2
THE CRESCENT was not exclusive to the Great Guild of Artificers, though it was where the majority of them chose to settle, and where their private halls and clubs loomed on virtually every street corner, and where they were most tolerated in their habit of leaving incomprehensible and occasionally hazardous devices out in plain sight.
Jean made his way up the steep steps of the Avenue of the Brass Cockatrice, past candle merchants and blade sharpeners and veniparsifers (mystics who claimed to be able to read the full sweep of someone’s destiny from the pattern of blood vessels visible on their hands and forearms). At the top of the avenue he dodged away from a slim young woman in a four-cornered hat and sun veil walking a valcona on a reinforced leather leash. Valcona were flightless attack birds, larger than hunting hounds. With their vestigial wings folded back along their stout bodies, they hopped about on claws that could tear out fist-sized chunks of human flesh. They bonded like affectionate babies to one person and were perfectly happy to kill anyone else in the entire world, at any time.
“Good killer bird,” muttered Jean. “Pretty threat to life and limb. What a lovely little girl or boy or thing you are.”
The creature chirruped a little warning at him and scampered after its mistress.
Huffing and sweating, Jean made his way up another set of switchback stairs and made an irritated mental note that a few hours of training would do his spreading gut some good. Jerome de Ferra was a man who viewed exercise solely as a means of getting from bed to the gambling tables and back again. Forty feet, sixty feet, eighty feet…up from the waterfront, up the second and third tiers of the island, up to the fourth and topmost, where the eccentric influence of the Artificers was at its strongest.
The shops and houses on the fourth tier of the Crescent were provided with water by an extremely elaborate network of aqueducts. Some of them were the stones and pillars of the Therin Throne era, while some were merely leather chutes supported by wooden struts. Waterwheels, windmills, gears, counterweights, and pendulums swung everywhere Jean looked. Rearranging the water supply was a game the Artificers played amongst themselves; the only rule was that nobody’s supply was to be cut off at the point of final delivery. Every few days, a new offshoot of some duct or a new pumping apparatus would appear, stealing water from an older duct or pumping apparatus. A few days later another artificer would divert water through another new channel and the battle would continue. Tropical storms would invariably litter the streets of the Crescent with cogs and mechanisms and ductwork, and the artificers would invariably rebuild their water channels twice as strangely as before.
Glassbender Street ran the full length of the topmost tier. Jean turned to his left and hurried along the cobbles. The strange smells of glassmaking wafted out at him from shop fronts; through open doors he could see artisans spinning glowing orange shapes at the ends of long poles. A small crowd of alchemists’ assistants brushed past him, hogging the street. They wore the trademark red skullcaps of their profession and displayed the chemical burns along their hands and faces that were their badges of pride.
He passed the Avenue of the Cog-Scrapers, where a small crowd of laborers were seated before their shops, cleaning and polishing pieces of metal. Some were under the direct scrutiny of impatient artificers, who grumbled unhelpful directions and stamped their feet nervously. This intersection was the southwestern end of the fourth tier; there was nowhere else to go except down—or out along the forty-foot walk to the home of Azura Gallardine.
At the cul-de-sac end to Glassbender Street was an arc of shop fronts with one gap like a tooth knocked out of a smile. Jutting beyond this gap was an Elderglass pylon, anchored to the stone of the fourth tier for some unfathomable Eldren reason. The pylon was about a foot and a half wide, flat-topped, and forty feet long. It speared out into the empty air, fifteen yards above the rooftops of a winding street down on the third tier.
The house of Azura Gallardine was perched at the far end of that pylon like a three-story bird’s nest on the tip of a branch. The second mistress of the Great Guild of Artificers had discovered an ideal means of assuring her privacy—only those with very serious business, or very sincere need of her skills, would be mad enough to scamper out along the pylon that led to her front door.
Jean swallowed, rubbed his hands together, and said a brief prayer to the Crooked Warden before stepping out onto the Elderglass. “It can’t be that hard,” he muttered. “I’ve been through worse. It’s just a short little walk. No need to look down. I’m as steady as a laden galleon.”
With his hands held out at his sides for balance, he began to make his way carefully across the pylon. It was curious, how the breeze seemed to pick up as he crossed, and how the sky seemed suddenly wider above him…. He fixed his eyes firmly on the door before him, and (unbeknownst to himself) ceased to breathe until his hands were planted firmly on that door. He gasped in a deep breath and wiped his brow, which had sprung an embarrassing quantity of sweat.
Azura Gallardine’s house was solidly crafted from white stone blocks. It had a high peaked roof crowned with a squeaking windmill and a large leather rain-collection bladder in a wooden frame. The door was decorated with relief carvings of gears and other clockwork mechanisms, and beside it a brass plate was set into the stone. Jean pressed the plate, and heard a gong echoing within the house. Smoke from cookfires below curled up past him while he stood there waiting for some response.
He was about to press the plate again when the door creaked open. A short, scowling woman appeared in the gap between the door and its frame, staring up at him. She had to be on the downside of sixty, Jean thought—her reddish skin was lined like the joints of an aged leather garment. She was heavyset, with a vaguely froglike bulge of flesh at her throat and jowly features drooping like sculptor’s putty from her high cheekbones. Her white hair was tightly braided with alternating rings of brass and black iron, and most of the visible flesh on her hands, forearms, and neck was covered in elaborate, slightly faded tattoos.
Jean set his right foot before his left and bowed at a forty-five-degree angle, with his left hand flung out and his right tucked beneath his stomach. He was about to start conjuring verbal flowers when Guildmistress Gallardine seized him by his collar and dragged him into her house.
“Ow! Madam, please! Allow me to introduce myself!”
“You’re too fat and well dressed to be an apprentice after patronage,” she replied, “so you must be here to beg a favor, and when your kind says hello, it tends to take a while. No, shut up.”
Her house smelled like oil, sweat, stone dust, and heated metal. The interior was one tall hollow, the strangest cluttered conglomeration Jean had ever seen. There were man-sized arched windows on the right-hand and left-hand walls, but every other inch of wall space was taken up with a sort of scaffolding that supported a hundred wooden shelves crammed with tools, materials, and junk. At the top of the scaffolding, set atop a makeshift floor of planks, Jean could see a sleeping pallet and a desk beneath a pair of hanging alchemical lamps. Ladders and leather cords hung down in several places; books and scrolls and half-empty corked bottles covered most of the floor.
“If I’ve come at a bad time…”
“It’s usually a bad time, Young Master Interloper. A client with an interesting request is about the only thing that ever changes that. So what’s it to be?”
“Guildmistress Gallardine, everyone I’ve asked has sworn that the most subtle, most accomplished, most imitated artificer in all of Tal Verrar is none other than y—”
“Quit bathing me with your flattery, boy,” said the old woman, waving her hands. “Look around you. Gears and levers, weights and chains. You don’t need to lick them with pretty words to make them work—nor me.”
“As you wish,” said Jean, straightening up and reaching within his coat. “I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t extend one small courtesy, however.”
From within his coat he brought forth a small package wrapped in cloth-of-silver. The neat corners of the wrapping were drawn together beneath a red wax seal, stamped into a curled disc of shaved gold.
Jean’s informants had all mentioned Gallardine’s single human failing: a taste for presents as strong as her distaste for flattery and interruptions. She knitted her eyebrows, but did manage a ghost of an anticipatory smile as she took the package in her tattooed hands.
“Well,” she said, “well, we must all certainly be able to live with ourselves….”
She popped the disc seal and pried the cloth-of silver apart with the eagerness of a little girl. The package contained a brass-stoppered rectangular bottle filled with milky white liquid. She sucked in her breath when she read the label.
“White Plum Austershalin,” she whispered. “Twelve gods. Who have you been speaking to?”
Brandy mixes were a Tal Verrar peculiarity; fine brandies from elsewhere (in this case, the peerless Austershalin of Emberlain) were mixed with local liquor from rare alchemical fruits (and there were none rarer than the heavenly white plum), then bottled and aged to produce cordials that could blast the tongue into numbness with the richness of their flavor. The bottle held perhaps two glasses of White Plum Austershalin, and it was worth forty-five solari.
“A few knowledgeable souls,” said Jean, “who said you might appreciate a modest draught.”
“This is hardly modest, Master…”
“De Ferra. Jerome de Ferra, at your service.”
“Quite the opposite, Master de Ferra. What did you want me to do for you?”
“Well—if you’d really prefer to get to the nub of the matter, I don’t have a specific need just yet. What I have are…questions.”
“About what?”
“Vaults.”
Guildmistress Gallardine cradled her brandy mix like a new baby and said, “Vaults, Master de Ferra? Simple storage vaults, with mechanical conveniences, or secure vaults, with mechanical defenses?”
“My taste, madam, runs more toward the latter.”
“What is it you wish to guard?”
“Nothing,” said Jean. “It is more a matter of something I wish to un- guard.”
“Are you locked out of a vault? Needing someone to loosen it up a bit for you?”
“Yes, madam. It’s just…”
“Just what?”
Jean licked his lips again and smiled. “I had heard, well, credible rumors that you might be amenable to the sort of work I might suggest.”