Responsible’s list of tasks had been reduced considerably by the turn of events. The project for spreading the Purdy girls round the Kingdoms to break the hold of the “you can’t do anything right because you’re a Purdy” idea would have to be postponed; at the moment, Brightwater had no kind of relationship with Castle Purdy to even suggest such a thing. She could also draw a firm line through the item that instructed her to see to the Arkansaw feuds; Farsons, Guthries, and Purdys could now go at one another with broadswords and bludgeons, free from all interference-the advantages of sovereignty. The matter of holding a day of celebration in honor of the alleged Skerry sighting had become irrelevant, even if there really had been a Skerry. The penalty for failing to celebrate was bad luck, and that had already arrived in ample measure. And the superstition at Castle Wommack?
Responsible thought about that one awhile. No question about it, she would of welcomed any sort of excuse to visit Castle Wommack, seeing as how that was where Lewis Motley Wommack the 33rd was to be found. Her sleep was filled with dreams of him, far too vivid to be restful, and she woke from them drenched as she had risen from his arms. Once awake, she guarded her mind rigorously, stamping out any thought of him the same way she’d have stamped out fire in dry grass, but her nights were a scandal. The advantage, of course, was that they required no effort on his part and only she was troubled by them; she would heartily have enjoyed a chance to let him share the occasions.
But the Wommacks had done no more to save the Confederation than any of the other Families had, and had left Castle Brightwater as rapidly as everybody else, and they’d left no invitations behind them. While the Confederation stood, she’d felt comfortable touring the Castles; now, for all she knew, they’d bar their gates against her and shout Spells. She’d best leave Castle Wommack alone.
Some of the Families had been prompt in their actions, praise the Gates. Castles McDaniels, Clark, and Airy had sent bids for alliance, obviously written as fast as Family meetings could be held, votes taken, and Mules saddled to fly the documents to Brightwater. Castle Motley had sent its own Magician of Rank, Shawn Merryweather Lewis the 7th, to let Brightwater know that Castles Motley and Lewis would remain allied with Brightwater for so long as it was possible to do so.
She looked up at the map above her desk; the tiny continent of Mizzurah had all of Arkansaw between it and Brightwater, and looked more like an island off Arkansaw’s coast than a nation of two Kingdoms. It was brave of Lewis and Motley to send the message, and a bit of good fortune for them that they had a Magician of Rank to SNAP it on to Brightwater; but they were very isolated now, just the same. When their supplies began to dwindle, which wouldn’t be all that long a time off, she was reasonably sure they’d have no choice but to turn to Arkansaw for help-and that would be the end of their ties to Brightwater.
There’d been no word from Castle Smith, now surrounded by Brightwater allies but only a brief flight away from Castle Guthrie, just across the narrow channel between Oklahomah and Arkansaw. Presumably they were debating their options . . . or might could be Delldon Mallard Smith was really fool enough to think he could go it entirely alone.
She turned back to her list, it being pleasanter food for thought than the blamed Smiths. There was the question of whether Una of Clark had acted alone in using magic against Brightwater to scuttle the Jubilee-she’d waste no time on that one! The Jubilee, and all that went with it, was over, and she intended to put it behind her, thought and deed, like any dead and dishonored thing.
But there was one task that had now become not just one more promise, one more duty postponed, but a matter of urgent necessity. She had given the Gentles her word. Whatever happened to the Confederation of Continents, stand or fall, they would not be involved in the results. For thirty thousand years of recorded history they had lived in the caves of Arkansaw; they had granted the surface of the land without stint or hesitation to the humans, by treaties that guaranteed them the right to go on with their own lives as they always had. And now they were smack in the middle of the feuds. Might could be the Farsons and the Guthries, and the Purdys following along, would hold to the treaties for the sake of simple decency; she would have liked to think so. Might could be, on the other hand, they’d take the position that the old treaties were Confederation agreements and no longer bound them. The Gentles would of been safer, all in all, at the hands of the Travellers, obsessed as they were with righteousness. No telling what the Arkansaw Families might do . . .
It was going to be a curious situation, grant that right off. The Granny had been discussing it that morning at the breakfast table, and Granny Hazelbide had laid it out for the rest of them with absolute accuracy.
“It’d be one thing,” she’d said, glaring over the top of her coffee cup, “if the very minute of First Landing we’d divided this world up twelve ways and sent everybody off to their own homeplaces and stayed that way since. That’d be one thing! As it is, that is not what we have on our platter, not in any degree whatsoever. We’re all scrambled and mixed and conglomerated . . . why, there’s not a place on Ozark that’s not got folks all settled in from every one of the Twelve Families!”
“Travellers excepted, might could be,” said Granny Gableframe. “I misdoubt there’s anybody on Tinaseeh but Travellers, Farsons, and Purdys-maybe a Guthrie or two. No more.”
“Tch!” went Ruth of Motley. “That’s not even decent.”
“If we’d gone the way Granny Hazelbide was mentioning,” Jonathan Cardwell Brightwater pointed out, “we’d of been inbred worse than the goats long before this.”
“Jonathan Cardwell! Such talk!”
“May not be elegant, m’dear, but it’s accurate,” he answered her, and bent to kiss her cheek. “It’s a right good thing the Families had sense enough to mix it up, and plenty of other family lines represented among them at the beginning.”
“So it is,” said Granny Hazelbide, “so it is. But it leads to a pure mess now. Take Brightwater, seeing it’s so handy-is there any Family we don’t have among the folks living here, Responsible?”
“No Travellers,” she said. “Nary a one.”
“Well, they don’t count anyway. If they lived here they’d have to worry all the time about their precious souls, what with our wicked electric lights and our evil lizzies and far on into the night. You can’t count them.”
“Everybody else, though,” Responsible agreed, “we have passels of. I know what you mean, and I don’t know precisely how they’ll do. Say you’re a family with Smiths in all directions, living here in Brightwater, then what? That make Delldon Mallard your King, or not?”
“It has always been true,” said Patience of Clark gravely, “that a woman gone to live in the house of a man considered herself a part of his family, from that time on, or went back to her own place. And the same for a man.”
“True,” said Thorn of Guthrie. “But that was when it didn’t matter, if you follow me. That was when we were all one Confederation. There might be squabbles among us, and some Families more annoying than others, the way one of the tadlings in a house’ll be more bothersome than all the rest put together. But in the ways that mattered, we were all one.”
“Bless my stars,” muttered Granny Hazelbide, “if Thorn’s not begun to learn politics in her old age! Never thought I’d see the day.”
Thorn of Guthrie curled her perfect lips and looked scornful, and allowed as how a question that related to the real world was worth noticing and she wasn’t such a poor stick she couldn’t notice it, thank you very much.
“It’s a skein that’ll be a long time unwinding,” observed Patience of Clark. “I’m not all that comfortable about it.”
“Nor me, child,” said Granny Gableframe. “I’ve got a feeling in my bones.”
“People will have to make up their minds, I suppose,” said Jubal Brooks. “Do they go by lines drawn on a map, when it comes to their loyalties, or do they go by blood? And say you’re a Farson man married to a McDaniels, and the both of you living in Kingdom Motley-if you did want to go back to your own kind, which one’d take precedence? Farson or McDaniels? And the children, would they want to go or would they consider theirselves Motleys by having been born there?”
“It’s Old Earth all over again,” said Granny Hazelbide grimly. “Next thing you know we’ll have people starving one side of a line that doesn’t exist, and people fat and sleek on the other, burning their garbage. I can just see it coming. Just see and hear it coming!”
“This world once more,” Granny Gableframe declaimed, “and then there’ll be fireworks.” Whatever that might mean.
It had put something of a pall on breakfast.
And thinking now, musing over the Families, scrambled or not, Responsible felt a good deal less than comfortable herself. She was worried about the Gentles.
Nothing she knew of the Guthries, for all that they were her close kin, led her to be optimistic about their behavior; they were sharp of wit, but they were by and large outrageous. The Farsons had a kind of elegant devious charm that was more dangerous than any of the right out front stupidities the Smiths had carried through. And the Purdys! Prejudice or not, you could not trust the Purdys. They didn’t even trust one another. And there sat the Gentles, relying on the sworn word of Responsible of Brightwater, completely surrounded on all sides by the three of them. And not knowing, might could be, that anything had changed.
Her mind was made up. Anything that might come up here at Brightwater for sure didn’t require her attention; there was a Magician of Rank and two Grannys under this roof. Already, she was pleased to remember, the Grannys had settled the Bridgewraith, and with the two of them working together it had taken hardly any time at all. She would go this very night, no more excuses, soon as it was dark enough to travel easily, and she’d see to the warding of the Gentles. The supplies she’d gathered that night Lewis Motley Wommack had made such a sorry showing trying to follow her were adequate for the task, if she was. It was near on nine o’clock this minute; if she planned to see to the matter tonight, and for sure she did, it would take her all the rest of the day and a hard push to get ready in time. Starting with locking her door and sending down word that she was to be left alone and not bothered even for meals. That would give the Family something else to talk about at the table, at least.
Two hours later, purged of her breakfast-and thank the Twelve Corners the conversation that morning hadn’t been the kind that made for a good appetite-and as clean as the three ritual baths could make her, her skin sore from the crushed herbs, she sat in her blue rocker and considered the problem. It was a nice one, and the more she thought about it the more complicated it became.
How, precisely, did you accomplish a task that could only be done by magic, on behalf of a large population that considered magic to be not only barbarous and primitive but unspeakably evil? How did you go about keeping a promise that had been a lie to begin with, on behalf of a race that so far as anyone had been able to determine was not capable of lying? For she had sworn she’d use no magic, when the complaint was made to her. And no way did she dare call in anyone for advice; as Granny Hazelbide would have said, she had a funny feeling.
She went over and pushed the computer access numbers for POPULATIONS, INDIGENOUS, which produced three entries: SKERRYS, GENTLES, MULES. That always made her nervous, finding the MULES on the list, but the computers were very firm about it. From among the set she chose GENTLES, and requested a full data display. The comset made none of its usual crotchety noises; the reduction of the broadcast area to one small Kingdom had improved its performance enormously. It hummed softly, and gave her what she asked for:
GENTLES, INDIGENOUS POPULATION OF PLANET OZARK-HUMANOID
ESTIMATED NUMBER OF YEARS ON PLANET, FIFTY THOUSAND
ESTIMATED NUMBER OF INDIVIDUALS, ELEVEN THOUSAND (CAUTION, THIS FIGURE BASED ON INADEQUATE DATA) LOCATION: CAVES UNDER WILDERNESS LANDS OF CONTINENT ARKANSAW, BOUNDED ON NORTH BY KINGDOM PURDY, ON EAST BY KINGDOM GUTHRIE, ON WEST BY KINGDOM FARSON, ON SOUTH BY OCEAN OF STORMS (NOTE NO EVIDENCE AREA INHABITED BY GENTLES EXTENDS TO OCEAN, DATA INSUFFICIENT)
PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION: MALES AND FEMALES, APPROX THREE FEET TALL, WHITE FUR ON ALL BODY SURFACES, EYES DARK PURPLE ON YELLOW, FELINE PUPILS PRESUMABLY FOR SEEING IN DARKNESS OF CAVES
PHYSICAL STRENGTH ONE FOURTH HUMAN APPROX (CAUTION, DATA INADEQUATE)
INTELLIGENCE PRESUMED EQUAL TO HUMAN (CAUTION, DATA INADEQUATE)
PSIBILITIE5 UNKNOWN
GOVERNMENT: OLIGARCHY OF THREE ANCIENT FAMILIES
RELIGION UNKNOWN
CUSTOMS UNKNOWN
HISTORY: CEDED ARKANSAW SURFACE TO HUMANS BY TREATY ON SETTLEMENT (CAUTION, REPEAT CAUTION-GENTLES CONSIDER ALL MAGIC SINFUL, HAVE BEEN KNOWN TO SUICIDE FOR “DISHONOR OF MAGIC”-APPROACH WITH CARE)
DATES OF CONTACT: NOVEMBER 112129; APRIL 4 ...
The list went on, showing some sixty-odd contacts in one thousand years-those would be the reported ones, and there’d be twice as many unreported, she didn’t doubt-and then there were a few names with a handful of data attached to each, and the display winked out.
It was a pitiful fragment of knowledge to have about a race you shared a planet with. On the other hand, it was a tribute, after a fashion, to the Ozarkers. They’d made no attempt to investigate the Gentles, as they’d made none to seek out the Skerrys, about whom far less was known. If there was one thing an Ozarker did understand, it was a request for privacy.
Responsible prayed rarely. She had an idea that she ought to pray more often, but she kept forgetting. This, however, was a situation where prayer was indicated forcibly enough to override even her desire not to be beholden. She found herself faced with the fact that if she did not use magic to protect the Gentles they might well be destroyed by the misbehavior of the Families of Arkansaw-not that they’d harm them on purpose, she wasn’t ready to consider any such thing as that, but that in the course of tearing around the continent disputing with one another they were almost guaranteed to grow careless of what they tore up and who got discommoded in the process. And if she did use magic, and the Gentles should discover that she had, the whole population might well feel obligated to ritual suicide. Talk of being between a rock and a hard place! She prayed, and she prayed from the heart, and she prayed at length, though she didn’t kneel; the idea that the Holy One had any special admiration for one posture over another, so firmly held to by the Reverends, struck her as ridiculous. The point was the praying, not how your legs were bent, nor how uncomfortable you could manage to get.
When that was done, she sighed, wishing she felt more confident and all charged with divine fire or some such, and not feeling that way at all, and she began taking things from her magic-chest. She drew out the gown of fine lawn and pulled it through the golden ring that fit her little finger; it went through without hindrance or snag, and she slipped it over her head. Her hair went into a single long braid down her back, bound by a clasp handed down from one Responsible to another since First Landing; she was always terrified she’d lose the fool thing and bring on some unspecified catastrophe, but so far she’d hung on to it. Next there were the shammybags that held the holy sands, to be hung from the narrow white belt that went round her waist, and the flagons of sacred springwater, bound together on a cord braided of her own hair and fastened to that same belt. A pouch of gailherb hung round her neck and slipped between her breasts to be warmed. On her bare feet went low boots of Muleskin made soft as velvet; over all, a hooded cloak of the same supple stuff. And she was ready.
She went lightly equipped, by Granny standards. They’d of thrown in two saddlebags of herbs, and put amulets and talismans all over her, and hung strings of garlic and preserved lilac from one end of Sterling to the other; there’d of been feathers and asafetida and probably conjure poppets . . .
Responsible grinned. By Granny standards she was off to a war naked and barefoot and blindfolded. She’d make very sure neither one of them caught sight of her, prowling the Castle in the night as was their habit. The thing was, the less of that truck she had on her person, the less likely she was to be spotted and seen to be engaged in magic if she had the awful fortune to be seen by one of the Gentles. And she’d not have used it anyway; this was a task requiring Formalisms & Transformations, not dolls and herbs and doodads.
As the sun started going down she began to get hungry, but that was to be expected. She ignored her stomach, and watched the line of Troublesome’s mountain out through her window. When the sun was tucked exactly in the notch that marked the highest ridge, it would be time for her to go.
And what, she wondered idly, would Lewis Motley Wommack the 33rd have had to say if he’d seen her SNAP from her own windowsill without benefit of a Mule?
Law, there she was, thinking of him again! She clicked her tongue like a Granny, disgusted with herself. Sure enough, it had been a kind of peace, a kind of wondrous rest, being with someone whose mind she could share as easily as she shared ordinary speech with everybody else. Like moving around in a place of columns and soft wind and- She brought herself up short. If there’d been words for what it was like, it wouldn’t have been what it was; she was just translating perceptions that had no counterpart into perceptions there were names for, and a mighty poor job she was doing of it. Nothing in the dictionary, so far as she knew, would cover an endless space confined in a finite one, nor label for her tongue a corner that you could not go round because it came back upon itself . . . She rubbed absently at the aching place just above her right eyebrow, that spot back of which the Immensity began, a golden Immensity swept by
“Responsible of Brightwater, stop it! Now!” she said aloud, sharp as she knew how. A fine shape she’d be in for what lay ahead of her if she went on like this! Think of Una of Clark, rotten to the soul with the sickness of Romantic Love, and how she’d despised her, taunted her, for that! Then think of her, Responsible of Brightwater, mooning here at her window over this man she’d lain with twice, and neither time blessed by either Reverend or custom . . . Was she any better than poor Una?
It was just that until he came she had thought there was nobody else like her in all the world. It was a kind of loneliness that was not eased by sharing mindspeech with a Mule, nor what the Magicians of Rank thought passed for mindspeech. And he had eased it, unbraided her mind for her where the knots were tightest and most tangled . . .
Nevertheless, Responsible, there was such a thing as seemliness. She stepped to her window, set one foot on the sill, made certain the picture she held firmly in her mind’s eye was the proper one, so she wouldn’t end up in some Arkansaw goatbarn by mistake-and SNAPPED.
On Kintucky, where it was daytime, the Guardian of Castle Wommack sat at his desk, going over again the specifications for his Teaching Order. He was pleased with the habit the Grannys and Gilead had designed; a long gown, high-necked and full of sleeve, hem right to the ground, with no sewn waist. It was caught round by a cord, from which could hang a useful pouch or two with the things a Teacher might need to carry. The cut would be useful; when a Teacher raised her arm to point to a map or a drawing, or just to get the attention of her pupils, the sleeve, narrow at the top and tapering out the rest of its length, would be dramatic. It would form a triangle, with its point below the Teacher’s knees.
Choosing the color had been difficult. The Wommack colors were sea-green and gold, but neither of those had the solemn dramatic quality he was after. Finding a color not taken by any of the other eleven Families, now that the Smiths had added purple to their traditional silver and gold and brown, had seemed impossible. Black was surely dramatic and solemn enough, and the drawings of nuns after which the Grannys had modeled the costume showed that they had been black-but black was the mark of a Traveller. Lewis Motley would not have his Teachers in black. They had settled at last on a shade of blue; not the medium shade worn by the Guthries, nor yet the Lewis azure-but a deep, dark, vibrant blue that was exactly right, and belonged to no one.
The headdress, the wimple and coif that Jewel had dreaded the weight of, the Grannys had modified only a little from the drawings. They had made it one piece and all of the same blue; it showed only the face, coming straight across the forehead just below the hairline, and falling to a point at the waist in back. And round the neck, the only ornament; a medallion with the Wommack crest, on a leather thong.
There was nobody cared to point out to him that the color of the habits was exactly the color of his eyes. And no one of the women would have mentioned to him how the cut of the gown was the same as a woman wore that achieved the rank of Magician; it was, after all, a very different cloth, and it was not subject to the requirement that it be possible to draw it without hindrance through a gold ring that fit the woman’s smallest finger. The women held their peace.
Already the first habit had been sewn up. He had trusted that task only to Gilead, whose fingers were famous for their skill with the needle. A ceremony had been put together-not hastily, either, for he’d done it himself, and he’d weighed every syllable and every gesture-and Jewel had donned the habit and the headdress and dedicated her life forever to the service of the Order. She rode out on Kintucky now, with the Attendants and servingmaid, the Mules walking every inch of the journey so that the people could see them pass by in search of other learned virgins, and she would bring them back to him at Castle Wommack.
The plans for the wing where the Order would be housed were before him, and he meant them to have his full attention. Until a few moments ago they had had it. But now he shook his head in that gesture the Grannys and Jewel noticed more and more often lately, and cursed bitterly, lengthily, obscenely, pounding his fist upon the surface of his desk till the knuckles bled.
Damn her, curse her, oh, the devils all take her and torture her, why could she not have the decency to stay out of his mind? Within him, something squirmed, and he was sick with a more than physical nausea; he knew now what the price of a witch’s virginity was, without asking. The question he could not answer was how long it had to go on being paid, and whether he would ever be free again.
He was an Ozarker; violence was something foreign to him. When he used his great physical strength he did it without violence, because it was a force that happened to be needed at that time and place. But so tortured was he now by this woman he had thought to make a pastime of . . . if he could have reached her at that moment, he would have killed her with his two bare hands.
If she could be killed. Could she? He did not know even that, and he laid his forehead on his arms and wept with rage and the despair of utter frustration. He might as well of wished to rid himself of his heart! No-that at least he could have torn from his breast. He did not know where the place that Responsible of Brightwater befouled within him was.
Responsible stood quietly in the darkness, alert for any sounds that might mean someone had seen her SNAP out of nowhere and would be coming along to demand an explanation.
It wasn’t likely; she stood in a tangle of trees and briars so thick she could not see her hand when she held it up before her eyes, and in her dark cloak and boots she would be invisible unless somebody stood almost within touching distance. Still, this was no time to take chances.
Nothing but nightbirds, used to her now and gone back to their singing, and something making a soft croak in a tiny creek that was running behind her just within hearing. And that was as it should be; there was no honest reason for anybody to be lying out here in the Wilderness Lands of Arkansaw in the middle of the night. The only possibility was a party of hunters-not probable in a tangle like this, it’d make a poor campsite-or the one thing she really feared, a Gentle standing watch. Not that she knew whether they stood watch or not! Ethics, that eternal millstone round her neck; not to interfere, as promised by the treaties, meant not to observe, either; and so she knew almost nothing about the people whose peace and tranquillity she had come to preserve. It was not an ideal situation in which to work, and she considered, briefly, the idea of using a Spell of Invisibility as a means of making certain that the ignorance stayed mutual.
No, she decided. Spells were not a part of Formalisms & Transformations, they fell into Granny Magic, and mixing levels was a sure way to get into a mess. She’d just be powerfully cautious.
Her eyes were getting used to the darkness now, as far as that was possible in this tomb of branches and thorns and roots, and she unrolled the pliofilm map, no bigger than her palm, that she was carrying in the left-hand pocket of her cloak. It showed all of Arkansaw, but that didn’t concern her; the part that interested Responsible was the part that glowed dimly, barely above the level of darkness. A line, running round and bordering off the Wilderness Lands; and then eleven tiny x’s, marking each of the entrances to the territory that was the rightful domain of the Gentles. She must ward each and every one of those entrances.
Technically, she could of done it by Coreference alone, working with the tiny map. But equally technically, it shouldn’t have been required at all. The Gentles should have been safe from the Families for all time, just because they were Ozarkers, and their word pledged. Just because of privacy. The Gentle T’an K’ib, coming to Responsible in the night to present her complaints, had not felt that to be any guarantee of the security of her people.
No, she would ward each entrance on the actual spot it held on the surface of the land, all eleven one at a time, SNAPPING from the first to the last. And it was time she began. The Twelve Gates grant she did not land right on top of some Gentle, out doing whatever it was that Gentles might do in the darkness, or find herself sharing a bedroll with an astonished hunter. Accuracy was not going to be a simple matter in this murk and with the limited information she had available.
Three hours it took her, moving from x to x, carefully, silently, until she had completed the circle and stood at the first one once again. Now each of the entrances was marked by the asterisk that means FORBIDDEN, laid in six overlapping lines of the holy sands. Three lines of white sand, three lines of ebony, alternating to form the six-pointed star, so: *. That should cause any ordinary citizen, happening to approach an entrance either accidentally or deliberately, to feel a sudden disinclination to move one step closer that could not be overcome by any effort of will.
And then, against not the ordinary citizen but some Magician or Magician of Rank bent upon mischief, or made curious by the repelling effect of the asterisk, she had set yet another ward at each-the double-barred arrow of the Transformations, slashed through with a diagonal line. Golden sand for the arrow; silver sand for the slash that said THE TRANSFORMATION DOES NOT APPLY and would keep anybody skilled in magic from removing her asterisks by a Deletion Transformation.
Over all the devices of sand she had poured sacred water from the flagons, so that they sank into the earth and could no longer be seen, but were bound there irrevocably by the power of the waters. Perhaps the Out-Cabal had ways of undoing such a warding-they claimed to have, bragging and threatening through the Mules, calling the Ozark magic bungling and primitive. But it was not against the Out-Cabal that she had promised to protect the Gentles, and no Ozarker, whatever his or her level of skill at magic, could undo what she had done. And nobody had seen or heard her, neither human nor Gentle. If the small people, down in their caves, had somehow heard her moving about and were to come up in the dawn to investigate the sound, they would find nothing; there would be nothing to see, nothing to sense. The wards were set for them; they would not be affected by their presence in the earth.
She tried to think; had she forgotten anything? There was a last step, but once it was done she would no longer have the power to make changes if anything had been neglected.
She checked it off on her fingers. Eleven entrances, eleven asterisks, eleven signs that said FORBIDDEN. Eleven entrances, eleven slashed arrows, eleven signs that said THE TRANSFORMATION DOES NOT APPLY. Twenty-two signs; water from the sacred desert spring poured over every sandgrain that formed them, the whole branded into the land. She could not see what else there could be to do, and she was tired; when she had first planned this, she had never considered that she’d have it all to do by herself alone. She’d thought a few of the Magicians of Rank would be with her, giving her aid, making it a minor effort.
That was before the discovery that a Magician of Rank could turn his magic against a Granny. It was natural that they should attack her, Responsible of Brightwater, they had reason to hate her-but harm a Granny? It was unthinkable, it was a tear in the fabric of magic, and she trusted them no longer. And she was weary, weary . . . which was no excuse for carelessness. Deliberately, she pinched the sensitive skin at the base of her thumb till she was certain beyond question that she was alert.
And then she moved to the final act that would complete her task and some left over. One flagon of water she still had, one small shammybag of sand all of silver. Carefully she prepared her Structural Index, using the little map with its glowing border and its eleven x points. Scrupulously, she prepared the Structural Change, specifying all eleven points of Coreference rigorously. The sharp point of her silver dagger cut it all into the earth at her feet, laid bare of its layer of thick leaves and protesting tiny crawlers and wigglers. In the glow of the map she made sure there was no character of the formal orthography not cut clean and clear and deep. The weariness moved over her in sluggish waves as she worked, and she knew there would be no SNAPPING back to her room until she had rested. She would be lucky if she had strength enough to get her over the water and onto Brightwater land, under some convenient bush that would hide her while she slept a little while.
Responsible of Brightwater stood then, and traced the doublebarred arrow in the air, where it hung, quivering and golden, throbbing with its stored energy held back only by her skill, between her two hands.
“There!” she whispered, and released it.
It was a Movement Transformation; the arrow sped straight for the line that bordered the Gentles’ holdings and raced round its perimeter in a blinding streak of gold, faster than the eye could follow it, out of her sight. She knew where it was going, though she could no longer watch its progress; a few seconds later she saw it again, coming back, and it plunged to the ground at her feet and winked out in the darkness.
Now, it was done. Well and truly done. Not only had she warded the entrances themselves, so that no Ozarker would be capable of passing them, but she had linked the wards one to another to make of them a ring of wards. If that was not invulnerable, if it did not represent a full keeping of her promise to T’an K’ib, then doing so was beyond any skill known to Ozark. It should be invulnerable, and no way for any Gentle ever to know that what guarded them was the magic they so abhorred. There was nothing left to give the secret away, and there was no living soul that knew what she had done, to tell them. It was done, over, accomplished.
If all her blood had been drawn from her veins she could not have been more weak, but she must get safely off Arkansaw before she let herself rest. She was aware that she shivered in the warm summer night and that she had bitten nearly through her lower lip, forcing herself not to fall, not to close her eyes.
She SNAPPED, sorry now she had not brought a Mule, clearing the coast of Marktwain but not reaching the borders of Brightwater, and fell unconscious in a patch of brush back of a goatbarn somewhere inside McDaniels Kingdom. She was past caring if the farmer found her there before she woke.