The Margin

Sel would not touch the sheet.

They asked Mali to lay it on the observatory floor, then sent everyone out except a lamp-keeper named Oren. Oren had one clouded eye and a habit of rubbing his left shoulder before he lifted anything heavy. Mali noticed because he did it before moving a chair. In the weeks ahead she would notice such things everywhere.

The Cosmic Codex stood closed on a stone desk. Around it, five small lights moved with a precision that made Mali think of patient insects. One separated from the others, approached her wrapped bundle and stopped.

“Warden,” Sel said quietly. “Keep your distance.”

The light retreated.

“You recognise the mark,” Mali said.

“I recognise the way it is wrong.”

Sel opened a drawer and took out a sketch. The mark on the paper resembled hers, but it had one fewer branch.

“Three weeks after the Convergence, the Codex composed this. It had always recorded. Then it began making something new. I thought the new page was a warning about the signal learning our counter-harmony.”

“And now?”

“Warnings and invitations can use the same door.”

They opened the Codex. Mali saw streets of light through the crystalline leaves, passages opening into passages. Her stomach turned. Across one margin, a branch grew.

Sel shut it with both hands.

Oren made a sound behind them. His left arm was raised. His right hand had grasped the familiar place on his shoulder and would not move. He looked embarrassed rather than frightened.

“It hurts less this way,” he said.

Sel pulled the lamp from its stand and set it between him and the desk. “Oren. Tell me something I don't know.”

“I broke the blue cup.”

“I know about the cup.”

His face tightened. Mali started forward, but Sel held up a hand.

“I kept the handle,” he said at last. “I thought I could make something from it.”

His fingers loosened. He looked down at them in terror.

Sel bound the Codex shut with copper wire. Their own hands were shaking.

“A routine,” they told Mali. “It entered through a movement he already trusted. The old signal pressed from outside. This one recruits what we repeat willingly.”

Mali remembered the instructor anticipating her private form. “It knows the schools.”

“It learns through them. Recovery houses have asked us for safer exercises. Fighting schools have asked for protection against the shards. For months the Codex has supplied comparative movement tables. I sent them out.”

The observatory seemed to contract around that admission.

“How many?”

“Forty-three houses. Eleven schools. The Assembly has invited their masters to demonstrate together in nine days.”

“Send a warning.”

Sel was already writing. “A warning from the scholar who distributed the lessons. Some will believe it. Some will think another faction wants control of their teaching.”

“Then go yourself.”

Sel looked at the wired book. “If I bring this north, I bring every connection it has made.”

Mali wanted to leave the page and go. Her ribs hurt. The ferry woman's blood had dried inside her sleeve. None of this belonged to a wandering swordswoman with a damaged scabbard and six copper pieces.

Oren took a curved piece of blue pottery from his pocket. He set it on the table, where all three could see it.

“I was going to make a whistle,” he said. “For my grandson.”

Mali picked up Sel's first warning.

“Who will they listen to?”

“Master Deren chairs the Assembly. He taught at Red Eave.”

“He taught me.”

Sel met her eyes then, fully. “Will he listen to you?”

Mali thought of an ankle bruised for an ugly kick, a room where no movement was allowed to end differently from the diagram.

“He'll listen long enough to tell me I'm wrong.”

“Take that long.”

Sel gave her the warning, a route map and a copper loop that would darken near an active carrier. It offered no protection. They were careful to say so. Mali appreciated that more than she wanted to.

As she went down the observatory steps, someone behind the bound Codex began to turn a page.