Free The Dream Compass [Book 1 of The Merquan Chronicle] by Jeff Bredenberg

lighten the weight and provide air to the feet.
    Webb limped in, silently cursing the storm and its crippling humidity. “Gregory’s coming in behind me,” Webb said stonily, “and he ain’t wearing a poking snap collar.”
    Faiging looked up.
    “The snapper, thass too scary even for me,” Webb said. “But Gregory’s stripped clean. Kim agreed to that fast enough.”
    The young man entered, muscle-hard but pink-skinned naked and embarrassed. Kim loped in after him, mercifully pretending not to notice, and handed a supply list to Faiging.
    The young man was anything but swaggering in his nudity. His shoulders hunched forward, bringing his arms into a frontward dangle that he hoped, futilely, might cover his crotch. “I’m … my name’s Gregory. You’re Mr. Faiging? The one what makes the generators and wenches … winches?” He blushed.
    Faiging chuckled, amused that this was the sideman he had been so wary of. “I am Cred Faiging, yes,” he said politely. “And, well, I designed those things and many more. It’s the mountain grunts that actually make them now—out in the assembly houses. You could say that the trade we take from those frees me to play at more interesting pursuits.”
    The old inventor-trader recognized the wide-eyed awe of a fan. He poked his pliers in the direction of the newly formed tubing on the bench. “Now, it sounds that you was brought up right—with Faiging machinery about ya, no?”
    “Plumb right, Mister,” Gregory replied eagerly, and Webb winced that his assistant could be so easily toyed with. “I grew up on the saying ‘If it ain’t Faiging, don’t trust your life to it.’”
    Faiging nodded reverently—he had heard the same hundreds of times and never tired of it. The inventor returned to his new experiment, snipping the questionable solder connection apart and starting it anew.
    “Son, it’s juss the way of progress, thass all,” Faiging said, eyes on his project. “Since the dawn of man—” He stopped himself. “Well, since the Big War, anyway, it’s juss been the way of the world. Some rad-scarred salvager will find a rusted piece of ancient junk an’ haul it in and sell it to an inventor, scientist, repairman, artist—call us anything you want.”
    Faiging waved his pliers grandly. “Thass the way the modern world was built. Reconstructed wire by wire, gear by gear—by myself and a handful of the like-minded.”
    Webb was growing impatient. “I have a supply list, and a tanker van to fill,” he said.
    Faiging did not look up. “Kim can take care of all that, as you know,” he mumbled. “Why is it for once you cannot take supply quietly and pass on to do your maiming? Ya must parade into the main shop so that all know Cred Faiging supplies the enemies of the Government? Every time it’s this way!”
    Webb snorted. “You’re a trader,” he said, “a trader of all things and a player of all sides. And any customer you have is plumby enough to know that. Last I knew, you were no more a Government man than you were a fish peddler.”
    “That may be, but on touchy matters the Monitor is not much for forgiving.”
    “I’m headed out again,” Webb said seriously, “into a thick bollocks I don’t gully to the bottom. But on the edges of everything, is this odd bugger—a man you connected me with a year ago.”
    Faiging nodded. “Pec-Pec, the magic man. Don’t hope to gully that one. You trade your nasty secrets with a bugger like that, now you’re part of his crazy world—a story writ by a madman.”
    “Your machinery is solid,” Webb said, “and that I trust with my life, as they say. Your odd friends I don’t. I have to know more.”
    Faiging paused with thought, then regarded the shivering young Gregory. He said to Kim, “The buster needs a covering. Bring ‘im a blanket—not his gear, gully, just a blanket. One of our blankets.” When Kim returned, Gregory settled onto a stool with the wool covering about him, more thankful