The Tally Master

by J. M. Ney-Grimm

  “Hungry, young ’un?” The cook smiled at the boy, nodded to Keir, winked at Gael, and then bent to pull a tray of smoked fish tidbits from the shelves below the hatch counter.

  “All well?” murmured Gael to Keir.

  She nodded. “I have some . . . anomalies . . . to report to you.”

  Gael’s face lightened. “Good.”

  Keir’s brows tightened. Why would Gael regard things gone wrong as good?

  Gael lifted an eyebrow, his eyes warm, and then Keir felt foolish. Anything unusual could be a lead on their thief.

  Barris rested his tray atop Jemer’s carry sack, one hand steadying its rim, the other hand below it. The boy stuffed two tidbits of the smoked fish into his mouth and started chewing while he snatched two more.

  The cook tilted his head to one side. “Gael? Keir? This batch is especially flavorful.”

  Keir could tell. An appetizing aroma rose from the glimmering golden skin that topped each neat square of the smoked fish. She allowed herself to be persuaded. The skin crunched under her teeth, giving way to the velvety smooth flesh beneath and a burst of smoky richness on her tongue.

  Barris smiled at her – relieved? – and she smiled back. Had he actually worried that she might not like the delicacy? She supposed that cooks did worry about things like that, but this was delicious.

  “Another?” he suggested.

  Keir took two more, noticing that Gael also accepted seconds, while Jemer went for fourths.

  * * *

  Martell was already present in the privy smithy when Keir arrived with Jemer. One scullion pumped the bellows at the forge, causing a shower of sparks to rise from the carefully layered charcoal. Others arranged various tongs and molds on a counter. In the neighboring smithies, the clatter of tools and the shouts of smiths punctuated the roar of the heating furnaces. A few long shafts of sunlight fell across the adjacent armor smithy. The smells of stone, metal, and fire permeated the dim and echoing space.

  Martell pounced on Jemer’s carry sack the instant he saw the boy.

  “Ha, ha! Now we are ready! Now we shall create greatness!”

  The smith rummaged briefly in the suede receptacle, placing the ingot of tin he grabbed directly into a crucible, while his notary hastily uncapped his ink bottle, dipped his pen, and scribed the first tally mark on his parchment.

  Keir intervened, touching Martell’s shoulder. “No, give your notary a chance.”

  The smith looked surprised. “Keir! Why is it that you are here?”

  Had he truly forgotten? If so, he recovered rapidly.

  “Ha! I have it! You wish to count the ingots!”

  Keir nodded. “I do. So if you’ll put that one back, please, we’ll begin.”

  Martell’s brows rose. “In the carry sack?”

  “In the carry sack,” she confirmed.

  “Ha!” He waved Jemer to do the deed.

  Keir checked to see that the notary was ready, perched on a stool at a counter, parchment spread before him, and pen poised. She pulled the tin ingot from the carry sack and set it on the counter. The notary tapped the tally mark he’d already made.

  Keir nodded and continued to empty the sack, item by item, with time for the notary to record each: two more ingots of tin, twenty-seven ingots of copper, the broken scissors, the failed ladle, and the nugget of remnant bronze, still four ounces when weighed on the privy scales.

  She didn’t even need her own parchments – temporarily abandoned in the locked vaults – to see that the privy smithy had already lost an ingot. But she couldn’t see how the loss – or theft – had occurred. She’d placed those four tin ingots in Jemer’s sack herself. She’d watched him every step of the way down the Regenen Stair to the forges. She’d watched Martell take one ingot out of the sack and watched Jemer replace it. Where in Cayim’s nine hells could the fourth tin ingot have got to?

  She felt in the empty sack once more. It truly was empty.

  She turned to Martell, hovering impatiently behind her.

  “Well? Well?” he asked. “We may begin, yes?”

  She repressed an urge to answer him immediately, contemplating her choices. She could require him to wait until she’d consulted Gael. But what would that gain? She’d already determined that the theft had occurred before the ingots arrived in the privy smithy. She could tell him that he was already missing an ingot. Which would merely spread the rumors she’d carefully avoided starting yesterday. Or she could tell him to go ahead.

  “Yes. You may begin,” she said.

  He seized her hands excitedly. “Today we make the ornaments for the regenen’s cape!” he told her. “I will be marvelous!”

  Her smile must have been faint, but Martell gave her hands a satisfied shake and dove into directing his scullions. His notary rolled his parchments and tucked them into the leather tube hanging from his belt. He looked worried.

  “They didn’t match, did they?” he murmured.

  Keir made her face stay still. “You will not share that guess,” she said softly.

  His eyes widened.

  “Your inaccurate speculation could do much harm,” she continued.

  The notary swallowed. “Notarius, I will do nothing to displease the tally chamber.”

  Keir’s lips twisted. “See that you don’t.”

  “I promise.”

  “Good.” She nodded and strode away toward the tin smeltery, which lay beyond the armor smithy and on around the other side of the annealing smithy.

  * * *

  The tin smelters must have laid and fired their charcoal early, long before their scullion fetched their pebbles from the vault, because they were already packing the unrefined tin into the weighty stone funnel at the top of the slanting upper surface of the forge. A stone trough extended from the funnel’s outlet and down across the slant. The smelters would keep the forge at just the right heat to melt the tin without melting the other impurities in the pebbles. The liquid tin would drip into the large crucible placed below the trough, while the solid impurities remained behind.

  The smelters would pour the tin ‘hat’ ingots one by one, setting an empty crucible below the trough and moving the full one inside the forge to re-melt the congealed tin. When the characteristic golden skin formed on its molten surface, it would be ready to go into the mold.

  Ravin saw Keir approaching and met her beside the massive pier dividing the tin smeltery from the annealing smithy. She forced herself not to look away from his truldemagar ravaged face. Was it truly hatred she felt? Or was it pity? She wished these flashes of emotion would cease taking her unawares.

  Ravin stripped off his heavy gloves and started right in with his account, needing no prompting.

  “The privy boys had started a game of blind-troll’s-buff. Tears, you should have seen them!” He shook his head. “Or maybe you shouldn’t have. The blindfolded one was stumbling into anvils and counters. The others were knocking over tool racks and sand buckets as they dodged.”

  Keir pursed her lips.

  Ravin wrinkled his nose. “Arnoll got involved when one of the boys, leaping away from his pursuer, knocked over the scullion raking the charcoal in the armor smithy’s forge.” Ravin shook his head. “He almost pushed him into the forge. Idiot. I doubt he knows how close he came to a beating, right there and then, from the smith himself.

  “But Arnoll lowered his hand, marched the boy back to the privy smithy, and began directing them in their usual chores. He didn’t lecture, just gave orders, but they knew he was furious. Hells, even I knew he was furious a smithy away.”

  “Go on,” said Keir.

  “Once the boys were busy, Arnoll just stood watching them, leaning against the counter where their ingots and such lay. He pointed at something, maybe a sand bucket – I couldn’t really see – and then looked down at the counter. I think he shook his head, and then put a tin ingot in the sack he was carrying.

  “He gave the boys a few more instructions, and then returned to his own ta
sks in the armor smithy.”

  “What did he do with the tin?” asked Keir, wondering if pursuing that question was wise. Ravin seemed oblivious to the possibility that Arnoll might be in the wrong, and she preferred he remain so.

  “Just laid it on the shelf under a counter. Why?”

  “I’m trying to get the full picture, that’s all,” she replied.

  Ravin scrubbed the back of a hand across his lined forehead. “There’s something wrong, isn’t there?”

  Keir intended to continue following Gael’s instructions scrupulously on this one. She would not give confidential tally room information away. “You know we hope to find more efficiencies, Ravin,” she said patiently. “I doubt there are any to be found in the tin smeltery or the blade smithy, but the more complex undertakings – armor, blade grinding – might benefit from small changes. And the privy smithy surely needs something. Or many somethings.” She let the corner of her mouth turn up. “Any extra witnesses of privy smithy doings are useful.”

  Ravin smiled. “Oh. Of course.” He started drawing his gloves back on. “My opteon will need me soon. Are you – may I –”

  “Yes, thank you, Ravin. I’ve heard all I need.” Actually, she’d heard more than she wanted to.

  He nodded and hurried toward the furnace, where the first bright droplets of molten tin were trickling down the canted trough.

  * * *

  Keir took the Cliff Stair, the least trafficked of all four and dim, with the sun over on the other side of the tower. She climbed, needing to retrieve her tally sheets from the vaults before retiring to the tally chamber to reconcile yesterday’s accounts. As she climbed, she thought about what she had learned this morning.

  The privy smithy, with its laxness, was a clear source of metal for the thief. But was Arnoll the thief? Even hearing Ravin’s story, she couldn’t believe such a thing of Arnoll. He and Gael were thick as . . . hmm . . . thieves. But Keir was more inclined to believe, like Ravin, that Arnoll had taken the tin for a legitimate reason. Even though he had not returned it or reported it yet to the tally chamber.

  She would see what Gael thought when she told him.

  And she would tell him. If Arnoll were the thief, Gael needed to know. If Arnoll were innocent, then Gael would know what the smith was doing with that tin ingot, and she could cease to consider him a suspect.

  The more worrying thing was this morning’s theft, somehow achieved right under her own nose. She supposed it must have happened in the stairwell, one of those times when Jemer plunged into a clump of trolls, with only a flash of his elbow or a bob of his head visible to Keir. Which meant that someone was very slick, winkling the tin out of Jemer’s carry sack within the few moments that the crowd hid him.

  She didn’t remember seeing any warriors on the Regenen Stair. They mostly used the West Stair anyway. It had been the usual crowd of the castellanum’s scullions – going to set up the tables and benches in the great halls – and the kitchen scullions bringing bowls of salt and mustard to the tables.

  What would motivate a scullion – or a porter – to steal a tin ingot? Surely there would be more trouble than benefit coming to him for such a theft. Unless . . . he was ordered to do it by a superior.

  Keir found it easy to suspect the castellanum. She’d seen him looking at her almost covetously, and she’d never liked him. But what use would the castellanum have for tin? Honestly, what use did anyone in Belzetarn – save the smiths – have for tin?

  She could see a warrior stealing one of the elite swords reserved for his superiors. Greater prowess in battle might tempt such a troll. She could see someone like the castellanum stealing a finely wrought chalice or a beautifully crafted table. Theron liked rich things. But he had no need to steal them; they were his already as a prerogative of his station.

  She could see the scullions stealing food, especially the rarer stuffs served only at the high table.

  But the only troll with a real use for tin and copper and bronze would be a troll-lord with legions at his command and smithies supplying them. Could one of the scullions possess such ambitions? The idea was ludicrous. The very nature of the mark of Gaelan – the truldemagar – tended to sort trolls by their innate power. Those with physical might became warriors, those possessing great force of character took leadership, and those with neither served their betters.

  If one of the scullions had stolen that tin ingot, he’d done so for someone else.

  Keir wondered who Gael suspected.

  Had he already heard Arnoll’s account of the tin ingot taken from the privy boys? Had he been shocked? Or had he nodded prosaically, approving Arnoll’s action as proper? And with Arnoll in the clear, who else might Gael suspect?

  Keir shivered. She was innocent of theft, but she had other secrets. Gael had always treated her like any other boy in Belzetarn, with fairness and precise instruction. And she’d felt no qualms about passing herself off as a boy. It had been necessary.

  But what if the theft of his metals prompted Gael to scrutinize his assistant more closely than before? A cursory scan of the nodes of her energea, sufficient to discern that they were unanchored, had not and would not reveal her sex. But a more thorough scrutiny would. As would a more thorough scrutiny of her person. What if Gael discovered she was – not a boy, but a young woman? How would he respond? Would he feel betrayed by the lie that she’d enacted all this time? And what if he plumbed . . . other things?

  Keir paused to lean into one of the arrowslit’s embrasures. Beyond the opening, golden sunlight lay on the forested hills. A thin mist rose from the trees. The northern sky was very clear, white near the horizon and shading to pale turquoise in the upper airs.

  If Gael scrutinized Keir, it would be with an eye to his assistant’s actions, not his assistant’s person, she reassured herself. Although . . . her actions were not wholly above reproach either. But why did she care so much anyway? Gael was a troll. Every last denizen of Belzetarn was a troll. She herself was a troll. It wasn’t as though someone still human would be judging her. The way her father had judged her on that last day.

  Pater’s opinion had been important.

  No one’s thoughts of her here in Belzetarn – not even Gael’s – could matter as Pater’s thoughts had mattered that day.

  * * *

  Cold, gray clouds had blown up during that last afternoon with her father, and the breeze over the white surf of the small cove between two headlands had grown stiff.

  Keiran stood barefoot on wet and shell-littered sand, looking out at the silver waves rushing in through the cove’s inlet and crashing around the tall rocks protruding within the smaller body of water. Pater stood behind her, his hands warm on her shoulders.

  A rolling billow crashed on the shore and she felt its vibration through the cool, wet sand. The broken wave hissed up the beach toward her toes. A gull cried, blown sideways by a gust.

  “Open your inner sight,” came Pater’s gravelly voice, “and direct it where the surf breaks.”

  Keiran drew in a deep breath of the sea air – too brisk to carry the scent of salt and brine as strongly as when the breeze was gentle or absent – and held it, then let it slowly trickle out through her nose. She closed her eyes and let her inner perceptions unfurl.

  Silver arcs of energea curled more wildly and more tightly in the ocean surf than she’d ever seen elsewhere. Flint and sand hummed with straight lattices. Grasses and reeds featured gentle, simple curves. People, sheep, and goats possessed complex arrays of arches that branched from one another. But the wind-tossed sea, powerful and furious, exhibited tangled spirals, ever changing and snarling.

  “Follow the energea from the moment of impact up the beach,” said Pater.

  Ah! The spiraling energea bounced against the lattice of the sand and uncurled, flowing in a current of loose spirals that grew ever straighter as they approached the farthest reach of the water. Where the wave ebbed, the energea ebbed with it, tangling anew in its retreat, save for a mis
t of softly undulating arcs flowing inland, under Keiran’s feet toward the dunes behind her.

  “Let the sea energea enter,” Pater instructed.

  Keir softened her knees and felt her feet relax, her toes letting tension flow out of them.

  The next incoming wave broke, pounding the sand, and the energea surged up the beach. Keir felt the inland flowing mist tickle the nodes at the base of each toe, stroking her own energea into a slightly faster vibration.

  “Good,” said Pater. Was he watching with his inner sight? No doubt.

  Another wave came in, and another. Her feet seemed to buzz, warm despite their contact with the cold, wet sand. The vibration – still within the energea, not the flesh – mounted through her legs and on up through her torso. Her heart warmed, but the energea cooled as it fountained up her neck and then out through her crown.

  “Now follow your own energea out to sea,” said Pater. Was that excitement in his voice?

  Her awareness glided on the energea, easy and comfortable, just above the surface of the waves. At the mouth of the cove, she plunged downward, sensing the water in a way wholly different from the interaction of one’s body with the ocean. She was liquid and permeable, yet powerful, with glints of brightness flickering in her lucidity. She surged and flowed. She soared out to sea, through the sea.

  The flickering glints within her lambency strengthened, definite and pulsing. Their brightness pierced her, and then she was their brightness, darting and fierce and free.

  “Stay with them,” rumbled Pater.

  She’d almost forgotten him in the sensations dominating her attention, but she obeyed.

  As a hundred or more points of sharp brilliance, she turned and flashed and swooped. I am the fish, she realized dimly. And it was magical.

  On and on she swam, one with the water, one with its denizens, one with being, one with all that was. How far had she travelled? How far would she go? How could she ever turn and return? Her larger self beguiled her.

  And then her fish school darted forward to envelop a monstrous presence. Darker, more powerful still, with colossal flukes and a mighty tail. Its mood was heavy, remorseless, and compelling. Her awareness entered its shadow, slow and intense. She tightened . . . something. And then the monster was hers, bound to her and caught.