Star's Reach by John Michael Greer

wide and mouth shut tight and every line of his face
holding something in. He noticed me looking at him, then, and put
on a different expression, fast, but I’d seen the earlier one, and
wondered about that for the rest of the evening.

Seven: The Way of Ruins
     
     
    One of the things that makes this story hard
to tell in a straight line is that so much of it has to do with
ruins, and ruins have their own way of doing things. They all have
stories to tell, but they don’t tell them from beginning to end,
the way that Eleen and Tashel Ban say I ought to tell the story I’m
trying to write here. Ruins know how to wait, seeing as they’ve had
plenty of practice at it. They say a word here and a word there,
and it’s a pretty safe bet that you won’t figure out what they mean
by those words the first time you hear them.
    If you’re a ruinman’s prentice, you either
learn that quick or you get reborn, because more often than not, if
a ruin’s going to kill somebody, it starts saying that to the
ruinmen in its own roundabout way days or weeks before anything
happens. I wrote something a while back about Shem sunna Janny, who
became a prentice the same year Conn and I did, and who looked at
Mam Kelsey’s book with me. He wasn’t stupid, but he never did
figure out how to listen to a ruin, and so he was pulling wire out
of a conduit one morning in a building we’d started taking down
when something inside gave way all at once, and a couple of floors
came crashing down on top of him.
    The ruin had been saying that it was going to
kill someone since we started work on it that year. When the wind
blew, it creaked and shifted, and when we chopped pieces of it
loose and dropped them into a clear space below, it creaked and
shifted some more. Now of course plenty of ruins creak and shift,
and there are some that don’t and still end up dropping on
somebody, but that’s the way of ruins; you have to listen to them
talk, and then sometimes you can figure out enough to keep from
getting reborn. The other prentices stayed away from the ruin that
flapjacked on Janny when they didn’t have to go there, even though
it had plenty of wire and other things prentices can salvage. Janny
didn’t, and that was why we had to haul more concrete than I like
to think about to get to his body so a priestess could say the
litany for him and we could leave him out underneath the sky for
the wild things to bring back into the circle.
    That’s the way ruins are. They tell you what
you need to know, but you can’t ever count on having an easy time
figuring out what they’re saying. The ruin in Shanuga where I found
the dead man’s letter and nearly got reborn was like that. It told
me everything I needed to walk straight here to Star’s Reach, but I
didn’t figure out what it was trying to tell me until I’d been to
Melumi and Troy, and traveled down the Misipi in a steamboat, and
gone digging in the Arksa jungle, and spent my time in Sisnaddi
half buried in the old archives, and went looking for the place
where every question has an answer near drowned Deesee, and all the
rest of it.
    It took me all of that to figure out that a
single word I’d noticed and then half forgotten was the one thing I
needed to understand. Every ruin I’ve ever gotten to know has been
like that, and Star’s Reach is like that doubled, tripled, and with
whiskey poured on top.
    If I had any doubts that Star’s Reach was
like that, they got neatly laid to rest earlier today. We’ve been
searching the whole underground complex here level by level and
room by room, looking for the place old Anna remembers, where her
mother and father and the other people who used to live and work
here had their living quarters, their books and records, and the
old computers they’d kept running or cobbled together out of old
parts. As far as we can tell, the door where we first got into
Star’s Reach let us into a part of the complex that no one lived in
for most of four