could not control stealing over him.
The High Priest: I fear that we will never agree, then, on what constitutes a good man.
Alpaurle: Is it wise to fear disagreement? Should we not, rather, embrace it?
The High Priest: Surely it is better to agree on such matters.
Alpaurle:You must be correct, of course, as you are very wise. But that is not what I asked. Should we not embrace a state of disagreement, on the grounds that from debate comes knowledge?
The High Priest: In matters of morals, I believe that unanimity is key. I find the idea of ambiguity in such matters disquieting.
Alpaurle:Why?
The High Priest: Because I desire to know the truth, of course!
Alpaurle: But what if truth is to be found in ambiguity?
-Alpaurle, from Conversations with the High Priest of Ulet, conversation VI, edited by Feven IV of the City Emerald
ronfoot ran toward Silverdun to help him, but Silverdun waved him away. 'No! Stay with Faella!' he shouted. 'You can tell her how to change all this back into iron!'
Ironfoot turned back to Faella and Sela, while Silverdun wrestled with Hy Pezho a dozen yards away.
'Sela,' he said. `Join me and Faella together, like you did back in the temple. Let's see if we can stop this.'
'Take my hands,' said Sela. 'I'll do what I can.'
Ironfoot closed his eyes and felt Faella and Sela flow into him. Now was the time to be perfect. Now was the time not to fail. Now was the time to be the best.
Ironfoot tried to sift through Faella's understanding, but it was difficult; she had no thaumatic training, no understanding of what it was she was doing, or how she did it. She was raw power, a creature of pure intuition.
And what she did, what Lin Vo had done back at the Arami Camp, was beyond anything Ironfoot even understood. All of his equations, all of his understanding about the workings of the Gifts-none of these applied here. This was an entirely new approach to magic. And he was going to have to work it out right here, right now, while his partner fought a demon to the death and gods rose up all around him.
What was iron? What was cobalt? What lay beneath Elements and Insight? What was at the heart of things, beyond reason and understanding? What was the quotient of division by zero?
Silverdun struggled against Hy Pezho, trying to work the knife up into his ribs. Hy Pezho had all of the strength and quickness of Silverdun's previous opponent, but what he lacked was Asp's skill, his experience. Asp had enjoyed a lifetime of killing before Silverdun had met him. Hy Pezho probably knew a thing or two about killing as well, but not the Bel Zheret kind. Not the punching, kicking, biting kind.
They rolled on top of each other, slammed up against the base of Ein's column. Above them, Ein bellowed and strained.
Ironfoot and Faella walked together through the substance of things. He asked questions without words; she provided answers without thoughts. Slowly he began to understand. The ground shook around them and Sela cried out, but Ironfoot couldn't worry about that right now.
As he watched Faella flail against her lack of understanding, trying to reach out with her Giftless re, Ironfoot began to see something. It wasn't music without pitch, not colorless color, but something that lay behind pitch, beyond color. It wasn't a Giftless Gift, but that which lay beyond Gifts, gave rise to them. Beyond iron and cobalt lay something else, a deeper reality. Both were expressions of a deeper whole.
There was no division by zero. That was a function of numbers that applied to the Gifts. The Gifts were not the reality, though. They were a special case of reality. The thaumatics that applied to them, applied to them only in their special cases. In the depth beneath that spawned them, those equations simply did not apply. That depth was the genesis of the equations and was not bound by them.
He and Faella saw it at the same time. Cobalt and iron were simply variations on a theme, as were the Gifts. Thaumaturges had believed in the Gifts for so long that they had made them the reality, just as the Chthonics had made a reality of their own gods. Believing made it so.
