Authors: Scott Lynch
Locke smiled thinly and nibbled a biscuit.
“The very first identity that we accept and recognize as
us
, that’s what becomes the red name. When we grow from the raw instincts of infancy
and discover that we exist, conscious and separate from the things around us. Most
of us acquire red names from what our parents whisper to us, over and over, until
we learn to repeat it in our own thoughts.”
“Huh,” said Locke. An instant later, he spat crumbs. “Holy shit. You know the Falconer’s
true name because you gave it to him!”
“I tried to avoid it,” said Patience. “Oh, I tried. But I was lying to myself. You
can’t love a baby and not give him a name. If my husband had lived, he would have
given the Falconer a secret name. That was the procedure … other magi might have intervened,
would have if I hadn’t deceived them. I wasn’t thinking straight. I needed that private
bond with my boy so desperately … and, inevitably, I named him.”
“He resented you for it,” said Jean.
“A mage’s deepest secret,” said Patience. “Never shared, not between masters and students,
closest friends, even husbands and wives. A mage who learns another mage’s true name
wields absolute power over them. My son has bitterly resented me since the moment
he realized what I held over him, whether or not I ever chose to use it.”
“Crooked Warden,” said Locke. “I guess I should be able to find it in my heart to
have some sympathy for the poor bastard. But I can’t. I sure as hell wish you’d had
a normal son.”
“I think I’ve said enough for the time being.” Patience moved away from the taffrail
and turned her back to Locke and Jean. “You two rest. We can dispose of any further
questions when you awake.”
“I could sleep,” admitted Locke. “For seven or eight years, I think. Have someone
kick the door in at the end of the month if I’m not out yet. And Patience … I guess …
I am sorry for—”
“You’re a curious man, Master Lamora. You bite on reflex, and then your conscience
bites you. Have you ever wondered where you might have acquired such contradictory
strains of character?”
“I don’t repent anything I said, Patience, but I do occasionally remember to try and
be civil after the fact.”
“As you said, I’m not dragging you to Karthain to be anyone’s friend. Least of all
mine. Go take some rest. We’ll talk after.”
JEAN HADN
’
T
realized just how exhausted the long night had left him, and after settling into
his hammock he tumbled into the sort of sleep that squashed awareness as thoroughly
as a few hundred pounds of bricks dropped on the head.
He woke, groggy and disoriented, to the smell of baked meat and crisp lake air. Locke
was sitting at a smaller version of the makeshift table on which he’d been subjected
to the cleansing ritual, hard at work on another small mountain of ship’s fare.
“Nnngh.” Jean rolled to his feet and heard his joints creak and pop. His bruises from
the encounter with Cortessa would smart for a few days, but bruises were bruises.
He’d had them before. “What’s the time?”
“Fifth hour of the afternoon,” said Locke around a mouthful of food. “We should be
in Karthain just before dawn, they say.”
Jean yawned, rubbed his eyes, and considered the scene. Locke was dressed in loose
clean slops, evidently chosen from an open chest of clothing set against the bulkhead
behind him.
“How do you feel, Locke?”
“Bloody hungry.” He wiped his lips against the back of his hand and took a swig of
water. “This is worse than Vel Virazzo. Wherever we go, I seem to get thinner and
thinner.”
“I’d have thought you’d still be sleeping.”
“I had a will for it, but my stomach wouldn’t be put off. You, if you’ll forgive me,
look like a man desperately in search of coffee.”
“I don’t smell any. Suppose you drank it all?”
“Come now, even I’m not that much of a scoundrel. Never was any aboard. Seems Patience
is big on tea.”
“Damn. Tea’s no good for waking up civilized.”
“What’s boiling in that muddled brain of yours?”
“I suppose I’m bemused.” Jean took one of the two empty chairs at the table, picked
up a knife, and used it to slide some ham onto a slab of bread. “And dizzy. Our Lady
of the Five Rings has spun our situation well beyond anything I expected.”
“That she has. You think it’s odd from where
you’re
sitting!”
“It is.” Jean ate, and studied Locke. He’d cleaned up, shaved, and pulled the lengthening
mass of his hair into a short tail. The removal of his beard made the marks of his
convalescence plain. He was pale, looking far more Vadran than Therin for a change,
and the creases at the edges of his mouth were graven a bit deeper, the lines beneath
his eyes more pronounced. Some invisible sculptor had been at work the past few weeks,
carving the first real hints of age into the face Jean had known for nearly twenty
years. “Where on the gods’ fair earth are you putting all that food, Locke?”
“If I knew that I’d be a physiker.”
Jean took another look around the cabin. A copper tub had been set near the stern
windows, and beside it a pile of towels and oil bottles.
“Wondering about the tub?” said Locke. “Water’s fresh—they replaced it after I was
done. They don’t expect us to go diving in the lake to make ourselves presentable.”
There was a knock at the cabin door. Jean glanced at Locke, and Locke nodded.
“Come,” yelled Jean.
“I knew you were awake,” said Patience. She came down the steps, made a casual gesture,
and the door shut itself behind her. She settled
into the third chair and folded her hands in her lap. “Are we proving ourselves adequate
hosts?”
“We seem to be well-kept,” said Jean with a yawn, “excepting a barbaric absence of
coffee.”
“Endure for another day, Master Tannen, and you’ll have all the foul black misuse
of water you can drink.”
“What happened to the last person you hired to rig this little game of yours, Patience?”
said Jean.
“Straight to business, eh?” said Locke.
“I don’t mind,” said Patience. “It’s why I’m here. But what do you mean?”
“You do this every five years,” said Jean. “You choose to work through agents that
can’t be Bondsmagi. So what happened to the last set you hired? Where are they? Can
we speak to them?”
“Ah. You’re wondering whether we tied weights around their ankles and threw them into
the lake when it was over.”
“Something like that.”
“In some cases, we traded services. In others we offered payments. All of our former
exemplars, regardless of compensation, left our service freely and in good health.”
“So, you ruthlessly protect every aspect of your privacy for centuries, but every
few years you pick a special friend, answer any questions they might have, show them
your fuckin’
memories
, begging your pardon, and then you just send them off when you’re finished, with
a cheerful wave?”
“None of our previous exemplars ever crippled a Bondsmage, Jean. None of them were
ever shown what you were. But you needn’t flatter yourself that you’ve been made privy
to some shattering secret that can only be preserved by the most extreme measures.
When this is over, we expect confidentiality for the rest of your lives. And if that
courtesy isn’t granted, you both know that we’ll never have
any
difficulty tracking at least one of you down.”
“I guess that works,” said Jean sourly. “So who took the ribbon, last time you did
this?”
“You’re being entrusted with a winning tradition,” said Patience. “Though two victories
in a row doesn’t quite make a dynasty, it’s a good basis from which to expect a third.
Now, we will discuss your
work in Karthain, but I made an unusual promise to get you both here. I would have
it fulfilled for good and all. Have you any further questions about my people, about
our arts?”
“Ask now or forever bite our tongues?” said Locke.
“I offered a brief opportunity, not a scholarly treatise.”
“As it happens,” said Locke, “I do have one last thing I want a real answer to. Jean
asked about the contracts you take. He asked
why
, and you gave us
why not?
But I don’t think that cuts to the heart of things. I can’t imagine that you people
actually need the money after four hundred years. Am I wrong?”
“No. I could touch sums, at an hour’s notice, that would buy a city-state,” said Patience.
“So why are you still mercenaries? Why build your world around it? Why do you call
yourselves Bondsmagi without flinching? Why ‘
Incipa veila armatos de
’?”
“Ahhh,” said Patience. “This is a deeper draught than you might wish to take.”
“Let me be the judge.”
“As you will. When did the Vadrans start raiding the northern coasts, where the Kingdom
of the Marrows is now?”
“What the hell does
that
have to do with anything?”
“Indulge me. When did they first come down from that miserable waste of theirs, whatever
their word for it—”
“Krystalvasen,” said Jean. “The Glass Land.”
“About eight hundred years ago,” said Locke. “So I was taught.”
“And how long since the Therin people moved onto this continent, from across the Iron
Sea?”
“Two thousand years, maybe,” said Locke.
“Eight hundred years of Vadran history,” said Patience. “Two thousand for the Therin.
The Syresti and the Golden Brethren are older still. Let’s generously give them three
thousand years. Now … what if I told you that we had reason to believe that some of
the Eldren ruins on this continent were built more than twenty thousand years ago?
Perhaps even thirty thousand?”
“That’s pretty damned wild,” said Locke. “How can you—”
“We have means,” said Patience with a dismissive wave. “They’re not important. What’s
important is this—no one in recorded history
has ever made a credible claim of meeting the Eldren. Whatever they were, they vanished
so long ago
that our ancestors didn’t leave us any stories about meeting them in the flesh. By
the time we took their empty cities, only the gods could know how long they’d been
deserted.
“Now, one glance at these cities tells us they were masters of a sorcery that makes
ours look like an idiot’s card tricks by comparison. They built miracles, and built
them to last for hundreds of centuries. The Eldren
meant
to tend their garden here for a very, very long time.”
“What made them leave?” said Locke.
“I used to scare myself as a kid by thinking about this,” said Jean.
“You can scare yourself now by thinking about it,” said Patience. “Indeed, Locke,
what made them leave? There are two possibilities. Either something wiped them out,
or something frightened them so badly that they abandoned all their cities and treasures
in their haste to be gone.”
“Leave the
world
?” said Locke. “Where would they go?”
“We don’t have the faintest speck of an idea,” said Patience. “But regardless of how
their marvelous cities were emptied in advance of our tenancy, it happened. Something
out there
made
it happen. We have to assume that
something
could return.”
“Gah,” said Locke, putting his head in his hands. “Patience, you’re a regular bundle
of smiles, you know that?”
“I warned you this might not be cheering.”
“This world and all its souls are the sovereign estate of the Thirteen,” said Locke.
“They rule it, protect it, and tend the mechanisms of nature. Hell, maybe they were
the ones that kicked the Eldren out.”
“Strange, then, that they wouldn’t mention it to us explicitly,” said Patience.
“Patience, let me reveal something from personal experience,” said Locke. “The gods
tell us what we
need
to know, but when you start asking about things you really just
want
to know, you’d best expect long pauses in the conversation.”
“Inconvenient,” said Patience. “Of course it’s possible that the gods are keeping
mum about what happened to the Eldren. Or they couldn’t act to stop it … or wouldn’t.
We’ve spent centuries arguing these possibilities. The only sensible assumption is
that we’ve got to take care on our own behalf.”
“How?” said Locke.
“The use of sorcery in a long-term fashion, in a grand and concerted manner, with
many magi working together, leaves an indelible imprint upon the world. Persons and
forces sensitive to magic can detect this phenomenon, just as you can look at a river
and tell which direction it’s flowing, and put your hand in the water to tell how
fast and warm it is. Great workings are like burning beacons on a clear dark night.
Somewhere out in the darkness, we must assume, are things it would be in our best
interest not to signal.
“That’s why we maintain only a handful of places like the Sky Chamber, and prefer
not to spend our time building fifty-story towers out of glass. We suspect the Eldren
paid for their lack of subtlety. They made themselves obvious to some power they didn’t
necessarily need to cross paths with.”
“Did my … did the ritual you used to get rid of that poison—”
“Oh, hardly. It
was
a significant piece of work. Any mage within twenty miles would have felt it, but
what I’m talking about requires a great deal more time and trouble. And that, at last,
is why we’ve made our contracts such a focus of our lives. Working toward the diverging
goals of thousands upon thousands of others over the years dissipates the magical
consequences of concentrating our power.
“Think of us as a few hundred tiny flames, crackling in the night. By sparking randomly,
at different times, in different directions, we avoid the danger of flaring together
into one vast and visible conflagration.”
“I congratulate you,” said Locke. “My mind has been thoroughly bent. But I think I
sort of understand. Your little guild … if what you’re saying is true, you didn’t
band together just to keep the peace or any bullshit like that. This Eldren thing
really spooks you.”