Cold Iron (Masters & Mages)

by Miles Cameron

  ‘First year?’ she asked.

  Another student, as tall as a tree with skin dark as the night sky, smiled as he passed, as if just being a first year was a little funny.

  ‘Second year,’ Aranthur said. ‘Ma’am.’

  She flashed him a brilliant smile. ‘I’ll bet no one has told you that you must sign in with her secretary.’

  He shot to his feet. ‘No, ma’am.’

  She nodded. ‘Come. Someone did this for me. I’m Dahlia, by the way. Dahlia Tarkas.’

  ‘Aranthur Timos,’ he said.

  She paused and looked back at him as if she knew the name.

  ‘Ahh,’ she said with a slight smile. ‘So much the better.’

  He followed her well-cut doublet to the door, and through it, where a middle-aged man in a notary’s black cap sat, writing.

  ‘Yes?’ he asked.

  ‘Aranthur Timos to see the master,’ Dahlia said.

  The notary glanced up. ‘Eh?’

  Aranthur leant forward. ‘I am Aranthur Timos. My book assignment …’

  The notary actually smiled. ‘Ah, young sir. I will inform the master. I suspect she will see you very soon.’ He nodded. ‘Sit here, please.’

  ‘There you go. Are you someone important?’ Dahlia asked.

  ‘Not that I know of,’ Aranthur said.

  She nodded. ‘Interesting. Well, it was a pleasure, Aranthur Timos. When you go through the gate, come and find me, and we’ll have a quaveh or something spicier.’ She flashed him a broad smile. ‘I live on the North Quad.’

  North Quad meant she was rich enough to live in one of the residences with a fireplace and glass windows and fine oak panelling scarred by hundreds of years of student abuse. And the invitation was like having the sun shine on him. He bowed.

  ‘Your servant, ma’am.’

  She was almost out of the office before he managed to speak again.

  ‘Do you fence?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ she said. ‘You?’

  He nodded.

  She looked at him for a moment longer.

  ‘Good,’ she said, and went out into the hall.

  It was another quarter of an hour and three gowned students before a woman’s voice said, ‘Timos.’

  He rose and entered.

  The Master of Arts’ study was as big as the room he shared with three men. There was a mullioned window behind her, as big as the sail of a small ship: a thousand panes of glass, each reflecting the light differently. Every other inch of all four walls was covered in books. Even the doors had shelves. Her writing table was the size of the feast table in a Great Hall, and on it were forty books and baskets of scrolls and pen cases, bottles of ink, and whole skins of vellum. The room smelt strongly of frankincense and myrrh. A skull sat on the table, atop a pile of black-bound books.

  The Master of Arts was an elderly woman with a severe face and a bun. She wore ivory spectacles on a gold chain round her neck, and a long gown, cut to show her narrow waist. She had lace at her cuffs and neck, and a wristlet of blazing glory that had to be magiked.

  He made his court bow, hand to the oak floor, knee touching the wood, eyes down.

  ‘Hmm. Syr Aranthur.’

  ‘I am not noble, Magistera.’

  She favoured him with a slight smile. ‘You are all equally noble to me, child. The purpose of the Revolution was never a nation of peasants, but a nation of aristocrats.’

  Aranthur nodded. He’d heard the words before, but somehow, when the Master of Arts said them, they were true.

  She picked up an ivory tablet, and flicked her thumb over it. Aranthur could feel the compilation of workings; the simple tablet was the most powerful artifact he’d ever seen. The saar seemed to radiate.

  She glanced at him, flicked her thumb over the surface again, and looked at him.

  ‘Ah. Yes. You’re the boy with the marvellous compulsion. You have killed a man, I believe?’ she asked, as if this was an everyday question.

  ‘Yes, Magistera.’

  ‘Don’t make a habit of it – it might destroy your power. However, you did it for others so perhaps your astra will balance.’ She sniffed, as if she doubted it.

  He nodded as if he understood what she was talking about.

  ‘Death masks spirit,’ he said, quoting a lesson.

  ‘Does it really? I’ve killed hundreds of sentient beings.’ She smiled.

  He had no idea what to say.

  She nodded. ‘We are assigning you a very difficult book. Uhlmagest.’ She looked at him. ‘It needs to be copied immediately, and we have chosen you.’

  He was aghast. He had heard of it – a fantastically rare book. In a language he’d never heard spoken.

  ‘It is …’ He clamped his mouth shut on the word impossible.

  ‘It is in Safiri. You will have to learn Safiri; perhaps even go there.’ She pursed her lips. ‘You score well on languages and you seem to have a great talent for complex occultae, especially compulsions. Also you know Katia ai Faryd. It is yours unless you refuse it.’

  Aranthur’s mind began to work. ‘Refuse it?’

  ‘Yes. Sunlight, young man, we don’t execute students any more. You can refuse it, and we’ll find you something else.’ She looked at him.

  He nodded. ‘I think I must refuse.’

  ‘Because?’ she asked.

  ‘Because my parents are farmers, Magistera. Because I can just possibly afford the materials to copy something like Compilations in Liote and I can’t imagine what a Safiri dictionary will cost, even if there is such a thing.’

  ‘A trip to the East?’ he wanted to cry. Such an opportunity. A decade of adventure. And high magik. Not the playthings of the rich – the most serious and elegant old workings. A life spent in the Aulos.

  She looked at him. And sniffed.

  ‘You might imagine we know of your … lack of riches,’ she said dryly.

  She extended a hand – a surprisingly young hand for such an old face. On it burnt a single ring of amethyst or some dark purple stone, lit from within by a secret fire.

  There before him was the codex itself, the size of a small table, as thick as an old door. The cover was leather over wood, worked in gold and gold leaf, and decorated in lapis blue – layers upon layers of complex patterns. The pages were entirely made of vellum; they shone as he opened it.

  Every page was richly illuminated. The script ran in diagonals from right to left, sometimes only three lines of incomprehensibly foreign script. The first page to which he turned revealed a man in flowing robes fighting what appeared to be a hippogriff, with six diagonal lines of script, and then what had to be further notes extending to the page margins, all written in gold. Aranthur had never seen anything so incredibly, intensely beautiful in all his life. He flipped it to the back. He’d already worked out that the letters ran the opposite of Ellene, from right to left, and he found pages of carefully rendered glyphs. He looked up.

  ‘That’s “water”,’ he said. ‘The true word. I just learned it in Signs and Sigils.’

  The Master of Arts nodded. ‘This part is not in Safiri,’ she said slowly, as if revealing something she had not expected to say. ‘The glyphs are Varestan.’

  Aranthur nodded. ‘The Dhadhian language.’

  The Master of Arts raised her eyebrows and frowned at the same time, a remarkable facial expression.

  ‘Not exactly. Varestan is the language most Dhadhi speak now. But it is also the root language of both Ellene and Safiri. We don’t know enough about it. But there was a language spoken by the Dhadhi before that …’ She smiled. ‘Rendering these glyphs and learning what they control might be the most important part of the whole project. Listen, young man. People died to bring us this book, out of the wreck of the East. It might be the key to many things, and just the fact that it has been hidden from us and we have never seen a copy is revealing.’

  Aranthur’s hands shook as he turned the page.

  ‘I am not worthy of this,’ he said.<
br />
  ‘I think otherwise.’ She waved her hand at the desk. ‘You will have all this to help you.’

  Beside the glory of the grimoire – if something so magnificent could be called by so mundane a name – rested a scroll case with eight scrolls on Safian history; a heavy tome, brand new and blank, of laid paper, not vellum; and a beautiful pen case. Finally there was a worn, heavy book that proved, when opened, to be a lexicon of the Safiri language: hundreds of folios bound together, some clearly added later. He had never seen such a thing, because it had a gold and crystal object of great beauty attached to the cover.

  ‘A reader,’ he breathed.

  ‘A very old reader. This is from the Imperial library. You may play with it to your heart’s content if you accept. None of these items may leave this room, except the pen case, so you will get to know me very well.’

  He was grinning. It was like the duel. He knew that to accept was to turn his back on his home and farm – to become something different, beyond his parents’ imagining. By the time he finished copying the massive series of scrolls he would be a decade older. He might die working on it. But it was a great work.

  ‘Thank you, I accept. Is the other student Kati, then?’ he asked, overcoming his fear of her.

  Then he realised that her thin-lipped smiles were not genuine, because a much brighter grin spread over her face.

  ‘Excellent,’ she said. ‘I take on two students a year and I am already pleased with you. Come one hour after prayer, every day. I have no days off – neither do you. You may bring me quaveh – very hot. Try a different street seller every day and I’ll tell you which one I like best. Some of them are from the East. You might even find one who speaks Safiri.’

  ‘Yes, Magistera.’

  She nodded and rose. ‘I will see you in the morning. And yes, your partner will be Myr ai Faryd.’

  He bowed and left her, and his knees were weak. But he managed to get to the notary, who rose and shook his hand.

  ‘Congratulations,’ he said. ‘I like quaveh too.’

  He wanted to go and find Kati, but that was out of the question, as he was due at work. Work paid his bills and for his horses – an extravagance that now seemed insane – and work was as important as the Academy and a great deal more important than fencing.

  The leather shop was on the Square of the Mulberry Trees, the nicest portion of the not altogether savoury keto of the leather-workers, and served a fairly wealthy clientele seeking carefully crafted purses and belts – sometimes with very expensive accessories from the jeweller next door, who specialised in fancy buckles and paste diamonds, although he was also a fine gem cutter. On the north side of the shop was a wheelwright, and beside him a saddler, and both often ordered cut belts and straps for tack. The square was quite pretty, the buildings mostly of stone, but the stench of tanneries two streets away kept the property values low.

  Ghazala, the elderly woman who owned the leather shop, always sniffed when she mentioned Ahzid Rachman, the gem-cutter.

  ‘He fences stolen things,’ she once said.

  Bajolli Orla, the wheelwright, was, by contrast, a cheerful, open-faced woman with a hard-working partner. They mostly built heavy carts for the military. Ghazala took her chai with Bajolli, most days.

  She and Manacher, her son, were master leather-workers, and they tended to take all the difficult projects, leaving a dozen piece workers like Aranthur to assemble pre-cut patterns: belt-purses for men, and day books and tablet binders; a great many belts and garters for hose; sometimes a week of simple cut straps for the saddler or the wheelwright. They also made items that required a wooden core – book covers, for example, and sword scabbards – but these were all custom work and Manacher tended to do them himself. The shop was small and cramped, a long, narrow building with a surprisingly pleasant garden in the back. It smelled of leather and dyes and beeswax, and Aranthur was happy there.

  Aranthur came in, hung his Academy gown on a peg, tied on an apron, and spent seven hours cutting belts from carefully selected tanned hides. It was hard work, and doubly hard on his hands and concentration. Cutting straight lines was difficult enough, and more difficult when your thoughts wandered every minute or so into new pastures. Safiri. Kati. Dahlia. Kallinikos.

  When his work was done, he had a meal of spiced rice and eggplant with the family. Manacher scratched his beard.

  ‘I want to teach you to dye,’ he said.

  Dyeing was miserable work that left the practitioners with stained hands – or worse. Many dyes were poisonous.

  Aranthur took another bite of rice. It was delicious, and the free food was one of the best parts of his job.

  ‘We would pay you more,’ Manacher said. ‘And you would have more hours. You understand this work, Arry. You could have your own shop.’ The Easterner shrugged and smiled. ‘Listen, even if you never plan to be a leather-worker, it won’t hurt you to move up and get your name on the guild list. I’d be happy to put you on now.’

  Aranthur nodded. ‘May I consider it?’

  Ghazala smiled politely. ‘Of course,’ she said in a way that indicated that he had best not take too long.

  It did occur to Aranthur that Ghazala was of Safiri extraction and he might be able to ask her about the language. And he liked her food.

  After finishing his meal, he went out into the Square of Mulberry Trees. His mare was stabled here, and he spent an hour with her, curried her, saw to her stall, and paid for another week. He rode Ariadne out of the Nika Gate, headed north to the Temple Ridge, and enjoyed a gallop across the hard ground before trotting back through the gate, saluting the bored guards, and returning her to her stall for a last rub down.

  More than anything he wanted to talk to Kati. He had a long walk home, along the spine of the isthmus, and thoughts of Safiri, about which he knew precisely nothing, and about the woman in the arming coat, who had been remarkably attractive, which became more thoughts about Kati. Would he spend a year copying next to her?

  She was from the East. And of course she spoke Safiri?

  And Dahlia was a swordswoman; it was written on her, and that made him think of Master Vladith, and Master Sparthos. He was under the Aqueduct, up on the ‘Spine’ or the ridge above the city, well along towards the Academy, when it occurred to him that he could probably find Master Sparthos’ rooms by asking.

  He paused, trying to figure out a route. Two men were selling quaveh, and he bought a tiny cup and drank it, and was thanked in Armean.

  ‘Last time you had a horse,’ said the young man in the brown robe. From the smell, he hadn’t had it off since they had met.

  ‘Last time I wasn’t lost.’ Aranthur thought the young man looked wistful. ‘Do you need a cup of quaveh?’

  The man in the brown robe nodded. ‘I do. But I’m sworn to poverty …’ He smiled. ‘But not sworn to refuse hospitality,’ he admitted.

  Aranthur spent seven copper obols on quaveh for the men seated with the young priest, if he was indeed a priest. They all touched their foreheads, and the man in brown rose.

  ‘Members of my order do not bow to anyone, or give or accept oaths,’ he said. ‘I am Radir Ulgul. I am a brother of the Browns, as you see.’

  Aranthur had never heard of the Browns, but as an Arnaut he was used to seeing new things every day in the City where he was effectively as foreign as the Easterners. He nodded.

  ‘Do I call you Brother?’ he asked.

  ‘It is not for me to define how you address me,’ the young man said. ‘My name is Ulgul, but I would be honoured to be your brother.’

  Aranthur felt as if he’d fallen into a myth – one of the gods wandering the world, looking to see who was hospitable. Ulgul was a Northerner name: famous warriors, hired thugs and killers, and dangerous merchants.

  ‘Well, brother, I am off to a sword lesson, I hope,’ he said.

  ‘A dangerous vanity.’ Ulgul shrugged. ‘But you bought me a quaveh, and so I’ll spare you my lecture.’ He smiled, and Aranthur co
uldn’t help but like him.

  He left, with the blessings of the quaveh merchant, and descended into the tenements below the Aqueduct and asked directions in three taverns. A pair of off-duty soldiers gave them, and he went back up, through the shanty town under the vast stone arches and went down past the tenements on the seaward side. He was surprisingly close to home: a fine neighbourhood with four-storey brick houses, colourfully stuccoed, in long connected rows with their own wooden walkways along the canal. This was where guild masters and bureaucrats lived, where middling aristocrats had their winter homes. Aranthur was out of place, but he had his student robes like a shield against the hard stares of the sell-swords who tended to provide the watch in such neighbourhoods. He crossed a pretty white marble bridge over the canal and found a tall pink building with a cherry wood door and a brass knocker in the shape of a cross-hilted sword.

  It was a day for change; he’d seen it in his horoscope. He knocked.

  There was no answer for some time, and then a girl, no more than seven or eight years old, answered, curtseyed, and then smiled.

  ‘You’re a Student,’ she said. ‘You don’t really get my best curtsey.’

  ‘No,’ Aranthur grinned. ‘I don’t suppose I do. Is Master Sparthos at home?’

  ‘Teaching a lesson,’ the young girl said. ‘I’ll take you. Did you know that the world is as round as a cheese? And that it is round in every direction, like a ball? But of course you know that, you are a Student. What do you study? Is it wonderful? I want to go to the Academy and study fish. Or perhaps squid.’

  The steep spiral stair did not stop the flow of her words, or even slow it.

  ‘Are you the Demoiselle Sparthos?’ Aranthur asked.

  ‘Oh, la!’ she said. ‘I have never been called Demoiselle before. I suppose I am. Patur? This man called me Demoiselle.’

  They had arrived on the third floor. The whole length of the house was open: all the interior walls had been removed, and the floor was sprung. Two young men were doing a drill. Mika Sula, the first duellist to fall at the Inn of Fosse, was standing very still with a long stave in his hands, watching them.