He scratched his chin through the leather wrappings, nudging one dark nail up beneath the needle-toothed brass muzzle. “You have the right of it there. You speak with the sharpness of a logic-chopper, but the sense of your words is not so pointed toward tearing into my argument.”
“I can chop logic well enough,” I demurred. “I was in the custody of sharp-minded teachers for a long while. This is not my day for the razor of truth. Please, either tell me what you will, or bid me farewell, so that I may pass about my urgent business.”
Archimandrix sighed theatrically. “Fair enough.” He turned half away, facing my direction toward the gallery beneath the Temple of Endurance. “Walk with me?”
“Of course.” I slipped my weapon away and wondered precisely what it was that Mother Iron saw in this ungainly youth with his core of power and pride.
“The sorcerer-engineers are the oldest guild, but we have been undeclared since the fall of the kings.”
Eight centuries past, in my understanding of that history. “You were driven underground?”
“We took ourselves there,” Archimandrix said distantly. I had the impression that if I but asked he would burst into recitation, chanting a list of kings and guildmasters like a memory man in the Dockmarket. “Once our guildhall was the proudest in the city. Where the Ducal Palace now stands, on Montane Street. Some of our old walls are still contained within those newer ones.”
Ah, the gnostic entanglements of conspiracy and architecture. “Ancient secrets wrapped in modern confidences.”
He glanced sidelong at me. For a moment, the trembling, foolish youth was in abeyance. “Some secrets are never unwrapped by those who follow later on. The Dukes were not always as the latest and last was.”
Is he aware of my central role in the assassination!? “I would know nothing of the late Duke,” I lied, the memory of his death at my hand blooming painfully in my mind.
“When the last king was pulled from his throne by the Varingii raiders and their pardine allies, the master of our guild at that time allowed himself to be taken as well in order to give out that the rest of our order had been eliminated. The banners were burned then, and our name stamped out.”
I could well imagine that scene, unfortunately. Which led me to wonder where the Royal Palace had stood, if the Ducal Palace was on the site of their old guildhall. Or had they been one and the same? “Even the bravest men will fall before a surging tide of swords,” I said, quoting the historian Benefactus.
“But the most patient will wait for the storm to clear,” Archimandrix responded unthinking.
Obviously we’d read the same books.
With an audible effort at realigning his thoughts, the sorcerer-engineer continued: “Even then our guild was very old. Our earlier… functions… had grown dormant. When this city was called Cupraneum and men with a different color of skin and eyes lived here, we were great. The Years of Brass were our time. The mines grew ever deeper, as secrets were imparted by the gods above and the powers below.”
It seemed he meant “powers below” literally. I would receive my litany whether I wished it or not. Mother Iron had urged me upon this strange man. It was incumbent on me not just to listen, but even to draw him out.
“We built machines to work the mines, to provide air and light and wondrous goods to the city. Though they are long since abandoned, most of their purposes forgotten even by us, still our guild tends those machines.” His voice was sad now, tinged with the twinned losses of history and time. “Now in these late days, we sorcerer-engineers mine the old ways for scraps of knowledge. Steam-kettle ships cross the oceans on the wings of the learning of newer, lesser men. Some of them even bear light as we once did. All our city can do is buy goods over their sides and stare longingly at the iron hulls and the growling power to sail against the wind.”
He was pushing me into the precincts of my own memory. “I have traveled aboard those steam-kettle ships,” I told him.
“They were not built by us as we might once have done. Our pride is in our past. The future comes speaking another language, seen first by foreign eyes.” That sadness had taken him over completely.
“And those are your deeper mysteries? Care of machines whose purposes you have forgotten?”
“Yes.”
The sheer, simple grief in his voice moved me. I was seeking wisdom from the depths of time. Mother Iron had delivered me into the hands of an odd young man who quite literally saw himself as the warden of those depths.
We had arrived at the gallery below the temple. Light filtered in from above, but much more dimly than recent memory suggested. I looked up the ladder that led to the surface. The acolytes had built a platform over the hole in the middle of their temple yard.
I bristled. There had better flaming well be a door set in that platform, or they’d see some divine wrath.
“We keep many old secrets, but those are our core.” Archimandrix sounded despondent now. He looked up, following my gaze. “You will need us soon. I am sure of it.”
I of all people understood the weight of history, but I was not ready to submit myself to the depressed recollections of this holdout from another age. He was probably right. I would need them soon. But I did not need them today. Lost knowledge of ancient mines and kettle ships from another age would do little to address whatever had passed between me and Desire in the ruins of Marya’s temple. I was looking for wisdom in the fruits of the wrong tree.
Neither would this one’s metallurgy and delving relieve me from Blackblood’s demands. Whatever magic these sorcerer-engineers carried with them, it had nothing to do with the Eyes of the Hills. I was certain of that much.
This was not divinity, nor even magic. This was tool using, elevated to a mystic rite then buried as all mystic rites are wont to be.
“How will I find you if I need you?” I fought the urge to dismiss Archimandrix and his obsession with ancient, rusted lore. It was important for me to trust Mother Iron that much, to believe that I would need this man and his guild again. She did not flow through the world as Archimandrix or I did; she might have seen a requirement years in coming, or moments away. I could only hope that I would know when.
Just not today.
“Return Below,” he said slowly. “Touch any of the great machines with your power. We will know.”
With my power? “Of course,” I murmured. “But for now, farewell.” I placed one hand on a rung, then turned back to him. “I thank you for the lesson in your history.”
“It is not mine,” Archimandrix mumbled, embarrassed. “I only recall it on behalf of those who have passed onward.”
With that, I climbed, wondering how much I would have to work to break out at the top.
Someone had been clever enough to build a trapdoor. Not only that, they had been wise enough to leave it unlatched for me. The true dangers of Below were far more intangible than night stalkers surfacing to rob and to raid. I had never heard of a gang of thieves using the network of sewers, tunnels, and old mine galleries for access around the city. Any that tried would be made short work of. I had been introduced with great civility and care in my day, so I supposed that I counted as one of the dangers of Below myself at this point.
Archimandrix was not so much a danger as a puzzle. I was most unclear on what aid he, his brass apes, and his derelict machines would bring me. But I trusted Mother Iron and her word. I just didn’t understand her. I had my counsel from deeper time, for all that was worth in the question of goddesses and city-killing power.
The temple construction was idle, which seemed curious. The afternoon had not finished slipping away. Chowdry’s acolytes should be at their laying-out of the foundation. Though I understood something of architecture, construction was not a skill of mine. Still, it seemed to me they were nearly at need of digging the trenches for the stonework courses.