“FOR WHAT PURPOSE do you disturb the Elder?”
Nyrgoth Elder was seven feet tall, gaunt, clad in slate robes that glittered with golden sigils, intricate beyond the dreams of tailors. Lyn imagined a legion of tiny imps sewing that rich quilted fabric with precious metal, every tiny convolution fierce with occult meaning. His hands were long-fingered, long-nailed; his face was long, too: high-cheekboned, narrow-eyed, the chin and cheeks rough with dark stubble. His skin was the sallow of old paper. He had horns. In the old pictures, she’d thought they were a crown he wore, but there they were, twin twisted spires that arched from his brows, curving backwards along his high forehead and into his long, swept-back hair. She would have said he was more than half monster if she hadn’t known he was something half god. He was the last scion of the ancient creators who had, the stories said, placed people on the world and taught them how to live.
And now she had been silent too long. Esha jogged her elbow and she burst out, “I call upon the ancient compact between the royal line of Lannesite and the Elder, where you bound yourself to aid the kingdom should foul magic rise against it. A new threat has arisen who wields terrible powers, as did Ulmoth in the time of Astresse Once Regent. Ulmoth whom you met sorcery with sorcery and cast down.”
The Elder’s look at her was haughty and dismissive. There had been a moment, when she told him of Astresse, that she had thought to read human responses in those arch features, but now she looked on him and could only see the distance between them.
“I am not troubled by such small matters,” he pronounced. “These disputes you must resolve yourself. It is not fit for me to intervene,” and he turned to go.
Lyn had a whole speech prepared—literally memorised by heart—in which she recited the Lineage of Queens, elucidated the deeds of her great-grandmother and the legends of Nyrgoth Elder and made a formal plea, diplomat to great power, for the honouring of bargains. There was an expected language to these things, just as though one were telling a tale, conventions to abide by. One did not just charge into the tower of a sorcerer and take liberties.
And yet he was already going away, without any of her elaborate charade enacted, and she just lunged forwards and tugged his sleeve, as though she were a peddler and he was departing without paying.
The robe punished her. There was a crackle and a feeling as though it had bitten her fingers. Then she was sitting on the floor, hand ringing with pain and tears in her eyes. Esha had grabbed her shoulders and was trying to haul her back, gabbling apologies to the Elder, begging him to forgive the princess’s temerity. Nyrgoth just stood there, looking down at her, seemingly as surprised as she was by the development.
At last, he said, “Forgive me. The things of this tower are jealous of me, and careful in my defence.” And then, after unnamed things came and went in his eyes, “Astresse did the same, when she came to me and I told her I would not intervene.”
“And you did intervene,” Lyn reminded him. “Elder, there is a new power arisen in the Ordwood that men say is a demon who steals minds, whom the strongest cannot face with a blade. The forest kingdoms are falling already. Lannesite’s roads are heavy with those fleeing their homes.” And my mother will do nothing, she thought but did not say. No gain in telling the Elder that she was not exactly here with royal sanction.
“Please,” she said, all those fancy words she’d learnt condensed down to that one. “I invoke the compact between us,” she went on, but quietly, an entreaty and not a demand. “You promised my family, long ago. Are the vows of a sorcerer nothing?”
Nyr
MY PROFESSIONAL ASSESSMENT IS that I let myself behave in a remarkably unprofessional manner some time ago and here it is, back to bite me. True, there is a loophole in the non-contamination procedures where advanced technology is concerned. Not a terribly well-reasoned loophole, given that the tech that the warlord Ulm had got hold of wasn’t ours at all, but a holdover from the colonial days. I would have been within my rights to decide that whatever he did with it was just part of the natural development of the society here, and hence that anything I did would just have been unconscionable meddling.
And yet whoever worded the contamination regs for the Corps was less than exacting, meaning that I could, if I wished, interpret them to mean that I could go and take down Ulmoth and restore the proper post-tech balance that I was supposed to be studying.
My rationalistic assessment, with Dissociative Cognition System engaged, is that I made the incorrect decision back then, and would only compound matters now. In fact, DCS on, I literally cannot understand why I weighed in to help Astresse. I can recall our first meeting word for word, and yet the decision I made makes no sense to me. On this basis, I feel I cannot make a final decision now, because I feel I lack some nebulous information I obviously possessed then.
I put a hand out to help this new woman to her feet and she flinches back. “I have tagged you as safe for my systems here,” I assure her. I have already apologised for the efficiency of the outpost’s defences, which interpreted her movement as an attack. Thankfully I had them set only to warn in the first instance, or the cleaners would be sweeping up her ashes.
Looking at her expression, I suspect that my grasp of the language remains imperfect, or at least lacks nuance. On the one hand, I could write you a dissertation on the linguistic roots of their various tongues in Old Earth stock and how they have developed since this colony became cut off from the wider human diaspora. On the other, I suspect that there is a whole level of subtext hidden amongst their suffixes and registers, cases and inflections where every word has a dozen different variants depending on precisely who’s talking to whom about what. I’ve wondered if, early on in the colony’s development, the colonists sat down and decided that they really, really needed to be clear about exactly what everyone meant, and now the language is a tangled thicket I have to hack through with a machete.
All of which is getting me nowhere nearer to making a decision. I should just go back into suspension and have the outpost wake me when . . .