The Language of Power

by Rosemary Kirstein

  “No one that we know of—”

  “You know everyone in Alemeth. There are no wizard’s minions there!”

  “And perhaps Jannik needs no minion to report my movements to him. He can watch me from the sky, through a Guidestar.”

  Silence. “But he can’t tell it’s you,” Bel said at last. “Fletcher said, from so high up you can’t tell one person from another.”

  “Yes. Still . . . magic.” The steerswoman spoke it like a curse word.

  Bel studied her long. “How’s your leg?”

  “Tired.”

  “So are you. That’s why you’re jumping at shadows.” She rose. “Get some rest. I have to go; Dan and I are planning on making an amazing number of very peculiar noises in our room for the next hour or so. With luck, we’ll be everyone’s favorite topic of conversation tomorrow, and no one will bother to wonder about some steerswoman.”

  Rowan laughed, quietly. “Oh, very well.” She checked the corridor outside, left and right, then stood aside to let Bel through.

  Something occurred to her: she said, as Bel passed, “And will any of those peculiar noises be genuine?”

  The short, strong woman paused in the light from the door, tilted her head, considered. “I haven’t decided yet,” she said; then she turned and slipped silently away into the dark.

  2

  Wizards and Steerswomen: there existed in the world no two categories of people more completely opposite.

  The Steerswomen were collectors of information, students of the world, of nature, and people; the wizards, too, had their own store of knowledge.

  Whatever a steerswoman knew was given freely, to whoever might ask. In return, one must answer a steerswoman’s questions truthfully—or be placed under the Steerswomen’s ban, with no question, even the most trivial, ever answered by them again.

  But when asked about the workings of their power, the wizards declined to answer. They shared their knowledge with no one.

  And so it had continued across long centuries. The Steerswomen had come to despise the wizards, and the wizards, for the most part, paid the Steerswomen the ultimate insult of ignoring them completely—until recently.

  Recently, Rowan had uncovered certain facts, information both startling and disturbing:

  She had learned that a Guidestar had fallen. Not one of the two visible in the nighttime sky, motionless points of light behind which the slow constellations shifted with the world’s turning; but another, one previously unknown and unseen in the Inner Lands.

  She had learned that the part of the world known as the Outskirts depended upon the intervention of magic, and had always done so. Every twenty years, a magical heat was sent down from the sky, sweeping an area east of the inhabited Outskirts, and destroying the dangerous creatures and poisonous plantlife common there. This spell was called by the wizards Routine Bioform Clearance—and its operation had ceased at the same time that the unknown Guidestar had fallen.

  Without Routine Bioform Clearance, the redgrass that fed the Outskirters’ goat herds would be unable to spread into newly empty lands; the Outskirters could not move to the east; and the Inner Lands would be unable to expand in the area left behind. The result would be famine among the warrior tribes, and overpopulation in the Inner Lands. A clash between two peoples seemed inevitable.

  And finally, Rowan had learned that the single person behind these events was a previously unknown wizard, the master-wizard over all others, a man named Slado.

  There Rowan’s knowledge ended. She knew nothing else about Slado: neither his age, nor his appearance, nor where he dwelled, nor what he hoped to accomplish—nor why he had kept his actions secret even from the other wizards.

  Those actions, inexplicably, seemed all designed to destroy. Slado had once even turned Routine Bioform Clearance against the Outskirter tribes directly, with results terrible to witness. And who knew what his next step might be?

  He had to be stopped. To be stopped, he first had to be found—or at the very least, the nature and course of his plans must be discovered, so that they could be circumvented. With no other source of information available, Rowan had turned to the Steerswomen’s Annex in Alemeth.

  There, duplicate copies of steerswomen’s logbooks were stored, covering centuries of travel and observation. There might, Rowan hoped, be some subtle clues buried unrecognized in the records. The hope was slim, but there seemed no other recourse.

  It had been close on to midnight one spring night, with Rowan, still recuperating from the injuries she had received in the Demon Lands, half dizzy with exhaustion. She was collating and transcribing onto various charts some very odd information about unusual weather patterns when Steffie, a man who assisted the Annex’s new custodian, appeared at the worktable.

  He was nearly as weary as she—and dusty. He and Zenna, the custodian, had been at work in the attic, sorting through trunks apparently untouched for decades. With an expression of suppressed outrage, Steffie wordlessly set a single logbook on the table in front of Rowan, then stalked back upstairs. Rowan glanced up from her work at the book, then stopped short.

  The book’s cover was worn and scratched, the leather stained dark in places from handling; the thong that tied it closed had been broken and re-knotted twice. The book had been used hard, and had traveled long.

  It was an original logbook, one written by the hand of a steerswoman during the course of her journeys—and the Annex was no place for it.

  Such books were precious, and were preserved in the Steerswomen’s Archives, north of Wulfshaven. The residents there would make two copies, to send to each of the far-flung annexes: safekeeping against the possibility of some disaster striking the Archives.

  But this was not the first original logbook that had been found in Alemeth; there had been several. The previous custodian had neglected her duties—to a criminal degree, in Rowan’s opinion. But the old woman had died, leaving others to sort out the chaos she had left behind.

  Rowan made a small, weak noise of anger. Suddenly, inexpressibly weary, she considered retiring for the night; found her cane inconveniently far away; decided to wait for Steffie to return and retrieve it for her; organized her papers; cleaned and set aside her pens; took up the logbook and opened it. She read the first lines:

  I’ve just been told that the wizard Kieran passed away two weeks ago. My entire trip to Donner is a waste of time.

  Moments later, the entire house had been roused.

  The comment was at the beginning of the logbook, and there was no later mention of Kieran at all; the reason for this steerswoman abandoning her assigned route, for her interest in a wizard, must have been recorded near the end of the previous volume. But three days of near-continual searching failed to produce, either in original or copy, the logbook that preceded Latitia’s mention of Kieran.

  Rowan was left with only two pieces of information, both equally compelling:

  First, that something about Kieran had drawn the steerswoman Latitia to Donner.

  And second, the date—two weeks after the fall of the unknown Guidestar.

  Whether or not Dan and Bel’s performance of the previous night did in fact monopolize the morning’s gossip, Rowan never discovered; she rose too late.

  It was halfway to lunch, which disappointed but did not surprise her. When she had lain down the previous night, her leg raised such vigorous complaint that Rowan had found it necessary to take a small draught of poppy extract. She disliked the drug intensely, but knew she must rest, and reasoned that if there were any night where it might be safe to sleep drugged it would be this night, and possibly no other.

  After attending to her morning routine, she climbed and then descended to the common room. It was deserted. Noises led her into the kitchen, and a request for some breakfast resulted in every member of the kitchen staff being introduced one by one as their duties brought them near her—and Rowan found herself adopted.

  Kippers produced themselves as if by magic, seeming
to regard in startlement the fans of sliced eggs arranged about their heads. Lemonade of exactly the best degree of tartness was presented in a fine crystal glass. The first bread prepared for the noon meal was ready, flavored with fennel and poppy seed, and Rowan enjoyed it hours before the paying customers.

  She sat by the edge of a preparing table, using fine linen and fine silver, observing the action of the kitchen crew as she ate. It seemed almost a dance, an orchestrated swirl of activity. Pockets of motion spun inward and outward, from one end of the kitchen to the other, under a cacophony of conversation, not one word of which pertained to the duties at hand. No one, it seemed, required verbal direction.

  Rowan found the entire performance deeply satisfying, and spent her breakfast lost in happy analysis of patterns of flow. Eventually, she noticed a single small discontinuity, and watched as it moved, generating minuscule disruptions in its wake. Amused, Rowan projected paths, crosscurrents, amplifications—and so was not surprised when, in three different parts of the kitchen, a pan of salt-covered turbot clattered and crunched to the floor; a basin of silver crashed, sending butter knives sliding to every corner; and an entire basket of rolls leapt into the air, causing four persons to collide in a flurry of snatching hands.

  All motion ceased. A moment of silence, then laughter, and cries of “Beck!” “Beck!” Rowan wondered if this were a local curse word, until the source of the original discontinuity—her young server of the previous evening—rose up from the crowd of knife retrievers. Beck blinked about in seeming innocence, then conceded his guilt with an elaborate bow, executed with many flourishes.

  The kitchen began to recover, and Rowan addressed the undercook, who was sharing her preparing table with the steerswoman. “Do you remember a wizard named Kieran?”

  The undercook, a woman of late middle age, was using heavy shears to trim tails and fins from a stack of five turbot. The question made her pause, causing a five-year-old boy, standing on a stool beside her, to offer a white handkerchief for her to scratch the tip of her nose against. This was his only duty, which he took very seriously.

  The cook declined the handkerchief with a jerk of her head, chewed her lip in thought, and began on the turbot again. “Killed a little girl,” she said.

  The handkerchief boy gaped, dumbfounded. Rowan was herself a moment recovering. “One of the children at his star parties?”

  “No . . . No. No, no.” She shook her head. “No. Before he started those up.” She finished trimming the last turbot. “Years before that, twenty, twenty-five or more . . As if on cue, an assistant arrived with a stack of five square pans. The under-cook transferred one fish into the top pan; it fit, edge to edge, as perfectly as if it had been measured.

  “Do you know how it happened?” Rowan asked.

  The stack of empty pans began to transform into a stack of fish-filled pans. “Got in his way,” the undercook said.

  “Surely there was more to it than that?”

  “I don’t know.” The last turbot made its journey. “Stay away from the wizard, my dad told me.” She tilted her head, beaming cheerfully at the completed stack, her expression rendering her next sentence freakishly incongruous: “Because he kills little girls who get in his way.”

  The pan carrier departed; Beck arrived, placed a heavy bucket on the table, and left. “Is your dad still alive?” Rowan asked the cook.

  “No. Years gone, him and my ma both.” The cook peered in the bucket, glanced up as if consulting an internal list, nodded, then extracted double fistfuls of clams from the water.

  The dance of the kitchen crew had recovered, and was quickening: lunch was nearing. Rowan disliked the idea of possibly interfering with the lovely flow, but managed one further question. “Would you happen to know where an elderly man named Nid lives?”

  “Rose Street. Off Ambleway. Third on the left. Tub of geraniums just outside. Take the staircase down.” The cook took up a clam knife and began plying it with a will.

  “Thank you.” And the steerswoman scanned the patterns of motion for an appropriate opening, sidled neatly through the moving staff members, and exited by the back door.

  Into the yard, around the corner, through another door, and she was at her room in moments. There, she strapped on her sword, collected her logbook, pencils, pen, and ink, loaded them into a shoulder-slung satchel. She made a point of climbing and descending the two staircases, so as to depart the inn publicly through the front door.

  When she reached the street, Rowan looked back and sighted Bel, nursing a cup of tea behind the windows of the ornate sitting room. Bel looked extremely comfortable, sitting with both legs folded beneath her, in ostentatious disregard for elegant sensibility. Rowan wondered what the dubious servers who watched askance would think if they knew that they were waiting on a member of a barbaric Outskirter tribe.

  Rowan walked away, knowing that Bel would not be far behind. It was good to have someone to watch one’s back.

  Rose Street was easily found, and the basement dwelling of the venerable Nid. Nid, however, was not present.

  The watcher at the harbormaster’s office had suggested riverside with the eelers, or the stevedores’ mug-room. Because it was nearer, Rowan chose the latter.

  Inside, a small iron stove threw out more heat than the day needed, but the dampness retreated from the blast, so that it served its purpose. Off to one side, three beefy men sat in chairs pushed against the wall, their hands wrapped around mugs of soup. They leaned toward each other, their heads close together, and spoke in low tones, occasionally casting sidelong glances at an equally beefy woman who sat alone at the sole, tiny table. She was working a bit of bone with a delicate rasping-file, whistling soundlessly, nonchalant, her own cup beside her.

  No proprietor was present. Rowan decided that the woman was the most approachable of the customers.

  “Nid?” The stevedore showed surprise at Rowan’s question. “Not here, not today. Was he supposed to be?” She considered this seriously, as if it were a difficult question. “Did Susan send you?”

  “No, I’m a steerswoman. I have some questions about the history of Donner, and I understand that Nid might be a good person to ask.”

  The conversation on the other side of the room ceased. Rowan found all present looking at her in puzzlement. “Is there something I don’t know about this that I ought?” she said.

  “Going to ask Nid?” one of the men asked, while another acquired a look of immense astonishment.

  Rowan became suspicious. “Is old Nid still in possession of his faculties?” The question caused merely perplexity in the listeners. Rowan clarified: “Gone soft in the head?”

  Comprehension. “You can’t get the time of day out of him,” one of the men confirmed.

  “Always mistakes me for some old sweetheart or another,” the female stevedore put in. “Most of them dead thirty, forty years now.”

  “Ask him a question, he’ll answer what he thought you’ve said instead of what you said.”

  Rowan sighed. “Do any of you happen to know of any people near Nid’s age who have lived in Donner all their lives, and can think clearly?” Some discussion, and a joint reply in the negative. “And have any of you lived here since you were children?”

  Again in the negative, with several attempts to amplify and discuss at length. Rowan managed to extract herself from the premises before having to sit through anyone’s entire life story.

  When she reached the street, she spotted Bel seated on a doorstep halfway down the street. The Outskirter was conversing cheerfully with two little girls, who examined with shy fascination the sword Bel had unsheathed to display to them.

  Rowan turned away and passed down the street. With Nid apparently useless as an informant, Rowan found herself briefly at a loss. Strolling with no particular goal in mind, she stepped into a provisioner’s and acquired a small loaf of black bread and some cheese for her lunch, taking the opportunity to question the proprietors. Both were in their forties, the
man a recent immigrant, the woman a longtime resident who nonetheless could recall no mention of a wizard named Kieran.

  Outside, the sun was finally dispersing the high mist. The sky lightened to a pale blue, and Rowan wandered toward the docks, planning to eat her lunch by the water; but on impulse she turned aside at Tilemaker’s Street.

  The workers whom Rowan had seen from the tower the previous day were present again. They were now taking their own lunches, dining out of buckets and satchels they had brought with them, ostentatiously ignoring a lone, disgruntled entrepreneur who had established himself and his steaming cook-cart at the completed end of the plaza.

  Rowan considered the layout of the streets, the surrounding buildings, matching them against memory.

  There had, in fact, been a cobbled square here five years ago, but much smaller, and with many businesses crowded around it. Rowan and Bel had sat at the old watering trough, conversing, watching the stars; later, they had pushed through a bucket line leading from the well, as they fled from the burning inn.

  Now Saranna’s Inn and at least seven of the surrounding buildings were entirely gone. The ground there was two-thirds bare earth and one-third brick cobbles, of the pleasant yellow-brown of the native clay. The well was unharmed, although its stone edges were blackened, but the watering trough was new.

  Rowan abruptly recalled a young woman, whose name she had never learned; who, wakened from sleep, wearing only a night shift, armed only with a splintered board, had stood side by side with the steerswoman, the two of them trying to fend off a swarm of Jannik’s dragon hatchlings while Bel and another stranger created an escape route.

  Fire, all around, and collapsing walls, and falling debris. And then the woman, caught in the breath of a dragon, was wearing new clothes, bright clothes, clothes of flame—