Nyr
MY STUDENTS ARE AT WORK, each to their own natures.
Three of the four are the Regent’s own children, because if you have children, and also a wizard at court, you have him teach them magic, don’t you?
And so I try, but there is no magic, and I am no teacher, and also they are not the most diligent of students.
Osteg, ten, does sums. Not what I’m teaching, but Osteg is like that.
And sums are an element of what I teach, but insufficient to make a magician.
Of the three girls, seven-year-old Allenesse has finished writing down her equations in double time so that she can add the enormously elaborate borders she gives to everything: animals and plants intertwining in ways that bring back bad memories I can never explain to her.
Erinesse, fifteen, has also bolted the meat of the lesson, so that she can attend to her correspondence.
She already has a miniature court of adolescents who write petitions and flattery and poems to her, and as far as I can see she plays them off against one another in a most unpleasant manner.
Nowhere in the world—Sophos IV, this world—is there another teacher such as I, who could review my curriculum and make informed suggestions about what it lacks.
It does lack, I am sure. I am, after all, not actually a teacher.
I am an anthropologist, and not even a first-class one at that.
If anyone tells you that knowing things and being able to impart that knowledge are close cousins, they’re a liar.
Second-class anthropology is not part of what I’m teaching. I am teaching something simultaneously rather more and less useful. To wit: magic.
Not actual magic, which doesn’t exist. There are only natural laws we cannot quite explain. So I wholeheartedly believe, despite some encounters in my past that resisted explanation to such a degree I had to throw my hands up and take it on faith, so to speak, that what was going on was science.
I crane over each shoulder in turn. Allenesse’s tangle of animals makes me squirm inside.
The twisted, intermingled bodies of the creatures.
My old eyes have seen unwholesome things, as befits a wizard.
I shake my head, feeling a great emotional weight come loose and lurch about like badly stowed cargo in a storm.
Joining all the other loose pieces of me.
My systems are engaged, though—that part of my internal suite that lets me lock these negative feelings away for later dismantling.
I don’t feel the doom and gloom of it, and can give them all my bright teacher’s smile.
But it’s there. My little telltales let me know I am overdue some bleak and miserable decompression.
At last, I come to my final student, the favourite, the one who gets it. A two-season child like Allenesse—meaning eight years, Earth reckoning. Sara. Saraesse Cousin-kin, but to me she’s Sara. The one I’m teaching the real magic to, not just scientific principles. Sara, Lyn’s daughter.
Another weight comes loose, in the unregarded hold of my mind. These burdens we carry, that no port will take off our hands. We sail on and on with them, and they ram against the bulkheads and timbers. We tie them back up, but they always come loose.
I steal a look at Sara’s board. She is writing incantations, as she calls it.
Meaning the chains of logic one might use, through whatever input was available, to instruct the machinery her ancestors deployed, when they came to Sophos IV.
She has also started working with the very different schema of logic my own people used for similar purposes—harder to grasp but far more flexible once mastered.
She is a precocious student. I do not know if Lannesite has a place for a wizard-cousin-aunt in the next generation, but if it doesn’t, she’ll make one.
I take up my place before them all. “Today,” I say, “on the motion of bodies, and how to calculate this.” I am a terrible fraud.
I only know this stuff because it is in the database of my tower, and I’ve downloaded it into my personal head-storage.
I am a worse teacher than I was an anthropologist. Most of my work is linguistic, turning the concepts of my own language and culture into words that the children—that anyone else on this world—might understand.
Telling them the laws magic is built on, which is true for a given definition of magic.
Sara watches me brightly. She already knows this stuff.
A magician could never ask for a brighter student.
Faster even than her mother was. I have, I fear, indulged her too much, but she is precious to me.
As much so as if she was mine. She is (the weight comes loose, shoulders into the vessel’s hull, so that the timbers shudder) all I have left of her mother.
My name is … well, that is complex. Like any wizard, I have many, but most are archaic, and those in a position to use them few and far between.
The name that I was born to, on a world light-years distant, in a civilization I have not heard from in around three centuries, is Nyr Illim Tevitch.
Nobody calls me that and nobody ever will, and these days I barely even recall it.
So, amongst these people, my name would be just Nyr, but they are particular about names, here.
Familiarity like that is bestowed only amongst the close, indicative of a genuine fondness and intimacy.
Good friends, old comrades, lovers. I would be Nyr, but there remains nobody in the palace to call me that.
It’s hard to make friends, as a magician.
And so I am the Elder. My title, if you were speaking about me to some other.
And I am Nyrgoth Elder to my face. The suffix of my peculiar station, because in this culture your relationship to the whole gets tacked on even when you’re an outsider.
Especially so. So the children greet me respectfully as Nyrgoth Elder, their teacher.
The adults, fearfully, as their court magician.
The last of the old creator folk—which I am not, by the way, but I can tell them until I’m blue in the face and it always seems to reset, in their minds.
The wizard of the tower, who should probably have stayed there, rather than coming here for …
the wrong reasons, honestly. Professionally and personally.
But I came anyway, and now I stay for Sara.
For my apprentice magician, because she is a painfully bright star.
So I slip further from proper anthropological practise.
Instead of studying her people, I teach her about mine.
A terrible mistake. A waste of time. But it’s all I have to give her. What little magic remains in the world.
When they are working out the equation problems I have set them—displayed on the wall with the little projector I set up—I have another visitor.
My heart sinks. I have retreated to this meagre role, as royal tutor.
The bare minimum of engagement with the culture I find myself immersed in.
Because the problem with turning up and claiming to be a court wizard is that the court starts expecting you to do wizardry to order.
It is not, of course, the Regent herself, come to call at my classroom.
She has better things to do with her time, and one skill that the royal families of these kingdoms tend to be good at is familial delegation.
Regents hope for three or four daughters, forming a tight-knit clique to govern under the aegis of the eldest. It didn’t quite work out that way for Lannesite, but the current Regent has at least one very capable sister left to act as majordomo, steward, chancellor and spymistress, and that’s who’s come calling.
So, they want something from me. Something I will not, I suspect, be willing to provide.
“Cantiresse First Sister,” I address her.
“What can I do for you today?” My most polite smile.
Polite smiles come across a little differently, if you’re a head taller than most, with a long, melancholy face of a caste not seen amongst any of Sophos IV’s ethnic groups, a man entirely outside the regular composition of the world.
And the horns. Cantiresse is, honestly, too composed and well mannered for her eyes to flick up towards them, but even people who have known me for years still stare.
An affectation, certainly, but also the broadcast and reception hub of my implants, for when I still need to examine the world or speak to my tower.
I inform the children that I must talk with their aunt.
They will have meandered from their work when I come back, each on their own path.
Osteg will set himself addition problems, Allenesse will draw, Erinesse will probably have left to find her sycophants.
And ingenious Sara? I guess she will be at my books again.
The ones I had the tower print. The advanced study.
The real magic. Not that magic is real, but just knowing some physics equations won’t let you pull the sort of stunts that I, as the Elder, am supposed to be capable of.
For that you need the sufficiently advanced technology, and the magic words to make it do what you want.
Cantiresse and I retire to a nearby chamber where a servant has set out some chilled drinks and a jug of brittle rolled straws, made from hybrid grain flour and spices. A favourite of mine, as it happens, which Cantiresse knows. I am being wooed for some magicianly service.
“What would the Regent?” I ask her. I’ve lived amongst this family for long enough that they don’t all just remind me of Lyn, who in turn reminds me of their great-grandmother, who was the first of their line to trouble me at my tower and draw me into their world.
She regards me, face like a porcelain mask, hair pulled back tight into a bun.
Cantiresse, alone of her sisters, has not married.
Borne no child, professed no ambition for a dynasty of her own.
Instead, she devotes her life to being the cushioning layer between the regent’s ambitions and the world, the oil that lets the machine work without too much friction.
Her look is cool. I’d say no love lost, except Cantiresse is a machine which wastes no energy in dislike or feuds.
You’re useful to her—to her sister and the state—or you’re not.
“The Regent beseeches the aid of the Elder,” Cantiresse says precisely.
And what Daimlesse Regent probably did was demand.
An Elder, however, is not swayed by demands.
Hence the Regent sends her more diplomatic sister to beseech.
Honestly, the traditions of court diplomacy in this region are complex enough even before you introduce a wild card like me.
“Your sister knows I will not lend my gifts in the matter of Lannesite’s territorial ambitions.
” Because when Daimlesse was crowned, she had thought that her youngest sister’s friend the wizard would be hers to throw at every neighbour, a stick to be brandished to keep them all in line.
My name was much used in diplomatic circles.
There were, indeed, demands. And Lyn was still here, then, to fend them off, and help me establish a status quo where I would teach, and sometimes advise, but only on matters related to my being a wizard.
A thing that I am not but have grown tired of trying to explain.
Better a wizard than a second-class anthropologist, surely.
Lyn’s intervention put an end to the demands but not the beseeching.
I have been asked to appear at various borders—not even do anything, just swan about looking magical.
I have been asked to make threats—not even to anyone, just mutter dire and arcane imprecations in earshot of ambassadors.
I have been asked, occasionally, to deploy the dread powers of my art and my tower and my monstrous servants—robots, drones, that sort of nonsense—against the enemies of Lannesite.
I have, to my credit, refused to do these things, but it doesn’t stop them asking, and here we go again.
“Lannesite is under threat,” Cantiresse says, true to form, and through the deadening of my Dissociative Cognition System I feel my heart sink. Or at least, my heart schedule a descent for a later time.
I draw my wizardly self up to restate my position, re: getting involved, which is something Cantiresse well knows.
I assume, then, she’s just going through the form of it so she can tell her sister she tried.
But she raises a slender finger, and honestly, I might be the magician here, but she has so much more quiet authority than I ever did, so she silences me.
“There have been raids,” she says. “Several of the border protectorates have been attacked. The forces of our allies have been defeated, from behind walls and in the field. And our own, when we marched to aid them.”
This, in my opinion, is not worth the raised finger. I open my mouth to explain that none of this justifies the deployment of my dread magics, and she says, “This new brigand warlord calls himself Sendroth.”
I permit myself a raised eyebrow. “Calls himself,” I echo. The suffix tells a tale. Sendroth. Like Nyrgoth. A slight variation, because of how the language of Lans Vulgar likes to order its consonants, but still …
“Witnesses say he commands monsters,” Cantiresse tells me tightly.
And I could still refuse, of course. I could demand such witnesses be brought to me, that I might cross-examine them before I credit any such business.
Any rogue can claim to be a sorcerer. But then Cantiresse says, “This is Minian, Storisite and Edmen way. Lyn’s out there.
” Her eyes on my face to make sure the dart lands. It does.
And if there is some wizardry involved with this bandit, that is my responsibility.
Meaning, some local thug has somehow managed to get an old piece of machinery working, and is using it to terrorise the other locals.
Exactly the sort of thing these women’s great-grandmother needed me for, a century and change ago.
That is why I magnanimously say I will go take a look at this Sendroth Sorcerer, to see if there’s anything more than flummery backing him.
Only for that reason. Not because it has been a year since I saw Lyn. Since I drove her away.