Anyway, the chief paper merchant of Zuslik was a close crony of the Baron. His monopoly and his flaunted wealth made certain few in the lower town would feel sorry for him.
The “global tapestry” was a sewn sphere of paper-light cloth with one open end. Its sides were vaguely embroidered with clouds and birds. The stitching was really rather uneven, though Lady Aren obviously thought herself an artiste.
Eventually, if practiced long enough by appreciative eyes, the figures would seem to come alive. Besides science, Dennis realized, art, too, had been stunted by this beneficent Practice Effect.
Dennis and Sigel and Gath waited while Lady Aren gossiped with Arth and Maggin. Sigel gave Gath a sharp look when the boy started drumming his fingers on the table. The wait seemed interminable. And Arth appeared in no hurry to end it. The little thief actually seemed to be enjoying himself!
Dennis forced himself to relax. He’d probably enjoy a little gossip, too, if he’d just returned home after a long imprisonment. He found himself longing to know who had been doing what to whom back at old Sahara Tech.
Idly, he wondered if Bernald Brady had had any luck winning the heart of fair Gabriella. He raised his cup and drank a toast to Brady’s luck in the venture.
Finally the old lady departed. “All right,” Dennis said, “let’s finish it.”
He spread the limp globe out on the table. Gath and Sigel took several soft tallow candles and began rubbing them carefully against the felt paper, laying down a thin coating of wax. Meanwhile, Dennis carefully tied a small gondola of string and bark to the open end. By the time he had affixed a candle to the tiny basket the others announced they were finished. Arth and Perth and Maggin watched, puzzlement on their faces.
Dennis and Gath carried the contraption to a corner, where a rough wooden frame had been prepared.
“It’s called a balloon,” Dennis said as he laid the fabric over the frame.
“You told us that much,” Perth said a little snidely. “And you said it would fly. A made thing would fly…and indoors where there’s no wind…” He obviously didn’t believe it. In the here and now there was one way to fly—by building, and slowly practicing, a great tethered kite.
Long ago, some Coylian genius who hated getting wet had invented an umbrella—now a common item owned by nearly everybody. Later, after a freak windstorm had caused a large umbrella to rise up with the wind, carrying its owner on a brief, harrowing ride, someone had a second conceptual leap. It was the birth of kites on Tatir. Furious practice led thereafter to the development of tethered wings, carrying men high above the surface to look at the ground below.
Those kites had helped Baron Kremer’s father, a minor nobleman from the northern hill country, to defeat the old Duke and force the King of Coylia to grant him domain over the upper valley of the Fingal.
Only in the past few years had the step to true gliders been taken—this time by Kremer himself. Though other armed forces now had kites, at the moment he, and only he, possessed a true air force. It was a major tactical advantage in his current conflict with royal authority.
Dennis wondered why no one else had ever developed gliders. Perhaps it had something to do with the imagery that took place when a person practiced an object. One had to have an idea of what one wanted in mind. Perhaps no one could conceive of an untethered kite as anything but fatal to the rider, and so they always were until Kremer made his breakthrough.
Dennis arranged the candle directly below the opening in the bottom of the trial balloon. He smiled with assurance. “You’ll see, Perth. Just make sure those buckets of water are handy in case we have an accident.”
He acted confident, but he was less than entirely certain. In a science-fiction story he had read as a boy, another Earthling had, just like himself, been transported to another world where the physical laws were also different. In the story, magic had worked, but the hero’s gunpowder and matches had all failed!
Dennis suspected that the Tatir Practice Effect merely supplemented the physics he knew, rather than supplanted it. He certainly hoped so.
Clear smoke rose from the candle, entering the balloon through the hole at the bottom.
Arth offered Dennis and Stivyung his best loungers and pulled out a few string-and-stick chairs that “needed a lot of work anyway,” he insisted. He gave Dennis and Stivyung two very nice pipes and happily puffed away on a hollowed twig and corncob contraption—working it slowly toward perfection, or at least staving off a decline to uselessness.
Dennis shook his head. The Practice Effect took a lot of getting used to.
“Will someone explain to me just what Baron Kremer is trying to pull?” Dennis asked as they waited for the bag to fill. “I take it he’s defying the central authority… the King?”
Stivyung Sigel puffed moodily at his pipe before answering.
“I was in the Royal Scouts, Dennis, until I married and retired. The Baron has been hard on us royal settlers out on the western frontier. He doesn’t care to have me and my land around, whose loyalty he can’t count on.
“The Baron’s supported by the maker guilds. The guilds don’t like homesteaders setting up too far from the towns. We make our own starters—chip our own flint, tan our own hides and rope, weave our own cloth. Lately we’ve even found out how to start makin’ our own paper, if the truth be told.”
Arth and Perth looked up, their interest piqued. Gath blinked in surprise. “But the paper guild’s the most secret of the lot! How did you learn…?” He snapped his fingers. “Of course! The L’Toff!”
Sigel merely puffed on his pipe. He said nothing until he noticed that all eyes were on him and he was clearly expected to go on.
“The Baron knows now,” he said, shrugging. “And so do the guilds. Common folk might as well find out, too. What’s happening out here is the sharp edge of something big that’s shaping up back in the estates an’ cities to the east, too. People are getting tired of the guilds, and churchmen, and petty barons pushing them around. The King’s popularity has gone way up ever since he cut the property requirement to vote for selectmen and since he’s been calling an Assembly every spring instead of one year in ten.”
Dennis nodded. “Let me guess. Kremer’s a leader in the cause for barons’ rights.” It was a story he had heard before.
Sigel nodded. “And it looks like they’ve got the muscle. The King’s scouts and guards are the best troops, of course, but the feudal levies outnumber them six or seven to one.
“And now Kremer’s got these free-flying kites to carry scouts wherever he wants. They scare the daylights out of the opposition, and the churches are spreading word that they’re the ancient dragons returned to Tatir again…proof that Kremer’s favored by the gods.
“I’ve got to give Kremer credit there, No one ever thought of gliders before. Not even the L’Toff.”
One more mention of the L’Toff brought Dennis’s thoughts back to Princess Linnora, Baron Kremer’s prisoner back at the castle. She had begun to show up in his dreams. He owed her his freedom, and he didn’t like to think of her still trapped in the tyrant’s power.
If only there was a way I could help her, too, he thought.
“Balloon is almost full.” Gath used the word as if it were a proper name.
The bag was starting to stretch from the pressure of hot air within. It didn’t form a very even sphere. But here it didn’t pay to lavish excess attention on most “made” goods, anyway, so long as they started out useful enough to be practiced.