Esha took over then, giving them one of the Coast-people’s twisting story - in - story - in - stories, full of humiliation for the proud and fortune for the clever. Allwer had what looked to be a story about three brothers at first, but then turned into a spectacularly ribald joke that nobody back home would ever have dared tell a Fourth Daughter. Then it was Lyn’s turn again, and she conjured up another tale of heroes, some time-smudged past era when another demon had come from outside to be faced with courage and blades and the solving of riddles. And so it went, around the circle where the fire should be, and Lyn stole glances at the huddled sorcerer and tried to work out if any of this was having the desired effect. He did not laugh at the joke or at the funny turns in Esha’s tale. He did not seem to rally at her own inspirational hero-talk. And yet she could tell that he listened.
And then, when her turn came about for the third time, she summoned her courage to reach over and touch him on the arm, cocking her head in invitation.
“Very well then.” His voice was slow and bleak, but all the stories had hooked something deep inside him and hauled it up to the air, nonetheless. “I will tell the story of a sorcerer.”
He had told her many things before, that he had plainly expected her not to understand, but which had been entirely transparent to her. Talk of the ancients, of magical workers and familiar spirits, all of it fitting neatly with her own tales and what she knew about the world. This story of his was not like that. She could not follow it, and he told it poorly because to be a magician was not the same thing as being a bard, and who did he have, in his tower, to practice the craft on? He went back on himself or repeated himself, corrections and contradictions and leaps in logic that nobody could quite follow him in. And yet the sense of it came over: there was a sorcerer, but the sorcerer was just a man. He had travelled from the otherworld of the sorcerers, which was the world her ancestors had journeyed from, long ago. He had come to his tower—his outpost, as he called it—to watch and study, and not interfere. But then the other ancients had left and returned to their otherworld and closed its doors behind them, and he ceased to hear their voices through the night sky, and he feared that all his kind, every one of them, had met some dark fate. The craft of travelling the rivers of the sky was lost, many mortal lifetimes ago. He was the last.
And she’d known he was the last of the Elders, but she had never stopped to think what that meant. How terrible it was to know yourself the last of anything.
But, at the end of the telling, something of the burden was gone from him. The set of his body said that the beast still loomed over him, but perhaps it had been driven off a pace or two. Lyn took his hand, and then Esha his other one, and after an awkward moment Allwer made up the circle.
“Tell me of Astresse and Ulmoth,” Nyrgoth said, almost like a child at bedtime. “Tell it to me, the way you know it. Tell me how we were.”
And so Lyn found one last tale within her, and gave the full rendition of the deeds of her glorious ancestor, and told the sorcerer how he was remembered: Nyrgoth Elder, terrible, wise and mighty, whose magic had turned Ulmoth’s behemoths of destruction to mere statues so that Astresse could meet the warlord blade on blade and slay him.
At the end, he was smiling, and weeping also. “It wasn’t like that,” he said. “Not really. But your way is better. Keep telling it like that.” And then, after a long time staring at her, “You are not Astresse.”
She flinched, but he hadn’t meant it as a criticism.
“I must remember that. You are so like her, but you are not her.” And then, when she thought he’d said his piece, “I loved her as much as I have ever loved anything. Which is not so very much. And you are not her, but for our compact I will destroy the demon for you if I can.”
Nyr
WE ARE WITHIN AN hour’s walk of the demon’s house, by Allwer’s reckoning. It’s time for me to earn my keep as wizard, I suppose.
I activate my drone, first of all: the insect-sized thing doesn’t have the power for prolonged operations, but I’m intending to run this whole business remotely and it will have to be my eyes. Based on the satellite map and Allwer’s testimony, I guide it to where the demon lives, wondering what I’ll see.
Not a house. Beyond that I hit the realm of guesswork almost immediately.
The actual spread of infection here is surprisingly localised, no more than half a kilometre across, thinnest at the edges, then making a dense and riotous ring of growth about midway in, and then flattening out towards the centre again. But then I’ve already worked out that the “demon” is not about holding ground for territory’s sake.