The Language of Power

by Rosemary Kirstein

  “A record of that event?”

  “A record of the orders he used . . He began to set the block of letters aside; but then stopped short, raised his brows. “Do you know . . . ,” he said, suddenly amazed, “if I had the right clearance . . . If I had the right clearance, I could bring one down myself, now.” He recovered, studied the page again, closely. “What’s just before this . . . ?” He read, became disappointed. “Broken off. Just a fragment.” He gave the page a shove and released it; it drifted up and back, then came to a stop high above the others, as if looking down on them, waiting. Willam turned his attention to another searcher.

  For no reason Rowan could identify, this action caused her mood of acceptance to waver. For a moment, the crossing red lines through which she watched seemed solid, like the bars of a cage; the floating blocks of letters beyond, and now above, inexplicable and threatening; the man in the center, with his skin and white hair painted blue and red in the strange light, not only a stranger, but stranger than that, a chimera called forth by some magic spell—something, perhaps, other than completely human.

  Something now possessing the knowledge to call down a Guidestar.

  Power may move by the numbers; but the human spirit did not.

  Nonsense. This was Willam.

  She tried to recapture her mood of but a moment before. These lights—truly, they were beautiful, purer and richer than any colors she had seen before, their arrangement clean, a visible embodiment of the mathematics that must lie beneath them—

  But it remained too strange to see such clarity and purity anywhere other than within her own mind.

  She found her gaze drifting toward the large, multicolored square on Willam’s right. Its randomness seemed more natural, its colors soothing. The blue, especially, seemed lovely, restful, almost calling to her in a voice she thought she knew. A swirl of brown specks within one blue area pleased her, as well—

  She stopped short. She stared.

  Eventually, she said, in a voice sounding distant to herself: “Do you have time for a question?”

  “A short one,” Will replied, half under his breath as he worked.

  “Am I looking at the world?”

  He looked up. Then he looked at the square, then back at her. He said, gently, “Yes. Yes, you are.”

  Wulfshaven was obscured by clouds, but the sweep of the Islands, in a patch of clear, glittering sea, indicated it. Donner was a glimpse of shoreline, Southport invisible, as was the Dolphin Stair.

  The Western Mountains were a riot of browns under thin mist, twisted, seeming a pause in some ancient violence. The upper branches of the River Wulf emerged from the cloud cover, reaching toward their sources. In the far north, the Red Desert was cloudless, and as flat and featureless as Rowan remembered it, small arms of green farms encroaching its edges, with a few sunlit flickers of irrigation.

  All foreshortened, not like a map at all, but exactly as seen by an eye hanging high in the sky.

  She matched the angles. “The Eastern Guidestar.”

  “Mm.” Willam had several red blocks waiting for him; he dismissed them after a brief glance, one after the other. “I’m sorry I can’t find better weather for you, but Jannik only stored today’s view. Do you want an overlay?”

  She heard herself say, distantly, “I don’t know that word . . .”

  He replied by playing his fingers across his lap board; thin lines appeared across the view, outlining details the steerswoman already knew by heart. She gazed, scarcely daring to breathe.

  “I’m going to give you the Western Guidestar,” he said, casually, as if the star itself could be presented as a gift. Then, apologetically: “The change might make you dizzy.”

  It did not. But it showed her parts of the world no steerswoman or member of the common folk had ever seen.

  Familiar parts of the world were slanted, compressed by perspective. The black outline of lands below the cloud remained, speaking to her with the logic of geography: mountains, here, with rivers twisting between; a collection of round lakes, like jewels from a broken necklace, their spill arcing across the land. And beyond, far to the west, under the clouds, an outline ragged and brutal, with nothing beyond—an ocean?

  The steerswoman tried to burn the view into her mind, to reconstruct later, but then: “Dragons.”

  Will stopped short. He seemed a bit out of breath. “How many?” But he saw for himself. “Oh . . .” Seven adjacent dragon eyes showed tiny night scenes. “Wait . . .” They winked out, as if little shutters had come down on little windows. Out of range, the shutters read.

  “That’s not good . . . ,” Willam said.

  “How many jammer-spells altogether?”

  “Thirty.” Willam was disturbed.

  “And you have no way, even from here, of knowing how many remain?”

  “No.” Four of his searcher pages needed attention. He returned to them, but kept glancing up at the dragon eyes.

  Rowan did not want to interrupt his work, and waited before speaking further. In the interim, Will puzzled over the searchers without using the translator, selected two, sent them to join the one hanging high above, and set the others back to their work. Rowan said, in the pause: “Did you use any sort of pattern in arranging the jammers?”

  Will grew still, and quiet. “No . . . ,” he said; but it was with deep uncertainty. “I tried to be random—”

  “You can’t have been random.” A truly random arrangement could not—

  She struggled a moment. She had not had a real grip on the phenomenon of the jammers. They each had a range, she had been told; but range of sight, range of sound—these she understood. An object could block sound, and sight; but Will had said “coverage . . .”

  She thought of the wizard’s green umbrella, made huge, a half a kilometer across, with its handle rooted to the ground.

  Then multiplied: thirty of them, crowded together, some folded, some open, with edges overlapping, creating solid shade beneath. Then some disappearing, suddenly; and some of the folded ones opening . . .

  How many to maintain full coverage?

  “Will, the jammers are not arranged randomly.” The constraints of the problem delimited the solution. “And there’s more than one way to discern organization.”

  “Like you did in the dragon fields.” He thought, displeased, then became more confident. “No. Rowan, Jannik is nowhere near as smart as you are. He’s not even as smart as I am! He probably doesn’t use a tenth of what he has here, and he couldn’t do what I’m doing, working behind the interface. I think . . . I think he was just lucky for a moment.”

  “Then let’s hope this doesn’t turn out to be his lucky day.”

  He looked around at his searching pages. “All right; let them trip over each other.”

  He caused more to appear, dozens. They stood tucked behind each other, crowding the air around him: bright butterflies of light hovering, as if in a frozen moment of time, magic words moving on their wings.

  Willam worked; Rowan watched. When she became overwhelmed by strangeness, she turned her gaze to the view of the world.

  With more searchers, Willam was busier, correcting them when they became confused. Or so she assumed; she did not interrupt to ask. But at one point, he did something that caused numbers to appear at the top edge of the dragon eyes, and indicated them to her silently. She watched them and soon decided that they represented the remaining time to the end of what Willam had called the “updates.”

  It was how much time they had left. Rowan was disturbed to note that nearly two hours had passed.

  Pages began to merge. Will would pull one out of the air, lay it over another, and the two would blend into each other like soap bubbles. These he set aside. He had run out of convenient space in front, and had begun sending them to stand over the wood panels behind him. He was lit from three sides, by pure blue and red light, moving, and on one side, by the sweet light of the world itself, shining from his immediate right.

&nb
sp; Twice dragon eyes flickered to life, then closed. Rowan drew his attention to them by pointing silently; he merely spared a glance each time, and continued to work.

  Rowan watched the dragon eyes, watched the time, watched the world, watched the man working magic.

  He moved quickly; she did not think she had ever seen anyone move with such precision, speed, and concentration.

  With less than an hour left, there came a moment when none of the searchers presently asked for attention; Willam cast about, almost petulantly, as if he had grown so accustomed to speed that he could not now do without it.

  He found nothing to do. He sat back, blinking, and noticed Rowan again. He checked the searchers one more time, then reached for the pages waiting behind him, pulled them forward, spoke quickly. “This is what I’ve got so far. The Guidestar that fell—Kieran was using it a lot, I don’t know what for, yet. I’ve found some pieces of commands, some of them with dates and times still attached. It looks like he accessed the Guidestar almost every day.” A searcher signaled red; he stood to see it closer, not bothering with the translator square. “Right”—he nodded as he read—“and this is one from the night he changed. And it doesn’t look any different from the others—” Another searcher turned red. “And . . . that’s another.” He paused. “Same night.” His gaze narrowed. “I can see the commands, but what follows them makes no sense. And it’s that way with each one, so far.”

  “Your translator square is no help?”

  He was confused a moment; then he reasoned out what she was referring to. “No, that’s for words. I don’t need it for commands. It just confuses things . . .” As if to confirm this, he picked up the translator, moved it on the page. “No.” He set it aside to hang in midair. “It looks . . . it looks like this ought to be a pointer, to where something is stored”—he glanced aside at another searcher—“but when I look in the place, it’s either empty, or has something else in it . . . and there are prefixes before that, that I just don’t recognize.”

  Another searcher called for him. He glanced at it, glanced again, then brought it close. “And here’s another.” He set it beside the first, read, comparing the two. “Same thing,” he said, helplessly. “Call to the Guidestar . . . access . . . these prefixes, the pointers—”

  He stopped short. He glanced back and forth. “No, that can’t be right.”

  He sat back, puzzling. He asked, apparently of himself: “How much storage space did Kieran have?” He sat up, plied his lap board again.

  The light behind Rowan altered. She looked back.

  Where the bookcase had been there now stood an entire wall of oak-faced filing cabinets.

  Will muttered, derisively, “Oh, that’s stupid; just tell me . . .” The cabinets disappeared. Rowan remained staring at the bookcases. And the very peculiar thing about it was how very prosaic it was, amid all this embodiment of abstraction. Merely bookcases, and then filing cabinets, here and then gone.

  A noise from Willam called her back, and she berated herself for neglecting her dragon watch. But nothing there had changed.

  Will had three more red-lettered searchers standing beside the first two. He noticed her, said: “From the same night,” and went back to studying them, with frustration and urgency. “They can’t be pointers,” he declared, “because they’re pointing nowhere! There are no such places. They must be some commands I don’t know . . .” He scanned the waiting red searchers. “More.” He brought three forward. “Same night.” He gazed at them helplessly, shaking his head. “It makes no sense. But look”—as if Rowan could discern anything by just looking—“some of them have times, and some of the times are just, just moments apart! What was he doing?”

  He had struck some kind of wall in his understanding; Rowan recalled the many times she had done so herself. And because she had been thinking of her earlier, she now thought again of Keridwen, during Rowan’s training. When you reach a dead end, the teacher had said, you’ve made a wrong turn. Go back.

  “Tell me what a pointer is,” Rowan said.

  “Rowan—”

  “Humor me. Talk quickly, if you must.”

  He seemed to realize that he had been short with her. “Sorry. A pointer is a number that tells you where some piece of information is stored, like, like a number written on the front of a box.”

  The vanished file cabinets; the number of drawers was limited. “And these particular pointers are pointing to locations you can’t find?”

  “Which is why they can’t really be pointers.”

  Marel had sent his clerk into his old files for the records of deliveries . . . “If the locations are not in this building, where else might they be?”

  He looked at her, astonished; then looked to his right.

  The world itself stood before him, or a portion of it, as if this room were high in the sky, and the square an open window, looking down—

  A mistake; Rowan ought not think of the view as down; her stomach twisted; she shut her eyes; she gripped the sides of the stepladder.

  “How are the dragons?”

  She forced her eyes open, suddenly terrified that she might have missed something. “Just the same one.”

  “Good—” He was standing; he leaned across the desk, his body passing through ghostly pages; he gripped edges of the dragon lattice, shifted it, turned it to angle toward Rowan from her right. “Here—” He turned back, took hold of the window open on the world, and moved it.

  Toward Rowan. She felt she was falling—

  “Here.” He released it. It stood on her left, a hole in the air, terrifying. “Wait—” Will played the lap board, still standing. “Waitwaitwait . . . there.” He leaned forward again, spoke quickly. “What you’re looking for is structures—buildings, or roads—someplace where they shouldn’t be. Take your hand—” He took it himself; it was limp in his grip. “Flat, like this.” He arranged her fingers, moved her hand forward. “And touch it, so—” She was touching nothing, she felt nothing, only air— “And move, like this—”

  The entire world shifted under her hand—or the window did. The view slid up; she was twisting in the sky, she was spinning, falling—

  Instinctively, her hand pulled back sharply. Willam caught it again, brought it back. “Go slow . . . move smoothly.”

  Color slipped, left to right: blue, brown, green, white, weird, dizzying. In pure animal reflex, she flailed, jerked back, escaped Willam’s hand.

  He startled. “Rowan?” She turned to him, wild-eyed.

  He had half climbed across the top of the desk and was leaning out toward her. “Rowan? Rowan, I’m sorry,” he said. He made to reach to her again, then dropped his hand. “I’m pushing you too fast, I know. It’s just. . .you were doing so well. . .”

  He remained, waiting: a human form seeming to emerge from layer after ordered layer of cold, glowing symbols. The light of the world itself painted his copper gaze with blue, with white; Rowan could almost read the map of the world, reversed, in Willam’s eyes.

  And to his left, the numbers above the dragon eyes showed thirty-five minutes remaining.

  Then thirty-four.

  “I’m looking for Slado’s place,” Rowan said.

  “Yes . . .”

  “Let me try.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  He smiled, relieved. “Good. Someone has to.” He moved back to his chair but remained standing, reaching down to the board. “I tried asking for it by name, but I don’t think the name Corvus called it is its true name . . . It’s important to have the true name . . .” His fingers moved faster, his voice grew distracted. “But . . .” One of the many pages erased itself, then spawned new writing. “Maybe I can find out if these pointers do fit. . .”

  Rowan turned back to the magic window. Awkward, the steerswoman moved the world with her hand.

  It was hard. Touch gave her no cue, no support. Her arm trembled, jumped. The view of the world leapt west, north, wildly. The sight was too
strange; her vision seemed to fragment and reassemble randomly, dizzying. Her skin was damp; she tasted bile. She fought, focused, forced herself.

  This was not the world. It was a map. She knew maps.

  She tried again. The lovely colors jittered, jerked, a view all strangeness, no country that she knew, but then: “There’s something here.”

  Willam glanced, dismissed it. “That’s not it. That’s the Grid. It collects power. Keep trying.”

  There was now no foreshortening, no compression of perspective. She was looking straight down. She knew where she must be: directly beneath the Western Guidestar. By clumsy leaps, she began to work back toward the Inland Sea.

  She noticed that the soft pad of Will’s fingertips against his lap board had ceased. She glanced at him.

  He sat quiet, and very still, as if caught in a pause beyond which he could not pass. He noticed her regard with a flick of his eyes, said: “Wherever it is that Slado does live, the pointers aren’t pointing there, either.”

  Then he leaned back slowly and gave himself to thought. Rowan turned back to the world.

  She must work quickly. She could not work quickly. She worked, the only way she was able—

  “Rowan, stop.”

  “No, I can do this—”

  “No. Stop. Now.”

  She stopped. She turned back to him. He remained motionless.

  An entire minute spun by.

  Then: “Rowan, you have to leave.”

  “No.”

  He pushed his chair back, picked up his burlap sack, set it in his lap. “Please.” But there was no pleading in his voice. He spoke quietly. He began drawing a number of small objects from his sack, setting them on the desk.

  “Why—” Rowan began.

  “There’s no time to explain,” he said. “Just go.” He was assembling something, attaching the objects to each other, moving smoothly, swiftly, calmly.

  Too calmly. It was that deep calm that he possessed when he knew for certain exactly what he must do. It did not comfort Rowan; he seemed to her at that moment like one who had made some ultimate decision, some final choice from which there could be no turning back.