“Find a place very far from town and bury them,” she answered. “Plant nothing nearby that you intend to eat.”
“Right.” He glanced again at each of them, then turned away quickly; and from the flicker of speculation in that glance, Rowan suddenly understood that he knew she had some plan involving the talisman. He had publicly provided her with a reasonable excuse to keep possession of it and the time to act without interference.
Zenna had arrived at the same conclusion. “Smarter than he looks. Isn’t that always the way with the peacekeepers?”
“What next?” Steffie asked.
Rowan looked down at the talisman, feeling the weight of it in her hand, trying to sense the magic it held. She could not. She sensed only the utter strangeness of its design, a thing seeming even more alien to her than the wreck of the fallen Guidestar. She almost felt she was hallucinating it.
She looked up at Steffie. He was bedraggled, soaked to the skin, shivering.
“We get you dry,” Rowan said. “We eat. We read the charts. And then we try to find out why it was that the magic failed Janus in the end.”
27
Like this?” Rowan asked.
Steffie looked up from the mug of hot broth he was cradling. “Looks like. Sword in the right hand, talisman in the left.” He was shirtless, wrapped in a blanket, ensconced in the seat of honor in Mira’s old chair by the flickering fire. His shirt was draped over the wicker chair, drying. “Sometimes his hand was out further than that, and sometimes it was closer in.”
“That might be merely for balance.” She tested a few moves: a crossing sweep from left to right, a downstroke, two twisting stabs. She found that the talisman hand tended to get thrown to the left. “Still, it’s fortunate that I’m not left-handed. And the only demons that did approach him came from behind …”
“I think it’s an emanation of some sort,” Zenna put in, “and Janus’s own body blocked the power from affecting the demons behind him. Think of it as a torch, or a lantern, and you can see the shadow your body will cast.” She was seated at the worktable, copying Janus’s maps; the originals must remain safely behind.
“Mystical emanations …” Rowan disliked the idea. And why would the presence of a nonmagical human body have any effect? “It might be most effective held directly overhead. But I couldn’t hold it there for long.”
“Could you put it on a hat?” Steffie asked.
“I don’t know. But the only clue to its use that we have is what we saw Janus doing. I shouldn’t risk doing anything differently.”
“You’ll have to get some gloves,” Zenna said. For the present, Rowan had wrapped a kerchief around her left hand as protection against irritation.
“Yes. I hate using a sword with gloves.” She set the talisman on the table, returned her weapon to the sheath hanging from the back of one chair, and sat down across from Zenna. “I wish I could be certain that I need merely possess the talisman to be protected.” But the notes had contained nothing other than the sketches. “Steffie, you didn’t hear Janus say anything, did you? Anything like a chant or an incantation?”
“Nothing.” He looked faintly ludicrous, bundled up and bedraggled, the blanket pulled up over his wet hair like a shabby cloak hood. “And that’s something, too: Janus didn’t say a word at all, never made a sound until them demons already had him.”
“Then silence is what I need, as well,” Rowan said, unknotting the kerchief. She folded it more carefully than was necessary, patted it flat with a sigh of deep dissatisfaction. “I need more information, I really do. The demons captured Janus despite the talisman.”
Zenna said, “Once the first one caught him from behind— ”
“No,” Steffie said. “First one had him from the front.”
“He must have turned in its grip.”
“Maybe …”
“Or,” Rowan said, “the wizard himself was somewhere nearby— ”
“Waiting in the boat,” Zenna suggested.
“Perhaps,” Rowan said. So close. “And he … he did something, called forth some counterspell to overpower the talisman …”
“But wouldn’t he have to be right there?” Steffie said. “To see what those demons were doing?”
“Maybe he used another spell,” Zenna speculated, “to see through the demons own eyes.”
“Could be … or invisible?” Steffie wondered.
“It’s possible,” Zenna said. “An invisibility spell.”
Magic. Spell after spell, upon spell—
Rowan threw up her hands. “This,” she said, “this is what I hate about magic!” She rose abruptly, knocking over her chair, took two angry steps away, one back, and stood, dithering in frustration. “Every time one talks about magic, it’s all ifs and maybes— it’s all guesses, and guesses built on other guesses”— she made sharp, agitated gestures— “and hypotheses based purely upon guesses with anything, anything at all, possible— there are no parameters!” She flung out both arms, spoke to the world at large. “There have to be parameters!”
She leaned on the table, spoke urgently. “Anything that happens,” she said— addressing Steffie only because she must address someone, and Zenna already knew these things— “any event, process, initiation, conclusion, any occurrence at all, must take place within a framework of delimited possibility. Reality is not infinitely fluid; if it were, the world would be a very different place than it is.
“Magic does have parameters. It must have. Look at this.” Barehanded, she picked up the talisman, went to Steffie, stooped to hold it before his face. “The construction is very, very precise. That precision isn’t merely decorative. It’s a result of the delimiting parameters, like the shape of a scythe or the keel of a ship. Those things are the agents of events, and they are shaped by their parameters and they reflect them. So must the talisman.” She regarded it herself. “This object embodies its own parameters, and they are all right here, in clear view. It ought to be possible to read this thing like a book!”
“You know,” Zenna said in a conversational tone, “you’re asking rather a lot of yourself.”
Rowan looked back at her. Zenna’s expression was wry. “Yes,” Rowan admitted, relaxing somewhat. “You’re right.” She turned back to Steffie and realized from his face that he had followed little of what she had said. She ought to have chosen a different vocabulary.
She sighed, straightened. “Well.” She set the talisman on the table and then, very sensibly, went to the kitchen basin to rinse her hand. “At the very least, let’s try not to stack too many guesses on each other. The whole thing could come crashing down on me in the middle of the wizard’s keep.”
“All right.” Zenna folded her hands. “Looking at this as rigorously as possible, all we have is what Steffie saw and what you saw.” Rowan had already described Janus’s attack on the lone demon in Lasker’s field. “Demons retreat from the talisman unless something else, like a human body, stands directly between them. And that adds up to line of sight.”
Rowan sighed, dried her hands. “Demons have no eyes.”
Zenna looked at her from under raised brows. “They must have eyes. They do have eyes. You simply didn’t recognize them.” She started sifting through Janus’s notes for his sketch of a demon; but before Rowan could ask him to, Steffie retrieved Rowan’s own logbook.
“I’m sure you’re right,” Rowan said. “I also did not recognize any ears. Nor organs of smell or taste. The only thing I’m certain of is touch.” She pulled up the third chair, and the three gathered around as Zenna studied the pages.
She pointed. “What are these?”
“Small pockets of fluid, distributed all over the demon’s torso. And the skin is very opaque; I already thought of that.”
“Hm.” Zenna flipped forward, back. “Where’s the brain?”
“I didn’t find one.”
“No head,” Steffie put in.
“Some simple animals do have no brain. But nothing as large a
nd complex as a demon.”
Zenna tilted her head back, her eyes half closed, thinking. Rowan found the pose so familiar from their Academy days that she could not help but smile. “Have I mentioned,” she said, “how very good it is to see you again?”
Zenna’s mouth twitched. “Be quiet, I’m thinking.”
“About anything in particular?”
“Edith.” She came out of her thinking posture. “Do you remember what she said about the senses?”
“I remember that she had a conjecture, which we discussed endlessly, to no conclusion whatsoever. She suggested that all senses might ultimately translate into touch.”
Zenna explained for Steffie’s benefit. “Your skin touches an object, and you feel it. Light bounces off everything around you, enters your eye through your pupils, touches the back of your eye, and you see. Sound vibrations travel through the air, enter your ears, touch certain small structures inside, makes them vibrate, and you hear.”
Steffie almost visibly floundered in a sea of new concepts, then got his head above water. “How about when you’re smelling things?”
“Well, Edith suggested that tiny pieces of objects, so small you can’t see them, break off and float, like smoke. You breathe them in, and they touch the inside of your nose.”
“The critical point,” Rowan said, “is that, other than touch itself, all the other senses require something to actually enter your body to be perceived.”
Steffie fingered the bridge of his nose, looking mildly affronted. “Sort of cheeky, that, getting right inside you and all.”
“Edith’s conjecture is only a conjecture,” Rowan said.
“Hm. But for sight and hearing, there still have to be specialized structures.” Rowan sat considering; then she emitted a noise of frustration. Zenna gave a weary sigh, and they turned back to the relevant page.
“The fluid pockets are the only things that come close. All the other unidentifiable structures are deep inside the body,” Rowan said.
“Touch is attached to the skin; smell must be attached to the respiratory system. Taste would have to be in its mouth. That leaves only sight and hearing.”
“Got to be just one or the other, you mean?” Steffie asked.
“If it sees, it can’t hear; if it hears, it can’t see.”
“Huh. Deaf as a post or blind as a bat.”
The steerswomen spoke simultaneously, reflexively. “Bats aren’t blind.”
Perhaps the precision of their performance took Steffie aback; it was a moment before he spoke in a perplexed tone. “They’re not?”
But Rowan and Zenna were regarding each other in utter astonishment. Then Rowan made a small noise, and then a huge grin. Zenna threw back her arms. “That’s it!”
“Yes, yes, it’s perfect!” Rowan laughed out loud.
Steffie was watching them as if they were mad. In a sudden excess of glee, Rowan pulled him out of his chair. “Come here.”
“What?”
“Stand up, stand up.” She brought him to the center of the room. “Right here. Close your eyes.”
“Um.”
“Go on.” She put her hand over his eyes until he complied. “Now, listen.” She clapped her hands: a hollow sound in the big open area.
“Er, right, but— ”
“Now come here.” She half dragged him down an inner aisle of books. “There. Shut your eyes. Listen.” A clap: close, smaller, more intimate. “Can you hear the difference?”
“Well, yes … yes, I can.”
“You can tell what sort of space you’re in from nothing but the sound. You can tell a lot from sound alone.” She abandoned him, hurried back to the table. “And, in answer to your question,” she called back, “bats can see, although their eyesight is poor— ”
“But,” Zenna said, “they hear very, very well.”
“They emit noises— ”
“Very high— ”
“And they listen to the echoes— ”
“And they can steer themselves in perfect darkness.”
Steffie emerged from the aisle and approached, rather cautiously. “Echoes?” He adjusted his blanket.
“Yes. If you block a bat’s ears— and we know this, because it’s been done— they can’t navigate in the dark.”
“Exactly, exactly. Zenna, look.” Rowan remained standing, too excited to sit. She jabbed at the page. “Sound touches the skin, the skin is in contact with the fluid— ”
“And vibrations travel much better in fluid than in air—
“And these strings from the back of the pockets: they’re nerves, they have to be. Dozens of them from each pocket.”
“And thousands of them, counted all together. Rowan, this animal hears very well indeed.”
“Demons emit a lot of sound. The fundamental tone is the loudest, but there are overtones all the way up the register. So many different kinds of echoes— their perceptions must be fantastically detailed.”
“So, that noise, then. They make it … so they can see?” The idea clearly intrigued Steffie.
“Exactly.”
“It’s not line of sight,” Zenna declared. “It’s line of sound.”
“Yes,” Rowan said happily, then laughed. “Amazing.”
Zenna looked up at her. “I see one very pleased steerswoman.”
“Absolutely. I have a parameter.” She held out her hands as if feeling the sounds moving around her with the palms of her hands. “Only one, but it’s real. The demon’s voice can’t pass though a human standing in the way, can’t reach the talisman, can’t echo. The demon then can’t perceive the talisman.” In actual effect, this was little different from line of sight. “It’s not a guess. It’s a fact. It’s something I know, something I can trust. I feel much better about this.”
“Despite that we still have no idea why a demon retreats from the talisman when it does sense it?”
Rowan stopped short. She blinked. She sighed.
She sat.
Zenna set the talisman in the center of the table. The three of them regarded it silently.
“Maybe,” Zenna ventured at last, “it’s really, really ugly.”
They laughed, and they continued laughing, the helpless laughter of persons who had been too long at a difficult job and had spent all they had in them. “Oh, that’s got to be it, then,” Steffie said. “Demon takes one look— or one listen, that is— and thinks, ‘Bloody hell, I’m having I none of that thing!’ and heads for the hills.”
“And,” Rowan said, wiping her eyes, “being so extremely stupid, as soon as something blocks the view”— and she put on an exaggerated Alemeth accent— “it’s ‘Wonder where it’s got to now? Oh, well, think I’ll just have at this fellow waving the sword at me’— ”
Silence. “Oh, dear,” Rowan said stupidly. “Zenna, I’m sorry—
“Never mind. You just bring him back.”
A knock on the door: so unexpected that they were all a moment reacting. Steffie rose, but Rowan motioned him back to his seat and answered it herself.
Barely recognizable in billows of oilcloth and a wide-brimmed hat, Corey stood in the rain. “Ought to get curtains for the windows,” he said, brushing past Rowan, pulling off the hat, leaving a trail of water.
“I was thinking of it,” Zenna said, bemused. “The sun’s not good for those books— ”
“Not them windows”— pointing at the ones in front of the first aisle— “that one”— to the left of the door. “Person outside can see everything going on in here. Good thing no one’s out, night like this. Here.” He arrived at the table, extracted from under the oilcloth a small wicker box. “Hope you can keep quiet about it.”
Rowan shut the door and approached, as Zenna lifted the lid. “Oh, lovely! Thank you, Corey.”
“What is it?” Rowan asked.
Corey shot her a glance. “The steerswoman— Zenna, I mean— she hasn’t got a penny to her name, has she, since that party?”
Rowan was lost. “What pa
rty?”
“I’ll tell you later,” Zenna said. “Corey, where did this come from?” The wicker box contained a large number of coins.
“I went around, quiet-like, to a few people. Don’t want everyone in on it. Too many people, and not all of ’em sensible— some might get the idea that it’s asking for trouble, and try to put a stop to it.”
“A stop?” Rowan said.
He looked at her. “Well, you’re going to go chase your sweetheart, aren’t you?”
“He’s not— ”
“Right, right, he’s not your sweetheart. But you’re going, and you’ll need supplies, and the steerswoman can’t help you, and there it is. If I was you, I’d buy it all tomorrow morning while everyone’s at work, and be gone by noon.” He brushed past her again on his way to the door.
“Corey— ” He paused; she searched for adequate words. “Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me. It’s Dan and Maysie put the most in there. None of my money.”
“But they didn’t think of it. You did. Thank you.”
He nodded curtly. “Try to get back in one piece.” And he left.
Rowan shook her head in astonishment. “Imagine that.”
The coins clinked as Zenna sifted through them with one finger. “There’s much more than you need here.”
Steffie tested his shirt by the hearth, found it sufficiently dry, slipped it on. “Well, that’s good,” he said from inside the shirt, “because”— I-and his head emerged— “it’ll take twice as much, won’t it?” He shook out his hair.
“Not quite,” Rowan said. “Janus will only need food for the return trip.”
“Oh, right, Janus. Forgot about him for a minute. Then, I mean two and a half times.” He tucked in the shirt.
“Steffie, I can’t let Zenna come—
“Don’t mean Zenna.” He came and planted himself solidly in front of her. “I mean me. I’m going with you.”
Rowan was beyond words; and when words did come, they were very few. “Oh, Steffie,” she said. “No.”
The Lost Steersman (Steerswoman Series) Page 31