Star's Reach Read online

  He smiled a little tight smile and cuffed me on the shoulder. “You take your time. Mam Kelsey up top can make an honest copy, and that’ll be needed one way or the other.” To the prentices: “First of you to find a way out of here other’n that rope gets a mark.”

  That sent them scurrying, and soon enough Berry won the mark by finding a half-hidden door into a part of the ruin we’d explored days before. From the other side, you couldn’t see it at all; that was common enough for the old shelters. Prentices around the campfire at night used to wonder aloud what scared the people of the old world so much that they hid so many doors and laid so many traps. They may be asking the same question around their fires tonight, and I’m not yet sure that I could give them an answer.

  Three: The Misters’ Lodge

  Four days have gone by now since we got to Star’s Reach, and I’m finally beginning to get some sense of the shape of it all. There’s a lot of it, at least ten levels going down, and each level the size of a big city nowadays or a midsized farm town in the old world. As far as we can tell, it’s empty, which answers a question I wondered about on the way here. After Anna joined us in Cansiddi, it occurred to me more than once that we might just find people still living here, with all the good and bad chances that might bring. Everywhere we’ve searched so far is silent, though, and the only tracks in the dust are ours.

  The first level, just below the surface, has skylights in the ceilings, though there are places where the roof’s cracked and sand’s gotten in. The second and third levels are easier going, with light wells from the surface to bring in the daylight and no sand to speak of. Below that the darkness closes in. Anna says that there were hundreds of power cores down deep in the underplaces, and those may still be working, but we haven’t been able to get any of the lights to work but ours. Since the lamps we brought with us run on sunpower, they have to spend a good part of each day at the bottom of a light well charging. So I have plenty of time to write.

  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.”

  No one objected. Garman gave me one of his rare smiles and went to his chair. Jonus nodded once, and that was settled.

  The rest of the meeting was pretty dull; misters’ lodges usually are, though I didn’t know that yet. A couple of younger misters who were working claims next to each other on the west side of the ruins had gotten into a quarrel about who had the right to a little building right on the line between them, and had the common sense to bring it to the lodge instead of going to the circle to settle it with knives. A couple of senior misters working the underplaces close to the river warned of water getting into the deep parts of the ruin. Jonus passed the bucket for money to pay Mam Kelsey’s wages, and I panicked a bit before I remembered that she wouldn’t cost me anything yet since I didn’t have a claim of my own. The bucket went round a second time for money for ruinmen who couldn’t work any more, and I found a few coins for that, and then the meeting was over.

  By the time we filed out of the tent, Jonus first as the oldest mister and me dead last
as the youngest, the sun was well west of noon and the clouds had started to break up after dropping a little rain somewhere else. By then the prentices had gone from talking low to arguing at the top of their lungs, and somebody had dragged out a barrel of the small beer the misters let prentices drink in the ruins. You couldn’t get away with giving beer to boys of ten back in town, but nobody came out to the ruins but ruinmen, their prentices and failed scholars, and the few priestesses who were willing to get that close to the leavings of the old world, and so nobody made a fuss about it. It’s true enough that they had little reason to worry, for you had to drink one mighty lot of the stuff to get noticeably tip-overish from it.

  Still, the prentices did their level best to get lively with what they had, and once the rest of the misters headed off to their tents or wherever, I was surrounded by a fair-sized mob. Until a few hours before I’d been their equal, and they weren’t ready to let me forget that just yet. So I got dragged over to the barrel and handed a big wooden mug of beer, and had to repeat the story of how I’d blundered my way into the hidden room in the underplaces, and nearly gotten reborn, and got past that to find something that everybody in Meriga had been looking for one way or another since about an hour and a half after the last of the old towers went dark and the last airplanes fell out of the sky. Then I had to repeat it again, and again, with more beer, as more prentices joined the crowd and more barrels followed them.

  Then somebody who hadn’t seen it wanted to know what the letter said. I remembered about half of it, and some of the others remembered more, but neither the beer nor the excitement helped us get it straight, and the potuses and the nraos got mixed up with a lot of nonsense, and none of us could say any of the odd words without sounding like we were talking backwards. Before long we were all laughing too hard to stand up. Conn topped it off by guessing what a potus might be, and I’d be lying if I said his guess was anything clean. Before long we were discussing the difference between an ornl and a ceti, or some equally clear and important point, while clutching our sides and rolling on the ground.