The Vistor

by Sheri S. Tepper

  "What in the name of all the angels..." cried Michael, catching a glimpse of her forehead.

  "You didn't tell him," she said almost sulkily, clapping her hand over her brow.

  "No," breathed the doctor. "Quite true. I didn't tell him, and it must be done on the way, for more recent happenings make this journey even more urgent than I thought it was!"

  He hitched his horse to the rear of the wagon and got onto the driver's seat beside Michael. Dismé and her guides climbed into the wagon through the rear curtains, onto two fat and comfortable mattresses that lay atop their belongings. The airy interior was hidden from view by an arched canvas cover stout enough to provide shade and protect them from the weather. While they lay at their ease inside, the doctor proceeded to tell Michael about the general's declaration of war and also about the Council of Guardians.

  "So she's one of them!" said Michael, awed.

  "We don't even know if there is a them!" Dismé cried. "So far all we have is a hook, and a costume, and a ... a myth."

  "It's like being an emperor," said Bab, entranced. "You have nothing to say about it. If you're born one, you're just born one, and they start feeding you the myth along with your breast milk, then as soon as you stop wetting yourself, they costume you, drop the crown on your head, and you're it!"

  "I'm not at all sure I'm it," she said.

  "You were it yesterday," said the doctor. "I heard it in your voice."

  "Well, it's faded," she said, a bit angrily. "Or she's gone. Or something."

  "Maybe just retreated a bit," offered Michael. "To let you catch your breath."

  She had nothing to say about that, and her manner warned them to stop talking about it. Farmer Rateez fell silent and concentrated on the surroundings while Dismé stretched out to watch the road through a crack in the back curtain. Bobly and Bab amused themselves by singing a part song, in which, to their surprise, first Dismé joined and then Michael.

  The doctor sat up straight and paid attention to the sound. Bobly and Bab carried a tune well, but they had children's voices. Dismé's voice was already known to him, but Michael ... both their voices might have belonged to Praiser festival singers, especially here, among the trees, where Dismé let her full voice be heard. The two of them ... together ... were quite remarkable, which did not totally please Jens Ladislav.

  Hold was at the center of Bastion, with the three counties spread about it like clover leaflets, separated one from the other by ranges of hills that approached closely from the west, northeast, and southwest. The separating hills became higher the farther one went, ascending at last into the great mountain ranges that surrounded Bastion on all sides. The wagon was traveling on the road that ran between the shires of Comador to the left and Turnaway to the right, and far ahead of them were the ever-ice peaks of the Western Wall.

  By noon they were well into the rumple-lands, those uppish and downish hills that were home to small villages, farmers, and herders. Hayfields lay along the creeksides, interspersed with gardens and orchards, and an occasional village sprawled on a sunny hill, where a keg on a pole indicated the presence of a tavern, an oversize hammer betokened a smithy, and similar totems told of wheelwrights, coopers, or sawyers, even a thatcher, his trade betokened by a reed bundle cut from the swamps along the rivers. The houses were long, low shelters dug half into the sunny sides of hills, then built up of rammed earth or earth-brick or even daub and wattle, all back ditched and steep roofed, thatched heavily with long overhanging eaves that protected the walls from wet.

  By afternoon, they came to a split in the road, the right leg of which wound on upward to the Westward Pass and Ogre's Gap, a way often taken by the army and still used by raiding bands. It was a way no one else used much, and the road's sapling grown appearance indicated a lack of traffic.

  "Which way?" asked Michael, who was driving.

  "We should get over the pass as soon as possible," said the doctor, "as there are people we have to warn. However, if we take no more than an hour, we can go look at the old Lessy Storage Yard, and there's a reason we should see it."

  Accordingly, they drove to the left on an almost level road that wound generally southward along the edge of the hills. They were at the western side of a box canyon dotted with copses and centered on a burbling stream which grew more silent and deeper as they went. The canyon was not long, and they soon came to the end of it, an area of gravelly ground set about with rotted rails and faded signs that said, "Property of the Regime. No entry." The place was almost barren except for rampant growths of briar over the fallen fence and an unhinged gate.

  The doctor leapt to the ground, handed Dismé and the little ones down, and stalked toward the fallen rails, stopping almost at once to look around. South of them the forest rose abruptly among sheer precipices cleft by fringed waterfalls, froth that plummeted milkily down bulwarks, of black stone. From the nearer and much lower clifftop ahead of them, a single glassy cylinder of clear water plunged silently into a rock-bound pool, only a few yards away. East of them were lower hills, hiding any view northeast toward Hold or southeast toward Newland. Mountains stood north and west, stone teeth gnawing at the sky.

  "It's too quiet," said Dismé.

  It was true they heard no bird, no beast, no wind sound, no water sound. The doctor prowled across the fallen fence into the yard beyond, and the others followed. The area was littered with tanks and wheels, bent axles and toothless cogs, many now fallen into piles of rust, their shapes barely recognizable. Every artifact still extant wore manacles of briar that tangled all the yard. To one side a short grass area was dotted by patches of bare earth with abrupt outlines. Something had once stood upon these bare places; something had been moved away from them. Nothing had grown back where they had stood.

  The doctor knelt to examine a bare patch, then another before picking up a handful of stones and dropping a stone on each bare spot as he counted:"... eighteen, nineteen." He muttered. He checked to see if his count was correct, that every bare spot had a stone on it. When he returned to the others, he had deep lines of concentration between his eyes.

  "What was it that sat in those spots?" asked Michael.

  "My guess is they were devices like the one in the cellar of Hold. The archives say that when the fortress was built, there were a number of curved pillars on Hal P'Jardas's mound that were carted away to the Lessy Storage Yard. Archives has a map showing the yard. It's a good distance from Hold or any other habitation, which means there wouldn't likely be trash pickers out here."

  "Were the pillars like the one I saw?" asked Dismé.

  "The description sounded like. It all hangs together: Tamlar, the fumarole, her talk about Elnith and the pillars, all in one place."

  "Where did they go, then?" asked Michael.

  "I don't know," the doctor answered. "Three of those bare patches have edges so clean that whatever was there was moved recently. I've heard that one of the pillars was brought to Everday at least a generation or so past."

  Dismé said, "If people were transformed by them, maybe they vanished."

  "Possibly," the doctor agreed. "We know Tamlar existed before the pillars were found. We know one was still buried under the Fortress. Add those two to nineteen, get twenty-one, and there are twenty-one Guardians in the book."

  "Why was the pillar left buried in the mound?" asked Bab.

  Dismé said, haltingly. "Tamlar was here from the beginning, and it was she who created the Calling Stones, to summon the Guardians when the time came. Tamlar never sleeps. She needs no mortal body. She keeps time on time; she measures the age of the sun, the earth, the stars; she moves the stones to meet their chosen ones; she is Guardian of the Guardians..."

  Around them the hush deepened, became expectant.

  "How do you know that?" asked the doctor.

  Dismé shivered, whispering, "Something Dezmai left behind in my head. Let's leave here, Doctor. Now."

  "What do you feel?" he breathed.

  "Somethin
g evil, wrong, horrid coming here, yet a bit distant in time or space or knowing, but coming, nonetheless. We don't want to be here when it arrives."

  "No, we don't,' he replied. "Also, today is threeday, and the army of Bastion moves tomorrow morning. On sixday, it's supposed to be declaring war on the world from the border of Bastion. They're taking this same route, so we need to keep well ahead of them."

  "You didn't tell me it was so soon!" cried Dismé.

  "New information," he said, shaking his head. "Decided late last night. It's dismaying, but it doesn't change our plans."

  The sensation of menace deepened as they turned the wagon back the way they had come. When they had gone a little way, the doctor cleared his throat and asked, "They were known as the Calling Stones, by whom?"

  Dismé looked vacantly into the distance. "Tamlar named them. They call in two directions; earthward to us, the embodiments; outward to ... to something else. Something that's not in the stone, but comes through the stone into us. We give it or them a foothold in humanity. They don't live in us, but they can work through us."

  Michael broke the spell by putting his arm around her gently and murmuring, "It must make you terribly curious..."

  "Someday we may find out more about them," said the doctor, glancing at the sky. "Now we must make up for lost time."

  They drove back to the fork in the road, this time turning up the slope toward the mountains, stopping at intervals to clear fallen stones or chop a few saplings. By the time dusk began to settle, they had reached a clearing beside the stream where a fire circle of blackened stones identified the place as a usual wayhalt. Michael parked the wagon on high ground before unhitching and hobbling the horses, while Dismé, Bobly, and Bab gathered firewood and the doctor laid a fire.

  Dismé watched him as he took a demon stick from a small container in his pocket and struck it across the seat of his trousers. "What did you just do?" she asked in an alert, interested voice. "That's a..."

  "That's a match," he said. "What did you think it was? Oh, oh, of course. You've never seen one..."

  She cocked her head, regarding the flame in his fingers. "I've seen them, but not used that way. According to the sorcery teachers at Faience, you're supposed to give it a contagion first, and say a magical invocation..."

  "And a lot of other nonsense," said Michael, grinning at her. "I lived long enough on the border to know that matches light fires. All you have to do is get the head hot enough to explode into flame, and you do that by friction, by striking it on something. Though I hadn't seen anyone light it on his butt end, like the doctor just did."

  "So I was right. It's not magical at all," Dismé said.

  The doctor shook his head. "My butt end, magical? While some have admired it, even extravagantly, I would not be inclined to call it magical. Miraculous, perhaps. Or exceptionally fine..." The match burned his fingers, and he dropped it.

  "She meant the match," said Bobly, with a glance at Dismé's flaming cheeks.

  The doctor laughed. "The match isn't magic either. That's part of the nonsense the Selectivists and their predecessors have promulgated on a credulous populace."

  Dismé said, "I've never thought matches were magical, I was just surprised at the way you lit it. But... if a child stood up, pointed at his desk and said Hail Tamlar, let there be fire, and the desk went up in flame, that would be magic, wouldn't it?"

  "That would be magic," the doctor admitted. "Have you seen that happen?"

  She held out her hand and murmured, "Hail Tamlar, let there be fire."

  Fire bloomed on her palm, steady as an oak. She looked around her at the circle of staring faces. The doctor cleared his throat. Bobly made a little whimpering giggle. Dismé blew into her palm and the flame ascended into the sky, rising like a floating feather, higher and higher until it vanished.

  After a long silence, the doctor murmured, "Could you do that before yesterday?"

  Dismé nodded, rose, went to the wood laid in the circle of blackened stones and put her hand to it, igniting the wood. The fire was hot; the smoke smelled like smoke. It was definitely fire, not some kind of illusion. The others stared. She shrugged. She knew no more than they what it meant.

  The doctor burrowed into his pack and came up with a device which he put to his eyes, looking through it at the stony wall across from the road they had traveled on.

  "What is that?" Dismé asked Bobly.

  "Oh, those are distance glasses the doctor found somewhere outside," whispered Bobly. "They bring far away things very close, like a magnifying glass, only more so."

  The doctor pocketed his device, excused himself and went away into the woods. After a time, they saw him halfway up a rock wall opposite their camp site, one that culminated in a flat, protruding chunk of stone. Dismé, Bab, and Bobly began the preparation of a meal, and when they glanced up from their work they saw smoke rising from atop the rock, a single skein of white, pink-tipped by sunset, that rose straight in the calm of evening.

  "What's he doing?" Dismé murmured, fascinated.

  "Signaling someone," said Michael, who was also quite interested in this exercise. "Now I wonder who?"

  The doctor returned before their supper was quite ready, breathing heavily and rather red in the face from the climb. After they had eaten, Michael spread a waterproof canvas between the wheels of the wagon, attached a canvas skirt around its edges, and moved a mattress from inside the wagon to beneath it, where it would be well sheltered in event of rain. Michael and the doctor took the under-wagon bed, Dismé, Bab, and Bobly the in-wagon one, with the little people at opposite ends on one side and Dismé on the other.

  "You really hadn't lit a fire with a match before?" asked Bab from the darkness. "Even some people in Hold use them."

  "Where do they get them?" Dismé asked.

  "Peddlers sell them for splits, when nobody Regimic is around."

  "Where do the peddlers get them?" Dismé asked.

  Bab murmured sleepily. "They get them from peddlers over the edge, who get them from New Chicago."

  Bobly yawned. "Using matches can get you chaired, if anyone catches you at it. It's supposed to be magic, and fiddling with magic is forbidden, unless you have a permit. You know that."

  She did indeed know that. As well as a great many other things she hadn't really thought about. She lay there, intending to think about some of them, but though she had drowsed in the wagon a good part of the day, sleep came upon her almost at once.

  36

  rashel rages

  In the Fortress at Hold, Rashel began threeday by causing consternation among the staff of the Office of Acquisition, Department of Inexplicable Arts.

  A youngish clerk said for the third or fourth time: "Madam Deshôll, we have no other information on the device. It was simply there when the men started digging."

  "What about the area itself. Is there information on that?"

  "P'Jardas," said an older man from the back of the office. "His accounts. Let her look at that."

  Staff member know-not knew nothing, so staff member knows-a-lot, a sandy man with a short reddish beard, retrieved from the Archives a faded but remarkably dust free folder.

  "There've been a lot of people looking at that recently," he remarked before resuming his seat. "BHE. Division of Medicine."

  Rashel seethed. No one had mentioned any such file to her. She found a quiet corner and sat over the folder, leafing through it, scanning here and there, stopping to read all of a letter, all of another account. She caught knows-a-lot's attention with a snapped finger and said, "Where is the Lessy Storage Yard?"

  Knows-a-lot rose and wandered toward the file room. "There's some old maps in the file back there."

  Rashel examined the maps he furnished with increasing excitement. So, the pillar excavated under the Fortress was indeed not the only one. There were many others! And she was likely the first one to think of them! She would take the few necessary minutes to find Dismé's body, then go on to this storage
yard!

  Accordingly, she went up to the fourth floor and obtained a key from the keeper—not Livia Squin, who had gone to Amen City that morning to see her sick mother (mythical) with no intention of returning. As Rashel approached Dismé's door she rehearsed the panicky cries she would make when she found Dismé seemingly dead, opening the door onto an un-embodied room where she stood stupidly staring at nothing. It was just as it had been the day before. Except... the bottle was gone. Which meant what?

  Furiously, she went back to the keeper's stall and demanded to know who had been on duty the previous night, and when that woman was said to have gone to visit her sick mother, the day person was fetched so Rashel could insist on knowing when Dismé had last been seen.

  "What does she look like?" asked the woman, one Hermione Bittleby, in a voice as glacial as Rashel's own.

  "Plain," said Rashel. "Braided hair. Dressed like a farmwife."

  "Haven't seen her," said Bittleby. "There's no one like that on this corridor."

  "Her name is on your list. The room at the end of the hall."

  "I wouldn't call her plain! She works for Dr. Ladislav."

  "And where will I find him?"

  "Division of Health is up corridor twenty-seven a way, third floor, I think, off the main corridor."

  Rashel, growing ever more enraged, stalked to the main corridor, found offshoot stairs that led to corridors twenty-two through twenty-seven, went up several flights, and went to the doctor's office, where she encountered James Trublood.

  "I am Rashel Deshôll," she said haughtily. "I'm looking for my sister, Dismé Latimer?"

  "Gone," said the captain, seeing her hauteur and raising her an arrogance. "The Colonel Doctor sent her to Comador to dig out some kind of statistics." He had seen the assignment sheet himself, in the pile of materials he was just now sorting out.

  Rashel noted his arrogance and raised it a contemptuous. "Then you will announce me to the doctor?"

  "He's gone, too," said the captain, matching her contempt with a Turnaway's disdain. "He left early this morning, gone off to the borders of Praise." The doctor's itinerary had been on top of the stuff to be filed. The most recent document in the folder was a copy of a letter telling citizen Befum that the doctor would be visiting, leaving on summerspan five, threeday.