Lyn had been shouting and screaming at the mute monster, demanding it help. Demanding it take the wizard’s body back to his tower, where his magic was strongest. It ignored her. It only spoke Wizard, Esha guessed. They knew the Elder had his own speech. Why would his familiar respond to the words of regular people?
And nobody spoke Wizard, of course, but Esha did speak every other language known within two hundred miles. All the trade speech and the guild speech, all the tangle of related cants and dialects that people had carried to every corner of the world. More, whenever the wizard had spoken in his own way, to himself or to the monster, she had listened just as she’d listen to any traveller from a distant land. So Esha catechised the monster with every manner of speech she knew, hunting out any words they had in common. Because she knew there were some words that were close as sisters in all languages. Basic words, fundamentally human words. Words even a monster might know. “Mother.” “Father.” Such a basic concept, and there were only a handful of ways to say it, in thirty different languages.
And something she said reached it. Some word so fundamental that humans and wizards alike shared it. “Home.” And the monster had been airborne again, carrying Lyn and Nyrgoth’s corpse, with her friends left behind. Which was why Lyn arrived at court long before them.
For Lyn, Esha’s arrival meant some slight lessening of her mother’s disregard, to find that her Fourth Daughter had not just been wandering starry-eyed through the forests fighting with sticks. And yet, as though something of the demon clung to her, too deep rooted to dig out, catharsis never came. Her mother never stopped scowling. As though defeating the demon and saving the Ordwood meant nothing. Lannesite didn’t really care about the Ordwood, Lyn realised. Or perhaps a weaker and more divided Ordwood might be preferable. Even with Esha’s testimony, she could see everyone still doubted the details. Esha had lost her edge years before, after all, and Allwer was no more than a criminal. Something had happened, and now it had stopped happening, but was it really plausible that Lynesse had a hand in any of it? Lynesse the simpleton, the dreamer?
*
In her chambers, barred from her mother’s presence, she clung to what she could. She had defeated the demon, whatever they believed. She had ridden the familiar monster all the way to its home, the tower. And there she had hauled the elder’s body to the door and yelled at it until its invisible guardian had opened it for her. Then she’d yelled at the empty interior that she’d brought its master back for burial, by whatever traditions sorcerers held to.
When at last it had opened a panel in the wall, revealing a coffin-space within, she had done the last part of her duty. Interred the last of the Elders in his place of power. Spoken some words. And left.
*
Nineteen days after Esha’s return, a messenger appeared at the palace, a woman whose voice shook as she recounted her missive. A monster had appeared to her, she said: a flying thing with a hide of metal and teeth of crystal. It had hung in the sky above her and spoken with a stone’s voice, calling that Lynesse Fourth Daughter come to the sorcerer’s tower, and that she bring Esha Free Mark and Allwer Once Exile with her, by the invitation of Nyrgoth Elder.
And Lyn had the profound satisfaction of standing before her mother and the whole court and saying, “Well?”
Nyr
THE SATELLITE ISN’T TALKING to me anymore.
I don’t know exactly if this is because, once it exercised the Ultimate Anti-contamination Measures, I just don’t exist to it anymore. After all, as far as it’s concerned, it’s just obliterated my body to stop the locals getting hold of it and all the precious technology it contains.
On the other hand, it might be the locator. It wasn’t my heart I actually ripped from my own chest, after all, but it was my beacon, that let the satellite know exactly where I was. I was right there, where the gateway stood, as far as it was concerned. And now I’m not here, because I don’t have a beacon anymore, so the satellite ignores my requests to link with it. My familiar spirit has been cut from me.
And if my Explorer Corps colleagues return, somehow, after so long, if Earth signals me or sends a ship to bring me home, I won’t know, and the satellite will tell them I am dead. And probably tell them I was a very poor anthropologist, even for second class. And the first might be false, but the second will very definitely be true.
I thought the worker robot would get Lyn out. When I linked to it and found it had rebooted itself, I gave it that command. And somehow it came back here and Lyn told the outpost to admit her, and it did. I have gone back over the records. It’s when she basically hauls my unresisting body upright and leans me against the door, like some kind of grisly farce, that my blood chemistry gets recognised by the outpost systems and it opens up. Then she just shouts at the walls and eventually the tower systems work out what the situation is and put out a healing capsule, and Lyn bodily rolls me into it.
When the clear lid comes down and it retracts, with me inside, she sits with her back to the wall and weeps. I don’t think it’s for me, exactly, just a release of all that pent-up grief and anger and sheer soured adrenaline. Just a lot inside her to get out, and of all people I can certainly understand that.
Eventually, of course, she goes home.
Somewhat more eventually, the outpost wakes me up, and I sort through the torrid history of tolerance warnings and medical tuttings until I concede that I am still alive and functional and totally isolated from the wider universe. I send a long-range drone west, and the next time I let the DCS down I hope that some part of the cocktail of emotion that assails me is a profound satisfaction that the plan worked. The land the demon took will not be well for a long time, a great blighted scar across the Ordwood, and in the minds of its people. Whatever the demon was, though, it is gone, the signal cut off where it entered our . . . world? Universe? Reality? I cannot guess.
And by then it’s time for me to flush out my mind without the benefit of the DCS, and it’s still bad, all that pent-up negative stuff. Just because I did good doesn’t mean I don’t feel bad, because the feeling bad, it’s not particularly because of anything that’s happened; it’s just the way I’m wired. But in the midst of it I think about Lyn and Esha and Allwer and the whole mad business, and I can smile a bit, and think, Those days, eh? Just as I did with Astresse and Ulmoth.
And I should go back to sleep, really, to wait for . . . what, though?