That’s how I met Plummer. Of all the people who didn’t join me on the journey to Star’s Reach, he’s the one who put the most into the story I’m trying to tell in this notebook, and to this day I’m not sure why. I’m not sure of a lot of things about Plummer. Most people you meet, you get to know them and a lot of the things about them that seemed funny or puzzling early on look like plain common sense as soon as you’ve been around them a while, but Plummer isn’t like that. The more I learned about him, the more puzzled I got.
All that came later, though, and I didn’t guess any of it when I first met Plummer there in the ruin beside the road to Luwul. About the time we finished eating that first meal with him, the sun came up, and he settled down in a corner of the ruin and wrapped himself in an old shabby coat and went right to sleep. Berry and I weren’t anything like so confident of him as he seemed to be of us, and so we kept watches, turn and turn again, while the sun was up.
Still, nothing happened. We were far enough off the road that if anybody went riding past, looking for us or otherwise, neither of us saw or heard it. Mam Gaia took her sweet time turning that part of her belly away from the sun, but finally dusk came rising up out of the east and the first stars came out, and Plummer woke up.
He’d hardly moved the whole time, but all of a sudden he was dead awake. “I suppose wishing you a good morning is a little untimely,” he said. “I trust you both managed to find some sleep, though.”
“Enough to get by,” I said. I’d taken the last watch and so was wide awake; Berry was still rubbing his eyes and blinking.
“Good. The next safe place I know of is perhaps twenty kil—kloms away from here; there should be food, and friends, but of course it will be necessary for us to get there.”
The comment about friends got my hackles up a bit, since we still didn’t have any way of knowing whether Plummer could be trusted. Still, we’d stayed with him and shared his food, and unless we hit him over the head and left him there in the ruin there wasn’t an easy way to go somewhere besides where he was going. So Berry and I looked at each other and didn’t say anything. As soon as we’d all had a little food, we shouldered our bags, and the three of us made our way through the dusk back down to the road to Luwul.
I’d worried as well that Plummer might talk on the way, and make it harder to listen for the people who might be following us, but once we left the ruin he didn’t say a word more than he had to. If you’ve ever watched an old fox come up to the edge of a road, listen and sniff until he was sure it was safe for him to cross, and then trot across it, no faster than he had to but no slower either, that was Plummer. Even in the faint light I could see his eyeglasses glint as he looked here and there or canted his head to catch a sound.
That night didn’t seem quite as long as the one before, though it was still a long slow journey down empty roads. For the first half of it we might as well have been a hundred kloms from anyplace; the road wound its way through forest, and even with the moon up we didn’t have a lot of light to go by. Later on, past midnight by where the moon was, we got back into farm country and had an easier time of it. Nothing but us moved anywhere on the road, and the scattered farmhouses we could see were dark as old ruins; even the wind hushed, the way it does sometimes in the hours before dawn, so that every sound our feet made on the road, no matter how quiet, seemed to hang there for a moment.
About the time the first bit of gray showed up off to the east of us, we got to a place where a narrow little farm track headed off to one side of the road. Plummer looked at it, tilted his head, then motioned down the track and said in a low voice, “This way. They are expecting me.” It took a moment for that to sink in, and when it did I looked around and tried to see whatever sign must have been left for him.
I know what it was now, or at least I think I can guess, but right then I couldn’t see a thing. I nodded anyway, and Berry and I followed him down the track.
We were both more than half expecting him to lead us to another ruin, even though that didn’t square with what he’d said about food and friends. The track led right up to a little farmhouse well back from the road, though, rather than a ruin. Plummer motioned for us to wait by the gate, saying, “They will need to know that I’m not alone, or—well, not to worry about that. A moment, please.”
He disappeared into the night, and a few minutes later I heard a door open and close. Berry gave me a worried look, and I could tell his hand wasn’t too far from his pry bar. I was too busy thinking to do the same thing, though I could have gotten mine out in a hurry if I’d had to. What Plummer had said about friends, and safe places, and throats being cut if the wrong things got said to the wrong people had me wondering just what Berry and I had stumbled across, and whether we’d been meant to stumble across it, and why. Certainly Plummer had figured out who we were quickly enough.
After a few minutes, the door opened and closed again, and a bit after that Plummer came out of the darkness. “All’s well,” he said. “If you’d care to come this way?”
So we followed him, to a meal and a place to sleep or a club across the back of the head, I didn’t know which. It probably would have served me right to get the latter, but that’s not what happened. Instead, Plummer led us into the farmhouse, through one door into a dark place, and then through another into a big comfortable room that didn’t have any windows to let the light of a lamp out into the night. There was a table in the middle of the room and some solid wooden benches, and a couple old enough to make Plummer look young, who were putting food on the table. The woman, who was plump and sturdy and had her white hair tied back with a scrap of rag, nodded and smiled at us and went back out through another door into what I guessed was the kitchen; the man, who was lean and bent and walked with a limp, put the platter he was carrying down on the table and then shook our hands, saying, “Pleased to meet you. Nobody uses names here; I hope you don’t mind.”
“Not a bit,” I said. “I hope it’s not a problem if I say thank you.”
“Of course not.” Pointing to a third door: “Washroom’s there if you need it.”
I did. When I got back there was a meal on the table and everyone else was sitting down to it, so I joined them, and noticed only after plates were being filled that nobody had called for Mam Gaia’s blessing first. I stuck that bit of knowledge away with the rest of what I’d noticed about Plummer, and wondered what it meant, with the very small part of my mind that wasn’t thinking about pork sausage, potatoes, squash, and the unmistakable smell of pie coming in through the kitchen door.
There was talk around the table, the sort of thing you’d hear in any household, but it had a very odd feeling to it. I got the same feeling later on when I was searching the archives in Sisnaddi, and eating lunch every day with the archivists. Until I got to know them and learned something about their lives and their work, it was as if most of the conversation was happening somewhere I couldn’t hear, and the part of it that I could hear had big holes in it full of things I didn’t understand, people I’d never met, and words I didn’t know. The archivists didn’t mean to hide anything, they’d just been working and sharing meals together for so long that it never occurred to them that everybody else in the world didn’t spend their time talking about how to keep old high-acid paper from turning back into the wood pulp it was made of, say, or the games the jennels and cunnels of the presden’s court played for blood and money and power that sometimes made the archivists work extra hours for a week or two.
There in the room without windows, though, I was sharing food with people who knew how to hide things, and had plenty of practice doing it. That’s the sense I had, clear as midnight stars, by the time we finally finished up the meal and the old woman showed Berry and me to the little room on the second floor where we slept through the next day. It wasn’t just that Plummer and the old couple were used to talking to each other and not to Berry or me; I guessed that Plummer and the old couple knew each other only just a little, if at all. It was that they had something to hide and were used to hiding it in the most graceful way, and so they talked back and forth about whatever it was in a way that they understood and Berry and I didn’t. It didn’t occur to me then that they might have wanted me to notice that, and to wonder about it.
At any rate, Berry and I went right to sleep. We didn’t bother to keep watch, since we wouldn’t have much of a chance to get away if Plummer and the old couple did plan on handing us over to somebody, and it had been quite a few days since we’d had a chance to sleep on real pallets with blankets and all. I slept hard, and if I dreamed about the ruins of Deesee that night I didn’t remember it when sunset came and the old woman knocked on the door to wake us up.
The old couple gave Plummer a sack of food for the road and wished us all a safe journey, and as soon as it was good and dark the three of us slipped back to the road and headed north toward Luwul. When we were out of sight of the house, Plummer turned to me and said, “By morning there will be no one in that house, and no sign that anyone has been there in weeks. In case you were wondering.” The moon gleamed on his eyeglasses, so I couldn’t see his eyes; I think he wanted me to ask a question, but I didn’t know what question to ask, so I let it be.
That night we had to leave the road twice, once early on when a wagon came rumbling by and once later, a little before midnight, when the sound of hooves off behind us warned of horsemen coming our way. There were three of them, riding fast, but they didn’t keep us from getting to the next safe place Plummer had in mind. That was another ruin, most of a klom away from the road in a little patch of forest between two farms. Like the one where we’d met Plummer, it had a roof to keep out weather, and Plummer showed us where somebody had stacked dry firewood; it was in a place you couldn’t see unless you knew where to look, with a bit of oiled cloth over it to keep the damp off during the rainy season. We didn’t need a fire; it was a fine clear day, pleasantly cool except around midday, the kind of weather most of Meriga gets more often than not in winter. I nodded and thanked Plummer, and wondered why he’d showed the wood to me.
So we hid there through the day, made a good meal of the old couple’s food before getting some sleep, ate another as the sun went down, and got ready for our last day on the road with Plummer. “By morning we will reach Luwul,” he said as we filled our packs, “and there our paths part for the time being. The ruinmen’s hall is on this side of the city, just outside the gates, which should be convenient for you. By the time you get there, however, I will be gone.”
I thought he was joking, and laughed. Still, that’s the way it happened. We spent the night walking through farm country; the road went nearly due north by the stars, and we all kept an eye out for watchers and an ear listening for any sign of pursuit, but the only thing we saw was the slow turning of the stars and the only thing we heard was, toward dawn, the first roosters making noise and clattering and voices here and there as farm hands headed out for the earliest chores. The east turned gray, and then the rest of the sky did, and about the time the first glow of sunlight hit a few scattered clouds high up above us and the sky went blue, and the farms gave way to market gardens and then to rows of houses, I glanced toward Plummer and suddenly realized that he wasn’t there.
Berry hadn’t seen him leave either. We stood there like a couple of fools in the middle of the road, looking at each other, and then laughed and shrugged and kept going. The first wagons were rumbling in from the market gardens to the city, but we’d already seen the ruinmen’s hall rising up over the roofs into the morning sky, and we decided to finish the trip as quick as possible and let the stout door of the ruinmen’s hall be our answer to anybody who was after us.
I’m not sure what it is about ruinmen’s halls. Other guilds either buy a couple of houses and tear out the walls between them, if they’re poor, or build something for themselves toward the center of town if they’re rich. Nobody wants the ruinmen in town, of course, which is why our halls are always outside the gates, but you might think ruinmen would build the same sort of halls as the others. Not a chance; it’s always some improbable chunk of salvage from the old world, tipped up on end so it rises up above everything else and can’t be ignored.
Luwul’s was no exception. Some bright boys a long time ago, back when metal was cheap, hauled half a dozen old airplanes from wherever they got left when the fuel ran out, cut off the wings and the tails, and propped them up on end in a circle as though they were all about to fly off together to the moon. That gave them six tall towers, and they used the wings and other salvaged metal to make walls to fill the spaces between the towers, and put in floors every three meedas or so; the rooms for traveling ruinmen were right there in the bodies of the planes, so you could look out the little oval window next to your pallet and see the walls and roofs of Luwul against the sky, if you were on one side, or the farms south of town stretching away toward the hills if you were on the other.
We saw the towers from a couple of kloms away, so we didn’t have any trouble finding the hall, and we didn’t have any trouble on the way there, either. We got to the guild hall just as the sun came up. The houses of the misters around the hall were empty and silent—everyone would be living in tents at whatever ruin they were working that season—but the hall itself, like every ruinmen’s hall everywhere, was always open and always had people in it.
The door was big and made of riveted metal, and it boomed when I knocked on it. After a moment it opened, and an old man in ruinman’s leathers stood there. He had a wooden leg, which explained why he wasn’t out at the ruins, and he gave me the same sort of dubious look I imagine doorkeepers at ruinmen’s halls must always give people who come knocking at sunrise.
“Trey sunna Gwen, a Mister from Shanuga,” I said. “This is my prentice Berry.”
The man’s face changed suddenly; he grabbed my arm and all but pulled me inside, and motioned Berry to follow. As soon as we were in, he shut the door hard, and dropped the bar back into place. “Mister Trey,” he said then. “We’ve heard about what you’re carrying. I’ll have someone go get the misters; there’s trouble you need to know about.”
It wasn’t half an hour later that Berry and I were sitting in the big main room of the Luwul ruinmen’s hall with a couple of the senior misters. We’d had a chance to wash up and get some food, but they still had dirt from the Luwul ruins on their leathers; they’d come back as fast as they could once word of our arrival got to them. I wasn’t sure yet why one of the prentices at the hall had gone sprinting out to the ruins as soon as we’d gotten settled in at the hall, but it was pretty clear that we’d stumbled into a mother of a mess.
“Word got here about two weeks ago,” said Mister Bron. He was one of the senior misters in the Luwul guild, a big burly man with one eye gone and a scar from whatever did it that ran halfway down his face. “Upriver from Duca with the boatmen, and then downriver from Sisnaddi the same way. We didn’t think too much of it, rumors being rumors, until we got a letter from Jennel Cobey Taggart.”
“Who’s he?” I asked. “I don’t think I’ve heard of him.”
“No?” Bron’s eye turned to look at me. “Shanuga’s further out of the way than I thought. He’s a big name these days. The Taggarts are an old Tucki family, cousins of the presden’s or something like that, and they’ve had a house here in Luwul since I don’t know when. Jennel Cobey’s usually either in Sisnaddi or out on the borders with the armies, but the letter came from here and had his private seal on it, and it asked about you. By name.”
I blinked. “That’s a surprise.”
Bron laughed, a short deep laugh that seemed to come from somewhere down past the floor. “True enough.”
“What did it say?”
“Mostly that the jennel wants to talk to you as soon as you get to Luwul. I’ll let you see it, if you like.” He motioned to one of the prentices who were hanging back, listening but trying not to look like that was what they were doing. “Frey, get the letter from Marsh, will you?”
The prentice hurried off. Berry gave me a worried look, though it wasn’t half so worried as I was feeling right then. “What do you figure he means by that?” I asked.
“That’s what we don’t know,” said Bron.
I thought about that for a long moment. People don’t trouble the guilds often, and they trouble ruinmen even less than they do the other guilds. Annoy the gunsmiths or the doctors or the radiomen, and they turn away your business from then on, which can be bad enough; annoy the ruinmen, though, and you might just find out what kind of nasty things hang around in old ruins. I heard of two people who thought they could rob ruinmen and get away with it, and both of them had their hair fall out, took sick, and died a couple of months later. Not that anything ever got proved, you understand. Still, not even ruinmen could get away with doing that to a jennel, and especially to a jennel who had connections at the presden’s court.
I knew that part of what Bron was telling me was that if this Jennel Cobey sent for me, I didn’t have much choice in the matter. Even if Berry and I left the guild hall and tried to make a run for it out of Luwul, once it came out that we’d stopped at the hall, there would be six kinds of trouble to pay for; ruinmen are supposed to protect each other no matter what, but “no matter what” in this case could be soldiers battering down the doors of the guild hall and sticking the misters’ heads on spikes over Luwul’s gates. There are times when you can ask for people to make good on their promises, and there are times when you know better.
The prentice came back with the jennel’s letter, then, and Bron told him to go wash up and get a clean shirt on. I didn’t listen too closely, because the letter took some reading; it was written in the long curving letters the presden’s court uses these days, and used all the old names of towns, which I didn’t know too well then. I made sure Berry could see it, in case he had to help me with it, and started reading. This is what it said:
To the misters of the Ruinmens’ Guild of Louisville, my greetings. A ruinman of Chattanooga, Trey son of Gwen, is traveling through this part of the country on his way to the scholars at Bloomington. If he comes to your guildhall, I will consider it a personal favor if you contact my people here in town at once. I want to talk with him.
— General Cobey Taggert
I looked up from the letter.
“You’d better send somebody to the jennel’s house,” I told him.
He nodded. “I don’t know anything else we can do.”
“As for the letter, I’ve got two copies, one for Melumi and one that’s mine. I’d like to leave one here.”
Bron nodded again. “I see. Good. Yes, and we can get it to Melumi, in case.” In case you don’t come back was what he was too polite to say, of course.
So the prentice Bron sent to wash up went trotting off to Jennel Cobey’s house as fast as he could. I got out one of the two copies of the dead man’s letter I had with me, and handed it to Bron, then took the other one and handed it to Berry. He gave me a startled look, and gulped, but took it. We sat there and talked a bit about the ruins in Luwul and Shanuga, the way you find something to talk about when the thing everybody is thinking about is the thing nobody wants to mention, and Bron mentioned in passing that he had room for an extra prentice or two in his end of the ruins, which was his way of saying that Berry would have someplace to go if something happened to me.
By the time the prentice came back I was almost relieved. “Mister Trey,” he told me, “The jennel sent two of his servants and wants you to go with them.” I got up, shook Bron’s hand and Berry’s as well, and went down the stairs to the guildhall door.
I was half expecting soldiers, but the two men waiting outside the door were ordinary servants in the sleeveless shirts and knee-length trousers people wear in the Hiyo valley, and they had three horses with them. “Trey sunna Gwen?” one of them asked.
“That’s me.”
They both bowed, just a little, and the one who’d spoken motioned at one of the horses and said, “If you’ll come with us, Sir and Mister.”
That’s the proper title for a guild mister, but nobody on Mam Gaia’s round belly had ever used it for me before then. I was pleased, in an odd sort of way. The horse was another matter, for I’d never ridden one and only had the sketchiest idea how. Horses aren’t common nowadays; they like a drier climate than Meriga has now, and the old world left us with some diseases that kill two foals out of three every year, so if you’re not a cavalryman in the army or a servant or soldier of a jennel, or just plain rich, you don’t usually get much of a chance to ride one.
I certainly wasn’t going to miss the chance this time, especially not if my head was going to be on a spike sometime soon. I walked over to the side of the horse, grabbed whatever you call the thing on the front of the saddle that you’re supposed to grab, got one foot into the stirrup and swung myself up. I had no idea what I’d do if the horse objected to the proceedings, but it just shifted its feet a bit and let me mount. Once I got myself settled, it swung its head around to glance at me with one eye, as though it wanted to ask if I was done yet.
The two servants popped up into their saddles with a mother of a lot more grace than I must have had, grabbed the reins and started down the street. I wasn’t sure what to do, but my horse started off right away without bothering for me to guide it. I picked up the reins, too, and the horse gave me a second glance; I think it was wondering if I was going to do something stupid. I wasn’t. I figured the horse was probably smarter than I was, and let it do whatever it was going to do.
That’s how I rode through the streets of Luwul that morning: sitting in the saddle holding the reins as though I knew what I was doing, without the smallest baby kitten of an idea where we were going or what was going to happen to me when we got there. Luwul’s a bigger town than Shanuga, but it’s still got the big gray town walls made of old concrete chunks mortared together, the gate with a pair of tired guards looking down from their windows, the narrow muddy streets inside with tall narrow buildings rising up on either side, pigs and dogs and people all busy with their own affairs in the streets and the dim little alleys, smoke and smells and a hundred different noises all tumbling over each other in the sultry air.
I got to see plenty of Luwul, too, for the ruinmen’s hall was outside the south side of the walls and Jennel Cobey’s house was on the river, which runs along the northern edge of town. Plenty of Luwul got to see me, too; a lot of people in the streets looked up at me as I rode past them on the horse and then turned to watch me go. I wondered whether they’d heard about the letter from Shanuga, or if the thought of a ruinman on a horse was just strange enough to catch their interest.
Still, as we got close to the jennel’s house, the people thinned out. The houses got bigger, and more of them were made of stone, with big gates and courtyards, and towers up above where men with guns could keep watch over the street and the river if they had to.
Jennel Cobey’s house was one of those, as big as any and bigger than most. We rode up to his gate, where a couple of his soldiers glanced at us and hauled the gate open, and then into his courtyard, where the servants swung down from their horses and waited patiently while I did the same thing. “This way, Sir and Mister,” said the same one who had spoken to me earlier, and motioned toward a door. I followed him through the door, up a stair, and along a corridor with tall windows along the one side looking out toward the river, and paintings on the other side of faces of men I didn’t recognize. The second servant was right behind me; I never heard him say a word then or later, but I could feel his gaze on my back the whole time.
Finally we stopped at a door. “Please to wait here, Sir and Mister,” said the servant who did all the talking, and went inside. I could hear his voice, though not the words, and then another voice; and then the servant came back through the door. “If you’ll follow me, Sir and Mister.” I followed him into the room, and that’s how I met Cobey Taggart.
Thinking back on that first meeting now, after everything that’s happened, it’s hard for me to be sure how much of what I think I remember got changed around to fit what happened afterwards. For most of five years, I would have said that Cobey was one of the best friends I had on Mam Gaia’s round belly, and I still thought that right up until the moment at the door to Star’s Reach when I realized that one of us was going to kill the other. I traveled with him, shared hopes and finds with him, told him some of my secrets and guessed at a few of his, saw how he lived and watched him die. It’s hard to set that aside and reach back to the memory of our first meeting, untouched by anything else, but I’ll try.
He was younger than I expected, not ten years older than I was, with a mop of sand-colored hair and a narrow beard along the edge of his jaw, the sort of thing that was fashionable that year at the presden’s court. He was dressed all in green, the way jennels usually are, but the only sign of rank he had anywhere on him was the bone-handled gun that showed at his hip.
“Trey sunna Gwen,” the servant said, and ducked back out through the door; I heard it click behind me. “Sir and Jennel,” I said; if he was going to have his servants use my title, damn if I wasn’t going to use his.
“Mister Trey,” he said, and crossed the room to shake my hand. That startled me, though I tried not to show it. “Thank you for coming. I suspect you’re wondering why I sent for you.”
“That I am, Sir and Jennel.”
That got a sudden bright smile, which startled me even more than the handshake. “The simplest explanation is right over here. If you’ll follow?”
He set off across the room. It was a big room, nearly as big as the main room of the ruinmen’s hall I’d just left, with tall narrow windows along two sides and bookshelves along a third. Heavy timbers framed the ceiling above, and the carpet that covered the floor was nice enough that I was sorry to be walking on it with dusty boots. In the corner where the walls with the windows met, there was a table, and on the table was a flat box as big as a sheet of paper.
He got to the table first, and lifted the lid off the box. “I think you’ll recognize this.”
I did, too. I bent over to give it a close look, and he motioned to me to pick it up, then stood back, watching me, as I examined front and back, the bits of gray dust stuck to it, the hint of fingerprints where I must have held the thing before the resin I’d sprayed on it had time to dry. The single word on the back was there, too, in the pale gray writing nobody nowadays knows how to make. I set the thing back in its box and turned to face the jennel, wondering how he’d gotten the letter I’d found beneath the dead man’s hand in the Shanuga ruins.