Sixteen: The Jennel's Letter

“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.”

Berry and I were sitting in the big main room of the Luwul ruinmen’s hall, with Bron and a couple of other 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, and that didn’t take long. 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.

“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, then. He’s a big name these days. Some kind of cousin of the presden, or so they say. He’s got a house here in Luwul. He’s usually either at the court in Sisnaddi or out on the borders with one of 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?’

“That’s what we don’t know.”

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 and you’re going to find out what kind of nasty things hang around in old ruins. I’d 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 something like 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 really 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 send tomy 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 of 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 of 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, 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 that 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 have 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 was; it 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 most of it was pretty much the same: 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 gate and Jennel Cobey’s house was on the river, which runs along the northern edge of the 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 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, too, and most of them were made of stone or old concrete instead of wood and plaster, 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, so 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 was how I met Cobey Taggert. 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 was reshaped by what followed. For most of five years, I would have said that Cobey was one of the best friends I had on Mam Gaia’s belly, and I still thought that right up until the moment when I realized that one of us was going to kill the other, there in the sun and the dust in front of the door to Star’s Reach; I traveled with him, shared hopes and discoveries with him, told him some of my secrets and guessed at a few of his. 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 black, the way jennels usually do, 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, lopsided smile. “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 a carpet nice enough that I regretted the state of my boots covered the floor. In the corner where the walls with the windows met, there was a table, and on the table was a flat box about as big as a sheet of paper.

He got to the table before I did, 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.