The Ordinary (22 page)

“Kei?”

“I can't translate it into your speech. A place of the mind. You would study nothing but the making of that for your first three or four years as a novice.”

“Where did you study?”

“With himself.” He looked at her. “There are only a few people in your time who know about me. As I said, I'm not Prin and I'm not Drune.”

“Does Malin know?”

“Yes, then. But not now.”

Jedda nodded.

Arvith handed her a ring. “This is a novice ring. Put it on and it will allow you to feel what I'm doing. You'll miss a lot, since your senses haven't been worked on, but we'll see how it goes.”

The comment about her senses put her in a bit of a huff; how did he know whether or not her senses had been worked on? She slid the ring neatly onto the middle finger of her right hand; it fit best there, though it was still a bit loose.

“Say this word,” he said. She repeated it, and they chanted it together, and he placed her thumb on the ring, the metal growing warm; she kept her thumb to the metal because of the pleasure of it, though a moment later the ring grew closer to her finger, there was no other way to describe it. She felt the movement under the tip of her thumb. At once she forgot the word she had been chanting, but a wave of dizziness passed over her.

“That's it,” he said. “You'll be dizzy a bit. You did that yourself, you know. I gave you a bit of a nudge, but you were the—” something, he said, a word she did not understand, and she was too dizzy to ask him to repeat it. He switched to Alenke, which he spoke well. “You were the carrier, that time. Did you feel any difference in your head, beyond the dizziness?”

“No,” she shook her head.

He shrugged. “Sometimes it takes a bit. Would you like a cup of tea, or something else? You seem a bit shaken up.”

“Some nice tea to help my stomach,” she managed, taking deep breaths. He reached to help her to a daybed but she pushed him off and walked there herself.

She could feel a difference in her head, now that she was lying there, but she was still too irritable to tell Arvith. Let him give her a moment to get her breath. The ring felt warm, still, and if it were something a Hormling were giving her she would have sworn it was some kind of nanotech sending tendrils into her body, long ones, reaching into deep places, including her brain. She felt herself sinking, separating. She pictured a shell of the clearest plastic sliding into place on all sides of her, a beautiful shell, and she was inside it but could feel everything that was happening outside as well. It was as if part of her were inside and part outside the shell. She instructed the one outside to say, “I'm feeling something in my head, now.”

“Can you describe it? Or would you like me to describe it for you?”

She gestured for the latter. “You,” she said, and closed her eyes.

“You have a feeling of weight, which is the way you perceive the initial preparation of your consciousness to fork. You feel yourself contained in a clear shell of some kind; for me it was windows. This is how you perceive yourself as entering the kei space. You feel the two parts of yourself, the consciousness outside the kei, and the one within, and each is transparent to the other. But the controller is within the kei, and the watcher is outside. You are reaching through the kei space to the watcher in order to talk to me. But from the kei space you can reach in many other directions as well.”

He began the four-word chant again, and she joined him. Her voice felt stronger now, and she was less afraid to use it. From the part of herself he had named the controller, she could hear her voice and his blended, but she could feel much more. Something palpable ran through his language, as if the physical effects of the sound had been exaggerated in some way; and she could see the singing as if it were an object, a liquid pooling in his palm to lift the coin. As he varied the sound she could see the change of its shape, the coin sinking into it like a cushion. She was entranced. She opened the palm of her own hand and he smiled into her eyes and moved the coin over it; she could feel the music pooled in her hand; and at the same time, from the part of herself he had called the watcher, outside the kei space, she watched with only the physical sensation of a slight breeze over her moist palm, the coin sliding up and down, floating in circles, or coming to rest for a moment on the pulse of her wrist as she and Arvith continued to sing.

This time when she stopped singing the coin wavered and fell, and he looked at her. “You were doing part of that yourself, that time, too. The ring allows you to do it. It appears you do have the talent for this, Jedda. I don't know whether you think that's good news or not.”

She was shaken, but not likely to let him see it. The music had felt beautiful when she could touch it with her skin, wind it in a ball in her hand. “It would help if I could manage to see any of this as more than a parlor trick.”

“You watched your fleet sink to the bottom of our bay.”

“Even that doesn't seem quite real, in memory.”

He gave her a long, quiet look; the householder brought tea and served them. She sipped the delicate blend and felt her stomach soothed. “It's easier for those of us who still believe in Mother-God,” he said. “For me it is as simple as to say that words of power are the tools she used to make the world. To make all the worlds, yours included.”

“I thought the Prin made this language themselves.”

“Very good. You have been taking this in quite well. Yes, we derived this language ourselves, through a very long study of the world. But in making the language, we were working closely with a wizard of the old time, who made magic in the language of creation, the words that God herself spoke, same as does himself. So with her aid the words of the Malei echo the power of God's own words.”

“That's what you believe?”

For the first time since she had known him, he appeared a bit chagrined. “I'm a creature of faith. I prefer to be simple.”

“But Jessex has doubts, and yet is much more powerful than you.”

“It would be better if you called him Irion. If you don't mind my saying so. No one uses the real name.”

“He didn't seem to mind it.”

“That's between you and him, in private,” Arvith said. “Yes, himself has doubts. But he's much stronger in the magic, he's the center of the whole Oregal.”

She heard that word but let it go for the moment. Her curiosity was focused, for the moment, on the ring on her finger, the way it refracted her consciousness into layers. To explore this was no effort; what did it matter whether it made sense or not, when it felt so real? That part she liked. But the change made her afraid as well, especially that she knew it was driven by something called magic, so that on impulse she slipped the ring off her finger.

The effect did not go away, she still felt the controller and the watcher, a sense of coziness to the arrangement that was quite seductive for her. She had heard of implants that could make a person's consciousness take on more than one stream of tasks at a time, and wondered if this were the same effect, or something like it. “Why doesn't it go away when I take off the ring?”

“You're still holding it,” Arvith said. “That's another good sign. It means your mind can learn to make the kei on its own. Since you can sustain the controller yourself, the effect will continue even when you put the ring down, for a while, because you've tuned it to yourself and you're still near it. If I clear the ring, the effect will go away altogether, but even then it won't disappear instantly from your mind. It'll fade over the course of a few minutes.”

“Why can't I remember the chant words?”

“That's not allowed until you're a novice,” he said.

“You're doing something?”

“Me and the ring,” he nodded his head. “I'm not working in Malei, so the ring can't help you feel it. The novice chants are about as much Malei as I know.”

She picked up the ring and looked at him. “May I keep it? For now, until I go back?”

He looked her in the eye. He was smiling, slowly, beginning with the center of his eyes. “You're eager.”

“I've had a taste,” she said. “I want more.” The feeling had begun to ebb. She slipped the ring onto her finger and waited for the change in her consciousness to come again.

She kept Arvith with her for as long as he showed the patience to stay. The rain continued, hurled down by a storm that sometimes abated, only to return. Arvith studied the weather with some concern, at moments, though when she asked him why he only replied that one rarely saw that sort of storm in the north. Something in Arvith's manner warned her she would get no answer to any question that was more direct.

He let her wear the ring again and, when he left her alone with the books, late in the day with the rain still falling and thunder booming over the three hills, she was still fingering the simple silver band as she continued to puzzle at the pages. She made little progress with any sort of study other than the language itself—she had rarely been granted access to any of the major Erejhen libraries before, and here was a feast of books published over hundreds of years, in which she could trace the permutations of words and spellings from one century to the next.

The books themselves, as objects, were still strange to her, though she was growing to love their shape and texture. The weight of a volume in the hand or the lap, the smell of paper, old and new, the shape of print and the design of the blocks of type, came to please her over the course of the afternoon. Running her fingertips across the surface of the page, feeling the slight change of texture where the type ran in even columns up and down the page, she found herself approaching the pieces of writing with something like awe. To read the words that others here had written long ago gave her a greater sense than she had possessed before of the history of this place, the depth of it. The fact that she must read in real time made the words more vivid.

Late in the day, she felt a rush of wind in the room and turned to see Irion standing there, a cloud of vapor swirling to nothing around him, a smell of lightning and storm, as if he had stepped into the room out of a cloud. He was elaborately dressed, much more so than she had seen him on the day before, not so much in clothing as in jewels: rings, necklaces, bracelets, a kind of fine mesh chain that clung to each hand, earcups and earrings, a circlet of silver worked with gems on his brow. He glittered as if he himself were a jewel. “Good afternoon,” he said, “I hope I'm coming at a good moment.”

“I didn't hear you come in,” she said.

He smiled and stepped closer. “Are you making any headway? Did Arvith help you?”

“Yes, he did. The books—” She turned and lay her hands along the cloth cover of one of them, called, as far as she could make out,
The Word Turning
. “They're helping me with my study of your language, but that's about it. I'd need weeks to be able to read well enough to learn very much.”

“In your world, of course, you could make an adjustment that would help you?”

“I'd buy a neural patch, something like that. Something to help me learn faster and something to make sure I retained what I studied.”

He nodded, close enough now to see the silver ring on the table where she had lain it, nestled in a finely crocheted table covering that mimicked a fall of flowered vine. “We use these rings for that purpose,” he said. “This ring is a very simple one, but I could give you a better, if you wish.”

Jedda closed
The Word Turning
and turned in her chair to face him. “I'll keep that in mind.”

He smiled. “You're very cautious. I respect that.”

“I come from a cautious place. A cautious people, maybe that's a better way to say it.”

“Is it true that all Hormling are careful like you? I haven't found it to be so.”

“All Hormling, no. People from my city, Nadi, yes. Nearly all, anyway. We make a cult of it.” She hesitated. “Have you traveled in my world a lot? You sound as if you have.”

He smiled and nodded. “Briefly, so far. I'll travel a good deal more beyond the gate, once it's permanently open. And I have access to all of that experience, here and now.”

She slipped the ring onto her finger, and waited. He was watching as the change came over her, the feeling of a kind of psychedelic separation of her consciousness from the texture of the present moment. “I can understand that idea a bit better when I'm wearing this,” she said from within the controller, fingering the ring, hearing the oddly echoless distance of her own voice. “But it's still such an odd notion.”

“For me, too,” he said. “It's still very new. Until I moved you to this time, I had never taken advantage of the opportunity such a consciousness affords me to interfere.”

“What do you mean?”

He moved to the window, considering. “In the line of time that existed before I brought you here, this storm did not happen, and in fact these days were quite peaceful ones, in which I would have had ample opportunity to speak with you and teach you myself.”

“But your bringing me back has changed events?”

“My bringing you back has caused my adversary to react. To search for you and me.”

“That's causing the storm?”

“The storm is my own, though it's part of my response. There are energies in it of which I can make use, violent ones, in the work that I do.”

She could see the change in his manner now, the animation of his features, the nervous tapping of his finger along the sill of the window. He was more alive in some way than the night before, with a look in his eye that made her a little afraid. “Are you in any danger?”

“I will be,” he said, “in your time. And so will you be when you go back.”

“Is there any urgency? Do I need to make up my mind and go?”

He had gone suddenly distant, lit by a cascade of lightning at his back. He paced away from the window, the necklaces and bracelets murmuring. “Only of a kind. Keeping you here in a temporary way is rather like keeping tension in a strong elastic. The storm comes from this work, and feeds it.”

“So you really couldn't let me stay forever, without a great deal of effort.”

“I could bring you here completely and cut the link, yes. Then to return you to your own time would be much more difficult and I would no longer be able to return you to the moment of your departure. You would vanish from your time altogether and return to it after a vacancy, and not in the same place from which I brought you. As it stands now, as long as I hold this tension, when you return, no one will be the wiser, no one will know you've been gone at all.”

She touched the ring, finding it easier to focus on what he was saying from this state of mind, this cloud of herself. “I've already decided to go back, anyway,” she said, her voice slurred, as if she were speaking slowly.

She must have looked puzzled at the effect, since he saw her and stepped toward her, touching the ring, gently pulling it from her finger. “You're not ready to wear it so long,” he said. “Be careful.”

“I had it on for much longer with Arvith.”

“Yes, I'm sure. Without training, your tolerance for the kei decreases; you need to rest from wearing the ring, after you've used it for a while. Once you begin to study, you'll be able to counter this effect in various ways.”

“How could you tell?”

“Your reactions were slowed. You looked a bit drunk.”

She felt herself beginning to return to herself.

“At any rate,” he went on, “I'm in no real hurry to return you as I enjoy your company, even with this slight problem to deal with. So you may go when you choose, however long that be. As I told you last evening.”

The effect of the ring ebbed slowly, as before. She sat quietly till she felt herself no longer divided. “I expect I'd rather go sooner than later.”

“You've read enough?”

“Enough to know the books aren't going to help.”

“But you still wish to be trained?”

She looked him in the eye. He held her gaze without hesitation. She felt herself deciding again that she would trust him. Feeling trust for him, in fact. “Yes. Whatever this is, I want to know more.”

He relaxed almost visibly. When he sat, the weight of necklaces pressed into the layers of his robes. “That's what's essential,” he said. “Malin can see to your teaching, in your own time.”

“Malin?”

“Yes.”

“She's here, you know. I met her.”

He nodded. “So I hoped you would. Where?”

“In the hall of welcome. She was tending the hall, doing her duty, she said.”

“A lucky chance. Or not a chance at all. Does it disturb you?”

“It means that in my own time she already knows me. But she's never given me any indication.”

“So you think she remembers you, so many hundred years later?” He smiled. “Maybe not, after so short a meeting.”

“Are you concerned?”

He gave the dark fireplace a long look, and a fire began to burn there, small at first. “Concerned enough that I wish you to join Malin and me for dinner, to make certain that she does remember.”

Jedda laughed. He looked at her curiously, but she could not have explained at that moment what she found funny. “Do you want her to know why I'm here?”

He shook his head. “The mystery will serve us better. She'll figure out my purpose for herself, in your day. Though I'll send a clue or two along with you, when you return, to help her along.”

“And you'll tell me what I'm going back to face?”

“To the degree that I can.” His face had briefly darkened. “Then it's agreed, you'll return to your own day tomorrow.”

She felt a hand tighten around her middle at the thought, but refused it. “Yes.”

She opened her mouth to ask another question but he held up a palm toward her. “Enough,” he said, “I can't stay longer. If I don't bring this work to some kind of conclusion there'll be no dinner for any of us, and I can't send you home until you've had time to talk to Malin.”

“Why?”

“I won't give you a reason for that.”

“Why not?”

“What hardship is it, for me to give you this gift?” He shook his head, gestured impatiently, and began to dissolve like mist before her eyes. “You should know her as she is now. It will help you.”

“Help me to do what?” she asked, but he was gone.

Only a few minutes later Arvith arrived with several bundles that he spread out across her room, setting some onto the books on the table at which she had been studying. Her costume, he said, for the dinner that evening, which was a state affair.

“State?”

Arvith paused in his unwrapping of one of the largest bundles. “Yes. We do have a state here, you know. And himself is the head of it.”

“But what does that have to do with me?”

“He told me you were invited and you knew about it.”

“I knew I was having dinner with Irion and Malin.”

“The madam will be there, too, of course; she runs a good deal of the business of the place for himself.”

She stood cautiously from the table of books to look over his shoulder. He had left the bundle covered, so far. “How many people?”

“Twenty or so. Plus retainers. Himself is meeting with delegates from the Nesset who've journeyed up from the south. The Nesset is our national assembly.”

“I've heard of it.”

“There are a couple of important Tervan here, and they'll be invited; and there'll be the governor of Davyssa, the royal city that's close by.”

“And Malin.”

“Yes. And you. You're to be costumed as one of the members of the House of Turissa, a distant relative of himself.”

“Costumed is right. All these packages have something in them I have to wear?”

He straightened and gave her a look that had in it a certain satisfaction.

“I suppose you think this is quite funny,” she said, sighing. “All right. I'm already in this deep enough. Let's get started. I'm certain there's a good deal you have to teach me about all this fabric.”

He had brought a picture to show her the effect, figuring she would be curious; the picture, something he called a woodcutting, offered a stark, black-and-white image of many layers of garments swaddling a body that looked pitifully small. Even when he had unwrapped all the parcels and laid out each part of the costume, she had trouble relating most of it to the drawing. She could see the finely cut trousers, a brocaded fabric edged with geometric designs embroidered in bright gold thread; there was a snowy white blouse that she could not see in the drawing at all. He named the other garments and she wrote the names down, sashalla, a front and back drape, like an open-sided tunic with skirts nearly to her ankles; menoret, a waistband that covered the junction of trousers and blouse; vidor, the overblouse that covered the white one, this one of a stunning blue color that would show off Jedda's brown skin and eyes; seven or eight other names to cover shoulder guards, a collar to cover the one on the overblouse, a riser collar to wrap around that one, a coronet, garters, hosiery, underclothing, and to finish the picture, a grand black coat with huge puffed sleeves lined with another beautiful brocade, a blue to match the overblouse. The coat had a long train and she was to put it on as soon as possible and practice moving in it. Shoes and shoe ornaments and overboots for the walk across the muddy grounds to one of the formal halls, where dinner would be served. Other protective garments to guard the formal clothing from the mud. “I'll look like some kind of strange bird growing mating plumage,” she said.

“You'll look fine. The coat will come off after the cup of welcome is offered; you'll only have to pose in it a bit and then give it to a householder.”

“Irion has a taste for this sort of thing? Finery and pomp?”

Arvith shrugged. “He plays to his audience. Not by wearing these clothes himself, of course; his rank is so high it doesn't matter how he displays it. But the politicians from the south love to wear their court clothes, and himself is all the king we have since King Kirith crossed the mountains.”