Jack Campbell - The Dragons of Dorcastle

To what?

She didn’t know the answer to that, but she did know what could happen to Mechanics who complained too loudly and too often.

Mari ate quickly, apprentices refilling her glass several times as she tried to make up for the dehydration of the desert journey. As she tipped back the last glass, Mari caught a whiff of something that didn’t smell very good. “Is that me?” she asked Cara.

“Uh, yeah. Understandable, though, if you walked here through the Waste.”

“Understandable or not, I appreciate you putting up with it. I’d better get cleaned up.”

She felt the eyes of everyone in the dining hall upon her as she left, then a rising roar of conversation behind her.

Back in her room, Mari had to let the water out of the bath and refill it after the dirt on her made the first tubful too filthy to get clean in. After getting her hair clean and combed, then putting on fresh clothes, Mari held her breath as she rolled up her old clothes before setting them outside to be laundered. She couldn’t launder the jacket, but she did clean it as well as possible.

She put her jacket back on and checked her reflection in the mirror. No wonder that Mage never hit on me. A couple of weeks confined in a stifling hot wagon, followed by a week out in the open desert, had not done her complexion any favors, but at least she was clean now. Mari flipped her hair lightly, causing the tips to brush her shoulders, and not for the first time thought about cutting it shorter. Some days her hair was just a pain. Other days she liked it, though, so she might as well keep it at this length.

Tired but restless, Mari carefully drew her pistol from the holster draped over the room’s chair. After all her time in the desert, the dust-covered pistol needed cleaning, too. Sitting down, Mari got out the oil and wire brushes and worked away, finding comfort in the simple task. Once she had finished, she reassembled it, pulled back the slide to check the mechanism, clicked off a dry shot on the empty chamber, then reinserted an ammunition clip, set the safety, and returned the pistol to its holster.

Only to yank it out again when a knock sounded on her door. “Who’s there?” Mari called, wishing that she could control her voice as well as that Mage had.

“Mechanic Pradar. I was wondering if you could tell me anything about my uncle. He was at the Guild Hall in Caer Lyn.”

Angered at herself for panicking, and surprised that she would react that way inside a Guild Hall, Mari shoved her pistol back into the holster. She paused to control her breathing before opening the door.

The Mechanic there looked to be in his mid-twenties, and seemed as nervous as Mari had been. “Master Mechanic Mari of Caer Lyn?” Pradar asked.

“Yes. Though it’s been a couple of years since I left. Do you want to come in and—”

“No!” Pradar smiled anxiously. “Better we just talk here.”

“All right. What’s your uncle’s name?”

“Rindal. Mechanic Rindal.” Pradar must have seen her reaction. “Do you know anything?” His voice had taken on a pleading quality.

Mari hesitated, thinking that she was in enough trouble already. But if Rindal was this guy’s uncle… “Yes. What do you know?”

Pradar made a helpless gesture. “He just disappeared. Uncle Rindal stopped sending letters, and my father’s letters to him were never answered. We checked with other Mechanics we knew at Caer Lyn and they said he was gone. Nobody knew where or how.”

“I know how,” Mari said, her voice barely above a whisper. “I don’t know where. Not for sure.”

“What do you know?” Pradar asked, his eyes lit with hope and dread intermingled. “Please. My father…it’s been years.”

“Four years,” Mari said. She had never forgotten that night, because nightmares weren’t supposed to happen while you were awake. “I was on night internal security watch in the Guild Hall. You know how boring that is. Nothing ever happens. Except this night, a little after midnight, I got a call to come to the entrance guard post. There were Mechanics there, ones that I’d never seen before. They were all armed, all of them had pistols and rifles, and they seemed…dangerous. The Guild Hall Supervisor was there, too. He told me to do whatever these other Mechanics said, then he left.”

Pradar nodded, his eyes locked on hers. “Dangerous Mechanics?”

“Yes. Like they were soldiers or something instead of Mechanics. But they were Mechanics. I can’t explain it. Their leader told me to take them to Mechanic Rindal’s room. So I did.” Mari clenched her teeth at the memory, old guilt flooding through her.

“You didn’t have any choice,” Pradar said. “You were just an apprentice given direct orders by a Guild Hall Supervisor and some full Mechanic.”

“Thanks. I thought, stars above, Rindal’s finally going to get it. Because we’d all heard him arguing with Senior Mechanics, saying things like ‘we need to do this differently’ and ‘it’s wrong.’ ”

Pradar nodded with a pained look. “Father said that Uncle Rindal had a big mouth. I remember he was…sort of opinionated.”

“I took them through the Guild Hall to Mechanic Rindal’s room,” Mari said, reliving memories of that night. The strangely menacing Mechanics walked in a tight group, saying nothing, Mari in the lead terrified of doing something wrong, whatever “wrong” was to those people. The normally busy halls had been otherwise empty and silent as they always were at that late hour, dimly lit at intervals by night security lighting. Mari had kept hoping that someone else, anyone else, would come by, but she saw no one. Finally reaching Rindal’s room, she had pointed it out to the strange Mechanics. “The leader told me to walk away and not look back, told me that I hadn’t seen anybody or anything, and that I was never to talk about it to anyone by order of the Guild Master. But I did look back as I was rounding the corner and partly in a deeper shadow. I saw them pulling Mechanic Rindal out of his room, and his arms were already locked behind his back, and there was a hood over his head.”

Mari shook her head, the old helpless feeling returned. “And in the morning, all anyone knew was that Mechanic Rindal was gone.”

“That’s…what we’ve feared,” Pradar whispered back to her in anguish. “You never told anyone?”

“I told a couple of my friends. They told me to keep quiet, that I couldn’t do anything but…but I might end up just like Mechanic Rindal if I didn’t keep my mouth shut. Because…everybody already thought that I had a big mouth, too.”

“That was good advice,” Pradar said. “You couldn’t have done anything. My father told me he thought Uncle Rindal had been sent to the Guild prison at Longfalls, but we could never turn up any evidence of that. I’ll tell him what you said, though I won’t tell him who told me, and maybe he can finally find out what happened to Uncle Rindal. Maybe he’s still…”

Still alive? Mari’s thoughts had never gone there. Imprisoning a dissident Mechanic was one thing, but executing him? “Be careful,” Mari said. “If your father raises too much fuss—”

“He’ll end up disappearing like Uncle Rindal. I know. You probably thought Uncle Rindal was a lot more than a big mouth, right?” Pradar asked. “That he was a traitor or something?”

“Yeah,” Mari admitted. “Just arguing shouldn’t have—”

“Made him disappear. Yeah. But he wasn’t a traitor, Mari. My father said Uncle Rindal wanted only the best for the Guild. He was loyal. But he wanted to fix things.”

“I can understand that.”

“It’s what Mechanics do, right? What we’re supposed to do.” Pradar glanced up and down the hallway, his nervousness returned stronger than ever. “Thank you. I really mean that. Keep your head down. The Senior Mechanics here are as touchy as old explosives.”