The Name of the Wind

Moving carefully, I ran through the decanting procedure in my head, making sure I hadn’t forgotten anything. It was so cold that my breath hung white in the air. The sweat on my hands froze my fingers to the canister’s fastenings the same way a curious child’s tongue sticks to a pump handle in the dead of winter.

I decanted about an ounce of the thick, oily liquid into the pressure vial and quickly applied the cap. Then I made my way back to the fume hood and started preparing my materials. After a few tense minutes, I began the long, meticulous process of preparing and doping a set of blue emitters.

My concentration was broken two hours later by a voice behind me. It wasn’t particularly loud, but it held a serious tone you never ignore in the Fishery.

It said, “Oh my God.”

Because of my current work, the first thing I looked at was the bone-tar canister. I felt a flash of cold sweat roll over me when I saw black liquid leaking from one corner and running down the worktable’s leg to pool on the floor. The thick timber of the table’s leg was almost entirely eaten away, and I heard a light popping and crackling as the liquid pooling on the floor began to boil. All I could think of was Kilvin’s statement during the demonstration: In addition to being highly corrosive, the gas burns when it comes in contact with air....

Even as I turned to look, the leg gave way and the worktable began to tip. The burnished metal canister tumbled down. When it struck the stone floor, the metal was so cold it didn’t simply crack or dent, it shattered like glass. Gallons of the dark fluid burst out in a great splay across the workshop floor. The room filled with sharp crackling and popping sounds as the bone-tar spread across the warm stone floor and started to boil.

Long ago, the clever person who designed the Fishery placed about two dozen drains in the workshop to help with cleaning and managing spills. What’s more, the workshop’s stone floor rose and fell in a gentle pattern of peaks and troughs to guide the spills toward those drains. That meant as soon as the container shattered, the wide spill of oily liquid began to run off in two different directions, heading for two different drains. At the same time it continued to boil, forming thick, low clouds, dark as tar, caustic, and ready to burst into flame.

Trapped between these two spreading arms of dark fog was Fela, who had been working by herself at an out-of-the-way table in the corner of the shop. She stood, her mouth half open in shock. She was dressed practically for work in the shop, light trousers and a gauzy linen shirt cuffed at the elbow. Her long, dark hair was pulled back into a tail, but still hung down to nearly the small of her back. She would burn like a torch.

The room began to fill with frantic noise as people realized what was happening. They shouted orders or simply yelled in panic. They dropped tools and knocked over half-finished projects as they scrambled around.

Fela hadn’t screamed or called for help, which meant no one but me had noticed the danger she was in. If Kilvin’s demonstration was any indication, I guessed the whole shop could be a sea of flame and caustic fog in less than a minute. There wasn’t any time....

I glanced at the scattered projects on the nearby worktable, looking for anything that could be of some help. But there was nothing: a jumble of basalt blocks, spools of copper wire, a half-inscribed hemisphere of glass that was probably destined to become one of Kilvin’s lamps....

And as easy as that, I knew what I had to do. I grabbed the glass hemisphere and dashed it against one of the basalt blocks. It shattered and I was left with a thin, curved shard of broken glass about the size of my palm. With my other hand I grabbed my cloak from the table and strode past the fume hood.

I pressed my thumb against the edge of the piece of glass and felt an unpleasant tugging sensation followed by a sharp pain. Knowing I’d drawn blood, I smeared my thumb across the glass and spoke a binding. As I came to stand in front of the drench I dropped the glass to the floor, concentrated, and stepped down hard, crushing it with my heel.

Cold unlike anything I’d ever felt stabbed into me. Not the simple cold you feel in your skin and limbs on a winter day. It hit my body like a clap of thunder. I felt it in my tongue and lungs and liver.

But I got what I wanted. The twice-tough glass of the drench spiderwebbed into a thousand fractures, and I closed my eyes just as it burst. Five hundred gallons of water struck me like a great fist, knocking me back a step and soaking me through to the skin. Then I was off, running between the tables.