Jean Johnson - The Guild

The archbishop, about to seat himself behind his desk, stopped and scowled at her. Now that she was standing out in the hall, she could hear what sounded like the priest Koler arguing with someone at the Patriarch’s office that he knew what was going on, and the Patriarch had better speak with him immediately, before the whole populace revolted. But it was the archbishop’s reply that she waited for, because she wanted to know what the official line would be. Elcarei wouldn’t tell a dull-witted Servers Guild apprentice anything more than that.

Archbishop Elcarei eyed her. Leaving his desk, he clasped his hands behind his back as he slowly moved closer and closer to the lanky figure just beyond his door. “What happened? What happened ? Our God is no longer here. He has removed all Patronage from Mekhana. We are Godless , you stupid peasant, and that means that without His Patronage and protection, our neighbors will gleefully invade, and we will be crushed beneath their hatred for all things Mekhanan! That is, unless we can come up with a new Patron quickly .”

Stopping right in front of her, the archbishop spat his last few words in her face. She blinked at that, lifted the back of a wrist to get a tiny bit of spittle off her cheek, then shrugged. Rexei knew who she wanted for a Patron Goddess, but a misogynistic archbishop was not the person to tell. Instead, she just asked, “Need help, sir?”

She looked and sounded earnest, asking that. Her innocent question made the taller man rear back and blink down at her. Once his stunned disbelief faded, though, he chuckled.

“My, my, you are an innocent, aren’t you?” He studied her for a moment, then sighed. “Come with me, idiot-boy. And set down the damn bucket.”

He returned to his desk, so Rexei moved cautiously into the room, wondering what she had just gotten herself into now. She needed to stay near enough to overhear Koler’s conversation with the Patriarch . . . but the archbishop had given her a command. Personal notice by a priest was never a good thing, but disobedience carried the very real threat of the priest doing something horrible to the offender. Ambivalence warred within her.

Nervous, she set the coal bucket by his desk and dropped her gloves on top of it, watching him warily as he fetched out a heavy iron ring laden with many keys. To her inner senses, those keys glowed . . . dark. That was the only word for it. They were darker than they should have been, full of foul magics, and she wanted nothing to do with them.

Thankfully, he didn’t hand them over. He did, however, lead her away from the corridors she was familiar with, toward the one door she was forbidden to enter. The door that led down to the dungeons where the non-priest mages were housed. Rexei balked, watching him use one of the keys to unlock the door. It didn’t reek of evil, of rot and horror quite so much anymore, but only a mage might have noticed that. A mind-blind drudge like the “boy” she was portraying would still be afraid for other reasons. “I . . . I’m not s’pposed t’ go there, Holy sir . . . not s’pposed t’ go . . .”

“Stop cowering and follow me,” Archbishop Elcarei ordered, grabbing Rexei by the shoulder. Contrary to his words, he pushed her through the door and down the steps ahead of him. Mages were prepped in chambers on the ground floor rather than down below, because until they were bound to Mekha’s will, it was too dangerous to give them a chance to not only free themselves but possibly free the others as well.

Descending two, three, four flights until they were well below the level of the city’s cobbled streets, Rexei found herself pushed aside when the stairwell opened into a long, curving corridor lined with many, many doors. Several oil lamps illuminated the corridor almost as well as daylight would have, making the cracked, whitewashed plaster walls look worse than if the lighting had been dim. To her other sense, her mage-sense, each door in those cracked walls was a blot. Not a slime but more like a patch of mold or mildew, something decaying that she didn’t want to touch.

Visible signs of rot , Rexei thought, humming hard in the back of her mind. She suspected that, had the Dead God still been around, that rot would have been ten times stronger, but with His departure, everything associated with Him was fading. Prudence demanded extra caution, however, and so she hummed. Her mother had taught her meditation techniques, musically enhanced mind tricks to hide any and all magical traces . . . but she shied away from thoughts of her mother. That was the horror that had started her long flight and lonely, distressed life too many years ago.

Except . . . except she could hear familiar, frightening, rhythmic noises from one of the rooms on her right. Paling, Rexei sagged against the outer curving wall. Fear rose in her mind, dragging her down into memory. The sharp smell of various vegetables and cool, dusty stones in the root cellar. The faintest glimpse through the cracks in the kitchen floorboards overhead, of her mother’s form pinned over the worktable, of her limbs glowing with magical shackles, and those sounds . . . those sounds . . . as that priest had . . . had . . .

Archbishop Elcarei unlocked that room and flung open the door. “Novice Stearlen!” he snapped. “Pull out and pull your pants back up!”

“Wh-what?” the novice stammered. “Holiness—I swear, I was given permission to breed—”

“Pull your piston out of the wench and dry it off,” the archbishop ordered, stepping inside and vanishing from Rexei’s line of view. “Whether or not she’s pregnant is no longer any concern of ours . . . unfortunately.”

The last word was muttered under his breath, as if to ensure the dullard leaning against the wall couldn’t hear. She heard, but she didn’t react. Rexei remained outside the room, struggling to shut out the memory of another priest and her mother . . . her poor mum . . .

“If you haven’t noticed, boy ,” Elcarei scorned, “all of the God’s markings and symbols have vanished in this room. And from all the others. Mekha has somehow been vanquished, and if we don’t set free all the mages and push them out onto the streets, the locals will come here to destroy us!”

“But . . . but we have magic—” the novice protested.

“Magic won’t stop a weapon aimed at your head when it’s a lump of metal flung from a hand-cannon, imbecile. And magic cannot stop the thousands of resentful residents who are about to wake up and realize Mekha is not here anymore .”

A thump of something striking something else—probably the archbishop’s boot hitting the novice’s backside—preceded the appearance of Novice Stearlen stumbling into view, hands still fumbling to get his velvet trousers buttoned. Elcarei appeared in his wake, forcing the novice to back up farther.

“The only defense we have is to release all the prisoners, shove them out the doors with a fast public apology, and then bolt the doors behind us. Boy! ” the archbishop shouted. “Come here!”

Rexei jumped, snapping out of her unwanted memories. She scuttled inside when the archbishop snapped his fingers and pointed into the room. It wasn’t quite as bad a place as she had feared. An odd section of the ceiling, some sort of glowing crystal as big as the bottom of a chest, brought in clean daylight. The walls were a little less cracked and crumbling, suggesting this place had been plastered and whitewashed more recently than the main hall, and the floor was neatly swept, though since no one in the Servers Guild was allowed to come down here and clean, it had to have been done by the apprentice priests, the novices.