Lens of the World by R. A. MacAvoy Read Free Book Online

Nazhuret, I will teach you the arts of conflict, since that is your background, and as I have heard said, one can only teach a person what he already knows. I will also teach you five languages, two of which are dead and one of which has—for you—what are called magical properties. Together we will study dancing, too, and a sort of history more accurate than that fed you poor brutes at your school. But the only perfect teaching—the only treasure I have—I can give you in a few words, right now.
    “You, Nazhuret, once of Sordaling, are the lens of the world: the lens through which the world may become aware of itself. The world, on the other hand, is the only lens in which you can see yourself. It is both lenses together that make vision.” He paused, terribly still.
    “Do you understand me?”
    I listened, and I looked into the cool clearness of this immense glass, which showed me magnified the fine pink fingers of Powl and the glint of gold and the blue-rose-colored drop of a discreet ruby on one of those rings, and superimposed over all this the ghost of my own face, turned upside down and thus unknowable to me. I had to put both hands over my face and retreat into darkness.
    He asked me again, “Do you understand me, Nazhuret?”
    The words, meaningless to me, were locked in the dark box of my head, and like powder charges, were set to go off. I knew about handling powder charges, and knowing they were locked in with me and the fuse ignited, I began to sweat.
    For a moment I saw myself from above as I had briefly the day before.
For a moment I felt the blackness that preceded death. Then I remembered more. I opened my eyes
again and let go of Powl’s words. “I don’t understand at all, Powl. Not at all.
And I can’t think. My head fills instead with memories of… of before I knew I ought to
come back.” “Good.” He nodded forcefully, as though I had said something profound
instead of failing the test completely. “Knew you ought to come back. No nonsense about my
calling…” He nodded and nodded. To himself.
    “Good, Nazhuret. We have a very strong beginning.”
     
    Memories only remain connected, so that they make a tale that moves from third hour to fourth hour to noon, in situations so utterly new that our minds cannot otherwise catalog them. Once we have begun to feel comfortable—to understand or to give up understanding all things around us—we group memories in clumps of like experiences. (I am told, however, that it is not the same for idiots, who remember each incident of their unsuccessful lives as sequential, unique, and inexplicable. Though I have been called a simpleton all my life, I am glad my memories have not been so drearily particular as this.) My recollection of my first whole day with Powl switches from the first mode of memory to the second at about the time just described. Sometime later in the afternoon he took a set of keys and led me through various doors into the odd-shaped rooms that made up the rest of the volume of this round building within a square one.
    There was a spare but perfectly comfortable bedroom that boasted a
fireplace not set into the wall but pounded out of what seemed to be pieces of old body armor (both
of horse and man) and served by a flimsy exhaust pipe, and a storage room where grain was kept very
tidily in glass and ceramic with rubber gaskets and where wooden crates rose almost to the low
ceiling, along with a far more interesting collection of sabers, rapiers, disassembled pistols,
lance cannons, caltrops, and other instruments to eviscerate, maim, and otherwise discourage
one’s friends. The room at the third corner smelled of fuller’s earth; it had certain of
the flags lifted, and a great displacement of the earth beneath them was scattered over the
remaining floor. Atop the hole in the flags was a thigh-high iron box with a matching hole in its
top. The entirety was described to me (reluctantly, it seemed) as a “work