The Hidden Masters of Marandur Page 3

  “You’ve come lately from Julesport? Have they relaxed the curfew there yet?” one trader asked another.

  The stout woman shrugged in response. “No. Officially, the curfew is still in effect. Ask me if the city is enforcing it, though.”

  “But do you need to bribe the city watch to move around?” the questioner pressed.

  “No,” the woman repeated. “It’s not being enforced, except around the Mechanics Guild Hall in Julesport. The city leaders have kept the curfew on the books, but only because the demon-spawn Mechanics have insisted on it.”

  The traders and several other commons spat to one side at the mention of Mari’s Guild. Mari stayed silent and kept her face turned toward her horse to hide her reactions.

  “Dematr would be a better place if every Mechanic died tomorrow,” someone growled.

  But that caused the woman to shake her head. “We need what they have, blast them all. Imagine a world where every Mechanic device broke and could never be used again. And if the Mechanics were gone, who would be able to counteract the Mages? Who wants the Mages as undisputed rulers of Dematr?”

  “Better both vanished then.”

  “And how will that happen?” another traveler taunted.

  “The daughter.” Tense silence fell as the one who had said that looked around cautiously. “Have you heard about Dorcastle?”

  “I’ve heard rumors,” the woman trader admitted.

  “Rumors? She was there. The Mechanics and Mages were fighting among themselves, grinding Dorcastle and the city’s people between them, and the daughter showed up and stopped them both.” He paused to bask in the attention his words gathered. “I heard from one who was at Dorcastle. He saw it. An entire warehouse reduced to ruin, a dead Mage dragon and a bunch of broken Mechanic devices inside, and a young woman seen leaving just as people came to see what had happened. The Mechanics showed up quickly enough to get rid of the evidence, but everyone in Dorcastle knows of it.”

  “I’ve heard something the same,” another traveler admitted. “But that doesn’t prove the daughter did it, that she’s finally come.”

  “Who else could have done such a thing? Defeated Mechanics and Mages? That’s the prophecy, isn’t it? The daughter of Jules will appear someday, and she will overthrow both of the Great Guilds and free us all. That young woman seen in Dorcastle slew a dragon. You ever seen a dragon?”

  “Only at a great distance, and that still too close,” someone else said. “But I’ve heard of what happened at Dorcastle, and it’s the same as you said. A dead dragon and a whole mess of Mechanic devices shattered, and the Mechanics sealing off the place as soon as more of them got there. There was for certain something they didn’t want us knowing.”

  Quiet fell for a moment, broken only by the wet noise of horses drinking at the troughs and the sounds of travelers passing on the nearby road.

  “I won’t believe it,” the woman trader finally said in a low voice. “It would hurt too much to believe and then learn it was a false hope. But if she truly came at last to free us all, if my children could grow up without Mechanics and Mages lording it over them, that would be the greatest day ever seen.”

  “Bless her wherever she is, and may she come soon,” another said, and the other commons murmured in agreement.

  “It has to be soon,” one of the travelers muttered, her voice despairing. “The madness in Tiae is spreading.”

  “Not into the Confederation—”

  “No? There have been riots in Julesport and Debran.”

  “And there was some kind of civil disturbance in Emdin that a legion had to be called in to suppress,” a man said. “Citizens of the Empire acting up! They haven’t done anything like that since the great revolt that destroyed Marandur over a century ago.”

  “Some people went crazy in Larharbor last month,” a man said.

  “I heard that, too. I heard that they killed a Mage before they died,” one of the other men said. “What would make people just snap like that?”

  The woman traveler snorted. “Keep an animal in a small cage long enough, beat it every time it complains, and it will snap, sure enough. Isn’t that us? If the daughter doesn’t get here soon, she’s likely to find nothing to free but the ruins of the world.”

  The commons fell silent. Some of them urged their horses away from the troughs and back to the road.

  Mari stood, eyes on the neck of her horse, waiting a few moments before moving on and thinking that the commons had some good sources of information. The incident in Larharbor had scared her Guild’s Senior Mechanics, because anyone crazy enough to attack a Mage would have been crazy enough to attack a Mechanic. She had hoped it would finally move the Senior Mechanics to admit to growing problems, but instead the event had been blamed on the Mage who had been killed.

  Of course, the commons who had killed the Mage had themselves all been killed, too, so no one could ask them why they had done it.

  But for the moment, Mari was more concerned that the commons had heard something about Dorcastle despite the Guild’s efforts to hide everything. And, unlike the Mechanics Guild, the commons were willing to talk about the dragon found amid the wreckage. They think the daughter of Jules did that? Alain and I barely survived it. I thought we hadn’t been seen getting away, but someone must have spotted us. Spotted me, anyway.

  The Senior Mechanics must know that the commons are talking this freely about the incident in Dorcastle. Is that why they chose to send me on a one-way mission? Because they still suspect I didn’t tell the full truth about what happened at Dorcastle? I would have told them, if they would have listened, if they hadn’t threatened me and told me to say nothing.

  Instead, the commons are thinking the mythical daughter of Jules did it. What if they had known it was me? What would they have said when they learned I was a Mechanic?

  She thought of the woman trader, wistfully and sorrowfully dreaming of freedom for her children. Freedom from Mari’s Guild, as well as from the Mage Guild. In her many years confined within Mechanics Guild Halls, isolated from the commons, Mari had come to accept the beliefs the Guild had drilled into her: that Mechanics were inherently superior, that commons couldn’t rule themselves. But like so many other things she had been taught, those beliefs had been badly battered by what Mari had seen and experienced in the last few months.

  She led her horse back to the road, looking intently in both directions in search of anyone lingering to keep watch on her, but seeing no one like that Mari mounted her horse and headed on toward the north.

  Mari kept moving slowly along the road until night fell, the number of other travelers dwindling rapidly as darkness came on. Finally she halted, sitting silently in the gloom. Almost everyone else using the road had stopped for the night, either finding shelter at an inn, tavern or hostel, or simply camping on the road’s edge in groups for safety. From here, Mari could see and hear no one else.

  Sighing, she finally dismounted and settled her pack on her back. “Thanks for the ride,” she whispered to the horse, then started to turn the animal loose. At the last moment she noticed the dangling reins and remembered that she had to do something about them. Mari tied the reins back across the saddle so they wouldn’t catch on anything. The horse would surely find her own way back to Edinton. The saddle and other tack had the name of the stable on it, and if those were lost the horse had the brand of the stable burned into one haunch. Nonetheless, Mari felt guilty as she watched the tired horse wander slowly back down the road, worried about abandoning the animal even though she had no alternative.

  Already weary, her legs and thighs stiff from riding, Mari turned off the road, walking to the east through rough country. Even if she hadn’t been forced to abandon her horse in order to avoid revealing where she might have gone from there, the lack of visibility and the poor terrain would have made it too dangerous to ride through here at night. Mari picked her away along through the dark until she literally stumbled onto the impossible-to-miss tracks of the single train line connecting Edinton with cities farther north. Hoping she was heading in the right direction, Mari walked north alongside the tracks until with relief she reached a place the Mechanics in Edinton often complained about, a spot where the track curved while it also climbed a short, steep grade, forcing trains to slow to a crawl.

  It would have been easy enough to fix that section, to excavate a portion of the rising terrain and straighten the track, but that was how the original line had been built centuries ago. Fixing it would mean changing it, and the Senior Mechanics didn’t approve changes except on those rare occasions when no other alternative existed. Since this section of track was still passable, it would be repaired when necessary, but otherwise remain as it had always been.

  Thoroughly worn out, Mari sat down to wait. Only two trains ran north from Edinton each week, using a schedule which hadn’t varied for decades. One of those trains should come by here tonight.

  Despite her efforts to stay alert, she was drowsing when the sound of the approaching train brought Mari to full wakefulness. Lying on her stomach in the darkness to be as inconspicuous as possible, she waited tensely as the ancient steam locomotive chugged past, straining at the burden of hauling its train of freight and passenger cars up the slope. She could see the engineer in the cab of the locomotive—probably some Mechanic she knew—along with a couple of apprentices, visible in the dim orange glow from the grate on the locomotive firebox.

  Mari watched freight cars rolling past, then jumped up and ran toward the train as the first passenger car loomed into view. Leaping up, she caught at the platform at the end of the car, shaking with effort and anxiety as the gravel roadbed swept by below.

  Her hands gripped the railing on the platform so tightly they hurt as Mari swung over the railing and found secure footing on the platform itself. Sighing with relief, she turned and peered into the darkened interior of the passenger car. She knew that only the last car, the one reserved for Mechanics, would have any electric lights. The candles or oil lamps commons would have used were banned for fear of fire in the wooden cars.

  Unable to see much of the inside of the car, Mari eased the door open and slid through as quickly as she could. Inside, vague shapes were all that could be seen of passengers trying to sleep through the night journey. Fortunately, the Mechanics Guild kept the price of train tickets high enough that some seats were empty, so by moving cautiously Mari was able to find one and sit down.

  The train began speeding up again as it crested the slope and the track straightened. Mari sat among the sleeping commons, staring ahead through the darkness. The port of Edinton and a ship north had been a tempting alternative, but she had thought the passenger piers too open and too easily watched. Hopefully by this roundabout overland route she had thrown off her path any Mages and Dark Mechanics as well as the Mechanics Guild itself. There was a small terminal just south of Debran where she could leave the train with little chance of being spotted and take back roads the rest of the way to Danalee.

  But all that did was buy time. She needed to talk to someone else, someone she knew would listen and judge whether Mari had totally lost it or if she really was marked for death. If there was anyone else in the Guild like that, someone she could still trust to tell almost everything that Mari had learned, that person was now at the Guild’s weapons workshops in Danalee. Alli, I hope you are still the best friend I knew back in Caer Lyn.

  And beyond that, Mari’s thoughts went to someone else much farther north. The Mages have decided to stop watching me and instead are trying to kill me. What if they are also after Alain?

  What if his Guild suspects or learns the truth about him, and like my Guild decides to send him on a mission of no return?

  I’ve been so afraid that my Guild would learn my biggest secret. If it had, the Senior Mechanics wouldn’t have played around with schemes to get rid of me. They were afraid I knew more than I was supposed to about Mages and Dark Mechanics, they thought I was a negative influence on other Mechanics, and they completely rejected what I once said about where the Mechanics Guild’s own policies are leading. But all they would have had to do to destroy me was to find out that Mari of Caer Lyn was in love with a Mage.

  Chapter Two

  Mage Alain of Ihris went to war.

  The elders who had informed him of his new contract had of course betrayed no emotions. He had managed to keep his own expression unrevealing as one of the elders spoke in the cold monotone of a Mage. “You will accompany a military force from the Free Cities during an attack on Imperial territory east of the mountains. Provide whatever services you deem appropriate.”

  “Who will be the other Mage assigned to this contract?” Alain had asked, his own voice just as unfeeling as those of the elders.

  “There will be no other Mage.” The elders had watched him, as if expecting to see some betraying emotion, but Alain had not given them that satisfaction.

  “This one has questions,” Alain said.

  Instead of giving the formal reply of “This one listens,” one of the elders simply shook his head. “The Free Cities cannot afford more than one Mage on this expedition of theirs. You will do this task alone. Perhaps you will succeed this time.”

  Had Alain’s face or eyes revealed emotion then? The elder’s brutally emotionless reference to the caravan which Alain alone had been contracted to defend, a caravan almost wiped out by overwhelming force, seemed to have been intended to provoke Alain into showing some feeling.

  But elders had been using similar tricks ever since Alain had been taken from his family to become an acolyte, and the punishments for any visible trace of feeling had been severe. The scars he bore testified to that. After years of such training, Alain felt sure his voice, his face, and even his eyes revealed nothing as he answered. “This one understands.”

  Alain had accepted the contract. He had no choice but to accept it.

  Now, a week later, he rode among the soldiers of the Free Cities.

  He turned in his saddle, gazing back at the mountains named the Northern Ramparts. They rose majestically skyward, seeming to leap up from the flat lands that lapped at their feet. It was as if nature itself had raised the Ramparts as a barrier to block the Empire’s reach. The column of soldiers had left the foot of a pass at the base of those mountains earlier today. Settling back into his saddle, Alain looked forward again, where the rolling, fertile plains of the northern reaches of the Empire stretched away toward the horizon.

  The Free Cities sat nestled within the rugged reaches of the Northern Ramparts, while the Empire had dominated the part of the continent to the east of those mountains for almost as long as history recorded. This attack would not change that, would not change anything, because nothing in the world of Dematr was allowed to change. Some of the shadows who rode and marched around Alain—those the Mechanics called common folk—would die, along with some Imperial soldiers. But in the end the border between the Free Cities and the Empire would remain as it had always been. The Mage Guild wanted nothing to change, unless that change involved something harmful to those who called themselves Mechanics.

  The teachings of the Mage Guild were that none of these others was real, no one else and nothing anywhere was real, that everything around him was merely a shadow born of Alain’s own illusions. He had accepted that wisdom—until he met Mari. In a world where nothing was allowed to change, Alain had been changed.

  He could let himself feel emotions again. He had learned what it meant to help someone else. He had learned what a friend was.

  He had forgotten what love was. Until he had fallen in love.

  He had learned that this unchanging world was threatened by catastrophic change, a storm of death and destruction that only one person could prevent—by overthrowing the power of the Mage Guild and the Mechanics Guild.

  The elders suspected something was wrong with him. If they ever learned the depth of his failure, he would die. If they ever learned about Mari, that she was the one long ago foretold to overthrow the Great Guilds…

  She would die.

  Master Mechanic Mari of Caer Lyn. Even the thought of her name gave him a feeling of forbidden pleasure. No matter how hard he resolved, no matter how he tried to concentrate on the danger that he and these soldiers might encounter, Alain could not stop thinking of her, wondering where she was, wondering whether she was safe. Such thoughts could lead to Mari’s death, even if the Mage Guild elders never learned of the vision Alain’s foresight had given him.

  Every thought could betray him—and. worse, betray her. She was somewhere far south of here, on the other side of the Sea of Bakre, far from him and the danger his presence would bring Mari. And…it could well be that her thoughts of him had changed. She had said that she cared for him, but they had been separated since then, and Mari had been among her fellow Mechanics. Did Mari still think of him as a friend? As more than a friend? Or had she already regretted and cast aside feelings which could only add to the dangers she faced?

  But even if she forgot him, he could not forget her, no matter how hard Alain tried to wall away all feelings, all thoughts of Mari.

  He rode alone, about two lance-lengths separating him and the horse he rode from those ahead and behind. Commons kept their distance from Mages, more out of fear and revulsion than respect, but that did not matter to Mages. Nothing mattered to Mages, because nothing was real.

  In front of and in the wake of Alain, the soldiers of the Free City of Alexdria marched, following the track they were on eastward and deeper into the Empire. Farthest forward rode a long column of cavalry, their harnesses jingling with a merry sound that clashed strangely with the sharp, businesslike points of the cavalry’s lances. Behind came a long file of foot soldiers, tramping along steadily, every one of them carrying a few empty bags which they expected to fill with loot by morning. Last of all came wagons, pulled by mules and similarly empty, clattering along over the dirt road.

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