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 â€" 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 â€" 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 â€" possible but they had no Academy connections he knew
of. Someone from the Crown who'd pulled his birth records â€" possible but
provisional acceptance wasn't a Crown mechanism. An Academy faculty
member who'd somehow come across his file â€" 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 â€" 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 â€" 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.