Pathspace
Page 36
Chapter 36
Lester: “shake a thousand whispers from the yew”
The stairs seemed endless. “Aren't we going in the wrong direction?” he asked the wizard. At first he had thought the reason for going up was to notify the Governor. But they'd already done that.
“No,” said Xander. “It's easier to do this from the roof.” He stopped on a landing to catch his breath.
“I don't understand,” Lester complained. “Why go up? By the time we get to the roof they'll be out of the city. If they aren't already.”
“That doesn't matter,” the wizard told him, resuming his climb, though not so fast as before.
As they ascended, Lester tried to imagine what the old man was planning. Could he signal someone from the roof, was that it? It had to be. Once they reached the roof he'd send some kind of signal to someone far enough away to head off Brutus before he was long gone.
But he wanted to meet the redhead again before he was returned to his cell.
After another eternity, they emerged onto the roof. Xander waved to the guard on lookout duty, then reached for the top of his staff and unscrewed it. The top came off, revealing a couple of inches of pipe protruding from the end of the wood. Then he did the same with the bottom.
Lester watched him. “Why is there a steel pipe inside your staff?”
“Two reasons,” said Xander as the staff began to hiss. “Keeps me from breaking it when I have to fight. That's one. Also it cuts down on wind erosion. I have to turn up the flow rate pretty high. We'll have to make you one like it soon.”
Lester blinked as the hiss began to get deeper. “It's a swizzle,” he said. “Are you going to shoot up some kind of signal? Is that it?”
Xander laughed. “No,” he said. “We have other ways of sending signals. Have you ever heard of Newton's Third Law of Motion?”
“No. Why?”
“You're about to get a practical demonstration. As you've guessed, I often use my staff as a swizzle.” The outflow from the bottom of his staff stirred up a cloud of dust from the roof of the skyscraper. “As you know, the swizzle is a free-energy pump, commonly used nowadays for irrigation and to supply mill ponds. A few smiths have them for bellows, where they make light work of heating the forge for metalworking.”
“What has that got to do with pursuing the escape prisoners?”
From a pocket of his clock Xander produced a small bottle of something which he daubed liberally on the wood at two locations on the staff, one a foot from the upper end, and the other nearly a foot below that.
“What is that for?” Lester asked.
Xander showed him a frightening grin. “It's to keep us alive, by preventing the staff from slipping through our fingers.” He moved around to the opposite side of it from Lester and grabbed the upper area he had daubed. “Now take hold of the other spot I put the stickum on, and don't let go, whatever happens.”
Wondering what this ritual was all about, Lester did as he was told. The sound made by the air flowing through the staff was quite deep now, a growling roar. “You still haven't said why we are doing –”
And then he shut up. Not because the roaring hum of the staff was making his chest vibrate and would have drowned out his words in any case. He shut up because they were rising off the roof. Risking a glance down, he saw the roof receding and Xander's boots crossing around the bottom of the staff. Without a word he crossed his own boots around it also. In moments they were over a hundred feet above the tallest buildings. At that point the staff began to tilt. The top of it leaned over toward the South. The roar became even louder.
The next half hour Lester spent being more terrified than he had ever felt in his life.