Interim Errantry 2: On Ordeal Page 5

  Rho closed his eyes against the light for a moment, hearing in memory fragments of past years’ discussions about the Aethyrs. Rho started out knowing about them what most Wellakhit knew: the Aethyrs worked the will of the Most Central One on the worlds. They were many, and They had many roles. The average Wellakhit in the street honored them in a vaguely affectionate way without paying Them much more attention than that. Some liked to go out to the big temples and acknowledge Them there; some people built little shrines on their property or even inside their houses.

  Rho’s father laughed softly about that sometimes. “As if one can pen the Powers up like a thaelth in the back yard or by the kitchen stove,” he’d say under his breath, “to keep the night-thieves out.” But then his lady mother would laugh at her royal consort in that You’re-not-fooling-me way she had, and say, “Oh, the way you don’t have them in the shrine out back.”

  “It’s not as if they’re actually there, Miril.”

  “Except insofar as they’re everywhere, since as They inevitably interpenetrate lower-dimensional spaces—”

  “Yes, well, but I don’t go out there and have little chats with Them about politics or the ever-declining state of public discourse!”

  “No, you do that hanging over the terrace-walls at Sunplace, don’t think I haven’t heard you!”

  And off they would go, fighting—or it could have been mistaken for fighting—but always somehow in good cheer about it. And Rho was always cheered, too, to hear them. No matter what else bothers them about their lives, he would think, no matter what else might go wrong in their lives, at least they’re not alone.

  That was a thought that did come back to haunt Rho sometimes. It was a terrible thing to be alone. Sometimes he hated thinking about the future at all, because from early indications—particularly the reactions of his yearsmates at lessons, or even among the younger members of the wizardly det Nuiiliat clans—friendship seemed to be a thing that happened to other people. The thought that Rho would have to do what his parents did, but do it all by himself, without anyone to share the work with and watch his back—that was hard.

  He blinked his eyes open again in the face of the growing light. Still. This is going to be my job. If I have to learn to do it with nothing but the simulator… This too he hated thinking about. The thing was a crude mechanical aid without any elegance or subtlety, suitable only for teaching the nonwizardly how to manage a star. Thahit deserved something better, a wizard who could talk to it and be heard—badly-behaved body though it might be. But what it was going to get as Sunlord in Rho’s time was someone who could communicate with it only through a machine, and only get it to change its behavior by force instead of the persuasion of the Speech enabled by full enacture.

  Not the way it will be, though, he thought rather sadly. Truly I am sorry about that, you bad-tempered ball of plasma. And it was strange, because he genuinely did feel sorry for once, instead of frustrated or angry. Probably it’s shock, Rho thought. Stupid day that it’s been.

  He straightened up and regarded the horizon, which was growing more dazzling every second. Strange, in a moment when he seemed to have finally given up some hope he’d been holding onto out of sheer stubbornness, to somehow feel a bit better than he had. I’m so tired, he thought. But no matter. And as if his father was there with him, he said the words, because it didn’t matter if he was mostly useless at what he’d been born to do: they weren’t.

  “Here we see the fire at the heart,” Rho murmured, “bodying forth Your service and Your art. In such wise You who made it body forth the Fire at the heart of That from which you proceeded. Let our endeavors to tend this star look in fellowship toward Yours, as Yours look toward the One’s: workers together we, in the same art, from the lesser to the greater. And so we say, as laborers to one another: Go well, work well, and keep hearts up!”

  With that, as if in response, the blinding edge of the Sun came up over the edge of the world, and everything around Rho from here to the horizon made a leap into brilliance and new clarity. Rho’s eyes watered and he turned away and stifled a yawn, feeling suddenly exhausted.

  All right, ready to collapse for a bit now, he thought, and made his way through one of the glass doors that stood open, into his rooms.

  ***

  After the cool elegance of the city house, Rho was always glad to get back into the fussy coziness of his own space… though it hadn’t always looked like it did now.

  There had been a time when he’d just started his first public lessons, and overheard some of his agemates whispering about what he must have in his house and how a Sunborn must live: precious metals and costly jewels scattered around like trash, delicate and expensive foods to eat, the spoils of unthinking privilege. He tried to tell them more than once how it really was, but they weren’t interested in hearing. Their fantasies were more entertaining to them than any truth he could tell.

  So Rho had gone home and gradually began to turn his quarters into something quite different from the relatively sparsely-furnished space it had once been, rather like his parents’. His excuse (when his mother and father asked him what was going on) was that he was interested in the old Demosh architectural and artistic style featured in the Great Room… but he was careful not to answer such queries in the Speech, when one or the other of them would chance to be using it in language-of-discourse mode (as numerous Wellakhit did). Even though such usage didn’t bind him to truth, as it did a wizard, it was so much easier to hear the lie that there was hardly any point in speaking at all.

  Over time Rho’s rooms had become furnished in all the kinds of things the public-lessons students accused him of having—richly decorated walls, ornate couches and divans and chairs halfway to being thrones, draperies stiff with embroidery in precious metals, lamps shining through jeweled shades, everything a blaze of clashing colors. It was an exercise in bad taste (so his father had said), and Rho knew it, but refused to admit it. His rooms were a secret poke in the eye to those who’d refused to listen to him. And over time, even though the old anger died away, he got used to the look of the place and refused to change it.

  Cost, of course, had never been an issue. Anything the Sunborn asked for was always given them. But Rho’s mother would walk in, look around at the place, sigh deeply, and walk out again without offering an opinion. There was, nonetheless, no way to misunderstand her meaning, as his mother always had an opinion.

  Rho shut the terrace door behind him and waved the glass of all the doors dark; then spoke the names of a few of the lamps, and the room’s programming turned them on and dimmed them down. At the back of this high-ceilinged space was a long broad couch that he favored when he was too lazy or weary to go properly to bed. Rho dropped his satchel nearby, pulled off his outer robe, threw it over a convenient chair, and flopped down on the couch.

  For a few moments he just stretched and savored the feeling of being off his feet and out of anyone’s view, free to do nothing and not be expected to seem any particular way. “Down here,” he said to the small reading lamp that hung over the head end of his couch. Obligingly it levitated down on its little impeller and hovered where he wanted it, while Rho felt around under the couch for the adventure-tale codex he had left there half-read last night.

  He found it, rolled over on his back, and pulled the codex open. Yawning, he tapped the top of the right-hand scroll handle, instructing the scroll’s surface to display again the last portion of text that had displayed. It always took a few moments to do this, and such was Rho’s weariness that his arms felt tired from just these few moments of holding it up. He lowered it to his chest and rested it there, waiting for the right section to display.

  And as he was about to lift it up and start reading again, someone said in his ear: “Will you serve?”

  ***

  Rho’s eyes snapped open and his whole body went taut with fear as his head jerked sideways to see who’d managed to get into his rooms without tripping any of the alarms. But the
room was empty except for its proper furnishings, and most specifically there was no one standing or crouching by the head of his couch, where they would have had to be to speak so quietly and intimately to him and yet be heard.

  Rho stared up at the elaborately decorated ceiling, vague in the dimness and high enough above him that its details ran together in this light. No voice, then. Just a trick of the body, one of those snatches of weary-brain babble you caught sometimes when startling awake before falling fully asleep at last.

  Sighing, Rho let his head fall back against the couch’s head-cushion. Just fatigue, he thought. But then, such a long day… And as if on cue, back came the image of his mother standing across the road with her shopping, reaching for the handplate of the postern door.

  Rho squeezed his eyes shut and pushed the image away. It’s not as if you have not known for years that these things happen to the ruling Sunborn. And that your mother is a wizard, one of the most powerful on the planet. She has walked away safe and sound from far worse attempts in the past. It will take more than a few disaffected types with hand weapons to kill her.

  But this truth was no particular consolation, because it suggested another—one that here in the shadows and the quiet, by himself, there was no avoiding. Even the most careful and powerful wizards could make a mistake, or have an accident. And even without accidents or errors, all wizards die.

  Rho’s throat had gone tight. He swallowed against the lump there, but it didn’t help. One way or another, some day the two of them will be gone. And I’ll be left spending the rest of my life handling Thahit with nothing but that machine.

  Rho swallowed again, for this was the truth he hated more than anything to be forced to admit. There was no chance for him ever to be able to do what his parents did—slide into rapport with the star, hear it think, feel his small heart and that great one beat as one. The great joy of his mother’s and father’s lives, the experience that made all the work and the danger worthwhile, would never be his. There was even a phrase to describe the likes of him, though he’d never heard either parent speak it and felt sure he never would: ket mawhir, “under cloud.” It was used for one between the Sun and whom there lay a barrier—the impenetrability of uncooperative flesh, or of a spirit that had not been given the tools to do the work that would otherwise have been expected of it.

  Rho sighed. Ket mawhir Sunlords who held down the position for more than a decade or two were the exception rather than the rule. Routinely they resigned, or were pushed out of their duties on Sunwatch by vote of the massed det Nuiiliat clans. Or if they were too politically powerful to get rid of, they would cling on to their positions until they died young of overwork, worn out by the stresses of trying to manage so difficult a star with nothing but a mechanism.

  And if that happens to me, well, at least it’ll be the end of people looking at me as if they’re sorry for me. He’d been putting up with that kind of thing for long enough. If you were in the Sunlords’ line and you weren’t a wizard, the assumption was that the Aethyrs felt there was something possibly psychologically or morally wrong with you: some way you fell short, some way you would fail. Or some way you’ll get something catastrophically wrong when you’re working with Thahit, Rho thought, dropping the codex he’d been holding to the floor beside the couch. And if that was true, who could blame them? Wellakh’s had enough of that.

  So just stop resisting what is going to happen. It’s time it stopped hurting so much.

  …Except that it won’t stop. Doesn’t stop. “And who do I think I’m fooling?” he muttered.

  Whom, said the voice by his ear.

  This time he was less taken by surprise. He turned his head and saw nothing, but at the moment Rho found himself untroubled. He’d managed to fall asleep, he assumed, for real this time, and was dreaming. Because why else would someone invisible be correcting his grammar as if they were his mother? “You’ll be telling me I should be speaking Kings’-speech next,” he said.

  And why not? It is how a Sunlord signals to his people that they are dealing with royalty.

  “My people are not here, though,” Rho said to whatever spoke in his ear. “And since here I lie in the prince’s quarters in Sunplace, that’s surely a hint that I am royalty.”

  Except in one respect.

  Rho tilted his head against the cushion in agreement. “Not holding the world’s rule at the moment,” he said, “or in charge of the Sunwatch, no.”

  But some day.

  “If the Aethyrs please,” Rho said, closing his eyes and not much caring at the moment whether they pleased or not, or ever would. “Don’t know why they would, though, because I’m not likely to be as good a king as my father, or even my noble grandsire. It doesn’t matter how smart I am, or how good I am with the simulator and the rest of the machinery. I can’t feel Thahit, learn his moods from the inside… derail them before they get serious.”

  Yet you’re still able to intervene.

  “Mechanically, yes. Well, why would I not? What else am I good for? My father’s spent so much time on me, I may as well do my best at looking after Thahit until someone better suited to the Watch comes along.” Rho yawned.

  And you would see that happen without ill will?

  “Well, yes! Whether it’s me or someone else, Thahit needs watching,” Rho said. “For our people’s sake. And the world’s.”

  He frowned. “…And its own! Even if there wasn’t an inhabited world at stake, who leaves an unstable star to its own devices? Why should it die early? It has its own way of being. Let it have that for as long as it may.” That was something his father had said to him only occasionally when he was younger, but it had struck Rho as both deeply important and profoundly sensible—maybe the most important thing about the whole idea of the Sunwatch. Too many Wellakhit talked about the Sun as if it was an enemy out to get them, and that had always struck Rho as unfair. But then he was also used to people assuming things about him that weren’t so.

  Even if that other person is a wizard, as you are not.

  Rho opened his eyes enough to gaze up at the intricate designs of the ceiling, near-invisible in the gloom. “If they’re better at this than I am, and better for Thahit, why not?” He let out a tired breath. “If that person can be friendly with our star, can keep him company as well as keep him right, then let it be so. And I wish them well of it.”

  He closed his eyes again. “Company,” Rho heard himself saying very softly, “would be quite marvelous. And a friend, beyond any miracle.” Which wasn’t the kind of thing that Rho would normally say to anyone alive, but all this was unreal enough to absolve him of any concern.

  Nor did the unreality appear about to cease. Companionship, said that oddly intimate voice, comes in many forms. And the price demanded for it may be high. Are you prepared to be put in the Lost One’s way?

  “What,” Rho said, starting to weary of this, “the Lost Aethyr? For the most Central’s sake, where am I now? Not that every time Thahit rises we’re not all put in Its way somewhat! But judging by how my life’s gone so far, It’s been busy with me for twenty sunrounds or so without even paying much attention.”

  And something occurred to him: Except, possibly, today—

  For some moments there was silence. Finally Rho realized his odd interlocutor was waiting for an answer. There he lay, seeing in his mind’s eye his mother standing on the path across the road from the park, putting her hand on the doorplate—

  “But yes,” Rho said. “Yes.”

  Then speak the words.

  He could hear his heart starting to pound. “Which words?”

  The Avowal.

  Rho knew the words. Of course he knew them. He had been hearing his parents speak them at regular intervals since he was a tiny child. Often enough when he was too young to know any better, he’d thought, I will say the words and become a wizard. But of course nothing happened. As he got older, though he’d found again and again that saying the words made no difference, noneth
eless every now and then he would go somewhere quiet, someplace he knew he couldn’t be heard, and repeat them one more time… because you never could tell. Perhaps this time the Aethyrs would grant his heart’s desire. It never happened, of course. But you never gave up, either.

  Until lately, anyway…

  And now here Rho was, lying on his couch—where he’d said the words who knew how many times before without effect—and it all just seemed funny, let his heart hammer away as it liked. “Fine,” he said. “Why not?”

  He meant then to just rattle it all off as if it wasn’t important, didn’t mean anything. But it did mean something. It meant everything.

  Rho took a long breath and said the words.

  “As the Fire that rules our lives lies at the center of our worlds, so the Life that rules all fires lies within them and beyond; and to that Life I this avow, to use the Gift it offers on its behalf alone, in its service and no other’s. As the Fire warms life to growth, that burgeoning is my business; what the Fire burns, causing pain, that anguish will I ease. What grows well I will maintain, never changing what’s not threatened. Till the last Fire dies in darkness, so long my Art I’ll wield in the cause of That which made it and which calls us to the battle, rank on rank among the Aethyrs here and now and ever more!”

  Rho stopped and waited…

  And instantly felt like an idiot. No thunderclap, no triumphal chorus of otherworldly voices; in fact, none of the results he’d imagined since he was old enough to be let out in public in full-length robes without absorptive undergarments. Well, what did I expect?

  And even the invisible source of the voice in his ear seemed to have gone off somewhere else. There was this at least: he wasn’t awake, there was no chance anyone could have heard him making a fool of himself.

  Fine, Rho thought. Fine. Still tired. Back to sleep.

  He closed his eyes, again, too tired to even mock himself any further, and let it all go.

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