The Lost Steersman (Steerswoman Series) (53 page)

It did not pause in each place it had before; but each time that it did pause, however briefly, it reached down, picked up one small spell, and ate it.

When it arrived at the road again, Rowan had already stationed herself at a distance; and when it completed its apparently obligatory pause and moved on, the demon had acquired a silent companion.

It led the steerswoman directly into the demon colony.

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S
he moved like a rat through the streets.

She sidled along the dens, slinked from one structure to the next, shifted abruptly to opposite sides of the den-lined pathways when demons emerged from entrances or intersections, kept her back against or directed at walls, bushes, rocks.

At fifteen feet away, females ignored her; twelve feet for the males. At twelve feet, the females retreated; the males, at six.

She must not disturb these creatures. A crowd, a panic, and one of them could slip behind her, where her own body would hide the talisman.

Where she was unprotected. Where she was blind.

And all the while, entirely, as good as deaf.

Demon-voice was everywhere: tones so deep they trembled in her chest and throat, so high they dizzied her. She felt she could not breathe for the sound; the sound was an ocean; she was at the bottom of it. She had the bizarre impression that if she opened her mouth, the sound itself would wash into her throat, her lungs, and drown her.

And this with the street nearly empty: two females walking far ahead and the male that Rowan followed at a distance of twenty feet. All the other noise— pouring down between the dens, falling, it seemed, from the sky itself— was voiced by demons out of sight.

Rowan’s guide had stopped halfway along the path, and now sat on four heels, four knees high all around, on the ground outside one of the dens. The steerswoman moved back, leaned against the den opposite, breathing shallowly, trying to focus her thoughts amid the din, and failing. She tried again, more forcefully, but achieved only a macabre intellectual detachment in which all sensory information seemed distant and irrelevant— a state so dangerous of itself that a sudden thrust of fear brought her back to reality.

Beside her, an opening between two dens. Down it, an open, marshy space clotted with sea blackgrass, empty of demons. Behind the shield of her talisman, Rowan rose, backed down the gap and out into the marsh, half stumbling over clots of blackgrass.

She stopped in the center of the area, trees and demon dens all around, demon-voices still filling the air, and only fractionally quieter.

“I can’t do this,” she said. She said it out loud, realized the fact, spun around to see if any of the monsters had heard. None were visible.

Something must be done. She stared at the talisman in her hand.

Then, cautiously, glancing all around, she set it on the ground, kneeled in the mud beside it, and removed her right glove. With the flat of her sword propped against one knee, she clumsily used the edge to slice off the last two fingertips of the glove. She put a daub of mud inside each, folded them tightly, and stuffed them in her ears.

Relief.

Not silence but near it. Intimate sounds only: her own breath, her slowing heart, a rough hiss as she ran her hands through her hair.

There was a breeze she had not before noticed, coming from the south; and it was cool, carrying the now-familiar odor of the strange seaweed and seawrack of the great ocean. She drank it in and felt better, cleaner, saner. Even her vision seemed clearer.

She dipped her kerchief into the dirty marsh water, wiped its coolness down her neck, across her forehead. Then she donned her glove, took up the talisman and her sword.

A shield and a weapon. No traveler or warrior could ask for more.

And her goal was near, so near.

When she emerged from the path, she found her guide still seated by the side of the den, its arms now knotted above its maw. At this proximity, she did hear its voice; but only its lowest tones came through the obstructions in her ears. Exactly enough to be useful. She lowered herself to a seat opposite it, resting her sword across her knees.

But now she was entirely unable to hear quieter sounds: distant human voices, say, or human footsteps. And humans were immune to the talisman.

Any person, either wizard or wizard’s servant, would also be carrying a talisman, Rowan assumed. A simple thing for Slado to provide. But she still had yet to see a single human being.

Her route into the colony had taken many turns; each street was crossed by others, at wide intervals. Her guide had turned corner after corner, never hesitating, before coming to rest here.

The steerswoman tried to reconstruct the route in her mind— and was startled to find that she could not. Her mind had been too muddled by noise; she had been too intent on maintaining a safe distance from the demons she had passed. She had no idea at all where she was. The feeling was strange to her, and deeply disturbing.

Meanwhile, her guide still had not moved. Rowan began to wonder if the creature had fallen asleep. If so, it hummed in its dreams.

Rowan pulled more tightly against the den at the approach of two demons, both female. Their only reaction to her presence was to move as far as possible to the other side of the path, jostling the male as they passed. Other than that, they ignored Rowan, the male, and as far as the steerswoman could tell, each other.

Time passed. More demons came and went, behaving exactly as the others had. Rowan became restive.

Her guide stirred; she became intent. Then it defecated, moved three feet to the left away from its own excrement, and returned to motionlessness. Rowan suppressed a hiss of frustration.

Somewhat later, another passing demon paused by the male, picked up the feces, dropped them into its maw, and continued on.

Cleaning the street. Insects, birds, and even some mammals would clean their nests in exactly the same fashion. Nothing inexplicable there. And all the while, her chosen guide inexplicably continued to do nothing whatsoever.

Surely it was asleep. Rowan resisted an impulse to go over and prod it with her foot.

With the street otherwise deserted, the steerswoman had nearly decided to abandon the male and continue alone, when one more demon turned into the street.

A male. Males were marginally less sensitive to the spell. Best to wait.

The demon plodded the length of the street to the next intersection, where it paused, then abruptly executed the eerie, unturning demon reversal of direction. It approached again. Wondering if something had alerted it to her presence, Rowan slowly rose, sword held at the ready.

The demon arrived at Rowan’s napping guide; the other demon stirred, unknotted its arms, and rose.

Each demon reached out one arm, touched fingers, then intertwined them. With another arm, Rowan’s guide reached up and then down into its own maw, extracted something, and passed it to the reaching fingers of the other demon.

A spell-object. Rowan’s astonishment was complete.

The second demon ate it.

The demons repeated the action three times. Then they immediately parted, in opposite directions.

Rowan dithered briefly. Which demon was more inexplicable? Which action more bizarre?

For familiarity’s sake, she followed her original guide, hurrying to safe distance, then pacing it, slinking and side-stepping.

Apparently, the demon had not actually digested the spells it had earlier taken, but had been carrying them, conveniently in its maw, as a chipmunk carried nuts stuffed in its cheek pockets.

This creature was merely sharing food. An entirely natural action, and not directed by magic—

The male was not leading her to the wizard.

She stopped, allowed the male to proceed without her. It passed through a trio of approaching females, took the next intersection, and was gone.

Rowan must find Slado’s residence herself, and for safety’s sake, as soon as possible. She took a sip from her water sack, and narrowed her eyes in thought.

Very well; if Rowan herself were a powerful wizard, with the ability to utterly control the actions of these monsters, where might she choose to live?

If not close to her demon servants, then among them; and if among them, where else but directly in the center?

She grimaced. An unpleasant prospect, to move so deep among these creatures. And how was she even to locate the center, when she did not know where she was?

By the sun’s angle she knew the cardinal directions, and she had entered the colony from the north. She decided to try south.

Easily said, less easily accomplished. The streets seemed intentionally designed to prevent any straight-line movement. She took turn after turn, zigzagging, knowing only that she was going in a generally southerly direction.

The steerswoman passed demons; they passed her: singly, in pairs and groups. Rowan found herself falling into a pattern: step to the right as a demon neared; turn to place her back against a den; wait for the demon to leave the street. Repeat and repeat. It became second nature. Dangerous. She must not become too accustomed to this.

When demons were numerous, she walked sideways, her back against a den, the talisman held centrally. Far more awkward, but it did serve to keep her alert.

Then, at the next intersection: a crowd of demons, seven of them. Rowan paused, wondering how best to pass.

In the middle of the group stood a single spell-object, as tall as Rowan’s waist. It was complex in structure, standing on many feet like tree roots, combining and rising to a single striated flute. Rowan noted that the animals had oriented themselves so that no demon blocked another’s view.

Each of the demons stood completely motionless. Perhaps the spell had placed them in a trance.

Rowan doubled back to the intersection, took a different turn, then another, continuing to work her way south.

She came upon her erstwhile guide again, recognizing the demon by the stippled pattern on its torso and the fact that it was once again napping in a deserted street. She almost felt glad: a familiar face, so to speak. When she left it behind, another male was entering the street; when she glanced back, she saw it receive a spell object from the cache in the first male’s maw.

She went on. Intersections began appearing at closer intervals. A good sign, the steerswoman decided. She envisioned the perimeter road as a huge circle, the demon dens within; she overlaid the streets she could see, surmising repetition of pattern.

Something like a network emerged, wide at the edges, tighter toward the center. But the streets curved; she curved them on her internal map. And alternate streets curved in opposite directions . . .

The pattern blossomed in her mind: lovely, perfect. The crisscrossing streets were each a spiral segment. Each street ended in the center.

All roads led to Slado.

She ceased bothering to take any turns at all; but now she became even more cautious, more tensely alert. Here, among these close-set intersections, so near the residence, here would be the worst place to be surprised by one of Slado’s people, with monsters all about and her own presence so unexpected.

But still she saw no one.

But surely Slado had servants. Surely a demon, however precisely controlled, could not cook a meal, do the laundry.

Passage became more difficult. Streets were narrower, intersections ever more close and sharply angled. Out of sheer exhaustion, Rowan backed up against a den and allowed the traffic to find its own way around her.

A thought passed through her mind as if from afar: What if the count of left-curving streets and right-curving streets were adjacent Fibonacci numbers?

She stopped short.

What if?

Rowan had been introduced to the peculiar sequence of numbers mysteriously named Fibonacci in her second year of training. Each element was the sum of the two previous: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13 . . . extending infinitely.

An intellectual oddity, she had then thought, charming but useless, until the teachers Arian and Edith had independently begun pointing out examples of the numbers in nature.

Petals on a daisy. The spiral growth of snail shells, ram’s horns. Leaves on a grass stem, seeds on a pine-cone, the double spiral of a sunflower. The sequence seemed to appear everywhere, either as simple integer counts or as ratios.

Even Outskirts life: the number of the outermost twigs on a tanglebrush was always a Fibonacci number, and the count of branchings from the original stem was 1, 2, 3, 5, continuing in an unbroken sequence. Blackgrass leaves were offset from each other by five-eighths of a turn around the stem.

People do not typically build in spirals nor cause spiral streets to be built. Humans liked straight lines, square buildings, and even numbers— and direct routes to important places.

The demons had created these streets themselves, by a natural process. Uncontrolled, undirected.

Apparently, in daily matters, the wizard ruled the monsters with a very light hand—