by K. J. Parker
Looking up, and then around, I felt as though I was inside a ribcage—all those arches, columns, vestigial ornamental pillars and columns cut in low relief into the walls, taper-curving up over my head. All a bit unnerving, though that’s probably just cultural conditioning. You spend your childhood being told scary stories about wizards’ towers, nothing’s ever going to scrub those images out of your brain, even when you know the banal facts. Even so; all those curved uprights looked uncommonly like bones to me, which put us squarely in the tower’s digestive tract. Call me old-fashioned, but I don’t like it when a building eats me.
The furniture was presumably the fault of the previous tenant. The only good thing was that there wasn’t very much of it; three chairs, one table. But the chairs (a matching set) were carved in the shape of a giant cupped hand—the fingers were the back, and you sat in the palm—and the table had arms instead of legs. They were thin, bony arms with the muscles standing out, like you see on country people, undernourished but still very strong, and the hands clawed at the floor with splayed fingers.
“Late Conceptualist school,” she observed. “Very nice. And worth a lot of money.”
I stared at her. “You don’t honestly expect me to believe you actually like that stuff.”
“They’re classics of post-Restoration design.”
“They’re grotesque.”
She had that no-point-talking-to-you shrug. “How much?” I asked her.
“Three chairs and a table.” She thought for a moment. “Nine hundred angels. Why?”
The thought hadn’t crossed my mind, really. “It amazes me,” I said, “that anyone would pay good money for something so horrible. Put blankets over those chairs, would you? I really don’t want to have to look at them.”
She hesitated, then pulled three blankets out of the saddle-bag. “This isn’t like you,” she said. “Something’s bothering you, isn’t it?”
She’d only known me for two days. “Yes,” I said. “The horrible furniture. You could give yourself nightmares, looking at that sort of thing.”
She looked at me. Mind-reading forms are strictly forbidden, of course; also, they don’t work. In her case, they were redundant.
There was also a bookshelf; mercifully not a classic of post-Restoration design, just a slab of board, grey with age, resting on two chunks of batten nailed to the wall. And on the shelf, six books. I guess you could say they were what we’d come for. I sort of casually strolled in that direction and happened to find myself standing where I could make out the writing on the spines.
“Well?” she said.
“Saloninus’ General Principles,” I read out. Well, of course. “Perceptuus’ Divine Instrument.” I grinned. “Everyone keeps their old school books, don’t they?”
“I sold mine.”
Ah well. “Corbulo On Natural Philosophy.” I pulled it down and checked the title page. It had the frontispiece but no watermark. Pity. “Second edition.” I put it back. “Maxentius’ Huntsman’s Garland, and—” There was nothing written on the spine of the next one. I opened it and quickly put it back.
“What?”
“Oh, nothing.”
“What?”
“If you must know, it’s a deluxe edition of the Garden of Entrancing Images. With pictures,” I added. She blushed. “Oh,” she said.
“Quite.”
“Maybe,” she suggested hopefully, “it was already here when he—”
“Yes,” I said. “Of course. Anyway, that just leaves—” The last one just had the number 5, on the bottom of the spine, in black ink. I opened it.
Ah. Now, then.
“Is that—?”
I nodded.
His handwriting—of course, at that stage we had no idea who he was, no name or anything—was even worse than mine, and that’s saying something. Of course there are many different types of appallingly bad handwriting; this was the sort that appears completely unintelligible if you look closely at the individual letters, but if you lean your head back a bit and treat it as a pattern rather than conventional script, sooner or later you get the hang of it, apart from the occasional completely obscure squiggle which you have to reconstruct from context. Trouble is, my eyes aren’t what they were. Actis heliou helps—I muttered it under my breath, and the blotches and squiggles calmed down a little—but not enough. I’m told you can buy bits of round glass, like flattened raindrops; but they’re very expensive.
“Well?”
I sighed. “See what you can make of it,” I said.
She hesitated, bless her. “Are you sure?”
Fair enough. She only had a Class 3 clearance. But I was supervising her, and I’ve got a Class 8. “Go on,” I said. “It won’t bite.”
She took the book over to the horrible table and sat down in one of the horrible chairs. “I don’t recognise any of this,” she said.
“Well, you wouldn’t, if it’s original research.”
She screwed up her eyes. “What’s orbs subito?”
“No idea. What’s the context?”
“Sorry, I can’t make head or tail of this. It’s all in sort of note form.”
Naturally; he was writing for himself, not us. “Is there anything at all you recognise?”
“Sorry.” She lifted her head. “Shall I read it out to you?”
“Don’t do that,” I said quickly. Actually, I kept my temper really rather well. A moment later, the penny dropped. “Oh,” she said.
“Quite.”
(First rule of practice; don’t say any kind of Form out loud unless you’re absolutely sure what it is and what it does. As basic principles go, it’s on a par with not checking the level in the oil tank by the light of a naked candle. She really should’ve known that.)
“This is awkward,” she said. “You can’t read it and I can’t understand it, and I can’t read it to you. It looks like we’re a bit stuck.”
I smiled. “Not really,” I said. “This is what we do. You copy it out, in your nice, clear copperplate hand, and then I’ll be able to figure it out.” I paused. “You brought your inkwell.”
“Oh yes.”
“Fine.”
“Did you bring some paper?”
All due respect to women in general and absolutely no offence intended, but you have to tell them every damn thing.
“We’ll just have to take it back with us,” she said.
Sensible; but I wasn’t having that. Stupid of me, very stupid indeed. But this was my first field assignment for three years, and I really didn’t want it to be the last. Didn’t you take any paper with you?, I could hear them saying, and then I’d have to explain. In situations like that, I get creative. It’s a failing of mine.
“Just a moment,” I said, and I pulled down the deluxe edition of Entrancing Images. Written, of course, on best-quality white parchment vellum, which makes a much better medium for painting illustrations on than paper.
“What we need,” I said, “is a brick.”
When I was a novice, you did two years in the scriptorium before they let you anywhere near a reading list. At the time I found this both arbitrary and oppressive—I’d come here to learn magic, not how to copy out old books—and I’m still not entirely sure of the logic behind it. That said, one thing I learned was how to clean off a page of parchment using brick dust and the palm of my hand.
It’s a foul job. Think about it. Parchment is basically just skin, like your hand. The difference is, the parchment has been cured and polished, which makes it hard and durable. The brick dust grinds skin away. Reasonably enough, it takes the soft stuff off first. You can see why page preparation is a job usually assigned to the most junior members of the scriptorium staff.
By the time I’d done half a dozen double-fold sheets my hand was red raw. I went outside and washed it off in the brook. It was just starting to get dark. We’d brought a dozen of the big field-issue candles, enough to read by for ten hours, and one of those army-pattern closed lanterns. You can
see your hand in front of your face, but that’s about it.
All the time I’d been mutilating myself in the cause of scientific investigation, she’d been reading. “Any joy?” I asked.
She shook her head. “Sometimes it’s like it’s just starting to make some kind of sense,” she said, “and then I lose it completely. I think it’s supposed to be a reasoned, consecutive argument, but he keeps wandering off, and then it’s just plain weird.”
I wasn’t sure I liked the sound of that. Our department title is, forensic recovery investigation and damage limitation. I had a nasty feeling we were rather too late for the last part of our remit. “I suggest you leave it for tonight and we’ll have a proper go at it in the morning,” I said. I’d wrapped a handkerchief round my hand. My handkerchieves aren’t the cleanest in the world. “I don’t know about you, but I’ve had enough for one day.”
She gave me this look, which I confess I found hard to interpret. “What?” I said.
“Oh, nothing.”
Now I’m a scholar, sworn to the celibate life, wouldn’t have it any other way. But once a year I go home and spend a week with my brother—married for thirty years, two sons, still working the farm—and sometimes his wife says “Oh, nothing” in exactly that tone of voice, and that’s when I make an excuse, take a book and spend a couple of hours reading in the hayloft, because if I was the sort of man who relishes the spectacle of total war, I’d have joined the army instead of the Order. There’s that bit in the General Collect about how you have broken every law, dishonoured every commandment, done every evil, neglected every good. Get a woman to say it and you could compress all that down into ‘Oh, nothing’ and save twenty minutes.
“What?” I said.
“Perhaps you hadn’t noticed—” she was one of those women whose voices get quieter when they’re really angry—”but there’s nothing to sleep on in this horrible building. There’s no beds, there’s no couches—”
“Floor,” I pointed out.
“It’s freezing.”
Ah, I thought. Here we go. “No it isn’t.”
“Yes it is.” You can’t argue with women about temperature, I’ve noticed. They’re always cold, all of them. It can be hot enough to puddle the nails in the doorframe, and still they’ll moan at you for not lighting the fire. “I’m chilled to the bone, and there’s no fireplace.”
“This isn’t cold,” I assured her. “Where I grew up, you’d be sweating. When I was a kid—”
“I’m not spending the night here,” she snapped. “Not without a proper bed and some heat.”
“No choice, I’m afraid,” I explained, as patiently as I could. “It’s four hours to the village, and you really don’t want to try going down the mountain in the dark.”
“I wasn’t proposing to,” she growled quietly.
I frowned at her. “You’re not suggesting—”
“Yes.”
“No, sorry.” I shook my head. “Bia kai cratos is a high-intensity sixth-level transmutation. It takes enormous amounts of energy and creates a force three differential.”
“I know,” she said. “If it was easy, I’d do it myself. But I can’t, so you’ll have to.”
“Don’t be silly,” I said. “This is a highly unstable environment. Diverting that much energy into heat and light could cause a flashover. Wrap up warm in a blanket, you’ll be fine.”
There are various military forms (mirabile ictu, that sort of thing) that enable you to kill a fellow human being just by looking at them. Technically they’re quite straightforward—level three—but for obvious reasons they’re not taught until fourth year postgraduate. On the other hand, she struck me as the sort of dedicated student who reads ahead. I was, therefore, tempted to raise a surreptitious shield form. Trouble is, in subdued lighting or darkness you glow slightly. So I did the sensible thing and used dormienda under my breath. She was fast asleep in ten minutes. She snored.
A question that’s always coming up in year four end-of-term exams is, why can’t you use dormienda on yourself? Answer—well, you know, of course (and if you don’t, stop reading this and revise). Annoying; because there are times when you’re lying awake at night and you’d give anything to be able to mutter a few words and drift off to sleep, even if it does mean a headache and slight nausea in the morning. Instead, I made myself as comfortable as I could in one of the horrible chairs and spent the night staring at where the ceiling would be if only I could see it. I remember taking extraordinary pains to stay as still as possible, almost as if there was someone or something else inside the tower with us, which I really didn’t want to disturb. I’d like to report that I spent the time working on some abstruse point of theory. Sadly, no. My mind drifted; various topics, including the refectory roof (I really didn’t want to be on the Works Committee, but sometimes you just get lumbered), the vacant chair in Theoretical Ethics, that nagging pain I get in my jaw, the six hundred angels my brother needed to fix up the mill—a first edition Corbulo would’ve covered that easily, and I’ve heard it said that unscrupulous people know how to fake the watermark using wood blocks, steam and olive oil; the problem was, I didn’t know any unscrupulous people; that sort of thing, the usual garbage that bounces around inside your head when you’re awake in the wee small hours. Also, for some unaccountable reason, our mysterious friend’s choice of reading matter. The textbooks, yes, everybody’s got a Saloninus and a Perceptuus, and the Corbulo—nice to have your own copy, saves waiting your turn in the library. The Huntsman’s Mirror, on the other hand, suggested landed gentry rather than your typical poor scholar. By and large, the Order is mostly middle-class; a respectable profession for the sons of merchants, lawyers, doctors, the better class of land agent. We don’t get many scions of the nobility, for some reason. The upper echelons of society simply don’t seem to be fertile ground for the Talent, which I’ve always put down to inbreeding. But you get them from time to time, just as you get peasants’ sons and even women. Or maybe our friend had ideas above his station, or he won the book in a card game. You can’t tell, can you?
The Garden, on the other hand. We don’t encourage that sort of thing. In fact, we don’t hold with it at all. Go figure. It really is true what they tell you in first year; you can damage your talent, possibly lose it altogether—look what that sort of thing does to women adepts, after all. A copy of the Garden would get you thrown out of the Studium, and even the lesser schools, where they can’t afford to be quite so fussy, would take a pretty dim view. Hence, quite possibly, our man moving away from civilisation and setting up shop in a wizard’s tower in the middle of nowhere. All very sad, and it wouldn’t be the first time.
In which case, we really did need to know what he’d been up to. A corrupted and decadent talent, under the influence of malignant tendencies, decays quickly but nastily, with occasional flashes of exceptional brilliance. It’s not widely known, but half the military forms in the General Concordance were developed under those sorts of circumstances, and if you want a classic example, you don’t need to look further than Saloninus himself.
Well, we had his journal; that was the main thing. In cases where the journal’s lost or destroyed, all you can do is reconstruct and guess. Much easier when you’ve got a detailed, scientifically-compiled record of a fellow adept’s mind going all to pieces; you can see where the shrapnel flew, and usually how fast it was going, and possibly what it hit.
“I think we should go back,” she said.
“Really.” I was grinding the brick against a flint to make more dust.
“Well, yes. We should take this back to the Studium and let the experts look at it.”
“I’m an expert,” I said coldly.
She paused, not for very long. “Yes, but some of this stuff is really strange. There’s whole pages that simply don’t make sense at all. I mean, it’s perfectly normal words and phrases, proper grammar and syntax. Really good spelling. But it doesn’t mean anything.”
“Not to you.�
�
She pulled a face. “I really wish I could read some of it out to you, and then you’d be able to see what I mean. It’s gibberish. Except sometimes—”
Odd she should put it that way. It’s gibberish, except sometimes. I’d said that once, those exact same words, twenty years ago. Whereupon my field supervisor (Germanus of Met’Oc, rest his soul; a good man and a competent scholar) grabbed the book out of my hands and sent me to fetch him an apple from the refectory. Later, of course, he explained.
“I’d leave it for now,” I said, as pleasantly as I could. “Why don’t you go outside, have a walk, stretch your legs? You’ve been cooped up in here all morning, you could do with some fresh air.”
“It’s tipping down with rain out there. Can’t you hear it?”
“And then,” I said, “I’ll have cleaned off enough parchment and you can start copying out. All right?”
She scowled horribly at me as I closed the tower door on her, but I couldn’t help that. It was for her own good; pneumonia can be cured, but you can come to harm reading allogloss, even if you don’t know what it means. She was going to have to copy it out; that was bad enough.
Just to be sure, I put my hand on the page she’d left it open at and used spes gentis. Turned my fingertips numb for several seconds. Allogloss. Oh hell.
Think about what you do when you write something down. You take a thought out of your own mind, you separate it from yourself, and you fix it in a permanent medium, like a fly in amber. Then you leave it there.
A book can last a very long time. Even if the paper you wrote on is lost or destroyed, all it takes is for someone else to make a copy. Written words can propagate like maggots in a sheep’s arse. Some flies in amber are only sleeping.