The Lost Steersman (Steerswoman Series) (41 page)

“Well, well, first off, it’s this. Janus, and all. I mean”— he turned to Zenna— “I know how you feel about him, lady, and I’m sorry, but”— and he turned to Rowan— “I know how you feel about him, too, and I’m thinking it’s a lot like how I feel about him— and if it was Janus being here brought them demons to kill people, and him never warning anyone about it, and a wizard’s got him now, then I say serves him right. Why is it you want to go sailing off to rescue him?”

Rowan hardly knew how to begin answering. She stood mute while the reasons ranked and ordered themselves in her mind.

A wizard living perfectly hidden, in a perfectly secret place.

An old friend who had lied to her, lied about her, betrayed her.

Slado. Janus.

Rowan said, “I need to know.”

Steffie dropped his jaw. “ ‘Need to know,’ ” he said in a small voice. “I guess I can tell I’m talking to a steerswoman. She needs to know.”

Rowan swung on her cloak, passed the other to Zenna. “Second off,” Zenna said as she donned and clasped it.

“What?”

“You said ‘first off.’ There ought to be a ‘second off.’ ”

“Second off,” Steffie said. Then he turned to the chart on the table. “Second off— I don’t know much about maps, ladies, but I’m looking at this one, and what I see is a lot of exactly nothing, exactly where you’re meaning to go. Miles of nothing. Wizard’s got to be in some one place in all them miles, and you don’t know where that is.”

“Charts,” Zenna said.

“Nautical charts,” Rowan amplified. “Any sailor would have them. If Janus kept returning to the same place, he’ll have made charts of the course.”

“They’ll be in his boat,” Zenna said, swinging herself toward the door.

Rowan held the door open; rain swept in. “No. I looked there. But he has a room in town, and he keeps it locked; that’s where they’ll be.”

“Good. We should take a lamp.”

“I’ll get it.” Rowan stepped back, brushing past Steffie, snatched the lamp from the mantel, and used a twist of paper to light it from the fire.

“Third off,” Steffie said. Rowan looked up. “What about them demons? Janus knew how to keep ’em back, when he was facing them anyways, but you don’t.”

“Not yet.” Rowan adjusted the flame, returned to Zenna’s side.

“Steerswomen write things down,” Zenna said to Steffie. “It’s like an instinct with us. If Janus learned anything at all, he’ll have kept notes of some kind— ”

“If we find nothing, then you’re right, and there’s nothing I can do,” Rowan said. “And I’ll abandon the whole idea. But I believe that we will find
something
. If we find charts, we’ll find notes.”

“Between Rowan’s knowledge and mine, the two of us might just be able to reason out how Janus’s spell operated.”

“Spell?” Confusion on Steffie’s face; then sudden realization.

“It could be something quite simple,” Rowan said to Zenna. “If it’s an incantation, the entire spell itself might be sitting up in his room, written out ”

“With any luck,” Zenna said.

“It had better not be!”

Steffie stood in the center of the room, arms flung out, hands in trembling fists. His eyes were huge. “If, if,” he said in a voice that cracked, “if you find a magic demon spell that could have kept people safe, sitting
right up there in his room all this time
, then— then, Rowan, I swear I’ll knock you on the head and
sit
on you for three weeks straight until I think that wizard has got all his answers and killed Janus dead! I’ll do it, Rowan, I swear I will!”

The change in him stunned Rowan, and she was a few moments finding a response. “Steffie,” she said, “if I find a spell that simple and that strong . . . then I will go and get Janus and personally deliver him into the justice of the people of Alemeth.”

“Good.” His eyes told her what he thought the people of Alemeth should do with Janus. Then he drew deep breaths, relaxed his stance, looked away from her, eyes narrowed. “Good.”

Zenna spoke. “It’s a one-person spell.”

Rowan turned to her. Zenna continued, “Possibilities are two: either only Janus himself can work the spell, or only one person at a time can work it. He would have shared it if he could— I know he would have. But he didn’t. So he couldn’t.”

Rowan was not at all convinced of this. Nevertheless: “Let’s take that as a working assumption.”

“Right,” Steffie said. “Let’s go and find out.” And he pushed past the steerswomen roughly on his way out.

When they did not follow immediately, he turned back to them, standing in the street in his shirtsleeves in the rain. “If that door’s locked, you’ll be needing someone to knock it down,” he said, raising his voice over the hiss of water. “Right now, I feel just like knocking something down.”

26

B
y the time they reached the cooper’s shop, rain had cooled Steffie’s anger. Nevertheless, Rowan stood back and let him use the hilt of her sword to smash at the rotted, thin wood beside the padlock, which he did with a cold and methodical efficiency.

Down in the courtyard, Zenna’s up-tilted face was a spot of paleness in the gray, rain-pattering light. The stairs were too narrow and unsteady for her to negotiate.

The wood gave; Steffie handed back Rowan’s sword, pried away the hasp with his fingers, then swung the door open and stood aside to let her enter first. She raised the lamp as he came in behind her. “Hell of a way to live,” he commented. He brushed water from his face, shook his head like a dog.

“It’s hardly worse than Mira’s when I arrived.” Piles of used clothing were scattered about; the motion of the lamp gave them moving shadows, like small animals ducking in and out of hiding. “At least there are no dirty dishes.”

“Well, here’s a place to start.” Steffie made for a small chest in the room’s far corner. Rowan slipped out of her cloak, allowing it to drop to the floor, then remained where she stood, scanning the room.

If she herself lived here, and she wished to work, to study or write, where would she do it?

There was no table, or desk. A straight-backed chair stood alone against the damp-stained outer wall, but clean clothing stacked on it demonstrated that it was rarely used.

The bed was merely a straw-stuffed canvas mattress lying directly on the floor, strewn with ancient pillows. A small lath crate served as nightstand, with a reflector candle-holder resting on it.

Rowan crossed the room, set the lamp beside the candle, and sat on the mattress, finding musty pillows already cradling her back comfortably.

A sweep of bare floor lay before her, illuminated by a wash of lamplight. A perfect work space.

The crate was open on the side toward the bed. “Here,” Rowan said.

It had been agreed that the first examination of notes must take place in Janus’s room. Rowan had good evidence of magic’s dependence on precise conditions; quite possibly the spell could only be worked, or even comprehended, in this one place. As Steffie folded himself to a seat opposite Rowan, she pulled out the contents of the crate and spread them on the floor: a fat folder of stiffened paper, tied with a ribbon; pens, spare quill nibs, and a penknife; a brass ruler and calipers, a stone bottle of ink; a leather roll; a burlap sack.

The sack was unexpected. Rowan loosened the drawstring, upended it. A number of brown and black objects spilled out. “What in the world?”

They were like nothing she had ever seen. She sat regarding them stupidly, entirely unable to integrate their shapes into anything she could name. Presently, she resorted to counting them: nine. The act of enumeration steadied her, oddly, and she found that she could at least see that the objects were designed with a particular orientation. She reached out to begin setting upright those that were lying on their sides.

But the first that she touched, she recognized not by sight but by feel. “I
know
this . . .” She closed her eyes to let her hands remember. “In the Outskirts, we found something near where a demon had been. A sphere . . . we thought it was a demon egg, but it had only water inside. It felt like this . . .” Both sandy and gummy, as if some steerswoman had not waited for the soles of her boots to dry before walking on a beach.

Rowan opened her eyes again. “But it did not look like this.” The sphere had been simple and the reddish-brown color of Outskirts earth. The object now in her hands was complicated and mottled brown and black.

It was a canted cone, she saw now, with odd bulbous protrusions and a flat base. She set it down. The next was a rounded ellipsoid section from which rose three curving flutes, their surfaces completely covered with close, shallow depressions. The others were vague blocks, scarred masses, and a number of rough, flattened pyramids.

Cautiously, Steffie touched one. “Be careful,” Rowan said. Handling the sphere had caused the Outskirters’ hands to itch and peel the next day. “I’m sure these are the cause of Janus’s problem with his hands.” Steffie drew his finger back, more quickly than was necessary. “The effect is cumulative,” she assured him. “If you do handle them, be sure to wash your hands later.” She set down the object she was holding.

The leather roll almost certainly contained the charts, and at that thought, Rowan felt a sudden, sharp yearning, as if the maps were almost audibly calling to her. But the spell was more likely in the folder. She opened it, found a collection of loose pages. She sorted through them, seeking the unexpected.

She found first: pages with torn edges and writing spoiled by immersion in water— from Janus’s own logbook, Rowan surmised, rescued by him after the shipwreck. Then: sketches in charcoal on dried, damaged paper: a mudwort; the leaves of a tanglebrush; a skinny, four-limbed insect Rowan recognized as a trawler— Outskirts life-forms, with the proper accompanying descriptions and measurements. Among these, executed in lampblack ink, was a diagram of one dissected quarter of a demon’s body, nearly exactly as Rowan had drawn her own.

Finally: page after page of drawings, each resembling the others closely. Rowan thumbed through them to confirm the fact, then returned to the first of that series.

Steffie tilted his head, trying to read the notation. “What’s that say?”

“ ‘Talisman,’ ” Rowan read. She drew a breath. “This must be it.”

“Is that a one-person spell?”

“Yes.”

The sketches showed a truncated pyramid, with a swirling grooved surface; the notes described it as standing about four inches square at the base, rising to two and a half inches, rounded at the top, colored in blotches and twists of black and brown.

Rowan glanced through the pages. All were views of the talisman: careful, detailed. At first sight they seemed exactly the sort of precise work Rowan would have expected of any good steerswoman, but there were far more sketches than were necessary to convey the information. She went through them again, more slowly.

First: rough sketches. Next: sketches less rough, with measurements more and more specific and precise. Then: one depicting the object with an obsessive, almost hallucinatory clarity but which included no measurements whatsoever, rendering it oddly mute to Rowan’s eye, and disturbing.

After that, all the way to the end, the talisman: page after page, view after view, numbered, measured, marked, each executed with dry, detached precision, each page telling the same tale, over and over.

Rowan reached among the strange objects on the floor, pulled out one of the rough pyramids. She compared it to the eerie, voiceless drawing. “Similar . . .” But not exact. It was close in shape, but the colors did not match at all, the surface was uneven, the raised swirls clumsy and notched.

She picked up the penknife, compared its size to the irregularities. “He was trying to make one. And failing.” And handling the objects barehanded— at least for a while. Janus must not have realized, or not realized at first; apparently, with repeated exposure, even washing between times was not enough, and damage to the skin became permanent and self-sustaining. If Janus had learned this, he had learned it too late.

She set aside knife and object, turned the pages to the later drawings. “These specifications are very precise . . .” Decimal divisions of an inch down to four significant places, for the size and height of each swirling groove; degrees of arc for the cross section of a typical groove, and a formula for increase and decrease along the groove’s length. “I’m not sure this is humanly possible,” she told Steffie.

He did not reply. She looked up, and found him sitting loose limbed and slack jawed, stunned, his eyes on Janus’s failed creation. “Bloody hell?” he managed to get out, barely audible.

“Steffie?” Rowan felt a sudden twist of fear at the thought that magic might be about to manifest itself, here and now, somehow choosing to devolve upon Steffie. She put out a hand to touch him, then held back.

Very slowly, he reached out and picked up one of the pyramids. He gazed at it in a breathless puzzlement for a long moment, then carefully placed it in his left hand.

He rose. He stood in the center of the room, holding the object away from his body, slightly to his left— and then, in a movement utterly natural, and so seeming even more bizarre, he hefted it, as if testing its weight.