The Language of Power

by Rosemary Kirstein

  Then his hands moved, graceful, precise. Despite herself, Rowan expected sound.

  She got light.

  Symbols, painted in pure light, from no visible source, appeared in midair. Ranks of symbols, lines of them, an entire block of them, hovered between her face and Willam’s.

  Things hanging in the air, Bel had said, after spying on Fletcher as he worked his magic in secret in the Outskirts. Cold light. Symbols, imparting information.

  Will paused to study the shapes, nodded, executed another flurry of movement, considered the result. “Good . . .” He leaned back, now more at ease. His eyes flicked across the symbols, as if reading them—

  Rowan realized that he was, in fact, reading them; that they were letters, and numbers; and that she had not recognized them because, from her perspective, they were printed backward.

  She attempted to read them herself. The letters, although oddly shaped, were recognizable; but they formed no words she knew.

  Will’s hands moved again, briefly, and he looked up, anticipating the result.

  To Willam’s left, a lattice appeared, in crisscrossing lines of red light painted on thin air, each square of the lattice containing some tiny bit of writing, too small to read, but to Rowan seeming all alike—

  But for one. Something was alive, trapped in the square, shifting and flickering. Rowan could not discern what it might be.

  Apparently, neither could Willam. He corrected this by, quite simply, reaching across and plucking the square directly off the lattice, out of the air, and bringing it closer.

  Everything is power, Rowan found herself thinking, as if repeating a litany, reassuring herself. Power can be directed, controlled. Will squinted at the tiny square, released it to hang in the air before him; then, using thumb and forefingers, he grasped alternate corners and pulled.

  The square expanded.

  Magic is what happens when you have a very precise control over the movement of power. The square was translucent, like a frosted pane of glass, and Rowan could see Willam through it. Movement flickered within the square’s four borders, at varying depths, some of which absolutely could not be reconciled against the distance of Willam’s face. The effect was dizzying.

  It had no such effect on Willam. He watched, thoughtful, then looked through it at Rowan. “This is the dragon we stole,” he told her. “It’s the only one in contact at the moment.”

  She forced down nausea. “Very well.”

  He puzzled at her a moment, then seemed to understand, and looked apologetic. He took hold of the insubstantial square, and turned it around in the air to face her.

  Depth suddenly resolved. Rowan saw a shimmering surface extending into the distance, humped dark shapes nearby. It was like a small window, or a magic mirror out of an old folk-tale, showing, as such mirrors often did in their tales, a distant view.

  She recognized it. “The brook.”

  Where they had left the dragon. She was seeing through the eyes of a dragon.

  And, she now understood, with utter amazement, she had before been viewing this scene from behind, not merely mirror-reversed, but with depth itself reversed, near to far, far to near. She found this easy to comprehend mathematically; in fact, it worked out with a satisfying neatness. But it remained freakish as experienced, as if, somehow, she had been standing on the far side of existence itself, viewing the entire universe from a point of view opposite to everything.

  She had once before in her life experienced so great a shift, so complete a turning about and change . . .

  A deep, bitter winter at the edge of the Red Desert. The air had been too dry for snow, but the ground itself froze, as it often did, so that it crunched and crumbled beneath the feet, and two sun dogs, nearly as bright as the sun itself, stood in the sky, illusory companions of the true sun.

  Out of this cold, from the far, crisp distance, had wandered a strange figure. At first the people of Umber thought it to be a bear out of legend, with its strange humped shape and trudging gait. The villagers had sufficient time to speculate, with the cold air so clear. They gathered at the edge of town, young Rowan among them, wrapped in blankets and stamping her feet warm.

  But when the figure neared it resolved into a person, bundled hugely against the frigid air, carrying an outsized pack; and when the person arrived in the common square, and pulled back the fur-lined hood, Rowan saw, amazingly, a woman.

  A woman who traveled, alone, in the dead of winter. A stranger, brown-skinned, blue-eyed, the first person Rowan had ever seen whom she had not known since birth; either her own birth, or the other’s.

  In later years Rowan came to know her well, as both a merciless taskmistress and a gentle, sympathetic soul, with kind words for her young Academy students so far from their homes, and harsh ones for those who slacked in their studies: the steerswoman Keridwen.

  But on that day she had been a stranger, with stories of far lands, odd and delightful facts, and an open, cheerful air that made her seem a bright star flickering here and there, in this corner and that of the great winter lodge—asking questions.

  Questions, and more questions; she seemed to have no end of them.

  Some were questions Rowan had herself asked, of her family and fellow villagers: asked and asked more, until they grew tired of her, and declared that she must be mentally deficient, to not know all these things as matters of simple fact, to need explanations for the obvious.

  But when Keridwen asked, she was answered. And sometimes, questions were asked of her, always beginning: Tell me, lady . . .

  Rowan shadowed Keridwen about the lodge, listening to the answers and explanations that had been denied Rowan from the time she was a very little girl—all of them delivered in formal, respectful tones.

  At last, in the quiet of the evening, by the center fire, Rowan had gathered her courage to ask her own question: Tell me, lady, why do they always answer you?

  Because I am a steerswoman.

  And there had begun Rowan’s life. She asked, and was answered.

  Question followed question, ranging farther and wider and, later, deeper. And in the heart of the night, with everyone wrapped in their sleeping alcoves, young Rowan had asked: Does everyone answer you?

  Every person I choose to ask. And not only people.

  Rowan could not understand this. Who else is there to ask, but people?

  You can ask the hawk how it hunts by watching it do it. You can ask the river how it flows by putting your hand in the moving water. These are answers, too. And Rowan recognized a truth she had always known, for this was how she herself asked, and was answered, when the village grew tired of her.

  And more, the blue-eyed stranger went on: Where the river flows from, how it grows, at what speed, where in the Land its path must go; how stones fall; where in the sky the stars must rise and set; what makes the seasons happen; all of these answers are being spoken for us, constantly. The universe itself is speaking, all the time.

  Young Rowan was not at all certain how literally she was expected to take this statement. Why can’t we hear it?

  First: you have to listen. And second—and the steerswoman smiled—you have to know the language.

  The language was mathematics.

  Rowan watched Willam: stark white hair, and copper eyes; hands moving across the panel in his lap; glance flicking here and there, where now six blocks of letters of pure light stood painted in the air around him.

  What if, Rowan thought, you knew the language, or portions of it, so well that you not only understood it, but could speak it; could not only ask the universe, but tell it?

  Instruct it. Command.

  Magic.

  She knew that this could not be done by writing down formulas, or by uttering them with her voice. Numbers and formulas were representations of relationships possessed by objects and forces. But by knowing the relationships with utter precision, and manipulating the objects, directing the forces— one could, in fact, command.

  Everyt
hing might be power; but all power must move by the numbers.

  “Here’s where you can help me,” Willam said. He leaned through the light-words as if they were merely what they were, light, and retrieved the square containing the distant dragon’s sight. He shrank it between his hands, replaced it in its previous position within the red-lined lattice. “I don’t know how many jammers Jannik has found so far, but we still have full coverage of the field. I don’t think he can disable enough of them to make gaps before we’re done here—but he might. If he does . . .”

  “The house will be able to call to him, and try to tell him that we’re here?”

  “Well, no, not anymore. I’ve stopped that. But he might try to talk to the house himself, just to check. I’m not sure what would happen then, but we ought to stop what we’re doing, and get out.”

  Reaching out, he took the entire lattice, turned it to face Rowan, placed it between him and her, expanded it slightly. His fingers danced on his lap panel, and the lines of red light dimmed slightly; Rowan found she could still see it clearly, while remaining able to see through it easily. “Now—” Willam glanced up at her, then looked again, puzzled.

  “What is it?”

  “You’re awfully easy about this, all of a sudden,” he said.

  Rowan realized that this was true: she found the structure hanging in thin air before her not freakish, nor frightening, but intriguing, and lovely, in its way. “I’ve given the matter some thought,” she said simply.

  He leaned back, regarding her with something like amazement. “You know,” he said, “you never stop surprising me.”

  “The feeling is mutual. What do you want me to do?”

  He leaned forward again, indicating from behind the shrunken square he had replaced. “That’s our dragon, outside of the jammers’ influence. All of these”—his finger swept among the other squares—“are the dragons still in the field, inside the jammers.”

  With the lattice larger and no longer reversed, Rowan could read the little words. “ ‘Out of Range.’ ”

  “Meaning, too far away for the controlling spell to reach. Which they aren’t really, but the spell can’t tell the difference. It just knows it can’t reach them.”

  “Some of the squares say,” and she puzzled over the unfamiliar word, “ ‘Offline.’ ”

  He nodded. “Those are the dragons that are dead. If Jannik disables enough jammers—”

  “The other squares will show what the dragons see.”

  “That’s right.” He sat back again. “The spell’s not set up to warn me by itself, that’s not how it usually works, and I don’t have the time to figure out how to change it. And pretty soon I’ll be too busy to watch the monitors myself.”

  She decided that he was referring to the array of dragon eyes. “I can do it.” Arranged as it was, she could hardly miss any change in the configuration.

  “Good.” He gazed about, at the ranks of letters in the air. Within each block, the letters moved, marching along, shifting position, appearing at the lower corner of some invisible boundary, proceeding to the left, then up to the next line. “You know,” Willam said, shaking his head, half disbelieving, “Corvus doesn’t have anything nearly this sophisticated.”

  “Really?” And why would Jannik, she wondered, then realized. “Jannik inherited this from Kieran?”

  “No . . .” Willam adjusted the position of two blocks, in order to view them more comfortably. “This is a lot older than that. It probably goes back to Donner.”

  Rowan was confused for a moment, then recalled that the city had adopted the name of its first wizard, out of gratitude for his rescue of the people from marauding dragons. Dragons almost certainly planted by Donner himself.

  She studied Willam again. “Not to tell you your business, but shouldn’t you be doing something?”

  “It will get hot enough, soon enough,” he said distractedly, then came back to his surroundings. “Actually, I set up these spells to search for me. They’re checking the supposedly empty storage spaces for leftover pieces of records.” Something occurred to him. “But. . .” He plied his lap panel again.

  Something appeared to his far right, an opaque area three feet wide by three feet tall. “No, of course”—he seemed annoyed at himself—“the updates are running. Let’s see if Jannik was looking earlier.”

  The dark area flashed into light, and color: mostly white, with spots and streaks of blue, green, brown, yellow, and at the upper limit, a ragged section of brick red. “Well, that’s no good—” Something to his left caught his attention: one of the blocks of letters and numbers had ceased marching, and changed color from blue to red. Willam turned away from the complex colors, toward the simple ones. “We’ve got something.” He pulled the block closer, directly through another section, still marching, which it had been half tucked behind.

  Willam caused a square to appear, close by, its existence indicated merely by four white lines. This he picked out of the air as casually as if it were a pane of glass, and held it over the red-lettered section, moving it here and there. White letters appeared inside the square. “A fragment,” Will said, “with no date. That’s why the searcher brought it to me . . . It looks like a diary.” He read, tilting his head from side to side, impatient. “Well, someone fell in love . . . with a truly wonderful man, la, la, and this does run on and on, and . . . it looks like the writer is a woman, so it’s someone before Kieran.” A few taps at his lap panel, and the red became blue, and marched once more.

  “Did Jannik keep a diary of any sort?”

  “If he did, it will show up.” He indicated several of the blocks. “Those searchers are looking at the unused storage areas, for old information left behind. These”—he pointed— “are going through the indexed areas, looking for anything with a date from a month before Kieran died, through a year afterward. That one,” to his far left, “is looking for the names of Kieran or Slado, starting from one end of the storage, and the one behind it is doing the same thing, starting at the other end. Ho.” The second panel became red. “Let’s see . . .” Willam pulled it forward.

  Rowan found it useful to think of the blocks of letters as being written on invisible sheets of paper, pinned up on equally invisible walls, from which Willam would pluck as needed. It was only at this point that she realized that the invisible walls seemed to rise from the ranked flat panels of the unfolded desk.

  But these pages searched, of themselves, wrote their findings on themselves, and would call for one’s attention with a change of color when they found something.

  Willam was passing his white-outlined ghost-square over the red symbols. He made a noise of amusement. “There you are.”

  She was not certain what he meant. “Me?”

  He nodded, reading through the white square. “From . . . more than six years ago. The last time you were here in Donner. Slado’s general order to find and kill you. Jannik’s reply, that you were here, and he’d take care of it.” He looked wry. “Slado sounds very annoyed.”

  She wanted to know his words, exactly; but something caught her attention. “Dragon.”

  He looked up. “I don’t see it.”

  “Just for a moment. That one.” She indicated, bringing her fingertip a fraction of an inch from the relevant square. She could not bring herself to touch it. “I saw a scene, briefly. Shapes moving, in darkness.” She found it useful to think of a little window that had rapidly opened on a distant view, then immediately closed.

  Will was disturbed. “He found a jammer, with no others operating nearby at the moment. Then another must have activated, almost right away. This is going too slow.” He checked his searchers. “There’s a lot of storage to go through. But if I make any more searchers, they’ll start tripping over each other . . .”

  He sat back, now tense. He glanced about, found nothing he could do; then his eye fell on the large square on his right, where the blotches of random colors still shone. “Well, let’s make sure it’s not a comp
lete waste of time.” His fingers moved on his lap panel; the colors altered in flashes, over and over. “It must have been clear sometime . . .”

  Almost simultaneously, three pages of words turned red. Will turned away from the square of random colors. “We’ve got something, from the fragments.” He pulled one of the pages forward. “It looks like words,” he said, as if this would disappoint him. “Numbered lines, and lots of spaces.” Rowan could see nothing of the sort, but Willam pulled the small white out-line over it, which Rowan decided to think of as a magical glass that would translate from one language to another.

  Unfortunately, gazing through the dragon lattice, through the back of the page of red words, and through the back of the translator, at words written backward, Rowan could not make sense of the odd-shaped letters.

  “No good,” Willam said. “A list. Something to do with flower bulbs.” The letters went blue again, and walked up the page. Two more pages had gone red, waiting for Willam’s attention. He reached for the nearest, but then noticed one of the farther ones. “There!” He stood. “I recognize that command.” He plucked the page out of the air, remained standing. He did not use the translator, as if this were too urgent to bother with it. He read directly, blue light on his face. “Override—that’s a command that means, ‘Stop everything else you’re doing, and only pay attention to this . . .’ ”

  Rowan waited. Willam nodded slightly, then more definitely, talking as if to himself. “Override, there, yes . . . And shut down, and shut down . . . Delayed command, I don’t know that one, but it’s asking for a lot of power . . .” He sat, on the edge of the wizard’s chair, reading eagerly. “Time to execution . . . and close all communication . . .” He looked up at her. “Would you like to know the exact second the Guidestar was called down?”

  She said, with feeling, “Very much.”

  “At fourteen hundred thirty-eight, and twenty-three seconds. On the two hundred and forty-first day of the year. This is Slado, bringing down the Guidestar.”