His hands trembled slightly as he turned the racks of the cooling frits. If the colors were true, whatever rune was inscribed in the test plates would be visible. Omet had no idea what information that might reveal, but its mere presence would signal that the color formulas were correct. Once that was achieved, Esten was poised to fire the enormous rolls that would be cut into sheets of glass to be embedded in the tower’s ceiling.
And what that would lead to, he had no idea.
Though the Firbolg king had said little about the purpose of the project, Omet had had enough exposure to the original plans to know that the tower was more than a mere work of art. The stained glass was the final piece that would make it into an instrumentality of some sort, some kind of funnel of power that must be very great for Achmed to be so insistent on it. Omet had no use for magic, especially when he didn’t know what it would bring about, but that had mattered little while the king was in the mountain. Whatever ends Achmed was building his Lightcatcher for, Omet trusted they were not threatening to him.
Now, with the king gone, and a vengeful killer in control, that was no longer the case.
Black eyes were suddenly staring directly into his.
Omet jumped.
The eyes focused even more intently on him.
“Where did you learn to turn racks like that, Sandy?”
Omet struggled to keep from shaking visibly.
“Shaene,” he said simply. It was a lie, but safer than revealing that his technique had come from endless instruction by her own journeymen when he was indentured to her in the foundry of Yarim.
Esten watched him complete the rotation, then nodded, satisfied; she touched the rack and, determining it to be cool, took the red frit out and returned to the worktable.
“It’s true to my eye. Let’s have a look, then, and see if the test plate agrees.”
She held the ancient plate of glass up to the light of the open ceiling above, then carefully slid the newly cooled frit in front of it. She waited for the clouds overhead to pass, then eyed it, the other artisans hovering behind her.
Delight broke over her face as a beam of sun shone into the tower, glowing through the double layer of red glass.
“I see it,” she said quietly. “But I can’t make out what it says. Can any of you? Come here and look while I hold it.”
Rhur and Shaene each looked over her shoulder at the pieces she was holding aloft, then shook their heads. “Don’t even recognize the symbols,” Shaene said, returning to his work. “Those aren’t any letters I’ve ever seen. Looks like scratchings or numbers of some sort. Sorry, Theophila.”
“Come here, Sandy,” Esten said, her eyes still on the test glass. “Do you recognize this writing?”
Omet set his tools down and came over quickly, not wishing to draw he notice further by dawdling. He peered over her shoulder as well, inhaling am holding it so as not to breathe on her.
In the translucency of the glowing red glass he could make out some symbols in a language he could not read, but had in fact seen many times in the original documents. Until the Bolg king had gone to Yarim, no one had any idea what the symbols meant. Rhapsody had translated them, had scratched their meanings onto the diagrams next to the places the runes appeared.
This one was merely the symbol for red.
He shook his head, then walked quickly back to his workbench where th Bolg apprentices and journeymen where preparing the colorants to be added to the ash and sand in the huge vats near the furnaces.
Esten continued to stare at the symbols for a moment longer, then shrugged. She took each of the remaining test plates and held them up to the colored frits, seeing symbols in all but the last.
“Oh well. No time to be lost worrying about it. All right, Rhur, tell the furnace minders to set up the large sheets of frit in each of the colors except violet; we haven’t got the formula right on that one yet. We’ll get the fritting started on the other six. Once they’re fired, grind them down and get then ready for the melt.”
“Grind them down?” Shaene asked incredulously. “You going to add some thing to the mix, lady, and remelt them? An enamel?”
Esten’s eyes glinted sharply. “Yes, just a protective glaze, so that when they’re annealed they will be stronger. I had it sent from Yarim—it’s in those green barrels. No one is to touch them save for me. The glaze is expensive Now, set about it. I want to have the ceiling installed before the king returns.”
Omet smoothed the surface of the wooden board on which the panes wen to be cut, dusting it lightly with chalk. When the board was as white as hi; hands now were, he took the can of water and sprinkled it, then rubbed i down vigorously to make the surface reflective and easy to see.
Once the board was prepared, he looked at Esten, who was busy giving directions to the journeymen, and exhaled quietly.
He reached for the tin-tipped compass, the instrument with which she would draw the window sections, which he was expected to go over with red pigment, noting where the support cames, the leading that bordered each section, would go.
His hand was shaking. No matter how much he tried to control his terror despite being blessed with a nonchalant aspect and a deadpan expression, then were subtle signs of the fear—the gleam he could see on occasion in his eyes reflecting in the undulating glass, his mouth, dry as the sand and ash from which that glass was formed, the way his voice would occasionally refuse to come forth from his constricted throat.
His quaking hands.
Has she noticed? he wondered, watching the masquerading guildmistress cutting pieces of other glass sheets with a red-hot iron cutter, trimming it with her shoddy groziers. How long will it be before she realizes I belonged to her once, lived under her lash, languished in the inferno of her foundry, witnessed her send the bodies of the dead slave boys to the kilns, and hundreds of other crimes?
Amid all those wonderings, the one he had no question about was what would happen to him when she discovered him.
Please let the king return soon, he prayed to whatever god might hear him.
He could feel the gaze from her black eyes on his neck.
“Sandy, get the stonemasons in here,” she said curtly. “It’s time to measure for the tracery supports.”
Omet nodded without turning around, grateful as always to Shaene for his stupid nickname, and to Rhur, for his unwillingness to speak much. His true name was still guarded because of both of their idiosyncrasies. He rose from his workbench and left the room quickly, heading for the quarry where the masons worked.
He had considered telling Rhur, or Shaene, to be wary of the new artisan, not to use his name in her presence, to try and stall the work until the return of the king. But he could not do that. He had seen her in action, had watched her overtly tossing unfortunate boys who tried to escape into ovens, covertly assigning them to tasks that would inevitably drown or asphyxiate them, knew in the depths of his soul that to speak any of his terror out loud would only hasten his end.
He knew what everyone who knew her name knew.
No secret could be kept from Esten for long, let alone forever.
42
After the first few days, Rhapsody managed to settle into a routine, trapped within the tidal cave.
She had made one valiant attempt to swim out with the ebbing current, confirm what she already knew—that the spiraling rip tide was too strong for her to bear up against. She was caught almost immediately in the undertow and found herself fighting to keep from drowning.
So she had to look around for another means of exit.
The first thing that she knew she had to find, after warmth, was water. Drying herself during the times when the tide was low was easy enough; the elemental bond to fire in her soul allowed heat to come forth upon her command, and she took every opportunity to summon it, using the warmth to dry her hair and clothes, reveling in the comfort of not being wet until the next time the current flooded, keeping her body from losing too much heat.