Pathspace

by Matthew Kennedy

Chapter 56

  Lester: “Do you see nothing?”

  He spared a glance through the transparent wall to make sure no one was coming, than focused on the wooden tray on the floor, trying to weave the pathspace.

  After a minute, it wobbled, and rose an inch from the floor.

  Lester wiped sweat from his face with the sleeve of his robe and pushed the weaving tighter. The tray rose another inch and rocked, as if in a breeze.

  It had been a day since Jeffrey returned with more metal tubing. This time he had brought a couple of old coins as well. Obviously, he was hoping that Lester would find a way to make everflames, too. But why? Whatever the reason, it couldn't be good for Rado. He had to get the hell out of here, and soon.

  Movement in the corner of his eye alerted him. Quickly, he un-wove the pathspace that was levitating the tray and mad the wall opaque again. As the key turned in the door, he dropped to the floor and began doing push ups.

  A new guard, whose name he didn't know pushed the door open and brought in his dinner on another tray. As he set it down and reached for the old one Lester struggled to his feet and then sat on the edge of his cot wiping sweat off his face.

  “What's with the workout?” the guard asked. “Are you cold in here?”

  “Not at the moment,” Lester said. “But it's hard to get proper exercise in a room I can cross with a few steps. When do I get to spend time out in the exercise yard?”

  “How should I know? From what I hear, you're lucky they don't let Brutus visit you in here.” He swung the door open to leave. “Word is, he's still having headaches from that rock you bounced off his head. He'd love to have a chat with you about it.”

  “That wasn't me, that was the wizard who did that.”

  The guard shrugged. “Whatever.” He shut the door and locked it.

  Lester made the wall transparent again and watched him leave. “You've got that backwards,” he muttered. “Brutus is the lucky one. For now.”

  After the guard was gone he waited to see if there would be a visit from Jeffrey. Unless the Runt appeared, he might have a few hours before the watch changed and the new guard glanced in the barred window in the door. Time to get to work.

  He had discovered that the key to moving objects with pathspace was circular weaving. The pathspace was more effective if it consisted of closed paths – like the multitude of circles that made up the donut-shaped vortex that made the swizzle work. Straight line paths were temporary, and faded. But closed circular paths tended to regenerate, to maintain their strength. And if you wove them tighter, they seemed to get stronger in the push they imparted to whatever was within their paths.

  To make the tray rise, all he had to do was imagine a tube sticking up through it, and weave the donut pathspace. Matter in the center of the pathspace vortex to move upwards, so the effect was as if something pushed the tray up against gravity.

  Now it was time to see if he could use a similar weaving to manipulate the lock in the door. Standing up, he paced over to the door and made a portion of it near the doorknob transparent. By fuddling with the weave, he found he was able to control how deep the transparency went. Instead of seeing all the way around the door, he experimented until he could see the locking mechanism inside it.

  Now for the hard part. This was going to be trickier. He had to make the pins engaged by the teeth of the guard's key push into their slots without the key to do it. He'd gotten a look at the key several times, so he knew it wasn't very complicated. In the days of the Ancients, this would have been harder, maybe even impossible. From the books he'd seen in Xander's room, many of the locks of the Ancients used electronic keys. He had no idea what that meant, but obviously it wasn't something he could manipulate with pathspace. Fortunately, no one used locks that anymore, since the electricity of the Ancients was a thing of the past.

  He imagined tiny donut-shaped pathspace weavings, their holes pointing toward the edge of the door, one for each of the lock's three pins. He had to do this individually at first, playing with each of the three spring-loaded pins separately, until he could hold the images well enough to try to do more than one at a time.

  It took more than an hour to do. By the time he was ready for the next step, he was drenched in sweat and had a splitting headache.

  Taking a break, he drained the water the guard had brought and devoured the bread and meat, striving to replenish his strength. After what seemed like fifteen minutes or so, the worst of the headache was fading, and he was ready to try again.

  Once more he wove the three donuts of pathspace, this time leaving each one in pace as he continued on to the next. After a minute or so he turned the knob and opened the door.

  That's another thing Xander never showed me, he thought with satisfaction. But there was no time to waste breaking his arm patting himself on the back. He faced down the corridor and wove pathspace again. This time he did it from behind him, making the light from behind bend around him so that he would be hard to see from the front, but could see the light coming toward him so he could see where he was going. As long as no one came up behind him, he ought to be able to pull this off.

  He edged down the corridor, ears straining for the faintest sound that could be a guard coming. As he passed another door with a barred window, he did a quick transparency-weave to see if it was occupied. It wasn't, and neither were the next three.

  After a while he realized he was going the wrong way, heading deeper into the prison.

  He realized this because the corridor came to a dead end. Cursing under his breath, he turned and rewove the pathspace to let him see back the way he had come and make himself invisible, or at least very transparent, from that direction.

  He was wasting time. He headed back the way he had come, picking up the pace. In less than a minute he was passing his own door. He knew that because it was the only one open.

  He passed it and continued down the corridor. There should still be hours before the guard came back. There was still time to make his escape.

  He should have known better. Coming around another corner, he near walked right into the guard, who was seated at a little table, sharpening his sword with a whetstone.

  What prevented him from running into the guard (whose back was too him), however, was not his own caution, but a wall of bars. In it, directly behind the guard, was a door. It was locked.

  He could open that lock, he knew, because it was probably opened by the same key that opened his cell door. But unless the hinges were oiled, the man would hear the door opening behind him. And there was no way to slip past him without touching him.

  Cursing mentally, Lester went back to his cell and closed the door. He threw himself on his cot and nearly forgot, before he forced himself to get up and un-weave the pathspace keeping the door unlocked. He tried the knob to make sure it wouldn't turn, then flung himself back on the cot and tried to get some sleep.