Hope and the Patient Man

by Mike Reeves-McMillan

  “My boots aren’t making any noise,” said Rosie in a low voice.

  “Mine have a silencing spell,” said Hope. “Its radius is about a dwarfpace, so yours are inside it.”

  “I’d wondered about that.”

  Halfway to the lab, skirting a run-down area of the city, they saw a dark figure in a doorway. It looked like a man. Despite their silent boots and Hope’s amulet, the figure’s head tracked them as they passed, but he didn’t leave his doorway. They paused once, pulling into a doorway themselves, as several drunken youths, shouting casual obscenities to each other at high volume, passed on a cross street. Rosie was trembling by the time they reached the lab door, but she pulled herself together with a clear effort, squared her shoulders and stood up straight.

  No light shone from under the door to the lab, and they unlocked it and entered, just in time to hear Bucket’s alarm clock. The gnome, who lived on the premises in a room next to Dignified’s, emerged, yawning, and worked the spell to put on the main lights. He nodded to the two women.

  “Thought you might be here,” he said. “Tea?”

  They both nodded, and he puttered off into the little kitchen.

  There was still no sign of Dignified. His door was closed firmly. Rosie couldn’t settle, sitting on a stool at one of the benches, then jumping up and pacing, picking things up to fiddle with and dropping them.

  “Rosie,” said Hope, “calm down. He’ll be all right.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes,” said Hope, with less than complete honesty. Dignified was, despite his lack of self-expression, a man who felt things deeply. She had discovered that for herself on the rare occasions they had talked about personal matters. He had lost all of his family at a vulnerable age, and spent years in prison, blaming himself for their deaths. She knew firsthand how powerful a romantic connection could be, for both good and ill. She sent up one of her rare prayers that she and Rosie, with Bucket’s support, could salvage the situation.

  Bucket stuck his head out of the kitchen. “Tea’s ready,” he called. “You want to come in here?”

  Rosie and Hope swapped glances, and Hope jerked her head towards the kitchen door. Rosie followed, and Hope sat at the table with Bucket while Rosie paced. A fourth mug, empty, waited at Dignified’s accustomed place, to be filled with tea when he emerged.

  Twenty minutes passed without conversation. He hadn’t come out.

  “Bucket,” said Hope at last, “would you check on him? He should have been awake by now.”

  The gnome nodded, and trotted off. They heard the bedroom door open, and Bucket’s voice, and caught the word “Master”. A distant, toneless voice replied, and Rosie, who had finally sat down, leapt to her feet. Hope put up a hand in a restraining gesture, listening to the voices, but she couldn’t make out the conversation.

  Bucket returned at last, and said to Hope, “He’ll talk to you.”

  She put a hand on Rosie’s shoulder and squeezed, then walked in her silent boots to Dignified’s door.

  She looked into a room messier even than Briar’s, the floor covered not only in clothing but also in odds and ends of junk that had made it in from the main lab, interspersed with occasional dirty crockery. It smelled less than fresh: grease, a faint undertone of rotting food, and the tang of a man who didn’t wash every day.

  Against the back wall, Dignified sprawled on a narrow cot, his face dull and lifeless. Hope leaned her arms on the doorframe, but didn’t try to enter the room.

  “Dignified,” she said. He didn’t answer, but that was normal for him, so she pressed on. “Rosie wants to talk to you.”

  No response.

  “Dignified, she’s very sorry. She didn’t understand about how you felt. She wants to apologise for what she said.”

  “Not what she said,” said Dignified. “Who she is.” His eyes stared at the ceiling.

  “What do you mean?”

  “All her family’s wealth comes from death.”

  That was almost certainly an exaggeration, but Hope held herself back from saying so. She didn’t think it would be a useful argument. “So it’s the money that’s the problem?”

  He thought about that for a minute. “Yes.”

  “If she didn’t have that money, that death money, you’d be willing to be her friend?”

  Another pause. “Yes.”

  Hope shot a glance at Rosie, who had crept up as quietly as her boots would let her and was standing a few paces to Hope’s left, out of Dignified’s line of sight (if he had been looking at the door, which he wasn’t).

  “And if she wasn’t living in her family’s house?” Hope went on.

  “Yes.” Much quicker this time.

  “Could she still see her family?”

  A longer pause. “Yes. They’re her family. You shouldn’t lose your family.”

  Out of the corner of her eye — she was now leaning back so that she could see Rosie in her peripheral vision — Hope saw the other woman’s posture change from tension to relief. She turned her head.

  “Rosie,” she said, “you’ve heard what Dignified said. Would you be willing to give up all benefits from your family’s money, for his sake?”

  “Of course I would,” said Rosie, coming up to stand in the doorway too as Hope made room. She wrinkled her nose just a little as the smell hit her, but schooled her expression, and leaned into the room, resting her shoulder against the door jamb. “Dignified, I… I hope you and I can build a friendship, perhaps more than that. I don’t care about my family’s money compared with that. I have a job and an income of my own now, and I can move out of their house and go and live somewhere else.”

  “You can stay with us until you find somewhere,” said Hope, and Rosie shot her a grateful smile before her face reverted to its previous worried expression.

  They waited for Dignified’s response. He sat up in the bed, swung his feet over the side, and stared at the floor (or, more accurately, in the direction of the floor, which wasn’t visible under piles of clothing and bits of devices). After a long pause, he looked up.

  “Thank you,” he said. “Nobody ever cared so much about how I feel before.” A tear slid down his cheek.

  Hope found herself shouldered aside by a determined Rosie, who pushed through the doorway and immediately stumbled over some of the junk on the floor. She started to recover, but tripped over something else and fell against Dignified, bearing him backwards onto the bed. Two sets of long limbs flailed, and Hope was irresistibly reminded of a dying spider. She suppressed a laugh behind her hand, glancing back at Bucket, who had come up behind Rosie and was now standing in the door. She saw the gnome’s large eyes grow abruptly larger, his eyebrows going up, and glanced back at the bed. Her own eyebrows rose as she took in the sight of Rosie and Dignified with their lips locked together, Rosie’s arms having found firm purchase on his undernourished body. As she watched, unable to tear her gaze away, Dignified’s arms first thrashed, then, tentatively, drew in and clasped Rosie’s back, and (to the accompaniment of “mph! mph!” noises from an enthusiastic Rosie) began caressing her, at first gently and then with increasing firmness.

  Bucket touched Hope’s hand, breaking her paralysis, and gestured backward with his head. She nodded, and pulled the door closed. Only then did she realise she was blushing like Rosie.

  “Well!” she said.

  “Didn’t expect that,” said Bucket.

  “Me neither.” There was a loud squeak from the cot, and it thumped into the wall, once, in a way that suggested two people rolling fully onto it. They traded glances.

  “I don’t think we should stay here,” said Hope.

  “No,” Bucket agreed.

  “Want to come back to my place on the airhorse for what’s left of the night, and sleep on the floor cushions?”

  “Sounds good.”

  As they passed through the factory, Bucket said musingly, “I wonder if she knows, you know, what to do? I’m pretty sure he doesn’t. Though peo
ple work it out, don’t they? I mean, he was on the right lines, looked like.”

  “Ah,” said Hope. “I gave her a book the other night, as it happens.”

  “A book? About…”

  “Yes. Thought she should be prepared.”

  “Ah.” They passed through the small door into the yard, and Bucket said, “I didn’t know they had books on that.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well. So they should be all right, then.”

  “I don’t know how far she’d read. She didn’t seem all that keen on it, to be honest. A bit… shocked. You know, a well-brought-up young woman…”

  “She seemed to be well on top of kissing, at least.”

  “She certainly did.”

  They mounted the airhorse and rode back to the flat in reflective silence.

  In the morning, Bucket was gone already when Hope woke up.

  She was waiting for Dignified to review her first article still, and she suspected that he might have other priorities. She felt diffident about going in to the lab, as well, fearing that Rosie might be embarrassed. So she gave the neglected airhorse a proper wash until its red paint and brass trim were gleaming, started up the steam compressor, and rode it sedately off in the direction of the Master-Mage’s Institute. It was past time for her to pay it a visit.

  She found the location easily enough, in one of the new parts of the city on the other side of the river from the university. There was a ferry, which accommodated her airhorse, the ferryman admiring it and asking her questions about it as he helped her wheel it on, down a ramp also used for live horses and carriages. They rolled it off again at the other side, and she mounted and rode the short distance to the Institute.

  Hope recognised the construction of the building instantly. Dignified had invented rapid-assembly buildings some time before, when the Realmgold complained about how long it was taking to set up manufactories, and the plywood panels of just such a construction rose at the address she’d been given. Scaffolding around them, and a few unfinished courses of bricks, hinted that the Master-Mage had grander plans.

  Inside, there was a basic reception office, lit by a skylight and furnished with battered pieces that looked much older than the building. A pleasant clerk took her details and vanished through a door at the back, returning with a familiar face at his elbow.

  “Mister Gizmo,” said Hope. “So nice to see you again.”

  “And you, Mage,” said Gizmo, sincerely, as far as she could tell. She still felt guilty about her slip with him when the topic of his working at the Institute had first come up. “Come on through,” he added.

  “As you can see,” he said, as they entered a large open space that combined the many workbenches, wheeled sketching boards and tool stations of Dignified’s lab with the neatness and order of the manufactory, “we are still setting up. Eventually, this building’s shell will be made from some of the materials we’re still developing here.”

  A number of humans and gnomes laboured at the benches, which were of varying heights to accommodate the two races, and also had stools beside them which could be raised and lowered in moments. The same kind of quiet, industrious atmosphere predominated that Hope was used to in the manufactory. A high mezzanine ran around the outside of the room, with several stairways up to it, and she glimpsed packed bookshelves and more sketching boards.

  “This is the main research room,” said Gizmo. “There are more specialised furnaces and large or noisy tools in the next section,” he gestured at the back of the workroom, “a library up on the mezzanine, and we have a basement for fungus research.”

  “Fungus?” she said. They were speaking Dwarvish, and she repeated the word in Pektal to make sure she’d understood correctly.

  “Yes, we gnomes have found a thousand uses for fungi. Food and drink, of course, but also everything from packing material to medicinals to refining other substances. The dwarves have no interest in anything that grows, particularly anything that grows on waste material, so we’ve been left to it with minimal interference for, oh, several thousand years, probably. We’ve got quite good at breeding them. And now your human lifemages are getting involved, using some of the old elvish knowledge to understand better how they work.” He opened the door of an office at the back of the room and gestured for her to precede him. Like his old office back at the manufactory, it had a glass front looking out onto the main floor.

  “I have to apologise, first of all,” said Hope, as she sat down, “for taking so long to get here. I’m only just starting to get well. The headaches have been fierce, and even after they stopped I can’t seem to concentrate for long.”

  “That’s all right,” he said. “I hit my head once, not as bad as you, but I know how much it hurts. You’re recovering now?”

  “Better each day, it seems. I have some of the lectures drafted, though Dignified still has to go over them and comment, and outlines for the rest.”

  “How is Dignified?”

  She pondered how to answer that. “You remember Rosie?”

  “Of course.”

  “Well, as of last night, he and she are…” she gestured in the air, and the gnome’s bushy eyebrows rose.

  “Really? I wouldn’t have expected…”

  “Nor would I, but Rosie is full of surprises. I haven’t been in this morning, but… It’s hard to say how something like that will affect him. For the better, I hope.”

  “So do I. I’ve worried about him. Bucket will want to go on to greater things eventually, and he needs someone to take care of him.”

  “Well, I do believe he’ll have such a person. It won’t be easy for either of them. She’s agreed to give up her family’s wealth. Did you know they made it in munitions?”

  “No, I didn’t. I can see why that would bother him, though.” Gizmo knew Dignified’s story better than anyone, since they had met in prison. “Well, good for her.”

  “Now,” said Hope, changing the subject, “assuming I can get him to focus long enough to proof those drafts, can I start the lectures next shift-round?”

  “That might be short notice to get everyone’s schedules arranged so they can come. How would the one after be?” He looked up at a wall calendar covered in scribbled marks.

  They arranged a time and date for the first lecture and pencilled in the ones beyond that. As they rose, Gizmo said, “Do you have time for a little tour? Talk to some of our researchers?”

  “I’d love to.”

  Their tour of the benches rapidly became a blur of names and projects. Some researchers were trying to extrapolate some of the ancient texts and come up with new spells, and these, in particular, wanted to talk with her. Gizmo had to drag her away, promising plenty of consultation time after her lectures. The spell someone had found that caused a small mechanical movement when illuminated struck her as especially promising, and she made a mental note to mention it to Dignified.

  Some were working on materials that were stronger, lighter, cheaper to produce or, preferably, all three. There was a whole section attempting to rediscover the secret of hardlac, an ancient elven material made from processed tree sap. Farmers tilling their fields still dug up caches of hardlac tools and weapons in perfect condition, more than 500 years after the fall of the Elven Empire, and one could still find windows in the older parts of some towns made out of clearlac, the transparent variant. “But nobody knows how to make it,” said a frustrated researcher. “The elves never let us in on the secret.”

  One gnome, alone at his bench, had what looked like a rope made of glass, and was shining a magical light in at one end and peering at the other. “What’s that?” asked Hope.

  “Glass string,” said Gizmo. “Carries the light from one place to another. We’re still looking for a use for it.”

  By the time they had made it back to the front door, Hope was growing tired, and she turned down an offer to see the fungus cellar and pressed Gizmo’s hand in farewell.

  “Thank you, Mister Gizmo,” she
said. “You seem happy here, I have to say.”

  “I am,” he said. “The change has done me good. To be honest, the old place was running so smooth that the challenge had gone out of it, and it was past time young Wheel stepped up. This is much more interesting.”

  “Glad to hear it,” she said. “Now that Rosie and Dignified are doing so well, and I’m able to work again, I think I will take up the Master-Mage’s offer and come to work here, if that offer’s still open. I’ll need to ask him.”

  “No, you won’t,” said Gizmo. “I make the hiring decisions. You’d be very welcome.”

  “Thank you, Mister Gizmo!” she said. “I especially appreciate that in light of… um… my remarks earlier, when…”

  “I’ve heard a lot worse,” said Gizmo. “You didn’t mean anything by it, I’m sure.”

  On the way back home, Hope stopped by the lab. Her curiosity about the upshot of the previous night had grown to irresistible proportions. Bucket greeted her cheerfully as she entered, his eyes dancing, so she assumed that nothing terrible had happened. Besides, she could hear Dignified and Rosie speaking Dwarvish behind one of the clusters of erasable boards.

  On her way past, she glanced through the open door of Dignified’s room. The floor was not only clear, but gleaming clean, and a new dresser stood beside a neatly-made full-sized bed, replacing the narrow cot. She assumed that the rug under the bed was a privacy rug, which would mute any noises and save Bucket from embarrassment. The sheets looked fresh and crisp, and there was a smell of floor cleaner and furniture oil. She smiled to herself. Rosie had evidently wasted no time.

  Apart from wearing the same clothes as the previous day, Rosie also looked spruce and clean, if perhaps a touch sleepy. Dignified’s clothing was fresh and tidy, and she caught a whiff of scented water that wasn’t Rosie’s. He looked like a man who has been struck in the face several times, who has then discovered that what he is being struck with is a large bar of gold, and it’s his, and there are more like it.