When Ulmoth was defeated, I remember parting from Astresse. I would return to my outpost, to wait for my colleagues and my people and word from distant Earth. But she could call on me, of course. If she had need, or if her line had need, Nyrgoth Elder would be there for them. Nyr, as she called me. And that was as far as I was willing to bend the rules, and it was an unforgivable breach anyway. Staying with her would have been a step too far. And now . . .
She’s dead these hundred years. And while she lived, she never did quite need me enough to come to the outpost and wake me. I made that promise to her bloodline, and she took me at my word, very seriously indeed, when actually I had been asking her to come back for me, to save me from myself.
Or else, once she was immersed in the running of the kingdom, her adventure with the sorcerer had gone from memory to myth inside her mind, and eventually she put away childish things.
And where does that leave me, now?
I repair the robot, or enough for one more flight, and send it to deliver a message. And then I wait.
*
Later, after they arrive, I watch Allwer regrowing his lost fingers and hope I can store up the joy for later use, and that it won’t just sour into dismay as these things so often do. And I stand with Lyn and look out of the outpost’s eyes at the entourage her mother gave her, to come here. Not just two ragged travellers this time: an honour guard and courtiers who are also spies for the Crown, tents, flunkies, riding animals, all that. And I force them to stay outside and camp in the hard places because I can be petty like that. Only Lyn, Esha, and Allwer get to come in. My companions, the demon-slayers.
And I decide, with my most rational mind, that I am no longer an anthropologist. My failures of objectivity and detachment surely mean that anything I wrote would be hopelessly contaminated by my involvement with the culture I purport to study. Similarly, this place is no longer an outpost. To be an outpost requires some larger thing to be posted out of, and I can be honest with myself: there is no larger thing; not for any practical intents and purposes, and most likely not at all in any way. This is nothing but a tower, and I am nothing but a scientist of sufficiently advanced technology, which is to say a magician.
“I was thinking that I might come to court with you,” I say idly to Lyn. Live a life amongst her people, tell stories that seem one way for me, but which my listeners will forever hear in some other way denied me. Be the court magician of Lannesite. And grow old, I do not say. And, at last, give up my absurdly attenuated existence, I also omit. But first, I will have lived.
In Lyn’s eyes I see a spark. Not for me, Nyr Illim Tevitch, but for a world where there are sorcerers and monsters and wonders, and where courage and resolve can solve problems that intrigue and bookkeeping cannot. The last age of magic, perhaps.
Or perhaps not. The tower will still stand. Its systems will last for half a millennium, a hundred Storm-seasons and more. And if I am to be a wizard, maybe I should take on an apprentice.
Lyn grins at me, and I lift the cognitive shielding, and for a moment I am happy.
Acknowledgments
Thank you to my agent, Simon Kavanagh; my editor, Lee Harris; everyone else involved at Tordotcom; and Liz Myles for acting as an advance reader.