Toward the end of our afternoon break under the endless blue of the veld sky, Eidahn stalked over, leading a gigantic horse by the reins. He looked at my mutton shank, nearly finished, and back at me.
“Ride?” he said.
“Um,” I replied, looking about. Hester beamed at me encouragingly, Gena looked like she was quietly laughing, and Ariké was nowhere to be found—perhaps with the outriders today.
Ariké was the one I was really looking for, to help translate. But without them handy, I decided it was rude to shrug off Eidahn to go looking, so I decided I would honor our hosts and… well…
“On that?” I gulped, looking up at the immense creature.
“He,” Eidahn chuckled. “He is working horse. Pulls wagons. Strong, gentle. Easy.”
“On… him, then. All right.” I glanced about and found myself alone with Eidahn and his titan of a steed in this little grove of the Riders’ tent forest. “Say, where did they go? I was just eating with Hester and Gena.”
Eidahn shrugged and handed me the reins.
My first proper lesson in riding was, upon later reflection, a stirring success. The beast was docile, we trotted about on an infinite sea of unproblematic grass, and I was never in much danger of falling off. But at the time, I was filled nearly to my very capacity by fear. Fear of embarrassing myself. Fear of injury1. Fear that I would prove unable to learn and unworthy of my present company. Even a meta-fear that I was near to the point that fear would overwhelm me and I would involuntarily toss the reins aside, dismount, and flee idiotically on foot into the distance.
But the most menacing, most sinister fear lurking in the menagerie of my fears was the fear of the future. The veld is the storied land of legendary horsemen, but it is also a harsh land. It crushes the unprepared, it swallows mighty heroes, and it ambushes and gobbles up even its native sons and daughters. Was I next? Would my life depend on my ability to fight and ride as the Yariagar do? If so, each minute in this saddle was one of the most precious minutes available to me.
But, as it happens, the hardest part of my day to come was not one I had been fearing at all. Eidahn helped me down from the saddle as the band began to stake out a camp for the evening. I spent a decent portion of a minute fully concentrating on keeping my noodly, quavering legs beneath me. Then I looked up to see Hester.
He was offering me a sword.
I looked around. Gena and three of the riders’ teens stood in a loose circle just behind Hester, also holding swords.
I looked back at Hester, pleading silently.
“Oh, no, this is a favor, my friend,” Hester said, a drop of reproach at the tip of his tongue. “New training at the point of exhaustion settles in the fastest.”
“You jerk,” I said.
The shit-eating grin crept across his face. “But it’s true. Come on.”
He lofted the sword at me and I caught it with a great theatric fumble. It was some relief, at least, to realize that the scabbard was not a scabbard at all—it was the sword itself, which was a wooden trainer.
Finally, the sun dove behind the distant ridge to the west. I left Gena and Hester and stumbled back to our tent, and when I collapsed onto my bed I realized I would barely be able to get up even if pressed. I suppose Hester had known that, too, which is why he hadn’t allotted any breaks during the exercise.
Ariké and Eidahn bustled about the tent; Hester remained out on some unspecified business (or perhaps simply for a drink around a fire somewhere else at camp). Gena, eventually, lifted the flap and came in with a little ceramic flagon, which she carried by the neck, and a pair of little matching cups.
“Here. Don’t have too much, you need to sleep, but…”
“Oh, gods, thank you. Don’t trap yourself in here on my acc…”
“You needn’t worry. Here on my own initiative.”
I took a smell of the steaming liquid she offered.
“A rice liquor. From the south end of the Valley,” Gena explained.
“Cheers.”
“Cheers.”
“I don’t… um. Drink very much,” I said, wincing a bit at the sweet strength of the stuff.
“Neither do I. Do you plan on doing something stupid?”
“No, but…”
Gena snorted. “‘But?’ Oh no.”
“Yeah. I said something… very regrettable to Henri once at a feast.”
“Good thing you’re still an apprentice. Youthful proclivities get overlooked, right?”
“I suppose. I rather suspect that some lords overlook… youthless proclivities, too. But I’ve never once seen… I can’t imagine Montigo… I have to fill her shoes.”
“Is that how it works?”
“What? No, not technically; I’m not required to fully abstain, but…”
“No, I mean; are you to be pledged to the service of the court of Ilianath? Isn’t that a very serious engagement?”
“Well, yes, it’s very serious. The Court Wizard’s Oath isn’t just a set of words, it’s a whole ceremony that a senior wizard officiates and spell cast by the oath-taker. The oath-taking wizard is bound in fealty and service to their lord, and the lord is bound to heed and protect their wizard. The spell ensures hair-raising punishments for either party breaking those bonds.”
“So is that what you’ll be doing?”
“I suppose so.”
“You suppose so.”
“I haven’t given it much thought.”
“But it’s not an inevitability.”
“Suppose not.”
“Hm.”
There was a gentle silence as Gena refilled our drinks.
“I’ve been making progress,” she said.
“On…?”
“Oh, right. You’ve had a lot on your mind,” she chuckled. “I’ve been studying the Halls.”
“How?”
“I’ve been thinking, with my mind. Do they not teach apprentices that?”
“No, but… I mean yes! But where have you found the time? In all this travel? The resources? I want to find my way back to the Halls just as badly—even worse lately—but I’d need a stack of books the size of one of these wagons…”
“I’d wish for the same, but we have to do without.”
“So you have, I guess. Let’s hear it, then, eh?”
She laid out the basic points of her hypothesis to me. I began to feel a bit lightheaded with the implications. Or was that the liquor?
The Halls were a realm of the Lightbringer’s creation, Gena postulated. This came as no particular surprise. But, further, she said, consider its bare and alien nature: it was a realm of the Lightbringer’s own meaning, a meaning unfettered by the minds and wills of her peer divinities. A realm of meaning, then, would make contact with our own not in physical ways, but in conceptual ways.
To understand the Halls, we could start by better understanding our own world.
I regret that I am unable to reproduce the hypothesis in its entirety. Gena’s first bit of genius was the little twist of inverse thinking that inspired her to think of studying Mundus to understand better the Halls. The rest was an exercise in dogged polymathematics. Each idea was supported by other observations and further theories. She had checked every supposition against an array of sources—whatever sources she could simply remember. Three of which she quoted (by memory!). Every stray thought was collected and constructed, and I could sense the invisible mass of ideas that didn’t fit and had been ruthlessly discarded. It would be so easy, in the hypnosis of passion, to let just any charming thought cling to one’s argument and fail to see its deficiencies, and then let it weigh the whole enterprise down. Not Gena. She had harnessed her passion for this search into a razor-sharp perception, carving away what was wrong from what was right.
There was just one aspect that I thought was under-examined.
“This invites obvious comparisons, don’t you think? Mundus. We think of it as a world below the Garden and above Chthonus2. But what if instead, it’s between…”
“Between a cadre of divinities, yes. That they may push and tug.”
“We’re going to make a heretic of you after all, I think,” I mumbled.
“I follow only her commandment to study,” she said uneasily.
“You don’t think you’ll get objections from the… uh… doctrinists? Big thing, that ordering of the cosmos, with the ancient gods and their grand architecture.”
“The theories aren’t inconsistent.”
“In a basic sense, sure, but… this is an entirely new characterization of Mundus! Every last little fixture of our current logos seems suspect in its light, if you ask me.” Gena shrugged, so I barreled on. “You know I was there for the bitter infighting over where a rock goes when you throw it. Imagine the politics over questions like, ‘was the original godly design meant to be so… malleable?’”
“Fine,” Gena said. “I get it. Nothing I can’t handle.”
I was suddenly feeling a little disoriented for a new reason. “Gena! This is marvelous insight, potentially world-shattering3 work ahead. This is a new frontier for mortal understanding of… everything, and it came to you on a stroll across the grasslands. Shouldn’t this be exciting?”
“It is, Howe, don’t get me wrong. It just doesn’t change everything. Not yet. We still have work to do to get back to the Halls.”
I eyed her. “Maybe you express excitement differently than I do.”
“Years of reclusion in a monastery might do that.”
“Sure,” I laughed. “Cheers.”
“Cheers.”
“So,” I said, finishing my little cup. “We find places where the meaning here, on Mundus, has contact with the meaning there, in the Halls.”
“Right.”
“But since we can’t see the ‘geography’ over there, we have to make do with our best guess.”
“Also right.”
“I have a partial star chart; it’s what I could draw down from memory from our last visit. I’ll make a study of it.”
“A star chart?” Gena asked, tilting her head.
“Right. History is my favorite subject of logical study, but astromancy is my favorite subject of arcane study. The stars are… ‘fixed’ is perhaps an oversimplification, but they are nearly so. They are there, always there, whether they are in plain view or hidden behind the clouds or invisible before the sunlight. They have been so for millennia. Their arrangements contain meaning, meaning which is extraordinary because it is shared by every inhabitant of the Mundus. Well, on the southern continent anyway.
“Many of the spells I have trained on in my years are derived from the stars. Find some number of them that bear relations, in position, size, color, harmonics; detect their meaning; relate that meaning to latent correspondences in the Mundus… once all of these ideas are correlated in one’s mind and those lines of correlation are sensed down here, a spell may be formed from them.
“Anyhow, with so much power in the stars… it stands to reason that if the stars there bear any relation to the stars here, they should provide valuable clues in our search.”
“I see,” Gena replied, sipping, learning. “A fine start. Do keep me apprised.”
I handed her my cup. “I will. But you’re right—first I need to stop drinking and get some sleep.”
“Right. I’ll contemplate the Word. In some new ways, mind.”
“Gena, I just wanted to say… well, thank you for the drink; I needed that, and… I meant it; this is a stunning and impressive idea you’ve had.”
“Happy to, Howe.”
It felt unbecoming of me to complain about it, but it seemed to me like she hadn’t taken the damn compliment and I wondered why. Did she see it as pointless fawning? Did she not enjoy my company much? Did she suspect my motives?
The tiny knot bubbled around a bit in my chest for a moment, but I didn’t end up having the time to fret over it. I’m sure I fell asleep immediately, because I remember nothing other than a brief and happily dulled creak of pain my sides gave as I lowered myself, still clothed, onto my bed.
I slept blessedly free of any dreams.
I could sense the horse’s latent, cosmic strength beneath me. But while strength would certainly be a causal factor in any injury I sustained, my sense of fairness toward the kind creature compels me to clarify that his strength would not be the culprit in any injury. ↩
Hence, Mundus Medias, “the world between.” ↩
In a sort of less-metaphorical-than-usual way! Ha, ha. ↩