Destiny: Child of the Sky

5

Omet did not like the new apprentice.

Under normal circumstances, Omet was busy enough that he would be hard pressed to have even noticed the new apprentice. As an apprentice himself in the tile foundry, two years away from his journeyman’s year, work was endless and life sleepless. He didn’t have time for opinions, or sentiments, or anything else that might distract him from remembering to check the temperature of the slip as it cooked, or getting up every two hours to stoke the fires of the ovens through the night with peat and coal, dung, and, sparingly, wood.

The red clay of Yarim had been of little use for raising crops, but it made wonderful tile. In its heyday Yarim had produced most of the utilitarian drainage and paving stones that built the great Cymrian cities, as well as the mosaics and ceramic tiles that decorated them. Yarim had adorned itself in the grandest pieces, from the glistening fountainbeds that surrounded the duke’s palace to the walls of the Oracle’s temple. Even now, in its declining years, with the availability of the water necessary to make it limited, Yarim still produced both tile and pottery for export.

The enormous foundry was the city’s largest building outside of the various government facilities and the temple of the Oracle. It stood, partially empty, at the outskirts of the city to the southeast, near the largest interprovince thoroughfare. Caustic black smoke from the fires that burned night and day hung heavy in the air above and around the building and the nearby streets, making it difficult to breathe, so there were few other buildings, and no residences near it.

When Omet’s mother had apprenticed him to the proprietor of the tile-works, she had known full well the life to which she was sentencing her son. The foundry’s owner, a diminutive woman of mixed human and Lirin blood by the name of Esten, was known by sight or name or reputation not only through all of the province of Yarim, but west in Canderre and south in Bethe Corbair as well.

Esten’s small physical stature was in direct opposition to her social one; publicly she was the owner and operator of Yarim’s largest foundry. Even more commonly known was her position as chief of the bloodthirsty Raven’s Guild, a coterie of blacksmiths, thugs, and professional thieves that ruled the dark hours in Yarim.

Despite her ferocious reputation, Esten’s face was a pretty one, an exotic countenance with angular lines and high cheekbones, probably owing to her Lirin blood. That anyone had even seen it at all was a testament to her status in and of itself, since most women in Yarim took the veil. Most striking of all that face’s features were the eyes, dark and inquisitive like that of the bird her guild had been named for. Those eyes always held a hint of amusement, even when they were black with anger, and were more piercing in their stare than an ice pick. Omet had decided at the meeting where he was chosen as an apprentice that he would always avoid their gaze if at all possible. The few seconds he had been the target of it had made him fear he would lose his water onto the floor at her feet. It was of little surprise to him that his mother had not come to visit him once in the five years since then.

For the most part he had managed to avoid Esten’s notice. She came every new moon to check the progress of the tunnel, and when she did he made certain he was busy feeding the slave children or stoking the ovens so as to eliminate any encounter but a chance one.

Perhaps his decision to remain away from her notice had been an error in judgment. Ever since Vincane, the new apprentice, had been pulled from the tunnel and promoted to work beside Omet and the others, he had gone out of his way to endear himself to Esten, to curry her favor in a dozen slavish, obvious ways that had turned Omet’s stomach. Those antics had seemed to have turned Esten’s head as well; now she favored Vincane, brought him small treats and tousled his hair, laughing and teasing him. There was something in Vincane’s eyes, something dark and inquisitive that mirrored Esten’s own, and it served to place him in a position as her pet.

It was not this favored status that bothered Omet. Rather, it was the cruel streak that Vincane displayed without reprimand, occasionally toward Omet and the other apprentices, but mostly toward the slave children.

For the most part, no one saw much of those children. Food and water were handed down the shaft several times a day, always as a reward for making their quota of clay. Fifty buckets of clay came up, one pail of water was lowered down. One hundred buckets of clay came up, one box of food went down. Up, down, up, down. Such was the life of a fifth-year apprentice, hauling the hook-stick up out of the well, dumping the clay, tossing the pail back down again, occasionally bestowing a little bread and broth on the small dark beings that scrambled like rats at the bottom of the shaft and in the tunnel beyond. In between they handed down the hods of finished tiles and mortar, all the while minding the furnace and the ovens, checking the huge vats of clay slip as it baked in the sweltering heat, ringing the bell to summon the journeymen from the separate annex in which they lived and worked when their special firings were finished.

Vincane had been one of those slave children himself until recently. A ragtag orphan like all the others, purchased or stolen from wherever he had come from, he had shown remarkable stamina in the digging, and more—he had a resistance to pain that seemed almost inhuman. Omet had seen him once put his hand directly into the kiln itself and pull forth a rack of greenware tiles without flinching as his hand grasped the red-hot wire. That, and a willingness to betray the small secrets of his fellow slaves—they had widened the tunnel a few hands’ widths for extra sleeping room, they had hidden the broken pieces of a trowel instead of turning it in—had endeared him to Esten, and had given him the singular opportunity to escape the tunnel and come to work for her as an apprentice.

At first the journeymen had feared the slave children would begin turning on each other to see if they could obtain the same promotion, and that chaos would disrupt the digging, but Esten had nipped that possibility in the bud easily. Any uproar whatsoever would result in Vincane coming back down into the tunnel, she had announced sweetly during the slave children’s monthly airing. And he would be allowed to bring some of his toys. The slaves had eaten their meal even more quietly than the moment before she spoke, their all-but-blind eyes glimmering in terror.

Omet felt no particular compassion toward the plight of the slave children—his own life was nothing to be envied, after all—but even he was appalled at the cruelties Vincane employed. A pallet of food would be handed down, eagerly clutched at by two dozen filthy hands, to be discovered to contain only two hard rolls and scraps of rope left over from the packing area. Vincane’s high, shrieking laugh at the bloody riot that ensued had caused Omet to go cold, even in the reflected heat of the ovens.

It seemed whenever Vincane was responsible for hoisting the hods that dragged the diggers up for their monthly feeding and airing, at least half of them would be bloodied in the process, battered against the tiled walls of the well or accidentally dropped out of the hod and stepped upon. Anguished wails or fisticuffs would break out whenever he was in the midst of passing out the monthly rations, to Vincane’s wide-eyed protestations of innocence, followed by self-righteous accusations. It bothered Omet greatly that Vincane’s eyes glittered even more excitedly while watching the accused slave child being thrashed after his indictment, bothered him so greatly in fact that he sometimes considered knocking Vincane backward down the shaft when the new apprentice was off his guard.

Vincane had even gone so far as to cut Omet’s hair as he slept as a joke; he had tossed in the throes of horrific dreams all the long night, visions of Vincane hovering over him with a knife, grinning, to wake in a loose mane of his own hair, slashed in uneven swaths across his pate. Omet had thought about giving Vincane the beating he deserved, but decided that, even if he were to emerge victorious, it would attract Esten’s notice, and that was something Omet sought never to do. So he swallowed his fury and shaved the rest of his head completely bald, finding it cooler in the heat of the furnaces anyway.

The only misstep he had seen Vincane make was the time he had chosen to urinate in the drinking water bucket before handing it down, thinking this to be great fun. He had his back to the doorway, and had not noticed that Esten had arrived early for her monthly inspection of the tunnel. The wasting of water was a crime in Yarim Paar, and though Esten chose to disregard a number of common laws herself on a daily basis, apparently this was one about which she felt strongly.

She had seized Vincane by the ears from behind and twisted them violently, almost ripping them free of his head in the process, following the action up with a resounding box on both sides of his bleeding head. Vincane had learned from that experience and had not repeated his joke, at least as far as Omet had noticed, though he had not seemed to even notice the pain.

Even those things that could be seen as positive attributes about Vincane somehow or another always turned fetid. Unlike the other apprentices, Vin-cane had no compunction about hauling out the bodies of the slave-child miners who died in the tunnels, dragging them out of the hod and back to the furnace in the wing of the foundry where the journeymen slept.

Esten had decreed that the secondary furnace, the journeymen’s furnace, would be used as a crematorium since the unfortunate day when one of the slave boys had made the mistake of attempting escape during the monthly airing. Esten had hurled him into the largest main kiln and slammed the door shut. The stench afterward had been minimal, but the slip had been affected by the additional moisture; six racks of tiles were ruined, and so from that time on Vincane would use only the furnace in the far wing for disposal of slave-child bodies. Omet had once gone back to see what had taken him so long, and had retched upon discovering what Vincane’s ritual before cremation had been.

Blessedly, only one of the current crew had died recently; this batch appeared to be fairly hardy. No one spoke of the tunnel; it was forbidden, under pain of death, to do so outside the tileworks. The tileworks itself was merely a front for the digging, which took place all hours of the day and night.

The front of the foundry, known as the anteroom, held a small forge and some ceramic kilns for firing the tiles and pottery which was sold throughout Yarim and Roland. The first- and second-year apprentices served there, learning to mix and measure the slip, to trim the molds and shovel the heavy pallets of tile from the smaller furnaces.

The real work took place in the rear, behind the great double doors, in the firing room where the larger ovens and vats were. The third-, fourth-, and fifth-year apprentices lived and worked in this place, pouring and baking drainage tiles and paving stones. The more artistic work was done in the foundry’s wings, where the journeymen lived and worked. Sixth-year apprentices, as well as sevens in their journeyman year, spent their days serving the end of their training under the masters of the craft, learning the delicate intricacies of architectural drawing and hand-painted porcelain.

For a brief time in his fourth year, Omet had served an overseer’s rotation among the first- and second-year apprentices, supervising their work. Quickly he had learned the most important lesson of supervision: put the whip to those lower than you on the ladder. It had been an easy few months, and he looked forward to returning to the indolence of supervision when his journeyman year was over. Once the profession in which he was training had been a vocation, an artistic calling. Now Omet hated tile, hated the hard work of pouring and baking, trimming and hauling, hated the red clay that stained his hands and arms the color of dried blood.

And Omet hated the new apprentice.

Esten’s voice reverberated up from the well shaft.

“Done.”

Omet continued to gather the battered tin plates from the filthy hands of the diggers, watching silently out of the corner of his eye as two of the journeymen dashed to the well and lowered down the hook-stick.

Esten’s head appeared a moment later; one of the journeymen offered her a hand and hauled her over the edge of the well shaft. She brushed the loose clay from her dark clothing, the same plain black shirt and trousers she always wore on her monthly inspections, and shook her long, black braid. Her face molded into a glittering smile as she turned to the small group of a dozen ragged souls, huddled against the far wall of the foundry, surrounded by the armed journeymen.

“Well done, boys; you’re doing very well,” she said soothingly. The eyes of the children, the only thing visible in the fireshadows from the open kilns, blinked in their dark red faces.

She strode to the bag she had left by the door, snatched it up, and returned to the group. Almost every thin limb retracted as the boys recoiled at her approach. Esten opened the sack and dug deep, then drew forth a handful of sweetmeats and tossed them into the trembling crew. Instantly cacophony erupted, and she laughed in delight.

“Aren’t they sweet?” she said to the journeymen, then crouched down to get a better look at the individuals of the group. “Omet, where’s Tidd?”

Omet felt his throat go drier than Entudenin. “Dead, mum,” he said. The words came out in a croak.

“Tidd, dead? Dear me.” The glittering smile vanished, and Esten surveyed the group more closely. “What a shame. He had a fine sense of direction. Hmmm, now, who can we make chief?”

A forest of sapling limbs shot up and began waving desperately, accompanied by thin cries for selection. Esten’s smile returned, and she stood.

“That’s my boys! Such an enthusiastic lot. Let’s see, Haverill, Avery, no, you’re blind as a bat, aren’t you, dear? Jyn, Collin, no; Gume, hmmm, not you, either; you’re always doing everyone else’s work; much too softhearted. Hello, Vincane, who have we here?” She stopped in front of a small, yellow-haired boy, with large eyes and an angled face, trembling violently, his arms wrapped around spindly bent knees.

“That’s Aric,” Vincane crowed importantly. “He’s new—in for Tidd.”

“Well, you weren’t much of a trade, were you, lad?” Esten turned again and smiled down at a tall boy whose hair had once been white-blond, but now bore the same red filth as the others. “Ernst—what about you? Would you like to be crew chief?”

The tall boy smiled broadly, showing the few remaining teeth he had. “Yes, mum.”

“Good, good! Then come, lad, and we’ll go back to the tunnel and discuss the direction I want you to take this month.”

After Esten had returned from the well shaft, and the child miners had been lowered back in, she went to the door and took her coat from the peg rack near it, then left through the double doors without a backward glance. Omet caught fragments of her parting words to the journeyman in the anteroom.

“Have you seen how tall Ernst has gotten? What are you feeding him?”

“Same as the others. They scrap for it. We don’t dole it out or nothin’.”

“Hmmm. Well, that might be a problem soon. Tell the apprentices to be certain to guard that well shaft and to keep listening. We’ll decide what to do next month—if we haven’t broken through yet.” Her smile glittered in the dark shadows of the firing room. “I suspect it’s a moot issue. Have the journeymen summon me immediately when the time comes.”

“Yes, mum.”

In the distance Omet heard the door open, and the whine of the winter wind that lingered after it slammed shut. After a moment, he realized that the soft keening was no longer the voice of the wind, but came from the well shaft. Then it was gone.