Rosemary Kirstein - Steerswoman 04 (25 page)

“This is good,” Bel said quietly as she watched Rowan secure
her sword to the saddle. “I can try to keep an eye on Jannik, from a distance
… Do you think you’ll need your cane?”

“No.”

The undercook pushed through the group at the kitchen door,
carrying two sets of saddlebags, which bulged temptingly. These she passed to
the travelers. “That’s two breakfasts, and two lunches, and a dinner. Each.”

Rowan was genuinely grateful. “I’m already looking forward
to them.”

“Hm.” The cook eyed her, up and down, so obviously assessing
the state of her health that Rowan grew embarrassed.

She was glad to be distracted by a tug at her trouser leg:
the handkerchief boy, holding up yet another folded bit of paper. Rowan adopted
a serious expression, and with great formality accepted it. “Thank you very
much.” He grinned, then suddenly dashed behind the undercook, from which
position of supposed invisibility he gave himself to a fit of giggles.

Rowan unfolded the paper, considered the depiction, and
passed it down to Bel.

“Ha. Last night’s boar.”

“At least the poor creature seems resigned to its fate.”

“More than resigned; look at that grin! No mean feat, with
all those knives sticking out of it …”

Willam completed his own arrangements, and came over to the
women. “Are we set?” he asked Rowan.

Set, for a pleasant ride about the countryside … “We’re
set,” Rowan said, and turned to mount up.

At which point, faced with a horse whose back was as tall as
her shoulder, she realized that although her left leg was adequate for walking
and stair climbing, it would definitely be unable by itself to hoist her entire
weight up such a height. And no horse would allow her to mount from the right.
She was about to ask for a mounting block when Will solved the problem by
casually gripping her by the waist and heaving her upward—and Rowan found
herself ludicrously sprawled across the saddle. She slipped her right leg
around and sat erect—quickly, lest Willam decide that it would aid the
deception for him to slap her on the backside. She gave him a warning look,
which he accepted with a grin.

Then he mounted, and the two turned their horses, waved
good-bye to Bel and the spectators, and rode out of the yard and into the
street.

The sun was risen, but had not yet cleared the buildings.
The air was cool, with that perceptible difference in temperature from the
ground up that one only truly experienced when seated high on the back of a horse.

They moved along, down the cobbled streets with shops and
homes on either side still shuttered or just stirring; and Rowan loved her
mare, who responded so easily to her, moving with such strength and lovely
economy of motion; and it was a beautiful day for a ride, with a clean blue sky
above, clear and growing brighter.

And they were off to steal a dragon.

Rowan shook her head, feeling half unreal.

She urged her mare closer to Willam’s, spoke across the distance.
“I saw the undercook take you aside just before you mounted. What did she say?”

He put on a dignified expression and spoke in an admonishing
tone. “I’m not to treat you roughly.”

She chuckled. “Good advice all around, I should think.”

There was no useful straight road toward the dragon fields;
Greyriver was wide, shallow, and marshy at the banks. Past the city limits,
Rowan and Willam turned east to drier ground, passing among shabby dwellings,
hardly more than shacks. In the distance, mud-fishers poled their flatboats,
their heads seeming to float above the grass as they threaded through the
estuaries. Two blue herons stalked the grasses, imperiously indifferent to the
presence of humans, protected by custom as signs of good luck.

Close to mid-day the travelers stopped at a small hill
facing the river and settled down on its crest, allowing the tethered horses to
graze below. Willam found a bottle of red wine in his saddlebags, considered it
regretfully. “Not until dinner, I guess. We’re going to need our wits about
us.” He replaced it, and brought out a string-tied package. “Now, is this
lunch, or dinner, do you think?”

“It’s lunch if you eat it now.”

He settled down across from her, with a blue cotton
tablecloth spread on the grass between them, one of its corners showing an
embroidered red dolphin. He set the packet down on the cloth, and shook his
head, seeming half amazed. “This is all just too civilized.”

“I was thinking exactly the same thing.”

“The last time I was here, it was the dead of night,
blasting thunder, raining buckets, and I was cowering under—” He scanned the
ground below, pointed.
“—that
bush.”

Rowan considered the sky above them, which remained utterly
perfect. “With any luck, this weather might hold through tomorrow night.”

“Actually, rain might be better. I think this is dinner.”
This when the package proved to contain cold roast boar. “Oh, well … Less
chance of people noticing us skulking around in the night, I mean,” he
continued, pulling a shred from the meat with his fingers.

“Perhaps,” Rowan said; she had fish pastries and a baked potato.
“But if we must begin our invasion of Jannik’s home at twenty-three hundred,
we’ll need to see the sky. I’d hate to have to send Bel jogging to find the
watchman every few minutes, to check the time.”

He glanced at her, gave an odd, shy smile, then set the meat
down on its wrapper, carefully wiping his fingers on the edge of the
tablecloth. Then he reached into the collar of his shirt, pulled out and over
his head a loop of string, with something dangling from it. He leaned across and
passed it to her.

A simple bit of rough twine, its ends knotted together.
Inside that knot, secured with crossing loops, was a small black rectangle,
perhaps an inch and a half long, half an inch wide, a quarter inch deep. It had
an odd texture, seeming both dry and slightly oily. Rowan turned it over in her
palm.

Written on one side, in white: 8 I : I I .

The steerswoman puzzled. She suspected from its texture that
it was magic. She had on occasion handled a few shards and pieces of magical
objects that had possessed a similar feel. A charm of some sort, then, or a
talisman?

She glanced up at Willam, but he seemed merely amused. Rowan
considered the rectangle again, turning it over and over, testing its seamless
surface.

Magic animates
the
inanimate.
This was the one
clear fact that she knew about magic: not a true principle, but an ob—

served apparent universality, and the only means she had to
recognize and categorize it.

6 I : I 1 , the numbers now read.

One small, distant part of her mind remarked to her,
perfectly calm: There, you see? Magic. But the rest of her, body and mind,
remained still, and stopped, and uncomprehending, as if some barrier had
appeared before her, blocking her movement.

Presently, like an insect faced with a brick wall, and just
as instinctively, she began to grope for the edges of the barrier. They had
been discussing time …

Rowan rotated the rectangle in place.

1 1 : 1 9.

Really, she thought, she ought not be so very surprised.
Nevertheless, she heard herself mutter, more breath than voice: “Gods below
…”

Willam said, now solicitous: “Rowan, I’m … I’m sorry. I
guess I’m used to that sort of thing …”

She looked up at him, perfectly amazed and silent. After a
moment, he gave a small, helpless shrug. “It’s a clock.”

“I suppose it must be,” she managed to say. She had seen a
few clocks. They were huge, cumbersome affairs, involving levers, and pulleys,
and tubs of sand or tins of water. They needed constant attention, and daily
correction, usually achieved by simply watching the sky to note the moment that
one or another Guidestar passed into the darkness of the world’s own shadow.
This a Guidestar would do at exactly the same instant, nightly, forever.

Rowan looked again.

1 1:20.

Eventually Will said: “Rowan—say something—”

“How can it know?”

“When it was made, it was told the exact time, at that moment,”
Willam said. “Since then, well—it’s just counting. Really, Rowan, it’s a very
simple thing.”

“Counting is a very simple action,” Rowan admitted, in a distant
voice. Simple, for a human mind. And for that of a wood-gnome, or a Demon,
likely. And crows can count to three. And insects cannot count at all. And
objects

No: the clocks she had seen did count, after a fashion.
Perhaps it was merely that magic had reduced the workings to such a tiny size.
And sealed them completely within this little box. And perfected them, so that
they would never need adjusting. And caused the white numbers to show
themselves on the seamless surface, and to change, when appropriate …

She looked up at Willam: a man of only twenty years,
kneeling on the edge of the cotton tablecloth, on the grass, on a hill, under
the blue, clear sky; white-haired, copper-eyed, one eyebrow ragged, his right
hand missing two fingers from a spell gone wrong in his childhood.

Rowan felt her balance slowly return. She said: “You made
this?”

Willam made a sound of amusement. “No. I brought it with
me.”

“And Corvus won’t miss it ?”

He hesitated; and she realized then that he often hesitated,
when Corvus’s name appeared in a conversation. It seemed to her that he needed
to make some internal adjustment before speaking. “No,” he said, then shrugged.
“There are a dozen or so of those, all over the estate. I kept that one on my
nightstand.”

She passed it back to him. He regarded it in the palm of his
hand a moment, twisted his mouth wryly, put it back about his neck. “Rowan, I’m
sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you. Really, it’s nothing particularly
fantastic.”

“I suppose,” she said, halfheartedly picking up a fish
pastry, “that I must seem a little foolish to you.”

2 0 4 THE LANGUAGE OF POWER

“Oh, no!” He was sincere. “Not at all, the same sort of
thing happened to me, too. Only worse!” He settled back, returned to prying
apart the boar meat. “Corvus,” he began; and again, that hesitation. “Corvus
has a device,” he went on, “like a bird. About the size of a hawk. It flies”—he
made one hand go up, to demonstrate—“and it can move about,” the hand tilted,
as if catching and riding the wind, “and watch the countryside below it. One
day—and it wasn’t long after I first got there—Corvus let me see through the
bird’s eyes. Rowan,” and he dropped his hand and shook his head, “it took me
days
to recover!”

“Actually,” Rowan admitted, “it sounds rather wonderful.” To
see the whole of the land below, directly, without so abstract an intermediary
as lines drawn on paper …

“It sounds it, yes, but it’s another thing to have it happen
to you! And with not much warning, either.” He began on his lunch again. “One
moment,” he said around a mouthful, “you’re standing in a room, thinking, Well,
what’s the wizard up to now?; and the next, you’re hanging in the middle of the
air—I wasn’t really, I was still in the room, but it
looked
like I was
up there. Nothing all around me, nothing underneath me, except, way, way down,
the tops of trees, and the whole of the River Wulf with tiny boats on it, and
the buildings of Corvus’s estate. And then, the bird turned in the air”—his
free hand demonstrated a banking maneuver—“which looks, through the bird’s
eyes, exactly as if the whole world was tilting over—” He dropped his hand
again. “That was the last straw. I just collapsed on the floor, raving like a
lunatic, and finally had to be carried out by the servants.” He pulled another
shred from the boar, but did not eat. He set it aside, pried a second,
contemplatively. “And all I could think,” he said, “when I got my wits back,
that is—all I could think was that I’d somehow failed, and that I wasn’t good
enough to learn magic after all, and that Corvus would throw me out.”

“But he didn’t,” Rowan said.

Will was quiet a moment. “No.” He reached for the canteen of
water. “Later,” and he paused to drink, “later, Corvus told me that letting me
see through the bird’s eyes wasn’t the right thing to do so soon. And that he
hadn’t taken into account my—he called it my ‘context,’ but he really meant my
ignorance.”

“I think ‘context’ is probably accurate.”

“Well, call it what you like,” Will said. “The thing was,
Corvus knew how to teach the usual sort of apprentice, but he wasn’t sure where
to start in teaching me. So we went back to the things I’d already learned by
myself”

“Your blasting-charms.”

“That’s right. We started there, and went on.” He resumed eating.

Rowan remembered well the destructive power of Willam’s
spells, so blithely referred to as “charms”; but the little clock, somehow,
seemed weirder to her.

A lightning strike might have an effect similar to the blasting-charms;
an avalanche would be as destructive. So it seemed that the Krue could
confiscate and command the very powers of nature, and this she was forced to
accept as fact. But these were powers that already existed, independently.

The steerswoman could think of nothing at all in the natural
world that would do so peculiar a thing as hang from the end of a bit of string
and cheerfully, innocently, count.

They rested briefly after lunch. They had had no sleep the
night before. When they moved on, the party atmosphere had completely vanished.
Dragons
ahead,
Rowan did not need to remind herself.

And a very simple plan:

Ride to the dragon fields. Select a small dragon. Move it
away from Willam’s jammer-spells. Release it.

Once the dragon was clear of the spells, Jannik would again
become aware of the creature, and able to command it—but he would not know why
or how it had traveled so far, without his instructions. And his only
conclusion would be that someone had been able, if only briefly, to take
control.