Star's Reach (4 page)

I have plenty of paper, too. Two days ago we
found a couple of boxes of blank notebooks in an otherwise empty
storeroom, sealed in plastic with the air pumped out and nitrogen
pumped in, and I took one notebook for myself. So far those are the
only paper we’ve found anywhere in Star’s Reach. Eleen is fretting
about that; there’s always the chance that the people who were here
after the old world ended, Anna’s people, might have destroyed all
their papers before whatever happened to them got around to
happening.

Still, as evening tosses blue shadows into
the light well and Berry and Thu clatter the pots over in the
corner of the room we’ve set aside for a kitchen, I have a hard
time worrying about what will come of this journey of ours. I think
of other times over the years that the path to Star’s Reach looked
as though it had come to a dead stop, no way onward, and then
picked up again once I’d seen through a misunderstanding or dodged
a danger. If it’s true that they listened to a message from a
distant world here, and anything is left of it, I think we’ll find
it.

I don’t remember just now if I felt the same
way when Mister Garman and his prentices and I left the place in
the Shanuga ruins where we’d found the letter that led me here. We
were pretty far down and the way back up wasn’t straight by any
means, so it took us a while to climb up out of the underplaces of
the building. By the time we saw daylight it was close to noon and
getting hot enough to hurt. Big heaps of cloud were rising over the
hills around the ruins, and big bright birds came flapping past out
of the forest that wraps the ruins on three sides. I drew in a deep
breath to remind myself that I was still alive.

Word must have gotten around that something
was up, since a mob of prentices and a good handful of misters were
waiting for us down in the old street. “Found something,” Garman
told them. “A little more than you’d expect.” He held up the paper,
then waved off the prentices so the other misters could get close
and read it. That was worth seeing. Mister Calwel spat out a bit of
language so hot I half expected my ears to catch fire, and Mister
Jonus, the senior mister there that season and a man who never
seemed surprised by anything, blinked and read the paper again and
said, “Garman, now that’s a find.”

“Found by Mister Trey here,” said Garman,
“who’ll get either the paper or the finder’s rights once he makes
up his mind.” He gave me a look and nudged me with an elbow, and I
think it was then that the other misters noticed the blood on my
face. All of them, even Calwel, came up to shake my hand and let me
know that if I took the finder’s rights they’d offer a good price
for them. I grinned and told them they could go ahead and jump off
the next tower they happened to climb, and they laughed.

They didn’t have to acknowledge me; they
could have called me out if they wanted to. Ruinmen go to the
circle now and then, with hands or knives or pry bars, and during
my prentice years I saw more than one fight end with a mister
carried away dead. Still, either they had no quarrel with my
advancement to mistership or they didn’t fancy the risk of going to
the circle with me. Prentices fight more often than misters, though
it almost always stops at first blood, and I won’t claim I never
lost those fights but I will say it didn’t happen much. That wasn’t
just a matter of talent, either. Gray Garman hired a fighting
master to teach his prentices the tricks of staying alive in the
circle, which is more than most of the misters did.

Once the misters all had their look at the
paper, the prentices crowded around to read it, and most of them
weren’t half so quiet as the misters had been. Some of them whooped
and some of them used language I won’t write down, and there were
only a couple of them who stopped and stared with big round eyes; I
think those were the ones that really caught what it was that we’d
found. Soon enough Garman waved them off, and he and I crossed the
ruins to the tent where Mam Kelsey spent the digging seasons.

Most ruinmen hire failed scholars from Melumi
to puzzle out old writing and make copies of any papers that get
found, and when the ruin’s of any size the misters go in together
to pay one to stay out there at the site through the digging
season. The Shanuga ruins were big and rich enough for that, so we
had a failed scholar there every season since I first became a
prentice. The last four years I was there, that was Mam Kelsey. She
was a lean thing with hair the same gray color as the robe of her
guild, and eyes so bad she had to wear glasses thick as old bottles
to see more than a few senamees past her nose.

Her tent was over to one side of the camp,
not far from the river. When the ruinmen had no work for her she
would sit on a little folding chair behind a little folding table
that always looked ready to collapse beneath notes for the book she
was writing to get back into the Versty. When we had work for her,
she would push the notes aside, pull her glasses just that extra
little bit down her nose, and do whatever needed to be done without
saying any more words than she had to. I used to feel sorry for her
now and then, but the misters paid her a good wage and she could
still call herself a scholar without shame. Later on, I met one
failed scholar who worked as a cook in a roadhouse and another who
was a harlot, and neither of them would admit to most folk they’d
ever been to Melumi at all.

The prentices used to talk about her book
sometimes around campfires at night. Nobody knew what it was about,
and I don’t think more than one or two of us had any notion why she
spent all her time on it. Melumi was six hundred kloms northwest of
us by the shortest road. Some of the misters had been there, but
unless they felt like talking, all we had to go on was the stories
that traveling folk told, and that wasn’t much. So we wondered, and
made things up, silly or scary as the mood struck us. I don’t
recall any of the prentices suggesting that the book might be about
Star’s Reach, but that must have been the only thing nobody thought
to mention.

One day during the first season Mam Kelsey
was at the Shanuga ruins, though, a few of us managed to get a look
at her book. It was a hot sluggish day toward the end of summer,
and most of us had been set loose for the afternoon, because part
of the old tower Gray Garman was salvaging had gotten unstable and
needed to be blasted down. That’s work for misters and their senior
prentices, and it’s dangerous, since the big kegs of powder we get
from the gunsmiths don’t always go off right. So the rest of us
were left to sit around in camp or scavenge wire in safe areas
while Garman and his two oldest prentices set the charges.

Three of us were playing toss-the-bones over
on the side of camp by Mam Kelsey’s tent. There was me and Conn,
and another boy name of Shem sunna Janny, who died the next year
when a couple of floors in a building we were stripping flapjacked
on top of him. We’d gotten halfway through the game when we saw one
of Mister Jonus’ prentices pelting across the field toward Mam
Kelsey’s tent at a run. We couldn’t hear what he said to her when
he got there, but it wasn’t hard to guess: Jonus’ people must have
found something written in the part of the ruins he was working,
and needed her help to figure out what it meant. After a moment,
she pushed her notes aside, got up, and followed the prentice back
across the field toward the ruins.

I think all three of us thought of her book
at the same moment. We looked at each other, and grinned, and once
she was out of sight got up and pocketed the knucklebones we’d been
playng with and went oh so casually over to her tent.

I was the only one of us who could read, and
I won’t say I was that good at it, even with the practice I got
reading Conn the letters from his family. Still, the other two
pushed me over to the book, saying “What does it say?” almost at
the same moment, so the words tumbled over each other. The book was
open, lying there on Mam Kelsey’s table. I know I looked at it, and
I know I tried to read it aloud, but that’s about as much as I
recall of it at this point.

There were a lot of long words, I remember
that, and I slid to a halt after beating them up so bad that their
own mothers wouldn’t have known them. I don’t imagine Conn or Shar
got any more out of what I’d read than I did, but we’d looked at
the book, which was the point of the exercise. After a moment Conn
said, “I bet she’ll be back soon,” and we hurried back over to
where we’d been playing and started the game where we’d left off.
It wasn’t more than a few minutes later that we heard the big
rolling boom of the blast, and only a few minutes after that people
came running from the ruins to get us. The keg of powder had gone
off too soon. Gray Garman was unhurt, and we managed to dig one of
his prentices out from the rubble with no worse than a broken leg,
but we never found the other one. The priestess said the words for
him and recited the litany on top of a mess of broken concrete, and
we had to call that good.

I’m pretty sure that Mam Kelsey found out
that we stole a look at her book, probably from someone else in
camp who caught sight of us over at her tent. She never said a word
about it, but I always got the sense when she looked my way that
something in the back of her mind was whispering, “That’s the boy
who looked at my book.” The day that Garman and I came to her tent
with the dead man’s letter in our hands was no different. She
glanced up at us, seemed to take note of me, pushed her notes
aside, pulled her glasses down her nose a bit, and took the brown
resin-stiff paper from Garman’s hands. She read it, then stopped
and read it again, much more slowly.

“Honest copy, Mam Kelsey,” Garman said to
her. “Front and back both.”

She nodded, took a piece of paper from the
black leather case by her chair, dipped a pen and copied the paper
letter by letter. When she was done, she signed the copy, pressed
her seal into the paper good and hard, and then got out a bulb of
resin and sprayed the copy front and back so it couldn’t be changed
without a mark you could see. She blew on the copy until it was
dry, then handed it to Garman. He thanked her, and she nodded,
waited politely for a moment, and then spread her notes back out on
the table and got back to work. I was impressed. I’m sure Mam
Kelsey understood at least as much as any of us what that piece of
paper meant, but even so she never said a word.

By the time she finished copying the letter,
work had come to a halt all over the ruin. That happens most times
a big find turns up, since most misters are smart enough to take
their prentices off the job when they can’t concentrate enough to
be safe. That was the one break we usually got from work between
the time the ruins dried out enough to dig and the time the rains
came back, too, so it gave the prentices another good reason to
keep an eye open for signs that might lead to something.

There were a few misters in the Shanuga guild
who balked now and then at letting their prentices go when a find
turned up, but even Mister Calwel knew better than to hold them
back this time, since nobody had an eye open for anything but
Star’s Reach. It didn’t matter that none of us could make head or
tail of the message in the letter, or had the least notion what a
potus or a nrao might be. That would be tomorrow’s problem, for as
many tomorrows as it took to send somebody to Melumi and ask the
scholars. For the moment, as Garman and I walked back into camp
from Mam Kelsey’s tent, we passed clusters of prentices talking low
and fast, and every last one of them was talking about Star’s
Reach.

Most of them jumped up and came over to ask
for another look at the letter. Even the ones who were bitter
rivals of mine the day before called me “Mister Trey” and were as
polite as you could ask. Garman, who had both the copy and the
original, let them read the copy. He gave me a sidelong glance
every time he handed it over, and I knew he was wondering when I’d
tell him whether I wanted the letter itself or the finder’s rights.
I couldn’t have told him if I wanted to. I knew which one I should
choose if I had any brains at all, and I knew which one every
senamee of me wanted to choose, and unfortunately they weren’t the
same one.

So we went across the camp to the big tent in
the middle of everything that was the misters’ lodge seven months
of the year. Before we got there, the other misters had already
hauled one of the big wooden chairs outside the entrance to the
lodge and left it there for me to haul back inside. Of course
they’d tied a bunch of scrap iron to the thing so it weighed close
to fifty keelos, just to add to the welcome. Still, I counted
myself lucky. A couple of years before there had been one prentice
just turned mister that a lot of people disliked, and whoever
loaded up his chair drove a stake into the ground and chained the
chair to the stake, then draped a bunch more chain all around it so
it took him a dozen tries and some of the hottest language I’ve
ever heard before he figured out why the thing just wouldn’t
budge.

I had an easier time than that, but the chair
was still a mother to lift, and a mother with babies to carry into
the lodge. Most of the other misters were already in the tent,
sitting in their chairs or gathered in twos and threes around the
walls, so I had an audience while I staggered a quarter of the way
around the lodge to the open place they’d left for me, and set down
the chair with a crash like a building falling over. The misters
laughed and applauded, and then the circle got quiet as I sat down
for the first time in a mister’s chair.

“Well,” said Mister Jonus then, taking his
seat. As the senior mister at the ruin, he had first and last voice
any time the misters made a decision in lodge. “Unless anyone
objects, we’ve got a new mister among us.”