Rosemary Kirstein - Steerswoman 04 (21 page)

Irina sat very still. “My word,” she said quietly.

“And so did Ona,” Naio said. His eyes were wide in his dark
face.

Irina turned to him, astonished. “Your wife had an interest
in this creature?”

“A girlish infatuation. She was hardly more than a child
…” Rowan said, “Perhaps it was her youth that saved her.”

Later, Rowan crossed the street to where Bel and Willam
waited.

Will looked up from his seat on the ground. “Were the gardeners
helpful?”

“Yes, very.” Rowan leaned back against the lamppost. “And
Naio seems to have become interested in the subject, as well. He’s promised to
ask around, and about Latitia, as well. I’m starting to feel like information
is seeking me out, instead of the reverse.” She considered the burlap sack
beside Willam. “And either you’re not carrying any of your destructive charms,
or you’ve learned to make them less unstable. You practically dropped that sack
on the ground.”

He grinned. “They’re a lot safer now. And some of them have
delays, so that I can set them and get out of range before they go off. I don’t
need to use flaming arrows.”

“Far more convenient,” Rowan commented. She noticed that Bel
sat unnaturally still and quiet. The Outskirter glanced up at her once, a dark
glance, then looked away. “Will told me an interesting story about his time
with Corvus.”

Rowan hesitated. “Oh?” She was not certain she wished to
hear it.

Bel nodded, gazing off across the square. Then she said:
“That minion of Shammer and Dhree’s who we questioned, the one with the
speech-garbling spell—Will watched Corvus put that spell on someone.”

“A house servant,” Will said. He looked distressed. “They
all have it—”

“Please,” Bel said vehemently, “don’t tell it again, I don’t
think my stomach could take it.” Rowan found it difficult to imagine a process
that would be considered too gruesome to discuss by a woman who had herself
been able and willing to apply torture to a man.

“If you want the details, I can tell you later,” Will
offered.

“And bring a diagram of the inside of a human head,” Bel
added, through clenched teeth. “And expect to have nightmares for a week.”

Rowan changed the subject. “Well, we’ve made a lot of
progress.” And she handed Ona’s drawing of the lobster traps and Slado to Bel,
gave Willam the note from Marel.

Will read with growing interest—and very rapidly indeed, Rowan
noted, seeming to take in both pages in only five separate glances. “It does
look like Kieran was probably dead before that first package … unless he was
off doing maintenance on the dragons,” he said.

“Yes,” Rowan said. “And there’s more.” She outlined the content
of her conversation with Lorren and Earner.

Bel forgot her nausea entirely, and became fascinated. “He
did
change overnight,” she said when Rowan finished. “So he did.”

“Something happened. Right then, that very night.”

“Yes—but I can’t guess what.”

“If I can get into the records, I’ll look for that date,”
Willam said. “But there might not be anything. If it was something personal
that happened, and not magical, it will only show up if Kieran kept a diary.”

Rowan considered this. “But all magical events are
recorded?”

Willam thought. “Do you want a long answer, or a short one?”

“A short one, please.”

“It depends.”

Bel said: “If the records the Guidestars make can be erased,
couldn’t the ones in the house be erased, too?” Will opened his mouth to reply,
but Bel quickly added: “And give me the short
_answer.
^,,

He made a sound of amusement, then said: “There are two ways
to erase records, a hard way and an easy way. If you do it the easy way, pieces
can still be left behind.”

Willam did not expect to find complete records, as he had explained
to Rowan the previous night. They would be fragmentary, scattered, tucked away
in spaces between current records, spaces assumed to be empty.

Spaces in what, and where, Rowan did not know. Will had attempted
to explain; Rowan had understood not a single word.

“At least we do know that it was Slado, and not Kieran, who
brought down the Guidestar,” Rowan said.

Will was dubious. “Well, that would make the most sense. But
we can’t be absolutely sure—”

“It happened between those two packages,” Bel said. “Kieran
was dead. Slado did it.”

Will looked at Bel, then up at Rowan. “I’ve got the Guide—

star’s fall narrowed down to somewhere inside a two-year
range—”

And Bel said, rather smugly: “Rowan’s narrowed it down to
two weeks.”

He was astonished. “How did you manage that?”

“By the application of good Steerswomen’s techniques,” Rowan
said.

“Good,
boring
Steerswomen’s techniques,” Bel
amplified. “And
I’ll
tell him about it. You”—here she climbed to her
feet, slapped dust from her trouser seat, and took Rowan’s arm—“are going to
get some sleep. If we’re going to be sneaking around in the dead of night,
doing something fantastically dangerous, we all need to be rested enough to be
alert. It will be the dead of night, won’t it?” This to Willam.

He nodded. “An hour before midnight. And I have three hours
to get everything done.”

“Then we have two days to get used to being awake all
night,” Bel informed Rowan. “And you’re exhausted. Shut up; you are.”

Rowan laughed. “Far be it from a steerswoman to deny the
truth.”

Bel began to usher Rowan back across the street; Willam gathered
his gear and followed. “We’ll wake you at dinnertime,” Bel said. “Will and I
can find something to occupy ourselves until then—and I’ll fill him in on what
we’ve done since we saw him last. Then after dinner, we’ll all carouse until
dawn, sleep until noon, and do it all over again. Then we’ll be set.”

“Oh, if you insist.”

“I do.”

“Use Bel’s room,” Willam suggested. “You won’t fall out of
bed if you toss in your sleep.”

“At the top of the stairs,” Bel said, releasing Rowan’s arm,
and indicating a window above. “The door on the left.”

“Actually—” Actually, all Rowan’s gear was in her own room,
including logbook, pen, and ink. She planned to take some time to record the
information she had just acquired. “Actually, I think I’d prefer my own room.”

“How’s your leg?” Bel asked suspiciously; she obviously assumed
that it was the climb that daunted Rowan.

“Fine,” Rowan said, with emphasis, and perfect truth. She recovered
her arm, made a show of resetting her shirtsleeve. “And I will see you both
later. Try not to get into any trouble.”

Reeason, precision, patience: good steerswomanly techniques
that had served Rowan well during her research at the Annex in Alemeth.

For a wizard, look for magic; for magic, look for something
otherwise impossible; for a
secret
wizard, one unknown to the common
folk, look for impossible events that no known wizard could claim.

The copies of the steerswomen’s logbooks in the Annex held
centuries of observations. Any steerswoman observing an inexplicable event
would be certain to record it. By the condition and location of the Guidestar
fragments that Rowan had found, she was able to place the event somewhere
within a four-year span.

Steerswomen traveled wide, and were few. Not all logbooks
successfully made their way back to the Archives, and not all of the copies
made subsequently found their way safely to the Annexes. Nevertheless, Rowan
managed to locate fifty-two books covering the relevant period.

She read them. She began generating notes, charts, and in
one case, a graph. After a while, and quite incidental to her planned search,
she began to notice something odd.

It was the weather.

Steerswomen routinely, in every day’s first entry, made note
of the weather. The collation of this information by the resi—

dents of the Archives, steerswomen past the age of
traveling, had resulted across the centuries in quite a lot of useful knowledge
about climate, and the movement of weather patterns.

Late one summer, every traveling steerswoman described identical
weather.

The women had been widely scattered: Terminus in the north;
Southport in the south; a mountain peak west of The Crags; the edge of the
Outskirts east of Five Corners; the empty lands northeast of the loop of the
Long North Road. Two others, at sea; the rest, at various locations within the
great circle of the Inner Lands.

All reported the same phenomenon: heavy, dark clouds that
moved in from the north, remained for many days, occasionally emitting thunder
and brief deluges of rain—and then dissipated.

There could not be individual pockets of foul weather miraculously
choosing to hover over each and every steerswoman. It took no great leap of
logic to assume that everywhere, across the entire Inner Lands, the sky had
been completely obscured.

For fourteen days. And this was impossible.

Rowan had already known that the Guidestar did not simply
drop to the ground. Its fall had been long, and bright. It had crossed the sky,
burning. And yet, in all the Inner Lands, there was not even a rumor of any
person seeing it fall.

This was why. Weather had shielded the Guidestar from human
eyes. Only during this specific two-week period could the Guidestar have fallen
with no Inner Lander witnessing it.

Magic, hiding magic.

In the darkness, Rowan startled, struggled, struck out.

The shadowy figure stumbled back. A
thump
against the
table, a clatter, a splash of water spilled. “Rowan, it’s me!”

“Willam?” The white hair was barely visible, seeming to float
in the darkness. Rowan calmed down. “I’m sorry—” she said as he simultaneously
said: “Sorry—”

She climbed to her knees, took the wash towel hanging on her
bedstead, located by memory the vase of fresh-cut flowers that the day maid had
placed on her table, began sopping. “Are you all right?” She didn’t think she
had struck very hard.

“Yes. Are you? You didn’t answer my knock. And—”

“Yes … A dream, that’s all.” She considered lighting the
candle, decided that it was not worth the effort.

“It sounded bad,” Will said. A pause.

“Nightmares don’t give you much rest … if you want to
sleep some more, I’ll tell Bel.”

“No.” Rowan handed him the towel, sat back on her heels,
rubbed her forehead, watching the ghost-hair dip as he went on his knees to
find the rest of the spill. “Actually, it wasn’t so very bad.” It had been one
of those peculiar dreams wherein nothing particularly dreadful occurred, but
that nonetheless filled one with an inexplicable terror. “I dreamed you were a
Demon.” She cast about on the foot of the bed for her clothing.

“One of those, those strange people?” Apparently, Bel had
gone a long way toward filling Will in on Rowan’s experiences. He rose, set the
towel on the table. “The ones who burned you?” He sounded distressed.

Rowan knew how one sometimes felt a vague responsibility for
the actions one’s imagined self took in others’ dreams. “You weren’t trying to
hurt me,” she reassured him. She found her shirt. “You were trying to talk to
me.” She pulled the shirt over her head. “But, being a male, you didn’t have
the necessary equipment.”

He had politely turned his back, despite the fact that the
room was almost completely dark. He made a noise of amusement. “I guess I
wouldn’t, would I?” He must have been told of the nature of the female Demons’
organ of communication.

“It did present a quandary,” Rowan said, sliding from the
sheets to put on her trousers. In the dream, Rowan herself had been speaking,
at length, in human language; but as she spoke, each word transformed itself
into a solid shape, like a Demon Utterance. The shapes appeared, and then hung
in the air about her head, unsupported. And the Demon-Willam was attempting to
communicate as Demon males did, by collecting and rearranging word-objects
uttered by females, in this case snatching Rowan’s words from the air instead
of off the ground.

The dream-Rowan had been watching this behavior with interest,
and commenting—rather pontifically, Rowan now thought—on the cleverness of the
process by which the speechless males circumvented their inability. Each sentence
the dream-Rowan uttered allowed the Demon access to more words.

But the Rowan who observed the dream, who seemed entirely
separate and with separate knowledge and emotions, was terrified, filled with a
desperate urgency. She knew, with perfect certainty, that the dream-Rowan must
speak
differently,
must use more
words, other words, that the words being said were not the ones the
Demon-Willam needed. But despite all effort and strain on Rowan’s part, despite
her rising panic, the tedious steerswoman continued to pontificate, using very
similar words, over and over; and the little male continued, patiently, to
collect, to test new arrangements, discard, collect, and test again.

“What’s the time ?” Rowan asked, rising, groping under the
bed for her boots. “And is dinner imminent?” She found that she was famished.

“Eighteen thirty,” Will said, “and yes, and it smells wonderful.”
He stopped short, made a small noise of surprise. “I mean, half past six.”

“I knew what you meant,” Rowan said, and found and donned
the boots. They left the room, proceeded down the corridor. “Is Bel in the
dining room upstairs, or the common room?”

“The common room. Upstairs is filled, I think some event is
afoot. The innkeeper said that we could dine in Bel’s room, for a surcharge,
but Bel said no. I think she’s starting to worry about money.”

“It can’t last forever.” Bel had spent the last season
working with the silkworms in Alemeth, largely because there had been very
little else to occupy her. With no need to pay for lodging at the Annex, she
had acquired a tidy sum.