This was not like the usual locks she faced. She was back in the Rivets’ Guild. Here, everything was designed as a challenge—a mental puzzle where success often hung opposite bodily harm. Right now, she suspected that harm took the form of a collapsing platform beneath their feet if she couldn’t open the door in time.
Arianna ran her fingers along the lock. There were a series of pictures and numerals on its spinners. She could either solve the puzzle, or break her way in. The Arianna of the past would have delighted in the former . . .
But she was too old for games.
Arianna unclipped and unrolled a bag of tools from her belt, quickly selecting a narrow, flat-headed screwdriver. Fortunately for her . . . the designer of this particular lock expected her to revel in solving the puzzle, not dismantling the thing entirely. Its seams were well exposed and screws easy to access. Arianna had the box apart in a mere minute, manually unlatching the heavy curved bolt that affixed the lock to the door.
The room within crackled with electricity. Arianna could hear it humming in the wires that draped from the ceiling like moss off swamp trees. She flipped a switch next to her, funneling that energy into a bulb in the center of the room. Arianna blinked at the light. The last time she had been at the guild, electricity was new and only in a few areas.
She looked around the room, finding a series of levers on one of the side walls, nestled between two bookcases.
“Lock, raise, release . . .” She read the labels scribbled on each of the handles. Arianna tugged on the one labeled lock. The release lever raised slightly in reply, a soft click engaging it in place.
“You’re much faster than I,” a weathered voice spoke from the doorway.
“I should be.” Arianna turned to face Willard, rolling up her tools. “You have a good fifteen years on me, old man.”
“You’re back in the hall; you’d think you’d show a little more respect to your vicar.”
“Just honoring what would’ve been the wishes of my Master.” Arianna couldn’t fight a small smile at the idea of being back in the Rivets’ Guild, but her face fell at the thought of Master Oliver. He had never been able to return.
“Your work alone honors him.”
Arianna didn’t have a chance to comment one way or another, for the door to the inside of the hall opened, revealing a man with a filled bolt and wrench tattoo on his cheek. The journeyman crossed his forearms in an X—a gesture of respect within the guild, for the vicar. Willard promptly settled them in what would become their new quarters.
“Should they require anything, see that they receive it, within reason,” Willard said after Louie and his crew had been closed away behind the doors of their new rooms. Arianna appreciated the vicar’s foresight to add the final caveat. “And go tell Charles to meet me in my office in one hour.”
“Understood, Vicar.” The journeyman departed promptly.
“This way, Arianna.” Willard motioned for her to follow him.
She ran her fingertips along the metal walls that encased her. They pulsed with the omnipresent movement of the hall itself. Behind every wall there were gears churning, shifting, pushing something into a new design. Every panel could be removed and tinkered with, and every Rivet was encouraged to leave their mark by doing so.
“What is it?” Willard paused, noticing her palm flat against the wall.
“It’s unlike Holx,” she observed. “The Ravens’ Guild was so quiet from everyone being gone . . . How many people are still here?”
“I believe about fifty journeymen stayed behind, and I left one Master, Master Charles, to oversee them.”
And in case something happened to you, Arianna finished mentally. “Nearly empty, and the guild still moves, still lives.”
Vicar Willard outstretched his gnarled and age-spotted hand, placing it next to hers. “And it will continue to tick, long after we all are dead.”
That much was true.
As they continued, the paths became more and more familiar. It was like an old toolkit, where every wrench and screwdriver was remembered the moment it was seen once more. Ghosts were their only company in the empty halls.
“Wait, Willard, my room is that way.” Arianna pointed down a hall at one of the forks.
“Your room has long since been given away.” Willard progressed forward, and Arianna did the same, ignoring the stab of pain she felt at his words. She knew there hadn’t been a home for her to come back to for some time, but to hear it articulated so clearly wasn’t easy. “And even if it hadn’t been, you no longer belong in that wing.”
Instead, Willard led her into a great hall. Square skylights dotted the ceiling, letting in natural light to blend with the electric sconces that dotted every column of the main stretch. Between the columns, down the center of the room, were sturdy wing-backed chairs, high tables—impromptu meeting areas and spaces to sit and think. On the perimeter, between the columns and the outer walls, doorways adorned with nameplates lined the room.
Arianna adjusted her harness, which suddenly felt too tight and tightening with every step.
The Vicar Rivet led her back to the far corner. Her feet weaved her among the couches and chairs, familiar with the path rutted into the plush carpeting. This was the hall of masters, a place she had visited frequently to consult with a man whose door she now faced.
“You kept it?” Her voice was stunted, and she couldn’t quite figure out why. Her eyes fixated on the plaque that read Master Oliver.
“In a way.”
“Oddly sentimental for a bunch of Rivets.” Arianna buried her hands into her pockets and told herself that Oliver’s untouched old quarters meant nothing.
“Sentimentality only had little to do with it.” Willard tapped one of the two door locks.
Every master’s door had its own lock fused with the metal door. But Oliver had conceived a second addition that he welded into the doorframe himself. It was the most complicated lock Arianna had ever had the privilege of seeing crafted, with multiple tumblers and no clear seams or screws.
“You can’t open it.” She grinned knowingly. “Why not break the door down?”
“Perhaps that was the sentimentality—violating a master’s workshop like that. But now . . .”
“You want me to open it?” Arianna arched her eyebrows.
“Well, of course. You know the combination, don’t you?”
“I do.” Arianna thought briefly about concealing the fact, but she’d have much more fun watching Willard squirm as he pined for access into the physical manifestation of his rival’s mind.
A long moment stretched on. “Well . . .?”
“I’ll have to think if I want to open it or not.”
“This is going to be your chambers, now.” He stopped her with a sentence as she turned away. “Everything within is yours.”
The words buzzed between her ears louder than the electricity that hummed throughout the guild. “It’s not mine to have,” she whispered without facing the vicar.
“It is.” Willard patted her shoulder, passing by her and heading for the exit.
“He did not give it to me.” She wasn’t good enough for it. Arianna knew she was ten times more brilliant than most other Rivets and she was still only half as smart as Oliver was.
“I think, in his way, he did.”