Rosemary Kirstein - Steerswoman 04 (38 page)

Side panels shifted, rose, tilted, moved back, around,
behind. Slabs of curly maple and walnut unfolded, spreading around Willam as if
seeking to embrace him, sliding across each other, and out from beneath each
other.

When the motions finally stopped, Wiliam sat in the center
of an array of levels, like a bee in the heart of a wooden flower—or, Rowan
thought, like a master musician with his collection of instruments laid out all
around him, each within reach, ready for a virtuoso performance.

Wiliam raised his brows. “This is interesting … ,” he said
in a dubious tone.

“I take it you weren’t expecting that?”

“No … I just hope I can recognize what I need. It has to
be the most convenient …” He looked down. A section of the top of the desk
had tilted toward him and shifted down to nearly rest in his lap. “This looks
like the place to start.” He looked up. “Are you all right? Because this is
going to get a lot stranger.”

Rowan surprised herself by laughing, if somewhat weakly. “I
believe I shall be disappointed if it doesn’t.”

“All right.” He passed his hands lightly across the surface
in his lap, as if feeling for something. He found it, whatever it was, nodded
satisfaction, and then arranged his hands carefully, and Rowan was reminded
even more sharply of a musician. Wiliam seemed poised, like someone about to
execute a complex composition on some keyboard instrument: a pump organ,
perhaps.

Then his hands moved, graceful, precise. Despite herself, Rowan
expected sound.

She got light.

Symbols, painted in pure light, from no visible source, appeared
in midair. Ranks of symbols, lines of them, an entire block of them, hovered
between her face and Wiliam’s.

Things
hanging in the
air,
Bel had said, after
spying on Fletcher as he worked his magic in secret in the Outskirts.
Cold
light.
Symbols, imparting information.

Will paused to study the shapes, nodded, executed another

3 10 THE LANGUAGE OF POWER

flurry of movement, considered the result. “Good …” He
leaned back, now more at ease. His eyes flicked across the symbols, as if
reading them

Rowan realized that he was, in fact, reading them; that they
were letters, and numbers; and that she had not recognized them because, from
her perspective, they were printed backward.

She attempted to read them herself. The letters, although
oddly shaped, were recognizable; but they formed no words she knew.

Will’s hands moved again, briefly, and he looked up, anticipating
the result.

To Willam’s left, a lattice appeared, in crisscrossing lines
of red light painted on thin air, each square of the lattice containing some
tiny bit of writing, too small to read, but to Rowan seeming all alike

But for one. Something was alive, trapped in the square,
shifting and flickering. Rowan could not discern what it might be.

Apparently, neither could Willam. He corrected this by,
quite simply, reaching across and plucking the square directly off the lattice,
out of the air, and bringing it closer.

Everything
is
power, Rowan found herself thinking, as
if repeating a litany, reassuring herself.
Power can be directed, controlled.
Will squinted at the tiny square, released it to hang in the air before
him; then, using thumb and forefingers, he grasped alternate corners and
pulled.

The square expanded.

Magic is
what
happens when you have a
very
precise
control
over
the movement of
power. The square was translucent, like
a frosted pane of glass, and Rowan could see Willam through it. Movement
flickered within the square’s four borders, at vary—

ing depths, some of which absolutely could not be reconciled
against the distance of Willam’s face. The effect was dizzying.

It had no such effect on Willam. He watched, thoughtful,
then looked through it at Rowan. “This is the dragon we stole,” he told her.
“It’s the only one in contact at the moment.”

She forced down nausea. “Very well.”

He puzzled at her a moment, then seemed to understand, and
looked apologetic. He took hold of the insubstantial square, and turned it
around in the air to face her.

Depth suddenly resolved. Rowan saw a shimmering surface
extending into the distance, humped dark shapes nearby. It was like a small
window, or a magic mirror out of an old folktale, showing, as such mirrors
often did in their tales, a distant view.

She recognized it. “The brook.”

Where they had left the dragon. She was seeing through the
eyes of a dragon.

And, she now understood, with utter amazement, she had before
been viewing this scene from behind, not merely mirror-reversed, but with depth
itself
reversed, near to far, far to near. She found this easy to
comprehend mathematically; in fact, it worked out with a satisfying neatness.
But it remained freakish as experienced, as if, somehow, she had been standing
on the far side of existence itself, viewing the entire universe from a point
of view opposite to everything.

She had once before in her life experienced so great a
shift, so complete a turning about and change …

A deep, bitter winter at the edge of the Red Desert. The air
had been too dry for snow, but the ground itself froze, as it often did, so
that it crunched and crumbled beneath the feet, and two sun dogs, nearly as
bright as the sun itself, stood in the sky, illusory companions of the true
sun.

Out of this cold, from the far, crisp distance, had wandered
a strange figure. At first the people of Umber thought it to be a bear out of
legend, with its strange humped shape and trudging gait. The villagers had
sufficient time to speculate, with the cold air so clear. They gathered at the
edge of town, young Rowan among them, wrapped in blankets and stamping her feet
warm.

But when the figure neared it resolved into a person,
bundled hugely against the frigid air, carrying an outsized pack; and when the
person arrived in the common square, and pulled back the fur-lined hood, Rowan
saw, amazingly, a woman.

A woman who traveled, alone, in the dead of winter. A stranger,
brown-skinned, blue-eyed, the first person Rowan had ever seen whom she had not
known since birth; either her own birth, or the other’s.

In later years Rowan came to know her well, as both a merciless
taskmistress and a gentle, sympathetic soul, with kind words for her young
Academy students so far from their homes, and harsh ones for those who slacked
in their studies: the steerswoman Keridwen.

But on that day she had been a stranger, with stories of far
lands, odd and delightful facts, and an open, cheerful air that made her seem a
bright star flickering here and there, in this corner and that of the great
winter lodge—asking questions.

Questions, and more questions; she seemed to have no end of
them.

Some were questions Rowan had herself asked, of her family
and fellow villagers: asked and asked more, until they grew tired of her, and
declared that she must be mentally deficient, to not know all these things as
matters of simple fact, to need explanations for the obvious.

But when Keridwen asked, she was answered. And sometimes,
questions were asked of her, always beginning:
Tell me, lady …

Rowan shadowed Keridwen about the lodge, listening to the
answers and explanations that had been denied Rowan from the time she was a
very little girl—all of them delivered in formal, respectful tones.

At last, in the quiet of the evening, by the center fire,
Rowan had gathered her courage to ask her own question:
Tell me,
lady,
why
do they always answer
you?

Because
I
am a steerswoman.

And there had begun Rowan’s life. She asked, and was answered.

Question followed question, ranging farther and wider and,
later, deeper. And in the heart of the night, with everyone wrapped in their
sleeping alcoves, young Rowan had asked:
Does everyone answer you?

Every person I
choose to ask.
And
not only people.

Rowan could not understand this.
Who else is
there
to
ask, but people?

You
can ask the hawk how
it
hunts by watching
it
do
it.
You can ask the
river
how
it
flows by
putting
your hand in the
moving
water. These
are answers, too.
And Rowan
recognized a truth she had always known, for this was how she herself asked,
and was answered, when the village grew tired of her.

And
more,
the blue-eyed stranger went on:
Where
the
river flows
from,
how it grows, at
what
speed, where in the
land
its path
must go;
how
stones fall; where in the
sky
the
stars
must rise
and
set;
what
makes
the
seasons
happen;
all of these answers are being spoken
for
us, constantly. The
universe itself is speaking, all
the time.

Young Rowan was not at all certain how literally she was expected
to take this statement. Why can’t
we hear
it?

First: you have to
listen. And second—and the
steerswoman smiled—you
have to know the language.

The language was mathematics.

Rowan watched Willam: stark white hair, and copper eyes;
hands moving across the panel in his lap; glance flicking here and there, where
now six blocks of letters of pure light stood painted in the air around him.

What if, Rowan thought, you knew the language, or portions
of it, so well that you not only understood it, but could speak it; could not
only ask the universe, but
tell
it?

Instruct it. Command.

Magic.

She knew that this could not be done by writing down formulas,
or by uttering them with her voice. Numbers and formulas were representations
of relationships possessed by objects and forces. But by knowing the
relationships with utter precision, and manipulating the objects, directing the
forces—one could, in fact, command.

Everything might be power; but all power must move by the
numbers.

“Here’s where you can help me,” Willam said. He leaned
through the light-words as if they were merely what they were, light, and
retrieved the square containing the distant dragon’s sight. He shrank it
between his hands, replaced it in its previous position within the red-lined
lattice. “I don’t know how many jammers Jannik has found so far, but we still
have full coverage of the field. I don’t
think
he can disable enough of
them to make gaps before we’re done here—but he might. If he does …”

“The house will be able to call to him, and try to tell him
that we’re here?”

“Well, no, not anymore. I’ve stopped that. But he might try
to talk to the house himself, just to check. I’m not sure what would happen
then, but we ought to stop what we’re doing, and get out.”

Reaching out, he took the entire lattice, turned it to face Rowan,
placed it between him and her, expanded it slightly. His fingers danced on his
lap panel, and the lines of red light dimmed slightly; Rowan found she could
still see it clearly, while remaining able to see through it easily. “Now—”
Wiliam glanced up at her, then looked again, puzzled.

“What is it?”

“You’re awfully easy about this, all of a sudden,” he said.

Rowan realized that this was true: she found the structure
hanging in thin air before her not freakish, nor frightening, but intriguing,
and lovely, in its way. “I’ve given the matter some thought,” she said simply.

He leaned back, regarding her with something like amazement.
“You know,” he said, “you never stop surprising me.”

“The feeling is mutual. What do you want me to do?”

He leaned forward again, indicating from behind the shrunken
square he had replaced. “That’s our dragon, outside of the jammers’ influence.
All of these”—his finger swept among the other squares—“are the dragons still
in the field, inside the jammers.”

With the lattice larger and no longer reversed, Rowan could
read the little words. “‘Out of Range.’”

“Meaning, too far away for the controlling spell to reach.
Which they aren’t really, but the spell can’t tell the difference. It just
knows it can’t reach them.”

“Some of the squares say,” and she puzzled over the
unfamiliar word, “‘Offline.’”

He nodded. “Those are the dragons that are dead. If Jannik
disables enough jammers—”

“The other squares will show what the dragons see.”

“That’s right.” He sat back again. “The spell’s not set up to
warn me by itself, that’s not how it usually works, and I don’t have the time
to figure out how to change it. And pretty soon I’ll be too busy to watch the
monitors myself.”

She decided that he was referring to the array of dragon
eyes. “I can do it.” Arranged as it was, she could hardly miss any change in
the configuration.

“Good.” He gazed about, at the ranks of letters in the air.
Within each block, the letters moved, marching along, shifting position,
appearing at the lower corner of some invisible boundary, proceeding to the
left, then up to the next line. “You know,” Willam said, shaking his head, half
disbelieving, “Corvus doesn’t have anything nearly this sophisticated.”

“Really?” And why would Jannik, she wondered, then realized.
“Jannik inherited this from Kieran?”

“No …” Willam adjusted the position of two blocks, in
order to view them more comfortably. “This is a lot older than that. It
probably goes back to Donner.”

Rowan was confused for a moment, then recalled that the city
had adopted the name of its first wizard, out of gratitude for his rescue of
the people from marauding dragons. Dragons almost certainly planted by Donner
himself.