Maker of Fire

Emily, Healing Shrine of Mugash

I almost ran away when I saw an axe and shield leaning on the wall outside Lisaykos' study. As it was, I stopped as the sight of the weapons triggered the memory of the bunkhouse set on fire. The Cosm guards of the breeding farm killed anyone who ran out of the building. The screams as my bunkmates died in the flames still haunt my nightmares.

To this day, I do not know how I was overlooked when the corpses were collected and burned. Left for dead in a drainage ditch, the fever that had spread through the bunkhouse should have killed me. The blow to my head should also have doomed me.

Waking in that ditch, the pain in my head was the worst I ever experienced during either of my lives. It was then that I bit the control gem off my hand with my teeth. I don't remember how I got out of the ditch. My next memory was hiding under another bunkhouse. How I lived after that is a painful thing to remember. I ate snakes and insects and the remains of discarded food off the middens, and I stole what I could not scavenge.

I don't know why the sight of weapons will trigger the memory of that night, but it does: Cosm men hacking and impaling the few escaping girls, backlit by the flames of the burning bunkhouse, playing over and over again in my mind. When I saw the weapons outside Lisaykos' study, the memory threatened to overcome me; but I pushed it aside and stuffed it back down the hole it came from. It wasn't easy.

It was hard to push those horrific images away but I knew I had to do it to deal with the King's minion. This wasn't the time to show weakness. Confronted with beings who possessed both magical powers and physical supremacy, my only advantage was what was in my mind. I could not afford to show any mental shortcomings or deficiencies.

"Emily, are you alright?" the Queen looked down at me. "You just went white as snow." She was keeping pace with me by shortening her stride and dropping her cadence. I don’t know how long I stood there but I stopped until I could no longer see the flames and the death with my eyes open. When they were gone, I started walking again.

The Cosm general performed a proper obeisance when I entered the room. That was freaky. I doubt I will ever get used to that. The general then explained that he came on King's behalf. The King wanted the recipe for making matches. That made me angry. The King was the indirect cause of burning down my home, and now he wanted to haggle? Over matches? It was just too surreal.

I had an epiphany right then: people wanted what I could make. Properly leveraged, my knowledge was a commodity and it was a seller's market. I was safe so long as people in power thought they could profit from me. It was also a weapon, but using knowledge that way was a more dangerous path to follow. I think I was close to this realization when I told the Queen I would trade steel for the emancipation of the Coyn, but when I said that to the Queen, it was my depression and my rage at this screwed up kingdom that was talking.

It was odd that my realization only took a breath or two, sitting on a couch and just talking. It was odd because it happened in such a mundane setting but it changed everything. The world changed right then because of it. I had a tool no one else had. The only thing that limited my use of it was myself.

In the face of the King's emissary, I had found my courage. My demand for restitution was written by my rage. I would play hard to get as a delaying tactic. Now that I knew what I wanted, I needed time more than anything else to figure out how to get it.

The study was quiet after General Bobbo left. Then the Queen asked a question which she should have asked two rotations ago: "Emily, what caused the explosion at your cave?"

I wrote the one-word answer on a fresh tablet: "gunpowder."

"Why? I mean, why did you make gunpowder? That stuff is dangerous, isn't it?"

I was beginning to get tired of writing long answers, but I wrote: "Used it to mine magnetite. Low power explosive but easy to make, safe to store. Should not have been enough to blow up cave. I think blast wave knocked down walls---then, lacking support, roof fell in."

"Well, that's understandable," the Queen looked relieved for some reason.

"What's understandable? What is gunpowder?" Lisaykos asked from the other couch. It occurred to me that while the Queen and I knew about explosives, this technology did not exist on this world, at least not yet. Lisaykos lacked an understanding of what explosives were and how they destroyed things.

"Remember when the red terraces above the Fire Pot were destroyed?" the Queen explained. "Huge blocks of rocks were thrown into the air and strewn all around, and where the terraces once were, there is now just a huge crater filled with rubble."

"Yes, go on."

"Explosives can do that sort of destruction without relying on steam or geysers or lava. A small amount of explosive was enough to destroy Emily's cave."

"What a dreadful thing," Lisaykos frowned. "It would make a horrific weapon in war, worse than dropping boulders at a height."

"Yes," the Queen grimaced and clenched her fists, earning a speculative look from Lisaykos. Her expression returned to normal after a half breath, as if nothing was wrong. I guess I wasn't the only person here that hid what they were thinking.

"Emily," the Queen changed the subject, "how hard would it be for you to make a batch of matches, starting right now?"

"Wait," Lisaykos interjected. "What are matches?"

"Emily's instant fire," the Queen explained.

"Good enough, but why is it called matches?"

"Huh? I do not know. Do you, Emily?" I shook my head no. The name didn't even make sense in English.

On a fresh tablet, I wrote: "Matches need wax, potassium chlorate, antimony trisulfide, red phosphorus, and a binder. The binder is tree sap from the long-needle red pine trees. Antimony trisulfide is the mineral stibnite. There is an outcrop two valleys to the east of my valley. Phosphorus is made by evaporating urine - took two years. The problem is the potassium chlorate, which is made by electrolysis. Can't make that without building a new Gramme machine generator."

"How hard is it to build a new one?" the Queen asked.

I wrote: "Have to build a cupola furnace to cast an iron ring. Took me a year last time. Need to find white clay. Need to build brick kiln. Need to build new bellows for furnaces. Need to make replacement tongs, which requires a bloomery and a forge to make wrought iron. Need copper bar and copper wire. Need graphite. Lots of work to rebuild all of these."

"This is just a hypothetical question, Emily. What if there were already bellows, copper, bricks, and extra hands to do the work that doesn't need your brain?"

"Even teaching takes time and I can't speak to teach." I needed to speak to get what I desired out of the Cosm.

Having filled the last tablet, I took a fresh one and wrote on it: "If I want to get my voice back, what's involved and how long does it take?"

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Imstay King, on march with the army

Both Bobbo's report and Usruldes' report agreed: the maker of fire was at the Healing Shrine of Mugash, where she was recovering from some kind of accident. Other than that, there was little overlap in what the two men reported. Read side-by-side, the two narratives could be stitched together to make a coherent story.

Imstay put together a storyline that made the most sense:

Four rotations ago, the maker of fire suffered some kind of accident. The Queen rescued the Coyn and took her to the Shrine of Mugash for treatment. The Coyn was confined for over one rotation, suggesting that whatever happened to her, it was serious. Only major injuries take that much time to heal.

The maker of fire probably recovered from her injuries two rotations ago. The Coyn was seen riding a griffin, first in the canyon of the Black River, then in the Valley of the Vanishing River. The griffin was probably the Queen's.

Two days after the griffin sighting, High Priestess Foyuna announced that the Coyn was blessed with a revelation by Tiki. The Coyn was literate and already wrote out the revelation. The revelation is a recipe for a medicine for constipation. The ingredients were exotic but understood by the Queen.

Bobbo first visited the palace and an information broker in Is'syal, gathering intelligence in both places. Bobbo detected Usruldes' tailing him in Is'syal. Usruldes does not believe Bobbo detected his tail after that. Before meeting with the maker of fire in the evening two days ago, Bobbo spent time during the day flirting with the Captain of the Aybhas garrison.

The Queen and the maker of fire visited the Valley of the Vanishing River on the same day that Bobbo visited the Healing Shrine of Mugash. They brought back two black slabs of unknown composition.

The maker of fire will not negotiate to make anything until she is compensated for the loss of her home and workshop. She states the King's scouts got into something they should not have meddled with, and that caused the explosion and the fire afterward.

Imstay was not happy that the Queen already had some sort of relationship established with the maker of fire, though it was logical seeing that she had rescued the Coyn. He guessed she had been watching the Coyn ever since their children had been lost after that blizzard during the cold season.

Bobbo made it clear in his report that the maker of fire insisted on her status as a free Coyn who did not reside in Foskos and did not acknowledge him as her king. Bobbo believed the destruction of Coyn's home by the King's scouts may have given her a bad opinion of Imstay.

Usruldes noted that no one outside the shrine had met the maker of fire, nor had most of the healers and attendants who worked inside the shrine. He said the attitude of the residents of Aybhas toward the newly blessed revelator was one of curiosity among the Cosm and approval among the Coyn. His agents found this attitude replicated in every city and town of the realm excluding Blockit, Angsum, and Ixism'os. In those three, Cosm were hostile and Coyn silent on the subject of a Coyn revelator.

After pondering the intelligence he received, Imstay took a ribbon of linen and wrote a message to Bobbo to obtain an inventory of the destroyed possession from the maker of fire's home, along with an estimate of what it would cost to replace everything. He found the right messenger bird, tied the message on, and sent it on its way. Then he took another ribbon of linen and ordered Usruldes to set up surveillance on the maker of fire in Aybhas. If he found the Coyn alone, Usruldes should capture her and bring her to Imstay.

He considered taking his griffin and flying back to Is'syal but then discarded that idea. He had decided to prevent the problem of sending his army home early with nothing to do when they got home. That was a recipe for trouble. So he put his army to work on building a wagon road through the mountains. He needed to stay and work with them. He spent a few hours every day among the soldiers, joining them in moving dirt around. It did wonders for morale.

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