Page 14 of Engines of Reason

“She doesn’t know?” Lyn said.

“I felt that the knowledge would only hurt her. That her own blood conspires behind her back even now.”

“Mama, what about Aunt Meli?” Another cutting whisper from Sara.

Cantiresse smiled, that cut-glass expression. “Sara, your mother cares deeply for her family. So that, after your Aunt Meli was exiled, for taking up arms against her sister the Regent, your mother took pity on her and found her a place. Anonymity. A farm, to live out her days in comfort. And wisely decided not to let your Aunt Daimi know, because it would only make her sad. There, now you, too, know this secret.”

Sara looked from one woman to the other, part pleased at being spoken to like an adult, part frightened by the sudden tension in the room.

“Cass,” Lyn said.

“Our markets are empty,” Cantiresse said. “Our river trade has atrophied. And yes, before you say the words, that is what happens when you cross the Coast-people and bar them from your borders. I advised against it. Our sister made her decision.” Tight lipped, dancing about the criticism. “We need to re-establish good relations. You, they know. You, they will talk to. Their Wordbearer’s message has come this very morning, seeking an airing of grievances. If I went, or any of the court, they’d load us with payments and penalties and such. You, perhaps they will wear softer gloves with.”

“Esharaeyn?” Lyn asked.

“Your old rambling companion,” Cass confirmed.

Lyn unrolled a map in her mind. All the places the Coast-people had moored at, back when they had free run of Lannesite’s waterways. Specifically in reference to other, more isolated landmarks.

“Sara,” she said. “I want you to show me you can pack wisely for a few days’ travel.” Contriving to hold Cantiresse’s gaze past the girl’s squeak of joy. “I’ll gladly meet my old friend Esha,” she said. “If matters of state come up, in our talk, well, so be it.” And she may have word on the witch and Sendroth Sorcerer, which she said she’d listen out for. And if we meet here then it’s only a step further to Nyr’s tower, and I can bear him that word as a peace offering and maybe Sara can bridge the gap between us.

Sendra

“I HADN’T BELIEVED IN the horns,” said Sendra, crouching by the man. “That they were real. I thought—when I saw you, I thought that they were just…” A hat. Some wizardly affectation. “She doesn’t have them. Ilmoth Elder doesn’t.”

Nyrgoth didn’t look at him. He’d not done anything wizardly, since they’d taken him. As Ilmoth had promised he wouldn’t. These last days, the man had just stayed in this cell they’d made, of a room in his own tower. Sitting on a shelf the wall had just put out like a tongue. Eating the food Ilmoth had coaxed the tower into providing. Refusing to help the witch unshell the secrets of the place, not that it had slowed her down much. Possibly Nyrgoth was doing invisible magic, battling Ilmoth on some higher plane. For all Sendra’s pretensions to sorcery, his gauntlets were mute. They’d given him no feedback since all the monsters had died.

He’d thought that, up close and defeated, the Eldest would seem just an old man. Perhaps there was some magic way to see him like that. Perhaps, if you plucked three eyebrow hairs and squinted through the tears, Nyrgoth would look just like some sad, grey old-timer. But Sendra couldn’t manage the trick of it. The man’s face, the way each feature sat, and all of them in combination. The clothes. The horns. Eldritch. Not a word he was particularly confident of defining, honestly, but it turned out he knew it when he saw it.

The wizard of Lannesite, who had slain a demon and defeated sorcerers, here in their hands. What concessions might the Regent make, to have him back? Or what works could he, Sendra, achieve, if he could put the creature under sufficient duress to do his bidding?

What works could Ilmoth achieve, if she could solve the riddles of the man’s magic tower?

Sendra had come here at her urging. A mad errand, but they were either mad or they were nothing. The Elder and Lynesse Second Sister had defeated Sendroth’s poor creatures. There would be no more walls torn down, no high-handed demands. No more life than a brigand’s, living where world met wild, always hunted, eventually hung. The fate of every poor man who wouldn’t knuckle under. And the fate of more than a few wicked ones, too. A just fate, in many cases. Not all brigands were paupers. Plenty of discontent within the upper classes save that, when caught, they were most often exiled rather than losing digits or lives. He clung to that, when called on by his conscience to examine his cause.

Ilmoth had led him in as straight a line as the landscape would allow, to this place. At its door, she’d riddled with its keeper until it had consented to stab her hand, then riddled again until it accepted her as Elder enough to let her in. She’d spoken to the spirits within, as Sendra had stared about fearfully at the uncanny, weirdly cramped interior of the place. If I was a great wizard, I’d have more space than this. And it was a tower but there weren’t even enough floors to justify the height. No grand view from the top. No observatory to watch the stars, though Ilmoth said that the stars didn’t go unwatched. She said that there was one star in particular—a fleet one, she’d show it to him some night—that was possessed of vast powers. She’d come here with the aim of … wooing it to their cause? This was where Sendra’s understanding tailed off. Ilmoth had been wroth, honestly. That was the precise word she’d used. Discovering that the spirits of the tower and the spirits of the star no longer communicated, so her demands and entreaties could not be carried up into the aether. Cursing the name of Nyrgoth Elder for so preparing against her. And then he’d turned up, as though called by her curses. At that point Sendra had known he’d well and truly stepped from the world and into a story of sorcerers, and he with no more than defective magic gloves.

Ilmoth hadn’t started pulling fingernails out of Nyrgoth Elder, though. That would have been a brigand’s play, surely. That was the sort of thing Kaille had been known for back in the day, with merchants grown close-mouthed about where they’d hidden the goods. Ilmoth had made her demands and Nyrgoth had said “It does not answer me. I am dead to it,” and apparently that had been more than just a gambit. Ilmoth had understood the truth of it, and declared, “Then I shall make it answer me,” and that was what she had been trying to do ever since. Leaving the wizard to do … whatever it was wizards did.

“I wondered if she’d cut them off you,” he said, of the horns. That did get a response, a wary flick of the eyes in a face still mumming disinterest. “Wear them herself. Or me. Sendroth Sorcerer turns up at Daimlesse Regent’s court wearing the horns of her pet magician. It would be a message.”

Nyrgoth Elder made a sour noise unbecoming of a wizard.

“A message I’d not want to send,” Sendra admitted. And the brigand king shouldn’t scruple, but he’d never been the kind to torture old men. “Not a step like that, which couldn’t be taken back.”

The man looked at him, at last. “And the walls of Edmen, that had stood for three hundred years?”

“Can be rebuilt,” Sendra said firmly. “Can your horns be regrown?”

The man’s lips moved, once or twice. Withered old-man lips, except they were thinner than Sendra was used to. Wrinkled in a different way, covering teeth too regular by far. “Probably,” he said at last. “Forgive me if I don’t look forward to finding out. What will it be, Sendroth Sorcerer? Use my tower to … unseat the Regent and be Headman of Lannesite?”

Sendra was about to reply that surely it wasn’t too great an ambition, now they had the tower. Except, he realised, that wasn’t what the Elder meant. Meant the opposite: that compared to all this—the tower, the star, the spirits—Lannesite was just a patch of dirt. The revelation shook him. He felt his horizons being torn down to reveal … space going on forever.

“Ceryon,” he said flatly. “You know it? The Enclave at Ceryon.”

He saw the man about to deny it, the whole of Sendra’s past and grievance just vanishing into the century-heavy memory of the wizard. Then the faintest of frowns creasing the brow beneath the ridges of his horns.

“You’re of Ceryon? The … Forgive me, it wasn’t headman or porsir they had there. Their chief person.”