The Lost Steersman (Steerswoman Series)

by Rosemary Kirstein

  A crowd of tanglebrush stood behind Rowan; she could remove herself no further without rattling their branches. She did not risk the noise and watched as the male took two more hesitant steps toward her. When it was no more than six feet away, it stopped and stood.

  She could smell it. She could taste its strange breath on the air. Should it reach out its hand and Rowan reach hers, they would touch fingers. At the thought, every nerve in her body seemed individually to twist, to attempt to draw back from the monster.

  A long minute passed, during which neither moved. Then Rowan’s sword point rose as she tightened her fingers. She stepped forward.

  The male stepped back.

  She stepped again; the male retreated again.

  It would not attack her; it could not.

  She had magic. She was invincible.

  Rowan stepped forward twice, raising her sword to strike.

  The male took two quick steps back, then a third— then fled, back up the path. With a dark, fierce satisfaction, Rowan watched it go.

  She let it live. She could kill it later, at any time, if she cared to.

  She had magic.

  Ahead, the female demon was still visible through thinning underbrush, plodding along. The male, at a staggering run, caught up to it.

  With sudden shock, Rowan realized the deep, the very deep stupidity of her actions.

  A dog would bark warning to other dogs. A wolf would run to the pack leader. Even a crow would scream danger to others at the sight of a cat.

  The male knew that something strange, something frightening, was nearby.

  It came to a stop by the female; it reached up, clutching at the female’s fingers. The female thrust it away, continued on. The male caught up again, reached again.

  Rowan found that she had herself retreated, stepping back down the path, sword point dropped, talisman held directly before her.

  The female stopped walking. Rowan prepared to run.

  The female demon paused long; then it lowered itself, spreading two knees in mating stance.

  The male disengaged its fingers, retreated a few steps.

  The female rose, then continued on its way. After a pause, the male followed, more slowly.

  Rowan watched them out of sight, their voices fading to blend with the distant demon song.

  In the quiet of their absence, she became sharply aware of the sky, the air, herself: muscles tensed, nerves tuned to painful tautness, listening so intently that every leaf and insect noise struck her ears with a tiny shock.

  She could kill a demon; she could kill two. But if three, five, nine were all around her, and in a panic?

  But the male’s warning was not understood. How very lucky for Rowan that these animals were so stupid.

  She backed down the path some twenty feet before she remembered that, with the demons gone, there was no need to walk backward. She turned and managed to keep herself from running the rest of the way to her camp.

  She had set up among the dunes.

  She did not know if demons slept, but she must do so. She had needed a place where she would be protected on three sides, so that she could place the talisman on the open side, where it would deter the approach of any passing demon while she slept. Such a location was difficult to find. She had hoped for a cave with a single opening, but there were no cliffs, no visible outcroppings of rock.

  Physically, her camp was comfortable, in a little cul-de-sac among the maze of grassy dunes; now, it felt like a trap.

  She sat on her bedroll, wrapped in her cloak, studying with narrowed gaze the talisman flickering in the firelight before her.

  Did demons, she wondered, have a sense of smell? Could the male demon track her here? Would others follow, perhaps out of curiosity? Would she find herself mobbed?

  Or would the male remain so frightened that its master would notice, suspect, and investigate?

  How stupid, how unutterably stupid to have drawn attention to herself, and then let the creature go. She ought to have killed the male demon immediately.

  Perhaps the talisman’s magic worked in both directions. Perhaps she had been under a spell of some sort herself.

  She rejected the idea with an almost physical disgust at the rationalization. It was power, merely power. She had become drunk on power.

  Perhaps that had been Janus’s own mistake. Perhaps that had been what gave him away to the wizard.

  Perhaps she had just done the same, herself.

  If only there were two persons traveling, to take turns watching the night. If only Bel were here.

  Rowan rose, arranged her pack behind her to prop her into a sitting position, sat with the talisman at her feet.

  Outskirters could sleep deeply, sitting up. She could not.

  The night was long.

  35

  No mob of demons came to her camp. Light grew slowly, mist white, until the first sliver of sunlight caught every speck of dew, strewing the blackgrass, the dark tanglebrush, the brown sand with constellations of pink, then gold.

  A sole whistle-spider set up its tune, pausing to wait for replies that never came. A hawkbug had spent the night on Rowan’s pack. She chased it off; it crawled away awkwardly, wings still too wet to fly.

  The road from the harbor remained Rowan’s only clue to Slado,’s keep. She breakfasted, filled her water sack, slung it over one shoulder and her sword over the other. Then she slipped on her gloves, took up the talisman, and left camp.

  The beach was deserted of both people and monsters, as was the road, when she reached it. She passed the rock pool, and was wondering what sort of natural schedule demons kept when not under magical control, when she first heard, then sighted up ahead six demons assembled in the middle of the road.

  She waited, sword drawn, talisman carefully displayed. She would not repeat yesterday’s mistake.

  The demons did nothing whatever; and finally, one by one, they left the road, entering and disappearing down a rough path that led into the undergrowth.

  Rowan wondered what mission they were on: their own or the wizard’s. Perhaps she ought to follow them.

  But this road must lead to the keep. She continued.

  The curve of the road remained very smooth, continual, its arc unchanging. If it did not change farther on, Rowan thought, it would eventually complete a circle.

  Glimpses through gaps in the blue-leaves on the left told the steerswoman what lay within the circle: the domed roofs of demon dens showed through, intermittently, the brown and black color of native earth. The mass of demon-voices was louder now, closer, an invisible edifice of noise, directly in her left ear. The comparative quiet in her right made her slightly dizzy.

  Paths led from the dens to the road, and Rowan had to pause, again and again, to permit demons to cross in front of her and move out into the countryside. Twenty-six of them passed her in this fashion, singly and in small groups.

  The massed demon song seemed undiminished by their departure. Rowan adjusted upward her estimation of the demons’ numbers.

  And still no sign of people.

  She went on. She passed another rock pool, and then another. She considered the distances, surmised a pattern, and immediately found it confirmed. The next pool contained two male demons, breakfasting at their leisure. Rowan kept her distance.

  But beyond the far edge of the pool, the undergrowth was less dense and shorter, and the steerswoman acquired a very good view of the countryside to the north.

  An undulating slope of blackgrass, blue-leaf, and tanglebrush crossed by a brook, threaded by vague paths through the grass. A flat meadow beyond, with the humped shapes of small and larger lichen-towers. A series of low, shrub-covered hills with higher, more distant hills beyond. Above: the white, overcast sky.

  No fortress visible, neither near nor far. No structures at all. And no paths well-worn enough to betray an important destination.

  But not every wizard possessed a keep. And, now that Rowan thought of it, for what purpo
se would Slado need so great a thing as a fortress, when the demons— and the hostile countryside itself— secured his isolation?

  Very well: her target was smaller than she had thought. A low-built mansion, perhaps, with a small adjacent compound for servant quarters and livestock. Quite possibly, it sat directly among the dens kept by Slado’s pets, protected from them by his magic.

  Rowan turned back and continued down the road.

  But she could not simply wander about aimlessly until she stumbled over Slado’s doorstep. She needed clues.

  Magic: magic was the supposedly inexplicable. Look for the inexplicable.

  She found it, almost immediately.

  Talismans. Dozens of them.

  She had expected another rock pool here. Instead: a large area, flat and completely free of brush and grass, some fifty feet in diameter— and talismans, strewn and grouped all across it.

  Even to the eye alone, the material of these objects was clearly the same as that of her own; but not a single spell resembled hers in shape.

  Some were small, low, and individual; others stood in cluttered clusters; still others were large indeed, spun up into bizarre constructions with flutes, filigrees, risers, and ribbons.

  The steerswoman stood, stunned, the point of her sword dropped to the ground. A wind rose, ruffled her hair with casual intimacy. Diffuse sunlight cast her vague shadow across, into, and among the objects.

  There they merely stood, matter-of-fact, weirdly innocent. Rowan half expected them to make some sound; but the only sound, other than the endless hum of the demons, was a single demon-voice, somewhere nearby.

  Then motion, on the far side of the area: a female demon emerged from behind one of the higher constructions. Rowan watched nervously.

  It ambled. It merely ambled among the spells, pausing now and again, and then moving on and doing, apparently, nothing.

  Rowan skirted the limits of the area, studying the animal’s every movement with fierce concentration— and learned nothing. It wandered and paused, wandered and paused. Only that.

  Rowan had frankly hoped for something more obviously purposeful; but she could not fault the situation for inexplicability.

  A growing voice announced another demon’s approach. It soon appeared: a male, this time. It paused on the road, then changed direction and stepped into the spell field.

  And proceeded to do exactly as the female did. It ignored the female and Rowan, moved at its own pace, wandering, pausing, moving on.

  Rowan cautiously took a sip from her water sack, let it linger in her mouth, continued watching. The female demon continued its amble; the male did the same.

  Exactly the same.

  Rowan swallowed, moved cautiously along the edge of the area for a better view.

  As she watched, the female demon approached and paused before a collection of low, angular spell objects. After a moment, it moved on. Just over a minute later, the male arrived at the same collection and also paused, then continued.

  A winding route among the objects, with many small pauses, eventually brought the female to a large, complex construction. The creature stood by it, and for a brief moment its arms weaved in the reaction Rowan had equated with confusion or puzzlement. Then the weaving ceased, and the demon stood quiet for a long moment, and then passed on.

  The male demon traced the identical winding route, arrived at the same construction, and showed the identical reaction. Had the male wished to reach the construction earlier, it would only have needed to take four steps west of its previous location. Nevertheless, it walked exactly where the female had walked.

  The steerswoman watched, dumbfounded, as step-by-step the two demons marked out the route of an invisible maze.

  Eventually, the female’s route brought it back to the road, where it stood motionless. Soon, the male reached the same location, paused exactly as pointlessly. Then the female departed.

  Follow the inexplicable.

  Rowan sidled around the talisman field, trying to keep a comfortable distance between herself and the male when she passed it. But the male moved abruptly; Rowan froze.

  The male demon reentered the maze and, moving with an odd quickness, retraced its entire previous route— backward. Rowan watched with utter incomprehension.

  It did not pause in each place it had before; but each time that it did pause, however briefly, it reached down, picked up one small spell, and ate it.

  When it arrived at the road again, Rowan had already stationed herself at a distance; and when it completed its apparently obligatory pause and moved on, the demon had acquired a silent companion.

  It led the steerswoman directly into the demon colony.

  36

  She moved like a rat through the streets.

  She sidled along the dens, slinked from one structure to the next, shifted abruptly to opposite sides of the den-lined pathways when demons emerged from entrances or intersections, kept her back against or directed at walls, bushes, rocks.

  At fifteen feet away, females ignored her; twelve feet for the males. At twelve feet, the females retreated; the males, at six.

  She must not disturb these creatures. A crowd, a panic, and one of them could slip behind her, where her own body would hide the talisman.

  Where she was unprotected. Where she was blind.

  And all the while, entirely, as good as deaf.

  Demon-voice was everywhere: tones so deep they trembled in her chest and throat, so high they dizzied her. She felt she could not breathe for the sound; the sound was an ocean; she was at the bottom of it. She had the bizarre impression that if she opened her mouth, the sound itself would wash into her throat, her lungs, and drown her.

  And this with the street nearly empty: two females walking far ahead and the male that Rowan followed at a distance of twenty feet. All the other noise— pouring down between the dens, falling, it seemed, from the sky itself— was voiced by demons out of sight.

  Rowan’s guide had stopped halfway along the path, and now sat on four heels, four knees high all around, on the ground outside one of the dens. The steerswoman moved back, leaned against the den opposite, breathing shallowly, trying to focus her thoughts amid the din, and failing. She tried again, more forcefully, but achieved only a macabre intellectual detachment in which all sensory information seemed distant and irrelevant— a state so dangerous of itself that a sudden thrust of fear brought her back to reality.

  Beside her, an opening between two dens. Down it, an open, marshy space clotted with sea blackgrass, empty of demons. Behind the shield of her talisman, Rowan rose, backed down the gap and out into the marsh, half stumbling over clots of blackgrass.

  She stopped in the center of the area, trees and demon dens all around, demon-voices still filling the air, and only fractionally quieter.

  “I can’t do this,” she said. She said it out loud, realized the fact, spun around to see if any of the monsters had heard. None were visible.

  Something must be done. She stared at the talisman in her hand.

  Then, cautiously, glancing all around, she set it on the ground, kneeled in the mud beside it, and removed her right glove. With the flat of her sword propped against one knee, she clumsily used the edge to slice off the last two fingertips of the glove. She put a daub of mud inside each, folded them tightly, and stuffed them in her ears.

  Relief.

  Not silence but near it. Intimate sounds only: her own breath, her slowing heart, a rough hiss as she ran her hands through her hair.

  There was a breeze she had not before noticed, coming from the south; and it was cool, carrying the now-familiar odor of the strange seaweed and seawrack of the great ocean. She drank it in and felt better, cleaner, saner. Even her vision seemed clearer.

  She dipped her kerchief into the dirty marsh water, wiped its coolness down her neck, across her forehead. Then she donned her glove, took up the talisman and her sword.

  A shield and a weapon. No traveler or warrior could ask for more.r />
  And her goal was near, so near.

  When she emerged from the path, she found her guide still seated by the side of the den, its arms now knotted above its maw. At this proximity, she did hear its voice; but only its lowest tones came through the obstructions in her ears. Exactly enough to be useful. She lowered herself to a seat opposite it, resting her sword across her knees.

  But now she was entirely unable to hear quieter sounds: distant human voices, say, or human footsteps. And humans were immune to the talisman.

  Any person, either wizard or wizard’s servant, would also be carrying a talisman, Rowan assumed. A simple thing for Slado to provide. But she still had yet to see a single human being.

  Her route into the colony had taken many turns; each street was crossed by others, at wide intervals. Her guide had turned corner after corner, never hesitating, before coming to rest here.

  The steerswoman tried to reconstruct the route in her mind— and was startled to find that she could not. Her mind had been too muddled by noise; she had been too intent on maintaining a safe distance from the demons she had passed. She had no idea at all where she was. The feeling was strange to her, and deeply disturbing.

  Meanwhile, her guide still had not moved. Rowan began to wonder if the creature had fallen asleep. If so, it hummed in its dreams.

  Rowan pulled more tightly against the den at the approach of two demons, both female. Their only reaction to her presence was to move as far as possible to the other side of the path, jostling the male as they passed. Other than that, they ignored Rowan, the male, and as far as the steerswoman could tell, each other.

  Time passed. More demons came and went, behaving exactly as the others had. Rowan became restive.

  Her guide stirred; she became intent. Then it defecated, moved three feet to the left away from its own excrement, and returned to motionlessness. Rowan suppressed a hiss of frustration.

  Somewhat later, another passing demon paused by the male, picked up the feces, dropped them into its maw, and continued on.

  Cleaning the street. Insects, birds, and even some mammals would clean their nests in exactly the same fashion. Nothing inexplicable there. And all the while, her chosen guide inexplicably continued to do nothing whatsoever.