Nyr #2
“No,” she says. “Sendroth. We do not talk. We do not compromise. We have the tower. We shall have the satellite.” Hammering alien words into her sentences, for where the local tongue won’t stretch. “Talking is for when they have some threat to hold over us. We’ve won, Sendra. We have them.”
“The whole of Lannesite—” he starts, and she cuts him off.
“We can destroy it. Cast down the walls. Make the Regent kneel. Exterminate her whole line and have you on the throne.” Fierce, her hands clutching at the air and the future, her eyes wide.
“Isn’t that what you want, for what they took from you?
We can do it. Not just a handful of old monsters.
An army, a plague of them! We can have the world, Sendra.
” Begging him to see what she sees. And, when I should find her ambition hideous, her vainglory terrifying, instead I see something piteous in her.
Because she wants it for him. She doesn’t want to be the witch-queen of Sophos IV, the power behind the puppet throne.
She wants him to get what she things he wants. Not for love, but because …
Because without him she is an empty vessel, sans purpose or reason.
Under cover of all that, I manage to speak to Sara’s necklace. Show me where you hear the little voice.
Her eyes go wide but I’m the only one looking at her.
Sendroth Sorcerer is shaking his head, saying “That’s …
too much.” A look from him to Lyn, a connection between them.
The sane ones, in this little room in my tower.
The thread that leads back to a regular, comprehensible world that’s not on fire.
“Just put them back in their borders. Teach them they can’t just trample the world… ”
Here, Sara shows me. And she’s a good student.
And—I find—a child. Meaning she doesn’t approach things like I might, or even Lyn.
She’s tracked dozens of little moments of signal.
All the intrusions of the thing within Ilmoth.
She’s trying to put them together as though they’re some sort of continuous sentence.
No, I tell her, because to me it’s monstrous. It’s the demon, prying open a way back into our world. But to Sara it’s a puzzle and she keeps trying to line all the pieces up. It’s talking to me, she tells me, and I tell her Do not listen and know she can’t help but open her ears to it. Her mind.
Sara, no. And Lyn is focused on the adults talking, and Sendroth knows nothing of it, and Ilmoth … is the source of these signals, which she sends out into the world like familiars, and doesn’t know she’s doing it.
“And would they stay there?” Ilmoth demands of her sorcerer.
“How long, before the Regent raises an army, finds another wizard, comes for you? You have to destroy them, Sendra. You have to rule.” Because that’s what the sorcerer does.
It’s what Ulmoth would have done, a hundred years before, had I let him.
The logic of these things, ruts in history ready for each new generation to be driven down. The way these things are told.
Sara shows me what she’s found in the gaps between. I expect a signal: numbers, the complexities of machines to machines, but it’s not that. A piecemeal thing that doesn’t add up to a whole voice until you take all its distributed parts and put them together.
Hello? I send into that reconstructed channel, wondering if I will receive a blast of demon-noise, the electromagnetic equivalent of its hideous mark, of its impossible physics. What am I speaking to?
And the voice, coming back to me in my own language, in the slightly stilted and prissy tones of my own studies and reports, To whom are you speaking?
What are you? I press, and the answer returns to me, What am I?
I, the Elder, the wizard, the scientist, shiver, meeting Sara’s eyes across the room. She’s smiling, like it’s a game.
Sendroth says, “She has a way this can work. She can bind Lannesite,” and Ilmoth shoots back, “No, she can only help Lannesite bind you,” and I want to raise a hand for silence, get them all to shut up so I can work out just what Sara’s led me to.
But Ilmoth is loud with rage, and I understand she’s loud because the space inside her is hollow.
It resounds with the sound and fury of her, and signifies? Signifies nothing.
The demon never spoke. Or, rather, I heard its voice but the voice was alien.
Not just a different language but a line of communication that admitted to no concepts or principles I could understand.
This is … echo, obviously. But as though an echo was trying to speak.
Tell me about yourself, I say, and I tell you about myself it replies.
Linguistically correct, but iteration, not repetition.
Lyn says, “My sister will listen. Because of the power you have here. And because she is already starting to realise that the answer to dissent is not simply more force. That all you get, if you take violent control of your neighbours, are more neighbours who like you less. And because I will stand with Sendroth, in this.”
I lose the tenuous thread of the connection. “What?” I demand, and “What?” Ilmoth says, and “What?” Sendroth himself asks.
“A sister’s betrayal started this,” Lyn says.
“Set Daimlesse on this path. Let it be the same to end it. The towns you took, Sendra—evicted my sister’s client headmen from—they didn’t just follow you because you had followers with swords.
They were waiting for someone to give them an option that wasn’t imposed on them by Lannesite. They’d follow you still.”
“They might,” he allows. “If I offer them more than Lannesite did. Which isn’t hard. And if they believe I can win.”
“Then I will help you,” Lyn tells him. “Because I’m sick of it. It has to stop. And so I’m stopping it.”
“No!” Ilmoth says. “This isn’t how it goes!” Furious, scrabbling at the shifting shape of the situation. “Sendra, you can’t. You have to bring war, that’s how it has to be. The monsters, the fighting!”
“The defeat,” he finishes for her. “Ulmoth, all the others, defeated. Battles and deaths, and none of it ever worked.”
“But that’s the way!” Ilmoth shouts at him, and then, “Does it matter, if you can destroy Lannesite first? I can give you Lannesite. You can destroy it now!”
And in that instant she’s finally loosened the knot she’s been working on, since she came to the tower.
I feel the contact with my satellite flare into being.
Her voice here, transmitting to up there.
Not to call out to Earth, because there are light years and no guarantee anyone’s listening.
But the satellite itself is a weapon. The sword with which I killed the demon, now in the hands of Ilmoth.
“Lannesite,” she tells Sendra, “will burn.”