Chapter 25
Lester: “to mock ourselves with falsehood”
He groped his way in darkness, barely conscious that she was saying something to the guards. The blackness was total. He felt his way along the wall, hoping he had taken the right direction for the stairwell.
After what seemed an eternity, his fingers felt the door. She stepped to the side of is and waited. In a moment he heard her open it, and slipped into the stairwell ahead of her. Once inside, he relaxed and unraveled the pathspace weave.
Light flooded back into his universe, bringing the welcome sight of Aria with it. “So you made it,” she said. “Why are you sweating?”
He wiped his forehead. “I'm still new at this,” he told her. “It's not easy to maintain while I'm moving. It's a lot easier if I just stand still, so the weave only has to be done once.”
“Oh,” she said. “Come on, it's several floors below us.”
As they descended, he tried not to glue his eyes to the tightness of her clothing. Her blouse was tucked into trousers that no one would have mistaken for a man's...given their contents. Mentally slapping himself, he forced his eyes up higher and reminded himself that she was the Governor's daughter. The Heir! Somehow she had neglected to mention that, the first time he had seen her with a tray of food. At the time he had wondered if he might ask her to a dance, assuming they had dances in Denver. Now he had to laugh at such thoughts. One day she would rule Rado, and he would be just a wizard, if he was lucky. And not even the only wizard. If Xander's plans succeeded, he'd be one of many by then, just another member of a growing school.
But was it true that she had no friends? He considered it. It might be true. Obviously the Governor wouldn't look kindly on her soldiers following her daughter around. Maybe she had something in common with him, after all. Both of them were isolated by their circumstances.
After many floors, she stopped on a landing. “The holding cell is to the left,” she said. “It's inside another room. I'll open the outer door for you so you can find a good place to stand or sit before they get here.”
“Are you sure this is the one they'll be in?” he asked. "I mean, there must be more than one holding cell. Won't they just throw them in the one closest to the ground floor?”
“No,” she said. “if they're high-priority prisoner (and these will be, given what they've done), they'll want them as far from the street level as possible. That's this one. Ready?”
He nodded and wrapped pathspace around him as she opened the door. The darkness closed in again. As he often did at such times, Lester wondered if there might be a way to let some of the light in, as long as it didn't get back out to the eyes of others. But there was no helping it, at least for now. He groped his way out the door, turned left, and inched forward, reweaving the pathspace shield every foot or so before he could push out of the darkness into visibility.
He heard the sound of the door, found it by feel, and slipped in after her.
“Is there anyone within sight?” he whispered.
“No,” he heard. “Why?”
Instead of answering, he undid the weave and squinted as light tried to blind his dark-adapted eyes again. The room was about twenty feet square, and had a wall of iron bars across the middle. The wall was parallel to the corridor outside, so that the rectangular cell it bounded ran the length of the room from left to right. “Shouldn't that window be barred, too?” he wondered.
Aria looked at him as if he were crazy. He could almost hear the word fool in her mind.
“No, we're still fifteen floors above the ground. And there's no ledge. Anyone who goes out that window will decorate the sidewalk with their insides. Hey, what are you doing? If anyone walks by they'll see you!”
“It's easier to pick my spot if I can see it,” he said, trying not to show his irritation. Didn't she realize he had to stand somewhere where there was little chance of anyone walking right into an invisible man? “Once I vanish, I won't be able to see anyone coming to get out of their way,” he told her. “So I have to see to find the best place to hide.”
“Oh, right. Sorry,” she said, sounding contrite.
There was a small table and a chair by the right wall, so he planted himself on the opposite side. He leaned against the wall. “I have two questions. First, how long do we have before they get here? If I have to stay invisible for hours I might get tired by the time they arrive and reappear before I hear anything useful.”
She considered it. “Good point. Tell you what. Vanish here for a bit in case anyone walks by while I'm gone, and I'll go and ask about it and come back in a few minutes. Once we know how long it's going to be, I'll let you know, then hang around in the corridor outside and say something loud when I see them coming. That way you won't have to vanish again until they're practically in the cell.”
It sounded like a good plan. “Okay,” he said, and wove the pathspace again, letting the darkness swallow him. He leaned against the wall, wrapped in artificial night, and listened to the sound of her opening the door to the corridor.
How is it, he wondered, that I can hear – and speak – to her when the light is going around me? It seemed to him that sound would do the same thing, avoid him. Was it possible that there was more than one kind of pathspace? He made a note to ask Xander about it after he finished here.
It was only after she left that he realized he had forgotten to ask her the second question. If she had classes all the time to prepare her for the future, wouldn't they miss her if she stayed down here near the cell?
He tried to pass the time thinking of new things to do with pathspace. Was it good for anything else besides invisibility? Then he remembered Xander making the bits of cracker circle in opposite directions in the bowl of soup. Xander hadn't seemed to even be trying very hard when he did it. Like it wasn't even work. Was making ordinary matter follow a path easier than re-routing the light?
There was a wooden cup and an empty clay pitcher on the table across from him. Maybe he could practice on that when she got back. It'd be pretty hard to do anything when he was trapped in his own pocket of blindness.
He thought about the swizzles. Obviously it must be possible to make ordinary matter follow the pathspace, else how could you make air or water shoot through a swizzle? As always, He wondered what it was about his mind that could affect the pathspace so readily as to render him invisible. But, as Xander had already told him, it was more important to be able to do it than to know how he did it. Or at least, at this stage of my apprenticeship.
Presently Aria returned, bearing several items. The first was a peculiar hourglass. It dripped oil, rather than sand, from the top half into the bottom, and the glass was marked with transparent bands of color. She set it down on the table, and he saw that the oil had filled the red and orange levels and was beginning to fill the yellow band.
“Where did you get that?” he asked her. “I've never seen anything like it.”
“Oh, we have a lot of them,” she said. “It's called a Xander clock. He invented it, and they're becoming quite popular. There's even talk of exporting them east. There's a different color for each hour, and oil drips so slowly that it's good for a whole eight hour watch.” She paused. “The thing is, he's the only one who can get the little glow-tube inside to work. If it wasn't for that they'd be all over Rado by now.”
“It's brilliant,” he said, and meant it. “How did he ever think of such a thing?”
“He's more than a crazy old wizard,” she said. “But most people don't see that. You know about his idea of starting a school for wizards, don't you?”
“Yes. At first I thought it was a little nutty. But after thinking about it, I've realized that it's probably one of the best ideas I've ever heard. Your mother – I mean, the Governor – is lucky to have him.”
“I'm sure she knows it,” she said. “Sometimes I hear it in her voice – something that makes me think he's even more important to her than she lets on.”
“Has he been here a long t
ime?”
“As long as I can remember,” she said. Then she changed the subject. “Anyway, from what I hear, it'll be at least a couple of hours before they get here. They won't be here until it reaches the blue line at the earliest. That's why I brought us a couple of books.”
He looked them over. Both were hand-bound, obviously expensive. One was called Rise! and it was the biography of the General. The other was The Tourists, a story of the Fall. He picked that one up. “I'd like to read this one.”
“I thought you might,” she said, “considering the author. The other one's my favorite, anyway.”
He turned the book in his hands to read the author's name and immediately felt stupid again. “Oh. I guess I should have expected it was by him. Why didn't he show it to me as soon as I arrived here?”
“It must have slipped his mind,” she said. “But it's hardly surprising. I think only Mother and I have read it. Nobody else seems to care about the Tourists anymore.”
“Even after what they did to us?” He couldn't believe it. “Back where I come from in Inverness, if a neighbor's dog bites someone they still talk about it twenty years later. And the Tourists, they wrecked our whole civilization!”
“I don't think they meant to,” she said. “And no one remembers what it used to be like before the Fall. Well,” she amended, “maybe a few people like Xander.. But no one else. Well, I''ll go keep a lookout so you won't have to vanish yet.”
She left, and Lester sat down by the wall to read The Tourists, by Xander.
Pathspace Page 25
