Everyone
Lyn
They had found the largest space possible, for Nyr’s laboratory.
It wasn’t a wizard’s tower, though Lyn reckoned he actually had more room here than he had in his abandoned home.
More, that was, until he’d moved in all the machines and parts he’d salvaged from the old building’s corpse.
Those parts, he’d explained to her, that hadn’t been too reliant on mediation from the tower’s guardian spirit—its operating system—which he had killed to save Lannesite.
An act of self-sacrifice and heroism that nobody there would even understand, let alone acknowledge.
Here he had a machine that could assist healing.
Here he had some of his archives, the data recovered from the cold banks where it lay, though Nyr said such retrieval seemed hardly worth the effort.
Here, too, he had such tools as he could save, that would allow him to analyse the world.
Which he was currently applying himself to.
Probably, she thought, so he didn’t have to talk to her.
Sara was here, too, helping him. One of the wizard’s two apprentices. The good one, people said. It fit a lot of stories, that Nyr should have a benevolent and a malign apprentice. It seemed decently mythic.
Was Ilmoth malign? Lyn studied the woman, wondering who she had been, before.
It wasn’t as though this part of the world was short of the displaced and desperate.
Lyn’s own sister was to blame for that, as much as anyone.
Who knew what Ilmoth would have been, and what the things would have been, had they not come together in such tumultuous times?
What Ilmoth was now, was Nyr’s shadow. Hungry, intent, learning everything he taught her.
She was the witch, and she would one day become greater than her master and overthrow him.
That was the narrative Nyr had gifted her.
A problem kicked into the future, but perhaps that future need never come.
Certainly, the Ilmoth that was building herself back up around that story hadn’t gone to cackling or cursing or evil, just that dreadfully intent study.
As though, if she understood enough of the universe, she would have the perspective to make herself a full person.
Lyn shivered. She didn’t like Ilmoth, and she didn’t like her daughter’s fate being intertwined with the woman’s.
But that was outside her power. Even Nyr said he couldn’t intervene in it.
There were drums outside, trumpets. It was time to be formal, and full, and adult, and put magic aside for a little while. After all, she had done the pragmatic thing. Made her own sacrifice.
“Nyr,” she said. “Are you coming to … bless the peace or something.”
“I don’t think,” he said, over his shoulder, “that the representatives of the Regent really want to see me here. Given this court wizard has moved courts. Only make things worse, don’t you think?”
And that was probably true, but she shifted and wrung her hands and couldn’t make herself go out there. The cord between her and the Elder pulled taut.
“Are you angry?”
He paused, and for a moment she thought he was going to deny knowing what she meant. A lie, but not one she’d call him on, and they’d just go on with it all unspoken between them.
“I have no right to be,” he said, very neutrally.
“And a wizard’s wisdom does not extend to such human things as who his friend marries.
” He looked up from his instruments at last, the glow of their screens paling his skin.
“Lyn, I love you, and that is a word that holds a thousand things, and neither your nor my language has the vocabulary for it. I will love you as a friend, and be the richer for it.”
“And with your wards down?” she prompted.
A wan smile. “They are.”
She turned to go—the sound of formality being assembled now had a definitely expectant air to it. She turned back.
“You never said I told you so. After Gorsaonnon…” The last time they’d been in this position, her about to wed.
Nyr regarded her for a long time. “I didn’t know anything, back then,” he said at last. “I was a fool and a bad friend. And Sendra isn’t Gorsaonnon. And this is politics, anyway. A subject about which anthropologists know less than they think.”
“And now?”
He smiled, very slightly. “And now I am still a little sad, but I will put it with all the other small sadnesses of life, and be happy for you.”
She embraced him, head against his chest, his bony arms around her, then went out to meet her sister.
Sendra
Not Daimlesse Regent, of course, who refused to travel out to Edmen for this travesty.
Cantiresse First Sister, though, the Regent’s right hand.
Here with pomp and ceremony and a sizable retinue to bear the Regent’s greetings to her sister.
Not merely sister in blood, now. Her sister, one regent to another.
Sendra found her profoundly intimidating, honestly. If he’d known this was what he’d be getting as a sister-in-law, he might have had second thoughts.
Lyn came out, at last, to stand beside him.
The youngest sister. The wild one. He’d heard all the stories now.
The girl who’d gone chasing wizards and fighting demons.
Nyr’s apprentice. The rebel, who was standing against Daimlesse Regent.
The confederation of Edmen, Minian, Brackish Way, Telm and a half-dozen other towns, united under Sendra.
Under Sendroth Sorcerer and Lynesse Regent, because they had a wizard and his witch apprentices and a dozen monsters to back them.
Power enough that Lannesite couldn’t just send its armies over the border.
A full stop to Daimlesse’s poisonous ambitions.
Daimlesse must be raging fit to explode.
Cantiresse First Sister’s face was calm, if cool.
Sendra had no idea if she was filled with resentment or glad that Lannesite’s destructive expansion was finally at an end.
He watched the handing over of sealed scrolls detailing goodwill, the formalising of boundaries and treaties, acknowledgements of the rights of the Coast folk and other third parties.
The tedious diplomacy of it all. Lyn walked through it, practised as anyone brought up at court.
Just as well one of them knew what they were doing.
He was aware of eyes on him, through the ceremony.
Oh, mostly people looked to Lyn and Cantiresse, but he’d spotted Kaille in the crowd, and probably there would be Blennardt, Irkon, others from his crew.
He would have a lot of old and crooked friends come tap him for favours now his big chair had found a home in an actual palace.
The new confederation was going to have a lot of poachers-turned-gamekeepers in its civil service.
Probably the actual unregenerate bandits would find it impossible to do business in, where every minor official knew how the game was played.
My job to keep them honest. Lyn’s to handle the upright and law-abiding people. Or law-making, like her sister.
The marriage between the two of them was pure convenience, he knew.
The people wouldn’t just accept one more daughter of Lannesite on the throne, whilst Lannesite wouldn’t have accepted him.
The pair of them together were just about tolerable to all concerned.
And yet Sendra looked sidelong at Lyn, now, and understood that his career of banditry had, at this late moment, delivered to him a jewel beyond all measure.
One he would work to be worthy of for the rest of his life.
Lyn
She hadn’t been looking to marry again. Certainly not to a brigand chief and sorcerer. But it had been the way that she’d seen, to put it all back in its box. A clash between sisters had started Lannesite’s campaign of border expansion. Now another such clash had ended it.
And he was no faithless gold-digger like Gorsaonnon.
Sometimes a brigand-sorcerer turned out to be an honest man, or close enough.
And Sara liked him. Even Nyr liked him a little.
It was enough. It solved a problem. It wasn’t the story she’d intended to be a part of, the princess and the bold bandit chieftain, but it would do.
She caught him looking at her, towards the end of all the ceremonial tedium. Unguarded, oddly vulnerable, and she found herself thinking, I can live with this. And clasped his hand, the calluses of sword and hard living there.
At the end of the business, it was for her and Cantiresse to embrace, sealing the peace and the treaties.
“Daimlesse is probably still breaking plates back in Lannesite Urban,” her sister said to her.
“She’s a grown-up,” Lyn murmured back. “She’ll get over it.”
Late that night, she passed by Nyr’s laboratory again, finding his uncanny lamps still burning there. He was deep in his researches by then, both his apprentices gone to bed, and most of the rest of the town just mopping up the dregs of celebration.
“It hasn’t killed you yet, then?” she said.
Nyr straightened from the lambent screen he had been reading from.
Nearby, just lying on one of the tables, was a hand-like thing.
Translucent, occluded, hard to look at. Incomplete.
He’d severed some fingers, examined some parts of it.
Nyr was trying to understand the familiars.
The devices that had given Ilmoth her second life as a witch.
The devices that spoke to one another like demons, that Sara had heard and invited.
That lived within Lyn’s daughter and whispered to her of arcane secrets even Nyr did not understand.
The dissection subject was one that Ilmoth had coaxed from within her.
The thing inhabiting Sara had not emerged.
Even the thought twisted Lyn’s guts. And yet Sara herself had already refused to even speak of giving it up, a child with a horrible new pet.
They tell me things, she had said. Special things.
And too much knowledge, already, in her child’s eyes.
The terrible understanding that Lyn’s daughter was going to become something other, greater, elder.
More than her mother, more than her teacher.
Nyr
And so it’s down to me, Doctor Nyrgoth, to give the prognosis.
I know that Lyn wants desperately for me to tell her it’s all going to be all right.
That I, the wise wizard, the clever scientist, understand everything.
That Sara can be unmade back into the girl she was.
A demon-ectomy, and everything put right.
I can’t tell her that. We’ve had enough of stories covering over things that aren’t there.
“Those parts of it I can actually study are … interesting,” I say. An understatement. “The mechanical elements, the principles behind them. Not something that’s arisen out of my technology, but yours.”
Lyn frowns. Her technology is steel-working, counterweights, the wheel. Then she gets it. “The … Ancients?” Her creation myth. Those who came from the stars in their long boats, bringing the seeds of people and animals and all things to the world …
“Those colonists went to many places. My own folk found plenty of worlds where human civilization had been cut loose to live or die. All fallen from their spacefaring roots, as you have here. Hence our rather patronising program of anthropological study.”
Lyn nods.
“But it’s been over a thousand years since that first wave of colonists.
A long time. A lot can happen.” I peer down at the partly dissected thing.
It still lives, I think. Just taking it apart and removing its organs hasn’t killed it, because a portion of it exists …
elsewhere. Invisible and intangible but interacting with the rest in a measurable way.
“I think,” I say, “that on one world they encountered something like our demon. Maybe the very same entity. Maybe there is only the one. But they met it and, instead of falling prey to it or destroying it, they did something I never dreamt of. They tamed it. They learned its principles, built a technology about it. Then they sent it out into the universe. Not … through space, as we travelled. Through that other medium, the demon’s place. Sent them here.”
“For what reason, though?” Lyn asks. “Is it an attack? They … didn’t seem to know.”
“They left their purpose behind,” I agree.
“I think their intent couldn’t survive so alien a journey.
Whatever the reason for these things, when they arrived they were just …
a bundle of potential. I’m sorry, Lyn. I can’t take it out of her.
It … won’t let me. Sara and Ilmoth are something more, now.
Something new. But it may be for the best.”
I wait for the anger. Justified, surely, at my dispassionate analysis. But she’s too much of a wizard herself; she understands me.
“Someone’s out there,” I say, and Lyn nods soberly. Picturing, perhaps, a tide of strange, hapless things materialising across the world. Empty of meaning, desperate for some engine to drive them. Latching on to any story that would justify their existence, just as Ilmoth did.
Or perhaps their makers will be next. Gods, true elders, anthropologists to look down on my people as we looked down on Lyn’s.
I have Lyn, the apprentice magician. I have Sendra, the sorcerer. I have Ilmoth and Sara, the witches with their familiars. We have our monsters, and these few tools salvaged from my dead tower.
I look into a future, and see a new age of magic, and this world will have need of wizards.