Foundation

Mags had not been one of the mine kiddies then, so he had been able to scuttle back to the kitchen, where he shivered through his work. Even the kitchen drudges, usually starving, had little appetite for their scraps that day.

Which, of course, was exactly what the Master intended. The lesson was clear. Take up a weapon and die.

So it was small wonder Mags had difficulty even contemplating setting a hand to a hilt.

Fortunately, no one seemed to think he needed to.

Slowly, he began poking his nose into other places around the Guard Post. He found the office of the fellow who did all the reckoning for this post, and watched in fascination as he made marks that looked like letters, but weren’t. The man seemed amused and, after a while, motioned him over.

“I take it no one ever taught ye your numbers as well as your letters, boy?” he said. He was the oldest person that Mags had ever seen; his hair was snow white, and his face as full of wrinkles as the bark of a tree. His eyes could scarcely be seen, but there was a bright look to them, like a bird’s eye. And Mags did not “hear” anything at all amiss in the thoughts that ticked away in his head like the regular dripping of water on stone. Numbers—this man thought mostly in numbers. He loved them, loved the patterns they made, loved the pure logic that governed them, loved that three and three always made six, never four, never seven.

Mags shook his head.

“Well then, ’tis time to learn, and as I’ve time meself, I’ll teach ye. Pull up yon stool.” He nodded at a tall stool in the corner. Mags obeyed.

The man pulled open a drawer in his desk and extracted a piece of slate and a square-cut stick of white stuff. “Ye’ll be usin’ this; ’tis slate an chalk. ’Tis easy rubbed out, y’ see?” He made a mark and buffed it away with a sleeve. “Now, ye kin count right enough, aye?”

“To a hunner’ sir,” Mags almost whispered.

“Right enough. Well, there’s marks for them numbers, just as there be marks that make letters that make words. On’y these be a bit more straightforward, belike. This be ‘one’—”

Mags caught on quickly. And although he had not realized it until the man—who he learned was Guard-Clerk Sergeant Taver—showed him, he did know some primitive reckoning. After all, he had to keep track of the sparklies he found. He took to the figuring quickly, learning how to add and subtract double-digit numbers by the end of the afternoon, much to Sergeant Taver’s delight. It was Taver who took him in to supper that night, in fact, and much enjoyed letting the “dunderheads” know that already the “wee boy” could outreckon no few of them.

He shook his finger at one particular young man who had pulled his head so far down into his collar that he looked like a turtle. “An’ the next time, Brion, ye come t’ me an’ tell me thet th’ two dozen socks ye been issued adds up t’ twenty, I’ll have him come an’ count ’em aright for ye!”

Mags was fearful then that the Guard would take it hard, and be angry with him. Yet as the others laughed, he grew crimson but laughed with them, and Mags sensed nothing more in his thoughts than chagrin and a determination to count more carefully next time.

Sheer astonishment left him dumb through the rest of the meal—but since silence on his part was a more common occurrence than speech, no one really noticed.

He went to bed feeling something he had never experienced before in his life; the warmth of accomplishment. Sergeant Taver had said he was clever! No one had ever said that before to him! He felt Dallen’s glow of approval, and decided on his own that if Sergeant Taver would continue to show him the mysteries of numbers, he would continue to pursue them.

But, as it fell out, the next day brought a rather different task for him.

Chapter 5

In the morning, Herald Jakyr was waiting for him as soon as he had finished his breakfast. He sensed Jakyr waiting outside the room and was surprised to feel a certain happiness when he also sensed the Herald was waiting for him. It was an unfamiliar feeling, taking pleasure from knowing someone wanted to see him. In the past, well, the only time anyone wanted to see him was to question him, usually before punishing him. It came to him with a feeling of shock that he actually had not seen anyone punished as such since he had come to this place. Oh, he had overheard men being berated by trainers, or even assigned to some undesirable duty because of some infraction or other, but he actually had not seen anyone punished as he understood the term.

But his pleasure in seeing Jakyr was short-lived. With him was a stranger, a sober-faced man in a dark tunic and trews, who carried a leather case with him and who regarded him with a measuring eye. Mags shrank from the stranger, instinctively trying to hide from that searching look. Jakyr brought both of them to the library, shut the door, and shot the latch across it. The only time he had ever been in a room with a locked door was when something truly terrible was about to happen, and Mags looked at the Herald with alarm until Dallen soothed him. :Just do what Jakyr tells you, Chosen,: came the calm voice in his head. :This is needful: Visions of horrible beatings passed across Mags’ mind as Dallen assured him that nothing of the sort was going to happen. :.He is only going to ask you questions. That is all:

Questions! Questions could lead to bad things, too! What if he got the answers wrong? What if the answers made the man angry?

It was with difficulty that Dallen finally persuaded Mags that it would be all right. Both Jakyr and the stranger must have found out in some way that Mags was afraid, and that Dallen was calming him down, because both of them stayed quiet until Mags was finally ready to talk. And even then he was shaking inside and regretting he’d had any breakfast at all.

“This is going to be difficult for you, Mags, I understand that,” Jakyr said carefully, as the other man took pens, a pot of ink, and a sheaf of clean paper from his case and set them up on a table. “Your condition, and that of the other children I saw at Cole Pieters’ mine is fairly convincing testimony of neglect, if not outright abuse. But I need more than that if I am to be able to take a company of the Guard there and close the place down. I need testimony from you, and as much as you can tell me about the place.”

Mags scarcely heard the last sentence, since the one before it was so astonishing. “Close the mine?” he whispered. “But—what ’bout the rest of th’ kiddies? If ye close th’ mine, Master Cole belike won’ feed ’em!”

“Master Cole won’t be in charge of them,” Jakyr replied, with a certain grim satisfaction. “And Master Cole