The Ozark trilogy (71 page)

“I’ll ride with you,” said Lewis Motley at once. “I know the shortest ways—we’ll save time.”

Jewel of Wommack stood up, put one slender finger in her brother’s chest, and pushed. It was a measure of his state of mind that it brought him to a full stop; ordinarily, he was about as easy to stop as an earthquake.

“You will not,” she said flatly. “You’ve done enough. You’ve done so much more than enough already, my beloved brother, that your name will go down in history—be satisfied with that. You may well have destroyed an entire world for the sake of your pride—be satisfied with that. And I will ride with Troublesome of Brightwater to the coast to see if her ship has waited for her. And if it hasn’t, I will see to it that a way is found to get her home, if I must call in every man still able-bodied on Kintucky to turn his hand to shipbuilding “

“I would feel better if— “

“No doubt you would!” she cut him off. “I haven’t any interest in you feeling better. You have a lifetime ahead of you to spend trying to ease your guilt, but
I’ll
not help you! And besides that, they wouldn’t obey you, Lewis Motley. Not as they will me, if that proves needful.”

Lewis Motley closed his eyes and made no more objections. She was right. Not a man on Kintucky that would not, if a Teacher asked it of him, build a ship or a cathedral or a rocket or anything else she might demand. It had been planned that way, and it had gone according to plan; the Teachers were not just respected, they were reverenced. He could not command that sort of loyalty.

And then ... there was the way his head was whirling. It could not be true, but what if it were? What if Responsible had not known, really had not known, what she was doing to him? And he had not even given her the chance to stop?

He had seen it himself, it was what had led him to her bed, scrawny plucked creature that she was; there had been something special about her, and he had been determined to investigate it. Was it his curiosity, and his pride, that had made Ozark a wasteland ... and how many deaths lay at his door?

He could not have ridden to the coast, he realized, as the two women left the room and slammed its door behind them. He could not, at that moment, have risen from his chair.

It was cold at Castle Brightwater; bitter bone-stabbing cold, the cold that comes when the skies are full of snow that refuses to fall; and the sky was a leaden sorrowful gray. No fires burned in any of the Castle fireplaces. The people in the towns and on the farms were better off by far than those at the Castle, because it had been for the most part a clear and sunny winter, and the solar collectors on their roofs had been adequate to carry them even through days like this one. The problems of keeping warm a hulking stone Castle designed with all the traditional drafty corridors and stairways were considerably more formidable.

Troublesome had gone through the gloom of the Castle like a wind added to the drafts that already whined there, with a fine disregard for the staff scuttling out of her way and the just-barely tolerance of the Family, shouting for Veritas Truebreed Motley the 4
^th
, the Castle’s very own Magician of Rank. “Where
is
the man?” she had demanded as she tore up and down the halls and through the parlors, and “Where has he
gotten
to?” She got nothing for her troubles but shrugs and raised eyebrows, but she was accustomed to that; ten years’ practice being shunned toughened you up some.

She found him at last, by the simple expedient of looking everywhere there was, up on the Castle roof rubbing his hands together and cursing fluently in a spot where a tower kept off the wind but let the dim light by.

“It’s a fine thing,” he observed, glaring at her, “when it’s warmer outside the place you live in than it is
in
side, in the dead of winter. I’ve a good mind to move into that hotel down by the landing. I’d be more comfortable there, and I’m sure the company would be better. How did you find me, anyway?”

“Used an algorithm,” said Troublesome.

He made a face, not appreciating that word in her mouth, and went on as if she’d not used it. “And it’s finer
yet
, when a man can’t even find privacy on the bestaggering roof of a bestaggering
Castle!
First, it was one of the Grannys; and then it was Thorn of Guthrie—curse her narrow pointy little soul—and now, the Twelve Gates defend us all, it’s
you!
What’s next, ghosts and demons?”

“Morning, Veritas Truebreed,” said Troublesome calmly. “Nice to see you, too, I’m sure.”

“What do you want with me?” the Magician of Rank demanded, cross as a patch. “Whatever it is, the answer is either no, I can’t or no, I won’t—there aren’t any other answers at the moment.”

“Might could be you’re right,” she said, “and might could be you’re wrong. Long as we’re being all binary here.”

“Troublesome, you’ll provoke me,” he warned her, and she let him know how alarmed she was at that prospect.

“Besides which,” she added, “you were already provoked before ever I set foot on this roof. And you may go right on being provoked till you choke, for all I care.”

“Well?” Veritas Truebreed was blue with cold and purple with outrage, but he knew quite well she could outlast him. “Speak up, woman; what are you here tormenting me for?”

Troublesome looked him up and down, noting that he’d abandoned the elegant garments of his station for something that looked more like a stableman’s winter wear. Something nubby and bulky, with a thick lining and a narrow stripe and a capacious hood. It showed good sense on his part.

“I want you to wake up Responsible,” she told him.

“You want me to what?”

“I’ve been to Kintucky and back, Veritas, and I— “

“You’ve been to
where
?”

“
As I said
, Veritas Truebreed, I’ve been to Kintucky and back—never you mind how, just let me tell you it wasn’t easy and it was hardly what you might call a holiday excursion—and I’ve heard the whole sorry tale from the lips of Lewis Motley Wommack the 33
^rd
his very own self, and you’d best hop it. Time’s a-wasting.”

The Magician of Rank stopped rubbing his hands together then, and blowing on them, and he leaned back against the stone of the tower, closed his eyes, and groaned aloud like a woman birthing.

“Only you could have brought this upon me. Troublesome of Brightwater,” he said at last through clenched teeth, when he’d done with his groaning, “only you! We don’t have trial and misery enough already; now we have to have
this
. Oh, for the power to do just one tiny Transformation... I’d turn you into a slimeworm, with the greatest of pleasure, I’d step on you with my shoe heel ... no, I’d set
fire
to you, right at the tender end where your little yellow eye was, and then— “

“Demented,” said Troublesome.

“What?”

“You’re demented. Mad. Plain crazy. And I’ve heard enough and a few buckets left over from you. I’m not
interested
in the twisted inventions of your imagination, Veritas Truebreed. I am interested in having you wake up my sister—bringing in all the other Magicians of Rank you need to help you at it, if that’s required, and I suppose it is, though it’s mighty curious that it takes nine-to-one odds for one small female like Responsible—and I’m interested in seeing if the Grannys are right that that will improve things around here a tad. Either you leave off your drivel and come along to get started on that, or I’ll push you off the roof—how’s that for managing without Formalisms & Transformations? Nothing fancy, O Mighty Magician, just shove you right off and let you try the effect of the stone down there in the courtyard on the very same body you came into this world with. You’ll squash, I expect, and the Holy One knows you deserve it.”

He opened his eyes and sighed, and she wondered impatiently what was next. There are only just so many meaningful noises in the sigh & moan & grunt & groan category, and he was running through them at a great rate.

“It can’t be done,” he said simply, and that surprised her. “I’m more than willing, but it—cannot—be—done. Don’t you think we tried?”

Troublesome hunched down beside him and regarded him seriously. This didn’t look to be at all funny, if he spoke the truth.

“You explain,” she said. “
Right
quick.”

“When we realized what we’d done,” said the man, making vague hopeless gestures, “we tried right away to undo it. The Mules weren’t making more than about ten miles an hour by then, some of the boats were a knot or two faster, whatever was left of the energy that had been fueling the system was winding down fast ... but since it had taken all nine of us to put Responsible into pseudocoma we had a feeling it would take all nine to get her back out again. We all got here; and since you were yammering about the difficulties of your jaunt to Kintucky, allow me to observe that there was nothing easy about
that
—but we did get here somehow. And in the dead of night we stood round her bed and we did everything we knew, and made up a sizable amount of stuff that had never been tried before ... and we kept at it until there was barely time for some of us to get out before people saw us leaving. Whether everyone got back home again, I don’t know ... and I’m not sure I care. But we
did try
, Troublesome.”

“And what happened?”

“And nothing happened. The only difference between pseudocoma and real coma is that the victim of pseudocoma does not deteriorate physically or mentally. Otherwise, it’s exactly the same—and we did a good job of it. Oh yes; that’s a downright magnificent pseudocoma we put her into. She went right on just as she was.”

“Do you understand it?” Troublesome asked gravely.

“No, of course we don’t understand it, curse your insolence for asking! We
ought
to understand it ... do you have to rub my nose in it? Does that give you pleasure?”

“That’s my sister,” she reminded him. It was no time to make her ritual speech about having no human feelings.

“And the hope of the world.”

To her amazement, she saw that there were tears on his cheeks, running in rivulets down into his beard; it wouldn’t do to let him know she saw that, and she devoted her attention to watching a seabird wheeling above them. It must have gone demented, too, she thought absently.

“We were so careful,” he mourned beside her. “One thousand years of being
so careful.
Keeping the population small, so that there was always abundance. Balancing every substance that went into the soil and the water and the air, and every substance that came out, to guard its purity. We made a paradise ... no crime, no war, no disease, no crowding, no hunger, no— “

“I remember, Veritas Truebreed,” Troublesome cut him off. “I was up on a mountaintop a good deal of the time, but I do remember. And I’d rather hear explanations than memorial services, if you don’t mind.”

“We have some guesses.”

“Guesses? What kind of guesses?”

He didn’t answer her, and she turned to look at him, tears or no tears.

“I said, what
kind
of guesses?”

“They ought, by rights, to be secret ...”

“Oh, hogwallow, you fool man! Secrets, at a time like this!”

“Maybe you’re right,” he said, “and I’m too tired to care any more ... and nobody’d believe you even if you weren’t too mean to tell, so what does it matter? We assume—just assume, mind you, we’ve no proof—that there was something about Responsible that was essential to the functioning of magic. She had no
powers
, of course, beyond those of any other female; don’t misunderstand me.”

“You’re a liar, Veritas—I told you I had the whole story from that poor piece of work at Castle Wommack, and he had a few words to say about Responsible’s powers; seems as how he mightily disliked being subjected to them.”

“Even on Old Earth,” said the Magician of Rank stiffly, “in the times of utter ignorance of magic, there were rare individuals capable of mindspeech—as there were rare individuals seven feet tall. Your sister is a freak, as those were freaks, with no knowledge or control of her abilities. But she is something else, something ... a catalyst, perhaps? Somehow, whatever she was, taking her out of the system of magic brought it to a full stop. And pseudocoma
takes
magic—you can’t put someone into it, nor take them out of it, with solar energy or electrical energy or any other kind. By the time we realized what had happened, there was no energy left—without her—for us to use to cancel the coma. So far as I know, that’s the way of it. And if you could get all nine of us together in her bedroom again, which I doubt, since the ships aren’t sailing and the Mules aren’t flying, it would be the same as it was. Just the same as it was ... “

“You were fools,” said Troublesome. “Plain fools.”

That long groan again ... it was getting boring, especially since he was in no pain.

“You were, you know,” she said, happy to twist the knife.

“We didn’t
realize
,” he protested. “We had no idea that she mattered that way ...” And if someone had told them, he thought to himself, if they’d been warned, it would have changed nothing. They wouldn’t have believed it. They had hated Responsible of Brightwater so much, and they had so welcomed a legitimate opportunity to punish her for humiliating them, he knew that no amount of warning could have held them back.

“You do not know the hours,” he said slowly, “the countless hours I have spent standing beside her all by myself ... trying things. Hoping I’d jog something loose, find the right thread accidentally. Because whatever it is that she is for,
that
is still intact.
That’s
still there, if I could only get at it.”