• • •
Head swimming with tiredness, Rexei finally put down the graphite stick she had been given for writing down everything she could remember. She wasn’t done recording her thoughts, but she was done for the night. Her notes weren’t the most organized, but she had underlined and repeated key words in the left margin so that one could skim the body of the text and pick out a specific topic. With all the food her host had pressed on her, it was a wonder she wasn’t fast asleep with full-belly syndrome.
What she wanted now was a hot bath with some mild-scented soft soap and a soft wool-stuffed bed with thick blankets. Of course, the mattresses down here in the southlands weren’t nearly as thick as the ones up north, but then up north was where most of the sheep grazed on large stretches of pastureland. But that was there, and this was here, and she was seated across the desk from the Guild Master of all mages. The head of a guild almost no one ever mentioned aloud for fear the priests would somehow hear of it.
Smothering a yawn behind her hand, she glanced at the scroll Alonnen Tallnose had offered to her. Eight verses of five lines, transcribed from some far-flung language into Mekhanan. The stuff doesn’t rhyme in our tongue, but there are notes down the side of what the meter was and which words rhymed together. The Mathematics Guild would claim that the numbers and the countings and the position of things has relevance . . . but all I can think of right now is that the first line of each quintain is paired over the whole simply by rhyme but mainly pertains to the verse it prefaces. And the four lines that follow each cover a specific event.
Line about me? Maybe. I don’t know. She honestly didn’t, but she did read over the third verse again.
“Cult’s Awareness, it shall rise:
Hidden people, gather now;
Fight the demons, fight your doubt.
Gearman’s strength shall then endow,
When Guilds’ defender casts them out.”
The verses about hidden people and “Guilds’ defender” were surely linked. There was a Thieves Guild in Mekhana, simply because having a guild structure meant having the safety of like-minded people who would band together to watch each other’s backs. Sometimes they were called the Antiquities Guild or the Reclamations Guild. But the line about fighting doubt, that was very much the life of a mage, the doubt that Mekha was truly gone, the doubt that the priests could be overthrown, the doubt that there was a better life just waiting to be somehow seized.
So that’s bound to be talking about the Mages Guild, not Thieves. But I have no clue what “Gearman’s strength shall then endow” means. I don’t have any strength. I’ve been a bit more brave than usual in the last day, after that horrid feeling of Mekha’s mildew and oppression and decay went away, but . . .
Another yawn interrupted her thought. Across from her, Alonnen sighed and set down the papers he was reading.
“You know, your yawns are making me sleepy. I can take the hint, though. Off to bed for both of us. Or rather, me to my bed, and you to a nice, broad, well-cushioned couch in my sitting room. I’ve napped on it a few times, and it’s about as good as any bed. Save mine, of course,” he added, flashing her another of his engaging grins. “But then mine comes with a feather-stuffed mattress two full handspans in depth. You should see the covers when I’m lying abed. It looks like nobody’s even in there; the mattress is all mounded up level with the rest of me.”
Deeply grateful she wouldn’t literally be sharing a bed with him, Rexei allowed him to shoo her out of his study and down the stairs to the next floor. This part of the building curved a little; now that she knew the Vortex was there, even if hidden, she could see how the floor had been built to curve around the swirling base of the Vortex. They passed a few rooms, which her host dismissed as “workrooms, nothing special unless you’re into trying to figure out how to make magic work properly” and guided her into a door at the end.
This turned out to be the promised sitting room. Touching the control rune by the door, he brightened the suncrystals in the ceiling. Squinting against the light, Rexei was glad he had taken the time to explain to her what they were, how they were activated, and how they absorbed real sunlight, transmitting roughly half of it right away and storing the other half for use at night. The shout, however, was unexpected.
“Oy! Turn’t off!”
“What the . . . ? Dolon! What the bloody Netherhell are you doing in here?” Alonnen demanded, glaring at the squinting redhead wrapped up in blankets on his divan.
“Got booted out by Grandmaster Parsong an’ his wife,” the younger man grumbled. “Too many damned people in th’ Vortex. Turn it off, already!”
Her host reduced the light coming into the sitting room, but he didn’t reduce his glare. “Bloody hell . . . Fine. I guess you’ll have to actually share the damned bed with me.”
“Oh, good,” Dolon mumbled, struggling to sit up. “More room in there.”
“Not you, you daft twit!” Alonnen argued, pushing Rexei forward to the far door. “This one. You snore too much. Not to mention I didn’t invite you in here.”
“I didn’t know you played that way, brother,” Dolon quipped, knuckling some of the sleep out of one eye, while surveying Rexei’s slender form with the other.
“I don’t,” the Guild Master retorted as Rexei flushed, belatedly catching Dolon’s meaning. “But you snore like an ore crusher. I’ll take my chances with Longshanks, here. At least he doesn’t have the family nose and all its attendant resonances.”
“Fine, whatever. Get the light, will you?” his brother muttered, hunkering down under his bedding.
Alonnen slapped the runes scribed on a metal panel next to the other door, then smacked the ones inside the next room. Muttering under his breath, he shut the door behind Rexei. “I can see I’ll have to make more rooms under the mountains to accommodate everybody. Or at this rate, I’ll be packed into my own bed with eighteen others. Sorry ’bout that.”
“I really shouldn’t . . .” she started to protest, trying not to look at the bed in the center of the carpet-strewn chamber. It was a little wider than twice the cot she was used to sleeping on, and maybe a little longer, but that was about it. There was one overstuffed chair by the iron stove, a short padded chest at the foot of the bed, a wardrobe cupboard, and a tall clothes chest. At least someone had built up the fire in the woodstove, but unless she could get her hands on the blankets she had brought, there wasn’t anything she could curl up under, other than what lay on the bed.
“Nonsense, it’s late, we’re both tired, and if I snore, I’ll forgive you for trying to smother me with a pillow. If you snore, I’ll expect you to extend the same forgiveness.” A friendly shove pushed her toward one of the other doors. “That’s the refreshing room. I’ll get you one of my nightshirts.
“Just dump your clothes in the basket in there, in the corner,” he directed her, moving over to the chest of drawers. “It’ll be taken off and cleaned, and your other things will be back by morning, fresh and ready to wear. The other door’s the bathing room, but the tub takes a while to fill, and it’s a bit late for that. You can do a sketch-bath with one of the washcloths, if you want, but don’t take too long—here, the nightshirt.”
Rexei caught the folded fabric, fumbling it before she had it secured in her grasp. Swallowing, she stalled for time. “Uh . . . you go first. I can wait. Promise.”