Quelt laughed, too. “I should have brought you here first to explain it,” she said.
They walked above the group standing there under some other sunlight, in another time, in a field full of flowers very like the ones all around them now. When she stood still, Nita found, she could see those figures down below moving, talking, consulting with one another—all but the one who stood apart, an Alaalid taller than the rest of them, dressed all in white, and coolly beautiful, with eyes of a gorgeous burning amber.
“Wow,” Kit said. “Who’s that?”
“Esemeli,” Quelt said.
“She’s hot,” Kit said, in considerable admiration.
Nita threw a glance at him. Next to Kit, Ponch, too, was gazing down into the depths…but he was starting to growl softly.
Kit looked at Ponch in shock, and then at Quelt. “Oh no. You mean she’s—”
“The Lone Power,” Nita said. “The local version.”
“That’s her,” Quelt said. “But we came in in the middle of the story. If you come over here, you can see it from the start.”
They walked over to the far side of the Display, and looked deep down into it. The landscape that presented itself was like the one in which they stood, but less groomed-looking, rougher around the edges. There was a field full of the blue jijis flowers; it seemed to stretch to the horizon, which was unusual in that world where no landscape seemed to go very far before running into the sea. In the middle of the field stood the seven Alaalid men and women, and in the center, the extremely beautiful one.
“That’s her when she first arrives,” Quelt said. “And there are our first seven wizards, who’re making the Choice.”
Nita cocked her ear at something she was coming to recognize since she’d started to study the Speech more closely—the “Enactive mode,” one of the most powerful ways in which the Speech could be spoken. Quelt wasn’t using the mode itself, but a secondary form called the pre-Enactive voice: a form for talking about first-level enactments and other major change, without actually using the words that would bring the change to pass. Its tenses were very weird if translated into any human language, where present and past are usually separate; so Nita didn’t bother trying to translate it in her head, and just let it sound like one very large kind of present.
“Come on,” Quelt said. “They tell the story better than I can.” And she stepped right down into the crystalline surface as if it were water.
Nita and Kit both stared. Quelt looked over her shoulder at them. “It’s all right,” she said. “It’s not an actual portal, just a replay. You can’t actually interact with it, but it’s as if you were there…”
“How do we—” Kit said, and then looked around him in surprise as, very slowly, he started to sink into the crystal where he stood.
“You just let yourself,” Quelt said. “There’s no problem breathing or
anything; the wizardry takes care of that for you.”
Do I have to go, too? Ponch said to Kit. I feel like running now.
“No, it’s fine,” Kit said, still sinking. “You go ahead.”
Ponch bounded off the Display and into the flowers.
“I think I’d rather do it your way,” Nita said, and followed Quelt’s lead, just taking a step down as if she were standing on a flight of stairs. The substrate behaved that way, too, letting her foot go down into the crystal.
Nita followed Quelt down into the substrate, while beside the two of them Kit just kept on sinking where he stood, as if he were on some kind of elevator. Within half a minute or so, they were standing in the same field of flowers as the seven figures and the eighth one, standing in the center of the circle.
“Let me get this straight,” Kit said. “This isn’t actually the past, and that wasn’t some kind of timeslide—”
“No, not at all,” Quelt said. “I don’t think that’d be allowed. You wouldn’t want to get involved in time paradoxes where a Decision was involved.”
“I don’t know,” Nita said as they walked toward the circle of Alaalids. “There have been times when I’ve wished we could do something like that with ours.”
Quelt gave Nita a concerned look. “You’re going to have to tell me more about that later,” she said. “Anyway, this wizardry just makes it seem as if we were there. “We can hear what they say, watch what they do.”
For the moment, though, none of the figures seemed to be doing much of anything. “The scenario repeats whenever anyone who sees it wants it to,” Quelt said. “Most people get taken here once or twice when we’re little. I got to see it more often than most people, because Vereich ran me through the Choice a lot while he was training me as his replacement.” She looked a little amused by this. “There’s not really a lot to it, but it is history, and something a wizard here would need to know about…”
They walked around the circle. “So these were our wizards,” Quelt said. “That little one there: He’s the chief, Seseil. He wrote out the first part of the Telling.”
“He wrote it?” Kit said, looking at the lean figure, slight for an Alaalid, who stood there among the flowers, barefoot, in breeches and a loose shirt. “Usually, it just seems to arrive somehow. You hear it, or find it, or find that you know the beginnings of it…”
“That’s sort of how it went for us,” Quelt said. “Seseil wrote the words that he heard the wind Telling the water. All the others did that, too, sooner or later, except they all heard different words. Seseil had to journey all over the settled lands, from island to island, to find other people who’d heard the words and could tell him the ones he didn’t know. It took a long time to find them all, but he wouldn’t give up.”
As they came around the side of the circle, Nita looked into that hard, wise face, frozen for the moment into immobility, and had no trouble believing what Quelt was telling them. “That’s the Imrar, isn’t it?” Nita said. “The poem about the Island Journey. It got mentioned in one of the orientation sources.”
“That’s right,” Quelt said. “It took him three hundred years, and he had all kinds of adventures. But he found all the words at last. And up above us, in physical
reality, in that field—that’s where they started the argument that ended with Ictanikë arriving.”
“Wait a minute,” Kit said. “I thought you just said the Lone One’s name was Esemeli.”
“That’s her second name: It comes later. So here you see them with Ictanikë, when she turns up for the first time. They were a little confused about her, because she plainly knew about wizardry, though she wasn’t a wizard.”
“I’ve heard many a strange tale on my travels,” Seseil said. The sound was fading in slowly, as if somebody was turning it up, and Nita wandered a little closer to hear. “But this is one of the stranger ones. What exactly is it that you’re offering us?”
“It doesn’t sound like anything new,” said another of the wizards. “This is the world, and entropy is running. We have time, and life to live in it.”
“But not in power,” Ictanikë said. “Not in power that you can depend upon. You sailed the seas from inner to outer and back again, finding a word here and a word there, hoping the wind would bring you what you need to know. Why should you be at the world’s mercy this way? With help from someone wise, someone longer in the world, you can find your power much more quickly. I can help you do that.”
The Alaalid wizards looked at one another, not quite sure what to make of this. “Help is always welcome,” one of them said.
“But you must pay my price,” Ictanikë said.
The uncertainty among them grew. Nita saw several of them exchange glances, and, in particular, Seseil began to regard Ictanikë with what looked like the beginnings of suspicion. “Among us,” Seseil said, “when one person needs something, another one gladly gives it to them. That way, you know that when the day comes that you need something, another will be ready to give. If you have a gift to give us, we’ll accept it gladly…assuming it’s a thing we need. But this talk of price—”