The Cutting Edge (14 page)

"Weak? Word? I don't understand."

The recorder closed his eyes as if repeating a lesson to a very dull child. "Almost everyone has some talent or other, some ability. A few have more than one. Tell such a person a word of power and that talent is raised to the level of genius. "

"Only if he has Faculty," Gaib said stubbornly.

The amber eyes flicked open. "No. Not normally, Goodman Gaib. It is true in your experience, I admit, but only because the words you are aware of are all very weak. Each one is known to a great many people and thus its power is very diluted. Spread thin, you see. Surely you were taught this?"

"I must have forgotten. "

"Mmm? Just a stupid peasant? I think you underestimate me, and that is truly stupid. But it is true that these words rarely produce much effect. We call them `background' words and we keep track of them very carefully. Because they are weak, when they do augment a talent, then we can assume that the person involved has Faculty, a Gift for magic itself. Otherwise, the effect is negligible, I agree. It is curious that your daughter just happened to be in the area when the woman Phain was about to die. "

It had not merely been curious, Gaib thought, it had been disastrous.

The recorder stuffed the papers back in the satchel and began lacing it up. With relief, Gaib decided the man was leaving. The next remark stopped his heart.

"At the Vool Place, I was told that your daughter Felt a battle in progress Outside, beyond the mountains."

"That was right after the old woman died, my daughter had never seen death before, she had just discovered a talent she did not know about, she was hysterical, she was imagining . . ." He was babbling like a child.

"There was a battle." The Good preserve us! The recorder had known everything, all along.

Jain stretched his legs, folded his arms, leaned back against the wall of the cottage, relaxed-and smiled thinly. "The Keeper knew of the battle, of course. And your daughter did. Only those two, in all Thume. And you tell me that her Feeling is weaker than her mother's?"

Gaib said nothing, watching his hands rub together, hearing his skin making raspy noises.

"I trust that you are loyal to the Keeper, Goodman Gaib?"

"Of course," Gaib said hoarsely.

"Perhaps you have forgotten your catechism? Let us see if you can remember it. Stand up. No, hands behind you. Head up, back straight. That's better. Now, Goodman Gaib. What lies Outside?"

"Death and torture and slavery."

"Who waits Outside?"

Gaib was a child again, standing before his father. "The redhaired demons, the white-haired demons, the gold-haired demons, the blue-haired demons, and the brown-haired-"

"Wrong! "

"The dark-haired demons."

"Right. How do the demons come?"

"Over the mountains and over the sea. "

"Who defends us from them?"

"The Keeper and the College."

"Whom do we serve?"

"The Keeper and the College."

"Who never sleeps? "

"The Keeper."

The recorder gathered his long legs and rose, clutching his satchel. He donned his hat. After a minute Gaib raised his eyes and met that bright gaze. He felt very small and stupid. And frightened.

"I shall go and talk with your daughter now. I judge that she has Faculty. You will send her to the College before her sixteenth birthday. This is your duty to the Keeper and the College."

God of Pity! Gaib mumbled something. "I beg your pardon? "

"Yes, sir."

"And how do you keep her until then?"

"Away from death."

"Correct. Look at your left hand."

Gaib obeyed. His hand was shaking as he had never seen it shake before, but that was not what mattered. Although he had felt nothing, the third and fourth fingers were now grown together. He cried out and tried to separate them. Then he tried with his other hand, but they had become one broad finger with two nails.

"You must blame your own stupidity," Jain said in a sad, weary voice. "I don't enjoy mutilating people, but you need a reminder of where your loyalty lies. Forget it in future and you will have to suffer much worse."

He brushed past Gaib as if he were a bush and strode across the clearing, heading away from the path, toward the hill. In a moment he had vanished amid the trees on the slope.

Gaib ran into the cottage and found his metal knife, the one he killed pigs with. He tried to push the point between the two halves of that hideous finger, but he found bone there. By the time he had made sure it was bone all the way across, the grotesque double finger was hurting and bleeding a lot. He wrapped a scrap of cloth around it.

He went through to his Place beside the boulder and threw himself down on the heaped fern fronds. He pulled the blanket up, covering even his face, and just lay there, curled small and shivering. He wished Frial were beside him, holding him.

It went without saying that all pixie children had secret places of their own. Thaile had shared a family secret place with Feen and Sheel, which they had shown her as soon as she was old enough to keep the secret, and another they took their friends to when they came to visit. She also had one of her own. She even knew now where Sheel's secret place had been, now that her sister had departed, and it was not nearly as good as her own. She had never discovered Feen's place, but boys were supposed to be better at finding good places than girls were. So Feen had told her, anyway.

As a small child she had changed her secret place several times as she had ranged farther afield and grown more discriminating, but her final choice had lasted her for several years and she did not expect to change it before she went away to a real Place and a man. In fact, a year or so ago shed thought her days of playing childish hiding games were over. Then shed learned a word of power and nothing had been quite right after that.

Hours ago she had Felt an unfamiliar mind coming closer to the Gaib Place. Contempt, she had Felt, and a sort of stem anger. Frightened, Thaile had slipped away from the cottage and hurried to her secret place. She had been there a long time.

Her place was halfway up a green cliff, in among the largest trees. You climbed a shabby old eucalyptus, crawled out on a wide branch, and scrambled across to the top of a big mossy rock. Then you squeezed between the two rocks it was leaning against and ducked under a massive dead trunk and you were there. The secret place itself was as large as one of the rooms in the cottage, a strangely angled grotto of flat, smooth rocks lined with moss and creepers. Most of it was open to the forest canopy, but there was a wide overhang to sit under when the rain came and a nook to store precious things in.

There she kept a stuffed dragon her mother had made for her ages ago, which had been her special favorite companion when she was small, some extra-beautiful pebbles she had picked up from time to time, strings of melon seeds to wear as necklaces, a man's elbow carved in stone, several bright snail shells and even brighter fragments of pottery, some bronze rings that must have been links in a soldier's armor once and were all green now but probably quite valuable, a half-finished feather hat, and a couple of lopsided baskets she had made herself.

Lately she had added a rolling pin and a well-polished bowl made from a gourd. Gaith had given her the bowl and Shoop the pin. She had given them her most gracious thanks in return. Gaith was bearable, so he'd also gotten a kiss, but Shoop hadn't, because he wasn't.

In the very safest, darkest comer, carefully wrapped in banana leaves, she hoarded some scraps of leather, a right-hand glove and the beginnings of a left-hand glove; also a needle and some thongs. A year ago shed been hoping she would find the courage to give the finished gloves to Phoon, who was as old as her brother; he had a wonderful laugh and bulgy muscles in his arms, but then Phoon had found a Place and offered it-and himself-to some girl he'd met on his explorations. Shed accepted both, so Thane's gloves had never been finished. Another day, some other boy ...

And about this time last year, Thaile had kept Death Watch for Grammy, because the family was Gifted. So she had learned the old woman's word of power. That had brought her Feeling and Feeling had spoiled everything.

It was bad enough here at the Gaib Place, remote though it was. She could Feel what everyone in the district was feelinglove, anger, happiness, boredom, and stranger things, too. To go and visit the neighbors' Places was torment, because the Feelings were stronger at close quarters, and she could not help but learn to recognize each person's own Feelings. That made it all worse. Even from here, she knew when Looth made love to his wife, or Heem raged at his children. Sometimes at night she would be wakened by thunderclaps of passion from her father in the, next room. They terrified and disgusted her, although they were not so nauseating as the underlying slithery hypocrisy of her mother's acceptance. She'd always thought her mother was the loving one and her father stolid.

Behind all the Feelings of the district lay a never-ending murmur of thousands of other Feelings from far away. Sometimes she thought she could Feel the whole world, all the people of Thume, and all the demons who lived Outside, as well.

Today she had Felt the stranger coming and had run up to her secret place and crouched there for hours. She'd Felt her mother's alarm begin when she'd detected the approach of the unknown, also. And then her father's lower, slower emotions had turned to alarm, too.

Her mother must have gone away, because her feelings had faded even as the stranger's grew stronger. Thaile had wished then that she had done what Frial had likely done, heading over the ridge to visit the Wide Place, or the Heem Place, or somewhere. She should not have stayed here at all.

By the time her father's sudden terror struck, she had become too paralyzed to do anything except hunker down as small as she could, like a baby bird in its nest. Then the stranger's spite and anger had stopped abruptly, cut off all at once. That had been almost worse, because after that she could not place himshe was quite certain, somehow, that it was a man who was visiting the Gaib Place and he was still there.

After a little while, she Felt pain from her father, real pain. She whimpered in sympathy. She had never known Gaib to react like that, even when he'd dropped the log on his toe last month and limped for days. No, no! What was the stranger doing to him? She began to pray-to the God of Places, the God of Mercy, the Keeper ...

Without warning, a blast of amusement surged over her, very strong, very close. Someone was laughing. Someone was extraordinarily happy about something. Her terror faded before it and she discovered that she was starting to smile in sympathy. Whatever could be so incredibly funny?

"Thaile!" cried an unfamiliar voice, not far off. "Thaile, come out wherever you are!" The voice was full of the same laughter she had been sensing.

Obviously it was the stranger, although how he could have come up from the cottage so quickly she could not imagine. He no longer Felt dangerous at all; the contempt and anger were all gone now. There was only that wonderfully reassuring hilarity. If she didn't go out to him, then he might come looking for her. He was probably a sorcerer and could find her secret place if he wanted to. So there was no use refusing him.

Thaile wiped her eyes with the backs of her hands, ran fingers through the tangle of her curls, and scrambled under the fallen tree that barred the exit-all legs and arms, like the climbing frog her mother called her sometimes.

He was a slender, lanky man in green, sitting on a brown blanket, which he had spread in a sunlit spot below an airy acacia tree. He was laying out things on the blanket, and she stood behind a bush for a moment to watch. She saw plates and bowls, but she could not see where he was getting them from. The blanket, she realized, must be a cloak, for it had a fur collar and very few blankets had collars. She could feel a snigger coming on, like a need to sneeze.

He raised his head and looked right at her. He waved an arm cheerfully. "Come on! I'm not going to hurt you!"

Grinning shyly, she walked through the trees to his patch of brightness. He was really quite good-looking, she decided, with curly brown hair and extremely pointy ears. His clothes were beautiful and his smile melted all the prickly fears inside her.

"Sit down, Thaile. I'm Jain of the College."

"You're a sorcerer!" She ought to be frightened out of her wits. She wondered why she felt so happy instead.

He grinned. "Not quite. I'm only a mage-but that doesn't matter just now. I expect you're hungry? I know you're hungry! So am I. How about some icy-cold orange juice to start with?"

She sat down, tucking her legs as far out of sight as she could, because they were all scratched and dirty, and very skinny legs anyway. Her frock was torn and full of burrs. She drank from the shiny metal cup he gave her. It was astonishingly heavy. She wondered why she could not Feel anything from him, being so close, but all she sensed was that bubbling, laughing amusement, the sort of happiness you want to share with someone else. That was all. Funny! Most men put out scary want-you Feelings when they were near her, even quite young boys; and most male adolescents were unbearable at close quarters now, because of that. Although she hated to think of it, she Felt that want you even from Wide, her sister's man ... and even her own father sometimes had traces of it. It was a man thing men couldn't help, shed assumed. So either this Jain sorcerer was not a normal man at all, or he was capable of hiding his real feelings from her.

"You can speak, can't you?"

"Yes, sir. I'm sorry."

He looked at her squarely. "Call me Jain. I want to be friends and you have absolutely nothing to fear from me. I'm a recorder, from the College. I'm not a monster. Not a freak. Just an ordinary sort of man. I have a Place of my own and a goodwife who shares it with me and I'm not going to do anything nasty at all. All right?" '

If he had a Place of his own, then why wasn't he at home in it, growing something, as a man should?