Tortall (25 page)

“Shouldn’t be so jumpy, I know,” Adria replied, rubbing her eyes. “Do you tell your children this?”

“Darkings not have children,” Lost explained as Adria ducked behind her privy screen. “Darkings split when more wanted. Saves time.”

“But then you’re all alike,” Adria said.

“No. New experiences make new darking. New learnings make new darking. New likings come, and dislikings. Have to learn quick. Human rules, immortal rules, god rules, all hard on us. Too many killed at first.”

Adria stared around the screen at it, her washcloth in hand. “You’ve seen gods up close?”

Lost shivered all over. “Too close. Gods and immortals too quick. Ogre step on me once. Make me flat for weeks.”

Adria chuckled as she finished washing up. The mental picture of a flat Lost trying to scold her was a good one.

When she came out from behind the screen in her shift, she halted, shocked. Two sausage rolls and a peach lay on the bed. “Where did those come from?” she asked as her belly growled. Never before had anyone, not even Mama, risked smuggling food to her when she was in disgrace.

“I bring,” Lost replied, its voice smug. “Bad to go hungry. Numbers won’t glow in head if you hungry.”

“But …,” she whispered, confused. The peach alone was bigger than the darking. “How?”

“Secret.” Lost was clearly pleased with itself. “Eat. Your belly talks.”

“Not here,” she said as she stuffed the food into her book bag. “If anyone catches us with this, the kitchen staff will get in trouble. Outside!”

She finished getting ready for the day in a hurry, her mouth watering at the smell of the sausage on her fingers. With Lost tucked in her pocket, she tiptoed down the back stairs. The kitchen servants were already awake, preparing breakfast for the household. None of them would look at her, knowing that she was going hungry. Adria ducked her head and trotted out of the house. So afraid was she of getting caught that she waited until she was a block away before she took a sausage roll from her bag and gobbled it down. She did not forget to give Lost as much as the darking would eat.

When they reached a small square where local households came for their morning water, Adria sat on a stone bench to eat the other roll and the peach with more decorum. She and Lost watched the sleepy-eyed maids, daughters, sons, and wives draw their buckets of water, listening to the bits of gossip that came their way. Finished and full,
Adria rinsed her hands in the trough of water by the well, shyly nodding to people she recognized. Then she hoisted her book bag on her shoulder and walked toward the river.

She liked the city at this hour, when people were getting ready for the day. The mist from the river kept things cool, but it was retreating, taking its pearly curtain away like a street-corner mage. Shopkeepers opened their shutters and called out greetings to passersby, not urging them to spend money, just welcoming the new day. Horsemen were slower and kinder at this hour, waiting for people to cross instead of half-riding them down. It was for these moments of unexpected kindness that Adria loved her city in the early morning, and it was why she walked out at this hour to watch them, stolen breakfast or no.

“School now?” Lost asked when they had been walking in silence for a while.

“Oh, I’m sorry, no, it doesn’t begin for a couple of hours. I go for long walks in the mornings,” Adria explained. “It’s time to myself, to think, and … you’ll say I’m silly.”

“No,” Lost said.

It was such a complete “no” that she believed it. She opened her mouth and told Lost the thing she had never told anyone, not her favorite sister, not her friends at school, not Instructor Hillbrand.

“I like to look at the places where things are being built. I like to see how they put up houses, and temples, and such. The … the way engineers and builders fit timber and stone together, how they get the roofs up. They use mathematics for that, did you know?”

“Darkings not build things,” Lost explained. Then it added, “Yet.”

“I wish I could,” Adria said as they came to the road that ran beside the Lily Canal. “Engineers are almost like gods, making things that will last forever.” The canal was the oldest in the city. It carried anything that could be transported on the Drell all the way inland right to the governor’s palace. A bee to the biggest flower in the garden, Adria headed straight for the new bridge.

Not that it was truly a bridge, not yet. A year had been spent already driving pylons into each side of the canal, pylons that were wide and strong enough to support what all of her elders, including her father, said was the maddest idea ever to gain Crown funding. A group of young engineers claimed they could build a bridge that would rise up, at need, to let river ships pass down the canal. Adria had been coming here since the day the building crews had blocked the river off from the canal and begun to dig.

They would not be at work for a while. At night the river gates were opened for small-boat traffic on the canal, enough to ferry goods to the city’s heart. The gates had been closed two hours before dawn, and it would take the water another hour to drain enough that the bridge crews could get at their tasks. The foremen were at their stations already, checking for changes to their orders. The master builders were there, too, consulting over their plans. And for the last two weeks the woman engineer had also been present, seated cross-legged on a large crate that overlooked the shrinking thread of water below.

Her materials were scattered around her: the pad of stitched-together parchments, a bottle of ink and a brush for permanent record-keeping, a pile of maps, and the bottle of red ink and the brush she used to mark them. Today she also held the slate and chalk she used for temporary calculations. The first week she had been there, Adria had crept closer and closer from behind, trying to see what she did. Twice Adria had seen the engineer write on the pad, tear off the sheet she had written on, and wave it in the air. Both times a man from the work crew had come to take it to the builders. Unless the woman did that, however, Adria had quickly discovered that if the engineer was concentrating on her work, she noticed nothing else, not the dogs that piddled on the edge of the crate, not the street urchins who threw rotting vegetables at her until Adria had found the courage to run them off. Not the curious town girls.

The second week, Adria was a foot away on tiptoe, reading the strings of numbers and letters the engineer had scrawled on the slate. She did not immediately notice when the engineer shifted the slate a little to her right, so Adria had a better view. Adria jumped back as soon as she
did
realize that she had been discovered, and fled home in alarm. After long hours of internal debate, she had returned the next morning, to find the engineer in the same place, making careful notes on parchment. The slate, full of equations, was placed at her side, positioned so that Adria, standing behind her, could read it easily. The invitation had been too tempting to pass up.

Without a word between them, the engineer continued to let Adria see what she was doing. Adria had spent several
days giddy with the discovery that the new bridge was to be built in two sections, with the flat parts to be lifted like castle drawbridges so ships could pass through. The mathematics was harder to grasp. It depended in part on a kind of figuring Adria did not know, though she saw plenty of the new school mathematics in the engineer’s calculations. Some of it was in strange new marks.

Then she remembered where she had seen the runelike marks before. Instructor Hillbrand had left her in his office for half an hour once while she completed a test. Finished and bored, she had begun to look through one of the instructor’s well-used texts. On one page she saw the angles of a triangle described and the rune called sine that helped the student calculate the size of the angles. When Hillbrand had returned, he’d taken the book away, telling her she would be ready for it in a year or two. That was before Instructor Park came to say Hillbrand had taught her all wrong.

Yet here was sine again, with the rune for square roots, and equations. The woman’s chalk, or her ink brush, spat them out rapidly, filling slate or paper with them. Adria soon began to piece together parts of equations. She was praying for the courage to ask the woman about the parts Adria hadn’t worked her way through when Lost came.

“Be quiet and watch,” she told Lost now when she saw that the woman was at her usual place. “Not a peep. She lets me watch her work. I don’t want to be turned away.”

“I be good,” Lost replied.

Adria carefully steadied her book bag so it made no noise and advanced until she stood a foot behind the crate
and the woman. Looking over the friendly stranger’s shoulder, she saw that the engineer was writing a series of numbers and letters, using sketches of cranes, pulleys, and weights to illustrate the figures. Swiftly the engineer made her marks, dipped the brush, and continued, leaving no drops or blots. Adria wished her own schoolwork was so tidy.

Then she stopped thinking about the look of the page and concentrated on what the engineer did. With the drawings to illustrate the problems, the mathematics began to explain itself. The strange oval cut in half at the top of the page was the angle of the ramp and the angle of the height to which a bridge had to be raised to clear an average ship. The equation beneath that one calculated the speed at which the bridge could be safely lowered without accident. A chance equation, scrawled in chalk on the slate beside the woman, was the key to a half page of calculations.

One page had filled up. Today the engineer did not tear it from the pad. Instead she cut it away with the tip of her belt knife, then anchored it under the slate. Wetting her brush afresh, she began a new page.

Adria, excited, was now figuring with her as she wrote, new insight following each calculation the engineer put down. These covered the weights necessary to pull the halves of the bridge up and to hold them up. If Adria understood correctly, each stone weight could be increased with lesser ones to a point, before it was necessary to switch to heavier rope cables and larger stones. Days of rain or snow changed the load of the bridge. The engineer was calculating the difference for the seasons.

The woman had covered half a page more when Adria forgot herself. She pointed over the engineer’s shoulder and said, “No, no—it’s
three
x divided by five, not four.”

“Oops,” said Lost.

“Maiden tears, you’re right,” the woman said, and half turned to look at Adria. “And when did you learn trigonometry?”

Adria backed up, suddenly convinced she had opened the door to disaster. She didn’t know what manner of disaster, she only knew it was coming.

“Stop it,” Lost ordered.

Adria halted. The engineer said nothing but waited, her hazel eyes level.

Finally Adria stammered, “What’s tri—trigo—?”

The engineer turned the rest of the way around, catching her ink jar before it tumbled over. “Don’t tell me you
guessed
the answer!”

“No,” Adria replied, stung at the suggestion. “I worked it out, going by the calculations that went before. The only possible answer was three x divided by five.”

“Then tell me again, where did a chit your age learn trigonometry? Don’t lie to me, now.”

“Adria not lie!” cried Lost, leaping from her pocket. It plopped to the ground in front of the girl. Adria gasped and lunged for it, but the darking dodged her. It added, “Adria too honest.”

The engineer pulled at her lower lip with her teeth and released it. “Mother, bless your servant,” she murmured. “What is a darking doing in Tusaine?”

“You know what Lost is!” Adria said, shocked.

The woman smiled. “Anyone who studies at the university in Corus knows what a darking looks like.” She turned to Lost. “What is your name, noble defender of shy mathematicians?”

“Lost,” it replied, as Adria blushed to hear herself called a mathematician.

She was also more than a little alarmed to learn that darkings came from the Tortallan capital. Her homeland was currently at peace with its larger neighbor, but things had not always been that way. There was an old saying, “Warbirds fly in any weather.”

“Lost, is it?” the engineer asked. “Not spying?”

“Lost,” repeated the darking. “Too silly to spy.”

“What a comfort to your friend,” the engineer said, looking at Adria. “I hear darkings are brutally honest. If they’re keeping a secret, they’ll tell you that’s what they’re doing. They won’t lie.” She turned back to her paper. “Well, then, I correct this figure, and what do I do next? Come on, girl. Move the slate—mind my paper, there, unless you saw any mistakes on that?”

Adria shook her head. Then she realized the engineer could not see her and said, “No, mistress, I didn’t. But I shouldn’t—”

Lost had inchwormed over to the crate and up its side. It looped itself around the chalk and erasure cloth for the slate. “Her name Adria,” it told the engineer before it lowered chalk and cloth to the ground.

Slowly, shaking with nervousness, Adria walked over
and took up the slate and the parchment under it. Gingerly she sat on the edge of the crate.

“Master Hillbrand said you would be timid,” the woman remarked as she wetted her brush once again.

“Master Hillbrand!” Adria cried, jumping to her feet. Lost, who had been trying to climb into her lap, fell to the ground.

“It’s polite to visit your advisor when you come to his new town,” the engineer said, glancing at Adria. “Did you know he’d taught in Corus as well as Carthak?”

The girl nodded.

“Why he came to this hole in the hedge … No offense. Anyway, I paid him a call when I arrived for this job. He told me you came this way in the mornings, and I might see you, but he never mentioned you’re as shy as a fawn. I’m Keraine Waterstone, by the way,” the engineer said. “I’m
not
shy.”

Adria smiled. “I noticed,” she said quietly. She curtsied. “It’s an honor, Mistress Waterstone.”

“Just Keraine, all right? Now, sit and look at these.” Keraine eyed Lost, who had climbed onto the crate. “Would you want to see, Master Lost?”