Sunday, July 8th, 2012
Della’s mind races with the
possibilities. The revenant, asking for her help? She had thought that being a bloodkin would
give her that sense of the extraordinary she had been seeking, but it was
turning out to be a colossal disappointment.
Sure, she saw things and knew things that would have flabbergasted her
in mortal life, but this was another
thing entirely. If the revenant was
looking to turn the very world on its head – well, Della wanted to be there to
see it. And she wanted to be on the side
doing the turning. Look for the ravens, she recalls, glancing at her watch. It was something Jamie had gotten for her,
after her cell phone was taken for the faking of her death. The watch took its time and date from cell
phone towers, so it should tell her the date.
It was clear that the bramble path she had been walking with Samantha
took them not only through space, but through time as well. Sure enough, the watch told her it was the 19th
of July, 2012. Less than two weeks into
the future.
Lots of things could change in
two weeks. She thought of her brief
romance with Edward, of her martial arts training with Jamie, of their
confrontation with the Hunters that had gone from “casual night out” to “cat and
mouse” to “face-stomping hunt” in the space of a single night. She had options upon options, and even if this raven thing turned out to be a
bust, she at least had some intel to share with Thomas while still keeping the
best parts to herself.
However things ultimately turned
out, tonight everything was coming up Della.
She smiles at the thought as she jogs back to Sam across the catwalk.
“Yeah,” Samantha says, “I’m fine
as long as I don’t look down. Is there a
door on the other side?”
“Sure is,” Della says. “I don’t know if it’s locked, though.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Sam
replies. “The spell will open it for
us. Was la mujerta there? That’ll
really tell us if it’s the right door.”
“I saw her as I headed out,”
Della says, “but she had moved on by the time I got to the door.”
“Good deal,” Samantha says with
a nod. Della cheers silently at the
bramblekin’s easy acceptance of her lie.
“I can carry you piggy-back
across the bridge, if you want,” Della offers.
“Yeah,” Samantha agrees, “that
would be good.” She rises to her feet,
eyes still closed, and Della takes her hand to guide the bramblekin around her
shoulders as she backs up against her.
As she proceeds across the
grated walkway in silence, Della reflects on the nature of the creature on her
back. That glamour of hers was sure a
funny thing: even though Della knows
that Sam is wooden, she feels like flesh and blood. Right down to her heartbeat, she seems human
to a fault. And how exactly does she
make those facial expressions with her glamour, when her actual face isn’t
capable of such expression? Then again,
Sam had apparently needed to put in a little extra whatever-it-was for the
spell to work on Della; perhaps it had something to do with making others see
what they expected to see? As her senses
had grown more acute post-infection, Della would be more difficult to fool –
Thomas and Herman would surely have seen her for what she was as well, but they
were used to dealing with this sort of thing, so it probably didn’t faze them. But to fool
them, it would take a more convincing illusion, right down to that telltale thump in the chest and the faint body
odor that the straights wouldn’t miss, but would be conspicuous in its absence
to the bloodkin.
At the other side, Della lets
Sam down, saying, “All right, we’re here.”
“Good. Thanks,” Samantha says, peeking through one
eye as she reaches for the doorknob.
Once safely back in the bramble, she heaves a deep sigh of relief and
says, “OK, we’re over the hump – two more stops and then we’re home.” Della nods and follows Sam as she heads off
at a brisk walk. “We’re coming up to the
last place where the Sandstorm Hourglass will be between two doors at night,
which might bring us to its final
resting place, but really could take us almost anywhere. So keep your guard up.”
“Gotcha,” Della says, ducking
and weaving among the thorny branches crowding the path. She watches the third writ crumble to dust in
Samantha’s hand. “So tell me about those
writs again. You said they run off of
agreement?” She looks over to see if she
can read the paper, but the writing is in a language she does not recognize.
“Oh, yeah,” Samantha begins,
glancing this way and that through the brush.
Her brow knits in thought as she gathers herself. “You ever hear of pan-psychism?”
“No,” Della says.
“No problem. It’s basically just the idea that everything
is conscious, at some level. Which is,
in a back-handed kind of way, mostly true.”
“How ‘mostly’? Like, let’s say I have a rock,” she says.
“A rock’s a good example,”
Samantha interrupts. “Now, the rock
isn’t aware of much, mostly just
pressure acting on it, age, and the occasional breaking.”
“Wait,” Della says. “Are you telling me that I can hurt a rock by
breaking it?”
“No, of course not. But now you have two rocks, and if you could somehow talk to rocks, you’d find that
they remember splitting apart.”
“So how much can I do this? Like, what happens when I bust it all the way
down to atoms?”
“Hmm,” Samantha says. “Well, it would probably stop being rocks and
start being dust at some point before you got to atoms – but that’s kind of the
thing. You see, rocks are rock-like
because they want to be; if you bust it down to dust, even though it’s the same
stuff, it doesn’t want to be like a rock any more. It doesn’t have the, uhh, patience. Kind of.
So it just wants to be dust.
Atoms do like they do because they want to.”
Della is visibly confused. “I don’t know if I buy this. It doesn’t make any sense to talk about rocks
and atoms acting with a will.”
“Oh,” Sam asks with a
smile. “Does it make more or less sense
to talk about humans and insects acting purely according to the laws of
physics?”
“That’s different,” Della
says. “I have a will. Free or not, I will things.”
“So you say,” Samantha replies
with a slow nod. “Prove it to me.”
Della waggles her fingers and
says, “I do this because I will it.”
“So you say,” and another slow
nod. “But psychology shows that humans
tend to try establishing and demonstrating their freedom and individuality when
pressed on the matter. And psychology is
neurology is biology is chemistry is physics – so if you just pile physics up
high enough, then you’ll waggle your fingers to ‘prove’ your will. Whether you have it or not.”
“OK, fine,” Della says, rolling
her eyes. “What if I didn’t waggle my fingers?”
Samantha shrugs and says, “There
is individual variation among both particles and people. Psychology and quantum mechanics are both
steeped in statistics, and neither deals in ironclad certainty. In fact, uncertain tendencies and aggregate
trends are the hallmarks of both fields.”
Della thinks this over for a moment, then Samantha adds, “Now, an atom
of gold doesn’t have any crazy complex drives or desires – it doesn’t hunger,
or feel tired, or enjoy TV – it mostly just wants to be gold-like. Which is to say: most of the time, most gold atoms do what
they want; then we come along and see this behavior, and we call it gold-like, because it’s what
gold does. Kind of how most of the time,
most people do what they want, and when you have experience with enough of ‘em
then you start to call it ‘human nature’.”
Della is disconcerted, it does make a certain kind of sense. Especially in light of how often people speak
of machines having “minds of their own” and so forth. And while it might make someone more
empathetic to her stuff, it still
wouldn’t make much sense to talk to one’s things. Even if it so happens that your pet rock
speaks English (and if it’s mostly interested in being rock-like, then it would
make little sense for it to try), it’s got no way to speak back.
“OK, fine,” Della says at
last. “But what does all this have to do
with your magic paper, then?”
“Oh, right,” Sam exclaims. “So people, being all complicated and stuff,
can scheme to break rocks. You would be
hard-pressed to find a rock scheming to break a person, though – unless it were
sufficiently motivated and had the opportunity.
“That’s where these writs come
in. They’re a written agreement between
the bearer and – whoever fuckin’ wrote the thing, I don’t know – which
basically comes down to the idea that if anyone so much as raises a hand
against you, the Earth itself will rise up in your defense. Or whatever’s handy, you know. Like if you had caught up to la mujerta and she had attacked you, maybe
the walkway would have chosen just
that moment to give under her feet and send her for a swim.”
“That seems like a pretty potent
spell, there,” Della says pensively.
“It is,” Samantha says. “But like I said, I got about a hundred of
the things. Payment for services
rendered on a big job a while back.
They’re useful for things like this.”
Della nods in agreement. “But then how does the spell know what to do
to keep you safe?”
“Well,” Samantha begins, “it’s
not so much the spell that knows, but
rather the ideas that were in the
minds of the parties making the agreement at the time.”
“So you’re not just talking
about weird physics here, you’re talking about actual magic.”
“Well, duh,” Samantha says,
rolling her eyes. “Everything is magic,
in one way or another.”
“What? No, it’s not,” Della says. “Science is like the opposite of magic.”
“Psh,” Samantha scoffs. “S’magic to me. So’s your logic.
“Now you’re telling me that
logic is magic, too?” Della was
incredulous. She had taken an introductory
logic course as an elective in the fall – it was fascinating to see the ways an
argument could be analyzed purely by its formal components, regardless of
whether any part of it was true.
“Sure is,” Samantha
replies. “What’s that silly gesture you
go on about, the one where you prove something by proving it?”
“You mean modus ponens. What about
it?”
“Well, give me an example.”
“OK,” Della says. “A general syllogism would be, ‘All As are
Bs, all Bs are Cs, so therefore all As are Cs.’
Is that so hard?”
“Greek to me,” Samantha
says. “You may as well say that all
wasps are oceans.”
“But that makes no sense.”
“Feh, you’re the one who just
said all bees are seas.”
“That’s not what I meant,” Della
insists.
“So? Whoever said that what you mean is what counts?”
“Well, the way I mean it, it works,” Della says. “The way you
took it, it doesn’t work.”
“See,” Samantha says, “that’s
where you’re messing up. The world itself is vague and ambiguous, and
that’s where we do our magic: by holding
our meanings fixed in our minds, or flexing them loose, we can weave spells to
do all manner of things based almost purely on our intentions – and, of course,
whatever amount of oomph we can put
behind it. It’s easy for us, tougher for
the mages, but nearly impossible to you.
You, on the other hand, are able to concretize and clarify things in
ways we bramblekin could never dream. In
specifics and statistics, you do your magic.”
“But what we do isn’t magic at
all,” Della persists, “It’s just the way things are.”
“No, you’re still not getting
it,” Samantha corrects her. “Magic is the way things are, you just don’t think it’s magic ‘cause it makes sense
to you. Our magic is weird to you, your
magic is weird to us, and that’s just the nature of the beast.”
They turn a corner, and the
conversation is cut off by a heavy oaken double door standing before them. It is large and ornately carved, depicting a
scene of various animals killing and eating each other and rotting in the
ground beneath plants which are eaten in their turn – the circle of life, with
a macabre twist. Stylized bronze handles
meet in the middle to form a split ankh.
“OK,” Samantha says, standing
before the doors. “We’ve come a ways
through the bramble, this is probably very far indeed from the last door. I know I said we had no idea where the
hourglass was going to end up, but I think it’s safe to say that this looks
like trouble.” She takes Della’s hand in
hers and squeezes tightly. “So make for
the first door you see, and try to take a quick glance around. We’ve got writs of safe passage, sure, but
there may be forces at work that could prove… overwhelming, shall we say, for
our little scrap of paper.”
Della nods her assent, and
Samantha opens the door.
The first thing Della registers
is torchlight – the second, a matching doorway some few dozen yards straight
across. Halfway between, there is a
throne made from what look to be bones bound together with leather. Then she hears the clang of metal on metal, and looks to her right as she hurries
behind Samantha.
Two men are dueling in the
middle of what seems to be a great black temple, columns lining the walls
toward an open front facing out over a moonlit mountain range. One of them is pale, bald, and dressed in a
black cassock; the other is heavily tanned, with black hear, and wearing a
white silk robe. Their longswords are
simple and well-balanced weapons, flashing through the air with frightening
speed and grace. Beyond them Della sees
the revenant, standing at a distance and holding a sword of her own. They lock eyes.
“Della,” she shouts above the
din of battle, “Whatever you – ”
“Silence, insect!” The man in black waves his hand at her
without taking his eyes off his opponent, his voice booming in the stone
temple. The revenant flies through the
air on a current of unseen force, slamming into one of the onyx columns.
“Safe passage,” Samantha shouts
as she leads Della through, just now clearing the throne at a dead run. “Holy shit
do we ever have safe passage!”
The
duelists pause to glance at the intruders, then return to the fight. The man in black is a hair too late – the man
in white has seized the distraction and run his opponent through. Della glances back at the revenant, sitting
in a heap at the foot of the column. A
few rivulets of blood – not the black ichor from when Della thought she’d
killed her, but blood, red and real – begin to trickle down from behind the
broad silk choker at her neck. She stops
staring just soon enough to cast her gaze about for the hourglass, but it is
nowhere in sight – she fixes for a moment on a golden-haired corpse laying in a
pool of blood between two columns, also wearing a white robe. Then Sam is leading them through the next set
of doors, and they’re back in the bramble.
No comments:
Post a Comment