Ullus dropped his mouth open in a facade that would not have convinced an intelligent child. “Good sir!” he exclaimed. “I do not know where you have heard this slander, but-”
The man tilted his head slightly and focused his eyes on Ullus. Ehren’s master was a drunken fool, but neither too drunk nor too foolish to recognize the danger glinting in the man’s eyes. He stopped talking, shut his mouth, and swallowed nervously.
“You are a fence,” the stranger continued in the same quiet tone. “I am Captain Demos. I have goods to liquidate.”
“Certainly,” Ullus said, slurring the word. “Why, just bring them here, and I should be glad to give you fair value for them.”
“I don’t care to be cheated,” the man said. He drew a piece of paper from his pocket and tossed it at Ullus’s feet. “This is a listing. You will sell them at my price or buy them yourself before I return in three weeks. I will pay you a tithe as commission. Cheat me a single copper ram, and I’ll cut your throat.”
Ullus swallowed. “I see.”
“I thought you would,” the man said.
Ullus picked up the list and read it. He winced. “Captain,” he said, his tone cautious, “you’ll get a better price for these farther east.”
“I do not sail east,” the man said.
Ehren sighed and dipped his quill, focusing on looking bored, miserable, and surly in order to disguise his sudden excitement and interest. Westmiston was the westernmost human settlement in the Sunset Isles. The only civilization west of here all belonged to the Canim. Their main trade port was ten days sailing from Westmiston, and at this time of year, about eleven days back.
Three weeks.
Captain Demos was carrying something to the Canim.
“Come,” Captain Demos said. “Bring your slave and a cart. I sail within the hour.”
Chapter 1
Tavi pulled on the rope until he thought his spine would snap from the strain. “Hurry!” he said through gritted teeth.
“You can’t rush true learning, my boy,” said the old man from where he knelt at the mechanism’s release pin. Magnus fussed and grunted over the device for a moment, then crudely forged metal scraped on metal. “Research is the essence of academia.”
Sweat broke out over Tavi’s whole body. “If you don’t get that pin in soon, the arm is going to slip and throw you halfway across the Vale,” Tavi growled.
“Nonsense, my boy. I’m well out of the way. It will shatter like the last one.” He grunted. “There, it’s in. Easy does it.”
Tavi slowly relaxed his hold on the rope, though his hands and arms screamed for relief. The long wooden arm of the device quivered, but remained bent back, locked into place and ready to be released. The haul rope, hooked up to several of the spinning wheels Magnus had manufactured, sagged to the ground.
“There, you see?” he said proudly. “You managed it all by yourself.”
Tavi shook his head, panting. “I still don’t understand how the wheels work.”
“By condensing your strength into a smaller area,” Magnus said. “You hauled forty feet of rope to move the arm back only five feet.”
“I can do the math,” Tavi said. “I’m just… it’s almost unreal. My uncle would have trouble bending that thing back, and he’s a strong earthcrafter.”
“Our forefathers knew their arts,” Magnus cackled. “If only Larus could see this. He’d start frothing at the mouth. Here, lad. Help me with the ammunition.”
Together, Tavi and Magnus grunted and lifted a stone weighing better than fifty pounds into place in the cup at the end of the engine’s arm, then they both stood back from it. “Maybe we should have used some professionally manufactured parts.”
“Never, never,” Magnus muttered. “If we’d used crafted parts, we’d just have to do the whole thing again without them, or else Larus and his kind would discredit us based on that fact alone. No, my boy, it had to be done just as the Romans did it, just like Appia itself.”
Tavi grunted. The ruins of the city of his forefathers stood all around them. They had been built upon the crown of an ancient mountain worn down to the size of an imposing hill, and everything had been made of stone. The walls of dozens and dozens of buildings, now reduced to jagged stone by time and the elements, surrounded them. Grass and trees grew among the ruined houses and old city walls. Wind sighed among the stones, a constant, gentle, and sad song of regret. Deer paced silently on streets so faded they could only be seen to be man-made if viewed from a distance, and sheltered among the walls during infrequent storms. Birds nested upon the remains of statues ground to feature-lessness by time.
The stones used in ruined Appia’s construction did not have the smooth arcs and precise corners of furycrafted rock, but were built piecemeal, from smaller stones that yet bore traces of tool marks, a practice some of the ancient, stone-carved texts Magnus had uncovered in the catacombs beneath the ruins called “quarrying.” Other carvings, apparently of the Romans in action, had survived the years of weathering in the stillness of the caves, and it was from one of those carvings that Magnus and Tavi had seen the war engine engaging in a battle against a foe that seemed to be some kind of monstrous, horned giant.
In fact, everything Tavi had seen and learned there made it quite clear that the ancestors of the Alerans had, like himself, possessed no furycraft whatsoever. It was a fact so self-evident that Tavi wanted to scream with frustration every time he thought of how “scholars” like Maestro Larus at the Academy casually dismissed the claim without bothering to examine the evidence.
Which was why Magnus insisted upon using only crude and inefficient manual labor for every step of the creation process of the war engine. He wanted there to be no way to dismiss the fact that it was at least possible to manage such things without the use of furycraft.
“I understand why we have to do it like this, sir. But the Romans had a lot more practice than we do. Are you sure this one will work?”
“Oh,” Magnus said. “As sure as I can be. The fittings are stronger, the beams thicker. It’s quite a bit more stable than the last one.”
The last engine had simply shattered into a mound of kindling when they tested it. The current model, the fifth of its line, was considerably more sturdy. “Which means if it explodes again, it’s going to throw a lot more pieces around. And harder.”
They looked at one another. Then Magnus grunted and tied the end of a long cord to the pin that held the arm back. The pair of them backed away a good twenty paces. “Here,” Magnus said, offering Tavi the cord. “I did the last one.”
Tavi accepted it warily and found himself smiling. “Kitai would have loved to see this. Ready?”
Magnus grinned like a madman. “Ready!”
Tavi jerked the cord. The pin snapped free. The mechanism bucked in place as its arm snapped forward, and threw the stone into a sharp arc that sent the missile soaring into the air. It clipped a few stones from the top of a ruined wall, arched over a low hilltop, and dropped out of sight on the other side.
Magnus let out a whoop and capered about in a spontaneous dance, waving his arms. “Hah! It works! Hah! A madman, am I?”
Tavi let out an excited laugh of his own and began to ask Magnus how far he thought the engine had thrown the stone, but then he heard something and snapped his head around to focus on the sound.
Somewhere on the other side of the hill, a man howled a string of sulfurous curses that rose into the midmorning spring sky.
“Maestro,” Tavi began. Before he could say more, the same stone that they had just thrown arched up into the air and plummeted toward them.
“Maestro!” Tavi shouted. He seized the back of the old man’s homespun tunic and hauled him away from the
