Nyr
“TELL ME,” I SAY, “how you became a part of this.” Because What are you?
seems to be more than I’ll get out of her.
More than Ilmoth Elder—that thing I’m talking to that answers to the name—is capable of encompassing.
The more reasonable question reactivates her scornful look, but that’s almost a relief.
“Sendra, he came to me amongst the graves,” she said, and now she’s talking my rusty old language again. A choice of dead tongues, between us, and none of them hers. “He sought my help.”
A fork in my path here. Do I ask why she—as whatever species of Elder she’s laying claim to—would even bother with the provincial ambitions of Sendroth Not-Yet-Sorcerer?
I mean, why would anyone? Except, yes, I did, with Astresse and then with Lyn, but I had good reason.
I was … following a narrative, I suppose, that said I could interfere under particular circumstances.
Which I made sure I could twist to fit circumstances, because I was old and bored and lonely.
And Ilmoth’s actions also fit a narrative, but it’s not one from my people nor of the original colonisers.
A narrative of the people of this land, that the hero—brigand in this case but Sendroth plainly sees himself as wronged—seeks aid from a magician, and is gifted magic, and becomes the avenging sorcerer.
A folk tale of Sophos IV, oft-repeated. Lyn was following a variation of it when she came to me that first time.
Lyn hasn’t gone anywhere. She’s closer, in fact. And her signature seems … doubled? I try to make contact, but I’m leery of alerting Ilmoth. Not the best time for a house call, Lyn.
So I don’t ask Ilmoth Elder about her motives. Instead I do my best to tie her up with a deeper question. “And before that? As you are an Elder, where were you for all those centuries? You never called on me here, one wizard to another.”
“You think yourself so important,” she says scathingly. But she is here in my tower, plundering my secrets. I manage an arch look, a proper Elder’s expression. It infuriates her, but at least her fury is focused on me.
“I have been biding my time,” she tells me.
“You in your fortress, brooking no competitor, destroying any mere sorcerer who raised themselves to push against the mundane powers of the world. Jealous of any who might rise to threaten your dominance.” And now, apparently, I am dominant again, the great wizard-lord and not the latecomer intruding on someone else’s domain.
And this is Sendroth’s narrative, yes, but it is also the way the witch and the wizard clash, in many tales.
One the old and powerful, the magical establishment; one the newcomer, raw but strong and …
assisted by some other power, sometimes.
Some wickedness to draw on, to threaten the other’s stone-built strength.
It goes back to old Earth stories, and it goes back to power struggles within the colonial administration and later recoveries of working tech.
Sometimes the wizard is an evil tyrant who must be overthrown; sometimes the witch is a wicked upstart who must be put down.
No narrative model for the pair of them just getting on, apparently.
Or there is. It occurs to me then, but is gone from my head in the next instant because Lyn is at the very gates of the tower. Go away, I send via back channels to the necklace she wears. My voice a ghostly whisper in her ear.
No, she says bluntly. And the other her says, It’s a rescue and I realise there aren’t two Lyns. It’s Sara. She’s brought Sara.
And here I sit with a witch who may be a demon or a vessel for demons, or … some damn thing I have no idea about at all.
I am going to set it all on fire right now. Because, if I’ve kicked off the fight with Ilmoth, however that’s going to go, at least Lyn won’t walk into the spiderweb of our negotiations and end up as leverage against me. At least Sara won’t be in danger. “None of this is true,” I tell Ilmoth.
She bares her teeth at me. “You think yourself so wise,” she tells me. “Your people, so smug, so sure of themselves. And where are they now?”
All true. Practically reading my mind, or at least my diary.
I don’t let it derail me. “You are not of my people. You are not of the coloniser people. You have access to the tower, and it tells you things you half understand. You regurgitate them to me because they sound right to you. You fit them into stories like parts to an engine, trying to make them run. But I’ve seen your blood, Ilmoth.
Your heritage, written out and analysed.
You’re from here, a local, present-day, Sophos IV standard.
No different to anyone else within a hundred miles of here.
” Not one of my people, whose genetic heritage is different enough—through time’s work and our own—that we’re close to being a different species.
Not the colonists, possessed of Earth genetics a millennium out of date, having to be engineered to produce descendants fit for the biochemical signature of this world, even after all their terraforming efforts.
Ilmoth is a modern local and, because my work tracked the way that certain epidemics leave a signature in the blood, of antibodies and genetic damage, I can give you the circumstances of her birth within five years and twenty miles.
Ilmoth Elder is no more than twenty-four.
Six Storm-seasons at most, as the locals—her people, Lyn’s people—would reckon it.
“I am—” she says, shouts, almost shrieks, and I tap into the tower’s own systems, whisk the audio out from her grasp and shout back at her from every wall and corner.
“You are not! What singles you out and makes you a witch is what is within you. Your passenger. Your familiar.” Speaking in Lyn’s language now so that Lyn will hear and understand. “What is it, Ilmoth? What lives under your skin?”
She flinches back from me and the boom of it.
“There’s nothing!” she yells at me. “I am Ilmoth Elder. I have beaten you, old man! I, with my power, with my magic!” Answering me in the same language, her own language.
Words collapsing into some regional accent beneath the stilted legend-speak she was putting on.
Lyn is there, entering the room, hearing this.
Lyn and Sara both. And, with them, Sendroth Sorcerer.
A captor and prisoners, I think, but they’re not standing like that.
He’s more like a servant come to usher in the pair of them.
And I know he’s seen the things that live under Ilmoth’s skin, and must know Ilmoth herself hasn’t.
They do not exist for her. She edits them out of her world, no part of her story.
His witch is mad, but she gives him power, so he must live with it. Or perhaps mad is not the word.
“What is this?” Ilmoth demands of her sorcerer.
“An emissary from Lannesite.” His eyes flick from me to the witch. “To negotiate.”
Ilmoth’s eyes flash and the skin under her robe bunches and squirms. A high, thin singing, like a chorus, or tinnitus, from many places simultaneously. When I try and locate it, it’s gone, but I hear Sara mutter, as though in reply.
“You would lower yourself to treat with them,” the witch tells Sendroth. Her champion. Her reason for being. And it’s nothing like love. Not handsome Sendra come to win the heart of Ilmoth Elder. It’s that without him there’s no story. And without that …
“Wasn’t that always the plan, though?” Sendroth says.
“Make ourselves strong enough that they had to come to the fire and talk? To accept they couldn’t just keep pushing.
Hold to their own borders. Stop eating up the world a spoon at a time?
And look, here she is. Someone who understands what we’ve got here.
” And that doesn’t make sense either. How would word of their activities have reached Lannesite in time for some formal response like this?
No, Lyn came here after me, when I ran away from her.
And she walked into this, and is somehow making a far better job of it than I did.
Lyn tilts her gorget. The emblem there is one I can trace back to a rather menial shipboard liaison officer’s rank, suitably ornamented.
How does this impact with Ilmoth, who has access to all my scholarly nonsense, but none of the context to know it as nonsense.
The unspoken scaffolding my peers would have taken for granted, that allows it to hold up as any kind of coherent structure.
“My sister, Daimlesse Regent, has sent me into the world to undo some of the harm her ambitions have done,” Lyn says.
“Which harm I recognise. So let us talk.” A look, to me, assessing if they’ve harmed me.
“You, me, Sendroth, Nyrgoth. A parliament of magicians here in the Elder’s tower.
Surely, from this high place, we can find some perspective. ” Very elegant.
“But who’s the other one?” Sara says. “The little voice?”
Abruptly I need to talk to Sara, but it’s my turn to be ignored, and Ilmoth’s to speak.
Lyn has put forwards a proposal to appeal to wizards.
We four, we wise ones, we can find a compromise that mere regents and brigand chiefs cannot.
Works for me and also for Sendroth, it seems. No magician, barely a sorcerer, just the puppet of the witch.
But perhaps not the villain, either. A man whose life got ground between the gears of history, trying to fight back.
He and Lyn, standing as though it’s the pair of them—the regular, normal people of Sophos IV—opposing we mad wizards.
Except Ilmoth may or may not be mad, but she’s not a wizard.
She’s a vehicle for something else. Something demonic.
And, within that, she’s a woman of this world, and doesn’t think as a wizard might.
She knows only the way the myths go, and in the myths magicians are seldom rational creatures.