Inexperienced Mage (Reawakening Saga) (17 page)

Shariel completely forgot about school and began talking about what she would get with her first allowance. After the meal he decided to head down to the local blacksmith to see about some swords. Shariel tagged along as far as the first trinket stand, smiling he told her to be home by supper and continued on to the blacksmiths.

The inside of the shop was clean and after a quick talk with the lady running the shop a bald six foot giant of a man wearing a thick leather apron came into the room. “Margret tells me you have a specific request.”

"Yes I need an order of one hundred long swords; I need them made fast and cheap. I don't need them to hold an edge long, but I do need them to be well balanced, and I don't want plain hits on them either I would like something pleasing to the eye."

The man scratched his chin. “If I made a molding I could put them out fairly quickly would still take about three weeks to get them all done, but they won’t be as strong as forged steel and as you said won’t hold an edge long, will that be acceptable.”

“That would be perfect, how much to have all hundred made.”

“Well first we will have to make the first sword and hilt, then the moldings for a hundred swords we will need about four of them. After that my apprentice can do most of the work, I would suggest to Margret a sum of around a hundred and twenty gold.”

He had brought all his gold with him, but even with everything Monique had left him he only had a little
over eighty gold, and if he wanted anymore gold he was going to have to have materials in order to make more magical products. “I will give you half down, and will pay the rest when the first quarter of the product is delivered. If you can turn them out as fast as you say and they are what I need, then I would suspect making more orders in the future.”

The woman behind the counter who had stayed silent during the discussion had a big smile. “That would be fine miss. Now why don’t we let Bruno get back to work while we settle
accounts.” Thad counted out to gold to the greedy eyed lady, who practically salivated over the gold, then gave her directions to his home for the delivery.

After buying enchantment supplies, food and a few other household items, his gold pouch was near empty.
If he wanted to make his house payment along with having the gold for his order of swords he was going to have to work hard. After a quick stop at his house Thad made his way to the familiar sewer entrance in the squatter’s district.

The next few weeks passed by in a uniform manner with
Shariel headed to school and him to the sewer to work. He had already made a fair amount of items half of which he sat aside for Monique. Had had made nearly forty gold but the deadline for his payment to the blacksmith was closing in fast.

Rubbing his head from the stress of the day’s work he made his way back to his house. Inside the house he was greeted by
Shariel who introduced him to a young lady in her early twenties with round chocolate-colored eyes with silky, straight, medium-length charcoal-colored hair that she wore in an exotic, yet attractive style. “Clare this is Willow, she is one of the senior students at the school, she heard that you had contacts with a magical dealer and wished to talk to you.” Shariel hedged about looking guilty, she wasn’t telling the whole truth but he saw no harm in the current situation.

Straitening his dress he sent Shariel to grab them some tea. “I guess asking how you found out I have contacts with items of magical significance is moot, it’s no secret that our company has been selling them, as to where I live I can take a guess as to how you found out, but the main question here is what do you need?”

Willow didn't strike his as the type to mince words and with his head aching he was glad he was right. "I am in need of a book that will allow me to carry a variable library around with me. This is my last year at school and there are quite a few tomes I wish to have copies of. While I could hire someone at the scribes guild to copy them, toting so many books back home would prove troublesome."

A book that could hold more than one book within it, he hadn't thought of that before. While paper was made of wood it was too thin and weak to hold an enchantment, and then there was the problem of copying the books then calling the book you wanted. If he was to use a central core along with a thin metal layer over the cover it could work, but how would he get it to copy. What if he put a second gem and enchantment on the back of the book, for that,
It should be possible. "I am sure I could acquire something of that nature in a few weeks' time but it wouldn't be cheap. You're not asking for some run of the mill artifact but one that would have been prized even among the mages of the past."

“Well if I was to have each of the books I wanted copied it would cost me around eight gold, for a magical book I would be willing to pay twenty.”

"I'm sorry but that wouldn't be enough we're not talking about a simple item here, but a magical book that can copy any book quickly to be recalled later at any time, for that I would have to demand forty gold." After a bit of haggling back and forth the pick was decided on thirty-two gold with half up front, that being Willow's request most likely to make him work harder to get her product it was much harder to tell someone you couldn't get their order when you had already received payment.

After Willow had left Thad went straight to the local scribe store and got three thick blank books
as well as ten smaller ones for the initial experimentation. The idea of a magical book intrigued him, if it worked he could have Shariel use it to copy some of the books from the school’s library for him to read at his leisure. Making the cover in steel didn’t seem right so he splurged on a bar of silver.

The next few he spent most of his time working on the magical tome. It seemed like an easy enough idea
, just make it copy the book, but it was a lot more complicated than he thought. After a few trial and errors using the smaller books he found that all he needed to do was to have the tome copy anything within a designated area, after that he just had to set the perimeters. After the book was copied gold flowing script would appear on the front of the tome that when touched and read would force the book to recall the selected item. Before he could give Willow her copy he had to see just how many books it could hold. So that night he passed the book to Shariel for instruction on how to make it work as well as what kind books he wanted copied. 

The day seemed to drag on as he waited for Shariel to come back from the school. He tried to keep himself busy, playing around with a few new rings, but couldn't hold his focus due to the anticipation. When she finally returned home she gave him a sad put upon look. "My tutor saw me with the history books and thought I liked them, I had to spend all day reading." The disgust in her voice matched with the vision he got of her sifting through a mountain of books and made him laugh.

The tome had done much better than he had figured and had been able to store a total of forty-six books. Flipping through
one of the books he had been waiting to read, he gave Shariel a big hug. He dug into his coin pouch and pulled out a single gold, and tossed it to her. “For testing it for me.” Shariel caught the coin deftly and began jumping around the room.

As word started getting around that he could get magical artifacts, he found himself beleaguered by people wishing to have things made from the mundane to the impossible. To solve his problem he started telling everyone to simply send him what they were looking for
and if he could procure their order he would be in contact. While the constant interruptions were annoying they did allow him to make a large sum of gold, which brought along an idea of his own. Monique had said he had a way for them to communicate and deliver items over long distances, what if he really could she could take specific orders and he could send them to her.

A couple days into what he called the sending box the first order of swords were delivered. Though the constant flow of people wanting magical devices was annoying, they had allowed him to gather a large amount of gold, so paying the remainder for the swords was quite easy. He had a fair amount of anticipation when he opened the crate wondering what design Bruno had come up with for the hilts. The blade was simple as he expected, the guard looked like two talons stretching out from a scaled hilt.

As he began working on the swords the princess made her way to visit him at his sewer home. He had thought she would have come to visit much sooner and have even entertained the idea to go visit her, but he didn’t want to push his luck, one wrong step within the palace and he would find himself in prison
.

The princess watched
him closely as he worked on the swords her mother had requested. Sitting down the sword he had just finished he turned to the princess. “I figured that you would have come to visit me sooner, I’ve missed your banter.”

“
I didn’t want to interrupt your time with your new friend.” While the princess’s face stayed impassive her voice showed more than a hint of irritation. He knew she was mad he just wasn’t sure about what; maybe he should have visited her sooner.

“Monique, she left the day after our audience with the queen
, I’ve told you about her she is like my sister. I’m sorry I haven’t visited the palace, but with everything going on I just haven’t had the chance, not to mention I’m still a little worried about spending time around the palace.”

Maria gave him a harsh stare for a bit, then a smile slowly crept onto her face, and she rushed over to him embracing him in a tight hug. “
So tell me everything that happened, the stories we’ve been getting are all over the place.”

Thad related the story telling her of how he had purchased Shariel from the woman who had been attacked by the bandits. Maria was quite interested in his new charge asking about every question from her age to what her hobbies were. After her curiosity was sated about Shariel he continued on the story. When he got to the part about the Ablain spies she looked worried and fussed over him profusely when he got to the part where he took an arrow in the back. Her attitude changed from concerned to outrage as he related his meeting with Eloen.

“So the Ablain are riling up the males in order to weaken us so they can attack. This isn’t good and I can’t tell mother or she will wonder where I learned it from. Oh and our plan didn’t work as I hoped mother is looking for you even harder now.”

That looked at the princess in a new light, though he had talked with her often it donned on him that she acted much older than her age. An eleven year old should be playing, and
having fun not talking to a mage in a musky sewer. “Are you sure you’re eleven?” The words popped out of his mouth before he had a chance to think better about it. He looked at the princess for any sign of anger, but she just gave him a glowing smile.

“I was wondering how long it would take you to notice. Since I was three years old I have been groomed to be the next quee
n, every day I’m reminded that everything I say and do affect the Queendom.”

Maria’s face fell slightly and Thad could see she mourned her lost childhood. He himself had been trained since early childhood to be perfect but the mothers at the academy had insisted that they enjoy some time to be kids, he had asked one time and was told that being serious all the time is bad for one’s heart. “I don’t think the
Ablain’s will give up on just one attempt, as soon as I have a chance I will visit some of the men’s taverns and see if I hear anything.”

Maria got up and began pacing back and forth if she didn’t look so serious he would have thought it was cute. “The
Ablain are only part of the problem, the men joined them of their own free will because of the way we treat them. Even if we stop every Ablain plot sooner or later we will still have problems if we don’t fix how we treat the men.”

Thad had thought the same thing but was unsure how to broach the topic with the princess he had few people he could talk to and didn’t want to alienate anyone fr
om his small circle of friends.

Bruno kept his end of the bargain and delivered the swords a few days ahead of schedule. Considering the timeline he had been given he produced four swords a day, allowing him to work projects from his backlist of orders as well as his sending box. Maria would stop by every few days to talk and inspect what he was working on. He found that when he was stumped by a difficult project, bouncing ideas off her was a good idea, and more than once she came up with a solution that he would have never thought of. He had been having an incredibly difficult time of finding out how to make the sending boxes, when the princess asked him if he could just make the insides like a hallway. While the idea struck him as funny the more he thought about it the more it made sense. He had learned magic didn't exist in a normal fashion but lived on a sub dimension waiting to be pulled on by a mage. If he could build a magical room in a sub dimension where the box lids were the doors to the room but only one could be opened at a time it could work. The only problem is what would happen if the box was ever destroyed, he would have to put in sub enchantments to cause the room to collapse on itself, and just to be safe the boxes would have to be made solidly out of metal not wood. And what if he wanted to make one box able to communicate with several, maybe he could make a revolving room, it seemed possible but just testing the idea on a small scale would require more gold and time than he currently had to waist, so he put the idea to the side and continued on with enchanting the swords.