"When you are older, you will go off to school in the city and you will learn many things, and then you will decide what sort of man you want to be."
Perrin doesn't really know what she means. "Can I go with you to the prayers? I want to hear you read them. Please?"
Now mother becomes very serious. "No you may not, and you mustn't ask again. And Perrin," she says, almost in a whisper, "you are never to speak of Aba, or of my conversations with lana, or of our prayers to anyone. Do you understand?"
"Even Father?"
"Especially Father."
"But why?"
"Your father and I agree on most things," says Mother. "But on one very important subject we have a fundamental difference." She looks so sad when she says this, and Perrin hugs her tight.
"Can't you compromise?" says Perrin. "You always say if I have a disagreement with another child I should compromise."
"In some matters there is no compromising."
Perrin feels a tightness in his stomach. "Do you want to watch me go all the way around the wall?"
"Of course I do," says Mother, and her smile returns. She stands him up and brushes his hair with her fingers. "You're getting so very big."
"Make sure you watch," Perrin says.
"Come here," says Mother. She hugs him, puts her face against the top of his head, and inhales. "My sunlight."
He turns to run off, but Mother catches his collar. "Remember what I told you. It's very important, and I must know that I can trust you."
"I promise," he says.
As he's running down the south lawn, she calls out, "Don't disturb the noblemen fixing that wall!"
"I won't!" he shouts back.
He makes it almost all the way around, but falls by the back gate, scraping his knee. He cries, and Mother comes and scoops him up, carries him into the house, and there is warm supper and music and play and the softness of sleep.
Silverdun sat up; at some point he'd drifted off to sleep again, but now hunger roused him. The door was still locked, and pounding on it still produced no response from Than or Master Jedron.
This was ridiculous; the mental equivalent of the paperweight to the head. A tactic meant to do what? Unnerve him? Test his patience? Annoy him? If so, it was succeeding admirably.
Clearly Jedron had no intention of allowing him out of the room, so it was going to be up to Silverdun to escape. Surely Everess and the odd, brooding Paet hadn't gone to all this trouble only to have Silverdun starve to death in a tower room like a doomed princess in a tale.
He began with the door. The bands around the wood and the lock were of iron plated in silver. Silverdun's attempts to use Elements or Motion against the door only succeeded in worsening his headache. Several painful shoves with his shoulders proved that it couldn't be forced, and he nicked the blade of his rapier trying amateurishly to pick the lock. If he'd had a bit of wire he might have tried picking the lock, although he wouldn't have had any idea how to do that given all the wire in the world.
"Damn you, Jedron!" Silverdun shouted, punching the door and immediately regretting it.
Breathe. Think. Be calm. Losing his temper wasn't going to accomplish anything. And if Jedron was watching him through a peephole or with clairvoyance, Silverdun felt sure that his anger would only give the old man pleasure. Clearly no one was coming to help him. He couldn't force the door. The window was of no use. He certainly couldn't spellcraft his way through the stone of the walls or the ceiling.
There must be something in the room that might help him. If nothing else, that stray bit of wire for him to practice his lock-picking skills with. He knelt and looked under the bed, finding nothing. He opened the drawers of the small bureau and felt around inside them, then pulled each drawer out and inspected it top and bottom. He pulled the bureau out from the wall and felt the back. He tipped it over and examined its bottom. Nothing. He took the mirror from the wall and found that it was indeed hung on its hook by a length of wire, but after a moment's experimentation it became clear that the stuff was far too flimsy to be of any use at lock picking. The bed frame was of wood, fitted with pegs, not nails.
After several minutes, Silverdun had been over every solid item in the small room and found nothing that might help him in any way. All that was left were the pillow and the mattress. Angrily, Silverdun stabbed at the pillow with the tip of his sword, sending goose down flying. The sight of the feathers floating aimlessly to the floor incensed Silverdun for some reason he could not explain, and he began to hack furiously at the mattress with the edge of his blade, sending clouds of down into the air. Again and again he struck at it, ignoring the pain in his skull.
He'd nearly shredded the entire mattress when he both heard and felt his sword strike metal. There, in the midst of the now-ruined mattress, was a silver key. It had been hidden in the mattress. Silverdun snatched it up and put it in the lock. It fit perfectly.
Master Jedron and Than were standing in the hallway. Jedron was smirking.
"Took you long enough," he said.
"And what, pray tell, was the point of that exercise?" Silverdun barked. "To teach me how to disarm bedclothes?"
"No," said Jedron. "It's to teach you to stop waiting around for other people to tell you what to do and think for yourself for a change."
Jedron peered into Silverdun's room. A layer of goose down covered the floor. "I hope you don't mind sleeping on wood slats," he said, smiling. "Because that's the only mattress you're getting."
-MaTula,''The Secret City"
It was always cold in the city. Always cold, always gray. No matter where Timha went, the wind always seemed to find its way at him, invading his robes, making him shiver anew, a hundred times a day. Even the fires in the common rooms seemed to burn colder, with a sickly blue aura around them. Timha couldn't remember the last time he'd felt warm.
He left his chamber, taking care not to look out the windows that he passed in the hall on the way to the stair. He kept his eyes on the floor, concentrating on the millennia-old patterns in the tiles, faded and cracked, but still clearly visible; a vision of an earlier era. Timha and his colleagues were led to believe that the city had been built even before the Rauane Envedun-e, the Age of Purest Silver, when magic filled the world like sunlight. Well, it was certainly old. It needn't be that old in order to impress Timha.
Timha made it to the staircase without glancing out a single window. It was strange how they attracted the eye, despite the deep unpleasantness that looking outside engendered. It was the sky. Timha did not need to see the sky today. Not today when the dread was so bad that it felt as though his insides were liquefying.
All night the intricate dance of the Project paraded before him in dreams. He could not escape those motions; the precision and complexity of them consumed his waking hours and his sleeping ones as well now. Not that he slept much, or well.
Timha was still seeing those motions when he emerged in the dining hall, glowering at the other journeyers and their apprentices. They seemed at ease, restful, even content as they sat lingering over their breakfasts before the stoves that were never quite hot enough. Well, why shouldn't they be content? Each had his or her own little bit of the overall structure of the Project to contend with, and it was challenging, rewarding work for them. They knew that their presence here meant that they were the best and most respected thaumaturges in the empire, long may it sail. They knew that when their work here was done they would retire, wealthy and respected, to villas on the fore moorings of the fairest cities, perhaps even the new City of Mab itself.