Chapter 12: The Standing Star

The man lifted one finger.

That was all it took. He didn’t stand to do it, and he didn’t say a word about what he was doing. He put the finger out toward Ren across the dark, and the dark went purple.

Ren felt it land. Not on skin — he had no skin in this place, no body to speak of, only the dark behind his own eyes, where the stone had gone the day he pressed it to his forehead. It went into the middle of him instead, no tear to it and nothing to push against, and then it was through.

And after it came a page of words.

Reading wasn’t what happened. They were simply in him the way his own name was in him — a hundred and some of them, close enough to touch, and not one line of it meaning anything he could hold.

He went through the whole thing twice. The second pass was no clearer. He was frowning at it, opening his mouth to ask, when the man got there first.

“Don’t. You won’t have it tonight. Nobody has it the first night.”

“Then why hand it to me now.”

“Because now is what I have.”

He said it flat and let it sit. Ren could feel him going while he talked — a fire burning down on the far side of a wall, and the sound of it getting smaller.

“It has a name,” the man said. “The Standing Star. There were others like it once. I never got told what they were called, and it stopped being a question worth asking a long time before you were born.”

Ren waited.

“A king made it. Not a king of anywhere you could walk to — higher up than that, and further back. He made more than one of them, and for a long stretch there wasn’t a thing in the world that would stand up to him. Then he got it into his head that the gods were beneath his notice. They weren’t. They came for him together and killed him, and the arts went into the ground with him. All but this one. This one came out by luck, and the luck was mine.”

“Yours.”

“Mostly.” Something moved in his face, and it wasn’t a smile. “I found it young. I was nobody, a long way from anywhere, doing a job nobody would have noticed, and I put my hand on a thing that wasn’t what it looked like. Everything anybody ever heard about me came out of that one afternoon. And there’s nobody left who was taught it but me — and there isn’t much of me.”

Ren could have told him to keep some of it. He got as far as opening his mouth. But the man had the look of somebody who had turned that question over from every side already and reached the same answer every time, and Ren didn’t trust his mouth to find a sentence that wouldn’t come out stupid.

“It’s for the mind,” the man said. “Not the body. Not the power. And I won’t be modest about it, since I’m out of time for modesty — there has never been a better one. Not that I’ve heard of, and I spent a long life listening.”

“Everybody works the power,” Ren said. “The power’s the whole business. What’s the mind for?”

“Ask a better question.”

“That’s the question.” Ren kept his voice level. “I don’t need to hear how fine it is. I want to know what it does.”

The man looked at him. Whatever a look cost him by then, he paid it.

“Two things. First, you’ll feel it. The strength in the air — the same thing the rest of them pull in and turn into power. Right now you can’t feel a hair of it. You were born plain and you’ve stayed plain, and plain men climb slow if they climb at all. A mind that’s been opened feels it, all of it, all the time. And a man who feels it soaks it up faster. A great deal faster. One hour will do for you what a week does for men several ranks above you, and they will not care for that.”

“And second.”

“The mind cuts.” He said it slower, not louder. “Nobody teaches that part. A man can be a hundred times your strength, and there is still no wall between your mind and his. None. You reach, and he comes apart, and everything he is goes with him. All the power in the world, and it won’t buy him one more breath.”

Ren turned it over.

He hadn’t come into the dark for a name or a rank. He wanted to be of some use, and he wanted it before the wound in his master finished what it was doing — his master, the man with the blanket over his knees, a month in and no change in him. The years Ren had in front of him were never going to get him there.

He didn’t know yet whether the thing he had just been handed would do it. He meant to find out.

“Boy.”

Ren said nothing.

“Hold still. I’m giving you what I’ve got.”

The man’s brow lit.

It was a pinpoint of light. It crossed the dark before Ren could flinch and went into his brow. He had braced for heat. It went in cold, and it did not stop going in.

He tried to say something. There was nothing in him that could say it. He wasn’t standing the way he had been standing, either — something in him had folded down cross-legged over the dark without asking him first, and the dark had gone purple all through, and the words had come back.

A hundred and some of them, going round, and they didn’t care what he wanted.

And behind him, behind the shape of himself that he thought of as himself, there was a star.

Small, purple, low. It hung where it was and did not move, and once he had seen it he could not see anything else. There was no clock in that place and nobody to ask.

When he opened his eyes, the purple flashed through them once and was gone. He was standing again, and he could not have said when. The dark behind his eyes stayed full of it, settled low and quiet.

The man lay flat on the stone.

All night he had sat with his back straight and his hands on his knees, being spent a little at a time, and he had not moved from it once. Now he was flat — arms along his sides, face up, no breath in him, and nothing coming off him at all.

And he was whole. The dark was thick with purple, and where he should have thinned away into nothing he lay there entire, the way a man lies in a quiet house.

Ren thought he was gone. He had nothing to set beside it, so he left it as a guess.

Whether the purple could bring him back — he turned that one over. And then what would come back. If a thing like that wanted a body again, and the only body within reach was his, there would be no argument, and he would not be the one making it.

What he had to go on was what a man said, set against what a man did. All night, the two had matched. He looked at him a while longer, and let it go.

He didn’t know his name.

That came to him while he was standing there. He had been told about the king, and the arts, and what the mind was for, and he had never once thought to ask what to call the man. Nobody left alive, anywhere, would have known it either.

He hadn’t asked about the stone, either. That came to him at the same time, and there was nobody to ask now.

The stone, at least, he could look at.

It stood on its own in the middle of the dark, three-cornered, a solid wedge, one face of it rough and split across with cracks running every which way, like somebody had snapped it off something much bigger and hadn’t cared how it broke. There was a man lying on top, so he came at it slowly, and he got nothing out of it — the same nothing he had got out of it the last time, and the time before that.

He left it where it was.

Then he stepped back out of the dark, and he was sitting on the floor of his own room with his back against the bed.

The lamp had burned down to the last of its oil, and the room was not empty.

It hadn’t been empty a minute earlier either. He simply hadn’t had anything to feel it with. Now the air had weight in it. It lay against the walls and shifted when he moved. He put a hand out, and the air came to meet it.

He got up and went to the window.

The yard. The wall. And then the trees past the wall, which he had looked at a hundred nights without getting a thing out of them — every trunk standing separate, and the gaps between them going back further than he had ever been able to see.

Past that, small lives going about their business. Something low moving through the grass without hurrying. Birds puffed up on a branch. One weed in the wall below him doing whatever a weed does in the dark. He could feel all of it at once, and none of it knew he was there, and none of it had anything to do with him.

At ten years old, if anybody had described a night like this to him, he would have guessed it would feel like holding the world in his fist.

It didn’t. It felt like a room he had lived in his whole life with the shutters down, and somebody had simply opened them, and it turned out to be the same room.

He stood at the window until he got cold. Then he went back and sat down on the floor in the same place, with his back against the bed, because that was where he had been when it happened and he wasn’t finished with it yet.

He would ask him in the morning.

He would ask him his name, and where he came from, and what the stone was, and everything else he had been too busy with real questions to ask tonight.

If there was a morning for either of them. He had no way of knowing that there was — and down in the dark behind his eyes, a man he couldn’t name lay whole on a stone and did not move.