“Weak? Word? I don’t understand.”
The recorder closed his eyes as if repeating a lesson to a very dull child. ”Almost everyone has some talent or other, some ability. A few have more than one. Tell such a person a word of power and that talent is raised to the level of genius.”
“Only if he has Faculty,” Gaib said stubbornly.
The amber eyes flicked open. “No. Not normally, Goodman Gaib. It is true in your experience, I admit, but only because the words you are aware of are all very weak. Each one is known to a great many people and thus its power is very diluted. Spread thin, you see. Surely you were taught this?”
“I must have forgotten.”
“Mmm? Just a stupid peasant? I think you underestimate me, and that is truly stupid. But it is true that these words rarely produce much effect. We call them `background’ words and we keep track of them very carefully. Because they are weak, when they do augment a talent, then we can assume that the person involved has Faculty, a Gift for magic itself. Otherwise, the effect is negligible, I agree. It is curious that your daughter just happened to be in the area when the woman Phain was about to die.”
It had not merely been curious, Gaib thought, it had been disastrous.
The recorder stuffed the papers back in the satchel and began lacing it up. With relief, Gaib decided the man was leaving. The next remark stopped his heart.
“At the Vool Place, I was told that your daughter Felt a battle in progress Outside, beyond the mountains.”
“That was right after the old woman died, my daughter had never seen death before, she had just discovered a talent she did not know about, she was hysterical, she was imagining . . .” He was babbling like a child.
“There was a battle.” The Good preserve us! The recorder had known everything, all along.
Jain stretched his legs, folded his arms, leaned back against the wall of the cottage, relaxed—and smiled thinly. “The Keeper knew of the battle, of course. And your daughter did. Only those two, in all Thume. And you tell me that her Feeling is weaker than her mother’s?”
Gaib said nothing, watching his hands rub together, hearing his skin making raspy noises.
“I trust that you are loyal to the Keeper, Goodman Gaib?”
“Of course,” Gaib said hoarsely.
“Perhaps you have forgotten your catechism? Let us see if you can remember it. Stand up. No, hands behind you. Head up, back straight. That’s better. Now, Goodman Gaib. What lies Outside?”
“Death and torture and slavery.”
“Who waits Outside?”
Gaib was a child again, standing before his father. “The redhaired demons, the white-haired demons, the gold-haired demons, the blue-haired demons, and the brown-haired—”
“Wrong!”
“The dark-haired demons.”
“Right. How do the demons come?”
“Over the mountains and over the sea.”
“Who defends us from them?”
“The Keeper and the College.”
“Whom do we serve?”
“The Keeper and the College.”
“Who never sleeps?”
“The Keeper.”
The recorder gathered his long legs and rose, clutching his satchel. He donned his hat. After a minute Gaib raised his eyes and met that bright gaze. He felt very small and stupid. And frightened.
“I shall go and talk with your daughter now. I judge that she has Faculty. You will send her to the College before her sixteenth birthday. This is your duty to the Keeper and the College.”
God of Pity! Gaib mumbled something. “I beg your pardon?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And how do you keep her until then?”
“Away from death.”
“Correct. Look at your left hand.”
Gaib obeyed. His hand was shaking as he had never seen it shake before, but that was not what mattered. Although he had felt nothing, the third and fourth fingers were now grown together. He cried out and tried to separate them. Then he tried with his other hand, but they had become one broad finger with two nails.
“You must blame your own stupidity,” Jain said in a sad, weary voice. “I don’t enjoy mutilating people, but you need a reminder of where your loyalty lies. Forget it in future and you will have to suffer much worse.”
He brushed past Gaib as if he were a bush and strode across the clearing, heading away from the path, toward the hill. In a moment he had vanished amid the trees on the slope.
Gaib ran into the cottage and found his metal knife, the one he killed pigs with. He tried to push the point between the two halves of that hideous finger, but he found bone there. By the time he had made sure it was bone all the way across, the grotesque double finger was hurting and bleeding a lot. He wrapped a scrap of cloth around it.
He went through to his Place beside the boulder and threw himself down on the heaped fern fronds. He pulled the blanket up, covering even his face, and just lay there, curled small and shivering. He wished Frial were beside him, holding him.
2
It went without saying that all pixie children had secret places of their own. Thaile had shared a family secret place with Feen and Sheel, which they had shown her as soon as she was old enough to keep the secret, and another they took their friends to when they came to visit. She also had one of her own. She even knew now where Sheel’s secret place had been, now that her sister had departed, and it was not nearly as good as her own. She had never discovered Feen’s place, but boys were supposed to be better at finding good places than girls were. So Feen had told her, anyway.
As a small child she had changed her secret place several times as she had ranged farther afield and grown more discriminating, but her final choice had lasted her for several years and she did not expect to change it before she went away to a real Place and a man. In fact, a year or so ago shed thought her days of playing childish hiding games were over. Then shed learned a word of power and nothing had been quite right after that.
Hours ago she had Felt an unfamiliar mind coming closer to the Gaib Place. Contempt, she had Felt, and a sort of stern anger. Frightened, Thaile had slipped away from the cottage and hurried to her secret place. She had been there a long time.
Her place was halfway up a green cliff, in among the largest trees. You climbed a shabby old eucalyptus, crawled out on a wide branch, and scrambled across to the top of a big mossy rock. Then you squeezed between the two rocks it was leaning against and ducked under a massive dead trunk and you were there. The secret place itself was as large as one of the rooms in the cottage, a strangely angled grotto of flat, smooth rocks lined with moss and creepers. Most of it was open to the forest canopy, but there was a wide overhang to sit under when the rain came and a nook to store precious things in.
There she kept a stuffed dragon her mother had made for her ages ago, which had been her special favorite companion when she was small, some extra-beautiful pebbles she had picked up from time to time, strings of melon seeds to wear as necklaces, a man’s elbow carved in stone, several bright snail shells and even brighter fragments of pottery, some bronze rings that must have been links in a soldier’s armor once and were all green now but probably quite valuable, a half-finished feather hat, and a couple of lopsided baskets she had made herself.
Lately she had added a rolling pin and a well-polished bowl made from a gourd. Gaith had given her the bowl and Shoop the pin. She had given them her most gracious thanks in return. Gaith was bearable, so he’d also gotten a kiss, but Shoop hadn’t, because he wasn’t.
In the very safest, darkest comer, carefully wrapped in banana leaves, she hoarded some scraps of leather, a right-hand glove and the beginnings of a left-hand glove; also a needle and some thongs. A year ago she’d been hoping she would find the courage to give the finished gloves to Phoon, who was as old as her brother; he had a wonderful laugh and bulgy muscles in his arms, but then Phoon had found a Place and offered it—and himself—to some girl he’d met on his explorations. Shed accepted both, so Thane’s gloves had never been finished. Another day, some other boy . . .
And about this time last year, Thaile had kept Death Watch for Grammy, because the family was Gifted. So she had learned the old woman’s word of power. That had brought her Feeling and Feeling had spoiled everything.