Master Pye did something with his hand-changed grip somehow.
The infidel knight grinned. “Ah-rafiki!” he said.
“He says, ‘Oh, friend!’” said the clerk.
Master Pye nodded. He turned.
“Boys, that’s one of the six-on a table in our shop. I expect that in the next quarter hour, we’ll have the most complete set of weights, measures and dimensions for that sword as exist in all the world. Eh?”
He took the clerk by the shoulder and led him-and the infidel, who didn’t want to leave his weapon-out of the shop.
“Six?” Duke asked.
Tom whistled. “Don’t you know anything?”
Duke gave him a look that promised bruised knuckles. Duke had made journeyman on pure talent, and lacked the book learning of the other journeymen.
“Hieronimus Magister was the greatest magus of the Archaics,” Edmund said. “You should read his essay on the property of metals. It is the origin of proper study.” He shrugged. “At any rate, he was the greatest of mages. In their world, he is treated as a prophet.” He pointed out the door, where the black man had gone. “When the Umroth attacked, he made a hundred swords for the Emperor’s guard to use against the not-dead.”
Tom was measuring and Sam was writing everything in his neat hand on wax.
“At the end of the last Umroth war, only six remained. They kill-both here and in the aethereal. But strange events follow them-weather, monsters, the Wild, assassins.” Edmund shrugged. “I thought they were a myth.”
Duke reached out-always the boldest of them-and picked up the great curved sword.
“Holy Mother of God,” he said.
He, too, seemed to grow in stature and dignity.
“Oh,” he breathed. He put the sword down, carefully. “Oh-my God.”
As Duke was never impressed by anything, Edmund couldn’t stop himself. He plucked up the sword.
Once, as a child, Edmund had gone with his mother and sisters to the cathedral and there, by chance, he had been standing in the nave when the sun emerged from the clouds and shone directly through the great central rose window of the cathedral. All around him, light exploded into bloom and in that moment, he had felt the touch of God-the direct, intangible presence of the universe and all wisdom, and everything: his sister’s laughter, his mother’s whisper, the priest’s hands, the passage of the smoking censor through the perfumed air, the perfection of its arc and the gleam of its silver shell; and every dust mote and every hint of the last chord of the last hymn and the whispers of the nuns and the gleam of a rich woman’s buttoned sleeve-everything made sense.
Edmund had never forgotten that moment. It was at the heart of his craftsmanship.
And now he relived it in half the beat of his heart. He was the sword. The sword was in him and over him. And everything, everywhere, made sense.
He regained control of himself-aware of a nearly overpowering urge to use the blade on something-anything-to feel its perfection in culmination, almost exactly the feeling he had when he lay beside Anne and kissed her and wanted more. To finish.
To be complete.
Instead, he laid the sword gradually down on the table.
“Be careful,” he said to Sam. “But you must try it.”
“Can you imagine wearing that every day?” Edmund asked Duke.
Duke sighed. “Oh-aye. I can imagine.” He smiled weakly. “I wanted to cut you in half, just to see if I could.”
Neither laughed.
An hour later, a boy came from Prior Wishart with a note for Ser Ricar. By then the sword was returned to its owner, who seemed profoundly more at ease to have it at his side. He was seated at a table in the yard, writing out words in his odd flowing runes at the dictation of Ser Gerald’s clerk.
The clerk made an odd gesture. “He speaks Etruscan well eno’,” he said. “I’m trying to give him a few words in Alban.”
“Etruscan?” Master Pye asked. He shook his head.
Ser Ricar appeared at his elbow and handed him a note.
Master Pye took the note and read it.
“Christ on the cross,” he snapped. “Boys! On me!”
Long before the King’s Guardsmen came, Blanche was gone, and her bed was stripped and the maids were washing in the yard. The black man vanished as if he had never been, and Ser Ricar vanished with him.
The guardsmen searched in a desultory way. Blanche had friends throughout the palace. The guardsmen were not very interested in finding her, but they had a warrant for her arrest.
When they were gone, Mistress Pye put her arms around her husband. “Bradley Pye,” she said. “I think it is time to get out of this town.”
He was watching the last two guardsmen as they went through his gate.
“Worse ’n you think,” he muttered. “They’re going to suppress the Order.”
His wife crossed herself. “Blessed Saint Thomas,” she said.
Master Pye had tears in his eyes. “My life’s work is here,” he said. “But our secret guards will be gone, now. The prior’s calling his knights away before the King can get to them.”
“So?” his wife asked.
“So we’re naked,” Master Pye said. “And an army of Galles will land in the next day or two. Gerry says the Venike know they’re coming.”
“Gerald Random won’t let us down.” Deirdre Pye shook her head.
“I’d be happy if you were gone,” Master Pye said. “You an’ the maids.”
“Bradley Pye, when will you learn that we’re not hostages? We’re willing hands.” His wife crossed her arms.
Pye pursed his lips. “We’ll see,” he said.
No Galles came the next day, or the next.
Outside the southern walls of the city, the bleachers rose for the tournament, and lists were built. There were lists for foot combat, with oak beams four fingers square that rested on oak posts, so that a knight in full armour, thrown by another, wouldn’t budge the fence. Four feet high, eighteen feet on a side-a bear pit for armoured fighters.
The mounted lists were more complicated; a central barricade the height of a horse’s haunches, walled in oak boards, the whole length of the course, with another oak fence all the way around the outside, a hundred and fifty feet long and forty feet wide.
Both lists were nearly complete. At the foot lists, a dozen pargeters and painters had begun hanging painted canvas and leather decorations that looked, for all the world, like solid gold and silver pedestals holding magnificently decorated shields.
The Master Pargeter already had a master roll of every knight and squire expected to fight. On the ninth and tenth pages, shields had been added to indicate the late entries-Galles who had not yet arrived, and Occitans who were rumoured, even now, to be en route.
The royal arms decorated the royal pavilion-the King was a noted jouster and had every intention to participate-and the stands.
The Master Pargeter had narrow red lines through a number of coats of arms, as well, from the original roll. The Earl of Towbray was no longer included. The Count of the Borders had been ordered to take a force of Royal Foresters into the west country in response to raids from the Wild. Edward Daispansay-the Lord of Bain-had taken his retainers and left the court a month before. Only his son Thomas remained, and the difference on his arms-an eight-pointed star-was, thankfully, an easy correction to paint.
The Count D’Eu, the Champion’s cousin and a famous lance, had just withdrawn that morning.
But the biggest change was that the Queen’s arms had been ordered stricken from the record. Desiderata’s arms-the Royal Arms of Occitan, quartered with Galle and Alba and supported by a unicorn and a Green Man, were well known throughout the kingdom, and her knights had, on other occasions, been the most cohesive team after the King’s. Now her arms were banned, which led to a great deal of speculation among the workmen, and not a single one of her knights was to break a lance or swing a sword in the lists.
Ser Gerald Random, the King’s “merchant knight,” stood on his wooden foot, supported by a thick ebony cane with a head of solid gold, watching the workmen. Around him stood most of his officers for the tournament, and with him was the new Lord Mayor of Harndon, Ailwin Darkwood, and the past mayor, Ser Richard Smythe.