Star's Reach Read Online Free PDF Page B

The day that Garman and I came to her tent
with the dead man’s letter in our hands was no different. She
glanced up at us, seemed to take note of me, pushed her notes
aside, pulled her glasses down her nose a bit, and took the brown
resin-stiff paper from Garman’s hands. She read it, then stopped
and read it again, much more slowly.
    “Honest copy, Mam Kelsey,” Garman said to
her. “Front and back both.”
    She nodded, took a piece of paper from the
black leather case by her chair, dipped a pen and copied the paper
letter by letter. When she was done, she signed the copy, pressed
her seal into the paper good and hard, and then got out a bulb of
resin and sprayed the copy front and back so it couldn’t be changed
without a mark you could see. She blew on the copy until it was
dry, then handed it to Garman. He thanked her, and she nodded,
waited politely for a moment, and then spread her notes back out on
the table and got back to work. I was impressed. I’m sure Mam
Kelsey understood at least as much as any of us what that piece of
paper meant, but even so she never said a word.
    By the time she finished copying the letter,
work had come to a halt all over the ruin. That happens most times
a big find turns up, since most misters are smart enough to take
their prentices off the job when they can’t concentrate enough to
be safe. That was the one break we usually got from work between
the time the ruins dried out enough to dig and the time the rains
came back, too, so it gave the prentices another good reason to
keep an eye open for signs that might lead to something.
    There were a few misters in the Shanuga guild
who balked now and then at letting their prentices go when a find
turned up, but even Mister Calwel knew better than to hold them
back this time, since nobody had an eye open for anything but
Star’s Reach. It didn’t matter that none of us could make head or
tail of the message in the letter, or had the least notion what a
potus or a nrao might be. That would be tomorrow’s problem, for as
many tomorrows as it took to send somebody to Melumi and ask the
scholars. For the moment, as Garman and I walked back into camp
from Mam Kelsey’s tent, we passed clusters of prentices talking low
and fast, and every last one of them was talking about Star’s
Reach.
    Most of them jumped up and came over to ask
for another look at the letter. Even the ones who were bitter
rivals of mine the day before called me “Mister Trey” and were as
polite as you could ask. Garman, who had both the copy and the
original, let them read the copy. He gave me a sidelong glance
every time he handed it over, and I knew he was wondering when I’d
tell him whether I wanted the letter itself or the finder’s rights.
I couldn’t have told him if I wanted to. I knew which one I should
choose if I had any brains at all, and I knew which one every
senamee of me wanted to choose, and unfortunately they weren’t the
same one.
    So we went across the camp to the big tent in
the middle of everything that was the misters’ lodge seven months
of the year. Before we got there, the other misters had already
hauled one of the big wooden chairs outside the entrance to the
lodge and left it there for me to haul back inside. Of course
they’d tied a bunch of scrap iron to the thing so it weighed close
to fifty keelos, just to add to the welcome. Still, I counted
myself lucky. A couple of years before there had been one prentice
just turned mister that a lot of people disliked, and whoever
loaded up his chair drove a stake into the ground and chained the
chair to the stake, then draped a bunch more chain all around it so
it took him a dozen tries and some of the hottest language I’ve
ever heard before he figured out why the thing just wouldn’t
budge.
    I had an easier time than that, but the chair
was still a mother to lift, and a mother with babies to carry into
the lodge. Most of the other misters were already in the tent,
sitting in their