“We may have a problem,” said Tashel Ban.
Dinner was on the table, just bread and beans—we’ve been at Star’s Reach long enough that the tastier end of our supplies have started to run short. Still, everyone looked at him. Everyone but Eleen, I ought to say; she sat there, not looking at anyone or anything, the way she does when there’s trouble and she can’t do anything about it. Tashel Ban had papers in his hands and he was looking at Thu, and that meant a very particular kind of trouble.
Thu said nothing, and after a moment Tashel Ban went on. “We found another paper on Cetan science and technology, probably the last one that the people here had time to put together—it was written about three years before Star’s Reach was abandoned. Not much different from the last one, except that it refers to another paper, and we were able to find the other paper.
“You’ll remember that the Cetans have their own way of getting electricity from sunlight, unlike anything humans ever tried. That’s what the other paper is about. Some of the people here decided to try to figure how that worked from what they’d already learned about Cetan technology. They—” He shrugged. “The compounds the Cetans use aren’t stable in an oxygen atmosphere—they catch fire as soon as electricity starts flowing through them—but they were able to figure out the basis for the effect, and find compounds that will work here. So—” He looked straight at Thu. “We have a formula for a Cetan technology that could change the way we get energy here.”
Thu considered that for a moment. “Does it differ from the sunpower cells we use?”
“The principle’s the same. The details aren’t. The solar cells the old world used were made with technologies we don’t have any more; the ones we use now are quite a bit less efficient, and they’re not cheap to make. This technology is much more efficient and probably much cheaper, once some work gets done on sources for the chemicals.”
“Chemicals.” Thu repeated the word as though it wasn’t something you say around good people. “How toxic?”
“They’d have to be tested. Still, the result seems to be chemically stable, and it’s recyclable.” He used his hands to show a ball the size of someone’s head. “Imagine something that looks like glass, about this big around, with a wire going into the center of it and a net of fine wires all over the outside. Light shines on it and kicks electrons into motion, and they flow out the wire that goes to the center and back in through the net around the outside. The Cetan ones last for about thirty of our years, then have to be melted down and remade. Here, they hadn’t figured out how long they would last, but something like that’s probably a good guess.”
“How much power will come from it?”
“Depends on location and season. My best guess, from the figures in the paper, is that each of them will produce around a hundred watts under average conditions—say, five of them would equal your ordinary farmyard wind turbine.”
Thu just looked at him for a long moment, then: “You say they will not be too expensive. As expensive as a wind turbine?”
“Less than that,” Tashel Ban answered. “As a guess—and it’s no more than a guess—once these were being produced in fair numbers, you could probably buy a five or six hundred watt system for about half as much as a wind turbine would cost you.”
Another long silent look from Thu, and then, unexpectedly, he laughed. He doesn’t laugh often, but when he does it’s a great rolling laugh that fills up whatever space he’s in. Tashel Ban looked baffled, probably wondering what the joke was, which was what I was wondering just then, too. The others watched and waited.
“You expect me,” Thu said then, “to invoke our bargain and settle our disagreement with knives, because farmers in Meriga will be able to choose between wind and sun to power a few light bulbs and a fan in the summer? No. My requirement—” He tapped a finger on the table, hard enough that it rang. “My requirement is that nothing we find here will give humanity the chance to do again what they did to the earth. Wind turbines have not done that. Solar cells and solar water heaters have not done that. I see no reason to think that this new technology will do that—and I do not grudge the farmers their light bulbs and cool air in the summer.”
There’s a kind of tension you get in a place where a fight’s about to start, and everyone knows it. If the fight isn’t going to happen after all, and everyone knows it, the moment when the tension lets go lands like a punch in the stomach. I know I swayed, and I’m pretty sure most of the others did, too. Berry didn’t, though. He glanced at me, at Thu, and at Tashel Ban, and then said, “I wonder how hard it would be to figure out whether there’s anything later than that paper on the computer.”
Tashel Ban thought about that for a moment. “I could probably do it now. We’ve found enough files with dates that it should be possible to figure out the raw code, and search.”
“That might be a good idea,” said Berry then. “I’ve been thinking, and it seems to me that we have to do two things before we can let other people know about any of this.”
We were all looking at him then. “First,” he went on, “is finding out if the Cetans have sent us anything that might hurt Mam Gaia, or humanity, or Meriga or the other nations. Second is finding out why the people here—” He glanced sideways at Anna, who was watching him sidelong with no expression on her face at all. “—why they died. We could do both by finding what information they left that’s later than this.”
“True,” said Tashel Ban.
“There’s another factor,” Eleen said then. “The radio.”
“Also true,” said Tashel Ban, as though the two of them had talked about it before, which no doubt they had. He turned back to Thu. “Before we make a decision about making all this public, we also need to know what’s happening in Meriga. If war’s broken out—well, then things are going to be rather more difficult.” He gestured, palms up. “So I’d like to propose that we assemble the radio receiver. Just the receiver, to listen; we can leave the transmitter for later.”
That was another part of the agreement I mentioned a while back, the one I got Thu and Tashel Ban to settle on before we left Cansiddi. Tashel Ban brought his own radio gear with him when he came to join us in Sanloo, a transmitter and a receiver, both of them with the tubes taken out and packed in lom wool to keep them from breaking on the road. They stayed that way after we arrived, because we’d agreed that no word of what we found, if we found anything, was to go out until we all agreed on what to say.
Thu thought a moment, and then said, “That will be acceptable.” I glanced around at everyone else and asked, “Anyone disagree?” Nobody did, and so that’s what Tashel Ban is doing now, muttering to himself as he makes sure the tubes are still good and figures out how to hook the radio up to one of the antennas outside. Anybody with two bits of common sense would be pretty much frantic to know what’s happened in Meriga while we’ve been gone, since the presden was probably dying when we left and jennels were busy raising armies to fight each other, but what I’m thinking about instead is Thu—how we met, and how he almost killed me.
That happened maybe a month after I got to Memfis. As soon as Berry and I got settled in at the ruinmen’s hall there, I went to the misters, explained to them what I was there for, asked about the records of past digs, and told them about the Walnut Ridge Telecommunications Facility and the contract dig I’d agreed to do with Jennel Cobey. They knew a fair amount of that already, of course, since ruinmen carry news with them when they travel, but they didn’t know all of it, and it’s one of the courtesies that you don’t dare skip when you’re planning a dig in someone else’s region.
Of course I planned on bringing the Memfis misters and prentices into the dig, and paying them with Jennel Cobey’s money, and I let them know that. I also mentioned, which they already knew, that I hadn’t managed a dig myself before, and would welcome the local guild’s help with that. Between the prospect of money up front and the chance to help find the way to Star’s Reach, they were pretty pleased with me, and gave me all the help I needed.
It turned out that the ruin of the Walnut Ridge Telecommunications Facility hadn’t been worked yet, either. Memfis was a big city in the old world, even bigger than it is now, when it’s the largest city in Meriga. Some of the ruins around it are buried deep in river mud and water, and won’t be at any risk of being touched by a ruinman’s shovel until Mam Gaia decides she wants a different climate again and the sea draws back a good long ways to the south, but there are a lot of ruins less hard to get, and the guild’s only been working them since after the Third Civil War. It wasn’t too hard to figure out where the place was, and so all I had to do was get the money from Jennel Cobey, hire people, get supplies together, and make a start on the dig.
I sent the jennel a letter right away and started making arrangements. That meant visiting the houses of each of the misters in the Memfis guild, first of all, and making deals over dinner and whiskey; after that was done and I knew how many misters and prentices I’d have to set up with food and tents and the like, it meant visiting the merchants that outfit ruinmen with the things they need, and making deals with them—usually with no dinner and whiskey in sight, since most of them will take a ruinman’s money but won’t stoop to eat or drink with him. So I went from place to place with somebody’s prentice to show me the way and Berry trotting alongside me to prove that I was enough of a mister to have a prentice of my own, and fairly often I got the feeling that somebody was watching me.
Someone was, and I found that out the hard way one night.
Berry and I went to visit a provision merchant that afternoon, and stayed late. The merchant’s name was Dalla; she was short and round and pleasant, and got into the provisions trade because she had family in the ruinmen’s guild, so we got dinner and whiskey; I don’t doubt that she meant to show off the sort of provisions she could get us, too. By the time we settled on a deal, or as much of a deal as I could make before Jennel Cobey got my letter and replied, it was well after dark, and though I wasn’t quite tipsy I wasn’t far from it. We went down the steps onto the street and the door of the merchant’s closed behind us, leaving us in the next thing to perfect darkness, since the moon was down and we were outside the gates of Memfis. We had only a few blocks to walk to get back to the ruinmen’s hall, and there was nobody else in sight, so we started off without any particular worries.
Then a shadow came out of a deeper shadow to one side and blocked our way.
I stopped, not too sure of myself. The shadow stood there for a moment, looming over the two of us, and then said in a deep voice, “You have a dead man’s letter. I need it. If you give it to me now, you will not become a dead man yourself.”
What startled me then wasn’t that somebody would be willing to kill me to get my copy of the letter; I’d been waiting for that since Berry and I left Shanuga all those months ago. What startled me is that I had the letter with me, and this person knew it. Now it’s true that I’d taken it with me to a couple of other merchants by then, since news about the letter had gotten around and I could usually get a better deal on provisions if I let the merchant see and handle the copy I had. I didn’t think of that, though. I could have simply handed over the letter and gotten a new copy from Jennel Cobey, too, but I didn’t think of that, either. All I could think of was that somebody was trying to take my one hope of finding Star’s Reach away from me.
I pulled my pry bar out of my belt, and the shadow turned into a man and jumped at me.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen anybody else move that fast. I was just barely able to jump out of his way, and flailed at him with the pry bar; that made him duck to one side, and probably kept me from getting spitted, because he had a knife in his hand—I could just about see it as he moved.
I had more reach with the pry bar than he had with the knife, so I dodged past him, as fast as I could, and snapped the pry bar out at the back of his knee, one of those nasty little moves that leaves your enemy down on the pavement where you can kill him or just go away, your choice. It hit—I could feel the shock right up the bar—but I might as well have clobbered a rock. He spun around and came at me again, as though I hadn’t hit him at all.
There’s a kind of nightmare I’ve had now and again all my life, where I’m being attacked in total darkness by somebody I can’t see, and nothing I do makes any difference. This fight was like that. I think I landed three or four good hard hits with the pry bar, and none of it seemed to do a thing to the man who was trying to kill me. He just kept coming at me, and I kept jumping away and hitting at him. I knew that he would wear me down if the fight kept going much longer but I didn’t have a spare moment to think of anything else I could do.
Then he came at me again, and I was just that little bit too slow getting out of his way, and by the time I landed I could feel something wet spreading along my side. The pain flared a moment later: not a deep cut, but bad enough. He moved toward me, slowly, testing. I shifted my grip on the pry bar and got ready to stuff it down his throat.
Then boots pounded on the cobblestones, dozens of them, fast. My attacker turned, stopped, and tried to run, but the moment of hesitation lost him his chance. Dark shapes blurred in a scuffle, and something rose and fell. I knew the shape at a glance: a ruinman’s shovel.
Light flared near my face, half blinding me. It was a lantern, and Berry was holding it. It wasn’t until then that I realized that I hadn’t noticed where he was since the fight started, and guessed that he’d gone for help. “He’s hurt!” Berry shouted, and some others in ruinmen’s leathers came over, got me down on the street and started doing something with my side.
I couldn’t quite see my attacker, just a hand here and a foot there pinned down under a fair-sized mob of burly ruinmen. They’d brought shovels and picks, which only get brought out for fighting when it’s a matter for blood.
“Kill him?” someone asked, and I was dizzy enough that for a moment I wondered if he meant me.
“No.” One of the guild misters—I recognized him, or almost—shook his head. “He goes back to the hall. If he’s somebody’s hired knife, we’ll find out who, and then...”
He didn’t have to finish. It wouldn’t have done me any good if he had, though, because the street was starting to spin around me, and the lantern got very faint and far away, and so did everything else for a good long time.
I woke up eventually, which I hadn’t really expected to do, but it was a good long while before I could do much of anything but lay there in my bed in the Memfis guild hall and heal. The knife cut I took in the fight wasn’t deep but it went most of the way through the muscles along my side, and though the ruinmen got someone in to clean it and stitch it up, it’s not the kind of thing you can jump up and ignore the next day. So I lay there, and tried not to yelp when the healer came by twice a day to dab it with something that smelled of herbs and cheap alcohol; it kept the cut from festering while it closed up, but damn, it hurt.
The man who’d tried to kill me was in the guild hall, too, down below ground. Most ruinmen’s halls have a couple of rooms in the basement where somebody can be locked up—a prentice who tried to cheat his mister, someone who isn’t a ruinman but tried to pass himself off as one, that sort of thing. There are places in Memfis where there aren’t any basements because the water level’s too high, but the ruinmen’s hall is up on what used to be a bluff overlooking the river before the seas rose, then became an island, and now is a sort of low ridge, not high enough to count for a hill, between two low flat areas full of warehouses and cheap lodgings that get a couple of senamees of water in the streets when the Misipi floods. There’s enough room between the top of the ridge and the water level for a basement, but it’s damp and smells bad. I can’t imagine a better place to take new prentices to shake the robot’s hand, but you wouldn’t want to store anything there.
But that’s where he was, or so Berry told me. He also said that the man hadn’t said a word since he was thrown into the room in the basement where they had him; the Memfis ruinmen had tried to get him to talk, to find out who’d paid him if anybody did, but they might as well have tried to get a word out of the stones of the basement walls. So there I was, and there he was, and nothing much changed while my belly healed.
After a while, they let me sit up for a few hours a day, and then for most of the day, and then I got to walk a little; Berry brought me records from the digs out in the part of Arksa where the Walnut Ridge Telecommunications Facility was, and ran messages to the merchants and misters who were negotiating with me about the dig, so I had something to think about besides how close I’d come to ending this story in a puddle of blood on a Memfis street.
Finally, though, I was healed enough to leave the room, eat with everyone else, and start doing more to get the dig going. If was pretty clear by then that the dig wasn’t going to start until after the rains came and went again, even if I’d been healed enough to handle heavy work before then, which I probably wasn’t. Even then I thought that this was probably a good thing, since it gave me enough time to figure out what I was doing, get as much advice as I could from the other misters, and catch the worst of my mistakes before they cost anything. So I made plans and drew up contracts and waited for word to come from Jennel Cobey.
Still, there was one other thing I wanted to do right away. As soon as I could walk well enough to handle the stairs, I went down to the basement to talk to the man who’d almost killed me. Berry went with me, along with one of the Memfis misters named Ran, a tough white-haired old man as short and solid as a brick, and a couple of his prentices. Just to be safe, the prentices had pry bars at their belts and shouldered a couple of shovels with the blades filed sharp. I didn’t go armed, but I pocketed something else I thought would be of more use. So we went down the stairs all the way to the basement, and Ran unlocked the door and turned on a light.
The basement smelled bad, as I wrote a moment ago. The air was damp, and the walls were big rough chunks of concrete split out of some old world structure, bashed into rough blocks, and mortared into place, the sort of thing you find all over Meriga wherever nobody cares what the results are going to look like. Ran led the way down a short passage and turned a corner, and we were in a room of sorts with a few old boxes and barrels in it. Over on the far side was a door made of iron bars, and on the other side of the door was the man I’d come to see.
I hadn’t realized until then that it wasn’t just the night that made him look dark when he attacked me. He was what they used to call black in the old world, and what we’d call really dark-skinned nowadays, now that everybody in Meriga is some shade of brown. I used to think, when I first heard that people in the old world spent so much time bickering and fighting over skin color, that the people they called white back then actually had skin the color of chalk, and the people they called black had skin the color of soot, and that people looked like that until they finally got around to making babies with each other in the drought years and, thank the four winds, the babies came out brown instead of concrete gray.
Most children in Meriga end up thinking something like that, before somebody gets around to telling them that “white” back then just meant light enough brown that you could see the pink through it, and “black” meant anything much darker than that. This man’s skin was a lot darker than that, darker than anybody else I’ve ever seen in Meriga, the color of really good beer or the kind of leather gear that’s stained with nutshells and then rubbed with oil until it glows.
He glanced up at us, noted each of us, and then without a word turned back to whatever patch on the floor he’d been considering when we came in.
“That’s him,” said Ran. “Maybe you can get him to talk.”
“Maybe I can,” I said, and faced the man behind the door. “You wanted a dead man’s letter from me,” I said to him. “I want to know some things from you. I thought maybe we could make a bargain.”
He looked up at me, considered. “Let me read the letter,” he answered, “and I will answer your questions.” He had a deep voice, with just a bit of an accent I couldn’t place.
“And if I show you the letter and you won’t talk?”
Another glance. “I do not break my word.”
The funny thing was that I believed him. People are odd that way; there are men who will kill you in a heartbeat for no reason at all but won’t tell a lie, women who will whore their bodies for a handful of coins but won’t break a promise; well, we all have things we do and things we won’t, and which is which doesn’t always make a lot of sense. I pulled the letter out of my pocket—it was the copy I got from Mam Kelsey back in Shanuga—and started to move toward the door, but Berry took it from my hand, carried it the rest of the way, and tossed it through the bars with a quick little motion that didn’t get any part of him close enough to the bars to be in range of whatever the man might do.
The man didn’t do much of anything, except reach a hand up so fast I couldn’t follow the motion and catch the letter as it flew. He unfolded it, angled it to catch the light, and read it. After a good long moment I said, “Make much sense?”
He glanced up at me again. “I assume it does to you.”
“I’ve got some guesses. But I’ve also got some questions.”
“Of course.” He folded the letter again and with a snap of his wrist sent it flying back out through the bars, where Berry caught it. “I will answer any question you ask except one.”
“Who are you?”
That got me just the faintest bit of a smile. “That is the one.”
One of Ran’s prentices started laughing, a sudden loud laugh like a donkey braying, and stopped all at once when Ran gave him a hard look. I wasn’t too surprised, though. “Who paid you to get the letter from me?”
The thought seemed to startle him. “No one paid me.”
“Why did you want the letter, then?”
“To find Star’s Reach, of course.”
“Why?”
He looked at me for a long moment. “If it exists,” he said then, “and if the stories about it are true, and if the people there did manage to speak to beings from some other world—so many ifs. Grant that it is all true. If the beings from some other world told them some way to do the same things to this world that our ancestors did in the past, that knowledge must be destroyed.”
“And you want to go there to destroy it.”
“Tell me this.” He leaned forward and stared at me, as though he was the one on the outside of the bars. “If you discover Star’s Reach, and you find knowledge of that kind, what will you do?”
“Hand it over to the priestesses,” I told him.
He considered that. “And those with you?”
“It’s the ruinmen’s way,” I said, but of course he had a point, and I knew it. That’s one of the things ruinmen ought to think about more than they usually do, because we deal with what’s left over from the old world. The priestesses say that the old world couldn’t survive once it burnt through most of Mam Gaia’s oil and coal and gas, and it’s going to be millions and millions of years before she can store enough carbon underground to let anyone do anything like that again. Still, nobody knows that for sure, and the idea that the aliens might have passed on something that would give people too much energy again, and do the same kind of harm to Mam Gaia a second time, hadn’t occurred to me.
The man who’d tried to kill me was still watching me. “I hope it is so. If you find something of the sort I have named, you may have a fight with those whose ways are different.”
“I think we can handle that,” I told him, but there again he had a point, one that I hadn’t considered anything like enough.
“Perhaps so. I grant that you were better with that iron bar than I expected.”
That startled me. “I couldn’t land a solid hit on you for anything.”
“You did so several times. I am—” He shrugged. “—difficult to hurt.”
All at once Berry let out a long low whistle. “Sir and Mister,” he said to me, “I know who he is.” I nodded, answering the question he hadn’t said out loud, and Berry turned to the man on the other side of the bars. “You’re Thu,” he said. “You’re the last king of Yami. Am I right?”
Ran’s prentice laughed his donkey-laugh again, and stopped when Ran glanced at him.
The man gave Berry a long slow look, and then nodded once. “That is correct.”
Ran blinked, and muttered a bit of hot language under his breath. I stared at Berry, then back at the man who’d tried to kill me. “That explains a few things,” I said, for want of anything better.
“I suppose it does.” There was something new in his voice, an edge that hadn’t been there before. I could guess why: if he was who he said he was, there were a lot of people in Meriga, Meyco and the coastal allegiancies who wanted his guts in a bucket and would pay good money for the chance to see them there.
Ran cleared his throat then. “Mister’s lodge is going to have to sort this out,” he said. “Unless there’s something else you want to ask him?”
There wasn’t, so we left him there in the little room with the barred door. Ran turned off the light and locked the door to the basement behind us. As we started up the stairs, he asked Berry, “How did you guess that, prentice?”
“I’ve heard a lot of stories about him, Sir and Mister. There really wasn’t anybody else he could be.”
Ran gave him a long steady look, and then nodded. “Clever.”
Of course there was a lot more to it than that, more even than Berry explained to me once we got back up to my room. Still, I wasn’t paying too much attention. Part of me was trying to figure out what to say to the mister’s lodge when it met, and part of me was more or less stumbling around in shock that somebody who was nearly as much of a legend as Star’s Reach had come jumping out of the shadows on a Memfis street and tried to gut me, but a good part had something else to think about.
I knew I was stupid even to consider it. I knew that the man had done his best to kill me and that the misters would be making a good choice if they either killed him or sold him to somebody who wanted to kill him, but damn if I wanted the last king of Yami to die because of me. As we climbed the stair—slowly, because the cut in my side wasn’t too happy just then—I started trying to figure out if there was a way I could get him out of there.
There was a reason for that, and most people in Meriga could probably guess it. Still, as I wrote a while back, the next person who comes here to Star’s Reach might be from the Neeyonjin country over on the far side of the dead lands, and won’t have the least idea of how things are over on this side of the dead lands. If you grew up in Meriga any time in the last thirty years or so, it’s a safe bet that you’ve heard of the last king of Yami, and before then it was his father or his grandfather or someone else in his family, back to the days when Yami was drowned by the rising oceans, but nobody from Meriga has gone to the Neeyonjin country since before that happened. I probably need to tell Thu’s story, then, and it so happens that I got to hear Thu tell his story himself.
That happened about a week before we got to Star’s Reach, on the road west out of Cansiddi. We left the last few scraggly trees behind us by the time we were out of sight of the Suri River, and from then on it was grass: tall grass at first, tall as I am, whipping in the wind off the desert, and then shorter and shorter as you go further west, until finally it’s low and sparse and as brown as the ground itself, just before the grass goes away and you’re in the desert. We weren’t that far, but the grass was no taller than my knees and the wind muttered and wheezed through it like an old man who’s drunk too much whiskey for too many years. We found a place where a building had been in the old world, and part of a concrete wall still stood shoulder-high at the right angle to screen us from the wind; it was late enough in the day to camp, and our chances of finding anything better up ahead didn’t look too good, so we staked the pack horses where the grass looked decent and settled in for the night.
There were eight of us, me and Berry and Eleen, Tashel Ban and Thu, Anna, Jennel Cobey, and his man Banyon; eight when we left Cansiddi and eight when we got to the door of Star’s Reach, though there were just six left not too many minutes after that. Once we got a fire going and some food cooked, we sat and talked, as we usually did, and somehow the talk wound its way around to Thu and the lost kingdom of Yami, and he told his story.
“It began with the three voyages,” he said in that deep musical voice of his, motioning with his hands; the firelight turned their shadows into big looming shapes on the crumbling wall behind him. “First, the voyage of grief, from Affiga across the sea to Meriga. That was long ago, when men were first beginning to dig their way into Mam Gaia’s flesh to get the fossil fuels they craved. They still needed strong muscles in those days, and so the people of Meriga enslaved my people and brought them here to labor for them.
“Then there was war, and my people won their freedom. Many stayed here in Meriga, but some took ship back to Affiga, to a country whose name meant the place of freedom. That was the second voyage, the voyage of hope from Meriga back across the sea to Affiga, though the hope was a long time seeking its fulfillment. It was not in Affiga as it was in Meriga; the power and the wealth and the technologies were here and not there. There, there was bitter poverty and much war, until the old world began to break apart.
“It happened then that a strong ruler took power in the country called the place of freedom, and seized countries near it to make a larger kingdom, and because the land was rich and had things the rest of the world needed, the kingdom grew strong as the old world grew weak. He lived long and left behind two sons, and when he died there was war between them. The younger had not so many followers as the elder, and when he knew he could not win he and his followers took ships and sailed west across the ocean, to Meriga. That was the third voyage, the voyage of power, from Affiga back across the sea to Meriga again.
“Meriga the rich, Meriga that had ruled the world, was then torn by war, crushed by drought, and broken into many quarreling parts, and an army that was not strong enough to win a kingdom in Affiga was still strong enough to take what it wanted here. So the prince of the place of freedom landed in a country that is now beneath the ocean, the country called Florda, and took it for his own, and much of the country along the shores of the Lannic that the allegiancies now hold, and many other lands that now lie under the waves.
“Those became his kingdom, and he ruled it from the city of Yami; and because he was heedless, and did not learn from the mistakes that brought Meriga and the old world low, he gathered as many of the old technologies as he could and made use of them to add to his power. That was when he and all his line lost the need for sleep; it was something that could be done with the old technologies, some trick of genetic engineering that someone still remembered; it was one of many things he claimed for himself out of the heritage of old Meriga.
“What he did not remember, and should have remembered, is that Mam Gaia does not care why we do what we do. The best of reasons and the worst are all one to her. All that matters to her is what we do, and all that mattered to her just then was that the king of Yami gathered and used the old technologies, and burnt what fuel he could find to power them, and the smoke added carbon to the carbon that had already been sent up into the sky in years past—just enough, or more than enough, to stir her to wrath. So the high cliffs of ice in the place called Nardiga broke and plunged into the sea, and the seas rose.
“Mam Gaia’s wrath is not quick. It was in the time of the third king of Yami that the cliffs of ice fell and the seas began to rise, and it was most of a lifetime before the seas reached where they are today. Long before they stopped, though, Yami was deep below the waves. Many died and many more lost all they had, and even though the king of Yami tried to rescue as much as he could, a crowd came upon him and tore his body to pieces with their hands.
“That was long ago. He who would have been the fourth king was taken by friends to a place of safety in the mountains of Joja, and when he came to manhood he swore a great oath, that he and his sons and his son’s sons until the ending of his line would make amends for what had been done. Since then it has been our purpose to make it so that the technologies that ravaged this world shall not do so a second time. I say we, for I am the heir of Yami, the eleventh king of the kingdom that is gone; the eleventh and the last, for Mam Gaia has not chosen to give me a son.”
He shrugged, and the shadows on the wall behind him rose and fell like waves. “So that is my story, or part of it. If you want to know every place I have gone and everything I have done since I first went out to fight with those who would reawaken those technologies that should sleep forever, well, we will be here a long time.”
That got a laugh, not least because he was right and we knew it. As I wrote a bit earlier, most people in Meriga know about Thu, and a fair number of them can tell stories about some of the things he’s done. The priestesses don’t like to hear people tell those stories, because they think we ought to keep clear of the bad old technologies because they’re bad, not because someone who never sleeps and can’t be bribed or bullied will come out of nowhere and mess with anybody who dabbles in them; and they don’t like fighting for any reason, and of course Thu has done a lot of that. Still, the stories get told, because most people in Meriga have their own reasons to want the old technologies to stay buried, and because someone who never sleeps and can’t be bribed or bullied is better than most of us at doing things that make for good stories.
“It seems almost unfair," said Eleen then. She hadn’t laughed with the rest of us. "The first king of Yami simply did what most rulers in those days were doing, salvaging whatever technologies they could find, and if I recall right, his grandson didn’t even do that much.”
“That is true,” said Thu. “By then the last of the fossil fuels in the kingdom were gone, and so were the technologies they used to find more underground. Still, that is the way of it.”
“Very much so,” Jennel Cobey said. He was sitting next to me, with Banyon behind him like a shadow, and he’d spent the whole story with his chin on his hands, watching Thu. “The balance of the world is always exact but it’s never fair. That’s true in politics, in war—“ He shrugged, glanced at me. “Anything else you care to name. One person gets the benefit, another pays the price, and there’s no justice to who does which—but the price still gets paid.”
There was a little more talk, I forget about what, and then all of us but Thu wrapped ourselves in our blankets and went to sleep, or tried to. It took me a while, because I was thinking about what the jennel said. It wasn’t until we got to Star’s Reach that I realized that he was giving me a warning, and by then it was too late for things to end any other way but the way they did. Looking back on it now, though, I’m sure it was a warning, and not the only one he gave me, either. That was his way, because I was a friend, or as near to a friend as a jennel with ambitions can let himself have.
I began to find out just how near to a friend he considered me when we were at Memfis, right after I met Thu for the first time. I think it was the next afternoon, when I was going over the contracts I’d drafted with the misters of the Memfis ruinmen, that a prentice I didn’t know came pelting into the room, out of breath. “Mister Trey,” he said, “it’s the jennel—Jennel Cobey. He’s here—“
Up the stairs behind him came quick footsteps, and then Jennel Cobey was there in the room. I got up, partly because that’s what you do when a jennel comes into the room, and partly because I was about as surprised as you can get. I was expecting a letter from him, and maybe a visit from one of his men, but not the man himself.
His face lit up when he saw me. “On your feet already! That’s a welcome thing. The reports I got made me think you were badly hurt.”
“More or less, Sir and Jennel,” I said. “Still, it’s mostly healed. I hope you didn’t come all the way down here just to check on me, though.”
“I have business in Memfis that has to be done before the rains.” A little fast gesture brushed them aside. "I also wanted to talk to you and find out how your plans are shaping up.”
I knew him well enough already to know that he meant I should tell him that right away, in detail, so I sent the prentice down to get him some wine, and started handing the jennel contracts and papers, explaining what was what as he peppered me with questions. By the time the prentice got back with the wine we were deep into the details: which misters and their prentices would be working for him, which provision merchants would be selling us the food and gear we’d need, plans for the first year’s digging, and the rest. He wanted to know all of it; that was his way, then and always. I don’t think I’ve ever met a man who was curious about so many things so much of the time.
So we went over all the preparations I’d made, and he nodded, said he’d have the money to me in two weeks, and started to get up. Then he stopped and sat back down. “I was told the ruinmen caught the man who attacked you. What happened to him?”
“He’s in the basement,” I said.
He gave me a startled look. “Alive or—“
“Alive.”
“Why?”
I hadn’t wanted to tell him, but I knew by that point that he’d get the whole story out of me or someone else quickly enough. “Because of who he is, Sir and Jennel. You’ve heard of Thu, the king of Yami.”
He took that in, and whistled after a long moment. “Plenty of people would pay good money to have him in their hands.”
“I know.” Then, though I hadn’t meant to say anything of the kind: “But damn if it’s going to be me who puts an end to all those stories.”
The jennel just stopped, stared at me for a while, and then started laughing: a quiet unwilling laugh like nothing I’d ever heard from him before. “Good,” he said. “Very good. You want to see him go free, even though he tried to rob and kill you.”
“I’ve been trying to figure out how to do it for a couple of days now,” I admitted. “Haven’t been able to come up with a plan.”
“Very good,” he said again. “I may be able to arrange something. No promises, you understand.”
I heard later that he went to the misters the next day and asked them how much they wanted for Thu. They set a good high price, though to be fair to them it was no higher than they could have gotten from some of the dons from Meyco who wanted him dead. Jennel Cobey paid it, and a bunch of his soldiers came over at night and hauled Thu away, took him out of the city, and let him go. I never did hear the details. Still, about a month later, when I was doing the rounds of the provision merchants again one evening, a shadow moved in the shadows of an alley and said, “Ruinman Trey.”
I would have recognized the voice anywhere. I stopped and turned to face him, and Berry backed away in case he had to run for the guild hall again.
“Your prentice need not worry,” said Thu. “I owe your friend the jennel a great favor, and you a greater one. What I wish to say, though, is this. When you find Star’s Reach—for I think you will find it—consider sending for me. I may be useful to you.”
That startled me, but I had enough of my wits about me to think of the obvious problem. “If I want to do that, how do I send for you?”
His laugh set echoes running down the alley. “Speak to the night air,” he said. “I will hear of it.” Then he was gone.
The odd thing was, that’s pretty much what happened. After I found my way back to Sisnaddi with the secret I learned in the ruins of Deesee, if that’s really where I learned it, I got to thinking about who I wanted with me when I went to Star’s Reach. I knew Berry had to be there, and Eleen would be our scholar, and I wrote to Tashel Ban because I knew we’d need a radioman and to Jennel Cobey because he was the one person who never stopped trusting in me to find it; and then one night I stood at the narrow little window of the rickety little room Eleen and I shared during those weeks, and called out into the darkness, “Thu, I’m going to Star’s Reach and I want you in the party.”
It was the only thing I could think of to do, and I felt about as stupid as you can imagine when I did it, but a week later a knock rattled our door and there he was. The three of us, Thu and Eleen and me, sat up late into the night talking about the journey. We all agreed that if there was anything at Star’s Reach that would put Mam Gaia at risk, we would destroy it or put it in the hands of the priestesses, but that nobody was going to destroy anything until all of us agreed to it. Once he agreed to that, I was glad to have him, since I knew we might have to fight, and of course I was right about that.
Still, the one thing I never did learn was how he knew to come looking for me. Did some friend of his outside the gates of Sisnaddi hear a rumor from the ruinmen and send for him, or did the night air actually tell him somehow? If it was anyone else, I’d laugh at that last notion, but Thu is, well, Thu, and I’d have laughed at the notion that somebody could have had his genes changed so he never has to sleep again, if I hadn’t seen the results. It’s easy enough to say that this belongs to stories and that belongs to everyday life, but what do you say when you’re washing dishes in Star’s Reach and the person who’s drying them has more stories about him than a dog has fleas?