I am perishing hot in my psychic's uniform, and it would be the height of rudeness to leave the ball before being introduced to every one of the debutantes being put forward here this Summer.
To be clear, this has nothing to do with my being in the offing for one such debutante. I am already courting, all but betrothed to, my beloved Miss Nirecel Davit, daughter of Lord Lessiven. Rather, I was invited to this event - implored to go - to make up the numbers after a scandalous elopement and a circulation of a nasty flu cut down the guest list. I will not marry the young woman seated to my left who is in animated conversation with the young law student on her own left, but I might spend twenty seconds opposite her when the dancing is underway, and my absence would dreadfully inconvenience her. I do not begrudge the favor; my aunt is the hostess and I am on leave without other plans but to enmesh myself in the Summer festivities.
The soup course is refreshingly cool. It is not refreshing enough to prevent my agitated thoughtforms from bouncing off the other minds in the room. I am not the only psychic here, but I am the strongest. At least, so I believe. A strong psychic is not made obvious by his powerful presence in the mindscape of the room. He commands no attention unless that is how he's chosen to strike. The conspicuous ones, the flying fish and the leaping dolphins of the mind's sea, are minor talents. I swim deeper. If I am right, no one can tell that I'm fretful. If I'm wrong, I am very obvious to some abyssal whale.
No such whales are attending in uniform, at least. My emanations bounce off the minds close to me and then a moment later off the farther ones in a patter of impressions. A mess of the expected excitement - innocent and otherwise - from the young hopefuls. My aunt's obsessive focus on the minutiae of arranging introductions and timing all the events of the party correctly. I sense headaches, but also indigestion, aching feet, faltering hearts - these things aren't the mind, but the mind is the relay station where they can be made known to me.
None of this is interesting. If I weren't all but melting into the upholstery beneath me I would have no trouble marshaling my pulses, reading no minds but my own. A psychic instinctively seeks refuge from the body when the body is disagreeable. I am not finding much refuge here. The happiest participants are enamored young things and proud parents. No one is physically comfortable, nor better yet, asleep. I focus back on myself by brute force rather than spend another moment meditating by proxy on the charms of a girl ten years my junior or participating in some poor father's liver complaint. Training as a psychic is a little like learning for the first time it is possible to slouch. It opens up entirely new ways to lose track of yourself and wind up with a poor reputation and a backache.
It is far too hot. I gulp water. The ballroom has a bit more of a breeze coming through, at least.
"Augur Harwisht!" says the lady on my right, a chaperone and not a debutante herself.
I cannot remember her name (she probably read mine off the embroidery on my coat), but I am a psychic. "Lady Ittane! How are you finding the soup?"
"I gave it a pinch of salt and then it was perfect. Augur, have you met my niece -"
"Ah, I don't believe I've had the pleasure."
I endure about a minute and a half of niece-themed puffery before I have an opportunity to mention that I should love to one day have the chance to introduce her to my Nirecel. Niece and aunt both withdraw from the dead end with respectable grace and move on as the seating arrangement permits. I would recommend them my brother, except I am not blessed with such a relation.
The remaining courses are not chosen with such regard to the weather and I suffer through them, mind escaping me every few bites to alight on cramps and ill-fitting shoes and someone's skin breaking out in mild hives in response to the glaze on the leg of lamb. What I wouldn't give for a dozy toddler in his mother's lap to drift away with. Or a merciful breeze. It would be unthinkably rude to start manifesting the temperature here at my aunt's ball, and yet I am thinking it.
The trouble with manifesting is that it's much harder to control even than my passive telepathic attention. If I learn a scandalous secret, my discretion suffices for there to be no harm done. If I start slinging essence of chill around a room because it's too hot, I will wind up with ice inside the walls ruining Auntie's wallpaper and frost decorating the dance floor until the cotillion becomes a collision course. That's if I don't kill anyone outright with hypothermia. It's best saved for the battlefield, even for people who are better than I am at the fine detail.
So I cope just like everyone else through to dessert and then line up for the dance. The musicians are behind a screen - a city fashion, you never see it in country estates - and can therefore dispense with some of their layers. I think based on the impressions wafting from them that the violinist may have actually taken off his shirt entirely. I can't be scattered like this and still keep up with the steps, unfortunately, so I crush myself back into my own head and smile at the lady opposite me.
I'm able to sit out a few of the songs after the first three, sipping water by the window and trying to catch as much breeze on my neck as I can. It smells like lilacs in the garden, and the remnants of last night's thunderstorm. One more turn around the ballroom, once they're doing something slow, and it will be within my rights to beg off and leave the floor to gentlemen more hopeful with these ladies, or at least gentlemen with eligible brothers and cousins and friends to place in the ladies' paths. I can hear, or at least catch the echoes of, conversations just like that. Somebody's coaxed their hermit of a nephew to come to tea, perhaps Miss So-and-so would care to join them; is the young lady going to be at Such-and-such a concert, perhaps this fellow might see her again there. I was keenly interested in this social brouhaha myself not so very long ago, until Nirecel. But for all the importance of finding a suitable spouse, a lucky person only needs to do it once. I can't think of a single other thing people do only once that warrants this much maneuvering. Even funerals are less of a production.
"Augur Harwisht! Or may I call you Aust?"
I don't know this fellow's name either. How in the world did I manage not to offend everyone I knew every time I opened my mouth, before I began training? "Mr. Soumelend."
"You must know all the gossip, mustn't you?"
"What gossip?" I say. "Surely there's nothing to say that wouldn't be publicly announced, with such esteemed guests as my aunt's inclined to know."
"Come now, don't give me that. I'll make you a trade, how's about. I've heard that the deb in the blue with the great big bow in the back was found compromised not six days ago with a Taydien fellow."
"What a nasty rumor to repeat, Mr. Soumeland, I would have thought better of you." I wouldn't. Bouncing off his mind is a little like licking a tree trunk. It was not about to kill me and that was all that there was to be said for the experience. There is sweat in my eye. I have been drinking so much water that I am now vividly imagining pissing on his shoe.
"It's only what I've heard. It'd be fair enough that your lady aunt wouldn't have caught wind yet, of course, I'm sure she overhears different things than I do. Now it's your turn, what have you got?"
"I've nothing," I reply.
"It says augur, just there on your lapel," laughs Mr. Soumeland. "I know that's at least a couple ranks above Junior Trainee Medium. You don't need to pretend to me you don't know more than anybody else in the room."
Psychics of any rank are tolerated at parties like this one, in rooms of people like these people, because we are discreet gentlemen of good reputation. What awaits a psychic who abuses his abilities in this or any context - even for the noblest of motives, warning a lady off a cad or a man off a bad investment - is only dubiously an improvement over summary execution. This isn't to say that we cannot give advice. I have met the fiancés of those of my sisters who became engaged after I began training my mind and I have registered my approval of them. But that was all it was: my approval. I could have disapproved for some grave and serious reason - or because I didn't care for the shape of his nose or his hippocampus. I provided no details. When I throw parties of my own I am sure many people take note of who I have chosen to include. But they have no idea if I have left someone out due to knowledge of wrongdoing or because I forgot altogether that they existed or because their cologne makes me sneeze, and they know better than to ask.
Mr. Soumeland may be innocently unaware what he is proposing I stake on his keenness for gossip. But he's hardly innocent of gossip himself.
"I must decline to say anything on the matter," I tell him.
"Nonsense. Is the uniform a fake, then?"
This is too far. I stand up immediately without quite meaning to. I am no longer my body, but the shape of the air in the room, lapping against the solid secrets of the people in it, the harpsichordist's indelicate itch and my aunt's monthlies and, yes, the terror of the debutante in blue with the enormous bow on her back, afeared she will have no chance to make a clean first impression on a gentleman who might like her enough to forgive the carelessness. My mind flings itself out in a low song and it throbs back into me full of emotions that are not mine as I involuntarily seek to flee from my own anger. It does not work. I am also thudding into this Mr. Soumeland, the presumptuous swine, who suggests that an officer must indulge his prurient prying or be no officer at all. His mind sticks out in the landscape of thought like a sharp rock in my shoe, so large as to be mysterious how it got there.
"Sir," I say, either very softly or in a shout, I am so out of myself I can scarcely tell, "I invite you to retract that suggestion, as you value your mind."
Psychics do not, as a rule, duel with swords or pistols. We're no more permitted to risk ourselves in this way than we are to use our powers to ruin scoundrels with rumor. If you duel a psychic, you do it in the realm of thought. But this doesn't mean that there's an overwhelming advantage for the psychic. After all, duelists must agree on a place as well as a time. And he cannot come to me, not with this choice of weapon - so I must go to him. I will have skill on him, to be sure, unless he is a remarkably stupid abyssal whale of a genius talent. But we will fight on his turf. This is not an inconsiderable factor.
It's just, I'm very good, and he was unforgivably rude.
I almost expect him to back off. It would be so much the rational thing to do, when his insult is so easily disproven, when he has evinced some knowledge of psychic ranks and must have an inkling what mine signifies, when he has for some unfathomable reason been invited to my own aunt's debutante ball and will not be on her guest list in the future win or lose. But that is not what the shape of his mind says. He's hit the wine hard, and the foolishness harder. He's going to double down.
"Swords," he says, lips thin in a smirk, with one word suggesting that I'd take up steel to destroy him.
"Oh, Mr. Soumeland," I say. "On my honor, I am no swordsman."
It's not really necessary to take it outside for a psychic conflict. We're not going to be at risk of injuring bystanders, we do not need any more space than we need to breathe. He's wide open and ready for me to go in and have at his mental furniture, and if there is a way to unhappen this disappointing clash, it is a mystery to me. I bow right back when he bends toward me. We have attracted attention. There is a hush falling over the nearer dancers and those who are resting from their own exertions. People are looking our way, watching us over their drinks, abandoning their conversations. I don't know why. There will be nothing to see.
I straighten up and I charge.
Mr. Soumeland's mind is a crash of tangles and tripwires. The trick is not to unpick them. They would take so long to fathom to the point of solving the maze that we'd be bodily removed from the premises before I got more than halfway through. Mental knots are more like drawings of knots than like anything you'll find in a ship's rigging or a knitting basket. There is no particular obligation for all of their pieces to exist on a continuous basis, for their threads not to go straight through one another, for any of it to be limited to three dimensions instead of twisting itself through time and forgetfulness and contradiction and north-by-sideways as much as it pleases. Mr. Soumeland is advantaged as I am not in maneuvering here, not because he can undo his own knots any faster, but because he can push them aside easily. That is his own noodle-dish of feelings about his mother, and I cannot decide it is irrelevant and slip through it intact, but he can. He can burrow through the holes to hide, to ambush, to launch attacks from arrow-slits that from my own angle cannot admit even a drop of imaginary water.
I, though, can shapechange.
Not literally, of course, but in the same way that I can spill out of the boundaries of my skull to bounce against the forms of other minds in the ballroom, I can flow, not through the right path but into every nook and cranny. I can become the air his thoughts breathe. I know how to send pulses through the blank space of thoughts he doesn't think, sensations he doesn't process, data he doesn't remember, and feel the negative space, and occupy it.
A duel is not a dignified thing. It is possible, of course, to take a beautiful portrait of two gentlemen standing off in solemn poses, or to sketch out a moment of the action itself that looks impressive. I am given to understand that some romantic young ladies can even find loveliness in a man clutching his wounded side, if they're the type for that. But the actual smack of violence against flesh, or in this case against gray matter, is neither elegant nor polite. It is preferable only to dishonor.
I insinuate myself into the empty spaces of Mr. Soumeland and thrash wildly.
This has to be done fast. I am in a sense "inside" his mind, and that means that he is "around" me. I can expand, and he can squeeze: the question is whether I explode faster than he bites. It's of course more complicated than this. We are not arm-wrestling. It's an elaborate choreography of pushing and snarling and shoring up weaknesses that would otherwise collapse or burst. But it's quick, and the basic principle is not unlike trying to hold an alligator's mouth shut.
I am the alligator. I slip out from his grip and get my fangs into him and it's over.
Mr. Soumeland staggers, drops to one knee, falls into the arms of somebody's mother.
A psychic duel normally does broad and indiscriminate damage. It has some things in common with a night of blackout drinking, some things in common with aging a year or thirty and finding that your skills are rusty and your memories dim. Most of it is recoverable. Most of the severed threads will grow back together, or prove to have redundancies, if he gives himself a good few weeks of rest and calm. At least, this is true of the threads I was not expressly aiming for.
The trouble with duels performed with blades or bullets is that they do not, as a matter of impolite nonfiction, solve anything. Whatever the question was, the duel provides a scaffold for forgiveness and forgetfulness. It is "settled". It barely even matters who won; it is not as though the loser is somehow obliged, being pinked with a rapier, to change his mind.
Not so when the duel's landscape is the mind.
I have some practice in this butchery, and Mr. Soumeland is not going to find it so easy in his future social engagements to spit barbs at fellow guests minding their own business.
As he is helped to his feet by some of his friends I attend to my own little headache. A gunshot may go wide, or be aimed deliberately at the sky, but no one leaves a psychic duel unscathed. I rub my temples, drain my glass of water and pass it to the nearest servant, and take the man's napkin from his apron pocket to wipe the sweat off my forehead. I will be fine in the morning, but I have no further appetite for dancing. Poor Auntie, two men short of an even count.
I don't retain much of the process of making my excuses and hailing a carriage to take me back to my apartments on Prince's Row. I achieve principally by subconscious habit my aim of being alone, at home, wearing many layers fewer than would be called for at the ball, lounging on my couch with a wet cloth on my forehead. I do not track time with much care. My attempts at napping will be rather troubled if I am lifting my head to look at the clock whenever I can't be confident of the hour. I expect warning enough in my hunger, well in advance of when I will need to dress for my dinner engagement with Nirecel.
Ah, damn, she's sure to notice that not all is well with me and scold me for dueling again. I could not begin to explain what she imagines remains as an option when someone is truly incorrigible. I know women do not duel, but I expect this must be down to some limitations on the sorts of insults they offer to one another, or to their menfolk championing them. Nirecel at times attempts to describe a future in which everyone is like this, except with no champions who do their fighting for them and without any detail on how knaves without respect for the rules of engagement would be brought into line.
After I've dozed off and been woken by my rumbling belly, displeased with how little of the main course I took, my head feels much better. Not completely, but it's now a cross between an ordinary tension headache and having just woken up from a nightmare I didn't have. I make myself quite presentable for dinner, consult the clock, and, keeping firmly to the shade, walk six blocks to the restaurant Nirecel and I favor.
It's a charming bistro with Chunabin breads and sauces and, today, a special on roasted goose. They don't do nearly as well with desserts, but Nirecel has no sweet tooth anyway. The host recognizes me and seats me at the usual table, beside the back window that looks out onto the river. I watch the boats and wait for Nirecel to arrive with her usual chaperone, her grandmother, who doesn't like me at all and still prefers me to anyone else who's ever crossed Nirecel's path.
They run a touch late, likely an attack of rheumatism on my grandmother-in-law-to-be's ankles - I have to watch myself around her, it's a genuinely nasty case and I don't like to borrow it. But before the waitstaff can begin to wonder if I've been stood up there they are. I get up and bow to the grandmother, kiss Nirecel's lovely hand, pull out their chairs and sit when they've sat.
The shape of Nirecel's mind is tremendously comfortable. I spill out over to her because I like the contact rather than because I dislike being inside myself; there's a beautiful smoothness to her, a bubbly round quality, like chimes or cranberries. Truth be told, an unkind person could call her face plain, but I was well over that hesitation some five minutes into our first acquaintance. If she is plain then she is plain like vanilla. I would import her all the way from the Unconquered Isles.
Nirecel herself is not ungifted in the psychic arts. She has no formal training, as that is generally reserved for the military, but if they ever did start enlisting women psychics she'd accumulate promotions very quickly. She's picked it up hanging around me. The way I lean on her mind is not totally unlike the initial lessons in emitting pulses and feeling out the psychic territory around oneself. By now she's able to gently push back, like a returned embrace. And her grandmother need be none the wiser.
Though she might have a guess, since when we've both sat down we remain in total silence with our eyes closed until a grandmotherly hum alerts us to the waiter standing by for our order.
When we've sent him off for a platter of goose and sundries, I take Nirecel's hand across the table; we entwine our fingers beside the candle that flickers between us. "How have you been?" I ask her.
"I thought I might have caught cold after I got caught in the storm yesterday with the boys," her nephews, "but mercifully seem unscathed - and you? You look run down."
I do not look run down. She's noticed the strain in my mind. It's more like feeling where a bit of fabric is threadbare than like spotting the shadows under someone's eyes. "I'm afraid I cannot understand my aunt's choices of guests sometimes," I tell her, shaking my head. "I -"
"Aust," she says, pulling back her hand from mine. "Not again!"
"He suggested that my uniform was a forgery! Thirty people could have overheard him, love." I almost reach for her hand again but suspect she wouldn't appreciate it.
"You could have told him to ask your aunt - or to look up your service record - you could have pretended you couldn't hear him at all -"
"Nirecel -"
"You could have asked her to escort him out of the ball. You could have -"
"I have my honor, Nirecel!" I exclaim, though I do my best to keep my voice low and level.
"If your honor requires you to put yourself in harm's way -"
"I am also an Augur serving at Her Majesty's pleasure, which is no safer, I assure you."
"I think defending our shores is more honorable than defending your dignity by shredding some other fellow's thoughts into a fine paste, even if both require a willingness to put your own health on the line. For mercy's sake, Aust, you don't take up a pistol because that's forbidden by your commanding officer and don't see this as a fault in your honor, do you? Tell them I forbid you to duel at all."
"That is not quite the same thing."
"And why shouldn't they be?"
"My love," I say, "we have something of an audience, just now."
She looks around, beginner's psychic pulse flaring out to confirm that we've begun to attract notice from neighboring tables, and pouts - or perhaps it is more of an outright scowl, endearing though I find her every expression. "This is not over."
"Please, let's just enjoy our meal." The waiter is coming back. The goose smells divine. I give Nirecel the lion's share of the potatoes as a peace offering, knowing she loves them. The grandmother, who has been glowering at me, permits a distraction from her vigil of disapproval when I slice her the choicest piece of meat.
I walk Nirecel and her grandmother home after we have eaten our quiet meal. Nirecel's pearlescent thoughts are roiling very concerningly. "Love," I say.
"Do you," she says. "Love me, I mean. Do you really."
"Of course - how can you imagine otherwise? Have I shown myself inconstant in any way - do you want your proposal right now in the middle of this street, Nirecel, I haven't the ring yet but if you have any doubt of me -"
"If you love me," she says, "you will swear to me, on your honor, no more duels."
I miss a step. She continues forward and I lose hold of her lovely cool hand. She turns on her toe, folds her arms.
"Nirecel."
"No, Aust, I do not fear that you have been taking advantage of debutantes or getting little bastards on every scullery in Southside. I do not suspect that you are sick to death of me and drowning the misery in drink and cards while gamely soldiering on through the courtship for the sake of appearances. I fear what I said. I will have your promise, Aust, or you will have your freedom, which I know full well is not what you would have of me."
"Nirecel, please - let's get your poor grandmother home, her ankles -"
"Oh, no, go right ahead," says the traitorous grandmother. "A little rest is just the thing in this weather."
"It isn't a complicated question, Aust," says Nirecel. Smooth cold thoughts all point in the same direction. She isn't going to budge.
"I cannot be anything but a gentleman," I whisper. "There is no Aust Harwisht without his honor."
"Yes. With your promise I could trust you."
"But I cannot - I cannot allow every rapscallion with a sharp wit go unanswered, even if they wouldn't let it be known across the entire Empire that I had made myself defenseless - you are no Senior Clarivoyant who speaks as though with the Queen's voice to command me to guard my own hide, Nirecel. We aren't even wed -"
"Would you promise, if we were?" she asks, frosty.
"What would you have me do?" I cry.
"Just what I said. Your promise, on your honor. Host all your own parties if you like and be selective as fine mesh, if it is so important to avoid slights. Become a hermit with me and we'll have a dozen children to keep us company. Live in the countryside all year round where you can socialize with tradesmen and feel no need to answer their unlettered remarks. In so many things you are so bright, Aust, can you apply none of it here? You're flailing like a garter snake in a child's apron."
I'm holding completely still but she's pressed thought to thought against me, glass-smooth, pillow-plush, and, yes, she can probably feel me casting about for some way to reconcile with her demands. Abandon society and the company of worthwhile peers just to filter out the handful of scoundrels? Endure those scoundrels in silence, like a child or a donkey, even as they sense weakness and crowd like vultures around my shambling remnants?
I would import her from the Unconquered Isles. It takes a ship four months to sail there and another four to come home again. It would cost a fair sum.
A broken reputation, though. That I cannot purchase, cannot have brought to me wrapped in brown paper in the belly of a cargo vessel, cannot defend from piracy and larceny without taking up my own weapon.
"Nirecel," I say again.
"I see," she says, cool. "I won't make you say it aloud. I wish you a swift recovery on this and all future occasions." She pivots away, draws level with her grandmother, and continues away without my company.
I stand there dumb as a rock until I must stand aside to let a carriage by, and then I meander home by gaslight as the streetlamps come on.
A month later the Summer is winding down. Nirecel has not relented; her answers to my letters are brief and sometimes memorized by the courier rather than committed to paper in her own hand. I have cancelled as many of my plans as I have been able to without needing to explain myself. Instead of concerts and card games and theater tickets and dances and the regatta, I have the walls of my apartment. I have the books that I have already read because I can concentrate on nothing new. I have delegated one of my sisters, Claine, to tell the rest of the family of my loss; it is their business, but I cannot bear it.
I might have gone back to the countryside entirely except that the trip takes nearly a week each way. It's really only worth the travel if one is staying for the whole of the Summer or some comparable length of time. And I will not be at liberty much longer. My leave will come to an end and I can rejoin my unit and return to the Westlands where there are problems that can be solved with force of will and keen thoughts. I can hope to be distracted, though it's possible that even combat will do nothing to relieve my misery, just as useless as a round of betting on dice with seashells (forbidden to use coinage, as a financially ruined officer is nearly as difficult to get use of as one full of steel or lead).
Still, it is not my choice, and there is some chilly comfort in that, that Her Majesty continues to find me of value without caring a whit about my heartbreak. Comforting, that my comrades in arms will not likely bestir themselves to suggest that my Nirecel was hardly the prettiest girl an Augur could hope to pull. We will be at sea and then we will be in a fortified position and none of them will have a sister on hand to recommend I meet at some forthcoming garden party, some dreadful sister scarcely out of the nursery with thoughts like bales of straw. (I was not able to excuse myself from the garden party without giving rather grievous offense. I barely excused myself from the sister.)
The day before I must report for duty, I send my own sister Claine - she is the only one in town for the Summer this year, the others respectively too poorly and too pregnant - to appeal to Nirecel for me, hoping for some token or a kiss farewell or at least an assurance that she hasn't taken up with another fellow. ("Nonsense," Claine said, "it was her great good luck that you could look past -" but then she shushed.) Claine returns empty-handed. "She wouldn't even speak to me," she reports. "I was turned away by the footman. You can try again next Summer, Aust, it'll be all right."
It shall never be all right. There's no one like her in all the world, not even if I search the Unconquered Isles from cape to cape and comb the Empire entire.
But I am called to serve, and I am there, in my uniform with my trunk neatly packed, when it is time to muster.
I am privileged with a private berth in the good ship Insight, one of several in a small convoy headed for the fortresses in the Westlands to bring supplies and letters and reinforcements. Then the ships will turn around and bring back the various prizes our men have taken there, and with them our fellows who are due to take leave. The Westlands are four weeks traveling west, a little longer returning home. A substantial journey, but a routine one. I will be able to send letters without too much delay, if ever I take it into my head that Nirecel won't forward them to my sister, unopened and unread.
There are some poor attempts on board the ship to entertain. A couple of the sailors have tolerable voices and there are three complete packs of cards in circulation and one incomplete one that is still, I am repeatedly told, suitable for some specific games. A bunch of fellows sit together on the deck to mend their clothes and work on their quilts and scrimshaw. There is frequent demand for literate assistance with letter-writing, and into this duty I am occasionally pressed.
Mostly, embarrassing though it is to confess, I mope.
There are three other psychics in my unit, along with dozens of riflemen and sappers and suchlike. Psychics don't cluster together too much - for one thing so few men show any aptitude for it, and for another most of what we do is at least as effective solo as in a team. All four of us trying to do anything together would be a bit like a table trying to stand up on legs of four different heights, one of which is made of cheese, another of which is thin enough to slice straight through the floor, a third which only exists during banking hours. This might keep your table off the ground, most of the time, after a fashion. It would still be more sensible to arrange four separate pedestals instead.
But we do know each other, and while I happen to be the strongest of the bunch that only means that they can't tell what I'm echoing my thoughts off, who I'm experiencing to avoid experiencing myself; it is certainly as plain to them as the nose on my face that I'm upset. One makes an abortive attempt while we're clearing the harbor to cheer me up, with an anecdote about his father's glory days, and when he finds me able to collect only a modicum of outward politeness and no genuine levity he leaves off and tells the other two. I spend the rest of that day and most of the next weeks as well simply staring at the clouds, or the waves, or partaking of vicarious sleep with whoever is on the schedule opposite my own and spends the day dreaming in his hammock. Sometimes that's all the sleep I get, and I spend the night surveying the stars and wishing I were unconscious or at least duty-bound to be busy.
By the end of the journey I have written eight letters to Nirecel, some of them quite long. I do not expect it to behoove me to send them. She has made up her mind. I flatter myself to think that she might miss me, and if I could alter her choices by playing on her feelings I might not be above it, but I don't expect her to be changeable. If I cannot see my way to abolishing the practice of dueling in my life she cannot see her way to our reconciliation. So all the letters might do is pointlessly grieve her, and I love her still and would not see this done if it could achieve nothing.
I ultimately bundle the letters up and send them to my sister with instructions that Nirecel may have them if she should ask for them, particularly if there should be news of my death. Perhaps if I fall in battle she will prefer to remember me as her beloved and not as her spurned, and might like to have the records of my affection.
It's not too common for psychics to fall in battle, fortunately - we can sense the enemy at a better distance than most riflemen can manage, if we're on alert, and one of us always is when there's any reason to suspect hostility. Other psychics may take us out of commission for a while. One of the gentlemen on the Insight with me had to learn all over again how to walk and it is to his credit that he did not resign on a permanent basis but came right back once he could march with the rest of us. But this is no special risk to psychics, at least - if anything we're less likely to forget the accustomed use of feet than a mentally undefended soldier is. We're there specifically to make those soldiers less undefended, less surprised by bandit camps and guerilla hideaways, a little more easily patched up if some fellow should take the metaphorical torch to their minds. And of course we're invaluable for interrogations, which crop up only rarely, and for taking out careless members of the other force by making them forget how to walk. It's at least no crueler a way to remove someone from the battlefield than a bayonet through the chest.
In my state as the Insight sails into the bay where we'll disembark into the Westland fortifications I am not immune to the idea that perhaps psychics could stand to fall in battle a bit more. Maybe I will be one of those men clutching a wounded side and Nirecel will turn out to be the sort of woman who likes to fuss over such men and she will apologize for ever imagining that a little scuffing of my thoughts against a challenger's should have kept her from my side. I will collect the ring from the jeweler and limp to our wedding, recovering my vigor at the sight of my beloved in her finery in plenty of time to fall into bed with her... This fantasy runs aground on the fact that most possible wounds would either kill me before I could be delivered ashore at home or be quite past the point of needing tender nursing by the time I completed the journey. Also self-recrimination that I never did cancel the request at the jeweler's. I may be holding out hope that Nirecel will with time think better of her refusing me but the jeweler's hope is more expensive.
The other psychics are shooting me odd looks. I know they're not reading me very deeply, but of course they can notice the rough craquelure in my mental surface and by now it's no secret from anyone aboard the ship that I'm a jilted man. They can do the sum.
We report to the command. We're assigned to our lodgings in the fort. Almost at once I am assigned to escort a supply mission to the men entrenched in a disputed position some miles inland. There's an attempt underway to build a mine there, and the objections to it have been sporadic but significant enough that a garrison is maintained at the site, and both the builders and the garrison require deliveries.
I do not receive a mount. My range is sufficient to cover the whole wagon train end to end with a little added slack for difficult terrain where we may be more spread out; I will walk near the middle rather than riding to and fro. I don't relish the prospect but would certainly be embarrassed beyond words if anyone should offer me a seat in his wagon.
It's a brisk day, as the autumn is finally biting into the climate and the Westlands get a chilly breeze off the ocean most of the time. The trail to the mine, deprived of its plant cover by repeated trips like this one, is dusty enough to make everyone sneeze and to coat an unwary tongue with fine yellow grit. The surrounding shrubbery that the head of the line prunes out of our way with rough slashes smells angrily green, oozing from the cut stems, and we are throughout shouted at by the queer local tree-rodents and colorful birds. I do not find it a pleasant walk. I drift into the heads of my compatriots. This is not a lack of military discipline, of course; I am there specifically in case the natives should choose to assault us, most especially with psychics of their own. Westlander psychics are trained very differently, or perhaps "trained" is not even the right word; but the underlying principles are the same, and if one is sniffing around the minds of these porters and the rest of the escort it is my duty to beat them back.
All appears clear. The minds in our line are moving unimpeded. Some are bored, some are too dull to be bored, and some are too lively in their observation of the nature around us to be bored. These last are of course the most pleasant; I ride pillion on their amateur naturalism to get away from my aching feet, unaccustomed after the moping and the sea voyage to all this tromping on the hard ground.
At the mining site I stand vigil over the process of unloading and disbursing the parcels of food and miscellany that we came here to hand over. The miners are a malcontent lot - some of them were brought here as part of a labor sentence for some sort of mischief, and some of them look like they could have been impressed from the local population , though I don't actually get close enough to check their accents or get a closer look at their features. It's not a comfortable atmosphere to spread myself out over, though. Resentment and yearning to be anywhere else bounces into me from dozens of points, and I can't even wedge myself back into my own skull to avoid it because I am there specifically to monitor them. My commanding officer would have my head if I let someone knock the lot of them unconscious and smuggle away some of the black powder they'll be using to blow holes in the ground, or even a carton of tinned fish. The would-be thieves must at least wait until it's stored safely and they'd have more of a job getting ahold of any.
There's a ripple in the thoughts before me.
Maybe they all saw something a little startling? A chipmunk running boldly across their line of sight might do it, but -
I push out a bit farther. Nothing, nothing -
Another ripple. There wasn't a chipmunk. Do they smell something, is there bad mine air seeping out? Is -
"Secure the powder!" I cry, running toward the wagons to draw attention. "Somebody's here! There's a psychic, a strong -"
The abyssal whale, a colossal mind moving through the dozens of men as easily as my hand might brush through a spiderweb, seizes me by the consciousness and pinches it like they're extinguishing a candle.
I come round faster than the other men, and immediately still my mind and my body alike to render this nonobvious. I flex my thoughts in the half-random twitches of a dream, hoping to conceal my actual attention in the shadows of these quivers. Close scrutiny could reveal me, but the other psychic, while considerably more formidable than I am, cannot have infinite attention for everyone here in detail and may not even know that I'm a psychic. An ordinary man could have noticed the nudges and there is always some variance in how long it takes a fellow to come round from being snuffed down like that.
I don't dare open my eyes, but I can hear dragging sounds and footfalls and the chatter of natives in their pitchy singsong tongue. And while I remain totally still, casting my mind at intervals to thoughts of battle and drowning and adventure on dragonback as though I'm dreaming yet, I seep out to sense their minds.
Almost all of the natives present feel to me like they have some psychic ability - not on the level of even my lowest ranked colleague, more like Nirecel's casual familiarity. I have to drift very carefully (I imagine returning to boarding school in the nude) out from my own ears and across the landscape, looking for an opening. (I contemplate Nirecel's lovely smile as though it were mine to see again and then cut myself off with a recollection of a nightmare I once had about all my teeth falling out before anyone might be treated to imaginings they ought not entertain). But it's only the strong one that I'm in serious danger of alerting - the others won't spot me as long as I keep doing things like thinking as hard as possible about being lost in an endless number of twisted copies of my grandparents' manor.
I spot him. - If it's a him? There's an ambiguous texture, but I daren't look too closely. As far as I can tell he hasn't yet detected that I'm awake. He may be focusing on something else. It's a pleasant enough day, with a brisk breeze, nothing to tempt someone out of their borders. Perhaps he's as comfortable as can be and doesn't think much of the Empire's psychics and isn't on guard.
Or he's just lurking beneath the edges of my ability to detect, watching me for a wrong move, and then he'll kill me.
Eh. What have I to go on for if I can't even serve Queen and country. (I imagine, dreamily, being presented a medal by Her Majesty before a grateful populace, and Nirecel breaking forth from the crowd, running toward me to fling her arms against me and her enamored mind against mine - I have an excellent reason to be dwelling on this, I must seem asleep -)
At any rate I've tracked the man down. He's over the rise from me; I couldn't see him from here even if I opened my eyes and twisted around, which would attract the attention of lots more of these fellows besides. Keeping my probes gentle and indistinct, like psychic snores - Nirecel's prone to those, I have had the privilege of experiencing her nodding off on my shoulder in a carriage once or twice - I scout. The psychic is stationary. Awake, but not particularly alert - so far as I can tell. (I pretend to dream about rabbits in my apartment, fancy rabbits in a hundred colors, appearing in droves every time I open a cupboard or closet, replacing my pillows, tripping me whenever I advance a step, always in my chair when I intend to sit down.)
From my position the only way to win the confrontation is to do it instantly, before it starts, before he knows there is any resistance about. I cannot get into all the nooks and crannies of his mind and puff up like a pudding in there, hoping to break the lacings and cinches on my way out. He'll crush me like an ant. Not even an ant; they have a sort of crispy armor to them and this fellow is a giant to my dwarf. Like a spit-bubble beneath his shoe, I'd crumple.
No, instead, I have two possible approaches. (I imagine myself ice-skating on a mirror until it shatters and I plunge into the darkness beneath, surrounded by tumbling shards.) If something very tiny wants to kill a man, if can go about it by poison: the spider, the snake, the jellyfish. Or, it can deal its tiny blow, and sometimes it will be lucky: the man with a fly in his eye may fall from his horse, someone bitten by a mouse might succumb later to infection, a cat's claw could strike a hemophiliac. (I imagine all my sisters transforming into swans and assailing me with their beaks insisting that I break the spell by brewing a curative potion.)
I do not have the time or the faith in my good fortune to rely on the second method. I must become poisonous. And I must finesse it quickly, because I can feel the flock of minds around me collecting themselves in a fashion that suggests, in conjunction with the sounds reaching my ears, that they are preparing to go with their explosive prizes, no doubt to blow up some of my countrymen and the installations we need to do our work here.
I contemplate my plan of attack with one of my fictive dreams. I picture myself walking down a hallway, tiles and walls and doors coming into existence as I approach them. It winds left, then right. I run into dead ends. I change the color of the hallway in my mind's eye capriciously, I add queer background noises that do not belong in hallways from birdsong to the roar of the tide, I imagine the whole thing to smell of apples - but the center of my attention is on which way the hallway is leading.
I am twisting and turning and tumbling and teleporting through this imaginary corridor and it is mapped to the shape of the other psychic's mind. I cannot spread out everywhere. I must sting in one well chosen place and seem on my journey there to be going by accident. So it must look like a dream. I turn the tile to carpet and the doors to windows. When I run into a real obstacle, I twist my hall that little bit farther, and I flood it and hike it upstream. When I reach a dead end I hang three lefts and a right and dream-logic the hallway into something suitably distinct so it won't look repetitive if I come under scrutiny.
The hallway is a hiking trail. I have turned myself into a bloodhound in case that helps. I am followed by a six-piece brass band. I cannot be inconspicuous; I must instead be madly harmless. Left, right, a sharp slope down, and I have reached the useless vestibule of the sense of smell. I turn around and proceed on snowshoes. There must be something I can do here more useful than knocking out the man's nose! I am running out of ideas! I become a spelunker in a cave, climbing as though with gecko-feet and floating in that slow heavy dreamy way from stalactite to stalagmite, searching and searching -
There.
I turn my staged dream into one about swimming with blind cave fish in an underground pool and circle, thoughtful. I am running out of time but haste will quite fox all my efforts. I have found the other psychic's ability to distinguish people from one another. If I can but strike true here, turn this pond into a powder keg like those they're looting and blow it up, the psychic won't be able to tell his men from mine. Then, if he tries to strike me, he'll be just as likely to hit anyone else. He is stronger than I am, but not to the point of standing a chance if his blows virtually all land wild and he pulls them for fear of harming a friend. It is not the most ideal target I could have wound my way to, but I am not at liberty to sniff around for anything better still; they seem to have collected what they're here for and begun to move out, and if he leaves my range and I have to chase him, my identity will be obvious. This one will do.
I collapse the dream and bear down in the same mental movement, drilling and cleaving apart everything in reach from my one little vantage point, and then I bail out.
Or, I begin to bail out.
No one escapes psychic combat unscathed. A few things buffet me here and there on my way home to my own brain. He may not know which person I am, but I'm in his head and have done something to it he wasn't expecting; it's no great puzzle to bludgeon my retreating mind even if he won't be able to chase me when I've made good my retreat.
Between having been knocked out earlier, and the soporific lull of having remained in the exact same physical position on the ground for so long, and the thwack of the great psychic's retaliatory blows, I lose consciousness again amid a great shout of confusion from the thieves.
I come to in a sitting position, in one of the wagons, a flask of water held to my lips. It is very welcome, though I drink it only clumsily. My head hurts and it is referring this pain to every other part of my body, but I know the stomachache at least to be a fake, and swallow through my sore throat over my phantom discomforts' objections.
"Augur? Are you with me?" says one of the enlisted. My ears resent the sound.
"Yes," I croak, once the water is safely drunk.
"We've run them off. Once they started hollering most of us woke up. What did you do to their psychic?"
I want this person to shut up. I want to sleep for a week. I want Nirecel to be the one offering me water instead. "Get us home again and I will explain in my report," I mumble. I take another drink. I tip over in the wagon to rest my head on some folded-up tarp and make no objection to being transported back from the mine, now with its powder locked up well and less appetizing to steal. I do not quite drift off. The wagon is not comfortable nor its action particularly smooth. But I rest, and try to convince the homunculus in my mind that it has not torn all its fingernails off down to the quick nor scraped half the skin off its legs, self-soothing the frantic random pains till all that remains is the pounding ache in my head.
I muster the energy, back at the fort, to give my account of the events. We have taken a couple of casualties, no one of exceptional value but funerals to arrange all the same. I am prescribed two days' complete bedrest, which does not sound like nearly enough but would be what I would order for a psychic under my auspices who had experienced a comparable issue. I will be much improved by then and ready for constitutionals around the premises, perhaps even light duty.
I sleep fitfully. My dreams, unlike the imaginary ones I came up with as camouflage, are too indistinct to remember on waking; I am missing some key faculty that would let me understand their content in retrospect and I recall being quite confused during their unfoldings as well. I lie in bed, bored but unable to do anything about it; someone brings me meals at intervals, easy porridges and soups. At one point a camp follower of some description wanders into my room and has to be directed elsewhere. If ever I wanted that sort of attention it wouldn't be while I was bedridden.
After my two days of rest I am feeling much better. The other psychics have been sufficient to cover operations, but I'm assigned a patrol to relieve them somewhat, and the walk helps me loosen myself from my stiff self-pity. But for some reason quite opaque to me, everyone I speak to soon begins to act very oddly.
There are no strange shapes in their minds. I do check. It seems likely that my confrontation with the enemy has done some more lasting harm. I need to render this information to my commander.
"Don't call me that," the commander says when I make my address.
"I apologize," I say. "I know the fault must lie with me, because I cannot detect any interference in anyone else, but everyone has been responding in that and similar ways to me whenever I speak. I think there is some wound in my mind causing my words to come out incorrectly and am only grateful that I can make myself understood as well as it seems I still can." The injury could easily have prevented me from speaking at all, or from breathing.
"That's clear," sighs the commander. "I'll have the Haruspex see if there's anything to be done directly, and failing that you are to return to leave in the hopes that you may recover before someone ignorant of your condition takes a stray word amiss and you wind up trying to duel someone."
"Duel someone!" I say. "I would never dream of it!"
"Wouldn't you?"
"Of course not," I reply. "It would be behavior completely unbefitting a gentlewoman."
The Haruspex is quite unable to solve my problem, and she - excuse me, I'm told otherwise and am under orders to take the lady's word for it - he pronounced me incurable after some hours of poking and prodding. For a time I'm still assigned my normal duties. My psychic abilities are intact, and after all, what cannot be solved with surgery may yet mend with time. I feel it cannot be that debilitating a problem if I can still walk and talk, read and play a competent hand of cards, take care of my personal affairs without assistance, and down an enemy combatant at a hundred paces without noticing anything amiss. But I do manage to keep offending people, little though I mean to do so.
Eventually the Commander decides that she's had enough of my innocent mischief and orders me sent back to the city on the next transport out. I am not discharged entirely, but will instead of further deployments be training novice psychic soldiers at the Academy; I heard some remark about my being a "useful cautionary tale", though, again, I can't see that I'm going to scare some neophyte cadet as long as I can still do everything I ought to be able to and am suffering not a bit. I wish I could fathom what it was that was wrong with me - it must be terrifically amusing at least to a certain sense of humor, because jokes at my expense are constantly flying behind my back even though I can detect them perfectly well without turning around. I have been asked the most peculiar questions about my wardrobe and my inheritance and my marital prospects as though any of those things should be affected. I am an officer and I wear my uniform like any other. Certainly my parents may decide some changes to the disposition of the estate are in order if I am indefinitely impaired, but not before having assessed me for themselves, and they are weeks away. As for my marital prospects...
On my way back home I pace the deck of the ship (it's the Insight, again, as it routinely sails this way) and plan my reunion with Nirecel. She had wanted me to stop dueling. I cannot now imagine why I was doing it in the first place! Presumably this is something to do with whatever the enemy psychic knocked aside in her defensive thrashing, either the main complaint or some additional marring. I must have felt I had some excellent rationale at the time, but no matter how I turn the matter about in my head it does not make a speck of sense. At any rate I can now see my way clear to setting the distasteful practice aside, and if I am missing some reason why others might expect me to partake of any dueling in the future then at least my mysterious infirmity should excuse me.
I shall go straightaway to Nirecel's house. She'll be in the countryside now that the Summer's over, but no matter, I can hire a carriage as soon as I reach land; my teaching duties won't begin until the next term in a month and a half. That should leave me enough time to go to her, ensure that no one else has snapped her up in my absence, and ask for her hand properly. I can stop at the jeweler on my way; the ring should be done by now since I never did post a letter cancelling my order.
The Insight comes into harbor on time and releases me into my homeland. It's glorious to be back home and ready to take the plunge with my beloved. We shall be married in the snow and I shall bring her to all the best parties in the next Summer and show her off to everyone as my wife, my wife, my wife. Assuming she will have me.
I collect the ring, stop off at my apartment to put away some things and exchange them for others in my traveling trunk, and proceed at best speed to Nirecel's family home. It is hours away, but not days. With regular changes of horses I arrive in the village surrounding her manor before midnight, though of course I can't call at that hour and instead secure a room at the nearest inn. Were it a few months ago I could have counted on her servants to receive me and tuck me away in a guest room to greet her over breakfast but I am not so sure of my status now as to attempt it.
The inn is no luxurious palace but it serves the purpose and I don't exchange enough words with anyone to alarm them with my invisible injury. In the morning I am off at sunup, too much aflutter in the stomach to contemplate eating at the inn before I fly to my Nirecel.
I can feel that she is at home as soon as I approach the front gate of the garden. I had worried that she might be visiting someone else, on a trip, married already to another and settled in their marital home together, but no, there she is, drifting from room to room up on the second floor. Lovely rainbowy polished-pearl thoughts in a butter-plush mind, and I had thought I'd never again have the privilege to be so near. I forget for a few moments to knock on the door and then have at it with some ferocity.
I am answered by the butler, and she leads me into the parlor and goes to alert Nirecel of my presence. I cannot sit. I pace. I must somehow avoid offending her. This is difficult, as tasks go, because all I know is that it has something to do with how I talk. I do not think she is easily ruffled, as a person. Perhaps it has simply been my bad luck to encounter thin-skinned sorts since my clash with the enemy psychic. But this is far too important to trust to these suppositions. I will have to open by begging her forgiveness in advance, and explain that my deficit is such that it is invisible to me, and then... well, it will have to be her own decision in the end if she'll have me with these scars, but it is so terrible to contemplate the possibility that I will once again see the back of her, my love, my only, that the worst day of my life might happen a second time.
I brace myself when I feel her approach.
"Aust," she says, and I sit down abruptly in the nearest chair, my knees knocked out from under me by the relief I feel simply from hearing her voice.
"Nirecel," I answer, clasping my hands before me in supplication. "I must begin by saying that I am wounded, in my mind."
She drops into the chair opposite me. "Wounded! I can't find it -" Her sleek satiny touch is so welcome that it might well have healed all my wounds at once, only then I would probably be able to discern in retrospect where the strike had landed and what it had done.
"Nor can I," I say. "I do not know what it is. It must be some subtle deep harm, and I do know that the one who dealt it was very powerful. Explanations from persons whom I have offended in my infirmity sound to me as sensical as a babbling drunkard and slip quickly from my memory. All I know is that I continually give those around me reason to complain of my manners. I must beg your indulgence, for I want nothing less than to upset you with some inadvertently mischosen word, but I do not know how to avoid what I cannot understand."
Nirecel's brow furrows and she nods very solemnly.
"I have been told by the expert Haruspex in my unit that the prospects for recovery are slim to none; she was unable to -"
Nirecel's eyebrows have shot up. I look at her apologetically. "I've gone and said whatever it is, haven't I."
"Yes. Ah, go on, I'm not vexed at you about it."
"Thank you. At any rate, I have been deemed unsuitable for active duty, and am reassigned to the Academy. But what brings me here is not that; I know you were never strongly averse to the anticipation of a wife who was often away..." She twitches again. I am seized by a sudden and terrible fear that I have somehow been clobbered about the brain in such a specific way that I have hallucinated our romance entire and we were ever only friends - but then why the ring, commissioned before I shipped out? I force the fear aside and go on. "So that my more permanent residence is not likely to be the deciding thing. Rather, I have the recollection that you wanted my vow to cease dueling. Have I got that right or is it mixed up with my addlement?"
"You have that right," she says, so gently, so softly.
"I cannot now recall why I would not give you that oath then and there. I cannot recall why I ever dueled at all, besides perhaps a juvenile fascination with my own prowess. It is a terribly unsuitable pastime. I shall now have no trouble giving it up for you. I know you would not have asked it of me in the first place if there were some obvious fine reason I should be a duelist."
"You... had your reasons," she allows. Her thoughts slide over one another like the voices in a polyphonic choir. "I did not think they sufficed. But, Aust, if you should one day recover your absent faculty, healed by an expert or only time, you may regret giving me your promise. You may regard it as a crippling lack. I could live without you. I do not know that I could bear it, if you began to resent me for taking advantage of your present state. For abusing your frailty to secure a promise from you that you did not wish to give when you were whole."
"Whole!" I say. "My darling, my Nirecel, these past months parted from you have been a wasteland of loneliness. I thought of scarcely nothing else but you. I was not whole, and if that monstrously powerful Westlander psychic has taken my career and even my ability to be polite, I will not be the wholer for also lacking you. My memory is no more intact than my etiquette, but I can recall the day you walked away. It was no easy decision even then, my love, my love -"
She reaches forward and takes my hand in hers. My breath catches in my throat.
"So," I continue in a whisper. "If my wound is not itself repulsive to you, dear Nirecel, I have come to offer you my promise that I shall never again partake of a duel, and - I ask to be your bride." I produce from my pocket the ring, an unconventional arrangement of cabochons I chose to resemble the serene and glossy timbre of her mind. I drop to my knee before her and offer it up.
"Aust," she murmurs. "Aust, my dear, of course." And she proffers her finger for the ornament, where it fits perfectly. I kiss her gorgeous knuckles, overjoyed.
Then she says, "You will still have to wear a suit to the wedding."
I blink at her. "Of course, what else would I wear?"
"I only wished to be sure." My fiancée strokes my hair from my forehead with her unringed hand, and tugs me up to kiss me.