The Invisible Hand by Chris Northern

Author:Chris Northern
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: fantasy, epic, magic
Publisher: Chris Northern

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The secret of success is to recognise an opportunity when you see it. And then to exploit it. Not that I had been looking, in fact. The truth was that I had been running away. Someone had tried to kill me, and not even for a good reason. Someone had started a rumour and the lie had been believed. The lie had festered in a man's mind and prompted him to act, to take a knife and wait for an opportunity to stick the blade in me. Luck had saved me, and not for the first time. Death was that close, that arbitrary. There were more than six thousand people crammed into Darklake. If they all decided to kill me, I was dead; simple as that. I hadn't been able to face going back inside the walls, to walk among them, to be a target for any damn fool with a weapon in his hand. I had not been able to face it, so I'd thought of an excuse to do something else. A little exploring, a casual investigation into what was happening outside the town, to judge how soon Darklake would begin to pay me back for my investment. A ride in the woodland to the south. Not something that needed doing, but an excuse to be doing something. The invisible hand would see my investments grow without supervision; each individual’s self-interest would motivate them to use the money loaned for their own benefit, and the consequences of that would benefit me to one degree or another. I could just let them get on with it but sometimes there was further advantage to be had by helping things along.

"A waterwheel?"

The turner seemed puzzled by the suggestion. He had stripped a sapling, bent it like a bow, a cord fixed to the end of the sapling, wrapped around the piece to be turned, and fixed to a foot treadle. Each time he pressed the pedal the wood spun so that he could work it with a chisel, then the sapling sprang back slowly but firmly. He'd stopped work as soon as we arrived. He stood now in a pool of curled shavings and looked up at me with a puzzled expression on his face.

"Like a mill?" He said.

He'd been nervous at first, him and the two lads building a charcoal stack on the edge of a small clearing. Four riders coming through the trees toward them in what for him must be uncertain times; I could see his point. But he'd recognised me and relaxed a little. Now he was just curious and a little confused.

"If a waterwheel provides enough power to turn a mill, don't you think you could syphon off enough to turn a lathe?" I was leaning forward on the saddle-horn, trying not to loom over him too much. Sapphire and my guards weren't far away but none of them seemed interested. I'm not sure the turner was, either.

He cocked his head to one side and considered it, then gestured to the sapling.

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