up the sloping streets of Lower Vectis, was enough to purchase clothing, bathing, and adequate food, as well as what I desired most in the world: an apprenticeship in an artificer’s workshop. There I began to learn the ways that metal, glass, and stone can be worked, manipulated, and bent to the tasks my will might require of them.
To this day there are slivers and tiny fragments of etherium lodged in a number of variously private places upon my body. To remove these fragments would be laborious and time-consuming-and, after all, they are my last remaining link to my father, to my childhood, and to the harsh realities of life in Tidehollow.
Keeping them is a symptom of an unfortunate sentimentality. I admit to being sentimental, though perhaps less so than most. Because I acknowledge this, I am able to compensate for the influence this flaw might have on my judgment. I don’t conceal this particular trait-it’s more useful on display, as it often leads others to misread my intentions and to underestimate my capabilities.
I left Tidehollow without saying good-bye. I did look back, but only to ensure that my father was not in pursuit. I was, approximately, eleven years old.
My apprenticeship to the artificer was to span the standard term of seven years; after three, when I had determined to my satisfaction that I had learned all my master could teach, I departed his service in the late hours of a moonless night. Fear of my father’s vengeance had driven me to enter my apprenticeship under an assumed name, which meant that deciding on a new name was no burden and carried no risk of exposure, even by vedalken truth-sayers or suspicious sphinxes. Since I had been given none of my own, whatever word I might choose to call myself in any given moment is my real name.
I have known since a very young age that I am not like other people, be they human, vedalken, viashino, or elf. I have sometimes wondered if the root of that difference might lie in my concept of self, which seems distinctly at variance with the concept others have of themselves. Ask a man who he is, and he will tell you his name. Ask me who I am… and if I wish to give an honest answer, it will come only after a certain amount of detailed self- reflection. I am not a name, and no word truly names me. Who I am is a fluid concept.
It can make social encounters awkward.
I immediately went in search of a new situation-a particular position for which a great deal of wealth would be required. The position I sought was far removed from the humble workshop I had fled; it was beyond the means of all but scions of the wealthiest families of Vectis. Being largely insolvent save for my few remaining grams of etherium, I undertook to supplement my personal financial resources with some judicious prospecting.
There is a particular type of individual-again, species is irrelevant-who is constitutionally incapable of trusting others. (Some say I am one such, but they are mistaken. Unfortunately. The expanding roster of catastrophic betrayals inflicted upon me speaks all too clearly of my trusting nature.)
In Vectis, the inability to trust can lead to some unfortunate behavior; for example, distrusting the reliability of counting houses ends with concealing one’s wealth on one’s person, or on one’s property. When one seeks to conceal wealth, it’s often done by converting said wealth into the most valuable material available, thus lowering the volume and sturdiness required of the hiding place. In Vectis-on the whole of Esper-the most valuable material is etherium, so a rhabdomant might find it in unlikely places.
Buried in someone’s garden, for example.
It was possible to find caches so old that the people who had stashed them away had either forgotten them or had perished without leaving a record of their locations. These were ideal, as one was far less likely to encounter outraged misers who might be armed with any given variety of lethal weapon. Bandits-and worse, rippers-were an issue, especially beyond the city limits, but my time at the artificer’s shop had provided me with the materials for, and the means of, constructing several varieties of lethal weapons of my own. More than one overly optimistic ripper ended up decomposing in the sluice pools of Tidehollow.
It amused me to think of my father investing hours or days in the painstaking dissection of these rotting carcasses, especially because by the time I was through with them, none of these corpses had so much as a microgram of etherium among them.
My unfortunate sentimentality is balanced, I believe, against an elegantly precise capacity for maintaining a grudge.
When I had accumulated five pounds of etherium, I was finally ready to begin my new life. Two pounds was the fee for a year’s study in the Right Ancient Order of Mystic Constructionist Masters-the Mechanists’ Guild.
A mechanist is as far beyond an artificer as a dragon is beyond a goose. At the artificer’s workshop, I had learned how ordinary metal, glass, and stone can be shaped to useful ends. In the Mechanists’ Guild, a student is taught the working of magical materials-and how magic can be used to work one’s materials-as well as how devices, machinery, and automata can be imbued with mana, to give them wholly extraordinary capabilities. After one achieves elevation to journeyman of the Guild, one begins to learn the working of etherium. Then, eventually, as a master, one undertakes the construction of etherium devices-devices with, literally, life of their own.
Mana is, functionally, only power. That is, energy-the capacity to accomplish work. A device of etherium does not require mana to operate; etherium is, itself, a source of mana-and, as I learned in my tenure at the Guild, it is a conduit that channels power from outside the universe.
In the service of the artificer, I had been taught that energy and matter are fundamentally one and the same, regardless of the form of either, and that energy can be neither created nor destroyed. The only change we can force is to alter its form. Even mana is a finite resource. Etherium, on the other hand…
Well, etherium itself is a finite resource-but the power it channels is not.
The Mechanists’ Guild teaches that etherium is the stuff of reality itself, and that by working etherium, one can touch directly the mind of god. It is, however, exceedingly bad manners to inquire “Which god?” They prefer to keep the nature of their purported deity carefully abstract. He sometimes is said to reside in etherium, sometimes in ourselves; sometimes he is said to actually be etherium itself… and sometimes etherium is said to be a channel for his grace.
The being who supposedly introduced etherium to Esper-who was reputed to have personally created, in fact, all the etherium that exists-is known there as Crucius the Mad Sphinx. Crucius is a figure of some renown and of considerable dispute. He is considered by the Mechanists to be not a sphinx at all, for example, but rather an incarnation of the will of their abstract god. This peculiar conviction was certainly sparked by the vast list of the Mad Sphinx’s gnomic utterances about “atonement with the?ther,” and by his dramatic disappearance some decades past.
Matters certainly aren’t helped by the fact that no one actually saw Crucius, with the possible exception of the Hegemon of Esper; he’s a figure one learns of only by repute, and tales grow in the telling. This bizarre cult of the Vanished Mad Sphinx is maintained and evangelized to this day by a vast and increasingly influential rabble of insufferable fanatics who name themselves the Ethersworn.
These demented pebbleheads decided-based on no actual evidence whatsoever-that the key to the “redemption” of the entire plane of Esper is to infuse every living creature with etherium. They have never been able to explicitly define what it is Esper needs to be redeemed from; again, pointing this out to them is excruciatingly bad manners. Given that the supply of etherium is finite and already fully exploited-its supposed creator may have been mad, but it seemed he was not mad enough to scatter deposits of etherium underground or at the bottom of the Sea of Unknowing-the activities of these simpletons have actually accomplished nothing other than driving the price of etherium to preposterous heights.
The normal progress through the Mechanists’ Guild from student to master is seventeen years; seven years as a student-essentially an apprentice, save that one must pay for the privilege-and ten years as a journeyman.
I was a master in five.
My rapid ascension was due, in part, to the same obsessive diligence that enabled me to escape my father and the slums of my birth, but it was also due to my experience as both scrapper and artificer. Sons and daughters of the rich cannot comprehend the actual value of an object. Nothing real is useless to a scrapper, and the limits of available finance and material are, to an artificer, absolute. If you can’t afford steel gears, you make your own, of whatever happens to be available in your shop-or if you are possessed of a mind like mine, you design your device to work without gears at all.
The pampered children of privilege who were my schoolmates had no concept of the tension between waste and elegance. Assigned to design and build a particular style of chronometer, for example, my supposed peers amassed truly baffling arrays of springs and chains, wires, gears, pendulums, ratchets, precious woods, and baroquely filigreed decorative elements. Many of their designs encompassed several hundred parts; the most
