Red Seas Under Red Skies (22 page)

“Honey, please.”

Baumondain poured steaming coffee from the silver pot into a thick glass cup, and spooned in honey until Locke nodded. Locke sipped at his cup while Baumondain bombarded his own with enough cream to turn it leather brown. It was quality brew, rich and very hot.

“My compliments,” Locke mumbled over a slightly scalded tongue.

“It's from Issara. Lady Saljesca's household has an endless thirst for the stuff,” said the carpenter. “The rest of us buy pecks and pinches from her sellers when they come around. Now, your messenger said that you wished to discuss a commission that was, in her words, very
particular
.”

“Yes, indeed,” said Locke. “Particular, to a design and an end that may strike you as eccentric. I assure you I am in grave earnest.”

Locke set down his coffee and lifted his satchel into his lap, then pulled a small key from his waistcoat pocket to open the lock. He reached inside and drew out a few pieces of folded parchment.

“You must be familiar,” Locke continued, “with the style of the last few years of the Therin Throne? The very last few, just before Talathri died in battle against the Bondsmagi?” He passed over one of his sheets of parchment, which Baumondain removed his optics to examine.

“Oh, yes,” the carpenter said slowly. “The Talathri Baroque, also called the Last Flowering. Yes, I've done pieces in this fashion before…. Laurishas as well. You have an interest in this style?”

“I require a suite of chairs,” said Locke. “Four of them, leather-backed, lacquered shear-crescent with real gold insets.”

“Shear-crescent is a somewhat delicate wood, fit only for occasional use. For more regular sitting I'm sure you'd want witchwood.”

“My master,” said Locke, “has very exact tastes, however peculiar. He insisted upon shear-crescent, several times, to ensure that his wishes were clear.”

“Well, if you wished them carved from marzipan, I suppose I should have to do it…with the clear understanding, of course, that I did warn you against hard use.”

“Naturally. I assure you, Master Baumondain, you won't be held liable for anything that happens to these chairs after they leave your workshop.”

“Oh, I would never do less than vouch for our work, but I cannot make a soft wood hard, Master Fehrwight. Well, then, I do have some books with excellent illustrations of this style. Your artist has done well to start with, but I'd like to give you more variety to choose from….”

“By all means,” said Locke, and he sipped his coffee contentedly as the carpenter rose and returned to the workshop door. “Lauris,” Baumondain cried, “my three volumes of Velonetta…. Yes, those.”

He returned a moment later cradling three heavy, leather-bound tomes that smelled of age and some spicy alchemical preservative. “Velonetta,” he said as he settled the books on his lap. “You are familiar with her? No? She was the foremost scholar of the Last Flowering. There are only six sets of her work in all the world, as far as I know. Most of these pages are on sculpture, painting, music, alchemy…but there are fine passages on furniture, gems worth mining. If you please…”

They spent half an hour poring over the sketches Locke had provided and the pages Baumondain wished to show him. Together, they hammered out an agreeable compromise on the design of the chairs that “Master Fehrwight” would receive. Baumondain fetched a stylus of his own and scrawled notes in an illegible chicken scratch. Locke had never before considered how many details might go into something as straightforward as a chair; by the time they had finished their discussion of legs, bracings, cushion filling, leathers, scrollwork, and joinery, Locke's brain was in full revolt.

“Excellent, Master Baumondain, excellent,” is nonetheless what he said. “The very thing, in shear-crescent, lacquered black, with gold leaf to gild the incised decorations and the rivets. They must look as though they had been plucked from Emperor Talathri's court just yesterday, new and un-burnt.”

“Ah,” said the carpenter, “a delicate subject arises, then. Without meaning to give the slightest offense, I must make it clear that these will never pass for originals. They will be exact reconstructions of the style, perfect facsimiles, of a quality to match
any
furnishings in the world—but an expert could tell. They are few, and far between, but such a one would never confuse a brilliant reconstruction for even a modest original. They have had centuries to weather; these will be plainly new.”

“I take your meaning, Master Baumondain. Never fear; I am ordering these for eccentric purposes, not for deceptive ones. These chairs will never be alleged to be originals, on my word. And the man who will receive them
is
such an expert, in fact.”

“Very good, then, very good. Is there anything else?”

“Yes,” said Locke, who had withheld two sketch-covered sheets of parchment and passed them over. “Now that we've settled on a design for the suite of chairs, this—or something very much like it, subject to your more expert adjustments—
must
be included in the plans.”

As Baumondain absorbed the implications of the sketches, his eyebrows rose steadily, until it seemed that they were being drawn up to the fullest possible extent of his forehead's suppleness, and must be flung back down to the floor like crossbow bolts when they reached their zenith.

“This is a prodigious curiosity,” he said at last. “A very strange thing to incorporate…. I'm not at all sure—”

“It is essential,” said Locke. “That, or something very much like it, within the bounds of your own discretion. It is absolutely necessary. My master simply will not place an order for the chairs unless these features are built into them. Cost is no object.”

“It's possible,” said the carpenter after a few seconds of further contemplation. “Possible, with some adjustments to these designs. I believe I see your intention, but I can improve upon this scheme…must, if the chairs are to function as chairs. May I ask why this is necessary?”

“My master is a dear old fellow, but as you must have gathered, quite eccentric, and morbidly afraid of fire. He fears to be trapped in his study or his library tower by flames. Surely you can see how these mechanisms might help set his mind at ease?”

“I suppose I can,” muttered Baumondain, his puzzled reluctance turning to interest in a professional challenge as he spoke.

After that, it was merely a matter of haggling, however politely, over finer and finer details, until Locke was finally able to coax a suggested price out of Baumondain.

“What coin would you wish to settle in, Master Fehrwight?”

“I presumed solari would be convenient.”

“Shall we say…six solari per chair?” Baumondain spoke with feigned nonchalance; that was a cheeky initial offer, even for luxury craftsmanship. Locke would be expected to haggle it down. Instead, he smiled and nodded.

“If six per chair is what you require, then six you will have.”

“Oh,” said Baumondain, almost too surprised to be pleased. “Oh. Well then! I should be only too happy to accept your note.”

“While that would be fine in ordinary circumstances, let's do something more convenient for both of us.” Locke reached inside the satchel and drew out a coin purse, from which he counted twenty-four gold solari onto the little coffee table while Baumondain watched with growing excitement. “There you are, in advance. I prefer to carry hard coinage when I come to Salon Corbeau. This little city needs a moneylender.”

“Well, thank you, Master Fehrwight, thank you! I didn't expect…well, let me get a work order and some papers for you to take with you, and we'll be set.”

“Now, let me ask—do you have all the materials you need for my master's order?”

“Oh yes! I know that off the top of my head.”

“Warehoused here, at your shop?”

“Yes indeed, Master Fehrwight.”

“About how long might I expect the construction to take?”

“Hmmm…given my other duties, and your requirements…six weeks, possibly seven. Will you be returning for them yourself, or will we need to arrange shipping?”

“In that, too, I was hoping for something a little more convenient.”

“Ah, well…you having been so very civil, I'm sure I could shift my schedule. Five weeks, perhaps?”

“Master Baumondain, if you and your daughters were to work on my master's order more or less exclusively, starting this afternoon, at your best possible speed…how long then would you say it might take?”

“Oh, Master Fehrwight, Master Fehrwight, you must understand, I have other orders pending, for clients of some standing.
Significant
people, if you take my meaning.”

Locke set four more gold coins atop the coffee table.

“Master Fehrwight, be reasonable! These are just chairs! I will bend every effort to finishing your order as fast as possible, but I cannot simply displace my existing clients or their pieces—”

Locke set four more coins down, next to the previous pile.

“Master Fehrwight, please, we would give you our exclusive efforts for far less, if
only
we didn't already have clients to satisfy! How could I possibly explain this to them?”

Locke set six more coins directly in the middle of the two stacks of four, building a little tower. “What is that now, Baumondain? Forty solari, when you were so pleased to get just twenty-four?”

“Sir, please, my sole consideration is that clients who placed their orders before your master's must, in all courtesy, have precedence.”

Locke sighed, and dumped ten more solari onto the coffee table, upsetting his little tower and emptying the purse. “You can have a shortage of materials. Some essential wood or oil or leather. You need to send away for it; six days to Tal Verrar and six days back. Surely it's happened before. Surely you can explain.”

“Oh, but the aggravation; they'll be so annoyed….”

Locke drew a second coin purse from his satchel and held it poised like a dagger in the air before him. “Refund some of their money. Here, have more of mine.” He shook out even more coins, haphazardly. The
clink-clink-clink
of metal falling upon metal echoed in the foyer.

“Master Fehrwight,” said the carpenter, “who
are
you?”

“A man who's dead serious about chairs.” Locke dropped the half-full purse atop the pile of gold next to the coffeepot. “One hundred solari, even. Put off your other appointments, set aside your other jobs, make your excuses and your refunds. How long would it take?”

“Perhaps a week,” said Baumondain, in a defeated whisper.

“Then you agree? Until my four chairs are finished, this is the Fehrwight Furniture Shop? I have more gold in the Villa Verdante's strongbox. You will have to kill me to stop forcing it upon you if you say no. So do we have a deal?”

“Gods help us both, yes!”

“Then shake on it. You get carving, and I'll start wasting time back at my inn. Send messengers if you need me to inspect anything. I'll stay until you're finished.”

4

“AS YOU
can see, my hands are empty, and it is unthinkable that anything should be concealed within the sleeves of such a finely tailored tunic.”

Locke stood before the full-length mirror in his suite at the Villa Verdante, wearing nothing but his breeches and a light tunic of fine silk. The cuffs of the tunic were drawn away from his wrists, and he stared intently at his own reflection.

“It would, of course, be impossible for me to produce a deck of cards from thin air…but what's this?”

He moved his right hand toward the mirror, with a flourish, and a deck of cards slipped clumsily out of it, coming apart in a fluttering mess as it fell to the floor.

“Oh, fucking hell,” Locke muttered.

He had a week of empty time on his hands, and his legerdemain was improving with torturous slowness. Locke soon turned his attention to the curious institution at the heart of Salon Corbeau, the reason so many idle rich made pilgrimage to the place, and the reason so many desperate and downtrodden ate their carriage dust as they trudged to the same destination.

They called it the Amusement War.

Lady Saljesca's stadium was a miniature of the legendary
stadia ultra
of Therim Pel, complete with twelve marble idols of the gods gracing the exterior in high stone niches. Ravens perched on their divine heads and shoulders, cawing halfheartedly down at the bustling crowd around the gates. As he made his way through the tumult Locke noted every species of attendant known to man. There were physikers clucking over the elderly, litter bearers hauling the infirm (or the unabashedly lazy), musicians and jugglers, guards, translators, and dozens of men and women waving fans or hoisting wide silk parasols, looking like nothing so much as fragile human-sized mushrooms as they chased their patrons under the growing morning sun.

While it was said that the floor of the Imperial Arena had been too wide for even the strongest archer to send an arrow across, the floor of Saljesca's recreation was just fifty yards in diameter. There were no common seats; the smooth stone walls rose twenty feet above the smooth stone floor, and were topped with luxury galleries whose cloth sunscreens flapped gently in the breeze.

Three times per day, Lady Saljesca's liveried guards would open the public gates to the better class of Salon Corbeau's visitors. There was a single standing gallery (which even had a decent view) to which admission was free, but the vast majority of spectators at the stadium would take nothing less than the luxury seats and boxes, which needed to be reserved at some considerable expense. Unfashionable as it was, Locke elected to stand for his first visit to the Amusement War. A relative nonentity like Mordavi Fehrwight had no reputation to protect.

On the floor of the arena was a gleaming grid of black and white marble squares, each one yard on a side. The squares were set twenty by twenty, like a gigantic Catch-the-Duke board. Where little carved pieces of wood or ivory were used in that game, Saljesca's playing field featured living pieces. The poor and destitute would man that field, forty to a side, wearing white or black tabards to distinguish themselves. This strange employment was the reason they risked the long, hard trudge to Salon Corbeau.