Star's Reach (58 page)

It was a strange journey, going along the big
corridor on fourth level through the middle of Star’s Reach. Berry
didn’t say much, and I said less. Pretty soon, I thought, I was
going to be walking back to Cansiddi all alone with a pack on my
back, and a while later, he would be riding to Sanloo with Thu and
a guard of young ruinmen, and nothing would ever bring back the
time we’d spent wandering around Meriga or digging up the jungle
outside of Wanrij or trying to figure out what was hidden here at
Star’s Reach. So we walked together, the way we’d walked down that
road north from Shanuga the day we started this long journey of
ours, and got to the trapped room a lot sooner than I wanted
to.

I turned off the trap, we both waited the
couple of heartbeats it takes for the charge to go away, and then
we crossed the floor where Jennel Cobey died, unlocked the door at
the far end of it, and walked out into the sand and the pale
sunlight of my last day at Star’s Reach.

The dust cloud looked a lot bigger, but it
was still just a dust cloud, with no sign yet of the people who
were making it. We walked up out of the hollow and went to the
closest antenna housing; it was flat on top and low enough that you
could climb up and sit, and that’s what we did. The wind blew by,
spraying sand against my back and whipping around us on its way
toward the Suri River and the green and settled lands off
beyond.

“You know what I’m thinking about?” Berry
asked all of a sudden.

“Nope. Tell me,” I said.

“The way I talked you into picking me as your
prentice, back in Shanuga. You have no idea how glad I am that it
worked.”

“Maybe not,” I told him. “But I know how glad
I am.”

He grinned and put an arm around me, and I
put one around him, and we sat there and waited until the first
dark shapes of people and horses came into sight in the distance.
One hundred forty-three misters and senior prentices make a mother
of a lot of dust, and when they’ve got horses loaded up with enough
food and gear to keep going through the rains and out the other
side, it’s a mother with babies. I was glad that the wind was
blowing toward them and not toward us.

Not too long after that, they were close
enough to see us. We got off the antenna housing, stood there and
waved, they waved back, and a little later one of them broke from
the front of the column and came running forward. It was Conn; he
came up to us, panting, gave Berry a mock-serious bow, and then
threw his arms around me. “Here we are!” he said. “Everything’s
fine?”

“Ready and waiting,” I told him, and he
laughed. “Star’s Reach,” he said. “I slapped myself this morning,
just to make sure I wasn’t dreaming all this.”

Then the others came up, and damn if one of
them wasn’t Orin, the mister who’d offered me a chance to join the
Memfis guild. He hadn’t forgotten, either, and after he’d given me
a big backslapping hug, he said, “Well, Sir and Mister Trey, you
seem to have done pretty good for yourself after all.”

I laughed and said, “Put it down to plain
pigheaded stubbornness.”

There was dust and shouting and horses
whinnying and jostling all around us. Berry was talking to Conn,
and then all of a sudden he heard something off in the middle of
the noise that jerked him around as though somebody had a string
tied to his nose. A moment later he was running through the crowd
of ruinmen and horses. Orin turned to look, blinked, and after a
moment said, “Is that who I think it is?”

I just nodded. Orin’s eyes widened, and he
shook his head. “Of all things.”

Then Berry was back, and somebody else was
with him. It took me a moment to recognize the other person as Sam,
Cob’s prentice from the empty nuke in Tucki. It took me longer
still to notice that Sam had a bundle wrapped in cloth cradled in
one arm. While I was figuring all this out, Berry walked straight
up to Conn and said, in an outraged voice, “You didn’t tell
me!”

“Sam made us promise,” Conn said. Berry
glared at him and walked right past him to me. “Trey,” he said,
“you remember Sam, don’t you?”

“Of course.” To Sam: “Glad to see you here. I
hope Cob’s all right?”

“More or less,” said Sam. “He fell off a
ladder and I had to get him to the guild hall at Lekstun—it was
pretty bad. I don’t think he’ll work again, though he’s got enough
money to be fine. So I came west. Is this really Star’s Reach?”

The last part of that more or less slipped by
me, because I’d finally figured out what the bundle was that Sam
was carrying. I looked at Berry, who was beaming, and then back at
the bundle, and Sam noticed and pulled back the cloth a little.
Yes, it was a baby, with a little lick of red hair on its forehead
just to tell you whose grandchild it was.

Orin was staring past me by then. He turned
to face Berry. “Yours?”

“Yeah.”

“So you’ve already got yourself an heir.”

You could just about watch Berry the ruinman
turn into Sharl sunna Sheren the next presden of Meriga as the
question sank in. “Yes.”

“Well, damn. A lot of people are going to be
happy if we won’t have to go through this same nonsense again. Any
chance you can get yourself a couple more, just to be sure?”

Sam turned bright red, but managed to say,
“We’ll do our best.”

Everybody laughed at that. “Trey,” Berry said
to me, “we’d settled that if this happened, we’d name him after
you—if you don’t mind.”

I’m not exactly sure what words I used to
tell him I didn’t mind at all, because I had my arms around both of
them and my face was wet. Still, we got that sorted out, and Berry
went off with Sam and the baby, and that left me to get the
ruinmen, the four failed scholars they’d brought, and all the
horses and gear and everything inside. The horses didn’t like the
smell of the trapped room at all, but there was a big room close to
the eastern door that made a pretty good stable; and once they were
settled and a few of the prentices got talked into staying to take
care of them, the rest of us went on into Star’s Reach.

If I needed a reminder of how big and dark
and silent Star’s Reach seemed when we first arrived here, that
would have done it. As we went down the stair to fourth level and
along the big central corridor to the room below our living
quarters, everyone but me was staring this way and that, talking
only in low voices and not much even then. I got them to the room
with the printers and the books of numbers; Tashel Ban was there
and so was Eleen. With their help I got everyone up the stair to
the living quarters, and we spent the next hour or so getting the
newcomers settled into the rooms we’d cleared for them. Some of the
prentices got working on a meal, and then the failed scholars
gathered in the common room to talk with Eleen, while the rest of
us went back down the stairs to the room below.

We’d hauled all the desks and low dividing
walls out of the way and brought in chairs for everyone, so the
ruinmen sat down and Tashel Ban stood in front and started talking.
He’d figured out a way to get pictures from the computer up onto a
big white screen, so I got to see it all again, and watched Conn
and the others get told in a couple of hours everything we’d
learned since we got here. I heard some pretty hot language, but
toward the end I don’t think anyone said a word; they were all
staring with round eyes as Tashel Ban talked about the message from
Delta Pavonis IV.

Then it was over. Tashel Ban had the briefing
documents he’d printed out all stacked on a table, and made sure
all the misters got a copy of everything, and then we all went back
up the stairs for lunch. I spent the meal and a good while after it
talking with some of the senior misters about how much metal there
was that could be salvaged and sold, and what had to be left. I had
my finder’s rights to sell off, and that’s a complicated thing when
the money to pay for it will be coming in a bunch at a time for
years. Meanwhile some of the prentices who’d heard Tashel Ban got
sent to take care of the horses and wash the dishes, and the ones
who hadn’t went back down the stair so that Tashel Ban could say
the whole thing over again for them.

By the time we’d finished sorting out the
metal, the money, and the rest of it, I was ready to go hide in my
room or something. Until the ruinmen arrived, I hadn’t noticed just
how used I’d gotten to the quiet of a big empty site with only five
people in it. Now that it was as loud and busy as a ruinmen’s camp
always is, well, let’s just say I didn’t have much trouble telling
the difference. When I got up from the table, though, Orin said,
“One other thing. A few of us need to talk to you about something
private.”

I could see from his face that he meant
really, really private. “Sure,” I said. “Down below, maybe?”

The “few of us” amounted to Orin and two
other misters, one from western Tucki and the other from Sanloo, I
forget their names. We went down the stair and crossed the room
behind the prentices, who were staring with wide eyes at something
Tashel Ban has up on his screen, then ducked into the empty parts
of Star’s Reach. Two levels down another stair and along a corridor
was a meeting room, or something like one, with chairs in it and a
big black table and a white board up on the wall with marks on it
none of us had been able to read.

We sat down. I thought I could guess what
this was about, and I wasn’t wrong. “We need to know what happened
to Jennel Cobey Taggart,” Orin said.

I nodded. “I’m wondering how much you already
know.”

Orin looked at the other two, who nodded, and
then turned back to me. “Here’s what happened. About two months
ago, the ruinmen’s hall in Luwul got contacted by the Taggart
family. They knew he’d gotten himself reborn, and they knew that
old world technology had something to do with it. They wouldn’t say
a lot else, but they wanted to know if we’d heard anything about
him messing with the kind of thing, well, that you don’t mess
with.”

I took that in. “Nobody in the Luwul guild
knew anything about that,” Orin went on, “but they did some
checking around, and contacted ruinmen in other cities. That’s when
I got involved. We decided we needed to find out what happened to
the jennel, and why the family was being so tight-lipped about it
all. We called in quite a few favors with the other guilds,
and—well, I won’t go into it.

“We found out.” He leaned forward. “He’d been
dabbling in the worst sort of old world technology. One of his
servants tipped off the family. He had plans for an airplane, one
that burned alcohol in its engine and could carry guns and bombs.
He had some other things—I’m not even going to go into them,
they’re that bad. He was—” I could see the bump on Orin’s throat go
up and down. “He was planning on using those if the electors didn’t
give him the presdency and it came to civil war. And he was
planning on starting that here, where it could be done out of sight
of anybody, and where there’s an old airfield close by. He knew
that; he had some maps of this facility in his private papers.”

I closed my mouth after a moment.

“So we need to know what happened to him,”
Orin said. “The Taggarts want to know—and so do the priestesses.
This is not a small thing.”

I nodded, drew in a breath, and told them
what happened. When I was done, Orin looked at the mister from
Tucki, who nodded and said, “That matches what we got from the
family.”

Orin turned to me and said, “That was a good
piece of work. Still—” He leaned forward again. “The family’s
trying to keep things quiet, for obvious reasons. The priestesses
are willing to let them, so long as it doesn’t become a public
scandal—then they’d have to call in the government, and there would
be trials and a mother of a lot of very ugly things aired for
everyone to see.”

“What Orin is trying to say,” said the mister
from Sanloo, “is that some very important people would be glad if
nobody ever hears what happened—and it would probably be a good
idea for you to make yourself good and scarce for a while. Maybe a
long while.”

We talked a while longer before we went
upstairs, but I don’t remember more of it than a stray word here
and there. I was trying to fit my mind around what I’d just heard.
It all made sense in the worst possible way. I could imagine Cobey
Taggart watching the plan come together, and realizing that if he
just let me keep on blundering ahead, he could get rid of two
dangers, Sheren’s heir and Thu, and take over a place where he
could build his airplanes without anyone knowing about it. When
they came buzzing out of the western sky to fire bullets and drop
bombs on his rivals, who could be sure that they hadn’t been
waiting at Star’s Reach?

All I had to do was find out where Star’s
Reach was, and if I’d failed, he could have brought out his maps,
handed them to me, and claimed that his people had found them in
some unlikely place. All he had to do to fool me and make it work
was to take a few risks, and he’d succeeded so often I don’t think
it ever occurred to him that he might fail.

It was when we were going back up the stairs
to the living quarters that I realized that I finally knew when the
old world ended. Not that long ago, I thought like everyone else
that it ended four and a half centuries ago. After I watched the
Spire fall, if I really did see that, I wondered if the old world
had ever ended at all. Both times, I was wrong, because the old
world ended in the trapped room by the east entrance of Star’s
Reach, when Cobey Taggart took his last step and his foot came down
on metal. He couldn’t have brought the old world all the way back,
not really, but he could have tried, and if he’d gotten far enough,
he might have convinced other people to think the same way he did,
and brought one last round of Mam Gaia’s fury down on all our
heads.