Free Jovah's Angel by Sharon Shinn Page B

handcrafted from start to finish by the master and an inferior piece in which a student had sloppily followed his teacher’s design. Besides, Hammad could afford to pay the price for Caleb’s services, whether the task was menial or inventive, and anyway, Caleb didn’t mind a little simple honest toil now and then. So he took care with the pipes, and laid them exactly where they should go, and soldered them at the joints with slow precision. When he finally got to constructing the housing for the steam unit, he would be able to rest secure in the knowledge that none of the pipes would blow under the whoosh of sudden pressure.
    By the time he left at sunset, he was tired with the self-satisfied weariness that comes after hard work on a worthwhile project. Walking unhurriedly home, he paused at a street vendor’s to buy a paper cup of hot chocolate, and he had finished it by the time he passed a meat-seller’s fire on the next corner. He dropped the cup into the flames, exchanged nods with the vendor, and continued on his way home.
    He lived in three rooms over a bakery, a small apartment filled with light and the luscious scent of rising yeast. In the three years he had lived there, he didn’t think a single day had gone by that he had not paused, morning or night, to buy a loaf or a pastry from the proprietor or one of her five daughters. “If you sleep by water, you dream of water” his mother had used to say (for she had grown up a stone’s throw from the Galilee River). If youslept by a bakery, you ate bread, and never tired of it.
    Tonight the friendly, gray-haired woman wrapped his rolls for him with a knowing smile. “You’ve got company upstairs,” she said. “I told her you usually came back about this time, but that sometimes you don’t, but she said she would wait. I left her on the landing outside your door.”
    Since the landing was really a lacework iron balcony, the waiting quarters were not especially cramped; but Caleb was expecting no visitors. “Company?” he repeated. “Who?”
    â€œShe didn’t give her name.” The baker leaned forward to whisper. “But she’s an angel.”
    He knew only one angel. “Dark-haired? Beautiful?”
    â€œThat would be her.”
    â€œHunh. Wonder what—How long has she been here? Did you feed her? Maybe I should get a couple extra rolls.”
    â€œTwenty minutes or so. And she bought her own rolls.”
    He grinned and left the bakery, taking the sturdy metal stairs two at a time. At the top of the landing, leaning against the railing with her folded wings toward him, Lilah waited. She must have heard his feet clattering on the stairs, but she did not face him until he spoke.
    â€œAh, the beautiful, mysterious stranger that has long been foretold,” Caleb greeted her. “Great messenger of light, how may I serve you?”
    Now she slowly turned around to survey him. “And I thought I was sarcastic,” she observed. “But you outdo me.”
    â€œI doubt that,” he said, unlocking the door. He had, more as an experiment than from any fear that someone would steal his meager belongings, outfitted the door with a complex mechanical baffle that even Noah had been unable to untangle. “Come right in. If I’d known you were going to be here, I would have brought you some beer.”
    â€œI’ve already refreshed myself, thank you very much,” she said, following him inside. “I drink very lightly before a performance.” She met his quizzical look with a bland smile. “And sometimes more heavily than I ought to afterward, but only sometimes.”
    â€œI’ve never seen you in a drunken stupor,” he said. “So I believe you. Are you hungry? I have rolls and I believe I have some shrunken oranges. I wasn’t expecting company, you see.”
    â€œNot hungry, thanks. Though I’ll sit down if