The monster spoke to him in reedy, piercing tones, twittering and singing like the wind over wires. Nygoth made three pronouncements, sequences of sounds that had the rhythm of sentences, each with its own termination, and none of which Lyn could make anything of. Esha was listening keenly, though; polyglot traveller as she was, perhaps some words of wizard-speak had meaning to her.
Then the demon was aloft again, just rising vertically into the air with its legs folding beneath it. It said one more thing to the wizard and then wobbled off into the air, heading for the higher peaks until it was lost to sight.
“It sensed certain talismans that I bear,” Nyrgoth Elder said apologetically. “It would not have troubled you if I were not here. I have bound it with oaths and, though I fear it may yet seek me out again, it should not threaten us.”
His words were portentous, and yet his manner suggested that he found the whole episode less than the stuff of legends, something soonest done and soonest forgotten, as her tutors used to say when disciplining her.
That night, the last by Esha’s reckoning before they came to Wherryover and the haunts of men, he sat away from the fire again, his back to a stone and staring up at the peaks as though seeking the monster out again. Still feeling the imprint of his hand on her shoulder like an itch, Lyn approached him.
“Is it your enemy from another age, Elder,” she asked formally, “the monster?”
He frowned at her blankly for a moment and then said, “It was but a worker whose masters are long dead. It wants to be of use, if only anyone needed any of the tasks it was made for. Your warlord, Ulmoth, learned command over such things from his study of the old languages.” The words were slow to come from him, and he seemed oppressed by something, even if it wasn’t the return of the creature.
She knelt, because it seemed disrespectful to stand and look down on him. The light of Esha’s fire chased over the rocky ground and touched his face, making it seem carved from pale stone a long time ago. It caught in his beard and the ridges of his horns, his long nose and fierce brows. All of a sudden she was very aware of how human he wasn’t, how everything about him was just an approximation of her kind, or perhaps all the people she ever knew were but poor copies of his.
“Forgive me, Elder. If not the monster, then there is some other foe in the world that causes you concern?” The thought was dire, and yet there was something weighing on him, and surely one did not become a great sorcerer without making great enemies.
“There is a beast that has hounded me down the centuries,” Nyrgoth told her. His hand lifted, and she shivered and leant back in case he should touch her again. His words filled her with a sense of creeping dread.
“It is always at my back,” he continued, “and sometimes it grows bold and its teeth are at my throat. It drags me down, and if I did not carry a shield against it, I could not get up from beneath its weight. But perhaps it is the same with you, or some of your people, though maybe they have never told you. Such beasts hunt in secrecy; even their prey are loath to speak of them for fear of showing weakness.”
“My uncle was killed by a cerkitt, a wild one,” she said uncertainly, but she knew it wasn’t the same thing. A beast that hunted sorcerers would doubtless savage a thousand men like her uncle and barely pause. She shuddered and returned to the fire and slept very poorly.
Nyr
I WAS TRYING TO be reassuring, but I evidently failed and now I’m not entirely sure what she made of my words. She seemed so solicitous, though, and I was trying to bleed off the build-up of sentiment that the DCS was keeping at bay, just like the operating manual says you should, to avoid unhealthy hormonal build-up. You can’t put it off forever, basically, but you can tap into it when circumstances allow, feel things when you have leisure to, and keep everything under control.
And so she wanted to know why I looked sad, and I explained it was basically a long-term mental state and that it was all under control, but that didn’t seem to be what she heard. And of course they don’t have a precise word for “clinical depression” or anything like that.
I did set her mind at ease about the mining robot, anyway. Not even an old colonial model, that one, but something left over from our own mission, gone wrong in its mechanical brain over a few centuries of inaction. And she nearly lost both hands at the elbow to it. It wasn’t trying to attack us, although it would have killed her on its way to me if I hadn’t had the codes to reset its priority queue.
And she stood in its way, when it was plainly going for me. Astresse would have, as well. In fact, she did, when Ulmoth sent his reprogrammed machines to destroy me. She almost died, too. We both did. But we prevailed: the white of her grin as they patched her wounds; her musician, extemporising the saga of the fight; she leant in to me and touched foreheads, her diadem rasping against the base of my horns. Meaning respect; meaning camaraderie, shared hurts and healing. Meaning intimacy. Good times. Good times three lifetimes gone, and here I still am.