Mari hesitated. She hated doing this, hated making a show out of something that meant so much to her, but there didn’t seem any alternative. Mari slowly raised her left hand, fingers slightly spread. “Do you see this?”
“A promise ring,” the old woman said. “Where is your husband?”
“Beside me.” Mari reached to take Alain’s hand and hold it up enough to reveal the matching ring.
All four of those from Julesport stared in disbelief for several long moments.
The old woman recovered first. “Why would you wed a Mage, Lady Mechanic?”
“He asked me,” she said. “Proposed to me, that is. I proposed to him later.”
“A political alliance, then? A means to the end of overthrowing the Great Guilds?”
“No!” Mari said with more force than she had intended. “We wed because we were in love, and we would have done it no matter whether it helped or hindered anything else.”
“In love?” the old woman asked. “You taught a Mage to love?”
“She did,” Alain said. Mari saw him relax his face, let some feeling show, and while it was a small display compared to what non-Mages would reveal, it was nonetheless shocking to see in a Mage. “She gave me back my life, a life that my Guild had taken from me.”
The old woman began laughing, drawing startled glances from the others. “The oldest magic of all! And it ensnared both of you, did it? You saw the man beneath a Mage’s mask, Lady Mechanic, and helped the Mage see the woman beneath your Mechanics jacket! I would not have believed it. See this!” she told the other three. “Those rings do not mark just the alliance of those two, of Mechanic and Mage. They also mark an alliance with us, for they show that these two believe in the same things that we do. That they believe in something other than power and wealth. That they would risk all for someone and something other than themselves! And that a new day can truly come. What else could you call a world where a Mechanic and a Mage are not enemies, but partners in life, joined by love?”
“But the safety of the city—” the woman in uniform began.
“The daughter is right! Give our people a reason to wait, a belief that the new day is finally coming, and they will wait.” The old woman shook her finger at Mari. “Don’t make it too long. Wherever you go, do not disappear. Let word come back to us. We will keep it from the Great Guilds as best we can, but our people must know you are pursuing their overthrow.”
“I will do that,” Mari said.
“General Shi,” the old woman said to the woman in uniform. “Your soldiers are already on alert?”
“Yes,” Shi confirmed.
“These two,” the old woman pointed to Mari and Alain, “do not exist as far as your soldiers are concerned. The soldiers do not see them. The same for the harbor guard, Colonel Faron. They will protect these two, but our soldiers will not see them.”
“What about the city council?” the middle-aged man asked. “They need to—”
“The city council,” the old woman interrupted, “will be told about this tomorrow, when there is no longer any possibility of them arguing other courses of action to death, or of one of them betraying the presence of our guests before they depart. The daughter should be welcomed in the home of her ancestor, and I would hope in the days and years to come that the daughter would remember the special status of Julesport in her family.”
The man nodded reluctantly. “The good wishes of the daughter are of immense value. And it is true that too many secrets have become known to the Mechanics and the Mages.”
Mari, uncomfortable from the repeated references to her as the daughter, felt a sudden suspicion. “Your city council chamber. Does it have electric lighting?”
“Mechanic lights, you mean?” the man asked. “Yes. Two large fixtures in the ceiling.”
“Can I see them?”
“Why?” the old woman asked, her eyes intent.
“I may be able to do you a service,” Mari said, “by finding the means by which the Mechanics Guild has learned your secrets.”
The old woman gestured briskly, and with a bow Colonel Faron led the way out of the room and into a long hallway. Mari and Alain followed him, while General Shi and the other man brought up the rear, the old woman staying behind to await their return.
Faron halted before an impressive set of double doors. Opening one side, he looked in, then nodded to Mari and opened his mouth to speak.
Mari silenced him with a strong gesture, then walked into the room. It was perhaps four times the size of the room they had left and much brighter, with a long table along one side and two massive chandeliers hanging from the ceiling. She looked up, studying the lights. Turning back to the mystified leaders of Julesport, Mari pantomimed the need for a ladder high enough to reach the lights.
It took a few minutes before Colonel Faron himself returned with a ladder and set it up where Mari directed. She climbed up, thinking that the ladder felt way too rickety, then when high enough began looking over the light fixture.
And found nothing but the bulbs and the wiring to them.
Fearing that she might look like an idiot, Mari climbed down and the ladder was moved beneath the second light.
This time she found what she had been looking for.
It wasn’t until they were out of the room and the door closed that Mari spoke. “The Mechanics Guild has a far-listener in that second light fixture.”
“A what?” General Shi asked.
“A far-listener. It’s a device that picks up sounds and transmits them along wires to somewhere else where they can be heard.” She pointed upward. “The wires for it are disguised by the wires for the light fixture. The Mechanics Guild has been listening in to everything said in that room.”
“Did you— Did you break it?” the middle-aged man asked.
“No. Do you want me to? Because if I do, the Mechanics Guild will immediately know that you have learned of it.”
Colonel Faron nodded grimly. “It’s like arresting a spy the moment you learn of them. Or leaving the spy in place and feeding that spy only what you want them to know.”
“You have done us a great service, Lady Mechanic,” General Shi said. “Would the Mechanics have shared the information gained here with the Mages?”
“No,” Mari said, almost laughing at the idea. “Alain?”
Alain gestured slightly toward the general. “Mages can learn your secrets by what is said—and by what is not said: by what you reveal in your voice, your face, the way you stand.”
“We know Mages can spot lies,” Colonel Faron said. “But if we don’t voice a lie—”
“It does not matter,” Alain said. “A Mage can see that you have not said something, that there is more left which you do not wish to speak, that by silence you seek to mislead. It is easy to read, for a Mage.”
Once back in the smaller room, the old woman was told. She lowered her face into one hand for a long moment. “No wonder the Great Guilds have been able to outthink us time and again. We thought we had our secrets, our means of avoiding their tricks, but they only let us believe that. How many men and women have died because the Great Guilds knew our plans even as we made them?”
Mari saw that the middle-aged man looked uncomfortable, and was not surprised when Alain called him on it.
“You are unhappy,” Alain said to him. “But not for the same reason as the others.”
Everyone looked at the man, who grimaced. “I would be a fool to lie to a Mage. Very well. I will say what is in my heart. I am grateful that the Lady Mechanic has done us this service. But she has done so by betraying the secrets of her Guild. I am concerned that someone willing to betray once may betray again.”
Mari held up a hand to halt the outbursts that nearly came from the others. “I understand. Would it make you feel better to know that those secrets never really belonged to my Guild? My former Guild, that is. The Mechanics Guild stole those secrets. They were never supposed to be secrets. They were meant to be shared
“If this is so, Lady Mechanic, you have my apologies,” the man said.
“How do you know this?” the old woman asked.
“I can’t tell you yet,” Mari said. “Someday I will be able to tell everyone. But I have seen the evidence. So has Mage Alain. The Mechanics Guild is built on the theft of its secrets from everyone else, and on the lie that commons cannot do the work that Mechanics can do. You can. I have proven it to be so.”
“You will turn this world upside-down,” General Shi said.
“Better upside-down,” Alain replied, “than broken as is Tiae.”
“No argument there,” the old woman said. “Tell me, daughter, do you know anything of the thinking devices of the Mechanics Guild?”
Mari felt a surge of interest. “Yes. I know a lot about them. Why?”
“Julesport has been hampered by the failure of the device we have in this building,” the middle-aged man explained. “We have been trying to get the Mechanics Guild Hall to fix it for the last year, but they insist that the repair will cost more than even Julesport can afford.”
“That doesn’t seem too likely,” Mari said. “Why aren’t they just offering to replace it, if it’s broken that badly? There aren’t a lot of them, but in a year’s time the Guild could have brought in a spare from Palandur. We’re talking a Calculating and Analysis Device, right?”
“Yes, Lady Mechanic.”
“I can fix one of those in my sleep,” Mari said, for once not having to feign total confidence. It felt almost disorienting to be working within her field as a Mechanic again rather than facing the challenges of the daughter. “Let me take a look at it.”
Once again the small group trooped down a long hall, then down some stairs, Colonel Faron going ahead to ensure that no one had returned to the building early.
The room Mari finally entered felt very familiar. The Guild insisted on certain design criteria for rooms holding Calculating and Analysis Devices, and there was really only one design of the CADs, with the ability to add on certain options. The large metal cabinets holding the many relays were as well known to her as the face of an old acquaintance.
Mari checked the room carefully for any far-listener, though she didn’t expect to find one. She powered up the device, waiting impatiently as it warmed up and wondering just how long she and Alain had already been away from the Gray Lady.
Finally she was able to run a test sequence, which went so badly that Mari had a long tape of data printed out so she could analyze the problem. “They’ve been cheating you,” she finally told General Shi and the middle-aged man. “The unit hasn’t been maintained all that well.” She suspected from what she saw that she knew the Mechanic who had done it. Why was he working in the field after washing out of the CAD program at the Mechanics Guild Academy? Maybe because there were so few Mechanics qualified for CAD work and the Guild had decided to try to kill one of them, Mari herself. “But the problems you’re having are because you’ve got a badly patched set of thinking ciphers.”
“Can you repair it?” General Shi asked.
Mari nodded. “Fixing the ciphers will be easy for me. The hard part is going to be doing the fixes in such a way that the Mechanic who is supposed to keep this CAD working doesn’t realize that I’ve fixed it. If it’s the Mechanic I think it is, I can do that, but it’ll take a while.” She looked at Alain. “Maybe you should go back to the Gray Lady and let them know that everything is all right. I’ll follow when this is done.”
Colonel Faron stuck his head in the room. “We have already sent word to fully provision your ship, daughter.”
“Uh, would you mind not calling me that?” Mari asked. “It feels like I’m not me any more when people do that. Just Lady is fine.”
“Yes, Lady. We could send them a message from you.”
Alain shook his head. “They would not know if the message was from Lady Mari. I should carry the message, but I am reluctant to leave here without you,” he told Mari.
Mari looked up from her work, brushing hair from her face. “The army of Julesport is guarding me, Alain. I’ll be fine. And you can still tell where I am, right?”
He nodded. “The thread.”
“Right,” Mari repeated. The idea of the invisible, insubstantial thread that connected her to Alain still felt sort of weird to her, but also sort of romantic, and it had saved her a couple of times already.
Reassured, Alain reached out to her. “Be careful.”
She got up and kissed him. “Don’t worry.”
It wasn’t until Mari bent back to her work that she wondered how the Julesport officials had taken seeing someone kiss a Mage. That wasn’t something one saw every day. In fact, it was doubtful that anyone had ever willingly kissed a Mage before she and Alain had grown together.
None of the fixes were complicated, but doing them in a way that didn’t look like fixes took a long time. Mari finally stood up, stretching out her back and wincing. “That’s got it. It’ll work fine for you. If the Mechanics Guild asks how that happened, tell them you have no idea, that it just started working all right again. CADs do that sometimes.”
“In truth,” the middle-aged man said, “I have no idea what you did, but we are all very grateful. How much?”
“How much what?”
“Uh…how much is the cost of your services?”
Mari took a moment to understand. “We didn’t negotiate a contract. And Julesport is helping us, or at least not hindering us. And if the prophecy is right, I guess I sort of do have a special obligation to the city that Jules founded. So let’s call that even.”
“Even?” General Shi asked with obvious disbelief. “You are charging nothing? The repair of these devices is one of the most expensive contracts the Mechanics Guild offers.”
“Yeah. There aren’t that many Mechanics trained to fix them,” Mari explained. “But I’m not with the Guild anymore.”
“You must accept—”
Seeing that the officials would not accept her services without recompense, Mari offered a compromise. “I’ll take something to help pay for the supplies the Gray Lady took on, all right? Is that enough?”
“If that is all you will take,” the middle-aged man said. He began to say something else, but turned as a messenger rushed up to Colonel Faron. “What is this?”
Faron turned a worried face to them. “The guards who accompanied Mage Alain to the Gray Lady have been found in an alley, all dead. My aide checked with the launch at the landing and Mage Alain has not returned.”
Mari’s sense of satisfaction, her pride in her work, turned instantly to ashes.
Chapter Four
“We’ll begin searching the entire city,” General Shi said. “With the entire army looking—”
“We must be dealing with Mages,” the middle-aged man interrupted. “They captured another Mage and killed your soldiers without creating enough disturbance to be noticed.”
“There have been no reports of unusual activity at the Mage Guild,” Shi insisted.
“Dark Mages,” Mari said. “It might be Dark Mages.”
“It might,” the man agreed. “Your Mage must still be alive, or they would have left his body with those of the soldiers. How can we find your Mage without a lengthy search that would give warning to those who hold him? They might kill him if they know we seek him.”
Mari buried her face in both hands, trying to think. If only that damned thread ran both ways… “Maybe it does,” she whispered.
“Lady?”
“I need to get back to my ship as quickly as possible. One of the Mages there might be able to locate Mage Alain.”
They rushed through hallways and down stairs, emerging into the open where General Shi flagged down a cavalry unit standing guard. “Two of you dismount and give your horses to Colonel Faron and this lady. Escort them to the waterfront. Do not delay and move as quickly as you can.”
At one point they raced past a corner where two Mechanics stood. Mari saw their faces only as blurs, impossible to recognize, but she thought one of the Mechanics looked indifferent to whatever emergency was causing commons to rush about. The other, though, seemed to gaze toward Mari as she and the cavalry passed by.
The column came to a halt at the quay, the horses blowing with exertion. Colonel Faron came to assist Mari, but she dropped from the saddle without help. As the cavalry milled about, Mari and Faron raced to the waiting launch. This time the rowers bent even harder to their task than before, the launch leaping across the water to the small clipper ship.
Mari jumped onto the ladder still hanging down the side of the Gray Lady and scrambled up it as fast as she could.
All of the Mechanics and Mages were waiting and watching her with visible alarm. “What’s up? Where’s Alain?” Alli asked as Mari caught her breath.
“He was taken,” Mari finally gasped out. “By Mages. Maybe Dark Mages. Mage Asha, is my beacon still there?”
Asha was actually betraying enough concern for Mari to see it. “It has never faded. But you do not wish me to speak of it.”
“Now I do. There’s a…Alain calls it a thread that connects him and me. He’s been able to use it to tell where I am. Can you sense that?” Mari asked desperately. “Can you track Alain through me?”
Asha paused for long enough that Mari felt like screaming in frustration. Then Asha said, “Try, yourself, to sense that thread, to feel where Alain is.”
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