POV: tress
Summary
Tress reorients herself inside the tower, brushing off the touch of the midnight creature. Huck is already vanishing up a flight of steps, using a running board alongside them as a ramp. The corridor she stands in is all metal, lit calmly from above through some plastic filter, a red carpet running down the centre and the walls inlaid with Aonic symbols that to her read as arcane runes. Several panels along the walls remind her of Fort's writing board. Where another reader might find the place sterile, she finds it beautiful — clean and radiant, like she imagines the afterlife. She climbs.
At the top, a door slides aside on its own into a large circular room. The floor is metal, inscribed with a detailed map of the planet. It is otherwise lived-in: furniture, bookshelves, the lights still industrial. At a desk by the bookshelves the Sorceress sits with a fluffy white cat in her lap, doing something at a panel of viewing-boards — the narrator allows them the more honest name of *magical seeing boards*, used to watch the world and occasionally to play a card game. One screen shows the corridor Tress just left; one shows the island; one shows the deck of the Crow's Song. Her skin glows softly, with a faint silvery sheen. She looks roughly in her fifties — that being the age at which she stopped aging. Short, plump, hair in a bun, no make-up. She is, the narrator notes, a very long way from home, and she is extremely powerful.
She rotates her chair, sets aside her board, shoos the cat — which slinks past Tress and out the door — and looks her offering over with a flat *I'm not impressed* and a complaint about her hair. Tress swallows her awe and recites the speech she has been building. *Sorceress! You have taken captive someone I love. I have come to demand his return — because I have defeated you. I crossed your ocean, approached your island, passed your metal army, gained entrance to your lair. I have overcome the four trials you set before me.* The Sorceress laughs — the *four trials* gives it away, she has been listening to Hoid. How is Ulaam keeping, she asks; he has never come to see her. Wise of him: she keeps a vat of acid set aside for him specifically. That or a good fire — those are the only two ways to be sure about his kind.
Tress's backup gambit — trading the design of the flare gun for Charlie — lands worse than the first. The Sorceress gestures to the viewing boards; she has seen the gun already. She has been watching. The image of the Crow's Song wobbles, and Tress realises with a jolt that the angle is from Fort's board itself — that they have been spied on the entire time. (The narrator concedes that, in his right mind, he'd have noticed the default security on the boards was trivially defeated. He has not been in his right mind.) The gun, she adds, is a type already manufactured in several seas; she simply hasn't seen one because it has not reached her ocean yet.
Tress's resolve collapses outright. Huck — on the desk — silently raises a paw toward her in a small fist of encouragement, and the gesture jolts her into thinking. There is something here she hasn't grasped. The rat could command the midnight monster. The Sorceress is curious about her crew, not annoyed. Why? *Hoid,* she thinks: he is the threat. The Sorceress is watching him. But she still cannot place Huck, and cannot work out why a captive who has just been told *no* is being chatted with rather than thrown in a cell.
*Well, child, I don't need your technology,* the Sorceress says, *but I find you intriguing.* *Seslo,* she calls, *please open the bridge's holding chamber.* *As you wish,* the voice of the tower's resident mind replies, and a door clicks open. Behind it is Charlie — a little rumpled, in one of his formal outfits, his hair sticking up the wrong way, his grin exactly as it was. He rushes over: *I knew you'd come. Oh, Tress — you've saved me.* Tress's emotions tangle into impossible knots: relief, joy, also a sadness she cannot name, also suspicion. The Sorceress offers a trade — Charlie for the two cups, leave them on the shelf by the door. Tress asks if he is ensorcelled in any way; the Sorceress sighs and performs an obviously theatrical bit of mock-magical doggerel to *break the spell*. (Barbarian, the narrator mutters. She does that to annoy me.) Charlie presses his hand to his head and leans down and kisses her briefly. *See, rat?* the Sorceress says. *I told you, didn't I.* Huck bows his head and is made to whisper *you were right* before slipping down off the desk and vanishing.
Tress decides to leave while she can. She sets the cups on the shelf by the door, takes Charlie by the hand, and goes out and down the stairs. He launches happily into a story from his captivity — the narrator declines to repeat it — and then into something else: how nice it will be to get back to their normal lives on the Rock, to pies and window-washing and gardening. And that, on the bottom step, is when the sadness she could not name finally lands. He is exactly the same. She is not. She has been changed by this voyage — by spores and what she can do with them, by sailing, by a crew — into someone for whom those things no longer fit. Her victory has carried her past being able to enjoy it. Here is the irony the narrator had promised at the beginning of the previous chapter: set-up, then collapse.
And in that moment, looking up at Charlie, she thinks of someone else — someone she shouldn't have cared about, on paper. The grin in front of her is perfect. Too perfect. Because she *knows* Charlie. He has just been told they get to go home, and there is no fluster, no embarrassment, no awkward hand-running-through-hair: only the grin. She turns, runs back up the steps, bursts into the chamber where the Sorceress is settling back into her seat, and shouts, full of electric defiance, *that is not Charlie.*
*And what,* the Sorceress asks, *do you think I did with him?*
*You turned him into a rat.*