Page 11 of Engines of Reason

He nodded but did not move from the doorway. She knew he knew he should step back, let her in, restore the diplomatic channels she’d severed when she left so precipitately. And he couldn’t make himself do it. He was an old, old man, set in his ways, like a shelled thing that has built a hard house around itself, and then finds it can no longer flex or grow. And she …

She had been a girl when they’d met. Barely adult, and still very much beloving of childish things like magic. Why else would she have decided that the answer to any problem was to recruit a wizard? and then it had been the answer, so those childish beliefs had carried her further through life than they ought. She had learned the business of wizardry—science, technology, Nyr would say. She had stretched out that credulous part of her life all her sisters had put away. And, because there was an actual wizard who did actual magic, nobody could really object. And that had been her and Nyr, an occult society of two, against the world.

She was not that child anymore. She’d seen out her ninth Storm-season, which put her into her middle years. Her eldest sister had assumed the throne. Lyn had taken up duties as befitted a supportive royal sibling, content with the magic she had.

She’d wed.

That had been it, of course. As a girl she’d thought Nyr might be one of those monstrous magicians of legend who, for whatever reason, desired young royal brides, and must be outwitted. And then, as she’d studied with him, she’d been aware that he, as a human being, had been fond of her, but their origins and stations, ages and natures had always complicated things sufficiently that she hadn’t needed to worry about it. And then she’d wed, and he’d taken it badly. He’d told her, straight up, that the man—Gorsaonnon, second son of an influential porsir—wasn’t good enough for her. That he was faithless, a rogue and an opportunist. She’d grown sick of his objections, and that had been the first rift between them. And then had come the word, by slow stages, soaking into the fabric of the Lannesite court. The man’s affairs, his promises in her name, his peddling of influence. And she’d denied it, refused to believe it, defended him to her sister, broken with friends who had tried to warn her. Until every single person in the world, it seemed, knew she was a fool, and only she was blind to it. Until it all came home at once, before the whole court, at Daimlesse’s insistence. The union broke and the man exiled by royal decree, because Lyn resisted any of the more politic options that would stop him from ruining her name. Every word Nyr had said about him had come true, as if he’d been some sort of prophetic wizard.

Public, shameful. A sign of poor judgment in one who was expected to be wise and just. That was bad enough, as was the new-renamed Gorsaeth hanging about the back-alleys of Lannesite politics still trying to trade on her name. Worse was Nyr. Because he had told her and she hadn’t listened; told him right to his face. Jealous, old, you just want me for yourself! Right before the truth came out.

When she was a child, and things became too much, she’d run away. The despair of her tutors and her mother, always. When she was a young woman, and nobody was crediting the rumours of a demon, she’d run off to find a wizard to help her in her supposed quest. And it turned out she wasn’t the grown woman as much as she’d thought because, faced with the excruciating humiliation of her faithless consort, she’d run again. Taken the gorget of a roving official, invented a role for herself in the provinces, fled the I-told-you-so of Nyrgoth Elder, wise and all-knowing.

All this, in the air between them, as she stood one side of his door and he the other. And then Esha arrived behind her with a clink of bottles and goblets and said, “Make way there, we’ve drinking to do.”

Esha Free Mark as was, Esharaeyn Wordbearer as her current status styled her. No ally to Lannesite or its Regent’s Second Sister. Lyn’s oldest friend. There was no resisting her. Moments later the three of them were in Nyr’s cabin, hunched about a hand’s span of little table folded down from the wall, as Esha poured out good wine.

“I know you two,” Esha said. “Obstinate, both. Wine loosens the tightest knots, they say.” She looked hawkishly from one to the other. “Well?”

Lyn met Nyr’s gaze and saw that, yes, they wouldn’t talk about it. He either couldn’t muster the fire for a good condemnation of her life choices, or had his own reasons for not wanting to. Instead, he said, “The demon.”

Esha eyed him sidelong. “A sorcerer and his monsters only…?” Not where she’d expected the conversation to go.

Nyr rubbed at his face. “I must find this witch, Ilmoth. I don’t know what she is. She’s trouble.”

He laid his cards out, Lyn speaking up where he started to sink back into himself. Ilmoth’s use of his language, her command of the machines that went beyond a sorcerer’s puppetry. And then his final revelation: that the voice passing from witch to familiars had not travelled as it should. Just manifested where it was needed. A decade and a half ago the three of them had gone into the Ordwood and faced a demon that was spreading its hideous corruption through the world, and that demon’s voice had skipped in just such an impossible way, bursting into the world from point to point without crossing the space between. Lyn knew enough, now, to understand why that was so wrong, by the precepts of Nyr’s science.

“My sister’s agents will listen out for word of her,” Lyn said. “But I don’t imagine she’ll be keen to announce her presence.”

“The Wordbearer of the Coast Folk cannot, of course, aid the Elder of Lannesite,” Esha said gravely, topping up the goblets. “But if they set up somewhere the rivers run, I’ll hear of it. Word will come to you.” Because the demon trumped politics, to those few who’d seen its corrosive influence.

They sat and drank a while more, then. Lyn waited and waited. Perhaps it was Esha’s presence, but the recent past was never raked up. Loomed like storm clouds over the pair of them, a burden of misery that must surely descend on them. But when the wine was done and she returned to her own cabin, the tempest remained unbroken.

They had to switch barges the next day, because the freedom of travel of Esha’s people was curtailed wherever Lannesite writ ran. One more way in which the world had become worse. As though the demon, in defeat, had pronounced some dying curse none of them had heard. But Lyn was grown enough, adult-wise enough, to know it only needed the hard decision of hard people like her sister. The world’s ills could not all be placed at the feet of demons and wizards.

When they reached Lannesite Urban, Nyr absented himself. He was not at formal court to see her being greeted coolly by Daimlesse Regent—the formal celebration at the sister returned, and everyone patently recalling the circumstances under which she’d left. The narrow look in her sister’s eye, intimidating as ever her mother’s was. After which she could see her daughter.

A year’s absence, so that the girl’s face had a moment of hesitation before she closed the distance. It wasn’t unusual—the raising of children was a business of aunts and cousins and grandparents even amongst the poorest, the mother free to ply her trade or enact the duties of her station. The business of servants and menials, too, if you were of the royal lineage of Lannesite. Tutelage and care was the business of many hands. A year’s absence was nothing. And yet Lyn thought, You’ve grown so tall, and meant, so far from me. Wondering what shape the straits of the court had pressed her daughter into, in her absence. One more perfect princess, fit to further Lannesite’s policy for her aunt the Regent?

They sat and talked, and she found that the fragile flame of the girl still burned as she remembered—the thing that made her like her mother had been at that age, wild and fey and unwilling to know the strictures of How Things Are Done. Sara had what Lyn never did, at her age: a wizard as her tutor. Already knew the principles as well as Lyn. Not merely the words that might command a monster but the whys behind them. Lyn still shrank from facing Nyr and raking up the thorns between them, but she felt a fierce stab of gratitude that he had nurtured that flame, in her absence.

“When you go again,” Sara told her, with the absolute assurance of a child, “I’m going with you.”

Lyn thought of all the wretched places her travels had taken her. Two Storm-seasons—seven, eight of the old years that didn’t really follow the seasons of the world—was far too young to travel, but …

She made no promises. She didn’t say no. Her own apprentice, already exceeding her in lore. Perhaps it might work out. What a myth they might make together. She should speak to Nyr …

Somehow, they’d come all the way to Lannesite Urban, the two of them, without either throwing anything in the other’s face. Old friends, after all. Tacitly agreeing territories on their personal map that neither would send an expedition into. She should talk to Nyr, because she could talk to Nyr.

Except she turned up, neat, presentable, at his chambers the next morning, and he was gone. Just a note left, in his own language, written simply, Gone to my tower. Can’t wait. Need to find the witch. The last word, only, in the script of Lannesite, because it wasn’t a concept he felt comfortable expressing in his own. This time it was the wizard who’d run away, leaving Lyn mired in the business of the court.

Nyr

I AM DOING IMPORTANT wizard things, that is what I am doing. I, Nyrgoth Elder, am returning to my tower, so that I might consult its familiar spirits concerning the origins and doings of Ilmoth, the witch.

I am running away.

I have waited a year for Lyn to come back. I wanted to go find her, out in the world. A lie. I have conceived of doing so. When my Dissociative Cognition System was active, cold logic told me it would only end poorly. When I turned the cursed thing off, my mood clamped like a cloak of dead things about my shoulders and weighed me down so that I could not stir from my rooms. And I had to keep up a brave face, for the child, for Sara.