Chapter 14

Porter’s day to day life boiled down to one word: blue. He practiced under Fane’s tutelage in the early morning, dueled with his sword before lunch, and hunted with Kanji in the afternoon. He was still hesitant with his newfound magic, but his skills were growing. His sword master was not near as pleased as his Blue Hand tutor, badgering Porter about his lack of coordination. Still, He forgot, albeit bit by bit, the twisted fear of his near death and escape from Timisoara. His insecurities melded into a romanticized adventure of the flight to Sky House. Each day was capped with the joy of hunting with a wastecat as both of their skillsets continued to grow.

The northern deer was a larger and sturdier breed with an impressive spread of antlers. Kanji was thrilled to stalk larger and more dangerous prey, which required her to sharpen her skills. With her ears pulled back and her fangs exposed as she fought another buck, Porter marveled at her grace and speed. Even in the thick of battle, her thick tail twitched with obvious delight. More than once, Gilly had been summoned to heal cuts and gouges in the cat’s side from antlers.

Porter also discovered that he could haul the carcass back to the kitchen of Sky House much more easily by using the Blue to float it. However, Kanji’s bulk required a lot more meat than their days playing near the Waste. She could easily devour half an animal. Usually she had enough control to wait for Porter to save the skin for leather. Usually.

After a day’s worth of stretching his mind and his muscles, Porter was rewarded with an evening in the arms of a beautiful woman. He had no doubts that he was novice in the art of love and seduction, but he was enjoying every minute. His nervous ticks and habits of insecurity abated as the days and weeks passed. Porter was in love.

Some evenings Gilly would invite friends and acquaintances for a visit, or she would drag Porter to a music concert or even a poetry recital. One of her favorite friends was a tall rail of a man named “Alin,” who she always greeted with a smile and a kiss. Porter noticed that Alin was the only one of her friends who received such treatment but thought no more of it.

Fane had a great deal of fun at young love’s expense. In between the exercises of expansion of fields and manipulation of objects, Porter endured lighthearted ribbings of late nights and weak knees. The seven movements became the fourteen movements and his brain was fuzzy at the end of each lesson. At least Fane did not slap him on his back. From time to time, another Elder would visit the tutorial, some with comment and others without. Costin, who seemed to more important than Fane, was a weekly visitor who said nothing to Porter but directed many comments to Fane as if Porter was not worthy of the man’s words.

Fane was merciless on the mats. If he did not like a posture, he corrected with a nip of Blue Flame that bit. When Porter’s execution was flawed, he suffered. When his defenses were poor, Fane would pound through the weaknesses and inflict pain. Porter learned never to make the same mistake twice.

After weeks of practice, Porter appreciated his teacher yet was confused by the cool distance of his tutor. The lack of relationship disturbed him. As he walked the halls of Sky House, he found the people in the corridors friendly and welcoming. People would introduce themselves and wave a greeting to him wherever they ran into each other. He never lacked for companions to the Dining Hall, even though he slipped sometimes and used the word cafeteria, harking back to his pre-Porter days. Everyone was busy with jobs, businesses, or unstated errands of one sort or another, but people stopped and greeted each other.

He mentioned Fane’s distance to Gilly one evening. She was exhausted from a day of councils and meetings whose content she could not mention. To her Fane was the most wonderful teacher of her youth. Porter was convinced that she must have had a crush on the man when she studied under him and that colored her perceptions.

Gilly kept Porter a bit off balance though. Alin was her constant companion during the day. He had long, thin fingers and an acerbic wit. Gilly and Alin were very close as longtime confederates. Even though Porter never saw them hug or touch each other, there was a shared intimacy, which Porter could see but could not grasp. Sometimes he had to hold his tongue when he saw them leaning close together, fearing a show of any insecurity.

Porter could see that Gilly was a leader, a recognized person of import at Sky House. She had little time for him during the day and would dismiss him with a brusqueness that he thought should only be reserved for others. She had cold, hard ambition. Porter recognized her ambition was attractive, but it was paired a haughtiness that he found slightly repugnant. He decided to avoid her during the day.

When he did need to speak with her after class or before dinner, often she would ask Alin to help him. Alin was not her personal assistant but she treated him like one at times. When Porter asked him about it, Alin would make a cynical remark to avoid addressing the point. As with most of the other residents, Alin was friendly and gracious on the surface. However, Porter could not miss that Alin was glum and bitter in his unguarded moments.

Porter did not ask Alim about his moods, but he did mention it to Gilly. He had expected her to dismiss his observation as none of his business but instead, she encouraged him to befriend Alin. She would not tell him why, yet he could read the worry across her face. The complications of these relationships kept Porter from feeling at peace. He felt cheated, but could not comprehend any next steps.

After several months on the practice floor, Porter was introduced to the library of Sky House. He learned most students were introduced to book study after six months, but Porter had arrived older and already educated. Fane told Porter that he was being sent to the library to study essays and reports on the nature and use of the Blue.

With the failure of technology, reams of books had been downloaded and printed; they stood on shelves on left side of the soaring room. The long, broad room, whose ingenious use of natural light precluded the need for artificial light most of the time, was laid out with books and scrolls on either side of the long walls with desks and chairs for reading in the center of the room. Stuffed couches and comfortable chairs were placed in sitting arrangements through the center of the room along with the polished wood tables that shone softly in the daylight.

On right wall were the books and scrolls of Sky House residents and scholars. The topics varied from agriculture and history to theoretical musings on using the Blue. At any given time that Porter visited, the library had only two or three visitors; it was not a popular place.

The Sky House Elder, Costin, was his guide to the stacks but the man acted more like a censor than a guide. He would direct Porter to certain shelves and steer him away from others, which fed Porter’s natural paranoia nearly every afternoon. Porter was hesitant to tell the man to leave him alone, to explain that he knew his way around a library well enough. Instead, Porter chose to be roundabout, annoying the elder with obtuse questions and poor habits. Every day Costin accosted him in the library, Porter would pepper him with tens of questions and leave his books and papers on chairs, tables, the floor and even sticking out of the shelves. After a week of abuse, the Elder excused himself and left Porter to his own devises.

Porter began curtailing his hunting adventures from every day to every other day to allocate more hours in the library. He had not seen a decent book since his time on his Emperor’s ill-fated ship and he salivated at the chance to dig into the texts again.

He skipped the left side of the room, the books brought from the same empire from which he had been excised. He was now a resident of Anshar and he was eager to delve into his new world. After days of picking from different stacks and perusing from a big list of subjects, Porter found himself drawn to discussions of the nature of the Blue. The librarian was quite helpful, and he had a small stack of thin books kept in a nice little pile just for him.

His life had reached an idyllic peak, but the library was proving to a vexing problem began to ring muted alarms. On one hand, he would crow how much more wonderful could life be than to practice with Fane in the morning, his cat or his books in the afternoon, and his lover in the evening? On the other hand, something about the library tugged at his brainstem, insisting that he was missing something obvious.

Weeks merged into months. The mountain and her valleys embraced the vibrant colors of the Ansharian autumn. For Porter, however, the grey skies that signaled this changing season roused the grey thoughts that were percolating in the back of his brain.

At first, the joy of his days masked his unease; however, as the days progressed, so did the pertinent questions in his ruminations. He began to ask probing questions of his teacher who did his best to respond with brief answers as to the nature of the Blue. When Porter was not satisfied and he asked a follow-up query, Fane would fall back on the catechism of the Blue Hand. Porter’s frustration with pat responses began to feed his unease.

Just once Porter brought one of his unanswered questions about the nature of the Blue to his lover in the evening; that was the end of their lovemaking for the night. Picking apart that incident as he separated his insecurities from his facts, Porter found validations for his suspicions. Pyotr of old was able to discern when data was missing or had been manipulated, and there was definitely a vacuum around the entire subject of the Blue. The entire population avoided questions about the origin or bedrock nature of their gifts.

Porter also realized that he had been too naïve, failing to consider withholding his questions. Leeza’s comment on the day they entered Timisoara that the Blue Hand had their blindnesses returned to the forefront of this ruminations. ‘How invaluable her advice has been,’ he thought as his mouth worked itself with pops and grunts of another lifetime. As he zeroed in upon this new puzzle, his old patterns seemed to re-emerge, as if he was calling upon half-remembered skill sets.

Porter’s focus broke when he realized that he had started to measure the width of the books on a shelf and was prepared to divide those widths against the length of the shelf in order to determine the number of books. The old habits were returning. This time he knew why though.

The sightlessness of the Blue Hand boiled down to two issues in Porter’s notes. The first was the nature of the Blue. While no student of the subject was willing to toss the power into the realm of magic, not one person had been able to describe or explain the physics of the phenomenon. Hypotheses abounded in the thin books, but there were no experiments done, no further explorations beyond the mere conjectures of stymied minds.

The second was the mention in the earliest records of the explorers of shrines or altars from which the Blue emanated. A number of these places had been located across the continent before and during the advent of the Blue Hand. These shrines were thought to be archeological sites of a previous civilization or perhaps the remnants of a visiting one. However, in the chaos of the fifty years of slaughter, the shrines dropped from the historical record and were basically unmentioned in the histories again. A few centuries later, the authors had begun to dismiss them as legends and superstition, or the writers argued that the shrines must have been destroyed amidst the bloodshed.

The bureaucrat inside of Porter did not countenance such dismissals. If someone recorded the existence of an object and no one reported its destruction, then for all intents and purposes that object still existed. No destructions or desecrations were in the histories or records. Furthermore, he was convinced that the two mysteries were linked. If both were mysterious and impenetrable, there was probably a connection of the Blue between them. He was working with conjecture, but his gut told him he was on a worthwhile path.

The next problem was the connection between the shrines and the Blue. Whatever other deficits he had, Porter had a fair estimation of his intelligence and his ability to solve problems, which was no greater than many other people, he was sorry to admit. If he could imagine a connection between the two, others in the past 600 years should have discovered the same link. He could not fathom how the writings gave no indication of someone else making the same linkage between the two subjects. They should have. There was not a great gulf between Blue Shrines and the nature of the Blue that only a unique insight could tie them together; rather, he was sure that any reasonable person could grasp the same reasonable conclusion that he did. A sense of foreboding made his fingers and hands twitch.

Porter returned to the stacks still single mindedly engaged in his search for answers. If the linkage was a taboo subject, then the shrines had to be approached indirectly by delving into old maps and books of recorded explorations. One book of maps had a page missing, and then another. A scroll which the catalogue said was on the shelf was not. In fact, several scrolls were missing

Porter considered returning to the librarian for help, but he had not encountered missing pages, books, or scrolls during any of his other literary investigations. The forensic detective in him sensed a purging of documents and information. A chill went down his spine, emphasizing that he had found the last clue for which he had not been seeking. He had been looking for facts and instead, found a giant hole of missing information. In his line of previous work, missing information was usually a sign of deliberate acts to hide data that others wanted to keep from the light of day.

He pulled one last book from the shelf and noticed that another thin cover with a folded piece of paper glued to it was tucked inside. His heart skipped a beat at the possibility of a flaw in the alleged conspiracy. Porter’s head popped up and his own sense of self-preservation blossomed into near panic mode. For the first time, he considered the probability that his time in the library was being monitored without him realizing.

Marking the book in his memory, he slid it back onto the shelf. He returned all his books to the librarian for shelving with due thanks and he left the room. Taking his notes back to his apartment, Porter burned them with a flame of Blue in a bowl. Only when the ashes cooled did the rapid heartbeat in his breast begin to ease. The growing fear he felt was that he was too late.