The Lost Steersman (Steerswoman Series)

by Rosemary Kirstein

  Surely it was asleep. Rowan resisted an impulse to go over and prod it with her foot.

  With the street otherwise deserted, the steerswoman had nearly decided to abandon the male and continue alone, when one more demon turned into the street.

  A male. Males were marginally less sensitive to the spell. Best to wait.

  The demon plodded the length of the street to the next intersection, where it paused, then abruptly executed the eerie, unturning demon reversal of direction. It approached again. Wondering if something had alerted it to her presence, Rowan slowly rose, sword held at the ready.

  The demon arrived at Rowan’s napping guide; the other demon stirred, unknotted its arms, and rose.

  Each demon reached out one arm, touched fingers, then intertwined them. With another arm, Rowan’s guide reached up and then down into its own maw, extracted something, and passed it to the reaching fingers of the other demon.

  A spell-object. Rowan’s astonishment was complete.

  The second demon ate it.

  The demons repeated the action three times. Then they immediately parted, in opposite directions.

  Rowan dithered briefly. Which demon was more inexplicable? Which action more bizarre?

  For familiarity’s sake, she followed her original guide, hurrying to safe distance, then pacing it, slinking and sidestepping.

  Apparently, the demon had not actually digested the spells it had earlier taken, but had been carrying them, conveniently in its maw, as a chipmunk carried nuts stuffed in its cheek pockets.

  This creature was merely sharing food. An entirely natural action, and not directed by magic—

  The male was not leading her to the wizard.

  She stopped, allowed the male to proceed without her. It passed through a trio of approaching females, took the next intersection, and was gone.

  Rowan must find Slado’s residence herself, and for safety’s sake, as soon as possible. She took a sip from her water sack, and narrowed her eyes in thought.

  Very well; if Rowan herself were a powerful wizard, with the ability to utterly control the actions of these monsters, where might she choose to live?

  If not close to her demon servants, then among them; and if among them, where else but directly in the center?

  She grimaced. An unpleasant prospect, to move so deep among these creatures. And how was she even to locate the center, when she did not know where she was?

  By the sun’s angle she knew the cardinal directions, and she had entered the colony from the north. She decided to try south.

  Easily said, less easily accomplished. The streets seemed intentionally designed to prevent any straight-line movement. She took turn after turn, zigzagging, knowing only that she was going in a generally southerly direction.

  The steerswoman passed demons; they passed her: singly, in pairs and groups. Rowan found herself falling into a pattern: step to the right as a demon neared; turn to place her back against a den; wait for the demon to leave the street. Repeat and repeat. It became second nature. Dangerous. She must not become too accustomed to this.

  When demons were numerous, she walked sideways, her back against a den, the talisman held centrally. Far more awkward, but it did serve to keep her alert.

  Then, at the next intersection: a crowd of demons, seven of them. Rowan paused, wondering how best to pass.

  In the middle of the group stood a single spell-object, as tall as Rowan’s waist. It was complex in structure, standing on many feet like tree roots, combining and rising to a single striated flute. Rowan noted that the animals had oriented themselves so that no demon blocked another’s view.

  Each of the demons stood completely motionless. Perhaps the spell had placed them in a trance.

  Rowan doubled back to the intersection, took a different turn, then another, continuing to work her way south.

  She came upon her erstwhile guide again, recognizing the demon by the stippled pattern on its torso and the fact that it was once again napping in a deserted street. She almost felt glad: a familiar face, so to speak. When she left it behind, another male was entering the street; when she glanced back, she saw it receive a spell object from the cache in the first male’s maw.

  She went on. Intersections began appearing at closer intervals. A good sign, the steerswoman decided. She envisioned the perimeter road as a huge circle, the demon dens within; she overlaid the streets she could see, surmising repetition of pattern.

  Something like a network emerged, wide at the edges, tighter toward the center. But the streets curved; she curved them on her internal map. And alternate streets curved in opposite directions …

  The pattern blossomed in her mind: lovely, perfect. The crisscrossing streets were each a spiral segment. Each street ended in the center.

  All roads led to Slado.

  She ceased bothering to take any turns at all; but now she became even more cautious, more tensely alert. Here, among these close-set intersections, so near the residence, here would be the worst place to be surprised by one of Slado’s people, with monsters all about and her own presence so unexpected.

  But still she saw no one.

  But surely Slado had servants. Surely a demon, however precisely controlled, could not cook a meal, do the laundry.

  Passage became more difficult. Streets were narrower, intersections ever more close and sharply angled. Out of sheer exhaustion, Rowan backed up against a den and allowed the traffic to find its own way around her.

  A thought passed through her mind as if from afar: What if the count of left-curving streets and right-curving streets were adjacent Fibonacci numbers?

  She stopped short.

  What if?

  Rowan had been introduced to the peculiar sequence of numbers mysteriously named Fibonacci in her second year of training. Each element was the sum of the two previous: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13 … extending infinitely.

  An intellectual oddity, she had then thought, charming but useless, until the teachers Arian and Edith had independently begun pointing out examples of the numbers in nature.

  Petals on a daisy. The spiral growth of snail shells, ram’s horns. Leaves on a grass stem, seeds on a pine-cone, the double spiral of a sunflower. The sequence seemed to appear everywhere, either as simple integer counts or as ratios.

  Even Outskirts life: the number of the outermost twigs on a tanglebrush was always a Fibonacci number, and the count of branchings from the original stem was 1, 2, 3, 5, continuing in an unbroken sequence. Blackgrass leaves were offset from each other by five-eighths of a turn around the stem.

  People do not typically build in spirals nor cause spiral streets to be built. Humans liked straight lines, square buildings, and even numbers— and direct routes to important places.

  The demons had created these streets themselves, by a natural process. Uncontrolled, undirected.

  Apparently, in daily matters, the wizard ruled the monsters with a very light hand—

  Assuming he was here at all.

  No. These were Slado’s creatures. He was here. He must be here.

  Janus had been taken from Alemeth; and this was the last mark on his map.

  And Janus had possessed a magical spell. Other spells were here. Magic was here; a wizard was here, or must be …

  The center. The center would tell her.

  She reached it sooner than pure mathematics predicted, simply because it was no abstract point. The steerswoman stood at the edge, looking down.

  A depression, nearly one hundred feet in diameter, sloping at an angle of about twenty degrees, down to a flat area some thirty feet across. Packed earth, all around.

  Along the slope, a few demons, scattered.

  Below, a few demons, gathered.

  Among them, a number of the spell objects.

  Nothing else.

  And all around the circular edge of the area: demon dens and street entrances— and nothing else.

  Above it all, the wide white sky, a pearl overcast, the sun a haze
of brightness in the west.

  Nothing else.

  Far below, one of the motionless demons stirred, moved, and began climbing the slope in Rowan’s direction. With no thought whatsoever in her mind, Rowan watched its slow approach.

  It stopped in front of her. Human and demon stood for some time, neither moving.

  Eventually, Rowan herself moved. She took six steps to the left.

  The demon entered the street whose access she had been blocking, walked its length, turned a corner, and was gone.

  Rowan watched it go. She turned back and regarded the great, empty center for some time.

  Then, slowly, the steerswoman walked: down, across, then up, to the street that natural geometry told her would exit the colony closest to her camp, and left the center behind.

  On the beach she stopped; she stood on the black-and-gold swirl-patterned sand, watching the surging of the strange and possibly endless ocean, gazing at a sky where no birds flew, and feeling that she was dreaming the entire scene— or dreaming herself.

  She twisted her mouth in derision, stabbed her sword point down in the sand, pulled the plugs from her ears. Reality flowed in with the sound: rush and crash of waves, whistle and scree of insects, clatter of leaves, and the soft sift of the wandering, wind-borne sand. She snatched up her weapon, strode down the beach.

  No sign of humans found during her original approach from the west; no sight of roads, buildings or even woodsmoke in the open countryside, north, east, west.

  In all this wilderness, no sign of human habitation at all; and Site Four was merely a remarkably large demon colony.

  Slado was not here.

  And so, neither was Janus.

  Rowan found she had reached the water, and had stopped. She was gazing blindly out to sea. She turned and gazed less blindly at beach and hillocks.

  “But he was here,” she said, her own voice sounding almost plaintive.

  And perhaps recently, as the spell objects testified. Magic had been enacted at this place and then abandoned. And it was important, important enough to change Janus utterly; important enough to Slado to cause Janus to be snatched away from Alemeth …

  But not brought here.

  Janus was likely dead. If not dead, as good as dead, because there was no way in the world for Rowan to find him.

  She walked up the beach again, more slowly.

  He really ought to have spoken. He really ought to have asked for help, long ago. Now he was lost.

  Very well, then. If she could not save Janus, could not find Slado, Rowan would, at the very least, recover the information Janus had found here, the precious secret that the wizard so vigorously protected. She could follow her lost comrade’s footsteps in this strange and dangerous country, her single advantage a magical protection so complete that she might as well be invisible.

  She stopped short, stood with the cooling wind ruffling her hair. Some natural pause in the waves’ pattern caused the ocean itself to be, for a moment, breathless.

  Invisible. What a very interesting idea.

  Was it possible, through magic, to hide an entire fortress? To obliterate all clues, disguise all roads, so confuse the mind that one could stand within sight of something that must surely be the equivalent of a small town and simply not see it?

  Her grip on the talisman tightened, her other hand clenched into a fist around her sword hilt, and she said out loud through clenched teeth, “Parameters.”

  But who could know what the most powerful wizard in the world was capable of?

  Janus had found something. Perhaps the fortress. Perhaps he had, somehow, circumvented Slado’s magic.

  By using … more magic?

  She looked at the talisman in her hand. It was the only magic she had.

  She pushed her sword tip in the sand again, leaving her right hand resting on its hilt. She took a deep breath, attempted to clear her mind of all confusion and misconceptions, held the talisman before her, and looked.

  Slowly. In a circle. Step-by-step around her upright sword.

  The beach to the west. South, the sea. East, the beach again and the breakwater. The dunes. The sandy hillocks, with the demon colony tucked behind and the distant hills rising far beyond. Dunes again, and the cat-striped beach running down to her feet—

  She stopped.

  A spell.

  A talisman. Like her own.

  Sitting, simply sitting, abandoned on the beach.

  She pulled out her sword and walked slowly to it.

  It was larger than hers, nearly three times the size, but— and she lay down her weapon, knelt in the sand, reached out to touch it— he same: the truncated pyramid, the swirling striations, and, to the two bare fingertips of her right hand, the exact gum-and-sand texture.

  Color was different: still black and gold but in blotches that in no way matched Rowan’s talisman.

  Of course. Color was irrelevant to demons.

  She set down her own talisman, and with one hand on each side of the new object, tried to lift it. She could not. She ran her fingers under the edges; it seemed rooted to the sand. Digging harder, pressing inward, she felt something give way, and her two bare fingertips were suddenly cold, and wet.

  The fingers immediately itched, first mildly, then madly. She yanked her hands out, struggled to free her water sack, and drenched fingers and gloves, thrust them into the dry sand, drenched and thrust again. The sensation subsided. Wiping the sand off on her trouser leg, she sat regarding the object.

  Then she took up her sword, prodded at one of the slanted faces. The surface dimpled. She pushed harder, punctured it.

  Clear fluid spilled out around the blade.

  Rowan thrust further in, feeling no resistance. She sliced the object completely across, levered it open.

  Within: transparent spheres more than an inch across, perhaps a hundred of them. Large enough and clear enough that she could see plainly inside each one the small, curled form, the gray line of backbone, the pale arms trailing forward, the tiny fins furled back.

  Rowan had a sudden urge to snatch up her own talisman, fling it away from her, in a sudden fear that it might split and hatch a horde of little demons onto the sand all around her.

  Impossible.

  Impossible: it was a made thing, it had to be. She could make no sense of this, none at all.

  “It does work,” she said out loud, slowly. “It does protect me.”

  How?

  Magic. A wizard made it.

  Made it of the same material a demon uses to cover its eggs?

  Apparently … Apparently, and why not? Who knows what properties in this substance a wizard might find useful?

  Made it in the same shape?

  “But it works!”

  How?

  “Magic …”

  And when exactly did you come to believe so easily in magic?

  But it had not come easily, not easily at all. It had taken a jewel of impossible origin, a statue that moved without life, blasts of destruction destroying an entire fortress, invisible heat from the sky killing everything in its path …

  But before that— and had it been so long ago? When, standing on the deck of a ship, she had said to Bel: The few times I’ve been faced with something called magical, it seemed simply mysterious … as if there were merely something about it that I didn’t know.

  What did she know, here and now?

  Next to nothing.

  Sometimes I feel people call it magic, she had said, because they want magic.

  What did she want?

  “No.” She spoke aloud. “What I want is irrelevant. A steerswoman sees what is.”

  Then, look.

  A cache of demon eggs in the sand, surrounded by a protective covering. A smaller object, resembling the cache.

  “But why would this protect me?”

  Why assume your own importance in this? Remove yourself from the equation.

  A demon does not approach or harm the so-called talisman. Therefo
re, a demon does not approach or harm a cache of eggs. Preserving the next generation: the simple logic of survival.

  Look at what is.

  She did. She looked up. She looked at the landscape all around, but now with her mind so nearly empty that she seemed to herself not to be present at all. Absent; and absent also every wish, every want, every hope. Only her sight remained, uninhabited.

  Endless wilderness. No humans. No sign of humans. Nothing that referred to or reflected humankind. No magic.

  Rowan remained, still, silent, empty, for many minutes.

  A troop of seven female demons emerged from the colony and made their way toward the ocean. Rowan’s only reaction was to shift her talisman to the other side of her body, toward the demons. This she did without thought.

  The creatures passed, entered the water, vanished.

  Finally, the steerswoman rose, picked up her sword and the object which she had carried with her from the Inner Lands, and returned to her camp.

  She sat on her bedroll in the sand in the flickering dark, arms around her knees, staring into the fire.

  Nothing she was seeking could be found here.

  Janus had acquired no magic at all, merely a dried stunted egg case.

  Something else about him had attracted Slado’s attention.

  The steerswoman said out loud, “You fool.” No— there was no reason, none at all, to think that it had been Slado who had taken Janus from Alemeth. Rowan had only assumed so because of the apparently magical inaccessibilty of these lands.

  But even that had a natural explanation. Little snails.

  Her tin stew pot clattered its lid; stew hissed down its side into the fire. She ignored it.

  Some other wizard could just as easily have taken Janus— anyone with the power to command animals. Jannik in Donner, for instance; he controlled dragons. Why not demons as well?

  Oh, and what a simple thing that would have been, to sail from Alemeth to Donner. She might have accomplished Janus’s rescue weeks ago.

  The steerswoman ran her fingers roughly through her hair, dropped her hands to her lap, sat gazing at them, watched as they clenched into fists.

  She had wanted it to be Slado. She had wanted her search to be over.