The Guild (7 page)

When her uncooked supper was halfway eaten, she wrapped it up and stuffed it back into her pocket, then took herself outside and to the far end of the balcony where the refreshers were located. As she came back, she checked the alleyway. No sign of a motorhorse, so she ducked into her tenement, hefted her packs, and stepped out again. A quick look around showed her an empty balcony and no one in sight across the narrow street, so she placed the key along the upper edge of the doorframe once the room was locked.

With that taken care of, she hefted the pack so it sat more comfortably and headed down the stairs. Choosing a path that would get her out of the north gate of the city, she started walking. After three blocks, though, just as she passed the mouth of an alley, the sudden rumble of a motorhorse coming to life startled her. A quick
glance to her right showed the leftenant on the machine, with no sign of the operator from earlier.

Rexei glared at him. Releasing the stopper pedal briefly, he coasted up next to her, then stilled the rumbling mount. “This isn’t the way to the east.”

“Any fool would head east right away. I know better when expecting pursuit,” she shot back.

For a moment, his mouth twisted wryly. Leftenant Tallnose tipped his head at the street she stood on, then at the second saddle position on his motorhorse. “I had a feeling you’d bolt, so I sent the corporal back on foot and picked your most likely route in this maze of streets. Get on. We’ll head north, then swing around east.”

For a second, she wanted to rest, to enspell him and run. But the Vortex was the safest place for her, and a motorhorse was considerably faster than a shank’s mare. Since she didn’t want to spend all night marching on foot in an inadequate coat while the temperatures dropped, she moved over to the side of his bike and awkwardly climbed aboard. Not because she was unfamiliar with motorhorses—no one reached journeyman status in the Messengers Guild without learning how to operate one of the machines—but because her belongings coupled with the greater height of the rear seat made climbing into place a bit awkward.

She managed, though. Tucking her gloved hands into his belt for security, she tightened her legs on the machine’s flanks and held on, balancing with each turn and twist in their path as they got under way. The last light of the sun glowed peach where it touched the city walls by the time they rumbled out of the north gate. He continued north for a mile, too, but she wasn’t too alarmed; in fact, when he slowed the motorhorse at the crossroads and turned right, she relaxed, leaning gently into the curve with him so the wheeled, mechanical beast wouldn’t slip or skid.

Once on the road that would connect with others headed
eastward, he shifted a couple of levers and increased the fuel mix in the engine. Rexei wasn’t completely sure of how such things worked; the Engines Guild was one of many she had yet to apprentice in, never mind master. She did know just enough to be able to tell the engine sounded like it was in excellent shape. Good enough that the leftenant increased their speed once they were on the straightest stretch of the road, until she was grateful to huddle behind his leather-clad back, though the wind still whipped around him, chilling her where it blew through her felted outer clothes.

The trip by motorhorse took only a fraction of the time it would have taken her to walk the five miles on foot. If it weren’t for the heat of the engine seeping through the metal flanks of the motorhorse, she would have been as cold from the wind caused by their speed as she would have been from the longer journey at a shank’s mare pace. Even the pack on her back helped somewhat, but her arms were stiff and numb by the time he carefully guided the vehicle up the winding road that mounted the side of the northern hill and turned it onto the crystal-lit curve that formed the top of the Heias Dam. By then, they were so close that the water cascading over the spillway was louder than the motorhorse engine.

The dam was one of the few structures still extant that had been crafted in part by magic. Over three hundred years old—and rumored to be from a time before Mekha had turned rapacious—the runes that imbued it with the power to self-seal any developing cracks drew their power down from the aether via large crystals on the ends of tall iron poles. During thunderstorms, those crystals attracted and transformed lightning into the magic necessary to prevent even a minor failure.

It was also rumored that the priesthood had been considering a similar system in their temples, but storms were difficult to conjure, even more difficult to turn electric, and without magic, they were too unpredictable and infrequent to make such a use practical
for anything other than the slowest, most long-term spells. Such as repairing the Heias Dam. Right now, there were no storms in the clouds drifting in patches over the near black sky, and what few stars shone through their gaps could not compete with the glow of the crystals.

They weren’t the only source of light. Brother and Sister Moons were riding the night sky, though their light was partially blocked by the clouds. On the northern hillside, Rexei and the leftenant had passed the buildings used by the Steelworks to manufacture the extra-hard, flexible metal for Mekhana’s war-machines industry. That guild ran its services every hour of the day, for it was far more difficult to restart the smelting fires from scratch than to keep them going, and too wasteful not to use up all that nighttime heat. On the southern hillside, there were only a few oil lamps and crystal lights, but those were the Guilds that had a mere building or two, not several, and they were usually only worked in the daylight hours.

Some of them were not what she had expected. The first time her work as a messenger had brought her here, Rexei had not expected to see the Tillers’ symbol—a scythe crossed with a wheat sheaf—on one of the signboards. She hadn’t expected to grow dizzy from the conflux of energies, either, but during her recovery in the outer halls of the Vortex and her subsequent induction into the never-mentioned Mages Guild, she had learned that the Heias Dam had been so well planned, its creators had even included a special set of spells and a sluice that scraped up the silt washed down to the reservoir from farther upstream.

That silt was captured, dried, and bagged by the Tillers Guild for shipment to local farms so it could be mixed in with composted manure and other forms of mulch. The Tillers—the farmers—who worked those fields spread it out to keep the ground fertile. She had grown up in the north, where the land was flat and had few trees and mines, but was rich in good farming soil. Down here
near Heiastowne, the valley where the town sat was fertile enough, but most of the landscape was hilly and better suited for growing timber, grapevines, and digging ore.

But they weren’t headed for the far side of the valley. At the center point of the broad, long curve, the leftenant guided the motorhorse to the left, along a causeway out over the reservoir waters. It terminated in a roundish, almost castlelike structure. To either side of the causeway, smaller ones led to the open, semi-submerged, pipelike spillways feeding the great turbines powering each of the local buildings, but this one led to the control house.

Moonlight gleamed off the ice that had crusted the edges of the lake, cold and pale blue. Warm yellow light spilled down from the windows of the control house. The leftenant guided his motorhorse into one of the stables set aside for vehicles, but once he parked it and turned it off, once they were both off the saddle-fitted back, he did not lead her toward the nearest door into the stone-walled structure. Instead, he caught her wrist and pulled her toward the back of the parking stable.

Confused, Rexei followed. The tune in her head had changed the moment they drew within sight of the dam. A counterpoint melody wove itself around the first one, stabilizing her inner senses so that the swirling energies of the aether around this place would not disturb her own energies, as they had the first time. As they did to any mage who didn’t know the exact key to countering what seemed to be a natural phenomenon, but which she had been told on her first visit was a deliberately exaggerated effect. Priests did not like coming here because of that effect, which was the one thing making the Vortex a safe zone for mages.

The militia officer did something in the darkest corner of the stall . . . and part of the stone wall swung away. Beckoning her to follow, he entered the shadowed passage beyond. Hoping she wasn’t making a mistake, clinging to her knowledge that the priests
hated coming to the dam and that Mekha was dead, Rexei followed him inside.

The head-sized rectangular stones quickly gave way to the smooth concrete surface that made up most of the dam. A good thing, too, for the passage turned into a spiral staircase that descended down, down, down. She expected the air to turn damp as well as cold, but it didn’t; it stayed dry and became warmer. The light coming from below grew brighter, too.

After the third turning, she could see the source, another of those odd, ceiling-embedded crystals like in the forbidden basement of the temple. It wasn’t quite as bright as daylight, but it was brighter than three oil lamps put together. It illuminated a table set at the bottom of the stairs and a man who was hastily pulling his feet off the table, replacing them with his book. Behind him lay a longish passage lined with two doors nearby, two farther down, and one at the end; the door behind him and to his right lay open and seemed to look into another curving stairwell leading down.

“Rogen!” the sentry exclaimed, gaining his feet. “Wait . . . who’s that?” he demanded, frowning at Rexei. “I don’t recognize that one.
He’s
not authorized to be here.”

“Stow it, Barclei,” Rogen Tallnose ordered, or tried.

“Stow it yourself, Tallnose,” the other man retorted, lifting his chin. “Your brother may be one of us, but
you’re
not, and I don’t take orders from you.
Leftenant
.”

Rexei struggled to keep her shock off her face. This man had zero fear of a leftenant of the militia? Or at least so little that he felt he could be rude to the man’s face? That was unheard-of, in her experience. Next to the priesthood, the militia was the second-biggest source of authority and power in the kingdom. Even the Consulates, which represented all the guilds, treaded lightly around their local Precinct officers. This man didn’t, and that
astounded her. The only thing she allowed herself to do was blink; the rest of her face, she kept carefully straight and blank.

“Stow it anyway, and get my brother up here,” Tallnose ordered. “There are things going on that
you
are not authorized to know about, but I am. So get him up here. Now.”

Barclei eyed Rogen a long moment, then shifted to a small box set in the wall above the edge of the table. Pressing a toggle, he spoke, “Barclei to central, Leftenant Tallnose wishes to see his brother at the control house gate. He has a . . . guest . . . with him.”

Releasing the toggle, he straightened. The mesh grille crackled and a tinny voice spoke. “
Central to control house gate, who is the guest?”

At a lift of the guard’s brows, Tallnose gestured at her. “Journeyman Rexei Longshanks. He’s already authorized for the outer levels.”

Barclei passed that along, though he eyed Rexei as he did so. A few moments passed, then a reply came back. “
He’s on his way
.”

The longer they waited, the warmer Rexei felt. Even the leftenant started feeling it, for he unbuckled the belt of his riding coat, unfastened the buttons, and pushed the edges aside. Eventually, he removed his helmet, once again revealing flattened, reddish brown curls with the faint start of a receding hairline. His hair reminded Rexei of her father, though her father’s hair had been as dark brown as her own. She turned away to hide her reaction, masking the movement by unbuttoning her own coat now that she, too, was finally feeling blessedly warm.

Footsteps made her turn back. A figure bounded up the steps of the second spiral stairway. He had a cap on his head and a scarf wrapped around his throat and chin, though his shirt and trews were lightweight wool at best. Green viewing lenses perched on his nose . . . and there was no doubt that this was the reason why the leftenant had warned her against making fun of the family name. His nose was long vertically like the leftenant’s, yes, but it also
jutted forward in a sharp point, more nose than most men possessed naturally.

She tried not to stare. Dragging her eyes up to those green lenses, she realized the leftenant’s brother was at most only a thumbwidth taller than her, not the length of a finger. It was odd, but she could sense his presence in the aether as easily as if she had been around this newcomer for a good solid week. He felt warm, clean, and well shielded. The redhead looked back at her, looked at his browner-haired brother, and clapped his hands together, rubbing them in an eager motion. His strawberry blond brows rose in an inquiry.

“Right, then, what have you got for me, Leftenant?” the unnamed brother asked. His tone was a lot more polite when using the other man’s title than Barclei’s had been.

“Tell him what you told me,” Rogen directed her.

Licking her lips and wondering how much she dared tell when this shrouded man was
not
the mage she was supposed to report everything to, Rexei finally began with the truth. “I was hired by someone in the uh . . . local guild . . . to investigate Servers Guild claims of abuse by priests. As a Sub-Consul, I could represent the local Consulate in the investigation.”

That was her cover story. The cap-and-scarf swathed man nodded, rolling his wrist to get her to move on. “Yes, yes, I know all that. Go on. What do you know about the claims of the Dead God being gone?”

“There was a foreign man—not Arbran, but brought up from beyond the border with another man—and he started negotiating for his freedom,” she said. That earned her snorts of disbelief from all three men. “He said, why should they be draining . . . you know, the prisoners . . . when they could be draining demons.”

The leftenant’s brother’s eyes widened behind those green-tinted viewing lenses, but they did not move from her face. His hand moved though. He pointed at Barclei and snapped his fingers. “You,
forget you ever heard that.” Pointing at his brother next, he said, “You, get back to town, and cover all his tracks; make it seem like Longshanks left town with no notice or future address. I’ll give your love to the family.” That finger jabbed at her. “You, come with me.”