"Oh, I didn't do it! I just found a new friend."
"A friend?" Sir Guy was instantly wary, eyes flicking to left and right. "What manner of being was this, who could counter such fell foes?"
"A goblin more fell than they." Puck was there suddenly, standing arms akimbo on Matt's shoulder, grin flashing. "I but set them to fighting each to each, and let them chew one another to powder, whiles the wizard did watch and ponder. Then he dispersed the last one, and all was peace."
"He's got an unusual twist of thought," Matt explained. "Puck, meet Sir Guy."
"Nay, this manner of spirit, I can comprehend!" Sir Guy grinned, holding out a forefinger. "Well met, good sprite!"
Puck clasped the forefinger. "I like the look of you, Sir Knight! Say, what mischief might you find for me?"
"He's good at mischief," Matt explained. "In fact, he's the embodiment of it."
"Why, I have as much a liking for a good jest as any," Sir Guy said.
Puck made a face. "Good jests have little of amusement in them, Sir Knight. 'Tis bad jests that do delight—when one does watch his enemy chasing after phantoms, belike, or being mired in the slough of his own cupidity."
"I own to enjoyment of seeing those who care naught for their fellow creatures suffering from the very ruses they used upon their victims. What would you say, Spirit, to making these soldiers of vileness execute the opposite of each command they're given?"
"So that, when their captain sounds the charge, they turn and flee in rout?" Puck's eyes lit with something like respect. He turned to Matt, nodding. "You may have here a mortal with more than half a mind!"
"That's a compliment," Matt explained quickly.
"Aye." Puck made a face. "This man who has called me up has too much of the proper prude in him. He kens not a true amusement."
"Prude?" Matt bleated. "Why, you half-pint harlequin—-"
"Enough!" Sir Guy held up a palm. "One must never give insult to an ally, Matthew, as you well know."
"A pin in the chair, perhaps," Puck suggested.
"Or an unseen hand that pulls at his hair whenever he ceases to expect it," Sir Guy proposed.
Puck's grin widened. "Better and better! Here stands a man of true insight!"
Insight into ways of making other people look foolish. Matt shuddered; he had never suspected that side of Sir Guy's nature before. But, now that he thought of it, to a man of war, it probably was better than having to carve your enemy into scrimshaw. "You were telling me about the ghost. He talks to you?"
"Um? Oh!" Sir Guy came back to the subject from some vision of practical jokes that would have made Matt shudder.
"Nay, he spoke not—but I had little difficulty comprehending the gist of his intent. Therefore, when he appeared before me this morn, and was clearly in a state of great excitement, I understood from his signs and gestures that doughty heroes were nearby and could be gathered into our number—but they could not see him well enough to comprehend."
"No, I couldn't." Matt frowned, unable to understand how Sir Guy could guess the ghost's meaning so easily, when Matt had been stumped.
Unable to understand. That was it—Sir Guy had the referents; he naturally thought the same way the ghost did. Which Matt did not. At all.
Odd. The ghost didn't look like a warrior..."So you decided to help him?"
"Aye. I had understood, from your talk and the Demon's, that seeing had something to do with Max's function; so I asked him to move brightness from the morning into the ghost..."
"A most distasteful ambiguity" Max hummed, hovering between them again. "He seems not even to know the word 'energy,' or to be able to understand it as anything other than a liveliness within his limbs."
Sir Guy glared at the spark, but Puck hooted with laughter. "What have we here? A will-o'-the-wisp that's scarcely hatched?"
"Hatched?" the Demon sang in indignation. "Why, what oaf is this, who mocks even at the powers of the universe!"
"Hoo! So you are the universe, are you, small spark? What is the sun, then, your child? The infant dwarfing ever the sire!"
"What foolishness!" Max snapped. "How could the sun be begotten of me, when I was there to oversee its birth?"
"A midwife to the sun?" Puck cried. "Nay, enough of such vainglorious boasting."
"Of course," Matt murmured. "That's your province."
"Speak with respect, weak mortal! Whiles I do dampen the enthusiasm of this humorless coal!" Puck gestured, and a small rain cloud appeared above the Demon. It contracted in an instant, intensive typhoon.
The drops struck the spark and exploded into steam.
Puck frowned. "Strange."
"What would you expect, foolish sprite?" the Demon seethed. "Know you not Boyle's law?"
"Why, it shall be my law that you shall boil!" Puck started another gesture, but Matt held up a hand. "Don't try to fine-tune it any, will you?" He had a nightmare vision of a duel between the Spirits of Entropy and Mischief. Strange—he would have thought the two would have gotten along famously.
Or notoriously...
In desperation, he guessed the end of Sir Guy's story. "So the ghost left with Max—and I saw them together, and knew he must be leading us to you." Finally, he had a referent for the ghost's motions.
"And thus you are come." Sir Guy grinned. "In good time, Matthew! Shall we chew this host up between us?"
"Say, rather, that you shall grind them 'gainst the grit of your grating wit!" Max keened. "Wizard, you know not what I have endured at his hands! Scarcely one task in a week, and that so simple it could have been done with stone and stick! This enforced idleness has brought me to seethe with impatience!"
"You were free to suggest any course of action you wished," Sir Guy snapped.
"I did, and you comprehended not! Why, Wizard, his grasp of science exceeds a child's—inversely! It rivals an infant's! His notion of experiment is to see how close he can bring the point of his lance to a target! He thinks a field force is an army's bivouac! That relativity is the tracing of his kindred! How could you desert me with such a one?"
"Easy, easy," Matt soothed. "Nobody said you had to stay with him."
"How could I have deserted him, in the face of such foes?"
"Easily," Puck said sourly. "You gave him no gain by your staying."
The Demon emitted a single, high-pitched note that stabbed right through Matt's eardrums and veered up higher. In a panic, he called, "Easy! Easy! Ease off, in fact! Damp your gain! His worldview doesn't encompass science, you know! In fact, he doesn't really have the concept of causality."
The Demon's note cut off in something that sounded remarkably like a gasp of horror. "You jest!"
"Who, him?" Puck said in scorn.
Matt reddened and gave the elf a glare as he told Max, "Not really. Cause-and-effect thinking is a relatively modern idea, you know."
"Modern! In what sense?"
"From the Renaissance on. Well, okay, the classical Greeks had it, and gave it to the Romans—but it died out for almost a thousand years, in anything more subtle than hammering a door with a battering ram to cause it to break. Then Europe relearned geometry, picked up algebra from the Muslims—and scientists like Copernicus and Kepler rediscovered the idea that you could reason back from effects to causes."
"Do you say this knight's teachers did not know enough to learn true science?"
"Not really, no. At this stage, Europe hasn't learned any mathematics beyond arithmetic, and they don't even have the idea of the zero—they're still using Roman numerals."
"What other form is there?" Sir Guy asked, intrigued.
Matt swallowed heavily. "Arabic."
"Saracens!"
"They're good mathematicians," Matt protested. Then he turned back to Max. "Before they can really start thinking scientifically, they'll need geometry. Then Copernicus will be able to realize that the orbits of the planets don't look the way they should if they were revolving around the earth. Kepler will take his idea and try to make it specific—but he'll need Tycho Brahe's observations. With those records, Kepler will find out that the motions of the planets don't fit the shapes of the perfect solids he's been thinking of—but they do fit ovals. Then Galileo will have to build his work on top of theirs, and Newton will have to learn Galileo's ideas and invent his own version of calculus before he'll be able to figure out the law of gravity. Knowledge is built up like a pyramid, you see—and so far, Europe has only laid the foundations."