4th of Darkfall, 412 AH
The healer came an hour later and greeted us briefly, a word for my new father and me. Then she crossed to the bed and set about the impossible without any of the apparatus I'd have demanded for it. She put her hands over my right eye, where the ache had pooled all morning behind the orbital bone. Then I felt it start.
It came in under the skin as a directed warmth, though warmth was the laziest possible name for it. A stream of something was being run along the tissue, originating from her hands. I could feel the swelling at the orbital bone drawing down in real time. The throb that had kept time with my pulse since I woke unhooked itself from the pulse and faded to a dull background pressure. I could finally think without interruption.
Accelerated healing. Cellular. She's doing in ninety seconds what biology does in days, and the energy for it is coming from somewhere. Thermodynamics did not get suspended because a stranger put her hands on my face.
They have magic here. Real magic.
And it wasn't only energy. Mending tissue that fast meant building it, which meant material: protein laid down, vessels reknit, the whole slow scaffolding a body throws up over days compressed into a few minutes.
None of that came free. So where was the raw stock coming from? The body's own reserves, or from her magic?
My father sat on the other side of the bed and asked her the same three questions in a slightly different order each time. Is he mending. Will there be lasting issues. Are you certain. She gave the answers back almost word for word without lifting her eyes from her hands. He held my free hand the whole time, and I let him, but my attention stayed on my eye. Whatever she was doing under my skin was the only event in the room worth the name.
When she finished, she left before I could ask a single question. I watched the door close behind her and wanted intensely to drag her back through it. I needed answers. Then food came.
I was hungrier than I'd thought. I ate too fast and choked on the water between bites. My father caught me by the shoulder and thumped my back while I coughed until my eye throbbed again. Dying a second time this early would be a truly pathetic result.
My stomach cramped around the food. This body was small, days behind on calories, and apparently unwilling to make up the deficit all at once. My father took the food away and told me to take it slowly. Then he squeezed my hand one last time and went.
The exhaustion hit all at once. I wanted to figure out the problem of where the energy had come from. Just for a minute, I told myself, eyes already closing. Work out the budget, and then...
I woke to gold light through the shutters and the sound of cloth being shaken out.
The light had moved a long way across the floor, afternoon now. It lay low and slanted in bars across the boards where the shutters broke it. A thin line of frost edged the window glass behind the shutters. Dust turned slowly in the beams. Somewhere below, muffled by stone, a household went about its afternoon, footsteps, a door, the small clatter of work. The headache had pulled back to a thin pressure behind my eye, present but quiet.
The first clear thought I had, fully formed and ahead of anything more sensible, was that I wanted a pencil and paper. Seems about right.
I had several pages' worth of unrecorded observations stacking up and no medium for them. The data-loss was starting to itch worse than the eye had.
"The healer suggested a short walk, young master," the same young servant from this morning said. "To move the blood."
A walk was exactly what I wanted, and not for the blood. Writing down my observations would have to wait a while longer, I needed more information about my surroundings first.
The open door gave me a narrow view of the corridor. Beyond it waited the rest of a place I had yet to see with my own eyes. I sat up and put my bare feet on the floor.
The stone was cold and smooth. I stood, and lost my balance immediately, my center of gravity low and forward where I kept expecting it higher. The servant caught me before I could fall.
"Slowly, young master."
He kept me upright until the floor stopped spinning. Shouldn't have stood up so fast. Then he moved to dress me.
I didn't want to be dressed by him, but pulling away might be suspicious.
The clothes were black and charcoal, made of thick cloth. The servant dressed me with a speed and economy that said he'd done it plenty of times already. Then he closed the collar all the way to the throat.
The collar pressed into my throat, close enough that it kept stealing my attention. It was annoying, so I undid it.
He did it back up.
I undid it again and watched him, genuinely curious whether he'd contest it or let it go.
He did it up. No comment or change in the face, just the button returning to its hole.
"It's too tight around my throat," I said. The question that actually interested me was why he cared, what made a single button at my collar worth doing up three times without a word.
He let the button stay open. But he squared the collar around the gap as he conceded it, so the thing sat like a collar styled. Definitely some kind of OCD.
There was a mirror on the wall by the door. I'd been meaning to check it since I woke.
It was a child's face. I knew that hours ago, but knowing a fact and standing in front of it are different things. Around ten years old. Dark hair, pressed flat on one side from the pillow and standing up on the other, it looked quite comical. A round, soft face, the cheek still carrying a child's fat. A boy fed every day of his life and exercised never, which matched with what my legs had told me. It didn't fit me.
The eyes though.
Gray, and a shade too calm for the young face. Too focused. They were already studying the reflection and taking it apart. The eyes were the only part that felt like mine.
(Klaus Pic)
Spoiler
[collapse]
I held the look a moment longer than a ten-year-old checking his hair would have, and made myself stop. Staring at my own face like it belonged to a stranger wasn't a habit I wanted to start in front of this guy.
"It fits you," he said from behind me.
My heart skipped a beat. For half a second I was sure he meant it the deeper way, that the body fit whoever was wearing it now, and that he'd seen as much. Then I caught him looking at the collar in the glass, open and squared as he'd left it, and understood he meant only his own handiwork.
I got my face back in order, and we went out into the corridor.
The corridor was wide, long, and well lit. I had taken perhaps three steps into it before I noticed the light.
It came from a row of stones cradled in iron sconces down both walls at head height. They were finally close enough to study. I drifted toward the nearest one, came up onto the balls of my feet, and got my hand close to the stone without touching it. Fine lines had been engraved across its exposed facets, too deliberate for flaws and too shallow to catch the light from more than one angle.
No heat.
I held my palm a finger's width off it and felt nothing. No radiant warmth at all, the light pouring out of it and not a calorie of waste coming with it. That was wrong. It didn't make sense in a different way than the healing, because the healing I could at least file under I don't understand it yet.
This I understood completely, and it still couldn't be true. Every light I had ever stood near in my life on earth had been a thermodynamic confession. The bulb warm, the flame hot, every photon paid for in waste heat shed to the room. That was the deal. This stone was breaking the rule to my face.
Luminescence could explain the lack of heat, but not the source. The stone was bright enough to light the corridor and showed no sign of charging, fuel, or decay. If it stored the energy, where? If it drew the energy continuously, from what?
My chest went tight.
The whole apparatus of how I think came online at once, the hunger for mechanism, and turned itself on this corridor.
"How do these work?" I asked.
The servant's eyebrows rose. "Light-stones, young master. The artificers make them. They draw on mana and turn it to light," he said.
Mana. He said it plainly, an ordinary household word, no different from naming the water in the pipes. I'd known it of course, from stories I'd read and games I'd played on Earth. Hearing it said seriously, as the name of a real substance, was strange. I wanted the rest of it so badly, where the mana was, how dense, whether I had any of it myself. It was fascinating.
The servant moved on before I could turn the answer into ten more questions. I followed him, there were plenty of other things to see.
The corridor was warm but there was no fireplace along it, no vent or source I could find, and yet the air sat at a comfortable temperature.
There was a source, all right. I just hadn't looked in the right place.
Because the walls were carved.
Cut deep into the stone between the light-stones ran patterns I'd taken at first for ornament and now saw were nothing of the kind. Geometric. Branching. A line would run straight and then split at a junction into two, and the two into four, with nodes seated at the forks. It seemed organized and directed, like circuit traces.
I put three fingers in one of the grooves.
A fine tingling met my fingertips, the faint acid fizz of mineral water on skin, concentrated beneath the carved channel exactly where the geometry said it should be.
The circuitry was doing something. The warmth in the corridor was almost certainly it, doing it. Mana used as fuel. I'd had the proof under my fingertips for less than a second when the servant's hand closed around my wrist.
Gentle but firm. He drew my hand back off the wall without any drama at all, a child's hand off a hot stove, except that the stove wasn't hot, and the worst of it was that he had to have known the stove wasn't hot.
"Best not to touch those, young master."
I was annoyed. Here I was, moments from changing the history of science on this world, and a valet had removed my hand from the material I needed. Revolutionizing this world would have to wait.
With the wall closed to me, I put my attention on the corridor itself instead.
A guard stood a dozen paces down the corridor, armed with a sword in its sheath, blue-eyed and sharp. Her eyes went wide for half a breath when I made eye contact, then smoothed flat again so fast I'd have missed it if missing things were a luxury I could afford. Then she gave me a short nod and went back to watching the corridor.
A second came around the far corner mid-stride. A third stood at the end of the hall, too far to read. Three guards in the length of one corridor was a density I had no baseline to judge. But three guards and all three of them women, that was unusual. Not conclusive though. A rich house's retinue could skew in any direction for a dozen reasons I didn't know.
Hung the full height of the wall, every few paces, were portraits.
Heavy frames, commemorative paintings of a lineage announcing itself. Women. Women in plate armor with their helmets under their arms, women in dark formal robes shaking hands, women in the severe high-collared attire of some older generation, face after face of them, receding down the corridor.
I had no idea who any of them were, what they'd done, which war or marriage or death each frame marked, but I could count. All of them women.
And in face after face, the same flat cool gray eyes that had just looked back at me out of the mirror.
I stood there longer than I should have, stopped dead in front of the paintings. The servant had paused a respectful distance off and was waiting. He couldn't have known what was going on in my mind, that I was standing in a gallery of my own borrowed eyes stretched back through centuries of women.
This world is weird.
A door opened to my right.
A girl stepped out, older than me, dark-brown hair pulled back in a high tail, dressed in dark training leather, caught mid-motion, working a glove down over her fingers. She got two steps into the corridor before she saw me. Then she stopped.
Her eyes widened when she saw me, then went blank. Whatever she wanted to ask, she kept it for somewhere more private; she turned without a word and went back through the door. More weirdness.
The servant's hand found my elbow again and turned me gently on down the corridor. She knew me, or rather this body and its previous occupant. And whatever she knew, she didn't like, or so I guessed.
The corridor ended at a tall window. I looked at the view.
Gardens below. The trees had gone yellow and red with mid-autumn. High stone walls enclosed the estate. Beyond them were the packed rooftops of a city, smoking gently in the cold. Past even that, hills dark with trees under a grey sky.
It was, all of it, old money. Written across the whole valley in the one language I could read fluently on any world. Scale.
"How large is this place?" I asked.
"Quite large, young master," he said, and walked me on.
I rolled my eyes at his back. He'd managed to answer without giving me a single fact I couldn't already see.
The walk back was several hundred meters, and my body was finished long before the end of them. The headache was flaring back up now that the healer's work had some use on it.
Inside, he set water by the bed, turned down the blankets. Then he dimmed the nightstand light-stone with a pass of his hand, no switch, and that went on the list too. It was getting long now.
I needed a pencil and paper before I started forgetting things.