Hiding a sensation of dread, Manxolio tapped the wand again, silencing it, wondering what would next eventuate. But the hooded stranger stood motionless.
Manxolio spoke in a voice of studied casualness: “This wand is the brother of the baton of the Curator of Man, and the Antiquarians of this city once, ages ago, communed with his archives. In my grandfather’s time, the weapon blew a vent through the north slope of Mount Scagg and out the other side. The tunnel exists to this day. My father, the last of the Remonstrators, could unsaddle a cataphract with a jolt. When I was younger, enough virtue remained in the marrow to deliver a vehement twinge that could unnerve even a full-grown forest-gleft. In any case, it is a stout truncheon, and I know how to break bones with it, and a hook unfolds from the end to allow me to use it like a peavey or picaroon, or, if my work require it, to impale a skull.” He opened this spike, which stood out from the shaft like a gnomon, giving the wand the aspect of a long-handled pickaxe.
The hooded man said, “Your work! What is its nature?”
“A strange question! You know the secrets of the greatest heirloom of the Quinc bloodline, and my name, and seek me, and do not know what I am in this town, splendid Old Romarth?”
“Your name was suggested to me by a pot-boy in the tavern, for I pestered him with questions while the landlord beat me.”
“Why did the landlord beat you?”
“Inadvertently, I cheated him of his due: your coinage is unfamiliar. Your people use scales pried from the belly of a aquatic megafauna for your bezants.”
Manxolio was taken aback at this comment. Could it be so? Putting his hand into his poke, he drew out two large blue bezants and a smaller pink. These were hemi-circular flakes of steel-hard substance. Enamel? Armor? In the dim rose light, Manxolio squinted at the coins in new wonder. The scales of Amfadrang, perhaps? The notion was unnerving.
Manxolio dismissively put away his coins. “I am an Effectuator — the last of that profession on all of Old Earth. The nature of my work is, in return for suitable remuneration, to expedite legal awkwardnesses, gather information of value, discourage effrontery, observe nuances, and to apply, when needed, deterrents to malefactors.”
“A resolver of mysteries?”
“Ahh…! You seek an Effectuation? No doubt your paramour sweats and swoons in the arms of another! Your outrage is understandable. With a clew-hook and fine thread, I can hoist myself to the most difficult vantages by rooftop or wall, and peer in through casements or chimneypot, using a technique I call the Surreptitious Dangle- Glass.”
“Suspicion of infidelity is not my impetus.”
“You display a charming innocence! Best to be sure. With no more noise than a shadow glancing along the snow, I can trail even an alert woman to discover the meaning of her unexplained absences, or rare lapses of memory.”
“While your clandestine skills are doubtless unparalleled, my needs are otherwise. Can you find missing men? Lost goods?”
“Such is a specialty of mine, if I may speak without boasting. What have you lost? What is your name and family? What man do you want me to find?”
“I wish to engage your services,” declared the young man. “I have lost my essential being. I cannot answer you my name: it is gone. The missing man…is me.”
The man threw back his hood. He was bruised along his cheek, and the quirk of his mouth suggested pain in his tooth or jaw. He was a slight but well-knit youth with clear eyes, who carried himself with an unconscious dignity so natural that Manxolio did not at first realize that, beneath the heavy cloak, the youth wore slops apparently from a rag-pickers wagon.
The stranger was exasperating to the patience of even so equitable a temper as Manxolio’s. His conversation consisted of a never-ending series of inquiries, over matters both small and great, philosophical and childlike, to the point of bewilderment. The stranger was also prone to eccentric behavior, stooping to examine objects in the street, craning his neck to see details of the rooftops.
They soon came to the domicile of Manxolio Quinc. Within, the parlor was walled with green and gold, and the posts had been carved into an intricate pattern of birds and lianas.
A fire crackled warmly on the grate to one side, and Bittern, the only servant in the house, set out warm drinks in porcelain cups. Garments of Manxolio’s father found in an old chest, able to fit the frame of the young man, had been exchanged for the rags, which Manxolio had decreed insufficient for a patron of the art of effectuation.
Only with difficulty could Manxolio restrain the young man from crawling the carpet to inspect the wainscoting joists, or fingering the carven roof-posts, asking questions about the artist, his school of craft, and the tools used in the woodwork. Finally, he was settled in a wing-backed chair near the fire.
Manxolio spoke meditatively, “Before I speak, let me impart my wisdom, an old man to a young.”
“Speak on. I have a deep thirst for wisdom.”
“Just this: ponder the advantage of ceasing to inquire further into your lost self-being.”
The youth raised his eyebrows. “What advantage?”
“The red sun shivers and is soon to die, whereupon all life on Old Earth will grope in the gloom and freeze. In the face of such an impending actuality, you must weigh the chance that your lost essential self once enjoyed a happy life, and that the restoration of your essence would return you to that happiness: over against this, weigh the carefree solitude you currently enjoy, a man with neither known debts nor parental obligations. Consider! What if you recovered your selfhood, and learned that a long voyage was required to return you to your proper place? The sun could fail before the voyage was done. Reaching home, perhaps an unadvantageous marriage, or durance in military service, or the completion of an onerous religious vow awaits you, involving acts of unusual and disquieting self-abnegation, chastity, or temperance. No, the statistics do not favor the resumption of an interrupted life. The wise course is to accept your condition with the equilibrium of a philosopher.”
The youth shook his head briefly. “The hunger for knowledge aches in my soul like an intrusive void.”
Manxolio nodded. “You speak like one who is well-read (indeed, one whose knowledge is beyond credible belief) but nothing of the strangeness of wizardry hangs about you: too hale a look gleams in your eye for you to be one who has memorized the polydimensional runes of continuum-jarring magic, nor have your fingernails been yellowed and stained by trifling with alchemic reagents. Not a wizard, then. But who else studies? You are not an Antiquarian. And yet your color and accent are local. You are from this land.”
“Then who am I? What befell me?”
“A dereliction of the mnemonic centers of the cortex can sometimes be caused by a shock to the skull that disarranges the fibers and nodules of the brain. You have no head wound sufficient for this. A second alternative is psychic distress, or a convulsion of purely spiritual influences caused by phrensy. Again, you are too oriented, too knowing, to be a sufferer of this type of malady. The final alternative is magic.”
“Are there theurgist’s draughts to enchant the memory?”
“Perhaps, but you exhibit none of the signs. No. I deduce a power more primal than mere pharmacopoeia at work. The IOUN stones, geodes of solidified primal ylem, collapsed by gravity in the heart of dead stars, and extracted by means too exotic for description, represent an ulterior order of being: they are said to be able to soak up the vibrations of thaumaturgy like a tippler drinking wine, and to drain soul and vital quintessence. I know of but one agency able to drain the very memories from the intellect: the IOUN stones!”
“Who controls this astonishing efficacy?”
“To my knowledge, none. The wizards of the various lands fritter away their lore in exchanges of morbid glamour and poisonous dream-weft, belittling each other with tricks, or devising homunculi. Any wizard administering such matchless strength as the IOUN stones bestow would have made himself supreme over his peers forthwith.”
The youth nodded. “This implies I was bereft by a wizard only recently come into the possession of such
