What he had found was still there where he had seen it yesterday, wedged at an angle in the unfired clay at the bottom of the urn.
Another backward glance reassured him that Bonnard’s attention was otherwise engaged. With a smooth movement, in the attempt to avoid the notice of the other lads stoking the dung fires and stirring the slip, Slith plucked the clay container from the shelf and tucked it quickly under his arm, then made his way out the back door of the tile foundry to the privies beyond.
Slith had long been accustomed to the stench of waste that slapped him each time he drew the rotten burlap curtain open; he ducked inside and pulled it closed carefully. Then, with moist hands that trembled slightly, he reached gingerly into the open mouth of the vessel again. With a firm tug he pulled out its contents and held it up to the light of the rising moon that leaked in through the gaps in the privy curtain.
A blue-black gleam stung his eyes in the dark.
With great care Slith turned the circular disk, thin as a butterfly’s wing, to the side, catching the moonlight that ran in ripples off its pristinely balanced rim. The outer edge was razor sharp—Slith had shaved several layers of skin from the back of his hand the previous day when he reached, entirely by accident, into the greenware jar while moving the older urns waiting to be fired from the dusty storage room to the kiln area.
He would probably have limited his curiosity to the curse he had muttered under his breath and assumed that the odd metal disk was an unfamiliar scraping tool of some sort, except for the dark, tacky shadow that marred its surface. Slith’s hand shook as he turned the disk over.
It was still there.
The shadow of blood, long dried.
A memory flooded Slith’s mind. Three years before, he and the other first-year apprentices had been jostled awake in the dead of night by bells ringing frantically deep within the foundry. He and his fellow novices in the art of tilemaking had crept out to see what the emergency was, only to be shoved roughly aside by the journeymen hurrying to respond to the alarm. What they all had found when they came into the kiln areas had kept him awake every night for months afterward.
The huge vats of boiling slip had been upended from their fires, spilling a sea of hot, molten earth in lumpy waves throughout the vast foundry. Three of the apprentices who had been working the late shift tending the slip and kiln fires had vanished, though one was later located, under a hill of cooling slip, drowned in the wet clay. The bodies of the other two, Omet, a bald-pated fifth-year apprentice whom Slith had liked, and Vincane, a brutish boy with a penchant for cruel pranks, were never found. A dozen or so journeymen were also missing.
But, worst by far, the alcove that led down to the tunnel where the slave boys were clandestinely digging had filled with boiling slip and somehow been fired, baking it to an impenetrable ceramic wall.
The night of the calamity was only the second time in his life that Slith had laid eyes on Esten, the foundry’s owner and Mistress of the Raven’s Guild, the trade association of ceramicists, tilemakers, glassblowers, and other artisans that was the cover for the most brutal and nefarious ring of thieves in the Market.
The first time had been the day he had been apprenticed to her in the tile foundry. Even though her face was darkly beautiful, her physical form slight, and her smile glittering, there was such menace, such inherent threat in her aspect, in the way she moved through the air, that Slith, then nine years of age, had begun quaking uncontrollably when he was brought into her presence. Esten had looked him up and down like a hog she was considering purchasing, then nodded and waved a dismissive hand. He was bound over, the papers signed, his life no longer his own, if it ever really had been. From that moment on, there had been no real abatement to the fear that was born in him that night.
But it was able to grow.
The night of the accident he had seen Esten for the second time. The cool, detached demeanor he had observed on the day he was bound over in her service was gone, replaced by an anger so complete that it seemed to call thunder from the sky above. Slith tried to put the image out of his mind of Esten stalking purposefully around the mounds of cooling slip, breaking suddenly into sharp, lunging movements, kicking the dim firecoals, slamming the open doors of the cold kilns shut, pulling over shelves of bisque pots and racks of fired tiles in explosions of black rage. The remaining journeymen winced at her cobra-like eruptions of fury, but grew even more agitated as that fury cooled to a seething, contemplative concentration.
Finally, after staring at the disaster for more than an hour, still as death, Esten turned around and leveled a chilling gaze at the assembled men and boys.
“This was not an accident,” she said softly, with a deliberateness that froze Slith’s spine. The faces of the journeymen, lit only by the dying embers of the slip fires, went paler at her words.
It was unnecessary for her to add the thought that followed.
Yet three years later, as far as Slith knew, there had been no clues found, no answers to the riddle of that night.
Life in the tile foundry was even more restricted now than it had been before. Prior to the accident, everyone was on alert because of the highly sensitive nature of the operations taking place in the tunnels below the foundry. Now the pressure came from the unresolved question of who had been suicidal enough to dare to disrupt Esten’s secretive digging, would be reckless enough to destroy something so important to her. Whether the answer would eventually point to a clever and powerful adversary, or an extremely lucky fool, mattered little.
Because, inevitably, like rivers to the sea, all secrets made their way, sooner or later, to the ear of Esten.
And Slith had just found one.
The fire on the mammoth hearth in the council chamber behind the throne room crackled and blazed with smoldering anger, neatly matching the mood of the Firbolg king.
Achmed the Snake, the Glowering Eye, the Earth Swallower, the Merciless, and owner of a host of other fear-invoking titles bestowed upon him in both honor and fear by his Bolg subjects, leaned forward in his heavy wooden chair and tossed a handful of broken shards of glass into the fire’s maw, muttering ugly Bolgish curses under his breath. The long fingers of his thin hands interlaced in a viselike lock, coming to rest against the lower half of his face, veiled, as always, in black cloth, as his mismatched eyes, one light, one dark, stared in savage silence into the fire.
Omet ran a hand absently over his beard and leaned back against the wall, but said nothing. He had always been given to judicious observation, rather than helpful interjection, and had learned almost from the moment he came to live in Ylorc three years ago that when the king had finished aligning the innumerable thoughts, images, plans, counterplans, and impressions that his vibrationally sensitive physiology was routinely bombarded with, he would speak.
Any disturbance to the sorting process was generally not appreciated.
Unlike his fellow artisans, many of them Bolg, Omet was comfortable with silence. After many long minutes of watching them shift uncomfortably from foot to foot, or sweat nervously in the presence of the Bolg king, he stretched, then leaned forward and picked up the last remaining shard from among the glass splinters on the floor, ran it in between his forefinger and thumb, then held it up to the firelight himself.
The king is right, he thought. Too thick.
When the king finally lowered his folded hands from where they rested against his upper lip to beneath his chin, Omet stood up noticeably. He had become quite good at recognizing the subtle signs that signaled changes in the Bolg monarch’s mood, and he tried to pass them along discreetly to his fellows. He cleared his throat slightly.