Thirteen #2
By the time Clement had finished the healing and nudged the woman’s brain into some further restorative sleep, the shouting had stopped.
The tall man was wielding a broom. Clement realised for the first time the extent of the shattered ceramics and glass on the floor, fallen from benches and shelves.
Moyna’s patient was now on their feet and poking at the pile of whatever had exploded.
The man who’d been calming them down was sitting on his heels, watching Clement. A dark, keen look. Familiar.
“Artificer Decroy,” said Clement. Finally, a scrap of luck. “You’re who we came here to talk to, actually.”
He nodded at the sleeping woman. “Is she all right?”
“Let her sleep a couple of hours if you can, then send her home to rest. And tell her to come to the courtyard clinic for a checkup in two days,” said Clement, standing.
They’d done enough to minimise symptoms, but even healed concussions were nasty if you pressed them too hard too fast. “What happened here?”
“Nothing that doesn’t happen once a month,” said Decroy.
“Granted, this one was a bit more dramatic than usual, but everything’s gone down the drain this week.
” He got to his feet and rubbed his brow.
No injuries, no scorch or soot; he must have been on the other side of the workshop from the blast. “The reward we get for seeking a strike exemption for the Grand Exam week,” he said bitterly.
“All it means is all the Academie’s big summer repair jobs being reported now, and all of us working overtime—unpaid—to cram them in before we join the strike.
We’re already behind because Dean Brodier had the wonderful idea to make us cram all the Grand Exam necessaries onto the Teaching Theatre yesterday, in the space of an hour, as if that were a walk across the Duke’s Bridge. ”
Because they hadn’t been able to use Chamber Two yesterday. Because of Ysabel. And it was probably all the more irksome that the theatre had then only been used for less than a day’s worth of exams.
Decroy finished, “And we’ll be a hand down for the rest of the week now, thanks to Joley.” Though he fetched a seat-cushion from a battered chair as he spoke, and settled it under the sleeping woman’s head.
“Maybe you won’t need to strike. The council might reach an agreement with your guild by the end of the week,” said Moyna, joining them. She pulled up the denuded chair and sat on it. Clement did the same with a tripod stool.
Perhaps it was exaggerated by the current damage, but the workshop of the Academie’s artificers was shabbier than Clement had expected.
Grubby cupboards lined the walls above the junk-crowded benches, and their doors hung at uneven angles.
Some were missing their handles. Beneath the clearing smoke—someone had opened a window—the air smelled of hot metal and magic and a sickly whiff of unfamiliar fumes.
Decroy snorted, leaning back against the nearest bench.
“You think that likely, do you? You think the rulers of Sieuxerr are going to pay attention before half the magicworks of the city grind to a halt? We’ve the same gift as you, Scholars, from the spirits of our birth towns, and we’re treated as glorified servants—paid like it, too—while you’re held up as the only mages of any worth in the city, and look down on anyone else as a mere townie. ”
Clement bit their tongue hard. They could have said: Have you heard the way Sieuxerrans talk about us, these days? Have you seen the graffiti and read the newspapers?
Decroy worked for the Academie, where healing mages were still the sole measure of the place’s worth. Townie could be a neutral word or a withering insult, depending on whose mouth it emerged from. Besides, arguing with the man wouldn’t coax information out of him.
“Some of the councillors are elected,” said Moyna.
“Not all of them come from money and lofty titles, and I know at least one of them’s sympathetic.
But she was yelling uphill for days during the builders’ strike last year, so you’re probably right about it dragging on through the summer.
As for the rest . . .” A shrug. “My parents are water-mages, and my dad’s done some contract work for the Academie.
You might have worked with him. Owen Apprice. ”
Decroy’s eyebrows lifted. “Sure. Recognise the name.”
“He’d say you’re right that healers are valued more than anything, but he and my mother moved here exactly because of that.
So that I would be a healer. And if you have mage-children and raise them here, Artificer, they’ll be just as valued and just as stuck.
You’re an elemental mage. You could take your gifts anywhere, and do anything.
You would have grown up knowing you could attend one of ten different universities, or stay entirely untrained if you preferred.
You could have been a fishmonger. A lawyer. An actor. You had a choice.”
So much for Moyna’s potential use as a tactful investigator. Decroy’s expression had darkened.
“Artificer Decroy,” said Clement hurriedly. “Yesterday I told you that the dead scholar is—was—a friend of mine.”
A long pause. “Yes?”
“Floris?” one of the other artificers called across the room. It was the woman. Someone else had bandaged her arm in the interim, and she now had a handful of papers. “Is everything all right?”
“Fine,” said Decroy, not looking away from Clement and Moyna. “Joley’s sleeping off the damage, I’m told, and these scholars have some questions about . . . ?”
“The scholar who died, Ysabel Caudotte. I wanted to ask if any of you might have heard anything, or seen anything—anyone—in the Rondelle the night before the first Grand Exam case,” Clement said. “Two nights ago.”
“Why are you asking us?” said the woman with the papers.
The sweeper had stopped sweeping. All three artificers were looking at them with faces varying from wary to suspicious.
Clement’s voice dried up. They looked back at Decroy and wished they hadn’t looked away at all, because they caught the vanishing end of a cool, calculating expression that made their skin prickle.
Moyna said, after a pause, “You’re the only ones who were supposed to be there, weren’t you? To set up the exam chambers and all the artifice that goes into them.”
“I’d’ve thought the gendarmes—”
“They won’t care to find the truth unless it’s dragged out and forced under their noses. She was my best friend,” said Clement. “I want to know what happened to her.”
“If we saw or heard anyone,” said Decroy. His dark eyes were utterly unreadable now. “You think someone killed her? Serious accusation, killing a healer.”
“I’m certain of it,” said Clement.
The artificers exchanged a look.
“I’m sorry about the girl’s death, if she was someone close to you.
But I can’t think of many reasons why someone would risk that,” said the man with the broom.
His Resée was heavily accented in a way that seemed to slide between Matorran and Palian.
Plenty of fire-mages from the islands off the tips of both countries became Collegiate artificers. “It’s death if you’re found out.”
“Not if the killer’s another healer,” said Moyna.
Some of that glossy bitterness still coated her tongue.
“We’re too precious. It’s a life-bond instead.
Sieuxerr could sell your labour anywhere, for the rest of your life, and you’d be guarded like a prisoner and paid only enough to live on.
You might end up healing burns and coal-lung in a mine, or passed from war to war, without any chance of building a life. ”
“Can’t say I wouldn’t choose it over death,” said Decroy, but he was frowning thoughtfully.
“I’d take death,” said Moyna.
Clement’s mind shied away from the question.
There were worse rumours than mining and military work, when it came to what the city might sell you into; and, since the serrage, demand—and the price such labour could extract, to fill the Grand Duchy’s coffers—would only be higher.
Clement could only think of two healers, in their lifetime, who’d committed crimes bad enough to be life-bonded as punishment.
Surely most of them just didn’t have the time.
Decroy shifted his weight and rubbed at a speck of something on his leather apron. “Hm. Well. I don’t know if we can help you, Scholars, but ask away. I think I stayed latest in the Rondelle that evening, didn’t I?” That last directed at the other two artificers, who nodded.
“How late?” asked Clement. “What were you doing—which parts of the building were you in?”
“I told you about the overtime, didn’t I?
” he said, dry. “Late enough. After sunset, though I’d say I wasn’t there more than an hour past. We’d already set the clocks in each room to have resonance with the main timekeeper and the bells.
I did a final sweep of the ground level to make sure the illusion-work on the curtains was holding, and that you couldn’t see through them to the galleries themselves.
That part isn’t clock-linked. The fabric comes from Galuce with the magic already woven in, and every year they’re more nervous it’s finally wearing out and they’ll have to pay for new ones. ”
“We had to race a contractor in from the Galucean embassy to help do the Teaching Theatre,” the tall artificer with the broom put in.
“It’s a hefty amount of illusion-work, when you haven’t got those curtains, but at least the pure illusionists aren’t on strike.
And I’m sure the Secretary will kick up a huge fuss over her bill, when it arrives. ”