Steven Brust - Issola

“What is it, Boss?”

“This water.”

“What about it?”

“I don’t know. It’s no more natural than the rest of this place, but ... it isn’t perfect.”

He said nothing; I continued studying it. Teldra reniaim a foot or two behind me, silent, the soul of patience. I stooped, then knelt. I reached out toward the water, then changed my mind, holding my hand motionless. Then I—how shall I put this—extended my senses. It’s hard to describe; it’s sort like the difference between hearing something and intensive listening; or between resting your hand on velvet, and closing your eyes and luxuriating in the feel of it; only with a sense that... oh forget it. It’s a witch thing.

In any case, I reached out, for the water, and—

“Yes,” I said aloud.

“Yes?” echoed Lady Teldra.

“Yes,” I agreed.

She waited.

I turned to her. “The water,” I said. “It isn’t water.”

She waited.

“Boss—”

“I don’t know, Loiosh; I’m working on it.”

Aloud I said, “The water isn’t like the rest of the place. Well, it is and it isn’t. It’s—I don’t know. I want to follow it.”

“All right, Vlad. Upstream or down?”

“Uh ... you ask good questions.”

The source or the result; the theoretical or the practical; find out what it all means, or go straight for where something can be done about it. A moment of sublime indecision, with a chance to learn something deep and important about myself. Or perhaps not; I know that by inclination I’m a source man; I like to understand things as completely as possible, but if I was to do something before things were done to me, I couldn’t take the time.

“Downstream,” I said. “Let’s see where this goes.”

She nodded, Loiosh mumbled an agreement into my mind, and we set off. The stream meandered gently, the ground underfoot was soft and springy if uneven; the air still had that sweetness. I was getting used to taking shallow breaths. The scenery didn’t change much, and the water was quieter than the forest streams I’d become used to finding by sound and smell.

After most of a mile, I realized that I was hearing something—a low sort of rumble. It was oddly difficult to localize, but seemed to come from ahead of us.

“l.oiosh, you said you couldn’t fly, but —”

“No, I can do it, I think.”

“Then—”

“I’m on my way, Boss.”

He left my shoulder and flew off ahead of me, his flight strong and smooth, mostly gliding, wings flapping now and then, smoothly; quite graceful, actually.

“Gee, thanks, Boss.”

“Oh, shut up. Are you all right?”

“Yeah, I can manage. I just have to glide a lot, and I won’t he able to keep this up very long.”

“You won’t have to. What do you see?”

“I’d say water, only you claim it isn’t water, so ... wait a minute. It’s getting louder. It’s —”

“Yes?

“Well, it’s safe enough. Come ahead.”

“All right.”

The ground rose a little, leaving the water—or whatever it was—about twenty feet below us in a sort of cleft, like a scale model of a river valley, all green and stuff. Loiosh returned to my shoulder as I took the last few steps. The roaring became louder—like, each step noticeably increased the volume; soon we’d have had to shout to be heard, and at about that time we came over a rise and saw it—a waterfall, or it would have been a waterfall if whatever was falling had been water. Certainly, it behaved like water as it went over the lip and struck the bottom, about a hundred or a hundred and twenty feet below; complete with what seemed to be mist springing up from it. The lip was narrower than the stream, I’d say about thirty-five feet. The “water,” for lack of a better word, rushed over it in a tremendous hurry to reach the bottom. I watched, fascinated the way one sometimes is by nature, though I hesitate to call it “nature”—I didn’t believe this was any more natural than anything else I’d seen since I got here.

It fell majestically. It foamed and swirled in the pool at the bottom, before heading off downstream; I picked out particles and watched them plummet; I watched the mist rise and curl. I wondered what it was.

On my arm, I felt Spellbreaker stir, just a little; a sort of twitch that could almost have been my imagination, but no, it wasn’t.

And then I knew.

Of course, you—who have heard all of my story to this point, and are now sitting back drinking your favorite wine and listening to my voice pour out—you had it figured a long time ago. And, I suppose, I ought to have too. But it is one thing to hear about it, and quite another to be there with it, watching , hearing it, and not really wanting to believe that you’re looking at what you think you’re looking at.

“Amorphia,” I said aloud, naming it, making it real. According to some of the beliefs surrounding the practice of witchcraft, to name it was to give it power; according to others, to name it was to give myself power over it. This felt like the former.

“What?” shouted Teldra.

I leaned over until I was talking into her ear. “Amorphia,” I repeated, making my voice calm, as if I were announcing nothing of any importance. “The stuff of chaos.”

She stared at it, then nodded slowly, leaned over, and spoke into my ear. “Yes,” she said. “You’re right. It is amorphia. Only controlled. Going where the Jenoine wish it to go, and doing what they wish it to do.”

I nodded, and led us back from the brink, just a score or so of paces over the hill so we could speak in normal tones. I said, “I didn’t think amorphia occurred anywhere except at home.”

“Neither did I,” she said.

I grunted. “So, which is scarier—that they have created a river of amorphia, or that they are able to create a river of amorphia? Or, for that matter, the fact that the Jenoine have permitted us to see all of this?”

“I begin to believe,” she said, “that the reason we haven’t been molested is that, quite simply, we are too insignificant to worry about.”

“Insulting,” I said, “but it could be true. It would explain why we’ve been permitted to see this, too—we just don’t matter.”

Teldra exhaled briefly through her nose and watched the scene. I watched with her. She said, “And we were wondering if there was any magic here.”

I listened to chaos splash over the cliff. From where we stood, we could see the rush of the gathered amorphia about to plunge over the falls. Now that I knew—or, perhaps, now that I had admitted to myself what it was—it looked even less like water; the color changed as you tried to focus on it, but now appeared mostly to fluctuate between steely grey and a dark, unhealthy green. And while it almost behaved as water should, it didn’t quite do that, either.

“Well, we’ve certainly learned something,” I remarked into the air.

Amorphia. The stuff of chaos. According to some, the stuff of life; according to others, the basic building block of all matter and energy. I didn’t know; I wasn’t a magical philosopher, and I’d certainly never studied the ancient, illegal, and frightening branch of sorcery devoted to such things.

I’d used amorphia once, and since then had skimmed a couple of Morrolan’s books to pick up useful-looking spells, bur I’d never studied it.

I had used it once.

A long time ago, in the heart of the city, trying to save the life of Morrolan (who was dead at the time; don’t ask), faced by several sorceresses of the Bitch Patrol—the Left Hand of the Jhereg—I had called upon abilities I didn’t know I had, I had hurled something at them they could not have anticipated any more than they could counter it. Yes, I had done it once.