The Glass Key

By S. A. Barton

Daniel is apprenticed to a master tinker in the Kingdom of Chicagoland, a society built in the ruins of the old high-tech world. When he breaks a piece of precious ancient glass, Master Nieve commands him to journey to a landfill guarded by ancient war bots to secure more. From there, he will find that the ancient world isn't as dead as everyone believes, and he'll have to think fast to survive!

• Language: English
• Publisher: S. A. Barton
• Release date: Sep 1, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370843428

S. A. Barton

S.A. Barton knows third person bios look professional, but he doesn't care for them nonetheless.I prefer to be more personal, partly because overcompartmentalization is a former flaw I remain mindful of. As a (recently diagnosed) autistic/ADHD human, I have many reasons to remain mindful and many rewards for doing so. I dislike the label disability but understand it does sometimes apply to me and my work–but enough about that.I live in the Chicagoland exurbs near parentals and my sole sibling and her family, where the city is in reach but the deer are closer. Like many writers I often live in my own head; I prefer to be close to nature and select humans daily so I don't stay there.My children live in Virginia with their mom and her husband. Buy more of my books, please: help finance some in-person visits because thrice-weekly videocalls are good but not the same as IRL hugs.My writing is diverse and reflects all of the above as well as roughly four decades of personal seeking and many jobs beginning with my rural Wisconsin roadside worm stand, begun to finance an RPG habit in 1981 and shut down by the state when my success began luring customers from the local bait shop.You'll find my more polished and mostly self-published fiction here; so far my nonfiction lives with my visual art and select fiction on Patreon.com/sabarton and Twitter.com/sabartonwrites :)

Book preview

License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for supporting a self-published author.

The Glass Key

By S.A. Barton

Copyright 2017

Smashwords Edition

See more from S.A. Barton:

Twitter @Tao23

Authorsite Seriously Eclectic

Patreon

Contents:

License notes and title

The beginning

1/3 through

2/3 through

The Glass Key

Daniel leaned, knees loose and holding himself up with outstretched palms against the glass wall of the atrium outside Master Tinker Nieve's rooms, panting. Even the energy of youth – Daniel was newly a manling, just beginning his thirteenth summer – bowed to a twenty-five story climb. Fifty flights. Eighteen steps per flight. Unlike many people he was numerate; he’d done the math. Nine hundred steps. He’d learned not to complain. The master would only say, uphill, both ways, chuckle, and refuse to elaborate.

The view of the lake through the glass was the antidote to the goosebumps he always got jogging up those shadowed stairwells. The flights were lit only by a single ancient glowforever each, and it was barely enough illumination to see where he was putting his feet. The shadows lay dense in the dim shafts, like black webs woven by the ghosts of a thousand spiders. And as he went he felt those phantom spiders plucking at him, at his neck and hair and clothes and back, every step of the way.

He'd been apprenticed at eight summers' age as was tradition for those fortunate enough to have a master, and had never shaken the chilly fear of the daily ascent and descent. But he walked it six days each week anyway, because needful things had to be done no matter how he felt about them. An apprentice quickly grew to understand duty or he wasn’t an apprentice long. He could make the climb, or lose his position as apprentice and be shamed – and, more importantly, lose his chance to master a trade.

The Kingdom had many beggars and unskilled workers without trades, and their lives were hard, very hard, and tended to end early in unmarked ditches dug in fallow fields. Their corpses were left to rot and fertilize the ancient soil for future plantings. Maybe two thousand years of crops had wrung much fertility out of the dirt and maybe it was a needful custom, but it was still terrible to hear the bones of the poor breaking under the iron keels of the plows in the spring sowing. Daniel had no desire to add his own bones to the crop.

Even a moderately successful master at trade could afford a place in a proper graveyard and a stone to bear his name into the future, and preserve his spirit to join the Ancestors. And Daniel meant to be more than a moderate success, although sometimes he wondered what talent he really had in him. After all, does anyone ever aim to be mediocre? And yet, so many end their days just that.

Daniel gazed out through the great window, a pane almost twice his height and fully thrice the span of his arms. It was a gull's eye view: in the distance below, like toys, a scatter of a hundred fishing boats plied the waters of Lake Michigan along the gentle curve of the shore. The morning sun sparkled on the low rippling waves around the boats and caught on the lines and nets and flopping fish of a thousand fisherfolk. The ancient glass was clean today, the outside washed by powerful thunderstorms that passed in the night and left cloudless azure sky behind them. The inside was clean, too, except for his handprint. It would be his job another day to wash it away. Cleaning glass was the easiest of his jobs. The ancient glass was amazingly slick, far smoother than any modern glass, even from the best glaziers. Dirt fell away with the simple wipe of a cloth, or the fall of a raindrop. Its qualities, like so many other things, were lost secrets. Dead with the ancients who had left their empty cities to today’s degenerated society.

The view was worth the climb and it never got old, but Daniel didn't look long. Master Nieve was expecting him.

Unlike some masters of trades, Nieve hired no guard to watch his door. It was unlocked and ajar, meaning the master was home – though few who wished to buy Nieve’s wares came to walk through it. A few did come by invitation, but most met the master at market and asked for what they wished, trusting Nieve’s excellent and long reputation that whatever he delivered would suit them.

Inside, the broad haggleroom was lit by wide windows that had lost their glass long, long ago. The great rectangular gaps were equipped with thick wooden shutters, now open wide in the fair weather. A screen of fine netting that undulated slowly with the breeze kept insects and birds from flying in. Another, coarser net covered the ceiling, holding dozens of glowforever balls clustered and singly. Below those pale spheres of phosphor was a maze of fifty or more tables and low open shelves, all handmade of salvaged metals and plastics and woods. It was a trove of treasure, but no thieves came; legend said that a bot guarded it, though Daniel had never seen one.

Collectively the tables held thousands of things, from ancient gadgets both repaired and not, to handmade cookware and utensils, and blown and knapped glass, and new tools and devices improvised from the parts of ancient things the master could not repair, or had not yet found time to.

Daniel passed through the maze quickly, his footsteps muffled by a multitude of overlapping rugs both ancient and new. A glance told him the hearth and forge beside the window were cold, so the master was working elsewhere. And he had no need to dally to see the treasures of the haggleroom – he’d seen them all a thousand times. A few of them, he’d even made with his own hands. Those few were simple things, but the master had judged him worthy to make them. Many apprentices were not permitted to make goods for trade before their fifteenth summer regardless of their skills, but Nieve said that it should be readiness that determined when an apprentice was ready to craft, not blind tradition.

It was easy to forget how lucky he was to have a thoughtful master, so Daniel made it a habit to give thanks to the Ancestors every time he arrived. He whispered it under his breath as he opened the door to the next room.

More shelves, more treasures – but on floors of bare concrete and arrayed around a broad open work area. The room was even more brightly lit than the haggleroom, and in the middle of a square of heavy scarred worktables stood Master Nieve. He was brown, a bit leathered with countless years of weather and sun, and lightly wrinkled with smile and laugh lines. His hair was the shocking white of virgin snow on a bright cloudless day – his namesake. It had been so, Daniel's grandmother once told him, since she was a girl at least. Nobody had tales of Nieve's youth. Nobody. And nobody knew Nieve’s age.

Daniel. You're well today? Master Nieve didn't look up as he spoke, but kept his eyes intently on his work: a glass knife on a folded deerskin before him, the little blade surrounded by a sparkling galaxy of tiny glass chips. Glass knives were