3 Lennitay, after dinner (continued)
The rest of it I’ll sum up, because it’s too painful to remember. I think Cederic told Vorantor to keep his stooges out of the way when he told the Darssan mages what was going to happen, and there was a lot of noise and furor. Cederic was so still during all of this that I couldn’t help wondering just how painful it was for him, that they all thought he’d abandoned them and the research they’d all worked so hard on. I tried to stay out of the way as they all packed up the books and washed down the walls, shut down the kathanas powering the commodes and the pools, and gathered up their belongings, because it felt as if my home were being destroyed. I had so many goodbyes to make that it didn’t help that the thirteen mages coming with us (not including Cederic) were all friends of mine, ten of the group leaders, including Terrael (that was an obvious choice) and Sovrin, plus Audryn and two other men I knew well. I had to hide in my room often so I wouldn’t make them feel worse by how miserable I was. This is why I’ve never had friends. It’s too hard when you have to leave them behind, and you always have to leave them behind.
No, that’s a lie, and if I’m going to be lying a lot in the days and weeks to come, I shouldn’t lie to myself. I’ve never had friends because I never could trust anyone before, and as much as it hurts, saying goodbye, I’d rather have had friendship than not. And Sovrin was more miserable than the rest of us. Her lover isn’t coming along, despite her arguments and even my pleas to Cederic to make an exception. He said, damn him for being right, “We can’t look weak in front of the Empress, and Denril will know we didn’t bring our best. Hard choices, Sesskia.” So the best we could do was give them as much time together as possible.
Eventually, the second loenerel arrived, and I didn’t go up to see it, but if the one we’re riding in now is small, I can’t even imagine how huge that one was. After it left, there was some uncomfortable shuffling around—I think Denril’s mages had the decency to feel guilty about why they were there—for an hour or two before our loenerel was positioned for us to bring our things on. It’s beautiful, in a hard and gleaming way—lots of brass and rubbed brown leather, and some of the senets are just rows of seats with lots of windows, and others have sleeping cubicles, and there’s one for eating in. It smells of hot metal all the time, though as I wrote above, the smell becomes stronger when it stops, and there’s also a bitter-oily scent I now associate with large quantities of magic, and never mind what Terrael said about magic being completely used up by th’an or kathanas. I went up to look at the collenna, which is what actually contains the magic—the senets are all connected to it in a long row—and it positively reeked of that odor. The master, whose name I’ve forgotten, showed me where he draws the th’an, and it was so clever! There’s an engraving on this brass panel in the shape of a couple of linked th’an, a groove just thin enough for a skinny paintbrush to fit, and the master has a five-gallon bucket full of that silvery ink or paint Terrael used on the aeden to give me his language. He paints the th’an, following the grooves exactly, and that makes the th’an work. That’s how people other than mages can use magic, though I gather it’s not as simple as just filling in a line. The masters, not just of collennas but of other machines as well, have to be taught to write their rune in exactly the right way, and they usually only learn just the one their job makes them responsible for. I’m not sure how that doesn’t make them mages, though I suppose in Castavir being a mage is defined as knowing hundreds or thousands of th’an. But it is reassuring to know if anything happened to the master, we’ve got fifty people on the loenerel who can make it go, which is good because the idea of being trapped in this horrible, hot, arid, stinking wasteland makes me feel even more queasy.
And that brings me up to now. To sum up:
- We’re all going to Colosse to take part in research none of us believes in.
- Denril Vorantor is dangerous.
- The Empress is even more so.
- Cederic still has hope the Codex Tiurindi will prove him right, and in time for that to make a difference.
We should be out of the desert soon, probably by tomorrow morning. I wish I knew how fast we’ve been traveling, so I could get a sense for how far we’ve come, but I suppose it doesn’t matter. And despite everything, I’m a little eager to see Colosse. I’ve visited many cities in I don’t know how many foreign lands, but this is my first time visiting a city in a completely different world. I hope it isn’t a disappointment.