Rosemary Kirstein - Steerswoman 04 (4 page)

The Steerswomen were collectors of information, students of
the world, of nature, and people; the wizards, too, had their own store of
knowledge.

Whatever a steerswoman knew was given freely, to whoever
might ask. In return, one must answer a steerswoman’s questions truthfully—or
be placed under the Steerswomen’s ban, with no question, even the most trivial,
ever answered by them again.

But when asked about the workings of their power, the
wizards declined to answer. They shared their knowledge with no one.

And so it had continued across long centuries. The
Steerswomen had come to despise the wizards, and the wizards, for the most
part, paid the Steerswomen the ultimate insult of ignoring them
completely—until recently.

Recently, Rowan had uncovered certain facts, information
both startling and disturbing:

She had learned that a Guidestar had fallen. Not one of the
two visible in the nighttime sky, motionless points of light behind which the
slow constellations shifted with the world’s turning; but another, one
previously unknown and unseen in the Inner Lands.

She had learned that the part of the world known as the Outskirts
depended upon the intervention of magic, and had always done so. Every twenty
years, a magical heat was sent down from the sky, sweeping an area east of the
inhabited Outskirts, and destroying the dangerous creatures and poisonous
plantlife common there. This spell was called by the wizards Routine Bioform
Clearance—and its operation had ceased at the same time that the unknown
Guidestar had fallen.

Without Routine Bioform Clearance, the redgrass that fed the
Outskirters’ goat herds would be unable to spread into newly empty lands; the
Outskirters could not move to the east; and the Inner Lands would be unable to
expand in the area left behind. The result would be famine among the warrior
tribes, and overpopulation in the Inner Lands. A clash between two peoples
seemed inevitable.

And finally, Rowan had learned that the single person behind
these events was a previously unknown wizard, the master-wizard over all
others, a man named Slado.

There Rowan’s knowledge ended. She knew nothing else about
Slado: neither his age, nor his appearance, nor where he dwelled, nor what he
hoped to accomplish—nor why he had kept his actions secret even from the other
wizards.

Those actions; inexplicably, seemed all designed to destroy.
Slado had once even turned Routine Bioform Clearance against the Outskirter
tribes directly, with results terrible to witness. And who knew what his next
step might be?

He had to be stopped. To be stopped, he first had to be
found—or at the very least, the nature and course of his plans must be discovered,
so that they could be circumvented. With no other source of information
available, Rowan had turned to the Steerswomen’s Annex in Alemeth.

There, duplicate copies of steerswomen’s logbooks were
stored, covering centuries of travel and observation. There might, Rowan hoped,
be some subtle clues buried unrecognized in the records. The hope was slim, but
there seemed no other recourse.

It had been close on to midnight one spring night, with
Rowan, still recuperating from the injuries she had received in the Demon
Lands, half dizzy with exhaustion. She was collating and transcribing onto
various charts some very odd information about unusual weather patterns when
Steffie, a man who assisted the Annex’s new custodian, appeared at the
worktable.

He was nearly as weary as she—and dusty. He and Zenna, the
custodian, had been at work in the attic, sorting through trunks apparently
untouched for decades. With an expression of suppressed outrage, Steffie
wordlessly set a single logbook on the table in front of Rowan, then stalked
back upstairs. Rowan glanced up from her work at the book, then stopped short.

The book’s cover was worn and scratched, the leather stained
dark in places from handling; the thong that tied it closed had been broken and
reknotted twice. The book had been used hard, and had traveled long.

It was an original logbook, one written by the hand of a
steerswoman during the course of her journeys—and the Annex was no place for
it.

Such books were precious, and were preserved in the
Steerswomen’s Archives, north of Wulfshaven. The residents there would make
two copies, to send to each of the far-flung annexes: safekeeping against the
possibility of some disaster striking the Archives.

But this was not the first original logbook that had been
found in Alemeth; there had been several. The previous custodian had neglected
her duties—to a criminal degree, in Rowan’s opinion. But the old woman had
died, leaving others to sort out the chaos she had left behind.

Rowan made a small, weak noise of anger. Suddenly, inex—

pressibly weary, she considered retiring for the night;
found her cane inconveniently far away; decided to wait for Steffie to return
and retrieve it for her; organized her papers; cleaned and set aside her pens;
took up the logbook and opened it. She read the first lines:

I’ve just been told that the
wizard
Kieran passed
away
two
weeks ago.
My entire trip to Donner is
a waste of time.

Moments later, the entire house had been roused.

The comment was at the beginning of the logbook, and there
was no later mention of Kieran at all; the reason for this steerswoman
abandoning her assigned route, for her interest in a wizard, must have been
recorded near the end of the previous volume. But three days of near-continual
searching failed to produce, either in original or copy, the logbook that
preceded Latitia’s mention of Kieran.

Rowan was left with only two pieces of information, both
equally compelling:

First, that something about Kieran had drawn the
steerswoman Latitia to Donner.

And second, the date—two weeks after the fall of the unknown
Guidestar.

Whether or not Dan and Bel’s performance of the previous
night did in fact monopolize the morning’s gossip, Rowan never discovered; she
rose too late.

It was halfway to lunch, which disappointed but did not surprise
her. When she had lain down the previous night, her leg raised such vigorous
complaint that Rowan had found it necessary to take a small draught of poppy extract.
She disliked the drug intensely, but knew she must rest, and reasoned that if
there were any night where it might be safe to sleep drugged it would be this
night, and possibly no other.

After attending to her morning routine, she climbed and then
descended to the common room. It was deserted. Noises led her into the kitchen,
and a request for some breakfast resulted in every member of the kitchen staff
being introduced one by one as their duties brought them near her—and Rowan
found herself adopted.

Kippers produced themselves as if by magic, seeming to
regard in startlement the fans of sliced eggs arranged about their heads.
Lemonade of exactly the best degree of tartness was presented in a fine crystal
glass. The first bread prepared for the noon meal was ready, flavored with
fennel and poppy seed, and Rowan enjoyed it hours before the paying customers.

She sat by the edge of a preparing table, using fine linen
and fine silver, observing the action of the kitchen crew as she ate. It seemed
almost a dance, an orchestrated swirl of activity. Pockets of motion spun
inward and outward, from one end of the kitchen to the other, under a cacophony
of conversation, not one word of which pertained to the duties at hand. No one,
it seemed, required verbal direction.

Rowan found the entire performance deeply satisfying, and
spent her breakfast lost in happy analysis of patterns of flow. Eventually, she
noticed a single small discontinuity, and watched as it moved, generating
minuscule disruptions in its wake. Amused, Rowan projected paths,
crosscurrents, amplifications—and so was not surprised when, in three different
parts of the kitchen, a pan of salt-covered turbot clattered and crunched to
the floor; a basin of silver crashed, sending butter knives sliding to every
corner; and an entire basket of rolls leapt into the air, causing four persons
to collide in a flurry of snatching hands.

All motion ceased. A moment of silence, then laughter, and
cries of “Beck!”

“Beck!” Rowan wondered if this were a local curse word,
until the source of the original discontinuity—her young server of the previous
evening—rose up from the crowd of knife retrievers. Beck blinked about in
seeming innocence, then conceded his guilt with an elaborate bow, executed with
many flourishes.

The kitchen began to recover, and Rowan addressed the undercook,
who was sharing her preparing table with the steerswoman. “Do you remember a
wizard named Kieran?”

The undercook, a woman of late middle age, was using heavy
shears to trim tails and fins from a stack of five turbot. The question made
her pause, causing a five-year-old boy, standing on a stool beside her, to
offer a white handkerchief for her to scratch the tip of her nose against. This
was his only duty, which he took very seriously.

The cook declined the handkerchief with a jerk of her head,
chewed her lip in thought, and began on the turbot again. “Killed a little
girl,” she said.

The handkerchief boy gaped, dumbfounded. Rowan was herself a
moment recovering. “One of the children at his star parties?”

“No … No. No, no.” She shook her head. “No. Before he
started those up.” She finished trimming the last turbot. “Years before that,
twenty, twenty-five or more …” As if on cue, an assistant arrived with a
stack of five square pans. The undercook transferred one fish into the top pan;
it fit, edge to edge, as perfectly as if it had been measured.

“Do you know how it happened?” Rowan asked.

The stack of empty pans began to transform into a stack of
fish-filled pans. “Got in his way,” the undercook said. “Surely there was more
to it than that ?”

“I don’t know.” The last turbot made its journey. “Stay away
from the wizard, my dad told me.” She tilted her head, beaming cheerfully at
the completed stack, her expression rendering her next sentence freakishly
incongruous: “Because he kills little girls who get in his way.”

The pan carrier departed; Beck arrived, placed a heavy
bucket on the table, and left. “Is your dad still alive?” Rowan asked the cook.

“No. Years gone, him and my ma both.” The cook peered in the
bucket, glanced up as if consulting an internal list, nodded, then extracted
double fistfuls of clams from the water.

The dance of the kitchen crew had recovered, and was quickening:
lunch was nearing. Rowan disliked the idea of possibly interfering with the
lovely flow, but managed one further question. “Would you happen to know where
an elderly man named N id lives?”

“Rose Street. Off Ambleway. Third on the left. Tub of geraniums
just outside. Take the staircase down.” The cook took up a clam knife and began
plying it with a will.

“Thank you.” And the steerswoman scanned the patterns of
motion for an appropriate opening, sidled neatly through the moving staff
members, and exited by the back door.

Into the yard, around the corner, through another door, and
she was at her room in moments. There, she strapped on her sword, collected her
logbook, pencils, pen, and ink, loaded them into a shoulder-slung satchel. She
made a point of climbing and descending the two staircases, so as to depart the
inn publicly through the front door.

When she reached the street, Rowan looked back and sighted
Bel, nursing a cup of tea behind the windows of the ornate sitting room. Bel
looked extremely comfortable, sitting with both legs folded beneath her, in
ostentatious disregard for elegant sensibility. Rowan wondered what the dubious
servers who watched askance would think if they knew that they were waiting on
a member of a barbaric Outskirter tribe.

Rowan walked away, knowing that Bel would not be far behind.
It was good to have someone to watch one’s back.

Rose Street was easily found, and the basement dwelling of
the venerable Nid. Nid, however, was not present.

The watcher at the harbormaster’s office had suggested riverside
with the eelers, or the stevedores’ mug-room. Because it was nearer, Rowan
chose the latter.

Inside, a small iron stove threw out more heat than the day
needed, but the dampness retreated from the blast, so that it served its
purpose. Off to one side, three beefy men sat in chairs pushed against the
wall, their hands wrapped around mugs of soup. They leaned toward each other,
their heads close together, and spoke in low tones, occasionally casting
sidelong glances at an equally beefy woman who sat alone at the sole, tiny
table. She was working a bit of bone with a delicate rasping-file, whistling
soundlessly, nonchalant, her own cup beside her.

No proprietor was present. Rowan decided that the woman was
the most approachable of the customers.

“Nid?” The stevedore showed surprise at Rowan’s question.
“Not here, not today. Was he supposed to be?” She considered this seriously, as
if it were a difficult question. “Did Susan send you?”

“No, I’m a steerswoman. I have some questions about the history
of Donner, and I understand that N id might be a good person to ask.”

The conversation on the other side of the room ceased. Rowan
found all present looking at her in puzzlement. “Is there something I don’t
know about this that I ought?” she said.

“Going to ask Nid?” one of the men asked, while another acquired
a look of immense astonishment.

Rowan became suspicious. “Is old Nid still in possession of
his faculties?” The question caused merely perplexity in the listeners. Rowan
clarified: “Gone soft in the head?”

Comprehension. “You can’t get the time of day out of him,”
one of the men confirmed.