Labors
By mid-morning the day after the vigil, Allystaire stood in a rough line of about a dozen people, half villagers, half Ravens, and all of them digging.
Most of the villagers had shovels, but the Iron Ravens had a supply of good Oyrwyn mattocks among their equipment, and Allystaire had been given the use of one. His body had hummed with energy for turns after the sun had risen that morning, after the vigil—but a few minutes of swinging the mattock had dulled his senses and begun to set a good ache into his shoulders. His armor lay in a heap several yards away and, as he worked in his sweat-stained gambeson, quickly growing too warm, he knew his energy was fading.
The mattock, a part of him noted, was rather sharper than it needed to be in order to effectively cut into the earth, a point that was driven home when he nearly swung it into his calf.
The line of laborers was situated at the western end of the village, just before the road led into the closer farmhouses, and the earth they were digging up was the very first step in a plan that Allystaire had roughly hashed out that morning with Captain Ivar, and a brief consultation from Torvul. The dwarf had grunted a few comments before declaring himself too tired to do any useful thinking and retiring to his wagon.
The warband and the villagers seemed to be at some kind of unofficial competition to see who could throw the most earth the fastest, and the pile of dirt was growing quickly. Still need to sit down and talk with the warband, Allystaire thought, as he rested his mattock a moment. And with Keegan and his lot. And Renard. His throat began to grow dry and the thought of all the talking he had in front of him.
A cleared throat from Gern saved him from another near mutilation of his leg with the razor sharp adze edge of the mattock. “Couple o’visitors, m’lord,” he mumbled, and the men all seemed grateful for the opportunity to take a break.
“Ah, posing manfully at the idiot end of a shovel or some other tool of ignorance. A noble posture I know all too well. It bespeaks a day of grueling but honest labor. All things I strive to avoid,” Torvul said, as he and Gideon approached from the village. Both were carrying an odd assortment of equipment. The boy had long coils of thin rope wrapped around him, a small round-headed mallet in one hand, and a few wooden stakes in the other. The dwarf carried a large wicker basket.
“What exactly are you two after doing, besides taunting me with how well-rested you look?” Allystaire asked.
“Call it a proof of concept,” the dwarf said. “The girl tells us we’ll have the right kind of clouds in a few days, and I mean to be sure we can put the necessary tinctures and concoctions in ‘em when they arrive.” He walked a few paces beyond the piles of dirt, and scanned the line of workers. “You know, we could hire a dwarf mason who knows the proper way to build walls.”
“We have not the weight nor the stone,” Allystaire replied. “Earthworks and a wooden palisade will have to do.”
“Walls don’t do much good for the people in outlying farms,” Gideon said suddenly. Allystaire suppressed a wince, and he saw that the villagers and the Ravens alike were turning sour faces at the boy.
“You have a point, Gideon, and you have identified a problem in our defense,” Allystaire said, carefully. “By dinner, I want you to have three proposals for me on how to solve it.”
The boy bit his bottom lip. “I have two already—”
“Dinner, Gideon,” Allystaire said. “One fantastical scheme at a time.”
The men milled around. Allystaire gave a discreet nod to Gern, and the gap-toothed man slapped a hand against his thigh. “Right. That’s a break n’ we’ll all be well after it again in a quarter turn. Piss or sleep or go behind a tree t’tug your c—”
Allystaire cleared his throat and Gern stopped. “Sorry m’lord. Old habits n’that.”
While they spoke, Torvul was unlimbering his basket, removing what looked like inflated paper bladders, and then a host of smaller, finer tools.
“With the stakes and the rope, boy, if y’please,” Torvul said, and Gideon hurried over to his side, awkwardly unlimbering the ropes coiled around his thin shoulders with hammer and stakes still in his hands. Allystaire meandered over. He saw, when he got closer, that they were not inflated bladders, but rather incredibly fine, thin paper stretched over an internal frame.
“What in the Cold are those?”
“Risers,” the dwarf said. “I’ll fill ‘em with the right vapors, coax those vapors to a controlled combustion, and the whole business’sll float straight up. Old dwarfish toy. Plenty of real application for it, though.”
“Such as?”
The dwarf looked up at him from underneath hairless brows. “Well, pretty lights in the sky, mostly. I s’spose they can be used fer signals in an army n’such.”
“See, that’s a solution right there,” Gideon said brightly.
“No, boy, it isn’t, because I’ve not got an endless supply, and I’m not handin’ over the necessary reagents to make ‘em fly to anyone without a solid score of years training in the alchemical arts. Dangerous otherwise,” the dwarf said, as he began producing vials, and a glass ball about the size of his fist with a waxed cork seal stuck into an opening at the top.
Torvul pulled the cork free, and Allystaire peered into the glass sphere as the dwarf quickly unstoppered two vials and poured them into the glass. He jammed the waxed cork back in, carefully levering his thumb against it to apply the pressure to push it in as far as he could without damaging the glass sphere.
Immediately the two liquids he’d poured in began to foam, then bubble, then suddenly it appeared as though the dwarf was holding a glass ball full of a steaming vapor, rather than liquids. He grinned, lifted his eyes up towards the bright, clear sky, and said, “Thank you, Your Ladyship.” He produced a thin glass stem and prepared, it seemed, to slip it through a hole his finger covered on the cork.
“The stakes and ropes any moment now, boy. This’sll hold for a while, but not all day,” he said.
Gideon had been just as entranced as Allystaire in watching the alchemical process Torvul produced. The boy suddenly scrambled for a stake and hammer. He held the hammer far down at the bottom of the handle and began to raise his hand above his head, holding the stake with his hand flat against the ground. Allystaire cleared his throat and Gideon stopped, turning back to him.
“Hang on a moment, Gideon,” he said, then walked to the boy’s side and knelt next to him. “Two suggestions for you: first, hold the bottom of a hammer if you want power, closer to the top if you want precision. I think you probably want the latter, aye?”
Gideon nodded, and adjusted his grip up the mallet’s handle, resettling his long, thin fingers around it carefully.
“Second,” Allystaire said, “bring your hand up closer to the top of the stake. Trust me.”
The boy knitted his brows. “Why?”
“If you miss your strike and hit your hand when it is close to the top of your target, it may hurt a bit. If you miss and hit your hand while it is hard to the ground, or a piece of wood or stone…”
The boy’s lips parted slightly and his brows lifted in understanding. “You’ll crush it. I see.”
Then, deftly, and carefully, with a few quick strikes, the boy had driven one stake far enough into the ground to satisfy Torvul and Allystaire both, the dwarf nodded to one of the coils of rope.
Adroitly, and without any assistance necessary, Gideon looped a quick, self-tightening hitch around the stake, and played out the rope till it reached Torvul. The dwarf, with thin glass stem and vapor-filled sphere in his hands, cleared his throat and looked to Allystaire.
“Would you mind?”
Allystaire chuckled, and reached for the rope, which was thin, pliant, and smooth. “I am no sailor, Torvul. You will want to check the knots.” He saw then that each of the risers had a thin metal ring protruding from an open bottom, as the dwarf had laid them delicately on their sides. Allystaire threaded the end through the ring, then made a loop in the rope and pulled the end taut.
The dwarf snorted. “It’ll do for now. Don’t you know any proper knots?”
“One,” Allystaire said, as he tugged with two fingers at the muddle he’d made of the rope.
“Well, then use it!”
“I do not think you want a noose.”
Torvul snorted, but the way his eyes turned sideways to Allystaire he seemed uncertain whether to take it as a joke or not.
Then, as Gideon hammered a second stake into the ground and again made the rope fast to it, Torvul plunged his thin stem of glass through a paper seal around the hole in the center of a cork, plugging the end of the stem with one finger. Next, he lifted it clear, placing the thumb of the hand holding the sphere over the cork, and quickly slipped the end of the stem—now filled with the blue, smoky vapor—into the bottom end of one of the risers, and removed his finger.
The thin paper creaked around its framework, shifted, and suddenly lifted perhaps a foot off the ground. Torvul cackled delightedly. “Well, it’s a start.”
“If you knew you could get them off the ground, why the test?”
“I’ve got to know I can get them off the ground when they’re heavier than normal, and I’ve added some weight to the framework by fastening a few scraps of wood and iron in place. Hold the rope so that it doesn’t fly off on me yet, eh?”
Allystaire grabbed a handful of rope, as the dwarf carefully piped another stemfull of vapor into the riser. Allystaire felt it tug. Torvul said, “Two more ought to do it.”
“Why must they be heavier?” Allystaire asked.
“When I put ‘em up for the girl’s clouds in a few days, I’ll need to have a mixture in ‘em,” the dwarf said. “Something to make sure the clouds are drawn to us instead of pushed away, and a little something to tickle their thighs open, as it were.”
“I see,” Allystaire said, though he wasn’t entirely sure that he did. Still, as Torvul piped more vapor into the riser, it suddenly tugged free of his grip and shot straight up, playing out the rope till it was nearly taut.
“Are we going to need more rope,” Allystaire asked, his voice smooth and flat. “To get them up into the clouds?”
Torvul fixed Allystaire with a flat, blank stare. “You can’t be serious. The clouds are thousands of spans above us, we’ve…”
The tiniest curl of a grin tugged at the left corner of Allystaire’s mouth, and Torvul harumphed. “Even you couldn’t be that daft. Anyway—we’ll keep ‘em tied up till the clouds arrive, then cut loose and wish them well.”
“Will it work?”
The alchemist narrowed his eyes threateningly. “Of course it’ll work.”
“How do we know that the clouds will even get here?”
“Mol says she knows when the Dragon’s priests are fiddling with the weather. She can feel it.” He extended one finger towards Gideon. “And our young man here says he can stop whatever they try to do once she lets him know.”
“Are you ready for that?” Allystaire turned his attention to the boy, who was making the second rope fast.
“It doesn’t matter if I am or not,” the boy replied. “It needs to be done.”
“Well,” Allystaire said, carefully, drawing the syllable out a bit. “It does not necessarily need to be done now. I have felt the weight of Braech’s will, through the Choiron Symod. It is a powerful and oppressive thing.”
“There’s no way to prepare for it or test it,” the boy replied. “Either I will be ready or I won’t. If I’m not, testing my Will against his—assuming for the moment that he is directing this effort, which we don’t know—will help me learn what I must strive against.”
“I cannot argue with the logic,” Allystaire replied, though he thought, if only briefly, that there was something else to be done. “When the time comes, do not risk yourself. If it is too much…”
The boy frowned and stared hard at Allystaire. “Would you give Idgen Marte the same advice? Or Torvul? Would you not risk yourself?”
Allystaire sighed and rubbed his brow with finger and thumb, lowering his eyes. “No, Gideon. I would not, and you are right.” Goddess, but I wish he were not, he thought.
“If you’ll risk yourself, you must be willing to let the rest of us do the same,” the boy said, more quietly.
Meanwhile, Torvul had gotten the second riser off the ground and both now floated, lightly buffeted by the wind, at the end of their ropes. Some of the resting work crew gawked and pointed at the flying paper spheres.
“Very true, Gideon.” Then an idea came to him, and he found himself trying not to grin. “Indeed, all of us, as the Mother’s Ordained, must be willing to share our tasks and trials with each other.”
Torvul, admiring his devices, suddenly glared at Allystaire. “I don’t like the sound—”
Allystaire cleared his throat, and, cutting the dwarf off, yelled, “Gern! Two more shovels, if you would, and let us get back to it.”
The villagers and mercenaries shoved themselves back to their feet and gathered up tools. Torvul began packing up his instruments, murmuring in Dwarfish as he did. Two more shovels were produced from a stack of tools. Allystaire took them by the shafts and held them out, handle first, to both the dwarf and the boy. Gideon took his without a word. Torvul glared at Allystaire for a moment, then set his basket and case of tools down and snatched it away.
Smiling brightly at Torvul in return, Allystaire took up his own mattock and set back to work.
Gideon, meanwhile, had extended the shovel as far as his arms would reach and ineffectually dug the head at the turf, barely cracking it. Taking care not to sigh, and keeping exasperation from his voice, Allystaire moved to his side.
“Once again, lad, let me give some advice. You are going to want to let the tool do the work—”