by Jean Johnson
I’d hate to be in Mekhastowne, in the heart of the kingdom. As soon as everyone there realizes Mekha is gone, there’ll be rioting for sure. Even the Patriarch won’t be safe; priests may be able to use their magics unfettered by fear, and they’ll know tons more spells than anyone else, but even a strong mage can do only so much in the face of an infuriated, finally free mob.
Another, more disturbing thought crossed her mind, making her hurry faster, taking the stairs two steps at a time. Oh, Gods—this place won’t be safe, once people realize what’s happened. I need to get out of here! But . . . I need to know if they’re actually going to try the demon-conjuring thing. That’s far more important . . . isn’t it?
It was not an easy choice. Ever since her family had been torn apart when she was barely ten, forcing her to flee her home and make her way on her own, Rexei had always preferred caution and flight. She wasn’t a fighter and didn’t want to be one, ever. She had always avoided being drafted into the local Precincts in her guise as a boy by initially pretending to be too young to be drafted whenever questioned about her age—aided by her slim figure and youthful, beardless face—and by vanishing to a new town and a new guild a month or so later, well before she could be considered old and healthy enough to be hauled to the Precinct headquarters for training.
Just like she had fled many other jobs. In fact, she had fled their associated guilds in the beginning as well, though after the first year she tried to make a point of giving the grandmaster of each local guild a feasible reason why she had to leave, and in a hurry. Often enough, the truth sufficed: Some of the priests were looking at me funny. I got a bad feeling. I need to go. But sometimes it was a non-priest who looked at “the boy” funny. At least until her time in the Messenger Guild, which had allowed her to move around quite a lot.
It was through the Messenger Guild that she had met up with the Hydraulics Guild, and that . . . had led her to her position here. A spy in the local priests’ stronghold. Which means . . . which means I have to find out what is going on and report on it. Even if it scares me.
Or annoys me, Rexei added, feeling the tender spot on her tongue where she had bitten it. The gray-haired priest, Bishop Koler, had startled her with his shouting about her being a useless lackwit. I’d think after two months of being berated and harangued on a daily basis, I’d have grown used to it . . . but all it does is make me want to stand up tall and proud and claim I’m not a boy, I’m an adult . . . since technically I’m not a man.
Unfortunately, she couldn’t let either her fear or her irritation show. She was here on behalf of three guilds: as a representative of the Gearmen’s Guild, acting on behalf of the Servers Guild, in order to investigate claims of guildmember abuse—that was the legitimate cover story—and the third was the Mages Guild, to see if there was any way of freeing the mages kept somewhere in here.
In two months, she had determined the Servers apprentices were treated with equal doses of disdain and contempt but, otherwise, were treated fairly for their lot. She had not, however, managed to make it into the basement level, though she at least knew which door the priesthood used. Only those bound to Mekha’s will—one way or another—were allowed to pass through that particular door.
Keeping her forehead and cheeks relaxed, breathing through her mouth as well as her nose, she carried the coal bucket to the stairs leading up to the second floor. Here were the little offices for each of the priests and the bishops, plus the larger one for the temple archbishop. Koler’s study was next to Archbishop Elcarei’s, and from the sound of Koler’s voice as she approached, it was to his own office that he had gone in order to use his scrying mirror.
Scrying mirrors were far more secure than the talker-boxes, since the messages sent by those could be picked up by anyone else within fifty miles who had a talker-box. Unfortunately, the scrying mirrors required magic to activate, which meant they were a secret reserved for the priesthood alone. No one outside of the priesthood knew how to make them, here in Mekhana . . . but that was okay, because unlike the sound-maker on the talker-box, which had to be held to an individual’s ear, mirrors made conversations as easily audible as if the people involved were standing in the same room.
She ducked into the archbishop’s empty office and moved to the fireplace. Her gloved hands went to work, pulling the tongs off the edge of the bucket, shifting the glowing embers, adding new lumps of black in a scattered pattern so they would slowly turn white and pale orange, heating up the place. This room didn’t have a brazier; it had a hearth, one that shared a thin brick wall with the chamber on the other side. If she strained her ears . . .
Footsteps were her only warning. “Boy! What are you doing up here?”
TWO
The shout should have startled her, but the sound of someone approaching had given her two seconds in which to master her surprise. As it was, she had to conceal her growing irritation. Lad was an acceptable term for a young man; it conveyed youth but didn’t condemn. Boy, particularly when spoken with a sneer to someone of her apparent age, was just plain insulting.
Blinking away her ire, Rexei merely turned her head and stared at the “spiritual leader” of Heiastowne, Archbishop Elcarei. She gaped, really, letting her mouth hang slack in a sign of stupidity. Not for nothing had she earned her journeyman status in the Actors Guild. “Holy sir?”
“What are you doing up here?” the dark-haired priest repeated, stalking toward her where she knelt in front of the hearth.
“Helping?” she asked, adopting a worried, dull-witted look that skittered around the room as if looking for anything to fasten on but the scowling priest. He always reminded her of the slimy feel of cold saliva spat onto a polished surface—one of the priests took near-weekly pleasure in spitting on the winter-chilled floor in front of her and then demanding she wipe it up with her bare hands. But she didn’t dare show revulsion in front of the archbishop himself. “Coals . . . go t’ the rooms wi’ people innem, sir?”
“I swear to the Gods, you get stupider every time I talk to you,” Elcarei muttered under his breath. Snapping his fingers, he pointed at the doorway. “Out!”
She took just enough time to replace the tongs and pick up the bucket, then moved out of his study. Then stopped just past the threshold, her mind racing. Slimy or not, she needed to know what the local priests were going to do, and that meant asking them about the few things she could reasonably know about. Like the vanished symbols from stone carvings and embroidered garments. Turning to face him, Rexei asked, “Holy sir? What happened t’ the walls, sir? They’s gone blank, sir.”
The archbishop, about to seat himself behind his desk, stopped and scowled at her. Now that she was standing out in the hall, she could hear what sounded like the priest Koler arguing with someone at the Patriarch’s office that he knew what was going on, and the Patriarch had better speak with him immediately, before the whole populace revolted. But it was the archbishop’s reply that she waited for, because she wanted to know what the official line would be. Elcarei wouldn’t tell a dull-witted Servers Guild apprentice anything more than that.
Archbishop Elcarei eyed her. Leaving his desk, he clasped his hands behind his back as he slowly moved closer and closer to the lanky figure just beyond his door. “What happened? What happened? Our God is no longer here. He has removed all Patronage from Mekhana. We are Godless, you stupid peasant, and that means that without His Patronage and protection, our neighbors will gleefully invade, and we will be crushed beneath their hatred for all things Mekhanan! That is, unless we can come up with a new Patron quickly.”
Stopping right in front of her, the archbishop spat his last few words in her face. She blinked at that, lifted the back of a wrist to get a tiny bit of spittle off her cheek, then shrugged. Rexei knew who she wanted for a Patron Goddess, but a misogynistic archbishop was not the person to tell. Instead, she just asked, “Need help, sir?”
She looked and
sounded earnest, asking that. Her innocent question made the taller man rear back and blink down at her. Once his stunned disbelief faded, though, he chuckled.
“My, my, you are an innocent, aren’t you?” He studied her for a moment, then sighed. “Come with me, idiot-boy. And set down the damn bucket.”
He returned to his desk, so Rexei moved cautiously into the room, wondering what she had just gotten herself into now. She needed to stay near enough to overhear Koler’s conversation with the Patriarch . . . but the archbishop had given her a command. Personal notice by a priest was never a good thing, but disobedience carried the very real threat of the priest doing something horrible to the offender. Ambivalence warred within her.
Nervous, she set the coal bucket by his desk and dropped her gloves on top of it, watching him warily as he fetched out a heavy iron ring laden with many keys. To her inner senses, those keys glowed . . . dark. That was the only word for it. They were darker than they should have been, full of foul magics, and she wanted nothing to do with them.
Thankfully, he didn’t hand them over. He did, however, lead her away from the corridors she was familiar with, toward the one door she was forbidden to enter. The door that led down to the dungeons where the non-priest mages were housed. Rexei balked, watching him use one of the keys to unlock the door. It didn’t reek of evil, of rot and horror quite so much anymore, but only a mage might have noticed that. A mind-blind drudge like the “boy” she was portraying would still be afraid for other reasons. “I . . . I’m not s’pposed t’ go there, Holy sir . . . not s’pposed t’ go . . .”
“Stop cowering and follow me,” Archbishop Elcarei ordered, grabbing Rexei by the shoulder. Contrary to his words, he pushed her through the door and down the steps ahead of him. Mages were prepped in chambers on the ground floor rather than down below, because until they were bound to Mekha’s will, it was too dangerous to give them a chance to not only free themselves but possibly free the others as well.
Descending two, three, four flights until they were well below the level of the city’s cobbled streets, Rexei found herself pushed aside when the stairwell opened into a long, curving corridor lined with many, many doors. Several oil lamps illuminated the corridor almost as well as daylight would have, making the cracked, whitewashed plaster walls look worse than if the lighting had been dim. To her other sense, her mage-sense, each door in those cracked walls was a blot. Not a slime but more like a patch of mold or mildew, something decaying that she didn’t want to touch.
Visible signs of rot, Rexei thought, humming hard in the back of her mind. She suspected that, had the Dead God still been around, that rot would have been ten times stronger, but with His departure, everything associated with Him was fading. Prudence demanded extra caution, however, and so she hummed. Her mother had taught her meditation techniques, musically enhanced mind tricks to hide any and all magical traces . . . but she shied away from thoughts of her mother. That was the horror that had started her long flight and lonely, distressed life too many years ago.
Except . . . except she could hear familiar, frightening, rhythmic noises from one of the rooms on her right. Paling, Rexei sagged against the outer curving wall. Fear rose in her mind, dragging her down into memory. The sharp smell of various vegetables and cool, dusty stones in the root cellar. The faintest glimpse through the cracks in the kitchen floorboards overhead, of her mother’s form pinned over the worktable, of her limbs glowing with magical shackles, and those sounds . . . those sounds . . . as that priest had . . . had . . .
Archbishop Elcarei unlocked that room and flung open the door. “Novice Stearlen!” he snapped. “Pull out and pull your pants back up!”
“Wh-what?” the novice stammered. “Holiness—I swear, I was given permission to breed—”
“Pull your piston out of the wench and dry it off,” the archbishop ordered, stepping inside and vanishing from Rexei’s line of view. “Whether or not she’s pregnant is no longer any concern of ours . . . unfortunately.”
The last word was muttered under his breath, as if to ensure the dullard leaning against the wall couldn’t hear. She heard, but she didn’t react. Rexei remained outside the room, struggling to shut out the memory of another priest and her mother . . . her poor mum . . .
“If you haven’t noticed, boy,” Elcarei scorned, “all of the God’s markings and symbols have vanished in this room. And from all the others. Mekha has somehow been vanquished, and if we don’t set free all the mages and push them out onto the streets, the locals will come here to destroy us!”
“But . . . but we have magic—” the novice protested.
“Magic won’t stop a weapon aimed at your head when it’s a lump of metal flung from a hand-cannon, imbecile. And magic cannot stop the thousands of resentful residents who are about to wake up and realize Mekha is not here anymore.”
A thump of something striking something else—probably the archbishop’s boot hitting the novice’s backside—preceded the appearance of Novice Stearlen stumbling into view, hands still fumbling to get his velvet trousers buttoned. Elcarei appeared in his wake, forcing the novice to back up farther.
“The only defense we have is to release all the prisoners, shove them out the doors with a fast public apology, and then bolt the doors behind us. Boy!” the archbishop shouted. “Come here!”
Rexei jumped, snapping out of her unwanted memories. She scuttled inside when the archbishop snapped his fingers and pointed into the room. It wasn’t quite as bad a place as she had feared. An odd section of the ceiling, some sort of glowing crystal as big as the bottom of a chest, brought in clean daylight. The walls were a little less cracked and crumbling, suggesting this place had been plastered and whitewashed more recently than the main hall, and the floor was neatly swept, though since no one in the Servers Guild was allowed to come down here and clean, it had to have been done by the apprentice priests, the novices.
The furniture was very simple. A water-flushed refresher stood in the corner of the room, and a sink next to it, though there were no drying towels. A chair sat under the sunshine-bright patch of crystal with a small table in front of it, and a narrow bed stood in the corner beside the door. On it sprawled a woman with short-cropped hair and vacant, staring eyes; the skirt of her plain gray woolen shift pushed up to her hips. Rexei flinched away from the signs of what the novice had been doing.
The archbishop noticed. “Haven’t you ever seen a naked woman, boy?”
Rexei shook her head quickly, looking anywhere but at the pale but breathing living doll lying expressionlessly on the bed. In fact, she shook it fast enough, her felted hat came off, revealing her own dark, short-cropped hair, though hers at least had been cut evenly so that it looked flattering and not butchered haphazardly just to keep it manageable.
“Figures. Beyond innocent . . . You’re probably too stupid to know what your piston is, let alone how it works,” Elcarei muttered. “Listen carefully, both of you,” the archbishop stated as Rexei quickly scooped her cap off the floor, pulling it back over her short, dark locks. “Stearlen, you are to fetch your fellow novices and have them unlock all these rooms. Boy . . . Rexal, or whatever your name is . . . you will touch each of these godly sacrifices on the metal collar, and while touching it, order them to walk up the stairs and into the prayer hall, where they are to seat themselves on the benches.
“That goes for the novices, too,” Elcarei added as Rexei stared and Stearlen blinked. “I want every last mage upstairs and seated in that hall . . . and then you will get them all to stand up and line up at the temple doors, where I will remove their control collars. Once they’re free, they’ll be pushed into the streets, where they can fend for themselves. We will all work quickly, as none of us has any idea how long it will take for them to regain their wits . . . and then you, boy, will be dismissed along with the other members of the Servers Guild for the day.”
Rexei blinked and mana
ged a dull-witted question. “We . . . go home early, Holy sir?”
“Yes, you ‘go home early,’ you delightful dullard,” Elcarei mocked. He pointed at the bed. “Touch her collar and get her on her feet. You know the path back to the prayer hall. Go. Both of you. And if you see any other servants, tell them to come down here or be spell-whipped for disobedience. I want these mages out of this temple in less than an hour.”
Novice Stearlen hustled away, his velvet robes once again neatly closed over his shirt and trousers. He felt to her mage-sense like snot from a bad nasal cold, the kind that looked green and yellow, pus-like, as it stained the sufferer’s clean-bleached kerchief. Cringing, Rexei turned back to the bed and approached the unmoving, slowly breathing woman, trying not to look at her still-splayed thighs. Rexei reached down and touched the rune-scribed collar around that pale neck. “Uh . . . on yer feet. Get on your feet.”
The woman sat up with barely a sound, closed her legs, then stood. Her shift dropped down around her legs, concealing what had happened to her . . . but the cloth was thin, even though it was wool, and all she had for shoes were the felted slippers keeping her toes warm in the not-quite-cold air found this far underground. Compassion made Rexei snatch up the top wool blanket from the bed and wrap it around the blank-staring mage’s shoulders.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Elcarei asked, frowning.
“It . . . it be cold upstairs, Holy sir,” Rexei managed, flushing. “Can’t give ’er burning coal t’ hold. Blanket’ll keep ’er warm.”
That earned her an impatient scowl, but the archbishop didn’t correct her decision. He just snapped his fingers and pointed toward the stairwell they had used. Rexei touched the collar and ordered the woman to start walking—and had to order her to turn left as they exited the room to save her from walking straight into the wall opposite. Thankfully, she didn’t have to order the woman to actually walk up the steps; the entranced mage managed them just fine. She even picked up the hem of her skirt so that she wouldn’t trip as she ascended the long flight.