The Ordinary (21 page)

“Yes, he can.”

“Do you always take a turn at duty here?” Jedda asked.

“What?”

“Kirson, your friend there. He told me all the Prin take shifts in the hall.”

“It's an old tradition,” she said. “I came this morning because I had a feeling. A good one, as it turns out.” She turned to go. “And I owe duty, too, of course. How long will you be staying?”

“A couple of days.”

“You won't tell me where you're from?”

“No. But you'll find out, one of these days.” Jedda smiled at Malin's look of vexation. Was she taller in Jedda's day? Or was it simply that she was younger, here and now, and less imposing? The softness of her curious beauty struck Jedda deeply, and she turned away to the rain. “I'd better get back to my rooms. Your uncle will think I've gotten myself lost.”

“I expect he'll find you,” Malin said. “He has a way of doing things like that.”

“On my way back, you mean?”

She nodded. “Probably bringing you a rain cloak.”

Jedda laughed, and stepped into the open.

“I'll tell my uncle I like you, at least.”

Jedda called, over her back, “Thanks,” but for some reason felt too shy or awkward to turn.

She headed into the rain pulling the cloak over her hair. The drumming of rain on the cloak beat at her hearing, but the air had such a fresh smell, she could taste the difference, and this made her happy. Splashing steps along the grass, she walked across the wide lawn in front of the house, beneath a grove of old trees that looped their branches into a nearly impenetrable ceiling over her head. Rain came dripping through in big drops. She walked from side to side in the twisted vaults.

What was different in Malin? She was fresher, cleaner, and clearer in every way. For the first time Jedda could feel the truth of the span of years she had crossed, for this Malin was unquestionably younger than the one Jedda had already met.

Heart pounding, Jedda headed at last across the lawn, looking for the road to her quarters. What could this mean but that Malin already knew her, knew Jedda, in Jedda's real time? What else could this mean? The thought knotted her up in the middle so that she could hardly breathe. A tangle through which she could not move her thoughts.

She found the road, the park, the Twelve-Tower, as the signs read. Only a few people about, most in military dress, hurrying through the rain wrapped in dun-colored cloaks. The sky had grown darker, the clouds heavy.

She shook out the cloak onto the wet stone of the colonnade that ran along the front of the tower, avoiding the stairs that swept up toward the formal entryway. Water streamed down the stairs and into open drains that rang hollowly with the transport. Maybe feeding into cisterns or maybe drained down from the top of the hill. She took a last breath of the rain, ducking down the stairs to a lower entrance, protected by the mass of the entryway overhead.

The room beyond was quite elegant, lined with portraits of a handsome man at various ages. He stood as a young hunter over the body of a stag, its antlers reaching as tall as the man; he stood as a swordsman in a practice yard, shirt open, sword carelessly held; he stood in formal clothing carrying some kind of elaborate hat in his hand; older, but still recognizable, he stood beside a beautiful white horse. Other images, very nearly like photographs, captured the same man in a garden, on horseback, meeting with various people, alone at a window which overlooked mountains, even on the steps of the Hall of Welcome where Jedda herself had just walked. By the time she noticed the small, carefully engraved plaque beneath the portrait with the hat, she had already guessed who this man was;
Kirith Dav Kirin,
read the script. The hat was a crown, the head ornament for a king.

She climbed the stairs behind, these steps carpeted and plush, leading to the wide wooden stairs in the entry hall, up those to the worn stone landings outside the door to her room. The door stood open, and she guessed correctly that she would find Arvith inside; the smell of tea and bread welcomed her. “You're just in time. Where have you been?”

“I walked to the hall called Halobar,” she said.

“In this mess?”

She shrugged. “I don't dissolve so easily. And it wasn't raining when I started out. I met Malin, she was on duty in the hall.” When she said the words aloud, she felt a bit queasy. She waited.

“That made you uncomfortable, I suppose.”

“It means she already knows me. In my time.”

He was watching her, and shrugged. A heavy morning beard brought out the strong line of his jaw. When he was younger he must have been almost handsome. “You think you're so memorable? It means she's met you once, so far.”

“Was this his plan?” she asked.

“You'll know before anyone else, I expect,” Arvith said.

“Why do you say that?”

He shrugged. “He's taken a liking to you, for one thing. It's what he brought you here to tell you, for another.”

Jedda laughed. “How very odd.”

“Doesn't bear too much thinking about, I find,” he said. “Don't let the tea get cold. There's honey and Tervan sugar.”

The tea was fragrant and delicate and needed nothing to sweeten it at all, though the multicolored crystals of the Tervan sugar were tempting enough that she tasted a bit on the tip of her spoon, a sweetness with a buttery flavor.

“He's sending books,” Arvith noted. “A cartload. To keep you from having to go out in the rain, he says. I didn't tell him you were already out in it.”

“Books in a cart, in this mess?”

Arvith gave her a wry smile. “It's himself, my dear. If he sends the books they'll be dry as a bone and safe as babes. Never was a man for books like that one.”

“He has a lovely library.”

Arvith busied himself with the fire, and she found herself drawn to watch him, his blocky figure in plain brown weave, the stuff called wool that came off the backs of animals, a vest and trousers over a shirt that tied at the neck, embroidered along the seams, a pattern too small to see. The fire was hot, the embers bright, coruscating with light as the flames licked along them. “In this part of the building, fires aren't for show. Himself sets the heat in the rocks same as the rest of the house, but somehow it's never enough in these old towers.”

“In the rocks?” She remembered the morning, long ago now, when she asked that question in Montajhena. “Is that how Montajhena is heated?”

“Yes. That's about all he does with those two towers anymore.”

“Those two—” But then she remembered. “What is his word for them?”

“Shenesoeniis,” Arvith said. “A word that doesn't change much from one age to the next.”

“He makes quite a bit of use of the shenesoeniis here.”

“That he does.” Looking out the window thoughtfully, as a sudden burst of lightning framed his head. “We'll all pay for it, today.”

“Do you know what he's working on?”

“The gate, I expect,” Arvith said. “I don't know much about it; I've never been this far back before. He's meeting me for the first time, too.” He shook his head, and she recognized his feeling, part puzzlement and part simple incomprehension.

“I know how you feel,” she said. “I can't get my head around it, entirely.”

He chortled, an abrupt sound that shook his shoulders. “I've known him for a very long time, but in the future, and he's known me just as long, but yesterday he met me for the first time, chronologically speaking. But even given that, he still knows everything I've already done with him, with all of it still the future, from his point of view, here and now.” A sudden rush of rain at the window, and lightning again. “I guess I was becoming too complacent. Figured I had him all sorted out.”

The books arrived, a small cart full, along with two Prin to unload the cart. Both it and they were completely dry. Arvith had cleared the long table at the end of the room, the line of windows over it giving good light. Some of the titles she could read, some would require a bit of study. Arvith set them out in order and explained, lifting the first of the books. “Novices start with this book. This one is by himself and it's one of the texts the Prin use. These novices will know it by heart, nearly.” He gestured to the two Prin, who were packing up their cart to go. She had expected one of them to stay, as her guide, but instead they both bowed their heads and departed without a word. Arvith was looking at her, and suddenly she understood.

He lifted a large, thin book, bound in fine leather, the paper a very fine texture, its text inked onto the pages. “The rest of these books are probably for show. This book is a very old text on the deriving of words from places in the physical world. It's the oldest book here, by more years than you want to count. The early priests used these methods to create the Malei, the language we use in the chant. This book,” lifting another, smaller in profile, dark brown, lettered too small for her to read, “is called the Mordicon, for short; it has a longer title, if you want to read it one of these days. It was written by the old raven, Drudaen, who started the Long War. Himself's enemy a long time ago. It's a text he made for his own students.” He went down the whole line of texts, while she inhaled the scents, the leather covers, the musty sharpness of the pages and inks: a popular biography of famous magicians, which was selling very well; the code of law by which the Prin college was governed; something called
Handbook of the Intercessor
with Malin's name on it, Malin abre Kiril, abru Imral. Malin daughter of mother Kiril, child of father Imral.

“Are you Drune or Prin?” she asked.

“Neither,” he said, refusing to meet her eye. “I'm simply knowledgeable.”

“So you're my teacher?”

“Yes. I suppose. Shall we begin?”

She nodded.

The first lesson, he said, was that the books would not teach enough, that no books could. To learn the discipline itself required effort of the body, motion, meditation, and an alteration of consciousness, of its course. Written books could be a guide to this. The book the novices used was called
Zan Ajasi: The Nature of the Word
. To use the languages that moved power, the novice must understand the physical nature of the word, the fact that a word was a tangible object, an action of the body that released energy and generated
egas turum,
the great decline, which from Arvith's description sounded like an Erejhen term for entropy. Any word by its nature allowed two disconnected minds to share thoughts with one another, as long as both minds understood the word, already a miracle in itself. This was simply a way to say that a word was energy and object at the same time, already capable of moving information from one person to another, and that therefore it should not be surprising that a word was capable of much more.

The novice must further understand that the mind already contained a mechanism for binding reality itself into material form. The mind drew in the work of the senses and made this into flesh. Flesh itself was nothing more than a vehicle for this process, and the same mind that could bind its perceptions into material form could also learn to do the reverse, to move perceptions into reality. The akana singer or the Drune speaker was simply learning to do this in smaller and more exact ways that became increasingly powerful.

For the novice, it was essential to see the world in three layers: the layer of consciousness, the realm in which magic was made; the layer of life, in which consciousness was created; and the background, out of which life arose. To make magic act on its source, consciousness, was difficult; to make it work on the living, less so, and to change events in the background, easiest of all.

She understood the words he was using and had no problem with what he presented as concepts but it all sounded like so much gibberish. Perhaps most of science would sound the same, she thought, to someone who knew nothing of it. She listened attentively, because she liked Arvith and because, after all, she had asked for the lecture. But she would have to do it for herself to understand it. There was no possibility of a leap of faith, for she had no faith to offer. Science did not require faith since it produced results. This thing called magic would have to do the same.

He offered to sit with her and teach her one of the novice chants in the afternoon, and since this was a real and tangible action that she could understand, she lost herself in the work, as the rain went on and on. Light filled the room when the tower pulsed brighter or when lightning struck, sometimes in a place where they could both see the fork of it rushing from earth to clouds. He told her to empty her head and she did, of all but the rain, and they chanted four words in Malei together. He began to sing harmony once she had learned the melody; she was singing with her eyes closed, four words of no meaning she understood, when she began to see images against her lids, a hawk, a tree, a stone, a bird she could not name. The words slid smoothly through her lips. Arvith touched her shoulder, and she opened his eyes.

Over his hand floated a gold coin. As he varied the simple chant, the coin moved back and forth, up and down. The variations were of all kinds; at times he was simply intoning the song, at other times he was singing very low, or departing so far from the melody that it hardly existed even as counterpoint; his voice was hardly beautiful except in its suppleness. He closed his eyes and still the coin passed over his hand. She touched the air around it gently, then finally grabbed it away from him, warm in her palm, and he opened his eyes, smiling. “That's as much of the Malei as I know.”

“What were you doing that I wasn't?”

“Actually, you were helping, though you couldn't know it. It takes at least two singers in the Malei to move any significant power. But what enabled me to control the coin was the meditation space, the thing we call the ‘kei,' which I know how to make and you don't.”