The Diviner (48 page)

At length he told himself he would have to be satisfied. He used the end of the spoon to prick his little finger and smeared the blood on the sign engraved into the key and then all over the key itself. As he passed his finger over and over the brass, he was reminded of the days spent passing the spoon handle over and over the walls, and how the steady, rhythmic motion had formed a framework for his thoughts.

Or, more accurately, for certain words that he knew now truly had been spoken to him while he was awake, not while he was dreaming. He sucked gently on his finger to bring up just a bit more blood, and heard the words again.

You can choose to grow old, and die.

You can refuse to grow old, and choose to die.

Or you can die, but choose not to grow old.

Crossing the room from the white-draped bed to the door, he slid the key into the lock and began laughing softly to himself.

For there was another choice, one Solanna had not considered.

He turned the key in the lock—the key stained with his blood and bearing the talishann marked over the interior of every gate in every al-Ma'aliq palace, in combination with others that warned or made the gate exclusive to merchants or servants or guards, or in extreme cases halted anyone approaching it in their tracks. The lock caught, the door opened, and he strolled down a long hallway lit by brilliant spring sunshine, all the way down six flights of stairs and into a large chamber filled with desks and paper and pens and adolescent boys.

Smiling, he chose a desk at the back and sat down. And when the mouallima—a severe matron with a face like a sour plum—stalked up to demand what he thought he was doing, he replied, “My education is sadly lacking, I fear. Please, return to the lesson. I'm eager to catch up.”

“What's your name? Who are you?”

“Qamar al-Ma'aliq,” he said amiably. “Sheyqir of Tza'ab Rih.”

And thus he made the choice that for all her talents Solanna had not envisioned.

I choose not to die.

“
W
hite is the color of purity, of chastity, of clarity, of sincerity, of energy, of harmony, of serenity, of spirituality . . .”
. . . of truthity and of protectiony and of meditationy and of sheer stark raving
lunacy
if this old fool doesn't end the class soon!
Qamar didn't say it out loud, of course. The man had knowledge he wanted—needed—and in the last year, if he had not learned patience, then at least he had discovered endurance.

As the mouallima's voice droned on about the properties of white, Qamar dutifully made notes to be added to the sheets already plumping the tooled leather folder at his feet. He had six of these folders, bulging with pages on each of six subjects: Color, Flowers and Herbs, Ink, Paper, Talishann, and Al-Fansihirro.

As for the first, had anyone asked him back when he lived in Hazganni, he would have said there were eight colors that looked very good on him, and why should he bother with the rest? In fact, according to these Shagara, there were scores of colors, and all of them had names and influences and powers and meanings, and the slightest variation could mean the difference between health and illness, even life and death.

The lessons about plants he found simply loathsome. This country had tried to kill him with its poisoned thorns. That it had also healed him was neither here nor there. It did not like him. He returned the sentiment.

When it came to the formulation of inks, it transpired that he had a real flair for the work. He got lampblack ink right the first time, for instance—not easy to do, as the mouallima grudgingly admitted. While the rest of the class was busy chasing down smuts of soot (lampblack was lighter than air and gleefully floated anywhere it pleased), Qamar was adding hot water one drop at a time to his little bowl and mixing it with a finger until the lampblack dissolved (again, difficult, as the soot tended to float atop the water). Subsequent formulations with various roots, leaves, flowers, nutshells, and tree barks were equally simple for him to master. And he found that he rather enjoyed it. Satisfying, to be good at something again without having to try much at all.

Paper turned out to be rather more physical than he'd anticipated. It seemed students were required to learn not just its properties but how to make it, and in several different varieties, too. His notes on this subject were scanty technical descriptions of various processes; the width of the folder was due to the samples. His work did not compare favorably to that of the masters who tried to teach him. Perhaps he had difficulty overcoming a Tza'ab's ingrained horror of cutting down trees instead of planting them.

The masters of the craft were known as Qa'arta, which seemed to be an adaptation of a barbarian word for
paper
. Their work was as messy as tending dye vats and not nearly as colorful, as smelly as a tannery—almost—and surprisingly demanding physically. The slurry of soaked fibers from wood, cloth, lint, fishing nets, bits of hemp rope, and seemingly anything else they took it into their heads to add must be stirred in vats with great wooden spoons. The screened frames dipped into those vats could weigh so much it took two men to maneuver them. The presses that squeezed all the water from the pages must be screwed down as tightly as possible. And all had to be done with precision.

“Tilt the frame to gather the fibers, Qamar—
not
when removing it from the vat! You'll end up with all the slurry at one end and all the water at the other! Do it again.”

“The sheet should peel off smoothly, Qamar, in a single piece—
not
in shreds! Do it again.”

“The task was to produce paper, Qamar—
not
a piece of shelving! Do it again.”

He sincerely hated papermaking class.

The memorization of seemingly thousands of talishann had a tendency to make his eyes cross. From the simple to the intricate, the mild to the dangerous, every stroke of the pen that formed the symbols demanded absolute concentration. Qamar's mother had once accused him of having the attention span of a flitwing drunk on Challa Leyliah's best stimulant tonic. Whole afternoons of copying and recopying and copying yet again the twists and turns of symbols that, if not perfectly formed, ended up as at best useless and at worst potentially lethal—ayia, more than once he was shocked from a doze by the rap of a willow switch across his shoulders.

It was the class taught by Zario that combined all the other subjects into the craft of the gifted Shagara male. Al-Fansihirro: art and magic.

“The thought you invest in your work will determine its success. The color of the ink is as vital as the paper. What you add to the ink intensifies your intent. The talishann must be perfect. Never think that a hasty sketch on a scrap of paper with whatever ink is to hand will function as you wish simply because you bleed onto it. What we do is an art, as truly as our lost brothers pound out their hazziri in metals.”

This last sentiment occurred often in his lectures, and when it did he invariably looked at Qamar. Qamar looked right back, unblinking. His complete lack of knowledge about anything to do with the making of hazziri—despite the key carved with the talishann for
exit
he had used to open the locked door of his room—irked Zario. Something, anything, the slightest hint of vague rumors—Qamar was a total disappointment to him regarding the traditional arts of the Shagara and, Zario implied, a total waste of his valuable time. For although they could not refuse education to one of their kind, they all suspected he would take what he had learned back to Tza'ab Rih at the first opportunity and use it in the service of the Empire's ambitions exactly as his great-grandfather and grandfather had done.

Qamar did not disabuse them of this error. It amused him to see them grind their teeth as they imparted some arcane magical formula, some obscure piece of herbal lore. He knew they were thinking that they were facilitating the very thing their forebears had fled Tza'ab Rih to avoid. He did not tell them that he had no intention of returning home.

He had two reasons for this. First, no one among the Shagara had ever succeeded even in slowing the rapid ageing of a Haddiyat. This told him everything he needed to know about the state of magic and medicine in his country. They could not do what he was determined to do. He could have received much the same education in signs and symbols there as here, but the people inside this fortress had something his kinfolk did not: plants the desert-dwelling Shagara had never seen and did not know how to use. The tools were here. He knew it. Whether it happened in metal and gemstones or ink on paper, he was positive that somewhere in the compendium of tradition and experimentation lay his answers. This land that had tried to kill him would be his salvation. He
knew
it.

The second reason was just as personal, though it became a reason almost without his being aware of it. Solanna Grijalva had not returned to her own people. If she had her reasons for this, Qamar was unsuccessful in discovering them. Her original purpose—to convince the Shagara to come to the aid of those fighting the Tza'ab—had failed. They would never turn directly against their “lost brothers.” Why she had lingered at the fortress, when she had had the vision that had sent her and Zario to the seaport, and why she stayed now that he had been rescued from himself, Qamar could not have said. Perhaps she found the mountain air beneficial to her health.

She stayed. Rather than work with the other women in the daily chores of the fortress, she became a teacher. Every child between the ages of four and ten was required to sit in a schoolroom five hours of every day, learning to read, write, and cipher, reciting long passages of
The Lessons
, listening to lectures about the history of all civilized and barbarian countries and especially about the history and beliefs of the Shagara. Solanna's residence here allowed a new subject to be taught: her language.

Naturally, he attended her classes. He was not the only adult to do so. The men and women who had dealings with the world outside the fortress already knew much about the local tongue, but within a few months Solanna had everyone speaking nothing else in her classroom.

That she used these lessons to disseminate
her
version of history amused Qamar endlessly. He never actually laughed aloud, but every time he smirked or smiled, she scowled at him and demanded to know
his
view of whatever event she claimed had taken place or whatever motive she ascribed to the Tza'ab.

And then they would argue.

One early evening in autumn—Solanna's classes were held after work had finished for the day but before the evening meal—she began the lesson by saying, in her own language, “The invading army that came northward from Tza'ab Rih was a blatant violation of all decency and honor—”

“Or it would have been,” Qamar agreed, “if we hadn't been invited.”

Solanna gave him a glower, and continued, “Count Garza do'Joharra and King Orturro do'Ferro da'Qaysh—”

“—were each so incredibly furious with the other that they committed the same act of desperation,” Qamar said, “because they knew neither could best the other on the battlefield.”

“—were betrayed by underlings who wished to seize power for themselves—”

“Eiha!” Qamar exclaimed, wide-eyed. “Was
that
why Orturro had Don Pederro's throat cut?” To the others in the class, he continued, “I was always told that when it was seen that the Tza'ab had won the battle—”

“By treachery!” Solanna snapped.

“—Orturro ordered his nephew's death. He'd acted as ambassador to Sheyqir Alessid, you see.” Turning back to Solanna, he said, “But I never learned what happened to Baron do'Gortova, who acted as emissary for Count Garza.”

Solanna did not reply. Another of the students said, “I think he killed himself, didn't he?”

“No,” an older man corrected, “his wife was unable to live with the disgrace and poisoned him.”

“I thought it was his daughter.”

“I heard he went into exile in Merse.”

“No, it was Ghillas. Or maybe Elleon.”

“Eiha, enough!” Solanna cried. “The fact is that the baron was heard of no more. And the
fact
is that the Tza'ab took control of both regions. They set up puppet rulers—”