It was immense, fully sixty carts long, coming on with speed and power. The runner pacing before it was a sleek muscular goddess, the steel hats of the keymen (and there were dozens of keymen) were polished, the carts were freshly painted with a flying dragon logo and loaded with cargo of every kind. Even the passengers looked prosperous, gazing out from blank dust-goggled eyes with cool indifference.
They came charging smoothly up the hill toward Smith’s caravan seemingly without the least effort! And there was their caravan master, sitting tall in the foremost cart, arms folded on the front of his long duster. No pistolbows for him; a long-range bow was displayed in its own rack on the side of his high seat, and a quiver just visible over his shoulder showed the red feathers of professional-quality hunting arrows. Smith gaped, and the caravan master acknowledged him with a majestic bow of the head as they came up on him and sped by.
The Smith children shrieked with excitement and waved. Even Mr. Amook turned his head to watch. Nobody could take their eyes off the grand spectacle, it seemed; and so everybody saw the last cart hurtling toward them with its outsize load, construction beams bound athwart the cart, protruding outward over its side just far enough to catch the protruding cargo net full of violet eggs on their last cart.
“Hey—” said Smith, watching in horror over his shoulder, and then it happened.
With a sound like a bowstring snapping the net was yanked away, the cart was jerked completely out of its ruts and came down at an angle so it toppled over, dragged along on its side after the rest of the caravan flaring sparks, and the eggs it had held went spilling, bouncing, tumbling out and down the embankment.
“STOP!” howled Smith, but the keymen had already seen and were manfully braking. The other caravan, meanwhile, had cleared the top of the hill and gone racing on all unmindful. The cargo net fluttered after it like a handkerchief waving good-bye.
As soon as the carts had ground to a halt, Smith slid down from his couch and staggered, groaning as he saw the extent of the damage. Lady Seven Butterflies’s holistic containers were bobbing end over end down the hill into the bushes. The cart lay on its side, still disgorging eggs at a slow trickle. Under its wheels one egg had smashed, and lay flattened on the road. Smith hobbled over and picked it up. Fragments of bright glass sifted out, bits of iridescent wing fragile as a dry leaf, colored like a rainbow.
Smith said something unprintable. He slumped against the cart and stared at the wreckage.
Crucible and the other keymen leaped from their seats and came running back to inspect the cart, hauling it upright.
“Watch out for the eggs, you lot!” shouted Mrs. Smith, making her way along the line. “Oh, no, did they break? Bloody hell.”
“That’s it,” muttered Smith. “We broke goods in transit. My cousin will lose Seven Butterflies Studios as a client. Two passengers gone and a client lost! So much for this job.”
“Now, now, young Smith, this sort of thing happens all the time,” Mrs. Smith told him, but there was a certain awe in her face as she looked around at the devastation. She took out a small flask, uncapped it, helped herself to a good shot of its contents, and passed it to Smith. “Drink up, dear. Despicable Flying Dragon Lines! I saw the way they had those beams loaded. Rampant heedlessness.”
“Don’t hang yourself yet, Caravan Master,” Lord Ermenwyr told him, approaching in a cloud of purple weedsmoke.
“You’ll find yourself another job in no time.”
“Thanks,” said Smith numbly, taking a drink from the flask. The liquor burned his throat pleasantly, with a faint perfume of honey and herbs.
“Let’s just get this mess collected, shall we?” said Lord Ermenwyr, peeling off his tailcoat. He draped it over the next-to-last cart and started down the embankment, then turned to look balefully up at the passenger carts. “You! Horrible little children. Get off your infant bottoms and be of some use. We’ve got to find all of these eggs for the poor caravan master!”
With yells of glee, the three older Smith children jumped from the cart and ran obediently down the embankment to him. Burnbright came running back to help them. They set about hunting through the bushes for the remaining violet eggs, most of which had stopped rolling around by then.
“The wheel assembly’s undamaged, sir,” Crucible reported. “Both axles sound, but the hitch is wrecked.” He held up a hook-and-rod twisted like a stick of Salesh Sweetvine. “We’ve got spares, of course. We’ll just replace it, sir, shall we?”
“Go ahead,” said Smith. He had another gulp from Mrs. Smith’s flask, watching the children following Lord Ermenwyr about like puppies. He had stripped off his shirt, and they were putting all the eggs they found in it. “This is good stuff. What is it?”
“It’s a cordial from the Abbey at Kemeldion,” Mrs. Smith informed him. “The Father Abbot’s own private receipt. We invented it together, he and I, when we were a good deal younger and less spiritually inclined than we are now.” She groped in her pocket for her smoking tube and lit it. “Lovely man. Always sends me a barrel at the holidays. Nothing like it for a restorative when one travels, I find.”
“Think it’ll stick glass butterflies back together?” Smith wondered. “Maybe if we pray a lot?”
“I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to pray. Don’t worry, Caravan Master.” Mrs. Smith kissed his cheek. She smelled of amberleaf, and food, and good drink. It was a comforting kind of smell. “Whatever happens, I’ll fix you a dish of fried eel when we get to Salesh. You’ve certainly earned it.”
“My cousin won’t think so,” said Smith morosely, and had another drink as Lord Ermenwyr clambered up the bank toward them, accompanied by the Smith children with their arms full of violet eggs. He carried a great number of eggs in his shirt. His bare skin was pale and fine as a girl’s, though he was otherwise quite sinewy and masculine.
“You know, Caravan Master, I don’t believe this is quite as bad as we thought at first,” he said. “None of these seem to be broken at all.”
“So maybe only that one smashed?” Smith felt his mood lifting, or perhaps it was the cordial.
“I saw a man get his foot crushed in a wheel rut in Mount Flame City once, and there was just nothing left of it even to be amputated,” said Burnbright encouragingly. “No wonder that one egg broke! I’ll bet the rest are fine, though.”
“Perhaps it’s Lady Seven Butterflies’s ballocky holistic packing method saving the day yet again,” said Mrs. Smith.
Lord Ermenwyr threw his head back and laughed, in the fox-yipping way he had. Smith felt Mrs. Smith stiffen beside him and catch her breath. He looked at her, but she had turned her head to stare intently at the young man as he emptied his shirtful of eggs into the righted cart. When he had added Burnbright’s and the Smith children’s contributions, they started back down the embankment again for more, and Smith leaned over and murmured, “What’s the matter?”
“Remarkable thing,” Mrs. Smith said, more to herself than to him. She followed Lord Ermenwyr with her eyes as he waded through the bushes, barking orders to the children. “May not be important. I’ll tell you later.”
To Smith’s immense relief, it turned out that only the egg that had been ground beneath the wheels had broken. The remaining violet eggs, all 143 of them gathered from the embankment, proved to be whole without so much as a crack. The cart was repaired, a spare cargo net tied down over the surviving eggs, and they were on their way again.