Woven Steel

PROLOUGE: The Honorable Ironworkers of Latimer

The empress was coming home.

     The grand carriage was driving down harvest street, lit up like a birthday cake with colored lanterns. Somewhere inside that jouncing cocoon of lacquered wood and alchemical glass, the empress herself would be sitting. A plump little woman in a platinum crown, she would probably have a furry little frisian hound in her lap and some sugary little pastry half-eaten in her hand. A pastry that probably cost as much as Rive or anyone she knew made in a year.

Rive could see it all from her perch. All that there was to see. She was two streets away, on the roof of an abandoned warehouse. The light, though fading from sunset red to gloaming-blue, was vivid enough for her to make the whole scene out. Atla, the inner moon, was half full and had just appeared over the horizon. Umara, the outer, was up near the zenith, small and copper yellow. Between them, the Olympia ring, a thin line of ice white, was just appearing.

    Rive's chin rested on top of her arms, folded on top of the brick parapet wall that encircled the roof. It was the tallest building in the neighborhood, so she had a clear view of the whole procession.  She could see the troop of imperial cavalry, five men wide and two deep, riding twenty feet ahead of the carriage. They did not bother to shout or curse to clear the busy street before them.  They simply rode forward at a trot, relying on the jangling of their armor and clatter of their hooves, along with their stern countenance, to do the job for them. 

It seemed to work.  All the apprentice boys running end of day errands, the ragpickers crying their wares,  the skinny shopgirls hurrying home scattered like ninepins as the cavalrymen bore down on them. One deaf old grandma had to be wrenched violently onto the sidewalk. She promptly rewarded her rescuer, a burly fruit seller, with several sharp blows from her bony little fists.

Behind the carriage rode all twelve members of the college of archmages. It was customary for them to visit the empress at her summer palace in the last weeks of the season, then return with her when she came back to Latimer for the winter. Six sour-faced old men with long grey beards hanging down their fronts on one side, and stately old women with long gray hair tressed down their backs on the other. Each rode their traditional mount, a high bred mare of pure white, and wore rich robes of particolored silk. 

Though Rive could not see them in detail, she knew each of their robes would be sewn with runes of power relating to their particular school of magic. Rive recognized most of them. She had studied directly under old Francus, the arch-electromancer, for six grueling months. He had hated everything about her- her lowborn Rakeside accent,  her refusal to flirt with or flatter him, and-finally and undeniably- for her raw and fearsome talent.

That hatred had propelled her right out of the Archmages college. It had propelled her all the way across the city, back to the narrow, greasy alleys of Rakeside that had reared her. With anything resembling a desirable posting barred to her, it had been Yasha who had come to her rescue. Her big brother-big in every sense, he towered over her- had a habit of doing that. When they were little, before he could even really use his fire magic, he had protected her with his fists and his bulk. After his own graduation from the college, two years ahead of her he had taken a post at the new imperial foundry.  He became one of several dozen mages and hundreds of mundane, non-magical workers ('danes, as they were called on the shop floor) in churning out everything from armor to anchors. They did so at a tremendous pace, faster than anyone had seen since the days of the wizard-kings before the moonbreak.

Like every other fire mage, Yasha had hoped for a cushy posting in the imperial navy after graduation. Unlike a ship's hydromancer and aeromancer, kept busy around the clock pitting their will against the elements, the fire mage was usually only called on in battle. Since the imperial navy hadn't seen any real action in ten years, that left the average ship's pyromancer ample time to sit around in his cabin playing cards with the ship's other most useless character-the chaplain. All of it amounted to a toil-free cruise around the known world, all on the imperial dime. As such, naval appointments were fought over fiercely. It was one fight for which Yasha was ill equipped. Neither his bulk nor his mastery of fire availed him much. This fight was fought with ancient noble titles, with connections in the Imperial bureaucracy and with money both old and new.