Sorcerer's Son (35 page)

“I have my methods,” Rezhyk replied sharply. “If you will learn from me, you must use them.”

“I understand, my lord. I only meant that I am more ignorant than I thought.”

“You are entirely ignorant. I can’t even guess if you are fit to become a demon-master; but I suppose we shall determine that soon enough. Come along.” He made a peremptory gesture with the same hand that had given Cray the book, then he wheeled about and walked swiftly to the door. Cray hurried after.

They walked far—as far as one could walk in Castle Ringforge—and at the end of a mirrored corridor, Rezhyk called for a door to open on a small, brightly lit room. He entered, Cray close behind, and he went to a long table that occupied the center of the floor. There were drawers beneath it and an open brazier atop the smooth black slate of the work surface. It was a duplicate, though smaller, of the table in his own workshop.

“This will be yours,” said Rezhyk, waving to encompass the whole chamber. “You will bring my instructions here and practice the arts I give you. Gildrum!”

The demon, who had followed their trek unobtrusively, glided up to the table. “My lord?”

“Light the fire.”

She removed coal briquets from a low drawer, heaped them expertly, with air spaces properly distributed, and then she applied her finger to the center of the pile. Flame leaped from her fingertip, licking up over the black lumps, fluttering in yellow ribbons above them. In a moment, their edges caught, graying quickly with superficial ash, reddening with the heat of their own combustion. Gildrum drew back, and the flames sank, leaving glowing coals that made the air above the brazier shimmer.

“If you are wise,” Rezhyk said to Cray, “you will feed this fire regularly and never let it die. Gildrum will show you how to bank it for the night.”

“Could I not relight it from one of the sconces?” Cray inquired.

“You can answer that question yourself by passing your hand through one of the sconce flames. Go ahead. Do it.”

“My lord?”

“You won’t be injured. Go on.”

Cray went to the wall and lifted his hand to the sconce. Even a finger’s breadth away from the flame, he could feel no heat. He swept his thumb through the fire quickly, once, then again, then settled it there, and the blaze, bright as a beeswax candle, bright enough to read fine print by, engulfed his flesh to the knuckle. He felt only cool air, though his eyes told him that he should be screaming in pain. He drew his hand back slowly, and by that same light he inspected the thumb; it was not even soot-blackened.

Rezhyk said, “I advise you not to try that with the coals of the brazier, or with any other flame than these on the walls.”

“Yes, my lord.” Cray returned to the table. “I will take good care of this fire, I promise you.”

“Very well. You will find various materials in the drawers appropriately marked. You may examine them at your leisure. Do not use them except at my direction. You will learn all their properties soon enough. Every morning, I will expect you to come to my workshop first, immediately after your breakfast, and there I will set you the day’s tasks. When you have finished my work, then you may retire up here to pursue your own. I do not require you to go to bed at any specific time, but I suggest that you do so early, for I shall have you called early every morning, and I shall accept no excuses for tardiness save dire illness.”

“I have never had a dire illness, my lord.”

“I am glad to hear it. I trust you shall not begin now.” He pulled open a drawer at the far end of the table. “You will find sundries in here—pen and ink and blotting sand, straightedge and compass and so forth. I suggest you mark your notebook with your name and today’s date and all that I have told you already.”

Cray dipped the quill and inscribed the first page of his book, dutifully noting: Never let the fire in the brazier go out.

“Now,” said Rezhyk, “the kiln must be scrubbed with soap and water before I can use it again, and there are other matters about my workshop that require your hand, so we shall return there, Cray Ormoru, apprentice.”

As they passed through the doorway, the lights in Cray’s new workroom dimmed, leaving only the glow of the brazier, ruddy and flickering, to be reflected in the walls. Cray bade the door close and hurried after his master, who was already several paces down the corridor.

In the following months, Cray learned that Rezhyk rushed everywhere, that he could not sit still for more than a moment save when engrossed in reading or writing. He expected Cray to be the same and set him endless tasks to fill up his time—cleaning, polishing, removing ashes, fetching stores from every part of Ringforge. And every time Cray wondered if all these things had to be done by human hands, his master would nod and say that he had done them before Cray’s arrival. The lad marveled, then, that the man had had any time for sorcery.

“I was more efficient than you are, apprentice,” Rezhyk told him.

Between chores, Rezhyk instructed Cray in certain basic sorcerous techniques: the crushing and smelting of ores, the assaying of alloys, the making of molds, and the passes to be performed and words uttered at every step of each process to insure safety and success. All these things he demonstrated in Cray’s workroom, with Cray’s allotted materials; rarely did he allow the youth to observe him with his own projects, and then only for the most trivial procedures. Cray took dutiful notes, and in the limited span of time left after all of this, he practiced his lessons over and over again. Some nights he crawled to bed long past the time his eyelids began to feel heavy, long past the time that flashing sconces warned him of a reasonable hour of retirement. Sometimes Gildrum would come up to his workroom on those late nights, bearing a tray of cheese and mulled wine.

“You work too hard, too late,” she would say.

And he would reply, “I must.”

One night the demon was standing by, watching him weigh a quantity of greenish powder. She leafed through his notebook. “He can find no fault with this,” she said, scanning page after page.

“He has found fault,” replied Cray. “With my handwriting, which he says is none too clear, with my addition and subtraction, which he says are frequently wrong, and with my lack of organization.”

“As to the figuring . . well, you must do better there, of course. But if you can read your handwriting, and if you can understand your organization, what fault lies there?”

Using a fine, camel’s hair brush, Cray swept another pinch of powder into the left-hand balance pan. “He says I may not be able to read my own handwriting years from now.”

“Ah.” She squinted at the page that lay beneath her fingers. “It seems not so bad to me. And how much will you need these early lessons, anyway, later in your career?”

He grinned at her. “Are you suggesting that I slough your master’s instructions, Gildrum?”

“No, no—you do well to follow them to the letter. He is a stern master.”

With one more breath of powder, the two sides of the scales matched exactly. Carefully, Cray emptied the weighed substance into a small stone crucible that already contained a heap of black dust and one of white, side by side. With the green added, Cray stirred the three together with a glass rod, until the mix was a sickly gray.

“What are you making now, Master Cray?”

“Brass. Again. I swear there are as many different kinds of brasses as there are flowers in a meadow. And I have made none of them properly yet. I will never reach gold at this rate.” He carried the crucible to the far end of the workroom, where a small oven stood hard against the wall. In the bottom of the oven a bright blaze, lit from a coal of the ever-burning brazier, was roaring; the coals glowed uniformly orange, with yellow flames dancing all about them, and the heat that spilled from the opened door was greater than any needed to roast a haunch of boar. Cray set the crucible in the claw of a pair of tongs and maneuvered it into the oven, loosing the tongs with a tiny shake and drawing them back. He closed the oven door and stepped away, his face red with the heat, perspiration popping out on his cheeks and forehead.

“Every time, I have done something wrong,” he said. “Either the zinc ore was ill-roasted or the copper ore not pulverized fine enough, or there was too much charcoal or too little, or the additional trace materials were measured out wrong

I have tried to be careful, but when Lord Rezhyk examines my work, he finds a thousand faults.” He began to work the bellows attached to the side of the oven, to inject air into the heating mixture.

“You need more practice in these techniques,” said Gildrum. “I am sure they did not come easy to him either.”

Cray sighed. “I suppose not. I’ve scarcely been here two months— how can I expect to master the art so quickly, even a small fraction of it? There is far more to learn than I ever dreamed. Still

I thought myself a better student than I have proved. Perhaps I am just better adapted to the other things that I have learned.”

Gildrum pulled herself up onto the table. “Are you sorry that you chose this sort of sorcery?” she inquired, nodding slightly to the steady rhythm of the bellows.

“No. My reasons are as good as ever.” He opened the oven door a crack, peered in, shut it again, and kept the bellows going. “And it is interesting of itself. Haven’t you found it so, Gildrum?”

“I?”

“You must have learned a great deal over the years you’ve been associated with Lord Rezhyk. Enough to be a sorcerer yourself, I’ll wager.”

Gildrum crossed her legs tailor-fashion, smoothing her long skirt over them. “I suppose I have. Though I would never practice it, if I were free to do so. No demon would ever attempt to enslave another.”

“No?”

“There would be no reason for it.”

“No greed among demons? No lust for control over the world?”

“I’ve told you before, Master Cray—you cannot judge us by human standards.”

Cray opened the oven again, and this time he was satisfied with what he saw and let the door gape wide. He eased the tongs about the crucible and drew it out as gently as he might lift a newborn babe. The powders had fused into a glowing yellow bubble of liquid brass. Atop the oven lay a shallow clay mold, a featureless rectangle; Cray filled it with the molten metal.

“How glad I am,” he said, wiping his sweaty brow with one sleeve, “that demons are drawing most of the fumes and heat away from this work. I’d have suffocated long since without them

without a window.”

“Still thinking about windows, Master Cray? Even now that you know how little Ringforge needs them?”

“Yes, I still think about them. My mind knows that the demons supply better ventilation than any window, but my heart still yearns.” He glanced back at her. “How many demons are there watching over me?”

“Oh, quite a number.”

“Yet since the bronze bird brought me here, I have seen only you.”

Gildrum made a sweeping gesture with one hand that included all the sconces on the walls. “You see a dozen or more, of them every day, Master Cray.”

“I mean in human form.”

“Ah. Well, my lord has not given all his servants human forms.”

“Why not?”

“Because the human form does not serve all purposes. It catches ocean fish poorly. It delves for gems poorly. It flies to the far corners of the world quite poorly.”

“Yet,” said Cray, “it serves well enough for Lord Rezhyk’s greatest demon.”

“I have other forms as well. But I wear this one most because my lord so bids me.”

Cray sauntered over to the table, set the tongs beside the brazier and leaned on the warm slate, looking up at her curiously, as if searching for the tell-tale clue that would betray her inhumanity. “You seem quite human to me. A little cool, perhaps, and aloof, but I have met cooler. From your example, I can hardly believe that demons are so different from us.”

“I have been among your kind a long time,” she replied. “My lord says that has made me a misfit among my fellows.”

“Do you like it—being among us?”

She stared down at him, that penetrating, unwinking stare, and after a long moment she said, “It does not matter whether I like it or no. A slave must accept the master’s orders.”

“But if you had a choice,” Cray persisted, “would you choose to stay among humans, in human form?”

“It serves no purpose to consider such questions,” Gildrum said, and she punctuated the remark by sliding off the table. “The hour is late, Master Cray, and your mold will not be cool for some time. Should you not seek your bed now?”

“I have a few other things to do.” He glanced down at his feet. “If I have offended you, I apologize, Gildrum; I did not mean to do so.”

“You cannot offend a slave,” said Gildrum. “We are not allowed to be offended. Good night, Master Cray.”

He weighed and measured and sealed powders into boxes for a time after she had gone, and he thought about the pain that had been so evident in her voice. He had encountered that tone before, that strained, hard-edged betrayal of grief. He had heard it from his mother and from Sepwin and—he realized suddenly—from himself. How harsh was slavery for a demon, he wondered, that it brought such sorrow? Was there home and family somewhere that mourned for Gildrum and she for them? Were there dreams unattainable, valuables lost, because Rezhyk required her presence?

Cray had never thought of demons being other than mindless forces, mere things without any real will or action of their own, until he met Gildrum. She was flesh and blood, or at least the semblance of flesh and blood, warm and palpable and human-seeming as anyone he had ever met. More human, he thought wryly, than some. Were all demons like her? He glanced about the room, and he could not will himself to believe that the flames that lit his work could change themselves into people and speak to him as equals.

Nor that she could turn into a flame like them.

He shook his head, then set about banking the brazier fire for the night, as she had taught him.

In the morning, he broke the wafer of brass out of its mold and presented it for Rezhyk’s inspection. Rezhyk turned it over in his hands, peering close by the light of the brazier in his own workshop. Then he licked it with the tip of his tongue.,