The Four Forges (46 page)

“Good.” The three of them watched the stout man and his thin, leathery Bolger helper leave, as he carried his songbird with him, and her cheery melody trailed after.

“Makes you wonder why the well was boarded up,” Nutmeg said.

“No telling yet.” Garner steered them both about-face. “Work to do, here and in the shop.”

Two noses wrinkled. “Worse than Da or Mom,” they grumbled as their brother marched them off, Grace wondering just what the well digger had “in his recollections” to find.

 
At the shop, Grace had just finished sweeping out for Adeena who complained constantly about the dust heat-driven winds brought into the city every other day or so, when a small crowd strolled down the lane, pausing at the storefront. The veiled ones stopped to eye her.

“You’re the one,” the tallest said softly. “You’re a seamstress here?” Every word made the thin veil flutter and billow, a prison of the most exotic kind, and she fought not to stare.

Rivergrace dipped a curtsy, trying not to stumble at the unaccustomed maneuver. “I work here, yes. Please come in, miladies.”

They glided in, the glove-soft leather of their shoes making but a whisper as they moved, their finely woven dresses accenting their willowy frames. Rivergrace put her broom aside, embarrassed. “I’ll bring Mistress Lily out for you.” She stopped as a hand caught her sleeve.

“Wait a moment.”

Caught, she halted in place.

“Do you model the gowns? I hear the seamstress is excellent, but a Dweller.”

“I have modeled for her, yes. And she has forms, miladies.”

A second Vaelinar said, in a faintly aggrieved voice, “With the Warrior Queen here this season, there will be more meetings, dances, and events than ever, and nearly every seamstress in the city is booked. I cannot abide an ill-fitting gown, and you—” Rivergrace could plainly see her veiled eyes assess her from head to toe, “look as if you would do.”

Bells chimed a bit impatiently as the other gestured. “What my companion is trying to convey is the press of time, even for the most excellent of tailors and seamstresses.”

“I see.” Rivergrace tried not to stretch her arm uneasily as her sleeve was released. “I think, miladies, that Mistress Lily can put all your fears to ease.”

“Will she work with fabric not her own?”

“She will, and has. Please let me get her.” Rivergrace dipped another curtsy and dashed into the back workroom before being detained again. Lily had gotten to her feet, clearly having heard every word, and stood waiting for her. She said nothing but hugged Grace tightly before going out to greet the potential clients. They talked for long moments before she and Nutmeg could hear melodious laughs, and then promises for business, and Lily returned, her cheeks flushed. “We’ll be busy,” she announced firmly.

Nutmeg let out a cheer, but Rivergrace could only stare after the women with a vague feeling of unrest.

 
The well digger was waiting for them as dusk draped cooling shadows all about Calcort on their way home from the shop. He’d left his assistant and bird at home, and stood as he and Tolby shared a pipe in the yard. The well seemed to draw the moon down inside it, reflecting it back as a soft, wavering eye peering from far below as Grace looked into it when she sat by its edge.

“It’s bad,” Nutmeg blurted out, as she saw the digger.

“Nae, lass, nae. I was just relating it to Master Tolby here. Oddest case of a well closing in all my history, and I wondered how I’d forgotten it, but I had, till I went looking through my records.” The digger waved his pipe at her. “Not a drop of bad water in it, far as I be knowin’. The priestess had us board it up.”

Tolby and Lily had never been much for priests and priestesses, although here in Calcort every few lanes seemed to have a small building with one or two living there. The religion they’d raised all the children in had been one of hard work and love for one another and all things in their keeping. If there had been any shrine at all to the Gods, it had been the orchards themselves. Grace stared mildly at Fancher in vague confusion.

“Seems the guardian of Tylivar had a dream one night that the Goddess came to her and said the well should be closed till she had need of it again.”

“This well?”

“Aye. Tylivar sent a vision of this particular well to th’ priestess.”

Tolby blew out a smoke ring. “And only this one? No others in the city? Any reasoning?”

“Aye, no, and none given. The way of Gods and Goddesses aren’t for the likes of us to know since the Magi let them down, although I hear the veiled lot talks to ’em fine. What Vaelinars and our Gods tolerate in each other, I cannot begin t’say.”

“That means we can’t leave it open?” Grace looked at the well in dismay, hating the thought of boarding it away again, and plotting to keep the boards with gaps, so at least the little living things that depended on it could reach it still.

“Frankly,” said Fancher. “That guardian has passed away long since, and was more than slightly addled when she did go. I doubt anyone around here gives a whoop about your well now. Leave it open. It tastes like sweet water and I’ve found nothing wrong with it. I’m thinkin’ if the Goddess wants it closed again, she’ll be tellin’ you soon enough. Till then.” He shrugged. “Good water is always a blessing.”

A few puffs of smoke wafted between them while Tolby thought, before looking at Rivergrace’s beseeching face, and saying, “I’ll stand on your judgment, then, master, and well met.” Tolby shook his hand, a coin passing between them, and the two walked off across the grounds, as Tolby showed him what he’d done to the ill-managed and all but abandoned place.

Nutmeg waited till they were out of earshot. “Think we dare?”

“It hasn’t poisoned me. I’ve been dabbling in it for a few weeks now.”

“But, Grace, you’re—” Her sister stopped in mid-sentence, her face stricken, and she looked as if she’d just bit her tongue.

Rivergrace glanced at her before supplying the word. “Different?”

“I can’t help it. You are.”

“I know,” she said miserably. “More than ever, I know.”

Nutmeg plopped down on the ground beside her. She knocked a pebble into the well, and a
click-click-splash
followed. “I hate the idea of you being veiled all the time.”

“But you wanted to make the veils.”

“That’s afore I found out everyone wears ’em or they get hated for not wearing them.” Nutmeg leaned her head on Rivergrace’s shoulder.

“It’s not so bad. And, look, we had those ladies come in tonight, just because they heard I worked with Lily.”

“Because they’re different, too.”

But, they weren’t different in the way she was, Rivergrace thought. They had been full-blooded Vaelinars, with court and House connections, taller and more graceful than she could ever hope to be, with stunning eyes that spoke of the magic they carried within them. She wasn’t one of them any more than she was a Dweller. “You think so?”

“I think,” Nutmeg said confidently, “you’re my sister, I found you, and no one is ever going to take that away from us.”

That made her smile. They leaned on each other for a long while, sitting by the edge of the well and watching the moon and stars drift across its still waters while the heat of the day slowly faded away.

EARLY DAWN BRIGHTENED the sky with red, fiery streaks.
Red sky in the morning, sailor and farmer take warning,
he thought. Abayan Diort reined to a halt, standing in his stirrups, and raised his hand in a gesture for the troops to wait. Burning torches dotted the stone walls of the city before them, a fortress of rigid determination and solitude, a city where his entreaties had been turned aside again and again. The time for talk was over. He looked at the stone. Built centuries ago and well kept, he considered the death toll to get through it. By sheer numbers, they would eventually overwhelm. Warfare, Galdarkan against Galdarkan, was not what he wished, but they had given him little choice by not allying with him when he’d brought the offer.

The war hammer hung from his baldric, its weight on his hip. A yearning called from it to him, to be swung in his hands, to be freed, a call that, however faint, never left him, and one that he’d never yielded to before. Abayan swung down from his mount, approached the flat plain before the stone walls, and looked up. The wall had a stone foot to it, under the dirt, a foundation laid down by old roads and workings. Overhead, he could see archers readying their bows. He put his hand on the hammer and drew it. They waited, unsure of loosing their arrows, for he stood barely within their range and was no threat to them yet, not with a hammer, a melee weapon. They had anticipated a siege, and had not worried, for they’d stores and water aplenty behind their heavy walls. His entreaty of alliance they sneered at, and had for years, and the new one yesterday was nothing new to them. Abayan clenched his teeth. He’d come to the end of his vaunted patience.

The hammer hummed in his grip. If he listened, he might even hear a guttural snatch or two in its deep whisper as he tightened his fingers about it and found a comfortable hold. God-ridden, they’d said. No, it was a Demon and he feared he already knew Its name.

“At my command,” he told his lieutenant. His aide nodded, cold eyes watching him.

Abayan spread his feet slightly, standing firmly on the rock base of the valley. He would put fear in their eyes and hearts, fear of what he would do to their bodies with his weapon, fear of the pounding hit of the massive hammer. In one fluid strike, he hefted the hammer over his head and then pounded its head on the ground in front of him to wake its power.
Rakka.
It hit with the ringing of stone on stone, belling deeply, tolling out its strength. He felt the ground tremble under him in answer, and the trembling grew to a shaking that rocked him back on his heels as the very earth roared to its foundations and back again. The ground began to split apart under the hammer’s head. He stared down at it, watching the stone open, a crack that ran toward the city, widening, fracturing off, a spidery crack that grew broader and blacker in the blink of an eye. It hit the city walls, and there was a moment of nothingness.

Pressure beat against his ears, a sound he felt rather than heard. Then, with an echoing
rakka,
a harsh grunting, the stone of the walls began to fracture. A slow trickle of dust and gravel started it, and then the avalanche began as the walls came tumbling down, a roar of dirt and pebbles following it, and the city’s defense collapsed, one stone after another answering the call of the war hammer in a hail of debris. Screams pierced the morning air, screams of surprise and agony, and wails of dismay. Rock rained upon the dead and dying as they slipped from walls caving away underfoot, and were buried under the debris—archers, defenders, and onlookers. Screams continued as dust plumed upward like smoke, and the very foundations of the city shifted.

He lifted the hammer from the ground and gave his signal to move in.

Infantry poured from the gaps now, staggering uncertainly, their war cries stuck in their throats, yet waving their weapons with weak energy as they charged his troops. Chasms in the ground slowed both sides as they wound their way through the destruction to meet each other.

The weapon growled low at him to be struck again, and he answered it, with stone to flesh, blooding it as the enemy ran shrieking away from him. Metal bit into flesh, hammered it, mauled and pulped it, and he waded through, swinging the war hammer from right to left and back again like a scythe through wheat. No one stood before him.

He took the city in less than a candlemark, its resistance shattered by the fall of its walls. The hammer fought him as he stowed it away, its hum a guttural threat in his ears. The weaponsmith who had made it had no idea what being he’d instilled within it, but Abayan knew. This was the Demon-God Mmenonrakka, the earthshaker. He had suspected it before and now knew it as deep in his bones as the earthshaker had struck into the rock and stone. He would have to consider carefully where he would loose it again.

Abayan Diort rode through the destruction of the city. Not a stone in the wall remained where it had been placed and mortared, and behind those sundered structures, other walls showed cracks and sliding. Chimneys had fallen to the streets. The very bedrock of the city gaped open, ranging from a dark abyss which opened the town like a broken eggshell to spidery fractures cobwebbing the outskirts. The people crept out from the rubble and pressed their foreheads to the ground in abject terror as he rode by. His people, and he had crushed their defenses to bring them to him. All the words he’d spoken throughout his years had not done it. A single strike of the war hammer had.

He had never seen anything like it, nor had anyone else living.

Bright sunlight slanted through the window shutter and woke Rivergrace early. Nutmeg lay at peace, still, one arm flung out, a smile curving her mouth, her rosy cheeks a little pale with slumber. Grace slid out of bed and dressed quietly, then went outside to do a batch or two of laundry and catch the fresh morning air that drifted in over the hilly countryside to the north, before the smells of the city to the south began to overcome it. These early morning hours were hers, no one else about, and she could watch the sky awaken, although today the streaks of sunrise had already faded. Keldan and Hosmer had built a new cap and bucket pulley for the well, and she cranked up buckets of water for her tubs. Barefoot, the water splashed about her as she drew it and filled the tubs, taking care as she began to scrub and beat the clothes. She sang as she washed, the song that ran through her mind at such times, wondering if there were words to her tune, and not caring if there were or not, because the expression lay in the singing. The sun dried her almost as soon as she grew damp as the water carried away the soil and stains from the clothing, and she took pride in leaving the water almost as clean as it had been drawn from the well. She poured her tubs out near the gardens after fastening the garments out on her lines to dry and snap in the morning breeze only to find herself being watched. She dropped in an immediate curtsy.