The Lost Steersman (Steerswoman Series) (54 page)

Assuming he was here at all.

No. These were Slado’s creatures. He was here. He must be here.

Janus had been taken from Alemeth; and this was the last mark on his map.

And Janus had possessed a magical spell. Other spells were here. Magic was here; a wizard was here, or must be . . .

The center. The center would tell her.

She reached it sooner than pure mathematics predicted, simply because it was no abstract point. The steerswoman stood at the edge, looking down.

A depression, nearly one hundred feet in diameter, sloping at an angle of about twenty degrees, down to a flat area some thirty feet across. Packed earth, all around.

Along the slope, a few demons, scattered.

Below, a few demons, gathered.

Among them, a number of the spell objects.

Nothing else.

And all around the circular edge of the area: demon dens and street entrances— and nothing else.

Above it all, the wide white sky, a pearl overcast, the sun a haze of brightness in the west.

Nothing else.

Far below, one of the motionless demons stirred, moved, and began climbing the slope in Rowan’s direction. With no thought whatsoever in her mind, Rowan watched its slow approach.

It stopped in front of her. Human and demon stood for some time, neither moving.

Eventually, Rowan herself moved. She took six steps to the left.

The demon entered the street whose access she had been blocking, walked its length, turned a corner, and was gone.

Rowan watched it go. She turned back and regarded the great, empty center for some time.

Then, slowly, the steerswoman walked: down, across, then up, to the street that natural geometry told her would exit the colony closest to her camp, and left the center behind.

On the beach she stopped; she stood on the black-and-gold swirl-patterned sand, watching the surging of the strange and possibly endless ocean, gazing at a sky where no birds flew, and feeling that she was dreaming the entire scene— or dreaming herself.

She twisted her mouth in derision, stabbed her sword point down in the sand, pulled the plugs from her ears. Reality flowed in with the sound: rush and crash of waves, whistle and scree of insects, clatter of leaves, and the soft sift of the wandering, wind-borne sand. She snatched up her weapon, strode down the beach.

No sign of humans found during her original approach from the west; no sight of roads, buildings or even woodsmoke in the open countryside, north, east, west.

In all this wilderness, no sign of human habitation at all; and Site Four was merely a remarkably large demon colony.

Slado was not here.

And so, neither was Janus.

Rowan found she had reached the water, and had stopped. She was gazing blindly out to sea. She turned and gazed less blindly at beach and hillocks.

“But he
was
here,” she said, her own voice sounding almost plaintive.

And perhaps recently, as the spell objects testified. Magic had been enacted at this place and then abandoned. And it was important, important enough to change Janus utterly; important enough to Slado to cause Janus to be snatched away from Alemeth . . .

But not brought here.

Janus was likely dead. If not dead, as good as dead, because there was no way in the world for Rowan to find him.

She walked up the beach again, more slowly.

He really ought to have spoken. He really ought to have asked for help, long ago. Now he was lost.

Very well, then. If she could not save Janus, could not find Slado, Rowan would, at the very least, recover the information Janus had found here, the precious secret that the wizard so vigorously protected. She could follow her lost comrade’s footsteps in this strange and dangerous country, her single advantage a magical protection so complete that she might as well be invisible.

She stopped short, stood with the cooling wind ruffling her hair. Some natural pause in the waves’ pattern caused the ocean itself to be, for a moment, breathless.

Invisible. What a very interesting idea.

Was it possible, through magic, to hide an entire fortress? To obliterate all clues, disguise all roads, so confuse the mind that one could stand within sight of something that must surely be the equivalent of a small town and simply not see it?

Her grip on the talisman tightened, her other hand clenched into a fist around her sword hilt, and she said out loud through clenched teeth, “
Parameters.
”

But who could know what the most powerful wizard in the world was capable of?

Janus had found
something
. Perhaps the fortress. Perhaps he had, somehow, circumvented Slado’s magic.

By using . . . more magic?

She looked at the talisman in her hand. It was the only magic she had.

She pushed her sword tip in the sand again, leaving her right hand resting on its hilt. She took a deep breath, attempted to clear her mind of all confusion and misconceptions, held the talisman before her, and looked.

Slowly. In a circle. Step-by-step around her upright sword.

The beach to the west. South, the sea. East, the beach again and the breakwater. The dunes. The sandy hillocks, with the demon colony tucked behind and the distant hills rising far beyond. Dunes again, and the cat-striped beach running down to her feet—

She stopped.

A spell.

A
talisman
. Like her own.

Sitting, simply sitting, abandoned on the beach.

She pulled out her sword and walked slowly to it.

It was larger than hers, nearly three times the size, but— and she lay down her weapon, knelt in the sand, reached out to touch it— he same: the truncated pyramid, the swirling striations, and, to the two bare fingertips of her right hand, the exact gum-and-sand texture.

Color was different: still black and gold but in blotches that in no way matched Rowan’s talisman.

Of course. Color was irrelevant to demons.

She set down her own talisman, and with one hand on each side of the new object, tried to lift it. She could not. She ran her fingers under the edges; it seemed rooted to the sand. Digging harder, pressing inward, she felt something give way, and her two bare fingertips were suddenly cold, and wet.

The fingers immediately itched, first mildly, then madly. She yanked her hands out, struggled to free her water sack, and drenched fingers and gloves, thrust them into the dry sand, drenched and thrust again. The sensation subsided. Wiping the sand off on her trouser leg, she sat regarding the object.

Then she took up her sword, prodded at one of the slanted faces. The surface dimpled. She pushed harder, punctured it.

Clear fluid spilled out around the blade.

Rowan thrust further in, feeling no resistance. She sliced the object completely across, levered it open.

Within: transparent spheres more than an inch across, perhaps a hundred of them. Large enough and clear enough that she could see plainly inside each one the small, curled form, the gray line of backbone, the pale arms trailing forward, the tiny fins furled back.

Rowan had a sudden urge to snatch up her own talisman, fling it away from her, in a sudden fear that it might split and hatch a horde of little demons onto the sand all around her.

Impossible.

Impossible: it was a
made
thing, it had to be. She could make no sense of this, none at all.

“It does work,” she said out loud, slowly. “It does protect me.”

How?

Magic. A wizard made it.

Made it of the same material a demon uses to cover its eggs?

Apparently . . . Apparently, and why not? Who knows what properties in this substance a wizard might find useful?

Made it in the same shape?

“But it works!”

How?

“Magic . . .”

And when exactly did you come to believe so easily in magic?

But it had not come easily, not easily at all. It had taken a jewel of impossible origin, a statue that moved without life, blasts of destruction destroying an entire fortress, invisible heat from the sky killing everything in its path . . .

But before that— and had it been so long ago? When, standing on the deck of a ship, she had said to Bel:
The few times I’ve been faced with something called magical, it seemed simply mysterious . . . as if there were merely something about it that I didn’t know.

What did she know, here and now?

Next to nothing.

Sometimes I feel people call it magic,
she had said,
because they want magic.

What did she want?

“No.” She spoke aloud. “What I want is irrelevant. A steerswoman sees what
is.
”

Then, look.

A cache of demon eggs in the sand, surrounded by a protective covering. A smaller object, resembling the cache.

“But why would this protect me?”

Why assume your own importance in this? Remove yourself from the equation.

A demon does not approach or harm the so-called talisman. Therefore, a demon does not approach or harm a cache of eggs. Preserving the next generation: the simple logic of survival.

Look at what is.

She did. She looked up. She looked at the landscape all around, but now with her mind so nearly empty that she seemed to herself not to be present at all. Absent; and absent also every wish, every want, every hope. Only her sight remained, uninhabited.

Endless wilderness. No humans. No sign of humans. Nothing that referred to or reflected humankind. No magic.

Rowan remained, still, silent, empty, for many minutes.

A troop of seven female demons emerged from the colony and made their way toward the ocean. Rowan’s only reaction was to shift her talisman to the other side of her body, toward the demons. This she did without thought.

The creatures passed, entered the water, vanished.

Finally, the steerswoman rose, picked up her sword and the object which she had carried with her from the Inner Lands, and returned to her camp.

She sat on her bedroll in the sand in the flickering dark, arms around her knees, staring into the fire.

Nothing she was seeking could be found here.

Janus had acquired no magic at all, merely a dried stunted egg case.

Something else about him had attracted Slado’s attention.

The steerswoman said out loud, “You
fool.
” No— there was no reason, none at all, to think that it had been Slado who had taken Janus from Alemeth. Rowan had only assumed so because of the apparently magical inaccessibilty of these lands.

But even that had a natural explanation. Little snails.

Her tin stew pot clattered its lid; stew hissed down its side into the fire. She ignored it.

Some other wizard could just as easily have taken Janus— anyone with the power to command animals. Jannik in Donner, for instance; he controlled dragons. Why not demons as well?

Oh, and what a simple thing that would have been, to sail from Alemeth to Donner. She might have accomplished Janus’s rescue weeks ago.

The steerswoman ran her fingers roughly through her hair, dropped her hands to her lap, sat gazing at them, watched as they clenched into fists.

She had wanted it to be Slado. She had wanted her search to be over.

“I,” she said out loud, “have misled myself at every turn!”

She was indifferent to the noise she made. Should a demon approach, she need merely become silent, show it the egg case. It would go away.

Her stew was burning. She muttered a curse, snagged it out of the fire with a bit of tanglebrush driftwood, set it on the sand to cool.

And now what?

Janus had inspired someone to cause him to be captured. The only unusual thing that he had been doing: wandering in the demon lands.

Wandering and charting, as any good steerswoman would. A difficult and dangerous task— but if he had resigned from the order, why bother?

Why does anyone do anything?

The answer from her early training spoke itself. “To make one’s life better; to prevent one’s life from becoming worse.” Neither alternative seemed to apply.

Leaving her— and she pulled the tin pot closer to her, began to attack her dinner with unnecessary viciousness— leaving her wandering the demon lands herself.

Accomplishing nothing. She ought to leave in the morning. She ought to be hunting Slado, sifting for clues; she could be reunited with Bel, they could be working together again. Instead—

She stopped short, a spoonful of stew suspended halfway to her mouth.

Instead, she was in a new and unknown country, seeing new, strange, and wonderful things.