Thessa followed on Montego’s heels, surprised to see that he was, apparently, known here. Despite the initial confusion, the three siliceers followed his instructions quickly, removing their current projects from the workbenches and pulling crucibles of molten cindersand out of the furnace to make room for new ones. Thessa did not wait for permission, throwing herself into the workshop with a siliceer’s eye, noting the layout of the tools and quickly finding the stores of cindersand – accompanied by notes explaining where each bag of sand had been quarried – and locating rows of small jars containing the needed impurities.
She plucked them out, one by one, muttering under her breath. “Gold, copper, selenium. Ah, manganese. Put him someplace comfortable. Wait! We should talk to him while I work. Put a blanket on that workbench there, then lay him down. Keep him focused. It’s like…” She snapped her fingers, trying to remember bits of her old instruction books. “Like staying awake in the cold, except we risk his mind breaking from the fear.”
As quickly as she dared, she mixed cindersand with tiny amounts of each impurity, then used long tongs to set each crucible into the heat of the furnace. Once that was done, she walked around the workshop one more time to make sure she knew where every tool was, and that she would not trip on anything in the unfamiliar space. She then went to Demir’s side, where Montego was talking to him in a soothing voice.
“Can you understand us?” Thessa asked, just to make sure he hadn’t slipped away since he last spoke to her.
Demir’s eyes left Montego and traveled to her. There was a long moment of quiet, the corners of Demir’s eyes wrinkling as if he was making an enormous mental effort. “Please tell. Montego. To stop talking. To me like. A child.” There was a hint of a smile at the end of this, and Thessa let out a relieved sigh.
“Good, good.”
One of the Prosotsi siliceers appeared in the doorway, tiptoeing over to Montego and whispering, though not quietly enough, “Craftsman Prosotsi left for Ossa earlier today. We don’t expect him back for several hours. Are you sure we should allow a stranger the run of the glassworks?”
“Do you know how to counter the effects of fearglass?” Thessa demanded.
The Prosotsi siliceer glanced at Demir’s upper chest, where the now-bloody handkerchief was still lying over the wound. “Ah,” he said. “No, I don’t. Please continue. Craftsman Prosotsi would put everything at Master Demir and Master Montego’s disposal.”
“Get clean linens for his wound,” Montego ordered. “And the best sample of cureglass you have on hand. Go on!”
Once he’d gone, Thessa turned her attention back to Demir. She leaned over him, looking in one eye, then the other, not entirely sure what she was looking for. He was still wearing both his own and Montego’s skyglass. “How do you feel?”
“Like. I am. Drowning.”
“Better or worse than before?”
Demir seemed to consider this for several moments, his eyes going in and out of focus. “The water is. Not. As deep? But I fear. Everything. I can hear them screaming. The civilians. I can see that little girl’s face.” Tears pooled in his eyes, rolling down the side of his face when he blinked.
Thessa didn’t know what he was going on about. “You can fight the fear,” Thessa told him, taking his hand and squeezing it. To her delight, he had the strength to squeeze back. “Montego is here, and he is your friend. I’m your friend. Don’t let the fear pull you into madness. I’m working on … I’m working on a way to bring you out of this. I can’t promise it’ll work, but–” She flinched, wishing immediately she hadn’t said that. “But I’ll do my best.”
Demir closed his eyes, and did not open them again until Montego gave him a little shake. “It is. Exhausting,” he said haltingly. “To be so. Scared. Again.”
Again. Had he dealt with fearglass before? Was that how he had survived it for so long? “It’s okay,” Thessa said, squeezing his hand harder. “That’s what fearglass does. It makes you more scared than you’ve ever been in your life. It makes your body want to flee, but it doesn’t know to where. It does all of this until your heart gives out or your mind breaks. If we can prevent both of those things from happening, then … What’s so funny?”
Demir had begun to tremble, letting out a little wheezing laugh. He looked at Montego for a long minute, then back to Thessa. Once she had his attention, she moved closer. “What’s so funny?” she repeated.
“Still not as. Bad. As…” He trailed off, not finishing, his eyes growing unfocused once more. He flinched. “Okay. Maybe a little. Worse.”
“Don’t talk if it hurts. But stay focused on one of us.” Thessa left him long enough to check the crucibles in the furnace. They were almost melted. She gave each a stir with a clean rod, then returned to Demir’s side. She took another deep breath, trying to maintain her own calm, preparing herself for what was to come. She glanced up to see that Montego was watching her sharply.
“Have you done this before?” he asked quietly.
She shook her head. “I know the theories, but I’m about to attempt a quadruple braiding in a furnace I’ve never worked before, using firewood and cindersand whose origins I cannot verify myself. This is master-level work and the stake is only the life of the person who just saved me from a fate worse than death. Is he … is he laughing again?”
On the workbench between them, Demir was making that rasping, wheezing, chuckling sound.
“He has a very morbid sense of humor,” Montego said.
“I hope it keeps him from dying or going insane before we can fix this. If,” she added under her breath, “we can fix this.” A thought occurred to her, and she tilted her head at Montego. “I’m sorry, but this has all gone so damned fast. Are you Baby Montego?”
“You recognize me?”
“I only surmised from the name. I don’t follow cudgeling myself, but my master used to talk about you all the time. He was very proud to have seen your last fight.”
Montego adjusted the collar of his jacket, looking supremely pleased with himself. “She’s heard of me, Demir,” he said, slapping his friend none-too-gently on the leg.
Demir let out a pained moan. “Needy. Prick.”
Thessa checked the crucibles, then turned back to Montego and Demir. “It’s time.”
She steeled herself for a few moments, and then leapt into her work. She started with molten cindersand for cureglass, rolling out a curved piece just over an inch long and no thicker than a heavy wire. The resonance eluded her, and she redid it until the tiny piece of glass was too stiff to work. She discarded it and started with another. It took her three tries before she got one she was happy with, and let it harden for several minutes while she began to work with the museglass, curling it around the center cureglass piece. It miraculously worked on the first attempt, but the resonance did not take when she tried to add shackleglass. She discarded it all and started again.
She talked as she worked, explaining each step, letting her mouth run in an attempt to calm her nerves. “I know this has been done before, even if I haven’t done it myself,” she told them. “You have cureglass for a core – we’re trying to heal him after all – and wrapped around that is museglass, witglass, and shackleglass. The museglass and shackleglass are both to make his mind more malleable; to accept the healing that we’re trying to get in there. The witglass helps the sorcery target the mind.” She winced as she made a mistake, and started over from the beginning.
“This is all theory, of course. We know that it does work, but we can only conjecture as to the how or why. There is a division among siliceers. Some claim that what we do is a science. Some claim that it is an art. They are both right. I’ve seen siliceers without a drop of logic in their minds produce fantastic works of high-resonance godglass using the very worst ingredients. Myself – well, I’m not much of an artist, but if you tell me exactly what I’m working with and exactly what I’m trying to accomplish, I will get there. Eventually.”