That might have satisfied the average layman, but a reporter halfway to being considered “dogged” and a quarter of the way to “confounded nuisance” held standards the ordinary commercial Ritualist thought unreasonable. “The accusation has been made that all they do is refuse to acknowledge any responsibility for the results of their work.”
“That is far from all we do,” Dirant protested. No longer able to resist, he added, “We also insist that we be paid no matter what happens.”
The response amused Taomenk, though Dirant worried about the consequences if Aptezor wrote, in addition to the thousand articles necessary to encompass his adventures and the revelations gained thereby, a piece to expose the grasping nature of Ritualists, convinced an outlet people actually read to run it, and caused the rivers of society to swell with indignation, carrying away the pleasant riverside property Ritualists bought with their questionable incomes. Put that way, he no longer worried.
The Fairy Vanquishing Ritual succeeded. Ritual Judgment, the core ability for the Ritualist class, made that clear. The investigation into what precisely had been vanquished extended to a frustrating duration. Even in the convenient and correspondingly unlikely circumstance that Todelk's collections of esoteric rituals included one which encouraged fairies to respond to answerable questions, the interrogators were unsure what to ask. As it was, Taomenk tried the gambit of saying, “You troops must be hungry. The drills, you understand.”
“You mean if we train hard enough we'll find out what hunger is?” One fairy wag elicited raucous laughter with that one. Taomenk admitted he found it just as amusing as most comedy.
Careful observation uncovered the secret. While Dirant prepared another ritual, a truculent fairy came over, not to fulfill his duties to support his queen in her ambitions, but to have it out with another about which of them was to inherit the name of Desaikyars Aikyars, a Survyaian athlete the Adabans mentioned in a digression they had soon regretted.
“You can have it,” the accosted soldier conceded. “I can't get bothered about it right now.”
Dirant resolved both to submit to Todelk University a commentary on the Fairy Vanquishing Ritual and to remember the effect if ever he needed an auxiliary plan to end the Hacanthu War, as Aptezor had decided to call it as a preliminary decision before he consulted an editor. More immediately, Dirant performed rituals for hours, a testament to his endurance someone might have said who was unaware of the low physical exertion usually involved in the process.
Somewhere around the Reduce Awareness of Skin Blemishes on Fairies Ritual, as expected a variant of the Reduce Awareness of Skin Blemishes Ritual which comforted many sufferers of certain maladies, Dirant learned his general possessed a capacity for frustration.
Aptezor disengaged himself from his troops, no longer able to bear the damage to his voice he was incurring because of his shouts of encouraging instruction to the effect that after loosing a shaft, the accepted followup was to nock another rather than watching it and writing a poem. He approached Dirant in a state far redder than he ever had been aside from a brief period after his birth and risked his raspy voice to say, “A ritual that has a slight chance of helping, does it exist, or? Urg! Please, Mr. Dirant, allow me to beg for a single ezola.” He hesitated. “As it were.” Whether his discomfort with figurative language derived from the specifics of his character or was the result of deliberate tempering, as it were, of his steel as a reporter by his superiors at the Crier might be investigated at a less desperate moment.
“Perhaps so. What is your objective at the moment, or rather your distant wish? The schedule will adjust to accommodate it if possible.”
“If they could just stay in a line from one end of the field to the other. If they could just . . . stay in a line. One minute in a line.”
“Must it be a line, or?”
“Any regular formation.”
“How regular? Ah, do not trouble yourself to respond to that. I must concentrate.” The evident distress of his commanding officer did not fail to arouse Dirant's sympathy. Moreover, Aptezor's scratchy voice was unpleasant to hear.
“Any regular formation,” Dirant repeated. “What is a formation but a persistent arrangement of people? A ritual exists which has nothing suggestive of the battlefield in its name or effect and yet nevertheless may satisfy you, General Aptezor. The fairies will soon be spurred to energetic activity, and so I must recommend that you rest for a moment.”
He hoped Aptezor, discombobulated as he was, would relax thoughtlessly and not examine closely the relationship between that last premise and the conclusion Dirant appended to it. His hope was not betrayed, and the trust the younger man had touched him and relieved his anxiety, mild though it was, over that possible scathing attack in print on professional Ritualists.
This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.
Untroubled by fairy caprice aside from the overall situation of being a prisoner, Captain Dirant moved on without delay to executing the proposed ritual. The distinct quality which separated fairy-affecting rituals from their human equivalents, he decided he deserved credit for noticing, was that the former invariably allowed any number of celebrants while the latter often imposed picky restrictions similar to those a child has regarding his plate, but with an inescapable authority. The way fairies gathered, attracted both by the ritual process and the undignified posture of their general who lay on his side, his face covered by one arm while he snored or else sobbed, prompted the observation.
Dirant disliked to disturb a man's repose, particularly when he understood the necessity of it. If in the end that day was the worst Aptezor ever lived it would be a fortunate escape for him, but it was bad enough. Even so, the forthcoming demonstration might result in a trampled reporter unless he stood up. “General, prepare for the Fairy Dance Ritual.”
“Huh? What? Oh. Wait. Dance Ritual? Mr. Dirant, have I actually awakened, or?”
The outcome surpassed expectations in that it enabled something which approximately resembled military discipline. The fairies placed themselves, not in a line, but at fixed distances from one another and thereupon engaged in a dance unfamiliar to the modern Adabans which moved them slowly across the field. “Amazing!” Aptezor would have shouted had he not broken into a cough after the second syllable. In a triumph of the spirit, he ignored his weakness and rushed to grab as many spears as his arms could hold and began distributing them to the dancers while explaining his plan: Persuade his soldiers to thrust while making their dancing advance and he would have an invincible army by fairy standards.
The two captains assisted with the manual labor while Dirant explained the ritual. “It causes fairy celebrants to hear music, all of them the same composition, which inspires in them an irresistible urge to execute the related moves.”
“I could resist it easily, but I would rather not.”
“Thank you for the correction,” Dirant told the soldier who had contributed to the better understanding of ritualism. “The shortcoming of the ritual, not in its conception but in its application so long after its creation, is that the Ritualist must select from a list of dances to be performed, and they are without exception unknown to me or anyone alive today save perhaps historians specializing in the topic. This one is 'the Forthing.' I picked it because the name is suggestive to me of forward motion.”
“Another dance may do even better for us then.” Like a businessman ruined by a downturn who, forced to enter a different market, builds up his new enterprise in time to catch a trend, a single success elevated Aptezor's optimism above what he had when first the Adabans theorized about ending the Hacanthu War in a manner consistent with their good and perhaps above what he felt on his first day as a reporter.
Three men returned to the waste district to which they once had been conveyed by inexplicable forces, not again as victims of capricious phenomena not yet understood but as contestants prepared on the field of battle for the honors and gain which all desired though few dared seek to attain.
By then, owing to a mapmaking competition open to the fay public, the general and his captains better grasped the geographical relationships of the five districts. They essentially were all contiguous with one another so far as movement was concerned; the wheel they formed around a small central area had the borderlands, unguarded and traversable, as its spokes, and those might be traversed to reach any realm from any other. As for the central area, the fairies recommended against trying to claim it, or rather they declared it impossible.
“It's no good,” they said. “Solely the strongest can make something of it, and they don't even go there for that.”
Such a vague caution as that must be tested. When Aptezor, Dirant, and Taomenk did so, accompanied of course by their army which followed their orders sometimes and Ydridd's usually, they saw a ring of distortion much like the visual effect the Fairy Fascination Ritual caused around its targets except the air darkened in a slightly reddish way as well, making the center impervious to sight as well as travel.
After confirming the inaccessibility of the center, Aptezor decided to invade the waste district for two reasons highly congruent with military science. He knew something of its layout, a familiarity which suggested the idea of fortifying the ziggurat where Dirant and Taomenk awoke (and of getting back at those ogres). He also had seen it to be sparsely populated and not at all defended unless those ogres counted, which they soon would not. His captains concurred with his plan of campaign.
The disciplined legion marched into the wastes while supported by intelligence of a regularity never previously dreamt by any fairy force. The officers had convinced their soldiers that the job of a scout was to act the part of a bard but without the requirement of learning an instrument. The proffered shortcut appealed exceedingly to some of them.
Those new scouts proved the value of the role more convincingly than any number of treatises on the subject, if only because nobody who read those doubted it in the first place. They reported sighting an army. “It's led by a general, though he, doubtless a human, may in fact be a prisoner.”
“Are the fairies now doing impressions of me?” Dirant wondered.
“What army, do you know?” Aptezor wondered more relevantly.
“I recognized some of the soldiers. I have no idea.” The scout's report contained nothing but honesty unalloyed with what he supposed his commander hoped to hear. Soon the condottieri of Greater Enloffenkir would be replacing all their scouts with fairies.