Apprentices

Three hours after Kasper's departure, the fast coach to Bostkirk made its scheduled stop in Disford. The animals that pulled the coach were radically changed by the season. In winter, gallifreys looked like dust bunnies with beaks and feet, and no necks. In summer, they were strong-bodied birds with sleek black plumage rippling to white at their wingtips and tails. Powerful leg muscles worked to drive long-clawed feet, with three toes forward and one pointing back. Marbled eyes shone from their mirrored black heads, over throats wavy with gray and white waves.

The coach behind the gallifreys was long and sleek, and rolled in at a good twenty-five miles an hour. It wasn't fast by some worlds' standards, but it was an excellent sustained pace for anything pulled by an animal. With wheels taller than Taylor, a suspension system made half from engineering and half from magic, and a team of birds boosted with taming magic, it was the second-speediest transportation the average person could hope to enjoy, after the imperial rail system. The truly privileged had class skills or flying animal companions.

While the driver and porter were busy exchanging mailbags, passengers, and luggage, Taylor entered the main compartment to verify his four fellow townsfolk were on board. The girls were ages twelve to thirteen, and sitting together. They had been chatting just a second before, but the appearance of his green mask and his sword in its bone sheath made them nervously silent.

"Good, you're all here. Does anyone need to get off? We only have ten minutes, so if you need the bathroom, you'd better move fast."

"I have something to give you," said one girl, "from Curator Jane?" She led him out of the coach and had the porter pull something from the magically expanded luggage compartment: a wooden box filled with papers. It was his backlog for the last few days, plus reports he hadn't read and duplicates to give to the governor in Bostkirk.

"At least I'll have something to do." He took the box by its cutout handles and carried it to his private compartment near the head of the coach.

"Is it true?" she asked. "What they're saying."

"I don't know what they're saying, so I have no idea. It's best not to put any stakes in rumors."

"You tried to kill that old beastkin."

"Oh. That." Taylor threw his bag and sword into the narrow compartment that would be his home for the next day. "He was trying to kidnap me at the time, so it seemed justified. Never go anywhere with a strange man who tries to force you to ride his pet bird and won't explain himself. You know?"

Her laughter bubbled up like water. "When you put it that way … "

He smiled, even though she couldn't see it. "Eight minutes, Miss Katherine. Please don't hold up the coach. They really hate that."

After the equipment Mourne had purchased for its farmers, the most expensive outlay this year was apprenticeships for four girls who received classes the previous fall: Ketherine the Miller, Orchid the Scholar, Alexia the Orchardist, and Ella the Farmer.

Classes were rare gifts, and a remote town like Mourne receiving four in one year was unlikely to the point of being suspicious. Most years, it would be impossible to train them properly, but Taylor's bounties were enough to make it happen, and all four girls were under contract. In exchange for three years of class education, they would return to work in Mourne for nine years. The potential quality and quantity of goods from classed producers was so impressive that the investment was worthwhile, even if they didn't stay past the nine years. They could break their contracts by buying out the remaining years for a hefty sum, but that still paid enough to make the venture worthwhile.

The problem, aside from money, was finding masters for them. Those blessed with classes gravitated toward the cities and often took on more apprentices than they could handle. Jane had arranged things, but it was Taylor's job to deliver the students to their temporary homes, inspect their new living situations, and pay the initial fees. Handing the girls off to their new teachers was a far more important task than attending the wedding of some minor relative of the governor's.

The fact that all four students were girls wasn't entirely an accident. Taylor was indirectly responsible for some of the classes granted in Mourne, but he had left it to his friend Kistur to choose the recipients. That Kistur picked three girls probably said something about him. The two boys had fallen out since then, but the classed townsfolk remained, and Taylor considered them one of the township's recent windfalls. He would make the most he could of them, with whatever time he had.

The box of papers barely lasted for half the journey, leaving Taylor at loose ends for several hours. In his last life, he had a network of teleportation circles, and crossing the continent was trivial if you had the mana to pay for it. The idle time got him thinking about the problem in detail, and soon he was pulling an engraver's drafting kit from his satchel. The work didn't need to be precise yet: he just needed to lay out the basics.

Aarden's magic system had all the necessary pieces, but nobody had put them together in the right order, yet. The Art and Practice of Magic (in nine volumes) made no mention of teleportation, and he hadn't heard of it anywhere except in fairy tales. If someone had figured it out, they were keeping it a secret.

He started with multiple circles, some concentric, others connected, to implement the necessary subsystems while keeping them separate. The innermost circle was space containment, while others handled exchange regulation, mana conditioning, mana supply, and, finally, a stabilization field encompassing all. The typical way to aim a teleporter was to know the exact direction, distance, and velocity of the target space. For destinations that hadn't been precisely surveyed, magicians resorted to divination to give them precise answers. Taylor dispensed with that nonsense (he didn't trust divination) and opted for paired circles, connected using quantum-entangled tokens at each endpoint of travel. Since both sides had to be prepared in advance, the system couldn't send you just anywhere. But it was safe.

The volume computations were finished, and he was trying out different combinations of the Spellscript language, looking for the most elegant phrasing of his needs. He'd just sketched out the runes for space-swapping when his paper caught on fire. It came without warning: blue flames, centered on the symbols he'd just written down.

At first, he tried to smother it with a thick report, but the flames turned brighter and ignored the interruption, consuming his worksheet and leaving nothing behind, not even ashes. Taylor grabbed the paper with his Unseen Hand and held the offending circle in the air, at the far end of his compartment, where smoke and spent mana got sucked out the half-open window. He fed the mana-fire all the scratch paper he'd used while thinking about the aborted circle, so the fire would get everything.

Someone didn't want those specific concepts put together. There were only two possibilities he could think of. One was built-in limits: some magic systems had governance features and administrators. Taylor had used them in his own magic systems, so he knew about the kinds of penalties they could impose when rule warnings were ignored.

If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

The second possibility was slightly more worrisome: That the gods had banned instantaneous travel. Since he was likely to see them again soon, Taylor resolved to ask about it. The old folks probably wouldn't answer, but he could ask them, all the same.

His four charges gawked at the immensity and variety of Qumurong Station. They'd acquired a flavor of the city while passing through it, but setting foot in the station sent their eager, curious eyes wide as they tried to take it all in at once. The press of people of all races (even the occasional elf), the startling variety of beastkin, outlandish clothes, tamers walking around with rare beasts beside them, sleek trains at their platforms, fast coaches in their stands, lines of garishly painted city carriages loading and unloading, souvenir stands, food stalls – all of it under a single glass roof far above them. Next to all that unaccustomed diversity, one boy cloaked by Riverstone barely stood out.

Taylor had to supervise them closely, ensure they got all their luggage, herd them to the city carriages, and then supervise the loading again. Girls kept trying to wander off, unaware they were leaving the group behind.

"Now's not the time," he told them more than once. "There's better shopping where we're going."

He got everything and everyone to The Sunglaze Inn safely (the nice one on A Street, not the run-down pile on Triumverate Boulevard), checked the girls into their shared room, and gathered them in the lobby before turning them loose in the city. He had prepared bracelets for the occasion, each with several beads of mottled red and green stone and a tiny bronze medallion. He'd borrowed the town's forge for an afternoon to craft the special alloy.

"This part of the city is mostly safe," he told them, "but only mostly. Be careful how much you trust anyone. I suggest you travel in pairs. You will wear these and you will not take them off for anything." He tied a bracelet to each reluctant arm and sealed it closed. "If you get hurt, I will find you. If you wander more than a mile away, I will find you. If you are late returning here, I will find you. Please do not make me find you. Other than that, you're free to do what you like until dark. The market is one block that way," he pointed, "and there's a scenic riverside park just beyond."

"Can we go now?" whined the scholar. "Please?"

"Almost. These are prepaid carriage tokens for our inn. If you get lost, you can give one to any city cab driver, and they will bring you here." He gave them each a wooden disk carved with the inn's name on one side and somebody's profile on the reverse side. "Have fun."

He was glad to have them out of his hair, but now he was worried about them. In some places, parents would never let a pack of girls their age loose without a chaperone, but Estford parents raised their children free-range. The girls probably thought he was weirdly protective, considering he was younger than they were. But he didn't care. They were country girls on their first visit to the big city, and a few unobtrusive precautions were warranted.

There was one last job for the day, and that was to send cards to the various masters telling them he'd arrived with their new students, and would they be so kind as to offer specific times to meet. He sent additional cards to members of the Mourne Image Team from his last visit, warning them he was in town again and would want them in the near future. The cards were taken by the concierge, who placed them in a box for the next posting, and he was finally free.

He spent the rest of the afternoon stalking used bookstores, looking for treasure.

Three of his precious classed townsfolk were handed off without any issues. Orchid the Scholar went to a government-run school where she would learn while helping with the city's administrative work. Katherine the Miller went to a jovial woman who had one apprentice and had been actively searching for another. Ella the Farmer went to a large farm where a whole barracks of farmhands ate mountainous meals at long tables, and well-fed dogs waited for their scraps with attentive eyes and excited tails. At each stop, Taylor observed the health and clothing of the apprentices, inspected the quarters where his people would be staying, reviewed terms with the masters, signed documents, and paid fees with the township's guild card.

The difficulty lay with Alexis the Orchardist. Or rather, her prospective master. First, the master didn't write to say when he'd be available, in spite of multiple requests. When Taylor and Alexis arrived unannounced, they discovered an impressive orchard on softly undulating land, filled with twenty varieties of healthy stone fruit trees.

The house was as impressive as the orchard, but Master Prater wasn't there. "You brought another one," sighed the sour lady who answered the door. "Try the north extension. Don't know what he does with those trees all day long. They grow themselves, don't they? Twenty years, and not a single vacation. With all those young things eating us out of house and home, you'd think we could get away once in a while." She shut the door, nearly knocking the mask from his face.

They left Alexis' bags in the carriage they'd hired for the day and walked along the only utility road going in the right direction. A film of hot dust clung to their skin. Three hundred yards from the main house, squatting like a forgotten box of old parts, sat the worker barracks. Taylor detoured to peek inside and saw a single room with a curtain divider between the boys and girls. Rows of thin mattresses marked where workers slept, each with a nearby box for their belongings, without any latches or means of locking them. Trash was piled up in one corner, and a filthy smell lingered in the area.

"Let's find that Prater fellow." Taylor walked fast enough that Alexis struggled to keep up. They took one more rise and, finally, they could see the master sitting in a chair while his thirty workers worked the rows of trees, visiting each in turn. As they got close, he could see the master was a tall, fit man with a head of black curly hair and brown eyes that crinkled when he smiled. Taylor dropped his Riverstone veil as he approached.

"About time! I wondered if you'd show up."

"You never answered my cards, so we took a chance and came anyway."

"I never answer those things." He waved away the memory of every card he'd ever received in the mail. "What's the point, when people come anyway? Is this the student?"

"Her name is Alexis. I'm Bilius, Legate of Mourne." Taylor held out his hand, palm up, in the standard polite greeting. Prater guffawed and went straight for the handshake instead. He crushed Taylor's hand and didn't let go until the boy winced and pulled away. "What's with the mask?"

"Accident as a baby. Can't show my face."

"Huh. Well, fees have gone up since your curator wrote me. It'll cost you thirty percent more now."

Behind his mask, Taylor let his eyes wander up and down Master Prater, who hadn't even stood up to greet him. He was over seventy, but he looked like a firm forty. Prater must have put a lot of class points into health. A whip coiled at his waist, its handle well-worn.

"No. The fee was already negotiated."

"It's that, or nothing. Take your pick." He smiled confidently. Apprentices and farmhands came in from the field, weary and dirty. They were thin, and the day's aches burdened their steps into shuffles. He saw signs, in their eyes and skin, of extreme fatigue and sleep deprivation.

"I'd like to see the living accommodations."

"You don't need to see that. Everyone has a bed and a private place to put their things. Look, you're a young legate, so maybe you don't understand how this works. Apprentices work hard. Classed apprentices work even harder. If they look beat down, it's because training a class is that hard. But the results are worth it. The proof is in the fruit. Here, try one of mine."

The Master Orchardist finally saw fit to rise from his seat and pluck an early plum from the nearest branch. A class skill flowed through him and into the fruit, changing it. Taylor accepted the plum and held it to the light. The enchantment Prater had put on it pulsed at him with promises of sweet, tart flesh to satisfy his tongue and wash his dusty throat. Streaks of sunny yellow danced on purple skin.

Enticement. Promises. And attraction, too, but not for the plum itself. Attraction to the person who gave it. He'd give Master Prater his extra thirty percent and be grateful for it. He'd leave Alexis there and never feel the need to think about her again until her three years were done.

"Keep it." Taylor tossed the poisoned fruit back to Master Prater. "We're leaving."

If you find any errors ( broken links, non-standard content, etc.. ), Please let us know < report chapter > so we can fix it as soon as possible.