Glasswrights' Journeyman Read online

  He shoved aside those thoughts. There was no time for foolishness. He hurried through the hallways, eager to bring his octolaris home.

  Chapter 14

  “Halt! Speak your name!”

  Rani jerked awake, gasping for breath even as she scrambled to her feet. In her first dream-crossed moment of awareness, she glanced at the high walls of the spiderguild enclave, at the ominous gate that was closed until dawn. The guild was not attacking, though. The guild had taken no formal notice of the group that waited for admittance.

  Instead, Crestman stood before her, his back lit by the low-burning campfire. He faced the darkness of the high plains with his Amanthian blade drawn, and he called again, “Speak your name! Identify yourself!”

  Rani snagged the long knife that she had set beside her saddle just before she fell asleep. She hefted the weapon and tossed her hair from her gaze. Mair materialized before her, swearing fluently and fingering her own blade. Tovin swept up from the darkness as well, his short sword glittering in the embers’ light.

  “Rani! Rani Trader!”

  Before she could recognize the voice that called her name, Mair tensed beside her. “Farso!” called the Touched girl, and she rushed past Crestman, ignoring his curved and deadly blade.

  Baron Farsobalinti stepped into the firelight. He held his hands clear at his side, conspicuously avoiding the hilt of his own sheathed sword, not even moving to embrace Mair. “Well met, Crestman. King Halaravilli would be pleased.”

  “Who is this?” Tovin asked, as Rani sheathed her knife.

  “Baron Farsobalinti. King Halaravilli’s closest friend.” She stepped forward. “What is it, my lord? Has our king fallen ill?”

  Farso reached a fleeting hand toward Mair’s face, but he answered Rani immediately. “Nay, King Halaravilli is well enough. He sent me with a message, though.”

  Crestman slapped his sword back into his sheath. He gestured toward their fire and said, “Come then, hand it over.”

  Farso shook his head. “It is not written. My lord did not want to risk it falling into the hands of his enemies.”

  “Then speak, man! We are all listening.”

  Again, Farso shook his head, looking past Crestman. “I must speak with Rani. The king’s words are for her alone.”

  Rani’s heart squeezed tight in her chest, and she barely managed to pull in a breath. What had happened in Liantine? Why had Hal sent Farso? Feeling as if another person moved her limbs, she made her way to the tall, pale lord. “Aye, my lord. Let us step aside.”

  She noticed Mair’s look of consternation, the protest that bubbled up to the Touched girl’s lips. She heard Crestman mutter something, and she sensed Tovin on the edge of their group, separate, confused. Farso wasted no time; he pulled her into the darkness.

  “What, my lord? What news could be so urgent?”

  “He told me I must reach you before you enter the spiderguild enclave. I rode out nine horses.”

  “Tell me, then. What message do you bring from the king?”

  The nobleman glanced at the towering wall behind her, and he lowered his voice so that he scarcely breathed his words. “His Majesty has acquired spiders, my lady. Octolaris for your plan.”

  “What?” Her yelp was loud enough that Crestman took a step closer. She forced herself to whisper to Farso, “How? How did he get them?”

  “The spiderguild apprentice in Liantine, Mareka. She stole them from her masters.”

  For just an instant, Rani pictured the woman’s face, her high cheekbones, her calculating eyes. Mareka Octolaris had broken her guild’s monopoly, then, smuggled out the spiders. Even now, Rani could remember the manipulative flash of the apprentice’s eyes. “And riberry trees? Did she manage those as well?”

  Farso shook his head. “No. There are grubs enough for another month, but after that the spiders will starve. His Majesty commands you to negotiate with the spiderguild for the trees. He thought your mission might be easier if you need not argue for the octolaris as well.”

  “Aye,” she breathed. Easier. But still not easy. “You did well to ride so fast. This news will make a difference.” She shook her head, still wondering how she would negotiate, how she might manipulate the spiderguild. What could she say to them? What bargain could she offer that would convince them to part with the trees? Could she trick them into giving up the riberries, if they did not know Morenia had the spiders? And when would the guild learn that news?

  “When did this happen, my lord?”

  “Late in the afternoon, the day before yesterday.” Rani stared at the nobleman, her surprise transparent. He had not exaggerated about the nine horses – even so, he had ridden faster than she would have thought possible.

  “Then the guild cannot know yet.”

  “Not yet, but they will soon. Princess Jerusha will send them notice, and she will have royal riders at her disposal. They should be here no more than an hour after dawn.”

  “And that will be an hour too late.”

  “My lady?”

  Rani realized that she had been speaking more to herself than to Farso. “Tovin Player has explained to us. The spiderguild opens its gate but once a day, to protect itself against marauders. Anyone who would enter or leave must stand before the gate at the moment the sun crests the horizon. After that, the gates are closed and all must wait until the next dawn.”

  “Surely they will open for a rider from the king!”

  “Tovin says they will yield to no one, for any amount of money, for any threat. The practice has kept them safe here on the plains for generations.”

  Farso glanced over his shoulder, at the sky beyond the glowing firelight. “We haven’t very long, then.”

  “No. Not long at all.” What could she bargain? What could she bid? She shook her head. “Thank you for your message, my lord, and for delivering it in time. I fear, though, if I do not release you to speak to Mair, she’ll gut us both, and we will have no further spiderguild concerns.”

  The nobleman smiled and sketched a hasty bow, then hurried off to the Touched girl. Rani crossed her arms and looked up at the guild’s walls. Soon. Soon she would be inside. Soon she would begin negotiating the bargain of her lifetime.

  “What news did Farsobalinti have?”

  She looked up to see Crestman beside her. “Nothing,” she said. At Crestman’s skeptical snort, she added, “Nothing that affects your mission here.”

  “I should know for myself.”

  “You won’t. His Majesty’s words were for me alone.”

  Crestman started to protest, obviously believing that he had the right to stake a claim. Before he could speak, though, Tovin approached.

  “Our plan remains the same, then? You will enter the spiderguild at dawn?”

  “Oh, yes. Nothing has changed,” Rani said, despite the fact that it had. Everything had changed.

  “We’d best be moving then,” Tovin said, and his teeth shone out against his lips in the greying darkness. For just an instant, Rani thought of the hours she had spent with the player in the dark storeroom, the hours spent learning glasswrights’ secrets, Speaking. Tovin nodded toward the wall. “We must be at the gate when the sun clears the horizon.”

  Rani turned back to the dying fire and started to gather up her belongings, but Tovin said, “Leave everything. The spiderguild will dispatch a groom to tend our horses while we are inside. Also, leave behind your weapons.”

  “Weapons?” Rani might never have heard the word before.

  “Any knife. Any blade. It will not pass the spiderguild gate.”

  Rani’s hand went to her waist, to the silver-chased dagger that she carried. “I can’t go in unarmed.”

  Tovin’s face remained placid. “They’ll check. If they find steel, they’ll turn you away, before you’ve had a chance to say one word to plead your cause.”

  “And if they find me unarmed? What danger will I be in then?”

  “Rani, these are guildsmen, not soldiers. Why would
they attack you, a messenger from another guild? They want to spin their webs, sell their silk. They won’t gain power by dragging unsuspecting visitors off to their dungeons.”

  Rani shrugged and patted her horse’s neck, using the motion to gain some time. She knew that Crestman would challenge the edict to go weaponless. Mair as well, and Farso. Nevertheless, Tovin’s claims seemed truthful. He had come before the spiderguild many times in the past.

  Rani breathed a prayer to Clain, the glasswrights’ god, as she slipped her knife into her saddlebag. Let him watch over her – she was only making herself vulnerable for his glory, after all. For his glory and for Hal’s.

  Tovin nodded and then repeated his warning to Mair and the two western men. As Rani had expected, all three protested. “Do it,” Rani said, before Tovin could explain once again. “If you are going to accompany me, do what Tovin says.”

  Mair grimaced, but she slipped her dagger into her own saddlebag. Her dagger, and a small bodkin that she held in a sheath against her wrist. Tovin pinned the Touched girl with hard eyes, a stare that she braved for a long, starlit minute before she sighed and reached beneath the ivory comb that held her hair off her face. Rani was surprised to see the steel picks that she withdrew – surprised because she had not known Mair to take such precautions.

  Farso swore softly under his breath, shaking his head as he discarded his own weaponry. Crestman looked as if he would rebel outright, but Rani’s imploring glance finally made him comply. He left behind a veritable armory – his Amanthian sword, two short daggers, a long iron spike that had nestled down his boot, and an iron bracelet that opened to reveal two wicked teeth.

  Tovin said nothing; he only led the way up to the heavy iron gate that barred entrance to the spiderguild. When all five of them stood before the guild’s enclosure, the player glanced over his shoulder, as if he were measuring the time until sunrise. He seemed pleased with what he found – the sky was flushing white behind them. Tovin nodded, and then he stepped forward, taking care to stand in the precise center of a great black flagstone that yawned before the gate. “Come along,” he said. “They won’t open up if we aren’t all standing here.”

  Crestman started to mutter, but Rani silenced him with a glance. With Tovin standing in the middle of the darkened stone, Rani stepped to his right side, and she waved Mair and Farso over to his left. The Touched girl’s eyes sparked, as if she did not care for the command, but she obeyed, pulling Farso with her. Crestman took up his position at Rani’s other side, standing close enough that she could feel him breathing, could feel the angry tension that twitched through his flesh, his arms, his very body.

  Rani glanced at Tovin for reassurance, but the player said nothing. She thought that she detected a smile curving his lips, the faintest of grins, as he turned his eyes forward, staring at the center of the massive iron-clad gate.

  Rani caught her breath, and she could make out sounds behind the wall. There was the creak of iron, and a rolling, rocking sound, as if a metal rack were jolting along cobbled streets. The noises were vaguely familiar, rising out of Rani’s past – the sounds of the Merchants’ Quarter swinging into action on a busy morning.

  The sun finally moved above the horizon, washing the walls of the spiderguild enclosure with rosy light. Tovin tensed beside her, and Rani made out a muffled order behind the gate. She braced herself, turning to face the entrance. Then, before she could whisper any of the questions that boiled up in her mind, before she could wonder what she was getting herself into, the door in the center of the gate flew open.

  Light.

  Dazzling, blinding light.

  Rani’s eyes squinted closed against the brilliance, cloaking her vision in blood-red. She stumbled, trying to brave the light, trying to make herself look inside the gate, inside the spiderguild’s enclosure.

  Instead, rough hands seized her. She recognized a soldier’s touch, impersonally gripping her shoulders, coursing down her torso, clutching around her legs as he checked for weapons. Mair swore aloud, and Crestman bellowed, so Rani knew that her companions must be similarly treated. She was grateful that she had followed Tovin’s advice, that she had left her knife in her worn leather saddlebags, for it surely would have been discovered.

  From the shouted oaths, though, Rani learned that Mair had not been so circumspect. “That’s my knife, you bastards’ the Touched girl cried.

  “Silence!” barked someone, and Rani felt the searching hands on her own body grow more brutal. She heard Crestman swear a terrible oath, and then she realized that Mair was being wrestled to the ground. Farso called out a challenge, and the spiderguild guards responded with sharp words of their own.

  Rani tossed her head, trying to discern what was happening. By opening her light-blinded eyes to the barest of slits and twisting away from her captors, she could just make out Mair’s form, spread-eagled on the black stone, a spiderguild guard settling his boot across her neck. Farso was on his knees beside her, his lashed hands pulled high behind him, involuntarily tightening a noose that looped around his throat. The nobleman was frozen, for any gesture that he made would tighten the rope, would cut off his breath even further.

  “Mair!” Rani shouted, but then she caught her breath – she recognized the prick of a blade against her own throat. The steel point nestled in the hollow above her breastbone. When she swallowed, she felt it rise and fall, and she knew that the sharp tip had nicked her flesh.

  As Rani watched through slitted eyes, the spiderguild guards wrestled Mair to her feet, lashing her hands behind her back with spidersilk cords. Mair spluttered at the rough treatment, her Touched tongue filling the air with a complete discourse on the guards’ parentage, on their mothers’ unnaturally close alliance with beasts. Farso glared but did not speak a word as one of the soldiers barked another order. Mair’s mouth was suddenly filled with a wad of spidersilk, the gag lashed tight about her head. The girl continued to thrash, almost breaking free from her captors, but then the leader hollered, “Hold!”

  The bellow echoed off the walls above them, so loud that it shocked Mair into stillness. The captain took advantage of the momentary calm to say to the burliest of his men, “I want your knife beside her jugular. Kill her if she swallows.”

  Crestman caught his breath beside Rani, as if his restraint might provide safety for Mair. Rani’s heart pounded, and her pulse raged in the sting at the base of her own throat. The struggle had moved her off of the black flagstone, and now she could see inside the city gates. She could make out a complicated system of polished mirrors, dozens of reflective glass plates hanging on rolling iron frameworks. Even as she struggled to make sense of the spiderguild’s rough greeting, even as she fought for an escape, she marveled at their cleverness.

  The spiderguild only opened its gates at dawn. At dawn, when the sun rose above the horizon. … The sun, magnified a hundred-fold by the carefully-positioned mirrors. … The spiderguild only let itself be vulnerable when it had the power to blind any potential attacker.

  And Tovin had known. He had stepped onto the black flagstone, onto the focus of the mirrors’ blinding light, with all the confidence of a child settling on his mother’s hearth.

  Mair’s eyes were wild above her gag as she glared a complicated message to Rani. Farso stared up from his own bonds, furiously silent. Before Rani could step forward, before she could try to restore some order to the situation, Tovin spoke. “Well met, spiderguild.” The player’s voice was wry. He raised his hands slowly, smoothly. Rani knew that he bore no weapon, but his motion was clearly calculated to remind his captors of his helplessness. “We beg leave to meet with the guildmaster.”

  “Tovin Player, is it?” The guard eyed the tall man suspiciously. “We expected your return, but no one said you’d bring these others.”

  “I had no time to let you know,” Tovin said easily. “They come on their own mission, not on mine.”

  “Then you do not vouch for them before the guildmaster?”

 
; Tovin’s eyes narrowed for a moment. “I’ll speak for Ranita Glasswright, for this woman here. The others I’ll not condemn, but I do not know their ways, and I do not know their reasons for coming to the spiderguild.” He nodded toward Mair. “That one was told not to approach the gate with steel.”

  “She’s with me!” Rani exclaimed, managing not to wince as her guard tightened his grip on her arms. The pricked spot on her throat pulsed hot. “Tovin says that I am safe, and I say that Mair is!”

  “No one has spoken to you, glasswright.” The captain did not spare her a glance. He even managed to ignore Crestman at her side, despite the Amanthian’s growl. Instead, he pinned all of his attention on Tovin. “This is irregular, player.”

  “Aye,” Tovin agreed. “Ranita Glasswright asked me to conduct her here. She has business with your guildmaster.”

  “What sort of business?”

  “Guild business. Beyond the ken of a common player.” Tovin shrugged as the soldier glared at him suspiciously. “You’ll have to ask the lady for more. I have only guided her here. I do not know the bargain that she hopes to strike.”

  Rani understood this much about negotiating: she would gain nothing by telling this soldier of her plans. “My words are for your guildmaster alone. I’ll do my business with him.”

  “You will, will you?” the captain growled. “You come to our gates with hidden knives, and you expect to be conducted to Master Anigo?”

  Curse Mair for her suspicious mind! Curse her for believing that she was always, unmitigatedly right! Rani forced an even tone into her retort. “My companion feared that we might not be well received here at the spiderguild. She feared that our welcome might be rough, and she vowed to protect herself – and me – from harm.”

  If the captain appreciated the irony in Rani’s statement, he gave no sign. Rather, he glared at her for a long moment, his gaze as hot as the reflecting mirrors’ light had been. He stared pointedly at Rani’s throat, and she wondered if her blood had begun to trickle down her front, if it had reached the top of her collar. She straightened her shoulders and met the soldier’s eyes.