As soon as the first note came from Yalosh Brindlemere’s lips, Cal knew he was in the presence of a master Water Singer. Unlike the other common Singer-class magicians, the magic of Water Singers was melodic, changing, and beautiful. The sound of a Steel Singer or a Stone Singer at work was hard to listen to. Their notes hummed on a loud, single pitch, filling a room and causing the listener to struggle to hear or think of anything else.
Yalosh’s water song was nothing like that. All Water Singing was pleasant to hear, but Yalosh’s singing was on another level. The spell started on a note so high that one would never have expected to hear it from such a big man. Then the music began to rise and fall in rhythmic flurries of small notes that fell like raindrops in the street around them.
And then real drops of water manifested in the air. The crowd gasped in amazement, for the sky above remained cold and blue, utterly free of any clouds and without a breath of wind, yet a sudden scatter of raindrops fell like glittering diamonds in the air around them, splashing onto the ground and making little dark spots on the dry stone where they landed.
Yalosh brought his hands slowly up, palms raised, as if summoning something from the ground. But instead of anything rising up from the ground, water suddenly flowed up from the palms of his own hands.
In perfect symmetry, seven jets of water blasted from each of the giant man’s hands. Six of the jets from each hand arched across to hit the twin windows of the Enchanter’s Emporium, while the remaining jets blasted forward and hit the glass of the door.
The notes of Yalosh’s song changed, and the crowd gasped again. Now, it sounded like there were two people singing. The two notes mingled in harmony, and then a third joined, a bass note that played a deep, leisurely counterpoint to the higher harmony. There was only Yalosh, though. Large as he was, he was only one person, but his song was the music of three voices mingling.
The crowd was as enthralled as Max and Cal were. For ten crowns at the rate of five per window, Cal certainly felt he was getting his money’s worth.
As the new notes joined the song, the water lit up. A dancing play of different colored lights shone through the water jets from an unseen source, making the jets of water look like streams of colored ink rather than plain water. And as the bass note grew in intensity, the water heated up. Steam flowed up from around the hands of the unlikely window-cleaner, and then to Cal’s amazement suds of soap appeared on the window glass, apparently out of nowhere. The jets of water, having at first worked their way up and down the windows, now strafed from side to side, washing the soap suds from the glass and leaving the windows gleaming, cleaner than Cal would have even thought possible.
The impressive light show continued as Yalosh Brindlemere sang his magic down to the bottom of the window frames. The brightly-lit water sloughed masses of soap suds down onto the street, and Yalosh stepped back, glancing down at the soapy water gathered around his feet.
His song quieted suddenly, the notes changing completely in an instant, and the water ceased blasting from his hands in jets and became one long, straight wave that moved swiftly, like a giant brush, to sweep the water and suds off the pavement and down into the gutter of the street.
The song ended, but again this was not the jarring, abrupt ending that the songs of other elemental singers usually had. Instead, the harmony faded out gently, giving the impression that it continued somewhere else, just out of hearing.
Yalosh Brindlemere turned, and the crowd that had gathered burst into spontaneous applause. Like a showman who is used to the adulation of his audience, Yalosh bowed, humbly accepting the enthusiasm of the crowd.
Then Cal saw the next stage of the play developing. He hadn’t anticipated it, but he realized that Yalosh Brindlemere must have known exactly what would happen. Many of the shopkeepers had come out of their shops to see what the fuss was, and they all began to make appointments with Yalosh to clean their windows too. In addition, the other people who’d been passing in the street began to tell Yalosh their addresses and ask him to come and see them when he had the time.
A few carriages had stopped to watch the show as well, and Cal saw at least one liveried footman descend from a wealthy-looking carriage to speak confidentially to Yalosh and slip him a piece of paper, presumably with the note of some rich person’s address.
Cal thought of the large and well-appointed houses of the wealthy people up in Castleview, and even of the expansive mansions of the eastern estates. At five crowns per window, Cal’s little shop might not be the most profitable place in the world for Yalosh, but Cal smiled as he imagined the giant man washing the many windows of a mansion. Five crowns per window - and possibly more if they were larger or more difficult to access - seemed like a more attractive rate when Cal looked at it that way.
Yalosh had his business model down. He was a window cleaner, but also a showman, and his approach to getting customers - by cleaning one person’s windows in a public setting to demonstrate his skill and the entertainment value of his services - seemed very smart and admirable to Cal.
“Wish we could get away with that kind of thing, eh?” Max said quietly.
“What d’you mean?” Cal asked as he watched Yalosh humbly accepting the praise of the crowd, and noting appointment times in an incongruously small notebook.
“Well, no overheads, for one thing. And getting the admiration and applause of the crowd like that. You can’t enchant in public, that’s for sure.”
Cal scratched his head. “No,” he said thoughtfully. “I guess not. Not with the way enchanting seals work, like we were discussing the other night. Mobile enchanting - now that would be an innovation. Hold on, I need to go and pay Yalosh for the windows.”
Cal dug into his pocket and found a gold 10-crown piece. He might have regretted the purchase of professional window cleaning even at this reasonable price if he hadn’t had all that new stock available, and more to come, but he was confident that he’d be making sales again before this day was out, and the shop front looked great, much better than it had before.
In fact, looking again at the shop Cal realized that the rest of the shop front appeared to have been cleared as well, even though there had been no sign of this happening while Yalosh had actually been at work. The Emporium had a low frontage of dark-painted wood that came up to a little below waist height below each of the large windows. This had never been anything much to look at - more functional than anything else - and Cal had never paid it much attention, but now it seemed to glow as if freshly varnished and polished.
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Even his little sign, made so well by Jason before they’d opened, looked fresh-painted and gleaming. There must be some deeper effect to Yalosh’s water magic that extended beyond the simple cleaning of the glass. Cal’s Emporium glowed like a jewel in the morning sun and he smiled as he slipped his ten crowns into the giant’s enormous hand.
“Thank you very much,” Cal said sincerely. “I have to say I wasn’t expecting quite such an impressive display, Yalosh.”
Yalosh winked one massive eye. “All part of the service,” he said, then added, “thank you.”
Cal knew exactly what Yalosh meant. He glanced at the dispersing crowd, many of whom had just signed up to have their windows cleaned by Yalosh. Thanks to Cal being the first customer, Yalosh had bagged a great deal of business.
“It’s going to be a busy week, now,” the giant said in satisfaction. “I’ll be back here to do a few more windows on this street later in the week.”
“Do you have a business card or something, so that I can contact you again if I need your services?” Cal asked.
The giant gave him an odd look. It was not a strange request, but Yalosh Brindlemere seemed to feel that it was somehow significant.
“Hmmm,” he said. He reached down into a pouch at his belt and drew out a small, embossed business card. Like his appointment book, this human-sized piece of stationery seemed incongruously small in the Yalosh’s huge hand.
He held the card out to Cal, gripped with extreme care between his finger and thumb. Cal took it, and asked impulsively, “Are you a giant, Yalosh?”
He’d heard of giants, of course, but of all the strange people and magical sentients that populated Jutlyn and the wider land of Roon, giants were one group who were not generally represented. Yalosh smiled through his enormous black beard and laughed quietly, the sound coming from a place very deep in his belly.
“No, Cal, not a giant. Just very large. Good day.”
He turned and strode away up the street, heading north away from the docks, toward the local market square. The people in the street - Cal included - stood and watched him go, his huge figure silhouetted dark against the bright sky. Abruptly, he turned the corner at the end of Sandweaver Street and was gone.
Cal felt like a spell had been lifted. He blinked as if waking from a doze and looked down, seeing the card in his hand.
Yalosh Brindlemere
Water Singer
TE: 341
“TE 341,” Cal said thoughtfully to himself. “That’s odd. No business address, just a telepathogram exchange number. I guess if I message him there he’ll get it, but it seems an odd way for a business card to be formatted. And it just gives his trade as Water Singer. I expected it to say Brindlemere’s Window Washing.”
He shrugged, tucking the card away into his pocket. Evidently there was a great deal more to Yalosh Brindlemere than met the eye. He was very mysterious, and the idea that a man with such an immense mastery of the Water Singer’s art should be making his living tramping the streets and cleaning windows for five crowns per pane seemed very counterintuitive.
“Well, well, I guess it takes all sorts,” he muttered. He turned away, looking for Max. The crowd had dispersed, the other merchants on the street going back to their shops, and the passers-by going on their way. The carriages were moving again, and except for the gleaming shop front and the swiftly-drying wet patch on the pavement outside Cal’s shop, there was no suggestion the mysterious giant man had ever been there.
Cal saw Max, then he smiled. Max hadn’t returned to the Emporium. Instead, he was standing on the other side of the street near the door to Maddie’s fabric shop. He was apparently deeply engaged in conversation with a lightly-built, brown-haired young woman who was listening closely toMax and laughing expressively at everything he said.
Cal grinned to himself, recognising the girl from Maddie’s shop. She must have come out to view Yalosh’s performance like everyone else. Whatever her name was and whatever her role, Cal guessed that Max would find out. He remembered the conversation about romance that he’d had with Max earlier that morning. From the looks of things, Max was interested in the young woman from the fabric shop.
Well, Max was younger than Cal, and though he was ambitious, his ambitions lay in different directions. Cal wanted to run his shop and make a success of it. For now, that was more than enough to satisfy him. Later, perhaps, he would think about marriage and settling down, but for now he had plenty to do without adding anything more.
Back inside the shop, Cal was struck by the difference the window cleaning had made. Perhaps it was just the fact that more light was getting in than before, but there seemed to be something extra in here, the same as there had seemed outside. The interior of the shop glowed as if every surface was freshly polished, every bit of wood freshly oiled, every charm newly-glazed. Cal breathed deep, the engrained homely scents of wood, smoke, and cooking giving him a profound sense of peace as he began to move around the shop, looking at his stock.
He checked that the little hand-lettered sign in the window was turned to Open, and then turned and was about to go back into the workshop when he caught sight of the plant pots.
The two earthenware pots were, like everything else in the shop, looking cleaner and more richly colored than they ever had before. One sat on each side of the door, balanced on the little tables that had been dug out and repaired from the junk that had populated the shop upon Cal’s moving in. Max had said that he’d bought some soil and seeds back when Cal had done the growth enchanting on the pots, but that seemed like ages ago now.
“Where did he put the soil and seeds?” Cal asked himself.
He had a quick look round the shop and soon found a bag of fine potting compost and a packet of little seeds marked Flowers: Mixed (Early).
“Good,” he said quietly. The compost and seeds had been stashed away in the lobby area at the back of the workshop, the little space that connected the workshop, the bathroom, and the back door that led out to the courtyard.
Giving the job some thought, Cal decided he’d be better to do this outside. He went to the front of the shop and glanced out the window, seeing Max apparently finishing up his conversation with Maddie’s assistant. Cal took the two enchanted plant pots and carried them to the back lobby, then opened the back door. Opening the door took a bit of effort - Cal hadn’t been out here for a while and the door was stiff.
As he pushed the back door open, he remembered how easily Max had gotten through it. “I really ought to enchant the door with a locking spell,” he said to himself. Then he remembered that to enchant a lock with a closure spell required a stealth enchantment, and that was one that he couldn’t do, not having the appropriate rune active on his table.
“Hmph,” he said. Darkworth had an enchanted lock, but he’d not had a stealth rune on his table either. He must have bought the lock from somewhere else. Or perhaps there had been another enchanter before him in this shop? Cal could ask Maddie when he saw her later, if he remembered.
He propped the door open and laid out his plant pots, his soil, and his seeds. Soon, he would have another enchanted product he could offer his customers, and he would brighten up his shop at the same time.