Read Otherwise for Free Online Page B

against the Seven Possessors. Creatures not anything but one of the Seven Strengths. The Folk have a thousand stories about such things, battles of the Seven Possessors against the Seven Strengths. Moral stories, you know; Gray knowledge or teaching made into a story about a battle. The Folk take them for real, the Sevens, real enough to see with eyes and touch.”
    “But the Gray in the village—he’s just as afraid of me.”
    Caredd laughed again. “Old Driggory? He’s afraid that you might have been sent to do battle against his own Possessor, the one named Blem.” The Visitor looked puzzled. “Drunkenness. A good old man Driggory is, but a simple country clerk; he’d hardly know what the great Grays are capable of. Because it’s from him, you see, and all his cousins, the village clerks and little Grays, that the Folk have learned their tales of the Sevens, from long ago.”
    The Visitor shook his head. “I wanted to talk with them. How can I explain I am no creature of the Grays?”
    Caredd looked down at the strange personage below her, who looked up with his infinite blank eyes. Indeed, if there were Gray champions of the Right, they might look like this: or then Demons too. “Whose creature are you?” she asked.
    The Deep had drunk the sun once more, and though the clouds Outward weren’t yet drained of all color, the sky above had been swept clean of cloud, and on that blue-black ceiling already burned three of the Wanderers, pink, gold and red, all decrescent. “I can’t remember,” the Visitor said, as though for the first time.
    “Perhaps,” said Caredd, “you are no Strength, but Possessed; and the Possessor has eaten your memory and made your hair fall out. The Possessor Blem can do that; they show it in the pageants at Yearend.” She was a wind-blown silhouette in the crack of battlement, and the Visitor couldn’t see her little mocking smile.
    “And if I am?” said the Visitor. “I don’t think I am, but if I am?”
    “If you are,” Caredd said thoughtfully. “Well. I wouldn’t know what then, and neither would Driggory. You’d have to go to Inviolable and ask.”
    “Inviolable?”
    “The Grays’ house in the mountains. Or”—a sudden thought that made her smile again—“wait till Fauconred takes you to my husband. His brother is a great Gray, oh very high.” She would like to see Learned’s unstirrable face, when this creature asked wisdom of him.
    The Visitor turned his bald face to the deep sky he knew had made him. Had made him for—somewhere within him some formed thing tried to coalesce: a reason, a direction, the proper question, the name uncoded. He stood stock-still and watched it light up fitfully the structured regularity of his manufacture… and then dissolve as quickly into blank unknowing again.
    “Very well,” he said, when he was sure it was gone. “I’ll wait, then. A little longer.”
    Learned Redhand was not particularly learned, though he was for sure Redhand. His family name had hardly hindered his quick rise through many degrees to the gray he wore, dark as rainclouds about to break; but still, it was due as much to his own efforts, to his subtlety if not depth of mind, to his unflappable grace of manner. Despite a certain cynicism in him, a smiling disregard for the dogmas of his Order that unsettled people, he had a deep affection for the elaborate systems, framed in ritual as though in antique, lustrous wood, that had taken the Grays countless centuries to create. But he had little interest in mastering those systems in all their complexity; was content to float on the deep stream of Gray knowledge, trailing one finger, buoyed by the immunity a Gray’s unarmed strength gave him in the violent world of the court.
    He did love without reservation, though, the house Inviolable, where he had first put on white linen, where he had grown up in the Grays and gained whatever wisdom he possessed. He loved the mountain that Inviolable had held since