The Lost Steersman (Steerswoman Series) (42 page)

“Bloody hell!” He flung it down, and was out the door and pounding down the stairs.

Rowan scrambled after him, tripping over her cloak on the way. “Steffie!” She picked it up.

“It’s still there!” she heard him call back.

“What?” Zenna shouted the question. Rowan was halfway down the stairs when she discovered that she had somehow snatched up the roll of maps.

In the courtyard, Zenna was trying to restrain Steffie. “What do you mean?” she asked him.

“He tried to
give
it to me!”

“When?” Rowan reached them, swung her cloak on. “How?”

“In the fight!” He blinked rain out of his eyes. “He
threw
it at me! It’s still there— it’s got to be! Come on!” He pounded off into the street.

With a glance back at Zenna, Rowan ran after him, sighted him, called ahead, “Wait! We don’t know where you’re going!”

“Galer’s place!” But he did pause, jittering with urgency, while Rowan and Zenna caught up. “See, see,” he said as they hurried on, “them demons, they only could come up behind him, ’cause that thing, it was always in front or to the side— ” he paused to gasp for breath “— and that’s why they would come at his sword on the right side, but not on his left— ”

“Shut up and run,” Zenna said, and then suddenly did so herself, using an astounding, efficient method that Rowan had never before seen. Steffie showed no surprise, but sped up, then fell in beside Zenna as easily and naturally as if he had been doing it all his life.

Rowan followed close behind, clutching the roll of maps under her cloak, ignoring a startled shopkeeper standing in his door and two gossiping, oilskin-clad fishers who called after her.

Harbor Road ended; Steffie led them into a woody path, slower now. They passed a burly woman dragging a burlap bag on which lay a demon corpse, a man with a wheelbarrow that held a demon in two pieces, and then entered a cluttered yard that stank of wet, burned wood. Three women were sifting through a pile of smoking rubble; other workers stood by the open door of a shabby house, conversing.

Steffie ignored them all, went straight to the tilted wreck of a wagon. He knelt. “Here. I was standing behind, Janus threw that thing, it hit here”— he rapped the wood— “and fell.” The three of them grubbed among the grass in front of the wagon. The workers left their duties and drifted over.

“I’ve got it.” Rowan’s hand knew it immediately. She drew it out carefully, mindful of the rain-driven grass wrapped around it; she did not wish to injure the critical precision of its surface.

She stood; Zenna and Steffie crowded close to see. The object lay in Rowan’s hand, wet and streaked with broken grass, otherwise exactly like Janus’s drawings.
I’m holding magic
, Rowan thought; but the idea seemed unreal.

“Now that we have it, somebody please tell me what it is,” Zenna said. Rowan did so, describing her findings in Janus’s room.

“What’s a talisman?” someone asked. Rowan discovered that the work crew, Corey among them, had gathered around to listen.

“According to general information, a talisman is a magical object that protects its user from evil,” Rowan replied.

“A one-person spell,” Zenna amplified. “And Janus was trying to make more of them. He was trying to help.”

Rowan did not point out that Janus ought to have reported the finding to the steerswomen; they could have set a dozen people to copying the spell.

Corey looked extremely uncomfortable as Rowan explained further, and she could see that he was struggling with ideas beyond his usual scope. “But he couldn’t make another one, so Rowan just said,” Corey stated finally. “So there’s only one of them.” He glanced around at the assembled people. “I think it’s me that better keep that.” Perhaps the simple pragmatism of his duties overrode any fears of magic; still, he did not put out his hand for the talisman but only held Rowan’s gaze levelly.

She passed the map case to Zenna, not doubting that Corey knew that the action freed her sword hand. “It’s staying with me,” she said firmly. “You won’t need it again. No more demons will come to Alemeth.”

“And how’s that?”

“They were sent by a wizard, to get Janus. They got him. There’s no reason for them to be sent again.” It had been Corey himself who, after dealing with the other attacks, had led a crew of archers along the trail that ended at the beach.

“Are you sure it’s him they wanted and not that talisman thing?”

Steffie spoke up. “When Janus threw it away, it was him they went for, not this.”

“I assure you,” Rowan said, clearly enough for the statement to carry to all listeners, “we have no intention of damaging the talisman.” She did not mention that it, and she, would be leaving town entirely.

Corey studied her determined expression, then considered Zenna’s, and even Steffie’s, seeming to give equal weight to all three. “Right,” he said, also pitching his voice to carry. “You lot go ahead and study it all you like.” He turned to the little crowd. “And you— got plenty to do yourselves, haven’t you? More dead demons to clear up, more wood to salvage.” He shooed them and followed them but paused to call over his shoulder. “Rowan, if you don’t want us putting demons into the sea, what should we do with ’em?”

“Find a place very far from town and bury them,” she answered. “Plant nothing nearby that you intend to eat.”

“Right.” He glanced again at each of them, then turned away quickly; and from the flicker of speculation in that glance, Rowan suddenly understood that he knew she had some plan involving the talisman. He had publicly provided her with a reasonable excuse to keep possession of it and the time to act without interference.

Zenna had arrived at the same conclusion. “Smarter than he looks. Isn’t that always the way with the peacekeepers?”

“What next?” Steffie asked.

Rowan looked down at the talisman, feeling the weight of it in her hand, trying to sense the magic it held. She could not. She sensed only the utter strangeness of its design, a thing seeming even more alien to her than the wreck of the fallen Guidestar. She almost felt she was hallucinating it.

She looked up at Steffie. He was bedraggled, soaked to the skin, shivering.

“We get you dry,” Rowan said. “We eat. We read the charts. And then we try to find out why it was that the magic failed Janus in the end.”

27

L
ike this?” Rowan asked.

Steffie looked up from the mug of hot broth he was cradling. “Looks like. Sword in the right hand, talisman in the left.” He was shirtless, wrapped in a blanket, ensconced in the seat of honor in Mira’s old chair by the flickering fire. His shirt was draped over the wicker chair, drying. “Sometimes his hand was out further than that, and sometimes it was closer in.”

“That might be merely for balance.” She tested a few moves: a crossing sweep from left to right, a downstroke, two twisting stabs. She found that the talisman hand tended to get thrown to the left. “Still, it’s fortunate that I’m not left-handed. And the only demons that did approach him came from behind . . .”

“I think it’s an emanation of some sort,” Zenna put in, “and Janus’s own body blocked the power from affecting the demons behind him. Think of it as a torch, or a lantern, and you can see the shadow your body will cast.” She was seated at the worktable, copying Janus’s maps; the originals must remain safely behind.

“Mystical emanations . . .” Rowan disliked the idea. And why would the presence of a nonmagical human body have any effect? “It might be most effective held directly overhead. But I couldn’t hold it there for long.”

“Could you put it on a hat?” Steffie asked.

“I don’t know. But the only clue to its use that we have is what we saw Janus doing. I shouldn’t risk doing anything differently.”

“You’ll have to get some gloves,” Zenna said. For the present, Rowan had wrapped a kerchief around her left hand as protection against irritation.

“Yes. I hate using a sword with gloves.” She set the talisman on the table, returned her weapon to the sheath hanging from the back of one chair, and sat down across from Zenna. “I wish I could be certain that I need merely possess the talisman to be protected.” But the notes had contained nothing other than the sketches. “Steffie, you didn’t hear Janus say anything, did you? Anything like a chant or an incantation?”

“Nothing.” He looked faintly ludicrous, bundled up and bedraggled, the blanket pulled up over his wet hair like a shabby cloak hood. “And that’s something, too: Janus didn’t say a word at all, never made a sound until them demons already had him.”

“Then silence is what I need, as well,” Rowan said, unknotting the kerchief. She folded it more carefully than was necessary, patted it flat with a sigh of deep dissatisfaction. “I need more information, I really do. The demons captured Janus despite the talisman.”

Zenna said, “Once the first one caught him from behind— ”

“No,” Steffie said. “First one had him from the front.”

“He must have turned in its grip.”

“Maybe . . .”

“Or,” Rowan said, “the wizard himself was somewhere nearby— ”

“Waiting in the boat,” Zenna suggested.

“Perhaps,” Rowan said. So close. “And he . . . he did something, called forth some counterspell to overpower the talisman . . .”

“But wouldn’t he have to be right there?” Steffie said. “To see what those demons were doing?”

“Maybe he used another spell,” Zenna speculated, “to see through the demons own eyes.”

“Could be . . . or invisible?” Steffie wondered.

“It’s possible,” Zenna said. “An invisibility spell.”

Magic.
Spell after spell, upon spell—

Rowan threw up her hands. “This,” she said, “
this
is what I hate about magic!” She rose abruptly, knocking over her chair, took two angry steps away, one back, and stood, dithering in frustration. “Every time one talks about magic, it’s all ifs and maybes— it’s all guesses, and guesses built on other guesses”— she made sharp, agitated gestures— “and hypotheses based purely upon guesses with anything, anything at all, possible— there are no
parameters
!” She flung out both arms, spoke to the world at large. “There
have
to be parameters!”

She leaned on the table, spoke urgently. “Anything that happens,” she said— addressing Steffie only because she must address someone, and Zenna already knew these things— “any event, process, initiation, conclusion, any occurrence at all, must take place within a framework of delimited possibility. Reality is not infinitely fluid; if it were, the world would be a very different place than it is.

“Magic does have parameters. It must have. Look at this.” Bare-handed, she picked up the talisman, went to Steffie, stooped to hold it before his face. “The construction is very, very precise. That precision isn’t merely decorative. It’s a result of the delimiting parameters, like the shape of a scythe or the keel of a ship. Those things are the agents of events, and they are shaped by their parameters and they reflect them. So must the talisman.” She regarded it herself. “This object embodies its own parameters, and they are all right here, in clear view. It ought to be possible to read this thing like a book!”

“You know,” Zenna said in a conversational tone, “you’re asking rather a lot of yourself.”

Rowan looked back at her. Zenna’s expression was wry. “Yes,” Rowan admitted, relaxing somewhat. “You’re right.” She turned back to Steffie and realized from his face that he had followed little of what she had said. She ought to have chosen a different vocabulary.

She sighed, straightened. “Well.” She set the talisman on the table and then, very sensibly, went to the kitchen basin to rinse her hand. “At the very least, let’s try not to stack too many guesses on each other. The whole thing could come crashing down on me in the middle of the wizard’s keep.”

“All right.” Zenna folded her hands. “Looking at this as rigorously as possible, all we have is what Steffie saw and what you saw.” Rowan had already described Janus’s attack on the lone demon in Lasker’s field. “Demons retreat from the talisman unless something else, like a human body, stands directly between them. And that adds up to line of sight.”

Rowan sighed, dried her hands. “Demons have no eyes.”

Zenna looked at her from under raised brows. “They must have eyes. They do have eyes. You simply didn’t recognize them.” She started sifting through Janus’s notes for his sketch of a demon; but before Rowan could ask him to, Steffie retrieved Rowan’s own logbook.

“I’m sure you’re right,” Rowan said. “I also did not recognize any ears. Nor organs of smell or taste. The only thing I’m certain of is touch.” She pulled up the third chair, and the three gathered around as Zenna studied the pages.

She pointed. “What are these?”

“Small pockets of fluid, distributed all over the demon’s torso. And the skin is very opaque; I already thought of that.”

“Hm.” Zenna flipped forward, back. “Where’s the brain?”

“I didn’t find one.”

“No head,” Steffie put in.

“Some simple animals do have no brain. But nothing as large and complex as a demon.”