Star's Reach (14 page)

At any rate, Berry and I went right to sleep.
We didn’t bother to keep watch, since we wouldn’t have much of a
chance to get away if Plummer and the old couple did plan on
handing us over to somebody, and it had been quite a few days since
we’d had a chance to sleep on real pallets with blankets and all. I
slept hard, and if I dreamed about the ruins of Deesee that night I
didn’t remember it when sunset came and the old woman knocked on
the door to wake us up.

The old couple gave Plummer a sack of food
for the road and wished us all a safe journey, and as soon as it
was good and dark the three of us slipped back to the road and
headed north toward Luwul. When we were out of sight of the house,
Plummer turned to me and said, “By morning there will be no one in
that house, and no sign that anyone has been there in weeks. In
case you were wondering.” The moon gleamed on his eyeglasses, so I
couldn’t see his eyes; I think he wanted me to ask a question, but
I didn’t know what question to ask, so I let it be.

That night we had to leave the road twice,
once early on when a wagon came rumbling by and once later, a
little before midnight, when the sound of hooves off behind us
warned of horsemen coming our way. There were three of them, riding
fast, but they didn’t keep us from getting to the next safe place
Plummer had in mind. That was another ruin, most of a klom away
from the road in a little patch of forest between two farms. Like
the one where we’d met Plummer, it had a roof to keep out weather,
and Plummer showed us where somebody had stacked dry firewood; it
was in a place you couldn’t see unless you knew where to look, with
a bit of oiled cloth over it to keep the damp off during the rainy
season. We didn’t need a fire; it was a fine clear day, pleasantly
cool except around midday, the kind of weather most of Meriga gets
more often than not in winter. I nodded and thanked Plummer, and
wondered why he’d showed the wood to me.

So we hid there through the day, made a good
meal of the old couple’s food before getting some sleep, ate
another as the sun went down, and got ready for our last day on the
road with Plummer. “By morning we will reach Luwul,” he said as we
filled our packs, “and there our paths part for the time being. The
ruinmen’s hall is on this side of the city, just outside the gates,
which should be convenient for you. By the time you get there,
however, I will be gone.”

I thought he was joking, and laughed. Still,
that’s the way it happened. We spent the night walking through farm
country; the road went nearly due north by the stars, and we all
kept an eye out for watchers and an ear listening for any sign of
pursuit, but the only thing we saw was the slow turning of the
stars and the only thing we heard was, toward dawn, the first
roosters making noise and clattering and voices here and there as
farm hands headed out for the earliest chores. The east turned
gray, and then the rest of the sky did, and about the time the
first glow of sunlight hit a few scattered clouds high up above us
and the sky went blue, and the farms gave way to market gardens and
then to rows of houses, I glanced toward Plummer and suddenly
realized that he wasn’t there.

Berry hadn’t seen him leave either. We stood
there like a couple of fools in the middle of the road, looking at
each other, and then laughed and shrugged and kept going. The first
wagons were rumbling in from the market gardens to the city, but
we’d already seen the ruinmen’s hall rising up over the roofs into
the morning sky, and we decided to finish the trip as quick as
possible and let the stout door of the ruinmen’s hall be our answer
to anybody who was after us.

I’m not sure what it is about ruinmen’s
halls. Other guilds either buy a couple of houses and tear out the
walls between them, if they’re poor, or build something for
themselves toward the center of town if they’re rich. Nobody wants
the ruinmen in town, of course, which is why our halls are always
outside the gates, but you might think ruinmen would build the same
sort of halls as the others. Not a chance; it’s always some
improbable chunk of salvage from the old world, tipped up on end so
it rises up above everything else and can’t be ignored.

Luwul’s was no exception. Some bright boys a
long time ago, back when metal was cheap, hauled half a dozen old
airplanes from wherever they got left when the fuel ran out, cut
off the wings and the tails, and propped them up on end in a circle
as though they were all about to fly off together to the moon. That
gave them six tall towers, and they used the wings and other
salvaged metal to make walls to fill the spaces between the towers,
and put in floors every three meedas or so; the rooms for traveling
ruinmen were right there in the bodies of the planes, so you could
look out the little oval window next to your pallet and see the
walls and roofs of Luwul against the sky, if you were on one side,
or the farms south of town stretching away toward the hills if you
were on the other.

We saw the towers from a couple of kloms
away, so we didn’t have any trouble finding the hall, and we didn’t
have any trouble on the way there, either. We got to the guild hall
just as the sun came up. The houses of the misters around the hall
were empty and silent—everyone would be living in tents at whatever
ruin they were working that season—but the hall itself, like every
ruinmen’s hall everywhere, was always open and always had people in
it.

The door was big and made of riveted metal,
and it boomed when I knocked on it. After a moment it opened, and
an old man in ruinman’s leathers stood there. He had a wooden leg,
which explained why he wasn’t out at the ruins, and he gave me the
same sort of dubious look I imagine doorkeepers at ruinmen’s halls
must always give people who come knocking at sunrise.

“Trey sunna Gwen, a Mister from Shanuga,” I
said. “This is my prentice Berry.”

The man’s face changed suddenly; he grabbed
my arm and all but pulled me inside, and motioned Berry to follow.
As soon as we were in, he shut the door hard, and dropped the bar
back into place. “Mister Trey,” he said then. “We’ve heard about
what you’re carrying. I’ll have someone go get the misters; there’s
trouble you need to know about.”

It wasn’t half an hour later that Berry and I
were sitting in the big main room of the Luwul ruinmen’s hall with
a couple of the senior misters. We’d had a chance to wash up and
get some food, but they still had dirt from the Luwul ruins on
their leathers; they’d come back as fast as they could once word of
our arrival got to them. I wasn’t sure yet why one of the prentices
at the hall had gone sprinting out to the ruins as soon as we’d
gotten settled in at the hall, but it was pretty clear that we’d
stumbled into a mother of a mess.

“Word got here about two weeks ago,” said
Mister Bron. He was one of the senior misters in the Luwul guild, a
big burly man with one eye gone and a scar from whatever did it
that ran halfway down his face. “Upriver from Duca with the
boatmen, and then downriver from Sisnaddi the same way. We didn’t
think too much of it, rumors being rumors, until we got a letter
from Jennel Cobey Taggart.”

“Who’s he?” I asked. “I don’t think I’ve
heard of him.”

“No?” Bron’s eye turned to look at me.
“Shanuga’s further out of the way than I thought. He’s a big name
these days. The Taggarts are an old Tucki family, cousins of the
presden’s or something like that, and they’ve had a house here in
Luwul since I don’t know when. Jennel Cobey’s usually either in
Sisnaddi or out on the borders with the armies, but the letter came
from here and had his private seal on it, and it asked about you.
By name.”

I blinked. “That’s a surprise.”

Bron laughed, a short deep laugh that seemed
to come from somewhere down past the floor. “True enough.”

“What did it say?”

“Mostly that the jennel wants to talk to you
as soon as you get to Luwul. I’ll let you see it, if you like.” He
motioned to one of the prentices who were hanging back, listening
but trying not to look like that was what they were doing. “Frey,
get the letter from Marsh, will you?”

The prentice hurried off. Berry gave me a
worried look, though it wasn’t half so worried as I was feeling
right then. “What do you figure he means by that?” I asked.

“That’s what we don’t know,” said Bron.

I thought about that for a long moment.
People don’t trouble the guilds often, and they trouble ruinmen
even less than they do the other guilds. Annoy the gunsmiths or the
doctors or the radiomen, and they turn away your business from then
on, which can be bad enough; annoy the ruinmen, though, and you
might just find out what kind of nasty things hang around in old
ruins. I heard of two people who thought they could rob ruinmen and
get away with it, and both of them had their hair fall out, took
sick, and died a couple of months later. Not that anything ever got
proved, you understand. Still, not even ruinmen could get away with
doing that to a jennel, and especially to a jennel who had
connections at the presden’s court.

I knew that part of what Bron was telling me
was that if this Jennel Cobey sent for me, I didn’t have much
choice in the matter. Even if Berry and I left the guild hall and
tried to make a run for it out of Luwul, once it came out that we’d
stopped at the hall, there would be six kinds of trouble to pay
for; ruinmen are supposed to protect each other no matter what, but
“no matter what” in this case could be soldiers battering down the
doors of the guild hall and sticking the misters’ heads on spikes
over Luwul’s gates. There are times when you can ask for people to
make good on their promises, and there are times when you know
better.

The prentice came back with the jennel’s
letter, then, and Bron told him to go wash up and get a clean shirt
on. I didn’t listen too closely, because the letter took some
reading; it was written in the long curving letters the presden’s
court uses these days, and used all the old names of towns, which I
didn’t know too well then. I made sure Berry could see it, in case
he had to help me with it, and started reading. This is what it
said:

To the misters of the Ruinmens’ Guild of
Louisville, my greetings. A ruinman of Chattanooga, Trey son of
Gwen, is traveling through this part of the country on his way to
the scholars at Bloomington. If he comes to your guildhall, I will
consider it a personal favor if you contact my people here in town
at once. I want to talk with him.

— General Cobey Taggert

I looked up from the letter.

“You’d better send somebody to the jennel’s
house,” I told him.

He nodded. “I don’t know anything else we can
do.”

“As for the letter, I’ve got two copies, one
for Melumi and one that’s mine. I’d like to leave one here.”

Bron nodded again. “I see. Good. Yes, and we
can get it to Melumi, in case.”
In case you don’t come back
was what he was too polite to say, of course.

So the prentice Bron sent to wash up went
trotting off to Jennel Cobey’s house as fast as he could. I got out
one of the two copies of the dead man’s letter I had with me, and
handed it to Bron, then took the other one and handed it to Berry.
He gave me a startled look, and gulped, but took it. We sat there
and talked a bit about the ruins in Luwul and Shanuga, the way you
find something to talk about when the thing everybody is thinking
about is the thing nobody wants to mention, and Bron mentioned in
passing that he had room for an extra prentice or two in his end of
the ruins, which was his way of saying that Berry would have
someplace to go if something happened to me.

By the time the prentice came back I was
almost relieved. “Mister Trey,” he told me, “The jennel sent two of
his servants and wants you to go with them.” I got up, shook Bron’s
hand and Berry’s as well, and went down the stairs to the guildhall
door.

I was half expecting soldiers, but the two
men waiting outside the door were ordinary servants in the
sleeveless shirts and knee-length trousers people wear in the Hiyo
valley, and they had three horses with them. “Trey sunna Gwen?” one
of them asked.

“That’s me.”

They both bowed, just a little, and the one
who’d spoken motioned at one of the horses and said, “If you’ll
come with us, Sir and Mister.”

That’s the proper title for a guild mister,
but nobody on Mam Gaia’s round belly had ever used it for me before
then. I was pleased, in an odd sort of way. The horse was another
matter, for I’d never ridden one and only had the sketchiest idea
how. Horses aren’t common nowadays; they like a drier climate than
Meriga has now, and the old world left us with some diseases that
kill two foals out of three every year, so if you’re not a
cavalryman in the army or a servant or soldier of a jennel, or just
plain rich, you don’t usually get much of a chance to ride one.

I certainly wasn’t going to miss the chance
this time, especially not if my head was going to be on a spike
sometime soon. I walked over to the side of the horse, grabbed
whatever you call the thing on the front of the saddle that you’re
supposed to grab, got one foot into the stirrup and swung myself
up. I had no idea what I’d do if the horse objected to the
proceedings, but it just shifted its feet a bit and let me mount.
Once I got myself settled, it swung its head around to glance at me
with one eye, as though it wanted to ask if I was done yet.

The two servants popped up into their saddles
with a mother of a lot more grace than I must have had, grabbed the
reins and started down the street. I wasn’t sure what to do, but my
horse started off right away without bothering for me to guide it.
I picked up the reins, too, and the horse gave me a second glance;
I think it was wondering if I was going to do something stupid. I
wasn’t. I figured the horse was probably smarter than I was, and
let it do whatever it was going to do.