by Jeff Grubb
“I am,” said Urza, but Mishra made a small coughing noise. Urza made a face and added, “I should say that Mishra and I were born in the same year, I was born on the first day of the year, Mishra was born on the last. So for all days but the last, I am a year older.”
“On the last day, we’re equal!” piped Mishra, as if pleased that his brother had corrected himself.
Tocasia held up the letter from Urza’s vest. “Do you know what this says?”
Again, the two boys looked at each other. Tocasia sensed they were conferring in a secret language, one only they could hear.
“Not exactly,” answered Urza at last.
“Your father was a dear friend to whom I owe much,” observed Tocasia. “He wants me to look after you, to care for you should something happen to him. That means you’re going to be staying here for quite a while. And that means working with me and my students. If you’re uncomfortable with this arrangement, I can send you back with Bly, but to be honest I don’t know what kind of welcome would await you in Penregon.”
Again the boys looked at each other. It was Mishra who spoke this time. “What is it that you do?”
“I dig,” said Tocasia. “Or rather, I supervise others who dig. We are searching for artifacts out here. Do you know what I’m talking about?”
“Remnants of the past,” said Urza. “Of a civilization that stood here long before Argive or any of the nations of Terisiare. Relics.”
“That’s right,” said Tocasia. “Artifacts that range in power from small toys to great machines, machines that can do the work of many men.”
“Like the big white ox-things?” asked Mishra, almost unheard.
Tocasia arched an eyebrow at the younger brother. “Yes, indeed. The onulets that we use as beasts of burden out here are artifacts, ones I created based on the designs we’ve pieced together of the artifact-creating race, the Thran. The onulets are strong, loyal, unthinking machines that are tireless workers. They require neither food nor water, and when they do at last break down, the fluids from their joints are used to brew a hearty beverage that we then trade with desert tribesmen for information and other artifacts.”
“They sound very useful,” said Urza.
Tocasia leaned back in her chair. “I’m impressed, Mishra. The framework is covered by stitched hides to protect the workings from the desert sands. I had one student who was quite handy with a needle. Most first-time students assume the onulets are alive, since the only things comparable are the aurochs.” She chuckled. “One of the pranks that Richlau and the other boys were probably planning was to assign you to feed an onulet and not to come back until it had finished its meal. How did you guess they weren’t living?”
Mishra blinked, then furrowed his brow. “I didn’t guess. I just knew.”
Urza sniffed and said, “The gait is wrong for something alive. It pitches forward when it takes a step. A real creature would be smoother.” He looked at Tocasia and shrugged. “I knew it too, but I didn’t think it important enough to mention. The Thran must have been amazing people to have created it.”
Tocasia said, “And what do you know of the Thran, young Urza?”
The sandy-haired boy planted his feet apart and put his hands behind his back—a recitation position Tocasia remembered from her own youth.
“The Thran were an ancient race that lived in this land many thousands of years ago. They created a number of wondrous devices, only a few of which have survived to the present day. The great clock of Penregon’s Grand Court is said to be a Thran artifact.”
Tocasia suppressed a smile; the device at the heart of that clock had been one of her earliest finds. “But who were they?” she asked. “Who were the Thran? Were they human?”
Urza blinked, as if the question were odd. “Of course. Why wouldn’t they be?”
“What proof can you offer?” asked Tocasia.
Urza thought for a moment, and Tocasia noticed he dropped his head slightly as if trying to support a thought-filled head with his chest. “I don’t remember anything saying they weren’t. I assumed they were.”
“Most people do,” said the scholar. “But the truth of the matter is we don’t know. They might be human, yes. Ahmahl, one of the Fallaji, has some folk stories about how the Thran were powerful gods who brought his people into this world, but the stories neglect any specifics. The Thran could have been minotaurs, elves, dwarves—or goblins, for all we know.”
“Oh, I hope they were minotaurs!” said Mishra. “Those are neatlooking!”
Urza spread his hands before him and said dryly, “There was a carnival in Penregon when we were younger. Most of what Mishra knows of minotaurs comes from seeing one there.”
“But the fact remains we don’t know who the Thran were,” continued Tocasia. “And so we dig, we examine, and we try to piece together the parts of the past. The onulets are a result of what we have learned. So, to a lesser extent, are the grapeshot catapults that guard the encampment. We do know that many of the Thran devices were powered by crystalline energy sources. We call them power stones. What the Thran called them is anyone’s guess. We have a rough idea of their language, though precious little that has been written down. We have not found statuary, art, or pottery—nothing that implies the creative arts. We know they stripped this land bare, but don’t know how they died off—whether by internal war, famine, or plague.”
She sighed. “We have no idea even of what they look like. They could have looked like us. Or they could have looked like our friend here.” She pushed the su-chi forward on the desk and patted it.
Mishra reached forward and grabbed the skull. Tocasia was surprised by the speed that only desert predators and small children can manage. He turned it over and over in his hands.
“Stop—” began Tocasia. She wanted to say, “Stop that and put it back down,” but she was too late. At the first sound from her Urza leapt on his little brother.
“Put it down!” snapped the sandy-haired boy. “It might be dangerous!”
“Its not dangerous,” snarled his darker-haired brother. “If it was dangerous, she’d keep it someplace where we couldn’t touch it!”
“Then its fragile!” shouted Urza. “You’ll break it!”
“If I break it, it’ll be because you made me!” replied Mishra. The pair formed a tight knot, the su-chi skull between them.
“Give!” shouted Urza.
“No!” responded Mishra.
“Enough!” roared Tocasia, thundering both hands on top of the table. At once both boys were on their feet again, and the skull was rocking gently against the pearl inlay where it had been a minute before.
The scholar scowled at the boys. “You two talk a good game and seem to have enough energy to burn. Good enough. You’re going to spend the rest of the month learning from the ground up. You’ll start by working in the kitchen. Alongside Richlau, so I strongly recommend you figure out how to deal with him. If I have any more trouble with the pair of you, I’ll send you back with Bly.” She glared at them. “Do I make myself clear?”
As one, both boys nodded.
“Good.” Tocasia settled her thin frame in the chair. “Now report to the mess tent and start peeling tubers. They’re serving a big feast tonight for Bly’s men. I trust there will be no more problems?”
Both boys nodded in unison again. Tocasia waved them out, and they vanished from her tarp, leaving trails of dust behind them as they scampered down the hillside.
Despite herself Tocasia smiled. They were so close in age, but their birth order set their attitudes. Urza was ten yet carried himself as if he were much older and felt responsible for his younger brother. Mishra was nearly ten but acted younger and was more exuberant. He would probably always be willing to try new things, thought Tocasia, because big brother would be there to watch out for him.
Still, she mused, a word to Richlau would probably be wise. Let him know she would not appreciate hearing he was making life difficult for the two newest and
youngest students. That might create more hard feelings if the “new children” were known to be favorites, but that was a small price, and a temporary one. At the end of this season, this batch of young nobles would head back to Penregon and a new group would take their place. The brothers should be capable of handling themselves by then, she thought, or they would be gone.
Tocasia’s smile died as she picked up the metallic skull of the su-chi. She examined it carefully to see if the boys had damaged it further in their grappling. Somehow, she saw, their fight had jostled the two halves of the power crystal together. The longitudinal crack had vanished, and the crystal now was a solid piece. More interesting, there was a flicker of light deep within the crystal, a weak glow but one that indicated that the crystal still held some of its energy.
Tocasia stared at the skull and its crystalline brain until Loran came to fetch her for dinner with the wagon master’s men and her own students. But her eyes and her thoughts strayed often during the meal to the two boys who had so recently arrived in the camp.
Tocasia did not send the boys back with Bly that trip, or for any other trip to Penregon for the next six summers. Urza came to terms with Richlau, and Mishra was more careful about sitting on others’ bunks. Loran went back to Penregon and stayed away for five years. Bly wore out the new oxen and tried to buy one of Tocasia’s onulets, to no avail. Tocasia continued to dig and to bring up the two boys put into her care.
At first Tocasia thought of Urza and Mishra as two parts of a single entity. Her inclination was reinforced by the way the two looked at each other before answering a question. Yet they were very different people, and the desert brought out different parts of their personalities.
Urza became more studious, devouring every scrap of information that Tocasia had gathered on the Thran. He pored over the rosters of artifacts from previous seasons and even the scrap heaps of material that had been discarded. In this fashion he found several pieces that belonged with later discoveries but had been discarded at the time.
Urza, Tocasia quickly discovered, was intrigued by the manner in which things worked. At twelve he took apart the front limbs of one of the onulets, reassembling it only after Tocasia threatened dire consequences. He and Mishra rebuilt the beast overnight, and their impromptu redesign stopped the lurching problem the machine had previously experienced.
The elder brother grew lean and wiry in the hot sun. His hair bleached to a straw-colored blond, and he now gathered it in a ponytail across the back of his neck. His knowledge was encyclopedic and his insights keen.
Mishra bloomed in the dry desert air as well. While Urza burrowed through the tattered scrolls and maps, Mishra learned to dig, to sift, and excavate. The younger brother spent more time out in the field than did his sibling. He climbed among the exposed rock faces and dry washes. Soon he could look at a proposed excavation site and hazard a guess on how deep the excavators would have to go to before striking the Thran level of artifacts. More often than not, his guess proved right.
Tocasia noticed that Mishra spent more time with the other students than did his brother, and with Ahmahl’s diggers as well. After supper, while Urza was hunched over a ligature of some skeletal artifact, Mishra was to be found at the diggers’ camp, listening to the legends of the Fallaji peoples. There were tales of raids and heroes and desert genies; of great cities captured in bottles and hapless souls transformed into donkeys. Mishra learned of the Thran as the desert people knew them—a race of demigods who had used their artifacts to create wonderful, terrible cities.
Tocasia suspected that the diggers let Mishra sample their nabiz, the powerful fermented wine spiced with cinnamon favored by the Fallaji, but she said nothing. It seemed good to her that Mishra had moved from beneath his brother’s protective wing. Urza, for his part, seemed not to notice that his brother spent more time with the others, so wrapped up was the elder child in his studies.
The work in the desert sun toughened Mishra. He was more muscular, the result of long hours at the dig sites, and his flesh had a deep, worker’s tan. His dark hair trailed after him like a banner, ornately braided in the manner of the desert. He had wider shoulders and a stauncher frame than his elder brother and could now handle himself in any scrap without Urza’s help.
Both boys were tireless workers, and Tocasia saw why Bly had tried to keep them. But something more than their work bound them to her. Each of the brothers had an enthusiasm for his tasks that was contagious. Tocasia felt no need to talk to them as children; rather she spoke to them as trusted adults, and they returned her trust.
Soon the pair were considered as vital and permanent a part of the encampment as Tocasia herself. Within two years, the young nobles arriving from Penregon were the same age as Urza and Mishra, and the brothers already knew the lay of the land. Remembering their own experiences, the pair always sought out the prospective bullies among the group and made it clear that no persecution of the smaller students would be permitted. Within another two years the brothers were considered the de facto leaders of the student contingent, allowing Tocasia more time for her own examination of artifacts and their power stones.
In the fall of the second year word reached the camp via Bly’s caravan that Urza and Mishra’s father had passed on after a long illness. The word was in a terse note, quickly penned, from the boys’ stepmother. The missive said nothing about an inheritance, and Tocasia suspected no mention would be ever be made.
She gave Urza the news first. He was working beneath Tocasia’s tarp, clearing the dust from a device found earlier that day, driven by a coiled spring. Tocasia suspected it was merely a clock mechanism, but the young man had found carvings along the length of the spring itself, carvings that seemed to have a relationship to known Thran glyphs. When she told him of his father, Urza set his tools down and stared at the inlaid pearl top for a long moment. He rubbed his eyes and thanked Tocasia for the information, then picked his tools up again, suddenly intent on the device.
Mishra responded very differently. When Tocasia gave him the news he fled the dig site altogether, climbing up the side of the rocky tor above Tocasia’s encampment. The old scholar thought to go after him, but Ahmahl counseled against it. Mishra needed to work out his feelings on his own, the Fallaji said. Still, after dinner Tocasia saw Urza climbing the outcropping, and the brothers sat up there a long time, watching the Glimmer Moon rise over the desert. Neither brother mentioned the incident afterward, and Tocasia wondered what they had said to each other on the side of that rocky tor.
In the spring of the sixth year of the boys’ arrival Loran returned, this time as an official representative of her house instead of as a mere student. She had grown as well and was now a highborn lady with (Bly informed Tocasia with a wink and an unsubtle nudge) a string of suitors desiring both her hand and her family’s moneys. Officially, Loran was to survey the encampment for its recent accomplishments and to recommend if her family should increase their sponsorship of Tocasia’s work. In reality that decision could have been made back in Penregon; a growing number of young leaders of the various families had spent at least one summer working for Tocasia, and fond memories now translated into hard currency. The Argivian Crown did not care for Tocasia’s work, the archaeologist knew, but the Argivian Crown was weak and treated the matter as it treated everything it did not care for: it ignored the issue.
Loran had made the long and difficult journey out to the encampment primarily to see Tocasia again, and Tocasia knew it. Most of the high manners and debutante softness disappeared by the end of the first evening, and by noon of the second day Loran was prowling alongside Tocasia as she moved from excavation to excavation.
Tocasia had something to show Loran, a story for her to carry back to the other former students in the Argivian capital. There had been a sudden downpour the month before, a hard-hitting desert rain that had threatened several of the dig sites. Rahud, one of Ahmahl’s diggers, had heard from a nomadic family member that the rain had hit even h
arder farther to the north, and flooded out an old dry wash, revealing what looked like a Thran machine. Rahud told Mishra, Mishra reported to Tocasia, and within a day the group had mounted a small expedition north.
It was a device they found, and one definitely of Thran creation. It looked at first like some sort of sailing craft, an impossibility in the desert. Long poles of ancient candlewood jutted from the exposed bank, to which had been attached what looked like sail rigging. Urza examined it and then, to Tocasia’s amazement, confidently declared it to be a flying craft, something unseen in Terisiare’s skies save only in the oldest of stories.
For the next week the camp activity moved to the new site, seeking to pry loose the birdlike flying machine and haul it back to the main encampment. The diggers had to work quickly to avoid the attention of less-friendly desert Fallaji as well as the predatory sand-colored rocs. The students were pressed into duty hauling dirt and clearing debris, and Urza and Mishra camped on the site to guard the new find.
It took only a few days to pry the device free of the surrounding soil and rock, and Urza was proven right. What Tocasia had thought of as sails were in fact wings. The construction did seem fashioned like a bird, and Tocasia dubbed it an ornithopter. Both wings were intact, though the tail assembly had been crushed. A small maze of wires and tubes at the heart of the craft cradled a now-shattered power stone.
They got the ornithopter back to the camp two days before Loran’s arrival, and Tocasia was glad to see the look on the young noblewoman’s face when she saw the tattered remains. To any other Argivian it was a mess of fractured poles, smashed metal, and scraps of ancient fabric, but to any former student of Tocasia it was a treasure. To see such a large device after spending a summer trying to pry fragments out of the rock with a small brush made the archaeologist and her students indescribably happy.
Tocasia also noticed that with the passage of time Loran had grown more sure of herself. She no longer hesitated to speak. Nor did she spend all her time with her old mentor. For the first few days she hovered over Urza, who had removed the crystal housing from the ornithopter and was busy disassembling and cleaning the small device. Then, without any warning, she suddenly switched her time and attention to Mishra, who was rebuilding the larger framework of the craft itself. Tocasia did not know what, if anything, had happened to make Loran change her interest; neither young man ever mentioned her in the scholar’s presence.
