The Wheelwright's Apprentice (17 page)

“First things first.” Art was silent for a few seconds, gazing intently at the ground, memorizing the location so he could come back. He stooped and picked up the woman. “Vanni, grab onto me.”

Vanni didn’t hesitate. She grabbed, and they vanished.

From the arrival room in his father’s castle, Art strode porposefully towards his father’s study. Without knocking, he i
nterrupted a meeting, and dumped the woman unceremoniously on the floor, “We were attacked at the auxiliary train by this present for Beech and Arch,” he announced. “I hope she knows something.”

His father, the Count, calmly replied, “Vanni do come in.” She stood holding Art’s arm. “It seems I don’t need to introduce you two then.”

The other men in the room were still looking down at the sprawled form on the floor. Art turned on his father. “It would have been really nice if you had done that a bit earlier.” His tone of voice was one no one used with the Count, even one of his children. That got them to pull their eyes from the body and rest them on him.

25

“My youngest son seems to have a talent for finding Aravia’s Will adepts lying around unconscious.” The Count was looking very self-satisfied as his gaze travelled from the body on the floor and back to what was in truth his war cabinet. He was putting on an air of confidence because he felt he should show one. The truth was completely different. He was unsettled for the first time in, well, hundreds of years. It was fast becoming obvious that, although Aravia was completely mad, she was far from stupid. This was an invasion that she had almost certainly been working towards for years, perhaps even decades. The planning would have been meticulous. Things were starting to look a lot direr than anyone would have thought.

He came to a quick decision, and addressed the room in an uncharacteristically stern voice. “This attack on the auxiliary train may not have been the only one. I want reports from all our units and all our population centers and I want them...” He took in a mechanical timepiece standing in a corner. “... in half an hour.”

This sudden change in mood had a salutary effect on everyone present. The Count quickly and efficiently detailed the various Will adepts around him as to where he wanted them to go or whom they needed to send. At last he sat down and addressed Art and Vanni, who were the only ones left after Arch had scooped up his prize from the floor and carried her away. “I hope I’m wrong but I haven’t been able to read Aravia for about thirty years. An attack everywhere to cause destruction, mayhem and to generally weaken our resolve would have been something she might have done in the past.”

He turned to Art. “The girl you snagged in the forest went comatose as soon as Arch started to question her, obviously spelled that way. She will likely snap out of it in a couple of months, assuming he doesn’t keep prodding at her. You’ll be in his good books, you know. He came up with a few ideas to try if he got another chance, and you’ve given him one.” The Count suppressed a smile. “You’re right; I should have told you about Vanni. Two Will adepts almost always defeat one, as you found out.” He looked meaningfully at Art. “I had other reasons for not letting you know.” His gaze encompassed the both of them. “I need a report from the Auxiliary train from you two, and I want you to make sure things are being attended to properly there.” He stood up. “Don’t take any unnecessary chances.” It was a dismissal.

Vanni said nothing but wondered why the Count didn’t elaborate as to why he deliberately kept Art in the dark about her. She noticed that the offhand remark didn’t faze Art at all. Was he used to being told nothing? She made a point to ask him when she had the chance.

They returned to the spot Art had memorized. He went to the medical tent, while Vanni started an inventory of the damage. He was hoping to find some wounded he could help, but there weren’t any. All the people the woman had attacked had been killed instantly, mostly by beheading. It was a stark reminder that the Will was an exterminator like no other. The only real casualty in the tent was the military head of the encampment, a Major Damdon. The Major was in shock, and not in any fit state to command.

This sort of malady was not something he knew how to cure, so he left and found a Captain Sargan who appeared to be both functional and sensible. He gave him explicit orders. “Get all the corpses moved out of sight and identified. Get the tents repaired and have a brief report for me in an hour. I will see the wagon master.” He raised his voice. “Move!” It seemed that the captain had been waiting for someone with sufficient authority to take charge. Art had acquired a lot of authority along with the character to back it up. The captain moved.

Art felt the mantle of responsibility settle on his shoulders. It was funny that a sixteen year old boy was effectively in charge of the camp. Just as it was odd when he had run the Temple in Red City for a month, it was the Will that made the difference. It wasn’t that he was powerful; it was that the Will had given him the confidence to take charge, and now he simply expected everyone to do as he said, and everyone could see it.

He went and found Vanni. She had been counting casualties, and it had been very hard for her. In fact, the whole thing had been very hard for her. Art didn’t think she had seen any killing before, or seen the Will used other than in a benign manner. The closer he looked at her, the more convinced he was that she was about to lose it.

He slowly enveloped her in his arms and hugged her. It wasn’t for him, although he probably needed a big dose of support himself. It was for her. He sensed that she wouldn’t be able to function unless she let it all out again and realized that things were all over, at least for now. She wept on his shoulder, or more accurately on his chest, as that was as far as she reached. After a minute she took a small step back, pulled him down and kissed him full on the mouth. “Thank you for everything today,” she told him as she released him. “Your girlfriend is a lucky lady. I should have thanked you properly earlier but I was overwhelmed. I’m still overwhelmed.” She looked away and then back at him. She was still more than a bit bedraggled, but appeared to have pulled herself together. Art went red. She tentd. Iook the opportunity to ask, “Why didn’t your dad tell you about me?”

Art brushed it off. “He tells me as little as possible and makes me work almost everything out myself. He also tends make changes in life without any notice. I think he is pushing me to learn as fast as I can, but I have no idea why.” He changed tack. “We made a good team earlier when we had to. Let’s do just as well while we clean up.” His complexion slowly subsided to a muted pink.

Vanni nodded at him and said, “I think you should report to the Count while I stay here.”

When Art got back to the Count’s conference room, it was total mayhem. The room was filled to bursting, and three people were trying to talk at the same time:

“I estimate around two thousand troops killed.”

“As many as three thousand civilians died when buildings in Red City were collapsed by enemy Will adepts.”

“Hundreds of fires are burning in the Capital.” It was obvious that the Count’s worst fears had been realized. There were disaster reports from all over.

“Stop!” The Count was upset. This was not an aspect that they had seen before. “Only speak if I ask you something.” He seemed to be keeping himself in check; unfortunately everyone could feel his anger seeping slowly out. In the circumstances that surprised no one. He pointed at one man. “Iffryd, you went to check on the infantry. What news?” He worked around the room one at a time as the news became progressively grimmer.

This approach at least gave a clear view of the situation, or as clear a picture as was possible in such a short time. At least four and a half thousand troops and seven thousand civilians had been killed. Damage to property had been enormous, but was mostly repairable. Aravia had sent out over twenty adepts and had lost three, one captured. The Count had lost two, none captured. At least that was the assumption, as they hadn’t returned.

That was perhaps the most significant statistic. Will adepts were not a replaceable commodity. Civilians weren’t either, but they wouldn’t determine the outcome of the conflict in quite the same way that the Will adepts would.

The Count was forced to change his tactics, and station Will adepts in all the most vulnerable places. Art and Vanni were the only exceptions, as they were young and were supposed to be hidden amongst the apprentices with the auxiliaries. After giving his brief report, Art went back to his place with them.

Art was able to use his anger at the destruction to repair almost all the wagons and some of the tents. He also managed to winkle out all the apprentices still alive. There were several missing from the ones he had seen at breakfast. None of them were sufficiently with it to notice he was wearing the same clothes that “Gim” had been wearing that morning. In fact, they all huddled together regardless of sex and just whispered amongst themselves.

He went to find Vanni. “Come with me for a minute, please. There are some others who need encouragement.” He led her over to the apprentices whom he had left in one of the dormitory tents.

Art reached for the most commanding voice he had. “Listen up guys. Vanni and I have something to tell you.” The array of heads snapped in their direction.

“Who are you?” came a weak voice. It was Didona.

Art looked at Vanni and then at the small crowd. He changed h. Hstifyis face from Art to Gim. This was followed by a chorus of gasps.

“As you can see, he is Gim. He is also Art; you might remember last night’s story.” Vanni’s flat statement got their attention.

“We were attacked today by an enemy Will adept. There was a concerted attack all across the country by enemy Will adepts. This encampment fared better than almost any other target as Vanni immobilized the enemy who appeared here.”

Vanni grabbed Art’s hand. “Gim here rendered her unconscious. You are as well protected here as anywhere in the country.”

“We need your help to recover from the attack. After a disaster, everyone needs to pitch in and help.” He took a deep breath as he paused. “Last night I assured all of you that if we all did our best we would prevail. Now is the time I need your best. Find your journeymen and work hard for all of us.” Art was still not very happy with his speeches, but the apprentices slowly started to leave the tent and move off to find work.

There was a lot of cleaning up to do but no sooner had he managed to get some sort of organization set up, he was found by Arch. “Art, you are needed in Red City to help healing. Vanni can look after things here.”

Art took a deep breath. “You tell her that.” He considered for a moment. “You had better tell her I said she would do a good job.” He managed a small smile. “I had better get to work then.” He vanished.

The casualties in Red City from the collapsed buildings were huge. It was three exhausting days later before he was allowed to “rest.” This was a euphemism for “collapse.” `All that time he had been healing virtually continuously. The attack there had been focused on knocking buildings over. This had meant that there were enormous amounts of injuries and a lot of people to help. He had been surviving on five hours sleep and eating standing up. It was not surprising that he slept for twelve hours straight afterwards.

When he woke up, Art was told to take the day off. Naturally he decided to go and visit Amia. The thought of seeing her soon had kept him going
all through the hardest times when all he saw was broken limbs, smashed faces and twisted bodies. The walk to her parent’s house was his first proper exercise in ages. It was depressing to see devastation on a scale that his unconscious mind hadn’t linked with the numbers of wounded he had healed. Another unnerving feature that he noticed as he came to the undamaged residential neighbourhood was the number of wreaths - mostly black - that were hung from the doors. On some streets the doors with wreaths outnumbered those without.

His mood improved the closer he got to her parent’s house, and when he turned onto her street he at last felt happy with the world. This only lasted until he got close enough to see the wreath on her parents’ front door.

26

Art stopped abruptly. Did the wreath on the door mean that Amia was dead, or was it someone else in the house? His trepidation deepened as it came to him that it could easily mean that more than one person in the household might have died, with civilian casualties being so high. There was only one way to be sure. He slowly walked the last few yards to the front door and, after spending a moment regarding the wreath, he knocked.

The door was opened by Amia’s mother. They took each other in for. Hstdoor a few moments before her mother whispered, “You had better come in, Art.”

She led him into the kitchen where her father was sitting quietly. Art was feeling terrible; the possibility that it was Amia who was dead was rising fast.

“We buried her yesterday.” The axe had fallen. Her father’s voice wavered, “We tried to let you know but the Temple was so busy with the wounded that we only had the opportunity to speak with one acolyte.” Her father’s head dropped. There was no question as to whom they were referring even though her name hadn’t been mentioned. It might have been that they didn’t want to say it.

“He told us that you were not to be disturbed under any circumstances. We could see why; there were still hundreds of injured waiting for treatment, and everyone at the Temple looked completely worn out.” Neither of her parents appeared to be able to say much at a time.

After a pause her father continued, “If you had known then, you mightn’t have been able to help all those people you did.”

Her mother was now sobbing. Art watched her wipe her tears, “The authorities wanted all the burials to be held as soon as possible. We were told there were health risks with so many, so we went ahead.”

Art at last felt it was time for him to say something. “I feel like saying something like: ‘I am so sorry for your loss.’ I am of course, as it is a loss for me too.” He took both of their hands and met their eyes. “My real message for you is that I will avenge and punish the people who did this.”

They looked back at him and saw fire, determination and anger staring back. He stood up. “I cannot bring her back, but one day I hope to show you a miracle. Please have faith in me. I didn’t fully realize what Amia meant to me until now. I will always regret that I never told her clearly.” Amidst his babbling, Art realized he was about to break down, so he muttered a quick goodbye and rushed out into the street. He took only a few paces before he stumbled down, put his back against the nearest wall, and wept.

Slowly but surely the tears flowed. After a long while they dropped to a trickle and then stopped. Replacing them was a rainbow of emotions running the gamut from anger to despair, from self pity to an aching need for revenge. When he stood up finally, Art was revitalized. As a Will adept, he knew the value of strong emotions, how to nurture them and how to use them to devastating effect. He turned back towards the Temple, and as his stride quickened and lengthened he started to plan.

On his return to the Temple, he avoided the usual entrances and instead went to see Garmgo in the morgue.

“Well if it isn’t young Art. Good to see you again. I hear you have been working very hard.” Garmgo’s voice showed that he was happy to see him. He came up and appraised Art. “You look horrible, like a dog’s turd - but one with teeth. You had better tell me what’s happened.” Garmgo appeared to be upbeat and unpredictable, as usual.

Art found a chair and sat. “The war has happened. I’ve been so busy healing that I don’t even know what’s going on. One thing I do know is that someone very important to me was killed.”

“So you came to me to have someone listen while you pour out your heart? I am honoured.” Garmgo actually managed to sound both flippant and serious.

“Thanks, yes, that’s part of it. But I have another more urgent reason for coming here.” He gathered himself.herant and “Has anyone died recently of anything particularly nasty or incurable?”

“I think anything that kills is more than particularly nasty.” His voice suggested that this was glaringly obvious. “As you can see we are full to bursting here.” Art at last took in the huge number of corpses that were clogging up the morgue. “Most of these here are the ones that died before you or Grammon could get to them. Almost all of them caused by the collapsed buildings.” Garmgo scratched his thin beard in thought, “I have a couple that would have been incurable a few months ago. That was before you came up with the way that used the optical instrument you found in Dorin’s room.” He lowered his voice. “They died for the same reason as all the others. Too many patients and too few healers.”

For the first time since he came into the morgue, Art appeared animated and enthusiastic, “Do you still have them here?”

Now Garmgo was interested as well. “I think so, let me check.” He bustled off to check his records and came back with a big smile. “They are both still here. Do you want to take a look at them?”

“Please.” They walked around several neatly stacked piles of gurneys until Garmgo stopped at a corpse that seemed to be a little more colourful than the others.

“This is the fresher of the two.”

Art thought that referring to a corpse as “fresh” was a bit much, but asked, “How long has he been dead?”

“Just over a day.” Garmgo double checked a file. “Thirty hours. Does it matter?”

Art put his face down and peered warily at the cadaver. “I don’t really know. May I take a blood sample?”

“He’s not going to object. Try not to make a mess.”

“You’ve made worse messes in here than I ever could.” Art was recalling the time when Garmgo initiated him by spraying him with a generous amount of unmentionable bodily fluids from an overripe corpse. Art quickly took his sample and left before Garmgo came up with another trick.

Art gazed through his optical instrument and looked at the wiggly creatures in the corpse’s blood. He recognized them. They were the same ones that had almost killed Anaxis. They would do. The only problem was that he needed an awful lot more of them. He didn’t know enough about them to create them with the Will. He could only kill them. He would have to find or make more in a conventional manner, and make sure the ones he had didn’t die.

First he needed to persuade his father the Count to let him do it.

Seeing his father was easier said than done. The war made everyone busy and the Count, being the grand strategist, was busiest of all. Art had to wait for three hours of his day off sitting on a hard stone floor, waiting hopefully, before he could be given a moment of his father’s time.

“It must be important if you are prepared to waste three hours of your day off, sitting outside my study, especially after all the hard work you did recently.” His father was obviously very busy, but was impressed by Art’s persistence. “It may have been luck, but you have accounted for half the Will adepts that we know Aravia has lost. For that I am willing to give you some leeway. So, what is it?”

Art chose his words carefully. After all, he had been gifted three hours to get things right. “I know that things are not going as you would have wished. I believe Aravia cauevechose hisght you flat footed.” He caught his father’s eye. When nothing was said he went on, “You need to surprise her the way she surprised you. I have an idea.”

The Count stretched in his chair, waved his hand and beckoned Art to continue. “A month or two ago Anaxis got very sick. He would have died if I had not been immediately called in. He had been struck by a very virulent disease that would have killed a lot more that just him, without the optical instrument you brought back from your travels.” Art made a point of skirting over his role. “This is a disease that can kill Will adepts, and I want to use it.”

“Even if you could manage to infect a few of them, it wouldn’t make enough of an impact to alter the course of the war.” His father was dismissive.

“My plan is is bigger than that. I want to breed enough of the disease that all of them can become infected at the same time. That would alter the course of the war.” Art had made his case.

The Count could see that his son was very intense and motivated. “What happened?”

Art wrinkled his eyes. “What do you mean?”

“Something extremely emotional must have happened to make you so intense and bent on wiping out the whole enemy army down to the last man. Or woman. What was it?”

Art slumped back in his chair and turned his face to the ceiling. “It was my girl. She was caught in a collapsed building and killed. I had been working so hard that I didn’t find out she was dead until after she had been buried.” He put his head between his knees. When it came back up, his voice had changed its tone. “I have worked her death out of my system, but I want to harness the motivation I have for revenge to our benefit.”

His father gave him the first really kindly smile he had seen. “I knew you had a girl, but I hadn’t known she had died.” A flash of intuition crossed his face. “Was she pregnant?”

Art was glad for the real life practice in facing a truthreader he had had when they had visited Hanpo. He was sure that his father truthread everybody all the time as a matter of course. “Yes, she was.” This was technically true. She was pregnant - up to about a month ago. She hadn’t been at the time of her death, as the embryo had been transplanted into a woman who couldn’t have her own children. Instinct told him not to reveal this. It seemed his father accepted his statement to mean that she was still pregnant when she had died.

The Count became businesslike. “While I am sorry to lose a potential grandchild, it’s probably for the best. Beech or Arch must have told you the harsher realities of life here. That I will kill anyone who gets dangerous either to me or to our citizens, and that I will kill any Will adept who simply becomes too powerful?”

Art nodded and replied, “Yes,” in a matter of fact manner.

“I don’t encourage my offspring, or for that matter any Will adept, to have children until I am sure of their total loyalty. Having a child to protect can provide significant extra motivation to a Will adept. If it’s their first child, and they are young - as you are - then that motivation can be even stronger.” His eyes bored into Art’s. “All of you are potential rivals. I never forget that.” Before Art could dwell too much on what he had said, his father came back to the subject at hand. “So how do you plan to infect them all?”

“I’m still working on it, but I have a good idea. It’s more than a little thaad habit gruesome, and I wouldn’t have considered it if my Amia hadn’t been killed. I would rather see if it can work first before I plan further. One key element is that I may be able to flit to the ruins of Dane’s Hamlet and get behind them.” Since the Count raised an eyebrow, Art expanded, “When we were attacked a few days ago, I managed to flit to a location I hadn’t specifically memorized. I believe I can flit to a location in my old village. If I can do that, will you allow me to try my scheme?”

The Count sat back in his chair and made Art wait for several minutes. At last he spoke. “If we have fifty thousand people sick from a killer disease, how do you intend to stop it spreading to our people?”

A hard question, but Art had an answer. “The Will adepts are the only risk. The regular troops are still so far from anyone else that they won’t spread it. I can make sure that all the healers know about the disease and how to cure it. Their adepts won’t come into contact with so many people that it cannot be contained.”

Art endured another long wait. The Count abruptly stood up. “If you can take Arch to Dane’s Hamlet, I’ll let you do it. Good luck.” Art jumped up and scurried off before his father could change his mind.