The Eagle & the Nightingales: Bardic Voices, Book III Page 12

  So, was there something there that T’fyrr could touch, perhaps even something he could awaken?

  I think so. In spite of the childishness, the pettiness—there is something there. I believe that I like him, or rather, I like what he could be. There is a King inside that child, still, and the King wants out again.

  At some point, King Theovere had been an admirable enough leader that his bodyguards were still inspired to a fanatic loyalty. A man simply did not inspire that kind of loyalty just because he happened to have a title.

  I wish I could talk to one of the bodyguards, honestly, T’fyrr thought wistfully. It would never happen, though. They had absolutely no reason to trust him. For all they knew, he was just another toy, this one presented to the King by a foreigner instead of one of his Advisors, but a toy and a distraction, nevertheless.

  I don’t want to be a toy, and I especially don’t want to be a distraction. I want to remind him of what he was.

  Well, to that end, he had delved into Harperus’ store of memory crystals and come up with several songs about King Theovere. Most of them weren’t very good, which didn’t exactly come as a shock, since they had been composed by Guild Bards—but there were germs of good ideas in there, and decent, if not stellar, melodies. I could improve the lyrics; even Nob could improve on some of those lyrics. He could sing those, and literally remind the King of what he had been.

  And there were other songs he had picked up himself on the way, songs that actually had some relevance to one of the situations the King had sloughed off into the Seneschal’s hands.

  I can certainly sing those songs that Raven and the rest wrote about Duke Arden of Kingsford—how he saved all those people during the fire, how he’s beggaring himself to rebuild his city. That should get his attention where reports won’t!

  And if T’fyrr got his attention, he just might be moved to do something about the situation.

  If I put a situation in front of him in music—ah, yes, that is a good idea.

  And who better to suggest such situations than the man who would otherwise have to take care of them—Lord Seneschal Acreon? Oh, now there was an idea calculated to make the Seneschal happier!

  He’ll help. This is exactly the kind of help that he has been looking for—I would willingly bet on it. The only problem is that if anyone besides Acreon figures out what I’m doing, they’ll know I’m not just a blank-brained musician; they’ll know I’m getting involved, and I might be dangerous. Which will make me even more of a target than I am already.

  Well, that couldn’t be helped. He had made a promise and a commitment, and it was time to see them through. Now I have a plan. Now I have a real means to do what Harperus wants me to. And I have a chance to redeem myself in the process, to counter the evil I have already done.

  Suddenly the tension in his back and wing muscles relaxed, as it always did when he had worried through a problem and found at least the beginnings of a solution.

  That was all he needed to be able to sleep; in the next instant, all the fatigue that he’d been holding off unconsciously descended on him.

  Ah . . . I didn’t realize I was so . . . tired.

  He was already in the most comfortable nest he’d had in ages, and in the most comfortable sleeping position he’d had since he’d begun traveling with Harperus.

  This nest is very good . . . very, very good. I don’t think I want to move.

  It was just as well that he was settled in, for as soon as he stopped fighting off sleep, it swooped down out of the darkness upon him, and carried him away—to dreams of falling, iron manacles and screams.

  ###

  Midnight. You’d think the city would be quiet.

  It wasn’t though; the rumble of cartwheels on cobblestones persisted right up until dawn, and a deeper rumble of the machineries turned by the swiftly moving river water permeated even one’s bones.

  Nightingale perched like her namesake on the roof of The Freehold, staring out into the darkness at the lights across the street. No Deliambren lights, these—though they were clever enough; she’d noticed them earlier this evening, just outside the building, where two of them stood like sentinels on either side of the door. Some kind of special air—a gas—was what these lights burned. One of her customers had told her that. It was piped into them from somewhere else, and burned with a flame much brighter than candles, without the flicker of a candle.

  With lights like that, you wouldn’t have to wait for daylight to do your work . . .

  No, you could work all night. Or, better still, you could have someone else work all night for you.

  There were similar lights burning inside that huge building, but not as many as the owner would like. He would have been happier if the whole place was lit up as brightly as full day. Only a few folk worked inside that building at night, those who cleaned the place and serviced the machines.

  Nightingale leaned on the brick of the low wall around the roof, rested her chin on her hands, and brooded over those lovely, clear, cursed lights and all they meant. She had learned more in her brief time here than she had ever anticipated, and most of it was completely unexpected.

  When she had arrived here, she had been working under the assumption that the Free Bards’ and the nonhumans’ chief enemies were going to be the Church and the Bardic Guild, that if anyone was behind the recent laws being passed it would be those two powers. It made sense that way—if the High King really was infatuated with music and musicians, it made sense for the most influential power in his Court to be the Bardic Guild, and the Bardic Guild and the Church worked hand-in-glove back in Rayden.

  Well, they have gotten a completely unprecedented level of power, that much is true. But the Bardic Guild was by no means the most important power in the Court. They weren’t even as important as they thought they were! No, the most important power in this place is across the street. In those buildings, in the hands of the men who own them.

  The merchants who owned and managed the various manufactories were individually as powerful and wealthy as many nobles. But they had not stopped there; no, seeing the power that an organization could wield, they had banded together to form something they called the “Manufactory Guild.” It was no Guild at all in the accepted sense; there was no passing on of skills and trade secrets, no fostering of apprentices, no protection of the old and infirm members. No; this was just a grouping of men with a single common interest.

  Profit.

  Not that I blame them there. Everyone wants to prosper. It’s just that they don’t seem to care how much misery they cause as long as they personally get their prosperity.

  And the Manufactory Guild was now more powerful than the Bardic Guild and even many of the Trade Guilds. They even had their own Lord Advisor to the King!

  Their agenda was pretty clear; they certainly didn’t try to hide it. They tended to oppose free access to entertainment in general, simply because entertainment got in the way of working. They wanted to outlaw all public entertainment in the streets, whether it be by simple juggler, Free Bard or Guild Bard. They had laws up for consideration to do just that, too, and some very persuasive people arguing their case, pointing out how crowds around entertainers clogged the streets and disrupted traffic, how work would stop if an entertainer set up outside a manufactory, how people were always coming in late and leaving early in order to see a particular entertainer on his corner. There was just enough truth in all of it to make it seem plausible, logical, reasonable.

  Oh, yes, very reasonable.

  They had another law up for consideration, as well, a law that would allow the employers at these manufactories to set working hours around the clock, seven days a week. It seemed very reasonable again—and here was the example, right across the street. There was no reason why people couldn’t be working all night, not with these wonderful, clear lights available. It would be no hardship to them, not the way working by candlelight or lamplight would be. It was the Church that opposed this law; it was t
he Church that decreed the hours during which it was permissible to work in the first place, and the conditions for working. Church law mandated that Sevenday be a day for rest and religious services. Church law forbade working after sundown, except in professions such as entertainment, on the grounds that God created the darkness in order to ensure that Man had peace in which to contemplate God and to sleep—or at least, rest from his labors, so he could contemplate God with his full attention.

  The Manufactory Guild wanted a law that permitted them to hire children as young as nine, on a multitude of grounds—and Nightingale had heard them all.

  So that children can be a benefit to their families, instead of a burden. So that families with many children can feed all of them instead of relying on charity. So that children can learn responsibility at an early age. To keep children out of the street and out of wickedness and idleness. Oh, it all sounds very plausible.

  Except, of course, that one would not have to pay a child as much as an adult. A family desperate enough to force its nine-year-old child into work would be desperate enough to take whatever wage was offered. And that child, who supposedly was learning to read and write from his Chapel Priest, would be losing that precious chance at education. There were Church-sanctioned exceptions to the law—children were allowed to be hired as pages or messengers, and to help their parents in a business or a farm. But all of those exceptions were hedged about with a vast web of carefully tailored precepts that kept abuse of those exceptions to a relative minimum, and all those exceptions required that the child receive his minimum education.

  You can’t keep a child’s parents from working him to death, or from abusing him in other ways, but you can at least keep a stranger from doing so. That was basically the reasoning of the Church, which decreed the completely contradictory precepts that a child was sacred to God and that a child was the possession and property of his parents.

  Then there’s that lovely little item, the “job security law.”

  That was a law that specifically forbade a worker in a manufactory from quitting one job to take another—effectively keeping him chained to the first job he ever took for the rest of his life, unless his employer chose otherwise, or got rid of him. That one had yet to be passed as well, but there was very little opposition, and the moment it was, it would mean the complete loss of freedom for anyone who went to work in a manufactory.

  They say that retraining someone is costly and dangerous, since folk in a manufactory are generally operating some sort of machinery. Oh, surely. “Machinery” no more complicated than a spinning wheel! But I would think that to most people, who think a wellpump is very complicated machinery, they’d look at the manufactories and agree that having an inexperienced person “operating machinery” could be very dangerous. As if most of what I’ve been watching people actually do was any more complicated than digging potatoes.

  But the Manufactory Guild wanted to keep that ignorance intact. And here the Church itself was divided; one group saw clearly the way this would take freedom away from anyone who worked in those places, leaving them virtual slaves to their jobs, but the other group was alarmed at the wild tales painted of accidents caused by “inexperience,” and was in favor of the law.

  She shifted her position, turning her back on the lights of the manufactory to stare up at the sky. You didn’t see as many stars here as you could in the country; she didn’t know why. Maybe it was all the smoke from the thousands of chimneys, getting in the way, like a perpetual layer of light clouds.

  The nastiest piece of work she’d heard about was something that so far was only a rumor, but it was chilling enough to have been the sole topic of conversation tonight, all over Freehold.

  This was—supposedly—a proposed law that had the support of not only some of the Church but the Manufactory Guild and the Trade Guild as well. They called it “the Law of Degree.”

  Nightingale shivered, a chill settling over her that the warm breeze could not chase away. Even the name sounded ominous.

  It would set a standard, a list of characteristics, which would determine just how “human” someone could be considered, based on his appearance. But the “standard” was only the beginning of the madness, for it would mandate that those who were considered to be below a certain “degree” of humanity were nothing more than animals.

  In other words, property. Bad enough that such things as being indentured are allowed everywhere, and that slavery is sanctioned in at least half the Twenty Kingdoms. The Church at least has laws that govern how slaves are treated, and an indentured servant has the hope of buying himself free. But this—this would be slavery with none of the protections! After all, it wouldn’t be “reasonable” to have a law stating that a man couldn’t beat his dog, so why have one saying he can’t beat his Mintak?

  Deliambrens, for instance, would be considered human under the law—but Mintaks and Haspur, with their hides of hair and feathers, their nonhuman hands and feet, their muzzles and beaks, would be animals.

  Some people were arguing that as property, these nonhumans would actually have protection they did not have now—protection from persecution by the Church. “Animals” by Church canon could not be evil, because they had no understanding of the difference between good and evil. It was also argued that some of the violence done to nonhumans in the past—the beatings and ambushes—would end if this law was passed, because since they would then be the property of a human, anyone harming one of them would have to pay heavy restitution to the owner.

  Naturally all those nonhumans not falling within the proper degree of humanity would have their property confiscated—cattle can’t own homes or businesses, of course—and both they and their property would be taken by the Crown. I’m sure that never entered the Lord Treasurer’s consideration. And, of course, as soon as the ink was dry on the confiscation orders, the Crown would then have itself a nice little “animal” auction. More money in the King’s coffers, and it wouldn’t even be slavery, which is wicked and really not civilized.

  Nasty, insidious, and very popular in some quarters. Yes, it would “protect” the nonhumans from the demon hunters, for a little while—until Church canon was changed to make it possible for animals to be considered possessed!

  Which it would be; after all, it’s in the Holy Writ. There were the demons possessing a human that were cast out, and then possessed a herd of pigs and made the pigs drown themselves.

  Small wonder that the Manufactory Guild was also behind this one, at least according to the rumors. If it was passed, the owners of manufactories could neatly bypass all the Church laws on labor by acquiring a nightshift of “animals” to run the machines without wages. There was no Church law saying animals couldn’t work all night—nor any Church law giving them a rest day. If it passed—

  Well, most of the nonhumans would flee before they could be caught, I suspect, but there are always those who can’t believe that something like that would happen to them. There would probably be just enough of those poor naive souls and their children in Lyonarie to make up a workforce large enough to work the manufactories at night.

  There would be a business in hunters, too, springing up in the wake of this law. Hunters? No, more like kidnappers. They would be going out and trying to entrap nonhumans in whichever of the other human kingdoms existed that did not pass this law, and bringing them back here to sell.

  Nightingale clutched her hands into fists and felt her nails biting into the palms of her hands. If she ever found out who the nasty piece of work was that first came up with this idea, she would throttle him herself.

  With my bare hands. And dance on his corpse.

  She told herself she had to relax; at the moment, it was no more than a rumor, and she had only heard about it here. No one had mentioned it in the High King’s servants’ kitchen this morning, nor even in the chapels friendly to all species. It might be nothing. It might only be a distortion of one of the other laws being considered. It might even be a rum
or deliberately started by the Church in order to make some of the other things they were trying to have passed look less unappetizing.

  Or to allow them to slip something else past while the nonhumans are agitating about the rumor.

  She would wait until the morning, and see what was in the kitchens and on the street.

  She took a deep breath—after a first, cautious sniff to make sure that the wind was not in the “wrong” direction. She let it out again, slowly, exhaling her tension with her breath. This was an old exercise, one that was second nature to her now. As always, it worked, as did her mental admonition that there was nothing she could do now, this moment. It would have to wait until tomorrow, so she might as well get the rest she needed to deal with it.

  When she finally felt as if she would be able to sleep, she got to her feet and picked her way across the rooftop, avoiding the places where she knew that some of her fellow staff might be sheltering together, star-watching. Supposedly the Deliambren who owned this place was considering a rooftop dining area, but so far nothing had materialized, and the staff had it all to themselves.

  And a good thing, too. The streets hereabouts aren’t safe for star-watching or nighttime strolls before bed. When customers of wealth came here, they came armed, or they came with guards. Not only were there thieves in plenty, but there were people who hated those who were not human, who would sometimes lie in wait to attack customers coming in or out of The Freehold. They seldom confined their beatings to nonhumans—they were just as happy to get their hands on a “Fuzzy-lover” and teach him a lesson about the drawbacks of tolerance.

  Once or twice a week, some of the staff would turn the tables on them, but that was a dangerous game, for it was difficult to prove who was the attacker and who the victim in a case like that. If the nightwatch happened to hear the commotion and come to break it up instead of running the other way as they often did, The Freehold staff often found themselves cooling their heels in gaol until someone came to pay their fines. The law was just as likely to punish Freehold staff as the members of the gang that had ambushed the customers.