Excerpt: The Mortal Gem

Drip. Drop. Drip. Drop.

The rain was stopping. It wasn’t coming down as hard, like the torrent that had been the plague of the day. Now it was just a drizzle, collecting on the roof of the White Horse tavern into little pools, until they had enough power as a group to slip off and fall to the ground below in big fat drops.

Drip. Drop. Drip. Drop.

It should have been more annoying to more people. The tavern was filled with people enjoying a tot of drink amongst themselves. It was surprisingly subdued inside; rain tended to make the people, old drunkards and young seamen and men of all sorts, a bit quieter. Storms were a time of contemplation, not of rowdy bar fights, and they all took to that rule with gusto. No one even noticed the drip drop, drip drop, so deep were they in their ale and pathos. No one noticed, except Antony della Uglini.

Sitting next to the window didn’t help. The lowest point of the roof was there, and the drizzle ran off just outside. Antony wasn’t about to move off to another table, though. This was his table; he had claimed it since he was little. If you looked closely in the wood, you could see the stain from where he tipped his father’s drink over when he was five. Look closer, and you could see his initials, carved in his zealousness after discovering the good news of text.

No, the answer wasn’t to switch tables, he absently told his wine. The drip drop was if anything a sign, a sign he didn’t particularly want to take. It was telling him that it was time to stop acting like a fool, or worse, like a child. He had been given a job to do, by his superiors no less. It was time to get a move on.

He stood up and stretched, slowly and painfully. Some distant bit of his brain told him he was much to young for getting up to hurt. Those sort of pains were supposed to be for the older people, the ones over thirty five or so to whom life had already taken its toll. Antony was only 18; he had hopefully many years left in him for him to find a better, more character-building way to break his back. Years spent hunched over a piece of parchment just did not count.

He laid a halfpence on the table and gathered his supplies. The Church had given him fresh parchment, an new pen, fresh ink, and even a new candle for this job. They clearly valued it at least a bit. At the same time, Antony had to wonder why they would send him to any important job. He would have thought that it would be a more senior clerk or cleric. After all, the man Antony was being sent to was one of a kind, or at least last of a kind. Even Antony thought the old man should be shown more respect than throwing a young and inexperienced chronicler at him.