Key to Magic 01 Orphan Read online

  At such times, he would laugh derisively at himself as he stirred back to work. Often enough back in Khalar he had been contemptuous of such activity in others; fanciful daydreams were a luxury that the denizens of the Lower City could ill afford. He was no less contemptuous of himself now when he succumbed to the temptations of his own fancy.

  He straightened to toss a melon-sized fragment of masonry down the broken hillside behind him. It skipped and rolled in spiraling arcs to the bottom, adding itself to the considerable collection of similar detritus already there. Pausing distractedly to watch it, he rubbed the aching muscles of his mid‑back. Trying to ease the soreness that grew there with every swing of the pick had become a daily ritual. Already this morning he had performed the rite with much greater frequency than was his custom.

  When he had first gazed upon the crumbling hillside, he had known that it would not be easy to dig into the unstable talus. But it had proven vastly more difficult than he had anticipated, with every spade of sand or block removed triggering a slide that swiftly erased any progress previously made.

  Mar had protested fiercely when Waleck had directed him to this spot for the day's work. Nevertheless, the old man had remained adamant that this was where Mar would dig today, and no amount of argument had been able to dissuade him from that certainty. At length, Mar had yielded to Waleck's decision. Once the Wasteminer's mind was made up, nothing short of an act of the eternally bickering Forty-Nine Gods in concert would change it. For Mar, the most galling aspect of the entire episode was that the old man's judgment had, yet again, been vindicated. After digging but for the scant space of an hour, Mar had found a door.

  In this city of ancient destruction, the door, set tightly in the buried remnant of a quarried granite wall, was an almost unbelievable find. Its rarity lay not solely in the fact that it existed, but in that it remained intact, where it should have been sundered into fragments as had been nearly every other large metal object in the Waste City. Doubly rare was the metal of which it had been cast. Bronze fetched a high price from the Khalarii smiths. The sounding metal, prized for use in the wind chimes that graced every merchant's villa, was in great demand, but perennially in short supply because of the scarcity of the component metal tin. Calamine was easy to come by and so yellow brass common, but, so far as Mar knew, tin had never been plentiful in Khalar or anywhere in the northern highlands. The numerous mines in the high mountain range that sheltered Khalar and the upland valleys from the Waste produced none. What tin there was available in the Imperial City came only in small quantities up the long wagon route that paralleled the Ice from the far off seaport of Mhajhkaei and thence only the Forty-Nine Gods knew from where. In times of scarcity, the usual condition, tin traded near par with silver.

  It struck Mar as extremely curious that this door existed at all. According to Waleck, decades of mining had shown that bronze was just as uncommon in the Waste City as it was in Khalar. That such a great cost had been paid to construct this plain panel made no sense at all. There were no decorations or superfluous marks, as there should have been had the intent been the flaunting of the owner's wealth to passersby. If it had only been that its builders had desired greater strength than that of wood, steel would have served much better and required the expenditure of much less gold.

  There was no sense to the door ‑‑ unless it identified some privileged dwelling or noteworthy merchant's shop. The Tavern of the Bronze Door, or possibly The Bronze Door Metal Traders, or even The Treasury of the Bronze Door? Such things were done in Khalar. Perhaps it simply indicated that the owner held some title or office ‑‑ The Palace of the Grand Prince of This Whatever Place.

  Mar shrugged. This was but one more strange and unanswerable question to add to a great long list of such.

  He had dug several test holes farther up the hill after he had uncovered the door, and those seemed to indicate that a chamber of some sort survived unbreached behind it. The door itself was a near priceless find, bound to bring a healthy sum from the smiths of Khalar and their wealthy clients. But if this were actually the Treasury of the Bronze Door, and a miser's hoard concealed behind it, then Waleck's talent would be proven true to Mar's satisfaction once and for all.

  The old man’s talent., the uncanny ability to peruse a field of rock and sand and then without reservation state whether metal lay buried beneath it, continued to amaze Mar. After what seemed no more than a casual inspection, Waleck would blithely indicate a spot that to Mar's eyes was no different from any other. This outrageously haphazard procedure had drawn very vocal skepticism from him at first, but this reaction had faded rapidly as the old man had been proven right time and again. Even his silent disbelief had become frayed as the store of their finds grew: piles of battered bits of copper cooking pots, collections of twisted and sheared sword blades pitted but not eaten away beneath the parched sand, sacks of bits of metal, brass and alloys, too mangled to name for a specific purpose.

  Yet, for all of this, Mar was only half‑convinced. There was not the merest shred of inclination in him to accept anything that he could not examine with his eyes or hold in his hands, anything that could not be defined or explained with hard, impersonal facts. Any parts of his character that might have longed to believe in fanciful possibilities had perished in the cold realities of an orphan's childhood. Even so, he was wise enough to keep his doubts to himself, and he put them firmly away while he worked.

  Without Waleck's talent, Mar knew ‑‑ if it was truly a talent, and not just the skill won by a lifetime of experience ‑‑ they would in all likelihood have found nothing at all. The Waste City had been the goal of salvage expeditions from Khalar for near as long as that latter city had existed, and the days were vanished a century or more when wagons were strained across the Waste to gather the metal that lay scattered about like pebbles in a streambed. Pits and tunnels of all sorts scarred every mound and ravine of the City. Some of the low hills had been displaced entirely, stone by stone and bucket of earth by bucket of earth. What little scrap remained was widely scattered, in smaller pieces, and often deeply buried; a normal day's effort seldom produced more than a few thay worth of metal. Waleck, by his own word, was the very last of the independent miners who had struggled to glean a living from the ruins. The great companies that had been organized to exploit the City were all dead and bankrupt decades before Mar was born, and independent scrappers such as Waleck were now known to most only in the proud boasts of grandfather's tales.

  Mar skimmed a stream of sweat from his forehead with the edge of his hand and flicked the drops of moisture into the dust. He took a moment to adjust the white cloth tied about his head as a sunshade, lifting the broad tail to allow a bit of air to waft across his neck, and stooped to retrieve his shovel. He had already removed most of the large blocks of masonry that had tumbled from the wall above the door in the long ago wreck of the building, and the balance of the work now appeared less daunting.

  With a large section of undamaged wall around the door free, he now had only to fight subsidence from the two sides of the excavation, and he began to make headway against the persistent sand. By the time the sun had climbed to within a fingerbreadth of noon, he was scrapping the last of the gravel and detritus from the flagged pavement that abutted the door.

  He stood back and sagged on the handle of his shovel. While he was half‑heartedly wondering if he should go look for Waleck, the wasteminer’s shout drew him to the gully.

  Almost from their first meeting, Mar had thought of Waleck as old. This perception derived not from any blatant physical evidence, for Waleck's lean, compact body displayed none of the common signs of great age. His dusty‑black hair, worn unfashionably long, and his stiff brush of a mustache were flecked with gray, but not overly so. No lines marked his broad face aside from the deep indentations that accented his almost purple eyes, and these but what one might earn from a life filled with laughter. He was spare of body, but the spareness was not the wasted thinness of an
exhausted life. His firm, purposeful stride as he climbed the hill was proof enough that the scrapper possessed the robust vitality of a man little advanced of Mar's own age.

  Rather, the scrapper's words betrayed the broad span of his years. When he talked of something other than the digging, which was not often – usually far into the evening when Mar had already retired to his pallet and the old man seemed mainly to be speaking to himself -- he rambled of events long since passed ‑‑ history, from Mar's point of view. His phrases were strewn with the names of men who Mar knew, in the case of those of patrician birth, only from the inscriptions of civil monuments or, in the case of those of common origin, not at all. Waleck often punctuated his comments with references to the reigns of Viceroys generations removed from the present ruler of Khalar. These thoughts were related as mere commentary on contemporary happenings, or simple recollections of the news of a previous season. When he spoke thus, in quiet moods of reminiscence, a weariness would invariably creep into the jovial tone he affected. A weariness that spoke of a life so long that everything of import, major and minor, had been seen or heard or done. A weariness that suggested that all that remained was a ponderous wait for the inevitable end.

  The scrapper raised his left hand to wave. In his other, he carried a parcel. It looked to be a small sack, but from this distance, Mar could not be sure. Waleck had mentioned an intention to examine the two other sites he had marked on the previous day and the thought occurred to Mar that perhaps Waleck had chanced upon something of more than normal value. No more than curious, however, he started down to meet the old man. Predictably, Waleck brought only Mar’s lunch and his own curiosity as to the younger man's progress.

  As Waleck caught sight of the door, his eyes widened in keen interest. He stepped closer to examine the panel. “Bronze of the best grade. I think this side is cast.” The old man tapped the door with the butt of his belt knife. “Hollow, but even if the other side is some other material, this side has to be at least twenty or thirty weights. That might be forty thal if the price is up.”

  The old man turned his head and grinned gleefully. “You have done well, Mar! This will add nicely to our profits this season.”

  Mar, sitting in the meager shade provided by the side of the excavation to eat his simple meal -- a half loaf of meal bread, a thick slice of pungent cheese, and a corked bottle filled with his noon ration of water – shrugged. Forty thal was a lot of money, but his share would only be four silver if the old man remained true to his bargain. Four thal might keep him going for a fortnight or so, even as much as a month if he stretched it. It was no pittance, but it certainly would not change his life.

  “Perhaps" the old man suggested, a quirky smile springing to his lips, "we will find our treasure behind this extraordinary door. What do you think, Mar?"

  Mar only grunted, without even the courtesy of a shrug, concentrating on chewing the tough, grainy bread. It would not do to encourage Waleck. On many dark evenings the old man had enthused of a mythical once‑in‑a‑lifetime strike, a hidden cache of tremendous wealth rumored almost from the discovery of the city to lie somewhere beneath its scorched sands. Mar, unrepentantly, had often been guilty of abetting the old man’s flights of fancy, responding to the inevitable “What will you do with your share?” with irresponsible prattle of villas, sumptuous households, exquisite food, and fine clothes.

  But in the broad light of day, he found he had little desire to play accomplice to the old man’s profitless speculation. The violent street life of Khalar had proved to him early and often that to hope for anything from life but a hard, unending struggle simply to survive was one certain way to insure a quick and painful end to that life.

  Only in tavern tales did riches miraculously fall into the hands of the lowly inhabitant of the slums.

  Only in tavern tales did the people on the bottom of life find justice.

  Only in tavern tales did thieves open the secret panel to find the miraculous hidden trove.

  Not, as it were, that Mar would fail to be pleased if they found something of value behind this door of bronze, but he never allowed himself the luxury of disappointment.

  Waleck slipped a small spade-shaped tool from a belt sheath and squatted to pick carefully at an encrusted plate on the left side of the door.

  "The handle is missing. Twisted off, it appears," Waleck commented after a moment of effort. He braced his shoulder against the bronze panel experimentally. It did not budge.

  "The lock and hinges are likely seized after all this time, in any event. We shall be forced to break it down." The old scrapper got to his feet.

  "We will need the long bars and the big hammer," he continued, eyeing the stone casing thoughtfully. He waved his hands as Mar made to rise. "No, Mar, finish your lunch and rest a bit. You have already done a full day's work this morning. I will return to the camp and fetch what tools we require."

  Mar nodded, then popped the last bit of cheese into his mouth, as Waleck ascended the lip of the excavation and dropped out of sight. He did not argue with Waleck when it came to the division of their labor; the old man drove him tirelessly, but was scrupulously fair. Waleck never ordered Mar to do more in one day than the scrapper set for himself. This did not mean that Mar felt any compulsion to volunteer for more than his appointed share. He performed his tasks ably enough and with steady determination, but he had no enthusiasm for them. With no shame, he made careful use of every chance for rest.

  Even so, he did not remain sitting for long after the old scrapper had gone. He quickly finished the scraps of his lunch, took a long pull from his water bottle, and got to his feet.

  As a thief, Mar found the challenge of this unknown locked door impossible to resist.

  TWO

  Mar crossed to the door and knelt to examine the lock plate. He drew his knife (his only true possession -- the clothes and boots he wore were Waleck's castoffs) from the sheath he had sewn into the inseam of his right boot and dug at the verdigris-fused sand that fouled the keyhole.

  Mar was a thief. Not a cutpurse – or, at least, not often – but a true outlaw denizen of the rooftops. He stole from the rich, and often from the not so rich, and even from the poor if he was hungry enough. Although he labored now in Waleck’s service and had likewise done labor of many sorts in the past, in his soul and in his mind he remained nothing more nor nothing less than a thief.

  One of his earliest memories was of a days-empty belly and the choice between putrid garbage and an apple from a vendor's cart to fill it. Mar had snatched the fruit and fled as fast as his short legs would carry him, biting and gulping even as he ran. He had gotten away, but maybe the vendor had not tried too very hard to catch him. It was just possible that the hard-faced man had had a trace of pity in his heart for a fair-haired boy with the tracks of tears like permanent brands on his grimed cheeks.

  From that initiation, Mar had studied his chosen trade with all the dedication he could muster. He had had the best of teachers -- beatings, knife wounds, the lash, chases so long and hard that his chest had burned till he cried and caused him to spit blood for days. The near loss of a hand had inspired him to depend more upon the sharpness of his wits than upon the swiftness of his feet, and from thence onward, he had experienced prosperity of a sort. He had eaten more often than not, and had always had somewhere to sleep, if it was only the wind-sheltered nook of a tavern's roof. With perfect humility, he knew that he had achieved the highest level of success possible in his craft, the only one that actually mattered at all -- he was still alive.

  Mar could pick any lock used in Khalar, new or old, simple or complex. As a boy, he had ransacked locksmiths’ shops in the dead of night, stealing heavy padlocks, tiny jewelry box latches, and intricate door bolts for no other purpose than to learn how to open them without keys. In recent years, he had had little opportunity to utilize his skill, having developed a preference for bypassing locks altogether. High windows and roof hatches were safer and easier entry points for h
is purposes. The former because these were located in little used and seldom watched spaces and the latter because most Khalarii’n citizens were under the mistaken impression that anything more than two manheight above the ground was inaccessible and therefore did not bother to lock them in the first place. Still, he had dutifully mastered each new mechanism and had conscientiously eased the occasional lock for no other reason than to hone his ability. If the bronze door's lock would function at all, he was fully confident that he could persuade it to open.

  The point of his blade broke through the veneer of corrosion, and presently he had cleared the keyhole, which was a simple, if unexpectedly large, rectangular opening. He held his blade between the fingers and thumb of his right hand and gently inserted the ground-down tip into the hole. The blade penetrated almost a half fingerlength before it bumped an obstruction. Carefully, he explored the mechanism of the lock through this sightless connection. After a moment, he leaned back and grinned.

  The lock was ridiculously, almost outrageously, simple, and reflected either an utterly honest populace or a deplorable drought of competent locksmiths. There were no wards to block access to the three vertical pins that held the bolt in the locked position, and no intricate series of levers, cams, and latches to impede improper operation. Drop the pins and the bolt would be free to slip back; there seemed to be no more to it than that. Even in the absence of the specialized tools that he had lost in the Blue Ice River it should be no problem. Once again, he inserted the tip of his knife into the keyhole.

  The first pin slipped with surprising ease, falling complacently back into its groove, as did the second, but the last flexed the length of his blade without a perceptible sign of movement.