The Language of Power

by Rosemary Kirstein

  At the open kitchen door, a small crowd of staff members watched, some standing, two seated on the doorstep. They observed Willam’s return with a cheerful interest, maintained an amused silence as he passed them by, then entered into subdued conversation. Apparently, the gossip was not going to wait for Rowan’s departure.

  For this short trip, the steerswoman took only her cloak and bedroll, within which she had rolled a spare shirt and stockings, flint and tinderbox, and her sword. Her satchel held logbook and writing implements. Will’s own bedroll was somewhat fatter, and definitely lumpy. His burlap sack was concealed within.

  “This is good,” Bel said quietly as she watched Rowan secure her sword to the saddle. “I can try to keep an eye on Jannik, from a distance . . . Do you think you’ll need your cane?”

  “No.”

  The undercook pushed through the group at the kitchen door, carrying two sets of saddlebags, which bulged temptingly. These she passed to the travelers. “That’s two breakfasts, and two lunches, and a dinner. Each.”

  Rowan was genuinely grateful. “I’m already looking forward to them.”

  “Hm.” The cook eyed her, up and down, so obviously assessing the state of her health that Rowan grew embarrassed.

  She was glad to be distracted by a tug at her trouser leg: the handkerchief boy, holding up yet another folded bit of paper. Rowan adopted a serious expression, and with great formality accepted it. “Thank you very much.” He grinned, then suddenly dashed behind the undercook, from which position of supposed invisibility he gave himself to a fit of giggles.

  Rowan unfolded the paper, considered the depiction, and passed it down to Bel.

  “Ha. Last night’s boar.”

  “At least the poor creature seems resigned to its fate.”

  “More than resigned; look at that grin! No mean feat, with all those knives sticking out of it . . .”

  Willam completed his own arrangements, and came over to the women. “Are we set?” he asked Rowan.

  Set, for a pleasant ride about the countryside . . . “We’re set,” Rowan said, and turned to mount up.

  At which point, faced with a horse whose back was as tall as her shoulder, she realized that although her left leg was adequate for walking and stair-climbing, it would definitely be unable by itself to hoist her entire weight up such a height. And no horse would allow her to mount from the right. She was about to ask for a mounting block when Will solved the problem by casually gripping her by the waist and heaving her upward— and Rowan found herself ludicrously sprawled across the saddle. She slipped her right leg around and sat erect—quickly, lest Willam decide that it would aid the deception for him to slap her on the backside. She gave him a warning look, which he accepted with a grin.

  Then he mounted, and the two turned their horses, waved goodbye to Bel and the spectators, and rode out of the yard and into the street.

  The sun was risen, but had not yet cleared the buildings. The air was cool, with that perceptible difference in temperature from the ground up that one only truly experienced when seated high on the back of a horse.

  They moved along, down the cobbled streets with shops and homes on either side still shuttered or just stirring; and Rowan loved her mare, who responded so easily to her, moving with such strength and lovely economy of motion; and it was a beautiful day for a ride, with a clean blue sky above, clear and growing brighter.

  And they were off to steal a dragon.

  Rowan shook her head, feeling half unreal.

  She urged her mare closer to Willam’s, spoke across the distance. “I saw the undercook take you aside just before you mounted. What did she say?”

  He put on a dignified expression and spoke in an admonishing tone. “I’m not to treat you roughly.”

  She chuckled. “Good advice all around, I should think.”

  There was no useful straight road toward the dragon fields; Greyriver was wide, shallow, and marshy at the banks. Past the city limits, Rowan and Willam turned east to drier ground, passing among shabby dwellings, hardly more than shacks. In the distance, mud-fishers poled their flatboats, their heads seeming to float above the grass as they threaded through the estuaries. Two blue herons stalked the grasses, imperiously indifferent to the presence of humans, protected by custom as signs of good luck.

  Close to midday the travelers stopped at a small hill facing the river and settled down on its crest, allowing the tethered horses to graze below. Willam found a bottle of red wine in his saddlebags, considered it regretfully. “Not until dinner, I guess. We’re going to need our wits about us.” He replaced it, and brought out a string-tied package. “Now, is this lunch, or dinner, do you think?”

  “It’s lunch if you eat it now.”

  He settled down across from her, with a blue cotton table-cloth spread on the grass between them, one of its corners showing an embroidered red dolphin. He set the packet down on the cloth, and shook his head, seeming half amazed. “This is all just too civilized.”

  “I was thinking exactly the same thing.”

  “The last time I was here, it was the dead of night, blasting thunder, raining buckets, and I was cowering under—” He scanned the ground below, pointed. “—that bush.”

  Rowan considered the sky above them, which remained utterly perfect. “With any luck, this weather might hold through tomorrow night.”

  “Actually, rain might be better. I think this is dinner.” This when the package proved to contain cold roast boar. “Oh, well . . . Less chance of people noticing us skulking around in the night, I mean,” he continued, pulling a shred from the meat with his fingers.

  “Perhaps,” Rowan said; she had fish pastries and a baked potato. “But if we must begin our invasion of Jannik’s home at twenty-three hundred, we’ll need to see the sky. I’d hate to have to send Bel jogging to find the watchman every few minutes, to check the time.”

  He glanced at her, gave an odd, shy smile, then set the meat down on its wrapper, carefully wiping his fingers on the edge of the tablecloth. Then he reached into the collar of his shirt, pulled out and over his head a loop of string, with something dangling from it. He leaned across and passed it to her.

  A simple bit of rough twine, its ends knotted together. Inside that knot, secured with crossing loops, was a small black rectangle, perhaps an inch and a half long, half an inch wide, a quarter inch deep. It had an odd texture, seeming both dry and slightly oily. Rowan turned it over in her palm.

  Written on one side, in white: 81:11.

  The steerswoman puzzled. She suspected from its texture that it was magic. She had on occasion handled a few shards and pieces of magical objects that had possessed a similar feel. A charm of some sort, then, or a talisman?

  She glanced up at Willam, but he seemed merely amused. Rowan considered the rectangle again, turning it over and over, testing its seamless surface.

  Magic animates the inanimate. This was the one clear fact that she knew about magic: not a true principle, but an observed apparent universality, and the only means she had to recognize and categorize it.

  61:11, the numbers now read.

  One small, distant part of her mind remarked to her, perfectly calm: There, you see? Magic. But the rest of her, body and mind, remained still, and stopped, and uncomprehending, as if some barrier had appeared before her, blocking her movement.

  Presently, like an insect faced with a brick wall, and just as instinctively, she began to grope for the edges of the barrier. They had been discussing time . . .

  Rowan rotated the rectangle in place.

  11:19.

  Really, she thought, she ought not be so very surprised. Nevertheless, she heard herself mutter, more breath than voice: “Gods below . . .”

  Willam said, now solicitous: “Rowan, I’m . . . I’m sorry. I guess I’m used to that sort of thing . .

  She looked up at him, perfectly amazed and silent. After a moment, he gave a small, helpless shrug. “It’s a clock.”

  “I su
ppose it must be,” she managed to say. She had seen a few clocks. They were huge, cumbersome affairs, involving levers, and pulleys, and tubs of sand or tins of water. They needed constant attention, and daily correction, usually achieved by simply watching the sky to note the moment that one or another Guidestar passed into the darkness of the world’s own shadow. This a Guidestar would do at exactly the same instant, nightly, forever.

  Rowan looked again.

  11:20.

  Eventually Will said: “Rowan—say something—”

  “How can it know?”

  “When it was made, it was told the exact time, at that moment,” Willam said. “Since then, well—it’s just counting. Really, Rowan, it’s a very simple thing.”

  “Counting is a very simple action,” Rowan admitted, in a distant voice. Simple, for a human mind. And for that of a wood-gnome, or a Demon, likely. And crows can count to three. And insects cannot count at all. And objects—

  No: the clocks she had seen did count, after a fashion. Perhaps it was merely that magic had reduced the workings to such a tiny size. And sealed them completely within this little box. And perfected them, so that they would never need adjusting. And caused the white numbers to show themselves on the seamless surface, and to change, when appropriate . . .

  She looked up at Willam: a man of only twenty years, kneeling on the edge of the cotton tablecloth, on the grass, on a hill, under the blue, clear sky; white-haired, copper-eyed, one eyebrow ragged, his right hand missing two fingers from a spell gone wrong in his childhood.

  Rowan felt her balance slowly return. She said: “You made this?”

  Willam made a sound of amusement. “No. I brought it with me.”

  “And Corvus won’t miss it?”

  He hesitated; and she realized then that he often hesitated, when Corvus’s name appeared in a conversation. It seemed to her that he needed to make some internal adjustment before speaking. “No,” he said, then shrugged. “There are a dozen or so of those, all over the estate. I kept that one on my nightstand.” She passed it back to him. He regarded it in the palm of his hand a moment, twisted his mouth wryly, put it back about his neck. “Rowan, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you. Really, it’s nothing particularly fantastic.”

  “I suppose,” she said, halfheartedly picking up a fish pastry, “that I must seem a little foolish to you.”

  “Oh, no!” He was sincere. “Not at all, the same sort of thing happened to me, too. Only worse!” He settled back, returned to prying apart the boar meat. “Corvus,” he began; and again, that hesitation. “Corvus has a device,” he went on, “like a bird. About the size of a hawk. It flies”—he made one hand go up, to demonstrate—“and it can move about,” the hand tilted, as if catching and riding the wind, “and watch the countryside below it. One day—and it wasn’t long after I first got there—Corvus let me see through the bird’s eyes. Rowan,” and he dropped his hand and shook his head, “it took me days to recover!”

  “Actually,” Rowan admitted, “it sounds rather wonderful.” To see the whole of the land below, directly, without so abstract an intermediary as lines drawn on paper . . .

  “It sounds it, yes, but it’s another thing to have it happen to you! And with not much warning, either.” He began on his lunch again. “One moment,” he said around a mouthful, “you’re standing in a room, thinking, Well, what’s the wizard up to now?; and the next, you’re hanging in the middle of the air—I wasn’t really, I was still in the room, but it looked like I was up there. Nothing all around me, nothing underneath me, except, way, way down, the tops of trees, and the whole of the River Wulf with tiny boats on it, and the buildings of Corvus’s estate. And then, the bird turned in the air”—his free hand demonstrated a banking maneuver—“which looks, through the bird’s eyes, exactly as if the whole world was tilting over—” He dropped his hand again. “That was the last straw. I just collapsed on the floor, raving like a lunatic, and finally had to be carried out by the servants.” He pulled another shred from the boar, but did not eat. He set it aside, pried a second, contemplatively. “And all I could think,” he said, “when I got my wits back, that is—all I could think was that I’d somehow failed, and that I wasn’t good enough to learn magic after all, and that Corvus would throw me out.”

  “But he didn’t,” Rowan said.

  Will was quiet a moment. “No.” He reached for the canteen of water. “Later,” and he paused to drink, “later, Corvus told me that letting me see through the bird’s eyes wasn’t the right thing to do so soon. And that he hadn’t taken into account my—he called it my ‘context,’ but he really meant my ignorance.”

  “I think ‘context’ is probably accurate.”

  “Well, call it what you like,” Will said. “The thing was, Corvus knew how to teach the usual sort of apprentice, but he wasn’t sure where to start in teaching me. So we went back to the things I’d already learned by myself.”

  “Your blasting-charms.”

  “That’s right. We started there, and went on.” He resumed eating.

  Rowan remembered well the destructive power of Willam’s spells, so blithely referred to as “charms”; but the little clock, somehow, seemed weirder to her.

  A lightning strike might have an effect similar to the blasting-charms; an avalanche would be as destructive. So it seemed that the Krue could confiscate and command the very powers of nature, and this she was forced to accept as fact. But these were powers that already existed, independently.

  The steerswoman could think of nothing at all in the natural world that would do so peculiar a thing as hang from the end of a bit of string and cheerfully, innocently, count.

  They rested briefly after lunch. They had had no sleep the night before. When they moved on, the party atmosphere had completely vanished. Dragons ahead, Rowan did not need to remind herself.

  And a very simple plan:

  Ride to the dragon fields. Select a small dragon. Move it away from Willam’s jammer-spells. Release it.

  Once the dragon was clear of the spells, Jannik would again become aware of the creature, and able to command it—but he would not know why or how it had traveled so far, without his instructions. And his only conclusion would be that someone had been able, if only briefly, to take control.

  Jannik could not allow that. He would return immediately to deal with the spells.

  It had all seemed so very simple when they had discussed it that morning. Now, in the full light of day, with very real fire-breathing dragons ahead, the steerswoman began to suspect that the entire mission bordered on insanity.

  She looked back. Will’s horse was trailing hers, with Willam lost in thought, tilting his head from side to side a bit in a rhythm independent of the mare’s gait, as if following some internal music. He stopped, sighed, shook his head.

  Rowan dropped her mare back beside his. “Patterns,” she said. Uncontrolled dragons, he had told her that first night, did nothing, or moved in patterns.

  “Yes. And that’s why we should be able to capture one.”

  “And the dragon we take won’t”—she still found this hard to believe—“won’t fight us?”

  “It should ignore us, and go on trying to follow its pattern. But if we want it to stop, covering its eyes should do it.”

  He had explained this when explaining the plan: if unable to see, the dragon would assume it was injured, and would wait for assistance. However, Rowan herself had half-blinded one dragon during the attack on Saranna’s Inn, and the creature had continued to fight.

  But that dragon had been under command. This time matters would be different: “Because of the jammer-spells . . .”

  “That’s right.”

  Rowan was not reassured. “Can we kidnap one of the ones that are doing nothing?”

  “If it’s doing nothing, it might be dead,” Will said. “Jannik won’t even notice that it’s gone.” He glanced about, reined in. “I think we should leave the horses here. The dragon we set loose
might catch sight of them, and attack.”

  “And they won’t have the sense to stay still.” They dismounted, led the horses into the cranberry bushes.

  He grinned at her. “I’d forgotten that you’ve already met some dragons.”

  She could not be amused. The nameless woman in Saranna’s Inn was standing in the back of the steerswoman’s mind, behind her thoughts, burning.

  “At least,” Rowan said, as they tied the reins to a bush, “out here in the countryside our victim won’t find victims of its own.”

  Past a collection of grassy hillocks, the mud flats appeared again. Between the mud and the hillocks: a wide marshy field, with a stand of scrub pine on its far edge, and another similar field visible beyond.

  Willam and Rowan stood atop one hillock, Rowan tense, Willam with such brazen casualness that the steerswoman glanced at him, occasionally, sidelong. He seemed not to notice.

  Below, in the near field: rather a lot of dragons.

  The largest was bigger than a horse. The smallest visible, the size of a cat. Little pockets of motion on the ground suggested the presence of others, perhaps as small as mice.

  They gleamed, green with glints of silver about the eyes, and on the taloned tips of their feet. The smaller dragons fairly glowed with vibrant color; the larger showed a darker green, with hints of dull pewter; and the very largest, the somber color of moss, with brown shading at the head, feet, and tail.

  Their heads were flat, their snouts long, with wide nostrils that shut to slits when their breath became flame. Eyes were side-set, a deep garnet red, faceted like jewels, glittering.

  Long necks wove, tails flailed. The smallest dragons half walked, half slithered, with a weasel-like sinuosity, sidling around each other and dodging the largest creatures, which moved with heavy dignity.