Lyn
She locked that away. Avoided it, as she always did her problems. Because Nyr was about to stroll into a trap, in that way he had of not reading a situation.
There was a time when life was simple. And of course it never had been, but somehow she’d gone through it as though it had, and life had indulged her.
She had been the storybook warrior-princess, when Daimlesse and her other sisters had been learning statecraft.
She had awoken the wizard in his tower and taken him to fight a demon, and it had all worked out.
Life, though, had been patient. Just when she’d thought she’d mastered it, there’d been a series of poor decisions on her part, and then …
humiliation. The understanding that, this time, all those dull and sober cautions she’d received from her sisters and Nyr had been right.
She’d reached the end of the storybook and the statecraft was all that was left.
And here she was, with a pack of bandits fencing her in. What was Nyr to think?
The peculiar prickling came at her collar.
Magic. Except the first lesson in Nyr’s curriculum of sorcery was There is no magic.
Usually as a preface to some patently magicianly feat.
So this was an electromagnetic signal, the precise modulations of which carried encoded information.
A signal originating in the horns Nyr bore, received and decrypted by her own shirt, that had been woven by spirits within the wizard’s tower.
So it was that a faint whisper of Nyrgoth Elder’s voice issued from the vibrations of threads in her collar, and he said, Are you in trouble?
She murmured back. “There is a second sorcerer. A woman. Calls herself Elder. Beware.” Almost a relief, to have a whole bandit camp and a couple of hostile sorcerers. Her and Nyr against the world. Almost like old times and no room for all that had come later.
Sendroth was warily greeting Nyrgoth Elder.
Lyn could detect the man’s gauntlets sending their own signals to the great battered robots, readying them to act.
She envied the fluid ease of his control system, the way some internal intelligence of the gauntlets translated flicks of his fingers into the painstakingly complex details that the robots required. A true wonder of the ancient world.
“You are the one who calls yourself Sorcerer,” Nyr stated.
Lyn saw Sendroth bite at his lip, just slightly. A child’s nervous habit, up before their elders. Nyr was everyone’s elder, by default. He had a reputation.
“Did Lannesite think it had a monopoly on magic?” Sendroth called.
Every brigand there was staring at Nyr, waiting for him to explode in arcana.
Some fingered their gutbows, the translucent strings taut, metal shot loaded.
There were ways to shoot a wizard, she knew, but if Nyr had dressed in the appropriate vestments, he’d be a harder target than they thought.
Since coming to live amongst regular people he had worked out a variety of ingenious defences.
She thought Nyr was going to fly off the handle, as he did if he’d been letting his feelings out of the box too much.
She thought he might put on some grand spectacle because she was there to see—meaning her presence would have made everything worse again.
Instead, he sagged a bit, possibly at the whole magic business which she knew he hated.
“I am not Lannesite,” he said. “Lannesite’s Regent would wish me constantly to use my powers for her civic ambitions.
I am not moved.” She heard the weirdly formal way his words still sounded, in any normal language.
She’s always after me to do magic, and I won’t, but in Lans Vulgar it came out very wizardly indeed.
“However,” he added, “I cannot allow this.” A gesture at the robots, whose many throats shimmered with heat buildup.
“It is the sole part of my oath that I have kept. That I shall intervene, when the things of the Elder age are raised to life. I’m sorry.
You’re plainly very gifted to have managed it.
There must be some other sphere that you can apply your talents to.
” Not understanding how patronising he sounded.
And she wondered if he had spoken to the warlord Ulmoth that way, back in her great-grandmother’s day.
Faced down the man and his monsters, simultaneously self-effacing and superior.
Sendroth opened his mouth to speak, and the robots went silent, all of them. Not even a gesture, from Nyr. No need for magic gauntlets. Just as Lyn had done, all half-dozen monsters at once, still and dead as stones.
She saw Sendroth’s face, then. Bitter, frustrated, a man with no traction on the world. He moved his gauntlets, but there was nothing to hear the signals they sent out.
“Well, that is all there is,” said Nyr. “I understand you are people with a grievance against Lannesite. I … do not want to become embroiled in such matters, but if you have some message for the Regent, I will carry it. Otherwise…” And he looked at Lyn, obviously not sure what to do with her, or even if her identity was known to her captors.
“Perhaps you would … allow this young woman to leave with me?”
She almost laughed at the awkward gallantry of it, because she was not young anymore, save to Nyr to whom she always would be. Let her go grey and lose her teeth and bear a score of children and he’d still think her a child. Which was part of the problem.
“No,” Sendroth said. Not entirely clear what it was in response to, initially. “You are privileged to walk in here cloaked in magic. To take what we have, that lets us pit ourselves against the might of your Regent. And why? Because you decide that such as we do not deserve these things.”
“I would do the same if the Regent had them,” Nyr said blandly. “As the Regent knows.”
“The Regent,” Sendroth said, “does not need them to enforce her will.” He had his fists clenched, sending who knew what signal to the dead robots.
Nyr sagged a little, the entirety of Sendroth’s thwarted rage just one minor matter to him. A small thing he really hadn’t wanted to get into. “You are brigands, are you not?” Slightly incredulous at the moral high ground the sorcerer was claiming.
“We were brigands, when brigandage was all that was left to us.” Sendroth advanced a step, fists half-raised as though he would just punch the Elder’s long nose. “Now we are more than that.”
The robots roared.
Lyn had been waiting for it. Around her, a thrill of fear and equal anticipation went through Sendroth’s people.
Nyr, too, had been forewarned, thanks to her.
He sighed, his stance communicating, I’d really hoped things wouldn’t get this far.
Nobody could be as beset by ennui as a centuries-old wizard.
She mouthed into her collar, Be careful, and saw him glance at her, smile slightly.
A look that said, You care? And of course she cared.
He was her friend, despite everything, Despite her not being ready to see him again.
Honestly, she was absurdly thankful for the whole sorcerer-bandit-warlord business because it gave him somewhere else to turn his arch regard.
The girl had come out, now. Ilmoth Elder, self-styled. Nyr regarded her. She was not tall, like he was. She had no horns, nor wore spirit-woven garments with magical incantations running through the threads. She had a power, though. Lyn felt it speaking from within her, beating like her heart.
“These beasts are mine to command, Nyrgoth,” she said. “You shall not have them.”
Lyn could not discern the signals then, just a great buzz of activity within unheard space as the robots searched for instructions. One by one the metal beasts shuddered and stamped, their cutting mandibles or grinding teeth flexing and closing.
Nyr’s eyes were narrow. “You are the one who styles yourself ‘Elder’,” he said, eyes flicking briefly to Lyn in acknowledgement of the warning.
He said it a particular way, garnishing the word with suffixes that plainly said the girl was no such thing.
A superior speaking to not only an inferior, but a braggart, a liar.
And probably Nyr hadn’t meant it to come out quite so scathingly. He struggled with the language still.
She looked to Ilmoth for the rage of the young dismissed by the old—a familiar feeling from Lyn’s own youth. Instead, the girl’s face set hard. “I am Ilmoth Elder, and I know you, old man,” she said.
Nyr shrugged as though to say that, as he was the sole survivor of an antique age, and the world’s greatest magician, this was hardly surprising.
“Lannesite’s tame conjurer,” Ilmoth declared.
“Ancient, moribund, heartless.” And she used a strange word for that, qualifiers of without emotion and the core of you torn out.
Both of which could be literally true, of Nyr.
And he hadn’t registered the nuance, because he never did.
On the electromagnetic magical plane, Lyn felt the two of them explore each other’s reach, raising walls of interference and counter-signal about the rumbling monsters.
Neither striking just yet, but sending out their insubstantial scouts and armies to out-manoeuvre the other.
“Impressive.” Nyr was frowning at last. “Accomplished. You are the one who’s taught this man his business.
Or … no, given him gifts to raise him up as a sorcerer.
So where does your own mastery come from…
?” Thinking in words, as he sometimes did.
And in his own language, too, so that Lyn could just about follow his meaning but it must have sounded like incantations to everyone there.
“Where does yours, save your privileged inheritance,” Ilmoth replied in the same tongue. Nyr’s eyes went wide a second later, and she added, “Anthropologist Second Class,” as though it was a curse, and the monsters roared into motion.