Chapter Six Lord Tanner
Beyond the clock tower, on the bridge between silk tailors and the dispensary, Geoffry Tanner had once asked a woman to marry him.
She’d been lovely, quite a bit older than him, and a Craftswoman.
The restaurant she’d worked in, plucking chickens and scrubbing pans, had just hours before sacked her. She met him on the bridge with raw eyes, her apron still fastened. Seeing her like that had made him want to cry.
Instead, he had proposed. He had promised her a safe life, in a town house somewhere just outside the city, where a marriage between Artisan and Crafter was sneered at far less.
He’d been just a lad, only twenty or so.
She had been fair-skinned, dark-haired, beautiful, her cheeks perpetually scorched by kitchen steam. This is all he remembered of her.
The engagement did not last, of course. Geoffry’s father was a Lord of the House, and a lord’s son did not marry just anyone. Certainly not a dish maid he’d lost his virginity to beside a chicken coop.
The dish maid was now dead. He heard she’d been involved in a factory accident just south of the city, not months after he’d rescinded his offer of marriage. By then, he’d married a Masonry woman instead—Olivette.
Unfortunately, Olivette took much longer to die.
Geoffry Tanner had loved his wife in the perfunctory ways of men at the peak of society. He helped her out of carriages, kissed her cold fingers, offered a laugh when she tried out a joke. He fucked her with lessening enthusiasm as they aged.
Thankfully, while a Lord’s son did not marry Craftswomen, bedding them was no matter so long as one was discreet.
The House’s servants were normally quite willing.
It rarely took much persuasion—a promise of bluff, a little spare coin.
“Perhaps,” he would tell them. “I can put in a good word with the board of enrollments for the Artisan school?” In this way, he endured a dull but respectful marriage.
Until, that is, his wife became wise to it and threatened the shameful prospect of divorce.
Such a scandal would have crippled his ambitions.
Olivette seemed to abhor him after that.
Even his ascension in the House of Lords could not impress her.
She complained incessantly about the long hours he worked, the company of the other lords.
The continent’s idium quotas shortened and shortened, and even this crisis did not free him of her carping.
She called him obsessive and single-minded.
She did not understand that the entire legacy of Artisans rested on his shoulders alone.
He grew to resent her, to pray for her early demise.
She bore him no children, and so her death, when it finally came, had been as plain as their marriage, with only him to mourn her.
Olivette had never quite compared to that Crafter girl on the bridge, despite her impressive Artisanal feats. The thought continued to anger him, even years after both women lay rotting in separate cemeteries.
Women, he’d learned, were the single-minded ones, incapable of grasping what he himself had long ago grasped. Idium was everything. Without it, people were nothing but animals scrambling up the rungs of a food chain.
“I seem to remember your son and the earth Charmer being quite taken with one another,” Tanner said to the glass panes of a window. It offered a view of the clock tower. He could imagine the bridge below it. “Young lovers, perhaps. Am I wrong?”
Behind him, Tanner heard shoes whisper over the floor, a music box played a soft opera to an audience of two. Lord Terrence Shop sipped his tea. “They were indeed.”
“So then, have the boy fuck her back to sense. It shouldn’t be so difficult.”
“You want me to prostitute my son?” Shop said on a laugh. “Come now, Geoffry.”
“Then what do you propose?” Tanner said, turning on his heel so abruptly it squeaked. His nostrils flared. For weeks, months, he had slowly morphed from man to bull. Now he rampaged, directionless.
Lord Shop replaced his teacup on his saucer and stood.
His full height was quite astonishing, his chin among the rafters.
Though his limbs seemed reedy, he held them in a way that implied strength.
He was bespectacled in round gold-framed glasses, and his hair was a mix of black and silver.
Terrence Shop was a man so angular it was unsettling.
Everywhere he went, he brought with him an emerald-capped cane, though his gait did not show a need for it.
Tanner assumed it was a flaunt of some kind—a Cutter turned ordained lord, despite the odds.
“Nina Clarke won’t be persuaded,” Shop began, in a voice calmer than Tanner’s. “Not with gentler measures.”
Tanner paced to the ancient, unimpressive book that lay on the desk, its binding barely tethered, the cover badly preserved.
It had been written, Tanner believed, in a time before Artisans, when men here were hardly more than those in far-off continents.
It was titled retrospectively, as though someone thought, hundreds of years after it were made, that it ought to have a title.
Embossed on the cover were the words The Stewards’ Testament.
Tanner remembered the first time he’d seen it on his desk.
He’d thought it irrelevant, at first. A strange relic.
Those tales of the Stewards—witnesses of Idia’s time on Earth—were a Crafter’s myth.
The Book of Belavere mentioned no such people.
The true disciples were those who had followed Idia into war and watched her sacrifices firsthand.
The Stewards were the ramblings of heretics. Accounts of them had dwindled in history. There were nearly no believers now, yet here was this book.
Frustratingly, it was written in a language no one could read.
Verian Script, he was told. An infantile Crafter code supposedly used by the Stewards, but more likely used in wartime to communicate on the battlefield.
Some impressions of Verian Script had been found and studied in Belavere’s great history, but there had been little reason to pay attention to these so-called Stewards until now.
Inked into the margins of the first page with an unsteady hand was a faded annotation:
THE SEAM OF IDIA.
It had been Shop who’d alerted him to it. To suggest that, if by some miracle, the myth of the Stewards was real, then the Seam was, too. It could be the answer. The end to this crisis.
But months had passed, and they had yet to find a single living Scribbler who could read Verian Script.
The book now sat on his tea table. They balanced saucers upon it.
How long had he stared at its porous pages, the ghost strokes of ink? How many times had he tried to find a lick of something recognizable in those strange glyphs.
But if any bloody seam existed, it was hidden in the nonsensical scratching of some archaic Crafter, and if Idia watched somewhere above, she laughed at Tanner now.
There must be some scholar, some Scribbler somewhere on this godforsaken continent that could draw meaning from it. He would find them.
And once he found the Seam, he would need the means to unearth it. There was only one Artisan with the means.
“It was you who insisted I employ gentler measures with Nina Clarke,” Tanner said through clenched teeth. “You made a case for courting her to our side in her years as a student.”
“Yes, but I fear that route is now foiled. Perhaps if you hadn’t taken her mother as your hostage—”
“Do not lecture me. She deserted her station. Refused her duty!”
“And spent seven years no better than a beggar. You might’ve employed a willing agent, had you offered her rewards instead of threats. You’ve made her into a revolutionary.”
Tanner chewed his tongue, simmering. He was inclined to take the teapot and throw its contents in Lord Shop’s face. “Careful,” he said. “We are schoolboys no longer.”
“No, my lord,” Shop nodded, no less grave. “I only think it prudent we speak plainly. Time is of the essence, as you know.”
Tanner bloody well knew. His last dose of idium waited in a safe beneath his bed. After it was spent, he’d be as base as the man who’d written that damned fairy tale.
“It is imperative that the girl do as we bid her, and if my son cannot persuade her, then we should revert back to the course you originally set.”
Tanner raised his eyebrow. “The mother?”
Shop seemed to consider it for a long moment before sighing. “I’m afraid so,” he said. There was no small amount of reluctance in it.
Artisans were not creatures of cruelty. They were merely pragmatists.
Every representative of their House knew that the cost of success, while substantial, was carefully weighed.
They were the gatekeepers of Idia’s enduring life source, after all.
That duty did not come without its share of the unsavory.
“The hand must be heavier this time,” Shop continued, his mouth a grim line.
“A demonstration, then,” Tanner said, and though he tried to put on an expression of regret, there was no help for the thrill that cycled up his spine.