The Language of Power

by Rosemary Kirstein

  He grinned. “They’re a lot safer now. And some of them have delays, so that I can set them and get out of range before they go off. I don’t need to use flaming arrows.”

  “Far more convenient,” Rowan commented. She noticed that Bel sat unnaturally still and quiet.

  The Outskirter glanced up at her once, a dark glance, then looked away. “Will told me an interesting story about his time with Corvus.”

  Rowan hesitated. “Oh?” She was not certain she wished to hear it.

  Bel nodded, gazing off across the square. Then she said: “That minion of Shammer and Dhree’s who we questioned, the one with the speech-garbling spell—Will watched Corvus put that spell on someone.”

  “A house servant,” Will said. He looked distressed. “They all have it—”

  “Please,” Bel said vehemently, “don’t tell it again, I don’t think my stomach could take it.” Rowan found it difficult to imagine a process that would be considered too gruesome to discuss by a woman who had herself been able and willing to apply torture to a man.

  “If you want the details, I can tell you later,” Will offered.

  “And bring a diagram of the inside of a human head,” Bel added, through clenched teeth. “And expect to have nightmares for a week.”

  Rowan changed the subject. “Well, we’ve made a lot of progress.” And she handed Ona’s drawing of the lobster traps and Slado to Bel, gave Willam the note from Marel.

  Will read with growing interest—and very rapidly indeed, Rowan noted, seeming to take in both pages in only five separate glances. “It does look like Kieran was probably dead before that first package . . . unless he was off doing maintenance on the dragons,” he said.

  “Yes,” Rowan said. “And there’s more.” She outlined the content of her conversation with Lorren and Eamer.

  Bel forgot her nausea entirely, and became fascinated. “He did change overnight,” she said when Rowan finished.

  “So he did.”

  “Something happened. Right then, that very night.”

  “Yes—but I can’t guess what.”

  “If I can get into the records, I’ll look for that date,” Willam said. “But there might not be anything. If it was something personal that happened, and not magical, it will only show up if Kieran kept a diary.”

  Rowan considered this. “But all magical events are recorded?”

  Willam thought. “Do you want a long answer, or a short one?”

  “A short one, please.”

  “It depends.”

  Bel said: “If the records the Guidestars make can be erased, couldn’t the ones in the house be erased, too?” Will opened his mouth to reply, but Bel quickly added: “And give me the short answer.”

  He made a sound of amusement, then said: “There are two ways to erase records, a hard way and an easy way. If you do it the easy way, pieces can still be left behind.”

  Willam did not expect to find complete records, as he had explained to Rowan the previous night. They would be fragmentary, scattered, tucked away in spaces between current records, spaces assumed to be empty.

  Spaces in what, and where, Rowan did not know. Will had attempted to explain; Rowan had understood not a single word.

  “At least we do know that it was Slado, and not Kieran, who brought down the Guidestar,” Rowan said.

  Will was dubious. “Well, that would make the most sense. But we can’t be absolutely sure—”

  “It happened between those two packages,” Bel said. “Kieran was dead. Slado did it.”

  Will looked at Bel, then up at Rowan. “I’ve got the Guidestar’s fall narrowed down to somewhere inside a two-year range—”

  And Bel said, rather smugly: “Rowan’s narrowed it down to two weeks.”

  He was astonished. “How did you manage that?”

  “By the application of good Steerswomen’s techniques,” Rowan said.

  “Good, boring Steerswomen’s techniques,” Bel amplified. “And I’ll tell him about it. You”—here she climbed to her feet, slapped dust from her trouser seat, and took Rowan’s arm— “are going to get some sleep. If we’re going to be sneaking around in the dead of night, doing something fantastically dangerous, we all need to be rested enough to be alert. It will be the dead of night, won’t it?” This to Willam.

  He nodded. “An hour before midnight. And I have three hours to get everything done.”

  “Then we have two days to get used to being awake all night,” Bel informed Rowan. “And you’re exhausted. Shut up; you are.”

  Rowan laughed. “Far be it from a steerswoman to deny the truth.”

  Bel began to usher Rowan back across the street; Willam gathered his gear and followed. “We’ll wake you at dinner-time,” Bel said. “Will and I can find something to occupy ourselves until then—and I’ll fill him in on what we’ve done since we saw him last. Then after dinner, we’ll all carouse until dawn, sleep until noon, and do it all over again. Then we’ll be set.”

  “Oh, if you insist.”

  “I do.”

  “Use Bel’s room,” Willam suggested. “You won’t fall out of bed if you toss in your sleep.”

  “At the top of the stairs,” Bel said, releasing Rowan’s arm, and indicating a window above. “The door on the left.”

  “Actually—” Actually, all Rowan’s gear was in her own room, including logbook, pen, and ink. She planned to take some time to record the information she had just acquired. “Actually, I think I’d prefer my own room.”

  “How’s your leg?” Bel asked suspiciously; she obviously assumed that it was the climb that daunted Rowan.

  “Fine,” Rowan said, with emphasis, and perfect truth. She recovered her arm, made a show of resetting her shirtsleeve. “And I will see you both later. Try not to get into any trouble.”

  11

  Reason, precision, patience: good steerswomanly techniques that had served Rowan well during her research at the Annex in Alemeth.

  For a wizard, look for magic; for magic, look for something otherwise impossible; for a secret wizard, one unknown to the common folk, look for impossible events that no known wizard could claim.

  The copies of the steerswomen’s logbooks in the Annex held centuries of observations. Any steerswoman observing an inexplicable event would be certain to record it. By the condition and location of the Guidestar fragments that Rowan had found, she was able to place the event somewhere within a four-year span.

  Steerswomen traveled wide, and were few. Not all logbooks successfully made their way back to the Archives, and not all of the copies made subsequently found their way safely to the Annexes. Nevertheless, Rowan managed to locate fifty-two books covering the relevant period.

  She read them. She began generating notes, charts, and in one case, a graph. After a while, and quite incidental to her planned search, she began to notice something odd.

  It was the weather.

  Steerswomen routinely, in every day’s first entry, made note of the weather. The collation of this information by the residents of the Archives, steerswomen past the age of traveling, had resulted across the centuries in quite a lot of useful knowledge about climate, and the movement of weather patterns.

  Late one summer, every traveling steerswoman described identical weather.

  The women had been widely scattered: Terminus in the north; Southport in the south; a mountain peak west of The Crags; the edge of the Outskirts east of Five Corners; the empty lands northeast of the loop of the Long North Road. Two others, at sea; the rest, at various locations within the great circle of the Inner Lands.

  All reported the same phenomenon: heavy, dark clouds that moved in from the north, remained for many days, occasionally emitting thunder and brief deluges of rain—and then dissipated.

  There could not be individual pockets of foul weather miraculously choosing to hover over each and every steerswoman. It took no great leap of logic to assume that everywhere, across the entire Inner Lands, the sky had been completely
obscured.

  For fourteen days. And this was impossible.

  Rowan had already known that the Guidestar did not simply drop to the ground. Its fall had been long, and bright. It had crossed the sky, burning. And yet, in all the Inner Lands, there was not even a rumor of any person seeing it fall.

  This was why. Weather had shielded the Guidestar from human eyes. Only during this specific two-week period could the Guidestar have fallen with no Inner Lander witnessing it.

  Magic, hiding magic.

  In the darkness, Rowan startled, struggled, struck out.

  The shadowy figure stumbled back. A thump against the table, a clatter, a splash of water spilled. “Rowan, it’s me!”

  “Willam?” The white hair was barely visible, seeming to float in the darkness. Rowan calmed down. “I’m sorry—” she said as he simultaneously said: “Sorry—”

  She climbed to her knees, took the wash towel hanging on her bedstead, located by memory the vase of fresh-cut flowers that the day maid had placed on her table, began sopping. “Are you all right?” She didn’t think she had struck very hard.

  “Yes. Are you? You didn’t answer my knock. And—”

  “Yes . . . A dream, that’s all.” She considered lighting the candle, decided that it was not worth the effort.

  “It sounded bad,” Will said. A pause. “Nightmares don’t give you much rest . . . if you want to sleep some more, I’ll tell Bel.”

  “No.” Rowan handed him the towel, sat back on her heels, rubbed her forehead, watching the ghost-hair dip as he went on his knees to find the rest of the spill. “Actually, it wasn’t so very bad.” It had been one of those peculiar dreams wherein nothing particularly dreadful occurred, but that nonetheless filled one with an inexplicable terror. “I dreamed you were a Demon.” She cast about on the foot of the bed for her clothing.

  “One of those, those strange people?” Apparently, Bel had gone a long way toward filling Will in on Rowan’s experiences. He rose, set the towel on the table. “The ones who burned you?” He sounded distressed.

  Rowan knew how one sometimes felt a vague responsibility for the actions one’s imagined self took in others’ dreams. “You weren’t trying to hurt me,” she reassured him. She found her shirt. “You were trying to talk to me.” She pulled the shirt over her head. “But, being a male, you didn’t have the necessary equipment.”

  He had politely turned his back, despite the fact that the room was almost completely dark. He made a noise of amusement. “I guess I wouldn’t, would I ?” He must have been told of the nature of the female Demons’ organ of communication.

  “It did present a quandary,” Rowan said, sliding from the sheets to put on her trousers. In the dream, Rowan herself had been speaking, at length, in human language; but as she spoke, each word transformed itself into a solid shape, like a Demon utterance. The shapes appeared, and then hung in the air about her head, unsupported. And the Demon-Willam was attempting to communicate as Demon males did, by collecting and rearranging word-objects uttered by females, in this case snatching Rowan’s words from the air instead of off the ground.

  The dream-Rowan had been watching this behavior with interest, and commenting—rather pontifically, Rowan now thought—on the cleverness of the process by which the speechless males circumvented their inability. Each sentence the dream-Rowan uttered allowed the Demon access to more words.

  But the Rowan who observed the dream, who seemed entirely separate and with separate knowledge and emotions, was terrified, filled with a desperate urgency. She knew, with perfect certainty, that the dream-Rowan must speak differently, must use more words, other words, that the words being said were not the ones the Demon-Willam needed. But despite all effort and strain on Rowan’s part, despite her rising panic, the tedious steerswoman continued to pontificate, using very similar words, over and over; and the little male continued, patiently, to collect, to test new arrangements, discard, collect, and test again.

  “What’s the time?” Rowan asked, rising, groping under the bed for her boots. “And is dinner imminent?” She found that she was famished.

  “Eighteen thirty,” Will said, “and yes, and it smells wonderful.” He stopped short, made a small noise of surprise. “I mean, half past six.”

  “I knew what you meant,” Rowan said, and found and donned the boots. They left the room, proceeded down the corridor. “Is Bel in the dining room upstairs, or the common room?”

  “The common room. Upstairs is filled, I think some event is afoot. The innkeeper said that we could dine in Bel’s room, for a surcharge, but Bel said no. I think she’s starting to worry about money.”

  “It can’t last forever.” Bel had spent the last season working with the silkworms in Alemeth, largely because there had been very little else to occupy her. With no need to pay for lodging at the Annex, she had acquired a tidy sum.

  “Well, I have some. Since I got here, I’ve mostly begged for food.”

  “Very effectively, I’m sure. You were truly pitiful.”

  An event was afoot after all: two roast boars with all the trimmings, with entertainment to follow. In the common room, every table was occupied, despite the caravan’s departure that morning. Bel had managed to claim a small table herself and defend it against all comers. The Outskirter waved Rowan and Willam over.

  When they arrived and took their seats, Bel leaned down and with a cautious glance around the room passed something surreptitiously to Willam under the table. “Here, take them,” she said to him quietly. “They make me nervous.”

  “They’re perfectly safe. Unless you drop them off a cliff, or throw them into the fireplace.” He shifted, arranging the object between his feet.

  “And you should find someplace to put them. Carrying a burlap sack with you everywhere you go looks too suspicious. You might be taken for a thief of some kind.”

  “I don’t like to leave them alone, with people about.”

  Willam’s destructive charms. “No one has bothered my pack in my room,” Rowan began. Then: “No . . .” The fact that the maids had so far been honest did not guarantee the same in the future.

  Will leaned back as a burly serving man arrived with fistfuls of knives and forks, which he distributed gracelessly; apparently the most experienced servers were working in the formal dining room.

  Will gestured Rowan and Bel closer, to speak above the clash of cutlery and rise of conversation all about. “When I was in the stables the other night, I noticed a place up in the rafters that should make a good hiding place for them, if I can climb up there without being noticed.”

  “Later tonight, then,” Rowan said. “There should be no one about at all by midnight.”

  A sudden crash and clatter as silverware escaped from the server’s overloaded grip, inspiring a cheer from a table of sailors across the room.

  Something nagged at the back of Rowan’s mind; she identified it, and stopped short, puzzling.

  Will was watching the serving man scrambling about on hands and knees, searching for lost silverware; some customers were cheerfully directing him toward far-flung items. Only Bel had noticed Rowan’s reaction. “What is it?” she asked, causing Will to turn back in curiosity.

  “Eighteen thirty,” the steerswoman said, thoughtfully.

  The others traded a glance. Bel said, “No, midnight is twenty-four hundred. You know that.”

  “Wait, let me think.” Rowan closed her eyes. The serving man was voicing petulant complaint; apparently some of the directions provided were intentionally spurious.

  “Are you all right?” Will asked Rowan. “Rowan?”

  “I’m trying to remember something . . .” So long ago . . .

  Six years back, and Rowan a captive of the wizards Shammer and Dhree. Rowan had told them of the fallen Guidestar; she had described the pattern of fragments; maps had been brought out. Maps of incredible detail, and seemingly impossible beauty of execution . . . Rowan tried to ignore the din around her, concentrated harder
.

  Numbers, everywhere on the wizards’ maps: measurements, Rowan had thought at first, elevations. But she had seen, then, that the numbers attached to landmarks that she knew well did not in any way match elevations on her own charts.

  She tried to remember some specific number from the wizards’ maps, any number at all. But it was no use: it was too long ago, and the numbers had been meaningless to her, and she had not retained them.

  She opened her eyes to find Bel and Willam watching her dubiously. “Will,” Rowan said, then checked to ensure that no one else was attending the conversation. “The Krue . . . do they measure length in centimeters and meters, distance in meters and kilometers?”

  The question surprised him. “Yes.”

  Bel turned to him. “So do we.”

  “And the Outskirters count twenty-four separate hours in a day, instead of twice twelve.”

  “So do we,” Will said. “Except, midnight is zero hundred.”

  “How very interesting.” Two such different peoples, standing, it seemed, at utter opposite points in both society and location. “The Outskirters must have learned it from the wizards.”

  Bel caught and held Rowan’s gaze, an extremely stubborn expression on her face. “No,” she said, and stressed the next words. “The Outskirters were the first people.” This was a very old disagreement between them. “If, as you say, our line names resemble your Inner Lands women’s names, then you got your names from us. And if the wizards use our time and distances, then they got those from us.”

  Rowan decided not to repeat the argument. “Regardless. There was, at some point, a connection between your people and mine. And now it seems that there was also a connection between the Outskirters and the Krue. Will—” She turned to him. “Do you know anything about that?”