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 was 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 stooped 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 ones bones.
Nightingale perched like her namesake on the roof of 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' chiefest 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!