Briar's Book (13 page)

He splashed through the sewers in a pure white novice’s robe that was much too big for him. He wore nothing under it, and – to his shock and disgust – he was barefoot. His bare toes sank through inches of the kind of muck that made his guts crawl to think of it.

“Come
on,”
ordered Flick. He saw her clearly, though neither of them carried lamps. “We’ll miss your birthday party.” She was properly dressed in rags and shoddy boots, jigging in her eagerness to move along.

Briar muttered about not having a birthday, let alone a party, but he followed as quickly as the habit would allow. She was moving farther off down the pipe. “Wait up!” he called, trying to lift the habit’s skirts. Flick only laughed and ran on.

The tunnel bent around a corner. When he cleared it, Flick was nowhere in sight. “Hey!” he yelled. “Where’d you get to?”

Her laugh emerged from an opening several feet away. He followed the sound and saw Flick well ahead. “Wait!”

“Briar’s gettin’ slo-ow, Briar’s gettin’ slo-ow,” she taunted. He sighed. She had done this just before the Longnight holiday, when he’d followed her through a warren of streets in the worst part of the Mire. She’d almost given him the slip then, just as now. He wasn’t about to lose her, not down here.

The pipe shrank, forcing him to walk hunched over. With every step he took, she seemed to take three. “You got to slow down!” he cried.

“You got to speed up,” she retorted, and giggled.

“Will you just
wait?”
he demanded. The filthy water rose, eddying around his calves, then his knees. It dragged on the habit, pulling him back.

“I can’t, Briar,” she said, voice somber. “I can’t wait, even if it is your birthday.”

“Flick!” he cried, battling water and habit to close with her. “Stop!”

The girl shrugged and ran off down the pipe. Briar watched in panic as she got farther and farther away. Something bad lay ahead. If he lost sight of her, it would be the end. He shucked the habit impatiently and pumped his suddenly weak legs, fighting to gain speed. He was too slow; she was too quick. She grew smaller and smaller.

“Flick!” he screamed, and she was gone. He was awake.

If his bed hadn’t been a mattress on the floor, he might have fallen out. Instead Briar thrashed his way out of the covers that tangled around him. Little Bear whined and licked sweat off the boy’s face. Panting, Briar sat out the shakes, clenching his hands as he remembered how he couldn’t hold Flick, not in a dream, not in Urda’s House. How could he have let her die, with all this magic to serve him? He didn’t try hard enough – if he had, Flick would be alive. He’d as good as killed her himself by not doing more.

Sandry came in, which was only to be expected. Her bedroom was across from his. In one open palm she carried her night lamp, the round, dirty stone that Briar, Tris, and Daja had spelled a year before to hold light for her. Sandry was afraid of the dark. On nights like this, Briar didn’t blame her in the least.

She sat next to him on the mattress, her white nightdress billowing. Her stone lamp went on the floor in front of them.

After a moment Briar whispered, “Maybe I should pick yesterday for a birthday. The day Flick – died.”

“Whatever for?” asked Sandry quietly. “Birthdays are supposed to be happy days.”

“But then I’d be remembering her, right? She wouldn’t be dead, if I remembered her on my birthday. It wouldn’t be so bad that – that I let her go.”

“That isn’t the way to remember her, Briar,” Sandry told him gravely, sounding as kind and wise as Lark. “She wouldn’t like it.”

Briar shook his head. “How would you know what she’d like and what she wouldn’t?”

Sandry rubbed her hand over his hair. “Because no one who’s truly your friend would want you to feel bad for knowing them.”

That struck home. He would need to think it over, of course, but he had the sense that she was in the right of it.

Daja arrived next, a lit incense stick in her fingers. It gave off fragrant, rose-scented smoke as she waved it in each corner, chasing out bad air as Traders did for nightmares. Once finished, she sat crosslegged on the floor, putting the incense in a little holder beside the lamp.

Last of all came Tris, a black crocheted shawl over her nightgown. On one forefinger she carried a ruffled bird that blinked sleepily. The other three stared at the bird in wonder. The summer before they had helped Tris raise a young starling named Shriek. In the autumn, after their return from a trip to northern Emelan, Shriek had taken wing with a flock of other starlings, headed south. Since no other birds of his kind came near humans, they had to believe this was Shriek, back after months away.

Tris held the starling out to Briar. He took the bird gently as Tris sat, fussing with her nightgown and shawl until they were arranged to her satisfaction. When Briar returned her starling, Shriek trundled up her arm and into her unruly curls, where he promptly went back to sleep. Little Bear settled too, warming Briar’s back. The four remained silent, thinking their own thoughts, as the night slowly wound down.

If Rosethorn had any thoughts when she entered Briar’s room before dawn and found all four of her charges sleeping there, she kept them to herself. Instead she woke the boy without disturbing the others and signaled that he’d better get ready to go.

Air Temple services were held at dawn. Soon after the hymns of greeting to the sun ended, Crane and a company of young men and women in Air yellow, Water blue, or novice white came to the greenhouse door where Rosethorn and Briar waited. Briar squinted at Crane’s following. Every one of them sported a large crimson dot on the forehead, to tell the world they didn’t have blue pox. He was also curious. Didn’t Crane say he had no help just the day before? Who were these people, then?

“Rosethorn,” Crane said. He looked at Briar and sniffed, then unlocked the door. It opened into a third of the greenhouse Briar had never seen, hidden behind drapes on its glass walls. “Osprey, show the boy our clean-up procedures. Make sure he is
thorough.
Then take him around.” To the Water dedicate and Rosethorn, Crane said, “It will be some time before the cleansing and robing rooms are clear. I have tea waiting in my office.”

Osprey, Crane’s yellow-robed apprentice, was a full-figured young woman with curly black hair. She sized Briar up through eyes a darker shade of green than his own, nodded, and jerked her head at the door. Briar followed, as did all of the other workers.

The men actually showed him the scrubbing procedure, since the women cleaned up in a separate cubicle. It worked much like the bath in the tent the day before, which was almost comforting. Briar recognized medicinal herbs and oils in the rinses as well as the soaps, ones he knew well. Better still, this washroom was warmer than the tent had been. As the sun’s early rays struck the high glass walls over the shrouding drapes, the whole building began to heat up.

Once they were clean, Briar and the young men donned treated caps, robes, masks, gloves, stockings that tied over the knee, and slippers. Everything in the boy’s size lay under a slate with his name chalked on it. Once more he got a sense of Lark and Sandry in all that he put on. It gave him heart, as it had done in Urda’s House.

“I don’t envy this lad,” a young man commented.
“He
has to work in the Master’s private workroom.”

“Don’t get comfortable,” advised another man, tying on his mask. “Nobody lured into his lordship’s private lair has lasted a whole day. Some of us
outer
workroom slaves have endured a week or more.”

They led him into a big room fitted with cabinets, braziers, counters, water kettles, and a vast tub that held steaming water by a glass wall. Once he had adjusted to the glitter of magic that lay over it all, and the heavy scent of cleansing oils and washes, Briar was fascinated. All the floors and walls were hard-glazed tile or marble except for the longest glass wall and the ceiling. When Briar knelt to inspect a drain in the floor, a youth said, “Every night when we’re gone, they fill both the inner and the outer workrooms with steam. It carries special chemicals and oils, to purify everything. All our cabinets are tight-fitted to keep water out, and we leave the glass and porcelain on the counters to be cleansed. It costs, but his Lordship dedicated his
personal
fortune to this greenhouse.”

Osprey told Briar who everyone was, pointing to each as she gave the name. “No sense in memorizing them, though,” she said, her black-fringed green eyes dancing over her mask. “Most of them will be gone in a few days.”

“Please,
gods,” chorused her crew. They were laying out bottles, trays, measuring spoons, and countless other mysterious objects Briar couldn’t name.

“When he ejects you from the inner workroom, come have supper with us at the Table of the Useless in the dining hall,” suggested a man called Acacia. “There’s what, twenty now? We had to move two tables together last night.”

Briar stared at them. He felt as if he’d been magically transported to a foreign land where he spoke none of the language. One day ago he’d been trapped in a damp, gloomy house where people raved in fever dreams and those who cared for them did so in tight-lipped silence. Now he was in a room filled with light, air, and warmth, among people who joked as if the blue pox were inconvenient, as if there were life away from sickbeds and the biting scent of willowbark tea. Only when he noted the speed at which they worked, writing labels, filling bottles and jars, loading wire racks with glassware, scrubbing, mincing bundles of herbs, did he think these people knew that things were desperate at Urda’s House and the other infirmaries.

At a wall beside an open doorway – to Crane’s “lair,” he assumed – two gloved, robed, and masked figures labored in silence. Briar moved close to watch as they drew liquid through narrow holes in sealed jars, dripping it into inch-deep wells in a thick crystal plate.

“They have the scary job,” Osprey said quietly in Briar’s ear. When he looked at her, she explained, “They infuse the disease in those jars. The samples we get” – she pointed to stacks of familiar-looking metal boxes near the two silent workers – “are steeped in a special liquid. It draws out the essence of the disease, then fades. Only the blue pox remains. Samples from each patient go into a row of seven wells, three such rows to a tray.
That
goes into the other workroom for his lordship to play with. Out here we all handle the disease. People tire quickly on that task, and we don’t dare make any mistakes. Our robes aren’t airtight. One little droplet would be deadly.”

“They dish out blue pox?” whispered Briar, not sure he’d understood her properly.

“It’s not the pox that kills people, you know,” said Osprey, watching the pair as intently as Briar. “It’s the fever that comes with it.”

“I know,” he replied bleakly.

Osprey glanced at him. “Wait – didn’t someone tell me it was you and Dedicate Rosethorn –? At Urda’s House?”

Briar nodded. Slowly he walked over until he could see the liquid as it was poured. This was the enemy that killed Flick, drooling in pale gold strings from tiny glass ladles.

“Come on,” Osprey said when he moved away from the jars. “Here’s the inner workroom.” She motioned toward the open doorway next to the blue pox workers.

If the outer workroom was grand, the inner was enough to stagger a boy from Deadman’s District, once he could see through the blaze of magic that shone everywhere. Two walls were entirely glass; two were covered with valuable procelain tiles that reached from the marble floor to the glass roof. Long counters ran down both glass walls and a third of the longer tiled wall. Every other inch of wall space, even under the counters, held watertight cabinets. Only the tall cabinets against the long tiled wall had no doors. On their shelves rested the crystal trays used for blue pox samples.

“Crane wants you working up trays.” Osprey pointed to the table at the tiled wall, between the open cabinets. A large slate hung there with a detailed list of instructions written in chalk. On the table was a stepped rack of thin bottles. Each bottle sported a paper label; seven also bore a string from which a numbered paper tag hung.

“You’ll get your trays here, once the blue pox is added.” She went to the open cabinet at their right, between the table and the doorway to the outer workroom. “Always keep the trays level” – very carefully she lifted one from the shelf – “because if you tilt them, blue pox will drip out. That is bad.”

“Lakik, yes!” whispered Briar.

“If any gets into the other wells on the tray, the whole thing’s ruined. If you leak or drip, whatever happens, don’t make a fuss. Bring it
quietly
to the washers at the tub. If Crane finds out you slipped, you’re out.”

“A dreadful fate, to be sure,” muttered Briar, startling a chuckle from her. Made bold by that, he added, “I don’t see how you can work with that Bag. You seem all right, but he’s such a pickle-faced cull from an overbred litter – ”

“I don’t know how you work with Rosethorn without bleeding to death,” she said frankly. “She’s that sharp with everyone.” Her eyes met Briar’s over their masks; both of them smiled. “To each his – or her – own, I suppose,” Osprey admitted. “Now. Trays. Put the glass lid aside, gently.
Very
gently. Follow the instructions on the board, there.” Briar read them carefully:

To Well numbered 1 – Add 2 drops liquid from Bottle numbered 1.

To Well numbered 2 – Add 1 drop liquid from Bottle numbered 2.

To Well numbered 3 – Add 1 measure powder from Bottle numbered 5.

To Well numbered 4 – Add 5 drops liquid from Bottle numbered 7.

To Well numbered 5 – Add 2 drops liquid from Bottle numbered 3.

To Well numbered 6 – Add 1 drop liquid from Bottle numbered 6.

To Well numbered 7 – Add 1 drop liquid from Bottle numbered 7.

Glancing at the tray as Osprey drew liquids or powders from the numbered bottles and slid them into the wells, he saw that a number was cut into the stone beside each well. There were seven in a row, which meant they tried seven possible cures on the pox liquid from three different people, all on one tray.