Mari saw that the middle-aged man looked uncomfortable, and was not surprised when Alain called him on it.
“You are unhappy,” Alain said to him. “But not for the same reason as the others.”
Everyone looked at the man, who grimaced. “I would be a fool to lie to a Mage. Very well. I will say what is in my heart. I am grateful that the Lady Mechanic has done us this service. But she has done so by betraying the secrets of her Guild. I am concerned that someone willing to betray once may betray again.”
Mari held up a hand to halt the outbursts that nearly came from the others. “I understand. Would it make you feel better to know that those secrets never really belonged to my Guild? My former Guild, that is. The Mechanics Guild stole those secrets. They were never supposed to be secrets. They were meant to be shared with everyone. I only gave you what your ancestors should have long ago received.”
“If this is so, Lady Mechanic, you have my apologies,” the man said.
“How do you know this?” the old woman asked.
“I can’t tell you yet,” Mari said. “Someday I will be able to tell everyone. But I have seen the evidence. So has Mage Alain. The Mechanics Guild is built on the theft of its secrets from everyone else, and on the lie that commons cannot do the work that Mechanics can do. You can. I have proven it to be so.”
“You will turn this world upside-down,” General Shi said.
“Better upside-down,” Alain replied, “than broken as is Tiae.”
“No argument there,” the old woman said. “Tell me, daughter, do you know anything of the thinking devices of the Mechanics Guild?”
Mari felt a surge of interest. “Yes. I know a lot about them. Why?”
“Julesport has been hampered by the failure of the device we have in this building,” the middle-aged man explained. “We have been trying to get the Mechanics Guild Hall to fix it for the last year, but they insist that the repair will cost more than even Julesport can afford.”
“That doesn’t seem too likely,” Mari said. “Why aren’t they just offering to replace it, if it’s broken that badly? There aren’t a lot of them, but in a year’s time the Guild could have brought in a spare from Palandur. We’re talking a Calculating and Analysis Device, right?”
“Yes, Lady Mechanic.”
“I can fix one of those in my sleep,” Mari said, for once not having to feign total confidence. It felt almost disorienting to be working within her field as a Mechanic again rather than facing the challenges of the daughter. “Let me take a look at it.”
Once again the small group trooped down a long hall, then down some stairs, Colonel Faron going ahead to ensure that no one had returned to the building early.
The room Mari finally entered felt very familiar. The Guild insisted on certain design criteria for rooms holding Calculating and Analysis Devices, and there was really only one design of the CADs, with the ability to add on certain options. The large metal cabinets holding the many relays were as well known to her as the face of an old acquaintance.
Mari checked the room carefully for any far-listener, though she didn’t expect to find one. She powered up the device, waiting impatiently as it warmed up and wondering just how long she and Alain had already been away from the Gray Lady.
Finally she was able to run a test sequence, which went so badly that Mari had a long tape of data printed out so she could analyze the problem. “They’ve been cheating you,” she finally told General Shi and the middle-aged man. “The unit hasn’t been maintained all that well.” She suspected from what she saw that she knew the Mechanic who had done it. Why was he working in the field after washing out of the CAD program at the Mechanics Guild Academy? Maybe because there were so few Mechanics qualified for CAD work and the Guild had decided to try to kill one of them, Mari herself. “But the problems you’re having are because you’ve got a badly patched set of thinking ciphers.”
“Can you repair it?” General Shi asked.
Mari nodded. “Fixing the ciphers will be easy for me. The hard part is going to be doing the fixes in such a way that the Mechanic who is supposed to keep this CAD working doesn’t realize that I’ve fixed it. If it’s the Mechanic I think it is, I can do that, but it’ll take a while.” She looked at Alain. “Maybe you should go back to the Gray Lady and let them know that everything is all right. I’ll follow when this is done.”
Colonel Faron stuck his head in the room. “We have already sent word to fully provision your ship, daughter.”
“Uh, would you mind not calling me that?” Mari asked. “It feels like I’m not me any more when people do that. Just Lady is fine.”
“Yes, Lady. We could send them a message from you.”
Alain shook his head. “They would not know if the message was from Lady Mari. I should carry the message, but I am reluctant to leave here without you,” he told Mari.
Mari looked up from her work, brushing hair from her face. “The army of Julesport is guarding me, Alain. I’ll be fine. And you can still tell where I am, right?”
He nodded. “The thread.”
“Right,” Mari repeated. The idea of the invisible, insubstantial thread that connected her to Alain still felt sort of weird to her, but also sort of romantic, and it had saved her a couple of times already.
Reassured, Alain reached out to her. “Be careful.”
She got up and kissed him. “Don’t worry.”
It wasn’t until Mari bent back to her work that she wondered how the Julesport officials had taken seeing someone kiss a Mage. That wasn’t something one saw every day. In fact, it was doubtful that anyone had ever willingly kissed a Mage before she and Alain had grown together.
None of the fixes were complicated, but doing them in a way that didn’t look like fixes took a long time. Mari finally stood up, stretching out her back and wincing. “That’s got it. It’ll work fine for you. If the Mechanics Guild asks how that happened, tell them you have no idea, that it just started working all right again. CADs do that sometimes.”
“In truth,” the middle-aged man said, “I have no idea what you did, but we are all very grateful. How much?”
“How much what?”
“Uh… how much is the cost of your services?”
Mari took a moment to understand. “We didn’t negotiate a contract. And Julesport is helping us, or at least not hindering us. And if the prophecy is right, I guess I sort of do have a special obligation to the city that Jules founded. So let’s call that even.”
“Even?” General Shi asked with obvious disbelief. “You are charging nothing? The repair of these devices is one of the most expensive contracts the Mechanics Guild offers.”
“Yeah. There aren’t that many Mechanics trained to fix them,” Mari explained. “But I’m not with the Guild anymore.”
“You must accept—”
Seeing that the officials would not accept her services without recompense, Mari offered a compromise. “I’ll take something to help pay for the supplies the Gray Lady took on, all right? Is that enough?”
“If that is all you will take,” the middle-aged man said. He began to say something else, but turned as a messenger rushed up to Colonel Faron. “What is this?”
Faron turned a worried face to them. “The guards who accompanied Mage Alain to the Gray Lady have been found in an alley, all dead. My aide checked with the launch at the landing and Mage Alain has not returned.”