Maker of Fire

Emily, Sils'chk, Planting Season, 5th rotation, 5th day (Mid-Planting Day)

*Wake up, kitten,* Galt sat on my legs with his paws tucked in, purring. *You'll want to wear something nice. The messenger will be here in less than a half bell, so you need to get going soon, slug-a-bed.*

I said something less than polite because Galt's weight was uncomfortable on the bruised backsides of my legs. I scowled at the fuzzy god camped out across my knees.

"How can I get up with your fat self pinning me down, fat cat?" I grumped at Galt.

*No longer a problem, kitten,* Galt vanished. *Enjoy today.*

After last night, I didn't like the sounds of that.

I dragged myself out of bed and dug into my clothes chest for nice clothes. If Galt said I needed to dress up, then that's what I would do. I picked the thinnest stockings, my warm-weather kirtle, and a light blue overtunic with Twessera's embroidery of yellow flowers at the hem, neck, and cuffs. The overtunic was brushed cotton, and I might have used it for experiments in making nitrocellulose, except for Twessera's embroidery.

Stepping out of the hut, I almost ran into Spot, who was grazing.

"Oop! Careful, little mare," Spot picked up the hoof I almost tripped over.

"Hey, who're you calling mare? I'm not that old." I scrambled backward and away from his legs.

"Listening to you and Tom after you retire at night, I am sure you are mare and stud."

"Ah." I'm sure my cheeks were burning.

"So, Little Emily, you look different today. May I ask why?"

"The cat god woke me just a moment ago. He told me to get up and get dressed in nice clothes because a messenger was coming," I replied.

"I expect one will arrive at the eastside landing very soon," Spot looked up at something I couldn't see from my lofty lack of height.

"Would you like a ride over?" Spot dropped his head to look me in the eyes.

"I would normally say yes, Spot, but these are really nice clothes, and I don't want to risk getting them soiled — no offense intended, but you are a bit dusty."

"No, offense taken, little one," Spot nickered. "Shall we walk over to the eastside landing together?"

"I would be delighted, friend Spot," I beamed. Spot had a good nature hiding behind his stiff demeanor. "How do you know it will be the eastside landing?"

"I can see the smoke from the east channel warning beacon," he stopped to let me get ahead on the single-file trail. "I noticed it about the same time as I heard you stirring."

"So the beacon's not been burning that long," I surmised. "Well, if I pick up the pace, you might be able to follow at a slow walk," and broke into a pace that was half fast walk and half jog. I was quite winded by the time we stumbled onto the eastside landing. As I gasped for breath, I spotted two of the Five Caretakers.

The gathered Chem reminded me of an audience right before a Grateful Dead concert, the few that Tom and I went to back in the late 60s and early 70s: eager, groovy, expectant of good things to come. I wouldn't have been surprised if one of the Chem had started to pass a joint around. That thought led me to ponder if cannabis plants grew on Erdos.

The two shaman Caretakers spotted me and walked immediately over.

"May Vassu bless your fields, Beloved of Vassu," they bowed their noses.

"May Vassu bless your nets, Chosen Caretakers of Vassu." I bowed my head back. "What news, friends? The cat god woke me so I could be here."

"Beloved, we only know it is good news because it is the green smoke, not the orange," said the shorter of the two Caretakers, the one with the dark brown scales and the lavender spots.

Spot's voice fell upon us from above, "Oh! Colored smoke for message meanings! How clever!"

After a worrisome pause, the taller of the two shamans, the one with the grey scales and bright blue spots, said, "Thank you, Beloved of Gertzpul. We appreciate your sentiment. It took us many years to perfect our smoke signals."

Spot nodded his head politely. The flying horse was clueless and was clueless that he was clueless. I was amazed at the incredible tact of the Chem Caretaker who had just spoken. Tom was going to have his hands full with trying to educate Spot. I smiled at the thought. I think I was still a little miffed over last night.

"I think I can see a boat," Spot, the very tall, announced. Several heads turned to look at the flags at the peak of the hill on Sils'chk, where a long-tailed green flag was being run up a pole right at that moment.

Soon, we could all see the boat coming up the eastside slough. Before it arrived, the four silverhairs arrived on their mounts, bringing Tom with them. He was dressed in a green cotton tunic and tan trews that we picked up in Is'syal on our shopping trip to Naheedray's Coyn clothing shop. The color of the clothes accented his red hair and green eyes. I could have spent the entire day just staring at how scrumptious he looked.

"Hey," Tom scowled as he walked up to me, "what are you looking at?"

"You," I replied in a quiet voice. I didn't want to start arguing in public if it could be avoided. "I was admiring how good you look this morning." My calm, simple answer stopped both his feet and his scowl.

"Oh," he frowned, trying to puzzle out how to respond. "Oh," he said again, staring at his feet.

"Tom, look!" I grabbed his arm and spun him around so he could see, "The boat is landing."

The boat was a long, thin craft, pointed on both ends, with eight rowers and a helmsman. The hull was varnished reddiefish skin stretched on a frame of scrub pine branches. The messenger sat in the bow, which rode up on the sand of the landing.

The shorter of the two Caretakers turned to me and took my hand, pulling me away from Tom. "Beloved, you should come with us to greet this bringer of good news," he said in the water language.

"You too, Leader Tom," the other Caretaker pulled Tom along by his wrist. "The waters are whispering to me that this is your news." The Caretaker was right because as soon as the messenger saw Tom, he hopped out of the boat and ran up to him, placing his nose in the sand.

"Leader Tom, I bring news of a raid and of overcoming the enemy," the messenger began. "Leader Twee was practicing with the crew of Ketch One when they saw Cosm raiders. The raiders had already set fire to a cane field to drive the workers into the slave traps." The messenger described the anatomy of almost every Chem slave raid for the last two thousand years.

"Ketch One fired on the Cosm ship using the cannon and the chain shot. It worked to take their mast down. Our crew had to kill the mage on the ship because we could not restrain him. We captured the rest of the crew and freed the kl'drt and ksh'g'lsht taken captive. Seven of them have already been blinded. Leader Twee is coming with Ketch One and the captured Cosm ship, but it travels slower, so we came ahead with the news."

The cannon was something Tom wanted. We were competent at casting small iron mortar tubes, but Tom and I have both agreed we should make some cannon if possible if I had the time. Cannon would give us the ability to shoot horizontally if we needed to attack other ships. Cannon can shoot chain shot at rigging, grapeshot at people, and round shot at wooden hulls.

It took eighteen days from breaking ground to pouring our first iron when I first arrived in Sussbesschem. The Chem made it so easy for us by providing an endless stream of intelligent labor. We were drawing steel wire and rolling iron sheets before Tom had the first ketch launched. Small-scale iron and steel were easy for me since I had unlimited foundry help. My problem was that I couldn't succeed in making large-scale iron castings. It didn't matter what I did for sprues because all my large castings consistently developed casting voids and cracks. Obviously, I was messing up on something major, but I was at my wit's end to figure out what I needed to fix.

Because I couldn't solve the large casting problem, I redesigned the cannon concept to use iron slats with trapezoidal cross-sections. I cast the slats and then stacked them in the round to make an open cylinder. Standing the cylinder on its end, I cast a breech plug and cap to seal the combustion end. I then poured an inside iron sleeve to seal the bore and prevent the venting of hot gasses from between the slats. I also bound the slats with iron rings around the circumference for strength.

The hardest part was the adjustment screw on the back. Tom insisted on setting up our cannon like a carronade, which was a cannon design the British Navy used in the late 1700s and early 1800s. Carronades used a large screw through the threaded knob—Tom, the army artillery officer, called it a cascabel—at the back of the breech end to adjust shooting height. We had to create mock-up pieces out of wood, which I used to make molds for casting. Tom carved several wood mock-ups while we sailed from Inkalem to Sussbesschem.

I had to use slurry molds because I couldn't find good enough sand and oil locally to make sand-casting molds that stayed together. Tom was shocked that I created a cannon this way in under a rotation, but he didn't realize how good I was at foundry casting. He had missed out on that part of my life. Tom was already dead in the late 70s when I got interested in casting for making jewelry and then small statuary.

All the mistakes I made four years ago when making my first gun helped me make this one. That previous failure informed this success and saved a lot of time. Back in my valley, I had worked on a small hand-held cannon for the defense of my cavern home from Cosm. I shot rocks out of it eight times, mostly to start avalanches for fun along the walls of the canyon behind my cave. The little cannon failed on the ninth firing. The failure was at the touch hole, and it gave me a nasty burn on my arm, a bad gash on my hand, and a piece of metal shard to dig out of my deltoid. My larger iron castings sucked back then too.

Once I gave up on large-scale iron castings and came up with the trapezoidal slat design, the cannon came together in a matter of days. I only had time to make the one prototype cannon before Twee swiped it and installed it on Ketch One. I held off on making another because I wanted to have Twee's feedback first.

I found it great news that the chain shot had actually worked. Almost everything I knew about naval cannons I learned by reading the Hornblower series of books by Forester, including how to use chain shot. Chain shot was simply two cannon balls connected by a chain. It was shot out of a cannon and used to destroy rigging on a sailing ship. Twee had gotten it to work on Ketch One, which he had taken out on a shake-down cruise. Ketch One had a battery of four mortar tubes and my cannon mounted amidships, between the main and mizzen masts.

Tom was gobsmacked by the news. Twee had traveled to the coast the previous morning to bring Ketch One up the south channel of the Stem River. The Caretakers had decided it would be good to show off the first gun ketch to the visiting Cosm. Twee and his crew must have found the raiders near the river mouth. It had to be close since they were able to attack and subdue the raiders in just a day's time.

I could tell Tom was about to say something to the messenger when I felt a wave of magic pass through me. Whatever the magic was, it must have been cast on the entire crowd because we all turned to look at the four silverhair, who had taken places at the back of the crowd out of politeness.

"Sorry for the sudden charm casting," said a smiling Usruldes in Irhessa clothes. "I have cast the Charm of Tongues on everyone because our three high priestesses do not know the water language. The charm should last all day. It's easier on me because otherwise, I would need to spend the day translating for the Holy Ones."

That got a raised eyebrow from me. I knew Usruldes was a talented and accomplished silverhair with all sorts of unique magic he learned from Ud, but I didn't know he had the raw power to cast an all-day charm. All-day charms were haup Foskos family or high-priestess caliber magic. Then I remembered who his mother was. His silverhair father, Lord Tridhoytos haup Gunndit, had been a Kas-trained battle mage, too. Usruldes had gotten talent from both sides of his parents' marriage.

Usruldes frowned briefly at the deadpan expressions on the Chem faces—not that Chem have many facial expressions due to their lack of face muscles—and then he got on his knees and performed a full obeisance toward the two Caretakers. "Please forgive my impudence. I was rude when I neglected to ask first before casting the charm," he said in Fosk.

The shorter of the two Caretakers nodded his head at Usruldes and replied in Fosk, "You meant well, Courier Irhessa. I will not forgive good intentions because no forgiveness is necessary. Do try to remember to ask next time."

"You have my thanks, Twckl'shtnl," Usruldes replied in the water language.

"That was a Cosm magic?" the messenger blinked his round, luminous eyes. "Is that why I could understand the wind language?"

"It is called the Lost Charm of Tongues," the taller Caretaker said. "It was lost for several millennia and recently rediscovered at the Fated Shrine of Galt in Is'syal, the city of the haup Foskos kings."

Usruldes and all three high priestesses looked surprised at the Caretaker's knowledge. They should not have been. I was sure Twee had told the Caretakers everything he had learned about Impotu, Foskos, and Inkalem while enslaved and then rescued by Healer Arma.

"We thank you and the crew of your boat," Tom said in the water language, "for bringing us this welcome news. When will the gun ketch arrive?"

"Late today, Leader," the messenger clicked and hissed back, "because the ketch is towing the Cosm ship. It might be sooner because the villagers along the channel were swimming out to pull it up the channel."

That statement confused me since a rowed or sailed boat would be faster than people swimming. Well, foolish me. I was wrong about that. Chem swim several times faster than humans, even Cosm-sized humans.

The gathering on the beach at the eastside landing broke up. The other three Caretakers showed up, and together with Tom, they debriefed the messenger in the entry room to the Well of Vassu. I had tagged along, though I could tell Kamagishi was itching to talk to me. The Cosm were all too big to get into the entry room. Even Tom and I had to crawl to get in since the entrance tunnel was made for Chem walking on all fours. The only way Cosm could enter was through the top of the Well or through one of the water-filled tunnels that entered the central lagoon from the river channels and sloughs that surrounded the island.

Sils'chk was a large and ancient atoll with a central lagoon. A surviving remnant of the island's volcanic base, sandwiched in the oolitic limestone of an ancient reef, formed the top of the hill of the island. The weathered basalt rose about two hundred hands above the water surface on the south side.

The Well of Vassu on Sils'ch was the lagoon of the atoll. The sea level had fallen since reefs covered the rim of the old volcano because there were no gradual slopes from the dry land of the island down to the lagoon. The Well had steep limestone sides all the way around with heights between ten to twenty hands, except where the much higher basalt cropped out.

The messenger didn't have much to add besides the number of Cosm captured (fifteen), the number of Cosm dead (two), and the number of Chem rescued (eleven). The chain shot snapped the sole mast on the Cosm longship in half, dropping its square-rigged sail as it turned to defend against the approach of Ketch One.

We exited the entry room tunnel into the sunshine and four silverhairs patiently waiting. Tom approached the four Cosm and shared the additional information. Then he and Usruldes got into a discussion with the Caretakers over the logistics of handing over the ice charm gems.

Kamagishi took the opportunity and snagged me. When I say snag, I mean snag. She didn't exactly grab me by the collar, but it was pretty much the magical equivalent. I was tugged off my feet, lifted through the air, and snatched by Kamagishi's long arms.

"Dammit, woman, warn me before you do that," I snapped, slammed by an adrenal rush. I did not like getting picked up. Receiving no warning was even worse. I had to fight myself to stay still because I wanted to jump down and escape from being held.

"You would get away if I warned you," Kamagishi grinned in a self-satisfied way.

"Not true," I stated in a calm tone of voice. "I can't outrun any of you, so I don't even try."

"Unless you have a wall you can climb into," she replied, enjoying herself, "or pipes to climb, or a god to spirit you away for a season."

"Not at all germane to here and now," I pointed out. I would not be suckered by any red herrings. "I have nowhere to run or hide that can protect me from a silverhair, excluding being kidnapped by a god or two—though that's hardly normal."

"It is for you, and you know it," she jumped on my words. "Regardless, I have your attention now, and I'm not letting it go when you and your attention are literally in my arms. So, have you talked with Tom this morning?"

"We only had time to say hello before we got interrupted," I informed her. She should have known better to ask. Of course, we didn't have time to talk. "You're being nosier than usual," I hoped I sounded as annoyed as I felt.

"Ooh! Stabbed to the heart! 'Nosier than usual,' you say? I'm just as curious as the next person, but nosier than usual? Oh, I may never recover from this!"

Such melodrama, but Kamagishi's good-humored banter relaxed me to a merely tense state. We retired to the visitor's island to eat and talk.