Glasswrights' Apprentice (7 page)

Sighing against Cook's barrage that was certain to accompany her morning appearance in the kitchen, Rani sat up, striking her head against the ceiling and discovering that she certainly was not in the pantry. Memory flooded back as she rubbed her forehead - visions of fleeing the berserker warrior, Larinda's bleeding hand, and the vengeance King Shanoranvilli had declared against the guildhall.

Now, Rani could recall her narrow escape from the king's guard, crouching in the steaming oven, certain that a soldier would throw open the door at any minute. She had regretted her impetuous hiding place almost as soon as she pulled the door closed. She could not see prospective invaders, and the stone thoroughly muffled any approaching footsteps. More than once, Rani imagined the door grating open against the brick platform, and she crouched against the kiln wall, fingering her Zarithian blade.

Ultimately, though, exhaustion eroded terror, and she slipped into an uneasy sleep peppered with horrific nightmares. Now, her stomach clenched, and she remembered that she had not eaten since devouring those few apples yesterday afternoon. Sweet as they had been, the fruit was no substitute for missed meals, and Rani rummaged in her tunic pockets, rooting out the apples she had hidden away. Her first bite was bruised, the flesh mealy and tasteless. Rani wrinkled her nose and started to toss away the fruit. Just as she began to flick her wrist, though, she realized that another meal might not come easily. The second and third apples were just as bruised, but Rani was a little less ravenous when she had finished them.

Of course, food was only part of the problem. Rani's hands were sticky with apple juice. Her clothes stuck to her body in uncomfortable patches on the outside, and her bladder pressed painfully from the inside. Grimacing in the dark, Rani crept to the kiln's door, easing open the heavy stone so she could peer outside.

Blinking in the sudden light, she dashed away involuntary tears. Only after forcing her eyes to stay open in the brilliance did she realize it wasn't actually bright at all. In fact, she was peering out at night-time, and only a single torch flickered in her line of sight. One torch, and an army of soldiers.

Rani froze like a deer startled by hunters. Straining her ears, she could make out an incessant scraping sound, a noise so persistent she wondered how she had ignored it so far. A shiver crept up her spine, changing almost to a convulsion as fresh air slapped her sodden chest. Trying to place the totally unfamiliar sound, Rani set her teeth and dared to edge her prison door open a little wider. The kiln door gritted on its stone platform, the sound echoed by the cavernous oven until it seemed that the alarm would summon every soldier in the quarter. Rani nearly compounded her error by crying aloud when she learned the source of the scraping noise. Stone by stone, the proud guildhall was being leveled. Rani stared in horror as teams of glasswrights struggled in rope harnesses, leaning forward under the steely eyes of Shanoranvilli's soldiers. Instructors stood on the crumbling walls, wedging metal bars into the ruined hall, prying out great blocks of stone. Hesitating workers were immediately confronted by uniformed soldiers, and Rani gasped indignantly at the crack of a whip - a whip! - as if the guildsmen were nothing more than dray animals!

Indignation melted to guilt in a heartbeat. How could she have brought this upon her guild, upon the folk who had adopted an unworthy merchant brat and pledged to teach her a valuable craft? For an instant, she thought to present herself to the soldiers, to creep from her hiding place and confess that she had summoned Tuvashanoran to his death. Her admission might ease the misery painted before her, and it would be better than huddling helplessly on the kiln platform.

Before she could move, though, a tiny voice murmured in the back of her skull.
She
was not responsible for the destruction of the guildhall.
She
had nothing to do with the attack on Tuvashanoran. Besides, the soldiers had spoken plainly enough in the refectory - they sought vengeance, and nothing could save the glasswrights' guild now. The hall would be razed, the fields sown with salt, the well fouled, and Rani's sacrifice would change nothing.

Thoughts of the well forced Rani's mind back to her current predicament - thirst made her tongue thick in her throat. Sighing, she looked about her cubby hole, ascertaining that she had left nothing behind. She took a deep breath and forced the kiln door open another spare inch.

The air flowing into the oven was freezing, and Rani's teeth chattered, despite her terror that the soldiers would overhear. As she crept from the oast, a breeze picked up, blowing some of the guildhall's dusty corpse into her eyes and nose. She smothered a dry cough and stifled a sneeze, clutching her arms about her to ward off the midnight air.

It did not take military prowess to realize that Rani's only means of escape was back in the apple orchard. Reversing the process of her inauspicious arrival, she could scale the wall with the help of the gnarled trees, make her way down the abandoned alley. As Rani huddled against the brick oven, the orchard looked impossibly distant - she needed to cross the entire kiln-yard and Cook's vegetable garden. Listening to the scrape of stones from the guildhall, a sound like the grating of bones, Rani was too afraid to move.

Too afraid, that was, until the captain of the guard took the decision from her. “You! Aye, you, you good for nothing sack of bones!” Rani's heart clenched in her chest. “Get your miserable arse over here and lend a hand with these prisoners! The kilns are coming down next - every last stone of them!” Only then did Rani realize the captain spoke to someone else, someone dangerously near her hiding place.

A soldier materialized out of the gloom, muttering under his breath and settling a hand on the hilt of his broadsword. Swearing an atrocious curse, the man kicked open the kiln door, muttering about the grit and the heat. The soldier had been lounging in the shadows on the far side of her kiln; Rani had escaped detection by a matter of minutes. As it was, he might peer into the gloom between the ovens at any moment, glimpsing the white gleam of her eyes in the midnight murk. If she hoped to make her escape, the time had come.

Drawing a deep breath and tugging at her tunic, Rani ducked from the deep shadow of her kiln to the next. No soldier cried out in rage; no alarm disrupted the glasswrights' steady labor. Her successful jump gave her confidence, and she ducked to the next oven, and the next, until she was at the end of the row.

From there, it was a simple dash to Cook's garden. Fortunately, Rani had been delinquent in completing her chores; she had not yet cleaned up the garden's autumn debris. Tangles of squash vines massed at the edges, and towering stalks waved where the onions had gone to seed. Rani crawled through a tangle of melon vines until she reached the corn, and then she was able to jog down the narrow rows, running nearly upright. She tried not to think about how many times Cook had ordered her into the garden, how many times she had complained about the endless platters of vegetables, without a hint of meat for a hungry young apprentice. She was grateful she had knelt in the fresh summer earth, pulling weeds and coaxing the garden to robust life.

She only wished that she had not been quite so zealous in harvesting the garden's riches for the guildhall kitchen. One melon - was that so much to ask for? So much to have overlooked?

Gaid, the god of gardens, must have heard her petulant demand, for she stumbled even as she thought her desire, and her hand came down hard on a feathery plume of greens. Tugging at the vegetables, Rani was rewarded with a cluster of thick carrots. She resisted the urge to gnaw on one of the orange roots then and there. Instead, remembering how grateful she had been for the apples she had tucked away before her night in the kiln, she shoved the roots deep into a tunic pocket. She clutched for more bounty but discovered that there were limits to Gaid's generosity.

Rani worked her way to the stone-lined edge of the garden, ready to dart past the well and melt into the orchard like a midnight shadow. She almost cried out in frustration when she discovered that soldiers had beaten her to the spot. Yet another of Shanoranvilli's iron-clad captains strode about the edge of the plot, roaring at a crew of glasswrights as if they were his personal slaves. “You miserable beasts! You think I don't know what you're doing? You think I don't see how every last one of you is plotting and planning, waiting to murder again!”

A crack rang out closer than Rani had expected, and she crouched lower behind her screen of dried vines as the soldier curled up his long whip. “You, goat-face!” Rani followed the captain's gesture into the night, realizing with a gasp that the soldier was berating Cook - and that the old woman was a scant meter away. “You put your back into that work, or I'll lay such stripes on you, you'll wish your dam had never spread her legs.”

Rani braced herself for the furious explosion that was certain to follow. Cook never permitted anyone to gainsay her, even when she was dumping an extra handful of salt into the stew. She certainly would not tolerate such foul language, even if the speaker
was
of a different caste. The soldier, oblivious to his imminent peril, continued, “Aye, you old hag! You put your back into hauling, or you'll find yourself
on
your back, if any of my men is desperate enough for a poke!”

Now, Rani understood that the workers were dragging stones to the well, razing the careful garden borders at the same time that they blocked off the guild's water supply. The rocks nearest the well were already gone, and the workers were forced to range farther afield. Cook had chosen a stone near Rani's hiding place.

The apprentice was close enough to see the hatred set in Cook's thin lips - close enough that the old woman looked up when the child gasped at the soldier's brutal words. Rani shut her eyes, scarcely bothering to offer up a fruitless prayer to Jun, the god of night, that he might take her under his wings and shield her from the soldiers' eyes, even if Cook had spotted her. “You ninny!” hissed the all-too-familiar voice. “Open your eyes so you can see where you're going!”

Rani was so startled she broke off her prayer in mid-word. Cook stood less than an
arm's length away, the old woman's face contorted in fury as she went through the motions of
struggling with the heavy stone. “Count to ten, then run for the wall.” When Rani only shook her
head, uncomprehending, Cook called on the god of kitchens: “Lan bless us, you'll only get one
chance. Find Morada and
prove them wrong
!”

Before Rani could question the old woman, before she could ask where she was to go and who she was to enlist in her battle to find the missing Instructor, the soldier's whip sang through the air, whistling just above the apprentice's head. “Don't waste your breath on prayers, old hag! Not one of the Thousand Gods would spare you the time of day.”

The whip licked the woman's cheek, leaving a trail of blood, black in the moonlight. Then, Cook launched herself from the ravaged garden, hurtling her rocky burden at the soldier with a lioness' single-minded courage.

The guard was surprised by the attack, and his terrible oaths rang out in the night. Other guildsmen stared stupidly, already too dulled by their labor to find liberation - or even encouragement - in Cook's brave rebellion. The captain of the guard hollered from his post by the kilns, and the ground trembled under metal-clad feet as soldiers gathered from all over the compound.

Rani sprang away from the commotion at the well, leaping for the orchard and lunging from gnarled trunk to gnarled trunk in a frantic effort to melt into shadow. She wriggled up one particularly knobby tree near the edge of the copse, ignoring the scrape of bark against her palms. Reaching the last branch broad enough to support her weight, she took a single steadying breath and launched herself at the wall.

There was one horrifying instant when she discovered she had miscalculated her leap, and the breath was crushed from her narrow chest as she came up sharp against the wall. She gasped for air and stifled a sob, certain she would feel a soldier's gauntleted hands on her legs at any instant. Driven by blind terror, she caught her bottom lip in her teeth and forced first one leg to the top of the barrier, then the other.

She lay across the top of the wall for a long second, gathering her breath and bracing herself for the hue and cry the soldiers were certain to raise. Ignoring the sting of scraped palms and knees, she clutched the stone like an orphan and offered up a prayer, calling on Lan, whose help Cook had already enlisted.

Even though she knew she was looking back at certain death, she could not refrain from one last glance at her adoptive home. Already, the guildhall's familiar outline was destroyed, the jagged teeth of its rotted towers lurid in the torchlight. A crew of soldiers swarmed in the kilnyard like maggots on a corpse, and Rani could scarcely believe that her sheltering oven was already reduced to rubble.

That destruction was nothing, though, compared to the tumult closest at hand. Cook was surrounded by half a dozen soldiers. The woman's cries floated across the orchard. “You drunken sots! The guild had nothing to do with the prince's murder! By First God Ait, I've never seen men as foolish as you!”

The woman's taunts were met by gauntleted fists, and Rani heard the crunch of breaking bones, even across the orchard. “You blooming idiots!” Cook's voice shrilled against the pain. “In the name of Lan, find the true murderer - find Instructor Morada and leave us to mourn the Prince!”

Rani knew Cook directed those last words at her, even as the soldiers surged forward, pummeling the woman into silence. Rani forced herself to look away, ordered herself to exploit the distraction as all the soldiers focused their attention on one rebellious old woman.

Dropping over the stone enclosure, Rani barely remembered to roll when she hit the ground. The breath was knocked out of her, and it took a long minute to recall how to climb to her feet, how to gather her arms and legs and run - run as fast as if wolves pursued her under the cloak of night.