I. The Voices in the Aether
The Sound-Weaver had always known that the air was full of voices.
Not the voices of the dead, though he knew those too, on Samhain night. These were the voices of the living, carried on something finer than air, a great invisible sea that the old far-speakers called the aether. It lay over the whole world like a second sky. It rose and fell with the sun and the seasons. And through it, all day and all night, voices travelled from one end of the land to the other, faster than any rider, faster than the wind in the pines.
Most people could not hear them. Their ears were not tuned to the aether, and they walked through it every day without knowing it was there, as fish swim through water without knowing they are wet. But Izzie walked the world by sound, and he had always sensed it humming at the edges of his hearing, like a choir singing in a room just out of reach.
There was a guild of those who could hear it. They were known as the far-speakers, and they were an old and strange fellowship, scattered across every land. They spoke to one another through the aether by means of Far-Speaking Stones, enchanted devices of metal and crystal that could catch a voice out of the sky and throw one back into it. Some of them spoke only to their neighbours across a single valley. Some of them spoke across oceans, bouncing their voices off the high ceiling of the sky where the sun's breath makes the aether shine. They had their own language, made of letters and numbers and short coded words, and their own customs, older than anyone could remember. And above all they had a law. No one might throw a voice into the aether without first passing the guild's trial and earning a true name.
Izzie had listened to them for a long time. Now, in the summer, with the sun riding high through Leo and the first harvest of Lughnasadh gathered in, he decided it was time to join them.
II. The Trial of Thirty-Five Riddles
The first trial of the far-speakers is not a trial of strength, or of courage, or of blood. It is a trial of knowing. The guild keeps a great book of riddles, many hundreds of them, renewed every four years by the elders, and from it they draw thirty-five. The one who would join them must answer twenty-six of the thirty-five truly. Fewer, and they are sent away to study and return another day.
The riddles are not easy. They ask about the nature of the aether itself, how it bends and how it carries and how high it reaches. They ask about the invisible forces that flow through copper and iron, the laws of resistance and current, the way a voice must be shaped to ride a particular wave. They ask about the guild's own laws, which bands of the aether belong to whom, and when one must give way to another. And they ask about safety, because the aether is not only a sea of voices. It is also a kind of fire, and those who handle it carelessly can be burned.
Izzie studied all through that summer, while the sun walked through Leo. He worked through the great book with his fingers and his ears, riddle by riddle, until he could hear the answers before the questions were finished. He set himself practice trials, thirty-five riddles at a time, again and again. The first time he passed. The second time he passed. By the fifth and sixth time he was answering thirty, then thirty-one, of the thirty-five, well past the twenty-six the guild required. Gweeny lay across his feet through most of it and sighed loudly whenever the studying went on past suppertime.
The day of the trial came on a Saturday late in August, which was Saturn's day. Izzie took that as a fitting sign. Saturn is the old lord of tests and thresholds, the keeper of the gate, and it was right that the gate into the guild should be kept by him. It was also the very last day of the sun's walk through Leo. By the next morning it would cross into Virgo, the sign ruled by Mercury, lord of messages and of the voice.
The elders of the guild set the thirty-five riddles before him. He answered them one by one, steady and certain, the way he worked through a piece of music, note by note. And when the elders counted his answers, they told him he had passed.
He went home to the hall at the edge of the pines that evening with Saturn's hour coming on, and he stood a while on the step in the warm summer dusk, listening to the cicadas grinding in the pines and to the aether humming faintly overhead. He could not yet speak into it. That required one more thing. He was waiting on his name.
III. The True Name
Among the far-speakers, no one goes by the name their mother gave them. When you pass the trial, the Council of the Realm, who keep the great rolls of everyone permitted to speak into the aether, grant you a true name of your own. It is made of letters and a single number, short enough to say in a breath, and it is yours alone in all the world. No other far-speaker anywhere may bear it. You speak it every time you throw your voice into the aether, so that anyone who hears you knows who you are and that you have the guild's leave. Without it, a far-speaker's voice is only noise. With it, a voice becomes a person.
Izzie waited four days.
The sun crossed out of Leo and into Virgo. Virgo is an earth sign, careful and exact, and it belongs to Mercury, the messenger of the gods, who rules all speech and all signals and every word carried from one place to another. And on the fourth day, a Wednesday, which is Mercury's own day, the Council wrote Izzie's true name into the great rolls.
He heard it read aloud for the first time by the Talking Glass on his table, and he sat very still. A name granted on Mercury's day, with the sun in Mercury's sign. The messenger himself had handed it to him. Izzie could not have chosen a better omen if he had tried.
He spoke it under his breath, letter by letter and the number in the middle, testing the sound. Gweeny lifted his head from the floor and turned both great ears toward him, the way he did when he heard a name that mattered.
Izzie keeps that name close. He speaks it into the aether whenever he calls, and anyone listening may hear it there. But it will not be written in this tale. A far-speaker's true name belongs to the aether, and that is where it lives.
The name opened other doors, and they opened quickly. Izzie took his place in the rolls of the far-speakers who speak through the stone-web, the great net of linked towers that carries voices as numbers, and he was given a number of his own there too, to go with his name. He sought the keys to the old linked halls where far-speakers gather from across the world, the ones called AllStar and Echo, and the keepers granted them in a matter of hours, as if they had been expecting him. Within a week of his trial, every gate he knocked on had swung open.
All he needed now was a Stone worthy of his voice.
IV. The Stone That Was Rebound
Izzie already had a Far-Speaking Stone. It was a small one, made to be carried in the hand, forged in a distant workshop by the house of TYT. It could speak both the old voice of the aether, plain and analog as a shout across a valley, and the newer voice of the stone-web, where words are broken into numbers and carried through the linked towers. It was a good Stone. But it had come to him bound with its makers' spell, and that spell had not been written for someone who walks the world by sound. The Stone did not tell him what it was doing. It kept its secrets behind a little glowing window that it assumed everyone could read.
So Izzie rebound it.
Across the world, in many lands, there was a circle of far-speakers who had grown tired of the makers' spells and woven a new one of their own, freely given to anyone who wanted it. They called it OpenGD77. It could be laid into a Stone like his in place of the old binding, and once it was there, the Stone woke up changed. Izzie laid the new spell into his Stone himself. It was delicate work, the kind where one wrong step can leave a Stone silent forever, and Gweeny watched the whole thing from the edge of the desk with his ears flat. When it was done, the Stone spoke to him. It told him its channels and its settings in a voice he could hear. It was the same metal and crystal as before, but it had a new soul, and that soul answered to him.
He was not finished. The tools the makers gave far-speakers for writing a Stone's memory, its lists of channels and towers and names, were made for eyes too, and they lived only in the realm of the Windows. But Izzie worked his spells in the realm of the Apple, and the makers' tools would not cross over into it. So Izzie began to forge a tool of his own, in the Apple's own swift tongue, for the machine on his own desk, so that he, and anyone else who walks by sound, could command such a Stone without asking anyone for help. That work is still going on, as such work always is.
Then there was the matter of reaching the stone-web from inside the hall.
The nearest towers were far away across the pines, and a small hand-Stone's voice does not always carry so far. What he needed was a bridge, a little familiar that would sit in their hall and catch his Stone's voice and carry it straight into the great net of linked towers, so he could speak to far-speakers anywhere in the world from his own chair. There were two such familiars he weighed. One was called the openSPOT. The other was a small creature from the house of SharkRF, called the M1KE.
He chose the shark. It was the more obedient of the two, in the way that mattered to him. When he spoke to it through its window, it answered him clearly, every setting and every switch laid out in words he could hear and reach. A familiar you cannot command is no familiar at all, and this one understood him.
But the shark has not come home yet. It is still out there somewhere on the merchants' roads, swimming slowly toward the hall at the edge of the pines. When it arrives, Izzie will set it in his studio, the room where he weaves his music, with its one window looking out toward the longleaf pines, and it will wake and reach out through the aether to the stone-web and hold the door open for him.
Until then, he had his rebound Stone, and an open window, and a tower within reach. That would have to be enough.
V. The First Call
The night he first spoke into the aether, the hall was quiet. His partner and the housemates had gone to their rooms, the fire had burned down to embers, and the studio was dark, which made no difference to Izzie at all. The window was open a crack, and the night came in smelling of warm sand and pine, and the cicadas had given way to the crickets.
Gweeny lay on the floor beside the chair with his chin on his paws. He did not sleep. His ears were up, both of them, turned toward the Stone in Izzie's hand, as if he already knew what it was and what it was about to do.
Izzie listened first, as the guild teaches. He listened to the hiss of the open aether, that soft endless rushing like the wind in the pine crowns heard from very far away. He listened for anyone else already speaking, so as not to talk over them. There was no one. The channel was clear.
He pressed the key on the side of the Stone. He felt it click under his thumb, and heard the tiny chirp as the Stone threw his voice out through the open window, across the pines, to the nearest tower, and from the tower out along the linked halls into the wider world.
And he spoke his true name into the aether for the first time.
Then he let go of the key, and waited, and listened.
For a moment there was only the hiss. Then, out of it, came a voice.
It was a stranger's voice, warm and a little crackled, coming from somewhere very far from the hall at the edge of the pines. It spoke Izzie's true name back to him, every letter and the number in the middle, exactly right. Then it spoke its own. And then it said the old words of welcome the guild always uses for someone new on the air, and asked him where he was, and how he was hearing.
Izzie laughed out loud in the dark, and Gweeny's tail thumped against the floor.
They talked for a long time, the two far-speakers, taking turns, each one pressing the key to speak and letting it go to listen, as the custom is. They talked about their Stones and their towers. They talked about the weather in their two lands, which was very different. The stranger had never spoken with a far-speaker who walked by sound before, and asked how he managed it. Izzie told him about the rebound Stone and the shark-spirit swimming its way toward him, and about the tool he was forging for others like him, and the stranger said that was the best thing he had heard all week. At the end, they wished each other well with the guild's old farewell, seventy-three, which means best regards in the far-speakers' tongue, and the stranger's voice went back into the hiss, and the channel was quiet again.
Izzie set the Stone down on the desk very gently.
He had heard the voices in the aether all his life. Now they could hear him.
He has spoken into the aether many times since. He has joined the linked halls of AllStar and Echo, where far-speakers from every corner of the world gather and talk long into the night. And he has plans, as every far-speaker does. First the shark-spirit will come home, and the stone-web will open to him from his own chair.
And further off lies the second trial of the guild, harder than the first, with a new book of riddles to learn. It opens the high bands of the aether, where a voice can be thrown up to the ceiling of the sky where the sun's breath makes the aether shine, and bounced down again across an ocean. He has begun to study it. Gweeny is already sighing about it.
On the nights when the aether is quiet and the hall is asleep, Izzie sometimes sits in his studio with the window open and simply listens to the hiss, that great invisible sea that lies over the whole world. And he thinks that perhaps on Samhain, when the veil is thin, there are other voices out there in it too, older ones, still calling their names into the dark and waiting for someone to answer.
If there are, he is ready. He knows how to listen.
Blessed be. Seventy-three.