Storm Breaking

Although the air was a bit stuffy and very dusty, with a hint of strange metallic scents, it was not at all damp. Nor was the room as gloomy and ill-lit as An'desha had anticipated. There were more of those magical lights everywhere, and as An'desha looked around, he had no doubt at all just what Urtho had used this room for. It was a workshop, with everything necessary for an inveterate tinkerer who was interested in literally everything.

Needless to say, the room was very crowded, despite the fact that it was just a little smaller than the main room above. This was not a mage's classical workroom, a place where only magic took place, and few if any physical components were needed. This was a place where anything and everything could be worked with, played with, investigated. Here was a bench with an array of glassware and rows of jars that had once held chemicals both liquid and solid—most of the former long since evaporated, leaving only dust or oily residue in the bottoms of their bottles. There stood another bench with a small lathe, clamps, a vise, and tools for working wood and ivory and beside it a similar bench with the tools for shaping soft metals, and a third bench with the tools for cutting and polishing lenses, glass, and crystal. Looking incongruous beside that was a potter's wheel and glassblower's pipes, and along the back wall were a forge, a kiln, a glassmaker's furnace, and a smelter. They probably had once shared a chimney, long since blocked up by the destruction of the Tower above. There were more benches and work spaces set up, but from the staircase An'desha could not tell what they were, only that most of them had been in use up to the day of the Cataclysm.

An'desha simply stood and stared as the others wandered about, looking, but not touching. Master Levy on the other hand, looked supremely satisfied by what he saw, as he surveyed it all from the staircase.

'Now this is much more in my way of doing things,' he said, folding his arms across his chest and looking over the workshop with approval. 'I believe I could have liked this Urtho.'

On all of the benches—all of them—were projects in various states of completion. It was difficult to tell what some of them had been intended to do, if anything. There were pages of notes arrayed neatly beside each of these projects; it appeared that, in his workplace at least, Urtho was a tidy and methodical man. Firesong stood beside a particular bench laden with some very odd equipment indeed. He gazed on these pieces of paper with longing, although he forbore to touch them.

'This is maddening,' he complained, hovering over a small sheaf of scrawled manuscript. 'I'm afraid even to breathe on these things for fear that they'll fall to dust, but I think I may die if I can't read what's on the next page!'

But something about the way the 'paper' looked stirred echoes in An'desha's deepest memories; he descended the last few stairs and made his way over to what appeared to be a small jeweler's workbench. There was a half-finished brooch there, nothing magical or mechanical, obviously just a piece of jewelry in the shape of a hummingbird to be inlaid with a mosaic of tiny agate-pieces formed into stylized feathers. 'Wait,' he muttered. The original design lay next to it, and after a close examination of the sheet, An'desha picked it up.

Silverfox stifled a gasp, and Firesong bit off a protest. He waved the intact and flexible drawing at them to prove it was not hurt by handling.

'Pick up what you want,' he urged, 'It's not paper. Or rather, it isn't like the paper we know and use now. It's a special rag-paper treated with resins so it wouldn't disintegrate. You can write on it in silverpoint, crayon, or graphite-stick, but not ink; ink just beads up and won't penetrate.'

'Really?' Master Levy walked to the bench nearest him and picked up another piece of the paper. 'Very useful around chemicals, I would guess.'

'Very useful around anything that might ruin your notes,' Firesong observed, snatching up the papers he had stared at so covetously. 'oh—now this—oh, my—' He held the papers up so that Silverfox could peruse them, too, as between them they tried to decipher Urtho's notes in ancient Kaled'a'in, using the Hawkbrother tongue Firesong knew and Silverfox's modem Kaled'a'in as guides.

Che'sera looked at them curiously, but Lo'isha laughed at their immediate absorption. 'Oh, we have lost them for a time,' he said indulgently. 'I know that look. The weaver is one with the loom!'

'Not entirely,' Firesong responded absently. 'But I will be very pleased when this scholar of Silverfox's shows up, so he can help us with this. If these notes are right, this may be the answer to our isolation here.' He waved a hand at the bench and what looked to be a pair of mirrors serving as the lids to a matching pair of boxes. 'These are completed, or all but some cosmetic frippery—and they're supposed to act like a pair of linked scrying spells, except they don't use true-magic, they use mind-magic. Apparently it can work over unknown, incredible distances. Somehow they amplify it so that it only needs one person with mind-magic to make both boxes work, or so I think this says.'

That made every head in the place turn toward the Adept, and he finally looked up from the notes he was sharing with Silverfox, shaking his hair out of his eyes. 'Got your attention then, did I?' he asked, with a sly smile.

:If these devices use mind-magic, they won't be disrupted by the mage-storms,: commented a mental voice from above, and Altra flowed gracefully down the staircase, taking a seat on one of the steps at about head-height to the humans. :That would be more than merely useful. If we learned how to use them, I could take one to Haven; if we learned how to make them, I could take another to Solaris. And I certainly have enough mind-magic to make them work, no matter who wishes to use them.:

'I thought you said that you didn't want to Jump anymore,' Firesong said sardonically. An'desha chuckled.

:I don't want to, but devices like these could replace that aspect of my duties as well as give us