The Ordinary (15 page)

“Do you have Irion's own book here?” Jedda asked.

“Surely it must be,” Arvith said, brow creased, moving toward a set of shelves near a broad, casemented window. “I should be able to find it by size alone. It's quite short, actually. For one of our books.”

The book he pulled off a lower shelf appeared rather thick to Jedda and weighed heavily in her arms. “Do you read our language as well?” he asked.

“I struggle with it, but I can manage. I'm slow.”

He rested his hand on the cover of the book, plainly lettered
Kirith Kirin in the Years of the Long War,
the King's name being largest, stenciled in the binding in gold. The binding was fabric, feeling light and pliable in Jedda's hand. Arvith said, “I doubt that's the original binding. It looks too modern to my eye.”

She wanted to open it, stepped to window for the light. “Might I take this to my room this evening, do you think?”

Something relaxed in his expression, and for a moment he became kindly. “You're the Lady's guest. But mind you, it's in an older style of our language, and a number of spellings have changed. You may not get much of a feeling for it in one night.”

“Even if I read just one page, it will be worth trying,” Jedda said, feeling a tingle in her palms, a chill from the book, probably her imagination working overtime.

 

He laid dinner for her in her room, some kind of roast bird and broiled vegetables, the flesh of the bird very tender and moist as she took the carcass apart bit by bit. At times like this, when she was able to recognize the animal she was eating, she felt a slight wave of repulsion, harder to manage without the stat's intervention. She ate slowly, careful to keep the greasy bird distant from the page as she scrutinized it.

At first she could make nothing of the writing, since there were no spaces between the words but only a running stream of characters. After some study she realized there was a character repeated, a simple twist, between clusters of letters, and that the twist demarked the space between words or between the word markers, the notes of music that preceded or followed an Erejhen word, assigning its meaning for that context. The Erejhen must have dropped the twist of ink as a word separator at some point; modern books showed spaces between words, the same pattern followed by most forms of Alenke.

Once she could read words she could begin to follow sentences, though here she was slowed by the written form of that mode of Erejhen she could not follow, the backward-running sentences. Even on paper, unless she followed the sentence markers carefully, she had trouble realizing how the relationships among the words had shifted. In this mode of Erejhen, all the objects and indirect objects were attached to the verb, along with further markers for tense, person, number agreement, and meaning modulation, for lack of a better term; while in the same sentence, all nouns were compounded into one noun, its components separated by direction markers that pointed it toward the proper relationship with the verb. Descriptive words like adverbs and adjectives could be used and had their own set of pointers.

She stared for a full measure at one simple sentence of two words, a supernoun and a verb encapsulated in layers of markings, prefixes, and suffixes, with only the vaguest feeling for what the sentence was meant to say. Something about a horse, “keikin,” a rider, “shavs,” a male relation, probably best called an uncle, and a garment of some precise shade of color. There were hundreds of names for different colors in different lights, a couple in this compound noun.

She read past that sentence and came back to it. Only a few sentences were compacted and compounded in this fashion, almost like punctuation; she wondered if this was some method of highlighting the importance of what was being said, or offering a topic sentence, or some such principle. Until she could crack the code of the words, she would have no luck guessing at the reason for their use.

The other sentences pieced out a story, however, a person named Jessex telling about the beginning of his life. She read the first three pages, read them again and followed the writing better, recognizing more words. She wished for paper, at least, to make a record of the variant spellings, to make a study of the differences. A young person telling the story of the beginning of a hard time. By the end of the evening, when Arvith took the book back to the library, Jedda had read some pages further.

Before he took the book, however, she asked him to help her with one of the backward-running, or perhaps inverted, sentences. He puzzled at the text for a while and shook his head. “That is old, isn't it?”

“Yes.”

“You'd do better with a newer edition. But those sentences. If you read the Anin versions, every new translator gives a different rendering, some of them very different indeed. You know this whole mode of their speaking is to frustrate the rest of us. That and the high-pitched word shifts, the ones we can't hear.”

“You're serious?”

“Historians on the Anin side have always held it to be true. The Erejhen are a secretive lot, for the most part. I am Anin, you know.”

“Yes, I'd guessed.”

“Even today they go into that mode of speaking when they want to say something a bit private. It's as if they can switch the direction in which they speak. I suppose that's exactly what it is.”

“I've studied languages. None of them are modal in terms of grammar, none of them shift like this.”

“Erejhen children babble in this very kind of jibberish from the cradle; they learn it before they learn the open speech, as the rest of us call it.” He shook his head, his eyes blank of amusement; she had never seen an expression quite like his. “Were you able to read any of it?”

“Yes, I understood quite a lot, actually. At least, I hope so. I got as far as the part about the storm. I don't think I caught everything, of course; the changes in spellings and style are very interesting and I kept getting distracted by those.”

Now he appeared pleased, and lifted the heavy volume from her hands. But there was no other change in his voice or manner, and he added, “It's late, madam. You'll want to get some rest. Tomorrow with be a long day's ride even in the putter.”

She agreed, washed her face in the cold-water sink, and slipped into the low bed. The bedding was scented with a hint of some kind of flower, and at every move she heard a whisper of rustling stuff. Maybe some dried herb? She was wondering this, picturing vaguely in her head the crushed leaves and stems beneath her weight, only a dream of course, because crushed plants would have been uncomfortable, most likely, whereas the bed held her like a cloud and soon she slept.

By morning the weather had changed, a dark cloud lowering over the river valley, a hint of moisture in the smell of the breeze, different from the scent of the river. From her windows and then from the park Jedda looked over the countryside, colors muted by the sky. A fresh scent was carried on the wind, a sweetness, like something bleeding at first, till the air began to gust too fast for scent. Wind whipped at her jerkin and her hair. She had foregone her coat and wished for it.

Soon Arvith came trudging out with her smaller trunk and the coat, which she pulled over her arms just in time to take it off again to climb into the putter. Kethen, Karsa, and Karsa's companion all emerged from the house at the same moment, exactly as they had vanished the day before. Wind plucked at Karsa's long cloak, at Kethen's great-coat and scarf. There was a bit of chill and a wave of shadow as the clouds overhead darkened. Jedda studied the sky and stepped into the putter, facing Kethen.

His dark, sallow face had an expression on it that she could read clearly, an anxiety that had to do with the change of weather, his glances at the clouds through the open door and then the window. Karsa sat with calm hands placed flat on her knees. The companion was wearing a purka, a face covering that left only her eyes visible, those closed as she reclined her head on the cushion near Jedda.

They are all listening to something, Jedda thought, and tried to hear any possible sound herself. Nothing came to her, except a hint of music that in fact was nearly constant in her consciousness, a background to which she had grown accustomed. But the sense that the others around her were listening persisted, and she sat back with a feeling of apprehension as the two drivers settled themselves into the front seat of the putter, beyond the pane of glass, and the trip began.

Rain was falling by the time the putter navigated through the narrow avenues to a stone bridge marked with a new-style road column; “Bridge to the Barrens,” she read. Behind the new column, on the base of the first of the massive stone pylons that connected the bridge to the wall, she read another name in older carving, “Shanoth's Crossing.”

Passing beneath the high stone of the gate and down the long narrow of the gate-bridge, she glimpsed, through slits in the stonework, the dark surface of the river, choppy with rising wind and rain.

The putter made her nervous on the stone road west, after the river crossing, or maybe it was the driver, an Anin, she guessed, who handed the mag-lev suspension carelessly, so that the putter's autocontrols engaged abruptly at times. Maybe the driver was enjoying the drive a bit too much; a putter could be a handful on a surface like this in the rain. After a while, the vehicle settled a bit heavier on the roadbed and Jedda felt better, both at the steadiness of the ride and at the fact that the driver had known to adjust the lift. She often had trouble riding with a native driver, and wondered if the fault were in her own perceptions. These people were adopting Hormling technology but their style was their own.

“Has the gate been closed yet, do you know?” She asked Karsa, since Kethen had his eyes closed.

Karsa answered after a moment, as if from a distance. “Yes. It will have closed this morning, I think. There was some delay getting the last of your people off.”

This is a skirmish in some kind of conflict, the thought came to her unbidden. She was reminded of the pages of the book she had read, the description of the unnatural storm. Even here in the putter she felt the currents of some kind of conflict, tension between Karsa and Kethen, between the Drune and the Prin. Layers of this place unfolding, each more complex than the previous.

She felt a moment's panic, willed it to subside.

Beyond the windows she glimpsed a brown, hilly country, rock strewn, mostly deforested, a number of farms visible from the road. The putter slowed to pass through a crossroads, a few beleaguered buildings clinging soddenly to the ground, which had become, in the turn of weather, one running sheet of rain.

In Nadi, in such weather, were she in a park or a public, uncovered place, and were she without a dry-field or umbrella or any other protection from the wet, she might for a few moments feel herself exposed to the energies possible in the sky. But in any part of Nadi that she could remember, the sky was a narrow, constrained field with only a limited reach. Here the sky swept out on all sides, enormous, and its whims were fearful, even seen from the dry of the putter.

“I miss the rain in the city; it never feels like this,” said Karsa's companion, her hood drawn down, eyes leveled at Jedda.

“I was sitting here thinking that the experience of weather is very different in the countryside.”

“You're looking at the storm as if you think it might eat you.” Companion laughed. “Like my little niece in Novrus.”

A sudden shattering of rain and wind against the putter caused it to swerve, and the conversation fell silent. Karsa murmured to Kethen, “It's possible, my dear adversary, that we may have to help our driver if we want to arrive at our destination safely.”

He answered without opening his eyes, syllables gliding out of his mouth in a most silken way. “I was just noticing that very thing.”

Kethen eyed the underside of clouds through the putter window. “This storm doesn't feel entirely natural. But I can't identify any weather-maker signal I can read.”

Karsa was surprised by the question, perhaps by its frankness, and looked at Kethen. “I was thinking the same thing. It's not yours, and it's not mine.”

For a moment, the window beside Jedda cleared of its sheet of rain and she glimpsed a countryside under the hand of a powerful storm. Here a good deal of the countryside still lay in forest, most of it with a look of new growth, a cultivated woodland; farther north Jedda had seen what an old-growth forest looked like, in the dense, dark woodland called Arth, the northernmost extent of her travels in Irion. In this country, here and there a field had been cleared, or several, or a cluster of buildings stood back from the road under its own canopy of branches. Rolling hills undulated in the rain and wind. The putter rode more steadily on the roadbed now, and the storm grew less fierce, the wind decreased to a murmur or a groan.

On the horizon, looming upward, mountains rose sheer and black-sided, shrouded in clouds.

Jedda chewed one of the leaves the companion offered, drowsed through the midday hour, opened her eyes to find the putter passing through a fair-sized settlement. Karsa smiled at Jedda. “We're on the outskirts of Arroth. When the rain clears, you'll be able to see the old wall and the tower here, Ekassa.”

“One of the mage towers?”

“Yes. One completed by Irion but begun by his enemy much earlier.”

“His enemy Drudaen, the Drune magician.”

“Very good,” murmured Companion.

“My friend is a scholar of the history of that period,” Karsa explained.

“Who finds most of the Hormling she's met to be uncurious as to our history on this side of the gate,” Companion added, her voice once again like a purr.

“There are some of us who are very curious indeed,” Jedda said.

“I imagine there are. It's refreshing.”

For a moment, Jedda felt as if the woman were flirting, but then the rain lifted and she could see the spire of the tower rising over a city of dark colors, stone buildings and roofs of slate. The city itself covered several low hills and had once been enclosed with a curtain wall, though now the city occupied both sides of it. The road curved out of a forest that undulated along the land, growing dense and dark nearly to the edge of the settlement. In the wind and rain, the green of the trees had begun to glow with a soft light, punctuating Jedda's glimpses of Arroth in the distance. She kept her eyes on the tower, easy to spot, since there was currently some kind of light at the top of it, the sort of amenity that seemed natural to Jedda, until she remembered that there would be no need of a warning for low-flying aircraft. Kethen was watching the city now and said, “Is that a light on Ekassa?”

“Yes. It appears to be.” Karsa spoke very quietly.

Kethen gave her a sharp look. “What's this about?”

“I don't have any idea.” She was looking eye to eye into her companion, as if they were carrying on a separate conversation.

“Why would anyone be manning the tower?”

“Who could it be but Malin?” Karsa asked.

She and Kethen looked at each other, then at Jedda. In Karsa's expression, a clear hesitation showed itself in her pursed lips. “There is something unusual going on, my dear. Kethen and I have been suspecting that this weather is not entirely natural in origin, and now we find the high place over Arroth is occupied.”

“What does that mean?”

“I'm not at all sure,” Karsa said. “I've never been close to one of the towers when there was someone in it.”

“It's the Drune, isn't it?” Companion leaned forward, pulling down her purka, looking at Kethen.

He glared at her a moment and appeared to understand what she meant. “If there's a rebellion of the Drune, nobody invited me,” he said.

They locked eyes with each other. A long moment passed, as if they were conversing on some other level, in some other way. Karsa said, “He's telling the truth, I think.”

“That doesn't mean this isn't the Drune. You know what I mean.”

“I wondered if that was why he wanted us to come to Cunevadrim,” Kethen said. “I wondered if something was happening.”

“You really don't know, do you?” Companion spoke almost wistfully.

Within the next few moments the wind swelled and rain redoubled in force, sweeping in sheets across the windows on all sides of the putter, which was buffeted strongly by the wind, the driver struggling to control it, his entire posture changed from the moments before. Jedda felt the car slow. The driver was having trouble with the stone surface, always the problem on these older roads. She closed her eyes, wishing for the stat to get rid of this nausea, to no effect, of course, since the link was a lump of silicone at the moment. Beyond the windows, through washes of rain, she glimpsed buildings, stone-walled courtyards, tree-lined lanes leading away from the main road, the forest thinning as the outskirts of the city took hold.

A huge gust of wind and the putter slid sideways for a few measures, Jedda holding her breath. The driver braked and stopped as ahead a wide space full of sheets and sheets of rain blocked his passage and he could no longer see where to steer.

Darkness fell across the world, as if the light were drained upward out of the sky all at once, a rolling wave of darkness falling over the rainy plaza and the putter sitting at the edge of it, the rest of traffic, if there was any, invisible behind the curtains of water, so that it felt for all the world as if the city were deserted and only this putter was caught in the weather.

“I don't know what this is, but we'd better do something,” Kethen said, looking ahead at the open space. “Something is on its way here from Ekassa.”

“You'll help us?” Karsa asked.

“Yes.” He nodded. He sounded out of breath, as if he were under some strain, though he was simply sitting there in the motionless putter.

Karsa, breathing deeply and evenly, nodded her head once. Her companion was drawing down her hood, adjusting the hang of an earring caught in her hair, fingers along the rough silver wires of the piece of jewelry, murmuring. Kethen's eyes had partly rolled back in his head, but he was reaching for the door latch as if he could see it, and when the door burst open, he stepped into the rain. He was murmuring, his fingers tracing patterns along an embroidered sash, and a space cleared around him, open and free of rain. The wind, however, lashed him hard, though he moved against it without effort, waiting patiently a few measures from the car. Karsa and her friend were sliding through the open door to join him. Arvith, awake, slid into the seat near Jedda and watched, as she did.

What she was seeing should have shocked her. They opened clear space around themselves, the three of them, perfectly dry, the rain disappearing against some barrier that had no color or weight, simply suspended around them, shifting and undulating moment to moment. The effect was like a dry field, but they weren't wearing any belts and the rain did not run down the barrier but simply vanished. The trio worked without need for words and so Jedda was forced to guess what was happening from what she saw while the figures of the three were within sight of the putter. For sound, a chorus of wind shrieked through the open doors, buffeting the car a bit. Arvith crawled forward to talk to the drivers, who were watching this whole spectacle. By now Karsa and her friend had moved to a point farther off, at the edge of what was clearly a plaza of some kind, where the putter had come to a halt. Panicked pedestrians were darting around the two women, calm figures encased in spheres of radiance. Kethen remained near the putter, spreading his cloud of whatever energy this was nearer the car, so that for a while only the wind crept in. Arvith gestured to ask whether she wanted the door closed and she shook her head fiercely; in the raucous chorus of the storm to gesture was simpler than to speak.

A billowing darkness appeared in the plaza ahead. Jedda stepped out of the car. Kethen, nearby, gave her a sharp look, and something happened to him, his concentration broken, and he sagged to his knees, could no longer move.

Across the plaza, a boiling shadow, dim light in a sphere holding back the rain, people huddled along the edges of the plaza, something settling onto the ground from the air, a figure wrapped in a cloak of shadows. This was like some full immersion entertainment, unreal. A figure reaching out of the cloud with pale skin, jeweled fingers, approaching, as Karsa and her companion fell back, crumpled to the ground. Wind howled over the plaza, ripping cloaks and coats and forcing everyone to look for shelter. Jedda watched all this, but she herself felt no trace of wind, no drop of rain, though it was slanting through the plaza nearly horizontally now, bursts of rain that came and went as the shadow in the plaza grew massive.