Star's Reach (15 page)

That’s how I rode through the streets of
Luwul that morning: sitting in the saddle holding the reins as
though I knew what I was doing, without the smallest baby kitten of
an idea where we were going or what was going to happen to me when
we got there. Luwul’s a bigger town than Shanuga, but it’s still
got the big gray town walls made of old concrete chunks mortared
together, the gate with a pair of tired guards looking down from
their windows, the narrow muddy streets inside with tall narrow
buildings rising up on either side, pigs and dogs and people all
busy with their own affairs in the streets and the dim little
alleys, smoke and smells and a hundred different noises all
tumbling over each other in the sultry air.

I got to see plenty of Luwul, too, for the
ruinmen’s hall was outside the south side of the walls and Jennel
Cobey’s house was on the river, which runs along the northern edge
of town. Plenty of Luwul got to see me, too; a lot of people in the
streets looked up at me as I rode past them on the horse and then
turned to watch me go. I wondered whether they’d heard about the
letter from Shanuga, or if the thought of a ruinman on a horse was
just strange enough to catch their interest.

Still, as we got close to the jennel’s house,
the people thinned out. The houses got bigger, and more of them
were made of stone, with big gates and courtyards, and towers up
above where men with guns could keep watch over the street and the
river if they had to.

Jennel Cobey’s house was one of those, as big
as any and bigger than most. We rode up to his gate, where a couple
of his soldiers glanced at us and hauled the gate open, and then
into his courtyard, where the servants swung down from their horses
and waited patiently while I did the same thing. “This way, Sir and
Mister,” said the same one who had spoken to me earlier, and
motioned toward a door. I followed him through the door, up a
stair, and along a corridor with tall windows along the one side
looking out toward the river, and paintings on the other side of
faces of men I didn’t recognize. The second servant was right
behind me; I never heard him say a word then or later, but I could
feel his gaze on my back the whole time.

Finally we stopped at a door. “Please to wait
here, Sir and Mister,” said the servant who did all the talking,
and went inside. I could hear his voice, though not the words, and
then another voice; and then the servant came back through the
door. “If you’ll follow me, Sir and Mister.” I followed him into
the room, and that’s how I met Cobey Taggart.

Thinking back on that first meeting now,
after everything that’s happened, it’s hard for me to be sure how
much of what I think I remember got changed around to fit what
happened afterwards. For most of five years, I would have said that
Cobey was one of the best friends I had on Mam Gaia’s round belly,
and I still thought that right up until the moment at the door to
Star’s Reach when I realized that one of us was going to kill the
other. I traveled with him, shared hopes and finds with him, told
him some of my secrets and guessed at a few of his, saw how he
lived and watched him die. It’s hard to set that aside and reach
back to the memory of our first meeting, untouched by anything
else, but I’ll try.

He was younger than I expected, not ten years
older than I was, with a mop of sand-colored hair and a narrow
beard along the edge of his jaw, the sort of thing that was
fashionable that year at the presden’s court. He was dressed all in
green, the way jennels usually are, but the only sign of rank he
had anywhere on him was the bone-handled gun that showed at his
hip.

“Trey sunna Gwen,” the servant said, and
ducked back out through the door; I heard it click behind me. “Sir
and Jennel,” I said; if he was going to have his servants use my
title, damn if I wasn’t going to use his.

“Mister Trey,” he said, and crossed the room
to shake my hand. That startled me, though I tried not to show it.
“Thank you for coming. I suspect you’re wondering why I sent for
you.”

“That I am, Sir and Jennel.”

That got a sudden bright smile, which
startled me even more than the handshake. “The simplest explanation
is right over here. If you’ll follow?”

He set off across the room. It was a big
room, nearly as big as the main room of the ruinmen’s hall I’d just
left, with tall narrow windows along two sides and bookshelves
along a third. Heavy timbers framed the ceiling above, and the
carpet that covered the floor was nice enough that I was sorry to
be walking on it with dusty boots. In the corner where the walls
with the windows met, there was a table, and on the table was a
flat box as big as a sheet of paper.

He got to the table first, and lifted the lid
off the box. “I think you’ll recognize this.”

I did, too. I bent over to give it a close
look, and he motioned to me to pick it up, then stood back,
watching me, as I examined front and back, the bits of gray dust
stuck to it, the hint of fingerprints where I must have held the
thing before the resin I’d sprayed on it had time to dry. The
single word on the back was there, too, in the pale gray writing
nobody nowadays knows how to make. I set the thing back in its box
and turned to face the jennel, wondering how he’d gotten the letter
I’d found beneath the dead man’s hand in the Shanuga ruins.

Ten: Dell’s Bargain

Looking back over what I wrote last night, I
realized that I’ve gone and talked about all kinds of things that
people won’t know about unless they grew up in Meriga or spent a
good long time there. Jennels, for instance. They don’t have those
in Nuwinga or Genda, and Mam Gaia only knows whether they’ve got
anything of the kind over in the Neeonjin country way off past the
mountains and the dead lands of the west. In Meyco they’ve got
dons, who are like jennels with attitude, but then Meyco’s an
empire and that comes with extra bragging rights.

Anyway, Meriga has jennels. We’ve got a
couple of hundred of them, maybe, and a couple of thousand cunnels,
who would have been jennels if somebody back along the line of
their grandfathers had been firstborn sons and not second or third
or whatever. Most of the jennels are heads of families that have
been famous names in Meriga since the old world ended; they own a
lot of land and a lot of other things, they have soldiers and
servants, and when the presden names somebody to take one of her
armies off to the borders to fight, it pretty much has to be one of
the jennels.

One of the archivists at Sisnaddi told me
that that’s all the jennels used to be, leaders of the Merigan
armies back before the old world ended, and all the rest of it came
later. That would explain why they don’t have them in Genda or
Nuwinga, since I don’t think either of those countries had a big
army back then. Meriga did, which is why ruinmen here know the look
of the stiff heavy clothing soldiers wore in Meriga before the old
world ended; you find a lot of bones in what’s left of that
clothing, tucked away here and there in the old ruins.

The man looking over my shoulder as I
examined the letter I’d found down deep in the ruins at Shanuga
wasn’t wearing that kind of clothing, of course, but some of his
grandfathers’ grandfathers back more than four hundred years had
worn it. The plain green clothes he was wearing might as well have
been the same thing; you only see that on jennels, and then only on
jennels who know that they don’t need to announce who they are to
everybody, just as the really big names in Circle aren’t the women
in the fancy gowns and pearls but the ones in the plain dresses and
the plain red hats, who don’t talk much and don’t have to.

Jennel Cobey didn’t have to talk much,
either. He stood there while I examined the letter I’d found down
inside the Shanuga ruins, watching me as though he had all the time
in the world.

“I’m curious how you came by this, Sir and
Jennel,” I said finally.

He laughed; it was a louder laugh than I
expected, and it sent echoes scurrying all over the room like mice.
“I imagine so. Still, no mystery there; one of my people in Noksul
heard about the letter as soon as word got out and contacted me by
radio, and so I was able to get someone to Shanuga in time for the
auction. That was good and lively; your Mister Garman did very well
out of it.”

“I’m glad to hear that.”

“The man I sent to Shanuga mentioned that you
had the finder’s rights for it.”

“That’s right.”

He was still watching me, of course. “I hope
you won’t feel insulted, Sir and Mister, if I say that you’ve taken
on quite a task there.”

He meant, of course, that I was a brand new
mister who probably didn’t even look my twenty years just at that
moment. “If you’d had a chance at something like that, Sir and
Jennel,” I said, “would you have turned it down?”

A moment later I knew I might just have said
the worst possible thing, since of course he did have a chance at
something like that, and could take it by nothing more difficult
than having one of his people cut my throat. He smiled, though, a
broad smile as though what I’d said came close to making him laugh.
“Of course not,” he said. “Good. I think we have the basis for an
understanding, then.”

He reached for the letter, and I handed it to
him. “You want to find Star’s Reach,” he went on then. “So do I,
badly. Still, finding it and digging down to it are your line of
business, not mine. If I recall correctly, your guild sometimes
does contract digs.”

“Sometimes,” I said.

“And in this case?”

I considered that long and hard. In a
contract dig, the ruinmen are paid out of somebody else’s pocket,
instead of getting by each season on whatever they made on finds
from the season before. That’s not something most ruinmen will do
unless the dig’s really worth it, because whoever pays the costs
gets their money back before anyone else gets paid, and after that
a share of the profits goes to the contract holder as well. On the
other hand, a dig at Star’s Reach would cover almost any contract I
could imagine with plenty to spare; having someone else foot the
bill for the digging would make it one mother of a lot easier for a
brand new mister and his prentice to get a good crew together, too,
and do the thing the way it ought to be done.

“In this case, Sir and Jennel,” I said, “it’s
a possibility.”

He nodded, then: “If you’re worried about
your profits, don’t be. I’m perfectly willing to see the salvage go
to the ruinmen and whatever records are there go to Melumi. That’s
your business and theirs.” Seeing my expression: “You’re wondering
why. I don’t need the money. Partly I want to find Star’s Reach for
the same reason everyone else in Meriga dreams of finding it;
partly—” He leaned a senamee or so toward me. “Partly, whoever
finds Star’s Reach is going to become the most famous person in
Meriga as fast as word can spread. That could be a real advantage
to me in Sisnaddi.”

“Fair enough,” I said, though I didn’t have
the least idea just then why it would be an advantage to him, or to
anyone else.

“Then would it be fair to say that we have a
bargain?”

I agreed, and we shook hands. “By the way,”
he said then, “do you have any idea yet where Star’s Reach is?”

“Not yet, Sir and Jennel. That’s why I’m
headed to Melumi.”

“Sensible. That was my destination as well.
Would you be willing to ride with my party? I think I can promise
you a faster trip and better accommodations than you’d have on your
own.”

I agreed to that gratefully enough, and he
said, “Good. We were planning on leaving tomorrow, if that’s
suitable. I’ll have a horse sent—do you have prentices?”

“Just one.”

“Two horses, then, to the guild hall tomorrow
morning.” He said a few more pleasantries, which I don’t remember
just now, and then without ever having to say a word about it he
dismissed me and I turned to find his servant waiting for me just
inside the door.

All the way back to the ruinmen’s guild hall,
I thought about what had just happened. Just about every ruinman
I’d ever met would have called that the best bit of luck I could
have had, and more than half of me thought the same thing, but the
rest of me wasn’t so sure, because the bargain I’d made with Jennel
Cobey felt a little too much like a Dell’s bargain.

That’s something else I ought to explain,
because I know for a fact that people from outside of Meriga don’t
say that or know what it means; I used the phrase once in front of
Tashel Ban, and he gave me the look he always gives when whatever
somebody says doesn’t make the least bit of sense to him.
Dell—well, you don’t mention him around the priestesses, because
they don’t believe in him and don’t like it when other people do,
either.

Dell’s not a human being, though he looks
like one. He looks like a tall man with light-colored skin, like
people from Genda have, and he wears fancy clothing from the old
world, with one of those funny strips of bright cloth tied around
his neck and hanging down onto his shirt. Nobody knows where he
lives, but if you want to find him, they say, all you have to do is
go right at midnight when the moon’s down, to a place where two
roads cross, going with one eye closed and one hand inside your
clothes and hopping on one foot, and call him. Sometimes he shows
up even if you don’t call him, if you want something badly enough,
or that’s what people say, but if you go to the crossroads that way
and call him three times, before you finish calling him the third
time, he’s there waiting for you.

I never knew anyone who called him, but the
story goes that you can call him if you want something so bad that
you think nothing else matters. If you do that, and tell him what
you want, he’ll get it for you, but you have to promise to give him
something else in trade for it. You don’t get to pick the something
else, he does, and he doesn’t have to tell you what it will be when
you make the bargain; sometime later, maybe years later, he just
shows up and takes it, and you know just as well as I do that it’s
going to be the one thing in the world you care about more than the
thing you got from him.