The Lost Steersman (Steerswoman Series) (19 page)

“That’s usual.”

But if Slado knew Rowan was at the Annex, and knew enough to consider her a threat, certainly some more direct and dependable means of eliminating her could be used. “I think,” she said slowly, “that I’ve simply lost my immunity. Somehow.” She made a noise of frustration. “And I don’t even know why steerswomen should be safe from guard spells in the first place. We simply are. Or ought to be.”

Gwen appeared at the end of the aisle. “I’m off,” she said, then added, “and thanks for making the dinner.”

“You’re welcome. In fact, come by tomorrow, and I’ll do better, since I’ll know to expect it.”

This left Gwen with such an ambivalent expression on her face that Rowan and Steffie exchanged a quick wry glance; then the two departed for their homes.

Rowan dreamed that Tyson, ship’s navigator from the Morgans Chance, unexpectedly appeared at the door of the Annex and that they two had a long and detailed conversation concerning the nature of guard spells. Interestingly, both of them seemed well-informed on the subject. The Rowan who observed the dream tried desperately to listen to what the Rowan who participated in the dream was saying. But, as is so often the case with dreams, the conversation proved to have no content whatsoever when examined closely.

Rowan woke to Mira’s lumpy bed and dim light filtering through the slats of the shutters.

No surprise that Rowan should dream of Tyson: it had been he who first demonstrated their mutual immunity to guard spells.

She tried to return to sleep, but was frustrated by the fact that the sheets had become so tangled that she would have to rise and remake the bed to get them right. After half an hour of attempting different postures, she gave it up and rose for the day.

She stubbornly ignored the box until she had prepared and eaten a makeshift breakfast, dealt with the dishes, planned what provisions to acquire for the evening, set out papers, ink, pens, and her logbook. Only then did she fetch the box.

She brought it back to the worktable, carrying it again by its wrappings, and set it down. Then she moved about it like a dog investigating a scorpion, crouching to view it from every possible angle, staying well back.

It clearly was meant for a steerswoman; the depiction on the lid left no question.

How had Rowan lost her immunity?

The woman on the lid was shown in typical steerswoman’s garb, with typical accoutrements: hooded cloak, trousers, high leather boots, pack with protruding tubular map case, and a sheathed sword hanging at her waist. It came to Rowan that it was only these details that enabled her to recognize the subject of the picture as a steerswoman.

She looked down at herself. She was wearing clothing salvaged from Mira’s wardrobe: a faded blue blouse of age-softened silk; moss-green canvas trousers, stiff from being stored unused for decades— and she was barefoot. Not at all the traditional appearance for a steerswoman. And how had she been dressed when she touched the box the previous day? Much the same.

Rowan brought her pack down from the storeroom and placed her map case inside; the protruding end of the case she carefully arranged to precisely the same angle as that shown on the box lid. She strapped on her sword, and arranged it with the same care. She took Mira’s cloak from its hook, swung it around her shoulders; her own she had discarded in the Outskirts, when the constant abrasion against the rough-edged redgrass had worn it down to the lining.

Then she shouldered the pack, readjusted her gear, and considered herself again. Anyone seeing her would instantly know her as a steerswoman. All she lacked were her gum-soled, gray leather steerswoman’s boots, which had suffered the same fate as her cloak; but if, as she guessed, the box was able to recognize a steerswoman, Rowan had certainly provided sufficient clues by which to be recognized

By any person of average intelligence. Rowan found very disturbing the idea of an object like a box possessing intelligence, or an inhabiting spirit.

Perhaps it was merely that certain conditions were necessary for the spell to work. Three years ago, when she had watched the boy Willam prepare to execute his particular kind of destructive magic, she had been impressed by the total concentration and utter precision of action he displayed. Exactitude had been required, exactitude in every detail. Willam’s spell had not been intelligent; the intelligence had been Willam’s, in the precise recreation of the proper conditions.

Rowan considered her own bare feet. She ought to search the house for Mira’s boots.

She sighed in impatience and doffed pack and cloak, wondering where to begin— then recalled the old boots sitting on the back stairs.

They were dank with damp, crusted with mud. Rowan spent some minutes sitting on the steps, scraping the mud with a broken broom haft. The boots were ancient and had not been well cared for even in their youth. The gum soles were worn to the leather, and apparently Mira had continued to use them in that condition, as the leather itself was also worn, nearly to the insole.

Rowan had no idea if the box’s requirements might include the soles of her feet. Still, the lack would be easy to remedy. The gum, distilled from the sap of certain trees, was available on any ship and in all seaports; sailors routinely used it to coat the soles of their boots and shoes, in order to improve their traction on wooden decks.

Rowan stopped short.

Gum-soled boots were used by steerswomen and by sailors— and by almost no one else. Those sailors most likely to wear footgear were those whose income enabled them to afford the expense: that is to say, officers. Like Tyson.

Rowan abandoned the boots, swept back into the house, scrabbled inside the cash jar on the mantel, extracted a small number of coins, and hurried out into the street.

At a harbor shop she found a secondhand pair of brown sailor’s boots with soles in good repair; the shopkeeper, knowing she was a steerswoman, offered them free.

Back at the Annex, she immediately donned the boots and turned to the table where the box still rested.

She wore no cloak, no pack, no sword. She made no attempt to make herself visibly a steerswoman. She reached out her hand and touched the lid of the box.

No effect. The steerswoman’s mouth twitched once in satisfaction and she pulled up the lid to examine the contents.

It was empty.

“
Rowan—
”

And she was on the opposite side of the room, her drawn sword at the ready in her hands, her back toward the now-open door. She stood, tense, shuddering with fear, equally prepared to strike or escape. Her breath came harsh through clenched teeth.

The box sat on the table, closed; she had slammed it shut when she fled.

It had spoken to her.

She sensed a presence behind her, spun.

A little boy with a stack of kindling balanced on his head stood in the center of the street, gape-mouthed in terror. Rowan considered the sight she must present: a madwoman in a fighting stance, weapon fearsomely wielded, wild-eyed with panic.

Rowan blinked and relaxed her posture. “Excuse me,” she said, and shut the door.

There was no one else in the room; Rowan was alone with the box. She cautiously approached it again, with her sword in her right hand, and reached out slowly to open it with her left.

The box continued: “I hope you will forgive me for choosing to communicate with you in such a startling fashion.” The voice was identical to that of Corvus, the wizard in Wulfshaven. “You certainly chose to startle me with the contents of your message. I’m sure you had your reasons. And I have mine.”

Rowan found she was clenching her teeth painfully. She forced her jaw to relax, made herself take one step closer.

Corvus would hardly be likely to have magically reduced his size and traveled in a little box in the cargo hold of a ship for weeks on end, purely in order to speak to Rowan. The wizard was not present. The box contained only his voice.

Did it contain his hearing, as well? “Corvus . . .” she said hesitantly; but the voice spoke over hers, oblivious.

“I’m sure you know that I was startled,” it continued, “not to say shocked, to hear that you knew of the existence of the links. You neglected to tell me how you found out about them, and of course”— the voice acquired a wry tone— “I cannot ask.” It had been Fletcher who had told Rowan of the magical devices carried by the wizards’ servants stationed in the Outskirts. He had destroyed his own link before changing his loyalties.

“But I did as you suggested,” the box said in Corvus’s voice, “and you are correct. Until fifty years ago Routine Bioform Clearance was a regularly scheduled event, repeating in a twenty-year cycle. By comparing old traces and maps, it’s clear that the beam was always directed at areas just beyond the Outskirts, and the result each time was an increase in the rate of expansion of human-supporting life-forms. We can only assume that its original purpose was to destroy the . . . the inimical life, so that the Outskirts could move eastward— and the Inner Lands grow behind it.”

Inimical life, such as demons. This was why demons did not exist in the Inner Lands: destroyed by magic, just beyond the ever-shifting edge of the Outskirts. And now— what would prevent the strange animals at the edge of the world from moving inward?

Corvus continued. “I still have not determined why the Clearance stopped, or whether Slado actually had anything to do with that; but you can be certain that I was concerned to hear that he had directed the beam into inhabited lands.

“I could not use my own link to communicate directly with the field agents currently working in the Outskirts, as you had requested. The action would require my messages to . . . shall we say, to take a route where there would be watchers. The messages might be intercepted; questions would be asked. And that’s particularly unfortunate, because some of our people did die. As you suspected, the record of the actual event had been erased, but I learned a great deal by replaying surveillance taken before and after it, paying particular attention to the flags.” Rowan wondered again how something as small as a link could possibly carry a flag large enough to be visible from the watching eye of a Guidestar and how that flag could be invisible to human eyes.

“There were four flags,” Corvus said, “in or near the affected areas. One nearby ceased to move after the gap in the records.” That wizard’s minion, Rowan understood, must have died in the bizarre weather that occurred after the heat. “Two flags directly in the path of the beam had vanished entirely after the event.” Two wizard’s servants, suffering the horrible fate of death by the magical heat; Rowan thought of the corpses she had seen, burst wide and turned hard as rock, and found herself disliking Corvus for referring to the minions themselves as flags, impersonally, instead of as people.

The voice acquired an affected innocence. “One flag, oddly, vanished more than a day before the Clearance”—
Fletcher’s
, Rowan thought— “and the heat track of the tribe that it was originally with showed a rather interesting pattern of motion. Due east. Very quickly. It looked”— and the voice became ironic— “like a difficult journey.” Three tribe members had died from the physical strain of that flight and more than a dozen others in the tempests and tornadoes that followed. Rowan felt her dislike begin to transform into positive hatred of Corvus for his callous manner; but abruptly, he dropped his tone and spoke simply. “Slado is not the only one who can erase a record, Rowan. The gap in the record is now two days longer than it was originally. No other wizard will know that one tribe had warning. They’re safe.”

By now Rowan was sitting on the edge of the table, sword hilt slack in her hands, absorbed in the words. “There’s no more that I can tell you— safely or wisely, I should say. But if the Outskirts are not allowed to continue to move, as is their nature, the results will be . . . troublesome.

“However, I still do not know why this is being done, nor whether or not some useful purpose is being served. When we last spoke, you told me that a time would come when I must choose for myself which side I will stand with. I can only tell you now that that time is not yet.”

Silence.

Corvus would provide no help. Not even so simple a fact as Slado’s location.

Still, he had not yet aligned himself with the master wizard’s purposes. Perhaps there was reason to hope.

Rowan reached out to close the box; but the spell had not run its course.

She heard the wizard’s voice again but quietly, as if from a distance: “Willam, say hello to your friend.” And then a sound, like a breath in her ear and different voice, close and loud, young and deep. “Um, hello, Rowan. I hope you’re well.” Willam, whom Rowan and Bel had befriended, now serving Corvus as apprentice. “Hello, Willam,” Rowan could not help replying, despite knowing that the young man could not hear her. Rowan understood that the message had been spoken in the past and that somehow she was magically listening across the intervening weeks.

There was silence again. Rowan smiled to herself. In her experience of magic she had seen, for the most part, horror and evil. But this charmed her, like the tiny dancing statue she had once seen, spinning with single-minded innocence. Pleasant to hear the voice of a friend across so many miles—

Then a third voice spoke; and at the sound of it, Rowan froze, her hand suddenly tight on her weapon. The voice was thin, colorless as stone, and utterly expressionless: the sort of voice a corpse might use.