Jay Lake - Endurance

I wondered how it had been for the miners, back in the morning of the world. Had they broken open the crust of the world only to find a population of haunts and legends already awaiting them? Or had they brought their fears with them on first creating the Below?

Musing so, I nearly ran into a man who seemed altogether flesh and blood. My short knife flashed into my right hand-it was rare for anyone to achieve such a complete advantage of surprise over me. I kept my point from his throat, though, for already I knew this was no attack.

“Excuse me.” His nervous voice was thin, reedy, as a boy not quite grown to his prime, though he seemed tall enough in the glow of my coldfire.

That was such an unlikely response to having a blade pulled that I had to laugh. Stepping back, I gave him room, and looked at my involuntary captive.

“I am sorry,” I said. “You startled me. This is unusual.”

His head pumped vigorously as he nodded. I was pretty sure he was male. For one thing, no woman with any decent sense of herself would wear such a hideous mask. His head was wrapped in bands of leather over which were affixed two goggle-eyed lenses and a tiny, sputtering lamp between them so faint I could not see the use of it. His mouth was covered with a verdigrised brass muzzle with needled teeth set into it, that last detail seemingly just for the look of the thing. He wore musty dark robes and a heavy leather belt creaking with tools and devices.

Had I seen him before hearing his voice, I might have found him threatening. Instead I realized I faced a man dressed as a kind of mummer. A boy, really, with a man’s height.

“Y-you are Green?”

I didn’t think he meant that as a question. “Yes, I am Green.” Now he was making me nervous. “I do not know you.”

“Mother Iron called me to y-you.”

The tulpa had just left me moments ago, but that did not mean she had not spoken to this boy-man, perhaps hours ago. Or even years. I’d long since understood that her rules were not my own.

“Who are you?” I asked gently, hefting my short knife for emphasis.

“I am Archimandrix.”

Now there was pride in his voice. Pride of place, pride of purpose, pride of self. I could hear it. I knew that pride, from when I had been a Lily Blade. Only a Lily Blade, I corrected myself.

“And what does an Archimandrix do? Besides heed the call of Mother Iron?” I was not so sure I would, or could, ignore her call should Mother Iron choose to speak through me.

“I lead the oldest guild,” he squeaked. Archimandrix cleared his throat and tried again. “I am the master of the sorcerer-engineers.”

Frankly I would have doubted if he had mastery of a bathtub, but I’d long given up on judging people from their seemings. How many had failed and died owing to wrongly judging me on my seeming, after all? And how many more yet would?

But the sorcerer-engineers? I was to learn that they were in truth guardians of ancient wisdom, but at that moment I did not know them from dunny divers. “I do not recognize your guild. And I have studied the old Duke’s lists.” Thanks to Mistress Danae’s careful instruction and endless books during my days in the Factor’s house, I could name even of some of the most obscure guilds, such as the Brotherhood of Lens Grinders, and the Worshipful Order of Loom Mechanics.

“You know us from the brass-ape races.” There was that pride again.

“I know of those races,” I said cautiously. “I’d always assumed them sponsored and designed by men in little workshops about the city.”

“Well, of course.” His tone was quite reasonable. “Those men in little workshops are us. The sorcerer-engineers. Our true craft is much deeper and older. The brass apes are how we enter into the life of the city. The work excuses and covers up many of our other tasks.”

That I could imagine. That work could excuse and cover up almost any other task. Still, this Archimandrix was not an easy man to speak with. As if he followed a script in his head that had not been written to include me. Further patient prompting was indicated. “Why did Mother Iron call you to me?”

“Sh-she said I might need you.”

That he might need me, I thought. Not the other way around. Curious. “That may well be true.” I kept my voice slow, in order to trail behind my thoughts. Was this about the Eyes of the Hills? “I might need you in turn.” Perhaps. “Tell me more of your true craft.”

“Those are secrets closely guarded down the generations,” he said dubiously, still speaking from his place of pride.

In those words, I realized Archimandrix would not be turned by threat of force, weak as this one sounded in other ways. He possessed a steel core beneath the tissue of confusion that wrapped his surface.

I could admire that.

“There is nothing I can say to you,” I told him, “which would be convincing of my credentials if you do not already believe in them. I do not know how Mother Iron calls you, or what that call means to a sorcerer-engineer. I can hardly claim to understand her myself. Only that I know Mother Iron has guarded this city down those long generations over which your secrets have been kept. And that she accepts something of me into her domain here Below.”

He scratched his chin through the leather wrappings, nudging one dark nail up beneath the needle-toothed brass muzzle. “You have the right of it there. You speak with the sharpness of a logic-chopper, but the sense of your words is not so pointed toward tearing into my argument.”

“I can chop logic well enough,” I demurred. “I was in the custody of sharp-minded teachers for a long while. This is not my day for the razor of truth. Please, either tell me what you will, or bid me farewell, so that I may pass about my urgent business.”

Archimandrix sighed theatrically. “Fair enough.” He turned half away, facing my direction toward the gallery beneath the Temple of Endurance. “Walk with me?”

“Of course.” I slipped my weapon away and wondered precisely what it was that Mother Iron saw in this ungainly youth with his core of power and pride.

“The sorcerer-engineers are the oldest guild, but we have been undeclared since the fall of the kings.”

Eight centuries past, in my understanding of that history. “You were driven underground?”

“We took ourselves there,” Archimandrix said distantly. I had the impression that if I but asked he would burst into recitation, chanting a list of kings and guildmasters like a memory man in the Dockmarket. “Once our guildhall was the proudest in the city. Where the Ducal Palace now stands, on Montane Street. Some of our old walls are still contained within those newer ones.”

Ah, the gnostic entanglements of conspiracy and architecture. “Ancient secrets wrapped in modern confidences.”

He glanced sidelong at me. For a moment, the trembling, foolish youth was in abeyance. “Some secrets are never unwrapped by those who follow later on. The Dukes were not always as the latest and last was.”

Is he aware of my central role in the assassination!? “I would know nothing of the late Duke,” I lied, the memory of his death at my hand blooming painfully in my mind.

“When the last king was pulled from his throne by the Varingii raiders and their pardine allies, the master of our guild at that time allowed himself to be taken as well in order to give out that the rest of our order had been eliminated. The banners were burned then, and our name stamped out.”

I could well imagine that scene, unfortunately. Which led me to wonder where the Royal Palace had stood, if the Ducal Palace was on the site of their old guildhall. Or had they been one and the same? “Even the bravest men will fall before a surging tide of swords,” I said, quoting the historian Benefactus.