By then the blacksmith had joined her. He and Jennaya pulled the baker from the burning building and into the road. He was coughing and choking, but managed to tell them between gasping breaths that he wasn’t badly hurt.
Pulling the apron from her head, Jennaya handed it to Drell. “Wrap this around your face,” she ordered, then turned away to pull off one of her petticoats to use as her own mask. “Can you walk?”
“Not ... yet,” the baker said, between coughs.
She heard horse’s hooves on the hard-packed dirt of the village road, and ran toward them, calling, “Please help. There’s a wounded man here.”
There was no response, and she wondered if the horse had been abandoned by its owners. Then she leaped aside as the horse, well burdened with bags and bundles, appeared through the swirling ash.
“Out of the way!” came a muffled snarl as the man atop the horse sped past.
She ran after him calling, “Please, Drell needs to be taken out of danger.”
“Horse can’t carry two.” Hoofbeats faded into the smoke. A wave of anger swept through Jennaya. At this time of need, how could the man be so selfish?
Jennaya ran back to where she had left Drell. The blacksmith and Emery were bandaging various gashes and cuts. “Can you walk now?” the blacksmith asked. “We must get to shelter.”
The baker coughed, nodded, and winced. Jennaya and the blacksmith supported Drell’s not-inconsiderable weight to the nearest intact building.
Jennaya left Drell leaning on the blacksmith while she set a chair upright for him. The shop was a chaos of overturned furniture and scattered tools, no doubt from both the earthshakes and hasty packing. She helped Drell sit, then looked about for water to ease both his cough and her own stinging throat. A water bucket lay on its side on the floor, with a cat licking up the water puddled there.
A heavy mug lay on the floor, and Jennaya poured the small amount of water left in the bucket into it. Drell accepted the water gratefully, but it didn’t seem to ease him. His lips were blue, and his breathing wheezed between coughs. Jennaya found herself close to tears. She didn’t know what to do for the baker, and from the uneasy way both the blacksmith and Emery regarded the man, neither did they. She wished desperately that Arrick was here. He would know what to do.
She straightened her back and gritted her teeth. Arrick was not here, and she was, so she would have to do her best. The cat caught her attention then, jumping behind an overturned table and sending something to the floor with a dull thump. Jennaya stared in disbelief. The cat had knocked a glassblowing blowpipe from where it had leaned against the wall. Was this, then, the infamous Tobbian’s shop?
It must be. Jennaya pushed overturned furniture and implements out of the way to get to the far end of the shop, and opened the furnace door. It was still hot, although she would have to add more fuel to get it hot enough. The crucible lay inside, holding molten glass.
The blacksmith, who had gone back out into the village to search for others, ran into the shop. “River of rock coming down the mountain!” he panted. “It’s cut off the village. I’m bringing the little ‘uns in here.” His tone of voice, even muffled under the cloth covering his face, sounded hopeless.
Instead of panic, a strange calm descended on Jennaya. She knew what to do.
She set the table upright, then fueled the furnace and began mixing sand, ash, and lime to make glass. Familiar, comfortable actions which had been part of her life for as long as she could remember. Even another earthshake did not daunt her.
Crying children and desperate men and women crowded into the workshop. Jennaya told some of the older boys to keep the space between the furnace and table clear. Even though they were scared, they had enough curiosity in what she was doing to follow her instructions.
Once Jennaya had a gather of molten glass on the end of her blowpipe, she began rotating it. She remembered the first time she had ever blown glass, how she had thought of the fly when she should have been concentrating on the glass. This time, though, she thought of Drell, and the old woman with the broken leg, and the children huddled with their parents.
In the crowd, Jennaya recognized Birla and Ingolki’s voices. The blacksmith—why did she not know his name?—told people to share what food and water they had.
Over the molten glass, Jennaya saw the curious faces of ragged children watching her. Perhaps they had never seen glass blown before.
For a moment, her concern for Arrick tried to insinuate itself into her mind. But she couldn’t think of him; she had a village full of people to worry about.
When another tremor shook the shop, the children who had just been quieted by their parents started crying again.
Jennaya ignored them, rotating the glass gather on the metal-topped table. Sweat soaked the petticoat protecting her head. The shop was noisy, the heat stifling. She wished there had been more water in that bucket. Her throat and eyes burned, and she was starting to cough again. It was hard to think; she wanted to lie down, but knew that would not be a good idea.
With a sharp crack one of the ceiling joists split. Everyone screamed, and over the noise came a roar, like an evil river. A sick thrill ran through Jennaya’s body. The heat she felt was not merely from the furnace.
She moved slowly, as if underwater. It seemed nearly impossible to blow into the pipe, to rotate the glass. But she remembered with great clarity that once she had put herself and everyone in her family’s workshop into a great bubble. She held to that memory.
She thought of the village of Lower Smoking, of the people she had befriended. Old Emery, who had stayed behind to warn anyone who had not left. The blacksmith, who had loaded his wagon and then gone back to the village to help others. They were all here, now, and she must help them.
~o0o~
Jennaya staggered and blinked ... and then the shop door burst open and Arrick was there. Worry on his face transformed to joy, and he threaded between the people crowding the room and crushed her to his chest, sobbing. “You’re alive!”
They held each other for a long time, until finally Jennaya became aware of shouts all around them. She freed herself from Arrick’s fierce grip to touch his cheek, wet with tears. His face was drawn and covered in soot, his hair tangled. He must have worked himself constantly without sleep to look that wasted in the short time since she had seen him last.
“Your honor, we’ve got all the wounded out,” someone called.
“Well done, Jennaya,” Arrick murmured in her ear. He wiped tears from his cheeks with a sleeve so dirty that he succeeded only in blackening more of his face. The petticoat Jennaya had used to shield her face had fallen to her shoulders. She dropped the blowpipe she was holding, pulled the petticoat free, and rubbed Arrick’s face clean.
The noise level in the room had dropped considerably. Jennaya blinked and realized that most everyone who had just crowded into it had left. “Don’t let them leave,” she said, mind still muzzy. “It’s dangerous out there.”
“Jennaya, my clever love, you’ve forgotten something.”
Her head slowly cleared as a cold draft blew stench and smoke from the room. “What? What have I forgotten?”
“If you put a workshop—or an entire village—into a glass bubble, everything inside stays unchanged until the bubble is broken.”
“Yes, I mean no, I hadn’t forgotten. Well, perhaps I did. I felt strange.”
“Poisoned by Smoking Mountain,” Arrick said, still holding her close. “It’s well that you acted when you did, or the village would have been nothing more than a scorched cemetery.”
The last of the villagers had left the workshop. Only Jennaya, Arrick, and the shop cat were still there. “So, it worked? I made the bubble?”
“You did. Then volcanic ash covered the entire village. I could only hope that you had found this shop. Tobbian said you were feet from it when he saw you last.”
“Tobbian, the glassblower?”
“He escaped on a horse, just before
stone buried the track. He was certain no one else had got away from the village. But I knew—” His voice broke. “I had a ... a vision, of you holding the blowpipe, and for three long years that was what I remembered you by.”
She took a deep breath and would have fallen if Arrick hadn’t had his arm around her shoulder. “We were in a bubble for three years?” she asked. “Me, and everyone else in the shop?”
“Three and a half years, actually,” he said. “So much longer than the year I had to wait to marry you. Far more difficult. I was certain you had made the bubble, but there was always doubt.”
No wonder he looked so exhausted and drawn, if he had been looking for her for years. “For me, no time passed—I was thinking of everyone in the village, and then there you were. What if you hadn’t found us? What if I’d been buried in ash forever?”
“Then you, my lady, would have stayed young while I aged, remembering you as the best thing that ever happened to me.” His arm tightened around her again. “But I’ve had crews digging here ever since the eruptions stopped and the mountainside was cool enough to let us work.”
“What did you tell them about the bubble?” Jennaya asked.
“I spun a tale about the volcano doing it—a freak occurrence.”
“You are an amazing man,” Jennaya said, leaning back so his heart beat against her ear, “and I love you beyond reason. Who else could have talked a crew into digging up the mountain on the strength of a vision?”
“They’re relatives of the village folk. They were hoping to salvage what they could and perhaps discover what happened to their kin. They certainly did not expect to find the entire village, protected in a bubble.”
“The entire village?”
Arrick pulled her around so he could look her in the face. His eyes, though still red from weeping, lit with excitement. “Jennaya, do you see the possibilities here? You survived a volcanic eruption! What else can you do? Even if your magic only makes bubbles, there are so many things they can be used for!”
He was interrupted by a yell from outside the shop. “Your honor, the fire’s out in the bakery.”
“Your honor?” Jennaya asked.
Arrick shrugged. “Someone had to be mayor of ‘New Lower Smoking’. Having the title made it easier for me to keep the search going.”
“Well on your way to becoming a baron, I see.” She chuckled. “I’ll have to work hard to keep up with you, as I study the possibilities.”
He hugged her again. Together they left the glassblower’s shop to see how the rest of the village fared.
Dark Speech
Michael Spence & Elisabeth Waters
When Michael and I tried to write a “Treasures of Albion” story for last year’s anthology, it contained three Treasures, spanned two continents, and was obviously going to exceed any reasonable length. We decided to put it off for later and skip that year. (I suspect that it’s going to be a stand-alone novella eventually.) So this year we started early, aiming for something simple and amusing. We revived the April & Juliana partnership from “Truth in the Inward Parts” and found another Psalm verse for inspiration and the story title. When I chose the final line-up for the anthology, I discovered that we had written the “short and funny” story for the end, even though this is a bit longer than most of them.
Michael Spence and I met in high school and have been collaborating on and off ever since. Michael is an expatriate Virginian living less than five hundred kilometers from the Canadian border, along the northern event horizon of the St. Paul-Minneapolis paradox. His reading of Marion's The Heirs of Hammerfell is available as an audiobook from Audible.com, Amazon.com, and iTunes; an article, “Requiem for a Harlequin: Two Perspectives on Time, and a Celebration of Kairos, in Three Stories by Harlan Ellison,” appears in the latest issue of Sci Phi Journal; and the novelette “Why the Sea Is Boiling Hot: A Tale from the Archives of the Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences” (published by Imagine That! Studios) was a 2014 finalist for the Parsec Award. He is proud to share a birthplace with Lord Robert, together with a love of magic and First Temple artifacts.
“Is black magic customarily set to music?”
It said something about April’s morning that this question was actually refreshing as well as bizarre.
Today was the ‘last day to drop a course without failing,’ and students had mobbed the University Registrar’s office since the doors opened. April, the first assistant registrar, was dealing with most of the rush. Students who came in person generally had the add/drop slips for their classes; but another horde had been calling the scrying mirror in the office practically non-stop. This latter group was the real headache; they consistently lacked the required paperwork and insisted on explaining why April should change their schedules anyway. Special treatment. They always want special treatment. Some year they will give me an excuse that is both original and convincing. This does not look like that year.
She looked bleakly up at her visitor and said, “Ordinarily I’d say no, but at this point I’m willing to give it a try. Good morning, Juliana. Would you like some tea? And what brought that question up?”
Corporal Juliana of the City Guard, ordered and businesslike in regulation uniform with boots, short sword, shield talisman, and mini-crossbow all agleam, provided a striking contrast to the office’s rumpled personnel amid the morning chaos. “I would love a cup of tea, thank you. Early this morning, one of your students came in and reported that he had received a death threat. The usual forensics work on the note has yielded nothing so far, so I thought I’d ask my resident expert.” From a pocket she withdrew a half-sheet of paper and laid it on the desk. “He says the wording suggests that someone is going to place a black spell on him, and I see where he gets that. But what would it have to do with a harp? Is the spell something you sing, or do you carve it into the instrument and play it?”
April smoothed out the paper and read the short sentence.
I will shew my dark speech upon the harp
For the first time that morning, she laughed—a belly-laugh arising partly from the wording of the note and partly from relief that at last she had a genuine, non-inane, non-‘you could have answered this yourself with a little thought’ question.
“Somebody’s been cutting chapel,” she said, shaking her head. “This isn’t a death threat, although, given that we train wizards here, I can see how it might look like one. No, it’s part of a Psalm. Anyone who attends chapel regularly should be familiar with the Psalms; we go through the entire book every month.”
Juliana received the laughter with a patient smile and a lifted eyebrow. “Do you have records of who attends chapel regularly?” she asked hopefully.
“No, we don’t.” April rose and went to fetch tea from a station in the corner. “Chapel is required for all students, but the administration feels it is irreverent to take attendance at prayer services.”
Juliana shook her head. “I just don’t understand you academic types.”
“It’s not the people; it’s the politics. I don’t imagine that politics makes any more sense in the City Guard.”
“True,” Juliana conceded the point. “Can you tell me anything from this note? And are you positive it’s not a death threat?”
April brought a tray back to her desk and handed Juliana a cup, and the two seated themselves. “‘I will incline mine ear to the parable, and’”—April indicated the note—“‘shew my dark speech upon the harp.’ Psalm 49, verse 4. It’s not a death threat. The Psalms are sung as part of worship, and the ‘dark speech’ is something obscure, hidden, like a mystery or a riddle. The only other thing I can tell you is that the printing is the style we teach our architecture students.”
Juliana winced. “I hadn’t made that connection before, but you’re right. It looks like the printing on all those plans at the municipal building. I still have nightmares about those.”
April nodded in sympathy. She and Juliana had met on a case where finding the correct buildi
ng plans meant life or death for April’s boss. It had provided bad-dream fodder for weeks.
“How many architecture students do you have?” Juliana asked.
“At least one too many,” April muttered under her breath as Byron Lamb bounced into the office. He completely ignored Juliana as he handed April two forms: one to drop Intermediate Structural Forms and one to add Advanced Logic. At least, she observed, they were correctly filled out and signed by the professors.
“You do know that Advanced Logic is a philosophy course, right?” April asked him.
Byron looked startled. “It is? I thought it was maths.”
“Logic is Mathematics; Advanced Logic is Philosophy.” April ignored Juliana’s snicker at this new example of academic oddity. “Do you still want to change your classes?”
“Yes,” Byron said. “I’m in the riddle game, and I need all the help I can get.” He spotted the verse on her desk and added, “I didn’t know you were playing!”
“Playing what?” Juliana had followed his gaze, and suddenly he had become—what was it they called it? ‘A person of interest,’ that was it, and Juliana certainly seemed interested in him.
Byron noticed Juliana for the first time. “There’s a riddle game a bunch of the maths students came up with,” he eyed her weapons and added, “ma’am.” He gestured to the paper. “That’s the invitation to the game.” He turned back to April. “You’ll put the change through?”
“Yes; it will be done today. Go to your new classes on Monday.”
“Thanks. Have a good weekend!” Byron bounced out again, grinning from ear to ear.
“He won’t be so thrilled in a few weeks,” April remarked. “That course chews up maths students like penny candy.”
“You did warn him,” Juliana reminded her. “So, why is this a riddle game, how do we find whoever is running it, and why on earth does someone think it’s a death threat?”
“That last is the really good question. How did someone who doesn’t know about the game get invited in the first place? Did he say where he found the note? And by the bye, just who is this student?”
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