Jean Johnson - The Guild

The furniture was very simple. A water-flushed refresher stood in the corner of the room, and a sink next to it, though there were no drying towels. A chair sat under the sunshine-bright patch of crystal with a small table in front of it, and a narrow bed stood in the corner beside the door. On it sprawled a woman with short-cropped hair and vacant, staring eyes; the skirt of her plain gray woolen shift pushed up to her hips. Rexei flinched away from the signs of what the novice had been doing.

The archbishop noticed. “Haven’t you ever seen a naked woman, boy?”

Rexei shook her head quickly, looking anywhere but at the pale but breathing living doll lying expressionlessly on the bed. In fact, she shook it fast enough, her felted hat came off, revealing her own dark, short-cropped hair, though hers at least had been cut evenly so that it looked flattering and not butchered haphazardly just to keep it manageable.

“Figures. Beyond innocent . . . You’re probably too stupid to know what your piston is , let alone how it works,” Elcarei muttered. “Listen carefully, both of you,” the archbishop stated as Rexei quickly scooped her cap off the floor, pulling it back over her short, dark locks. “Stearlen, you are to fetch your fellow novices and have them unlock all these rooms. Boy . . . Rexal, or whatever your name is . . . you will touch each of these godly sacrifices on the metal collar, and while touching it, order them to walk up the stairs and into the prayer hall, where they are to seat themselves on the benches.

“That goes for the novices, too,” Elcarei added as Rexei stared and Stearlen blinked. “I want every last mage upstairs and seated in that hall . . . and then you will get them all to stand up and line up at the temple doors, where I will remove their control collars. Once they’re free, they’ll be pushed into the streets, where they can fend for themselves. We will all work quickly, as none of us has any idea how long it will take for them to regain their wits . . . and then you , boy, will be dismissed along with the other members of the Servers Guild for the day.”

Rexei blinked and managed a dull-witted question. “We . . . go home early, Holy sir?”

“ Yes, you ‘go home early,’ you delightful dullard,” Elcarei mocked. He pointed at the bed. “Touch her collar and get her on her feet. You know the path back to the prayer hall. Go. Both of you. And if you see any other servants, tell them to come down here or be spell-whipped for disobedience. I want these mages out of this temple in less than an hour.”

Novice Stearlen hustled away, his velvet robes once again neatly closed over his shirt and trousers. He felt to her mage-sense like snot from a bad nasal cold, the kind that looked green and yellow, pus-like, as it stained the sufferer’s clean-bleached kerchief. Cringing, Rexei turned back to the bed and approached the unmoving, slowly breathing woman, trying not to look at her still-splayed thighs. Rexei reached down and touched the rune-scribed collar around that pale neck. “Uh . . . on yer feet. Get on your feet.”

The woman sat up with barely a sound, closed her legs, then stood. Her shift dropped down around her legs, concealing what had happened to her . . . but the cloth was thin, even though it was wool, and all she had for shoes were the felted slippers keeping her toes warm in the not-quite-cold air found this far underground. Compassion made Rexei snatch up the top wool blanket from the bed and wrap it around the blank-staring mage’s shoulders.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Elcarei asked, frowning.

“It . . . it be cold upstairs, Holy sir,” Rexei managed, flushing. “Can’t give ’er burning coal t’ hold. Blanket’ll keep ’er warm.”

That earned her an impatient scowl, but the archbishop didn’t correct her decision. He just snapped his fingers and pointed toward the stairwell they had used. Rexei touched the collar and ordered the woman to start walking—and had to order her to turn left as they exited the room to save her from walking straight into the wall opposite. Thankfully, she didn’t have to order the woman to actually walk up the steps; the entranced mage managed them just fine. She even picked up the hem of her skirt so that she wouldn’t trip as she ascended the long flight.

By the time Rexei got back upstairs to the once forbidden doorway, two more novices were guiding mage-prisoners up the steps. She backed up to let them pass, ears straining to try to hear Koler’s conversation, but the priest’s office was silent. Two more trips netted a total of twelve novices and five servants, including herself, now working to get all the mages upstairs.

On the fifth trip, which took her to the next level down, she caught a glimpse of what could only be the “power room” of the temple. It was blank walled now, but crystals lined the tiered edges of the chamber and topped the circular rows of stone pillars crowding the main floor, all focused toward a massive, empty throne at the heart. Here, then, was where a fragment of Mekha had been rumored to sit, the same as at every other temple in Mekhana.

To feed Himself, Mekha had been rumored to split into several “chunks” that then sat in the depths of each complex, draining all the mages the local priesthood had managed to catch. No corner of the kingdom was considered free of His hunger, His presence. Even the smallest of temples was rumored to house both a dozen mages at any one time and a piece of the Engineering God’s utterly unwanted being.

But this room was empty, and when she came back on her seventh trip and caught a glimpse of the central chamber again, the stones of the throne at the very heart and the matching crystal-tipped pillars around the edges were crumbling. Several tumbled as she snuck a few seconds to look. Not the walls or the ceiling, which was a relief because she didn’t want to be trapped underground in a cave-in. No, just the paraphernalia of Mekha’s hunger was vanishing.

He really is gone . . .

She couldn’t stop to explore in more detail, though. There were signs the mages were beginning to wake up, even with the collars still clasped around their necks. After having escorted over half a dozen of them upstairs, Rexei could see sections where the runes were clearly missing on the metal collars. Whatever had drawn the mages’ powers out of them to feed to Mekha was no longer there, and though one and all were still obedient, some semblance of awareness was coming back into their dull, vacant eyes.

They showed some semblance of living, not just of merely being alive; it could be seen in the way their cheeks started turning pink, in the way their breath caught and changed at random moments, instead of just soughing in and out at an even rate. There was even some semblance of thought. As she escorted the ninth and last of her prisoners upstairs, the older man blinked and licked his lips, frowning faintly as he tried to . . . form words?

Did he want to ask a question? Ask for water? Ask for something warmer to wear? He was lucky to have a blanket as well as his felted slippers and woolen shift, but she could understand feeling thirsty and hungry. It was now well past the noon meal and approaching sundown, which meant supper was only a few hours away. Rexei sincerely doubted the priests would go so far as to feed their former prisoners, though. Not if barely half of them had blankets, and not if the archbishop wanted them out of the temple before sundown.

“Right, then. Bishop Koler, make a one-way warding outside the front door. Something that will allow me to address the masses gathering outside without them getting close, and that will allow these former sacrifices to leave,” Archbishop Elcarei ordered. “The rest of you, start getting these . . . poor souls . . . on their feet, one bench at a time—no, make that two benches, in two lines. Bishop Halestes, come take half of these collar keys . . .”