Missing Piece

by Robert Priest

  “In a sense,” Lirodello said after a while, delicately patting his lips with a white handkerchief, “I think it’s fair to say that we have reached our consensus.”

  “If we’re going to be eating spell-made food, what is to stop us from using an undefeatable sword then?” Pryland asked bitterly.

  Someone else retorted, “I would be glad to have one at this point.”

  31

  Silver

  Xemion stood beside the closed stone mould in which he had hidden the spellcrafted sword. He put his hand on the long lid. It was cool and somehow reassuring. “Oh, don’t worry, I have not forgotten about you,” he said nervously, patting it as though it were the head of a pet dog. He lifted the lid for the first time since he’d closed it more than five years ago and gazed upon the weapon he had wielded in the Second Battle of Phaer Bay. Today he needed the sword again, but not for warfare.

  In fact, Xemion didn’t even know about the threat of invasion. He knew nothing of Tharfen’s sickness. He hadn’t been to the west side of the city since that night at the Great Kone. He had always ignored the goings on there as much as possible. The little he knew usually came from overheard conversations while waiting to draw water from the well or from the yammering of the fishmonger. The tell kone had shown him repeated images of sails and swords, but he could hardly keep his mind on them. Whatever he did, his attention was driven back to those few words he’d seen written on the outside of the Great Kone. “Love is not the answer. Love is ...” And the will to know the word that followed grew stronger and stronger. He had to spend every waking moment fighting the urge, fearing that it would drag him away from Saheli in these last crucial days.

  But now he was running out of supplies. There would soon be no food left in his larder and he would have no choice but to replenish it. And that meant going to the market in the city. He would have to stay as far as possible away from the Great Kone. He would have to take the collection by Rondell with him in case he needed it. He had been inching through it. But even at the pace he was going it would not last him anywhere near long enough. There were still three days until the equinox and he was more than halfway through the book. Without some new text he would soon be right up against raw compulsion and he didn’t know if he would be able to resist it. He’d gone all through Vallaine’s drawers and cabinets and closets searching for some previously undiscovered volume. He pulled out every book in the library once again and shook it hoping to dislodge some new text or paper, but there was nothing. Rereading texts hadn’t worked. He’d tried that, but his memory of the previous reading was so perfect that rereading held no thrall for him whatsoever. He would soon drift away from it and find himself pacing closer and closer to the door, his body unconsciously making its way to the Great Kone. Any texts they had in the library in Ulde were just copies of the texts he and the others had transcribed from the dictations of Musea. He had read them. Alas all the pamphlets and posters and writs handwritten by anyone in this new era offered him no relief at all. He thought of chaining himself to a pillar and heaving away the key, but he had no chain except that affixed to Poltorir, and he had never been able to remove it. Nor did he have a key.

  Every other moment he frantically attended Saheli, ever-watchful for that first breath. Check for the pulse. Feel the wrist. Put the mirror to the mouth. Spin the tell kone. Pace back and forth wringing his hands. Sword write texts in the air. Check her mouth. Check her wrist. Spin the tell kone. Read a poem very slowly. Sing the poem aloud. Consult the tell kone. Consult the tell kone. Consult the tell kone. He didn’t have enough attention for anything else to even notice that the wind had stopped.

  Looking down now at the sword, his palm tingled. Reflecting the little bit of light that streamed in the narrow window, it lay just as he had last seen it. He inspected it closely, noting that the thin brown line of dried blood that remained at the bottom of the gutter in the middle of the blade had all but faded from sight. For a second he felt like getting a brush and washing the last of it away, but it was easy to resist the impulse. The thought of the pain that touching it again might cause horrified him. He didn’t know if he could bear it long enough to do what he had to do, but he had to at least try. It was his only option.

  He took the tongs from the fireplace and used them to turn the sword over so he could inspect the other side. But as he lifted it a little higher to examine its point, it slipped from the tongs. With a gasp he caught it reflexively in his right hand. There was no pain, but immediately he felt the power flow into him. He had a lightning flash image from his childhood: sitting upon a horse, a sword held high, leading a victorious army. But he would never use it as a sword again. Nor as a staff.

  Vallaine had told him what a spell staff really was. The way the old mages finished their training was to obtain a special large sheet of reed paper, four feet high and four feet wide. On it they would then write out in miniature their own personal thaumatological lexicon from memory. When this was done the reed paper was rolled up tight and then bound and varnished so that it resembled a staff. Inside the sword was the staff and inside the staff was the thaumatological lexicon — a text Xemion had not yet read. If he began now, he might have it uncovered just as he was finishing Rondell. He squinted to see the place at the very tip of the sword where a small piece had come away. This was the point of copper he himself had added after he’d first found it and before he painted it.

  For a while after he first brought Saheli to the tower he had convinced himself that the spell he’d cast on her had remained incomplete because of this missing point in the sword. But that didn’t hold up to reason. It wasn’t even really a sword. It was at best the illusion of a sword. It was a spell staff inside. And there was no missing piece to that spell staff. (If indeed one even needed a spell staff to cast a spell.) And anyway, in the battle he had become the missing piece of the sword. He and the sword had became one whole. But he would never be joined with the sword in that way again, and he was glad of it. Carefully, he put the edge of his knife into the crack in the missing piece at the top of the blade and began to scrape away the silver paint.

  32

  Reading Materials

  The next day, Tharfen’s foot had almost returned to normal size. Her face was still swollen, but she was definitely feeling stronger, if not happier. She had her sword brought to her, but because she still couldn’t quite put all her weight on her heel, she leaned to the left as she practised ferociously. In the midst of this, she experienced a curious yearning to read something. She was quite accustomed to reading, having been taught the art by the same teacher who instructed her in elocution, but it was never anything she did for sheer pleasure. She read in order to learn; to decipher maps and charts to plot her ship’s journeys. But now the thought of reading seemed pleasurable; more than that, it almost felt like a necessity. She asked Mr. Stilpkin for materials. Sadly, he told her about the fate of the books burned by Montither. “Of all our vast literature we have only about a hundred volumes written out by hand from the memory of Musea the Thrall, and these are now kept in a secret location. All I can offer you is some unbound folios and some recently written pamphlets being distributed and shared throughout the city.”

  “Well, that will have to do. Suddenly my eyes ache to read … anything.”

  Obligingly, Mr. Stilpkin descended to the office on the third floor and retrieved his small collection of hand-lettered pamphlets and folios. She thumbed through them while he stood there and began to read the first page of the first folio. “They are in descending order of chronology,” Mr. Stilpkin said, “the last being the most recent.”

  She nodded and continued reading. Mostly the folios contained warnings and advice. There were also news items telling what ships had come in that day and which had gone out and where they were going to. When she got to the final page of the last pamphlet she saw something that infuriated her — a poem simply entitled “To Tharfen.”

 
; She read it quickly, her heart beating fast. It was a devotional poem where the presiding theme was that each was the other’s window and each was the other’s sun and that love was a crisscross of mutual illumination. The fact that it was a good poem was not lost on her, but the embarrassment she suffered to think of it being distributed with all its presumptions to people throughout the city outraged her. She tilted her head back and, in the voice she used at sea to be heard over a hurricane, she bellowed. “Mr. Stilpkin!”

  33

  Cataloguing the Kones

  Lirodello had known about the boxes full of disassembled spell kones ever since he had been the provost three years earlier. He had not, however, investigated their purposes; the fact that they were spell kones had been enough. But now that use of some of the spell kones for food and tools had been legalized, it made sense to find out if there was anything else of use in the other boxes.

  For this reason, on the morning after the consensus he summoned the elderly Eta for advice on how to go about doing this. Eta, who, now that the Great Kone had almost completed its first full turn, was experiencing her third straight day as a woman, was in buoyant spirits. She assessed the situation quickly and had Lirodello summon her fellow scribes: Butterwolf, Jik, Corwald, and the poet.

  The five of them spent the morning cataloging kones. To do this they had to open each box, carefully read the spell written on its topmost kone, and add whatever it was meant to produce to the ever-growing list. It grew hot and humid in the cavern and they were soon hungry and thirsty.

  At lunchtime, Eta prepared a special meal of kone food for them. To supplement this she turned a kone she thought likely to produce six brown ales. When this resulted in the appearance of sixteen brown ales, no one seemed to mind the surplus; in fact, everyone was most generous in their offers to make sure that it all got consumed. While Jik, Corwald, Butterwolf, and the poet ate and drank, Eta, who had been twenty years old at the time of the spell fire, caught them up on a little bit of history.

  “When we see these spell kones,” she said, gesturing into the darkness of the cavern, “we are seeing the Phaer people at the high point of their folly, just before the city fell.”

  “Do tell,” Jik encouraged her somewhat insolently between mouthfuls of ale.

  “People know there was a battle. But no one seems to recall these days that there was also a Phaer Tourney on the equinox, and because it was the seventh year of the seventh cycle, there was a great fair and people came from all over the island and it was a one-day festival of kones. And everyone who came to display their products brought boxes of these spell kones. Previously it had been illegal to make weapons kones because people believed that just having so many weapons might lead to war. But they changed the law, so somewhere in these many boxes I’m sure we will find spell kones to make swords, shields, and axes.”

  “Why did they change the law?” the poet asked.

  “Well, that is very interesting. That year, seven mages contributed to the making of something they called a peace kone. They were powerful mages and they assured everyone that if necessary a simple turn of this kone could immediately re-establish peace to any situation. Our people took this as surety and thereafter felt safe in relaxing the rules about weapon kones.”

  “Very smart,” said Butterwolf approvingly.

  “There was supposed to be a circus and fair that day,” Eta continued, “so there may also be things like lion kones and tiger kones. We’re also finding a great assortment of headwear, because there was a competition going on to see who could make the most beautiful hats, helmets, and crowns. If we’re lucky we’ll find a box of confectionaries for dessert. They made such sweet creams and cones, cold as ice, with sugars and swirling syrups. Mmmm!”

  The poet had a question. “But if they had a peace kone, and it was so powerful, why was there a battle?”

  Eta nodded knowingly. “There were several times when they might have made peace with or without a kone, but because they knew it was there, they relied on it and waited. Finally, when the Pathans came and the war was inevitable, they went to find the peace kone, but it wasn’t there. It was gone.”

  “Where?” Jik asked.

  Eta shrugged. “No one knows. It remains missing to this day.”

  “So maybe we will find the missing peace kone?” Corwald suggested.

  “Perhaps,” Eta said, “but it’s quite possible it wouldn’t work. Many believe that a peace magically achieved wouldn’t be a true peace. Many believe that only human courage, determination, and hard work can make peace.”

  Butterwolf raised his bottle and said, “Well, here is to peace, however it may be made.”

  After they drank, the poet lifted his bottle. “And here is to Tharfen and love.”

  Butterwolf had drained two bottles of mead beer and it was making him a little mean. “How can you go on loving her so much when she is such a coward?” he asked.

  “She’s not a coward,” the poet snapped back at him, “and don’t say she is. She is brave.”

  “If she’s so brave, why wouldn’t she give herself to the Cyclopes?” Butterwolf countered. “Because she isn’t brave.”

  Corwald clarified. “Well, maybe she is brave at a distance, where she can thwack you from afar. Maybe she has vast courage, but who has seen her brave in the thick of things?”

  “In the cut cut cut and the slash slash slash,” Jik added, illustrating with various drunken chops and thrusts of his hands as he danced about.

  “I suppose you think it takes no courage to captain a ship around the world,” the poet said haughtily.

  “Yes, a ship in her father’s fleet,” Butterwolf retorted.

  “It was the crew that had the guts,” Corwald said.

  “Says he who wasn’t there,” Butterwolf said snidely.

  “Says a cousin of my mother’s who was there. Said she hid in the cabin any time they were boarded.”

  “Pure hearsay,” the poet said contemptuously.

  “Said her father ordered her to stay in the cabin.” Corwald continued sucking away at the bottle.

  “But isn’t that just gossip?” Eta suggested diplomatically.

  “Well, she doesn’t have her father overseeing her on this particular ship,” Butterwolf continued, ignoring her.

  “Mr. Stilpkin says it was a thing called lockjaw that you get off of metal. She cut her heel,” the poet told them.

  “Mr. Stilpkin is a tubby old jelly-jug.” Jik giggled quite hysterically at his own joke.

  “He says she will soon be healed,” Eta said.

  “So you’re saying her heel will soon be healed?” Jik chortled, looking to the others for confirmation that this pun was indeed hilarious.

  “I believe in her,” the poet insisted seriously.

  “Well, I hope you also believe in miracles, because that is what it would take to get a ginger goddess like that to stoop to a little boy-child like you,” Corwald said with some slurring.

  “Shut up or I’ll smack you.”

  “Oh no, please don’t. You’ll hurt your writing hand.”

  “Watch out. He’ll compose a poem about you,” Butterwolf warned.

  “No one wants to be evil in the sagas.” Jik smirked.

  “Well, we have work to do,” Eta said, “and I suggest that we—”

  “I’m not ashamed to say I love her,” the poet interrupted. “I would die for her.”

  “You say little else,” Butterwolf sneered. He searched around and found one of the remaining bottles and opened it.

  “Yes, maybe you could stop saying anything for a while and go over somewhere and write us all a very, very long poem that takes you—”

  “You may mock me, but the poems I write for her will speak to the ages.”

  “And on. And on.”

  “You are under a spell.”

 
“No, I was under a spell all my life, but now finally I am unbound. Free. I have the will to love and I love her and I will never stop loving her.”

  Above them they heard the stone door being hauled open.

  “Poet!” Atathu called down.

  “Yes?”

  “You’re to go to the infirmary right now.”

  “The infirmary? Why?”

  “Tharfen,” she said tonelessly.

  “Tharfen?” This so moved the poet he began to shake. The others howled.

  “You’re to come now!” Atathu yelled over them. The poet wiped his brow and made for the stairs.

  “And the rest of us had better get to work,” Eta told the others as he left. “What say you?”

  The last thing the poet heard before Atathu closed the door was a chorus of loud belches.

  34

  An Undiplomatic Disclosure

  Dressed in the only clothing at present available to her — her captain’s uniform — Tharfen was doing some exercises with her sword. When Mr. Stilpkin announced the poet’s arrival, she put the weapon away and sat in a chair. Perhaps it was a miniscule vanity, but she saw to it that the swollen half of her face was turned away and pressed into a poultice.

  Mr. Stilpkin said nothing as he brought the poet in. He then retreated, leaving them to a private conversation. The poet’s exuberant greeting “My lady,” reminded her of the way Xemion had spoken to Saheli and it immediately grated on her, but she did her best to suppress it. She couldn’t quite smile, but she managed a nod of greeting.

  Her eyes briefly skimmed over his and she saw that they were intelligent and mirthful and full of a desperate dreaminess. Still sounding nasal due to the only slightly relieved clenching of her teeth, she said, “I asked that you be brought here so that I might address the issue of your poetry to me.” She held up the pamphlet with the poem in question. It was clear from her expression that she was not pleased. He seemed surprised by this reaction, but his eyes sought out hers and did not look away — could not look away.