Dawn of Wonder (The Wakening Book 1) (36 page)

“Need to make a natural tillering stick,” he
mumbled to Wildemar, and stepped through the wall of onlookers to a pile of
timber where he rummaged around and withdrew a stout, forked branch. He brought
it back and nailed it vertically into his workbench, then used the knife and
rock to chip half-a-dozen grooves across the branch, starting about six inches
below the fork and going down about two and half feet. Wildemar, after
conferring with Torval, explained to the class that the bowyer had set up the
branch to mimic a standing sapling or a stick wedged into the ground.

Torval placed the bow’s handle in the fork, pulled
the string down a few times, and hooked it into the first groove.

Aedan cringed with horror.

The curvature of the bow was so uneven that the
whole thing was lopsided. It looked ridiculous. He heard sniggers from behind.
Words drifted out – pathetic, crooked, can’t shoot that, not a real bow …

Using a piece of charcoal, Torval marked the rigid
sections of both limbs, took the bow down and began thinning the belly in those
areas with his same branch-and-handle drawknife. The next time he set the bow
on the tillering stick it looked much better. Aedan released his breath.

After several stages of this, the bow was bending evenly
and smoothly, but the wood itself was far from smooth. With a rough sandstone
rock, he began to file the jagged sections until there were no protruding splinters.

He motioned to Wildemar who leaned in, and after a
few hushed words, the master relayed the information.

“Better results if you make a paste of
blackberries or some other dye. White wood can be conspicuous for hunting. Fur
twisted into the string will help silence it too, reduce the chance of your quarry
flinching before the arrow covers the distance.”

Aedan wished they would spend less time on these
useful tips and just get on with it. The afternoon rays were slanting ominously
when Torval started on the arrow, beginning with a slightly bent stick which he
straightened over the fire. He bound a sharp stone to the tip and glued it in
place using heated pine resin mixed with a little charcoal dust. Wildemar mentioned
a few other simple glues that could be made from various saps or pounded from bulbs.

Torval sliced a nock in the back end of the arrow
and faint grooves a little forward. Into these grooves he fixed three trimmed
feathers using more pine resin and a fine thread from the original string
fibres. It was surprising just how neat and precise the great sausage fingers
could be.

His face was intent as he mumbled again, pointing
and motioning with his hands. Wildemar turned and explained that the feathers
selected were from the same side of the bird, producing arrow rotation.

Aedan blew out his breath noisily and stamped.
This time-wasting obsession with trifling details was pushing him, and all
those who had betted with him, to exasperation. They glanced constantly out the
window. The sun appeared to have lost its grip in the sky and begun plummeting
to earth. Aedan had never seen it drop this fast.

“Wait till you make your own arrows,” Wildemar
said with a feral grin. “Bet or no bet, shoddy fletching – you may as well
forget the bow and throw a stick.”

By this stage there was not a craftsman to be
found at his bench. The entire workshop had gathered around, those at the back
standing on chairs. The atmosphere was like the boiling hubbub preceding a
fight or race. It seemed everyone was in on the wager.

Torval was squinting and fiddling with some little
thread behind the feathers. He frowned, obviously dissatisfied. Then he pulled
the thread off, tossed it away and began afresh with another. Aedan dropped his
head in his hands. There were several exclamations of dismay, not all of them
from the boys.

The crimson sun fell lower and lower. They could
actually see it move as it began to fall behind the roofs outside, but Torval
was lost in his world, apparently unaware of any need for haste as he carefully
rewound the thread.

Then he tied it off, nodded, and placed the arrow
on the bench.

Aedan looked up with a start. It was done! The
last gleam of red was fading from the wall.

He turned to Malik and pushed out his chin.

“That was the easy part, you fool,” Malik said
with a tone that was almost sympathetic. “It has to shoot. It breaks, you
lose.”

All talk was shushed as the bowyer looked up at
Peashot and nodded. Peashot stepped forward, taking the bow.

The bowyer’s attention was complete, his eyes
young and eager. Aedan dreaded another snap, dreaded what it would do to the big
man. He dreaded it even more than the difficulty he himself would face.

Malik and Cayde moved to the front. They would
want to see if anything cracked or failed.

Aedan was breathing fast. Hope and fear wrestled
in him as Peashot walked to his position and the arc of spectators gathered
around. Aedan was near the front, and he saw with alarm that there was a slight
hairline crack in the handle. Wildemar had said that forced drying could have
that result. All he could do was hope.

Everyone held their breaths as Peashot lined up.
He placed his feet, rested the arrow in the shelf, nocked it, and gripped the
string. He took a deep breath, raised the bow, drew back, leaned into the
handle … and hesitated.

Aedan wanted to scream for him to release. The wood
creaked under the strain as the little boy steadied his aim. Every eye was
wide, every mouth open.

Peashot’s arm grew still. Then a noise split the
breathless tension in the room as he released the string and it snapped away
from his fingers.

The arrow hissed through the air, flew straight,
and thudded into the target.

The room erupted in wild shouts and cheers. Torval
smiled a shy smile while his fellow craftsmen gathered around, clasped his arm
and thumped him on the back. Coins began to slide from hands and clinked into
others.

Torval refused to accept the bow when Peashot
tried to hand it over. “It was made for you,” he said, handing it back along
with the borrowed knife.

The small boy’s confusion was all too obvious as
he stuttered, “But – I – but …”

Aedan knew what the trouble was, understood the torment.
He watched. When the attention shifted elsewhere, Peashot sidled around the
back of Torval’s workbench. With a movement so slight, so well covered as to be
almost invisible, he slipped a fletching clamp from his pocket and placed it where
it had been before the lunch break.

Aedan chuckled.

Peashot caught the look and scowled in return.

Before leaving, Wildemar thanked Torval for
sharing his remarkable knowledge with the apprentices. The old bowyer studied
his shoes, grimaced through the speech directed at him, and merely nodded when
it was done.

“Wish we could have given him more than that,” Aedan
said to Peashot as Wildemar finished off and led the way out. They looked back
and watched Torval cleaning his bench and replacing his tools with infinite
care. The other craftsmen had left the building and he was alone again.

Peashot stopped, and then ran back inside. He drew
up in front of the workbench where he placed his knife and sheath, nodded to
the bowyer, and returned to the departing group.

The last sight they had was of the silent man
smiling as he held the little knife in front of him. Words of appreciation were
not close to his heart, but this was something he did understand.

–––

Malik paid all his debts but one. He and Cayde insisted
that Aedan had pulled out of the wager. Of course the boot-lickers had
witnessed it too.

Hadley was even angrier than Aedan. If it had not
been for Dun’s looming presence, there would have been a fight to rattle the
walls and make the previous one look like a polite discussion. Peashot let his
tongue loose within Matron Rosalie’s field of surveillance and found himself on
kitchen duty that evening. That same evening, Malik found himself eating a
decomposed toad buried in his stew. Peashot was given a whipping from Dun and
hero’s welcome from the dorm.

Over the next five days, the boys worked with the
assistance of several bowyers to imitate the demonstration they had been given,
first with tools, and then with only their knives. They came to a full
appreciation of Torval’s skill and discovered just how many ways there were to
ruin and break a sturdy piece of wood.

After they had each produced something resembling
a bow, Wildemar set them loose in the forests. Not everyone had paid attention
to the wood-selection process. As a result, some fine-looking bows were
produced using soft, un-springy woods, from which eager arrows dribbled only a
little further than a boy could spit.

Some tried to bypass the drying and tillering
processes, scoffing at the talk of hand-shock. Aedan was one such. His first
bow was made of such a thin branch that it would have endangered nothing more
than a mouse at close range, so for his next attempt he used a much thicker
branch. The first shot almost gave him concussion. The bow, still heavy with
sap, delivered bone-rattling jolts, contributing nothing to accuracy and much
to headaches. Annoyed, he tracked Kian down in a woody valley and got some help
starting over.

Most of the early results were less than spectacular,
but enough, perhaps, to maim very small, short-sighted and deaf antelope from a
few paces downwind – ideally, not much wind. But over the weeks, the bows
improved, and some, like Kian’s and Peashot’s, were weapons to be respected.

Wildemar revised the string-making technique that Torval
had demonstrated, and introduced them to other natural fibres like flax and
nettles. He then went onto rawhide and gut strings which required less labour
but more drying time. Sinew strings were the most difficult to make. Tendons
had to be dried and pounded until they separated into fibres which would be
twisted together. One of the useful advantages with sinew was the way it could
be soaked into strands that dried with their own natural glue.

The different kinds of strings – which could be
combined to form rope – were useful for more than bows, so the apprentices
spent several classes learning the techniques.

As the range and power of survival bows did not
always stand up to larger prey, Wildemar demonstrated how to make many poisons
– poisons which were sometimes used in war. He led the boys through the riverbeds,
plains and forests where he ferreted about, saying nothing and noticing
everything until he had found what he was after. He started with a large tree
known as the quarter-mile tree – anything poisoned with its sap would collapse
within a quarter mile – to the larvae of a spotty beetle that looked much like
a toadstool on legs. When extracting and applying the poisons, Wildemar was
very clear about never letting them onto the tips or edges of the arrow, for
fear of the hunter scratching himself.

“Very dangerous. Very very dangerous,” he
chattered. “No antidote for any of these poisons except for the hermit rose.
Some of them are slow though. Can take five days to drop your prey. The beetle larvae
is the slowest, so only use it if you can’t find anything else. It will give
you many days hard tracking before you catch your meal.”

“Won’t the meat be poisoning of you?” Kian asked.

“No, no, not from eating. These poisons don’t kill
when swallowed. All the same, cut out the area where the arrow struck. Burn the
meat. Might have broken skin on your lips or in your mouth. Not worth the
chance. Dead marshals are no good.”

After two months of this, Dun, with Wildemar fidgeting
nearby, gathered the boys and banished them from the city for a week, allowing
them no equipment but their knives. They had to prepare sensible, concealed
shelters, make weapons, hunt, and feed themselves. Wildemar would find them and
assess the survival skills. Dun would meet them on their return and assess the
weapons.

Some of the boys grumbled and looked like they
were about to protest.

Dun told them that the following year they would
not be allowed knives, and that the next person who muttered would not be
allowed clothes.

Aedan took to the hills like a gazelle set loose.
He had a rough idea of where the others might go, and chose a different
direction, setting a course where even Wildemar would struggle to find him. He
laid a false trail up a dry rocky riverbed and then doubled back through a
section of dense woodland, climbing from tree to tree. When he finally dropped
to the ground there wasn’t a footprint within half a mile. He scouted a little further
and found an overhang that could be inconspicuously protected by bending and
not breaking a branch from a nearby tree, so the leaves would not dry out and
draw attention.

The plan worked better than he had expected. He
placed a few snares with string twisted from nettles, and after eight or nine
days he began to feel bloated with rabbit and quite lonely. Eventually he
abandoned the exercise and wandered back to the city where Wildemar was only
too happy to see him alive and gave him full marks for survival skills. It was
a good thing because Dun drove a splinter deep into his hand while examining Aedan’s
crooked bow, a rough specimen that had been heated and bent so many times it
looked like an overdone steak. Shot like one too.

It was disappointing. Aedan had held such bright
hopes for the bow, cutting it from an oak branch swaying high in the air, and
almost falling to his death in the process.

Dun frowned. “Did you manage to kill anything with
this?” he asked.

“Almost,” said Aedan, grinning slightly.

“There’s a room we need to explore.”

Spoons lowered and five sets of eyes looked across
at Aedan – the usual four and Kian’s.

Over the past few weeks Aedan had been feeling as
he had so often done back in the north, that it was time for his friends to
share an adventure. He was still convinced that adventures were the only real
forges of true friendship.

“What is it? Where is it?” asked Hadley.

“Will it get us in trouble?” Lorrimer whispered.

“It’s down a corridor I discovered last night.
There’s another level under the training hall. The stairways are always locked
but there’s a collapsed section of the floor that hasn’t been repaired and you
can climb down –”

“Don’t you sleep at night?” Vayle interrupted.

“Sometimes I get the adventuring fidgets at night,
and it’s been too hot to sleep lately. It’s nice and cool down below. Anyway,
as I was saying, there’s this huge black door made of some kind of metal that
looks so heavy I would have to use all my weight to open it a crack. Whatever
is in there is going to be worth seeing. And, yes, of course it will get us in
trouble – if we are stupid enough to get caught. Wouldn’t be worth exploring
otherwise.”

“I’m out,” said Lorrimer.

“In,” said Hadley and Peashot.

Vayle and Kian looked at each other, unsure.

“How will we get in?” Vayle asked.

“Well, I know the door has to be opened sometimes ’cos
I saw the scrape grooves on the floor had bits of grindings in them. Maybe they
use it during the day when we are busy. But I know the cleaners work at night.
They never lock themselves into a room when they are busy. If we can find the
night when they are there I’m sure we’ll be able to get a good look. Just need
to keep quiet. They don’t notice things very well.”

“If they let cleaners in there, it can’t be that
much of a secret.”

“The cleaners I’ve seen on the lower sections are
different. I think they are more like curators or inspectors – don’t know if
they actually do any cleaning. I’m sure they know the biggest secrets out of
everyone.”

“If you are sure that it’s open, I’ll go,” said
Vayle, “but I’m not dragging myself all the way and risking a misbehaviour
charge for a locked door.”

“Fine. I’ll check it tomorrow,” said Aedan.

The following night they were all waiting up for
him when he returned to the room.

“Locked,” he said, throwing down a coil of rope
and falling into bed.

The same thing happened the next night, and the
next. Eventually the others stopped waiting up, which made the shock all the
more when Aedan burst into the room, puffing.

“It’s open!” he called through the darkness in a
hoarse whisper, “and it doesn’t look like there’s anyone there!”

There were a series of yawns and confused
questions from various points, and then some very strange words from a sleep-talking
Lorrimer who began to spill a few dreaming thoughts over the edge of his
slumber – something about third helpings of byoodifil schoew.

“Do you think we should wake him?” Peashot asked.

“He’ll say no,” Vayle reminded them.

“Better than having him complain that we left him
out,” said Aedan, shaking Lorrimer from his gourmet dreams and getting ready to
deliver a customised version of his usual pre-adventure speech.

“Wha – were – haa – who?”

“Lorrimer. Wake up. The secret room’s open. We’re
going. Vayle is off to fetch Kian. If you don’t come you’ll spend the rest of
your life regretting it and wondering about what you might have found, and it will
drive you crazy and make you wish you hadn’t been such a coward, and all the
girls who hear that you –”

“Alright! Alright! Just let me find my boots.”

In the display room they didn’t bother with the ramp or
attempt the slippery statue Aedan had used earlier; instead they hoisted Lorrimer
up on their shoulders and then climbed a short rope he lowered for them. After
the hours they had spent in the training hall, this was a simple feat.

Aedan made sure everyone was properly awake before
proceeding down the treacherous stairs. They all carried their dark lanterns
unlit, except for Aedan who kept his trimmed low, so the group moved in
near-blackness and in silence disrupted only by the brushing of cloth and the
slapping of Lorrimer’s big feet.

“Can’t you put those things down more softly?”
Peashot whispered.

“What things?” Clack, clack, clack …

“Your boots. You sound like you’ve got hammers
strapped to your ankles. Why didn’t you come barefoot? Aedan’s barefoot.”

“Aedan’s mad. Have you tried –”

“Hush you two,” said Aedan. “I think I see …”

The light peeping from under an entrance ahead
suddenly burst out and flooded a section of the passage as the door swung open.
Aedan snapped the shutter closed on his lantern and crouched against the wall
as the others dropped down behind him.

Two cleaners with mops and buckets stepped into
the passage. Aedan prepared to run as he watched their movements. While one of
the men held the lamp, the other struggled with a key in the lock, dividing his
concentration between what he was doing and saying.

“But like I says, Mik, them folks what lives out
east is going to have a rough time if it’s true. We got our walls and our army.
What they got? Bunch o’ wooden fences and hay forks. I’m telling you like I’ve
told you before, you get her a nice job here in the city and she can stay with
my sister until you’ve got enough to get married. Don’t you be leaving her out
there with these whispers of a Fenn invasion. You won’t be able to turn the
days back if it happens.”

In the silence that followed, the lock in the door
finally yielded with a rusty scrape and a click. The second cleaner handed over
the broom he’d been holding, and to Aedan’s relief, the men turned away and
headed further down the passage while the conversation resumed.

“She already moved last year from Eymnoer. Slavers
pretending to be merchants from Tullenroe hit the town, she says. Hit it bad. Now
she says the further east, the better …”

By this stage the talk was all echoes, too
indistinct to follow. The cleaners unlocked another door in the distance,
stepped inside and closed it behind them, dropping the passage into blackness. Aedan
opened his lamp and moved off, the others following.

Clack, clack, clack …

They hurried along, passing the door to the
weapons and training halls, and continued until they reached a split.

“I’ve never been here,” said Peashot.

The others echoed him and wanted to know how far the
passages went.

“This is only the beginning,” said Aedan. “I think
there’s more under the ground of the academy than above it.”

He took the left turn. After fifty yards they
reached another split and turned left again. Even in the dim light it was clear
that this passage was different, older. The pale stone that had lined the walls
had given way to coarse-grained reddish blocks that were roughly placed. The
smooth flagstones were gone and they walked now on uneven blocks that had deep
and sometimes wide fissures between them. It wasn’t long before Lorrimer caught
his toe and swooped to ground with a crunch of his lantern. It was a good thing
it wasn’t lit because oil gushed out over the blocks and soaked most of his
shirt.

“Haven’t you learned to lift your feet over uneven
ground?” Peashot complained while helping Lorrimer up.

“I was keeping them low to be stealthy, so you
would stop yakking about the noise.”

“It didn’t work.”

“Quiet,” Aedan hissed. “There are night staff in
this section too.”

They moved on. The air was colder here, the walls
closer, and there was a forgotten smell of earth and damp and darkness. A few
doors were set in the walls, deeply recessed. The wood was black with age, as
if all colour had been leached from it during the long, silent years.

Hadley whistled quietly. “It’s enormous down here.
We must be near the edge of the academy by now.”

“I don’t think we’re under the academy anymore,”
said Aedan. “I have a hunch some of these passages might lead as far as the
city walls, maybe even beyond.”

He stopped at a doorway on his right that turned
out to be a very narrow corridor.

“Better light your lanterns now,” he said.

Using a splint, they transferred his flame to the
other wicks. When all but Lorrimer had a lantern, Aedan handed the tall boy his,
then moved into the dark opening, asking Lorrimer to hold the light up behind
him.

“Careful here,” he whispered. “Watch the ground. It’s
collapsed in places. Keep your feet to the outside.”

“Is he mad?” Vayle asked as Aedan scuttled away
down the shaft.

“Took you a while to notice,” Lorrimer mumbled.

Aedan stopped a few feet before an iron grille
that barred the way.

“Well?” Hadley asked when he came to a stop.

Aedan leaned to the side so Hadley could see, and
pointed ahead at the floor, or rather, he pointed to where the floor should
have been. A black void swallowed the ground. There was nothing to step on. No
way to proceed.

“But we can’t –”

Aedan had braced his back against one wall and his
feet against the other and started edging his way down through the hole into
the darkness beneath. Hadley leaned forward as far as he dared and held out his
lamp. It was twenty feet down to another tiny passage, only that the lower one
had a floor. He made no comment, simply copied Aedan. Lorrimer and Vayle had a
different reaction. They exchange thoughts freely and several words drifted
down, mostly colourful variants of idiotic, irresponsible and insane.

It was a while before Lorrimer, breathing hard,
lamp handle clasped in his teeth and spit dribbling off his chin, touched the
ground. Aedan noticed Lorrimer’s oil-soaked shirt eager inches from the flame.

“How is this supposed to be fun?” Lorrimer
growled.

“This way,” Aedan replied, grabbing his lantern
and moving off in the direction they had been going when the grille above had
blocked the way.

They came to an ancient wooden door, partly eaten
by time. It was not locked and Aedan pushed it open with a feeble creak. After
looking left and right he whispered, “There’s nobody here. Come on.”

He led the way down another blocky passage, this
one unexpectedly wide and high. It almost felt like stepping outdoors until the
gathering lanterns provided enough light to reveal the ceiling and far wall. The
paving stones showed evidence of recent heavy use – they were dirty, scraped
and well-trodden rather than dusty. The boys set out again, passing a number of
archways on both sides, and finally turned into a huge alcove that ended before
a giant door.

Aedan had not exaggerated. The black double door
was as wide and high as the passage itself. Obviously it held something
important. The metal looked thick enough to scoff at battering rams. A man
could pick any tool and spend a month hacking at panels like these without
success. This was a door nobody could force.

And it was open, just a crack.

Aedan put his ear to the crack and listened.

“What can you hear?” Lorrimer whispered, pressing
forward.

“You. What do you expect? Go breathe somewhere
else.”

“Oh, uh … right.”

They waited.

“I think it’s empty,” Aedan said. “Whoever was in
here must have forgotten to lock. This is even better than I’d hoped.”

“Could have gone to fetch something,” Vayle
pointed out.

“Been gone a long time for that. I don’t think
anyone is coming back tonight. Here, help me with the door.”

Hadley added his weight, and the two of them heaved
the great door back enough to allow them in.

Their lanterns illuminated a large room whose high
walls were shelved and hung with what looked like woodwork tools, but some of
them were strange indeed.

“Funny place to put a carpentry workshop,” Aedan
said.

Vayle was inspecting the shelves. “I don’t think
these belong to carpenters. These are shipwright’s tools.”

“Shipwrights? Who builds boats underground?”

Vayle wasn’t listening. He was walking to the end
of the workshop, but now the others saw that it wasn’t the end; there was no
wall here and a lot of hollow darkness lay beyond. Following Vayle, they passed
under a great arch and, after a few paces, came to a standstill on a balcony.
Surrounding them were giant swinging platforms suspended from levered beams,
and wide ramps that led down, far down. As they hastily snapped open the
shutters on their lanterns, greedy for more light, none could hold back the
gasps.

The space was cavernous. The ceiling rose high
overhead, but the floor dropped away even further, at least a hundred feet. And
before them, looking as out of place as a beached whale, and far more
intimidating, was a ship of such gigantic proportions that it completely dominated
everything else. Even with all their lanterns open, the far end of the hull
extended away into a thick, dusty gloom.