The Law of Isolation

by Angela Holder

  Captain Yosiv shouted orders, and the sailors began altering the set of the sails in preparation for rounding the point. Gevan didn’t care that their changing speed made it impossible to conduct more trials. He was confident his theory was correct. All that remained was to refine it by collecting as much and as varied data as possible.

  Josiah proved a surprisingly good source of ideas for how to do that. He chattered to Gevan as they watched the boundary stone draw closer. For once Gevan didn’t mind listening. “Lifting should be easy. We need to have a series of weights, like my mother uses to weigh her clay. Then we can see how far away we can lift each one. Or maybe just one weight, and move it farther and farther away, like we did with the window. Healing will be more difficult, though. It’s not as if we can heal the same cut from an inch away and a foot away and see how much harder it is. Although maybe we could, if we were careful to make them all exactly the same length and depth…” He traced a series of lines across his forearm with his fingernail.

  “Josiah!” Elkan said sharply. “You may not harm yourself, nor anyone else. Gevan will have to be content with observing the normal course of our work.”

  Josiah shrugged. “All right.” But Gevan could tell his mind was still worrying at the problem behind his guileless eyes.

  Elkan shook his head and looked toward the shore. They were just coming even with the stone tower. Gevan saw his hands on the rail tighten. He glanced at Tobi. The mountain cat gazed back at him unperturbed, her tongue lolling out of her mouth in a way that gave Gevan the uncanny feeling she was laughing. Elkan took a deep breath. The tower was clearly behind the ship now. There was commotion aloft as Captain Yosiv put the rudder around and the ship swung into a long curve. The sails flapped as they lost the wind and bellied out again as the sailors adjusted their angles.

  “Farewell, Tevenar,” Elkan murmured. He turned away. When he saw that Gevan had been watching, he flashed him a self-conscious grin. “Tell me more about what to expect when we reach Ramunna. Do you think it will be possible to convince the Purifiers we’re no threat if we confront them directly, or should we try to avoid them until the Matriarch’s problems have been dealt with?”

  “I think the best policy will be to keep a low profile until you’ve shown the Matriarch your abilities. She’ll do anything to protect you once she knows you can help her. And it should be easy to gain the support of the Temple. First Keeper Emirre is an open-minded man.”

  They discussed strategy as the Verinna finished coming about and settled into her new course. Gevan kept one eye on Kevessa and Josiah. They were taking turns with the window-glass, pointing out interesting sights on shore to each other.

  He’d let his attention drift when he heard a startled exclamation from Josiah and a laugh from Kevessa. He turned to see Josiah looking through the large end of the window-glass, with the small end pointing at Kevessa. Gevan pinched his lips and went to rescue his device.

  “If you can’t use it properly I’ll have to put it away.” He held out his hand and scowled at Josiah.

  “Sorry.” Josiah meekly flipped the tube around. “I was hoping if it could make distant things close, maybe the other way it would make small things large. But it doesn’t. It makes close things look far away. It looked like Kevessa was way out in the middle of the water.” He grinned at her, and she giggled.

  “Of course. It has to do with the way the light is bent as it passes through the lenses. Instead of gathering light from a wide area and focusing it, it takes light from a small area and spreads it apart.” He took the glass from Josiah.

  Josiah looked thoughtful. “Could you, though? Use lenses to make something small appear bigger?”

  “Probably.” Gevan considered the problem as he disconnected the tubes and tucked them into their case. The idea had occurred to him before, but he hadn’t thought it would be a very useful effect. “A single lens can do that to a certain extent. Look.” He unscrewed the metal band holding the large lens in place and pulled it out. He carefully held it close to the rail, where Josiah could look through it at the grain of the wood. He enjoyed Josiah’s enthusiastic reaction when he bent over and peered at the magnified lines, but kept tight hold of the lens when Josiah reached to take it from him. It would be far too easy to drop the precious bit of glass over the side.

  Josiah moved Gevan’s hand to adjust the angle of the lens. “Look at that, Kevessa. You can see every little line and bump.” After she obediently peered through, Josiah stuck his finger under the glass. “Hey, Elkan, look. See the ridges on my finger? They look like great big valleys.”

  Elkan responded to his apprentice’s urging and looked through the lens, first casually, then with sharply increased interest. He glanced at Gevan, who released the lens into his grip. It made him nervous, but he couldn’t insult the wizard by refusing to trust him with it. And there was a strange reverence in the way Elkan handled it, as if it were a precious jewel. He studied the palm of his hand through the lens, moving it closer and farther away, with the sort of absorption Gevan had only seen when he was in the middle of a healing.

  “I think I could make the effect stronger,” he offered. “A larger lens, certainly. And maybe a combination of several.” He pictured the path the light would follow and pulled out his notebook to sketch his idea. “One to capture the image, and another to magnify it further…”

  He drew for a few minutes, then looked up to find Elkan staring at him with an intensity that was almost frightening. The wizard’s voice was hushed but fierce. “Would such a device reveal objects too small for the eye to see?”

  Gevan swallowed, taken aback by such a strong reaction to an effect he’d considered only a curiosity. “Yes, I suppose it would, if it were strong enough. Why do you ask?”

  Elkan put his arm around Tobi’s neck and called up a window. He peered at it through the lens. “Too dark,” he muttered. He turned so the window was shadowed by his body. “Josiah, put your hand up where the sunlight can shine into it.”

  Josiah complied, coming closer to see what his master was doing. Gevan tried to figure out what the small window over Elkan’s hand was showing. It looked like a dark reddish oval, less than an inch across, with a gray patch in the center. He swallowed when he realized it was a cross section of a finger, presumably Josiah’s, looking for all the world as if a sharp blade had severed it diagonally between the first and second joints. Gevan suppressed a queasy feeling. Neither Elkan nor Josiah seemed to think anything odd of the apparition.

  Elkan moved the lens closer to the window, adjusting both hands until he found the right distance to resolve the image. He studied whatever was thus revealed. His head blocked the lens from Gevan’s view, and he couldn’t get closer without shoving aside either Josiah or Tobi, so he watched Elkan’s face. The wizard was deeply absorbed by what he saw, his eyebrows occasionally drawing together, or his teeth worrying at his lower lip.

  At length he pulled back and extended both hands toward Gevan. “Take a look.”

  Gevan bent to see as Elkan went on. “It will work better if the window is in a dark place, while the subject stays in sunlight. Only a certain amount of light can travel through the tissues of the body. But even so, the lens reveals a great deal. Look how you can see the structure of the bone. And I can make out shapes within the blood. Only a little, but enough to hope that a stronger device might show them clearly.”

  If he squinted, Gevan could see what Elkan was talking about. The bit of bone in the center of the image was dimmer than the surrounding flesh, but Gevan could make out a distinctly porous area with a network of filaments where he would have expected a solid mass. The soft tissues glowed a dull red, broken by various lighter and darker areas. Along one line, which Gevan realized must be a blood vessel, motion surged in a series of liquid rushes, the lens revealing a tantalizing suggestion of clumps of matter within the flow.

  Elkan sighed, and the image vanished. He handed the lens back to Gevan. The look the wizard gave him was se
arching, a layer of caution keeping tight rein on boundless, breathless hope. “Much of what happens in the body takes place on a level too small for us to see. Wizards can sense what’s happening, but only roughly, vaguely. For all our study there are many mysteries we’ve never been able to puzzle out. The exact nature of the sorts of life associated with transmissible diseases, the functions of many organs, the mechanics of healing itself. If you can construct a device which will allow us to see on that level and solve some of those mysteries, it could increase our effectiveness as healers a thousandfold. We could discover ways to heal using less energy, or to prevent diseases from getting started, or even to cure them without using the Mother’s power.”

  Gevan couldn’t help but respond to Elkan’s enthusiasm, though he still didn’t fully understand it. “But you have the Mother’s power. Of course it would be fascinating to comprehend more fully the way our bodies work, but I don’t see how it would be much of an advantage to learn new ways of doing the things you’re already able to do.”

  Josiah jumped in before Elkan could answer. “But then anybody could do those things, not just wizards. We could concentrate on things only the Mother’s power could cure. We could help lots more people that way.”

  Elkan nodded. “There are so few of us, Gevan. I can only imagine how much need there must be in Ravanetha. The three of us will barely be able to make a dent in it. Even if every wizard in Tevenar were to go there, it’s a whole continent, with a massive population. We could pour out all our energy every day for our whole lives and never come close to doing a fraction as much as we do here. And even that’s not enough.”

  When he put it like that, Gevan understood the magnitude of the problem. But he still didn’t grasp why it had to be so dire. “So train more wizards. Recruit people in Ramunna, or wherever.” Not that the Matriarch would ever let Marvanna or Giroda learn the secrets of the wizards, or allow them to travel there. But best not to bring that up with Elkan now. Gevan was sure the wizard would resist any such restrictions. “Give them their own animals and let them go to work.”

  Elkan fondled Tobi’s ears. “In the long run we will. At least I believe—hope—that’s the Mother’s plan.” He glanced at Kevessa. “She’s already started. But it’s not that easy. When the Mother touches an animal to create a familiar, it upsets the balance of the world. Just a little, but it adds up. Too much, too fast, and disasters start to happen. Earthquakes, hurricanes, volcanoes, weather that’s too hot or too cold, too much rain or too little, new diseases or changes to old ones… There are always some of those things, but her actions can cause there to be more, and worse. Some people were speculating that the bad weather this year, maybe even the wheat blight, were a result of built-up stresses from the past twenty years of the Mother calling more wizards than usual to make up for our losses during the hurricane.”

  Gevan stared at him. Even after what Kevessa had told him of her vision when she’d bonded with Nina, he was still deeply skeptical about the Mother’s existence as an actual individual being. But if she really did exist, it made sense that she would have those sorts of limits. Nothing in the universe came free; there was always a price for power, one way or another. Maybe it wasn’t as impossible as he’d thought for her to exist, if she must obey the same immutable laws as everyone else.

  He mentally shook himself back to the current discussion. “So you’re saying wizards are always going to be scarce.”

  “For our lifetimes, at least.” Elkan looked momentarily bleak. He gestured to the lens in Gevan’s hand. “If what we learn with the aid of your devices can do even a little to make us more efficient and able to help more people, the whole world will benefit.”

  Gevan let himself imagine such a future. All of Ramunna, all of Ravanetha, transformed into something like what he’d seen in Tevenar. A world where people didn’t just die, where there was always hope, where nearly everyone was able to live out the fullness of their lives…

  It seemed like a ridiculously optimistic dream. Yet Elkan seemed to think it was possible. And he wanted Gevan’s help. He thought Gevan’s devices, laughable as they were next to the the Mother’s power, could have a real purpose. They could complement the wizards’ abilities in a way that might lead to wonders far greater than either could accomplish alone.

  His hands shook as he fastened the lens into place and nestled the tube into the velvet of its case. “I think… I think I would like to work with you on that effort.”

  Elkan laid a hand on his shoulder. “Maybe now I understand why the Mother chose this time to reunite our lands. She’s guiding us, Gevan, whether we’re able to see it or not.” He sighed and looked toward the horizon, past where Josiah and Kevessa were leaning over the rail. “I’ll ask Captain Yosiv if he’s ready for more help with the wind.” He nodded to Gevan and turned to make his way toward the stern. Tobi bounded to him and twined around his legs, nearly tripping him. He laughed and fondled her ears with rough affection before they continued side by side.

  “Father, look!” Kevessa’s voice was bright with excitement. “In the water.”

  Gevan hurried to her side. Nina, on Kevessa’s shoulder, chattered in his ear as he leaned over the rail and looked down. The prow of the ship pushed up smooth green swells of water on either side as it cut through the waves. “I don’t see anything.”

  “There.” Josiah pointed. Gevan looked just in time to see a glossy grey back break the surface in an elegant curve and vanish back under the water.

  “Josiah says that when his ancestors came to Tevenar, the Mother sent a dolphin to guide them.” Kevessa caught her breath as another of the creatures appeared. This one released a burst of air and mist from the orifice on top of its head before submerging.

  “It’s in the First History,” Josiah said. “Of course, Whitecap was a familiar, and these are just ordinary animals.”

  “I don’t care,” Kevessa said. “I still think they’re good luck.” She laughed in delight as a third dolphin leaped ahead of them, his whole body emerging from the bow wave and arching gracefully, entering the water with scarcely a splash. “Maybe the Mother sent them to tell us we’re following her path.” She shot Gevan a teasing sidelong glance. “What do you think, Father?”

  Her enthusiasm was infections. He grinned back at her. “I think they’re playful animals who like to take advantage of the disturbance the ship makes in the water. I saw others do the same when we left the harbor in Ramunna, while you were hiding.”

  She made a face of exaggerated mock-dismay at him. “Listen to him, Josiah. Even after everything that’s happened, even though I told him I saw her with my own eyes, he still refuses to believe in the Mother.”

  Josiah held up a hand. “Leave me out of it. The last time you tried to get me to help you convince him, I ended up falling out of a tree.” He sobered briefly, remembering. He put his arms around Sar’s neck and leaned against the donkey. “It’s his choice if he wants to ignore you.”

  Kevessa pouted and wrinkled her nose at him. When she turned back to Gevan, her smile was still teasing, but a little bit wistful, too. “One of these days, Father, you’re going to see proof even you can’t deny. I’m going to laugh at you.” She turned away from him haughtily. On her shoulder, Nina’s bright eyes regarded him cheerfully.

  Gevan stroked the squirrel’s head with the tip of his finger, then put his arm around Kevessa’s shoulders. She leaned into him. “I’ll savor the sound of your laughter, no matter what the cause.”

  She sighed and put her arm around his waist. They stood there for a while, gazing out at the horizon.

  Kevessa caught her breath as another dolphin arched before them. “Say what you will, Father. I still think they’re a sign that the Mother is guiding us.”

  Gevan took a deep breath of the salty air. He thought about what awaited them in Ramunna. It would be nice to be able to believe that some invisible, benevolent power protected them and would lead them through the tangled web of dangers and opportu
nities that surely lay ahead. It would be so much easier than knowing that only their own choices and actions would determine whether their efforts would end in triumph or disaster.

  Still, Kevessa had seen something when Nina bit her, and somehow that experience had enabled her to wield the wizards’ powers. Those powers were undeniably real, no matter what he’d believed about them before.

  He tightened his arm around his daughter. “Maybe you’re right, Kevessa.” Maybe they’d need that kind of guidance if they were to have any hope of navigating the hazards ahead and coming at last to some safe harbor. “Maybe you’re right.”

  Above them, the Mother’s power filled the sails with radiance, driving them forward as the coast of Tevenar fell away behind and they set their course for Ravanetha.

  * * * * *

  Pre-order Beyond the Boundary Stones here or keep reading to see the first chapter.

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  Acknowledgements

  Thanks to my fourth-grade elementary school teacher who assigned me a research paper on Galileo, and to the author of the biography I read. I was impressed by his boundless curiosity and the ingenuity of his research methods. It was great fun to write a character inspired by him, and to imagine how that sort of scientist would react to encountering real magic.