On the fifth day, a rather perplexing question came to the forefront of my mind. Where is the magic?

  I have not volunteered that I am a Truthbinder as I’m not certain I can trust these people, but I have been aboard for more than half a week. I would have expected the captain to suggest I confer with one of his own Truthbinders by now, and the fact that he hasn’t indicates to me that he has none.

  There are other signs that have been conspicuously absent. In my wanderings aboard the ship, I’ve seen no enchantment totems, no spell relays, no ship’s ghosts. The hands of the crewmen are still, betraying not even a hint of a cantrip being cast. It’s certainly possible that these people keep their mages ashore, but I can’t imagine why a society would do such a thing.

  My current hypothesis is that the people of this realm are incapable of magic. Lacking power over the mental and spiritual world, they instead focused their efforts on mastery of the physical world through technology. This ship alone is far beyond anything I’ve seen in Guntao; I’ve yet to learn how it is able to cruise without the aid of a sail or oars. I’ve seen clockwork mechanisms and the clever application of waterwheels used to achieve similar effects in the markets of the imperial city, but those were mere trinkets made to entertain the wealthy. Certainly, our realm boasts nothing of this scale.

  Regardless of whether or not my hypothesis is correct, the fact remains that there is a vast technological gap between this world and ours. If I reveal the existence of other worlds beyond the ice wall, I may inadvertently unleash a mighty invader upon our realm—and perhaps other realms that we have yet to discover.

  Then again, perhaps they already know about the existence of other realms. All the same, it’s not a risk I care to take. Not until I’ve learned more about these people.

  Where does that leave me, as perhaps the only mage in this entire world? Well, here are the conclusions that I’ve reached:

  Aether

  There is enough ambient aether in the air here to permit spellcasting. There’s certainly more than when we were out on the ice, though it does feel somewhat thinner than in Guntao.

  Truthbinding

  This will be paramount to my success. I’m already leaning on my Truthbinding magic to absorb the local language, and I’ve made plans to create an encyclopedia spell to contain everything I learn about this place. If I were a less ethical person, such spells might be used to pull knowledge from others and manipulate their minds, but I am a supremely ethical person, as you well know.

  Soulcalling

  If my hypothesis is correct, this world has no Soulcallers. I will need to find a way to bring your body home so you can be revived. If only I had died instead of you, we would still be together… Fate has a cruel sense of humor to kill the only Soulcaller between us.

  Spellweaving

  I’ve always considered myself a superior Spellweaver. Without any other mages to draw power from, this discipline will be entirely useless to me. Wonderful.

  ***

  By the sixth day, I made a point of eating in the mess with the sailors, though they largely kept to themselves. They’d spare me a curious glance now and then, but none had the courage to approach me. This suited my purposes just fine, as my language spell benefited most from eavesdropping on fluent conversations.

  Ah, about the dining experience—the mess is a cramped room with long tables and benches, with a serving table along one side. As in my cabin, the furniture is all metal and the tables come up to my waist. They are still serving broth to me as I reacclimate to solid food, but they’ve begun to supplement it with bits of fish soaked in grease. Rather than chopsticks, I have been given a miniature trident with which to skewer my food.

  I was in the middle of stabbing my dinner when the captain appeared before me. I moved to rise, but he raised his palms in a placating manner, and so I settled back into my seat. He took the bench across from me.

  Setting down my trident, I began casting with both hands. I had prepared an addendum to my language spell for just such an occasion.

  “Hello,” I said, forcing the ugly syllables of his language from my mouth. “I… Why Shollin. Thanks…” I paused to search for the right words. As it happened, my spell had cataloged several hundred terms, but assigning a definition to each one was another matter entirely. “I… boat. Thanks I boat.”

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  The captain blinked. And then he blinked again. Several times, in fact.

  “Hello,” he said, followed by a string of words that came at me too quickly to comprehend. I must have given him another look, because he winced a little, before trying again at a more halting pace. “Hello. I [incomprehensible]. You [meat???] please. [Is] I old [incomprehensible] sea [incomprehensible]. You [is??]?”

  It was my turn to blink. It began to dawn on me that constructing a language-interpretation spell would not be so simple as I had initially thought.

  Briefly shifting to one-handed casting, I pressed a finger to my nose. “Why.”

  The captain let out a laugh at this. He gave me an explanation that was, once again, entirely too fast to follow. Pressing his hand to his chest, he tried again, and slower this time: “[Name?]. Olrick.” Then he pointed his finger at me (again with the pointing!). “[Name]?”

  My spell cataloged the new word and I gave him my reply. “Why.”

  “Why is name?”

  I nodded. “Why is name.” I motioned to him with my whole hand politely—not pointing—and added, “Ollek is name?”

  “Olrick.”

  “O-leek.”

  With a helpless smile, he shrugged his shoulders. “[???] Why,” he began, taking care to speak slowly and enunciate clearly, “[Incomprehensible] boat [how?]?”

  I imagined he was asking how my boat wound up where they’d found it, or perhaps where I’d originally come from.

  In my naivety, I had designed my language spell with the assumption that there was a one-to-one pairing of our words to theirs, but I’ve found that their language is not a mere cipher of ours. There are words with double meanings and bizarre conjugations that I can’t quite grasp. Even the sentence structure of this strange other language seems twisted up, almost backwards.

  At any rate, this was not a question I was prepared to answer—not in any detail, and not until I could be sure these people would pose no threat to Guntao. Still, there was one subject that would not wait. Could not wait.

  “Boat!” I said, perhaps a little more loudly than was strictly necessary. “On boat… I’s… Friend?”

  He crinkled his eyebrows and nodded thoughtfully. “[Your?] friend boat on [had?]?” he offered.

  I suspected he was asking if my ‘friend’ was on the boat. Progress! “Yes, yes. I’s… very friend.”

  He suggested a word that I believe means “husband” or perhaps “lover.” I nodded again.

  “I [need/want?]…” I quickened my casting, desperately searching my vocabulary for the right words, but there was only so much I had picked up from eavesdropping on the crew’s mealtime conversations. “In water…” I held out one arm, awkwardly tilting it back and forth to indicate the sea. “I’s… husband…” I dipped my other hand beneath the imaginary waves, then pantomimed plucking you from the water. “…out.”

  He said something to me then, but my gesticulations had caused the spell to collapse. That ruled out sign language. I resumed my casting.

  “Again?” I asked, and he repeated himself.

  “[I am?] sorry,” he said. “Is husband [???].”

  Dead. That had to mean your husband is dead. Did he think me a simpleton, not to recognize such an obvious fact?

  “Husband…” With a grunt of frustration, I made a vague, circling gesture around my body.

  “Want husband’s [body]?”

  “Yes!” It was a small thing, but I felt as though I could cry from that one little breakthrough in our communication. “You get? Out water?”

  My hope was short-lived. I didn’t need to understand his words; the answer was clear in the way he averted his gaze, the way he wrung his fingers together. No, they had not managed to recover your body.

  “Husband’s body,” I said slowly, “no is here?”

  He shook his head. “I am sorry. [Nothing?] there is we can do.”

  This society really did know nothing of magic. Without your body, there was no way to call your spirit back, and then you really were lost. I sat there, trying to turn my mind towards a solution, but all I could think of was your body deep below the waves. I’m not sure how long he watched me stew in my own self-pity.

  Olrick cleared his throat, and I looked up at him. It seemed he had something more to say, so, haltingly, I resumed my casting.

  “[need/important/must?]” he asked. Something in my eyes must have given him the answer, because he continued. “Is there way. [Open?] water.” He clapped his hands together, then moved his palms apart, wiggling his fingers so that they looked like parting waves. He then reached down below the imaginary waves, pantomiming as if he was scooping something up from under the water. “[Take?] out body. This can we do.”

  Do these people have some technology that can part the very waves? It seems ludicrous, doesn’t it? Then again, the very ship I’m sitting in defies my understanding of the natural world, too.

  “[True/real/right]?” I asked.

  He held out his hand, palm facing to the side, then gave a nod to my own hand. I mirrored his gesture and he grasped my hand, giving it a firm shake.

  “[I promise/I swear?].”

  ***

  That evening, the blue-eyed crewman visited my quarters and gifted me this journal. “From [???] captain,” he said simply before leaving me to my contemplations. Earlier, I’d noticed one of the other crewmen writing in a journal such as this one and pointed it out to Olrick. I suppose he remembered.

  That was yesterday. If I’m understanding correctly, we’ll reach land in a few more days, and then we can gather what’s needed to retrieve you from the depths. I’m still hazy on the details, but Captain Olrick seems confident. I’ve little choice but to trust him. I’ve decided to put my full faith in his ability to bring you back to me.

  In the meantime, I’ve been making improvements to my language spell. Individual words are now linked to definitions rather than attempting a one-to-one match, which has slowed down the speed at which I can communicate, but should improve my accuracy and clarity. Eventually I plan to distill each word into an intrinsic knowledge unit, but that will take time, and my priority is wrestling with the bizarre grammar rules that afflict the language here, and—

  Ah, my love, I’m sorry. Even in my writing, I suppose I am a bit tangent-prone. Once I’ve completed the spell, I’ll include a full diagram in case another Truthbinder ever has need of it, but I shan’t bore you with the details. At least, no more than is strictly necessary.

  Rest well, dear Soong. I will see you again very soon.