Mad Tinker's Daughter

by J. S. Morin

  Dan’s eyes brightened. “Korr has airships? That’s great! I always wanted one of my own here, but I don’t have the time to rune one myself.”

  “You mean you’re too lazy to,” Tanner corrected. “Miss Errol, I’ll make you a counteroffer: ten percent of the gold mined. Your people do all the work.”

  It was Madlin’s turn to do math. She didn’t trust whatever figures may have gone into Dan’s analysis, and his round-number result left her questioning the precision of his calculations. Madlin knew the precise amount of gold harvested—her father had copied old records from the kuduks. Though she hated them, she saw no reason to carry that hatred through to the kuduks’ exemplary record-keeping, nor to their measurements.

  Madlin stopped. There was something more than math at work here: she had been offered a deal where there was no payment up front. She could bring the mine under Errol Company control, then work on the terms later. Her father would see to the administration of the deal—or at least to its delegation—and she would walk away successful.

  “Deal,” Madlin said.

  Tanner broke into a smile. “Great.”

  “On one condition: you teach me some of those runes.”

  “Fine, but we get to come see your father. I want his word on this deal. I want to meet a twinborn who’s a slave in one world and owns half of this one.”

  “Hey wait a minute,” Dan protested. “You know you’re not going to show her a gutted thing. I’m going to have to do it.”

  Tanner put a hand to his eyes and rubbed at them. He leaned over and whispered something to Dan. Madlin tried not to eavesdrop, and suspected they were speaking in some Veydran tongue anyway. But halfway through their secretive chat, Dan glanced over at her, and returned his attention to Tanner, grinning.

  “We’ve got a deal,” Tanner said.

  Madlin and Jamile shared a cabin all to themselves. Tanner’s mining camp was built for growth, and they had vacant buildings awaiting more crew. The Errol Company expedition filled them to bursting, but no one questioned giving a private cabin to the only women along—one of whom was the boss’s daughter. The cabin was built well enough, but still kept a chill near the walls and the windows. A fire snapped and popped in the stone hearth as unseasoned wood warmed the area nearest to it. They had dragged the beds to a distance judged to be safe from the fire, but erred on the side of safety.

  Madlin was exhausted but didn’t want to sleep. She stayed up with a block of wood and a knife, practicing the first few runes Dan had shown her. He was a poor teacher, but knew what she needed. The runes he used were all familiar Korrish letters, arranged into the same sort of gibberish phrases that Rynn had used on her own rune work. What she needed practice on was getting them to touch correctly, and in the proper arrangements, the way Dan carved them.

  Dan. Madlin shook her head; he was an odd boy. Madlin had little experience with them herself and relied on what she knew from Rynn. Buckets and No-Boots had always been sweet on her, but that was mostly because she was the only girl even close to their age who talked to them regularly. Naul was a lecherous sleepwalker with busy hands. Dan wasn’t like any of them. He had a colorful and vivid vocabulary, even in Kheshi, and knew precisely what boys wanted girls for. But his manner was casual and matter of fact, and he never gave her the impression that he was preying on her. There was no doubt in her mind that Dan was brilliant, smarter than all but a few people she’d ever met. He was unflappable and seemed immune to criticism. But for all that, she thought of him as a boy, not a man.

  Madlin was startled by the mattress sinking behind her. Her knife slipped, and she ruined a rune.

  “Sorry,” Jamile muttered sleepily. “It’s still too cold in here. Put that away and lie down; I’m sleeping over here tonight—if you don’t mind, that is. It was nice sleeping in the wagon, all curled up and warm.”

  Madlin suspected she knew Jamile’s true motive. Though she had offered comfort when Madlin awoke from Rynn’s nightmares, Jamile had admitted that at the sanctuary they’d always slept three or four girls to a bed. She wasn’t used to sleeping alone—at least in Tellurak. “All right.”

  Madlin fell asleep with Jamile’s arm wrapped around her and felt safe, ready to take on Korr once more.

  Chapter 21

  “Never build what you’ve already built. Improve. Make something new.” -Cadmus Errol

  Rynn was awakened by a pile of cloth being dropped on her face. The smells of wool and bleach overwhelmed her nose, and everything was dark. By the time she reoriented herself and pushed the freshly laundered dress off her, Ordy was already working to unlock her shackles. She could feel the vibrations in the floor, the tell-tale humming of machinery at work that had been absent overnight.

  “How late is it?” Rynn asked.

  “Just after nine. Figured you’d get in the way while they were getting started downstairs. Plus, I imagine you had a late night,” Ordy said, his beard twisting lopsidedly with a smirk. He turned his back, allowing her an unexpected moment of privacy as she dressed.

  It was awkward, still leashed to the wall, but the dress slipped up over her easily, and she belted it in place. Somehow she still felt naked. There was a ritual involved in dressing, time taken to armor oneself against the day and its many prying eyes. The dress felt like one of the silver bell-shaped covers over the dinner platters at her father’s mansion on Tinker’s Island: a single cover, ready to be pulled away at a moment’s notice. The layers of undergarments, the stockings, leggings, trousers, shoes, and any other accessory pieces made each other piece less vital. Her makeshift dress was a single ill-fitting covering. It also let in a cool draft.

  Rynn shivered as Ordy unlocked her tether and let her up. The bed had warmed from her body heat, and she still had fresh memories of Jamile’s warmth, curled up around Madlin. The stone floor was icy against her bare feet, though it was no colder than it had been before bed.

  Ordy surprised her by not locking her leash on again as he took her down to the workshop level. Instead he merely took her by the wrist and towed her along. It might well have been a second iron collar that was around her wrist, for all she was likely to be able to do to break his grip. Instead, she followed along, curious to see the workshop building her coil pistols. Delliah would have wasted no time getting them started.

  The steps down creaked ominously, but Ordy didn’t seem to notice or care, so she assumed they were safe enough. Once down on the ground floor, the noise of the machinery struck her like a wave. It was as if she had walked into a concert hall at the crescendo. She could tell what machines were running just by the unique sounds they made. The turning of a lathe meant they were making gun barrels. A grinding wheel was likely being used to shave down the rough edges on the trigger mechanism parts. She could hear another lathe with no screeching sound of metal being reshaped—it had to be the wrapping of the wire inside the dynamo.

  Ordy led Rynn to a secluded workbench that had been cleared of anything that might look dangerous. Instead it was stacked with familiar papers: her sketches. Ordy chained her to one of the table legs.

  “Just mind yourself. You give any of these boys trouble, they’ll come get me. Oh, and I noticed Naul had a couple black eyes this morning. Was there any trouble last night?”

  “Naul just got lost; ended up somewhere he didn’t belong. I helped him find his way back. I blame that pipeweed of his,” Rynn replied.

  Ordy raised an eyebrow, but Rynn’s blank expression didn’t crack. “Yeah, well, he’s hiding up in his room. Didn’t want to work down here, he said. Brought all his work up with him.”

  “Pipeweed’s a nasty habit,” Rynn said, nodding.

  “No arguin’ there. All the same, he can’t do that every day, you hear me?”

  “Yessir,” Rynn agreed. This time she failed to keep the hint of a grin off her face.

  After Ordy was gone, Rynn started riffling through the stack of sketches. Many were missing, and others had markings made in heavy pencil lead.
There were notes, addendums, places where her own notations were struck through and others added in their place. She tried to figure out some pattern to the changes, and realized quickly what it was: they didn’t have the same cobbled materials to work from.

  The ceramic thunk of a bowl on her workbench startled Rynn. She looked up to see the shop foreman, Korburn, standing over her. “Eat up; I got issues with them scratch marks you call sketches.”

  “Thanks,” Rynn said. Korburn had brought a meaty stew with steam still rising from it. She took up a spoonful and blew on it. “What’s wrong with them? Can’t read shorthand?”

  “It’s all clever I’ll grant, but it’s clear you never been trained in drafting. I can—”

  “No, I have,” Rynn corrected him around a mouthful of boiler-hot stew. “I learned from as good a human tinker as there’s ever been.”

  “Not sayin’ much,” Koburn muttered.

  Rynn shrugged and put another spoonful of stew in her mouth. It had chunks of beef in it and was spiced too heavily for her to pick out individual flavors. She stopped chewing a moment when she realized it might contain kuduk ingredients that humans didn’t consider food, but pushed the thought aside long enough to swallow.

  “I drew all those freehand in a room just a little larger than this bench,” Rynn bragged, thumping her fist on the workbench’s steel surface. “Give me a drafting table with a compass, ruler, and square, and I’ll put them all to proper scale for you.”

  Korburn snorted. “You see that spoon in yer hand, girl? Bosslady says that’s the sharpest thing you’re allowed. I walked the street same side as some monstrous big rolly of a human this morning; prob’ly eats his rats raw and squirmin’—you must know the type, being’ one yourself. Never gave a thought to him hurtin’ me none. He got this dumb animal look in his eye, y’see. He was carryin’ some contraption or other, needin’ both arms. Just thinkin’ to himself not to drop that gizmo was the only thought steamin’ in that boiler of his.” Korburn poked a finger in Rynn’s chest. “And I’d sooner have knocked that whatsits out of his hands than turn my back on you.”

  “Me?”

  “Ordy don’t worry cuz Ordy’s made of bricks, but the rest of us seen what you done to that sorry wet sop of a lad. Trussed up in chains, no less.”

  Rynn shrugged. She was enjoying her stew and preferred another mouthful to trying to deny his claim.

  “You’ll get a pencil, and you’ll show Dorchuk how to engrave them runes,” Korburn told her before walking away.

  Rynn had finished her stew and sat watching the workshop’s bustle for nearly an hour before a squat kuduk with jeweler’s glasses waddled over to her. He wore a collared white shirt and trousers with suspenders, rather than the coveralls the other workers preferred. His beard was bushy, save for two thick braids hanging below his jowls, adorned with colored beads in a pattern whose meaning escaped Rynn.

  “So you’re the new human.”

  “You must be Dorchuk,” Rynn said. “I’m Rynn. We didn’t meet at dinner last night.” She held out her hand.

  Dorchuk looked at her hand and wiped his own on his pants. He reached behind his ear for a pencil, and keeping himself out of arm’s reach of Rynn, set it down on the far side of the workbench.

  “You are to write out the runes for the dynamo and for the stabilization effect,” Dorchuk stated with the formality of a tribunal judge. He stood chin up, back straight, and all his words were crisp.

  Rynn picked up the pencil and turned over one of her sketches—one that wasn’t already using both sides of a sheet. Rynn quickly copied down the pattern of runes, working outward from the center as she’d seen Dan do. She had made up a little rhyme of the nonsense syllables to help her remember the order. “These are your dynamo runes. Connect the wires where these two runes end. Those loop out to the—”

  “I saw your schematic. Not my concern, mind you. That’s Korburn’s problem. Just draw the ones for the recoil stabilizer.”

  Rynn gave a half shrug and turned back to the paper. It was easier keeping her story straight if she didn’t even have a chance to tell it. She had assumed they would be interrogating her for details.

  The second set of runes was more complicated. It was a longer pattern, there were more interconnections, and they connected in ways she had never tried previously. Rynn shuddered to think what sort of rune structures the Veydrans knew, if a child could develop such devious patterns in an evening.

  “These run down the barrel, all the way back to the breech. That little set there gets engraved on the hammer.”

  Dorchuk tapped a fingertip on the workbench, thumping against the steel. “Pencil.”

  Rynn set the pencil down and leaned away. Dorchuk took it and wiped it in the folds of a trouser leg before returning it above his ear. The kuduk rune engraver scooped up her sketched runes and waddled off with them. Rynn watched him wiping his pencil-grabbing hand on the seat of his trousers as he went.

  The rest of the day passed slowly. Korburn brought parts to her as Dorchuk finished engraving them. She would activate the runes, and Korburn would take the parts away again. When the first shining brightsteel gun barrel had been set before her, Rynn felt a parent’s pride in it. The second lost its luster in her eyes, and by the fifth, she was sick of seeing her creations carted off for kuduk use. The dynamos she felt differently about. She took quite a bit of satisfaction in those. She fought back a smile with each dynamo returned to her kuduk keepers.

  Rynn wished that Madlin had met the Veydrans earlier. Had she known more about runes when she made her first guns, she could have avoided so many mistakes. Dan seemed confident that he knew what the runes would do. Rynn had never known for sure that hers would do what she planned until she tried. Having her pistol stuck hanging in mid-air was something she hadn’t anticipated; she had counted on the trigger spring to pull the runes out of contact and end the effect. Dan’s way seemed more sensible.

  “What are you squinting at?” a voice snapped, making Rynn jump. She broke from staring down at the runes on a dynamo she was empowering and turned to see Delliah standing behind her.

  “Sorry, mistress” Rynn said. She’d adopted a policy of apologizing when she had any doubt whether she might be in trouble. “I was just checking the runes as I worked on them. It doesn’t take any longer, so I didn’t see the harm.”

  “Well and tidy, but I was asking about the squinting. When I asked whether you had any physical deficiencies, you ought to have mentioned it if you had bad eyes.”

  “I see just fine,” Rynn said.

  Delliah wagged a finger in Rynn’s face. “Mind your tone. And your eyes are most certainly shoddy. I won’t have you ruining them further.” Delliah shook her head and lowered her voice to a mutter. “Figures ... I buy a literate human and she’s got crone’s eyes.”

  Delliah walked off without another word. Rynn looked down to the dynamo in her hands. She tried not to squint to make out the runes, but they were tiny—each half the size of her smallest fingernail. She pulled the dynamo closer until the runes came into focus; it didn’t quite touch her nose.

  “Eyes are fine,” she muttered. “Runes are just too small.”

  The dynamo was fine. All the runes appeared to be made just as Rynn had described them to Dorchuk, and the kuduk engraver’s work was as consistent as if the pieces had been cast from the same mold. If one worked, they all would. Dan ought to have given her his best effort for his half of the ten-percent share in the largest gold mine in Tellurak.

  It was shortly after the lunchtime break that Flarn approached her. He was among the kuduks that had supped with her and Naul the night before. His short trimmed beard was fiery red, and his nose too big for the rest of his features. Rynn had remembered him as friendly enough. He wore thick spectacles in heavy brass frames.

  “Well missy, looks like you’ve got yourself some broken optics in that head of yours,” Flarn said, leaning up against the bench right beside her.

  “Bossl
ady says, right?” Rynn asked, rolling her maligned optics.

  “Yup, that she did. Might be a silly question, but you ever had spectacles? If you know the focal length, or even the curve radius, this will be a lot quicker.”

  “Sorry, I’ve had two pairs, but I couldn’t tell you either way,” Rynn said. “One pair got made for me, and the other I fiddled with quite a bit until I got them how I liked.”

  Flarn chuckled. “And you call yourself a tinker? What kind of a tinker doesn’t even know the focus of her own spectacles?”

  “The kind whose eyes are fine,” Rynn said dryly, crossing her arms.

  “Bosslady says otherwise,” Flarn replied. He handed Rynn the gun sight and looked about the workshop. “See that playbill posted on the wall over yonder?” Rynn nodded. “Read it to me.”

  Rynn squeezed one eye shut and held the sight up to the other. The whole workshop was a blur, like someone had left a painting out in the rain. She turned the end of the sight and screw threads set into the tube separating the two optics gradually lengthened the distance between them. The room came into focus with a bit of adjustment.

  It was an advertisement for a play, with a tri-color painted depiction of a kuduk woman with barely any clothing on. “Tonight ... only ... see ... Perla ... Cobalt ... as ...”

  “That’s enough,” Flarn said. He took the sight from her hands and withdrew a set of calipers from the back pocket of his coveralls. He took a quick measurement of the sight’s length and handed it back to her. “Now the other eye.”

  Rynn repeated the exercise left-eyed, and Flarn recorded that measurement too. He took his leave of her, leaving nothing behind but the dynamo she had been working on. She was surprised when he returned only two hours later, with a pair of brightsteel-framed spectacles in hand.

  “You got me,” Rynn said. “I’m impressed.”

  They were a simple design, not as fancy as Madlin’s pair. The lenses were thicker than they needed to be—she knew because they were three times as thick as Madlin’s delicate spectacles—but she couldn’t blame Flarn for working with the materials he had on hand. The lenses were held in place with wire wrapped around their circumference, and a small yoke bridged the gap between them, meant to perch on her nose. The arms were unfinished, jutting out straight and with excess length she knew would have to be trimmed.