Interim Errantry 2: On Ordeal Page 11

  That was too easy.

  Rho was so tired. Is this just some kind of backlash from the expenditure the first time of so much energy? Am I trying to talk myself out of accepting my success? And Rho pushed the thought away.

  But it kept coming back.

  Surely this can’t be so, he thought, pushing the idea away again. Every wizard is the answer to a question. Today was my turn at last to be the answer to the question, and answer it I did.

  …But who asked it?

  Right there in the middle of the great concourse of the Crossings Rho stopped stock-still, oblivious to the traffic walking and gliding and crawling and humping and legging around him. The thought that had come to him was halfway to being sacrilegious, in wizardly terms.

  It was impossible for a wizard to work consciously with the Lost Aethyr.

  But unconsciously—

  ***

  “Rho!”

  The call from down the concourse went through him as if he’d touched an unshielded power source. He turned.

  Maybe a couple hundred paces further along the concourse, to his great surprise Rho saw the young Archaint woman Avseh coming toward him. She wasn’t alone, however. There were two of her.

  He was tired enough after his exertions that it actually took a few moments for him to grasp what he was seeing. One of her was dressed as he’d seen her. The other was dressed differently, in a sort of long loose robe in bright patterns, and her hair was styled in a different manner (curly and fluffy instead of longer and pulled back). But otherwise she had the same red-gold hair, the same small light build, the same delicate features. Her clone, of course. Her clone.

  They came hurrying to him together. Avseh was looking at him happily, her companion somewhat uncertainly and curiously. “Oh, this is wonderful, I hoped we’d catch you before you went somewhere else, I wanted so much to thank you—”

  “You thanked me already,” Rho said, nonplussed.

  But Avseh didn’t seem to be listening, particularly. “But this is her, I wanted her to meet you and thank you too, this is Mevseh!”

  “Greetings,” said Mevseh, in exactly her sister’s voice, though she sounded far more cautious.

  “I greet you as well,” Rho said. “Avseh, however did you come to find me here in this whole vast place? Obviously not by accident.”

  “The system logs the presence of any wizard who’s in the facility,” Avseh said. “I asked one of the gate staff to help me keep an eye out after you got me back together with Mev.” She laughed with an air of slight embarrassment. “And you know, when I was first in trouble I really should have tried that kind of thing first. Except, well, I always had this picture of wizards as really important types that people wouldn’t be allowed to just walk up and talk to…”

  “Hardly,” Rho said. “Did you go on to meet with the rest of your party?’

  “Yes, we did, we have a little while, though, they had to reschedule our departure for Mevesh. Some kind of operational problem going on with the gates. Seems there’s a lot of that going on today…”

  “Yes,” Rho said, “a certain amount of excitement.”

  “Come on, sit down, tell us,” Avseh said.

  “I shouldn’t stay very long: my parents will be looking for me,” Rho said; and it was true. It was wondrous, and a little unnerving, to have to have a care about what one said in the Speech, now that it had drawn enacture about itself and would no more permit itself to be used in even casual falsehoods.

  Nonetheless there was a seating area not far away, and Rho couldn’t find it in himself to be discourteous—not near the end of a day such as this had been. He allowed himself to be drawn over there, and this time Avseh got him a water of the kind he’d drunk before, and the same kind of pink drink she’d had before, for both herself and her clone-sister.

  They sat there chatting for a little while, inconsequentially enough as it first seemed: about their reunion with the rest of their clone-group, news of the ongoing mass migration and the sudden turn of events that would make it unnecessary, strange and funny things they’d noticed in the Crossings between there and here now that they had leisure to see the area without being in fear for one another or the rest of their party. But Rho found himself first looking attentively into both their pairs of eyes, and then, strangely, finding that he was having trouble doing so. It was as if more attention than possible for just two people was being bent on him. And the two voices, too, were so alike. He was reminded of the many voices associated with the Aethyr, all of them sounding like him. But for some reason the reminder made him increasingly uncomfortable…

  But Avseh was talking. “So you found me and sent me off and then—it seemed like just a few hours later everything had changed! There was so much about it on the news, it was all confused, but… was that you?”

  Mevseh looked surprised. “They said that the planets’ wizards had found a solution and fixed the star—”

  “No one said anything about someone being involved except the people back home that we already knew about—”

  “It did seem much better when I left it,” Rho said. It was right, of course, to be cautious. “This, though, the events to come must yet prove.”

  “What happened, though?”

  The desire to not discuss any of this that now rose up in him was surprising. Even yesterday, if someone had said to Rho Tomorrow you’ll be a wizard and will help stop a star from flaring!, he’d have said he’d be ready right now to shout the news from the top of any available structure. But now Rho felt peculiarly exposed somehow.

  “It’s not easy to explain,” he said, and thank the Aethyrs, that was true. Rho spoke for a little about the politics of it, the business of getting the governments’ approval and so forth: material that he was sure would turn up on the newsfeeds in a matter of weeks if not days, as (inevitably) the nonwizardly contributors to the process tried to take as much as possible of the credit for the operation to themselves. Avseh seemed to be finding this boring—which struck him as sensible, as Aethyrs knew he’d found it so—but Mevseh seemed now to be hanging on Rho’s every word.

  This too he’d seen before at home: people who would attend a public or royal fixture and gaze at Rho as if the universe’s secrets were coded into his pores. Sometimes the attraction turned out to be merely physical, which he found unnerving. Because how in the worlds could anyone be interested in you that way without even slightly knowing your mind? Sometimes it was political—people looking to curry favor with his parents through him—and it was an indicator of how disordered this whole business was that Rho found the attention of the “political animals” more natural and acceptable than the merely physical connection. And who knows what it even means when an alien’s attention is fixed on you this narrowly? Their whole psychology, it has to be different, how can one predict how to protect oneself, no telling what it means—

  Except by using wizardry. And that I really do not want to do right now…!

  Rho snapped back into the moment and wondered with vague horror how much either of them might have noticed how much he hadn’t been in it. That feeling of exposure kept getting stronger, and it was a challenge not to make an excuse and leap out of his seat and be gone. “…But you’re not always doing spells and magic, surely!” Mevseh was saying. “What do you do?”

  “‘Do?’”

  “Your, I don’t know, work? When you’re not out wizarding, or whatever you call what you do. I mean, everybody knows wizards can’t just make themselves rich, it’s against the rules, so you have a job, I’m guessing?”

  It wasn’t a question Rho was used to being asked at home—not least because everyone on the planet knew who he was and what he did. It therefore took a moment to find an answer that was both true (since they were working in the Speech) and wouldn’t get him in trouble. “We call it being on errantry,” he said. “And at home I work with my mother and father in the family business.”

  “Sounds boring,” said Avseh.

&n
bsp; “Too often it is,” Rho said. “Desperately.”

  He allowed himself to fidget a bit, with purpose. Quite shortly I could make that excuse I was considering. What time would it even be in Sunplace right now? Were his parents up? They would check his rooms and wonder where he’d gone—

  “Why would you even want to stay home when you could be doing all these exciting things?” Mevseh said.

  Rho looked at her in some surprise, partly because he’d just realized something. Why, when she first greeted me, did something so neutral and Wellakhit come out of my mouth in response? Why didn’t it feel right to say dai stiho to her?

  But he was so worn out, and he was in a strange place, and nothing was going as expected today; why should this be any different? It’s not as if she was some unknown cousin and I slighted her. Rho sighed at himself. Once I thought wizardry would answer all the questions. Instead I get ever so many more…

  And something in the back of his mind whispered: …not a cousin… It was so faint a whisper he almost missed it; more like an echo than anything else.

  Rho didn’t know what to make of that. He was distracted. Because, strangely, the question she’d asked was one he’d asked himself.

  “I wouldn’t say it hasn’t occurred, sometimes,” he said. “My father would say, the turf is always browner on the other side… And a lot of what a wizard does won’t usually be exciting, or dangerous. It won’t have the kind of effect that makes people praise you. Mostly it’s about researching things, and working out what’s right to do, and then building the spell to do it. Having the world work shouldn’t be a high-profile business. Too much attention on you instead of the work just gets distracting…”

  “You’re right, it really does sound boring,” Avseh said, sipping her drink and looking down the concourse.

  Mevseh met Rho’s gaze again. “But what you did,” she said, “that means we won’t have to emigrate at all. We won’t have to lose our home, lose our whole world! We can go back after the power networks come back up and they fix the things that broke while the sun was being healed. You did that. And that was absolutely amazing!”

  The sudden memory of arms thrust elbow-deep into starstuff, holding Peklimut in place while he and the other wizards kept it from going into self-destruct mode, thrilled once more down Rho’s spine. Yes. Yes, it was amazing! If only all of wizardly life could be like that; on the edge, every breath a Challenge resolved, every moment vital! But that’s not the way of things, is it? Even from watching his parents, Rho knew that.

  “It worked out well for everyone involved,” Rho said, rubbing at his eyes. So tired… But don’t be rude. “Better than expected, in fact. That’s hardly a bad result.”

  “But why shouldn’t you want there to be more results like that?” Mevseh was looking at him as if it wasn’t just his dreams at stake here, but other people’s. “Why would you want to just have things keep on being the way they always have been? Why shouldn’t your whole life be like it was just now? Because it could!”

  Rho hardly knew what to do with such a question. And his first answer, the truthful answer, would have been, Probably not.

  Because too clearly Rho could see what would happen to him next. He would go home, and his mother and father would celebrate with him, yes: and many Wellakhit people would be glad for him, and many others would be annoyed because their plans for how various factions in the government would interact with the royal family would now have to be adjusted. And beyond that… matters would stay largely as they always had. Sunlords tended to be stay-at-homes. And except for infrequent out-of-system business, Guarantors tended to stay settled within the circle of their world around its star. He would be expected to do the same…

  It came as a surprise to Rho how long he must have been trying to avoid thinking about this. Yet here was the truth of how it would go, utterly at odds with all his childhood dreams of excitement and adventure. “I imagine,” Rho said finally, “that kind of life would get kind of tiring after a while.”

  But Mevseh was alight with excitement at what she apparently considered Rho’s prospects. “What? Why? It’s just a shame. You could do this kind of thing for a long time, for years, and think how many worlds would thank you! So many. Way more than would ever even hear about you if you just stayed home with your family!”

  Rho studied his drink and said nothing for some moments. Life without his family? What would that even be like?

  But still…

  The thought had come to him occasionally before, and now it rose up in new strength. To get away, out of the weary old frame of reference and never again to have to live up to anyone’s expectations. No one following him, forcing him into proper behavior, keeping him on a single planet against his will. Nor would finances necessarily be a problem. If he chose to go freelance as a wizard—which some did—he could move freely and at will from planet to planet, and people who needed his wizardry anywhere he went would feed him, clothe him, give him a place to live. He was entirely within his rights to take his Art and go where he liked with it, making his own way. Unless and until the Aethyrs specifically sent one on errantry, how one used the power from day to day was one’s own business.

  Strange that this idea never really came up for me before, Rho thought. The “paladin” mode of errantry—the lifestyle of the wizards who chose to operate without a circle of friends and family around them, without a home, without anything but the Aethyrs’ support—isolate, untethered, certainly heroic but essentially lonely— It had never particularly commended itself to him. But now—

  Rho stared into his drink while Avseh gazed out at the concourse and Mevseh watched him, though he was only slightly aware of her scrutiny right now. The width of the vista that had opened out before him was dazzling. When he’d first become aware as a tiny child that his parents were wizards, that alone had made them like gods to him. They talked to gods, after all; the Powers that had made the worlds and kept them running gave his mother and father missions, sent them places. Though mostly only places on Wellakh, he thought. At the time Rho hadn’t thought anything of that. Now he was wondering why this particular realization had been so long in arriving.

  And what Rho had always wanted from his parents, in the way of stories, was tales of the distant worlds: the places that he heard about in the newsfeeds and in reference works at his lessons, the far-off places with strange alien names, inhabited by astounding, unbelievable beings. His mother and father had told him these stories gladly enough, but there’d always been a sense of underlying—not exactly impatience, but a kind of resignation. Under it Rho could just hear them thinking: He’ll get over it, get past it, when he gets older and comes to understand. Our work, our lives, are here.

  But it doesn’t have to be that way for me, now, Rho thought in a tentatively joyous daze. I could go elsewhere, be otherwise.

  Because he was free. He was a wizard and could do as he pleased. By ordainment of the Aethyrs this very day he was free: of Wellakh, of other’s expectations, that for so long had felt like an unliftable weight around his neck.

  And if Rho went home now and said, “My calling leads me elsewhere,” both parents and planet would have no choice but to respect his choice. His royal father and noble mother would be heartbroken at first, yes, but eventually they’d find someone else on whom to settle the Great Watch over the Sun. After all there are hundreds of our clan scattered around the world, and many of them are wizards. There have to be at least some of them who’d be far better suited to this work than I am.

  Rho took a long breath, let it out. It was strange to so suddenly, and for the first time, feel his soul beating against the bars of the cage.

  Or rather, it had been beating so for a long time… but hopelessly. Now there was hope!

  You could go, his imagination said to him. You could go right now.

  Rho sucked in an involuntary breath at the truth of the idea, and the audacity of it.

  You should go. Don’t let anything slow
you down. There’s no reason even to go back. Anything you need on the road, you can purchase it, or it will be given you.

  Staggering as the concept was, Rho heard it in his head in the Speech and knew it to be true. It was as if all the unfulfilled longings and desires of a difficult childhood and youth were speaking to him at once. Wild and wide and shining the prospect stretched out before him in imagination: journeying the worlds at will, going where his heart took him… facing down the Lost Aethyr in a thousand venues, a thousand forms, never the same battle twice. Losing sometimes, winning sometimes, it wouldn’t matter which. Finding his own path, instead of following anyone else’s…

  The hunger for the mere possibility was for some moments nearly unbearable… the thought of a life outside of the trap he had been born into. To leave that half-scorched world and never come back! It had never been possible before, and so as a boy he had wasted no time dwelling on the desire to escape, because there was no way. He had been held planetbound by his powerlessness, by his duty to his House, by his love for his royal father and his lady mother. But now… now.

  Now it could be otherwise. He could have a life in which which people would praise him not in hopes of advancement or political power, but because they valued him; not just for what he was what he represented or what he had been born into, but what he did—

  Somewhere down inside Rho, a resonance thrummed softly, like a plucked string.

  Trapped, Rho thought. When was I thinking about that recently…?

  For all that he had just been drinking, his mouth started to go dry. And who heard me thinking?

  “Sorry,” Rho said, realizing with embarrassment how long his companions must have been waiting for him to say something. He looked up and saw Mevseh’s gaze resting on him, patient, curious, waiting.

  All at once Rho realized just who was looking at him and waiting to see what he would do.