Pathfinder Tales--Gears of Faith

by Gabrielle Harbowy

  Zae quickly fumbled in her bag for it. “It’s not a healing device, exactly, even though it’s been used as one several times.” She was set to continue with the story of how and why she’d made the divination orb that she now cradled in both hands, but at a gesture from Renwick she held her tongue and merely offered the plain bronze orb to the dwarf.

  His smile was gentle, and his chuckle sounded like a trickle of granite easing loose from a distant mountain. “Discerning what it does and how you made it is my task now. Look around and get settled, while I spend some time on what makes this tick.”

  Zae hadn’t realized that a crafted device would be her placement exam and interview rolled into one, but it made sense to her in afterthought. While she wished she’d known and had a chance to refine her device, she supposed it spoke more clearly of her abilities as it was. All the same, she felt a little lump in her throat as she watched Renwick carry it to a table, pull a jeweler’s loupe down over one eye, and start his examination of her work.

  “Duck!”

  The shout from across the room pulled Zae from her spiraling thoughts. Without hesitation, she hit the floor. Rowan landed atop her in a jumble of cloth and limbs.

  The audible whine came first, then a solid thunk.

  “All clear.” Where the warning had been a shout, this was a whimper. The room was a susurrus of clothing and expletives as thirty or so people rose from the floor, all looking around. A willowy elven man, the only person already upright and moving, was prying a circular saw blade out of the wall and cursing at it in several languages.

  Rowan surveyed Zae from head to toe to make sure she was all right, then nodded. At such close range, all Zae could notice was that his eyelashes were extraordinarily long.

  “Quick reflexes,” he noted, brushing imaginary dust off her shoulders. “That’s good. You’ll need them. So, where were we? Oh! I was going to introduce you around a little.”

  Zae was pleased that Rowan’s own curiosity led them first to the table from which the saw blade had flown. “Ask questions and look closely if you want to. Nobody worries about working on things in front of each other here because there’s no ownership of our plans or inventions.”

  “Is that unusual?”

  “It’s a quirk of our cognate in particular, though some of the others have picked it up from us. The year I started here, there was a nasty rash of competitiveness that led to secrecy, that got, well, extreme. Distrust spells death when we’re making things that people are supposed to be able to share and saves lives with. So we decided anything that helps to save lives should be available to anyone who can make it or use it.”

  Zae wasn’t sure how she felt about this. She liked the idea of getting credit for her designs, but had never thought about what the logical extreme of that sort of mindset would be in such a close setting as this one. “Brigh encourages us to share what we know,” she answered, supporting Rowan’s premise without necessarily agreeing. She brushed the gear on her pendant with her palm, imagining she felt the warmth of approval in the birthmark that sprawled over the heel of her thumb.

  Rowan beamed. “Exactly. Oh, and we’re not completely healing-obsessed. If you come up with something that doesn’t have a healing application and you want to try it out, you can still do that. It’s a focus, not a mandate. Anyway, sometimes things that aren’t designed for healing can still be used for healing.”

  The elf who had retrieved the saw blade was at a table with a woman with a bird on her shoulder. Their heads were bowed over a hand-cranked table saw that followed no schematic Zae had ever seen. As they watched, the elf jerked back from the saw, shaking out his hand and muttering under his breath.

  “Or to make you need healing,” the woman said. She was ready with a slender potion vial and a small square of cloth, and she offered these to the elf. He shook his head stubbornly and returned to his repairs, so she set items on the table within his reach. The whole exchange had the air of a longstanding routine. “Who’s your friend, Rowan?”

  “Zae, meet Ruby Tolmar. She’s been here about a month. Ruby, this is Zae, who’s ousting you as Newest Student.”

  With her long black hair tied back into a wavy fall down her back, striking blue eyes, and full red lips, Ruby looked like a classic illustration of a princess from a children’s book, even in the casual homespun tunic and plain linen skirt she wore. But what captivated Zae even more was the mechanical hummingbird that shifted on the woman’s shoulder with a brief whirring flutter of wings.

  “Who’s your friend?” Zae asked, nodding toward the bird. “She’s beautiful.”

  It was intricate and lifelike beyond anything Zae had ever seen, and Zae had seen a lot of constructs in her day. At a glance, she could see at least eight shades of metal variegating the feathers, from a rosy pink gold through deep burnished brass. And the eyes, and the simple liveliness of its expressions! She found herself wanting to sit and watch it preen idly for hours.

  A month, and Ruby had already created something so delicate and intricate. Zae suddenly felt less proud of her simple little orb. Was she even in the right place?

  Ruby reached up to stroke a finger along the construct’s narrow head, earning her a nuzzle. “This is Ouru, my familiar. I inherited her from my mother.” The bird ignored them and groomed itself, clacking metal beak along metal wing through the movement of tiny gears. Zae’s breath came a little easier now; the novice student hadn’t constructed it herself.

  “What are you working on?” Zae asked.

  “Repairs,” Ruby’s companion responded dryly.

  “We’re trying to seat a healing spell in the mechanism of the saw, so that if it detects blood the blade stops spinning and the saw heals the wound that stopped it. But apparently we don’t have it secured well enough. Get the blade going too fast and when it stops, momentum sends it flying. I think it just needs…” While her partner worked on returning the blade for another test, Ruby sketched out some improvements on a piece of parchment.

  Zae stared at what she could see of the drawing for a moment, knowing that her own gears were turning visibly. “So, the blood triggers the stop, and the stop triggers the healing spell?”

  “Almost,” Ruby answered. “The blood triggers both those things at once.”

  “That’s quite clever!”

  “Not till we get it working. Now it’s causing more injuries than it heals.” She smiled at Zae. “But I think we’ve almost got it.”

  The elf interrupted with an explosive sigh and rapped his knuckles on the table. “More creation, less conversation. Or do I need to do this all myself?”

  Rowan touched Zae’s elbow with a slight hint of pressure meant to guide her away. “We’ll let you get back to it.”

  “Pleasure to meet you both,” Zae called over her shoulder. She had more questions, but she could see that it might be better to ask them another time.

  They moved on, flitting about the room in a way that made Zae think of Ruby’s bird flitting its wings. Just about as Zae was feeling saturated with new names and friendliness, Rowan gestured toward the edge of the room with a dramatic flourish. “Next stop, the sideboard.”

  “The sideboard?”

  The sideboard was, indeed, just that. A shelf against the wall held a samovar and a precarious tower of cups and saucers. “One of the benefits of setting up in a former tea shop is never-ending tea. Renwick gets twitchy if you have tea on the table with an active project, but you can drink it here or take it to a table where no one’s currently working.”

  There were a lot of rules in her cognate, Zae thought, but at least they were all rules that made sense. She glanced around the room, counting other tables and peering a bit more closely at their active projects. This inevitably led her gaze toward Renwick, who had her divination orb in halves and was studying some of its moving parts with two long tweezers.

  “All right,” she said. “What next?”

  Rowan followed Zae’s line of sight, nudged her shoulder wit
h his, and took her by the hand, threading through the tables toward the opposite wall, like a ferret that had just caught a glint of light. “Best for last,” he said. “The Gallery of Unfortunate Devices.”

  A glass-fronted display case which Zae, at a glance, had assumed held tools and works-in-progress, was actually a tour through the cognate’s failed inventions. Each one was positioned proudly, with a small card proclaiming its intended function and its inventor’s name in neat script. “The, um, unintended consequences are written on the back,” Rowan said. “Some of us felt they ruined the aesthetics of the concept.”

  “More like, it’s too embarrassing?”

  Rowan coughed. “Like I said. Aesthetics.”

  Zae scanned the cards for familiar names. “Do you have anything in here?”

  Rowan’s cheeks flushed pinkish and he pointed to a monocle in an ornately filigreed silver housing on a lower shelf. “My first attempt. It’s supposed to detect magic.”

  Zae canted her head and looked closer. Her fingers itched to open the cabinet and hold up the lens. “But it doesn’t?”

  “Oh, no. It does. Too well. It’s built around a magic-detection spell, so…” He trailed off, waiting for Zae to make her own leap of reasoning. It hit her, and she straightened slowly.

  “So … it always detects itself?”

  Rowan beamed. “It’s actually great with children, or the really drunk. You can convince them that there’s magic everywhere.”

  Zae laughed, and barely stopped herself from clapping with glee. “It’s like a museum.”

  “It may very well become one, someday. Here … This is my latest.” The halfling removed what looked like a mechanical worm from his pocket. “It’s for leaving a trail for someone to follow. Not very elegant, I know. This is just my proof of concept. Anyway, it fragments off, and then each piece magically leads you to the next piece, until—” He straightened and cleared his throat.

  “Not a bad device, Zae of Brigh,” she heard from behind her. She whirled about, face to face with Renwick, who held her own orb reassembled in his hands. “Constructed on the go, I believe?”

  Zae’s nod was jerky, as if her head was so nervous that it stuttered on her neck. “On a boat,” she supplied, cursing herself inwardly for the defensive note in her voice.

  Renwick handed the device back as carefully as he’d taken it from her. “Your theory is sound, but your gears are imprecise. You cut them by hand, with a template, yes?”

  “Yes.” Those out-of-her-depth feelings started creeping up on her again. “And … on a boat.”

  He laughed. “It’s all right. They’re perfectly good for hand-cut gears. Have you done any hobbing or milling?”

  “Not in years and years.”

  “Well, then your first lesson will be on the mill.” He invited her to walk with him. “A gear is only as precise as its template. If one tooth on the template’s a bit off, then all your gears will follow. The advantage of milling is that each tooth is cut with the same blade, so they’ll always be precisely the same shape…”

  The feeling of incompetence faded as Renwick instructed her. He spoke to her as an equal, and taught her in the same way. Soon she had her goggles back down over her eyes and was creating gears that met his standards. Satisfied, he called one of the other students closer to watch her; Fidialory was another gnome, also a follower of Brigh, who looked barely past the age of maturity. A shock of purple hair sprouted from his head, just long enough to stand straight up on its own, and artful smudges of kohl made his eyebrows appear fixed in arches of surprise. He looked like he’d put his tongue to a motor. Zae idly wondered what that would feel like.

  There was so much novelty here in this workroom, and yet so much familiarity, too. It had been many years since she had been in a room with other crafters like herself—since the little house in Wispil, now that she thought of it—and it filled her with an odd sort of warmth and confusion and fear that she might wake up and find herself the only one of her kind again. Being the only one of a thing was comfortable, something she was used to—even took enjoyment from—but it was a comfort she was willing to give up for the novelty of belonging.

  She didn’t realize her attention had drifted from the metal-cutting machine until pain blossomed in bright lights across her vision. Zae was familiar with the sting of air against a wound, but this was far beyond a simple sting. Reflex curled her fingers away from the blade and the raw pain shot up her arm all the way to her jaw.

  Calmly, very slowly, she set the unfinished gear aside and reached into her satchel with her uninjured hand. The gear was slippery with blood—of which there was suddenly quite a lot—and Zae felt that certain mental numbness that sets in to lessen pain. She knew that the numbness always made rationality twist around on itself, but that didn’t stop her from deciding that the mess on the workbench was by far the worst part of all of this.

  “Oh no. Are you all right? Wait, wait!” the other gnome cried. “Glivia!” He beckoned to another of the students and a dwarf wearing green-lensed goggles came running so eagerly that Renwick snapped at her to take more care.

  Glivia held out both hands to ask wordlessly for Zae’s. She offered it, palm up. Glivia took it gently, turning it this way and that without touching the injured finger.

  “Zae! What happened?” Rowan was at her side, wringing his hands. He looked like he might faint from concern, if not from actual squeamishness.

  “It’s not as bad as it looks,” she assured him.

  Glivia had done something to the pain. Now it only hurt when she curled her hand, so she abruptly stopped curling her hand. The dwarf was cleaning the wound with a feather-light touch, bent over it to keep it from her view. Zae studied the intricate braids that wove Glivia’s blond hair to the back of her head.

  “You’ve got quite a shard of metal lodged in here. Would you mind horribly if I asked you to leave it? I’m working on a project that uses metal to reinforce bone, and Renwick won’t let me implant anyone yet. Will you be my test subject? Can I study how it heals with the metal in it?”

  “Let me see it?” Zae asked.

  Glivia moved aside at her request. In general, it was a good habit to shield a patient from anything too gory, but Zae knew she could handle it. Now, calmly, the gnome considered her finger. It had been a clean puncture. The shard, sharp at its point and all along the edge, had gone straight in through the fleshy pad of her fingertip, and it felt like the metal was thick enough that it probably wouldn’t bend and force her pinky crooked. Though she took a few moments to turn over the request, she already knew what her response would be; the other student’s enthusiasm was too joyous to deny.

  “Can I heal around it?” Zae asked.

  “Of course! Actually, allow me.” Glivia wasn’t a follower of Brigh, so her magic had a different flavor to it. It felt more like bricks reinforcing a wall than bronze heated in the sun.

  Zae whispered a soft prayer to Brigh, thanking her for allowing another healer’s touch. In moments, her fingertip was smooth and whole over the metal splint, though she still couldn’t bend her finger and if she touched it she could feel the firmness beneath the skin. “Thank you. That was well done!”

  “You’re all right?”

  “Of course. A sharp tool isn’t really yours until it’s drawn your blood. This means the workshop accepts me, that’s all.”

  Glivia exchanged a grin with Rowan, who said, “Oh, yes. You’ll fit in here just fine.”

  8

  PENNIES FOR YOUR THOUGHTS

  KEREN

  Keren prayed to Iomedae for guidance at the edge of the pit, contemplating the unfathomable chasm and the Starstone Cathedral beyond it. Some Zae-esque part of her mind was still surprised there weren’t more railings or other barriers around such a huge and obvious hazard, but she stood by the reason she had surmised to Evandor: Absalom, and even the gods themselves, didn’t suffer fools gladly. They didn’t step in to save people from themselves.

  Whe
n hopefuls took the test, they had to traverse the chasm through some inventive means; if they succeeded, a bridge formed itself across the chasm, by which they could return to the mortal world in their new ascended state. Thus, there were three bridges, one for each ascended god. Keren had yet to step foot on Iomedae’s bridge, but she made her way onto one of the others, contemplating both the pit and the Starstone Cathedral from the halfway vantage point. She couldn’t even conceive of trying to cross the expanse without a bridge; she had never been afraid of heights, but she had also never stood over anything that was essentially infinitely high before. She was glad that at least the bridges had railings.

  The Ascended Court district itself let her know when the noon hour arrived. One nearby cathedral’s bells pealed the hour, and then others joined in. She closed her eyes, listening to the pantheistic song of call and response, and opened them when footfalls approached her. The bridges were open to all, but only a very small portion of the milling crowd ventured out onto them. The vibrations of steps, which she could feel in her feet, were different from the vibration of the bells’ song, which she could feel in her ribs.

  Keren’s shadow barely pooled around her boots, with the sun almost directly overhead. The feet that halted near hers were not Evandor’s armored boots, but instead clad in aged leather. There was no specific moment where she decided to lift her head and turn on her heel, but instinct guided her and she spun. A dagger glinted right where she’d been a breath before.

  Keren drew her sword and took a step back from her assailant. He was human, alive, youthful, and clad in a blousy tunic that mostly hid a close-fitting shell of leather armor underneath. Dark haired, clean-shaven, he fit so well with the noonday crowd that Keren could have passed him by several times already and not noticed him.

  He feinted toward her. She backed away another step, and before he could take another swipe with his dagger two guards in gray cloaks were charging onto the bridge. Trapped between them and Keren, he had no way out but down. The boy peered over the edge, but didn’t take the chance.