The Language of Power

by Rosemary Kirstein

  “But it’s his authority!”

  “But he’s dead.” Bel backed off to sit on her heels beside him. Will went on: “When a person dies, his clearance is . . . canceled, negated. The spells won’t accept it anymore.” He looked up at Rowan. “But when that was done, Farside was already isolated. It never learned that Kieran is dead.”

  “What’s Farside?” Bel asked.

  “The third place of strong magic,” Rowan said. “Will, this is why Farside obeyed you, once your commands reached it?”

  “That’s right.”

  Bel asked Willam: “What can this Farside do for us?”

  “Nothing, anymore. I’d need the magic in Jannik’s house to reach it again . . . But, I wonder. I wonder if there are other systems—other collections of spells that have been isolated for a long time. It seems to me that there must be. I know the wizards aren’t as powerful as they used to be.”

  “How do we use it?” Bel asked.

  “You can’t. It isn’t Kieran’s passwords, or his voice. It’s what comes after that, it’s . . . it’s what the spells translate Kieran’s voice and passwords and scan into.”

  Rowan considered the acts done in Jannik’s study, remembered a phrase. She said, “We’d have to get behind the interface.”

  He nodded.

  “Willam, I can’t possibly do that myself.”

  “I know. But I shouldn’t be the only one who has it. Because somewhere, sometime, someone else might know how to use it. Because . . . because it’s something powerful, that the wizards don’t know we have.”

  Rowan opened the paper. Numbers and letters, in meaningless sequence. She found herself impelled to say, irrelevantly, “Willam, your handwriting is terrible.”

  At this, the man who mere hours before had nimbly manipulated bizarre and incomprehensible magics looked as sheepish as a child admonished by a teacher. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t often write by hand.”

  “You generally write by magic?” Bel asked.

  “Well, yes.”

  She grinned. “Clever boy. But what about the Krue in the Outskirts? Could they use it if they had it?”

  “I don’t know. It depends on what kind of link they have. But Rowan is right; if your friend Fletcher could turn against the wizards, another might, too.”

  Bel laughed. “Rowan,” she urged, “make a copy!” She turned back to Willam. “One of them is bound to turn. You can’t live as an Outskirter, be one of us, without learning to care about your tribe.”

  Tell her, Rowan thought; but she did not have the heart, at the moment, to quash Bel’s enthusiasm.

  Rowan sifted among the charts on the table, located her logbook. She flipped through it, looking for the first blank page.

  “It’s possible,” Will was saying to Bel. “Those people are so isolated from the Krue. They’d have to form local attachments, it’s only natural.”

  Loose sheets slid out of the book, lost themselves among the charts. Rowan retrieved them:

  Slado, nursing his tea. Slado, standing by the wharves. Slado’s portrait, left unfinished when young Ona fled. The handkerchief boy’s primitive pastoral scene. Rowan slipped them back into the logbook, one by one.

  “Some may have already turned, or be about to,” Bel was telling Will. “The tale of what has been going on has been spreading among the tribes for four years now.”

  “And if Slado uses the heat again, they could die along with the Outskirters,” Will replied. “One already has, that I know about.”

  Rowan stopped with the last drawing in her hands. She stared.

  “Slado doesn’t care,” Bel was saying. “He never warned Fletcher—”

  Rowan held up the drawing, face-out.

  Conversation ceased. Bel and Willam regarded the picture, perplexed. They shifted their confusion to the steerswoman. Rowan said nothing.

  Presently, Will spoke, tentatively. “. . . Horsies in a field?”

  Rowan said: “The sky is white, the stars are black.”

  They remained confused; then Willam blinked, and comprehension dawned. “Stars?” He took the drawing. “Kieran . . . Kieran was looking at the stars?”

  “Yes,” Rowan said, definitely.

  “Are you sure—”

  “Yes!” That was why the images had seemed so familiar, had seemed beautiful. It was the beauty of the natural world, like the sweet sight of the world itself, from high in the air. And if a Guidestar can look down, why not up?

  “Why black on white? Why not the way they would really look?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “But, why so many? Rowan, there were more than ten thousand!”

  “Kieran was looking at the sky.” She had no doubt.

  “But—” Willam studied the child’s drawing desperately, as if it were itself one of the magical images, as if it could provide the answer. “—but, why?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Rowan, you know the sky,” Bel said. “Where was he looking?”

  Rowan thought, and thought harder, trying to recall; but no, she had recognized nothing . . .

  But how could one, with the colors reversed, the view not known to be stars at all, and the entire scene viewed from behind, backward?

  The steerswoman turned out the chair and sat. She closed her eyes. “Give me a moment.” She concentrated: dots, blots, streamers, hazes . . . reverse it, match to known constellations . . .

  She heard Willam moving about in the room; there came the sound of papers being shifted; and then something was in the steerswoman’s hands. She opened her eyes, looked down. She said, in a small voice, “Oh . . .”

  It was beautiful, rendered with that inhuman perfection typical of wizards’ maps. A chart of the sky, black stars on white, but with nothing labeled, with every object mute and nameless.

  She looked up at Willam. He said simply: “Hard copy.”

  But nothing was familiar. Rowan turned it about, and about again, to no result. “This might be in the sky of the far south. There are stars beyond our horizons that no one has ever seen.”

  “Try this one.” Willam passed her another, handed hers to Bel, who studied it curiously. He held one more in his hands.

  Rowan tried again, recognized nothing; and then she did, but not from her own knowledge. “Give me the first again.” Bel passed it back to her. Rowan compared them. “They overlap.”

  They laid them on the bed, side by side. Rowan turned them about, testing orientations. “Here.” She slid them together. Two charts overlapped diagonally, with the third centered on the section in common.

  The steerswoman, the Outskirter, and the wizard’s apprentice stood regarding the result.

  Then Rowan lifted and dropped her shoulders. “Apparently Kieran was charting the sky.” A wizard who loved flowers, and children, and the stars . . . But surely ten thousand overlapping charts would cover the entire sky many times over. Why such obsessiveness?

  Accuracy, perhaps. By drawing each one fresh and comparing previous versions, errors would be obvious, and could be corrected on a master chart. Rowan separated the charts again, checked the overlapping area, and nodded. One chart did differ slightly from the other two.

  Fifty, on this one night alone, Will had said to Corvus.

  Rowan felt foolish. “Of course,” she muttered, “he didn’t actually draw these himself.” It would take Rowan hours to make an accurate chart of even a portion of the sky.

  Will looked at her in surprise. “No, they’re not drawings at all. They’re—it’s hard to explain. They’re images of what’s really there. As if you could capture exactly what you see, and save it forever.”

  Rowan rubbed her eyes, which suddenly stung with exhaustion. Magic, a part of her mind whispered; Impossible. Incomprehensible.

  No. She knew better now. Anything existing must be possible; anything existing could be comprehended. She understood Willam’s blasting-charms. A similar logic must lie behind this.

  Accept it; go o
n from there.

  “If this is what Kieran actually saw,” Rowan said, and pointed, “then, what is that?”

  Willam and Bel looked. “Stars,” Bel said.

  “Four stars,” Willam said.

  “But they’re not on this chart, nor”—she checked closely— “on this.”

  Four tiny stars, like the points of a tilted square, on one chart only. On the others, there stood in that position only a single star. “Will, what order were these”—charts would not do; she used his own word—“these images created?”

  This presented a problem, as the images were not marked. Willam finally reasoned from the order in which he had passed them out.

  In the relevant area, one star; then that star gone, and four in its place; then one star again. “These three images, all on the same night?”

  “Rowan,” Willam said, “these images were captured just seconds apart.”

  And the steerswoman knew that she could take this no farther.

  There was information here; but she could not recognize it. This was—and she was certain of it now—the very answer they had been seeking. But she could not understand it.

  Individually, each one of these captured views of the sky admitted of at least reasonable explanation. In fact, any two taken together did—because there were such things as new stars appearing where none had stood before, and she assumed that stars must sometimes die—

  But all three images taken together in sequence immediately negated even the most extreme speculation.

  New knowledge was built on earlier knowledge, built on knowledge learned earlier still, all of it growing wider, deeper, higher, and reaching endlessly farther. But these magical images represented information too distant from everything the steerswoman knew as true.

  There were steps between: a dozen, a thousand.

  Context; she had no context in which to understand this. Rowan considered long before speaking; so long that she moved the images from the bed to the table, sat down on the bed, pulled up her legs, and remained, gazing in the distance, and silent, for some time.

  Bel watched her, disappointed, then leaned against the wall, crossing her arms. “Send them to the Archives,” she said. “The Prime can put all the steerswomen there on it. Maybe together they can—”

  “Willam,” Rowan said, “if Corvus saw these images, would he understand them?”

  Bel was immediately, sharply disapproving. “Rowan, we should think carefully before we do that. Corvus may have passed you by once, but I don’t think it’s a good idea to put yourself in his path again.”

  Willam seemed not to hear Bel. At Rowan’s question, his face had become expressionless. He turned the chair out and sat, elbows on his knees, hands loose. He gazed at his hands, then looked up at the steerswoman. “I don’t know. He’s never been interested in the sky. I don’t think he knows much about it at all.”

  “But, with his magic, would he be able to learn more about it, if he chose?” Willam only nodded.

  Bel threw up her hands. “Wonderful! And whatever the wizards know, they keep secret. Let’s give them even more secrets, shall we? Let’s allow Corvus to figure all of this out, and just remain in the dark ourselves.”

  Rowan sighed. “Bel, this is beyond us. We need help.”

  “And why would Corvus help us?”

  Rowan waited for Willam to speak; he did not.

  Bel could not fail to miss this. She said slowly, in a dangerous tone: “Someone tell me what is going on.”

  “Willam,” Rowan prompted.

  Willam gathered himself to speak. He glanced at the Outskirter, but could not meet her eyes. He looked away. “Bel,” he began; but apparently he could get no farther. He fell silent.

  The steerswoman said: “Willam did not escape from Corvus. Corvus sent him here. Willam has been working for Corvus all along.”

  And the Outskirter seemed, at the moment, beyond words; but a word emerged nevertheless, weakly, on a breath not planned for speech: “What?”

  Will closed his eyes. “This wasn’t supposed to involve either of you, I didn’t know you were here—”

  Bel’s breath found its force. “What?”

  Rowan discovered that she had risen to interpose herself between Bel and Willam, and that the room was far too small for such sudden action. She found herself with her hands on Bel’s shoulders, and Bel against the wall. Rowan wondered how long that would last.

  Bel shifted her anger to Rowan, but at least used words first. “You knew!’’

  “I’ve only just found out. In Jannik’s house, when Will asked Corvus for help.”

  “Corvus was there?”

  “No. Only his voice was there. Bel, think of what Willam has done for us, working with us, helping us, giving magic to the people of Donner.” Rowan moved to look the Outskirter directly in the face, and stressed her next words, “Willam is not our enemy.”

  Bel looked at Rowan, then glanced past her at Willam. Rowan did not know what the Outskirter saw, but Bel said, “No. No, of course he’s not.” And Rowan relaxed somewhat, and released her friend. “Will, what’s the meaning of this?” Bel asked. “Why did your master send you here ? Is Corvus working on our side now?”

  “Corvus is playing his own game,” Willam said.

  “With you as his pawn!” Will did not deny this. “To do his dirty work, risk your life, and lie to your friends—and lie to a steerswoman!”

  “I tried not to!” Will said. He looked lost, helpless. “I did, but it was so hard, I had to keep watching what I said, it was hard to keep track—”

  Bel pushed Rowan aside; but there was no violence behind it. She stepped in front of Willam, and stooped down level with his face. He regarded her bleakly. “You’re talking about words,” she said. “I’m talking about actions. You did everything you could to make Rowan and me think you didn’t serve Corvus. Will—what kind of power does the wizard have over you?”

  “It’s not like that—”

  “Bel,” Rowan said.

  The Outskirter ignored her. “That blast Slado sent was meant for you! Is that how it is, then? Will you walk into danger for Corvus, lay down your life for him, betray your friends at his word—”

  “It was my idea!” Willam threw out both arms. “The whole thing was my idea! Bel”—he turned to the steerswoman— “Rowan . . . Whatever Slado is doing, it’s got to be as bad for the wizards as for the common folk, or why would he keep it secret from them? Bel, Corvus is trying to find out what’s going on but, but he has to be careful. He can’t let Slado know that he knows anything, and he can’t let Slado know he’s trying to learn even more!” He dropped his arms. “So, so after the last Bioform Clearance . . . I remembered that Slado had been an apprentice in Donner, I thought that there might be fragments of records left, and I said we should get into the house system and look for them—but Corvus wouldn’t do it.”

  “He was afraid,” Bel said, with scorn.

  “What happened to Jannik could happen to Corvus. Just as easily. But then, I thought”—he laid his hand on his chest— “I thought that if I was the one to actually do it, then if it went wrong Corvus could deny that he knew anything. So we let on that I had run away.” He leaned back, seeming suddenly weary. “And if everything went right, if no one noticed what I did, I could go back to Corvus with my tail between my legs. And Corvus would make a show of forgiving me, and take me back. The wizards would think that he was weak, and foolish, and a slave to his passions, and they’d gossip and laugh at him behind his back—but that’s all they’d do. No one would be any the wiser.” He looked up at Rowan. “I thought I could do it all myself. I thought you’d never have to know. But when it turned out to be Farside . . . I didn’t know how to reach it. I needed his help.”

  During this, Bel had seated herself on the floor, and was now looking up at him. “What a clever plan,” she said quietly. “And you couldn’t trust us enough to share it?”

  “It was safer that you didn’t know,” h
e said.

  “How would ignorance protect us?”

  “Not us, Bel,” Rowan put in. “Safer for Corvus.”

  Rowan expected anger again; but from her place on the floor, Bel looked up at Willam, showing only deep sadness. “You think we’d betray you.”

  “I think you wouldn’t have a choice. If the wizards thought you knew something—”

  “You don’t know me very well.”

  “I know them,” he said simply.

  From where she stood, Rowan could not see Willam’s expression, but Bel could. Whatever the Outskirter saw there gave her pause.

  Then abruptly Bel stood, reached past Willam, and picked up the sky images. She brushed into him as she did it; Willam did not startle, nor shy back. He seemed beyond action.

  The Outskirter fanned the three images in front of the apprentice’s face. “One man saw this, and turned good. Another man saw it and turned evil.” She paused. “Which way will Corvus go?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t know, without knowing what they mean.” And he saw the disbelief on Bel’s face; it seemed to break his heart. “Bel, I’m not lying!” he said desperately. “I don’t know! I’d tell you, if I did.”

  The steerswoman said, “I believe him.”

  Bel turned to her. “He deceived you worse than me. You’re the steerswoman.”

  “Corvus never knew that I was in the room.” Bel was surprised, and her eyes narrowed in thought. Rowan went on. “Corvus could hear and speak, but not see. Willam never betrayed my presence. And, Will—Corvus never knew that you were using Kieran’s clearance, did he?”

  “No,” Willam said. “I don’t think he should know about that.”

  “Are you playing your own game, too?” Bel asked him.

  He sighed. “I don’t know what it is that I’m doing anymore. I think I’m just tying to help.”

  Bel held up the images again. “What about these? Will you show them to Corvus?”

  Will regarded them, and was a long time replying. “Let the steerswoman keep them.”

  “Good,” Bel said. “One Slado in the world is enough.” She set them back on the table. “So, that’s it. Now you run back to your master.”