The Vistor

by Sheri S. Tepper

  Summerspan five, threeday was today, and Trublood had been at the Praise gate on the northeast side of the city, where indeed, the doctor had ridden out toward the Praise hills and Trublood had eaten a good deal of dust just to verify where the doctor was going! He had then gone posthaste to the Colonel Bishop, who had said yes, yes, the guards at the gate had already reported the doctor's movements. Trublood, who until that moment had thought he was the bishop's only or at least primary spy, had been offended by this intelligence, and he had added the irk to the revulsion he had stored away over the Bishop's daughters.

  "Do you know when Dismé left?" Rashel asked.

  The captain thought about it. When had she come into the office last. Not twoday, yesterday, when all the ruckus had taken place down in the cellars. Not the day before. And not during the span-end of span four, either. But the preceding day, he had seen her briefly, dropping off something for the doctor. "It could have been anytime within the last five days, Ma'am. She hasn't been into the office here since summerspan four, eightday." He did not like this woman's manner. She obviously did not know she was speaking to a member of the Turnaway clan.

  Rashel put the captain's name on the mental lists entitled "To-be-disposed-of-when-Rashel-is-running-things," and flung herself off in a fury. The poison in the bottle hadn't reached Dismé because Dismé had already gone! And now the bottle was gone also. Making the stuff took seven days after all the ingredients were obtained, which itself had taken more than a span! Was someone walking about with it in a pocket now? By the iron-barbed prick of Fell, she could hardly ask anyone!

  This was too much. Hetman Gone would expect her to follow Dismé to Newland, of course, but first she had to take a look at the Lessy Yard. She hired a guide-driver with a carriage and a pair of fast horses and reached the Lessy Yard with its tumbled fences by late afternoon, only a few hours after the doctor and his crew had left it. Rashel wandered among the trash and discards, at first looking for wavy pillars, then focusing on the places where such pillars had no doubt stood. She counted them, just as the doctor had done, noting the stone dropped on each vacant place and wondering at it.

  "Wagon was here," said her driver. "Not long ago."

  "Maybe the wagon took what I'm looking for," she said.

  "Not likely, no, Ma'am. Most likely just a family, come to fish in the pool yonder. Wagon tracks are no deeper going than coming, so whatever they were after, it didn't weigh much."

  "Why do you say a family?" she asked, suddenly alert.

  "Children's feet. Woman, couple of children, couple of men. Not many tracks so they didn't stay long."

  Rashel subsided. There for a moment she'd thought it might have been ... But no. Children would explain the stones on the bare spots, too. Children did things like that, making up games. Rashel herself had never played games. She disliked rules, and she could not bear losing.

  "Besides," said the driver, "if you're looking for whatever was standing there, the holes are deep in turf. The grass has grown green many a year where those things stood."

  The pillars certainly had to be somewhere, and it shouldn't be impossible to trace them, which she would do, right after she had seen to Dismé. She returned to Hold by late afternoon, which meant she had missed the train to Newland, and it was too late to start the journey in a carriage. She would hire a carriage for the morning, and spend another night at the lodging-house in Hold. It was as she was on her way there that she was rudely accosted by a stranger.

  "The Hetman wants to see you, Rashel," said this person, an anonymous, ashen-skinned, dun-haired, nothing-looking man.

  She drew herself up. "The Hetman? From Apocanew?"

  "The Hetman, from anywhere he chooses to be," said the messenger. "Follow me."

  She did so reluctantly, her stomach clenching, her jaw tight, wishing she had the courage to refuse, believing at one moment that it was a joke, a trick, and in the next that it was unacceptably real, that the Hetman was, in fact, in Hold. As, in fact, turned out to be true when her guide led her to a blind-ended street she had never seen before, between shuttered houses she found totally unfamiliar, to a grille gate she knew all too well. Inside it was an equally familiar, wizened and hairy figure who answered her knock.

  "Summoned?" he sneered at her, as the guide melted away into the darkness of the streets.

  "By the Hetman," she murmured, and was admitted. The corridors were not as long as in Apocanew, but the room to which she was admitted might as well have been the one in Apocanew for any difference she could detect. Gohdan Gone sat as he always did, facing the fireplace.

  "The bird has flown," he said.

  "Only so far as Newland," she replied. "And I will ride to Newland in the morning. She is there doing some work for Doctor Ladislav, or so his assistant says."

  "Ah," said the Hetman. "Come and sit by the fire."

  She went to the chair with her head down, her lips pinched together to keep them from trembling, surprised that he showed no anger. When he spoke his voice was soft, almost sweet.

  "Very recently, Rashel, you asked me to involve you in my magic. Remember that?"

  "I ... I was impudent, Master. As you said at the time."

  "Perhaps you were, then. Now, however, I have decided to grant your request."

  She was still for a long moment, trying to guess at his motives. "To aid me in getting Dismé back to Faience?"

  "Oh, yes. Your participation will help get Dismé back, to Faience or some other place."

  She swallowed deeply. "I am gratified that you believe I can assist you."

  He curved his mouth at her, showing the huge teeth at the corners of his lips. "I am, as you know, a follower of the Fell, and therefore the Fell grants me a measure of power to hold and use as I see fit. Still, the use of this power requires certain rites and observances."

  "I understand..."

  "I can save you the time you would have spent in journeying, to New-land, for Dismé is not there, nor anywhere in Bastion."

  Rashel looked up, totally alert. Not in Bastion?

  "So much was easy to determine. Where she is, we do not know. I must send ... a personal envoy to find her."

  "Master, I am your willing envoy. I'm sure I can..."

  He interrupted her with a raised hand. "If you had followed my orders at once, perhaps you could have, but you put other tasks first. Your research under the Fortress. Your dalliance with your lovers..."

  She searched desperately for something to divert him from this line. "I am late only because I thought you would want to know about the devices that summon the Guardian Council!"

  He turned his huge head toward her, the long yellow fangs sliding outside his lower lip, momentarily exposed as he curled his long upper lip in a sneer. "Devices?"

  "The one in the cellar of the Fortress. I was there, in the cellar, and some woman came, laid her hands upon it, and it dissolved in a shower of fire. A great voice said something or other about the council, and the woman went away too quickly to be followed. We were all blinded by the fire and deafened by the voice..."

  "This made you forget Dismé?"

  "Oh, no, Master. I was not concerned about Dismé for I had already put in her room the potion you told me to make. While I was allowing time for her to drink the stuff, I inquired about the pillar. There had been many of these pillars before the Fortress was built. They were taken to the Lessy Yard..."

  A long, thoughtful silence.

  "Which is where?"

  She babbled the location, concluding, "When I found Dismé had gone to Newland, I went to the Lessy Yard, first thing this morning. The pillars aren't there now, but several of them were taken away only recently. I intended to go in search of them once I had Dismé back in hand ... but you say she is not in Bastion..."

  He stared at her, eyes glowing from the fire. "I will send my envoy to this Lessy Yard. I will send after this woman you speak of, the one in the cellar. I will find Dismé Latimer. I will involve you in my magic, as
you have suggested. And because you have brought me this information, I will reward you by assuring you will live through the experience."

  Before she could speak, he rose, turning to look down upon her from a great height, while she in turn gazed up, far up, at the blazing glow of his eyes, the terror overwhelming her as she realized that the Hetman was not, as she had always assumed, a misshapen and ugly human fellow whose eyes merely reflected the red firelight. Whatever fire was about this creature burned from within.

  He reached out one finger and laid it upon the skin of her breast. She screamed as she felt the blister form. He had never touched her before. His minions had manipulated an iron image of the Fell during her dedication, her "mating" as they called it, and something out of the book had occupied that image once it was coupled with her, but the Hetman had not touched her until tonight.

  "To summon the envoy I need certain things," he whispered, his breath crisping her hair and brows so that the ash fell into her face. "I need the eyes of a living woman, the hands of a living woman, the womb of a living woman. The eyes will be taken first, then the hands, and finally the womb will be eaten from inside by the Fell himself."

  "Dismé," she stuttered, trying not to moan at the pain of the burning. "That's why you need Dismé."

  "I need the envoy to find Dismé," He smiled horribly. "I need your involvement to evoke the envoy."

  A little before midnight, two guards from the Fortress found a woman lying on the street. She still breathed, so they took her to the clinic where Dr. Ladislav often worked at night, as the doctor had asked them to do in any such case. The doctor wasn't there, but Old Ben was, and he had been studying with Dr. Ladislav. He gestured that the guards should wait in an outer room, which they did, while he undressed and examined the unconscious body, taking the blood pressure, measuring the temperature. As he counted the pulse in her throat, his eyes moved from severed wrist to severed wrist, from empty eyesockets to the area between her legs, which had been mutilated. Whoever had done this had intended her to live, for they had bound the wrists, and while the injury to her lower body had no doubt been excruciatingly painful, it had somehow been done without causing enough internal bleeding to lower her blood pressure. Though her eyesockets still oozed blood, that loss was not enough to endanger her life.

  What he saw was not new to him. Both he and the doctor had seen mutilations of this kind more frequently of late, mostly to women and children, occasionally to men, but never to old people. Almost always, the people were left alive. Which meant, so the doctor had told him in secretive whispers, that the continued life of the victim was an important ingredient of the ritual. "My theory," Jens had told him, "Is that a black art cannot come from any natural thing, for its power is against nature. Death is natural, so black art cannot take power from death. Continued pain, however, is not natural. Nature soothes, or nature lets die; rarely does it permit continued agony. So, the ritual takes its power from pain, from death withheld, the longer and more dreadful the agony, the more power it produces. Thus, we have mutilations as the method of choice, for coping with mutilation is a continuing agony even when wounds have healed..."

  Despite having seen it before, this was the first time Ben had seen so many parts taken from one still living victim. Ben went into the outer room and wrote a note to the guards. "Do you have any idea who she is?"

  The guards, who had been half asleep, shook their heads. She hadn't been carrying anything, they said, as was quite understandable considering she had no hands to carry anything with. The younger guard offered a bit of jewelry that had been around her neck, a silver pendant set with an obsidian image, and bearing an engraving on the back. "For my dear friend on the occasion of her promotion. MM."

  "It's set in a design," said one of the guards, peering over Ben's shoulder. "I know that design. It's the insignia of Inexplicable Arts, see, the I and the A woven together that way."

  "Mace Marchant is head of Inexarts in Apocanew," said the other guard. "Maybe the woman's from there. Is she gonna die?"

  "Not of her injuries," Ben wrote. "When she regains consciousness, perhaps she can tell us who she is. If not, you will perhaps ask the man at Inexplicable Arts?"

  When the guard had read this, he shook his head. "Sorry, Ben. It'd be against orders to leave her here. We only brought her because Dr. Ladislav wants every victim brought to him, no matter how bad they are, and once he has 'em, he's got the rank to decide what to do with 'em. But he's not here, him nor his rank, and you an't no officer, Ben. Hell, you an't even in the department! Look at her. She'll never be able to work, or have children, if a woman can't work or have children..."

  "Preferably both," said the other guard.

  "...then she's no good to the Spared and we're s'posed to put her in the demon locker near the Praise Gate, to be bottled."

  The woman inside the room may have heard this, for she began to thrash madly to and fro, emitting horrid, grating sounds. It was only then that Ben discovered she had no tongue.

  "Wait a bit," he wrote. "I'll stop the pain."

  He shut the door to the outer room. The doctor had shown him where all the drugs were: the red containers from Chasm by way of the demons, to fight infections: the blue containers, vials and bottles from the west, to sedate and kill pain. The individually labeled green-packaged herbs shipped from far Everday to reduce anxiety, to promote healing, to reduce fevers. He went to the shelf and looked for a certain small blue bottle. The doctor used the same colors to code his own drugs, for some of his assistants read little if at all. The small blue bottle had been here last time Ben was at the clinic.

  No such bottle. Well then, the last of it had been used! Or, there might be more in the storage closet. After a search he found an old, scratched blue bottle at the back of the highest shelf, not quite the same color, size, or shape as the one he'd been looking for, but then, the woman was so bad off that any calming drug could only help her.

  She would be unable to swallow, so he carefully filled a syringe attached to a tube and fed the tube into the back of her throat. When he had dosed her, she stopped thrashing and howling almost at once. Her breathing slowed. Her heart rate slowed. Ah, well, perhaps he had killed her, but the demons would have done that anyhow, after they took some of her to be bottled. He wrapped her closely in a sheet, opened the door to the hallway, and let the guards take her away. Though he felt great pity for the woman, he was not reluctant to let her go. She would either be dead before the demons came, or she would sleep through whatever they did to her. If Ben himself was on that stretcher, he would not want to go on living in that condition, even if it were possible.

  He stared at the bottle a long moment, considering. If it had killed her, best it not be left around where he or any other nincompoop could make a mistake with it. The bit of silver jewelry lay on the table beside the bed. He still felt it would be a good idea to send a note to Mace Marchant. Needn't tell the man the details. Just advise him there was an accident victim, so tall, so old, such and such color hair. Maybe he could identify her by her description.

  37

  leaving bastion

  When dawn came, the doctor told them to pack the wagon, but also to make up small packs of necessities for a long hike. When all this had been done, they drove on up the road until midmorning, then left the wagon and horses in a clearing while they went on foot to a path in the woods that very soon became steep and after that, perpendicular.

  At noon, when they stopped for a much needed rest, they heard the creak of wheels and saw through a gap in the trees their own wagon, now driven by a horned demon.

  Dismé stared questioningly at the doctor.

  "Regime guards are instructed not to see any demons who are moving about on ordinary demonish activities," he told her. "They would definitely see me, however, and neither general nor bishop would approve of my taking a wagon into demon territory."

  "How do you get away with these journeys?" asked Michael.

  The doctor st
opped to mop his forehead with a kerchief. "The farther from Hold one gets, the less Regimic the people are and the less the Regime knows or cares about them. Meantime, the Regime has become so smug it can't tell the difference among the revolutionary, the innovative, or the merely various. The high command knows so little about the outside that if I came back with a fully equipped chemical laboratory and told them I'd found it in a cave, they'd probably believe that, so long as I brought it back piecemeal in my saddle bags, thus proving I hadn't known it was there beforehand."

  "So it's the wagon that's troublesome," murmured Dismé.

  "At this pass, yes, because this pass has guards. If I hadn't really wanted to see the Lessy Yard for myself, we might have gone another way."

  "How do we get the wagon back?"

  "This path we're on meets the road on the other side."

  The path, if so it could be called, continued to be a hard, rough scramble up a rock wall and down another, during which Dismé blessed all her tree climbing days. Bobly and Bab climbed like squirrels, while furry beasts with large heads and short tails came out of the rocks and whistled at them, ducking for cover whenever Michael pretended to throw something.

  By early afternoon, they had crossed the pass out of sight of the road and descended a way down the far side of the mountain. Following the smell of smoke, they came upon horses and wagon hidden from above by rock outcroppings and leafy copses. Rabbits were roasting over a fire.

  "Heya," called the doctor.

  One of the demons approached them, holding out his hand. "Jens Ladislav," he said. "Who's this. New assistants?"

  "Dismé," said the doctor.

  "I know you," said Dismé, who had stared hard at him when she heard his voice. "You're Wolf."