Rodo's Regrets

Sometimes, dear reader, your daydreams come out and demand that they have their time in the spotlight.

This one actually came from a just-before-sleep vision of an apprentice with a kindly master, one who taught her of all the magic the old man knew before then giving the young lady a proper introduction to the world and society...

You say this week's story isn't that kind of dream? Oh?

Keep reading, friend, and all the way to the end, so that we may find out what things are not numbered among...

Rodo's Regrets by M. K. Dreysen

A few months before he turned twenty, Rodo Guerra killed the man who called himself Rodo's adoptive father. It was self-defense, as far as Rodo was concerned.

It was also payback for thirteen years of the old man calling himself Rodo's father, and then treating him as the least of his possessions. And not just the way the old man didn't teach that which he'd promised to.

But the knife, when it entered where Rodo aimed it, took back some of the pain. Rodo hadn't expected it to. He'd expected killing his "mentor" to be a relief, sure.

He didn't expect that, as he filled his backpack with the little bit of cash and the couple of books he'd managed to steal, Rodo didn't expect to weigh his costs and his benefits and see it good. Not for the years and the scars and the lacks.

The promises, those he carried along with him as he left the building he'd scraped something like a life from. Promises, and then the letdown. "Looks like real engineering and science are beyond you, boy. But maybe I can teach you to be a proper dishwasher. That way you'll at least make a useful lackey for your betters."

The books didn't promise anything. They just laid out what you had to do if you wanted to learn. No promises, just work.

Rodo preferred that to the old man's promise-refusal routine. He could do the reading, while he worked nights at the bar. He read during the daylight hours, when the light came free with the open window. He worked problems in the dust until they made sense and he believed his answers.

He ignored people asking him why. Just shrug and sweep, or mop.

Or break in. "Rodo Guerra? I've heard that name."

Rodo had spent thirteen years in the building. Most nights, at least. He'd never strayed far from the streets. Not when the old man got out the bottle. Better to disappear for a couple nights.

Roam the rooftops. Poke his head in, here and there, to remember he could do it. And pick up the occasional loose item.

Treya, as she called herself, wanted a way into a rich man's bedroom. And not the other route. "What are you after?"

"Just get me to the safe, kid. I'll split whatever cash is there."

More than enough to keep Rodo's interests focused on his own subjects, as it turned out. Similar with Booka. He needed access to the town's records.

The town needed guards to watch the taverns and the docks and the other places of the night. The town hall, not so much. And the cabinets with the paperwork needed to stand up to casual abuse, not Rodo's picks. Booka had paid up front, half, which meant Rodo could doodle on the window sill dust, a pressure gradient problem, while Booka swapped papers and did his own doodling.

Rodo didn't chase the little jobs, he let them come. In that odd way that they did, right when Rodo needed a new old book.

Few wrote of science, these days. Whether from what Rodo thought was indifference, like his step-father, or the need to stay out of the eye of the public. "You're not still reading that stuff, are you?" his landlady asked.

"Came from my parents," Rodo said. It was, more or less, the truth. "Why, think they're worth anything?"

"A hanging," she sniffed. "If you're lucky. A kid, that's just learning enough to be useful. An adult, and you're asking for the rope."

Right. Rodo's books found their way to locations his landlady didn't have access to at that point.

And when he broke into the library at night, to search the basement where they kept the books they didn't want good honest adults reading, or when Rodo made discrete inquiries of the quiet network of working engineers and scientists, he made sure to keep names and such out of it.

He'd set his eyes on a particular find, one fine afternoon, when Ulis and Shil came calling.

A truly old geology book, one of the last ones written that anyone knew of. But four hundred years or more meant the owner needed serious cash to part with it. Rodo had turned his few extra funds into an almost as old, but much less sought after, quantum physics book when Ulis turned up wanting a roper.

"Where? And what kind of building?"

"Out of town. You'll want to see it first. We've got all the gear you could imagine, you'll need it."

The building turned out to be a tower, three stories or maybe a little more. White-clad, limestone or something, the kind that glowed in the sunset.

A camp on a hill, the tower stood on the other side of a little valley. Leoma had kept the camp and the watch over the tower while Ulis and Shil acquired gear and Rodo. "What is it? Anyone know?"

Leoma shrugged. "It's been there for longer than anyone can remember, even in their family stories. I used to hunt here, when I was a kid." He pointed at the tower. "Good deer over there, there's a stream behind it where they head to drink in the evening. Ducks in the fall, too."

Rodo nodded. Deer, ducks, and a tower empty for more generations than anyone had bothered to keep track of. Which meant no one around to complain when they started their work. "Why the rope gear?"

"Only entrance is at the top."

"Figures."

Leoma wasn't lying, either. When they got to the tower's base, Rodo noted the pitting, first. Cement, limestone, whatever the material, centuries of exposure and the surface held cracks and pits. Rodo pried at pieces of it with his fingers, then his knife.

Testing whether it crumbled. But it held good, at least down here. Rodo walked around the entire base of the tower, just in case.

But the only entrance was the shadowed nook, a window maybe, just below the pyramid shaped cap of the tower. Forty feet up, give or take.

Rodo spent that night going through the gear.

It took him a day to drill and set the anchor points. A long hard day, Ulis at the next one down the rope and Leoma on the ground below, passing up tools. Rodo roped down, Ulis behind him, when he'd set the anchors they'd need for the window.

"Tomorrow?" Shil asked.

"Yep." Rodo spent the night thinking through an angular momentum problem that he'd been having trouble with.

Whatever the tower held, it would hold for a night or two longer without Rodo's having to mind it.

Rodo pulled the panes of glass free of the frame the next morning, when the sunlight came enough to rope up and climb with a little surety.

He and Uliss waited until the air from the window lost its stale taste before they went in. "One room, huh? Lot of damn work for a room you can't get into," Ulis summed up.

Rodo nodded. All the rope work, slide in through the window, and the tower had greeted them with one big room for the effort. On the inside of it, Rodo admitted the room gave great view. The window framed the valley perfectly.

But it didn't make much sense otherwise. He focused on the floor until he found it.

A seam, outlining a block in the floor. "We'll need pry bars."

"And wedges," Ulis added. Ulis went to the window and tossed a message line down to Leoma.

Rodo used his belt knife to scrape what little dust had drifted into the seam while Ulis managed Leoma and Shil's appearance. "Got anything new?" Ulis asked when they'd finished hauling up the gear.

"What you see is what you get."

Two on the pry bars, one on the wedges, and Rodo to push the wood poles through when the block of stone had been lifted high enough for that.

It was only about six inches deep, fortunately. Heavy and more than heavy, but not so much the four of them couldn't pry and lift and roll it out of the way. Of the staircase lying beneath it.

"Well, would you look at that?" Shil asked. "Tower's got a few more secrets for us, don't it?"

Rodo smiled, then lifted the lantern he'd readied. "No time like the present."

However well the outside of the tower had stood up to ice and wind and rain and sun, the inside, the dark shaft, might have done better. But for the wet.

Rodo felt it as soon as he climbed below the floor of the tower room. Humid air and a slick feel beneath his feet. He stopped and tested the stair treads.

Unlike the outside, the concrete here shifted under the knife's pressure. The surface, anyway, if only a little. Rodo tested his footing to make sure of it, then turned to the others. "Watch your feet on the stairs."

"Got it," Ulis said, before passing word back. "You ok to keep going?"

"Yep." It was just a stairway, after all, winding its way down the dark open shaft of the tower.

To another room at the bottom, essentially a copy of the empty room at the top. Except for the stone sarcophagus.

And the rats. They came in right after Leoma and Shil did, when Shil made his way straight to the box. The rats poured out of a hole in the wall behind it.

Ulis and Leom and Shil stomped and cussed while Rodo dug through one of the packs for the kerosene. The four of them ran back up the stairs until the smoke had cleared.

While the other three dug into the sarcophagus, Rodo used one of the poles to shift the rats out of the way and look at the hole. Like the stairs, only more so, the concrete over the hole had deteriorated, crumbled away.

Rodo didn't stick his head through the hole, but he did look for the seam. Where whoever had filled the box had then covered up their last exit on their way out. "What kind of king is he then?"

"King? Yeah, I guess he is wearing a crown," Ulis laughed. "Look at that."

Crown and scepter and a book that crumbled to dust faster than they could lift it free. Rodo let the frustration at that drift away with the dust while he pondered the tower's story. "Guy builds himself a tower to look out at the world, then his people bury him and seal the place up when he's gone."

"And leave us a nice payment for the privilege of discovery," Shil added. "Don't forget that part."

The scepter was made of silver with gold tracing. The crown reversed these, and added a handful of jewels to go along with the difference.

All told, the metals and jewels, Rodo's share at least, gave him cash enough to buy his geology book. Rodo spent a few months pondering what a handful of centuries had done to the names of things.

Until the tower's story brought him, and Ulis, back to the hole in its base. "Rats, right?"

"Bats too," Rodo answered. A couple of them had taken refuge in the tower's upper room in the months since the pair's last visit. "They'll have another entrance, somewhere close."

"We find that first."

Rodo agreed. It meant less rope work, if nothing else.

Rats and bats and crumbly limestone greeted them in the world beneath.

And the remnants of somebody's, somebodies', lives. Worked stone, enough for safe passage between small homes, stone walls with wood framing and roofs dusted away by time. "So this was his kingdom?"

"Looks like it," Ulis agreed. "Wonder why they lived down here, instead of out in the valley?"

Rodo shook his head. None of the small city, for city it was, held information, only remnants. The king, if that's who he was, was the only body they found. "They must have left right after they buried him."

"Last message to the past."

Rodo and Ulis used the rats' exit cave half a dozen times, exploring the underground city, before they decided they'd seen the extent of its story. "You're a book type guy, Rodo. Think you'll write anything about this?"

Rodo stopped in his tracks, Ulis's question hanging there in front of him along with the weight of memory.

But people paid for fiction, still. And some history. Those books, so long as the history didn't go too far in the past, hundreds was ok but thousands didn't fly, not really...

It wasn't science, engineering. "I'd never really thought about what to do, you know?"

"You are now."

Rodo laughed. "See you around."

"Yeah."

****

A few months before he turned sixty, Rodo Guerra, reasonably respected writer of trashy novels about an underground kingdom some fair few centuries in the past, looked out his window and watched the spaceships return.

"Geer, quick. You have to warn them," Rodo told his apprentice.

Geer smiled at the old man, imagining her beloved old friend trying to rush out and catch the captain of the 'ship before they got themselves in trouble. "I'll catch them, don't worry."

"Go, and stay safe."

Stay hidden, he meant, but Geer knew.

So far as any of the locals knew, Geer had taken the old man's job offer for an assistant. Someone to keep up with all the things arthritis and a failing memory had robbed him of.

They'd both been thrilled as hell to discover in the other a passion for equations and tinkering and joyful laughter when a flask smoked, turned green, and exploded unexpectedly.

Four years of putting books and notes and stories in front of Geer...

Rodo didn't have to hide the joy, or the pain, the tears of both when Geer told him, a week later, of the captain's offer. "She's got space for a tech-apprentice, Rodo."

He smiled, and shrugged. "Go. And take the good wishes of an old man with you."

She kissed him on his bald spot before she left. "And a little love?"

"Some of that, too."