“Dunno ’bout bein’ in charge. Only folks as scares guildsfolk ’ud be mages. When them mages talk, best believe them guildsbuggers chew their tongues ’cept for yessir.”
“Mages?” I’m fairly certain that this was the first time in my life I’d heard that word. It’s certainly the first I remember. “What’s mages?”
“Sumpin as ye need not know, boy. You’ll never see one.”
This was the longest conversation my father and I ever had.
So this was my lesson: The strong-the wealthy, the powerful, the influential-take. The weak are taken from. The strong do to the weak whatever the weak can’t stop them from doing. The strong could run my mother down in the street without even thinking about it.
This did not strike me as injustice. I’m from Tidehollow; I didn’t know what injustice meant until years later, when I came across the word in the course of my self-education. The concepts of justice and injustice struck me at that time as inherently suspect, and nothing in my life has since moved me to alter that opinion. To complain of injustice seems as useful as complaining that the sun shines or that the winds blow.
No: the casual destruction of my mother’s life struck me instead as a reason to make myself strong. She was taken from me because I could not stop them from taking her. I understood that if I remained as I was-a scrapper’s boy in Tidehollow-anything in my life could be taken from me… and everything that could be taken would be taken.
The most reasonable solution, to my young mind, was to make of myself a stronger man. But even if I did, I could be robbed by folk stronger still. How could I stop them?
The answer seemed obvious. The experience that had earned me my nickname left me with an enduring appreciation for the power of precisely applied violence. By the second or third time some other people’s mothers were found dead in the street-the mothers of, say, individuals who had attempted to take from me-I was confident that the warning would be generally understood.
The power to revenge injury a thousandfold was my fondest boyhood dream. No one would dare take what is mine. Ever.
And the word my father taught me that evening, the word meaning “the strongest,” was mage.
I undertook my own investigation into the nature of mages, and how one achieves that title. To ask anyone in Tidehollow would have been futile; I would have gotten more useful answers from my reflection in a mud puddle.
Over the course of some weeks, my investigation took me on surreptitious scouting expeditions into Upper Vectis. There, I discovered for the first time what the slivers and oddments of pale metal that my father gathered were actually used for. I came to understand why a week’s food could be purchased with an amount of etherium that might barely equal the weight of my fingernail parings.
I learned that an individual’s wealth could be calculated to a nicety by observing how much etherium that individual exhibited in jewelry, articles of clothing, slaves, and vehicles. The wealthiest had etherium magically melded to their flesh, and mages-whether human or vedalken or even the great sphinxes of the distant islands- shared one distinguishing feature: a limb, or a body part or several, wholly replaced by a structure of etherium, enchanted to duplicate (and often exceed) the function of the part it replaced.
I also learned I could work as a scrapper for my entire life and never save enough to buy so much as an etherium nose ring.
I was very taken with the esthetics of the etherium enhancements, as well. The indestructible metal for structure and magic for muscles and nerves, clean lines and curves, and elegant purity of operation made them irresistible. Having spent some hours on that street in Lower Vectis, gathering up the filthy shreds of meat and bone that had been my mother, I was-I am-entirely too familiar with the muck restrained by human skin.
I know the color of raw human liver. I know the texture of ripped-open human lung. I saw gobbets of my mother’s brain, and the undigested remnants of a breakfast we had shared in a stew of blood and bile within her torn stomach. And I knew even then that the organs I helped my father scoop back into my mother’s abdominal cavity were no different than what lurked in my own guts, and that the foul stench of corruption lived inside me, too. To this day, I see and smell them again, fully as vivid as they were to my seven-year-old self, in the nightmares that overtake me when I must sleep.
Someone more interested in human psychology than I am might find something ironic in this; I do not think in such literary terms. I am what I am. The key to successful artificing has nothing to do with why; what is the relevant issue. Combined with a properly structured how, one can unlock the universe.
Relevant facts change as circumstances develop, but still…
I’ve known what I am since the night my mother died. I knew what I intended to make of myself, and how to achieve it.
The next day, I entered the family business at my father’s side. I undertook to learn every detail of how one finds and gathers cast-off shreds of etherium. The activity is surprisingly technical, requiring considerable expertise, as the value of the metal makes it very much sought after. One must learn to search where others won’t and learn to retrieve where others can’t.
I very shortly discovered that I surpassed my father in this work, though he’d been a scrapper since he was my age. For a time, I arrogantly assumed it was due to some innate superiority of intellect or character; there were untapped caches of a gram or less of etherium in any number of places, and I assumed my success in finding them-where my father could not-meant I was smarter than he was. I discovered I was wrong when my father decided he no longer needed to work at all, beyond assessing what I had found, calculating a price, and trekking upslope to Vectis to sell it.
He knew as well as I did that I was a better scrapper than he was, and-unlike my ignorant self-he knew why. I chance to have a talent that the vedalken call rhabdomancy. In plain terms, when I have a sample of a particular material, I have a sort of intuition that leads me to wherever I can find more. As rhabdomants go, I was not-nor am I now-especially gifted. My talent enabled me to find etherium because it’s an intense substance, one that casts a vivid shadow upon reality.
One might say that it’s loud.
If gold, for example, were to be counted equivalent to the sound of a man snapping his fingers across the street, etherium would be the sound of an angry sphinx hammering upon a gong larger than a rich man’s house.
My skill had nothing to do with superiority. It was simply an artifact of heredity, like my height or the color of my eyes-or, for that matter, my intellect.
Where I did find myself superior was in the diligence I was willing to exercise in the pursuit of my goal. My father watched me every second; he had learned all too well to read my face-over which I, not yet nine, had little control. If he even suspected I might have located a piece and had not told him, I would endure a memorable beating and would spend the next night, or several, chained to the main ceiling post in the room that served us as both kitchen and bedroom. I never gave over trying, and eventually I hit upon a workable tactic.
Working as a scrapper kept the skin of my hands and feet in a state of continual disrepair. My work involved wading through sewage-drenched cesspools and piles of rotting garbage, pulling out any item that might have come in contact with any etherium-even a smudge of the metal was valuable in its own right. I had no shoes or boots, and my hands were always scratched and torn, and usually infected. Every so often, I would discover slivers of etherium, almost like splinters of glass. The smallest-rarely more than a tenth of a gram-I could conceal by sticking them under the skin of my hands or my feet. Later, after my father was safely snoring in his drug-addled stupor, I could cut these splinters from my flesh and hide them away again.
At that age, I was already an experienced contingency planner. I had secreted four cover stashes in our hovel, each more difficult to uncover than the last. These were used when my father actually caught me stealing- which I took pains that he did, every few months; it made him confident in his vigilance and enabled me to steal all the more. On these occasions, after the customary beating, he would force me to “reveal” the location of my treasure. After absorbing enough physical abuse to make it believable, I would tearfully direct him to the next cover stash.
What my father never caught on to was that my real stash was on-in-my own body. The rank tangles of my hair helped conceal the forty-five grams of etherium splinters I had shoved under my scalp; another thirty grams was in my upper groin, at the tops of and between my thighs. By the time I was ready to leave Tidehollow forever, my permanently grimy flesh concealed two hundred grams of etherium-a princely sum, which, with judicious trading
