Chapter 777: Question and Answer
Roland had been thinking about the central carrier since the previous meeting with the Taquila witches.
The deciphering of the underground civilization’s texts had cost the lives of many Taquila witches—souls who had merged themselves into this entity and could not be retrieved. The carrier could now answer only yes or no. By most practical measures, that made it an extraordinary sacrifice in exchange for very limited utility. And yet the solemnity of the story had given it weight in his imagination. He had expected something ancient. Something remarkable.
What he found was worse than remarkable.
It was chained.
The central carrier was kept in a chamber beneath the main hall, and it dwarfed anything Roland had imagined. Larger than Pasha by a significant margin, it filled the low space in a way that made the chamber feel designed around it—which, Roland realized, it had been. Its thickest tentacles were forced apart and fixed to the walls and ceiling, pinned with iron driven into the stone. The skin where the chains and anchors contacted it was scarred, the tissue around each point thick and hardened from repeated damage. Some tentacles were broken.
He remembered what Pasha had told him. The carriers were not numb. They felt heat and cold, tasted, experienced pain.
He looked at what had been done to Eleanor and the others who had merged to create this, and felt his jaw tighten.
“Why?” he asked. “The witches who volunteered—they were witches of Taquila. One of the Three Chiefs.”
“Lady Eleanor,” Pasha said. Her voice, even through the tentacle-link and into his ears, carried something that had no exact name but felt like grief that had been carried too long to be fresh. “We had no choice. Carriers possess the strength of God’s Punishment Warriors—perhaps beyond it. Tentacles can penetrate the earth and open light shafts in a dome’s ceiling. They can also attack, and tear. Without restraint, she would move without awareness of what she was doing. The damage would be severe. If the central carrier lost control, the relics of gods and the magic cores would be at risk.”
Roland understood it quickly enough. The Taquila survivors had not done this because they were cruel. They had done it because an unrestrained entity of this power, without full consciousness, was a threat to the only things that might save humanity. They had made the calculation and lived with it.
Understanding the reasoning did not make the sight easier to bear. The witches who had surrendered themselves to this form had made the choice knowingly. That knowledge sat in his chest like a stone.
Pasha, watching his expression, said: “We tried to ask whether they could sense their surroundings. But we received no response. The souls merged into the central carrier cannot be separated back out by the magic core. Whether they remain aware of anything—we don’t know.”
Alethea spoke, and the temperature of her voice was the lowest Roland had heard from her yet. “Every Taquila witch, including us, chose to follow Lady Eleanor without reservation. You need not carry sorrow for them. They knew exactly what they were accepting.” A pause. “All of them knew.”
Dry ice has warmed to iced water, Roland thought.
Celine added: “When we asked the central carrier whether she should be constrained, all three of her main tentacles answered yes. She agreed to this herself.”
“Perhaps the Witch Union can help with that problem,” Roland said, after a moment. “Soraya produces materials with exceptional flexibility—she could replace the iron chains with something that restrains without cutting. And a young witch called Softfeathers bonds materials together with considerable precision. If they worked together, they might find an approach that holds without causing harm.” He paused. “If you’re willing.”
Pasha’s upper tentacle inclined toward him. “That would be very welcome. You have our gratitude.”
Roland looked at the three pinned tentacles hanging from the central carrier’s head. “You said ‘all three main tentacles answered yes.’ Can she give different answers with different tentacles at the same time? If so, how do you know what she means?”
“Celine,” Pasha said.
Celine seemed, through whatever qualities of movement and light Celine’s form expressed, to straighten slightly—the equivalent of a person pleased to be asked something they had thought hard about.
“The central carrier is structured differently from us. She has three main tentacles, which gives her more range of expression than a simple yes or no would allow.” As she spoke, the main tentacle on her head emitted a faint red glow.
Roland watched it, surprised. “It can produce light?”
“Yes. Before we learned to communicate through shared consciousness, this was our primary method of expressing feeling and meaning. We use it less now.” She moved to the center of the chamber, positioning herself beside the chained main tentacles that hung from the carrier’s head, pinned into the ground. “Without directed consciousness, she can’t express complex thought. She can only respond in red light—yes or no. A glowing tentacle means yes. A dark one means no.”
Roland looked at the three tentacles. Three possible yes-or-no signals, simultaneously visible.
“But a simple binary couldn’t decode complex texts efficiently,” Celine went on. “If we read a statement and she could only confirm or deny the whole thing—and we got the phrasing slightly wrong—she’d say no, and we’d have to start over. With three tentacles, we discovered something more nuanced. When we read her something closer to the correct answer, more tentacles lit. All three at once meant the answer was either completely correct, or she agreed as strongly as she was able.”
Roland felt the shape of it click into place. “You used the count of lit tentacles as a proximity signal. Like a distance measure for a guess.”
Celine’s delight was visible even through the alien form. “Exactly. You understand immediately.”
He held that understanding for a moment—then let it sit behind a larger thought. What had been said, matter-of-factly, was extraordinary: the merged souls of Taquila witches, trapped in a form they had agreed to, had used three small lights to confirm the choice that imprisoned them. And the witches outside had built an entire decoding methodology from those three lights across what must have been months of patient, grinding work.
He took a breath. “May I ask her some questions myself?”
Celine stepped aside. “Of course.”
Roland crouched near the carrier—near enough for his voice to carry—and spoke carefully.
“Suppose I have two baskets. Each basket holds two apples. I empty both baskets onto the ground. There are four apples.” He waited. “Is that correct?”
All three tentacles lit at once.
Celine blinked—or performed the equivalent of blinking. “That’s… what you wanted to know?”
Wendy, beside him, looked slightly embarrassed. “Your Majesty, what exactly are you—”
“Testing the baseline.” He was already moving to the second question. “Suppose I have twelve thousand, three hundred and forty-five baskets. Each basket holds fifty-four thousand, three hundred and twenty-one apples. If I empty all the baskets onto the ground, how many apples are there?”
He produced a folded strip of paper from his sleeve—the number he had calculated in advance, nine digits long, requiring multi-step multiplication that no one in this era without Neverwinter’s mathematics curriculum could produce from memory in moments. He read the number aloud.
“Is this answer correct?”
All three tentacles lit without delay.
He had not even finished reading the last digit before they were burning red.
The Taquila Senior Witches were silent. Not the silence of thought—the silence of recalibration.
She solved nine-digit multiplication instantly. Roland sat with that, turning it over. Not an approximation. The exact number. Without paper, without time. Whatever cognitive framework the underground civilization had embedded in this form—or whatever the merged Taquila souls had become after the fusion—the calculating capacity was real and enormous. Even if the yes-or-no constraint remained the only output, this was not a limited tool. It was an extraordinary one. An entity that could instantly verify any arithmetic result, no matter how large, was invaluable to any institution that depended on large-scale calculation.
The Academy of Arithmetic came immediately to mind.
He couldn’t ask yet. The trust wasn’t there. But he filed the thought.
He glanced at the central carrier again, at the three lit tentacles slowly dimming back to darkness, and felt something pull at his chest that he had not quite expected.
Brilliant, he thought.
He didn’t say it aloud—Pasha had already reminded him she couldn’t respond to that. But he looked at her, the massive chained form in the low chamber, and held the thought for a moment before standing up.