Eye Spy

by Mercedes Lackey

  Sussena looked at Tobin. “Th’ auld ’oman c’n do’t wit’ two, three more kitchen girls an two, three more ’ousemaids.”

  “You’d have been adding that much staff anyway, what with all the new farm workers you’d have needed to care for the herbs,” Abi pointed out, as Sussena wavered a little. “I’m sure Hansa can handle them.”

  “I’m sure Hansa could handle an army,” Sussena said, and then she smiled. “Tobin, you are finally going to get a well-deserved promotion, then. You will be my farm manager; all these new horse people will answer to you. Hansa will be the housekeeper. We might as well hire on someone to cook so she can concentrate on managing.” She turned to Kat. “I believe, your Highness, that we will accept the Crown’s offer. You may send your crews to start work immediately.”

  Kat grinned and extracted a small pen and a tiny, stoppered jar of ink from her belt pouch. “I was hoping you would, milady. Now, if you can just sign here. . . .”

  10

  Abi rested both her hands on the parapet that abruptly cut off the end of Stonebridge road and stared down into the deceptively calm waters of the river below. High summer brought the lowest water of the year, and the slowest current. Three years and four moons ago there had been a bridge here; it had disintegrated, practically beneath her and Kat, and only her Gift had given them both warning in time to save the people who had been on that bridge at the time. Since that time, all the Master Artificers had studied the river in flood and declared that there was no safe way to rebuild that bridge—unless one was to create a bridge entirely out of sword steel, which was clearly impossible. And since that time, there had been a steady clamor from the people of Haven that the bridge must be replaced.

  In one sense it had been; there was now a suspended rope-and-plank footbridge here, which could carry riders on horses, but nothing heavier, and which was far too dangerous to cross in icy weather. But that was not a replacement. People wanted what once had stood here, a substantial object able to hold the largest of wains and the cargo such wains could carry.

  Not possible. The original bridge had been borne on the back of three stone half-circle arches which in turn had rested on piers sunk into the riverbed. The piers were still there; as Abi peered down at the water, she saw them beneath it, shimmering a green white, stone beneath algae, just under the rippling surface. But every Master Artificer said that the columns built on the piers had been the weak point, the place where the bridge had failed; that the thundering waters in flood and the debris they carried would weaken every conceivable bridge support built on those piers. That nothing could withstand the battering, the temperature changes season by season, the continued etching of sand and pebbles and even boulders and tree trunks when the river was in flood. That no stone, no mortar, not even supports carved of single pillars of stone, could hold forever. The bridge would eventually fail, probably without warning, and without someone with Abi’s singular and rare Gift to sound the warning, there would, when that failure came, be an intolerable loss of life.

  Without the bridge here, Abi felt just fine. Better than fine, in fact. No shadow haunted this place for her. But she stood here studying the river, the banks, and the piers because she was not entirely sure all the Master Builders were right.

  There had to be a way to bring a broad bridge here again. If only she could think of it. And she desperately wanted to think of a solution, because it was time for her to produce a Master Work, and this place, this lost bridge, called out to her personally.

  Or maybe I shouldn’t take it personally. Maybe I should pick something I’m not so emotionally invested in. . . .

  Of course, that’s not what I want to do. And something one of the Masters had told the class rung true to her. “Pick a project you are passionate about. Your passion will help you find a way.”

  Oh, of course technically this span could be bridged by a single arch instead of three—but that would create a bridge so tall that the ramps up to it would be impossibly steep, and the bridge itself would be ridiculously high. Anything of a reasonable height would place the footings down in the water or, at least, too close to the water, and then there would be the same problem all over again, this time with two points of failure instead of four.

  Not an option.

  Two points of failure would certainly bring the bridge down as fast as four, if not faster.

  She studied the banks where the bridge had stood with her Gift, looking for places where the strain showed signs of weakness, and found nothing. Everything flawed had been carried away when the first bridge came down. If she could just find a way to make the span carry all its strain into those banks, it would stand, if not forever, then certainly so far into the future that it probably could be replaced with sword steel, because by then, people would have been able to figure out how to make beams and trusses of sword steel.

  Finally, as night came on, she turned away from the river and continued in the direction she’d been heading in the first place. Midsummer Fair. Now she was old enough to prowl the aisles of the Fair at night on her father’s behest. And in male disguise because she wasn’t stupid, and Mags had no interest in ordinary crime. That was for the Guard and the Watch, not the King’s Spy.

  The Fair at night was an entirely different creature than the Fair by day. Probably three fourths of the booths were closed, canvas sides pulled down over the tables where goods would have been displayed and lashed down tight. The booths themselves, however, shone in the darkness, like giant lanterns, because no one left his booth unguarded and unprotected. The trays of goods, removed from the display tables, had been piled in the center of each booth, and there were at least two people sleeping there as well.

  As for those whose booths were still open, most held two people, one to sell and one to keep a hawk-sharp eye on the goods. The Watch could only do so much, and shadows are a thief’s best friend.

  Each booth had at least three lanterns suspended over the goods, and even the most mundane or tawdry objects tended to sparkle and gleam enticingly in their light. As Abi drifted along with the crowd, she kept her ears tuned for scraps of conversation that had nothing to do with commerce. Her training in the day Fair had been mostly preparation for this.

  Somewhere Perry was prowling as well, but more than likely, he was slipping like a shadow in the spaces behind the booths.

  “. . . can find better gemstone beads from Hollistown,” said a man with a faint accent, dismissively.

  Both the accent and the words alerted her. Hollistown produced apples and applewood, and there were no mines, of gems or anything else there. And the accent could only come from the southeastern Border of Valdemar. And that was the Border shared with Karse.

  She almost rolled her eyes. When would they ever stop trying?

  On the twelfth of never.

  She slipped both hands into her pockets and lightly squeezed a sponge filled with an odorless, clear, colorless liquid her father extracted from urine. Well, it was colorless to humans. . . .

  She timed her move exquisitely, so that when she stepped in between two people trying to get around the booth, one of them stumbled into her, sending her stumbling into the man who had spoken. “Bloody hell!” she swore, as she grabbed the edge of the booth table and the drape over it in her left hand, and steadied herself against the man with her right, leaving invisible palm-prints on both.

  “I beg your pardon!” she said to the booth owner and the man she had tagged. Both of them assessed her clothing—which was commensurate with that of a young man of means—and their expressions changed. The merchant’s became dismissive; the speaker’s, sour, but no longer angry. “Damned crowds, don’t you know! Pardon!” And she moved on.

  “Puppy’ll have his pocket picked before the night’s half over,” the merchant said to the speaker, as she moved on.

  Got it. That was not her thoughts. That was her father’s Mindvoice in her
head, for Mags’ Gift was strong enough he could make almost anyone hear him, whether or not they were Gifted. The only ones he couldn’t reach were the very rare souls with natural Shields that were as strong as his Gift. Sending Larral and Perry to shadow them.

  The liquid might be colorless to humans, but not to Larral. Perry would mark the booth from the rear in some subtle fashion that humans could see, and then follow the speaker wherever he went, while another of Mags’ agents would set up a watch on the booth. If the speaker stayed on past the Fair, he’d already have been marked as a spy, and before a sennight was over, every one of Mags’ operatives in Haven would know his face.

  It was, all in all, a highly efficient operation. It was also unique to Mags and his family—but Abi supposed that her grandfather Herald Nikolas had had his own unique operation, and whoever came after Mags—probably Perry—would have his. The business of being the King’s Spy meant you had to be flexible and adaptable, after all.

  Abi worked her way around the vendors without encountering anything else that aroused her suspicions. She ignored the food tents; they were all staffed and owned by local people. If they were running a huge tavernlike operation, Mags already had one or more operatives working there as servers. If it was a simple one-food booth, Mags already knew whether they were someone that should have an eye kept on them.

  Larral and Perry had been given their targets, so they’d be busy; that meant it was time for her to prowl the entertainment tents.

  Specifically, the “mens’ shows.”

  There were many licensed houses of pleasure in Haven, and the proprietors would absolutely brook no competition from a lot of outsiders with no accountability and no reputation. And those houses sent enough of the girls down to the Fair at night to ensure that no one would successfully freelance for long. But since the pleasure houses were in the business of sex rather than entertainment, they had no problem whatsoever with shows that offered titillation without satisfaction. In fact, many of the pleasure houses had agreements with the shows to allow their girls in for free. Everyone won; the performers didn’t get pawed or mauled, and the girls got customers.

  That might have seemed unlikely, but the girls in these shows were performing from sundown to almost dawn, continuously, and they had no time or energy for prostitution. And the proprietors made more money offering dancing than they would have done offering sex. The per-head admission fee might not be much, but the men were packed in shoulder to shoulder, so the owners more than made their money on quantity of customers.

  The shows were a good place for agents to meet and pass on information, however. When a performer had just dropped her last veil, eyes and ears would be on her, and miss one man slipping a sheaf of papers to another in the crowd.

  “Tha’s why I want you there, Abi,” her father had said, grinning. “I know you won’ be distracted.”

  Well, that was not altogether true . . . there were a couple of girls who performed feats of unclothed acrobatics that had Abi both startled and envious of their flexibility. But for the most part, her father was completely correct about her ability to remain undistracted.

  She caught one exchange of information and tagged both parties; the second man very nearly turned on her in anger, but she was prepared for that. “Ready for the real thing, milord?” she whispered, and slipped him a bit of pasteboard printed with the sign of a brothel where one of her father’s agents was also the proprietress. And as luck would have it, she spotted one of the girls in the crowd. “Iris there, she’ll make you smile,” she added, and caught the girl’s eye, nodding toward her target. Iris’s eyes lit up, and she moved through the crowd to their side.

  “I’m Iris,” she cooed, taking the man’s arm. “And who might you be, my handsome lad?”

  Abi moved away; she couldn’t help but notice that her target made no attempt to remove Iris’s hand from his arm.

  Nicely done, Abi, she congratulated herself.

  And that was as eventful as the evening got. Now that she was supposed to be working on her Master Work, she didn’t have classes to worry about, so she was able to prowl the Fair until the entertainments shut down, just before dawn. Since Mags hadn’t contacted her, she decided to leave the fairgrounds and wait for sunrise in the ruins of an old temple that Mags used to train Auntie Minda’s littles in rooftop running. Abi, Perry, and now Tory trained there too. Some said the building dated all the way back to the Founding; its collapse from disuse certainly predated the time of Vanyel. The ruins were picturesque in themselves, and the grounds were littered with enough debris to discourage camping by those who had traveled to Haven just for the Fair.

  She knew this place by heart and could climb it in the dark. She scrambled to one of her favorite places to just sit, the top of an arch where the still intact arc of stone fed into a half-ruined wall. It looked like the sort of place where there had once been colored glass windows, but any fragments of glass had vanished decades ago, if not a hundred years or more. She tucked herself into the secure spot where arch met wall and waited for sunrise.

  The curve of the stone was particularly gentle, so the perching place felt secure but not uncomfortable. The stone was still warm after baking in the sun all day. What was left of the architecture was actually quite interesting; this building used techniques that had been lost or abandoned over the years. Which only made sense since fashions in buildings, as in clothing, fell into and out of favor. But there were some things here that you just didn’t see anywhere else, not even in the very oldest parts of the Palace, which predated almost everything. Things like the subtle curve of this arch, for instance, a segment of a circle instead of—

  Suddenly her mind felt as if it had caught fire.

  A segment of a circle, instead of a half-circle!

  Something her teachers swore could not support its own weight, let alone the weight of a building.

  Or a bridge . . .

  Trying not to feel too excited, she reached out with her Gift. After all, this could be a fluke. It might not be a weight-bearing structure. This might be an effect to fool the eye. This might—

  The stress of weight and pressure flowed smoothly over and through the ancient stone beneath her, transferring its weight, and the weight of the stone above it, into the walls on either side, and down in a sure, strong column into the bedrock beneath. An arch of a segment, perhaps no more than a fourth, of a circle. An arch with such a subtle curve she hadn’t noticed it was an arch until just this moment.

  An arch which her teachers swore could not stand. They would have said it was only an ornament, that it was not, could not be, load-bearing, and yet, it was.

  Yet it stood here, strong, after other parts of the building had fallen to pieces.

  Why did no one notice this before?

  Because they weren’t looking for it. You weren’t looking for it until now, and you’ve been all over these stones since you were eight.

  She wanted to wait here until the sun rose and drink in every detail of this construction. She wanted to sit and contemplate it, run to the Fair for drawing materials, sketch and measure every thumb-length of it.

  That’s what she wanted to do. Instead, she very sensibly climbed down, made her way through the sleeping city and up to the Palace. She greeted the Guards at the gate and made her way up to the family suite. It was dark, and silent; Mags, Perry, and Larral were probably still down at the Fair.

  So, still acting sensibly, she went to bed. The arch would still be there when she woke up, and the last thing she wanted to do was to make a mistake in measuring and sketching.

  But sleep was long in coming. And when it did, her dreams were full of the gentle curves of beautiful stone arches.

  * * *

  • • •

  “In this case,” Healer Sanje said to Abi, “It is time to trust your Gift and work backward to the numbers.”

  “But th
at—” Abi began.

  The Healer interrupted her with a single upraised finger. “But that is precisely what you have been trained to do. The Artificers intend for you to use your Gift first, and justify it afterward. Any Artificer can begin with the numbers, and that is why they have all insisted that an arch can only be a full half circle. You have a unique Gift that shows you additional truths; they intend you to use it to find those truths, then justify those truths in a way that other Artificers can understand. And, in fact, your doing so now will be your true Master Work, not the bridge.”

  Sanje had met Abi at Abi’s request in the herb garden. She waited patiently while Abi mulled over what she had just been told.

  “That makes sense,” she said, finally. “But how do I do that? I don’t want to go out there and take that arch apart. For one thing, I’m not sure I can without wrecking it before I can learn anything, and for another, it’s not mine.”

  Sanje shrugged gracefully. “I do not know your Gift as you do, nor the discipline of the Builders, but . . . perhaps start small?”

  “With a model. And test to destruction.” Abi nodded and grinned wryly. “And this is so backward from how I have been taught to work!”

  “Sometimes this is not a bad thing.” Sanje rose. “Good luck Abidela. Not that I think you will need it.”

  * * *

  • • •

  The exact model of the Temple arch held an astonishing amount of weight. Half-circle arches directed all of the weight of the loads they were carrying straight down into the pillars that they rested on, or into the ground; but the segment carried it into the supports at either end, which stood in for the riverbanks. But the exact model of that arch still had too high a rise to be practical for the heavy wains it would have to carry. So once again, Abi worked backward, deciding the maximum rise practical and the maximum angle the wains could manage, then finding the segment that fit that parameter, then building the model and testing the load it would bear.