The Commission

In Hollow Reach the glass remembers, and that morning the workshop was loud with the memory of a hundred things, and Tovan moved among them carrying his master's breakfast and trying not to listen. He had grown up in the noise and had never grown used to it. Every pane in Master Halix's workshop held something — a promise made over a daughter's cradle, the taste of a wedding cake, the last clear sight a dying woman had wanted kept. Glass in Hollow Reach was not a window or a cup. Glass was a vessel for the things people could not bear to forget and could not bear to keep, and a glassmaker was the craftsman who took those things off their hands and set them, gently, into something that would hold. Tovan was sixteen, and four years an apprentice, and not yet trusted with anything that mattered. He swept. He fed the furnace. He ground the sand and washed the tools and carried the breakfast, and he listened, against his will, to the soft remembering hum of a hundred panes, and he waited for the day Master Halix would let him blow something true. That morning was the day, though it did not arrive the way Tovan had imagined it. Master Halix was old, and that winter he had been getting older faster, the way a fire gets smaller faster near its end. He took his breakfast at the cooling-bench and he did not eat it, and he watched Tovan sweep, and at last he said, "There is a commission." Tovan kept sweeping. Commissions were not his business. Commissions were Halix's, the master's, the work of a true glassmaker. "It is a large one," Halix said. "It is the largest I have ever been offered, and I am too old and too near the end to take it, and so I am going to give it to you, and you are going to hate me for it, and you should listen anyway." Tovan stopped sweeping. "The commission," Halix said, "comes from the House of Veil. You know the House of Veil." Everyone in Hollow Reach knew the House of Veil. They were the family that owned the river-locks, which meant they owned the water, which meant they owned, in the soft and total way of such things, the city. "They want a window," Halix said. "A single great window, to be set in the high hall of their house. And the window is to do a thing that no glassmaker of Hollow Reach has made glass do in my lifetime, Tovan, and the reason no one has made it is that it is very nearly impossible and the cost of failing is ruin." He looked at the boy. "They want a window that shows the truth. Stand before it, and it will show you not your face but the true state of the one who looks — what they have done, what they intend, what they have hidden. The House of Veil wants a window that cannot be lied to." Tovan did not understand, yet, why his master's voice had gone so careful. "Why us," he said. "Why not a master from the Hill. Why not someone—" he had been about to say someone better, and stopped himself. "Because the House of Veil has quarreled with every master on the Hill," Halix said, "and because they pay in advance, and because, Tovan, the fee is enough to clear the debt this workshop carries — the debt you do not know we carry, the debt that will fall on you when I am given to the river, because an apprentice inherits his master's bench and his master's bench's debts both." He folded his thin hands. "Take the commission, and make the window, and our family is free. Take it and fail, and the House of Veil will own the workshop, and own you with it, the way they own the water. Refuse it — and the debt comes to you anyway, in a year or two, and there will be no fee to answer it with." The hundred panes hummed their soft remembering hum, and Tovan stood in the middle of them with the broom still in his hands, and understood that his apprenticeship had ended, this morning, in the worst possible way: not with a gift of trust, but with a debt and an impossible task and a master too kind to leave him nothing and too honest to pretend the nothing was a kindness. "A window that shows the truth," Tovan said slowly. "Master. To make glass do a thing, you have to understand the thing. I have watched you make glass remember a taste, a promise, a face. But the truth—" He turned the word over. "I do not even know what the truth is. How do I blow a thing into glass when I cannot say what the thing is?" And Master Halix smiled, for the first time that morning, a small and tired and not unhopeful smile, because his apprentice had, without knowing it, asked exactly the right question, and a craftsman who asks the right question on the first morning is a craftsman who has a chance. "Good," the old man said. "That is the commission, Tovan. That has always been the commission. Now come and sit, and let me tell you everything I know, which is not enough, and then you will have to go and find the rest."