by Jean Johnson
Smothering a yawn behind her hand, she glanced at the scroll Alonnen Tallnose had offered to her. Eight verses of five lines, transcribed from some far-flung language into Mekhanan. The stuff doesn’t rhyme in our tongue, but there are notes down the side of what the meter was and which words rhymed together. The Mathematics Guild would claim that the numbers and the countings and the position of things has relevance . . . but all I can think of right now is that the first line of each quintain is paired over the whole simply by rhyme but mainly pertains to the verse it prefaces. And the four lines that follow each cover a specific event.
Line about me? Maybe. I don’t know. She honestly didn’t, but she did read over the third verse again.
“Cult’s Awareness, it shall rise:
Hidden people, gather now;
Fight the demons, fight your doubt.
Gearman’s strength shall then endow,
When Guilds’ defender casts them out.”
The verses about hidden people and “Guilds’ defender” were surely linked. There was a Thieves Guild in Mekhana, simply because having a guild structure meant having the safety of like-minded people who would band together to watch each other’s backs. Sometimes they were called the Antiquities Guild or the Reclamations Guild. But the line about fighting doubt, that was very much the life of a mage, the doubt that Mekha was truly gone, the doubt that the priests could be overthrown, the doubt that there was a better life just waiting to be somehow seized.
So that’s bound to be talking about the Mages Guild, not Thieves. But I have no clue what “Gearman’s strength shall then endow” means. I don’t have any strength. I’ve been a bit more brave than usual in the last day, after that horrid feeling of Mekha’s mildew and oppression and decay went away, but . . .
Another yawn interrupted her thought. Across from her, Alonnen sighed and set down the papers he was reading.
“You know, your yawns are making me sleepy. I can take the hint, though. Off to bed for both of us. Or rather, me to my bed, and you to a nice, broad, well-cushioned couch in my sitting room. I’ve napped on it a few times, and it’s about as good as any bed. Save mine, of course,” he added, flashing her another of his engaging grins. “But then mine comes with a feather-stuffed mattress two full handspans in depth. You should see the covers when I’m lying abed. It looks like nobody’s even in there; the mattress is all mounded up level with the rest of me.”
Deeply grateful she wouldn’t literally be sharing a bed with him, Rexei allowed him to shoo her out of his study and down the stairs to the next floor. This part of the building curved a little; now that she knew the Vortex was there, even if hidden, she could see how the floor had been built to curve around the swirling base of the Vortex. They passed a few rooms, which her host dismissed as “workrooms, nothing special unless you’re into trying to figure out how to make magic work properly” and guided her into a door at the end.
This turned out to be the promised sitting room. Touching the control rune by the door, he brightened the suncrystals in the ceiling. Squinting against the light, Rexei was glad he had taken the time to explain to her what they were, how they were activated, and how they absorbed real sunlight, transmitting roughly half of it right away and storing the other half for use at night. The shout, however, was unexpected.
“Oy! Turn’t off!”
“What the . . . ? Dolon! What the bloody Netherhell are you doing in here?” Alonnen demanded, glaring at the squinting redhead wrapped up in blankets on his divan.
“Got booted out by Grandmaster Parsong an’ his wife,” the younger man grumbled. “Too many damned people in th’ Vortex. Turn it off, already!”
Her host reduced the light coming into the sitting room, but he didn’t reduce his glare. “Bloody hell . . . Fine. I guess you’ll have to actually share the damned bed with me.”
“Oh, good,” Dolon mumbled, struggling to sit up. “More room in there.”
“Not you, you daft twit!” Alonnen argued, pushing Rexei forward to the far door. “This one. You snore too much. Not to mention I didn’t invite you in here.”
“I didn’t know you played that way, brother,” Dolon quipped, knuckling some of the sleep out of one eye, while surveying Rexei’s slender form with the other.
“I don’t,” the Guild Master retorted as Rexei flushed, belatedly catching Dolon’s meaning. “But you snore like an ore crusher. I’ll take my chances with Longshanks, here. At least he doesn’t have the family nose and all its attendant resonances.”
“Fine, whatever. Get the light, will you?” his brother muttered, hunkering down under his bedding.
Alonnen slapped the runes scribed on a metal panel next to the other door, then smacked the ones inside the next room. Muttering under his breath, he shut the door behind Rexei. “I can see I’ll have to make more rooms under the mountains to accommodate everybody. Or at this rate, I’ll be packed into my own bed with eighteen others. Sorry ’bout that.”
“I really shouldn’t . . .” she started to protest, trying not to look at the bed in the center of the carpet-strewn chamber. It was a little wider than twice the cot she was used to sleeping on, and maybe a little longer, but that was about it. There was one overstuffed chair by the iron stove, a short padded chest at the foot of the bed, a wardrobe cupboard, and a tall clothes chest. At least someone had built up the fire in the woodstove, but unless she could get her hands on the blankets she had brought, there wasn’t anything she could curl up under, other than what lay on the bed.
“Nonsense, it’s late, we’re both tired, and if I snore, I’ll forgive you for trying to smother me with a pillow. If you snore, I’ll expect you to extend the same forgiveness.” A friendly shove pushed her toward one of the other doors. “That’s the refreshing room. I’ll get you one of my nightshirts.
“Just dump your clothes in the basket in there, in the corner,” he directed her, moving over to the chest of drawers. “It’ll be taken off and cleaned, and your other things will be back by morning, fresh and ready to wear. The other door’s the bathing room, but the tub takes a while to fill, and it’s a bit late for that. You can do a sketch-bath with one of the washcloths, if you want, but don’t take too long—here, the nightshirt.”
Rexei caught the folded fabric, fumbling it before she had it secured in her grasp. Swallowing, she stalled for time. “Uh . . . you go first. I can wait. Promise.”
Eyeing her, he shrugged and stepped into the refreshing room. Left alone, Rexei tried to dredge up any excuse for not sharing a bed with her host. With this Guild Master, though, she didn’t really feel like a member of his guild, the Mages Guild. Picking her way over to the side of the bed, she investigated the coverlets. A sheet, a wool blanket, a feather-stuffed quilt, and a lightly felted coverlet in a soft dyed gray; the color of the coverlet was too uniform to have been from a naturally gray sheep.
Maybe if she stripped the bottom and top blankets and doubled them up, she might be comfortable enough. As a messenger, sometimes she’d been forced to sleep in the wild. A carpet-strewn floor in a fire-warmed building would be far more comfortable than dossing down on a bedroll inside a low-slung tent made out of an oilcloth tarp tied over the back of her motorhorse for a ridgepole and staked out to one side. Not often, but sometimes she had been forced to camp like that.
The door opened. She glanced at her host—and gasped, stumbling back. Alonnen Tallnose was naked. Completely nude. Hair brushed out and looking like gold and copper fluff around his shoulders, he padded out of the refreshing room on bare feet . . . bare legs, and bare everything else . . . and headed toward the same drawer he had used before. Only to stop and stare at her. “Are you alright?”
Wide-eyed, she shook her head. He looked around the room, then down at himself, clearly puzzled by what was upsetting her. Thankfully his organ was flaccid, but it was still there, exposed to the world amid a short thatch of reddish nethercu
rls. Rexei tried not to stare at it, but she couldn’t help backing away from it. She had spent over half of her life avoiding the horrid things, thanks to the memory of what that priest had done to her own mother, and if it so much as twitched, she would run. Except there really wasn’t any other place for her that was safe from the priests. Feeling trapped, she tried not to panic.
“What? You’re acting like you’ve never seen another naked man before.” Pulling out a second nightshirt, Alonnen padded over to her. She looked anywhere but at him. “Buck up, lad! It’s not like you’re seeing nothing you yourself don’t have, right? . . . Right?”
He wasn’t going to let the subject go . . . and there was really nowhere left for her to flee. Arms folded across her chest, shoulders hunched, she squeezed her eyes shut. Hoping—praying to any God that would listen—that he was as nice as he seemed, Rexei blurted out, “I’m a lass, not a lad!”
FIVE
“Gods!” Shocked, Alonnen smacked the nightshirt over his groin to hide it, then quickly fumbled his way into it while she still had her face scrunched up and her head averted. “I’m so sorry! I didn’t know . . .”
Her confession clarified several things in an instant, the lack of any beard hairs on her chin, her reluctance to share his quarters—not that there was much chance of finding a place for her this late at night—and other little things. “Rexei” was common enough when used for both girls and boys that it was probably her real name, or perhaps one she had chosen to cling to her true self in the midst of her deception.
He couldn’t blame her for that deception, though. Everyone in the Mages Guild knew what priests preferred to do to childbearing-aged women, whether or not they were captive mages. No doubt she was mortified by him walking around all but waving his piston in her face. As soon as he had the nightshirt tugged down over his knees, he spoke in hushed tones, hoping to keep her calm. Since she was something of a mage, he had to keep her calm so that she didn’t just randomly lash out with her magic. “It’s okay. You can relax. I’m all covered now, promise. I wish you’d told me a couple hours ago, when I’d have had a chance of finding you a female bunkmate. But it’s okay. I promise, you’re safe with me.”
She unsquinched her eyes a little, but she still looked like she was bracing for some sort of blow. It made him feel worse, that this otherwise brave and rather talented young woman could be so patently afraid. Sighing, he raked a hand through his hair, which he had unbound and given a quick brushing while in the refreshing room. She didn’t relax much more, just continued to give him a wide, wary stare while he stood there and thought.
“Oh, do stop looking at me like that,” he groused when Rexei didn’t relax. Her fear made him feel like a monster, which he was not. “I’m not going to pounce on you. Even if I were so inclined—which I am not—I’ve got my bloody youngest brother in the next room—who would flirt with you if he knew, since he’s a bit dense that way—plus our two sisters and our mum and dad all live here in the inner circle. And my elder brother himself would publically flog me ’til I bled to my knees if I tried to harm you. Now, it’s late; we’re both tired; we’re both polite, properly raised adults.
“There are more people crammed into the inner circle than I expected, which means I doubt either of us would find anything for you if we tried looking for another room right now. So we’ll just have to put up with things for one night. Go get changed, wash your face and whatever else, and pick a side to sleep on—and don’t even suggest sleeping on the floor. The woodstove doesn’t burn wood; it burns magic, but the spell’s set to drop the temperature once the lights go out, and that means it’ll get bloody cold in here. Don’t freeze just because you only think you have to be afraid of me. Because you don’t.”
Her jaw dropped. Alonnen held up a hand, forestalling her argument.
“Not for the reason you’re thinking. Frankly, you’re insulting me with that look on your face and those suspicions in your eyes. The natural state of a man is not a rapist, and I’ll thank you to remember that. And I am certainly not one,” he asserted. “I’ve no urge to assault you. I’m not going to beat you in your sleep, or even bother you, unless I should snore . . . and I can’t help the latter, in case you haven’t noticed by the size of my rather tall nose. But either way, nothing is going to happen between us but a bit of snoring . . . and maybe an elbowing if one of us snores.
“Have I harmed you?” he added tartly when she didn’t move and didn’t speak. “Aside from the shoulder thing? Have I done anything cruel or savage or utterly lacking in self-control? Or even just slightly lacking?”
“No,” she admitted reluctantly. Her shoulders were still a little tense, but her arms had relaxed slightly.
Alonnen took that for the positive sign it was, and he flipped a hand at her again. “Well, there you go. You’ll be as safe in my bed as my mum would be.” Oddly enough, that caused her to wince and tense again. “Or your own mum,” he added.
That made her blanch and stare at him. Or rather, through him. Alonnen had the disturbing notion she was seeing very bad memories. Before he could question her, she tightened her arms across her flat chest and mumbled, “She’s . . . She was taken. By a priest. She’d be long dead by now. He . . . He . . .”
She didn’t finish the sentence, but Alonnen was not ignorant. He could fill in the blanks.
“Taken” had only one meaning in the Mages Guild. It meant her mother was a mage, and if she was female, then she was undoubtedly raped. New priests had to come from somewhere, and that meant boys with magic, which often ran in family bloodlines for a handful of generations or more.
Orphaned girls were dumped on the other guilds all the time once past the weaning stage, and sometimes boys, though the latter usually were raised among the priests until old enough to manifest powers. If they had no magic, they were pushed out of the temples. Often, they made their way to the militia, where they were usually considered arrogant and coldhearted enough to be assigned to the Hunter Squads.
But the women . . . they remained forever under the threat of being taken and force-bred by men, compelled by more than enough magic to enforce their attackers’ will and whims. Alonnen gave Rexei a sympathetic look.
“I am sorry that it happened, Longshanks. I wish we’d found a way to break and banish Mekha long, long ago . . . but not even the strongest mage can change the past. We can only move on,” he said.
She sniffed and glared off to the side, then gave a tiny, huddled shrug. “’S okay,” she muttered. “He’s gone now. No one else will . . . U-Unless the priests really do start . . . summoning demons to regain . . .”
This was entirely too depressing a line of thought. Alonnen stepped forward, slipped his arm gently around her shoulders—steadfastly ignored the way she flinched—and guided the lanky young woman toward the refreshing room.
“Enough of that for now,” he ordered gently. “Those kind of thoughts right before bed are enough to give anyone nightmares, and we’ll both need a good night’s sleep to be fresh minded and ready to tackle all the other problems at hand. Now get in there, wash your face, get yourself changed into your nightshirt, and get ready for bed. You can even borrow my tooth-scrubber if you like. I use a spearmint paste mixed up at one of the apothecary shops in Heiastowne—you know the one, on the corner of Bladesmith and Seventh Lane? It’s the best apothecary in town, in my opinion.”
She nodded, and he patted her on her good shoulder.
“Excellent. There’s also a bottle of pain drops in there from the same shop, extract of willow, clearly labeled. Take four drops for your shoulder now if you want, or in the morning if it’s still bothering you. But if you take it now, use the scrubbing paste after. I find it helps kill the bitter taste. And don’t worry when you come back out. Just think of me as a brother. Did you have any brothers?” he asked her as she slowed a little. “Or any sisters? Or were you an only child?”
“Two br
others. Older. A lot older.” Her shoulders hunched inward. “They . . . they and our father were out of the house w-when . . .”
He swatted her on the shoulder blade, making her blink and look at him in shock. “Oy! What did I say, Apprentice? Stop thinking about the awful bits in life all the time. Start thinking about happy things, and about scrubbing your teeth, and worrying about nothing worse than whether or not I’ll snore. I’m told if I sleep just right—on my stomach, not on my back—I don’t actually, so that’s how I try to sleep at night. You know, I should set you an assignment to see if I really don’t snore on my belly, that’s what. Go on, wash up,” he ordered her, giving her a little push. “Don’t take too long. And don’t try to hurt me in my sleep, or I swear I’ll roll onto my back and keep you awake all night by snoring.”
A soft sound escaped her. Alonnen wasn’t sure if it qualified as a snort or as a laugh. He took it for what it was worth—something other than fear or distrust—and nudged her the last inch or so into the refreshing room. When she was fully inside, he closed the door between them, and quietly rested his forehead on the panel.
Her mum raped and taken by the priests; family scattered who knows where or what happened to them; she’s afraid of men, afraid of priests, afraid of me . . . Gods, I need him—her—to trust me, and You dump this in my lap?
Praying to all the Gods and Goddesses of the world wouldn’t get him very far, though. Not even if They were gathered right now at the resumption of the old Convocations. That was on an island somewhere on the other side of the Sun’s Belt, where it was summer instead of winter and where the people hadn’t ever had to deal with the murderous hunger of their so-called Patron.