The Outskirter's Secret

by Rosemary Kirstein

  But there was new life: redgrass, spreading in from the Outskirts, meeting no natural competitors at all. Rowan and Bel walked across dried mulch composed of dead and rotted plant and insect life, merged and mixed by the intervening rains. Here and there were small and larger stands of redgrass, rattling sweetly, promising pastures to come.

  Rowan’s calculations of the location of the fallen Guidestar had a limit to their accuracy: she could not narrow the possible area to anything less than twenty miles. But Rowan had no plan to scour the face of the ridge for the Guidestar.

  Instead, she and Bel made their camp on the plain below the cliffs and waited.

  At sunset, Rowan stood facing the ridge; and as the sun fell behind her, illuminating the cliffs with gold and rose, she saw a streak, a smear of white glints on the raw face of the ridge, glowing brighter as the light changed, then fading when it disappeared. She marked the place in her mind, and sat staring at it long after dark.

  They found a path up to it, certainly the same path Bel’s father had used; there was no other. It was rough, and switched back and forth. They left their equipment below, taking only Rowan’s logbook, pens, ink, and a waterskin, in an otherwise empty pack.

  Rowan and Bel stood at last at a place where a thousand glittering blue jewels lay at their feet, in the shadow of a huge, shattered shape that thrust out from the cliff itself.

  It was as large as a large house, and had once been larger; they could see that one side was torn, and open. Inside, there might once have been a chamber; but the body of the Guidestar was itself crushed, and that possible chamber was collapsed, extruding trusses, beams of metal, blackened with the heat of its burning fall.

  Rowan clambered over it, probing, peering. She found more wires, their coatings melted like wax from the copper cores; more mysterious surfaces etched with copper on one side, black with soot, brown with corrosion. She pried one loose and saw for the first time its opposite side. It was festooned with tiny objects, partially melted, like square insects with their metal legs thrust through to contact the copper on the other side.

  Most of the Guidestar was metal; some was ceramic, and Rowan found something like a wide, broken ceramic plank, wedged under one edge of the body of the Guidestar. Bel helped her tug it out. It freed by breaking, leaving most still under the hulk.

  The plank was some four feet wide, perhaps six long. When it was freed, Rowan saw that one edge was hinged. She and Bel pried at the opposite edge, and the plank opened like the cover of a book. Inside, both faces were coated with perfect, unbroken jewels, their opalescent colors fracturing the light within them, their surfaces crossed by a grid of tiny, silver lines. Rowan knelt beside the plank for many minutes, running one hand across its eerie surface.

  “Rowan! Take a look at this!”

  Bel had wandered off to one side and made her own discovery: a large rectangle of metal, once flat, now twisted like taffy. Rowan went to it and sat beside it, bracing her legs against a boulder to keep from sliding downslope.

  Bel was wedged on its opposite side. “Look at this.” She had wiped dust from is surface with one palm, showing only corrosion beneath. Now she wiped again, widening the clear area. “Isn’t that writing?”

  Rowan would not have recognized it as such at first glance; it was too different from the forms she knew. But Bel, perhaps because she was new to writing, had recognized it as belonging to a category: shapes designed to communicate.

  Rowan cleared more dust from it. The letters were an inch tall and consisted purely of deeper areas of corrosion lined up below a hole in the object itself. She puzzled out the shapes, compared them with known forms, found similarities, and guessed at the words.

  ” ‘Turn left,’ ” she read, ” ‘and latch.’ “

  Bel looked at her. “Latch? Like a door?”

  Rowan inserted her fingers into the round hole and felt the works within. “Exactly like a door.”

  Rowan settled down on a flat rock with her logbook, laying her pens and ink stone carefully beside her, to sketch and describe the Guidestar. Above her, Bel leaned back against the hulk itself, warming herself in the sunlight, with sun-warmed metal at her back.

  Rowan filled the final pages of her book. The sun slowly shifted.

  At last she set down her pen and paged through what she had written, moving forward and back, helplessly. Then she closed the book.

  What she had written and drawn was mere description. Even standing beside the Guidestar, even touching it, she could not wrest from it the secrets of its magic, of its purpose, nor the reason it had fallen from the sky.

  All she knew, she had learned earlier: the Guidestars sent down killing heat, at the command of wizards; and they watched the world from high above.

  Rowan herself was high, halfway up a cliff, with sun-drenched air all around. She looked out, down.

  Far to the west, the wild colors of the distant veldt merged into a single mass of brick red. Ahead, to the north, the land was gray and earth brown, with the sparse stands of redgrass discernible only directly below. To the northeast, just at the limit of sight, the line of the cliffs disappeared into a sudden blot of darkness: the near edge of the blackgrass prairie, where humans could not survive.

  Blackgrass poisoned human skin. The goats could not live by eating it. Blackgrass was stronger than redgrass; where blackgrass was established, redgrass would not thrive. There were demons, goblins, other stranger creatures, beyond the Outskirts, beyond the Face.

  “The Outskirts move.” She had always assumed that it was the growth of the Inner Lands themselves, the cultivation of green life that pushed back the redgrass, the spreading of farms and towns that pushed back the barbarians themselves. But the Outskirters could only be pushed so far, to the Face, where there was more blackgrass than redgrass. Movement would be stopped there.

  But then came the killing heat. The blackgrass, the poisonous plants, the monsters, were destroyed. And with no competitor, redgrass, always quick to grow, spread into the dead area. The Face people followed it, even as the living prairie sent new blackgrass back, eventually meeting and intermingling with the red, creating the mix of life common on the Face. And twenty years later, the cycle repeated.

  But if the Face itself moved, then the zone of heat must move. Each time it appeared, it must appear farther to the east; destroying, clearing the way for the expansion of the Outskirts.

  And the western edge of the Outskirts also shifted east, as the Inner Landers claimed new fields for cultivation. But as blackgrass was stronger than redgrass, so redgrass was stronger than greengrass. Farmers always needed to pull any redgrass that appeared, or it would choke their crops. But at the edge of the Outskirts, there were no farms, but young forests, bramble, greengrass fields. Green life spread of its own power.

  She realized with a shock that it did so because it was free to do so. The Outskirters themselves cleared the way.

  The goats ate the redgrass to the roots, their feces killing what they did not eat. The Outskirters themselves destroyed more, with their waste, offal, corpses. They pulled down lichen-towers, they hunted goblin eggs, purely for the sake of destruction.

  Goblins, blackgrass, lichen-towers, insects: these were native to the Outskirts, and to the prairie beyond. Humans and goats were not. The redgrass stood between; and it was the only thing that stood between, the only link.

  As if from a Guidestar, Rowan saw the world spread below her. She saw a band of heat destroy the Face and a portion of the prairie; and redgrass fill and spread into the dead area; and Outskirters using the redgrass, clearing it behind them as they moved east; and sweet green life following their path, feeding on the fertilization they left behind.

  The Outskirters were the destroyers, and the seed. They conquered the evil land, used it, and made it ready for better life to come. They gave the land a human soul.

  “And then killing heat stopped,” Rowan said to the blot of black on the horizon.

  “What?” Bel leane
d forward to look down at her.

  The Face People had been stopped against a barrier, constructed of life that could not support humankind. They had tried to push into the prairie, and could not. They starved. And then they doubled back, to prey on the inhabitants of the Outskirts proper.

  “It’s the end of the Outskirts,” Rowan said.

  “What do you mean?” Bel scrambled, slithered down to stand beside Rowan.

  The Face needed the heat; the Outskirts needed the Face. Rowan looked up at her. “Slado is destroying the Outskirts. That’s his plan, or part of his plan …” But such a process might take centuries; even wizards did not live so long.

  How might the process be made to move faster?

  Don’t wait. Destroy the Outskirts directly. Test the heat spell, see that it works, and then move its aim away from the Face and into inhabited lands.

  Outskirters would die in the path of the heat, and from the weather that came after. Those who survived would have a harder life—

  And would turn in on the Inner Lands. “It will be war,” Rowan said. “Your people against mine.”

  “How soon?”

  “I don’t know.” The Outskirts was huge; even if Slado continued his accelerated destruction, years might pass before the situation became critical.

  “We’ll have to find Slado,” Bel said simply, “and stop him before it happens.”

  But who could win such a war? The Inner Landers? And what then?

  With the Outskirts destroyed, the Inner Lands would continue to grow as before; but there would be no intermediary zone between it and the deadly life beyond the Face. Eventually, expansion must stop. And as the people increased in number, there would be shortages, hunger. They would prey on each other. “Slado will destroy the Inner Lands … How can he possibly want that?” She scrambled to her feet. “Bel, what can possibly be the point?”

  Bel had her own answer. “Slado is mad.”

  “No.” Madness was the inability to recognize and deal with reality. Madness could not control, could not be so clever, so powerful, as to design and execute a plan of this scope. “I must be wrong. He can’t mean to do this.”

  Rowan turned back to the shattered Guidestar, went to it, and laid her two hands against its sun-warmed surface. She had learned nothing from it, nothing. It was the Outskirts that had given her what knowledge she had, and the Outskirters, with their traditions, poems, their very names. But there was one answer they could not provide. “Why did this Guidestar fall?”

  Then she remembered an answer provided, perhaps unwittingly, by a wizard’s man. At Rendezvous, after plying Efraim with erby, Fletcher had said of Slado: “I think that he did it. On purpose.”

  Guidestars made it possible for humankind to spread to new lands. This Guidestar had hung over the opposite side of the world. It had been planned that humans would one day live there. Now that would never happen. Rowan said, “He’s stopping everything. He’ll destroy us all.” She thought of her home village and her family; she thought of the Archives. She thought of Kammeryn and his tribe waiting for her and Bel’s return, friends and comrades all, two weeks’ travel away across the Face.

  All would die.

  She turned back to the open land, where far on the horizon, a small blot of black stood. And now it seemed to her that it was not retreating, but advancing, moving in to swallow the Outskirts, the Inner Lands—all the world she knew.

  People could not survive in the world that the world would become.

  Rowan picked up her pens, her ink stone, her books. She thrust them into the pack.

  “Let’s get out of here,” the steerswoman said. “This place was never meant for human beings.”

  END

  About the Author

  Rosemary Kirstein is the author of the Steerswoman series: The Steerswoman, The Outskirter’s Secret, The Lost Steersman, and The Language of Power. Work is underway on Volumes 5 and 6.

  Paperback versions of the first four volumes were originally published by Del Rey Books.

  Kirstein’s short fiction has appeared in Asimov’s and in Aboriginal SF. She blogs at www.rosemarykirstein.com, and occasionally tweets random non sequiturs on Twitter as @rkirstein.