Coldmaker(73)

‘And you’ll have one again,’ I said, keeping my voice like stone, ‘and this time it will.’

‘You think you have the mind for it?’ Leroi took another swig, longer this time, and I worried for his safety. ‘The discipline?’

I kept my back straight, trying to look as defiant as my partner. My back ached from the posture. ‘Yes, sir. I do.’

He picked up the decanter again and chugged the rest of the drink. Closing his eyes and making a satisfied face, he settled back into his chair. ‘Then go Invent. And wake me when you’re done.’

I waited for further instruction, but none seemed to be coming.

‘What shall I make?’ I asked.

Leroi spoke with his eyes closed. ‘I don’t care. You’re the one who’s been tinkering all your life, Micah Behn-Abb, Behn-Crier. Go ahead, no one will bother you, I chained the main door.’ He made a shooing motion. ‘The tinkershop is right down there.’

I leaned against the door for support, my eyes flitting around the large room in wild abandon.

It was my own personal promised land.

Now I understood why Leroi would need a bare room to hand, because after one glance I was already overwhelmed.

First and foremost were the lights.

I had no idea what I was looking at. Blazing across the room were little glass domes, but instead of holding normal candles they glowed fuzzy white, so brightly that if Leroi had told me he’d trapped little pieces of Sun inside, I might have believed him.

The domes illuminated a giant room, bigger than my barracks, and every wall contained a nook, an alcove or a side passage. Every available space housed a machine or an invention. Most of them I didn’t recognize. There were things that made sense, like the huge crank-fans, and the shelves of Cold Bellows, but there were also things I’d never seen in all the streets of Paphos: hourglasses filled with metal beads that fell upwards. A pool in the centre of the room, filled with gears instead of water, all interlocked and spinning. And small pyramids made of glass, Wisps floating in their liquid centres and somehow not dissolving.

Most tables were weighed down by large clay pots from which metallic wires snaked out and led to buckets underneath. An army of barrels brimmed with white sand that, knowing the exuberant wealth of the Tavor family, could be salt. A whole section of the room was dedicated to glass vials, filled with everything from slimy green paste, to milky smoke, to what looked like powdered bone.

An anvil waited patiently in front of a desolate fireplace, saddled with water buckets and sets of heavy gloves. On the shelves along the walls I saw a hundred different types of metal parts jumbled with instruments with too many angles and strings to be usable, and buckets of Wisp and Drafts, as if the Cold were as common as sand. There were meticulous piles of rare woods, and stacks of coloured glass. Lining the left wall were bookshelves overflowing with scrolls, flanked by cabinets bursting with mysterious trinkets.

Shutting my eyes, I listened to the few light hums and whirrs spinning through the air, trying to pinpoint which machines were still awake. Leroi might have stopped tinkering, but there was magic here.

I concentrated on breathing as I wandered around the room. Each step brought a hundred new things to touch and spin and ogle, but I kept my hands at my sides, not sure what inventions might unexpectedly bite back and take off a finger, like the boxy metal frame filled with rotating spikes that looked as if it would chomp twice given the chance.

As I wandered through the mechanical wonders and the rivers of material shelves, I felt nervous beads of sweat on my forehead, trying to conjure an Idea that could prove my worth. Shilah was wrong. This was where I needed to be, and I pitied her. I wished she’d made the right decision to come here with me instead of wandering through the empty sands alone.

I stepped over a tub filled with pulped boilweed and found my answer stacked in neat sheets.

How fitting to start this new journey where the last big one had begun, especially considering the implications of the invention itself.

Piled high and precisely cut, the waxy paper called out to me with a smile.

I returned the expression.

I’d created the original with rusty tools and bent metal in darkness. Recreating it in a real tinkershop would be easy. My hands already knew what to do, and in no time the needles and gears and other pieces needed had leapt into my fingers. I grabbed a few sheets of fabric from the top and found a clean table on which to work.

It was time to make another Cold Wrap.

Three loud knocks echoed through the shop and my eyes jumped to the door.

The chain rattled, a nose peeking through the gap. ‘Spout? Can you let me in?’

My stomach uncurled at Cam’s voice. I stuffed my quill back in the bottle of ink, only a few strokes away from the final touches.

I hopped around the machine that dripped waste into a grate in the floor, and the wheelless cart loaded with huge fan blades. I raced up the staircase leading to the main door of the tinkershop, undid the chain, and let Cam in.

The door swung open. Cam was holding a tray laden with meat, cheese, fruit, and doughy bread. I’d only ever eaten stale crusts, baked with leftover, thrown-out grease, and this loaf looked wonderfully pillowy and soft.

‘Spout! You look like a new Jadan.’ Cam thrust the tray at me. ‘Leroi said the tonic would make you hungry.’

I was indeed famished, and I plucked off the first piece of fruit I could find, a little red thing with seeds on the sides, and popped it in my mouth. It was sweet, and juicy, and tasted so good I thought I might never eat anything better.