Page 2 of Engines of Reason

Blennardt shinned down without a word. One eye, but her people could see well in the dark, whatever foreign place she came from. A moment later, her voice came out of the hole, “Door, is. Metal, is.” And then, “Yaik mas!” which was some oath in her own language. And then, “Open, is.”

Sendra met Kaille’s gaze. Neither of them needed to say, They’re not going to be looking for us down a hole. They’re not going to be looking for us through a magic door. The other thing neither of them said was, You’d have to be really stupid, to go into a magic door below the barrows.

But what was also not being said was, If you find a magic door below the barrows … you go in, right? Just to see what’s there.

Dark, down there. Enough moonlight from down the hole that Blennardt claimed she could see, still. Nobody else could, much. The door had, apparently, been shiny enough for Irkon to make it out, but it was gone into a slot in the wall, now. The wall that was of earth, but earth bonded together some way that Sendra could barely scratch with his nails. He could feel the slot, though, and it was definitely edged in metal. And there was a space beyond.

“Let me go first,” he said. “If there are traps…” And then found that his strength was just about sufficient to let him lean against the wall, so he nobly went first draped over Kaille’s shoulder. First into the dark, but it was Irkon who limped off and touched something. There was a loud crackle, and a yelp, and then light.

Not bright light, but a slow dawn here beneath the earth. A glimmer of flat silver from fist-sized bulges on the walls, like protuberant eyes. A smell of burning. Sendra was fully ready to see Irkon’s charred corpse ahead of them, because there must really have been a trap. Instead the man was sucking at burned fingers.

The light waxed, and gleamed off the bodies of monsters. He saw rounded, shiny carapaces. Jointed legs curled in upon themselves. Heads that were not even heads, but more like hands made of swords and hammers and torture-tools. Round blank eyes of glass. A half-dozen monsters, curled massively in death.

“The servants of Lucef Half-Elder,” said Kaille softly. And she was not under any circumstances a superstitious woman, but that was the legend about this place, so what was anybody supposed to think? And the thing about old stories was that they weren’t true, obviously. They were there to teach you important things about how to live and how the world was. Except, apparently, how the world was, here and now, was a repository for dead monsters.

After a while he began to laugh. A quiet snickering that turned into a whooping, despairing howl that wrenched dreadfully at his wound. “All the time!” he got out. “This was here all the time! We robbed! We killed! We brought the soldiers down on us! And if we’d known this was here we could just have dug it up like honest people and made a bloody fortune!”

“We were never honest people,” said Kaille. And true, they’d only been out here, each of them, because their lives had already fallen off the narrow course. But even so.

“All right, all right.” He was fighting for breath, fighting against the shooting pains that fighting for breath brought. “We could have … brought them to life! Become warlord-magicians. Defeated armies. Killed every bloody soldier they sent us.” Another shuddering laugh. Because that was one more story. The malcontent who finds the monsters and persuades them to do his bidding. The old stories of Ulmoth Sorcerer from a century back.

Something groaned, in the half-light of the chamber. A slow, heavy metal sound. None of the dead monsters so much as shivered, but abruptly nothing was funny.

Then something did move, out at the edge of the weird, dead light. Stepped out into view, and Sendra’s breath caught. They were going to die, now.

Or else they were saved.

Nyr

MY STUDENTS ARE AT WORK, each to their own natures. Three of the four are the Regent’s own children, because if you have children, and also a wizard at court, you have him teach them magic, don’t you? And so I try, but there is no magic, and I am no teacher, and also they are not the most diligent of students. Osteg, ten, does sums. Not what I’m teaching, but Osteg is like that. And sums are an element of what I teach, but insufficient to make a magician.

Of the three girls, seven-year-old Allenesse has finished writing down her equations in double time so that she can add the enormously elaborate borders she gives to everything: animals and plants intertwining in ways that bring back bad memories I can never explain to her. Erinesse, fifteen, has also bolted the meat of the lesson, so that she can attend to her correspondence. She already has a miniature court of adolescents who write petitions and flattery and poems to her, and as far as I can see she plays them off against one another in a most unpleasant manner.

Nowhere in the world—Sophos IV, this world—is there another teacher such as I, who could review my curriculum and make informed suggestions about what it lacks. It does lack, I am sure. I am, after all, not actually a teacher. I am an anthropologist, and not even a first-class one at that. If anyone tells you that knowing things and being able to impart that knowledge are close cousins, they’re a liar.

Second-class anthropology is not part of what I’m teaching. I am teaching something simultaneously rather more and less useful. To wit: magic.

Not actual magic, which doesn’t exist. There are only natural laws we cannot quite explain. So I wholeheartedly believe, despite some encounters in my past that resisted explanation to such a degree I had to throw my hands up and take it on faith, so to speak, that what was going on was science.

I crane over each shoulder in turn. Allenesse’s tangle of animals makes me squirm inside. The twisted, intermingled bodies of the creatures. My old eyes have seen unwholesome things, as befits a wizard. I shake my head, feeling a great emotional weight come loose and lurch about like badly stowed cargo in a storm. Joining all the other loose pieces of me. My systems are engaged, though—that part of my internal suite that lets me lock these negative feelings away for later dismantling. I don’t feel the doom and gloom of it, and can give them all my bright teacher’s smile. But it’s there. My little telltales let me know I am overdue some bleak and miserable decompression.

At last, I come to my final student, the favourite, the one who gets it. A two-season child like Allenesse—meaning eight years, Earth reckoning. Sara. Saraesse Cousin-kin, but to me she’s Sara. The one I’m teaching the real magic to, not just scientific principles. Sara, Lyn’s daughter.

Another weight comes loose, in the unregarded hold of my mind. These burdens we carry, that no port will take off our hands. We sail on and on with them, and they ram against the bulkheads and timbers. We tie them back up, but they always come loose.

I steal a look at Sara’s board. She is writing incantations, as she calls it. Meaning the chains of logic one might use, through whatever input was available, to instruct the machinery her ancestors deployed, when they came to Sophos IV. She has also started working with the very different schema of logic my own people used for similar purposes—harder to grasp but far more flexible once mastered. She is a precocious student. I do not know if Lannesite has a place for a wizard-cousin-aunt in the next generation, but if it doesn’t, she’ll make one.

I take up my place before them all. “Today,” I say, “on the motion of bodies, and how to calculate this.” I am a terrible fraud. I only know this stuff because it is in the database of my tower, and I’ve downloaded it into my personal head-storage. I am a worse teacher than I was an anthropologist. Most of my work is linguistic, turning the concepts of my own language and culture into words that the children—that anyone else on this world—might understand. Telling them the laws magic is built on, which is true for a given definition of magic.

Sara watches me brightly. She already knows this stuff. A magician could never ask for a brighter student. Faster even than her mother was. I have, I fear, indulged her too much, but she is precious to me. As much so as if she was mine. She is (the weight comes loose, shoulders into the vessel’s hull, so that the timbers shudder) all I have left of her mother.

My name is … well, that is complex. Like any wizard, I have many, but most are archaic, and those in a position to use them few and far between. The name that I was born to, on a world light-years distant, in a civilization I have not heard from in around three centuries, is Nyr Illim Tevitch. Nobody calls me that and nobody ever will, and these days I barely even recall it.

So, amongst these people, my name would be just Nyr, but they are particular about names, here. Familiarity like that is bestowed only amongst the close, indicative of a genuine fondness and intimacy. Good friends, old comrades, lovers. I would be Nyr, but there remains nobody in the palace to call me that. It’s hard to make friends, as a magician.

And so I am the Elder. My title, if you were speaking about me to some other. And I am Nyrgoth Elder to my face. The suffix of my peculiar station, because in this culture your relationship to the whole gets tacked on even when you’re an outsider. Especially so. So the children greet me respectfully as Nyrgoth Elder, their teacher. The adults, fearfully, as their court magician. The last of the old creator folk—which I am not, by the way, but I can tell them until I’m blue in the face and it always seems to reset, in their minds. The wizard of the tower, who should probably have stayed there, rather than coming here for … the wrong reasons, honestly. Professionally and personally. But I came anyway, and now I stay for Sara. For my apprentice magician, because she is a painfully bright star. So I slip further from proper anthropological practise. Instead of studying her people, I teach her about mine.

A terrible mistake. A waste of time. But it’s all I have to give her. What little magic remains in the world.