Page 19 of Engines of Reason

“My sister is learning about what she’s ruined,” she said. “And about time.”

He blinked at her. At the gorget hanging from her belt. Simultaneously an official of Lannesite and not, caught between two tales. She tilted so the tower’s light gleamed on the heraldry there.

“Let it be this way,” she said. “Nyr is my friend. I will help him if I can. And I know that this”—a tap at her sword hilt—“is no use in there. Not in the tower. Not against the witch. So let it be this way. Let me be an emissary of Lannesite, come to treat with Sendroth Sorcerer. Let me stand in for my sister, in recognising what has been ruined, and what might be put right.” She hugged the child to her. And she could hardly send the kid off down the mountain on her own, but if it had been Sendra’s daughter he’d never have taken her into such a place.

“‘Let me be’ doesn’t suggest it’s true,” he observed.

“I can make it true,” Lynesse told him flatly. “If I can leave here with a story that my sister can be made to accept.”

He noted the language, and what it might say about the sympathies behind it. He stood.

“You’d better shift that to your throat, princess,” he said, of the gorget. “If you’re going to be on the crown’s business. If you’re sure.” One more chance for her to save herself and her child from wizard business. But then, if they were both the old man’s apprentices, perhaps they’d always have been caught in the fallout. The witch kills the wizard, his apprentices kill the witch, the sorcerer kills them, and where does any of it end? Just the sort of idiot blood-and-thunder saga he’d liked when he was a child and foolish.

“Come on then, if you’re coming,” he said, feeling like a man with no good choices. When they stood, the child was casting about like she was listening for something.

“You hear the witch in there?” he asked her, because he could, too, or his gloves could. The ghost-words Ilmoth was plying the tower with, to get it to do what she wanted.

“I hear a big voice that is the witch,” the child told him solemnly. “And I hear a big voice that is Nyr. And a little voice that speaks under them. A little voice in a hundred pieces.”

He frowned at her. My gloves, she means? The tower itself? But it wasn’t that because, somehow, her mentioning it had opened his ears to it, just for a moment. A weird, fleeting voice, here and there and everywhere and in none of the spaces in between. Strange and plaintive and utterly inhuman. And then gone, as though it never was. And he met Lynesse’s gaze, and she was as thrown by it as he was.

Nyr

“TELL ME,” I SAY, “how you became a part of this.” Because What are you? seems to be more than I’ll get out of her. More than Ilmoth Elder—that thing I’m talking to that answers to the name—is capable of encompassing. The more reasonable question reactivates her scornful look, but that’s almost a relief.

“Sendra, he came to me amongst the graves,” she said, and now she’s talking my rusty old language again. A choice of dead tongues, between us, and none of them hers. “He sought my help.”

A fork in my path here. Do I ask why she—as whatever species of Elder she’s laying claim to—would even bother with the provincial ambitions of Sendroth Not-Yet-Sorcerer? I mean, why would anyone? Except, yes, I did, with Astresse and then with Lyn, but I had good reason. I was … following a narrative, I suppose, that said I could interfere under particular circumstances. Which I made sure I could twist to fit circumstances, because I was old and bored and lonely. And Ilmoth’s actions also fit a narrative, but it’s not one from my people nor of the original colonisers. A narrative of the people of this land, that the hero—brigand in this case but Sendroth plainly sees himself as wronged—seeks aid from a magician, and is gifted magic, and becomes the avenging sorcerer. A folk tale of Sophos IV, oft-repeated. Lyn was following a variation of it when she came to me that first time.

Lyn hasn’t gone anywhere. She’s closer, in fact. And her signature seems … doubled? I try to make contact, but I’m leery of alerting Ilmoth. Not the best time for a house call, Lyn.

So I don’t ask Ilmoth Elder about her motives. Instead I do my best to tie her up with a deeper question. “And before that? As you are an Elder, where were you for all those centuries? You never called on me here, one wizard to another.”

“You think yourself so important,” she says scathingly. But she is here in my tower, plundering my secrets. I manage an arch look, a proper Elder’s expression. It infuriates her, but at least her fury is focused on me.

“I have been biding my time,” she tells me. “You in your fortress, brooking no competitor, destroying any mere sorcerer who raised themselves to push against the mundane powers of the world. Jealous of any who might rise to threaten your dominance.” And now, apparently, I am dominant again, the great wizard-lord and not the latecomer intruding on someone else’s domain. And this is Sendroth’s narrative, yes, but it is also the way the witch and the wizard clash, in many tales. One the old and powerful, the magical establishment; one the newcomer, raw but strong and … assisted by some other power, sometimes. Some wickedness to draw on, to threaten the other’s stone-built strength. It goes back to old Earth stories, and it goes back to power struggles within the colonial administration and later recoveries of working tech. Sometimes the wizard is an evil tyrant who must be overthrown; sometimes the witch is a wicked upstart who must be put down. No narrative model for the pair of them just getting on, apparently.

Or there is. It occurs to me then, but is gone from my head in the next instant because Lyn is at the very gates of the tower. Go away, I send via back channels to the necklace she wears. My voice a ghostly whisper in her ear.

No, she says bluntly. And the other her says, It’s a rescue and I realise there aren’t two Lyns. It’s Sara. She’s brought Sara.

And here I sit with a witch who may be a demon or a vessel for demons, or … some damn thing I have no idea about at all.

I am going to set it all on fire right now. Because, if I’ve kicked off the fight with Ilmoth, however that’s going to go, at least Lyn won’t walk into the spiderweb of our negotiations and end up as leverage against me. At least Sara won’t be in danger. “None of this is true,” I tell Ilmoth.

She bares her teeth at me. “You think yourself so wise,” she tells me. “Your people, so smug, so sure of themselves. And where are they now?”

All true. Practically reading my mind, or at least my diary. I don’t let it derail me. “You are not of my people. You are not of the coloniser people. You have access to the tower, and it tells you things you half understand. You regurgitate them to me because they sound right to you. You fit them into stories like parts to an engine, trying to make them run. But I’ve seen your blood, Ilmoth. Your heritage, written out and analysed. You’re from here, a local, present-day, Sophos IV standard. No different to anyone else within a hundred miles of here.” Not one of my people, whose genetic heritage is different enough—through time’s work and our own—that we’re close to being a different species. Not the colonists, possessed of Earth genetics a millennium out of date, having to be engineered to produce descendants fit for the biochemical signature of this world, even after all their terraforming efforts. Ilmoth is a modern local and, because my work tracked the way that certain epidemics leave a signature in the blood, of antibodies and genetic damage, I can give you the circumstances of her birth within five years and twenty miles. Ilmoth Elder is no more than twenty-four. Six Storm-seasons at most, as the locals—her people, Lyn’s people—would reckon it.

“I am—” she says, shouts, almost shrieks, and I tap into the tower’s own systems, whisk the audio out from her grasp and shout back at her from every wall and corner.

“You are not! What singles you out and makes you a witch is what is within you. Your passenger. Your familiar.” Speaking in Lyn’s language now so that Lyn will hear and understand. “What is it, Ilmoth? What lives under your skin?”

She flinches back from me and the boom of it. “There’s nothing!” she yells at me. “I am Ilmoth Elder. I have beaten you, old man! I, with my power, with my magic!” Answering me in the same language, her own language. Words collapsing into some regional accent beneath the stilted legend-speak she was putting on.

Lyn is there, entering the room, hearing this. Lyn and Sara both. And, with them, Sendroth Sorcerer. A captor and prisoners, I think, but they’re not standing like that. He’s more like a servant come to usher in the pair of them. And I know he’s seen the things that live under Ilmoth’s skin, and must know Ilmoth herself hasn’t. They do not exist for her. She edits them out of her world, no part of her story. His witch is mad, but she gives him power, so he must live with it. Or perhaps mad is not the word.

“What is this?” Ilmoth demands of her sorcerer.