Fela gave a radiant smile and held out her hand for all of us to see. The ring wasn’t smooth as I’d first thought. It was covered in a thousand tiny, flat facets. They circled each other in a subtle, swirling pattern unlike anything I’d ever seen before.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
The Catch
Despite the trouble with Ambrose, my obsession with the Archives, and my countless fruitless trips to Imre hunting Denna, I managed to finish my project in the Fishery.
I would have liked another span of days to run a few more tests and tinker with it. But I was simply out of time. The admissions lottery was coming up soon, and my tuition would be due not long after. Before I could put my project up for sale, I needed Kilvin to approve my design.
So it was with no small amount of trepidation that I knocked on the door of Kilvin’s office.
The Master Artificer was hunched over his personal worktable, carefully removing the screws from the bronze casing of a compression pump. He didn’t look up as he spoke, “Yes, Re’lar Kvothe?”
“I’m finished, Master Kilvin,” I said simply.
He looked up at me, blinking. “Are you now?”
“Yes, I was hoping to make an appointment so I might demonstrate it to you.”
Kilvin set the screws in a tray and brushed his hands together. “For this I am available now.”
I nodded and led the way through the busy workshop, past Stocks, to the private workroom Kilvin had assigned me. I brought out the key and unlocked the heavy timber door.
It was large as workrooms go, with its own fire well, anvil, fume hood, drench, and other assorted staples of the artificing trade. I’d pushed the worktable aside to leave half of the room empty except for several thick bales of straw stacked against the wall.
Hanging from the ceiling in front of the bales was a crude scarecrow. I’d dressed it in my burned shirt and a pair of sackcloth pants. Part of me wished I’d run a few more tests in the time it had taken to sew the pants and stuff the straw man. But at the end of the day, I am a trouper first and all else second. As such, I couldn’t ignore the chance for a little showmanship.
I closed the door behind us while Kilvin looked around the room curiously. Deciding to let my work speak for itself, I brought out the crossbow and handed it to him.
The huge master’s expression went dark. “Re’lar Kvothe,” he said, his voice heavy with disapproval. “Tell me you have not squandered the labor of your hands on the improvement of such a beastly thing.”
“Trust me, Master Kilvin,” I said, holding it out to him.
He gave me a long look, then took the crossbow and began to examine it with the meticulous care of a man who spent every day working with deadly equipment. He fingered the tightly woven string and eyed the curved metal arm of the bow.
After several long minutes he nodded, put one foot through the stirrup, and cocked it without any noticeable effort. Idly, I wondered how strong Kilvin was. My shoulders ached and my hands were blistered from struggling with the unwieldy thing over the last several days.
I handed him the heavy bolt and he examined it as well. I could see him looking increasingly perplexed. I knew why. The bow didn’t have any obvious modifications or sygaldry. Neither did the bolt.
Kilvin slotted the bolt into the crossbow and raised an eyebrow at me.
I made an expansive gesture to the straw man, trying to look more confident than I felt. My hands were sweating and my stomach was full of doves. Tests were fine and good. Tests were important. Tests were like rehearsal. But all that really matters is what happens when the audience is watching. This is a truth all troupers know.
Kilvin shrugged and raised the crossbow. It looked small braced against his broad shoulder, and he took a moment to carefully sight along the top of it. I was surprised to see him calmly draw half a breath, then exhale slowly as he pulled the trigger.
The crossbow jerked, the string twanged, the bolt blurred.
There was a harsh, metallic
Unable to help myself, I laughed and threw my arms triumphantly into the air.
Kilvin raised his eyebrows and looked at me. I grinned a manic grin.
The master retrieved the bolt from the floor and examined it again. Then he recocked the crossbow, sighted, and pulled the trigger.
This time Kilvin spotted the source of the noise. Hanging from the ceiling in the far corner of the room was a metal object the size of a large lantern. It was rocking back and forth and spinning slightly, as if someone had just struck it a glancing blow.
I took it off its hook and brought it back to where Master Kilvin waited at the worktable. “What is this thing, Re’lar Kvothe?” he said curiously.
I set it down on the table with a heavy clunk. “In general terms, Master Kilvin, it’s an automatically triggered kinetic opposition device.” I beamed proudly. “More specifically, it stops arrows.”
Kilvin bent to look at it, but there was nothing to see except for featureless plates of dark iron. My creation looked like nothing so much as a large, eight-sided lantern made entirely of metal.
“And what do you call it?”
That was the one part of my invention I hadn’t managed to finish. I’d thought of a hundred names, but none of them seemed to fit. Arrow-trap was pedestrian. The Traveler’s Friend was prosaic. Banditbane was ridiculously melodramatic. I could never have looked Kilvin in the eye again if I’d tried to call it that.
“I’m having some trouble with the name,” I admitted. “But for now I’m calling it an arrowcatch.”
“Hmmph,” Kilvin grunted. “It does not catch the arrow, precisely.”
“I know,” I said, exasperated. “But it was either that or call it a ‘clank.’ ”
Kilvin looked at me sideways, his eyes smiling a little. “One would think a student of Elodin’s would prove more facile with his naming, Re’lar Kvothe.”
“Delivari had it easy, Master Kilvin,” I said. “He just made a better axle and stuck his name on it. I can’t very well call this ‘the Kvothe.’ ”
Kilvin chuckled. “True.” He turned back to the arrowcatch, eyeing it curiously. “How does it work?”
I grinned and brought out a large roll of paper covered in diagrams, complicated sygaldry, metallurgical symbols, and painstaking formulae for kinetic conversion.
“There are two main parts,” I said. “The first is the sygaldry that automatically forms a sympathetic link with any thin, fast-moving piece of metal within twenty feet. I don’t mind telling you that took me a long couple of days to figure out.”
I tapped the appropriate runes on the piece of paper. “At first I thought that might be enough by itself. I hoped if I bound an incoming arrowhead to a stationary piece of iron, it would absorb the arrow’s momentum and make it harmless.”
Kilvin shook his head. “It has been tried before.”
“I should have realized before I even tried,” I said. “At best it only absorbs a third of the arrow’s momentum, and anyone two-thirds arrowshot is still going to be in a bad way.”
I gestured to a different diagram. “What I really needed was something that could push back against the arrow. And it had to push very fast and very hard. I ended up using the spring steel from a bear trap. Modified, of course.”
I picked up a spare arrowhead from the worktable and pretended it was moving toward the arrowcatch. “First, the arrow comes close and establishes the binding. Second, the incoming arrow’s momentum sets off the trigger, just like stepping on a trap.” I snapped my fingers sharply. “Then the spring’s stored energy pushes back at the arrow, stopping it or even knocking it backward.”
