The Locksmith

by Howe, Barbara;

  “Shhh,” he hissed. “I’ll be relieved at eight o’clock. Wait for me.”

  I glanced at the church tower. Its clock read twenty till eight. I mouthed, “Thanks,” at him.

  Claire had reached the other guard, and glared at me over her shoulder, snapping, “Lucinda, hurry up!” She turned to the guard and smiled. “I am on my way to see the Fire Warlock. Open the gate and let me through.”

  The guard did not move. “You’ll have to talk to the sergeant, miss.”

  The sergeant was apparently the third guardsman, the one pacing between the two pillars. He came to a halt in front of Claire.

  Claire gave him the blinding smile that turned all males to mush and repeated her demand.

  He asked, “Do you have an invitation?”

  Invitation? “Sir,” I said, “isn’t the challenge path open to all comers?”

  “No invitation,” Claire said. “The Warlock doesn’t know I’m coming, but I’m sure you’ll let me through, won’t you, Sergeant?”

  I gasped when the sergeant scowled. “Nobody gets through this gate without an invitation. Good day, Miss.”

  Claire’s eyelashes fluttered. “Really, Sergeant, I’m sure that rule wasn’t meant for me.”

  He said, “You won’t talk to me or the boys again if you know what’s good for you.”

  Claire’s smile vanished. “I am not used to people talking to me like—”

  The sergeant took her by the arm and marched her across the street. She struggled with him, so that when he let go she was off balance and fell on her knees in the grass. She got up and stalked away, her very gait expressing outrage.

  For several seconds, I stood frozen. I had not seen anyone, male or female, refuse a request from Claire in more than five years.

  I bobbed a curtsey to the sergeant and ran after Claire, intending to give her a piece of my mind for being so rude. I caught up to her, but my tongue wouldn’t say the angry words. We walked across the square without speaking. Should I go back and talk to the sergeant? If he treated Claire like that how would he treat me?

  I looked back at the guards. A conversation with George would be more satisfying alone.

  “Claire,” I said, guiding her by the arm back around the apothecary’s. “I know you’re tired. Why don’t you go to that coffee house we passed on the way and have a better breakfast? I’ll see if there is another way in. You can relax.”

  After she settled in with a cup of coffee and breakfast on order at a table out of view of the square, I walked back to the gazebo and sat down to wait. The fact that I, too, was tired and hungry was irrelevant. I had no money, and persuading Claire to part with any of hers on my account was a lost cause from the outset.

  A new trio of guards arrived on time, there were presentations of arms and salutes all round, and the old trio sauntered away. George carried on an earnest conversation with the sergeant, with glances in my direction, and then he loped across the square, grinning.

  “Hey, Miss Lucinda, it sure is good to see you. Are you both trying to see His Wisdom or just Miss Claire?”

  “George, you have no idea how glad I am you’re here. We both want to see him. How do we get through the gate without an invitation?”

  “I don’t know, but you can ask Sarge now that he’s off duty. I told him you were nicer than Miss Claire, and he said you could come have breakfast with us if you wanted, as long as you didn’t bring the witch. Meaning Miss Claire, that is.”

  “What? That doesn’t make sense. Claire’s no more a witch than I am.”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know about witches, but it would explain things, wouldn’t it? So how about breakfast? And where is she?”

  “She’s in one of the coffee houses. I’d love to have breakfast with you, but I don’t have any money.”

  “Don’t worry about that, it’s on me.”

  “No, really, I can’t—”

  “Course you can. It’s the least I can do. I’d do the same for anybody from Lesser Campton, except maybe Miss Claire, who never gave me the time of day unless she wanted something from me.”

  I followed him down one of the side streets, admitting that yes, it would be nice to relax and eat breakfast with them. “What are you doing here? The last I had heard you were working on the wharfs downriver.”

  “The work wasn’t bad, hard but not any worse than working a farm, but I didn’t like my boss. When the guards came to town I heard they had a couple of holes in their ranks, and jumped at the chance. It seems like a fair deal to me. They’ll train me to fight with a pike, and most of the time all I have to do is stand up straight and keep an eye on things. I can do that well enough, and if things get nasty and there’s a fight, I think I can do alright there, too.”

  “I’ve heard rumours of you emerging with honours from a few dust-ups.”

  He grinned. “And it could get real interesting if we go to war.”

  I recoiled. “War?”

  He shrugged. “The guards are saying the emperor wants to be Europa’s most powerful wizard, and just thinking about our Fire Warlock pisses him off. They think he’s looking for an excuse to say the Warlock’s insulted him, and it won’t be long now until he finds something.”

  I knew empires didn’t appreciate obstinate nuisances like us on their flanks. They had no chance against our Fire Warlock, of course, but far too many wars had triggered Scorching Times. I shivered. We could do ourselves far more damage in a decade than the Europan Empire could in a century. We reached the inn and a more urgent problem drove worries about war out of my mind. I had to face the sergeant that Claire hadn’t charmed.

  The Guards

  I followed George to a table with the sergeant and the other guard. George ordered a big breakfast for me, over my feeble protests. The sergeant looked me up and down coldly, but I kept my chin up. I was going to see the great Warlock, wasn’t I? I couldn’t let a mere sergeant put me off.

  George told a story about one of my childhood pranks that made the sergeant’s lips twitch. I relaxed a little. The food came, and as we dug into our bacon and eggs I started to tell a story in retaliation about one of George’s less sensible escapades. Better not, the voice of reason said, and I changed it mid-sentence to a story about his pluck and daring. George and I took turns telling stories about our childhood days, mostly at my expense. By the time we finished eating the sergeant was laughing outright.

  Over coffee I dove in. “Sergeant, I know my sister got off on the wrong foot demanding that you let her through the gates, but how can we get to the challenge path if we have to have an invitation? Is there another way in? Or some other test I don’t know about?”

  The sergeant cleared his throat. “Miss, I never heard of two people going together. As far as I know everybody has to get in by theirselves.”

  The other guard added, “I never heard of girls going either.”

  George said, “If any girl can do it, it’s going to be Miss Lucinda. Everybody in Lesser Campton was sure she was going to be a fire witch after the Guillierre’s made a trip to Gastòn and she screamed bloody murder the whole time she was on the ferry.”

  I had kicked, bit, and punched, too. It was a shame I was too old to crawl under the table. That had been fourteen years ago, and I had still not lived it down.

  “Drown her,” the ferryman, a low-level water wizard, had said.

  My mother, white-lipped and rigid in the centre of the boat, had snapped, “How dare you! Can’t you see she’s going to be a fire witch?”

  “All the more reason to drown the brat.”

  My father had been furious, and proud. When I had displayed no magical abilities by the age of twelve, he had taken me to be tested. The bitter disappointment on his face when the wizard told him I had no discernible talent still stung.

  George was saying, “Doesn’t hurt for her to try,
does it?”

  The sergeant shrugged. “Beats me.”

  George said, “But I think he’s right about going by yourself. You’ll have better luck with His Wisdom without Miss Claire along. Besides, if you get through and she doesn’t, you won’t have to put up with her anymore. For a year, anyway.”

  I stared down at my coffee cup. Claire had once been my best friend. What had happened to her? The Claire I once knew would have been a prize for any wealthy, shallow nobleman.

  “George, I made a promise and I’m going to keep it. Who knows? Maybe the Warlock can help her. If he does, I’ll be glad. I don’t want her to get her comeuppance and live out her life as a nasty old maid. I’d rather have the old Claire back than just be rid of the new one.”

  And if she didn’t marry well, I’d be stuck supporting both her and Mother Janet. I wasn’t sure I could even support myself.

  There was silence. I looked up from my coffee. All three men were staring at me.

  I asked, “Uh, does that make any sense?”

  The sergeant said, “Well maybe it do and maybe it don’t. I can’t say what the Warlock will make of it, miss. If you want to try, I won’t stop you. I just didn’t like your sister trying to use magic on us.”

  “But Claire doesn’t have any talent.”

  “She was doing something, miss.”

  “What?”

  He shrugged. “Don’t know, but the Warlock doesn’t let much of anything work on us. Anyway, I don’t mind telling you that there’s another way to get in. There’s another, little gate. A door in a wall, see, on past the church. There ain’t no guard there, but anybody that has regular business at the castle—the lieutenant and a few other people—they’ve got keys. Just ask nice and the lieutenant will let you through.”

  “Oh, bless you, sir. That’s wonderful.”

  “Don’t sir, me, miss, I’m not a gentleman. I’m a sergeant. Just doing my job.”

  “Where can I find the lieutenant? I’ll go get Claire and then we’ll ask him to let us through.”

  “Uh, miss, maybe you’d have better luck with the lieutenant if you was to go by yourself.”

  “You’re probably right,” I said. “Do you know anything about the challenges? I’ve read that there are three, but I have no idea what they are. Is there any advice or hints for getting through them?”

  The sergeant stared up at the ceiling. “Yep, there are three. As for anything else, everybody as has been through comes out magicked and can’t tell anybody else. You’ll just have to find out for yourselves, miss.”

  “I was afraid you were going to say that.”

  He stood up. “All right, we’ll take you to the lieutenant. Let’s go.”

  “Yes, sir. Thank you!”

  “Told you not to ‘sir’ me. Go on with you.”

  They led me to the lieutenant’s office and waited outside while I went in. The lieutenant was a young man, not much older than George or me, with a thin beard. He listened in silence to my request, then studied me with his arms folded across his chest for at least half a minute longer. I waited. If he’d been as old as the sergeant, I might have been nervous, but despite the fancy uniform he looked like just another farm boy, trying to look older by growing a beard.

  He said, “The Warlock makes people he agrees to help work for a year. If you aren’t willing to work hard, you should go home.”

  What could the Warlock make me do that would be harder than being a farmer’s wife? I shrugged.

  “What kind of work can you and your sister do?” he asked.

  “Everybody needs to eat, and I can cook. My sister can do laundry. We can both clean and sew and do other housekeeping chores.”

  “Ha,” he leered. “There are other services a pretty girl can provide, and you wouldn’t even have to get out of bed to do them.”

  What was he talking about—work in my sleep? Or… Oh. I laughed. He drew back as if I’d gone mad.

  I’d heard of sleeping one’s way to the top, but this was ridiculous. “Seduce the Fire Warlock? I’m not stupid. Or suicidal.”

  He turned bright red. “I meant you could do things for the guards. You might as well. What’s a year among us going to do to your reputation? If you value it, don’t go.”

  “Witches spend years at the Fire Guild’s school without damaging their reputations. The whole purpose of the Office of the Fire Warlock, and the guards and everything else associated with it, is to protect the women and children of Frankland. If members of the guard spread malicious rumours about an innocent girl, he wouldn’t like it.”

  The lieutenant blanched.

  “The Frost Maiden wouldn’t like it either,” I added.

  “Ahem. Well. I don’t have to let you through if I think you’re going to waste the Warlock’s time. Why do you want to see His Wisdom?”

  “I’m sorry, sir, but we don’t have to explain our quests to anyone but the Warlock. That’s what the rules have always said, and you ought to know the rules as well as I do, if not better.”

  He sniffed. “Maybe the rules have changed. Maybe the Warlock doesn’t want all kinds of riffraff and silly girls coming to see him, and he’s told us to only let through sensible people.”

  I bit back my first response—in that case, the Warlock needed to find someone sensible to sort them out—and said as meekly as I could manage, “But the challenges are designed to weed out the people who aren’t sensible and serious. The lore says the Warlock doesn’t appreciate anybody else putting obstacles in a quester’s path. You should let us through, sir. I wouldn’t want it on my conscience that he got angry with you for stopping us.”

  He stared at me through narrowed lids. I struggled to keep a straight face.

  He said, “If you get through, which isn’t likely, he’ll just send you home again without even listening to you. You shouldn’t waste your time and put yourself in danger for that.”

  “No, sir. He’s obligated to listen to anyone who makes it through the challenges. Then he might send us home, but he has to listen first.”

  “Even to a couple of girls?” he sneered. “Girls don’t go to the Warlock.”

  “Even to a couple of girls. If no girls have come to him before then maybe the sheer novelty will amuse him.”

  “I doubt it. You aren’t likely to be the sort of person he wants to see.”

  Interested, I asked, “What sort of person does he want to see?”

  “A brave one,” he snapped, “or an educated one, who wants to talk about books and ideas.”

  I laughed again, and pulled the two books out of my bundle. I laid them on his desk with a thump. “I’m a scholar’s daughter, and these are my treasures. If he wants to talk about books I would be in heaven.”

  He gave up. He shooed me out and called the sergeant in to give him the key.

  The Warlock loves to talk about books, does he? I ran down the street, laughing. What kind of a man was the reigning Warlock? The History of the Office of The Fire Warlock in Father’s library was two hundred years old. I knew little about the current one, other than the stories Gladys told about the wars he had fought, and his nom de guerre, Quicksilver. An odd name, surely, for a member of a breed noted for violent tempers and stubborn grudges.

  Claire was where I had left her, looking cross. “Where have you been?”

  I said, “I’ve been talking to the guards. Supplicants go through another gate, an ordinary door. George just joined the guards. He and—”

  “Who?” She looked blank.

  “George Barnes. From the farm down the lane. He left Lesser Campton a few months ago looking for work. Remember?”

  “Oh, yes. He’s one of the rowdies who always smelled of pigs, right?”

  I closed my eyes and counted to ten. “Right. Well, he and the sergeant are going to meet us at the door and let us through.�
�

  “Good.”

  “We need to be polite to them.”

  She sniffed. “Why? They’re guards. If you get along with them so well perhaps you should do all the talking.”

  “Claire, that’s brilliant. I’m glad you suggested it.”

  She glared at me, and started to retort, then closed her mouth and sniffed again. She followed me around to the back of the church, where George and the sergeant were waiting. She nodded at them, gave George a smile, and didn’t say anything. Why had the sergeant turned her away? He had said why, but I had already forgotten. I shrugged. It didn’t matter; he was going to let us both through.

  We followed the sergeant down the alley to a wooden door with an iron handle, and no markings to distinguish it from any of dozens of other wooden doors in the same town.

  He held up a key, and said, “Now, miss, this here door is locked on this side, but on the other side it has a latch, and it’s been magicked so that if you need to come back you can pull the latch and walk right on out. But if you do, you won’t never get no second chance.”

  I nodded. “That’s what I expected.”

  He unlocked the door and pulled it open. “Are you sure you want to go in?”

  “Yes, s…I mean, yes, Sergeant.” He grinned.

  Claire said, “Thank you, George. Thank you, Sergeant,” and walked through.

  I walked past George, then turned and kissed him on the cheek. I whispered, “Wish me luck.” He gave me the double thumbs up and a big wink. I thanked the sergeant again, and kissed him on the cheek too before walking through.

  Behind me, as the door closed, the sergeant said, “Good luck, miss, with the other two challenges.”

  A Sticky Situation

  I whirled but the door had already clicked shut. I stared at it for a moment, then turned to look around. We were in a wooded park with a path through it. Pine trees thinned out before a curving hedge, its top about eye level. Beyond it, in the distance, the path ended at another door in a wall. We looked at each other and shrugged. Walk in one door and out the other. What could be hard about that?