Gael nodded, taking his sketches from his satchel.
“I’ll arrange for the smiths to wrap up early today, and I’ll proclaim tomorrow a day of rest for the forges,” declared Arnoll.
“Thank you.” It felt good to shift a vaultful of necessary chores onto Arnoll’s capable shoulders. “This is the program Nathiar and I have worked out for how to proceed.”
Arnoll added a few cogent suggestions as Gael made his explanations, both of them referencing the energetic diagrams from Olluvarde. The troll-smith might not be a mage, but he’d witnessed the slipped nodes and stretched arcs of countless fugitives entering Belzetarn, and he was a peerless metalworker.
“Any questions?” asked Gael as he concluded.
“I’ll have an apronful in the morning.” Arnoll grinned. “But you’ll review the entire sequence before we start, and I’ll ask them then.”
“Are you sure you want to join this mad venture?” Now that it was settled, Gael’s qualms rose anew.
Arnoll snorted. “I see the danger, Gael. Stop trying to coddle me, and get yourself up to the tally room. You’ll need to brief Keir, hear his report, and let the boy know that he’ll be doing your job for another few days yet. ” The corner of Arnoll’s mouth twitched. “You do realize the gong will keep you too busy for much else, do you not?”
Gael stifled a laugh. The tally room was where he’d intended to go next.
Arnoll was always a step ahead, which was why Gael wanted him in the fight against the gong’s curse.
* * *
Entering the smithies had felt like coming home. Entering the tally chamber felt like achieving sanctuary when a pack of wolves – or trolls – nipped at one’s tired heels.
The glass casements, as well as their inner and outer shutters, were open, admitting the sweet summer air and light – not the morning’s flood of brightness, the sun was already tilted around to the other side of the tower, it being early afternoon – but a softer radiance, welcoming and easy on the eyes. The dark wood of the pigeonhole cabinets looked mellow and sheltering, a harbor for their precious scrolls. The warm scent of parchment, laced by the flat odor of ink, wrapped Gael round like a velvet cloak. He felt his shoulders let go a tension he’d not been aware of.
Keir remained seated at her desk, head bent forward over her work, her straight, blond hair just touching the dark brown thistlesilk folds of her overly large caputum.
She didn’t glance up as Gael rounded the cabinets flanking the door, merely saying, “Yes? How did the bladesmith reply, Adarn?”
“Oh, did you select Adarn” – one of that crowd that had bullied the lunchboy, if Gael was remembering correctly – “as your messenger?”
The quill dropped from Keir’s fingers, spattering ink on her tally sheet. What was that slight jump about? Had the sound of his voice, when she’d expected the lighter tones of the boy Adarn, startled her so badly?
If so, she recovered quickly enough, turning easily around in her chair, a delighted – and genuine – smile on her lips, eyes shining. The tone of her greeting was calm, however, as she stood. “Gael! You look well!”
Gael found himself speechless for a moment. How had he ever thought her a boy? Her smooth skin, finely molded lips, even her strong chin and straight-gazing gray eyes, all spoke of the feminine. He’d been a fool. And yet . . . nearly all of Belzetarn took her for a boy. Maybe most folks saw what they expected to see.
“I am well, thanks to your good work before I departed,” he replied. “How goes it here?”
“Without hitch. Let me tidy this” – she gestured at the spilled ink – “and I’ll make a proper report.”
Gael went around to his own desk, pulling out its chair, while she busied herself with blotting sand and whisk. As he sat, she corked her ink jar, took a handful of papers from the shelf above her desk, and pulled her own chair nearer to him. Her proximity felt both strange, now that he knew her to be a young woman, and as comfortable as it had been for the past two years.
Gael lifted the satchel’s strap from his shoulder and placed the case on his desk. “I spoke with Arnoll just now, and he said that you’d encountered no lack of respect for your authority.”
One corner of Keir’s mouth turned up. “You’d think I was either a feared tyrant or everyone’s best friend. Every scullion in the tower was eager to run my errands, each smith addressed me punctiliously by my full title – Secretarius Pro Tem – and the castellanum insisted I take your seat at the high table every evening.”
Arnoll – as Keir’s opteon in potestas – must have done a superb job of terrifying the entire troll community. Gael smiled, saying nothing. Keir had clearly gotten over her qualms about occupying the role of authority. He’d seen her scruples in her face, misgivings that were now gone.
“Even Martell began giving his notary a chance without my doing or saying anything. In fact” – Keir looked a little guilty – “I stopped directly supervising the transfer of metals into the privy smithy. I was wasting my time and Martell’s.”
“But, indirectly?” Gael knew Keir too well to think he – she – had dropped the matter and its attendant concerns.
Keir grinned. “I told Martell that I would require that his notary give me an accurate report each evening as to the degree of support and cooperation he received from Martell.”
“I’m imagining you put it to Martell in such a way that you secured his enthusiasm.” Gael could almost hear Martell exclaiming, ‘But, yes, my dear Secretarius Pro Tem, you shall receive most excellent reports of Martell each night, and his notary shall be the envy of all!’
Keir face acquired a more serious cast, and she straightened her shoulders. “My report in brief is that all proceeded smoothly, with fewer than the usual small problems, no major ones, and no interference from the castellanum. But let me go over the details.”
She set her handful of parchments on his desk and started reviewing the contents. The works-in-progress and the ingots checked out to the various smithies were exactly as Gael had expected, save for one thing.
“How is it that Olix forges twelve blades instead of his usual eight each day?” asked Gael, somewhat astonished. Was Keir just that good? Was this what happened when newer, younger blood entered an established position? Should Gael think of retiring? What then would he do, in Belzetarn’s dark tower? A quiver of unease – similar to that he’d felt when he first stumbled upon evidence of theft – ran through him.
“You remember the quartermaster had wondered if we could speed production?”
Gael nodded. The official results from the quartermaster’s audit of the legions’ stores had not been complete upon Gael’s departure, but he’d suspected it would turn up a faster resupply rate in the swords being issued to the warriors. One could not tally for years without gaining a gut sense as to how the numbers were running.
Keir continued, “I met with him, but I took Opteon Olix with me.” Her eyes narrowed. “It turns out that the blade smithy has several decanens ready to move up to opteon, and many more scullions skilled enough to fill a decanen’s boots. They’re running two shifts now, the first starting a little earlier, and the second ending a little later, each producing six blades.”
Gael frowned. “Olix will tire and fall into error, if he maintains such a pace for longer than two deichtains. Does he intend to return to the old schedule at intervals?”
“Oh, Olix supervises only the first shift,” explained Keir. “His decanen confided to me that the opteon must be finding it difficult to fill his leisure time, because he usually hangs about the smithy for a while into the second shift.”
“Incidence of accident?” asked Gael, almost automatically.
“Down,” answered Keir.
“Well done, then.”
Keir smiled demurely. “Thank you, Secretarius.”
Gael drew his mind back to the here and now. Fascinating as improvements to the efficiency of the smithies might be, he had more immediate concerns.
&n
bsp; “No thefts while I was gone?” he asked.
“No.” Keir looked troubled.
“And no annoyance to you from the magus?” After Arnoll’s assurances and Nathiar’s admissions, Gael was certain there had been no trespass, but he had to hear it from the party most nearly affected.
Keir smirked. “He’s one of the ones who seems almost afraid of me. He leaves a room, if I enter while he is present. And all those nights Theron insisted I dine at the high table? Nathiar dined in his own chambers.”
Studying Keir’s beaming face, Gael felt abruptly an idiot all over again. It was one thing to pretend to Belzetarn at large that he believed Keir to be the boy she pretended to be. But when they sat in close conference, she knowing herself to be a young woman, but keeping the pretense of boyhood, while he also knew her to be a young woman, also pretending he knew it not – it was too ridiculous.
He drew in a short breath.
Keir glanced at him inquiringly, her face innocently expectant, almost confiding.
“Keir,” Gael said abruptly, “I know.”
Keir’s face went white as a newly washed fleece.
* * *
Chapter 16
Staring at Keir’s alarmed expression and dilated eyes, Gael felt a villain. He’d intended to keep his new knowledge of Keir’s gender to himself. For very good reasons. Why had he changed his mind? Keir undoubtedly knew quite well just how dangerous it was to be a woman in Belzetarn. And now her protective disguise was revealed.
What if Gael denounced her to Carbraes? Would the regenen banish her to the wilderness?
What if Gael announced her secret to the tower at large? What might the horde do to her?
What if Gael took advantage of her vulnerability, stuck as she was in a citadel of trolls, far from any defenders?
Tiamar’s throne! She must be wondering all those and more. So unlock your throat and reassure her, you fool! he admonished himself.
He forced himself to refrain from reaching to grip her shoulder. Or rising to fold her in a comforting embrace. Under the circumstances, any movement from him – any touch from him – would be the reverse of reassuring.
“I shall tell no one that you are a girl, a young woman,” he amended.
Keir’s white face flushed red. Her mouth opened, shut. She swallowed.
Gael continued, “I shall treat you just the same. As though you are the boy you pretend to be.” He nodded. “Although . . . how old are you? Perhaps I’d best recalibrate my expectations. You scarcely need parental guidance, do you?” He lifted an eyebrow, hoping his dry demeanor would help restore her equanimity.
“Gael, I’m so sorry!” gasped Keir.
“You needn’t be,” he said. “What else could you do, when the scouts dragged you here?”
She bit her lip. “That was it, of course.”
He nodded again. “Of course.”
“I’m twenty-five,” she said, a slight twinkle returning to her eyes. “Not fifteen. Or sixteen.” The twinkle became quirking lips, barely restrained from laughter.
Gael chuckled. “I quite missed the date on that one, didn’t I?”
“You did,” she agreed. “Gael –”
He tilted his head.
“I knew I could trust you. And I felt a little . . . strange, keeping it a secret from you. But I just thought . . . it would be safer if we didn’t have to worry about keeping our stories straight. Who knew and who didn’t. When I should act like a boy. When I didn’t need to.”
“Very sensible,” he concurred. “And we should continue in that way. For all intents and purposes, you are the boy you pretend to be. Go ahead and act the boy, even around me, so that you don’t slip where you shouldn’t.”
She nodded, then looked at the floor, her cheeks still slightly flushed.
Gael felt a touch awkward, too. What could he do to get them back on their old footing?
His gaze caught on his satchel. Of course. Olluvarde. He’d not planned on explaining the details of his scheme for the gong to Keir, but showing her his sketches of the ruin would distract her – and him – from their present embarrassment.
“I made renderings of most of the bas relief murals in the underground passage at Olluvarde,” he said. “But some of the energetic diagrams surrounding the first panel – the one depicting the creation of the lodestone from meteoric iron – didn’t make sense to me.”
He unfastened the satchel’s flap and pulled the top bunch of parchments out.
“I didn’t study the energetic vignettes that closely,” Keir confessed. “I was too enthralled with the amazing quality of the stonework at first. And then . . . the trolls captured me before I could retrace my steps to see more.”
“What do you make of these?” Gael handed her his sketches.
Like Nathiar, she paged through them in silence. Unlike Nathiar, her face held a look of appreciative wonder.
“These are beautiful, Gael. We should preserve them in a scroll, when you finish using them for a technical guide. Why do you not –?” She broke off, shaking her head.
“Why what?” he asked.
“I was going to ask why you do not make such drawings of your surroundings here, but” – she wrinkled her nose – “why would you want to immortalize a troll citadel.”
“There are other subjects than trolls here,” he said mildly. “But truthfully, I always associated sketching with the more tedious exercises set by my teacher. Perhaps I should reconsider my opinion.”
Her lips curved slightly, and then she returned her attention to his drawings. She went through them more slowly, a frown growing on her face. Her fingers traced a series of broad curves, then tapped on a tangle of intertwined fronds. Her frown deepened.
“This is the base pattern for any energetic pattern that addresses the root node,” she murmured. “Except those lopsided spirals indicate movement. This is very strange.”
She brought the sketch closer to her eyes, scrutinizing the details for a long moment.
Abruptly, she thrust five of the parchments toward Gael, fanning them out.
“Gael, do you realize what these seem to indicate?” she asked, her voice sharp.
He scanned the renderings. They were some of the energetic diagrams that had mystified him. He’d taken particular care with them, figuring they might be critical to Nathiar’s understanding of how the lodestone in the gong operated and thus critical to devising how to make the artifact harmless. But Nathiar had skipped over these diagrams lightly, referring almost exclusively to the ones from the seventh panel while they strategized.
“I didn’t understand how they pertained to the creation of the lodestone,” he admitted.
“That’s because they don’t,” said Keir, a certain intensity to her expression. “Look” – she brandished another set of drawings at him – “these show how the lodestone was adjusted and used to power a spinner’s spinning wheel, and these” – another set – “show how to make it lift a platform up the side of a tower.”
“And that first set?” asked Gael. He was not sure he wanted to know. Keir’s demeanor gave him pause – growing determination mixed with unease.
She placed all except one parchment on his desk and held that one out for his perusal. It was the scene depicting a healer and her patient.
“Don’t you see?” Keir persisted. “The man is not ill or injured, not in the typical sense. He’s a troll!”
How had Gael missed that? Were the curved and elongated noses, the enlarged ears, and crooked thumbs common in Belzetarn become so normal to him that he did not mark them any more? Perhaps so.
He glanced up from the drawing to meet Keir’s intense gaze.
“Those energetic diagrams” – she stabbed the stack of parchments on Gael’s desk – “show how to use a lodestone to move a troll’s nodes back to their proper positions. Gael –” she paused to take a breath “– I could heal you. I could heal Arnoll. I could heal Kayd. Gael –” she swallowed “– you cannot destroy the go
ng’s lodestone. You must not.”
“You could re-anchor floating nodes?” Gael felt breathless. It had been a tenet of the ages, from the beginning of the truldemagar – whenever that was – that troll-disease could not be healed. The nodes, once ripped from their moorings, could not be reattached.
“No.” Keir’s excitement ebbed, but her determination strengthened. “Not re-anchored. But think! Moving the nodes to their correct locations, and maintaining them there, would gradually drag the obvious physical deformations back to normalcy, and many of the other symptoms along with them. A troll maintained in this way might live to a normal old age. And die a normal, human death. Gael, this is an incomparable resource!” She sounded almost fearful. He felt fearful. This forgotten bit of lore from the ancient world . . . could change everything about their present world.
Or would it? Suppose Keir were to heal every troll in Belzetarn. What then? Would the humans re-admit trolls to their enclaves? Unlikely. Would the trolls even want to go? They’d made lives for themselves here. Would the Ghriana-folk – Belzetarn’s current foes – cease to attack? Would Carbraes cease to defend?
The lodestone contained within the gong – if preserved in its current configuration – might change the world eventually. But nothing would change immediately. Or even within a few years.
So what was he to do with this disconcerting piece of possibility?
He almost wished he’d not shown his sketches to Keir. Surely he could have come up with some other distraction. But if the healing properties of the lodestone were to be plumbed, it would have to be done immediately. The morrow, after Gael reforged the blasted thing – with the help of Nathiar and Arnoll – would be too late. The lodestone would have an altogether different configuration then, and its effects would either be nullified – his goal – or utterly changed.
If the lodestone could generate healing now . . . tomorrow it would likely no longer do so. If.
“We need to know whether the lodestone within the gong still functions as it did outside of the gong,” he decided aloud. “This could all be furor for naught.”
The Tally Master Page 31
