Page 13 of Still the Sun

The bag of scraps shakes Arthen’s table when I drop it down. “Happy yearmark.”

Arthen sits on a stool in the corner, straightening old nails, and he immediately puts down his pliers and approaches. “What on Tampere did you find?”

Strangers who opened the tower.Biting back the confession, I say, “Frantess is right.” Though I’d practiced the excuse multiple times on my way here, saying it to another person feels like choking. I’m a terrible liar, so I had to practice this one. “I found these on my last dig.” I pull pieces from the bag, one by one, and examine each, wondering at its use. Most have no distinct purpose—a sheet of that, an ingot of this, something that looks like a handle off a tankard—but a few things catch my eye: narrow tubes connected by a gear that certainly belonged to something complex, bits of metal the size of dining utensils forged like little arrows.

Oh Ancients, if only I could speak to just one of you for a single minute, I would learn so much.

I push the metal debris toward Arthen.

“Where on the Serpent’s world were you digging?” he asks, his eyes wide. He picks up a piece of scrap and turns it over in his hands.

“Can you use it?”

“I can use all of it.” He grasps those utensil things. “I’ll need to get the forgeveryhot, but I can work this.” He wipes his free hand down his face. “The backlog, Pell, I don’t even know where to start.”

I grin. “From the top, I guess.”

He collects a few pieces that appear to be made of the same alloy and brings them to his forge.

“One request?”

Arthen pushes down on the bellows. “Anything.”

“Do you still have those plans I made, for the rover?”

He pauses. Tips his head toward a set of drawers sitting as far from the furnace as a set of drawers can get. Starting at the top, I open the drawers one at a time. In the third one, I find parchment with my scrawl. It depicts a three-wheeled vehicle, the size of a deer, that would transport water buckets to and from the well, helping out the farmers. Itwas fun to design with Arthen, but we’d never had the materials to build it. I’m sure, with enough resources, I could build a motor to propel it. It could carry a dozen buckets of water or more.

I’d scrawled all of this in smudged charcoal, along with a little symbol in the bottom right corner, a rhombus with one line cutting through the top, and two smaller, parallel lines in the center. My own version of an Ancient symbol, were I ever to craft something of my own.

“That,” Arthen grunts as he pushes on the bellows, “is at thebottomof the list.”

“And I’m guessing darts are at the top?”

It’s Arthen’s favorite game. Used to have a board inside Maglon’s alehouse, until Arthen melted down the darts last year to make Amlynn some needles for sutures and to repair her scissors. He snorts. “Only slightly.”

I close the drawer. “I’ll get the materials we need.”

“Will you now?”

I wiggle my fingers at him in a show of facetious mystery and head back toward the road.

Before I reach it, though, Arthen calls out, “I want my knife!”

“Oh, for the Serpent”—I reel back at him—“I do not have your knife!”

He’s focused on his fire. “Thirteen-centimeter blade, braided leather handle. It’s got sorghum leaves etched onto one side of the blade.”

Hand on hip, I reply, “It sounds beautiful, Arthen, but completely unfamiliar.”

He clicks his tongue. “I could have sworn I lent it to you.”

“So I could what? Stab the dead bodies I bury?” Rolling my eyes, I wave and leave. I’m not especially tired, so I consider heading to the farms to find Salki after I eat, but as I approach home, she finds me first.

“Pell!” She runs toward me from my front door. She’s lively and grinning, a flash of her old self. The eagerness in her voice brings relief I didn’t know I needed. Casnia lingers a few paces behind her, peering off toward the southern mountains. “Glad I found you! Look!”

She shoves something yellow into my hands. It takes me a beat to recognize it as Ancients’ work, and it’s covered in symbols.

My jaw drops. It’s unlike anything I’ve uncovered, and nothing like the machines in the tower. “Where did you find this?” It’s heavy, a flawlessly crafted circle about thirty centimeters across, with symbols carved on its face, close to its edge, framing about two-thirds of it. A right triangle protrudes from its center. Tarnish has given the metal a matte finish.

---