Neveryóna, or The Tales of Signs and Cities

12. Of Models, Monsters, Night, and the Numinous

PRYN BLINKED.

More accurately, what she saw was a map of a city, a map on which one might measure, in rippling gold, gray, and silver, distance and direction. There ran one golden avenue; there another crossed it. There lay a glimmering yard, in the midst of which was a dark circle, the cistern at its center, where, no doubt, long-vanished children had run up to bounce their balls against salt-stained stones. There was the dark rectangle of a large building. That stretch, there, might have been a market square. Several smaller rectangles abutted it, suggesting an irregularly set line of smaller houses. Around and between them all ran glittering alleys, some broad and gently curving, some narrow and straight, some thin and tangled. On one island, green brush continued the line of some bright walkway till, on the differentiated waters, gold ripples took it up again. On another, half covered with shrubs, now Pryn saw two mostly fallen, but real, stone walls that joined: the remains of a building corner among a group of buildings, the rest of which were only scribed by angular darknesses in the glimmering ripples around.

She started to speak.

Then Pryn saw something else.

‘…“eight thousand one hundred ninety-two,”’ the earl’s voice droned on.

On the column nearest Lavik, clamped in iron top and bottom to the stone, was a sword. Indeed, on each of the dozen columns that rose to the chamber’s roof swords were clamped. The one on the column directly before Pryn, however, like a double bar across the vision, had two blades rising from its hilt. They were joined for the first three inches but after that were separate, like a blade and its afterimage an inch to the side, or a blade and its strangely diffracted shadow — though which was which (because both were real metal) was impossible to tell. Pryn looked at the next column. The blade there was single. There was also a single blade on the next. But on the next — and, indeed, on the one after that — there were double blades. On the next, indeed on the rest, were single blades.

But three of the swords displayed on the chamber’s dozen columns were clearly twinned weapons.

Beyond them, the sun touched a hill. One side of the golden city, a spot of blackness formed, a simple shadow intensified by the surrounding glimmer. It spread the water, lightening as it moved. In the shifting angle of the sun, avenues, alleys, big and little buildings lost definition.

A breeze — and half the city was wiped away by copper fire!

Pryn blinked at the ripples, trying to recall their previous form. The earl’s voice continued: ‘…“two hundred sixty-two thousand one hundred forty-four”…’

The city disappeared…

More accurately, the evening’s darknesses and glitterings spread their more flamboyant, less distinctive illumination over it toward the sea.

‘…“one million forty-eight thousand five hundred seventy-six,”’ the earl intoned. ‘Tell me.’ He turned from the parchment to regard Pryn. ‘Do you notice anything about these signs?’

Pryn had been both dazzled and confused by the pattern the sun had struck so briefly on the water. The swords, however, were clear and real.

‘I’m sorry,’ the earl said. ‘But I asked you: Do you notice anything about these signs?’

With silence ringing over everything she saw, Pryn looked at the parchment. What was that city? was the question in her mind. She said: ‘Well, I…the numbers get very big. But the signs for each of them are…all very small, a single mark for each.’

‘Yes!’ the earl’s smile threatened to tear loose from his face and go careening about the chamber. ‘You have noted the profound economy Belham was able to impose on these huge, unwieldy concepts. And in the same manner that one can represent the numbers missing between “four” and “eight” by a unique combination of the signs up to and including “four,” so one can supply the numbers between any sign and any other by a similar and unique recombination.’

Pryn was still wondering at the warning swords clamped to the columns.

‘But an even greater economy suggested itself to Belham,’ the earl went on. ‘He found he could master fractional numbers as well by the use of pairs of numbers from his new system. A “half” was simply one divided into two equal parts — represented by the sign for “one” with the sign for “two” below it. One-and-a-third was four divided into three equal parts: the sign for “four” subscribed by the sign for “three.”’ As the earl spoke, his finger moved to other configurations of marks on the Parchment that, as Pryn looked at them, more and more clearly were the same as she had seen on the dragon’s pedestal or that rimmed the disk she wore at her neck. ‘Three-and-a-seventh, for example, was twenty-two divided into seven equal parts: “twenty-two” above “seven.” The young Belham felt he had mastered the entire range of number, from the greatest to the smallest, covering all fractional gradations. With his economical system of signs, he thought, he could express any number, whole or partial, any man or woman might conceive. Now as I said, Belham invented this system when he was not much more than a boy; by the time he could rightly be called a man, he was easily the most famous man in all Nevèrÿon — certainly the most famous from our part of it. So you see, that “writing,” which you have seen here, on our local monuments, represents number, or what can be expressed by number: dates of origin, specific moments of the day or year, costs, measurements, angles of degree — words that mean something in our old language, but little in yours, mainly because Belham happened to be…a barbarian. They are like your commercial script without the pollution of greed and profit that motivate commerce — not that greed and profit are absent from such writing. They are merely elided between its signs, as my little divagation on the nature of all writing should suggest. So.’ The earl’s hands went back beneath his cloak. ‘Now you know the secret of our local writing that graces our monuments — and the rim of your astrolabe.’ He smiled. ‘Is there anything else you want to ask? Tell me what you think of it all.’

Pryn pressed her lips together. She wanted to speak as carefully as she might write with only a limited area of waxed board on which to create her thought. ‘I was thinking of — I was remembering a morning, not so long ago, when I stood on a hill, in the morning, just north of Kolhari, looking down through the dawn fog at the city. If I’d never stood there, if I’d never thought the thoughts I thought then, I doubt — I don’t think I would ever have seen what I…what I just saw. Yes, there’s something I very much want to ask.’ Pryn looked again out between the sword-bearing columns at the inlet. The sky’s blue had visibly deepened over half its vault. ‘What city was that out in the water?’

From his seat on the end of the railing, Jenta laughed. ‘What city? There’s no city there.’

‘I don’t mean,’ said Pryn, ‘there’s a city there now. There was a city. Once. Its foundations, its empty cisterns, the broken paving of its streets and the overturned flags of its alleys are under the water now. I want to know: What was the city that used to be there?’

‘But there’s only water there.’ Lavik turned at her end of the rail. ‘Perhaps there’s a paving stone or two on some of the sand bars. Yes, there are some old foundations along the edge of the inlet, where the children go out looking for old trinkets. But a few ruined huts and stones aren’t a city!’

Pryn said: ‘I’ve stood on the hill north of Kolhari at dawn and gazed down through the fog and seen the city, erased and faded till it is only a shape, a plan, a dream. I know a city when I see one! There is — there was a city there!’

‘Well’ Lavik retorted sharply, ‘when I went to court at Kolhari, I was never let out of the wagon when we stopped on the dawn-fogged hills above it. So I’ve never seen your city! There’s no city there!’

‘Do you think she’s a spy from the north?’ Jenta leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. His smile took on a mocking play. ‘You wouldn’t believe the number of spies they do send down here, to ferret out with great stealth what any field girl or dye-house boy would tell them if they only asked.’

‘I’m not a spy!’ Pryn turned abruptly. ‘I’m not! I told the roughnecks on the road, I told the Liberator, and I told the Wild Ini! And I tell you!’ Looking down at herself, she picked up the astrolabe. ‘I didn’t even know this was Olin’s “circle of different stars” until that slave, Bruka, told me. I only wore it because Gorgik gave it to me when I snuck into Neveryòna — ’

Jenta’s elbows left his knees and the smile vanished. Lavik got up from the rail, to stand beside it. The earl’s expression underwent some baffling transformation that, Pryn realized, was simply that its animation — a part of the luminous smile — had stilled. ‘Bruka told you…?’ Silence spilled down like the hill fog spilling across the burning bay.

‘Come here,’ Lavik said, suddenly, nervously. ‘Yes, over here. Look there — no, not there. Over there. At the hills to our left. Do you see that low stone building, in the mist, now, with the four, stubby stone towers at its corners? That’s the Vygernangx Monastery, once the home of the most powerful priests in Nevèrÿon, when the conflict between the north and south was an open military dispute. For years the north sent spies here — and still sends them! — to learn if there is any power left at the Vygernangx. Let me tell you! Ten years ago there were perhaps ten doddering feyers within its crumbling walls. Today, there are none! The last left or died or simply moved on to another location where priests are more respected. The monastery is deserted. Any local youngster will take you to explore for yourself, let you wander the leaf-strewn chapels where you can kick aside fallen birds’ nests, scare up snakes and beetles from the rubbish on its stone floors. But power, there, is absent. And now you know what the lords of the High Court at Kolhari are still plotting and planning and scheming to learn. There is nothing there — as any barbarian boy who climbs through its ruined windows of an autumn evening can tell you.’

‘Here,’ Jenta said from the other end of the rail. ‘Come here. Look out…there.’

Confused, Pryn moved from Lavik.

With one foot on the floor now, Jenta leaned a furred hip against the stone rail. ‘No, not down at the inlet — to the right. You can just glimpse the castle, through the trees, sitting on the plain. It’s like a smaller version of the High Court of Eagles itself, isn’t it? It’s the castle of the Dragon Lord Aldamir. If there have been no priests in the Vygernangx for ten years, there has been no lord in the Dragon Castle for twenty. Yet yearly the High Court at Kolhari sends down its spies to check on the extent of the deception by which the power of the lord is maintained. There is no Lord Aldamir! For all the power he ever wielded, there might as well never have been one. There is only an empty castle, where groups of barbarian girls go to lose one another in the roofless halls, leap out at one another from behind crumbling corners and shout “Boo!”, then fall to giggling. At the castle of the Dragon Lord, power also is absent. And now you know what the High Court throws away handful after handful of gold to learn and relearn and learn again — a fact that any tavern maid grown up in these parts could tell them!’

The sound was sharp, astonishing, unsettling, a single syllable of laughter, for which Pryn realized there was no written sign. She looked at the earl, who’d uttered it. Such a laugh was clearly the extension of that distressing smile. ‘We are, I’m afraid, all of us, very nervously proceeding in a way that tries to allow the possibility that you are, indeed, a spy, while we take you at your word that, indeed, you are not. Let me confess it: such duplicity even informed my initial invitation.

‘It did?’ Pryn asked, ‘Oh, it did…I mean, you did invite me here because you saw the astrolabe?’ She let it drop back against the cloth.

‘A simple “yes” or a simple “no” would insult my motivations and your intelligence. You have asked a question. Let me — simply — answer it. Out there where the waters lie between the hills was once a great city, the greatest in all Nevèrÿon. Its name was Neveryóna.’

Pryn frowned. ‘But Neveryóna isn’t a city. It’s a neighborhood, where the noblemen used to live on the edge of Kolhari — ’

‘And where do you think those noblemen came from when they moved north to the new and thriving village that, even in those days, as it claimed itself capital and High Court, was about to become a city? Oh, the actual streets and avenues of Neveryóna sank below the waters well before the nobles took their wagons out on the once fine highroads that had served it, to leave for the north. But they took with them the memory of a city that had once named the nation. No doubt you know that when they took power at the High Court they even tried to rename Kolhari herself. But place names are tenacious; and they could not affix their displaced dream to that northern town any more than Babàra could affix his to the fields and forests of the Garth.’

At the railing, Lavik laughed. ‘Oh — you meant the city that once was there. I mean…that isn’t there now. That’s Neveryóna!’

‘You meant Neveryóna?’ Jenta cried. ‘But it’s only a memory of a city — you said “ruin,” and it’s not even a ruin, most of it. It’s just a pattern in the water that shows up under the proper light. If I’d known that’s what you’d meant — ’ He laughed — ‘I would have told you!’

Looking between them, Pryn again saw the swords clamped to their columns. Swords of heroes, she wondered, men and women come on some task they had failed…? Were they true warnings or was her reading only tale-teller’s stuff? ‘The circle of different stars,’ she said, ‘the sunken city — it was a story I heard, made up by a taleteller from the islands. She told it to me even before I left from my — ’

‘The island woman who made up that tale,’ the earl said, ‘would be a very old woman today. Though I will credit your aunt with an ancient acquaintance with Belham — for rumor is, yes, he died somewhere in the northern Falthas — I rather doubt you ever met this woman, unless you are both older and more traveled than I thought!’ He laughed. ‘I know because she was a friend of mine. Her name was Venn — a brilliant woman from the Ulvayn Islands.’ (Pryn frowned, hearing the name of this unknown woman a third time in her travels.) ‘She had a truly astonishing mind. I met her in this very room for the first time when I was younger than you. And I last saw her at her home in the Greater Ulvayns, when she took me around with her to see the tribes that lived in the island’s center, discoursing on their manners and economy, introducing me to a son she had left among them — only a few years before news of her death reached me from across the water. But she had many friends who respected her to the point of adulation for her marvelous powers of intellect. She never had the fame of a Belham — but Belham sought fame, while Venn fled it. And she may well have been the greater thinker. Belham was a flamboyant lecher, a drinker, a carouser, a wit when he wanted to be, and a tyrant to his patrons when his patrons displeased him. Venn was sharp-tongued, yes. But riches and notoriety never interested her. Still, she very much interested me. But all that was many years back.’

‘The island woman who told the tale to me,’ Pryn said, ‘was older than I am, yes — but not as old as you. And she was very much alive.’ Once more she glanced at the swords.

‘No doubt, the earl said, ‘you’ve heard people here speak of me as a magician?’ He grew solemn. ‘Venn taught me what I know of real magic, right here, in this very room. I was just a boy. My father had invited her here — to join with Belham, as a matter of fact. Venn had come from the Ulvayns to Nevèrÿon, and my father had immediately taken an interest in the reports he heard of her, for back then when the world was younger we had a respect for pure mind that seems to be missing from our modern enterprises. Belham, you see, had a problem. Whenever he met a bright youngster — as Venn must have seemed to him back then — he would explain his problem and ask for a solution. When he was younger, when he first realized he had a problem, it was very shortly after he’d invented the number system I outlined to you. At first he used to give the problem out in hopes of an answer. As he grew older, however, and the problem remained unsolved, he began to toss it to the young geniuses of Nevèrÿon he was called on to confer with as a challenge and, by the time my father summoned him, as a foregone insult to put the youngsters in their place — as it seemed to him the nameless gods, by allowing the problem to exist, had put Belham in his.’ The earl moved to another parchment on the wall. Drawn on it was a large circle with a vertical line down its middle. ‘Almost as soon as his numbering system had been invented, many lords — at Belham’s insistent urging — asked him to build buildings for them, using the great accuracy his system allowed, demanded he landscape one or two of their prize gardens for them, wanted him to build bridges, lay out roads. From time to time someone asked him to construct a circular building. So this problem, as you will soon see, was a real one. Belham wanted to know what two numbers, one of which might divide the other, expressed the number of times the diameter — ’ The earl ran his finger down the vertical line halving the circle — ‘would divide the circumference — ’ His finger traced about the circle itself — ‘of its own circle. Let me ask you: how many lengths of cord this long — ’ He indicated the diameter again — ‘must be laid end to end around the edge of this circle to surround it?’ Again his wide forenail outlined the circle itself.

Pryn tried to take an imaginary strip of vine the length of the diameter and lay it around the edge. ‘Two and a half lengths…?’ she hazarded. ‘Three? It looks to me it would go about three times.’

The earl nodded. ‘Belham’s first estimate, when he was only a year or so older than you. Within days of making it, however, if not hours — because he was that kind of young man — he took a real piece of vine, anchored one end down, drew a real circle, measured out the diameter on a strip of vine, then laid it out around the edge in order to see.’ The earl’s finger went to the top of the circle, moved along the circumference till it reached a small red mark, somewhere below the first quarter. ‘One diameter’s length around the circle, as Belham laid it out.’ The finger moved along the circle, down under the bottom, and started up the other side till it reached a second red mark. ‘Two diameters’ lengths around the circle.’ The finger continued up the far side until it reached a third red mark a hand’s span from the circle’s top where it had begun. ‘This is three diameters’ length around the circle…which still leaves this much left over.’ Here he switched fingers to outline the remaining arc.

The circle on the parchment was perhaps twice as big as the earl’s head, like a full moon low on the horizon — with its palm’s-width anomaly exceeding the three diameters laid about it. ‘Is it three-and-a-third, then…?’ Pryn suggested. As she said it, though, she immediately saw that the remaining arc was much less than a third of the diameter drawn down the center. ‘Three and…a half of a third?’

‘Belham’s next estimate, which, in this northern tongue we southern aristocrats teach our children and our slaves to speak in deference to the High Court, till it has become the language even of our peasants, can only be talked of — clumsily — as three and a half of a third. In Belham’s own notation, that becomes nineteen divided into six equal parts: one could say three-and one-sixth. To a northerner, I suppose, where all fractions are expressed as thirds, halves, quarters, or tenths, though you’d be able to figure out what it meant, it still must sound clumsy.’

It did.

‘I will not reproduce the thinking which led Belham, after much speculation, to revise that estimate to three-and-one-seventh, or, indeed, the later reasoning that led him to the inescapable conclusion that even three-and-one-seventh, while it was closer than three-and-one-sixth, was still not absolutely accurate. Three-and-a-seventh, in Belham’s system, is “twenty-two divided into seven parts.” When Belham returned from a trip to the western desert where he had been called on to supervise the construction of such a circular monument for some reigning desert potentate, my father told me he’d actually taken the time off to experiment. He told my father: “Three-and-a-seventh is certainly close enough for any practical use one might want to put it to in building any real building on the good, solid ground. But just suppose one wanted to build a circular fortress an entire fifteen stades in diameter! If one laid out the diameter across the land and used the figure three-and-one-seventh to calculate, say, a length of a rope to wrap precisely once around the outside wall, one would have — using such a figure — too much rope by the height of a good-sized man.”’ The earl laughed. ‘He’d apparently found this out, he told my father, by laying out the outline for such a fortress on the western earth and measuring it with real vine. Such experiments, of course, can only be carried out in a locale with slaves — as well as potentates obsessed by the desire for such knowledge, or at least potentates who can be convinced to finance the experiments. But then, they’ve always been particularly harsh on slaves in the west.’ The earl laughed again. ‘At any rate, this ultimate accuracy became Belham’s problem, Belham’s challenge, Belham’s obsession. One of Belham’s other early inventions, as you no doubt recall, was the lock and key — till then, slaves’ collars had been permanently welded closed. But frequently he used to say that the existence of this problem was as if his key no longer fit his lock, and he was now its slave forever. This was the problem he presented to anyone for whom a claim of mind was made: find two numbers such that one divided by the other will express exactly the number of times the diameter of the circle wraps its circumference. This was the challenge Belham presented young Venn, when my father introduced them. I must tell you, Belham explained his system of numbers to Venn in this room, just as I explained it to you, but just as I would not be surprised if you had heard it before — ’

Pryn hadn’t.

‘—I would not be surprised if Venn knew of it already. For it was, as was the problem by then, famous in the circles that concerned themselves with such things. That explanation took place in this very room. My father stood where you stand now. Belham stood where I stand; Venn stood near the balcony where Jenta is sitting. And I stood — ‘He looked about — ‘just at the door, hoping not to be sent from the room for coughing too loud or asking an importunate question.’ The earl took an inking stick from a seashell on the shelf below the diagram. ‘With this inking stick Belham drew this very diagram I have just shown you. Using this stick as a pointer, he explained his problem. When he finished his explanation, he took the diagram — ’ The earl reached for the circled parchment and slipped it from the several metal clips by which it was held to the yellowed backing board — ‘and gave them to young Venn — you must remember that parchment in those days was regarded as even more valuable, since there was more need for it. “Use the back of this for your solution. You may come here at this same hour tomorrow morning to show us what you’ve found.” Venn seized them both, parchment and stick, I remember, and practically fled the room. That evening, at about this hour, she sent a slave to call my father and Belham to come here to the chamber at the seven o’clock bell — she had found her answer! My father was taking an early evening nap at the time; yawning and complaining about these mad commoners who ordered titled lords about like slaves, he arrived here five minutes late. In a fury lest he be presented with another hopelessly garbled non-solution, Belham arrived five minutes early. Because I was a child and could lurk more or less unobserved, I watched Venn wait nervously in a lower hallway just until she saw the slave go to ring the hour bell; then she dashed up the steps with the parchment and the marking stick in her hands so that — as I dashed after her — she walked through the door, there, just as the bell rang. When my father arrived, Venn looked nervously about, then laid the parchment on the floor — ’ Rather imperiously (for a nervous young woman from the islands, Pryn thought), the earl tossed the parchment before him, face down. Across its back were inked evenly spaced parallel lines, forming a grid across the whole of it. ‘Clutching the marking stick — ’ The earl held the stick up — ‘Venn explained in an intense, soft voice: “I have measured out the lines across the parchment so that they are the same distance apart as the length of the writing implement, with which I inked them. They run edge to edge across the whole piece. Now, if I toss the stick down onto the parchment, giving it a little spin, you can see that it will fall — on the parchment — in one of two ways: either it will fall touching — or even crossing — one of the lines; or it will fall so that it lies wholly between the lines, not touching or crossing any line either side of it. Belham,” she said, “you will never find two numbers that express exactly the number you are seeking. But if you throw down the stick repeatedly, and if you keep count of the times it falls touching or crossing a line, as well as the total number of times you toss the stick at all, and if you then divide twice the number of tosses by the number of times the stick touches or crosses a line, the successive numbers you express, as you make more and more tosses, will move nearer and nearer the number you seek. Sometimes the number you express will be more, sometimes it will be less, but it will always, eventually, return; and when it returns, it will return to an even closer approximation than before. Thus you are limited in the accuracy of your estimate only by the number of times you toss.” Then Venn thrust the stick at my father, blinked at Belham, and stepping across the parchment, fled past me down the stairs — and went walking in one of the gardens with my mother, where they talked deeply and intently with each other several hours of matters I never heard for myself.’ The earl looked thoughtful a moment. ‘Venn always got along better with my mother than my father…At any rate: My father, surprised, dropped the inking stick, I recall — people did not usually thrust things into his hand that way. Belham snatched it up off the floor, paced back and forth, tossed the stick onto the grid, some ten, fifteen, twenty-five times. He frowned a while. Then he ordered me and my father to go away — he was perhaps the only man who could give my father such orders. Belham stayed here for most of the night, calling for lamps when the sun got too low.’ The earl spun the stick and tossed. It landed on the lined parchment, its upper end a-slant a line. ‘One,’ announced the earl, “to be doubled and divided up into what number of equal parts we do not know…?’ He laughed and let his cloak fall over his hand. ‘Quite late, Belham called my father back up here — I came along too, because I was a curious boy. “She’s right, you know,” Belham said. “What’s worse, I don’t know how I know she’s right! But I’ve already been able to determine that with only five hundred tosses, I’m now at an approximation more accurate than my twenty-two divided by seven! Another five hundred and I shall be a good deal more accurate! Now, the ends of the stick describe a circle as they fall, turning — two circles, actually, one for each end — two interlocked helices, that may be interrupted at any arbitrary point. But then, there’re always two lines on either side they might fall on to compensate…and the lines are the same distance apart as the length of the stick. The sum of all possible angles at which the stick can land so that it crosses a line, divided by the sum of all possible angles it can land so that it doesn’t cross — but what sort of sum is that?”’ The earl laughed again. ‘Of course they called Venn up to talk to them about it in the morning. And she did talk with them, quietly and intently, late into the afternoon. One thing I remember she said before I grew too bored and I went down to my suite: ‘The problem you have put me will remain a problem till the globe of the world and the globe of the sun meet in their common center and the one consumes the other. This answer I have proposed, however, humanity will know and forget, know and forget, know and forget again. And that knowing and forgetting will approximate the peaks and depths of civilization as closely as the quotient of your tosses approximates that number which, rationally, we know is not there.’ And as I turned from the door to go, I thought: “What can be known…What can be forgotten…” And I became a magician — though no doubt I have left out all sorts of details that might elucidate what certainly will strike you as an enigma — ’

‘Daddy — ’ Lavik got down from the railing — ‘what you’ve left out — forgotten, I suppose — is the reason grandfather called Belham and Venn together in the first place!’

Jenta walked from the rail, picked up the lined parchment, the inking stick, and returned them to the counter.

The earl said: ‘But I didn’t think our guest was really interested in that…’

‘Of course she is!’ Lavik said.

Jenta looked back out between the columns. ‘She probably wants to know…’

‘Well.’ The earl shrugged beneath his cloak; the edges swung before his robe. ‘What my father had called them both here for, you see…He wanted them to build an engine. He wanted them to build him an engine that would raise a city from beneath the waters where it had sunk.’

‘Now,’ Lavik said, ‘you know he doesn’t think you’re a spy — anymore. At least he’s decided to treat you as though he doesn’t.’

‘Really, Lavik,’ the earl said, ‘why should I think she was a spy? She’s only a girl, even younger than you are.’ He looked at Pryn. ‘Building the engine, of course, was a job they never completed. Belham gave up on it in a week, after driving my father almost to distraction by doing lots of things that required lots of money and lots of time and had as little to do with his assigned task as laying out miles of vine in the desert when you’re called on to build a three-story circular fortress. “It can’t be done,” he said at last; and besides, he was more interested in other things. But Venn finally did invent a sort of engine — another approximating engine. It’s been working, now, for quite a while. It included a story, and a magic astrolabe…’

Pryn looked out at the waters where the late sun no longer revealed a city. ‘The engine,’ she said, ‘was this astrolabe, and the taleteller’s story, and the old tales of Olin’s wealth and madness, the rumors among the slaves, all the signs around Nevèrÿon that bring heroes to this spot in the Garth…’

‘Heroes and spies, heroes and spies — though it’s sometimes hard to tell the difference.’ The earl’s smile returned to its radiant absolute. ‘One might revise your details. But you have outlined — approximately — Venn’s solution to my father’s problem; although for all its efficacy it was as far from successful as were Belham’s attempts — at least he abandoned his. We should be going down to supper shortly. I’ve told you the history of this chamber — but Venn’s “engine” was put together downstairs where we shall be eating. Perhaps we should discuss it there?’

‘Your father wanted the city raised in order to get the money,’ Pryn said.

‘One assumes.’ The earl took the edge of his cloak which had drifted open and pulled the brilliant blue closed.

‘And heroes come with swords, don’t they,’ Pryn said, ‘all kinds of swords, seeking the same treasure?’

‘All kinds of heroes,’ the earl said. ‘All kinds of spies — ’

Jenta said: ‘The spies usually carry small knives — ’

‘—which they leave at home tucked under the straw of their sleeping pallets when they’re invited for dinner.’ Lavik laughed.

Pryn looked at the earl again. Was he gazing at the double swords more than at the single?

‘I suppose my father felt, like so many of his breed, that the discovery of the treasure would restore a certain glory to the south that had already begun, even then, to drift north. For once, in the days of Neveryóna, this was a very different land.’

‘And this astrolabe…?’ Pryn looked down. ‘Mad Olin’s magic circle of different stars — it was to guide people here to…the treasure?’

The earl nodded.

Suddenly Pryn bent her head to loose the links from under her hair. ‘Here…’ She lifted the chain from her neck. ‘I’m not a spy. And I’m certainly not a hero. You take it!’ Surprised she’d actually said it, she’d wondered, rehearsing it in her mind, how much her hesitation had been idealism and how much, indeed, simple fear. ‘I think when I want to find a fortune, I’ll go back to Kolhari and see what I can win in the markets there. I have the key to Belham’s lock, I’ve been shown the memory of water, and I’ve flown a dragon — there ought to be something I can do. Go on. You take it.’

The earl raised an eyebrow. ‘You would just…give it to me?’

Pryn extended her two fists. ‘It was just…given to me.’ On its chain, the bronze disk turned and turned back in the late sunlight. ‘I have no use for it, need of it, nor, really, knowledge about it — at least that I knew, when I got it, would turn out to be knowledge.’

‘Oh…’ The earl pondered. ‘Well, the truth is…I have no need of it either!’ He smiled again; the stocky little man’s cloak drifted open. ‘I don’t, believe me! Take it with you back to Kolhari — if you go. Pass it on to someone else. You see…how shall I put it?’ He coughed. ‘It’s as if my voice deserts me when I most need — ’ He turned first left, then right, looking among the unknown writings on the various parchments for some prompt to articulation. ‘The astrolabe is a tool to bring people here. But once it, itself, is here, it has finished its job — until it is recirculated abroad. Once it reaches the origin, the center, the heart of the system, however, it is, so to speak, excluded from the system, and the system itself threatens to come to a halt without that vital part.’

‘But perhaps you want the money…?’ Pryn said, tactfully, she hoped — though it just sounded suspicious. ‘Take it. Certainly it would be an easier job if you had it to help you than if it were off, sliding and slipping all over Nevèrÿon.

‘Jobs, work, tools, engines, hearts — the engines that drive the workers to use their tools and function on their jobs! Production! Ah!’ the earl cried. ‘I have been associating with Old Rorkar and his like so long now I only know how to speak of the world as if it were all a huge brewery! Your astrolabe is a sign in a system of signs. It has a meaning, yes, but that meaning is supplied by the rest of the system, which includes not only the tales of history, madness, and invention, but the similar instruments sailors use to orient themselves at sea, the play of power in the land, and the language by which they can all of them be — systematically — described.’

Again Pryn frowned — though whether it was her inherited suspicion or real confusion, there was no one to say. ‘What is this astrolabe’s power?’ she asked suddenly. ‘Why are the stars different?’

‘Good! Good!’ the earl exclaimed. Momentarily, his expression passed near something Pryn could recognize — before it retreated into beatific certainty. ‘For a moment, I thought I had misjudged you, both in your ignorance and your knowledge. Some of your actions, words, statements seemed to mark you as a creature from another world, another system entirely!’ He breathed relief. ‘You want to know how — as Old Rorkar and the other peasants around here who know no other language than the language of labor would put it, the language our fathers who owned them first taught them — it works?’

‘I’ll show her!’

Pryn looked at the door.

Panting from his run up in his military underwear, Ardra blinked about the stone chamber. ‘I can show her!’ He held the jambs.

Behind him on the rocky landing stood a tall man, his head shaved, a white collar-cover around his neck. He waited with his arms folded as Ardra came in.

‘I can show her — like I saw you show the last one who came!’

Lavik laughed. ‘That was years ago. You couldn’t remember — ’

‘Let him try!’ Jenta stepped back to the rail and sat. ‘Let’s see if he remembers…’

The slave in the doorway was barefoot. One toe looked as though it had started out to be two, then gotten stepped on for its ambition. He scrunched them — the normal nine and the deformed one — relaxed them, scrunched them again.

‘Give it to me!’ Ardra took the chain from Pryn and turned to the counter. With his forearm he started to clear the wood of models, statuettes, rocks, shells —

‘I’ll move those!’ The earl lifted some of the tiny objects and put them to the side, lifted some others.

Ardra blinked at his stepfather. Then he took the astrolabe and turned it on its back. The bolt that joined its several disks was held by a twist of wire. ‘Here, you bend this to take it apart — ’ Ardra grimaced, twisted. The wire slid from its hole to tinkle the counter. ‘This back disk, when you take it off, is a map, just like on the astrolabes sailors use. Do you know how the sailors’ work?’

‘I’ve heard it has to do with finding where you are by the stars…But I don’t really know how it — ’

‘Neither do I.’ Ardra handed Pryn the bottom disk. Etched on bronze was the twisted suggestion of an involuted coast. Measurement lines gridded it. Contour lines wound on it. Pryn glanced between the columns again. Certainly the scribed lines might indicate such an inlet. ‘It’s a map of the area here…?’

‘Can you tell which side of the coastline is water and which side is land?’ Working the other disks apart, Ardra glanced over. ‘I can’t.’

Pryn looked again at the greenish metal and watched what she’d assumed inlets become peninsulas — and peninsulas become inlets!

In the doorway, the slave unfolded one arm, reached up, and rubbed his earlobe vigorously between thumb and forefinger, then folded his arm again.

‘The rhet here — that’s what this disk is called,’ which wasn’t really a true disk but a spidery filigree cleanly cut from one, with a center hole for the bolt, and many little points, juttings, and curvings, in each of which was itself a small hole, ‘—is the “stars” part.’ Ardra held it up. ‘The holes — they’re the stars that hang in the sky over the map.’ The sun put the rhet’s involuted shadow half on the rock wall and half on some parchment hanging there. ‘You hold it.’

Pryn took it, while Ardra went scrambling through things his stepfather had moved away.

The curlicued shadow, a bright dot in the tip of each curl, moved on the stone as Pryn looked at what the boy pawed through.

Ardra picked up a gray block, spat on it, took the marking stick from the shell, and rubbed its point on the wet spot. ‘Ink…’ He spat again, rubbed the point some more. Gray turned black. ‘Now hold the rhet up — no, over here.’ He moved Pryn’s wrist so that the shadow was entirely on the parchment, then turned to the earl. ‘Is it all right if I use the corner of this piece…?’

‘I would rather you wouldn’t…’ The earl looked up at the inscription in still another unknown script that filled most of the parchment’s top half. ‘But then, I suppose it’s all right, really. Go on.’

Ardra turned back to Pryn. ‘Hold it very still.’ With the inking stick clumsily in his fist, he leaned across the counter and placed a black dot on the parchment at one of the luminous pinpoints, then at another — he moved his own curly head aside from where its frizzy shadow obscured the rhet’s — and at another. ‘These are the stars. Do you know the patterns stars make at night and the names the sailors give to them?’

There had been times, during her journey south, when Pryn had gone a little ways apart from her campfire to look up at the night, when she had thought, as do all such travelers, that between her changing days the stars’ array was her one permanence. She’d even thought to spend more time looking at them, to familiarize herself with them, to try and write down what she saw in them and the patterns they made; but, as so frequently happens with such travelers, what was illuminated in the immediate sphere of her own fire had finally reclaimed her interest. ‘No…’ Pryn blinked.

‘Don’t jiggle!’

‘…No, I don’t know them. Not really.’

‘Me neither.’ Ardra finished placing his last black ‘star’ within its tiny halo. ‘There…You can put it down.’

Curlicues of light and shadow slid down the parchment. Black ‘stars’ remained.

Pryn lay the rhet among the loose disks.

‘Can you see the pictures such stars as these might make on the sky?’ Ardra leaned over the counter again and drew a line between two dots; and two more. ‘Is that right…?’ He glanced back over his shoulder.

The earl nodded.

‘That’s the part I thought he wouldn’t remember,’ Jenta said.

Without unfolding his arms, the slave turned to rub his chin back and forth on his shoulder — for the tickling of the gnats swarming just outside the door in the damp crevice.

Pryn looked at the parchment again.

Ardra had connected one set of stars all to a single star above them; he was making a similar pattern beside it. More black stars on the tan ‘sky’ speckled down between the two spined wing shapes. The trajectories of the rhet’s curlicues and filigrees had obscured the pattern Ardra now traced. The boy marked an angular line down from a kind of beak, to a neck, to a body that joined both flared wings.

‘It’s a dragon…!’ Pryn said.

‘Yep!’ Ardra connected the ‘stars’ that formed the beast’s curving tail. ‘It’s the constellation Gauine, the Great Sea Dragon, that rears aloft in the night, guarding Mad Olin’s treasure at Neveryóna. Have you ever looked up at the unchanging stars and seen her among them?’

‘I’m not…sure. My aunt, when I was a little girl, sometimes took me outside at night and pointed out some constellations. But she said people saw different ones in different parts of the country. And I never could remember their names, anyway, so I don’t know if — ’

‘I haven’t seen her,’ Ardra said. ‘You haven’t seen her either. Because there aren’t any such stars, at least none in this pattern. The holes are set to suggest any number of southern constellations, so that a northerner who’s seen the sky maps southern sailors make might think this one is from our region. But there’s no constellation — north or south — it actually and accurately represents.’

Lavik said: ‘I didn’t think he would remember that!’

‘You could look for it all night long, at any time of the year, in any part of…’ Once more Ardra glanced at his stepfather — who nodded him on (and Pryn realized she was listening to a recitation). ‘…part of the world, as the unchanging heavens circle and tilt through the night and the year, and still you’d never find it. It doesn’t exist. That’s why these stars are “different.” And I…’ Ardra faltered again. He put down the stick. His shoulders drooped; his gaze, then his smudged fingers, fell among the disassembled astrolabe. ‘…I don’t remember about this next part.’

It had formed the top layer, a disk from which two opposing semicircles had been cut, so that what remained was just a flat ring with a band left across its center, in the middle of which was the hole for the bolt. About the rim were inscribed the signs that had identified it with this odd local writing which, Pryn reflected, must have no need of capitals.

The earl took it from his stepson’s hand, held it up, turned it. A ring of shadow collapsed and opened over the angular dragon. ‘But I’m sure our guest can see for herself…’ He handed it to Pryn.

Taking it, Pryn looked at the markings on the metal that had formed the astrolabe’s rim. ‘They’re Belham’s signs for numbers, but what numbers I don’t — ?’

‘That’s precisely what they are,’ the earl said. ‘More to the point, they are no more.’ With his forefinger he reached over to indicate a sign on the bronze. ‘“One — ”’ His finger moved on — ‘“Two — ”’ and on — ‘“Four — ”’ and on — ‘“Eight — ”’ and on — ‘“Sixteen — ”’ and on — ‘“Thirty-two — ”’ and on ‘“Sixty-four,” and so on, about the circle. A circle of numbers counting nothing. That’s all.’

‘I’ll put it back together now!’ Ardra pushed between them, taking the circle from Pryn, reaching to pull the other disks together across the counter.

‘Ardra — !’ the earl said.

‘I’m sorry. I’m going to put it back together now.’ He blinked at Pryn, ‘Is that all right?’

Pryn nodded.

‘So you see — ’ the earl stepped from the counter — ‘your astrolabe, as a sign in a system of signs — ’

Behind Pryn, Ardra said: ‘It’s a map of a non-existent coast under an imaginary constellation on an impossible sky in — ’ he grunted, twisting something — ‘the middle of a ring of meaningless numbers. That’s why it’s powerful. That’s why it’s magic.’

‘Now I hope you see,’ the earl said, ‘what your astrolabe is not: It is not a tool to perform a job; it is not a key to open a lock; it is not a map to guide you to the treasure; it is not a coded message to be deciphered; it is not a container of secret meanings that can be opened and revealed by some other, different tool, different key, different code, different map. It’s an artfully constructed part of an artfully constructed engine that, by the maneuvering of meanings, holds open a space from which certain meanings are forever excluded, are always absent. That alone is what allows it to function — to work, if you insist on the language of the brewery — in the greater system.’

‘Like a great castle with no lord in it,’ Lavik said.

‘Or a monastery from which the powerful priests have all gone,’ said Jenta.

‘Or the Liberator’s headquarters — ’ Pryn looked about the chamber — ‘in Neveryóna.’

The earl frowned.

Just then Ardra stepped around Pryn. ‘Here you are.’ Reassembled, the astrolabe hung from its chain.

‘That’s really very good, Ardra,’ Jenta said. ‘That’s very good.’

‘Your astrolabe functions in the system in its particular way,’ the earl went on, ‘because that is the way, finally, all signs function.’

Ardra put the chain over Pryn’s head — which surprised her, because she’d intended to take it back herself. ‘I never understood that part, either.’ The boy stepped back.

With some frustration, the earl turned to the parchment on which Belham’s numbers were written in that strange script. ‘Take Belham’s sign “one.” Excluded from what it can mean are “two,” “three,” “four,” “five,” “six,” or “twenty-two-divided-by-seven”…’

Whereas it can mean an apple, a pear, a kumquat, a great castle, a lord, or even one other number,’ Lavik said. ‘They’re not excluded.’

‘What is excluded from it — ’ the earl lowered his hand — ‘what it is empty of, alone, is what makes it meaningful. Ardra, why are you up here anyway?’

‘Oh.’ The boy blinked. ‘Well, I…I brought a message. From mother.’ He looked at the doorway.

The slave waited.

The earl, Jenta, and Lavik looked too — and Pryn had a suspicion they hadn’t even seen the man till now.

‘Oh, you brought a message. Well,’ the earl said. ‘What does the Lady Nyergrinkuga say?’

‘My lord,’ the slave answered (Pryn was surprised at the voice, which was somehow shriller than she’d expected), ‘the lady says that dinner is ready.’

‘Dinner is ready,’ the earl repeated. ‘Oh. Thank you, Ardra. You may go — ’ this to the slave, who unfolded his arms, touched the back of his fist to his forehead, turned from the doorway, and hurried down. ‘Why don’t we all go down, then? Shall we?’

Jenta walked up to Pryn and put his arm around her shoulder in a way that for a moment felt comfortable and made her smile with the memory of the way the earl or Madame Keyne had been with the workers, but, a moment later, as they followed Ardra out through the door into the crevice steps, became, through its uncertainty of lightness and pressure, a man touching a woman — which, Pryn thought, had it been Inige rather than this hairy, affable, eldest son, would have been acceptable. Then, because of the narrowness of the crevice, his hand fell away; Jenta fell behind. Pryn glanced back to see the earl’s cloak open as the little man descended after Lavik. Pryn hurried down, away from the tickling of the almost invisible gnats, to the sunlight below.

‘Myself, I suspect it’s a kind of madness: the madness that makes one repeat whatever one is trained to repeat. Do you agree?’ Inige asked from his couch beneath the brace of lamps. ‘Common sense says all the workers would need to do is demand ownership, and Rorkar certainly couldn’t oppose them. Nevertheless, Yrnik comes in every morning and opens the brewery — whether Rorkar sleeps on the hill or no. Of course, the truth is that father’s soldiers used to be called in, when, occasionally, the workers did try to take over. That ill-remembered association is the real bond between father and the peas and businessmen around here. Somehow, though, as father’s soldiers drifted away, the rebellions ceased. The workers who do remember them have somehow got it confused, so that, when they talk about them today, it’s the lack of soldiers — today — that makes rebellion unnecessary. And I’m sure no one talks to Yrnik about the men and women who held his job previously that father and Rorkar together ruined or removed or obliterated as thanks for their desire to better the lot of those around them. But that’s the sort of thing Belham’s language can’t write of; and no one has yet cared to write them in the new script.’

‘Nor does anyone here care to talk about it,’ said the earl.

‘Is that what they teach you in the north is proper dinner conversation?’ Tritty asked. ‘Really. You know’ she turned back to Pryn, ‘Queen Olin, whom you were discussing with my husband, was often a guest here — at least in his Lordship’s father’s day.’ On her couch, she turned to the earl. ‘Or was it your father’s father’s?’

‘You know, I was never really sure.’ The earl reached from his couch to a tray, passing in the hands of a slave, piled with sliced and peeled kiwis, a fruit of which Pryn had never even heard before that evening. ‘It is hard to keep the past organized. And when the past is disorganized, the present is…well, as you see it: all barbaric splendor — and misery. But as long as I can keep clear the principles by which the present orders itself, I suppose that’s why I stay one of the most powerful of the remaining, real barbarian princes — “Earl” is the title the northern aristocracy has granted us. But the fine points of such terminology have never troubled me.’

Lying on her back, Petal reached for unseen heights with, alternately, toes and fingers.

‘My father is prince of one of the Seven Clans.’ Sitting on the floor by her own couch, Lavik gently shook the baby’s foot. ‘The Dragon Clan, actually.’

Suddenly Petal, with a great rock, almost turned over.

‘—which hasn’t existed as a clan,’ Inige added from his own couch, ‘for more than a hundred years…which, I suspect, is what they’ve been saying in these parts for at least five hundred.’ He dropped a handful of tiny bird bones he’d collected in his palm into a dish on the carpet with all the other bird bones. ‘But that’s the way in a world without history. And that, as the lawyers in the north with whom I shall go back to study in the fall all tell me, is what makes us, here in the south, barbarians!’ He laughed.

So did the others.

Pryn wondered how one got to study with a lawyer — and wiped her fingers, which she could not bring herself to suck as they did of all the various food juices, on the brocade over the edge of the couch she had been given. For the third time she caught Ardra staring with a gaze that could as easily have masked astonishment as desire or loathing. Certainly she could see nothing wrong with her wipings, but within the blank look from the adopted son (a look that the others might simply have been too polite for), it was too easy to inscribe, along with desire in its positive or negative form, starkest disapproval. Her hand went back to her stomach, then behind her neck to scratch at the chain, then to her hip, then to the couch edge again — as if to work loose from the compass of his wide, wet eyes.

Her other elbow, propped on the embroidered bolster, was getting sore. Pryn shifted her position and wondered what she might eat now.

‘But we’re at it again.’ From her couch, Tritty ladled dark gravy over an impressive roast on a tray held by a young, white-collared woman with very wide shoulders, who took the meat off to a side table where an older man, with the same white collar, waited, carving knives poised. ‘I want to know where our guest has been, what she’s seen, what’s fascinated her most on her travels!’

‘Yes,’ Jenta said. ‘Where have you been? What have you done?’

‘What has fascinated you about it?’ Lavik pulled the infant into her lap; the little creature curled up, closed her eyes, and began an infantile snore.

Pryn pushed herself further up, suffused again with pride at being the focus of such a gathering. ‘What I have been fascinated most by, in all my travels — indeed, what I began my travels with, caught up between its beating wings and flung out under the sun by it, to land wherever I might and make my way from there with only its chance trajectory for guide — indeed, what I love to observe, to gaze down into and explore its subterranean workings, is…power!’

The earl’s family listened, smiling — approving, Pryn decided.

‘It’s been an education,’ she went on, ‘finding the various places where it…writes —’ she could think of no other word — ‘its passage, its process, its however fleeting presence.’

‘And where,’ Jenta asked from his side of the room, ‘have you been observing all this power?’

‘All over!’ Pryn declared. ‘It’s inscribed as clearly in the stone carvings above your mantel there — where some person must have hammered and pounded and chipped the stone to chisel it to shape — as it is in Old Rorkar’s oldest — ’ she started to say ‘slave bench,’ but because a slave passed between them, said, ‘beer barrel, whose staves someone must have shaved down and whose edges someone must have pitched together and whose bindings someone must have tied on with wet rope so that it would shrink dry!’ She looked about again, wondering if, indeed, the barrel makers here were the same women who made rope-bound barrels in fabled Ellamon. ‘Where I got a chance to observe it most closely, I think, was in the city.’ (The expectant smiles of her country listeners did not change.) ‘In Kolhari. There I fought along with the Liberator against the intrigues and conspiracies that wove about his efforts to free all the slaves of Nevèrÿon.’ There, she’d said it!

‘Free the slaves?’ Tritty asked. ‘Well, all of us have had our problems with the institution. Between the time I was at court and the time Lavik went, they’ve forbidden slaves there. And I thoroughly approve — there’s just no need for them in the city.’ Tritty nodded to one of the white-collared servers who passed among the couches again with another platter of fruit, on whose red and purple rinds the lamplight slid and slipped. ‘But you say all the slaves of Nevèrÿon? Someone is actually lobbying for their freedom? Of course it’s not the same situation in the country. Still, it sounds like an advance.’

‘Tritty — ’ Pryn laughed — ‘someone is fighting for it tooth and nail! He himself wears an iron slave collar and has sworn not to remove it till slavery in Nevèrÿon is gone forever. I’ve seen plots of unbelievable insidiousness launched against him! I’ve seen more blood spilled in his cause in a day than, indeed, I’ve ever seen spilled in my life!’

‘He sounds like a powerful man.’ Inige smiled in a way that, for a moment, made Pryn sure that in his northern law study he’d learned more of the Liberator than she could ever know.

‘He’s called Gorgik, and his name makes people pause in the poorest alleys and the wealthiest homes throughout Kolhari.’

‘I’m only surprised,’ the earl said, ‘that we’ve never heard of him here. We had guests from Kolhari only days ago; he wasn’t mentioned.’

‘Oh, he is a powerful man,’ Pryn said. ‘When I left, he’d at last secured an audience with one of the Empress’s own ministers to plead his cause!’

It was Inige’s chuckle that broke the silence. ‘You know, the Empress has over a dozen ministers, advisers, viziers, and vizerines. All day every day, groups and individuals meet and confer with all of them, pleading, begging, demanding, cajoling, sometimes trying to bribe, sometimes trying to reason. Most such petitions, as you must know, are of necessity refused. To receive such an audience does not necessarily mark your man as powerful — if anything, the fact that he has only just received such an audience suggests he is among the least powerful of that city’s numerous players in the game of magic and time.’

‘Oh, I don’t think — ’ Pryn paused. ‘But that was not all. I met an important merchant woman with a great home in the suburb of Sallese. She was helping finance the construction of Kolhari’s New Market, as well as building a whole set of warehouses for — ’

Lavik’s laughter was louder than Inige’s chuckle. ‘But nobody who’s anybody lives in — ’ Lavik stopped, looking around to catch her parents’ reproving gaze. She cuddled her sleeping child a little closer, still smiling.

‘I think — ’ Inige said — ‘what my sister was trying, in her way, to say is that it’s a little surprising for us to hear of a truly powerful personage living in such a neighborhood. That’s not the usual sign by which power can be read from an account of a person’s — ’

‘Neighborhoods do change — ’ Tritty suggested.

‘What,’ Inige said over his stepmother, ‘is this powerful…merchant, you say? What is this merchant’s name? Most of the real power in Kolhari resides either at court or in homes of royalty in Neveryóna.’

‘She lives right at the edge Neveryóna,’ Pryn said.

‘No,’ Tritty muttered, ‘that isn’t the best part of the neighborhood…’

‘—and she really is rich. Her name is Madame Keyne.’

‘Ah, a Madame Keyne?’ Tritty said. Then: ‘Really, that kind of snideness from my stepdaughter is most unseemly. And yet it’s no secret to us, so while you are a guest in our house it shouldn’t be kept from you. We who move in court circles have always tended to consider Sallese a neighborhood of pretentious tradesmen and vulgar commercial interests, people who would ape and mimic the accoutrements of power, mystifying and declaring magic those elements that were beyond them or that they simply did not understand.’

‘Belham made her fountains…’ Pryn said, hesitantly.

‘He also lived in your aunt’s shack,’ the earl said. ‘Is there a way to put this delicately? Belham was a brilliant man. But the careers of the brilliant are not always rising flights.’

‘Myself,’ Jenta said, ‘I always thought that from the way we went on about the vulgarities of Sallese — at least back when I was at court, or visiting Neveryóna — meant there was something going on there.’

‘Now,’ the earl said, ‘my eldest son speaks the truth.’ He gave a wise nod (the exact nature of whose wisdom Pryn did not quite follow, as she had decided on a mango and had found that a bite taken from one direction was deliciously juicy, while a bite from another made it all string and pith). ‘I told you, we had guests here just recently from Kolhari, and there, so said our guests, the talk is indeed of many great, far-reaching projects. And there was, from time to time, even in these halls, mention that some of the better-connected Sallese residents have joined their moneys with some of our truly powerful friends in Neveryóna — ’

‘Our friends,’ Ardra said from where he’d moved again to the bottom of the steps, ‘don’t like it, either.’

‘There was talk, I believe — ’ the earl pondered a moment — ‘of a project that will take some ten years to complete, which would involve doubling the length of the Kolhari waterfront, rebuilding it dock by dock. Was your Madame Keyne one of the tradesmen who’d agreed to lend some support to this great undertaking?’

‘Oh, no — ’ Pryn began. ‘At least I don’t know if she was. She never mentioned it.’

‘There was also some talk, as I recall, about another project to repave the entire southern road that runs from Kolhari to the Garth and beyond.’ Inige spooned up some spiced mush from a glimmering tureen, which Pryn had first declined but was now having second thoughts about — though the slave carrying it did not seem inclined to give her a second chance. (How did one ask?) ‘They want to expand it along its whole length to something like three times its present width till it’s as wide in the north as it used to be at this end in the heyday of Neveryóna — our Neveryóna, that is. Then Rorkar and the rest can export their goods to Kolhari with ease. The smugglers who run their tiny amounts up and down would be driven out of operation, and both import and export for the whole south could be reorganized along real profit lines. There were some Sallese people involved in this project, too — although we’re talking about an undertaking whose completion time is estimated at twenty years. Was one of them perhaps your Madame Keyne?’

‘I don’t…’ Pryn was uneasy. ‘I don’t think so. She never spoke of it.’

Lavik made a cooing grimace over the baby, now asleep in the crook of her knee. She looked up. ‘Of course there are some truly powerful merchants, or what have you, in Sallese. And as much as it irks us, we’re forced to hear their names too. But they are the people who are involved in enterprises that will change the shape of Kolhari, and thus the future of Nevèrÿon. They are the ones who are engaged in projects that might well make it reasonable to build one, or ten, or twenty-five new markets. And no doubt one, or ten, or twenty-five new markets will be built by one or ten or twenty-five canny, money-grubbing pot vendors run amok. But you mustn’t confuse that with power — with real power — any more than you let yourself confuse the notoriety of some radical upstart, wrangling a hearing from a court minister while friends and enemies both mumble that he may become a minister himself with the real power of court. Come.’ She hoisted the baby under a plump arm and pushed to one knee. ‘Take a walk with me outside. We’ll be having cheeses and cordials in a few minutes. I always like a turn about the nearer gardens after I’ve eaten. And no matter what that old iron-bound harridan upstairs says, the evening air is good for the baby!’ Lavik pushed the edge of her couch with her free hand to stand.

‘Oh, can I carry her!’ Pryn cried, impelled as much by anxiety over the haphazard way Lavik lugged her drooping daughter as by a childhood conviction that babies were the warmest, sweetest, most wonderful things in the world — a conviction that had vanished, she’d noted, when she’d thought she might be having one but that, now she knew she wasn’t, had apparently returned.

‘Sure!’ Lavik extended the child, even more awkwardly.

From Tritty: ‘Dear, don’t stay out with her too long. Of course, I don’t mean that I object…’

The baby didn’t fall; but Pryn was there to take the warm, wheezing thing as though she might.

From the steps came an adolescent grunt.

Cuddling the snoring baby in its loose swaddling, Pryn glanced at Ardra.

He sat with a fist on each knee. ‘You know, I usually take Petal for her evening walk around the grounds!’

‘Oh, darling…!’ his mother said from her couch.

‘I only let you do that last night because you asked,’ Lavik said. ‘It isn’t a ritual. Besides, when you play with her, you always pretend she’s going to grow up to be a little general. I don’t know whether I like that.’

‘Well, it’s only fair that I get a chance to play with her before she grows and becomes a girl — don’t you think?’ Ardra stood. ‘I’m going for a walk around the near garden anyway. Just as though we didn’t have a guest.’ He strode across the room, in stiff-legged mocking of a military strut.

‘If he really wants to — ’ began Pryn, while the earl and Tritty and Jenta all thrust out consoling hands and uttered stabilizing protests. The last voice over all was Tritty’s:’…to learn that he can’t always have his own way!’

But Ardra was out the door.

‘Come on,’ Lavik said. ‘I think it’s important that lots of people hold her, so that she gets a sense of the range of society. Don’t you think?’

The sleeping Petal probably had little sense of anything right now. Shoulder to shoulder with Lavik, Pryn carried the baby between the dining couches. Behind them Tritty clapped her hands: the room filled about them with white-collared men and women, some younger than Pryn, others quite old, some of whom Pryn had already seen serving, but many of whom she hadn’t. Lavik led her through a smaller arch. ‘If you get tired, just let me know.’

Pryn had expected to pass through at least as many corridors and halls as she had on her journey in with Tritty. But they walked through a low, stone passage with blackness at its end, and stepped out into it…Pryn thought they’d entered some cavernous hall, a roofless one with dozens of lamps set at unfathomable distances, making myriad small lights…

But they were outdoors.

What she’d thought lamps were flares about an expanse of garden that, it was clear, even in the dark, would have dwarfed Madame Keyne’s walled enclosure. Pryn remembered the plural that had always accompanied their references to the grounds. One of the gardens? They walked along a path, paved — they passed a flare and Pryn glanced down — with brick. Yellow? Red? Some other color? She couldn’t tell. In the distance, holding aloft more brands, each with its raddled smoke ribboning up into the darkness over its own pale halo, moving along other paths, pausing here and there to light another pathside flare, moved innumerable slaves!

Some dozen steps ahead walked resolute Ardra — though Pryn only realized who it was when he passed one of the brands.

Lavik said: ‘He thinks he’s protecting us.’

Pryn glanced at her. ‘From what?’

‘Was your home ever occupied by soldiers?’

Pryn shook her head.

‘Ours was, once. Right after dad and Tritty first married. I was ten. Ardra was only three, so you wouldn’t think he’d remember. But he became the occupying soldiers’ mascot. Tritty’d been through things like that before — so had dad, I suppose. But for me and Inige — and Jenta too, I guess — it was awful.’ She sighed. ‘Ardra, however, hasn’t thought about anything but growing up to be a soldier ever since. I say he’s protecting us. Sometimes, though, I think he dreams of slaughtering us all in our beds. The soldiers who were here — when I was ten — did some of that too! Jenta is dad’s oldest living son. But we used to have two more half-sisters and a half-brother, by his first wife — only she was related to all the wrong people; they wouldn’t let her — so we heard later — or her children live.’ Lavik hunched her shoulders. ‘It wasn’t pleasant. Believe me, that’s the only reason dad tolerates my running off to have babies with jungle savages or Jenta’s going off to live like a hermit with a girl goatherd, nice as she is, from the next town over. I mean it’s a way of survival, of putting us outside the normal political considerations of bloodlines and alliances and the like — the sort of things that get you clapped into dungeons or murdered, when you’re really interested in other things entirely. What real power can buy, of course, is anonymity, and dad doesn’t have enough for that. So we use other means. Now with Ardra, of course, it’s different.’ Lavik nodded ahead at the would-be captain, stalking the garden night. ‘Thanks to the people he’s related to, both through Tritty and his real father, he doesn’t have our options. Oh, he’s safer here than he would be in the north — and don’t think Tritty isn’t grateful to father, either. The odd thing is, though, he’s turning out exactly the way he should. Inige and I have spent hours discussing it! Oh, I don’t mean the way dad would want him to be, or even his mother. But he’s exactly the sort they’re going to want to do all the jobs that are waiting for him as soon as he comes of age. You’d think there was some sort of power guiding it all.’ She took a large breath and gave a small sigh. ‘Really, it’s uncanny. I wish there were something I could do to make him a little…I don’t know — looser, I suppose. But maybe it’s just as well. I’m glad you’re here,’ she said suddenly. ‘I mean it’s nice to have ordinary visitors who aren’t always plotting to do someone in — especially when it’s you. Honestly, we all think so!’

‘I’m…glad I’m here too!’ Pryn looked at the young man walking ahead, whom, she felt now, she’d deprived of the warm, marvelous responsibility she held.

The warmth shifted; the breathing changed.

Pryn looked down. ‘She’ll be all right, don’t you think?’

‘Sure,’ Lavik said. ‘She’s been on the mend for two, really three, days now. Though, if you listen to the old slaves upstairs, who, for some reason, everyone thinks know about such things — and that’s all Tritty ever listens to — they’ll scare you to death!’ She glanced at Petal over Pryn’s arm to check her own pronouncement of recuperation. ‘She’ll be fine. You know — ’ Lavik’s tone grew thoughtful — ‘I was thinking about something you said — to father, when we were up on the hill. When you travel to Kolhari from the south, the road really goes around the marsh below the city, joins the northern road, and enters over the same hills you come over from the mountains. But you’ve seen it on maps…?’

‘Yes?’ Pryn said, listening to the dark around them, which sounded the same tone on which Lavik spoke.

‘Do you remember,’ Lavik asked, ‘when I said I’d never seen Kolhari at dawn from the hills?’

Yes?’

‘Well, when I went to court, it wasn’t just my furniture in the provision wagon. In fact I went with nearly a dozen nobles’ children, boys and girls — more girls than boys, actually. When we reached the hills above the city, they stopped our sleeping carriage — it was dawn. We all woke up, the few of us who’d managed to sleep. The drivers and chaperones called the boys out to see. Everyone started out, I remember, but they told the girls that we had to stay inside, because it wasn’t seemly for young ladies to go pell-melling out on the highroad in their night shifts, even if it was dawn and nobody was about. So we stayed in, all excited at what the two — yes, there were only two — boys might be doing. And you know something? As soon as he came back from court, Jenta immediately saw the city in the water — Neveryóna. Just the way you did. But J couldn’t! We’d both always heard about it, of course. But it had to be explained to me, and the streets and alleys and buildings had to be pointed out and outlined before, at sunset, I could even be sure it was really there! And it was only because I had seen some city maps of Kolhari, finally, that I was able to be sure what the rest were talking about.’ They walked through the dark gardens, whose extent and plan Pryn kept silently trying to assess. ‘Do you know what a map is? I mean a real map?’

‘Yes…’ Responding to Lavik’s deep seriousness, Pryn spoke a little lower. ‘Of course. Of course I do.’

‘You’ve seen one?’ Lavik asked. ‘I don’t just mean the silly scratches on the astrolabe this evening that don’t mean anything at all.’

‘Well, I’ve certainly heard of them,’ Pryn said. ‘Heard people speak of them and describe what they do. Sailors use them for navigating coastlines — my aunt explained to me about that. And I’ve seen one of them, anyway.’

‘What did it look like?’ Lavik asked.

‘Well, it was…made of clay and stuff. It was of a garden. It was covered with something that had the same texture as grass. And little molded trees were set about on it. And a toy house. Water ran through the space where the stream went, down the falls, and over bits of ceramic molded like rocks and statues — ’

Lavik laughed, quietly and shyly. ‘That’s a garden maquette! We’ve got over a dozen, scattered among the maintenance sheds all over the grounds. They make it easier for the gardeners to keep the plants in order if you’ve really got extensive landscaped property — another one of Belham’s notions. Most gardeners, you know, don’t read — maps or anything else. But you’ve never seen a map…!’ In the dark she looked at Pryn. They passed a flare, and her serious, southern face brightened — flickering — and faded.

Pryn looked away in the dark and saw nothing.

‘You haven’t seen a map! A map is just marks on a piece of parchment. Oh, you can read distances and directions on it — but not much else.’ Lavik paused. ‘I knew you’d never seen one. Somehow, from things you said, I just knew you hadn’t really seen one. I’ve never seen a city — I mean a real one, from outside it, all at once! And you’ve never seen a map!’

Pryn looked back at Lavik, who now looked away — and who sounded as alone as Pryn had ever felt. Pryn watched her, and felt as close to her as she had ever felt to anyone. After a few moments, Pryn looked away, so that she could not see if Lavik looked back at her.

Petal coughed.

The two plump young women, one a mother and one all but motherless, walked through the dark garden, shoulder brushing shoulder, bare feet now loud and now soft on the leaf-strewn brick, and were alone together.

Ahead, Ardra’s back, in the rough cloth, became visible as he passed another torch.

‘Something in the way you talked about it just made me sure you’d never seen one,’ Lavik repeated. ‘Though I swear, I couldn’t tell you what. I don’t know, but once you have a baby, you feel a lot of things — but you don’t do too much analytical thinking.’

‘I know,’ Pryn said, who, in fabled Ellamon, had babysat for many of her cousins’ children and had been, for days at a time, the sole care of her baker cousin’s two-year-old son. ‘When I take care of one for more than three hours at a stretch, I can’t think at all! That’s why I don’t want to have any myself.’ She hugged Petal, sweet and sick as she was, who felt wonderful.

‘Oh, that’s not true!’ Lavik protested. ‘I mean, well…after a week or so, you begin to think again. A little bit, at least. You really do. That is, if you take care of it all by yourself. Of course once the slaves begin taking over, then what you spend all your time thinking about is how to get them to take over more. But you really do get back to some…thinking. Eventually — I think.’

‘I think,’ Pryn said, ‘that babies are wonderful and beautiful and comforting and rewarding, the solace of the present and the hope — the real hope — of the future.’ She sighed. ‘And I don’t want one. At least not now.’

‘Mmm,’ Lavik said.

Pryn glanced at the young woman beside her and saw her looking ahead at her step-brother.

‘Well,’ Lavik said, ‘I feel the same way; and I am glad I have mine. Now. And…’ She looked down at the brick — ‘I’ll die a thousand deaths if she does die. But still, I don’t see how anyone who has taken care of one couldn’t understand what you say.’ When she looked up in the passing flare, her face bore her family’s absolute smile.

Pryn looked at the stiff-kneed boy marching ahead of them and wished he would come and carry little Petal, who, small as she was, had begun to seem heavy — for now Pryn also felt that, without the baby between them, she might be able to talk about more with Lavik. At the same time, she resolved not to offer Petal back to her mother until they were again inside the house.

Lavik said: ‘It is nice of you to carry her for me. I appreciate it.’

Pryn wondered if her great-aunt had felt the same way when she’d been presented with Pryn’s own, wiggling, wheezing self by Pryn’s mother, fifteen — well, a month shy of sixteen, now — years ago.

‘We’re almost at the door.’ Lavik touched Pryn’s arm. The path had taken them in a circle through the near night.

Ahead, Ardra walked up to a vast, mottled nothingness and disappeared into it: the castle door.

Then Pryn, Lavik, and Petal went through it too.