Star's Reach (36 page)

Thu thought a moment, and then said, “That
will be acceptable.” I glanced around at everyone else and asked,
“Anyone disagree?” Nobody did, and so that’s what Tashel Ban is
doing now, muttering to himself as he makes sure the tubes are
still good and figures out how to hook the radio up to one of the
antennas outside. Anybody with two bits of common sense would be
pretty much frantic to know what’s happened in Meriga while we’ve
been gone, since the presden was probably dying when we left and
jennels were busy raising armies to fight each other, but what I’m
thinking about instead is Thu—how we met, and how he almost killed
me.

That happened maybe a month after I got to
Memfis. As soon as Berry and I got settled in at the ruinmen’s hall
there, I went to the misters, explained to them what I was there
for, asked about the records of past digs, and told them about the
Walnut Ridge Telecommunications Facility and the contract dig I’d
agreed to do with Jennel Cobey. They knew a fair amount of that
already, of course, since ruinmen carry news with them when they
travel, but they didn’t know all of it, and it’s one of the
courtesies that you don’t dare skip when you’re planning a dig in
someone else’s region.

Of course I planned on bringing the Memfis
misters and prentices into the dig, and paying them with Jennel
Cobey’s money, and I let them know that. I also mentioned, which
they already knew, that I hadn’t managed a dig myself before, and
would welcome the local guild’s help with that. Between the
prospect of money up front and the chance to help find the way to
Star’s Reach, they were pretty pleased with me, and gave me all the
help I needed.

It turned out that the ruin of the Walnut
Ridge Telecommunications Facility hadn’t been worked yet, either.
Memfis was a big city in the old world, even bigger than it is now,
when it’s the largest city in Meriga. Some of the ruins around it
are buried deep in river mud and water, and won’t be at any risk of
being touched by a ruinman’s shovel until Mam Gaia decides she
wants a different climate again and the sea draws back a good long
ways to the south, but there are a lot of ruins less hard to get,
and the guild’s only been working them since after the Third Civil
War. It wasn’t too hard to figure out where the place was, and so
all I had to do was get the money from Jennel Cobey, hire people,
get supplies together, and make a start on the dig.

I sent the jennel a letter right away and
started making arrangements. That meant visiting the houses of each
of the misters in the Memfis guild, first of all, and making deals
over dinner and whiskey; after that was done and I knew how many
misters and prentices I’d have to set up with food and tents and
the like, it meant visiting the merchants that outfit ruinmen with
the things they need, and making deals with them—usually with no
dinner and whiskey in sight, since most of them will take a
ruinman’s money but won’t stoop to eat or drink with him. So I went
from place to place with somebody’s prentice to show me the way and
Berry trotting alongside me to prove that I was enough of a mister
to have a prentice of my own, and fairly often I got the feeling
that somebody was watching me.

Someone was, and I found that out the hard
way one night.

Berry and I went to visit a provision
merchant that afternoon, and stayed late. The merchant’s name was
Dalla; she was short and round and pleasant, and got into the
provisions trade because she had family in the ruinmen’s guild, so
we got dinner and whiskey; I don’t doubt that she meant to show off
the sort of provisions she could get us, too. By the time we
settled on a deal, or as much of a deal as I could make before
Jennel Cobey got my letter and replied, it was well after dark, and
though I wasn’t quite tipsy I wasn’t far from it. We went down the
steps onto the street and the door of the merchant’s closed behind
us, leaving us in the next thing to perfect darkness, since the
moon was down and we were outside the gates of Memfis. We had only
a few blocks to walk to get back to the ruinmen’s hall, and there
was nobody else in sight, so we started off without any particular
worries.

Then a shadow came out of a deeper shadow to
one side and blocked our way.

I stopped, not too sure of myself. The shadow
stood there for a moment, looming over the two of us, and then said
in a deep voice, “You have a dead man’s letter. I need it. If you
give it to me now, you will not become a dead man yourself.”

What startled me then wasn’t that somebody
would be willing to kill me to get my copy of the letter; I’d been
waiting for that since Berry and I left Shanuga all those months
ago. What startled me is that I had the letter with me, and this
person knew it. Now it’s true that I’d taken it with me to a couple
of other merchants by then, since news about the letter had gotten
around and I could usually get a better deal on provisions if I let
the merchant see and handle the copy I had. I didn’t think of that,
though. I could have simply handed over the letter and gotten a new
copy from Jennel Cobey, too, but I didn’t think of that, either.
All I could think of was that somebody was trying to take my one
hope of finding Star’s Reach away from me.

I pulled my pry bar out of my belt, and the
shadow turned into a man and jumped at me.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen anybody else
move that fast. I was just barely able to jump out of his way, and
flailed at him with the pry bar; that made him duck to one side,
and probably kept me from getting spitted, because he had a knife
in his hand—I could just about see it as he moved.

I had more reach with the pry bar than he had
with the knife, so I dodged past him, as fast as I could, and
snapped the pry bar out at the back of his knee, one of those nasty
little moves that leaves your enemy down on the pavement where you
can kill him or just go away, your choice. It hit—I could feel the
shock right up the bar—but I might as well have clobbered a rock.
He spun around and came at me again, as though I hadn’t hit him at
all.

There’s a kind of nightmare I’ve had now and
again all my life, where I’m being attacked in total darkness by
somebody I can’t see, and nothing I do makes any difference. This
fight was like that. I think I landed three or four good hard hits
with the pry bar, and none of it seemed to do a thing to the man
who was trying to kill me. He just kept coming at me, and I kept
jumping away and hitting at him. I knew that he would wear me down
if the fight kept going much longer but I didn’t have a spare
moment to think of anything else I could do.

Then he came at me again, and I was just that
little bit too slow getting out of his way, and by the time I
landed I could feel something wet spreading along my side. The pain
flared a moment later: not a deep cut, but bad enough. He moved
toward me, slowly, testing. I shifted my grip on the pry bar and
got ready to stuff it down his throat.

Then boots pounded on the cobblestones,
dozens of them, fast. My attacker turned, stopped, and tried to
run, but the moment of hesitation lost him his chance. Dark shapes
blurred in a scuffle, and something rose and fell. I knew the shape
at a glance: a ruinman’s shovel.

Light flared near my face, half blinding me.
It was a lantern, and Berry was holding it. It wasn’t until then
that I realized that I hadn’t noticed where he was since the fight
started, and guessed that he’d gone for help. “He’s hurt!” Berry
shouted, and some others in ruinmen’s leathers came over, got me
down on the street and started doing something with my side.

I couldn’t quite see my attacker, just a hand
here and a foot there pinned down under a fair-sized mob of burly
ruinmen. They’d brought shovels and picks, which only get brought
out for fighting when it’s a matter for blood.

“Kill him?” someone asked, and I was dizzy
enough that for a moment I wondered if he meant me.

“No.” One of the guild misters—I recognized
him, or almost—shook his head. “He goes back to the hall. If he’s
somebody’s hired knife, we’ll find out who, and then...”

He didn’t have to finish. It wouldn’t have
done me any good if he had, though, because the street was starting
to spin around me, and the lantern got very faint and far away, and
so did everything else for a good long time.

I woke up eventually, which I hadn’t really
expected to do, but it was a good long while before I could do much
of anything but lay there in my bed in the Memfis guild hall and
heal. The knife cut I took in the fight wasn’t deep but it went
most of the way through the muscles along my side, and though the
ruinmen got someone in to clean it and stitch it up, it’s not the
kind of thing you can jump up and ignore the next day. So I lay
there, and tried not to yelp when the healer came by twice a day to
dab it with something that smelled of herbs and cheap alcohol; it
kept the cut from festering while it closed up, but damn, it
hurt.

The man who’d tried to kill me was in the
guild hall, too, down below ground. Most ruinmen’s halls have a
couple of rooms in the basement where somebody can be locked up—a
prentice who tried to cheat his mister, someone who isn’t a ruinman
but tried to pass himself off as one, that sort of thing. There are
places in Memfis where there aren’t any basements because the water
level’s too high, but the ruinmen’s hall is up on what used to be a
bluff overlooking the river before the seas rose, then became an
island, and now is a sort of low ridge, not high enough to count
for a hill, between two low flat areas full of warehouses and cheap
lodgings that get a couple of senamees of water in the streets when
the Misipi floods. There’s enough room between the top of the ridge
and the water level for a basement, but it’s damp and smells bad. I
can’t imagine a better place to take new prentices to shake the
robot’s hand, but you wouldn’t want to store anything there.

But that’s where he was, or so Berry told me.
He also said that the man hadn’t said a word since he was thrown
into the room in the basement where they had him; the Memfis
ruinmen had tried to get him to talk, to find out who’d paid him if
anybody did, but they might as well have tried to get a word out of
the stones of the basement walls. So there I was, and there he was,
and nothing much changed while my belly healed.

After a while, they let me sit up for a few
hours a day, and then for most of the day, and then I got to walk a
little; Berry brought me records from the digs out in the part of
Arksa where the Walnut Ridge Telecommunications Facility was, and
ran messages to the merchants and misters who were negotiating with
me about the dig, so I had something to think about besides how
close I’d come to ending this story in a puddle of blood on a
Memfis street.

Finally, though, I was healed enough to leave
the room, eat with everyone else, and start doing more to get the
dig going. If was pretty clear by then that the dig wasn’t going to
start until after the rains came and went again, even if I’d been
healed enough to handle heavy work before then, which I probably
wasn’t. Even then I thought that this was probably a good thing,
since it gave me enough time to figure out what I was doing, get as
much advice as I could from the other misters, and catch the worst
of my mistakes before they cost anything. So I made plans and drew
up contracts and waited for word to come from Jennel Cobey.

Still, there was one other thing I wanted to
do right away. As soon as I could walk well enough to handle the
stairs, I went down to the basement to talk to the man who’d almost
killed me. Berry went with me, along with one of the Memfis misters
named Ran, a tough white-haired old man as short and solid as a
brick, and a couple of his prentices. Just to be safe, the
prentices had pry bars at their belts and shouldered a couple of
shovels with the blades filed sharp. I didn’t go armed, but I
pocketed something else I thought would be of more use. So we went
down the stairs all the way to the basement, and Ran unlocked the
door and turned on a light.

The basement smelled bad, as I wrote a moment
ago. The air was damp, and the walls were big rough chunks of
concrete split out of some old world structure, bashed into rough
blocks, and mortared into place, the sort of thing you find all
over Meriga wherever nobody cares what the results are going to
look like. Ran led the way down a short passage and turned a
corner, and we were in a room of sorts with a few old boxes and
barrels in it. Over on the far side was a door made of iron bars,
and on the other side of the door was the man I’d come to see.

I hadn’t realized until then that it wasn’t
just the night that made him look dark when he attacked me. He was
what they used to call black in the old world, and what we’d call
really dark-skinned nowadays, now that everybody in Meriga is some
shade of brown. I used to think, when I first heard that people in
the old world spent so much time bickering and fighting over skin
color, that the people they called white back then actually had
skin the color of chalk, and the people they called black had skin
the color of soot, and that people looked like that until they
finally got around to making babies with each other in the drought
years and, thank the four winds, the babies came out brown instead
of concrete gray.

Most children in Meriga end up thinking
something like that, before somebody gets around to telling them
that “white” back then just meant light enough brown that you could
see the pink through it, and “black” meant anything much darker
than that. This man’s skin was a lot darker than that, darker than
anybody else I’ve ever seen in Meriga, the color of really good
beer or the kind of leather gear that’s stained with nutshells and
then rubbed with oil until it glows.

He glanced up at us, noted each of us, and
then without a word turned back to whatever patch on the floor he’d
been considering when we came in.