Wonders of the Invisible World

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “Lies,” Damaris said succinctly. “Like her face.”

  He was silent again, blinking at her out of heavy, blood-shot eyes, as though he couldn’t remember the difference between the minister and the nymph. She shifted abruptly; he raised his hand to his eyes, rubbed them wearily.

  “I’m too tired to think. I’m going to rest a little, for as long as the mage will let me.”

  “Let’s hope the night will be more peaceful than the day.”

  She went to the music room, where the musicians, Master Ainsley, and Lord Felden sat on their gilt chairs in ranks according to their instruments. Beale smiled at her, pleased.

  “Welcome, my lady. We are just about to go over it again.”

  Damaris sat down. He lifted his horn and nodded his head. As they played the first light, charming flurry of falling water droplets, she heard the storm begin.

  A summer storm, Beale had said. Warm, noisy, clearing by morning. But nothing was predictable that day, not even water coming out of a tap. Damaris left as early as she could, throwing Beale an apologetic smile without quite meeting his eyes. In her office, she studied the tide tables. Rare for a summer storm to be destructive. As rare, she thought dourly, for a water bucket to sing. And that night the moon was nearly full, the tide would be high, and late, and everyone would be sleeping as it rose...

  She made her decision, wrote a note, affixed her seal of office, and sent it to the harbormaster.

  Close the sea gates now.

  The mage heard the first falling notes of rain on the river, on the sea. She was a shadow beside the Well, night-dark, motionless as the ancient tumble of stones around her. Her blank gaze was fixed upon the water. She saw nothing; she saw everything. Her mind was a fish, a ripple, a current running here, there, everywhere: through pipes, along ditches, in ponds, canals, down the river flowing to the sea. She listened, wondered, watched.

  Snatches, she heard: underwater whisperings. Brief as the gurgle of water down a drain, some were, and as coherent. But she had been water-mage for many decades. She understood the ways of water creatures, and many of their words. When she didn’t understand, she went farther, her mind seeping into another like water, filling every wrinkled crevice of it until she saw, she spoke, she understood.

  What she guessed at last amazed her.

  Her surprise cast her thoughts back into the still old woman she had left at the edge of the Well. For a long time she sat there, contemplating the fragments of this and that she had pieced together. A word repeated many different ways, an odd detail washing up against another, an underwater face seen through as many kinds of eyes as were in the water, now a colorless blur, now a bright, startling mosaic of itself repeated in a single eye, now as nearly human as it could get...

  “Well, I never,” the mage said in the dark, and, a little later, “All this fuss...”

  The Well turned suddenly vivid, bone-white, as though the moon had fallen into it. The mage gazed at the water, astonished again. Then the thunderbolts pounded all around her, trying to shake apart the boulders. She drew fully into herself for a moment, hearing the rain hiss down through the open roof onto the Well; then she felt it. She grunted; her thoughts slid back into the water. She rode the river current down until down became up as the salt tide pushed upriver. She borrowed bodies, then. There were many, she realized, and all swimming against the tide, making for the sea.

  She saw it as they did: the massive gates across the harbor, sluice gates lowered, hinged gates fashioned to open outward with the outgoing sea and close fast when needed, with the help of the incoming tide. The tide had barely begun to turn, but they were already shut.

  She came slowly back to herself, feeling as though, between rain and river and sea, she must be wet as a puddle. She whispered, as she pulled herself to her feet, balancing on one stone, then another, “Good girl.”

  She moved through the torch-lit cavern of her workroom, into the chamber beyond, which had a bed, and a hearth, and warm, dry clothes. She put them on, and moved into the tiny kitchen. She found Perla there, windblown and barefoot, stirring something savory in a pot over the fire.

  “The knight came, mistress.”

  “Did he?” She warmed her hands, remembering him like a dream: the knight looking into her cave, she seeing nothing out of his eyes. “Did he leave a message?”

  “No.”

  “What are you doing here, child? Didn’t you see the rain coming? You should have scampered home.”

  Perla answered only with a brief, wild grin at the thought that a storm should be something to avoid. She brought Eada a bowl of stew, bread, and some late strawberries. The mage ate absently, mulling over what she had glimpsed underwater.

  “Who’s to say?” she inquired finally, of nobody, she realized. The child had gone somewhere, maybe home, maybe out to watch the lightning. “Not I,” she answered herself, and rose with sudden energy to clear the table. “Not for me to say...”

  For a long time then, she sat beside the Well, half-dreaming, half-dozing. She heard rain dripping off reeds and waterweeds, dimpling ponds, sighing in gusts over the restless sea. In her thoughts, or her dreams, she allowed herself to be carried along by impulses. They went against the tide, she realized: push against flow, drive against mindless drag. Mute and innocent as a polliwog she went along, seeing little beyond a silken, singing dark running against the tide. Then the tide caught the shadowy travelers, sent them swirling, tumbling in its grasp, flung them toward stones, toward the moon. They melted down, fingering themselves between stones, slithering, flattening themselves, easing around, sliding under vast slabs of wood, finding ways through the heave and swamp of tide, clinging, climbing, up and over, into the calm on the other side.

  And then they began to push back at the tide.

  Eada woke as though she had heard, across the city and river and fields, the sound of moored ships banging recklessly against the wharves, straining at their cables, masts reeling drunkenly, swiping at one another.

  She opened her eyes, just as she felt Damaris, in her own bed, open hers, stare into the suddenly chaotic night.

  Damaris, the mage said to her. They have opened a gate.

  “I can hear it,” Damaris said aloud. The mage, riding her mind, looking out of her eyes as she sprang out of bed, felt the cold stones under her feet, and the slap of wind and rain as she pushed a casement open.

  In the harbor ships and boats heaved and tumbled on a tide that was trying to tear away the wharves. Some, anchored in deeper water, had already begun to drift, meandering a choppy, heedless path toward other ships, toward warehouses and moored boats. Little rain-battered blooms of fire moved quickly along the harbor’s edge; some met to confer, parted again; a few vanished, doused under a wild burst of tide.

  The great harbor bell in its massive tower began to boom a warning, accompanied by the high, fey voices of ships’ bells careening madly in the waves.

  I’ll be right there, Eada told the Minister of Water, and was, quick as a thought, far more quickly than any of the Knights of the Well her thoughts had galvanized awake along the way.

  The tide was still dancing its way into the open gate, which trembled mightily under the onslaught, but couldn’t bring itself to close, locked, as it was, in the grip of many invisible hands. The sprites recognized the mage, who was barely visible, and who looked more like a battering ram than herself. She wedged herself against the gate and pushed back at them: an enormous snag caught against the gate, her feet its root ball in the sand, her head and shoulders its broken trunk rising above the weltering. She could hear the hisses and whispers in the rain, the spindrift.

  “You’ll have to sort things out another way,” she told them. “Drowning Luminum will not explain anything to humans.”

  The longboats were casting off from the wharf, rowing against the tide. Some of her knights were among them, the strongest, the most fearless, straining against the surge to reach the gate. Their boats rode low under the weight of h
uge chains, which they would lock into the iron rings on the inner side of the gate, so their pulling could help the tide push it shut.

  If the water-mage could only coax it free from the stubborn grip of the waterworld.

  She saw, in a vivid flash of lightning, the world out of Garner’s eyes as he rowed.

  The sprites have gotten hold of it, she told him. That’s what you must pull against.

  She gave him a crazed glimpse of the formless swarm inside the gate jamming it open. Eada felt their strength pitted against her power. The power of persuasion would be even stronger, she thought, if only she could think of what to say.

  And then she knew.

  How they understood something shaped like a battered old tree trunk, she wasn’t sure. Maybe they just picked the impulse and the image out of her head. Take what you want at the Ritual of the Well, she told them. Until then, let the city be.

  The gate shifted; the tree trunk slid. They were gone, she realized. Vanished like the last thinning rill of a wave into sand. Water pushed the gate; the men pulled their chains, plied their oars. The trunk, angled sharply now, and underwater, prodded at the gate as it moved a few more feet. The gate closed finally; tide built against it, but could not enter. The tree trunk, finally level, floated to the surface and vanished as well.

  Garner, standing at the prow of one of the longboats, struggling with wet, numb hands to unhook all the chains from the ring, nearly fell overboard yet again when the mage appeared beside him. She freed the chains easily, and passed them back into the boats alongside them. Garner stared at her, worse for the wear, she noted, thoroughly soaked again, and just waking as from a nightmare.

  “What happened?” he asked hoarsely. “We couldn’t budge that gate.”

  “I made a bargain.”

  The boat lurched, turning; he tumbled into a seat, took up his oars. Eada sat in the prow on the pile of chain; the knight’s incredulous eyes were telling him there was no room, between him and the pile of chain, and the sea, for anything bigger than a broom straw.

  “Or a shadow,” she told him.

  “What?”

  “I need you to do something for me.”

  “Now?”

  “Well, no, not exactly at this moment. When it seems appropriate. You know far better than I how these things go.”

  He pulled his oars, blinking rain out of his eyes, as though, if he could see her more clearly, she might make more sense. “Exactly what kind of bargain did you make?”

  “We’ve got something they think is theirs. I told them they could have it back at the ritual.”

  “And you want me to—”

  “Find it.” She put a weightless hand on his shoulder, patted it. “Don’t worry. Just go along as you do. How do humans put it? Follow your heart.” He stared at her, his mouth hanging open to any passing wave, as she nodded. “Oh, and tell the Minister of Water what I’ve just told you. That’s all.”

  Above his head, she saw that the winds were busy shredding cloud, uncovering stars, and then the glowing moon, which illumined the tattered roil, turning cloud to silk and smoke before everything blew back into black.

  “But I have no idea—”

  “Magic,” the mage breathed, enchanted, and vanished.

  Garner fell into the sea and woke.

  He pulled himself out of the dream of dark, cold, weltering water, and blinked at his squire, who was reverently examining the ceremonial garb.

  “For tonight, sir,” he told Garner, who needed no reminding.

  He sat up, holding his head together in both hands, while pieces of the extremely early morning’s adventure came back to him. What had the mage said to him? Something he was supposed to find? Something he was supposed to tell Damaris.... He groaned softly.

  Inis murmured sympathetically, “A short and noisy night, sir.... At least you didn’t lose your boots this time. My boots.” He brought Garner a cup of watered, spiced wine, and added, “Your ritual tunic has a couple of stains on it, but only in the back, and your cloak will cover them. Everything’s dry, now.”

  “Let’s hope it stays that way,” Garner muttered. “See if you can get me a pair of boots made by this evening, and you’ll have yours back.”

  “Yes, sir,” Inis answered simply, having grown used to the vicissitudes of knightly endeavor, especially Garner’s.

  “Do I have anything decent left to wear? I have to talk to the Minister of Water.” He saw the rare trace of anxiety cross his squire’s face. “Have you been hearing tales?”

  Inis nodded. “From everywhere in the city. And even in the palace. Your cousin, Sir Edord, was found climbing into the well near the stables yesterday. He said a woman was calling to him, and he had to rescue her. He fought, but they managed to pull him out before he got far.”

  Garner, musing over possibilities, breathed, “Pity...”

  “Sir?”

  “The mage spoke to the water creatures last night while we were having a tug-of-war over the sea gate. She made some kind of truce with them. Things will be much quieter today.”

  “And the ritual?” Inis prodded shrewdly.

  Garner shook his head, completely mystified. “All we can do is trust that the mage knows what she’s doing.”

  He couldn’t begin to guess what Eada wanted him to find. All he could do was send a page ahead to request an interview with the Minister of Water, and hope that the mage had revealed a few more details to Damaris. The Minister of Water, summoning him immediately to her office, seemed neither surprised nor displeased to see him. She hadn’t slept much, either, he guessed; her braid was becoming unraveled and her eyes seemed huge, luminous.

  “Eada told me to give you a message,” Garner said.

  “Another one?” she marveled. “Why doesn’t she speak to me?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “She wants you to speak to me,” Damaris answered herself promptly. “But why?” She gazed at him, as perplexed as he; he restrained himself from taking the braid she was picking apart out of her restless fingers, and folding her hands in his own to calm them.

  “I don’t know. She said that we have something the water creatures think belongs to them. She promised that, if they left Luminum in peace until the ritual, they could claim it then.” He paused. She was absolutely still now, her eyes lowered, her fingers motionless. “Oh,” he added, remembering, “and she wants me to find this thing. Whatever it is. Do you have any idea what she’s talking about? Where do I begin to look for this nameless, vital thing?”

  She raised her eyes finally. “Why you?” she asked again, her brows crumpled, her tired eyes trying to look so deeply through his that he wondered if she were trying to find the mage in his head.

  “Because we have known each other most of our lives? Because I can hide nothing from you, so if I know something that will help us, you will know it, too? Because despite all my blunderings and rashness, there is nothing I wouldn’t do for the Minister of Water? I don’t know. Is any of that likely?”

  She swallowed, looked down again, quickly. “As likely as it is unlikely.”

  “What should I do?” he pleaded. “Where do I begin? It must be something that the water creatures want badly, judging from the ways they have been harassing us.”

  “And why now?” she wondered. “What’s different now?”

  “You’re betrothed.” She stared at him. “I’m sorry,” he said hastily. “I’m sorry. It was the first thing that leaped into my head. Of course, that has nothing to do with water.”

  “Garner—”

  “You have every right to please yourself, and I have no right to torment you about your decisions. I promise I will stop. Just tell me where to go, what to look for—”

  “I don’t know!” she cried, so fiercely that he started. “I don’t know. Garner, just go away and look for something. Anything. I have to think.” He opened his mouth. She shook her head wildly and he closed it. “If I think of anything useful at all, I will send for you, I
promise. I promise. Go.”

  So he went, following the paths of water as he had the day before, hoping at every moment for a whisper from the mage, a message from the minister. Both were silent. So were the water people, he realized as the day passed. Water behaved like water in pipes and buckets, stayed mute and did not sing. Fountains splashed with decorum; sluice gates remained as they were set; mill wheels turned placidly. Everyone waited, Garner felt.

  But for what?

  At dusk, he returned to the palace to dress. Inis gave him new boots, buckled his sword belt and brightly polished spurs, pinned the bright silver disc of the moon that drew all waters onto his cloak. They joined the other knights and squires in the yard where the procession was forming behind the king.

  The townspeople lined the streets, carrying torches and drinking vessels. They were subdued, murmuring, laughing only softly, for the ritual was ancient, vital, and, the previous day had warned them, by no means predictable. After the king, his consort, his courtiers, the royal knights and the Knights of the Well with their torch-bearing squires had all passed, the townspeople fell in behind them. The procession grew slowly longer and longer, a river of people flowing down the twining streets of the old city, past the shrouded fountain in the square and across the bridge to the broader streets that changed, beyond Luminum, into the wide, rutted, uncobbled wagon roads between the fields.

  Garner rode silently, his eyes on the gentle uprise ahead, already marked by torches thrust into the earth around the opening above the Well. It was growing very dark. The pillars and walkways of the outer pool were lined with fire as well, where the city folk would gather to drop their gifts and wishes, and dip their cups to salute the moon. The full moon, rising in leisurely fashion out of the sea, had been following the procession for some time, arching higher and higher among the stars. By the time the king and the knights gathered around the Well itself and began the ritual, the moon would already be regarding its own perfect reflection in the water beneath the earth.

  The king reached the hillock finally and drew aside. Courtiers, warriors and city folk all waited, while the Knights of the Well dismounted and filed underground through the mage’s doorway. Eada drew them one by one to their positions around the Well. No one spoke, not even Edord, who usually had some appropriate exhortation ready for the occasion. Even he looked apprehensive, Garner noted, after his adventure with the nymph in the stable well. Garner himself wanted nothing more than to drown himself in the nearest tavern until dawn. He had found nothing; neither mage nor minister was speaking to him; he foresaw nothing but disaster.