The Steerswoman's Road (30 page)

Bel shrugged. “I know what to do.”

The facts of the situation again ordered themselves before Rowan,
doggedly presenting the same conclusion. “No. I can do it.” However much her
friend might be involved, Rowan was the source and reason for the fight. It was
her responsibility. This dirty job was her own.

It slowly dawned on the soldier how serious was their
intent. He looked from one woman to the other in growing astonishment and finally
fixed on Rowan in disbelief. She leaned forward, speaking reluctantly. “Your
last chance, friend. Who sent you, and why?”

He was pale. “What’re you going to do?”

They altered his bonds, first freeing his left hand, bracing
it against the top of Bel’s pack, then securing it in place, palm up. He
struggled desperately and quieted only under the influence of a choking hold
from Bel, held long enough to bring him to the edge of fainting.

Rowan took a moment to regather her determination. She
pulled out her knife and examined it reluctantly, testing its edge, wondering
if she would ever be able to use it to eat again. It came to her that, quite
sensibly, she would.

Shaking his head to clear it, breathing in heavy gasps, the
soldier spoke to her. “You, you’re a steerswoman.”

“That’s right.”

“It’s a bluff, right?” His voice quavered in desperation. “I
mean, you lot, you’re not that sort, are you? You steerswomen, you’re supposed
to be, supposed to be ...” He ran down.

“Supposed to be?” Rowan prompted.

He swallowed. “Well ... good.”

She digested his words. “Last chance,” she said again, and
felt on her own face a mirror of the panicked pleading that she saw in her victim’s.
Bel watched her sidelong.

Rowan looked at the knife, looked at the soldier, looked up
at the sky. She drew one shaky breath and stepped forward.

Bel’s hand was on her shoulder. “Wait.”

“No.” A mote of anger sparked in her. She dared not
interrupt herself, but knew she must act in the momentum of her decision.

Bel grabbed one shoulder and pulled her around to face the
other way. She spoke quietly. “Get out of sight.”

“What? Why?”

“Because you’re no good!” Bel hissed. Then she continued
more calmly. “A torture victim’s mood is just as important as the pain. You’re
sorry for him, and he knows it. You don’t want to hurt him.”

Rowan turned to her blankly. “I don’t.”

“Well, I do!” Her eyes blazed. “I
hate
him. I’ll be
glad to see him suffer. And he’s going to suffer, not because of you or because
of me, but because he made an evil choice, to serve a wizard who means us harm.”

Rowan attempted to formulate a reply, but Bel pressed on. “When
you start cutting him, you’ll want to stop, and he’ll want you to, and you’ll
know it, and he’ll know it. It’ll be back and forth between the two of you. You’ll
look for any excuse to stop. He’ll use that against you.” She stopped and
glanced once at the man. “Let me do it. I’ll take him apart and enjoy it.”

“It’s my job.”

“The job belongs to the one who can do it best.” The Outskirter’s
gaze challenged her, but as Rowan watched, her friend’s expression changed to
reluctant sympathy. “Rowan, cold blood’s not for everyone.” She jerked her
head. “Get out of sight.”

The horses had quieted, and Rowan had no desire to upset them
again. She led them down the path, until it curved and the clearing was out of
sight, tethered them to a stout fallen tree, and turned away to where the path’s
edge sloped down to the ravine below.

An outcropping of rock stood a few feet down the slope. Rowan
climbed down and found a seat, looking north across the darkening landscape.
Northwest, a lake caught the failing sunlight, a single silver line in the
distance, like a sword.

From up the path there came an odd sound, like the cry of an
unidentifiable small animal. The horses shifted nervously.

The evening was clear, and to her right the Eastern
Guidestar hung like a beacon, twenty-five degrees up from the eastern horizon,
forty degrees south of due east. Unseen over her left shoulder, the Western
Guidestar stood, higher than its partner and dimmer at present.

The sounds in the distance became more continuous.

She felt a strange combination of relief and shame. The
responsibility was hers, and she had abdicated it, and deep inside she was
glad to do so. It made her feel somehow unfit; it rankled.

The noises became appalling, inhuman.

Bel was right; the job was best done by one best suited for
it. And yet

She tried to distract herself. She realized that it would
take a problem to lose herself in solving, something useful, confirming her
own skills. She sifted, searching, the soldier’s voice a weird music behind her
thoughts.

The jewels—irritating, frustrating, apparently
useless,
yet
still the fulcrum on which all these events pivoted. But the information was
too slight and too familiar. More was needed for further thought to be
effective.

She wanted something more technical and involving, something
with information and principles to grasp and work with. That incidental
paradox that she had argued with Arian about ...

An object flung with great force from a high tower, at a
certain upward angle: by using straightforward techniques known to any
steers-woman, by taking them further than anyone had before, Rowan had seemed
to demonstrate that it was possible for the object never to strike the ground.

It was quite obviously false. Things simply did not happen
that way. And yet, why would the techniques work in other circumstances but
fail in this one? She reconstructed the details of the problem in her mind, and
the events in the distance, the strange sounds, and her own shame faded from
her awareness.

She recognized that there was an interrelationship between
the height of the tower and the force of the impetus. The higher the tower, the
less force was necessary. At a great enough height, one needed merely to let go
of the object, and it would fall away, never quite reaching the ground;
slightly lower, and it would reach ground eventually.

The shorter the tower, the more force was needed, until eventually
the object could be flung by someone standing at ground level. But the force
required was impossible, immeasurable—and she reminded herself that “impossible”
and “immeasurable” were not the same idea. It was patently impossible to
construct a tower high enough—she knew too well the restrictions on the
variables involved—but the force of the impetus was merely immeasurable.

She had a feel for the quantity, however; she could
imagine
it, in principle, but not with precision. She disliked that. It was too
vague.

And it left her with the same glaring contradiction that had
so outraged Arian at the Archives: No matter what the numbers said, objects
did fall to the earth.

But did they? Every single time?

Approach it from another direction. What does not fall?

Birds flew, by some technique known to themselves. Wizards
were said to fly and could make things fly, possibly by the same means. Clouds
floated, but they were vapors, like steam, mere fogs risen above ground level.
When she had been a child, she had dreamed of tying a rope to a cloud and being
lifted into the sky. She imagined herself a child without knowledge, looking at
the world as a child did. Would a child be surprised to hear of objects that
did not fall?

Not at all. The sun did not fall, nor the constellations,
nor the Guide-stars. Children, and for that matter, most adults, took that as a
given.

But the sun did not fall because it was no object moving
across the sky. In fact it was the stable center of the universe, and the world
moved about it in a great circle, spinning improbably on its axis. Rowan
remembered how amazed she was when she had first learned that. But once known,
it was easily confirmed, by any number of methods.

The stars were far suns, or so tradition said. But this was
unprovable. In any event, they were immeasurably distant.

The Guidestars hovered forever in the sky. They did not
fall, but neither did they move. They hung immobile on the celestial equator and
seemed to shift only as the traveler below changed position on the world’s
surface.

They were neither far suns, nor immeasurably distant. Their
height was easily calculable from their apparent displacement when viewed from
different locations on the world. Though they were very high indeed, if they
had been suns the world would have been aflame from the heat of their
proximity.

But they did not move.

She noticed vaguely that there was silence from up the path,
had been for some time, and that Willam was seated beside her. The boy was
shaking, rank with sweat. Rowan ignored him and returned to the seduction of
the problem.

Reason and reasonableness were at odds. Something was wrong,
either in the calculations, or in the formulation of the problem, or in the
principles by which she understood the world.

And that was the possibility that Arian had overlooked. The
error was not necessarily in the calculations, nor in the construction of the
problem.

She checked the numbers over and over, trying to quantify the
vaguenesses, to identify and limit the areas of missing knowledge. She kept
reaching the same results: It might be true. It might be possible for a falling
object never to reach the ground. And more: Under certain conditions, it might
actually be impossible for it to do so.

At some point she realized that Willam was gone, and in retrospect
remembered that he had risen, stepped to one side, vomited, and returned up
the path.

The sounds in the distance began again.

She was briefly taken by nausea at imagining the nature of
those proceedings, and in her single-mindedness she found herself annoyed at
the interruption. Of their own accord, her thoughts slipped back into the
fascination of reason.

What would actually happen, taking the calculations as
valid? Precisely, how would an object flung to that height behave?

It would move away into the distance, past the horizon. And
then?

If it never reached the ground, it would simply continue, completely
around the world. Eventually, it would come back into view from the opposite
horizon, crossing the point where it had started.

No, not quite—because the world would have turned a bit in
the interval.

This made the computations more complicated. Annoyed, she altered
the orientation of the object’s path, from north-south to west-east, on the
equator, to minimize the effect of the world’s rotation. It helped.

Abruptly, in a leap of reason, she flung it higher, far
above the minimum height necessary for an unfailing object

She came to her feet and spun to seek the Western Guidestar
hanging motionless above her

And was face-to-face with Bel. The Outskirter had spoken.
Rowan shook her head in momentary confusion. “What?”

Bel repeated, her face showing vast dissatisfaction. “It’s
no use,” she said. “I think he’s under a spell.”

“He won’t say anything?” She vaguely recalled a wild, weeping
voice in the distance, and that it had spoken at length.

“It isn’t that. He talks. He’s even eager to. But he just
doesn’t make any sense. You’d better hear it yourself.”

As Rowan approached, she looked once at the state of the man’s
hand and arm, then kept her eyes to his face. Unfortunately, her observation
and memory were too good. The sight stayed with her, against her will; and then
she chose to remember it, and recognize and accept the results of her actions.

Bel dropped one hand on the trembling man’s right shoulder,
in a gesture that seemed almost friendly. His head snapped up, and he looked at
her, wild-eyed. “No! That’s all there is, I swear it, I don’t know any more!”
His skin was white, slick with sweat.

“Of course,” Bel reassured him. “But just repeat it for the
steers-woman, there’s a good fellow.”

He looked at Rowan and began to speak, urgently,
desperately. As she listened, Rowan felt her scalp prickle.

What she heard was not the incoherent gibberings a man might
make in delirium. The sounds were organized, inflected like speech, and the
look on the soldier’s face reflected the meaning he believed them to carry. The
pattern of inflection teased the ear, mimicking reason—but not one of the
utterances matched any single true word. The effect was uncanny.

At the end, his communication slipped into comprehensibility
with a plaintive “That’s all, please, I’d tell more, but that’s all they told
me.”

Rowan stood helpless, sick with horror. Somehow, this was
the most appalling result of magic she had yet witnessed—worse than the casual
death of Reeder’s boy, crueler than the orchestrated slaughter of innocent
people by a swarm of dragons, stranger than Willam’s eerie traveling fire. This
man’s very will and sacred reason had been twisted by some wizard, twisted for
a purpose incidental to his own life.

Rowan crouched down beside him, studying his face. He
avoided her gaze, his breath hissing behind clenched teeth.

“Listen,” she said carefully, trying to sound kind and
reasonable. “I’m sorry, but there’s a problem here. We believe you’re under
some kind of spell.” He screwed his eyes shut, ignoring her. “I know you think
you’ve told us something,” she went on, “but you haven’t really. It’s an
illusion.”

He looked up at her, and a small sound escaped from the back
of his throat. Realization grew on his face, and with it the terror that the
evening’s events were not finished, that there was more to come.

“Perhaps there’s some way you can get around it?” Rowan
said. “Can you approach it from some other direction?”

A strangled cry escaped him, and then he was speaking again,
in a high pleading voice—all sounds with no sense.