Maker of Fire

Raoleer, Building Shrine of Giltak

A rotation later, after the bronze and wood workers got together to make the scales, the Blessed Emily wanted to add a thing she called a cursor. One of our few priest artificers, Nitsuthluk, had the talent to shape crystals to make Emily’s cursor with a hairline etched and blackened on it to help read the scales on the slide rules. The cursor had to be the clear crystal that formed in octahedrons or cubes and could be scratched with a piece of iron or bronze but not with the clear three-sided crystals we used for window panes. Emily called the cursor crystal fluorite and the crystals used in windows calcite. Any other clear crystals wouldn't work because, as Emily explained, light would be distorted as it traveled through them.

I made her promise me she would write down the properties for the different clear varieties of crystal. I also asked her to document how to tell one crystal type from another. In return, I promised to take her around to all the mine sites where we got our materials to make metals, after she recovered from the malaise the Queen gave her.

The afternoon she visited Nitsuthluk's workshop, she said some very fateful words: "I need to finish my w...work on making glass. It's amorphous so it doesn't matter how you cut it to make transparent pieces. It would make this so much easier since anyone can make glass. It doesn't need magic or the right variety of crystal."

"Glass?" I asked. "What is glass beside the shiny black or grey stuff you find out on the lava plains?"

"It was something I was working on when I got injured and the queen rescued me," she frowned. "Mueb and Vassu both said they w...want me to finish with it, but I can't even last a quarter bell at a forge right now without being exhausted." She sighed, "it's very frustrating trying to do these things when I'm physically unable and feeling like I'm trapped here until I do." She was looking off into space, eyes focused somewhere far distant.

"What's so special about glass that you keep talking about it, Great One?" asked Kayseo, who was Emily's healer on hand for this rotation. She was a sweet girl and the recently acknowledged Heir of Pinisla. She was also promoted to priestess healer at the age of 16, two years ahead of her age group; but according to Lisaykos, the girl is a prodigy of healing magic.

"Huh?" Emily blinked and returned from whatever distant place she had been visiting. "See this beaker?" She pointed at Nitsuthluk's beaker of tea. "Imagine this beaker being a quarter of the thickness, just as hard and completely transparent. That's glass."

"I see," Kayseo sighed and pulled her tablet out of her pocket. "That's right. I remember now. The Queen called the beads that she pulled out of your eyes glass and they were all clear. Now how it is made?" Lisaykos had all of Emily's healers trained to write down all the interesting things that Emily mentioned.

"Wait, you got this glass stuff in your eyes, Great One?" I asked.

"I forgot to preheat the tube I made to manipulate the melted glass in the furnace. Since I used a lot of w...water to shape the tube out of this nice soft amphibolite that I found in my valley when I...uh..."

"It flashed to steam and propelled the hot glass stuff into your eyes, just like a cold mold can blowback molten metal while casting?" I finished her sentence for her.

"Yeah, an extremely embarrassing mistake for someone like me who should know better," the Blessed Emily made a face at her own self-described failings. "It w...was a very bad moment for me because I was alone in my workshop and had no hope of rescue. That's when the queen found me and took me to Aybhas to be healed."

Kayseo had that grin she gets when she's about to tease the Great One, which she loved to do, "the Blessed Emily was a lot easier to manage back then since she couldn't talk yet." Emily and Kayseo were very close and the teasing was constant between the two of them.

"Hmph," Emily gave her a well-baked glare.

"So, dear heart," Kayseo smiled, having gotten the reaction she wanted out of Emily, "outline how glass is made please."

"Yes, how is it made, Great One?" I pulled up a chair since she had been standing to watch Nitsuthluk working with crystal. "Have a seat. Let me help you." Emily just grimaced at me but made no verbal protest when I picked her up and put her in the chair. Nitsuthluk didn't have any helpers, Cosm or Coyn, so there was just Cosm-scaled furniture.

"It shouldn't be that difficult," she started explaining. "The only difficult part of making glass is building a furnace that can get hot enough. Glass is just a mix of different kinds of sand. The different mixes of sand w...will give you different varieties of glass with differing properties, all of which will melt at different temperatures depending on the mix and any fluxes.

"For example, Holy One, you know from all your assaying experience that when you assay white quartz---that's the same stuff as the six-sided crystals used in the temples---mixed with litharge, the slag that forms over the button after the melting step is often a beautiful clear green. That's a form of glass, called leaded glass, and the amount of green coloration can be controlled by how much litharge you put into the crucible. If you use only a little litharge, the slag w...would be almost completely clear.

"So in a w...way, you already know how to make glass because you make almost clear slags when assaying all the time. This gives y...you an idea of how hot the furnace has to be to melt the ingredients for glass. Assay furnaces are hot enough to do the job, though their configuration isn't well suited to manipulating glass, which needs more room.

"When I tried to make glass, I made a dome with a floor on stilts that I put over my very best charcoal in the lower chamber of my assay furnace. That w...was to concentrate heat. I made a crucible of white clay with ground thorianite in it so it would w...withstand as much heat as I could generate."

I had no idea what this thorianite was that the Blessed Emily mentioned or why it would improve the heat resistance of a crucible, but I had learned by now to just let her talk. If you stopped her with questions, she would often go off on a tangent.

She continued: "My first batches of attempted glass didn't w...work, probably because I didn't have the right mix of fluxes yet. What worked finally was silica sand from the Vanished River, which was mostly quartz plus some plagioclase and K-spar sand. I removed all the magnetite in it with my homemade magnet. To that, I added some ground-up limestone and the ashes of burnt salt reeds that grew at my hot springs by the brine spring. That melted w...well and easily. And it w...was that batch that I got in my eyes. There, can I stop now?" She glowered at Kayseo who just raised an eyebrow as she finished writing.

"Might I interest you in one of these?" Nitsuthluk looked at Kayseo and put a quartz crystal in her hand. Then he cast a series of charms on it. It started taking with Emily's voice, repeating exactly what she had just said.

"A recording device," Emily smiled with glee. "That's awesome!" Awesome is one of Emily's favorite words, and she used it enough that it was spreading through all the Coyn at the Shrine.

"Sorry," Nitsuthluk apologized, "one must have at least an intermediate level of magic to use it."

"Well, it's not that hard to do w...without magic," Emily said thoughtfully. "I'd have to make some kind of motor or hand crank, and I'd have to play around to get the right mixture of hard w...wax, but I know it can be done."

Nitsuthluk's jaw dropped, "without magic?"

"Sure? W...why not?" the Blessed Emily looked at him in surprise, as if making a recording without magic was the easiest thing in the world. It probably was to someone like her, with the knowledge of a whole different world in her head.

"Dear heart," Kayseo said, oh so sweetly.

"Gods!" Emily grimaced.

"You did it again." Kayseo was really enjoying herself.

---

Lisaykos, Healing Shrine of Mugash

I stared off into space and sighed, "is my schedule free at the end of the rotation?"

Wolkayrs picked up a large wax tablet, "no, there's a note here that you are taking your granddaughter to Manse Gunndit."

"Ah, that's right." I looked out the window, restless.

"I think, Great One, that your problem is that it's too quiet without Emily."

"Well, we don't own her. She's not property and we've always known that at some point she would leave us." I watched pale pink petals from the fruit trees in the garden blow past the calcite windows. At this time last year, Aylem had brought a small pathetic Coyn girl to the shrine to heal her injured eyes. Who knew that she would work her way into our lives like this?

"I'm having the same problem you're having," he remarked. "It's too quiet around here and there's this Emily-sized hole that needs filling. I miss waiting for the next ridiculous thing she comes up with." He sighed. "It was fun. Paper was fun and ice cream was fun and now the whole town is filled with people playing the divine. Emily was like throwing a pebble in a quiet pond and now the ripples are swamping the banks."

"Stop now or I may need to make a quick trip to Omexkel to kidnap her and bring her home," I laughed.

"In that case, I won't stop," he sat up. "Should I send an order down to the mount residence for your eagle?"

We both laughed.

"I have a perfectly good excuse, I mean reason, to have Emily stay here longer. She still needs to finish explaining the theory of gases and elements and the like to me. It's necessary for documenting my revelation and she's the only one who understands it."

"Why that could take years," he said, brightening up and smiling at the thought.

"Yes," I smiled back. We both laughed again.

I stopped and held up a hand to quiet Wolkayrs who didn't have my sensitivity to approaching magic users. We both heard the door from the balcony open and close quietly. There were no footsteps. I caught a fleeting feeling of someone who was there but who wasn't there. I pulled up my body clairvoyance and overlaid it with my healing magic to measure physiological disfunction. What I found almost made me laugh out loud.

"You can drop the charms of shadows and circular light, Lord Usruldes. I may even have something that would help with your bruised posterior from riding your eagle too many days without rest."

Usruldes appeared in the middle of the room, "May the blessings of the eleven gods be upon you, Great One," he did a full kneeling obeisance.

"And also with you, Lord Usruldes. Please rise."

He stiffly got to his feet.

"You look like you could use a little healing if you're that sore," I remarked. "How long have you been on the eagle of yours and sleeping on the ground? Feel free to have a seat. The armchairs are probably the least painful. And if you are this tired, how is your poor eagle doing? I do have a very talented healer for mounts on my staff." I looked at Usruldes with encouragement.

Poor Wolkayrs was dumbfounded by the conversation.

Usruldes pointed at Wolkayrs and made inquiring eyes at me. I could see dark circles not completely covered by the face mask.

"Wolkayrs is completely trustworthy. It would make all of our lives a little easier too if he knew. He's so closed-mouthed, he turned down a 500 gold bribe to disclose one of Emily's recipes that the kitchen decided not to make public. You can trust him."

Usruldes turned and studied Wolkayrs.

"Mint jelly, we're keeping it in-house for as long as possible. I couldn't sell out my friends in the kitchen." Wolkayrs was unmovable when he needed to be.

Usruldes turned and charmed the door shut. He staggered to a chair and fell into it. He leaned his head back and moaned a little.

"Wolkayrs, get some hot smoked black tea, unsweetened."

"You should spend the night," I told Usruldes. "You are in no shape to fly further this afternoon. You could stand to shave. I can see the stubble through your mask. How long have you been in the air?"

"Since half night," he said. He pulled off the head cloth and then the face covering. He had been in the air for all day and half of the previous night.

"What's the rush?"

"I have found the Queen."

"Where?" I got up and moved to the lounge against the south wall to sit next to him.

"On the coast of the Fenland," he leaned his head back again, resting it against the high padded back of the chair.

"Your tea," Wolkayrs handed him a full steaming beaker on a small plate. There were also three sourdough bread chips with a liver pate that Emily likes from one of the food shops in Aybhas.

Usruldes, or rather Irhessa or Hessakos, depending on who was talking to him, looked at the chips with pate and wolfed them down. "I should have eaten those slower," he apologized. "Emily got me hooked on that liver pate from the little specialty food store three rings in on the Eastway in Is'syal. This is just as good."

"When did you eat last?" I asked.

"I had rations," he explained. "I haven't missed any meal times. I wouldn't be able to function if I skipped."

"Rations?" I inquired.

"Flying calvalry rations, tasteless, unsatisfying, small volume, and barfaceous."

"Not those little square things?"

"Yes, those horrid little square things, but they work for me, so I use them."

"Oh my poor son, you will eat a real meal before you leave, even if you turn down my offer of a bed and some healing. So, why are you here? I'm not your employer."

"The King told me to do whatever needed to be done to get the Queen back and gave me the discretion to act as I see fit," he explained. "He does that a lot. He trusts me, maybe even more than he trusts General Bobbo."

"So why are you here?"

"I need Emily," he took a swallow of tea. "That's a wonderful tea, Wolkayrs. Thank you."

"You are welcome." Woldayrs was already back at his table working on the chapel shrine accounts to close out the books for last year. "More pate?"

"Do you need to ask?" my son said.

"I thought as much," he got up and returned to the sideboard to prepare more pate.

"Emily is in Omexkel," I said.

"Still?"

"Well, you know Emily," I chortled a little. "She's been turning the place upside down. She herded them through two sky metal furnace designs and one variation to make steel. Now she's got them building a third design that's supposed to make steel directly instead of iron. She calls it a blast furnace. I don't pretend to understand any of it, though I keep feeling like I should since furnaces for sky metal are all about balancing oxygen and carbon dioxide, which are part of my revelation from Mugash."

"Look," I fetched a box from my worktable. "This was made for me," I handed him a knife with a varnished stacked leather hilt. "Those wavy lines are called pattern welding. Emily started the work on that knife and couldn't finish it because she still lacks stamina, so the folks in the foundry finished it for her. And this one is for the Queen." I took out a slightly larger knife with a purplewood hilt. "Emily didn't tell the folks at the Shrine of Giltak it was for Aylem, but her note for me in the box said it was for the Queen."

"Ow," my son cut himself on the queen's knife.

"You're not the first to do that, you know. These are amazingly sharp knives."

“I don’t understand why she is doing anything for or with the Queen,” my son wondered with a frown. “If I were her, I’d be staying as far as possible from the person who had ruined my life and my health.”

“I asked her that,” I sheathed my knife. “It has to do with the revelation that Landa has for Emily. Aylem Queen apparently is part of that revelation. Emily believes that once the revelation from Landa is complete, she will have fulfilled all the tasks the gods want her to accomplish and she will be free to do what she wants. It’s not a matter of what she thinks of Aylem. She sees Aylem as part of her path to freedom from the demands of the gods.”

Wolkayrs delivered a plate full of pate on bread chips. Irhessa popped two chips with pate in his mouth without even looking at the plate.

"I want one of these," my son said with lust in his eyes for my knife.

"You're probably on her list. I need to get to Omexkel and negotiate the craft right for iron and steel before she does something inadvisable like give it away because she can't be bothered with money."

My son sighed. “I wish I could instill some honest greed in her."

"I know. That's why I did all the negotiating on paper, pencils, the ice cream maker, the kite, the flushing necessary, the shower, and the divine. She will get her fair share, whether she likes it or not. I need to return there soon to make sure she gets some kind of return on glass too, especially since she has already paid the price of her eye injury and the loss of her home. I will need to negotiate with the Shrine of Mueb too, over purple wet weed, and with both Mueb and Giltac over sugar from beets."

"Here for just one year," he shook his head.

"And then there is this," I handed him a one-scale slide rule.

"Oh! The shrine is already making these? That was fast." He started to play with the slide.

"So, will you stay or will you go?" I asked.

"I will stay on the premise that I might have some time with my daughter? I haven't seen any family for eight rotations, I think. I've lost track."

"This can be arranged. Do you have anything other than black to wear?"

"In my saddlebags."

"Wolkayrs can get those for you."

"I'll call Cadrees back."

"He's not on the balcony?" Both Wolkayrs and I looked at my son in surprise.

"I jumped and landed on the dome and climbed down. He kept going and is probably at our old hiding place."

I shook my head in wonderment. "Should I have my mount specialist meet Cadrees at the shrine's mount house or the garrison? If he's in the same shape as you, he may appreciate the services of a healer."

"I think he would like that. He's familiar with the garrison here, so let's make it the garrison. The garrison captain here is familiar with Hessakos the courier." He paused for a moment, "Cadrees will be here in just a moment."

"Let me contact Captain Tyoep. It will help her get used to the thought that you're my son, especially since she already knows you. I'll alert Yutmuss to pay a visit with Cadrees too."

"Thank you."

---