by Jim Grimsley
“That made you uncomfortable, I suppose.”
“It means she already knows me. In my time.”
He was watching her, and shrugged. A heavy morning beard brought out the strong line of his jaw. When he was younger he must have been almost handsome. “You think you’re so memorable? It means she’s met you once, so far.”
“Was this his plan?” she asked.
“You’ll know before anyone else, I expect,” Arvith said.
“Why do you say that?”
He shrugged. “He’s taken a liking to you, for one thing. It’s what he brought you here to tell you, for another.”
Jedda laughed. “How very odd.”
“Doesn’t bear too much thinking about, I find,” he said. “Don’t let the tea get cold. There’s honey and Tervan sugar.”
The tea was fragrant and delicate and needed nothing to sweeten it at all, though the multicolored crystals of the Tervan sugar were tempting enough that she tasted a bit on the tip of her spoon, a sweetness with a buttery flavor.
“He’s sending books,” Arvith noted. “A cartload. To keep you from having to go out in the rain, he says. I didn’t tell him you were already out in it.”
“Books in a cart, in this mess?”
Arvith gave her a wry smile. “It’s himself, my dear. If he sends the books they’ll be dry as a bone and safe as babes. Never was a man for books like that one.”
“He has a lovely library.”
Arvith busied himself with the fire, and she found herself drawn to watch him, his blocky figure in plain brown weave, the stuff called wool that came off the backs of animals, a vest and trousers over a shirt that tied at the neck, embroidered along the seams, a pattern too small to see. The fire was hot, the embers bright, coruscating with light as the flames licked along them. “In this part of the building, fires aren’t for show. Himself sets the heat in the rocks same as the rest of the house, but somehow it’s never enough in these old towers.”
“In the rocks?” She remembered the morning, long ago now, when she asked that question in Montajhena. “Is that how Montajhena is heated?”
“Yes. That’s about all he does with those two towers anymore.”
“Those two—” But then she remembered. “What is his word for them?”
“Shenesoeniis,” Arvith said. “A word that doesn’t change much from one age to the next.”
“He makes quite a bit of use of the shenesoeniis here.”
“That he does.” Looking out the window thoughtfully, as a sudden burst of lightning framed his head. “We’ll all pay for it, today.”
“Do you know what he’s working on?”
“The gate, I expect,” Arvith said. “I don’t know much about it; I’ve never been this far back before. He’s meeting me for the first time, too.” He shook his head, and she recognized his feeling, part puzzlement and part simple incomprehension.
“I know how you feel,” she said. “I can’t get my head around it, entirely.”
He chortled, an abrupt sound that shook his shoulders. “I’ve known him for a very long time, but in the future, and he’s known me just as long, but yesterday he met me for the first time, chronologically speaking. But even given that, he still knows everything I’ve already done with him, with all of it still the future, from his point of view, here and now.” A sudden rush of rain at the window, and lightning again. “I guess I was becoming too complacent. Figured I had him all sorted out.”
The books arrived, a small cart full, along with two Prin to unload the cart. Both it and they were completely dry. Arvith had cleared the long table at the end of the room, the line of windows over it giving good light. Some of the titles she could read, some would require a bit of study. Arvith set them out in order and explained, lifting the first of the books. “Novices start with this book. This one is by himself and it’s one of the texts the Prin use. These novices will know it by heart, nearly.” He gestured to the two Prin, who were packing up their cart to go. She had expected one of them to stay, as her guide, but instead they both bowed their heads and departed without a word. Arvith was looking at her, and suddenly she understood.
He lifted a large, thin book, bound in fine leather, the paper a very fine texture, its text inked onto the pages. “The rest of these books are probably for show. This book is a very old text on the deriving of words from places in the physical world. It’s the oldest book here, by more years than you want to count. The early priests used these methods to create the Malei, the language we use in the chant. This book,” lifting another, smaller in profile, dark brown, lettered too small for her to read, “is called the Mordicon, for short; it has a longer title, if you want to read it one of these days. It was written by the old raven, Drudaen, who started the Long War. Himself’s enemy a long time ago. It’s a text he made for his own students.” He went down the whole line of texts, while she inhaled the scents, the leather covers, the musty sharpness of the pages and inks: a popular biography of famous magicians, which was selling very well; the code of law by which the Prin college was governed; something called Handbook of the Intercessor with Malin’s name on it, Malin abre Kiril, abru Imral. Malin daughter of mother Kiril, child of father Imral.
“Are you Drune or Prin?” she asked.
“Neither,” he said, refusing to meet her eye. “I’m simply knowledgeable.”
“So you’re my teacher?”
“Yes. I suppose. Shall we begin?”
She nodded.
The first lesson, he said, was that the books would not teach enough, that no books could. To learn the discipline itself required effort of the body, motion, meditation, and an alteration of consciousness, of its course. Written books could be a guide to this. The book the novices used was called Zan Ajasi: The Nature of the Word. To use the languages that moved power, the novice must understand the physical nature of the word, the fact that a word was a tangible object, an action of the body that released energy and generated egas turum, the great decline, which from Arvith’s description sounded like an Erejhen term for entropy. Any word by its nature allowed two disconnected minds to share thoughts with one another, as long as both minds understood the word, already a miracle in itself. This was simply a way to say that a word was energy and object at the same time, already capable of moving information from one person to another, and that therefore it should not be surprising that a word was capable of much more.
The novice must further understand that the mind already contained a mechanism for binding reality itself into material form. The mind drew in the work of the senses and made this into flesh. Flesh itself was nothing more than a vehicle for this process, and the same mind that could bind its perceptions into material form could also learn to do the reverse, to move perceptions into reality. The akana singer or the Drune speaker was simply learning to do this in smaller and more exact ways that became increasingly powerful.
For the novice, it was essential to see the world in three layers: the layer of consciousness, the realm in which magic was made; the layer of life, in which consciousness was created; and the background, out of which life arose. To make magic act on its source, consciousness, was difficult; to make it work on the living, less so, and to change events in the background, easiest of all.
She understood the words he was using and had no problem with what he presented as concepts but it all sounded like so much gibberish. Perhaps most of science would sound the same, she thought, to someone who knew nothing of it. She listened attentively, because she liked Arvith and because, after all, she had asked for the lecture. But she would have to do it for herself to understand it. There was no possibility of a leap of faith, for she had no faith to offer. Science did not require faith since it produced results. This thing called magic would have to do the same.
He offered to sit with her and teach her one of the novice chants in the afternoon, and since this was a real and tangible action that she could understand, she lost herself in the work, as the rain went
on and on. Light filled the room when the tower pulsed brighter or when lightning struck, sometimes in a place where they could both see the fork of it rushing from earth to clouds. He told her to empty her head and she did, of all but the rain, and they chanted four words in Malei together. He began to sing harmony once she had learned the melody; she was singing with her eyes closed, four words of no meaning she understood, when she began to see images against her lids, a hawk, a tree, a stone, a bird she could not name. The words slid smoothly through her lips. Arvith touched her shoulder, and she opened his eyes.
Over his hand floated a gold coin. As he varied the simple chant, the coin moved back and forth, up and down. The variations were of all kinds; at times he was simply intoning the song, at other times he was singing very low, or departing so far from the melody that it hardly existed even as counterpoint; his voice was hardly beautiful except in its suppleness. He closed his eyes and still the coin passed over his hand. She touched the air around it gently, then finally grabbed it away from him, warm in her palm, and he opened his eyes, smiling. “That’s as much of the Malei as I know.”
“What were you doing that I wasn’t?”
“Actually, you were helping, though you couldn’t know it. It takes at least two singers in the Malei to move any significant power. But what enabled me to control the coin was the meditation space, the thing we call the ‘kei,’ which I know how to make and you don’t.”
“Kei?”
“I can’t translate it into your speech. A place of the mind. You would study nothing but the making of that for your first three or four years as a novice.”
“Where did you study?”
“With himself.” He looked at her. “There are only a few people in your time who know about me. As I said, I’m not Prin and I’m not Drune.”
“Does Malin know?”
“Yes, then. But not now.”
Jedda nodded.
Arvith handed her a ring. “This is a novice ring. Put it on and it will allow you to feel what I’m doing. You’ll miss a lot, since your senses haven’t been worked on, but we’ll see how it goes.”
The comment about her senses put her in a bit of a huff; how did he know whether or not her senses had been worked on? She slid the ring neatly onto the middle finger of her right hand; it fit best there, though it was still a bit loose.
“Say this word,” he said. She repeated it, and they chanted it together, and he placed her thumb on the ring, the metal growing warm; she kept her thumb to the metal because of the pleasure of it, though a moment later the ring grew closer to her finger, there was no other way to describe it. She felt the movement under the tip of her thumb. At once she forgot the word she had been chanting, but a wave of dizziness passed over her.
“That’s it,” he said. “You’ll be dizzy a bit. You did that yourself, you know. I gave you a bit of a nudge, but you were the—” something, he said, a word she did not understand, and she was too dizzy to ask him to repeat it. He switched to Alenke, which he spoke well. “You were the carrier, that time. Did you feel any difference in your head, beyond the dizziness?”
“No,” she shook her head.
He shrugged. “Sometimes it takes a bit. Would you like a cup of tea, or something else? You seem a bit shaken up.”
“Some nice tea to help my stomach,” she managed, taking deep breaths. He reached to help her to a daybed but she pushed him off and walked there herself.
She could feel a difference in her head, now that she was lying there, but she was still too irritable to tell Arvith. Let him give her a moment to get her breath. The ring felt warm, still, and if it were something a Hormling were giving her she would have sworn it was some kind of nanotech sending tendrils into her body, long ones, reaching into deep places, including her brain. She felt herself sinking, separating. She pictured a shell of the clearest plastic sliding into place on all sides of her, a beautiful shell, and she was inside it but could feel everything that was happening outside as well. It was as if part of her were inside and part outside the shell. She instructed the one outside to say, “I’m feeling something in my head, now.”
“Can you describe it? Or would you like me to describe it for you?”
She gestured for the latter. “You,” she said, and closed her eyes.
“You have a feeling of weight, which is the way you perceive the initial preparation of your consciousness to fork. You feel yourself contained in a clear shell of some kind; for me it was windows. This is how you perceive yourself as entering the kei space. You feel the two parts of yourself, the consciousness outside the kei, and the one within, and each is transparent to the other. But the controller is within the kei, and the watcher is outside. You are reaching through the kei space to the watcher in order to talk to me. But from the kei space you can reach in many other directions as well.”
He began the four-word chant again, and she joined him. Her voice felt stronger now, and she was less afraid to use it. From the part of herself he had named the controller, she could hear her voice and his blended, but she could feel much more. Something palpable ran through his language, as if the physical effects of the sound had been exaggerated in some way; and she could see the singing as if it were an object, a liquid pooling in his palm to lift the coin. As he varied the sound she could see the change of its shape, the coin sinking into it like a cushion. She was entranced. She opened the palm of her own hand and he smiled into her eyes and moved the coin over it; she could feel the music pooled in her hand; and at the same time, from the part of herself he had called the watcher, outside the kei space, she watched with only the physical sensation of a slight breeze over her moist palm, the coin sliding up and down, floating in circles, or coming to rest for a moment on the pulse of her wrist as she and Arvith continued to sing.
This time when she stopped singing the coin wavered and fell, and he looked at her. “You were doing part of that yourself, that time, too. The ring allows you to do it. It appears you do have the talent for this, Jedda. I don’t know whether you think that’s good news or not.”
She was shaken, but not likely to let him see it. The music had felt beautiful when she could touch it with her skin, wind it in a ball in her hand. “It would help if I could manage to see any of this as more than a parlor trick.”
“You watched your fleet sink to the bottom of our bay.”
“Even that doesn’t seem quite real, in memory.”
He gave her a long, quiet look; the householder brought tea and served them. She sipped the delicate blend and felt her stomach soothed. “It’s easier for those of us who still believe in Mother-God,” he said. “For me it is as simple as to say that words of power are the tools she used to make the world. To make all the worlds, yours included.”
“I thought the Prin made this language themselves.”
“Very good. You have been taking this in quite well. Yes, we derived this language ourselves, through a very long study of the world. But in making the language, we were working closely with a wizard of the old time, who made magic in the language of creation, the words that God herself spoke, same as does himself. So with her aid the words of the Malei echo the power of God’s own words.”
“That’s what you believe?”
For the first time since she had known him, he appeared a bit chagrined. “I’m a creature of faith. I prefer to be simple.”
“But Jessex has doubts, and yet is much more powerful than you.”
“It would be better if you called him Irion. If you don’t mind my saying so. No one uses the real name.”
“He didn’t seem to mind it.”
“That’s between you and him, in private,” Arvith said. “Yes, himself has doubts. But he’s much stronger in the magic, he’s the center of the whole Oregal.”
She heard that word but let it go for the moment. Her curiosity was focused, for the moment, on the ring on her finger, the way it refracted her consciousness into layers. To explore this was no effort; what did it
matter whether it made sense or not, when it felt so real? That part she liked. But the change made her afraid as well, especially that she knew it was driven by something called magic, so that on impulse she slipped the ring off her finger.
The effect did not go away, she still felt the controller and the watcher, a sense of coziness to the arrangement that was quite seductive for her. She had heard of implants that could make a person’s consciousness take on more than one stream of tasks at a time, and wondered if this were the same effect, or something like it. “Why doesn’t it go away when I take off the ring?”
“You’re still holding it,” Arvith said. “That’s another good sign. It means your mind can learn to make the kei on its own. Since you can sustain the controller yourself, the effect will continue even when you put the ring down, for a while, because you’ve tuned it to yourself and you’re still near it. If I clear the ring, the effect will go away altogether, but even then it won’t disappear instantly from your mind. It’ll fade over the course of a few minutes.”
“Why can’t I remember the chant words?”
“That’s not allowed until you’re a novice,” he said.
“You’re doing something?”
“Me and the ring,” he nodded his head. “I’m not working in Malei, so the ring can’t help you feel it. The novice chants are about as much Malei as I know.”
She picked up the ring and looked at him. “May I keep it? For now, until I go back?”
He looked her in the eye. He was smiling, slowly, beginning with the center of his eyes. “You’re eager.”
“I’ve had a taste,” she said. “I want more.” The feeling had begun to ebb. She slipped the ring onto her finger and waited for the change in her consciousness to come again.
16
She kept Arvith with her for as long as he showed the patience to stay. The rain continued, hurled down by a storm that sometimes abated, only to return. Arvith studied the weather with some concern, at moments, though when she asked him why he only replied that one rarely saw that sort of storm in the north. Something in Arvith’s manner warned her she would get no answer to any question that was more direct.