A Discourse on Change
I didn't learn why the soldiers had come until the next day. A wanted notice had been issued over the whole of Lehman.
At first I wasn't sure. Had someone seen me working magic, careful as I'd been to hide it? Or had Remi's crew—forced to lie low after falling out of the army's favor—put the knife in my back again?
It was neither.
"Pressure came down from above."
Dorothy was the one who told me how things really stood.
The Lehman garrison, whose record had already been slipping for three years, seemed at last to be under direct pressure. An overseas deployment demands considerable capital on its own. Even so, for the past several years the army had been indispensable—there was the work of cutting out what remained of the old empire's brutality and settling the land under federal rule.
That was no longer true.
Eight years.
Eight years had passed since the war's end, and the soldiers stationed in Lehman—not even the imperial capital—were having their usefulness called into question. The ban on magic was a smooth, well-paved road by now, and the exalted gentlemen of the mainland had begun, in all sincerity, to wonder why they should go on spending good money to keep these men employed.
And so a fire was lit under the officers of the Lehman garrison. A soldier is a soldier wherever he goes, but an officer could feel it plainly: the moment he was sent back to the mainland, both his standing and his pay would drop.
Something had to be done.
An ordinary interest group would have racked its brains for a way to make itself useful. The officers did not. A military body had long since put a more efficient method to work—concealment and fabrication.
If there were no results, one had only to manufacture them. As a first step they turned every old record inside out, and that was how they found my name.
"As long as you're here, you'll be safe."
Benjamin said it, and he was right.
Yesterday had proved as much. A private knocks at the door, and an acting lieutenant steps out to meet him. Promotion was the only thing Dorothy lacked; in treatment she was already a lieutenant, or better. Talent of that order.
The five soldiers withdrew without a backward glance.
Safe. I was largely inclined to agree.
But.
Would the federal troops really be satisfied with tearing through old records the way a man tears after rats? I didn't think so.
And I was right.
Before two weeks had passed, rumor was already going around that the federal army had hauled in one innocent civilian. Two months later, the number had grown to five. Three of them, so the whispers went, had been gray-haired young men.
Two months had passed since I last stepped past the threshold. It had been decided unanimously: wander outside carelessly in a situation like this, and there was no telling what disaster might follow. I'd expected a week or two at most. I hadn't imagined it would stretch on for two months.
There was a good side to it, though.
A heavy sound—the closing of a cover. Even that thick, thick calculus text had come, at last, to its end. Two months of relentless study had brought me there.
Benjamin was beside the desk. He smiled, satisfied.
"Well done."
I neither agreed nor denied it. I picked up the magic book instead. Showing an achievement was faster than speaking of it.
"Move."
I spoke the word that set the spell in motion. The object was the pen in my hand, and I pictured the path it would travel. This time, though, I didn't trust to instinct.
A formula for the trajectory an object would trace. Assign it, and necessity follows. From this moment, the pen had to move like this.
It rose into the air with a low hum. Until now, what Move could manage had been exceedingly simple. Every act of lifting a thing and carrying it elsewhere had been constant in speed, and stiff besides. Not anymore.
I flicked my finger, and the pen set off, climbing through an elegant curve. Benjamin's eyes went wide as he followed its wake.
A helical orbit. The very thing I could never have imagined before I opened that book.
And that was not all. I flicked my finger once more, and the pen began to accelerate—this time in the opposite direction. It came knifing in with a sharp whistle. Had I demanded a maneuver like that of myself three years ago, I would have put a pen through somebody and had plenty left to spare. But the pen, acceleration upon acceleration, came to rest precisely inside my grip. It slid home to the very place it had started. Proof that my magic now stood even with Benjamin's in precision as well.
"Well?"
I asked, and Benjamin answered with an easy smile.
"Splendid."
"Oh. I don't think I've ever been acknowledged this cleanly. Does that make me a magic scholar too?"
"You've still a long way to go."
"A shame."
I meant it. Once today was over, I would never again receive Benjamin's instruction.
"…"
Five people of the Empire had been taken away. Perhaps more. That three gray-haired young men were among them made it plain the federal army was running wild under the pretext of "Eugene." The troops stationed at the Lehman garrison would go on rounding up new Eugenes, one after another, to protect their own livelihoods.
For the Empire's people, it was a devastating blow. Among them, gray hair ran to more than three in ten. All of them would end up living in hiding, unable to show their faces in the street.
But.
What if the real Eugene appeared? What if he proved with his own body that innocent people had been arrested, and spread the fact through every neighborhood until those above could no longer conceal it? I would no longer be able to live in Lehman. The officer charged with enforcing the magic ban at the Lehman garrison, though, would take two charges at once—incompetence, and the falsification of results.
Let the one who tied the knot be the one to untie it. I had brought this about, so it was mine to bring to an end. And at the same time, it was a thoroughly convenient pretext for leaving this land.
July 16. Tomorrow, I would leave Lehman. This, then, was the last of Benjamin's teaching.
There was one thing I had to keep clear. Half my reason for going was personal desire. The other half was the Oslo family. If it came out that they had been hiding Eugene, a user of magic, the damage would not stop at a fall from authority. Stay planted in this harmonious two-story house, and Benjamin would lose his honor; Dorothy, a soldier, might well be hauled before a court-martial. So it would remain a secret from both of them. Tell them the circumstances, and they would never consent to a solution so simple and so easy.
I made it plain to myself that this plan served my own arrogance and self-righteousness.
The fifteenth. The day I closed the calculus text. We spent an utterly ordinary evening together, over bread and potato salad.
"Sleep well."
"Good night."
I waved. Dorothy waved back, awkward as the gesture was, and only after I'd seen it did I return to my room.
My hand on the knob felt strangely ill at ease. I tried to recall the first time I had entered this room, and what came instead was the memory that there had been no such moment. I'd been carried in unconscious and opened my eyes already inside it. If anything, I ought to have been remembering the first time I stepped out.
Come to think of it, I had called this a storage room back then. Somewhere along the way, I had started calling it my room. A change that had come over me without my noticing. Had I grown so deeply attached to the place?
"…"
The door creaked open on a desk and a bed, both neatly kept. I had prepared a great deal in advance, and in the time that remained I checked my luggage once more.
What I would take: a bag holding clothes and enough food to last a little over three days; twelve pounds, earned begging long ago; the magic book.
What I would leave: the textbooks, the money Benjamin had paid me for the copying, and a letter ten sheets long.
I meant to leave behind everything but what was strictly necessary. Most of what I owned had been given to me by the two of them.
Ah. There were exceptions. A shirt that had already grown too small for me, and a scarf I had no use for in weather like this. Absurdly enough, I needed neither, and I packed them both.
"Whew."
With the last check finished, I wiped the sweat from my brow.
"Ready."
Preparations were done. More precisely, I had finished every preparation that lay within my power.
Leaving Lehman was, quite literally, no more than the first step toward the Federation. Passage was still forbidden to people of the Empire. I had no money, so I would have to board in secret. No one could discover me during the voyage, and I had heard that disembarking brought a mandatory verification of identity. The last of these worried me most. The Federation's inspections were unlikely to be as slipshod as the Empire's.
There was more than a gate or two ahead of me. My mind, even so, was already made up. I still wanted to set foot in the Federation. That was enough.
A rattle—I shouldered the bag, opened the window, and slipped out onto the roof. It was dawn, and the sun had not yet risen.
"Levitation."
I landed lightly on the ground and looked back. The two-story house lay sunk in stillness.
"Good."
I had managed to slip away unseen. A relief. Caught stepping out the door with my luggage bundled up, I would have been in trouble. I settled my grip on the magic book and hurried on. From here, I meant to raise hell at the garrison.
Then I had the strange sense that the book had swollen. I had handled it for a long time. However I looked at it, it bulged as though a thick bookmark had been slipped inside. I hadn't noticed in the room. Under the moonlight, it was unmistakable.
"What is this? I never put anything in the magic book."
One step short of leaving the yard, I stopped and opened it. The pages fluttered, and I turned at once to the one where the foreign thing was caught.
"…What is this?"
A thick sheet of paper, about the size of a palm. I had seen Benjamin carrying paper of the same size more than once. A certificate of identity—what people called an identification card. It wasn't mine. Half in doubt, I read the Frauvian written across it. A date, symbols whose meaning I couldn't parse, small numbers scrawled in a jumble. And at the center of the paper, a name.
"Eugene… Oslo?"
I spun around. The two-story house was still wrapped in silence.
And yet, in the window where the moonlight fell, two silhouettes seemed to stand, waving.
"Ah…"
I couldn't be sure. Something hot had welled up in both eyes, and I could hardly see what was in front of me. Probably ghosts. Or something of that sort.
I turned to go without hesitation. I had started to turn when I stopped.
I shouted it with a voice that rose from the deepest part of my chest.
The sun was rising. Follow that yellow light, and I would reach the east—the harbor. I broke into a run with no thought for where my feet were taking me, feeling the heat stream down my cheeks.
That day, Eugene appeared at the garrison and put on a spectacle, flying through the air and knocking the officers down, and the higher command, receiving word of it, fell into great confusion. On paper, Eugene was already in prison. The rumor of the gray-haired magician had spread through the whole city, and there was no hiding it.
The superiors who uncovered the false report granted one last chance. The officer who received it brightened and turned Lehman inside out in search of the gray-haired magician, but in the end he was not found. It was only natural.
"The times are changing. Let's stop resting on the glory of eight years ago."
With those words, from a certain old man laughing his deep laugh, the officer was taken away.
"Ah."
The old man reached a hand toward the sky.
"The rain has stopped."