Sword of the Bright Lady

by M. C. Planck

  He offered the man a hand, helping him to his feet.

  “It’s a long walk home. I suggest you get started.” From his purse he handed the man a silver piece. “Pay for your lodging and meals. Do not beg, steal, or tarry, or I’ll have you to Kingsrock.”

  The man bowed, scraping the ground as he retreated, and ran from the village without looking back.

  “He’s evil,” Gregor said, although without force.

  “We cannot address all the sins of the world,” Faren repeated under his breath, and then he called forward the next man.

  The ritual went on for a while, but then it changed. The ax still missed, but when the man stood, Faren shook his head.

  “Your Red is more danger to your family than is your absence. You go into the wagon, to Kingsrock, to either atone or hang.”

  Christopher had just gotten comfortable with the judging, pleased to see that less than a quarter of the men were being classified as Red, when the ritual changed again.

  This time, when the man put his head on the block, his eyes burning with hatred and fear, Faren froze him in place with the Celestial command Rana had used on Bart.

  “Do not miss this time,” he told Gregor sadly.

  “Why?” Christopher asked. “Doesn’t he get a chance to atone?” How could the Cardinal have judged this man without even asking him a question?

  “He is Black,” the Cardinal said. “They never atone, and I am not certain I would let one if they would.”

  “Have no sympathy for him,” spoke up one of the prisoners still in line. “He was our sergeant. When Bart was displeased, he would let Bugger Bill abuse us.”

  “Yes,” another agreed, “and worse. The only reason we did not kill him in the barn was fear that Bart still lived.”

  “In fact,” said one of the prisoners from the wagon, “you should return us to the barn for a brief period, so that we might rectify the imbalance of the world. Bill has given much and has much to receive.”

  “One time he—” another prisoner started, but Christopher cut him off.

  “I get it,” he said resignedly, and the ax fell.

  There was only one more Black in the group.

  “If Black Bart were truly evil, then why so few truly evil men?” Christopher asked the Cardinal as he was getting back into his carriage.

  “Perhaps you already killed them all, when you slew his knights,” Faren said, unconcerned.

  “Or he killed them himself,” Karl answered. “Blacks do not make good soldiers. They are undisciplined. Even the Darkest fiend prefers an army of Yellows, or at least Reds.”

  Then Karl idly recited a bit of doggerel.

  White for right,

  Blue for tame,

  Green for name,

  Yellow for gain,

  Red for pain,

  Black for none.

  “I’ve never liked that ditty,” Faren complained. “Tame is a poor choice of word. Law would be better.”

  “But that doesn’t rhyme,” Karl said.

  “Spare me your literary critique,” Christopher said in exasperation. “What does it mean?”

  “You have never heard the Color Poem before?” Karl asked in surprise. Even Faren raised his eyebrows.

  “The Pater is new here, remember,” Svengusta said. He had been uncharacteristically silent so far. Christopher was guessing the old man was a little upset at having his wood yard turned into an abattoir. Christopher agreed; he was planning on burning that stump and getting a new one as soon as Faren left town.

  “It means,” Svengusta explained, “those are the reins that drive the affiliations. White works for the right of everyone. Blue serves the law. Green is driven by honour. Yellow seeks gain. Red can only be compelled by threat of punishment. And Black does evil for its own sake, even sometimes to its own undoing.”

  Now it made sense. The five stages of moral development: universal rights, social contract, peer approval, desire for gain and fear of punishment, and then absolute amoral sociopathy—not a stage, but the lack of any moral compulsion at all.

  “There was even a Green in that lot,” Faren said. “But I did not want to make his life harder by exposing him to his fellows. Perhaps their next lord will be less Dark. It wouldn’t be hard. It was only a matter of time until something drove Bart over the edge, into madness.”

  “The loss of his ring,” Christopher said. Then he couldn’t remem­­ber if anyone had told Faren about the ring. “Did we tell you about the ring?”

  “I heard about it, no thanks to you,” Faren said, while Svengusta blushed. “This is a secret that should not be bandied about, agreed. But in the future, keep me better informed. Speaking of secrets,” he added, suddenly cranky again, “you are released from my command. You may dispose of your sword, and its truth, as you see fit. Possibly we overplayed our hand. We did not intend to start a war.”

  Christopher breathed a sigh of pure relief. And immediately moved on to the next problem.

  “I’ll need that mill soon.” He was eager to get back to industrializing people instead of killing them.

  Faren rolled his eyes, even grumpier than before, if possible. “The answer is no. It would be easier to redirect the river than to undo so many years of legal contract. But be silent, Pater, we are not deaf to your needs. The Saint has sent you an offering, a loan from our church to yours of valuable property. I left it at the Knockford Church. Make it work or do without.”

  Christopher wanted to ask more, but Faren would have none of it. His carriage trundled away, followed by Bart’s wagon with the prisoners marked for atonement.

  “You’ve let an awful lot of tael run off,” Gregor said, referring to the majority of prisoners that were released. “But I find I cannot be unhappy with your choice. And we should still see a little more from that wagon-load. I doubt any of them will atone.”

  “Does anybody ever atone?” Christopher asked darkly. So far, every person he’d sent to Kingsrock had wound up on the wrong end of a rope.

  “Sometimes, Brother,” Svengusta soothed. “Sometimes.”

  That night, after dinner, when he and Svengusta had a moment alone, he asked another question that had been bothering him badly.

  “We barely got enough tael out of Bart to promote someone to second rank. But he was fifth rank. I don’t get it. You’re the only one I dare ask, Brother. Please help me.”

  Svengusta’s eyes grew wide as he studied Christopher’s clueless face. The old man shook his head in disbelief.

  “I had thought your past mystifying; now I find it unimaginable,” Svengusta said softly. “But do not elaborate. I am content to let you and the Saint bear that knowledge.

  “But your answer, which every child knows, is that while death reduces a man by a whole rank, it enriches his slayer only by a fraction of his rank. One-sixteenth, to be exact.”

  The precision of the number did not bother Christopher as much as the magnitude. Trading tael was not a zero-sum game; it was a losing game. For every knight created, sixteen commoners would have to die. To create all those knights, Bart really must have slaughtered whole villages.

  The blood on his wood stump suddenly seemed inconsequential.

  25.

  BOTTLED WATER

  Standing in the Knockford Church vault, Christopher scratched his beard, annoyed. He’d asked for a watermill and gotten five bronze bottles. He was just a little confused.

  Svengusta wasn’t. “Faren said it would be easier to redirect the river than unmoor the mill from the miller’s hands, and so he has. But do not ask him for a second miracle; these have stood in the Cathedral fountain for at least a century.”

  The bottles were not graceful enough to qualify as art in Christopher’s opinion, being heavily cast out of inch-thick metal. But each one did bear an image of a god, Ostara, and her four consorts from the tapestry back in Burseberry.

  “How is this supposed to help again?”

  “Perhaps an experiment, since you’re so fond of
them,” Svengusta said with a laugh. “But not in here—outside!”

  Christopher struggled with one of the heavy metal bottles. It had a bronze stopper screwed into the top, with markings carved into it. He couldn’t quite read them, and the bottle was too heavy to hold up to his face, so he unscrewed the stopper and looked more closely at it while they walked through the halls.

  The words were in Celestial. “Stopper” was the first word. Well, yes, it was a stopper. Nice that they labeled it.

  He read the second word aloud, because it was so unexpected. “Stream,” he said. “What does that mean?”

  But then he noticed water was gushing from the bottle.

  “Ack . . .”

  He tried to stick the stopper back in, but Svengusta screamed at him and waved his hands.

  “No!” yelled the old man. “Read the command word, the com­mand word!”

  Christopher looked at the bottle cap again. “Fountain” was the next word, but that couldn’t be right. The last word was “Geyser,” so he read it aloud before his brain considered the wisdom of such an act.

  The bottle kicked him in the stomach like an angry mule. Water gushed out of the bottle like, well, like a geyser, knocking Svengusta to the floor and washing him flailing down the hall.

  “Stopper,” Christopher shouted, wrestling with the bottle, and the flow stopped. “Brother, I’m sorry.” He sat in the pool of water where the bottle had knocked him down. “Are you all right?”

  Svengusta sat up, soaking wet, watching the water run down the hall. Novitiates and servants stuck their heads out of doors. They did not succeed at stifling their giggling.

  “Now you know what it does,” Svengusta said, “and I know why Helga squeals when you use the word ‘experiment.’”

  “How did all that water come out of this bottle?”

  “Brother,” Svengusta said with exaggerated gentleness, “it’s magic.”

  “Well, duh, but how does it work? How long will the effect last?”

  “Last? I already told you the bottles are at least a hundred years old.”

  “You mean,” Christopher said with amazement, “they were pumping water for all that time?”

  “Yes,” Svengusta said. “The fountains of the Cathedral. Bathed in colored lights, they were a beautiful sight. And now they are stilled. The Saint favors your cause. He signals to the city that no beauty can thrive when unjust war rages.”

  “Or more likely, he feels guilty.” Rana glared at them, having been summoned by the commotion. “He rewards you for surviving his unintentional war. Note that he does not send any pretty presents to me, seeking my pardon for the uproar he has caused in my town.”

  Before Christopher could utter his usual apology, she spoke again.

  “You must learn more caution, Pater. Not all magical devices are so benign.”

  Then she was gone, in an imperial splashing.

  Dereth was not overly impressed with the results of the new blast furnace.

  “A Master could make better steel,” he said.

  “It’s not supposed to be better,” Christopher answered, “just cheaper.”

  And it was, which was why they now had sixty feet of heavy steel pipe standing up in the air, supported by scaffolding that cast the new buildings going up around the Old Bog in an industrial light. Christopher sent an apprentice scrambling up the side and coached him through the pronunciation of the command word for the bronze bottle’s screwed-on top.

  The pipe rumbled under the pressure of the geyser. Then the falling water hit the wheel attached to the bottom, and Christopher’s new lathe began to spin like a demon.

  After a brief moment of shock, the assembled smiths broke into spontaneous applause for Jhom, who stood with his hands behind his back and tried to look modest, but failed.

  “You did well, Journeyman,” Christopher said. “Very well. Here you go.” He handed the smith a sheaf of papers.

  “Is this my reward?” the young smith asked, but then became enraptured in the drawings.

  “No, it’s the next one. It’s an inverted lathe, called a mill. And these things, these are ball bearings. The first set you make goes on the lathe.” The squealing of the axle was already driving him nuts. “You’ll need the lathe to make them, though.”

  “But Pater, you own the lathe.”

  Christopher put his hand on the younger man’s shoulder.

  “I will pay you like a Senior and treat you like an equal. You’ll hire and manage at least a dozen other men. Will you take the job?”

  “My father needs me,” Jhom said. “I cannot abandon him.”

  Christopher took a deep breath. “Your father is one of the smiths I want you to hire. Along with every man in his shop.”

  Jhom was dumbfounded. “You would buy my father’s shop and give it to me?”

  “I can’t afford to buy it. I don’t have that much cash. But if you convince him to join our operations, I’ll give him a share of the profits. And you, too.”

  Jhom got right to the point. “How big of a share?”

  Christopher didn’t care about the money; he just needed the men. “An equal share. Me, you, Dereth, your father, and Palek. All equal shares.”

  “That is a mighty shop you assemble,” Jhom said, stars in his eyes.

  “And you can run it for me. All you have to do is convince them to join it. I’ll pay everybody standard guild rates. They’ll have to work for another man, but then, most of them already do. And they’ll get paid regular and only work eight days a week, ten hours a day, with an hour off for lunch.”

  Christopher’s conscience would not allow him to faithfully re-create the dawn of the industrial age. It remained to be seen if it was possible to build a commercial empire without savage exploitation.

  “Can you make it happen?” he asked the young man.

  “They are proud,” Jhom said dubiously.

  “They are idle,” Christopher said. “I’ll let you in on a little secret: when the draft contracts are finally released, they’ll all go to one shop.”

  Jhom was properly scandalized.

  “They’ll kill you, Pater.”

  Christopher winked. “They’re nowhere near as mean as Bart, and he didn’t kill me.”

  Jhom laughed. Christopher’s final victory over Bart had made him the local hero. The townspeople’s attitude was more in line with that of Karl and Gregor than with official Church doctrine.

  “I will do my best,” Jhom told him, “but I might not have much clout until you award the contracts. The bird in the bush always looks tastier than the one in your hand.”

  “As long as you get the lathe running. We’ll need those ball bearings.” Ball bearings were one of those things you took for granted, until you didn’t have any.

  His new popularity paid off in more ways than one. Fae told him that people kept asking her if they could buy more bonds.

  “Why won’t you sell as many as you can?” she wanted to know.

  “We want to keep demand up,” he told her. “If we flood the market, we’ll have trouble selling them. They’re only worth anything because there aren’t very many of them.” He could see she was struggling with the concept, but it looked like a fair fight.

  Lalania, back again from one of her many jaunts and sharing dinner with them all in his chapel, confirmed the wisdom of his restraint. His bonds were trading at face value. Although they couldn’t be redeemed for another ten years, people were accepting them in lieu of a gold piece.

  “And now what will you do?” she asked intently.

  “Spend it. Unless you tell me we can issue more bonds without collapsing the market.”

  “What makes you think I support this scheme?”

  “I offered to put you on the payroll. Do you want a cut instead?”

  The girl was getting angry. Christopher was a little mystified until Gregor sighed in the background, and suddenly it came to him in an epiphany.

  “You’ve been spying on me. You
left Gregor here to watch me.”

  “Now what makes you think that?” Lalania asked, impossibly innocent.

  “Who are you spying for? Your College? The Saint? Tell me, dammit.” He didn’t care that she was spying; he just wanted to know who his enemies were.

  “Myself.” She glared at him. “I undertook to protect the common folk of my own accord. Does this surprise you?”

  Now he was back to being mystified. “Protect them from whom?”

  “From you,” she snapped. “Look at you. You live like a lord with chapels and armies, and yet last year you did not even exist. How should I not be suspicious?”

  “Like a lord?” He looked down at the chicken leg he’d been stripping with his teeth.

  “It’s true, Lala,” Gregor said gently. “The Pater eats from the same pot we do. His money does not buy him luxuries. Nor does he revel in the command of others. If anything, he shirks it.”

  Well, of course he did. Telling other people what to do was a lot of work. He had better things to do with his time, like figure out how to increase iron production. He wanted to start selling efficient Franklin stoves before the cold returned.

  “Tell me where you came from,” she demanded, point-blank.

  “A distant land. Where things are done differently,” he fired back. “Do you disapprove of my changes?”

  “You take their gold and give them paper. You take their shops and give them work. You take their hopes and give them dreams,” she said menacingly. “They believe in you, Pater. They believe you will arm them with your sky-fire magic and overthrow the Dark. They can live without money or shops, but they cannot live without hope. If you steal their dreams, I will find a way to kill you, your luck be damned.”

  “If I fail their dreams,” he answered, “you won’t have to, because I’ll be dead. They’re my dreams too, you know.”