In the Shadow of Lightning

24

Thessa cradled Demir’s head in her lap, whispering a constant stream of reassurances while she tried to keep him from swallowing his tongue. An extra piece of calming skyglass from Montego seemed to have helped slow the advance of the madness.

An eternity seemed to pass before their carriage stopped. Montego threw open the door and lifted Demir carefully into his arms. They were in a small village on the windswept slope, surrounded by farmland for miles. A workshop, rambling but cozy-looking, with two smokestacks coming off the top, sat directly in the center of the village. Montego kicked open the door, startling a number of siliceers, bellowing at the top of his voice.

“Everyone out! Clear the furnaces! You, make sure there’s plenty of wood ready to stoke the fires. You, find me Craftsman Prosotsi!”

Thessa followed on Montego’s heels, surprised to see that he was, apparently, known here. Despite the initial confusion, the three siliceers followed his instructions quickly, removing their current projects from the workbenches and pulling crucibles of molten cindersand out of the furnace to make room for new ones. Thessa did not wait for permission, throwing herself into the workshop with a siliceer’s eye, noting the layout of the tools and quickly finding the stores of cindersand – accompanied by notes explaining where each bag of sand had been quarried – and locating rows of small jars containing the needed impurities.

She plucked them out, one by one, muttering under her breath. “Gold, copper, selenium. Ah, manganese. Put him someplace comfortable. Wait! We should talk to him while I work. Put a blanket on that workbench there, then lay him down. Keep him focused. It’s like…” She snapped her fingers, trying to remember bits of her old instruction books. “Like staying awake in the cold, except we risk his mind breaking from the fear.”

As quickly as she dared, she mixed cindersand with tiny amounts of each impurity, then used long tongs to set each crucible into the heat of the furnace. Once that was done, she walked around the workshop one more time to make sure she knew where every tool was, and that she would not trip on anything in the unfamiliar space. She then went to Demir’s side, where Montego was talking to him in a soothing voice.

“Can you understand us?” Thessa asked, just to make sure he hadn’t slipped away since he last spoke to her.

Demir’s eyes left Montego and traveled to her. There was a long moment of quiet, the corners of Demir’s eyes wrinkling as if he was making an enormous mental effort. “Please tell. Montego. To stop talking. To me like. A child.” There was a hint of a smile at the end of this, and Thessa let out a relieved sigh.

“Good, good.”

One of the Prosotsi siliceers appeared in the doorway, tiptoeing over to Montego and whispering, though not quietly enough, “Craftsman Prosotsi left for Ossa earlier today. We don’t expect him back for several hours. Are you sure we should allow a stranger the run of the glassworks?”

“Do you know how to counter the effects of fearglass?” Thessa demanded.

The Prosotsi siliceer glanced at Demir’s upper chest, where the now-bloody handkerchief was still lying over the wound. “Ah,” he said. “No, I don’t. Please continue. Craftsman Prosotsi would put everything at Master Demir and Master Montego’s disposal.”

“Get clean linens for his wound,” Montego ordered. “And the best sample of cureglass you have on hand. Go on!”

Once he’d gone, Thessa turned her attention back to Demir. She leaned over him, looking in one eye, then the other, not entirely sure what she was looking for. He was still wearing both his own and Montego’s skyglass. “How do you feel?”

“Like. I am. Drowning.”

“Better or worse than before?”

Demir seemed to consider this for several moments, his eyes going in and out of focus. “The water is. Not. As deep? But I fear. Everything. I can hear them screaming. The civilians. I can see that little girl’s face.” Tears pooled in his eyes, rolling down the side of his face when he blinked.

Thessa didn’t know what he was going on about. “You can fight the fear,” Thessa told him, taking his hand and squeezing it. To her delight, he had the strength to squeeze back. “Montego is here, and he is your friend. I’m your friend. Don’t let the fear pull you into madness. I’m working on … I’m working on a way to bring you out of this. I can’t promise it’ll work, but–” She flinched, wishing immediately she hadn’t said that. “But I’ll do my best.”

Demir closed his eyes, and did not open them again until Montego gave him a little shake. “It is. Exhausting,” he said haltingly. “To be so. Scared. Again.”

Again. Had he dealt with fearglass before? Was that how he had survived it for so long? “It’s okay,” Thessa said, squeezing his hand harder. “That’s what fearglass does. It makes you more scared than you’ve ever been in your life. It makes your body want to flee, but it doesn’t know to where. It does all of this until your heart gives out or your mind breaks. If we can prevent both of those things from happening, then … What’s so funny?”

Demir had begun to tremble, letting out a little wheezing laugh. He looked at Montego for a long minute, then back to Thessa. Once she had his attention, she moved closer. “What’s so funny?” she repeated.

“Still not as. Bad. As…” He trailed off, not finishing, his eyes growing unfocused once more. He flinched. “Okay. Maybe a little. Worse.”

“Don’t talk if it hurts. But stay focused on one of us.” Thessa left him long enough to check the crucibles in the furnace. They were almost melted. She gave each a stir with a clean rod, then returned to Demir’s side. She took another deep breath, trying to maintain her own calm, preparing herself for what was to come. She glanced up to see that Montego was watching her sharply.

“Have you done this before?” he asked quietly.

She shook her head. “I know the theories, but I’m about to attempt a quadruple braiding in a furnace I’ve never worked before, using firewood and cindersand whose origins I cannot verify myself. This is master-level work and the stake is only the life of the person who just saved me from a fate worse than death. Is he … is he laughing again?”

On the workbench between them, Demir was making that rasping, wheezing, chuckling sound.

“He has a very morbid sense of humor,” Montego said.

“I hope it keeps him from dying or going insane before we can fix this. If,” she added under her breath, “we can fix this.” A thought occurred to her, and she tilted her head at Montego. “I’m sorry, but this has all gone so damned fast. Are you Baby Montego?”

“You recognize me?”

“I only surmised from the name. I don’t follow cudgeling myself, but my master used to talk about you all the time. He was very proud to have seen your last fight.”

Montego adjusted the collar of his jacket, looking supremely pleased with himself. “She’s heard of me, Demir,” he said, slapping his friend none-too-gently on the leg.

Demir let out a pained moan. “Needy. Prick.”

Thessa checked the crucibles, then turned back to Montego and Demir. “It’s time.”

She steeled herself for a few moments, and then leapt into her work. She started with molten cindersand for cureglass, rolling out a curved piece just over an inch long and no thicker than a heavy wire. The resonance eluded her, and she redid it until the tiny piece of glass was too stiff to work. She discarded it and started with another. It took her three tries before she got one she was happy with, and let it harden for several minutes while she began to work with the museglass, curling it around the center cureglass piece. It miraculously worked on the first attempt, but the resonance did not take when she tried to add shackleglass. She discarded it all and started again.

She talked as she worked, explaining each step, letting her mouth run in an attempt to calm her nerves. “I know this has been done before, even if I haven’t done it myself,” she told them. “You have cureglass for a core – we’re trying to heal him after all – and wrapped around that is museglass, witglass, and shackleglass. The museglass and shackleglass are both to make his mind more malleable; to accept the healing that we’re trying to get in there. The witglass helps the sorcery target the mind.” She winced as she made a mistake, and started over from the beginning.

“This is all theory, of course. We know that it does work, but we can only conjecture as to the how or why. There is a division among siliceers. Some claim that what we do is a science. Some claim that it is an art. They are both right. I’ve seen siliceers without a drop of logic in their minds produce fantastic works of high-resonance godglass using the very worst ingredients. Myself – well, I’m not much of an artist, but if you tell me exactly what I’m working with and exactly what I’m trying to accomplish, I will get there. Eventually.”

She worked the bellows for the godglass funnel, reheating her pieces again and again as needed. Her leg eventually grew numb. She switched legs, then ordered one of the apprentices to come and work the bellows for her.

She started over. Then she started over again. She barely noticed the siliceer that brought cureglass for Demir’s wounds. The arrival of the owner of the glassworks was similarly ignored. Montego took him aside, and she was not interrupted. Minutes passed, and then hours. She kept her head bent, listening to the resonance of the sorceries as she attempted to mold four pieces of godglass into one. It was, she reflected in a moment of clarity, like a musician trying to put together notes to find the right sound.

Darkness fell, the workshop lit by gas lanterns and the furnace that Prosotsi siliceers continued to stoke without questions. At one point the owner of the glassworks stood and watched her for almost an hour. He did not say anything.

She mixed more cureglass, throwing away her dozens of mistakes.

She did not know what time it was when the resonances finally matched up. At first she thought she had made a mistake; that she had managed only to braid three of the godglasses together without losing their resonance. But holding the curved, still-warm piece of glass at arm’s length she could see that it had all four together, and they hummed powerfully in her fingertips. She hurried over to Demir.

Montego rested his head on the workbench by Demir’s shoulder, his body slumped with exhaustion, still whispering in Demir’s ear in a gentle tone. Demir’s eyes were barely open, his breathing rasping and labored. Thessa turned up the lantern above them and moved a recently changed wet compress off Demir’s chest. The medium-resonance cureglass supplied by the Prosotsi siliceers had done an incredible job – the burn still looked nasty, but like it had already had a week to heal.

Demir’s eyes focused on her briefly as she stood above him. He made a sound that definitely had a question mark at the end.

“High-resonance braided godglass,” she told him. “I don’t know if it’ll work as intended, but…” She did not finish, instead pushing the godglass between his lips, using her opposite hand to work his jaw open so that he held the godglass between his teeth. “Keep it in place, but do not bite down. I don’t want to have to pick broken godglass out of your mouth.”

Demir did as instructed. Thessa searched the workbenches until she found a pocket watch left by one of the siliceers. She checked the time.

It was almost six in the morning. Without rest, food, or drink, she had worked the furnace for twenty hours straight. She shook the thought from her mind and focused on the second hand. One eye on the watch, she looked at Demir’s wound. For a moment, she could not tell if anything was happening. Then, slowly but definitely, the burn began to knit itself. Flesh grew where the old had come away with the fearglass. New skin, pinkish and puckered, slowly knit together, closing over the burn.

As the sorcery worked, she could see the glassrot scales growing on his chest. They shimmered in the gaslight, becoming more defined with each passing second. She wiped them away with the brush of her hand, but they grew back in moments. A minute passed. A minute and a half. Two minutes.

Once the pocket watch marked that two and a half minutes had passed, Thessa snatched the godglass from between Demir’s teeth and found a cork-lined box to put it in. She returned to his side, running her fingers across the pink-and-white scar that had only minutes ago been a terrible burn. Demir’s eyes were closed, but his breathing was now steady. She checked his pulse.

It was normal.

His lips moved imperceptibly, and Thessa bent to hear him.

“I am saved,” he whispered.

Thessa felt a great tension leave her body. She might have collapsed if she were not already leaning on the workbench. She rested her head against Demir’s bare chest for a moment and became aware that every sinew of her body hurt. Not bothering to remove her heavy boots or apron, she rolled onto the workbench next to Demir, closed her eyes, and slept.