Rahl decided to use standard hand. He picked up the pen and took the top report off the pile to his right, then took a sheet of the smooth beige paper and set it before him.
“You must write well,” said Talanyr from the far end of the table. Rhiobyn was serving as the duty messenger. “Thelsyn never says that.”
“One advantage of my humble past,” Rahl replied.
“More writing and less talking.” Thelsyn stood in the doorway once more.
“Yes, ser.” Rahl wondered how he’d managed to return from where he’d gone so quickly. He had seen the mage-guard leave.
“Remember that.” Thelsyn turned.
Rahl returned his attention to the first report, from a mage-guard named Wenyna. Her writing was hurried but clear, once he realized that the hooked curlicue was an “e,” and he was able to finish two copies of her daily report quickly.
The next one was a different matter. Rahl had to cross-check the scribbling against the roster of all the mage-guards even to make out the scrawled name-Shaelynt. He looked at the scrawled symbols on the sheet before him, struggling to make out the words, feeling as though he were working out some kind of puzzle. The first half page took him longer than two complete copies of Wenyna’s report.
The report after that was better, if disturbing, because it dealt with a loader who had attacked one of the servers in the loaders’ cookshack and thrown the old man into a kettle of boiling water. Why had the loader attacked the server? The servers were as much prisoners as the loaders and breakers.
After making that set of fair copies, he cleaned the pen. Then he got up and stretched and wiggled his fingers. He was little more than a glorified scrivener-except one without order skills.
Rahl could recall all too well that he had once thought he would be more than happy to have been a scrivener living in Land’s End for the rest of his days. Now…if he didn’t recover his order-skills, he’d be a clerk or a checker in Luba to the end of his life, and that was not what he wanted-even if he had no clear idea of what he did want.
Just after he’d reseated himself and started on the next set of reports, Thelsyn reappeared.
“Rahl, let’s see what you’ve done.”
“These here, ser.”
Thelsyn picked up the completed copies and leafed through them. Then he nodded, turned, and departed.
After Thelsyn left the copying room, Rahl glanced to the other end.
“You must be good,” observed Talanyr. “He always complains about mine and Rhiobyn’s.”
“He’ll find something else I do to complain about.”
“Such as talking too much,” suggested Thelsyn.
This time, Rahl realized that the mage-guard had not really left the chamber, but used magery to create that impression. “Yes, ser.”
When Thelsyn did leave, it did appear as though the mage-guard had actually walked out, but, to be safe, Rahl wrote out another set of reports and started on the next one before he said anything more.
“Does everyone just stay here in Luba all the time? The mage-guards and — clerks, I mean?”
“Oh, no,” replied Talanyr. “This is lousy duty, but we’re not confined the way the prisoners are. We get either sevenday or eightday off, usually eightday, and we can take the regular transport wagon to Guasyra. It makes a run after breakfast and leaves from the square there just about the time of evening bells. Or, if you’re really adventurous, you can come back on the early-morning run.”
“What’s in Guasyra?”
“Good food…well, better food…women, if you’re not too particular; young men, if your tastes run that way…”
Rahl winced.
“I thought not. You leave a girl behind?”
Deybri was anything but a girl, and Rahl hadn’t so much left her behind as been forced to leave Nylan-and her. He’d kept having dreams about when he’d seen her the last time, and her words about the past having no hold on him. If it had no hold on him, why did he keep thinking about her?
“I wonder how much it would cost to send a letter to Nylan,” he mused aloud.
“It’s three coppers a sheet anywhere west of the Heldyn Mountains and four to the east,” replied Talanyr, “and two silvers over that to any port in the world on a Hamorian vessel. I don’t know about what it costs on other lands’ vessels.”
“More,” said Rahl dryly. Still, he was now getting paid at the rate of five Hamorian coppers an eightday. If he were careful…
LXXI
As the sun shone over the eastern hills, Rahl and Talanyr sat in the third row of the long transport wagon while its iron tires rumbled over the stone road that rose gradually from the Luba Valley toward the southern pass. At Talanyr’s urging, not that it had taken much, Rahl had agreed to accompany him to Guasyra on eightday. Rahl had certainly wanted to leave Luba and the ironworks, as much to know that he could as for any other reason, and it had been so long since anyone had wanted him to accompany them anywhere. On the other hand, he had but six coppers to his name. He tried not to think about that. At the very least, he could walk around the town and learn more about Hamor.
“The town’s south of Luba, but isn’t the Swarth River to the east?” asked Rahl.
“It is, but Guasyra sits on the north side of the Rynn. It’s a small river that runs out of the mountains and into the Swarth, but, even without the cataracts east of it, it’s not deep enough for the iron barges and the steam tugs. It’s better that way. It’s still a small town. Well…for around here. It’s still three times the size of Jabuti.”
“Is there a town where they load the iron?”
“That’s Luba. It’s just docks and loading, and it’s almost as grimy as the ironworks. It’s also ten kays farther away from the ironworks than Guasyra is, but it’s a flat road almost the whole way, and that’s easier on the drays that haul the steel. The Emperor Halmyt thought about building a canal east from the ironworks, but the high mages told him not to. He got so upset that he tried to have one of them killed, but whatever he had in mind didn’t work, and his heart stopped.”
Rahl glanced ahead. The road had begun to level out. Less than half a kay ahead, it entered a stone-walled cut between two hills of a dusky red sandstone. “And nothing happened to the mages?”
“One died, and two of them were sent to oversee the mage-guard station here. That’s what they say, but when people talk about the Triad, you never know,” Talanyr said. “One of the first things the Emperor Mythalt had to do was to find a new trio of high mages. That took a while.”
“Do they come from the mage-guards?” Rahl blotted his forehead. Even the early sun was hot in summer, and the acrid odor of the ironworks still filled his nostrils. The ironworks never shut down, not even on eightday.
“They have to, and they have to have been a mage-guard for at least ten years.”
“Does the time spent as a mage-clerk count?” asked Rahl.
“After you finish training-or for someone like you-once you’re working in a mage-guard station.”
The transport wagon rolled into the stone-walled cut in the hillside. The walls stretched upward almost fifty cubits, and the stone pavement was wide enough to accommodate two wagons side by side and ran from wall to wall, except for shallow gutters a cubit wide at the base of the walls. The sandstone blocks were all of the same size and precisely cut and finished, although weathered and worn in places. Rahl was glad for the comparative cool of the shaded defile.
“This looks old.”
“Something like three centuries, Thelsyn said.”
From one of the mage-guards in the wooden seat just before them came a murmured comment. “That’s the sort of thing he’d know.”
Talanyr grinned and shook his head.
Just after the wagon rumbled through the stone defile, Rahl could see a small valley spreading out to the south. Unlike the desolation of Luba, the greenery of grass and of trees was almost everywhere. The road began to descend, but not nearly so far as it had climbed out of the Luba valley.