivered, but remained bent back, locked into place and ready to be released. The haul rope, hooked up to several of the spinning wheels Magnus had manufactured, sagged to the ground.
"There, you see?" he said proudly. "You managed it all by yourself."
Tavi shook his head, panting. "I still don't understand how the wheels work."
"By condensing your strength into a smaller area," Magnus said. "You hauled forty feet of rope to move the arm back only five feet."
"I can do the math," Tavi said. "I'm just... it's almost unreal. My uncle would have trouble bending that thing back, and he's a strong earthcrafter."
"Our forefathers knew their arts," Magnus cackled. "If only Larus could see this. He'd start frothing at the mouth. Here, lad. Help me with the ammunition."
Together, Tavi and Magnus grunted and lifted a stone weighing better than fifty pounds into place in the cup at the end of the engine's arm, then they both stood back from it. "Maybe we should have used some professionally manufactured parts."
"Never, never," Magnus muttered. "If we'd used crafted parts, we'd just have to do the whole thing again without them, or else Larus and his kind would discredit us based on that fact alone. No, my boy, it had to be done just as the Romans did it, just like Appia itself."
Tavi grunted. The ruins of the city of his forefathers stood all around them. They had been built upon the crown of an ancient mountain worn down to the size of an imposing hill, and everything had been made of stone. The walls of dozens and dozens of buildings, now reduced to jagged stone by time and the elements, surrounded them. Grass and trees grew among the ruined houses and old city walls. Wind sighed among the stones, a constant, gentle, and sad song of regret. Deer paced silently on streets so faded they could only be seen to be man-made if viewed from a distance, and sheltered among the walls during infrequent storms. Birds nested upon the remains of statues ground to feature-lessness by time.
The stones used in ruined Appia's construction did not have the smooth arcs and precise corners of furycrafted rock, but were built piecemeal, from smaller stones that yet bore traces of tool marks, a practice some of the ancient, stone-carved texts Magnus had uncovered in the catacombs beneath the ruins called "quarrying." Other carvings, apparently of the Romans in action, had survived the years of weathering in the stillness of the caves, and it was from one of those carvings that Magnus and Tavi had seen the war engine engaging in a battle against a foe that seemed to be some kind of monstrous, horned giant.
In fact, everything Tavi had seen and learned there made it quite clear that the ancestors of the Alerans had, like himself, possessed no furycraft whatsoever. It was a fact so self-evident that Tavi wanted to scream with frustration every time he thought of how "scholars" like Maestro Larus at the Academy casually dismissed the claim without bothering to examine the evidence.
Which was why Magnus insisted upon using only crude and inefficient manual labor for every step of the creation process of the war engine. He wanted there to be no way to dismiss the fact that it was at least possible to manage such things without the use of furycraft.
"I understand why we have to do it like this, sir. But the Romans had a lot more practice than we do. Are you sure this one will work?"
"Oh," Magnus said. "As sure as I can be. The fittings are stronger, the beams thicker. It's quite a bit more stable than the last one."
The last engine had simply shattered into a mound of kindling when they tested it. The current model, the fifth of its line, was considerably more sturdy. "Which means if it explodes again, it's going to throw a lot more pieces around. And harder."
They looked at one another. Then Magnus grunted and tied the end of a long cord to the pin that held the arm back. The pair of them backed away a good twenty paces. "Here," Magnus said, offering Tavi the cord. "I did the last one."
Tavi accepted it warily and found himself smiling. "Kitai would have loved to see this. Ready?"
Magnus grinned like a madman. "Ready!"
Tavi jerked the cord. The pin snapped free. The mechanism bucked in place as its arm snapped forward, and threw the stone into a sharp arc that sent the missile soaring into the air. It clipped a few stones from the top of a ruined wall, arched over a low hilltop, and dropped out of sight on the other side.
Magnus let out a whoop and capered about in a spontaneous dance, waving his arms. "Hah! It works! Hah! A madman, am I?"
Tavi let out an excited laugh of his own and began to ask Magnus how far he thought the engine had thrown the stone, but then he heard something and snapped his head around to focus on the sound.
Somewhere on the other side of the hill, a man howled a string of sulfurous curses that rose into the midmorning spring sky.
"Maestro," Tavi began. Before he could say more, the same stone that they had just thrown arched up into the air and plummeted toward them.
"Maestro!" Tavi shouted. He seized the back of the old man's homespun tunic and hauled him away from the engine.
The stone missed them both by inches and smashed into the engine. Wood shattered and splintered. Metal groaned. Chips broke off the stone and Tavi felt a flash of pain as a chunk the size of his fist struck his arm hard enough to make it go numb briefly. He kept his body between the wiry old Maestro and the flying debris and snapped, "Get down!"
Before Magnus had hit the ground, Tavi had his sling off his belt and a smooth, heavy ball of lead in it, as a mounted man rounded the side of the hill, sword in hand, his string of profanity growing louder as he charged. Tavi whirled the sling, but the instant before he would have loosed, he caught the sling's pouch in his free hand. "Antillar Maximus!" he shouted. "Max! It's me!"
The charging rider hauled on the reins of his horse so hard that the poor beast must have bruised its chin on its chest. The horse slid to a stop in the loose earth and stone of the dig site, throwing up a large cloud of fine dust.
"Tavi!" the young man atop the horse bellowed. Equal measures of joy and anger fought for dominance of his tone. "What the crows do you think you're doing? Did you throw that stone?"
"You could say that," Tavi said.
"Hah! Did you finally figure out how to do a simple earthcrafting?"
"Better," Tavi said. "We have a Romanic war engine." He turned and glanced at the wreckage, wincing. "Had," he corrected himself.
Max's mouth opened, then shut again. He was a young man come into the full of his adult strength, tall and strong. He had a solid jaw, a nose that had been broken on several occasions, wolfish grey eyes, and while he would never be thought beautiful, Max's features were rugged and strong and had an appeal of their own.
He sheathed his weapon and dismounted. "Romanics? Those guys who you think didn't have any furycraft, like you?"
"The people were called Romans," Tavi corrected him. "You call something Romanic when it was built by Romans. And yes. Though I'm surprised you remember that from the Academy. "
"Don't blame me. I did everything I could to prevent it, but it looks like some of the lectures stuck," Max said, and eyed Tavi. "You nearly took my head off with that rock, you know. I fell off my horse. I haven't done that since-"
"The last time you were drunk," Tavi interjected, grinning, and offered Max his hand.
The big young man snorted and traded a hard grip with Tavi. "Furies, Calderon. You kept growing. You're as tall as me. You're too old to grow that much."
"Must be making up for lost time," Tavi said. "Max, have you met Maestro Magnus?"
The old man picked himself up off the ground, brushing away dirt and scowling like a thunderstorm. "This? This mental deficient is Antillus Raucus's son?"
Max turned to face the old man, and to Tavi's surprise his face flushed red beneath his tanned skin. "Sir," Max said, giving an awkward duck of his head. "You're one of the people my father bid me give his regards should I see you."
Magnus arched a silvery eyebrow.
Max glanced at the wreckage of the engine. "Uh. And I'm sorry about your, uh... your Romanic thing."
"It's a war engine," Magnus said in a crisp tone. "A Romanic war engine. The carvings we've found refer to it as a mule. Though admittedly, there seems to be some kind of confusion, since some of the earlier texts use the same word to describe the soldiers of their Legions..." Magnus shook his head. "I'm wandering again, excuse me." The old man glanced at the ruined war device and sighed. "When is the last time you spoke to your father, Maximus?"
"About a week before I ran off and joined the Legions, sir," Max said. "Call it eight years or so."
Magnus's grunt conveyed a wealth of disapproval. "You know why he doesn't speak to you, I take it?"
"Aye," Max said, his tone quiet. Tavi heard an underpinning of sadness in his friend's voice, and he winced in sympathy. "Sir, I'd be glad to fix it for you."
"Would you now?" Magnus said, eyes glinting. "That's quite generous."
"Certainly," Max said, nodding. "Won't take me a minute. "
"Indeed not," Magnus said. "I should think it a project of weeks." He lifted his eyebrows and asked Max, "You were aware, of course, that my research compels us to use strictly Romanic methods. No furycrafting."
Max, in the midst of turning to the war engine, paused. "Um. What?"
"Sweat and muscle only," Magnus said cheerfully. "Everything from harvesting timber to metal fittings. We'll rebuild it. Only the next one needs to be about twice as large, so I'm glad you're volunteering your-"
Tavi got nothing more than a flicker of motion in the corner of his eye to warn him, but suddenly every instinct in his body screamed of danger. "Max!" Tavi shouted, even as he dived at the Maestro again.
Max spun, his sword flashing from its sheath with the speed only a wind-crafter could manage. His arm blurred into two sharp movements, and Tavi heard two snapping sounds as Max cut a pair of heavy arrows from the air with the precision only a master metalcrafter could bring to the sword, then darted to one side.
Tavi put a low, ruined wall between the attackers and the Maestro and crouched there. He looked over his shoulder to see Max standing with his back to a ten-foot-thick stone column that had broken off seven or eight feet above the ground.
"How many?" Tavi called.