Glasswrights' Journeyman (11 page)

“Mair,” Rani interrupted. “The messenger.”

The Touched girl swallowed the rest of her vitriolic speech before continuing. “I thought at first that Rabe had sent the child.”

Rani nodded. She remembered Mair's lieutenant, a shrewd boy who had taken an immediate dislike to a young merchant girl turned guildsman who had fled her new caste. To be fair, Rani had done her best to provoke him. Still, the boy – now a man, Rani supposed – had done a good job leading his crew in the streets.

Mair continued. “This was no child I had ever seen, though. Whoever is leading her troop isn't doing a grand job, either. Th' puir bairn 'ad only a shift on, not a scrap o' cape i' th' mornin' chill.”

Rani realized that Mair had slipped back into the Touched patois that she had spoken all her youth, and she resisted the urge to smile. Fierce emotions always brought out Mair's rough past. “I'm sure you remedied that.”

Mair blinked. “Aye. The child proved lucky – the cloak I was wearing was a bit ragged at the seams. She might be able to keep it if the older children in her troop find it too shabby to fight over.”

“What did she
say
, Mair?” Whatever the message, it must have been disturbing. Mair was usually far more direct.

“Not much at all. But she handed me this.” Mair produced a scrap of parchment from the pouch at her waist, and Rani stopped to read.

Jair summons all his faithful children.

Rani turned the scrap over, but there was nothing else. “She had no other message?”

“Nothing. She took the cloak I gave her, and she ran.”

“But how do we know where to meet?”

“We've received no notice of a new place, so we'll go to the old.”

“But the old one burned to the ground!”

“We met below the ground, Rai. The guildhall cellar must have survived, or we'd have heard of another gathering spot.”

Rani lacked Mair's complacence, or the Touched girl's faith in the Fellowship's communication. Nevertheless, she followed Mair through the city streets. As they left behind the palace compound, there were fewer people about. In short order, the pair skirted the edge of the fire-blackened ruins, arriving at the quarter that had housed merchants before the conflagration. These streets had been home to Rani for the first twelve years of her life, but her heart quailed at entering them now.

“Mair, I haven't been in there since the fire.”

The Touched girl shrugged. “We'll be fine.”

“It isn't safe! You heard Wodurini.”

“It's safe enough. Besides, we have no choice, Rai. We'll stay on the main streets. We're just passing through to the Guildsmen's Quarter.”

Rani let herself be convinced, but the first few steps were the hardest. Black grit crunched beneath her hard-soled shoes, yielding up the sharp smell of charcoal. Rani could see where Davin's engines had felled entire rows of buildings – storefronts, with their homes above, collapsed upon themselves in heaps of rubble. Rainwater had drenched the destruction, working its own damage, washing away shattered, blackened timbers. Dirty puddles shimmered in front of scorched, smoke-stained buildings. Rani's heart began to beat faster.

She caught her breath as she ventured further into the ruins, nauseated by the stench of burned timber and melted stone. The paving stones of the road had shattered under the combined assault of hot flame and cold rain, and the path required all of her attention. Twice, Rani and Mair startled rats, and the animals were slow to slink away from the shapeless prey that they gnawed. Rani was grateful that the priests had already passed through this quarter. At least the dead had been carried out, committed to clean and purifying pyres.

The farther the two girls went, the greater the damage from the fire itself. Rani knew that one corner had boasted two silver shops and the finest woven goods in all of Moren, but now nothing remained of the rich shops. There, on that long street, had been the vendors of all things made of tin. And on yet another, there had been leather goods, stretching as far as the eye could see.

Now, all the wooden frames were charred to shadows, and sooty stone crumbled on cracked foundations. The sky was often blocked, and the breeze that whistled through the ruins was even colder than the one that blew in the king's courtyard.

And everywhere, Rani smelled the acid reek of soot. Charred wood, melted stone, ruined curtains and furniture, clothing and trade goods. The stench was thick enough that she thought her lungs would never breathe free. She raised her sleeve and held it across her nose, as if that would be enough to keep the smell of utter destruction from intruding.

Mair, though, led the way as if she had already prowled through these ruins. She chose turnings down the devastated streets, navigating by memory, for there were no more references, not a single cheerful merchant sign. She took them the long way around the open space that had been the marketplace – Hal's men were busy excavating that field, preparing it for rebuilding. It would not do to be seen in the ruins.

At last, they reached the burnt-out warren of streets that had formed the barrier between the merchants and the guilds, and then they walked on the broader streets of the Guildsmen's Quarter. Rani knew these passages less well than those that criss-crossed her childhood home.

Of course, she remembered where the ill-fated Glasswrights' Guild had stood. When she had been bound by her new caste's expectations, though, she had found few opportunities to explore the surrounding streets. Mair, as the leader of a Touched troop, had lived under no such restrictions. She led the way through the devastation with confidence.

Rani noticed that the ground beneath their feet bore many footprints. Fire or no, people had been prowling through the Guildsmen's Quarter. Rani commented on the traffic to Mair, who shrugged. “The Touched. They'll have scoured these streets from top to bottom. I would have brought in my troop as soon as it was cool enough to walk here.”

Rani looked about the desolate ruins. “What could you hope to find?”

“You know the Touched, Rai. The guildsmen, the King's Men - they'd pass over all sorts of treasures. The Touched might be the only folk in all of Moren to have grown richer from the fire.” The statement sent a shiver down Rani's spine; she could not help but think of the Touched she had seen in the firelung wards, coughing, gasping, hacking up black soot. Nevertheless, she was grateful for the feet that had passed this way, crossing and recrossing the girls' path. If not for the Touched, Mair's and Rani's footprints would have been conspicuous. They might have led any over-curious strangers to the Fellowship's secret meeting place.

“Here we are,” Mair said at last. Rani turned her head at an angle, and she managed to recognize the wall that had surrounded the Tilers' Guild. She could make out the kilns that had fired the guildsmen's pottery, the ruined sheds where apprentices had mixed huge vats of clay with shredded straw. She could see the pitiful remains of the garden that had fed the guild, the spidery trellises that had been erected for vines. A pang shot through Rani's heart as she looked around – so much of this blighted landscape resembled her own destroyed glasswrights' guild after the old king's soldiers had had their way with it, after they had torn it down and torched it for her supposed wrongdoings.

Mair, unencumbered by such haunting memories, picked her way across the sooty ground, grimacing at the cross-beamed structure that threatened to collapse at any moment. “Back here, Rai. The cellar opened onto the edge of the garden. Remember?”

Rani swallowed hard and forced herself to follow. Of course, Mair was right. The Fellowship's secret meeting house had been hidden from the street, hidden from casual onlookers. The tilers' gatekeeper was a member; that was how the Fellowship had been spirited past the guild's high walls.

The entrance to the cellar was set into massive stonework, as if its builder had anticipated that it would provide a refuge after some great disaster. The deep alcove had protected the oaken door – although the planks were darkened, they stood fast. Rani followed Mair down a handful of steps, gathering her skirts close to keep them from brushing against the blackened stairs. The door was slightly ajar, as if it had been forced inward by the fiery forces that had been at work throughout the quarter.

Mair paused for a moment and reached beneath her furred cloak. She fumbled among her garments, and then she withdrew some scraps of black fabric, as dark as the fire-charred wood around them. Her fingers moving with certainty despite the chill in the air, Mair separated out two pieces of cloth and passed one to Rani.

By time-honored custom, the Fellowship of Jair hid their faces from each other when they came together in a large meeting. Traditionally, that hiding took the form of long, full cloaks, with dark hoods that swept over the wearers' heads. The alternative, though, a fashion newly come to the secret conspirators, was a simple cloth mask, a loose hood that covered only the head, hanging down to the wearer's shoulders. The mask was a reflection of the truth that all the conspirators knew – the disguises were more symbolic than practical. Rani could recognize more than a dozen members of the Fellowship, black hoods or no.

Still, tradition was tradition. Mair must have snatched Rani's hood from its hiding place at the same time that she collected both girls' cloaks. Rani caught her breath as she pulled on the garment. It took a moment for her to find the eye-holes, and she fought down a momentary surge of panic as she could not see. Of course she was fine. Of course she could breathe. Mair was beside her, and all would be well.

Apparently unaware of Rani's scrambled panic, Mair glided down to the bottom stair. Her whisper was harsh as she said, “The spring rain nurtures the thistle and the thorn.”

Rain. Thistle. Thorn. The Fellowship's passwords were always vaguely ominous.

As if the entrance were controlled by Cor, the god of doors, the heavy oak swung inward, and Mair and Rani moved rapidly over the threshold. Rani blinked in the dark interior, willing her eyes to adjust to the single flickering candle at the end of the short corridor. Once again, Mair led the way as the girls walked toward the guttering flame.

Rani's heart leaped in her chest. She had certainly been to a number of Fellowship meetings in the past five years, and she'd spent her share of time lurking in dark hallways. This meeting place, though, seemed eerier than the others; it was more dangerous, with the timbers above the cellar creaking in the stiffening spring breeze. In the past, Rani had feared only that the Fellowship might be discovered. Now, she feared that they all might die, caught in the collapse of a ceiling loaded down with ruined wood.

Her morbid speculation was cut short as they stepped into a large room. The two girls were nearly the last to arrive – dozens of people already milled about the chamber, perhaps two score conspirators. There were a few whispers, a few surreptitious greetings among people who recognized each other beneath their symbolic black disguises. Mostly, there was a quiet sense of expectation.

Rani used the time to look about the room, to try to identify members of the Fellowship whom she knew outside of the cellar. Hal was the easiest to find – he stood by himself, at the dais at the front of the room. He must have escaped the palace from one of his secret passages. Over the years, he had become an expert at avoiding his retainers' watchful eyes. He wore his hood like all the other members of the Fellowship, but he was known to all in the room. Other fellows kept their distance from him, uncertain of the proper etiquette regarding an anonymous king. Uncertain, Rani thought, of the rumors that had begun to swirl through the anonymous company, rumors that said Hal had high hopes for the Fellowship, or at least for his place within its ranks.

Rani pushed aside such thoughts and extended her search, looking for the broad shoulders of a tall merchant-man. Borin. He had led the Merchants' Council when Rani's guild was destroyed, and he had helped a lost, confused girl find her way clear of conspiring forces. Rani had not consciously realized that she was worried about Borin's safety after the fire, but when she saw him across the room, her relief was palpable. She wondered if his bald head glistened beneath its black hood, as it had in the marketplace so long ago.

She did not have time for further speculation. A figure shuffled to the front of the room, moving jerkily as if weighted down by its hunched shoulders. The person's black mask was ragged; the eye holes looked as if they had been ripped with a rusty nail. The disheveled garment matched the newcomer's clothes, rough robes that seemed more patch than fabric. Rags wove between the knobby fingers, filthy scraps of cloth clearly intended to cushion swollen joints.

Glair – the leader of this cell of the Fellowship.

Rani had met the ancient Touched woman many times in the past. She admired the crone for maintaining an iron grip on her fellows, but she feared the old woman as well. Glair's leadership of the Morenian Fellowship turned order on its head. A Touched woman should not order about nobles, should not issue commands to merchants and soldiers and guildsmen, to the king of all Morenia.

Glair, though, was apparently not at all concerned about what she
should
do. Hunched almost double, she turned sideways like a crab and pulled her wretched body up the single step of a low dais at the front of the room. She rubbed at her right hip as if an ache shot down her side and then she raised one gnarled hand in a silent command. The door to the chamber was closed, the latch snicking audibly.

The old woman's voice echoed in the suddenly silent chamber, her Touched accent thick: “Blessed be Jair, 'oo watches o'er all our comin's 'n' goin's.”

“Blessed be Jair,” the assembly replied. Rani added her voice to the group's, and she heard Mair beside her. She resisted the urge to reach out and take her friend's hand.