of numbers are of little interest to me.
Due to my abandonment of chemistry and arithmetic, I had a great deal of free time on my hands. Some of this I spent in the Fishery, making a Bloodless of my own that sold practically before it hit the shelves. I also spent a fair amount of time in the Archives and the Medica, doing research for an essay titled “On the Non-Efficacy of Arrowroot.” Arwyl was skeptical, but agreed my initial research warranted attention.
I also spent some of my time romantically. It was a new experience for me, as I had never caught the eye of women before. Or if I had, I hadn’t known what to do with the attention.
But I was older now, and wiser to some degree. And because of the stories circulating, women on both sides of the river were beginning to show an interest in me.
My romances were all pleasant and brief. I cannot say why brief, except to state the obvious: that I do not have much in me that might encourage a woman to make long habit of my company. Simmon, for example, had a great deal to offer. He was a gemstone in the rough. Not stunning at first glance, but with a great deal of worth beneath the surface. Sim was tender, kind, and attentive as any woman could care for. He made Fela deliriously happy. Sim was a prince.
By contrast, what did I have to offer? Nothing really. Less now. I was more like a curious stone that is picked up, carried a while, and finally dropped again with the realization that for all its interesting look, it is nothing more than hardened earth.
“Master Kilvin,” I asked. “Can you think of a metal that will stand hard use for two thousand years and remain relatively unworn or unblemished?”
The huge artificer looked up from the brass gear he was inscribing and eyed me standing in the doorway of his office. “And what manner of project are you planning now, Re’lar Kvothe?”
In the last three months, I’d been trying to create another schema as successful as my Bloodless. Partly for the money, but also because I’d learned that Kilvin was much more likely to promote students with three or four impressive schema to their credit.
Unfortunately, I had met with a string of failures here, too. I’d had more than a dozen clever ideas, none of which had led to a finished design.
Most of the ideas were struck down by Kilvin himself. Eight of my clever ideas had already been created, some of them more than a hundred years ago. Five of them, Kilvin informed me, would require the use of runes that were forbidden to Re’lar. Three of them were mathematically unsound, and he quickly sketched out how they were doomed to failure, saving me dozens of hours of wasted time.
One of my ideas, he rejected as “utterly inappropriate for a responsible artificer.” I argued that a mechanism that would cut the time needed to reload a ballista would help ships defend against piracy. It would help defend towns against attack by Vi Sembi raiders. . . .
But Kilvin would hear none of it. When his face began to grow dark as a storm cloud, I quickly abandoned my carefully planned arguments.
In the end, only two of my ideas were sound, acceptable, and original. But after weeks of work, I was forced to abandon them as well, unable to get them to work.
Kilvin set down his stylus and half-inscribed brass gear, turning to face me. “I admire a student who thinks in terms of durability, Re’lar Kvothe. But a thousand years is a great deal to ask of stone, let alone metal. To say nothing of metal put to heavy use.”
I was asking about Caesura, of course. But I hesitated to tell Kilvin the full truth. I knew all too well that the Master Artificer did not approve of artificery being used in conjunction with any sort of weapon. While he might appreciate the craftsmanship of such a sword, he would not think well of me for owning such a thing.
I smiled. “It isn’t for a project,” I said. “I was just curious. During my travels I was shown a sword that was quite serviceable and sharp. Despite this, there seemed to be proof that it was over two thousand years old. Do you know of any metal that could avoid breaking for so long as that? Let alone keep an edge?”
“Ah.” Kilvin nodded, his expression not particularly surprised. “There are such things. Old magics, one could say. Or old arts now lost to us. These things are scattered through the world. Marvelous devices. Mysteries. There are many reliable sources that speak of the ever-burning lamp.” He gestured with a broad hand at the hemispheres of glass laid out on his worktable. “We even possess a handful of these things here at the University.”
I felt my curiosity flare up. “What sort of things?” I asked.
Kilvin tugged his beard idly with one hand. “I have a device devoid of any sygaldry that seems to do nothing but consume angular momentum. I have four ingots of white metal, lighter than water, that I can neither melt nor mar in any way. A sheet of black glass, one side of which lacks any frictive properties at all. A piece of oddly shaped stone that maintains a temperate slightly above freezing, no matter what the heat around it.” His massive shoulders shrugged. “These things are mysteries.”
I opened my mouth, then hesitated. “Would it be inappropriate for me to ask to see some of these things?”
Kilvin’s smile was very white against the dark of his skin and his beard. “It is never inappropriate to ask, Re’lar Kvothe,” he said. “A student should be curious. I would be troubled if you were indifferent to such things.”
The big artificer went to his large wooden desk, so strewn with half-finished projects that the surface was barely visible. He unlocked a drawer with a key from his pocket and drew out two dull metal cubes, slightly larger than dice.
“Many of these old things we cannot fathom or make use of,” he said. “But some possess remarkable utility.” He rattled the two metal cubes as if they were dice, and they rang together sweetly in his hand. “We call these warding stones.”
He bent and set them on the floor, spaced several feet apart from each other. He touched them and spoke very softly under his breath, too quietly for me to hear.
I felt a subtle change in the air. At first I thought that the room was growing colder, but then I realized the truth: I couldn’t feel the radiant heat of the smoldering forge at the other end of Kilvin’s office.
Kilvin casually picked up the bar of iron used to stir the forge and swung it hard at my head. His gesture was so casual that it caught me completely off my guard, and I didn’t even have time to cower or flinch away.
The bar stopped two feet away from me, as if striking some unseen obstruction. There was no sound as if it had struck something, neither did it rebound in Kilvin’s grip.
I reached out my hand cautiously and it butted up against . . . nothing. It was as if the intangible air in front of me was suddenly made solid.
Kilvin grinned at me. “The warding stones are of particular use when performing dangerous experiments or testing certain equipment,” he said. “They somehow produce a thaumic and kinetic barrier.”
I continued to run my hand along the unseen barrier. It wasn’t hard, or even solid. It gave way slightly when I pushed at it and felt slippery as buttered glass.
Kilvin watched me, his expression faintly amused. “Truthfully, Re’lar Kvothe, until Elodin made his suggestion, I was thinking of calling your arrow-arresting device the Minor Ward.” He frowned slightly. “Not entirely accurate, of course, but more so than Elodin’s dramatic nonsense.”
I leaned hard against the unseen barrier. It was solid as a stone wall. Now that I was looking more closely, I could see a subtle distortion in the air, as if I were looking through a slightly imperfect sheet of glass. “This is far superior to my arrowcatch, Master Kilvin.”
“True.” Kilvin gave a conciliatory nod and bent to pick up the stones, muttering again under his breath. I staggered a little when the barrier disappeared. “But your cleverness we can repeat endlessly. This mystery we cannot.”
Kilvin held up the two cubes of metal on the palm of his huge hand. “These are useful, but never forget: cleverness and caution profit the artificer. We do our work in the realm of the real.” He closed his fingers over the warding stones. “Leave mystery to poets, priests, and fools.”
Despite my other failures, my study with Master Elodin was progressing rather well. He claimed all I needed to improve myself as a namer was time and dedication. I gave him both, and he put them to use in odd ways.
We spent hours riddling. He made me drink a pint of applejack, then read Teccam’s
