The Ordinary (18 page)

“Time to climb again,” he said.

She gathered her legs beneath her and started upward. She was looking eastward, over the walls of the house beyond the three hills to the undulating of a forest toward the horizon, clouds shimmering, and a sight followed that froze her in place. Two moons were rising, a red and a white, ghosts hanging beyond reach of the clouds. The white moon was in crescent phase, and appeared to the be the moon it ought to be, the one that circled Senal though it was in the sky at the wrong time of evening. Was that the right phase? She was a seasoned traveler but had never paid much attention to the moon on either side of the Twil Gate.

But there was no red moon. Had never been a red moon, not in the sky over Senal. Ruddy, colored like flakes of rust. Smaller, appearing more distant, than the other, full and round.

The sight made her stomach flop, as if the whole world had gone wrong. When she looked again, the moons both hung as before.

Jessex stood at the top of the long ascent, where the land flattened a bit, emerging from a grove of low trees around the tower that Arvith had called Needle. The tower gave the illusion of height through some architectural trick, maybe the long clean vertical lines; it rose no more than six stories high. He stood there watching the sky, and caught Jedda's eye. “Aren't the moons lovely?” he asked, as they drew close. “Such a fine night.”

“Are you trying to be funny?” Jedda asked.

His eyes were brimming with what looked like amusement, as well as a kind of satisfaction that felt sinister. “The white moon is the same moon in your sky, in ours. The other one is a stranger to you, and mostly to us.”

“Where am I?”

Arvith had turned to look at the moons himself, then gazed at her in sudden embarrassment. “I'm so sorry. I'd forgotten.”

“That's all right, Arvith,” Jessex said. “It's better that I should explain.”

“Where am I?” Jedda repeated.

“You're exactly where I said. You're in the north of Irion, in the forest we call Arthen.” His face, maybe seeing her distress, grew suddenly gentler. “I'm sorry. This has disturbed you more than I meant it to. And to be truthful, I'd hoped to get you indoors before the moons were up.”

He conducted her into the garden with a manner that was almost contrite. Below, on the lower ranks of the hill, eerily colored fires were burning in regularly spaced stone pots along the walls, and the mass of the house descended toward the distant entrance halls that she had passed such a long while ago. The red of the moonlight tinged the shadows and bled along the stone. “This is so beautiful,” she said. “The only landscapes in my world that are as wonderful as this are imaginary.”

“This place was created for its beauty,” he said.

“Who created it?”

“Why, God, of course.” He was smiling at her with what could only be irony. Beneath the trees they walked, across a lawn that needed mowing, thick with wildflowers and grasses at the fringes, vine in the deeper parts of the garden, under the tree cover. As the light faded everything became one mass of glowing green. “This is my favorite time of day,” he said. “The way the light lingers to the last moment.”

“The moons are beautiful,” she said, watching the two swim upward beyond clouds.

He gave her a long, steady look this time, and she felt as if she were being touched. “It was a calculated risk, bringing you to this particular night,” he said. “The moons were to be proof, if you required any.”

“Proof of what?”

“That I'll be telling you the truth. That I've brought you not only a great distance in the world but through many years of time.”

Her breath had become constricted. She was trying, as much as possible, to think nothing at all. Again she wished for the control of body chemistry provided her by the stat link, useless now. “Why?”

“To make certain you have a choice. And that you understand its consequences.”

“Why is my choice important?”

He shook his head. “For a reason I can't tell you, but one that you will eventually guess.” She started to say something else and he shook his head, made a gesture with his hand. “Be patient, Jedda. Let this be as easy as it can be. I understand you have a fear to be chosen, but you have been chosen, there is nothing to do about it. Unless you decide to stay here and now for the rest of your life.”

“Is that one of my possibilities?”

He smiled, and nodded. “Of course. But we'll see how attractive you find it, compared to your own time.”

He led her around a bramble to a path of loose stone. Lamps had been lit at the doorways of his house, inviting golden light that shimmered with other colors, maybe some kind of prism in the lamp, or some impurity of the oil. For a moment, through the trees, she glimpsed the mass of the other tower and the huge spur of rock from which it soared; the stones gave off faint traces of color, light, as she watched. A snatch of music passed through her head, drifted away. More music, a different kind, spilled from the open doors and windows of the house. Arvith waited for them there, glanced anxiously at Jedda, who said to him, “Oh stop it, Arvith, I'm fine. I was a bit shocked but I'm fine.”

He let out breath. “Very good.”

“Maybe it's having you here, too, that makes it all right.”

“Arvith has that effect on a person, I find,” Jessex said, in that rich voice again, making Jedda shiver. “That's why I like to have him around.” The phrase he used could also have meant, “That's why I like to have him in the circle.” The words resonated with both meanings.

Inside, passing through rooms lit with various kinds of lamps, she found herself enchanted against her will. The house was very comfortable but not at all elaborate. The tower was one enormous library, through which one had to pass to get from the public part of the living quarters to the private. He stopped in the center of the tower to let Jedda get a look, lamps glowing up the long spiral of the stair, which was made of metal and which wound up five or six levels. The smell of paper and ink filled the room, a smell that she found pleasant, slightly acrid. “What sort of books are these?” she asked. “Do you read a lot of fiction?”

He laughed, easy and plain. “I have, on occasion. Our writers do write fiction, but you already know this.”

“Yes.”

“These are books on another subject most dear to me, of course. Studies of magic, going back as far as we go.” He was looking upward a bit wistfully. “I have spent many pleasant hours here.”

“Does anyone else use the books?” She asked because the stillness of the vault was a bit ominous, despite the warmth of the light.

“I've people to help me maintain it.”

“Do you allow a person like me any sort of access?”

He smiled. “If you're asking for access, I grant you whatever you like. What books there are that might be of any danger to you would be incomprehensible. If you would like, I could assign you a tutor, one of the Prin, who can guide your reading.”

She felt a prickle at the base of her scalp, along with an instinct that he was making this entirely too easy. “That's good to know.”

“You would be interested in studying magic?” he asked. “In order to determine what it is and where it comes from?”

“Yes.”

They were passing out of the library now, Arvith holding open a wide, polished door that was hidden among shelves. Beyond was a small, tapestried room that served, apparently, as an antechamber. “We've brought you in by the back way,” Jessex explained, “because it's quicker. I was going to show you a bit of the house, but Arvith tells me he's bored you enough with stories about old furniture.”

“We did have a long walk through the house in Telyar, and he was very educational. Though I'm sure I wouldn't mind more.”

“We have enough to talk about for one evening. The real tour is not Needle, which is brand-new, but the rest of the house. The oldest parts of Inniscaudra are much older than the Erejhen.”

The windows of these rooms, a comfortably appointed study, a sitting room, and a small dining room, looked over the western part of the hill, where the gorgeous stone halls glimmered in torchlight, layers of light and house and hill, under the glow of that red moon. She looked only for a moment before he offered her a glass of wine and she accepted. They touched cups.

“We call the first cup the cup of politeness,” Jessex said. “The second is the cup of friendship, the third is laughter. We'll see how far along we get, you and I.”

He had settled her in the study. A fire burned in the fireplace, a young woman kneeling to tend it, dressed like one of the military, with a stony expression on her face. He paced near the fireplace and the woman withdrew. He looked at Jedda. “Well, then.”

The sight of the moon had brought back an edge of the fear, and she fought it down. She saw no reason to use more emotion than necessary. The fear would be helped by answers, or made worse by them, one or the other. “Do I really need to draw this out of you by questions?” she asked. “You know what you've done. I don't.”

He nodded, slowly. “Fair enough.”

“You may as well start with the choice you told me about. You said I was here to make a choice.”

“I said I brought you here to make certain that you do have a choice in what follows.” He paced, slowly, the length of the room. His gown had begun to shimmer, slow glimmers of changing color that she thought at first were a trick of the dark. “What was about to happen to you, in the moment out of which I took you, was that my———” and here he said a word that meant nothing to her, “would have taken you himself, to Cunevadrim, the place for which you were bound and the journey to which I'll return you, whenever you decide you're ready to continue it.”

“You said a word I don't know.”

He assented and repeated it, spelled it. “Intukur. It's an old word for husband, but it implies opposition, even enmity.”

“But I don't understand. I thought it was you I was going to meet in the first place.”

He spread his hands to the fire, and for a moment it swelled as if he had called it, light filling the space between his arms. “It was. In your time, there is a part of me that lives in Inniscaudra, here. And there is another part that lives in Cunevadrim.” He signed her to wait while he thought a bit. “I know this sounds strange to you. So, in regard to your wish not to have to draw this out of me with questions, give me a moment to decide how best to explain.”

She sipped wine, and he followed suit. A calm had wrapped her once she was free to sit and stare at the fire, the warm lull of wine in her belly. After a moment, he said, “Your people live to be how old. Two hundred or more, I'm told?”

“Two hundred six years for women, 198 for men. That's what we can expect on average. I'd be more certain of the statistic if my stat link were functioning.”

“Your guess is good enough. My people in general live to be quite old, too; nearly as long as you, in your time, with the kinds of medical care that the Prin can provide, with the kind of life that peacetime allows.” He paused to sip his own wine, to take a chair near her, leaning on its arm and drawing up his feet into the seat. “But occasionally we live much longer. Sometimes tens of thousands of years. Do your elderly have a phenomenon in which the consciousness grows disinterested in time, in which it will no longer perform its function of knitting the moments of time together?”

“Yes. Most of the time it can be treated, at least partially.”

“We prefer not to treat this as an illness,” he said. “We believe it to be the sign that the consciousness has reached the end of its natural life, and is loosening its bonds.”

“I'm confused, what does this have to do—”

He gestured and continued himself. “Among immortals, or, to be more exact, among transmortals, there is a different kind of sickness that comes after very long life.”

“Are you saying this is happening to you?”

He gave her a gentle, grateful smile, but at the same time his body pulsed with a wave of color and light that was answered in the echo of light in the windows. He saw the movement of her eyes and said, “The light comes from the tower, my high place. I'm involved in a large work that I can't entirely let go of.”

“I understand.” She felt a small knot of fear in her stomach.

“This illness is coming to me soon,” he said, and appeared to speak with less effort now. “I can feel parts of it already.”

She stood, restless, and paced to the window, agitated at first, but calmer when she moved. He watched her without response. “I can hardly believe any of this, really.”

“It would help you if I could tell you what we are, why we are different from you. It would help you if I could tell you what magic is.”

“Yes.”

“That's why I brought you to this night, when the red moon is visible. To show you the old sky.”

She grew still, her back to the window.

“This is our world, Irion as you name it, as it existed before the link between your world and ours. This is our sky, what's called the Old Sky in your time, which changes from night to night with no rhyme or reason. Out there are our mountains that climb and climb so far it is unimaginable, farther than anyone has ever been able to travel, even in the span of our history and our lifetimes. Yet in another direction is our ocean, which simply stops after a point, a place we call the edge of the world. We were tardy in exploring that direction, we were not great sailors, so that knowledge is more recent. But what we have learned, from the sky, from the earth, from the ocean, is that our world makes sense only as a created place.

“Yet we know that there is, or was, something across the ocean, at least at one time, because of the Anin people who came here so long ago, came here from somewhere.”