Most were in motion: either slowly or quickly, they roamed the field, often passing close by each other. There were occasional confrontations between like-sized dragons, involving threatening displays, screams and hisses, and gouts of flame directed toward the sky.
All of the creatures ignored the humans.
“I think this is not going to be as easy as we hoped,” the steerswoman said.
Will said nothing.
Pick one; approach from behind, to avoid any flame. Cover its eyes. Carry it away.
Simple.
Madness.
Rowan mentally rehearsed the actions, selecting a cat-sized creature that seemed to be wandering outward toward the edge of the herd, imagining herself and Willam stalking it. But halfway to the edge, the small dragon paused, industriously scratched at the back of its head with one hind leg, turned about, and moved back toward the center of the group.
Rowan wondered what sort of flea or tick might call a dragon hide home.
Beside her, Willam let out a huff of frustration. “They’re staying very close together.”
“Yes . . .” There did seem to be some definite limit to their wanderings, an invisible circle beyond which they would not pass. “But they’re not moving in patterns.”
“No, they are,” Will said, definitely. “But the movements are designed to look like the sort of thing they’d be doing naturally.”
Rowan watched for a while. “It’s very convincing.” Too convincing; the animals gave every semblance of a collection of reluctantly social creatures, disliking each other but for some reason unwilling to separate from the herd.
Will hazarded, “I suppose I could just make a dash for the edge, grab the nearest small dragon, and get back before some other one happens to spit fire my way . . .”
The burning woman transformed into a burning man . . . “Willam.”
He continued to study the scene below. She repeated his name, and he turned to her.
“Are you absolutely certain that these animals are . . . are completely caught up in these . . . patterns?” She had almost said hypothetical patterns.
He could not miss her distress, and said, with such kindly patience that she felt embarrassed, “Yes. Absolutely. They have no outside direction now, not from the controller spell, and not from Jannik. They can’t decide for themselves what to do, they’re too simple. All they can do is follow the pattern.”
She would have to take his word for it. “Very well.”
But he continued to regard her, seeming faintly disappointed. Then an idea occurred to him; and before Rowan could stop him, he stooped to the ground, rose again, and flung a small rock directly into the center of the dragons.
Rowan cried out, in a sudden flare of terror.
The stone struck the wide side of the largest dragon, bounced, and dropped.
Completely oblivious, the dragon continued its slow, imperious stroll through a collection of smaller creatures, which were squealing annoyance at its intrusion, scrambling to get out from under its feet.
Stunned, Rowan turned back to find Willam regarding her with a small, self-satisfied smile. He had another stone; he tossed it straight up, caught it, then shied it out among the creatures. It fell toward the littler dragons, skidded across several backs, then dropped out of sight.
When Rowan turned back, Will was holding out to her a third stone.
Before fear got the better of her, she snatched it from his hand, turned, and, with a sudden weird, fierce glee, flung it.
It struck a horse-sized dragon directly below its left eye.
The animal showed no reaction at all. It proceeded on its way, paused to scratch at the ground, then circled like an immense dog, and lay down, nose to tail.
The steerswoman gave a weak laugh. “You’ve convinced me.” Willam grinned at her. She felt her heart slowing; she had not realized it had been racing. “Let’s choose our target,” she said, “and get this over with.”
His amusement faded. “Well”—he turned back to the scene below—“that’s the problem.”
The dragons continued to keep close together; and there was the fire. “You’ll have to choose a point in the pattern when none of them is breathing flame . . .”
Willam sat down in the grass on the hillock, pulled his knees close, wrapped his arms around them, and studied the movements in the dragon field, his expression intent, analytical.
Something dawned on Rowan. “You don’t know what the pattern is, do you?”
“No . . . I’ll just have to keep watching until I can figure it out. Or enough of it to know when it’s safe to make a try.”
Rowan was silent for a moment. Below, the dragons continued, wandering, writhing, facing each other off. “But didn’t you see it when you were here before, placing your jammer-spells?”
“The spells have a range of about half a kilometer. I didn’t have to get close to the dragons. Just near enough to set the jammers.”
A silence somewhat longer than the first. “Will . . . is this the closest you’ve ever been to any dragon?”
He replied with a nod, still watching the creatures.
At least they would not be attacked while they sorted this out. Rowan sat down beside Willam, leaned back on her elbows in the grass. They both watched in silence for a while.
The wind picked up, bringing to them the cloying stink of the mud flats, and the scent of smoke; and then a small pocket of heat from a pony-sized dragon that, in an apparent fit of exuberance, had reared back to send a plume of fire toward the sky.
Eventually, Rowan said: “You don’t know what the patterns are, but you do know something about their nature.”
“Yes.” He pulled his attention in. “They’re lists,” he told her. “Each dragon has a list that it’s following, of movements and behaviors. When it reaches the end of the list, it will go back to the start.”
Rowan could not fathom this at all. “These creatures are intelligent enough to remember a list?” She had expected something much simpler, as a dog might be trained to do a number of actions in a row, when prompted by a single cue.
“It doesn’t take intelligence. Remembering things just takes memory. Even a book has that kind of memory. Just a place to hold something.”
“But. . . they must then read the list.”
“They don’t read it. They just do it. Whatever is on the list, they do.”
This remained incomprehensible. She decided that he must be using an analogy, one that unfortunately did not correctly communicate the principle.
The steerswoman struggled. “We have to watch for the point when they start repeating. Then, watch the whole pattern, all the way through.”
“That’s right.” He went back to studying the actions in the dragon field.
“How long are the lists of actions?”
The pause told her that she would not like the answer. “I don’t know. They can’t be too short, or any fool walking by would notice that the dragons repeat.”
“Then, this might take some time . . .”
They both watched. After some minutes had passed: “Nothing yet?” the steerswoman asked.
“No.”
“I don’t see anything, either.” Nothing other than the natural movements of a group of animals. For a moment she studied Willam instead. He sat with his arms wrapped around his knees, his chin on his forearms, the copper gaze scanning the field below. He seemed to her to be very good at focus, and concentration; his attention never lapsed.
His lips were moving, silently. Rowan guessed his thoughts, and said: “I count thirty-two dragons. Not counting the ones too small to see clearly. But I notice that those haven’t spit fire yet.”
“The littlest ones can’t. We can ignore them. And I think there are only thirty active dragons. Two of them haven’t moved at all; I think they’re dead.”
There was no vegetation within the dragon field, no living thing other than the dragons themselves. Scorched ground, a number of boulders, charre
d skeletons of bushes. Nothing else.
“What do they eat?” Rowan wondered.
“Nothing at all,” Will said.
“How can they grow?”
“They don’t. They’re each already the size they’ll always be. Some of them are hundreds of years old.”
In the field, two dragons faced off, screaming fury. It was an impressive display: the two backed and twisted their bodies, weaving their heads, now low, now high, studying each other, first from one side-set eye, then the other. Smaller dragons nearby scrambled away, giving out whistling calls of annoyance. Halfway across the field, the largest dragon lifted its head to watch, emitting a low rumbling.
The steerswoman found herself analyzing, hypothesizing patterns of dominance, drawing comparisons to other sorts of creatures—wolves, perhaps—
Lists?
“All of that”—Rowan indicated the confrontation below— “is on a list?”
Willam nodded. “This is good. When this part repeats, we’ll notice it.”
Rowan said, bemused, “We could hardly fail to.”
She returned to watching. She continued to discern no repetition, no pattern.
Beyond the dragon fields, beyond the mud flats, the wide expanse of Greyriver was visible, murky with the black mud transported by the current from farther north, which gave it its color and its name.
At the water’s edge, Rowan sighted a blue-gray shape that by its posture and actions she recognized as a heron. She allowed herself a few moments to watch the bird.
In her arid homeland, so far to the north, birds were rare. When first she had traveled south, crossing the entire breadth of the Inner Lands to reach the Steerswomen’s Academy, Rowan had been surprised on her journey, and then astounded, by the birds.
They were everywhere, tucked into every corner of the country: squabbling, hunting, fleeing and fighting, singing to the morning sun, and above all else flying. They seemed to her perfect little pockets of life, bright-eyed, intent, utterly certain in all their small tasks, and by virtue of this, utterly free. She loved them.
At the river’s edge, the lone heron stretched its wide wings, canting them as if testing the air; then with one, two down-strokes, it lifted. Rowan hoped it would approach, and then saw that it would.
To closely observe the flight of so great, so nearly royal a bird, was a privilege. The steerswoman watched, feeling a poignant joy as the heron moved with its characteristic slow grace.
It acquired no great height, wisely conserving its effort, moving smoothly inland and nearer, until Rowan could count and name each of its long flight-feathers as it soared low over the dragon field.
Below, a number of dragons paused, lifted their heads—
The heron burst into flame.
Rowan was down from the hill, away, and halfway to the horses before she realized that Willam was not with her.
She stopped, looked back. She called his name, desperate. She stood a moment, shuddering; then she clenched her teeth and ran back.
He was approaching at an easy jog, which slowed when he saw her. She reached him, breathless. He wore a mildly worried expression. “That was interesting,” he commented.
“Interesting?” She clutched his arm. “Will, the dragons are not moving in patterns!”
Willam said thoughtfully, “I still think they are, really—”
“That bird was not on any list!”
“Well, no, it couldn’t be, could it—”
His complacency suddenly infuriated her. She shouted. “Your spells are not working! The dragons are acting freely! There are thirty of them down there, each one capable of burning us to death!”
He was astonished by her anger, but he did not reply in kind. He spoke with patient reasonableness. “Rowan, we threw rocks at them, and they never reacted. You leapt up and ran, and they didn’t chase you. And right after they got the bird, they went back to what they were doing, like nothing had happened. There’s something else going on here, some other factor that I didn’t know about. It’s just a matter of figuring out what it is.”
In the face of Willam’s calm, Rowan found herself caught between shame at losing her temper, and even greater fury at what now seemed to her a blind and thickheaded stubbornness. “Very well.” She sheathed her sword—she did not recall having drawn it—and stepped closer, looked up at him, spoke harshly. “You’ve told me what you know about dragons. Now let me tell you what I know:
“A dragon reacts to motion. It can’t properly see a thing unless that thing is moving— or unless the dragon’s head is moving, which has the same effect. Its eyes are immobile, and side-set like a horse’s, so it has a blind spot directly in front, as horses do. When the dragon is spitting fire at you, it cannot see you; when it sees you, it cannot flame you until it first turns its head— and from the look on your face, you didn’t know any of this, did you?”
Her vehemence took him aback. “No . . .” Did Willam know nothing of dragons? Then he recovered, said musingly, “That part about seeing only motion is interesting . . .”
She threw out her arms. “That’s why they burned the heron! And that, Willam, is why they will burn us.”
This reached him. He stood silent. Rowan said: “This plan is not going to work.”
He thought for some moments; and then he took her by the arm, leading her off. “Let’s go and check the jammers.”
14
The first jammer-spell Willam sought was not present: a small hole in the ground between two tree roots marked its previous position. Will hissed displeasure, looked about to orient himself, and led Rowan off again.
It took some minutes to find the next. Willam paused under a pine tree, peered up at its branches, received no satisfaction, and tried an adjacent tree of very similar configuration. “There.”
Rowan stood below while Willam shimmied up the trunk. Once at the lowest branches, he reached up and tugged; pine needles hissed against each other, and bits of debris and dead needles briefly showered on the steerswoman. As she brushed them off her hair something else fell, something that fluttered, then thumped when it landed.
A length of cloth, very close in color to the tree bark; and a small cube, about three inches in each dimension, painted in garish colors. Rowan stooped to examine it, but could not bring herself to touch it, due to the truly hideous little face that grimaced up at her from the top surface.
“Go ahead,” Willam said, and he dropped to the ground. “It can’t hurt you.”
Rowan forced herself to pick up the cube, despite her fear that the imp-face would come alive and speak to her. To her relief, it did not, although its expression of disgust and derision was very realistic indeed.
“The decoration doesn’t do anything,” Willam said. “It’s just there because that’s how Olin would do it. Er—” This as Rowan turned the cube over. On the underside the same imp was enthusiastically flaunting its hairy buttocks.
Will held up both hands. “That’s not—that’s not my choice, really! It’s just, that’s the sort of thing Olin would put there.”
“I see.” She examined the other surfaces, which displayed other offensive postures and gestures. “I know that Olin is a trickster, but I frankly thought he’d be more subtle than this.”
“Well, generally.” Willam took the cube from her; his flush of embarrassment was impossible to hide. “But doing this would be like Olin saying that undermining Jannik’s spells takes no subtlety at all.”
“Thumbing his nose at Jannik,” Rowan said; and thinking of one image in particular, could not help adding: “So to speak.”
“Please.” He was turning the cube over in his hands, prizing at the edges. “I’m just glad it was this one that we found first. Some of the others are even worse—Here we go.” The side with the face on it flipped up with a quiet click. Willam prodded at the contents of the box with his index finger. “It looks good. Here.” He stepped closer to Rowan, tilted the box to show her.
Inside: a tangle of co
lored strings; a flat rectangle etched with copper lines; a pair of black insect-like objects, with their many legs rooted to the copper; various other objects similarly attached, some as small as apple seeds, brightly colored; and, filling the bottom half of the box, a squat black square with two metal studs.
Willam indicated. “Push that yellow button.”
It did look like a shank button, pulled from some festive shirt. The steerswoman touched it hesitantly, attempted to gently push it aside. It did not shift; but when her fingertip slid across it, the button moved downward, into some slight recess. One of the apple seeds emitted a brief green glow.
Rowan, startled, drew her hand back; then, more cautiously repeated the action, to the same effect.
“If the spell didn’t have any power left, or if it was set up wrong, that light wouldn’t light. This one is working.”
Rowan pressed the shank button down again, and once more, finding the obedient little light weirdly charming. She did it again. “And this box somehow stops Jannik’s power over the dragons?”
“Yes. It sends out . . . something like a noise, that we can’t hear, but the dragons can. It’s really very loud. It’s as if you were trying to talk to someone when you were standing next to a crashing surf, or a grinding millstone.”
“I wouldn’t be able to hear the voice.”
“And the dragons can’t hear Jannik’s commands, or the commands sent by the controlling spell in his house.”
They replaced the jammer-spell, and searched out others. They did not check each and every one, but selected a sample, spread out around the two dragon fields. All were, according to the test, functioning.
Through all this, Rowan was engaged in an internal struggle. The jammer-spells definitely existed, were definitely magical, and Willam seemed very at ease with them. Perhaps he was mistaken about their effectiveness against dragons—but if nothing else, he was capable of constructing a spell that emitted green light when prompted to do so.
That in itself was a wonder. Rowan felt the tug to believe in Willam’s skill, utterly.
The Language of Power Page 20
