Friday, July 3, 2708 continued.

          A gentle sadness settles on me, as we climb up higher than a range of clouds.  They look like a landscape of immaculate hills out there, stretching away, and I wish that I could become light enough to run to them—live in them, not just visit by flit-travel, but truly live above it all, in a world of white mist and blue skies, where no politics, no religion, no customs, no binding of any kind exists, just pure, free drifting.  My feet tread heavy on the path before me.

(I  stroll the grounds, a melancholy mood upon me.  The school bricks and mortar, normally so embracing, feel like prison walls to me today.  Perhaps the blue sky this morning did it.  It made the gray afterwards so much...well, grayer.  I shiver, then suppress it; I wish I’d brought my cloak.  It’s gone cold for summer.)

(This abandoned corner of the school, normally so comforting, frightens me today.  The peeling walls, the ghostly dust-covers, the creak of the stairs as I go up to the abandoned bedrooms—it feels no longer mine, somehow.  And the stuffy air feels chill, winterlike.  I shrug; maybe messing with time and space can make unseasonable weather leak through.

Enough of that.  You’re the student who embraces change, remember?  And how could it not be mine, when nobody else in the school can even look this way?  And no one else can think it odd, this habitual aversion of the eyes.  If I encounter still more strangeness than usual today, then good!  Why else come here?

Yet I can’t help but look down longingly, over my shoulder, past the stairs at the huge old fireplace behind me.  They used to let in some comfort here.)

I used to let some comfort into my life.  I used to eat when I felt hungry, sleep when I felt weary, a free spirit like all Tilanitos, scheduling my classes around my pleasures and desires, with Archives careful to make sure that all my needs got met.

And all that time I played “agent” with the boys.  I pretended to face hunger and exhaustion, striking valiant poses and expressions, hamming to the hilt.  My pleasures and desires revolved around pretending to do without.

I have no cause to complain.  I chose this path, winding up this pale dirt track amid the frost-cracked stones, the bitter wind moaning in my face.

(I have no cause for complaint.  The walls around the courtyards meet at perfect right angles, as always, still the reliable old friends that I have known since boyhood, waiting out my unjust distemper against them with their usual patience. The grass of the lawns between them stands at precisely one point five inches high.  Nary a twig strays from its place in the hedges, and the straight-trunked trees stay trimmed to a geometric perfection.  Only those clouds, up there, ever slip into chaotic forms, with nothing I can do about it.  Ah well, already they’ve settled down into a uniform overcast again.)

(Why should any of this bother me?  I used to feel my parents’ handprint on this rail.  I used to feel my feet press where they stepped.  Why does it feel so…alien…today?)

As a child at play, I believed that agents never felt regrets—we’d drill all that out of ourselves, laugh at the shifts in our fortunes, live for the tantalizing invitation of the horizon, to go ever into the new and strange.  Sunrises and sunsets looked most beautiful to me, because they’d paint the farthest distances in delicious colors, sweeter than any fruit.

I thought we wouldn’t need regret.  We’d take control of any situation, set things right and then skip off to the next country.  I think of Kief and shudder.  Then I sigh with relief, to think of Cyran in charge...at least for the moment.  I dread worse than bullets the moment when e hands my “field commission” back to me.

(No one likes things out of control, of course.  But I could have dealt with the occasional rude dandelion, a leaf or two as yet unraked, an errant cobweb rounding out the right angles.  Truth be told, these things don’t bother me as much as they ought to; sometimes (I do confess!) I even like them.)

(The cobwebs everywhere flicker in the corners of my sight, animated on drafts, but I shiver when they do, wondering what else might move them?  Truly, I don’t feel alone here, today.)

Because when e hands back power, the ghosts come with it.  Oh, they never leave, but when I take charge they’ll pass judgment on me—I can feel it coming.  Miko will question my error that cost him his life.  Fatima will want to know how well I use the gift that she died to bring to me, and here I’ve hardly done a thing with it.  Lucinda will demand that I live up to the standard of leadership that she bequeathed to me.  And Kief will want to make damn sure that I can justify killing him and taking over.

Does Cyran, I wonder, have ghosts of hir own?  E must!  More than me, no doubt, more than anybody.  Yet somehow e manages to hold the reins steady, anyway.

(But when the students go out of control, now that can only lead to tragedy.  Oh, not the occasional schoolboy romance that they fancy such a secret, nor the surreptitious puffs upon smuggled cigarettes, nor even the odd sneaked-in flask, though of course we must discipline these things where we find them.  If they didn’t flout the rules a little, I’d worry about them, actually.)

(I sip from the flask to give myself courage.  Why do I feel like I’ve lost control of everything?  Me—the Changewright, for God’s sake!  For…whose sake?

Then I remember that courage doesn't come from this particular flask.  I've only made things worse.)

I think that I might have made things a wee bit worse by skipping breakfast and lunch to fill the bowls of others , with good ol’ Til-trained sleight of hand.  Poor voracious teenagers—they need it more than me.  Hunger’s lightheadedness can feel good, sometimes, putting a distance between myself and the pains of the world.  But it also floats me up a bit, a little closer to the realm of ghosts.  The ones light enough to dwell in clouds.

(No, something feels different this time.  At least I keep telling myself that, to justify what I’ve done, writing to the strange folks on the underbelly of the world.  Something crawling under my skin suggests that it might surpass what any headmaster has ever dealt with before.)

(Something tells me that whatever lies in that room, with that relic, surpasses anything that I have ever dealt with before.)

Oh, come on, Deirdre!  Get your feet back on the ground!  We live here and now, in the world of hungry children and dirty, itchy serapes, a world as hard and real as guns.  I’ve got quite enough to worry about without inviting my ghosts to weigh in.

(Folly! Hysterics!  I would have rebuked any student for entertaining notions half so ridiculous.  Some children have gotten up to nasty antics, a teenage exploration of the dark, for guilty thrills—what headmaster hasn’t dealt with such things sometime in his life?  I should take care of it by myself, root out the latest superstitious sadism, send the culprits home in disgrace, and carry on.  What was I thinking, to write all the way to Til Institute for operatives to infiltrate my school for me, on nothing but a hunch?)

(Wimp!  Mewling baby!  Acting like a prepubescent first-year crying for his mawwwmy!

Except they don’t.  They don’t and...and something about that just...I don’t know what, but they need me to fix...whatever... and...and everything has gone precisely according to plan.  I should not hesitate at this door, which I, more than any other in Toulin Academy, have a right to open.)

And yet I never hesitate to ask the favor of my ghosts, in times of doubt or danger.  So why shouldn’t I accept their displeasure, when they mete it out, and humbly take my due?

(And yet, here in my hand I hold the return-message, courteously written in my own language.   Here I hold the incredible words, that Til’s own oracles believe that I have stumbled onto something.)

(And yet my hand sweats on the knob so that I can hardly get a grip on it—here in this shivering-cold hall.

Get a grip—yeah.  Turn the knob!)

          Turn to the left, behind Cyran.  The path comes closer to the brink, now, and soon becomes yet another of those cliff-huggers, though not as bad as the way of the jutting rocks; it does give us, human and beast, a bit of a ledge, and others besides rebels have trod it.  Out here the wind grows sharper, colder still, especially from the empty lefthand side, tumbling down the mountain as the way narrows and I must pay attention to my feet.  It’s okay, though; I’ve tread worse.

          I can see snow down there, and trees that sparkle in the frost and icicles made by the mist off the frozen river.  We shall soon pass to the rain-side of this peak, ourselves, into the snow-country.

          (My breath catches in my chest.  I think I would have preferred a diagnosis of my madness, an expertly delineated examination of my symptoms, and a recommended treatment.  Anything better than a confirmation of…this.)

(It…she…lies there, precisely where I left her, poor little thing.  Nothing has changed.  My skin crawls.  I think I would have welcomed something different, something clearly eerie that I could point to, to justify my urge to turn around and run!)

          A cold gust makes me gasp.  Damien forces a laugh.  “That’s Lucinda—an ether snowball in the face!  I think I caught a whiff of apple-blossom in the blast.”  Oh Lord, that’s the last thing I need—a confirmation!

( As a matter of fact, they plan to send an oracle in the team which will shortly enroll in my school.  Four agents, all told…no, three.  Why did I think four?  Ah yes, they had proposed an additional one, but I plan to write back not to include…now what the devil did I find wrong with the fourth agent?  I can’t remember.)

          The wind builds, now, and I shudder more than I should.  It seems to want to pry me off the path like a chip off the weather-chiseled cliff, by any crevice it can find.

(She she she.  How the word hammers into me!  Like a chisel prying open the weakness in a stone.  I have tried so earnestly to become as hard and cold as…what?  Why did I even try?  What do I think?  I…I…I should never have sipped from that flask.  Not with what I’ve come to do.  I just brought it for the libation, a few drops onto the dry little eyes, let them feel once more the living moisture of tears, of…

…somewhere somebody can’t cry.  Somebody who can…can save me?  If I can but cry for him?

Nonsense!  I don’t need saving and I should never have sipped from the flask—especially not with those herbs in it.)

          I feel a sudden, deep longing well up for Jake, my soul-brother, so far away.  He could make sense of what I only have a tiny feel for.  Maybe I even feel it through him.  I don’t think either of us understands, really, the link between us.  And maybe some things don’t need understood.

          Why does he feel so much farther away than usual these days?

(I frown down at the neat squares of concrete walkway, splitting the grass into two lawns, precise in their symmetry.  I’ve heard about oracles.  Deucedly unstable fellows, some say, usually in need of a keeper.  And sure enough, a second agent will accompany the first, who supposedly has a “positive synergistic effect” upon the young man’s work.  Indeed.

But what can one do?  I’d accept a bloody bone-nosed witch-doctor if he could exorcise the sickening sense of...wrongness, that haunts this place.)

(I feel the currents of the rituals.  They move me.  I light the candles that I made in shop, but the teacher never knew what I added to the wax.  I sprinkle the powder into patterns.

BANG! Something shoots through my head, a thought, a feel—no, a taste.  Something like licorice intertwined with cinnamon, something…but there, it has already vanished.  I don’t know what I thought the minute before.)

(BANG!  Something shoots through my head!  I stumble on the perfectly even pavement.  No, Wallace, nothing of the sort could possibly have happened.  Walk on before anyone notices.)

(BANG!  Something shoots through my head—I lurch and grab Jake, but he grabs me, too, also knocked half off his feet.

“Did you feel that?” he cries.

I blink, nodding.  We’re in a travel-goods store.  Shoppers stare at us. We grapple till we can set ourselves straight again, and people politely look away.  I feel miles away from the minty-fresh toothpaste tablets in front of me.)

“Whoa, Deirdre!”  Damien grips me as I hang over the brink.

 “Wind turbulence,” I say, trying to focus on his face.  “It was just a gust of turbulence.”  Which shot straight through my brain!

Or...did I shoot through somebody else’s brain?  Or...?

As Damien helps me find my feet again, Cyran eyes me critically.  “Deirdre, did you eat lunch?”

“Sure,” I lie, turning to pluck a twig from a rock-clinging shrub, so e won’t see my face.  Cyran’s uncommonly good at reading faces.  I chew the end of the twig to turn it into a camper’s toothbrush, and scour at my teeth, as if I needed it.  My mouth feels dirty, anyway—unfresh, somehow.

(Get a grip, man—no reason to feel dirty.  The experts say that you’ve done the right thing.  Read on.

The Tilián assure me that the third member of the team is, by far, the most intelligent agent within the proper age-range, in fact perhaps in their entire organization.  That sounds more encouraging.  Furthermore, all three young men outstrip the ordinary in even so elite a company.  Bright enough, it so happens, to crash-study my culture on the way over, rather than spending years to learn the necessaries, which could have compromised the mission, or so say the Tilián.)

(Come on, pull yourself together!  You spent years studying this stuff before you came to this point, and none of your fears have ever happened.  Position the candles and start the chant, fool!)

(Mission.  My school is now a foreigner’s “mission”.)

I have succeeded in my mission.  Cyran returns his attention to the trail, which now enters a wide crack in a boulder thrust out from the cliff.  The mule balks and brays at first, but Rashid eventually soothes him down and leads him up.  Not a problem for us; the crack makes a steeper but safer way for awhile, dark gray walls to protect us, under a jag of sky.  No wind in here, either. Soon I huff in the thin air and the sweat builds under my scarf.  I could almost use another gust.

(And the fourth…but no.  Absurd, what they propose.  Dangerous, in a young man’s school.  I will write to them immediately and tell them what we can and cannot permit in this establishment.  I do have some control.)

(I guess my heart takes this ritual more seriously than my head.  My voice shakes through the old incantations—and that can’t be good!  I hear a cawing sound—does it come from her?  Or is it a distant horn, from some other time and space, or…or…or?)

(Crows caw overhead; I look up into that ungovernable sky before I even realize what I’ve done.  I bring my eyes down quickly to the well-mown lawns once more.)

          I hear a distant crow, but looking up, I see nothing.

          (I had made a pet of a crow, once, that flew to the island, thirsty and exhausted.  Years before I’d even thought of school, let alone of becoming headmaster.  I nursed him back to life, and he followed me everywhere, bobbing his head, interested in whatever I did. 

          Then Father sailed back home and shot him.  He said that crows ate crops, and were enemies to Man.  My heart beats faster, just remembering.

          Fool!  Who gave you permission to wallow in your memories?)

          (Now I chant faster and faster, surprising myself.  I don’t even have time to think of the words, they just tumble out like they roll downhill, completely out of control—and I fear, oh how I fear, but I don’t think I can run!)

          A sudden panic sweeps into me.  I want to run, to run, but I have nowhere to go except back into the clouds!  And we’re almost out of time!  I stop, sweating in the cold, and the others pile up behind me.

          Cyran glances back at me.  “Deirdre, are you all right?”

          “Fine,” I say.  I take a deep breath and resume the march.  What just happened?

(I have no control over time, that’s what bothers me.  Never mind the ticking regularity, the clock-and-calendar appearance of it; time does what it will with one, and one has no say in it whatsoever.  (I feel it in the wobble of my jowls when I move my head.  When, exactly, did I grow jowls?)  The time it took to realize that the nightmares wouldn’t quit until I put words to my fears, and then the time to send the message, for it to cross all the distance to Istislan, and from thence to Til Institute.  And then, after that, the time in which they considered, and sent back this response, and still more time ahead for the response to bear fruit, for agents perforce must travel even slower than the mail.)

          (And now I see it: the Rift.  The Rift in Time and Space, minutes and years slipping backwards and forwards helly melly, and, and somehow I watch a silhouette form in the blackness more empty than any darkness known to eyes.)

          “NO!” I shout before I know I’ve shouted.  Hands pull me up from where I’ve curled up on a ledge of rock—precariously, Damien lower on the slope behind me, Cyran perched above and in front.

          Cyran grips me hard and growls in my face, “Deirdre!  What’s going on?”

          “I don’t know.  I’m sorry.  I really am.  I…just…I don’t know.”

          E stares, then suddenly smiles angrily.  “Did you, by any chance, come across a greenfire bush and didn’t tell the rest of us?”

          “No!  Of course I didn’t!”  Then I think.  “But you might have something there.  I, uh, react oddly to some things.  Delayed effects, sometimes.  Things can stay dormant in my system and hit me later, unexpectedly.” Or their patterns on my neurons.  I pull myself together and he releases me.  “Whatever, it’s over.  I’m okay, now.”

          E sizes me up, but I guess I look calmer.  “Are you sure?”

          I shrug.  “As much as I can be, of anything.”

          E laughs, then, though hir brows still glower a bit.  “Well, I suppose I’ve handled worse from Father Man.  But I’d advise you to think twice before you resort to the leaf again.”

          “I think you’re right,” I concede.

          But I don’t feel convinced.  That felt like a communication, like when a telepathic friend has tuned into me and sent a message.  Did I miss something important?

(Horrid, to think of what might happen if Til didn’t have agents who could study on the way!  Some say that the Ancients could do everything instantly, send a message in a snap, anywhere in their world, that time meant nothing to them whatsoever.  Considering how the Ancients ended, though, perhaps one should not learn too much from them, just the classics will do.)

          (He grows, the figure in the Rift.  He almost takes definition.  Time does not matter to him in the least.  Nor does he care that I never intended to let him in.  Nor does…I sink to my knees and worship—I feel like it’s the only way that I’ll get out of this alive!)

          Maybe a communication from my ghosts?

(Because yes, I do believe my hunches.  I have tried so very hard not to, but I do.)

(Because yes, right now I do believe in the Devil, though I have tried so long to tell myself that we just played games.)

(And what might yet grow in the months between now and the arrival of the agents?  What might happen even now, under my very nose?)

(I fall from my knees to the floor, and I feel myself shatter, trampled in cloven hooves.  And then he sweeps all my pieces back together, stands me up in that no-space, and laughs at me.

“You think that I’m the Devil?” he cries, incredulous.  “You wish you could be so lucky!”)

(Maybe luck will favor me.  I do rather hope that it will blow over by itself, prove itself nothing, yes, make a fool of me!  So that I should have to politely entertain the agents in question and then send them happily home, with nothing more to show for it than a Toulinian vacation.)

(I wake up on the floor, my head aching, trying to remember a dream, or a reason why I passed out on just one small sip.  Then I sit up, aghast, seeing the designs all smeared by my fall—that’s got to be bad luck.)

          It scares me, whatever just happened.  Even if I’m right, even if it’s some sort of delayed greenfire effect, what else can I expect from my altered neurosystem?  It took far less to trigger a relapse on my rookie mission.  Cyran’s right—I’d better avoid the leaf from here on out.

(But so far it has not blown over.  I feel it in the halls like an increase in air pressure, mounting, pressing me harder and harder till it becomes unbearable no matter how I try to ignore it, to pretend that I’ve imagined it.  Pressure so great that it drives me outside for no good reason, feeling that the openness overhead–messy clouds and all—could release it just a little.)

“Deirdre?”

Can’t respond.  Can’t stand, either.  Too much pressure.  Hands pull me back to my feet and guide me slowly forward, but I’m not blind, I just can’t open my eyes against all the pressure on them.  I hear Lufti murmur, “Oh Gaziley, protect her!” as I feel us dip down and come back into open space, the cliff-winds once more tugging at my clothing on the left.

(“Sit here, Jake,” I say as I tug him over to a bench.  He keeps his eyes shut tightly, so I pat the bench to make a sound, show him where it is.  He practically topples onto it.  “Stay right there, Weed.  I’m going to call us a taxi.  Let’s get you home.”

Why do I feel a ghost of what he feels, as though some heavy force shoots straight through me...on its way to somewhere else?)

(And the worst part of it is that I still cannot state, precisely, what has gone wrong or where it heads or even give it a clear-cut name.  Oh, the servants can talk of satanic experimentation, but this time...no, I’m repeating myself, jabbering inanely in my head.

Still, they do talk of it, this sense of wrongness; I have overheard the help, speaking among themselves, in frightened tones.  I think I really would have taken my floating fears for a nervous breakdown if others hadn’t felt it, too.)

(I pull myself together.  No backing out now.  I finish the ritual, anointing the ancient baby’s long-dead eyes.  Too late now for breakdowns, you silly wimp.  Get the job done and get out of here.)

I open my eyes.  I walk on my own.  The children need me.  I do my best to act perfectly normal, and ignore Cyran glancing back at me.

It doesn’t matter, whatever happened.  I still have a job to do.

(That’s it.  Done.  Back out now, slowly, respectfully, reach the door, step out into the hall...and jump at the sudden ringing of the bell.  And laugh at my own jumpiness.  People see things who taste such herbs—it doesn’t always mean something.

What did I see?)

(The bell-tower calls out for my attention.  I have a meeting to attend.  Some hitch in the turnip patch.  I sigh; so many unscholastic details bedevil the head of  a self-sufficient school.)

Finally the path winds back away from the cliff, into a broader, safer gully.  I hear Lufti gust a sigh of relief.  Soon the pragmatic matter of minding the path sooths away all sense of the uncanny.

(And what must the meeting involve that the hirelings cannot handle by themselves?  Probably nothing much.  The schools for their sort rarely cultivate independent minds, that’s all: maintain the social order, keep the lower stratum well-fed and contented, no need for revolution or anything so uncomfortable, and keep the upper stratum locked in the guilt of noblesse oblige and the maintenance of appearances, too proper to yield to the temptations of oppression and decadence, and heaven forbid that any of either comes up with an original idea!  I think, nevertheless, a few rebellious alternatives that I would have had to punish had one of my students suggested any of them out loud.)

(That’s the price you pay for daring to cultivate an imagination—sometimes it runs away with you.  So, would I want to turn back the clock on that?  Not hardly!

No…wait…didn’t I dream something about turning back a clock?  Or…or…or?)

          (The bells have not completed their reverberations before I step once more into the safety and comfort of wood panels, leather upholstery, and well-attended brass.  Here, I hope, I can forget the seductive little treacheries of the uncontrollable sky.  Back into the safety and the comfort and the pressure.)

          We leave the cliff behind, climbing to ground closer to level, with an easier path ahead.  Cyran declares a break and we all heave a sigh of relief.  Kiril doesn’t rest immediately, though, not before she and Rashid get a bit of fire going, enough to brew a pot of tea.  She looks at me and says, “I think we can all use it—warms up the vitals, you know.”  I couldn’t agree more.

          Kiril and Rashid line up the metal camper’s cups with tea-eggs in them.  Then Rashid asks Cyran, “How safe is the road ahead?”

          Cyran glances at me, then back to Rashid.  “Safe enough,” he says, and nods.  And Rashid puts different herbs in one of the eggs.