by Jeff Ayers
She nodded at the tiny coffer in his lap. “What’s your pretty rubies got to do with helping you stay…you?”
He smiled. “My rubies are no rubies at all. Actual gemstones of the sort are buried deep beneath the earth, taking millennia of churning within the earth to bring the valuable treasures near enough for mortals to have a chance at retrieving them. The dwarves are good at finding such things, but even those subterranean masters of the earth count such beauties an extraordinary find. To my memory, only the Hallowed Halls of Heronguzun were ever known to produce the things in large numbers. No, these are facsimiles of gems. They are, in fact, my own memories.”
He opened the box and showed her the sight. It looked as she remembered: ten gemstones aligned on a soft cloth within the delicate container. “These are memories?” She scratched her head, wondering how to pull her thoughts out to make them solid. “Why’d you make them look like rubies?”
“I didn’t. It is the shape my memories naturally take upon leaving the corners of my mind.” He took one out and examined it. “I do not know what color others’ memories may take, or even what shape. This is a work of my own invention, and is unique, so far as I know.” He held the false ruby out to Skate. “Here, hold on to this. Gently, please.”
She took it and cradled it in her hand, as if she had been handed a cracked egg and told not to spill it. “So, are all of these from before you became a lich?”
“The memories themselves span a range of years. Most of them are from before my transformation, but two are from afterward.”
“So you suck your memories out of your head, and that keeps you from going crazy?”
He laughed at the question. “It’s more that I make a physical copy of my memories to hold on to in case I forget them or where I have come from. At least part of the madness that accompanies longevity is to do with memory loss or memory confusion. This will, I hope, stave off the mental effects of extreme old age for decades, if not centuries.”
“So you use these to remind yourself of where you’ve been and what you did in case you forget.”
He nodded and pointed to the memory in her hands. “I’ve found that the memory is available to anyone who holds it. Through testing we’ve found that even Petre can use them, so long as someone is nearby to keep the memory pressed against the glass. Go on, try it.” He mimed bringing the small red sphere to his forehead. “The effect should be immediate.”
She smiled and touched the stone to her forehead, and a whole scene flashed by at the speed of
mem
She sat at her desk, reading a book. She looked up and saw her dear daughter, Alphetta, stretched in front of the fireplace, reading a book about a traveler to far-off lands. Her crystal ball sat in its usual place on the large desk.
or
She felt a swell of love toward her daughter, and she closed her own reading. Her hands were large and indelicate, though not without nimbleness. She stood up and walked around the desk. She wrapped her daughter up in her arms, and her daughter giggled and yelped for her daddy to put her down, and she never wanted to do that in a thousand thousand years, never.
y.
It was over in an instant, but the image was clear to Skate. The sights, sounds, textures, emotions, names—they had all been as real to her as if she’d been there herself.
She offered the gemstone back, and her breathing faltered. That sensation of love for her daughter—for Belamy’s daughter—had been overpowering. She looked into his old eyes and recognized the pain within them. The loss of her must have felt like dying to him. Even though Skate had felt all of the emotions out of order (learning of her loss only to catch a glimpse of love for her after she’d long been dead), it still hurt her, if only lightly and momentarily, to think of her as gone now.
She cleared her throat to paper over her discomfort. “So if you think you’re having trouble remembering something, you’ll have a way to keep everything…alive for yourself.”
Belamy took the stone and placed it back in its spot within the jewelry box and closed the lid. “That’s right. So far, it has hardly seemed necessary. I can still recall each scene in the glass before I have used the magic within. Even though, as you’ve seen, the experience is incredibly vivid, my own natural recollections are not far removed from the events within. I fear the day that the memory seems entirely new to me; at that point, I do not know how helpful these tools will be. I can only hope to forestall the deterioration.”
Skate considered the jewelry box as Belamy snapped it shut. He did all this after his meeting with the dragon. It can’t be the thing that holds his soul. “What will you do if it doesn’t work? Gonna try something else?”
He nodded and set the box on the arm of his chair. “Yes, I’ll have to. I don’t know what that something else would be.”
“I hope it works.” She looked over at Petre’s globe. His prison was as cloudy as ever. She didn’t know what he was doing or where he was looking. Belamy’s recollection had described a very unpleasant and oddly personal moment in the man’s life. She didn’t know what she’d say to him when they next talked.
“I do, too. Oh, that reminds me,” Belamy said, rising from his seat and stepping into the kitchen. He said something to Rattle and came back in. “Starting next week, we’ll begin actually reading a text as part of your lessons. Shall we begin your reading for the day?”
“After breakfast,” Skate said, smiling before gazing into the fire.
“Of course.” The old man pulled Petre to him through the air and made for the stairs.
“I’m sorry.” Skate wasn’t sure what made her say the words, but it felt like the right thing to say. She didn’t turn around, but heard Belamy halt his progress and turn, the bannister creaking as he put more weight on that side. “I’m sorry about what happened to Alphetta. I’m sorry you…” Her mind was filled with the memory of Alphetta, and the love that Belamy had felt for the girl as she got lost in her reading in front of the fireplace. “I’m sorry you didn’t get more time with her.”
There was silence from the staircase for a moment, and the only sounds were of the fireplace, the odd moving locks, and Rattle’s banging in the kitchen. Belamy finally spoke, and his voice sounded like it had come from the end of a long tunnel. “We only have the time we are given. We must learn to make the most of it.” His footsteps echoed through the house, seeming to fill her ears with their slow, sad rhythm, making her think of families, and friendships, and discarded trinkets.
Skate thought of the crystal ball on the desk, and smiled as the kitchen door swung open and the smell of fatty bacon filled the room. “I only have what time I’ve been given,” she said to Rattle, who set the plate down with a clink. “I guess eating bacon by a fire is worth the time, isn’t it?”
Rattle clicked in response and floated back into the kitchen.
The meat was flavorful, and her feet were warm by the flames. It is, Skate decided, well worth the time. Her concerns tried to press in on her again—
What will I do about the Ink? How can I be sure that the statuette is the thing I’m looking for? Do I have enough time to really learn to read before I leave forever?
—but she pushed them aside, and she was able to enjoy her breakfast.
Chapter 22
In which reading begins, a conversation is surveilled, and the Big Boss appears.
The days passed pleasantly. An entire week went by, in the course of which Skate began trying to read written words on a page. It just so happened that the book she was given was the book she’d chosen as practice days before, though on that occasion, she hadn’t gotten past the title: The Last Dragon of the Lost Brink Islands. She took ages on each sentence, and even then, she only knew two words out of every three.
“More will come with time and practice,” Belamy told her when she complained about the matter, and she decided to trust his judgment. He’d taught people to read before, and probably knew enough about the process to tell whether it would
come to her or not. So, Skate continued, and spent time talking with Petre in the meantime.
The first conversation was awkward, as both of them tiptoed around the fact that Skate knew the story of Petre’s imprisonment. Eventually, though, the tension eased as they wordlessly agreed not to mention it. Between meals and lessons, Skate talked with him about the reading and about other stories Petre knew. This pattern would have continued had Belamy not found something of interest in his spying glass as Skate came down for breakfast.
“Aha!” He laughed triumphantly and clapped his hands above his head. “I got him. I got him! Ha!” He was staring intently into his glass sphere, which contained within it a tiny moving image that Skate had no chance of discerning from her vantage point. His immediate return to silence after his outburst told her he had not even been talking to her, but making a general announcement to the house or to himself. He doesn’t know I’m on the stairs.
“Got who?”
“Hush.” Belamy was staring into the sphere, the golden enhancer buzzing away to his left.
“You just shouted—”
“Shh.” He held up a finger to emphasize his point.
Skate stuck her tongue out and walked into the kitchen, where Rattle was busy cooking breakfast. The chaos of the room was punctuated as ever by the clicks of the cook and the banging of pots and pans. Skate noted with some surprise that a lot of these sounds were superfluous; Rattle was banging louder and more often than it strictly needed to. She returned to the main room, where Belamy was sitting unmoved from his intense study of the crystal ball.
Skate joined her teacher by staring into it herself. She saw within it a figure wrapped in cloth that disguised all features in bulk and shadow. The person was seated at a table but doing nothing other than taking an occasional drink from a tankard in front of—him, Skate decided, based on body language alone; most women did not sit with that posture or drink in that fashion. It was Kibo the Magnificent, one of the street performers in the slums. He was in the corner, with others around him. The sphere did not show them fully, but their hands flashed into view and out as their conversation played out. One pair of hands was adorned in several gaudy rings; they were large and mannish hands, though finely cared for. They gesticulated expressively throughout the conversation. The other pair belonged to a pale woman, whose gestures were far more reserved than the man’s.
The owner of the ring-bedecked hand on Kibo’s left was speaking. “…can’t be too worried about it. It works—we’ve made sure of that. We’ll do our bit, get the goods, and be gone within a week. There’s no reason to be worried about these ruffians, Amanda. We’ll be done before they can track us down to demand any money. Forget it, I say.” It was the voice of Carsen Tillby, orator of a story that Skate could not remember. “Nothing to worry about.”
“You weren’t there, Carsen.” Miss Amanda’s bark of a voice was more subdued in this context, but no less unpleasant. “These aren’t nobodies we’re talking about here; these are people with connections. I’m pretty sure they’re running all or most of the crime in this town, like those Claws in Herzeschal. Do we need to go over how that worked out?”
The jeweled hand patted the air in mollification. “I get it. And if we were going to be here much longer, I’d be as concerned as you are. But we’re not, right? Two days, and we’re gone.” The hand took the pint in front of it out of sight for a moment, and Tillby let out a healthy burp as he returned the empty flagon to the table. “Gone like the wind, eh?” He laughed and knocked on the table.
“I don’t like it. They’d have to be keeping eyes everywhere, to be able to have found us out already.”
“They haven’t ‘found us out.’ Thanks, dearest,” he said as another drink landed on the table. The clink of coins and a giggle came from out of sight. “They have no idea what we’re doing; they think we’re a traveling troupe, just like everyone else does.”
“They know we do more than that.” Miss Amanda was growing impatient. “They know people watching the show can’t remember what they saw. They suspect—”
“They suspect much, I’m sure, but they don’t know, do they?” The new flagon disappeared from view. “So they made a threat. They won’t move on it in two days’ time. They don’t think there’s any urgency. Why would they, when they don’t know for sure what we’re doing?”
“Suspicion is enough to make me nervous, and if you had the wisdom that God gave an ant, it would do the same for you.” Her words were scolding, but there was a note of playfulness in her voice, as if Tillby’s words had lessened her fears somewhat.
“I’d take it, to be sure, so long as I could keep the rest of me.” He guffawed at his own wit, and surprisingly, Amanda joined in. Kibo made no sounds, but the robed shoulders shook with silent laughter. The focus of the vision shook their covered head and took another hearty gulp from the tankard.
When the trio recovered from the mirth, Amanda spoke up again. “And I still don’t like that girl who—”
“Oh, not this again,” Tillby said around another belch.
“Yes, this again.” Her irritation was back in full force. “I’m telling you, it didn’t work on her. Not all the way. Tell him, Kibo.”
The magician shifted and set down the almost empty flagon. “It was unexpected, Carsen.” One mystery settled: Kibo the Magnificent was decidedly a man. His voice was a register lower than Tillby’s, though breathy to the point of sounding like a whisper. “No one else has come out of the show so lucid—”
Tillby interrupted with a spluttering raspberry. “‘Lucid’? You said she barely even knew where she was!”
“And that she remembered nothing, yes. But she had questions for us about the show.” Skate realized with a small shock that they were discussing her, that they were talking about her attempt to get answers about the mysteriously disappearing story. “The magic is supposed to prevent that. Any nagging doubts about what was seen and heard should have been immediately smothered by an overwhelming sense of contentment and marvel. That this random child somehow evaded this effect would suggest something went wrong.”
“See?” Amanda chimed in. “It’s not nothing.”
Tillby considered a moment before answering. “You said it only ‘suggests’ something went wrong with the show.” Amanda let out an exasperated groan, but Tillby continued, his ring-adorned hand waving away her objection. “Now hold on, I’m serious. You said ‘suggests.’ What else could it be?”
Kibo leaned forward onto the table, resting on his elbows as he interlocked his fingers in front of him. “Well, it’s all conjecture, really. She could have been in a particular spot that interfered with the magic somehow. Such loci of interference do exist in the world, though they’re rare and difficult to find. It’s also possible she bore some sort of charm or trinket that protected her, but we’d not expect to find such magic among the slums. She was dressed finer than any slummer had any right to be, but that doesn’t mean she can afford magic. There’s also the possibility that she has been trained to resist such magic in the past, though that’s exceedingly unlikely. Training in magic, even in resisting it, costs a heavy fee; those of my craft do not part with their time or secrets trivially. Finally, it’s entirely possible she’s just an incredibly headstrong and intractable youngster, whose pigheadedness kept her from giving in entirely to the spell. Such a will would be one in a thousand; when we spring this on the city proper, we should expect we’ll run into at least a couple such resistors.” He leaned back and polished off the rest of his drink before returning to his original position. “Of all the secondary explanations, this last is most likely; but I think my original concern that something went wrong is likelier still.”
Tillby’s fingers drummed on the table. When he spoke, his voice was lowered to almost a whisper to match the magician’s. “Look, we’ve done this thing here, what, six times now? Nothing went wrong with any other shows. Nobody else at that show went off the rails, right? We need to assume we’re goo
d as far as the show goes and chalk up Little Miss Thinks-Too-Much as a fluke. We must have done it with, what, two hundred people so far? At least that many. And one out of two hundred comes up only…” He trailed off and pulled his hands out of view. Skate was doing the same thing he was at the moment: trying to figure out the number in terms of a percent.
Before he could finish, Kibo cleared his throat. “Half—”
“Half a percent! Thanks, I was getting there. Half-a-percent failure rate. Now listen, I may not be the absolute best gambler out there, but someone shows me a deal that’s 99.5% a sure thing? I’m there. We’re there,” he amended, reaching out and taking both Amanda’s and Kibo’s hands in his own. “We worked hard to get there so far. Let’s not be timid now.”
Kibo nodded and clasped right back on Tillby’s offered hand. “I’m still in, don’t worry. I want to know what happened with the girl, but it’s not going to interfere with my work.”
Amanda sighed. “It’s going to bother me, too, but I’m a professional. The spell works most of the time; that it went wrong exactly once doesn’t mean too much, I suppose. I’m in, too.”
Tillby chuckled, an encouraging sound. “Good! Good,” he repeated, his voice heavy with what sounded like genuine emotion. “We can do this. Tomorrow, after the last show, we’ll get outta this dump. If we do good enough, we’ll be able to retire to the country and live the rest of our days as landed money.”
“That’s what you said about Herzeschal.” Amanda’s voice was similarly more subdued than before.
“We got unlucky in Herzeschal. Luck won’t abandon us again; I’m sure of it. Not now. Not after all the work we’ve put into it. My dad always said that luck favors the prepared. Well, none can say that’s not us, right? Girl!” He was shouting, and it made Skate jump. “Another round for this table, and fast.”