Chapter 18: The Drawing on the Counter

Chapter 18: The Drawing on the Counter

Garrick Holt expected a sword with too many edges.

Young customers drew those regularly. They wanted hooks where clothing would catch, jewels where a hand needed to close, and a blade twice as long as they could lift. This one had spent ten minutes insulting perfectly serviceable daggers, so Garrick also expected a complaint when he explained the price.

The boy drew four narrow shapes instead.

His pencil moved quickly, stopped at one of the ends, and rubbed out a line with his thumb. He had an irritating habit of holding his chin up even while leaning over the bench. Garrick could see why Mercer had sent him a message saying the customer was difficult.

"What are those supposed to be?" Garrick asked.

"Separate pieces. About this long." The boy indicated the length with his hands. "A spiral along each one, with the fitting here. They join into a longer weapon."

He drew the assembled form beneath them, then laid the pencil across the page to check its proportions.

Garrick leaned closer despite himself.

Each piece had a purpose alone. Together, they made a slender, pointed weapon with a continuous shape, rather than four knives fastened into an awkward bundle. The exact fit would need work. Several parts of the drawing were vague. But the boy had left space for the joins instead of remembering them after filling the page with decoration.

"What’s holding it when you use it long?" Garrick asked.

"My Talent. Though I could take hold of the back if I had to."

"And when it comes apart?"

"Still my Talent." The boy glanced at him. "I did tell you."

Garrick ignored that. He drew a finger along the paper, following the way the separate curves became one line.

There were jointed weapons in the world. He had repaired enough expensive examples to dislike several of them. Their owners usually spent a great deal of money persuading a mechanism to perform one change reliably. This boy was choosing a form around an ability that could already move, turn, and hold every part.

"Lift those blanks," Garrick said, pointing to a shallow tray. "Four of them. Away from the tools."

The boy obeyed. Four unfinished steel pieces rose over the empty end of the bench. He arranged them separately, brought them together, and turned the group.

One lagged behind. He frowned and corrected it.

"Not quickly yet," he admitted. "I can manage four much better when they aren’t all changing position at once."

Garrick watched the pieces return to the tray.

That was useful to know. More useful than the nonsense about standards.

He picked up the pencil and marked the drawing. "This part needs changing. You can’t expect that end to bear a sideways blow."

"Then change it."

"You don’t mind?"

"I want it to work."

The boy pulled the sheet toward him and added another loose sketch in the margin. "Later, with longer pieces and better control, something closer to a spear. Or different arrangements, if the fittings allow it. This set would be enough to start."

Garrick reached across and turned the paper facedown.

The boy stared at him.

"Don’t leave that where anyone walking in can see it," Garrick said.

"It’s a drawing."

"I know what it is."

He checked the open workshop door. Nobody stood there. Even so, he moved the sheet farther from the entrance before turning it over again.

The boy seemed more concerned about a smear of pencil on his cuff than about the idea he had just offered to the room.

Where the hell did Mercer find you?

Garrick wanted to bring out better paper. He wanted measurements, demonstrations, an afternoon to ask questions. Had a polite apprentice shown him this much promise, he would have found a stool and sent someone for tea before the youngster could think of leaving.

Instead, he had this pale, sharp-faced brat examining a dagger again as though it smelled unpleasant.

"See?" the boy said. "These would slow me down."

Garrick disliked conceding the point. He disliked it more because the boy was right about the sort of movement he intended.

"For that approach," he said. "You could have explained before insulting the stock."

"I thought I had."

"You hadn’t." Garrick took the dagger away. "What material?"

"The least expensive suitable one."

That brought him back to ordinary business.

He named two choices. The boy selected plain steel before Garrick finished explaining the second, then asked how long it would last.

"If you look after it and don’t attack armored monsters with it, long enough to learn what you want changed. You’ll outgrow the first set."

"Good. What does it cost?"

Garrick considered the sketches, the stock he had available, and the work required to make the four sections fit properly.

"Sixteen silver. Four now. Balance on collection."

The boy’s face became very still.

Garrick waited. So much for standards.

"When?" the boy asked eventually.

"Late afternoon, day after tomorrow. If you answer any questions I send."

The customer took out his academy slate. Garrick entered the order under the name Silas Rooke and watched the four-silver deposit arrive. Rooke examined the receipt closely before putting the slate away.

"Keep the design private," he said, as though the idea had been his.

"I intended to."

"And don’t add ornament."

"Wasn’t planning to."

Rooke left at last. Garrick listened until his footsteps had passed the open doors, then pulled a clean sheet from the roll and sat down.

For several minutes he studied the rough sketches without making a mark.

He had been making weapons for nearly fifty years. He knew people who could forge extraordinary things and still needed someone else to tell them what shape to make. This customer had arrived wanting cheap daggers, become annoyed, and casually drawn something Garrick wanted to spend the entire evening on.

Garrick studied the unused sketches in the margin. If the boy could keep producing ideas like these, he might become the sort of designer a generation of smiths spent their lives trying to work with. And Garrick had nearly sent him out of the shop over a quarrel about handles.

He should have offered him tea. He could at least have found him a stool.

He reached for the pencil. The cracked-crate bill remained unattended beside his elbow.

Evan came to the studio the following morning with a lens housing, a stack of thin sleeves, and no interest in being told how unreasonable his smith was.

"He charged you four silver to start custom work?" Evan asked. "That’s reasonable."

"The total is sixteen."

"Still reasonable. Hold this while I open the case."

Silas lifted the housing from his hands. He had considered complaining further, but Evan had brought eighteen silver’s worth of work, and losing it would make the argument considerably more expensive.

The job was an adjustable housing for a survey lens. Evan had postponed it while finishing the regulator; with Silas available, he could complete it before its delivery date. They registered the commission and cleared the desk.

Unlike the regulator, the sleeves had to remain free to move after assembly. Evan needed to join the supports while Silas kept each sliding surface clear of its neighbor.

Their first dry run stopped when an inner sleeve caught.

"Back a little," Evan said. "I’m checking the lower edge."

Silas moved it.

"Your other little."

"Say toward the window."

"Toward the window, then." Evan bent over the housing. "There. I can see it now."

They worked out a sequence before using Fine Joining. Silas marked the troublesome sleeve on Evan’s sketch and put a tiny pencil dot on its removable tab. After that, he could find it without stopping to count inward from the casing.

The improvement saved them perhaps thirty seconds each time. By the sixth adjustment, he was glad of every one.

His new chair made long holds more comfortable, though Evan kept asking him to sit forward when his knee blocked the light. Eventually Silas moved the lamp instead.

"Better?" he asked.

"Much."

They finished the last support after a break for lunch. When Evan turned the adjustment ring, the lens mount traveled smoothly through its full range.

Silas waited through the second test before releasing his final hold.

Eighteen silver arrived in his account. Twelve of it would go straight to Holt tomorrow.

Six left. Don’t start looking at furniture.

While Evan packed, Silas opened the smith’s latest message. It contained a revised silhouette and a question about the combined form. He checked it, approved the change, and found himself enlarging the image after the reply had sent.

For years he had watched weapon concepts lose pieces as production cut them down. Sometimes he had been the junior designer told to cut them. He’d spent evenings filling a private folder with versions no one intended to build.

Someone was making this one.

Silas turned the image sideways, trying to picture the weight above his palm.

"Have you named it already?" Evan asked.

"No." He closed the picture. "It’s four pieces of steel."

Evan looked amused but didn’t press him. After he left, Silas practiced his ward for a few minutes, ate, and went to bed with Holt’s drawing still open on the terminal.