Chapter 13
No One Sends Letters to Errand Boys
The night before he left, Cyan couldn't stop thinking about the name.
His full name was Cyan Aethon. The monks had given him the surname from an old pre-Saint text -- a word that meant void in a language nobody spoke anymore. He'd asked one of the older monks about it once, when he was nine. The monk had looked at him with an expression he hadn't understood at the time and said it was the name that felt right when they found him.
He hadn't used Aethon since he was eleven. The name drew looks. It was in none of the pre-Saint texts that were widely available -- you had to go digging in restricted archives to find it, or so the monk had implied. Using it in the guild district was asking for questions he didn't have answers to.
Nobody should have known it.
He turned that over for most of the night. Someone knew his full name. Someone knew where he was working. Someone had Academy standing and had used it to file a provisional acceptance in his name without explaining why.
He listed the possibilities methodically. A monk from the monastery who'd tracked him -- possible but they had no Academy connections he knew of. Someone from the Crown who'd pulled his birth records -- possible but provisional acceptance wasn't a Crown mechanism. An Academy faculty member who'd somehow come across his file -- possible, but what file? He had a labor card and a failed Runestone reading. That wasn't a file, that was an absence.
He kept coming back to the Runestone.
The cracked stone. The null result. The way the officials had looked at each other when the stone went dark.
Failed readings weren't supposed to happen. The pamphlet hadn't said that directly but it was implied -- the Runestone system had been running for three thousand years and was considered functionally infallible. A stone that cracked and went dark wasn't a failed reading. It was something else. Something the officials had recorded as a failed reading because they didn't have another category.
Maybe someone had been watching for that. For the specific outcome of a stone that didn't just fail to read but actively broke.
Maybe the letter wasn't about him at all. Maybe it was about what he'd done to the stone.
He got up before dawn, dressed, and went to the guild one last time.
The dock was empty at that hour except for Hess, the old Iron-rank maintenance worker who kept hours that didn't match anyone else's. He was doing something to one of the mana-lamp housings when Cyan came through.
'Leaving?' Hess said without looking up.
'Today.'
'Academy letter.' Not a question.
Cyan stopped. 'You knew about it?'
'Heard Seff mention it.' Hess set down his tool and looked at Cyan with the particular directness of someone who'd been around long enough to have stopped bothering with indirection. 'You know nobody sends those letters to errand boys.'
'I know.'
'You know what that means.'
'It means someone wanted me there specifically.'
Hess nodded slowly. 'Thing about being wanted specifically,' he said, 'is you should spend some time thinking about what for before you show up.'
Cyan looked at him. 'Have you seen this before? Someone getting a letter like this?'
A long pause. Hess picked up his tool again.
'Once,' he said. 'Long time ago. Different city.' He went back to the lamp housing. 'That one didn't end well. But that one also didn't know what was coming. You seem like someone who pays attention.'
He didn't say anything else.
Cyan stood there for a moment, then picked up his pack and walked out of the guild district for the last time.
The morning was cold and clear. The mana-lights were still on, burning low in the pre-dawn dark. He felt each one as he passed -- a small constellation of signatures, familiar now, the particular texture of this district's enchantments that he'd been learning without meaning to for weeks.
He filed them away.
Then he turned north and started walking.