The Wise Man's Fear

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 clank, and the bolt stopped midair as if it had struck an invisible wall. It clattered to the stone floor in the middle of the room, fifteen feet away from the straw man.

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.

Clank. The bolt dropped to the floor a second time, skittering slightly to one side.

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.”

Kilvin was nodding along. “If it needs to be reset after each use, how did it stop my second bolt?”

I pointed to the central diagram. “This wouldn’t be of much use if it only stopped one arrow,” I said. “Or if it only stopped arrows coming from one direction. I designed it to have eight springs in a circle. It should be able to stop arrows from several directions at once.” I shrugged apologetically. “In theory. I haven’t been able to test that.”

Kilvin looked back at the straw man. “Both of my shots came from the same direction,” he said. “How was the second one stopped if that spring had already been triggered?”

I picked up the arrowcatch by the ring I’d set into the top and showed how it could rotate freely. “It hangs on a pivot ring,” I said. “The shock of the first arrow set it spinning slightly, which brought a new spring into alignment. Even if it hadn’t, the energy of the incoming arrow tends to swing it around to the nearest untriggered spring, like a weathervane points into the wind.”

I hadn’t actually planned the last. It had been a lucky accident, but I didn’t see any reason to tell Kilvin that.

I touched the red dots visible on two of the eight iron faces of the arrowcatch. “These show which springs have been triggered.”

Kilvin took it from me and turned it in his hands. “How do you reset the springs?”

I slid a metal device out from under the worktable, little more than a piece of iron with a long lever attached. Then I showed Kilvin the eight-sided hole in the bottom of the arrowcatch. I fit the arrowcatch onto the device and pressed down on the lever with my foot until I heard a sharp click. Then I rotated the arrowcatch and repeated the process.

Kilvin bent to pick it up and turned it over in his huge hands. “Heavy,” he commented.

“It needed to be sturdy,” I said. “A crossbow bolt can punch through a two-inch oak plank. I needed the spring to snap back with at least three times that much force to stop the arrow.”

Kilvin shook the arrowcatch idly, holding it to the side of his head. It didn’t make any noise. “And what if the arrowheads are not made of metal?” he asked. “Vi Sembi raiders are said to use arrows of flint or obsidian.”

I looked down at my hands and sighed. “Well . . .” I said slowly. “If the arrowheads aren’t some sort of iron, the arrowcatch wouldn’t trigger when they came within twenty feet.”

Kilvin gave a noncommittal grunt and set the arrowcatch back down on the table with a thump.

“But,” I said brightly. “When it came within fifteen feet, any piece of sharp stone or glass would trigger a different set of bindings.” I tapped my schema. I was proud of it, as I’d also had the foresight to inscribe the inset pieces of obsidian with the sygaldry for twice-tough glass. That way they wouldn’t shatter under the impact.

Kilvin glanced at the schema, then grinned proudly and chuckled deep in his chest. “Good. Good. What if the arrow has a head of bone or ivory?”

“The runes for bone aren’t trusted to a lowly Re’lar like myself,” I said.

“And if they were?” Kilvin asked.

“Then I still wouldn’t use them,” I said. “Lest some child doing a cartwheel trigger the arrowcatch with a thin, quickly moving piece of their skull.”

Kilvin nodded his approval. “I was thinking of a galloping horse,” he said. “But you show your wisdom in this. You show you have the careful mind of an artificer.”

I turned back to the schema and pointed. “That said, Master Kilvin, at ten feet a fast-moving cylindrical piece of wood will trigger the arrowcatch.” I sighed. “It’s not a good link, but it’s enough to stop the arrow, or at least deflect it.”

Kilvin bent to examine the schema more closely, his eyes wandering the crowded page for a long couple of minutes. “All iron?” he asked.

“Closer to steel, Master Kilvin. I worried iron would be too brittle in the long term.”

“And each of these eighteen bindings are inscribed on each of the springs?” he asked, gesturing.

I nodded.

“That is a great duplication of effort,” Kilvin said, his tone more conversational than accusatory. “Some might say such a thing is overbuilt.”

“I care very little what other people think, Master Kilvin,” I said. “Only what you think.”

He grunted, then looked up from the paper and turned to face me. “I have four questions.”

I nodded expectantly.

“First, of all things, why make this?” he asked.

“No one should ever die from ambush on the road,” I said firmly.

Kilvin waited, but I had nothing more to say on the matter. After a moment he shrugged and gestured to the other side of the room. “Second, where did you get the . . .” His brow furrowed slightly. “Tevetbem. The flatbow?”

My stomach clenched at the question. I’d held the vain hope that Kilvin, being Cealdish, wouldn’t know such things were illegal here in the Commonwealth. Barring that, I’d hoped he simply wouldn’t ask.

“I . . . procured it, Master Kilvin,” I said evasively. “I needed it to test the arrowcatch.”

“Why not use a simple hunter’s bow?” Kilvin said sternly. “And thereby avoid the need of illegal procurement?”

“It would be too weak, Master Kilvin. I needed to be sure my design would stop any arrow, and a crossbow fires a bolt harder than any other.”

“A Modegan longbow is equal of a flatbow,” Kilvin said.

“But the use of one is beyond my skill,” I said. “And the purchase of a Modegan bow is far beyond my means.”

Kilvin let out a deep sigh. “Before, when you made your thief ’s lamp, you made a bad thing in a good way. That I do not like.” He looked down at the schema. “This time you have made a good thing in a bad way. That is better, but not entirely. Best is to make a good thing in a good way. Agreed?”

I nodded.

He lay one massive hand on the crossbow. “Did anyone see you with it?”

I shook my head.

“Then we will say it is mine, and you procured it under my advisement. It will join the equipment in Stocks.” He gave me a hard look. “And in the future you will come to me if you need such things.”

That stung a bit, as I’d been planning on selling it back to Sleat. Still, it could have been worse. The last thing I wanted was to run afoul of the iron law.

“Third, I see no mention of gold wire or silver in your schema,” he said. “Nor can I imagine any use they could be put to in such a device as yours. Explain why you have checked these materials out of Stocks.”

I was suddenly pointedly aware of the cool metal of my gram against the inside of my arm. Its inlay was gold, but I could hardly tell him that. “I was short on money, Master Kilvin. And I needed materials I couldn’t get in Stocks.”

“Such as your flatbow.”

I nodded. “And the straw and the bear traps.”

“Wrong follows wrong,” Kilvin said disapprovingly. “The Stocks are not a moneylender’s stall and should not be used as such. I am rescinding your precious metals authorization.”

I bowed my head, hoping I looked appropriately chastised.

“You will also work twenty hours in Stocks as your punishment. If anyone asks, you will tell them what you did. And explain that as a punishment you were forced to repay the value of the metals plus an additional twenty percent. If you use Stocks as a moneylender, you will be charged interest like a moneylender.”

I winced at that. “Yes, Master Kilvin.”

“Last,” Kilvin said, turning to lay one huge hand on the arrowcatch. “What do you imagine such a thing would sell for, Re’lar Kvothe?”

My heart rose in my chest. “Does that mean you approve it for sale, Master Kilvin?”

The great bearlike artificer gave me a puzzled look. “Of course I approve it, Re’lar Kvothe. It is a wondrous thing. It is an improvement to the world. Every time a person sees such a thing, they will see how artificery is used to keep men safe. They will think well of all artificers for the making of such a thing.”

He looked down at the arrowcatch, frowning thoughtfully. “But if we are to sell it, it must have a price. What do you suggest?”

I’d been wondering on this question for six span. The simple truth was I hoped it would bring me enough money to pay for my tuition and my interest on Devi’s loan. Enough to keep me in the University for one more term.

“I honestly don’t know, Master Kilvin,” I said. “How much would you pay to avoid having a long yard of ash arrow shot through your lung?”

He chuckled. “My lung is quite valuable,” he said. “But let us think in other terms. Materials come to . . .” He glanced at the schema. “Roughly nine jots, am I correct?”

Uncannily correct. I nodded.

“How many hours did it take you to make?”

“About a hundred,” I said. “Maybe a hundred and twenty. But a lot of that was experimentation and testing. I could probably make another in fifty or sixty hours. Less if moldings are made.”

Kilvin nodded. “I suggest twenty-five talents. Does that seem reasonable to you?”

The sum took my breath away. Even after I repaid Stocks for materials and the workshop took its forty percent commission, it was six times more than I’d earn working on deck lamps. An almost ridiculous amount of money.

I began to agree enthusiastically, then a thought occurred to me. Though it pained me, I slowly shook my head. “Honestly, Master Kilvin. I’d prefer to sell them more cheaply than that.”

He raised an eyebrow. “They will pay it,” he reassured me. “I have seen people pay more for less useful things.”

I shrugged. “Twenty-five talents is a lot of money,” I said. “Safety and peace of mind shouldn’t only be available to those with heavy purses. I think eight would be a great plenty.”

Kilvin looked at me for a long moment, then nodded. “As you say. Eight talents.” He ran his hand over the top of the arrowcatch, almost petting it. “However, as this is the first and only one in existence, I will pay you twenty-five for it. It will go in my personal collection.” He cocked his head at me. “Lhinsatva?”

“Lhin,” I said gratefully, feeling a great weight of anxiety lifting off my shoulders.

Kilvin smiled and nodded toward the table. “I would also like to examine the schema at my leisure. Would you like to make me a copy?”

“For twenty-five talents,” I said, smiling as I slid the paper across the table, “you can have the original.”

Kilvin wrote me a receipt and left, clutching the arrowcatch like a child with a new favorite toy.

I hurried to Stocks with my slip of paper. I had to settle my debt for materials, including the gold wire and silver ingots. But even after the workshop took its commission I was left with almost eleven talents.

I went through the remainder of the day grinning and whistling like an idiot. It is as they say: a heavy purse makes for a light heart.