22

As much as I was happy to be done with my externally driven projects, I had gotten used to being busy. Sure lazy days were nice, but the two years of constant struggle for survival, followed by months of constant magical labor, had managed to beat an approximation of the Puritan work ethic into me. Maggie bore the brunt of my new energy and time, we spent hours most days studying magic. DuMorne and Ebenezer hadn't taught me as intensely, but they both had other jobs and responsibilities. Since I wasn't squandering my time creating warlocks to overthrow the White Council and destroy creation, or being the Council's wet work man, I could put more effort into teaching her. She learned quickly, and was far more skilled than I had been at her age. Part of that was in the similar nature of our power and part was her aptitude. Her mother had been very smart, and most people didn't call me stupid; ignorant, foolish, stubborn and thick-headed yes, but rarely stupid. I wasn't sure if it was just my fatherly pride talking, but Maggie was very clever, and grasped most concepts readily. We didn't spend all our time with magic, I didn't want to burn her out, but it was so much fun it certainly was our focus.

The other major recipient of my time was trying to introduce new technologies. A lot of the modern conveniences I missed relied on technologies that were impossible on a renaissance industrial base. Low power steam engines were the current limit of metallurgical efforts, and even then they were expensive. Mangini was using his to pump water from mines, where they were just barely cheaper than human labor. I knew they'd improve in time, especially as they were widely adopted and more brainpower was brought to bear, but I wanted them now. I had hit similar limits in most of my uplift efforts. It was fine to know that sending electrical signals down a wire was the basis of a telegraph, but it was useless to actually build one. I wasn't an engineer, I didn't have the knowledge of minutiae in all fields, from naval engineering to chemistry, and I felt I had hit the limits of my pre-existing knowledge. Naturally I sought to solve the problem with fire.

"More heat Maggie!" She pushed her sweat-damped hair from her face and groaned.

"It'll just set the balloon on fire again! It's not working!" Despite her defeatist attitude she raised her blasting road and sent another stream of flame into the cloth enclosure. I had thought hot air balloons were within reach, and rather than small scale experiments to get ready, I had bought and painstakingly sewed a fifteen foot diameter sack and had Maggie try to set it on fire. Or fill it with hot air, she had trouble distinguishing between the two. The cloth started to smoke, but I was able to pull the heat out of it, unfortunately that cooled the air inside. We had been at it all afternoon in the wetlands lining the lagoon, and it was starting to get dark, but I wasn't ready to call it a day just yet.

"Once more, with feeling!" Maggie glared and sent a bar of flame into the bag, this time I was too slow to save it. The sight of a flaming balloon, like a giant sky lantern, rapidly ascending distracted me a little. As we watched it climb into the darkening sky I walked over to Maggie who did not look at all displeased by the outcome. "For all of your excellent traits, why did you have to keep my inclination towards burning things?" She smirked as she watched the balloon rise.

"At least it was only a balloon, and the wind will sweep it out to sea. When I've destroyed a block we can talk." Telling her some of my more pyromaniac approved adventures had been a clear parenting mistake.

"Whatever. Get to my age and then we'll compare records." Her grin hadn't wavered but I was determined to be the mature one in the family and refrained from further commentary. "Any ideas on went wrong with the balloon? I didn't think we'd have too much trouble."

"Well while you were standing back and shouting, I was carefully observing it. It looked like hot air was going through the fabric, not lifting it."

One more technical problem, paper or parchment would probably work for a small one, but if I wanted to get people aloft I'd need something more durable. "I really didn't think this would be so hard, it's such a simple thing."

"Don't worry about it, instead just think what the people will think of a ball of fire traveling through the night sky." Looking up the balloon was still visible, the fires were still burning and it was moving quickly towards the ocean.

"With my luck Viserys will think its a dragon, and ask for my help to track it down." Maggie laughed and we began to walk back to catch the ferry.

Despite my worries, two nights later Viserys didn't mention the balloon. He was a decent student, clever and attentive, but arrogant. I didn't even really teach him, I just gave him the books I had, and messed around in my lab while he read them and occasionally asked questions. The magic of this world was strange and unknown to me, and I made sure he knew that coming in, but learning and talking about it was fun. I had removed all the books that discussed black magic, leaving mostly scrying spells and discussions on the Valyrian sorceries. He was predictably most interested in those, dragon binding and shaping stone would catch the imagination of any boy, much less a descendent of previous users. Magic in this world was said to have been linked to the dragons, and when they died the greater part was lost. None of the rituals we tried worked, whatever secrets Quaithe and the shadowbinder knew weren't written down. Viserys took it in surprisingly good grace, apparently trying to resurrect the dragons had been an obsession of the Targaryen kings, leading to tragedy every time. While he was disappointed as I with our failures, I think he saw the weekly magic discussions as an entertaining break from his increasingly heavy workload from Noho, who was responsible for his and his sister's education.

Currently though he wasn't even pretending to read, and was watching me closely. At the last Voyagers Club a man had been complaining about his Myrish glass window being broken and I had managed to purchase the shards. I knew glass could be made by melting sand and had done it, but I didn't know what was added to make it clear. Having clear glass on hand would let me experiment with it, as well as possibly identifying what else went into it. Using my molten metal lifting focus I was holding a ball of molten glass in the air, and trying to mold it into a lens. Shaping the floating liquids in midair was easy after the thousands of compasses but I didn't have a firm idea on what shape lenses should be. A little magnification was easy to achieve but I was hoping for a microscope. The work would have been simple except that I needed to let the glass cool, it was at least a thousand degrees, before I could look through it. After six or seven tries I was satisfied ,and flipped the now cool lense to Viserys, who caught it. "What is it" he asked holding it up, one eye comically enlarged, "A Myrish eye? I think you'd be better selling your compasses for all the work that took."

"Not quite, you'll see next week I think." I could feel someone approaching the wards, Noho was just about due. Viserys handed me back the lens, and marked his spot in the book he was reading.

"Either your printers are making lots of typos," the word had caught on fast even here, "or that author could hardly spell, it was like a different language at times." For all books on magic I had the printers exactly copy the words, I didn't know if it would matter but more accuracy was usually better in magic.

"Hopefully the latter, they're paid well enough for it."

With Viserys gone Maggie emerged. Neither of them really liked the other, Viserys was both in the girls are gross years and jealous of her power, and Maggie didn't see him as worth her time. Plus she was taller than him. "The 'dragon' is gone?" Oh she also thought his ambitions were ludicrous.

"He's gotten better, he didn't even mention he should be king this time." Maggie laughing at him to his face may have been a little rude, but he did tend to go on about it. "Enough about him though, take a look at this."

She examined the lens before setting it down. "Well we'll finally get to see if boiling all of our water these past few years was worth it."

"Please, you still like heating water by throwing fire into it. If you had your way when I first taught you, you'd have left Braavos sitting on the bedrock with the ocean boiled away."