Tinker's Justice (3 page)

The hospital room was centered on a knee-high table with a polished shine that told her that the wood was well-sealed. Shelves along one wall were filled with glass jars bearing illegible labels. Cabinets dominated another wall, and a third bore hooks holding tools of every description. Many of them had familiar appearances, similar in form to ones that Jamile had described from her medical training. Others, Madlin’s imagination could only make macabre guesses as to their function. She could only hope that a simple broken nose wouldn’t require any of them.

One of the goblins spoke up and conversed with the flummoxed physician, who was clearly unprepared to receive a human patient. Madlin was guided to a seat on the floor while the physician climbed onto the table to examine her. She allowed her hands to be pried free of her face, restarting the flow of blood. The physician chittered orders to an assistant, and in moments Madlin’s face had been daubed clean with alcohol. Rolled bits of liniment-soaked cloth were stuffed up her nostrils, stemming the flow of blood. A pair of thin, metal bars flared to life with aether in the physician’s hands. Madlin flinched away, but the handlers forced her forward and still once more. The physician pinched the bars to the sides of Madlin’s nose, forcing it straight with a stabbing twinge; then they felt cold, far colder than bare metal should have. In seconds her nose began to numb, the sensation spreading across her cheekbones and up to her brow. A slathering of paste was then applied, holding the bars in place. The assistant packed cloth at both sides of her nose and wrapped a bandage around her head, packing everything tight.

The cold numbed the pain in her face, but brought her wits back to her. Madlin began taking stock of her new situation as the goblins brought her a wash bowl and soap, and helped her cleanse herself of blood.
I’m collared again.
She was still too shocked and disoriented for that to have finished sinking in. For now, it was a fact, nothing more.
The dragon wants me, which means he wants me alive. That’s good. He might find ways to make my life miserable, but as long as I can survive, I can figure a way out of this. Eziel’s blood, he even said he’d keep delivering coil guns.
Madlin paused in her thoughts as the handlers prodded her to her feet. She followed them out of the hospital and back toward the mountain.
Of course he’d promise to keep the deal. He needed to buy time, and to stop them thinking of ways to rescue me. As long as they keep getting the guns, he must assume they’ll play things safe.

Madlin sighed.
He’s probably right, too.
In a strange way, it was a relief. The expected treachery had come, albeit in a form none of them had predicted. And she was still alive.

Madlin’s new quarters were within the dragon’s complex. It was not a part of the lair itself, but rather a newly excavated chamber not far from where Fr’n’ta’gur’s priests lived and worked. Life in Korr’s deeps had taught her what new stonework looked like. It galled her to think that the goblins had been planning ahead for weeks for this betrayal. Almost as galling was the fact that by the time she had arrived back from the goblin hospital, all her belongings had already been set up within. From desk to dresser, everything from her cottage in the valley was set up just as she had left it. The sheets were even tucked, and the pillows fluffed.

Her captors had proven to be an enigma. Two goblins were assigned to the ends of her chains, which clasped around their wrists with hinged bracers. The goblins could remove these easily, but they also bore runes that would send one of those jolts of spark through her whenever they liked. Neither of them would admit to understanding the least bit of Korrish, but when she had pantomimed a desire to change out of her blood-stained clothes, they had been surprisingly accommodating. Both had removed their bracer, allowing Madlin to pull a fresh shirt over her head by threading the chains through one at a time. Changing in front of the goblins was somehow less intimidating than being naked in front of a kuduk. Kuduks looked almost human, and she could project human motives onto them. The goblins … well the ones that didn’t speak Korrish were little more than trained monkeys to her.

It occurred to her to run when she had herself free from the handlers briefly.
Run where?
That was the problem. For the time being, she had no solution to the impassable world-ripper. Working with Anzik on a solution to that would be a priority for her. She was also in the dragon’s lair, and would have to sneak past untold numbers of goblins just to reach the surface. That left a more old-fashioned escape a dubious prospect, not to mention that she would be dragging her chains the whole way.

The chains. Drat them for a sense of irony, but the goblins had used knowledge she had taught them to help free Korr’s humans, and turned it to her capture. The chains were forged of brightsteel, and were frankly one of their metallurgists’ better efforts.

I’m too tired to escape, anyway.
The day’s events had drained Madlin, both of willpower and of blood. Whatever plans she came up with, they could wait for a bit of convalescence first. Broken noses weren’t the sort of thing that took months to heal. She collapsed onto the bed amid a clatter of delicate chain.

“K’k’rt,” she muttered. Surprisingly, being unable to breathe through her nose made goblin names a bit easier to pronounce. She repeated herself, lifting her head to see if she got any response from her keepers. One of them shook his head.

“K’k’rt?” Madlin asked, trying the human method of raising the last syllable to make an inquiry. The other keeper nodded, but the first one muttered to him, and then both looked to her and shook their heads.

Madlin collapsed onto her back and looked up at the stone ceiling. She was feeling queasy from having more of her own blood than food in her stomach, and exhausted from the turmoil.
Rynn’s problem
, she decided, and gave in to sleep.

Chapter 2

“Aim to become High Sorcerer one day, not Warlock. You get to work indoors and the only people trying to kill you are friends and colleagues.” – Axterion Solaran, to Danilaesis Solaran

Axterion Solaran sipped at a tea that reflected his mood—cold and bitter. The reports strewn across his desk held too little good news mixed in with all the bad. The Kadrin Empire relied little on the outside world, but since the war with Megrenn had begun in earnest, their foreign trade had dried up entirely. Their ships were lost at sea; their caravans disappeared from the tradeways. The old sorcerer shook his head in dismay. Letting a trickle of aether into his cup, he heated the tea back to a potable temperature.

The best news, as always, came in the form of missives from his grandson. For all the boy’s faults, Danilaesis Solaran was making a name for himself as a proper warlock, nipping at Megrenn raiders and giving pause to supply convoys, bottling up the forces arrayed along the borders of the empire wherever he could. Axterion was proud, in a wistful way.
Boy’s got his uncle in him, that’s for certain. He’ll meet no good end, but he’ll end his share of the empire’s enemies first.
It was the curse of a warlock. There was no
actual
curse, but the Kadrin Empire used them like battering rams, smashing them into their foes until one or the other broke. If the warlock survived, it was only a matter of time before the next war.

Well, this is the next war.
Axterion sighed. There was always a next war. One hundred forty-eight years of living in Veydrus had shown him that often enough. There was no final war. Wipe out every living thing in the world, and the rocks would start fighting amongst themselves. Axterion scratched at his chin, wondering whether he could spare the time for a shave. The war wasn’t going anywhere.

A knock at his office door provided Axterion a respite from his own company. “What?” he snapped at whomever lay beyond. The door cracked open and an eye peeked through.

“General Varnus sent me to find you,” said Tolomey, one of the Tower of Contemplation’s many guards.

“Congratulations,” Axterion replied. “But I wasn’t lost.” There was a blank stare from the eye in the doorway.
Imbecile.
Axterion rubbed his eyes, wondering if the headache was from too many hours of staring at words on paper or from the vexatious underlings that surrounded him. “What does the general want?”

“We’ve got visitors. Said you should meet them.”

Axterion gestured and the door to his office swung wide, revealing Tolomey fully. “General Varnus has never been prone to wasting my time. Either he has taken up a new hobby, or you are leaving out some important detail as to why, precisely, I should care that we have visitors. If they are dignitaries, they ought to see Empress Celia or her staff. If it’s a military matter, he ought to take care of it his blasted self. And if the issue was of a magical nature, I’d bloody blasted well hope that I’d hear about it from one of my own underlings, and not from that ox-head General Varnus.”

“They’re … um … rock people,” Tolomey replied, edging out of the doorway.

Axterion let his vision slip into the aether, looking for answers that eluded him in the light. He sighed. “Let me guess, they don’t speak Kadrin.”

“No, High Sorcerer,” Tolomey confirmed. “The general was hoping that you might, you know, understand their language, what with you being High Sorcerer and all. Do you? Happen to speak their language, that is?”

“No, I don’t” Axterion replied. He stood and began rummaging through the clutter in his office. Tolomey looked on, edging farther from the door by the moment, as if waiting for the perfect opportunity to slink away unnoticed. Axterion made a point of glancing in the guard’s direction often enough to keep him close by. “Aha!” The old sorcerer exclaimed, pulling a book-sized slate board from beneath a stack of historical texts. “I doubt I can speak their language, but I can write it.”

Kezudkan tried to stand as still as he could, but his eyes kept pulling his head to one side or the other, taking in his environment. He was aware that there were skies where the majority of the population was human. There had never been reason for him to visit one, but from all that he had heard, they were dusty, grimy places that baked beneath the relentless sun. Never in his wildest imaginings had he envisioned anything like the human city of Kadris. Farther than the eye could see, buildings kept popping up from the landscape, clear to the horizon. Individually, they were primitive, homely structures, but taken en masse, the effect was humbling.
This is the race that mops our floors and hauls coal out of our mines. These are the ones my kin turn to for aid.
Not only were there buildings everywhere, but humans swarmed around them like maggots on raw meat. And from their vantage on a low hill on the outskirts, Kezudkan could only see the very edge of the city.

“How many of them live here?” Kezudkan asked in a hushed tone.

“Reports say anywhere from half to three quarters of a million humans,” replied Lunjak, the successor to King Dekulon. It was just the two of them, along with four soldiers of the Iron Guard who were acting as an official escort. The Iron Guardsmen stood in a square formation around the two daruu dignitaries, keeping the spear-toting Kadrin soldiers in their ratty chain shirts at bay. None of the humans spoke the daruu tongue, and King Dekulon had no one in his kingdom who knew how to speak the Kadrin dialect. By primitive gestures, the humans had conveyed that Kezudkan and Lunjak should wait where they stood.

“What are the odds that any one of those half million or more humans speaks our language?” Kezudkan asked.

Lunjak shrugged, causing a jingle in his gold-chain shirt. “I’m sure we’ll manage something. They have scholars.”

Kezudkan weathered the looks of the human soldiers as they waited half the morning for someone to come retrieve them.
City this size, they might not even have gotten across it yet to ask around for daruu speakers. We should have brought chairs.
At length, a delegation arrived, looking far more formal than the contingent of soldiers who happened to have been guarding the city gates that day. The soldiers acting as escorts wore plated armor, with swords dangling from their hips and shields in hand. In their midst, a monstrous human in gold-trimmed armor strode along, his shaved head and bushy grey beard not covered by any helm. Beside the giant was a slim human nearly the same height, clad all in black. With unkempt hair and a grit of unshaven beard on his face, the slim human reminded him of someone. When the entourage approached closely enough for Kezudkan to see the slim human’s eyes—set into a scowl beneath a furrowed brow—he knew who that was: Erefan. Though taller, the Kadrin human had the same look to him. As initial impressions went, the Kadrins could have done better than someone who looked like Kezudkan’s least favorite human.

“Greetings,” Lunjak said as the group drew close enough for introductions. “I am Lunjak, successor of King Dekulon of—”

The slim human in black waved him off, cutting the successor short. Taking a slate board in hand, the human jabbed at it with a stick of chalk, squeaking and tapping until he held up the finished work for their inspection. Written in daruu runes were the words: CANNOT UNDERSTAND. MUST WRITE. COME WITH ME.

Lunjak nodded, gesturing to himself. “Lunjak.”

The slim human hooked a thumb at his chest. “Axterion Solaran.” Then he muttered something in his own tongue to the giant. With a snap of the giant’s fingers, the human soldiers fell into formation around Kezudkan and his fellows.

“Hope it’s not far,” Kezudkan muttered to Lunjak as they started the trek into the city.

The conversation had moved at a glacial pace. Kezudkan, Lunjak, and the human sorcerer Axterion had passed around a slate board, scuffing out and rewriting messages to one another throughout the afternoon. The Kadrins had scant information about the destruction of their outlying city, and even the little that Kezudkan and Lunjak knew was treated as military intelligence. Perhaps five minutes of proper conversation on the subject was stretched into hours by the tedious chalk scribbling and undertone translations to the rest of the two contingents.

Axterion’s people crowded his side of the long table and arrayed themselves along the wall. Several were clearly soldiers, but most dressed similarly to the sorcerer and presumably shared his occupation. Rune throwing—and the concept that aether could be unbound from objects—was an idea that the Kadrins seemed comfortable with. When they all gathered together around him, Kezudkan wondered just how easily he could be torn to tiny shreds by the first of them to get offended by something one of the daruu wrote. Kezudkan had always possessed a strong feel for the life within stone, but had never felt the sensation in the presence of people before. To feel that sort of life among humans … it made him question Korr’s vibrancy. The thought nagged at him as Lunjak eased the conversation into talk of alliance.

Kezudkan grabbed the track switch lever and heaved, hoping the thunderail stayed on the tracks. “Do you know what a kuduk is?” he wrote.

Axterion read the slate and looked up, a puzzled look on his face. He muttered over his shoulder to his compatriots, and clearly made out the word “kuduk” amid the blabbering.
So they can speak the words.
It was a simple failing of conversational understanding at work. Kezudkan was not about to let the observation pass without comment. He took the slate back. “You can sound out these words?” he wrote.

Axterion glanced at the slate and shrugged, nodding. Kezudkan reached across the table and tapped the slate with one thick finger, then pointed to Axterion. The human sorcerer narrowed his gaze and looked sidelong at Kezudkan, but sounded the words out like a schoolboy with his first-year primer.

“How did you know those sounds?” Kezudkan wrote.

Axterion took the slate. “They are the same runes that our sorcerers use,” he wrote in reply.

“Lunjak,” Kezudkan said aloud, “What if we brought the Pillar of Runes? Think that he could talk their rune language.”

“I don’t know,” the successor replied. “But I don’t see how that helps us right now.”

“Look around the table,” Kezudkan continued in an undertone. “The humans are wearing down; I know the look. They’ll call an end to the talks soon enough, and tomorrow we’ll see if we can’t find ourselves a proper translator.”

The talks carried on for another hour, but Kezudkan had been right about the growing fatigue among the human contingent. The final few minutes of passing the slate board back and forth revolved around accommodations for the night. Lunjak accepted an offer of rooms for each of them, and human servants escorted them through the halls of the palace.

Kezudkan had been preoccupied on the way in, paying more attention to the people than the stonework. He had taken his initial impression of the Veydran humans at the city gates, and had not bothered to revise it as he was presented with new information. The imperial palace was, to say the least, impressive work for humans. It was black marble, shot through with thin veins of copper that had oxidized to form a green patina. Unlike every other human structure Kezudkan had seen, there was no trace of mortar—“fools’ glue,” his people called it. Nor was there any sign of seams between stone blocks. It was as if the palace had been carved from a single monolithic block of stone. To a daruu eye, however, there were hints of the true process of creation. Misaligned grains in the rock and odd veining at corners and around arches hinted that the stone had flowed from its original shape. The palace was still rough in form, lacking the fluid beauty that the daruu city had displayed, but the craftsmanship was better than kuduks could manage.