Star's Reach Read online

  It took me a moment to realize what he was saying. “Ruinman’s bond.”

  He smiled. “Good. You take my meaning.”

  So Berry and I bound ourselves by the old words of the bond, and Plummer nodded once, as though that settled everything. “This is one of, shall we say, several places of the same kind,” he said then. “They change from time to time, for safety, but they can be recognized by those who know how. There are two more on this road between here and Luwul.”

  Berry and I glanced at each other. “This road goes to Luwul?”

  “You were told otherwise, I gather.”

  I told Plummer about the farmer at the fork in the road, and he let out a little sharp laugh. “Had you taken the other road, it would have led you in a circle back to Lebna. No, we are three days from Luwul by the road down there.” His gesture pointed back to the road Berry and I had followed all night. “I cannot recommend going back to Lebna. If you happen to be minded to go through Luwul, though, and don’t object to company, I can point out the safe places on the way.”

  Looking back on it, it’s clear enough that Plummer had planned on making that offer as soon as he’d sized us up. I didn’t guess that at the time, though; I didn’t know him yet, though that would change. Still, I was wary. “And you wouldn’t mind company, I would guess.”

  Again, the long careful glance. “There are men, I’m sorry to say, who would beat and rob a solitary old man without a qualm,” he said. “Most of them would think twice about it, however, if the old man was accompanied by two sturdy young ruinmen equipped with those iron bars of yours. So if you happen to be going my way...”

  I glanced at Berry again; his look said “Whatever you decide, Mister Trey” as clearly as if he’d spoken it out loud. “We’ll go your way,” I said then. “For now.”

  “Excellent.” Plummer gestured at the remains of the meal. “More ham? It really is quite good, I think.”

  Nine: Jennel Cobey’s Letter

  That’s how I met Plummer. Of all the people who didn’t join me on the journey to Star’s Reach, he’s the one who put the most into the story I’m trying to tell in this notebook, and to this day I’m not sure why. I’m not sure of a lot of things about Plummer. Most people you meet, you get to know them and a lot of the things about them that seemed funny or puzzling early on look like plain common sense as soon as you’ve been around them a while, but Plummer isn’t like that. The more I learned about him, the more puzzled I got.

  All that came later, though, and I didn’t guess any of it when I first met Plummer there in the ruin beside the road to Luwul. About the time we finished eating that first meal with him, the sun came up, and he settled down in a corner of the ruin and wrapped himself in an old shabby coat and went right to sleep. Berry and I weren’t anything like so confident of him as he seemed to be of us, and so we kept watches, turn and turn again, while the sun was up.

  Still, nothing happened. We were far enough off the road that if anybody went riding past, looking for us or otherwise, neither of us saw or heard it. Mam Gaia took her sweet time turning that part of her belly away from the sun, but finally dusk came rising up out of the east and the first stars came out, and Plummer woke up.

  He’d hardly moved the whole time, but all of a sudden he was dead awake. “I suppose wishing you a good morning is a little untimely,” he said. “I trust you both managed to find some sleep, though.”

  “Enough to get by,” I said. I’d taken the last watch and so was wide awake; Berry was still rubbing his eyes and blinking.

  “Good. The next safe place I know of is perhaps twenty kil—kloms away from here; there should be food, and friends, but of course it will be necessary for us to get there.”

  The comment about friends got my hackles up a bit, since we still didn’t have any way of knowing whether Plummer could be trusted. Still, we’d stayed with him and shared his food, and unless we hit him over the head and left him there in the ruin there wasn’t an easy way to go somewhere besides where he was going. So Berry and I looked at each other and didn’t say anything. As soon as we’d all had a little food, we shouldered our bags, and the three of us made our way through the dusk back down to the road to Luwul.

  I’d worried as well that Plummer might talk on the way, and make it harder to listen for the people who might be following us, but once we left the ruin he didn’t say a word more than he had to. If you’ve ever watched an old fox come up to the edge of a road, listen and sniff until he was sure it was safe for him to cross, and then trot across it, no faster than he had to but no slower either, that was Plummer. Even in the faint light I could see his eyeglasses glint as he looked here and there or canted his head to catch a sound.

  That night didn’t seem quite as long as the one before, though it was still a long slow journey down empty roads. For the first half of it we might as well have been a hundred kloms from anyplace; the road wound its way through forest, and even with the moon up we didn’t have a lot of light to go by. Later on, past midnight by where the moon was, we got back into farm country and had an easier time of it. Nothing but us moved anywhere on the road, and the scattered farmhouses we could see were dark as old ruins; even the wind hushed, the way it does sometimes in the hours before dawn, so that every sound our feet made on the road, no matter how quiet, seemed to hang there for a moment.

  About the time the first bit of gray showed up off to the east of us, we got to a place where a narrow little farm track headed off to one side of the road. Plummer looked at it, tilted his head, then motioned down the track and said in a low voice, “This way. They are expecting me.” It took a moment for that to sink in, and when it did I looked around and tried to see whatever sign must have been left for him.

  I know what it was now, or at least I think I can guess, but right then I couldn’t see a thing. I nodded anyway, and Berry and I followed him down the track.

  We were both more than half expecting him to lead us to another ruin, even though that didn’t square with what he’d said about food and friends. The track led right up to a little farmhouse well back from the road, though, rather than a ruin. Plummer motioned for us to wait by the gate, saying, “They will need to know that I’m not alone, or—well, not to worry about that. A moment, please.”

  He disappeared into the night, and a few minutes later I heard a door open and close. Berry gave me a worried look, and I could tell his hand wasn’t too far from his pry bar. I was too busy thinking to do the same thing, though I could have gotten mine out in a hurry if I’d had to. What Plummer had said about friends, and safe places, and throats being cut if the wrong things got said to the wrong people had me wondering just what Berry and I had stumbled across, and whether we’d been meant to stumble across it, and why. Certainly Plummer had figured out who we were quickly enough.

  After a few minutes, the door opened and closed again, and a bit after that Plummer came out of the darkness. “All’s well,” he said. “If you’d care to come this way?”

  So we followed him, to a meal and a place to sleep or a club across the back of the head, I didn’t know which. It probably would have served me right to get the latter, but that’s not what happened. Instead, Plummer led us into the farmhouse, through one door into a dark place, and then through another into a big comfortable room that didn’t have any windows to let the light of a lamp out into the night. There was a table in the middle of the room and some solid wooden benches, and a couple old enough to make Plummer look young, who were putting food on the table. The woman, who was plump and sturdy and had her white hair tied back with a scrap of rag, nodded and smiled at us and went back out through another door into what I guessed was the kitchen; the man, who was lean and bent and walked with a limp, put the platter he was carrying down on the table and then shook our hands, saying, “Pleased to meet you. Nobody uses names here; I hope you don’t mind.”

  “Not a bit,” I said. “I hope it’s not a problem if I say thank you.”

  “O
f course not.” Pointing to a third door: “Washroom’s there if you need it.”

  I did. When I got back there was a meal on the table and everyone else was sitting down to it, so I joined them, and noticed only after plates were being filled that nobody had called for Mam Gaia’s blessing first. I stuck that bit of knowledge away with the rest of what I’d noticed about Plummer, and wondered what it meant, with the very small part of my mind that wasn’t thinking about pork sausage, potatoes, squash, and the unmistakable smell of pie coming in through the kitchen door.

  There was talk around the table, the sort of thing you’d hear in any household, but it had a very odd feeling to it. I got the same feeling later on when I was searching the archives in Sisnaddi, and eating lunch every day with the archivists. Until I got to know them and learned something about their lives and their work, it was as if most of the conversation was happening somewhere I couldn’t hear, and the part of it that I could hear had big holes in it full of things I didn’t understand, people I’d never met, and words I didn’t know. The archivists didn’t mean to hide anything, they’d just been working and sharing meals together for so long that it never occurred to them that everybody else in the world didn’t spend their time talking about how to keep old high-acid paper from turning back into the wood pulp it was made of, say, or the games the jennels and cunnels of the presden’s court played for blood and money and power that sometimes made the archivists work extra hours for a week or two.

  There in the room without windows, though, I was sharing food with people who knew how to hide things, and had plenty of practice doing it. That’s the sense I had, clear as midnight stars, by the time we finally finished up the meal and the old woman showed Berry and me to the little room on the second floor where we slept through the next day. It wasn’t just that Plummer and the old couple were used to talking to each other and not to Berry or me; I guessed that Plummer and the old couple knew each other only just a little, if at all. It was that they had something to hide and were used to hiding it in the most graceful way, and so they talked back and forth about whatever it was in a way that they understood and Berry and I didn’t. It didn’t occur to me then that they might have wanted me to notice that, and to wonder about it.

  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.”