Academic Exercises (39 page)

In the end I opted for
verbum scripsi
rather than
verba scripsi
or
scripsimus
, simply because I liked the sound of it better. Strange thought; generations of practitioners will use those words, believing them to be immutable and—well—magical, and all because, at a given moment in time,
I
made a decision, based on preference, whim. Anyway,
verbum scripsi
it is. I have this mental image of an endless succession of students muttering “verbum scripsi” over and over under their breath as they file into the examination halls. I hope it’ll be easy to remember, and that they won’t lose marks if they get it slightly wrong,
verba
or
scripsimus
, because either of those will do just as well. But I won’t be there to speak up for them, of course.

An endless succession. Communication divorced from the presence of the communicator. The dead speak to us, and through us to others yet unborn. And you can perform this miracle by scratching obscenities on a wall, if nobody can be bothered to clear it off.

I didn’t tell her, of course. Risk of observer bias. Instead, I waited till she was asleep, then put her deep under with
dormienda
. Then I set to work.

I enjoyed my two years in the scriptorium, mostly because I was so good at it. I’ve always loved being good at things. It was a loss to the profession, they told me, when my time was up. I was the youngest ever illuminator of capitals; they let me do five-colour initials in my first year, and by the time I left I was doing gold leaf. Best of all, though, they told me, was my basic cursive script; in other words, my handwriting, would you believe. The clearest, best spaced, most classically formed letters they’d ever seen.

That was then, of course; many years ago. But, apparently, there are some things you don’t forget.

I wrote out
verbum scripsi
in full on her face as she slept, using oak-gall and soot in a thin alcohol base. I covered her forehead and both cheeks. Then I got rid of the mirror and covered up all the reflective surfaces in the room, and waited to see what would happen.

For the record;
verbum scripsi
is a ninth-level form enabling the user to take control of the subject’s mind and body. In order to be effective, it must be written on the subject’s skin. The subject need not be conscious. So far, I have made no tests to ascertain whether the effect is diminished if the subject is aware of what is being done. Given the nature of the form, however, I doubt whether this will make much difference in practice.

The next step, logically, will be to

Which was as far as she’d got.

Food for thought there, all right. For example; I sent her down to the village to buy food. Actually, there were three days’ rations in my saddlebags, something I neglected to mention, because I wanted her out of the way, because I needed to think. See? I imposed my will on her with a command—verbal, in this instance, but you can give orders just as well in writing. Giving orders, controlling, commanding, is easy. You don’t even have to be there. You don’t even have to be alive.

Grandson of the immortal Saloninus; thirty years to a generation, so round about AUC 1790; ninety years ago. Practically certain both of them were dead by now. Ninety years since the tower was last occupied? Hardly. Five; ten at most. And the reports said, activity here within the last eighteen months. Our orders (written
and
verbal) were, simply, investigate. Fine. An open-ended remit like that suggested that something nasty was suspected, but nobody knew what, and couldn’t be bothered to find out. Entirely possible, therefore, that the book and the allogloss texts were nothing to do with the problem we’d been sent to deal with. Sometimes I wonder what they do all day in General Situations. Whatever it is, it can’t be their jobs. They wouldn’t last a day in the private sector.

I needed a breath of fresh air, so I went outside. The sun was shining, so bright that the tower shone white against a rich blue sky. I thought about that for a moment, then went back inside and got the journal. With light this bright, maybe I’d be able to read it for myself.

Needless to say—

[The voice in my head was different, somehow]

Needless to say, he’d got it completely wrong. The form he’d invented worked all right, but it didn’t do what he thought it did.

Many women are arrogant; a great many women are stupid. But that special blend of stupidity and arrogance; my unique insight allows me to be quite categorical on this point. I don’t see how a woman could be capable of it. Quite simply that. It came as a terrible shock to me. I actually felt
guilty
about it, though of course it wasn’t my fault.

For the record; the form
verbum scripsi
, which I have recorded here and which I sincerely hope nobody will ever be stupid enough to use ever again, comprises a verbal component (the magic words, if you will) and the act of writing on the skin of another person. The effect of the form is to transfer to the person written on (the inscribed? The writee?) an intuitive summary of the writer’s consciousness at the time of writing. When I woke up, I knew everything, as though his memories had been
put
into my head. I knew what he’d done; put me to sleep with
dormienda
, concocted a form which he thought gave him the power to control my mind, planned an extensive and meticulous program of research into the way in which women gain, use and lose the talent (with me as his research tool, his subject, his raw material). I had his motivation; to improve the standing of talented women with a view, eventually, to seeing them recognised as men’s equals, provided that our biological frailties—his delightful expression—could be overcome by training and artificial assistance. I also knew, with summer-sunlight clarity, how he was prepared to sacrifice my talent and my life to further his sublime aim. Oh, and I could now fully participate in his obsession with me—intellectual admiration, a fierce collector’s desire to possess an exceptionally rare specimen, and lots and lots of straightforward physical lust. And something else, of course.

I am reminded of that fine old excuse, I don’t know what got into me. Except; I do. Unfortunately, knowledge is no antidote. A person can know all about the disease that’s killing her, but that doesn’t cure it. So; again for the record, and I do hope someone reads this; before he wrote on me, I was perfectly sane and rational. I had a perfectly functional moral compass and a proper, if conventional, respect for human life.

I’m telling the page this, and I hope the page will tell someone else. It wasn’t my fault. It wasn’t me. Not my insanity, but his. Not murder, but—what, suicide? I think we need a new category of homicide. Is there a lawyer in the house?

I stopped reading and went back inside. I wasn’t feeling too good.

My hands had been hurting for some time; a sort of dull throbbing, which suggested to me (though I wasn’t in the mood to listen) that scraped-off parchment flakes and brick dust had got into the cuts and cracks in my hand and turned septic. Not too good; you can get blood poisoning that way, and die. That’s a problem with reading allogloss, of course. It starts to become an obsession, as though the narrator’s will to be heard grows stronger than your own. Probably, now I come to think of it, why I’d refused to take the book back to the Studium. He’d been talking to
me
, after all. He was mine, just as I was his.

Hers, now. And I knew what had happened.

She came back just before dusk with bread, bacon, sausage and a jar of that revolting pickled cabbage that the country people seem to live on, though it always gives me the most appalling heartburn. I was outside, waiting for her.

“Is that you?” I called out.

“No, it’s the Supreme Archimandrite. Who do you think it is?”

Made me laugh. Questions of identity and all that. “If you wouldn’t mind stopping right there,” I said. “I don’t think you should come any closer.”

Silence. Well, we all know the risks. We never talk about them. But she knew enough to take me seriously.

“Something’s not quite right,” I said, as matter-of-factly as I could manage. “Probably best if you keep away from the tower. A bit of a nuisance, since it’s getting dark and all, but I think it’d be better.” I paused. “Hello? Can you hear me?”

No reply. Smart girl. Using
vox in tenebris
, I could’ve located her exactly by her voice. If she had the sense she was born with, she’d be doing a long dislocation—stop, query, can she do long dislocations? No idea, the subject hadn’t come up. If not, at the very least a deep
scutum
, or better still,
lorica
, which would at least protect her from any physical harm I might do her. But she’d be listening. Wouldn’t she? No way of telling (just as the writer doesn’t know who, if anyone, will read. Ah, your heavy-handed symbolism! Now read on.)

“I think what happened,” I said into the darkness, “is this. Well, actually, I’m pretty sure I know. You’ll need to tell the board of enquiry, so pay attention.”

I told her about him—Saloninus’ grandson—and his female protegee. I laid a certain stress on his motives, which were for the best, and rather less on his methods. I explained about
verbum scripsi
and how it hadn’t done what he thought it did.

“That’s as far as I’ve got,” I concluded. “But I know the rest.” Pause. Maybe she’d run for it—which would be entirely sensible—and I was talking to myself. “I know what happened,” I went on, “because I scraped down that manuscript, so it’s sort of in my blood. I’ll come to that in a minute.”

I paused for breath, which I took in the form of a deep, wolflike sniff. A female human scent is easy to find, using
nasem lupi
. “She killed him,” I went on, starting to move. “Partly it was her or him; self defence. Partly it was sheer rage at what he’d done. Mostly, though, I think it was pure intellectual curiosity.”

I can walk very quietly when I want to.

“So she killed him,” I went on, “bashed him on the head with—” I stooped and felt around. “A stone. Then she flayed off his skin.”