The Eagle & the Nightingales: Bardic Voices, Book III (14 page)

Atrovel had access to everything the King did and said. That was his job. Now, it was probably not a bad idea to have a flippant fellow for a secretary, a man who really didn’t care a great deal about the correspondence and documents he handled. But still—T’fyrr had the feeling that that sparkling surface was not all there was to Atrovel.

Perhaps, though, the deepest thing about him is his pride. He was certainly a man who had no doubts whatsoever about his own worth, and had no modesty about it, either. He would be the first to tell you just how important he was.

That might have been what T’fyrr sensed: beneath the flippant exterior was a man with a deep sense of pride in himself. If that was true, then the worst thing one could do to Lord Atrovel would be to harm his pride, to make
him
look foolish. He would never forgive that, and as Secretary he had access to the means to take revenge. Certain papers could fall into the hands of an enemy, perhaps . . . certain others vanish before they could be signed.

Lord Atrovel could be trusted—warily. And T’fyrr would have to be very careful of that touchy little man’s feelings.

Oh, this is all too much to think about
—Yet there remained one more human that T’fyrr sensed he must consider tonight, before he slept.

High King Theovere.

Now there—there was a puzzle and a question more complicated than that of Lord Atrovel. For one thing, he is
not
sane. He is not rational. He has mood changes that do not necessarily correspond to what is going on around him, and his ability to concentrate is not good. His priorities are skewed. His Advisors don’t care, because his insanity gives them leeway to do anything they really want. The problem is, what caused this? Theovere was not the man he once was. Harperus had been quite emphatic about that. High King Theovere had been well-respected, if not precisely beloved; he had kept every one of the Twenty Kingdoms under his careful scrutiny. So what happened? Why did he suddenly begin to lose interest in seeing things well-governed?

Was
it a lack of interest? Was he ill, in some way that simply didn’t show itself on the surface? There were certainly hints of that in the childishness, the petulance, the obsessive interest in music and other trivialities.

And yet—and yet there was still something of the old King there as well. King Theovere wanted T’fyrr the way a child wants a new toy, yes, but there was something else beneath that childish greed.

He is using me. Something in him is still vaguely aware that there is trouble in his Kingdoms, trouble involving nonhumans, and he is using me, he said so himself. I am to provide an example of excellence and tolerance. And I don’t think the Advisors are truly aware that he is using me in that way, even though they heard him
say
so. They don’t believe he could still have that much interest outside his little world of Bards and Musicians.

So, was there something there that T’fyrr could touch, perhaps even something he could awaken?

I think so. In spite of the childishness, the pettiness
—
there is something there. I believe that I like him, or rather, I like what he could be. There is a King inside that child, still, and the King wants out again.

At some point, King Theovere had been an admirable enough leader that his bodyguards were
still
inspired to a fanatic loyalty. A man simply did not inspire that kind of loyalty just because he happened to have a title.

I wish I could talk to one of the bodyguards, honestly,
T’fyrr thought wistfully. It would never happen, though. They had absolutely no reason to trust
him.
For all they knew, he was just another toy, this one presented to the King by a foreigner instead of one of his Advisors, but a toy and a distraction, nevertheless.

I don’t want to be a toy, and I especially don’t want to be a distraction. I want to remind him of what he was.

Well, to that end, he had delved into Harperus’ store of memory crystals and come up with several songs about King Theovere. Most of them weren’t very good, which didn’t exactly come as a shock, since they had been composed by Guild Bards—but there were germs of good ideas in there, and decent, if not stellar, melodies.
I
could improve the lyrics; even Nob could improve on some of those lyrics.
He could sing those, and literally remind the King of what he had been.

And there were other songs he had picked up himself on the way, songs that actually had some relevance to one of the situations the King had sloughed off into the Seneschal’s hands.

I
can certainly sing those songs that Raven and the rest wrote about Duke Arden of Kingsford
—
how he saved all those people during the fire, how he’s beggaring himself to rebuild his city. That should get his attention where reports won’t!

And if T’fyrr got his attention, he just might be moved to do something about the situation.

If I put a situation in front of him in music
—
ah, yes, that is a good idea.

And who better to suggest such situations than the man who would otherwise have to take care of them—Lord Seneschal Acreon? Oh, now
there
was an idea calculated to make the Seneschal happier!

He’ll help. This is exactly the kind of help that
he
has been looking for
—
I would willingly bet on it. The only problem is that if anyone besides Acreon figures out what I’m doing, they’ll know I’m not just a blank-brained musician; they’ll know I’m getting involved, and I might be dangerous. Which will make me even more of a target than I am already.

Well, that couldn’t be helped. He had made a promise and a commitment, and it was time to see them through.
Now I have a plan. Now I have a real means to do what Harperus wants me to. And I have a chance to redeem myself in the process, to counter the evil I have already done.

Suddenly the tension in his back and wing muscles relaxed, as it always did when he had worried through a problem and found at least the beginnings of a solution.

That was all he needed to be able to sleep; in the next instant, all the fatigue that he’d been holding off unconsciously descended on him.

Ah
. . .
I
didn’t realize I was so . . . tired.

He was already in the most comfortable nest he’d had in ages, and in the most comfortable sleeping position he’d had since he’d begun traveling with Harperus.

This nest is very good . .
.
very, very good. I don’t think I want to move.

It was just as well that he was settled in, for as soon as he stopped fighting off sleep, it swooped down out of the darkness upon him, and carried him away—to dreams of falling, iron manacles and screams.

###

Midnight. You’d think the city would be quiet.

It wasn’t though; the rumble of cartwheels on cobblestones persisted right up until dawn, and a deeper rumble of the machineries turned by the swiftly moving river water permeated even one’s bones.

Nightingale perched like her namesake on the roof of The Freehold, staring out into the darkness at the lights across the street. No Deliambren lights, these—though they were clever enough; she’d noticed them earlier this evening, just outside the building, where two of them stood like sentinels on either side of the door. Some kind of special air—a gas—was what these lights burned. One of her customers had told her that. It was piped into them from somewhere else, and burned with a flame much brighter than candles, without the flicker of a candle.

With lights like that, you wouldn’t have to wait for daylight to do your work . . .

No, you could work all night. Or, better still, you could have someone else work all night for you.

There were similar lights burning inside that huge building, but not as many as the owner would like. He would have been happier if the whole place was lit up as brightly as full day. Only a few folk worked inside that building at night, those who cleaned the place and serviced the machines.

Nightingale leaned on the brick of the low wall around the roof, rested her chin on her hands, and brooded over those lovely, clear, cursed lights and all they meant. She had learned more in her brief time here than she had ever anticipated, and most of it was completely unexpected.

When she had arrived here, she had been working under the assumption that the Free Bards’ and the nonhumans’ chief enemies were going to be the Church and the Bardic Guild, that if anyone was behind the recent laws being passed it would be those two powers. It made sense that way—if the High King really
was
infatuated with music and musicians, it made sense for the most influential power in his Court to be the Bardic Guild, and the Bardic Guild and the Church worked hand-in-glove back in Rayden.

Well, they have gotten a completely unprecedented level of power, that much is true. But the Bardic Guild was by no means the most important power in the Court. They weren’t even as important as they thought they were! No, the most important power in this place is across the street. In those buildings, in the hands of the men who own them.

The merchants who owned and managed the various manufactories were individually as powerful and wealthy as many nobles. But they had not stopped there; no, seeing the power that an organization could wield, they had banded together to form something they called the “Manufactory Guild.” It was no Guild at all in the accepted sense; there was no passing on of skills and trade secrets, no fostering of apprentices, no protection of the old and infirm members. No; this was just a grouping of men with a single common interest.

Profit.

Not that I blame them there. Everyone wants to prosper. It’s just that they don’t seem to care how much misery they cause as long as they personally get their prosperity.

And the Manufactory Guild was now more powerful than the Bardic Guild and even many of the Trade Guilds. They even had their own Lord Advisor to the King!

Their agenda was pretty clear; they certainly didn’t try to hide it. They tended to oppose free access to entertainment in general, simply because entertainment got in the way of working. They wanted to outlaw all public entertainment in the streets, whether it be by simple juggler, Free Bard or Guild Bard. They had laws up for consideration to do just that, too, and some very persuasive people arguing their case, pointing out how crowds around entertainers clogged the streets and disrupted traffic, how work would stop if an entertainer set up outside a manufactory, how people were always coming in late and leaving early in order to see a particular entertainer on his corner. There was just enough truth in all of it to make it seem plausible, logical, reasonable.

Oh, yes, very reasonable.

They had another law up for consideration, as well, a law that would allow the employers at these manufactories to set working hours around the clock, seven days a week. It seemed very reasonable again—and here was the example, right across the street. There was no reason why people couldn’t be working all night, not with these wonderful, clear lights available. It would be no hardship to them, not the way working by candlelight or lamplight would be. It was the Church that opposed
this
law; it was the Church that decreed the hours during which it was permissible to work in the first place, and the conditions for working. Church law mandated that Sevenday be a day for rest and religious services. Church law forbade working after sundown, except in professions such as entertainment, on the grounds that God created the darkness in order to ensure that Man had peace in which to contemplate God and to sleep—or at least, rest from his labors, so he could contemplate God with his full attention.

The Manufactory Guild wanted a law that permitted them to hire children as young as nine, on a multitude of grounds—and Nightingale had heard them all.

So that children can be a benefit to their families, instead of a burden. So that families with many children can feed all of them instead of relying on charity. So that children can learn responsibility at an early age. To keep children out of the street and out of wickedness and idleness. Oh, it all sounds very plausible.

Except, of course, that one would not have to pay a child as much as an adult. A family desperate enough to force its nine-year-old child into work would be desperate enough to take whatever wage was offered. And that child, who supposedly was learning to read and write from his Chapel Priest, would be losing that precious chance at education. There
were
Church-sanctioned exceptions to the law—children were allowed to be hired as pages or messengers, and to help their parents in a business or a farm. But all of those exceptions were hedged about with a vast web of carefully tailored precepts that kept abuse of those exceptions to a relative minimum, and all those exceptions required that the child receive his minimum education.

You can’t keep a child’s parents from working him to death, or from abusing him in other ways, but you can at least keep a stranger from doing so.
That was basically the reasoning of the Church, which decreed the completely contradictory precepts that a child was sacred to God and that a child was the possession and property of his parents.

Then there’s that lovely little item, the
“job security law.”

That was a law that specifically forbade a worker in a manufactory from quitting one job to take another—effectively keeping him chained to the first job he ever took for the rest of his life, unless his employer chose otherwise, or got rid of him. That one had yet to be passed as well, but there was very little opposition, and the moment it was, it would mean the complete loss of freedom for anyone who went to work in a manufactory.

They say that retraining someone is costly and dangerous, since folk in a manufactory are generally operating some sort of machinery. Oh, surely. “Machinery” no more complicated than a spinning wheel! But I would think that to most people, who think a wellpump is
very
complicated machinery, they’d look at the manufactories and agree that having an inexperienced person “operating machinery” could be
very
dangerous. As if most of what I’ve been watching people actually do was any more complicated than digging potatoes.