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“It’s like the start of a bad joke,” says Enthir, who is fiddling with a monstrous machine sprouting pipes. “Greasy gear-gatherer and her Falmer friend walk into my workshop. Pass me that wrench—”“Pass me our money,” growls the greasy gear-gatherer, catching his wrist. “I want half in advance this time.”And there, says her Falmer friend wearily, rapping out the words on the nearest wall, is the punchline.Enthir smiles his oiliest smile.“Oh, dear,” he drawls, delicately reclaiming his hand. “A sum like this, Finna-and-Gleeb”—he never addresses them separately—“and you think I’ll part with a single septim of it before you’ve done your job? That is funny—oh, bones of the earth!” His machine’s boiler is shrieking like a teakettle. He snatches the wrench from his workbench, raising his voice above the din. “Think again, my young friends. Think hard.”Finna scowls at him. Her second-best buyer is a lean whippet of a wizard, scruffy and snappish and stingy with the money he sneaks from the College’s coffers. It’s easy to forget, watching him tighten screws and snarl Falinesti oaths at his machine, that he’s older than she’ll ever be; elves are strange that way, straight and spry and smiling long after their neighbors start groaning of gout.Except Enthir isn’t smiling. He smacks the side of the device, and, in the dreadful silence that follows, she sees his face pinch with the pent-up wrath of centuries—“Ha!” he barks, baring his teeth in a grin as the boiler shivers awake. The pipes that coil around the room like catgut creak and tick. “There she goes. All right, what.”“We came straight here,” says Finna, unmoving. Though her foot itches for it, she resists the urge to kick the stool out from under him. “Soon as you sent word about a job. We’re hungry.”“Does this look”—Enthir whacks the boiler again, which clangs like a queasy gong—“like a patisserie?”Finna wrinkles her nose. She wipes it with the back of her hand and looks around the workshop: the bobbing magelights, the bubbling cauldrons, the pipes bulging and twisting with steam.“Looks like indigestion,” she says.And smells, says Gleeb, sitting comfortably cross-legged at Enthir’s elbow, like cheap cologne.Enthir smiles. Tightly.“They’ll sling some slop for you in the refectory,” he grumbles, waving them off. He stands to scribble some notes on a slateboard. “Don’t tell them I sent you, or they’ll probably poison it. Say you’re from the Synod or something. I don’t know. I don’t care, either, incidentally.”Gleeb pulls his mouth to one side, grimly amused. They’ll throw stones at me.“My unsightly friend, they’re scholars!” says Enthir, looking with shock over his shoulder. “Enlightened minds! They’ll throw textbooks at you.”“Piss off,” growls Finna, though it’s his workshop. She gently tugs Gleeb’s ear. “Come on. We’ll ask Gane. Or something.”Her friend unfolds his limbs like a spider, feeling the space around him for her arm. Finna offers it. As she steers him through the mess of gadgetry and magical paraphernalia, a noise pricks up his ears; he lays a pale and thoughtful hand on one of the pipes, then pats it and smiles helpfully at no one in particular. It’s overheating.“No, it isn’t,” says Enthir, throwing a baleful glance back at him. “It’s calibrated to exactly—it’s overheating. Shit. Shit.” He scrambles back to his machine. “By the Elden Grove—”
* * *
“And then,” Finna finishes, her voice devoid of emotion, “he caught on fire.”For a delicious moment, Arniel Gane and his lab assistant stare at her in horror. Then they tumble from their seats and scramble for the door.“This is—this is terrible!” she hears Gane cry from the corridor, his voice fading fast as he runs. “Just terrible! Who’s going to procure my research materials?”Finna-and-Gleeb stand for a moment, alone, in the center of Gane’s laboratory.Then Gleeb laughs—a wheezy, rattling sound—and feels his way to the worktable, where Gane and his assistant have left two bowls of steaming stew.We should make ourselves scarce, he says, tapping the words on the tabletop, before they find out he’s fine.Finna, righting Gane’s fallen chair, makes a curt noise of agreement. “But first—soup.”
Soup.
With solemn dignity, they clack their bowls together.