Avishraa Reloaded

Once she started getting food and water into her, the witch gradually moved away from being in danger of life to merely being sick and tired. She spent a lot of time sleeping, and a lot of time watching An-uxhwi intently with that strange long-distance gaze, as if something behind him were doing something extremely interesting.

Her name, apparently, was Evrith. Though she seemed to be taking her time in deciding whether to tell An-uxhwi about her abilities, and had difficulty properly pronouncing his name, she seemed a reassuringly agreeable sort.

(On the other hand, she did sometimes murmur in her sleep. She sounded as if she was, unsuccessfully, trying to convince someone not to do something. It wasn't usually loud enough to wake him if he were sleeping, but he was curious about it.)

An-uxhwi couldn't imagine what she was trying to decide about him. She didn't seem to ask questions about him - or, for that matter, about anything else either, even things that a prisoner looking to escape might take a keen interest in: the behavior of guards, the layout of the mine, and so on.

He found out why when the foreman, evidently feeling that Evrith was well enough to be questioned, had entered and demanded to know where to dig next. There had been no mention of where or how far the slaves had already gotten: just a brusque “Where next?”

And Evrith had told her: “Next deposit is almost straight down from the westmost branch of the current diggings. They should go slowly; there's fragile rock there that could crumble beneath their feet.” And, just like that, the foreman had grunted in acknowledgement and left.

Several minutes later, Evrith had glanced at An-uxhwi and sighed. “I suppose,” she murmured, “I should tell you. But understand: if the guards realize how I know what I know, things will get very messy very quickly, and it will get much, much harder for you to escape. You understand?”

It was, that much An-uxhwi was sure about at this point, not a trap. It really never could have been - their captors were too dim-witted to pull of anything requiring half the subtlety. Unfortunately their intellectual shortcomings were only of so much benefit - they had numbers, a punishing infrastructure, and were a force to be reckoned with in just about every other regard.

It wasn't even strictly a surprise when Evrith explained the next path to the metals their captors sought - while An-uxwhi did not understand how she did it, he knew magic was involved, and it meshed plausibly with her lack of interest in any information about the layout that part of her skill involved her already knowing about it.

He assumed even their dim-witted captors had to know what advantage that posed, even in isolation.

But he had not pushed the matter of knowing more about her magic beyond a conversational interest when it seemed apt. And he could sympathise with her desire to keep details to herself. In fact: “I understand; I have largely kept them from learning that I have more of a mind than one that knows purely to eat, move and sleep and nothing else, for the same reason.”

He smiled. “Mine may not be much of an advantage, but I do not have others to hide.”

Evrith glared at the door, but she had no indication that the guards were listening. She sighed. “Time,” she said, “is a direction. It's not like directions such as left or right, forward or backwards, and we get no choice as to how to move along it, but it's a direction.

“And, sometimes, there is someone who can see in any direction she wants. Not perfectly, but she can do it. Even time.” She hesitated, then shrugged. “That's what I'm doing. I look at the future where more silver is, and tell them which way the miners will have to go to get there. I know, because I've already watched them do it.”

Her antennae twisted in a bitter smile. “They just think I can sense where metal is. If they knew I could see the future… it's more complicated than it sounds, but it wouldn't take long for them to reason out how useful that would be.”

A part of An-uxhwi wanted to point out that they were pretty dim-witted and he wouldn't put it past them to miss the opportunity. The rest of him sat in stunned silence. That was an order of magnitude more interesting than he'd anticipated.

Interesting, but maybe not that useful. To some degree, An-uxhwi could predict the future - he could, for example, tell Evrith exactly at what time the guards would come for an inspection of progress.

Of course, there was a small chance they were going to shake up the time to catch their slaves unaware, but there was enough regularity to it that he would have little to no concerns building his plans around their schedules. Having certainty about it was nice, but perhaps not the grandest improvement of his situation.

Which almost surely meant he was missing better applications of her trick. He certainly trusted her not to lie to him, and she had implied he would escape - and it took no grand deductive skill to understand she had to be involved somehow.

“How… far?” he asks, haltingly, still trying to sort his surprise.

Evrith cleared her throat. It was debatable whether An-uxhwi could tell how embarrassed she was, but she obviously would have preferred the question didn't get asked. “It depends,” she said, reluctantly. “Some things are easy to see, some aren't. And it's not exactly seeing, either. Once I got sick, I knew they would bring someone else into my cell, but I couldn't tell who. I didn't expect one of your kind, for example.” It was very nearly the only time she'd commented on him not being a Soaker.

“But it all depends on what it is, and how close it is to me, and how big it is - lots of things. Some things I see only right before they happen. Others I can see coming long after I die, like a mountain in the distance.”

Of course, it sounded exactly like seeing to An-uxhwi, but that was thanks to the analogies she'd chosen to convey her ability. The idea that time was like a journey and that one's life might end before one reached the mountain visible in the far distance was very evocative. That was its problem.

But whether or not it was like the sense of sight wasn't very relevant to his plans to escape - to their plans of escape, rather. No doubt she had a far, far clearer idea of how to go about such a thing than he did.

Which left him with one obvious question: “…how static is it? The future?”

An-uxhwi did not have a word for 'tautology' at his command, but if he had, he might have commented on how tautological it seemed to point workers to silver they had uncovered in the future thanks to one seeing them do so in the present and commenting on it to guide them there. But maybe precisely that was how time worked.

Or maybe it just wasn't very static at all, and it truly wasn't like seeing, since there wasn't just one reality to perceive.

Evrith was pleased. She hadn't talked to many people about the future, but most of them didn't think to ask questions like that.

There was a good depth of water in her bowl at the moment; she pulled it closer. Then she picked up a tiny rock from the ground and held it above the bowl. “Keep your eye on the pebble,” she said, and dropped it.

It went plink. Because it was small and oddly shaped, its path wobbled as it sank to the bottom of the bowl. Evrith nodded, and then took another pebble and held it up. “About the same size and shape as the first,” she said. “Pretend it's the same. And if we drop it from the same place…”

It also went plink, and wobbled as it sank; but the path was not exactly the same, and it landed a little less than an inch away from the first one.

“You could drop the same pebble a hundred times or more. They wouldn't all land in the same place, but most of them would be close enough,” she said. “That's how the future is: the possibilities are all there, but you can see the way things will probably go, and what needs to be changed to make it go differently.

“So,” she added serenely, “for example… silver? Silver is easy. It's not moving anywhere by itself. I just have to look for the future where someone finds it - in an active mine that's already getting quite close to it, it would happen eventually. Then I know where it is, and I can tell them. With some things, the future is easy to change.”

She picked up another rock, a somewhat larger one this time. “But the bigger the event, the easier it is to see how it goes. And the harder it is to go in a different way.” Plop. The rock was heavy enough to sink almost straight down.

That Evrith made a point of elaborating on this distinction implied that she had experience with it - that there were events she had foreseen that she could likely not have altered, or that there were events yet still in their future that would similarly be essentially unavoidable.

An-uxhwi ran that notion about in his mind with a certain numb horror, fixated on it. What was it like, to look into a fixed future, when one was otherwise used to being able to nudge it into one's favour? If the event was good, there was nothing to worry about, but… the insight wouldn't let him go. He had to know.

“Are there events you see now, looming in the distance– in the future, that are a threat to you?” Unspoken, but implicit in the question, regardless: Or me.

A part of him chided himself for the question. What would the answer matter? What were the chances it would impact his escape? They should be focussing on that. And yet, his curiosity wasn't easily slaked, sternly arguing for patience.

Evrith was… less pleased at this question. She occupied herself for a few moments by picking the stones out of the bottom of the bowl and pushing it back to its original position. At last, not looking him in the face, she muttered, “To me?… yes. I won't talk about it.”

An-uxhwi didn't quite understand her reluctance, other than recognising it for what it was. If someone had suggested to him that he apologise, he would have done it instantly, but it simply didn't occur to him that that was an option, and a reasonable one at that.

Instead, he simply let her response sit, acknowledging it with a body language that encoded little more than 'I suppose'.

“In any case, I would seize any chance to help you,” he mused, more to himself than her. She would, he reasoned, know best to what degree he meant what he said - to what degree the unspoken but obvious 'as long as I don't sacrifice my life in the process' addition rang true.

An-uxhwi could not tell the future, of course, but he imagined it readily, and the more it became clear they would escape together, the more it became clear to him that he would, by some measure, owe her his life. That it was pre-ordained presumably made it no less true, no matter how alien the whole situation ultimately felt.

“What might we do about our current situation?” he asked, finally, returning to the mundane.

Evrith was lost in what looked like thought, though in fact she was trying very hard not to think. Arrayed before her were far too many futures in which she lay on the ground, wasted and pale and wracked with pain.

Not all of them. But, very likely, too many.

She pulled her gaze away from them. There were closer things to consider. “For the moment,” she said, “try to gain strength. The time for anything further approaches, but it hasn't come yet.” She glanced at the door. “The other slaves will riot, and the guards will be distracted. We can leave then.”