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the forest that wraps the ruins on three sides. I drew in a deep
breath to remind myself that I was still alive.
    Word must have gotten around that something
was up, since a mob of prentices and a good handful of misters were
waiting for us down in the old street. “Found something,” Garman
told them. “A little more than you’d expect.” He held up the paper,
then waved off the prentices so the other misters could get close
and read it. That was worth seeing. Mister Calwel spat out a bit of
language so hot I half expected my ears to catch fire, and Mister
Jonus, the senior mister there that season and a man who never
seemed surprised by anything, blinked and read the paper again and
said, “Garman, now that’s a find.”
    “Found by Mister Trey here,” said Garman,
“who’ll get either the paper or the finder’s rights once he makes
up his mind.” He gave me a look and nudged me with an elbow, and I
think it was then that the other misters noticed the blood on my
face. All of them, even Calwel, came up to shake my hand and let me
know that if I took the finder’s rights they’d offer a good price
for them. I grinned and told them they could go ahead and jump off
the next tower they happened to climb, and they laughed.
    They didn’t have to acknowledge me; they
could have called me out if they wanted to. Ruinmen go to the
circle now and then, with hands or knives or pry bars, and during
my prentice years I saw more than one fight end with a mister
carried away dead. Still, either they had no quarrel with my
advancement to mistership or they didn’t fancy the risk of going to
the circle with me. Prentices fight more often than misters, though
it almost always stops at first blood, and I won’t claim I never
lost those fights but I will say it didn’t happen much. That wasn’t
just a matter of talent, either. Gray Garman hired a fighting
master to teach his prentices the tricks of staying alive in the
circle, which is more than most of the misters did.
    Once the misters all had their look at the
paper, the prentices crowded around to read it, and most of them
weren’t half so quiet as the misters had been. Some of them whooped
and some of them used language I won’t write down, and there were
only a couple of them who stopped and stared with big round eyes; I
think those were the ones that really caught what it was that we’d
found. Soon enough Garman waved them off, and he and I crossed the
ruins to the tent where Mam Kelsey spent the digging seasons.
    Most ruinmen hire failed scholars from Melumi
to puzzle out old writing and make copies of any papers that get
found, and when the ruin’s of any size the misters go in together
to pay one to stay out there at the site through the digging
season. The Shanuga ruins were big and rich enough for that, so we
had a failed scholar there every season since I first became a
prentice. The last four years I was there, that was Mam Kelsey. She
was a lean thing with hair the same gray color as the robe of her
guild, and eyes so bad she had to wear glasses thick as old bottles
to see more than a few senamees past her nose.
    Her tent was over to one side of the camp,
not far from the river. When the ruinmen had no work for her she
would sit on a little folding chair behind a little folding table
that always looked ready to collapse beneath notes for the book she
was writing to get back into the Versty. When we had work for her,
she would push the notes aside, pull her glasses just that extra
little bit down her nose, and do whatever needed to be done without
saying any more words than she had to. I used to feel sorry for her
now and then, but the misters paid her a good wage and she could
still call herself a scholar without shame. Later on, I met one
failed scholar who worked as a cook in a roadhouse and another who
was a harlot, and neither of them would admit to most folk they’d
ever been to Melumi at all.
    The prentices used to talk about her book
sometimes