A Certain Sense Of Déjà vu
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The palace of the kings of Elly was eerily familiar, only the last time I’d seen it, it had running water with actual faucets, and light and heating and—
I probably should explain, right? And, because he’ll inevitably read this, I should keep in mind Mr. Crowe’s instructions and “Start from the beginning, damn it, Viscount Webson!”
So the beginning of it is that Peaseblossom got his way. Which I was starting to suspect he was in the habit of doing. I should probably be grateful – given how dependent I was on him, just then, since he was the most important person in the party of lunatics who had saved me from assassination and continued to save me – that his habit of getting his way involved relentless discussion and logic, with a certain amount of personal charm, and not royal commands.
His logic was impeccable, too, “Eerlen,” he said, when the Archmagician uncovered his face. “It’s only logical. I should take him to the palace as soon as possible, so that the next best thing we have to an archmagician who hasn’t been healed by someone whose power might be corrupted will zap any tracking mechanism on him.”
Eerlen spoke intently to a spot above Mahar’s head, I suspect so he wouldn’t engage the look of pleading in Mahar’s eyes, “Brund, we’re in deep no-magic. There is no magic here. Well, very little and it needs to be channeled from the people themselves. Which means we should be eating, sleeping, and powering the healing that is draining from us, so that we heal.”
“We don’t know that his tracker is the same sort of magic.”
“I don’t think there’s more than one type of magic,” Eerlen said, and looked an him, and sounded exasperated. “Sure the Draghals pull from another source, and have different spells,b ut it’s still the same magic.”
“What if,” Mahar said. “Hear me out, but what if the magic from the people of the stars isn’t?”
Eerlen Troz looked at me with that type of look an exasperated adult gives another. “Milord, would you please tell my deluded sireling that magic is magic?”
Oh, hell. There are things you really don’t want to do, but I had to. “My culture has no magic.”
Troz and Almar – but I’ll note not Peaseblossom – stared at me as though I’d taken leave of my senses for good.
“No. Magic?” the archmagician asked.
“None. No magicians, no brotherhood of magicians, no spells, no suggestions, no compulsions.”
His jaw dropped again. When he managed to speak, he said, “How do you do anything?”
Right, well. What the heck do you do in that situation. I stood straight, squared my shoulders. The shades of Archimedes, Pythagoras, Galileo, Blaise Pascal, Isaac Newton, both the Curies, Einstein, Robarth, Miles Tuney, Fidelia and Johannes Antal, and a hundred others whose names wouldn’t come to my mind right then, stood at my back, hands on my shoulders making me strong.
“We have science,” I said.
Which would have been an impressive declaration, and of course, got them falling at my feet in awe an abjuring their heretical creed, except that….
Yep, if you didn’t guess it before, you will now. What the translator nanos made come out of my mouth was “We have magic.”
Have you ever tried to look at your own mouth in stern disapproval? It’s not easy. It might not be possible. But whatever expression I was making made Troz and Almar look like, had they been standing and not had a fluffy cushion and the back of some kind of cabinet at their backs they would have taken a step back.
Their eyes definitely said, “Whoa, now!”
Meanwhile Peaseblossom coughed. Only I am not stupid, and no he didn’t. What the little traitor did was laugh. At me.
“That wasn’t the right translation. Sorry, my translating nanos seem to think that’s your only word for what we do. Let me explain.”
I started in the age of steam and tried to give them a fast retrospective of the wonders and marvels of science. I probably should have started with the Greeks. I would have too if I could remember Pythagoras doing more than calculating the size of fields, or one or the other of the weirder Greeks thinking that beans were humans in potentia.
And therein was the problem. I had an extensive and exquisite education, in the military arts, the history of the military, and then languages, and how to approach very different cultures, record their approach to things and—No, not a lot about science. Not since I’d left elementary education.
When I finished my summary, Eerlen Troz looked even more confused, and said, in a tiny voice “Your magic is powered by water boiled on coal, that makes machines move to make clothes. Lord Webson! None of that can be true.”
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