The Visitor (44 page)

Within the hour, he was at the College of Sorcery, bustling in with every appearance of officialdom, calling for the warden's aide, who happened to be the only one in the building.

“The warden has sent me down from Hold to pick up some papers for him, private papers. Something he needs for his business in Hold. He's told me where to look for them,
and which ones he needs, if you'll be kind enough to let me into his office. I had a note from him, but the train blew up outside town, can you imagine? I lost my cloak and everything in the pockets!”

The aide had heard of the train disaster and was not prepared to contradict the head of the Apocanew sub-office of Inexplicable Arts. He opened the door and offered his assistance, but was shooed away by Mace, who then locked the door and began a careful search of the warden's room. If what he had overheard there in the street was true, then the warden would have a cache of sorcerous stuff in this room. Among such a cache, he might even find something to aid Rashel…

Mace would have found nothing had he not stumbled over an irregularity in the floor near the back wall of the office, where a strip of flooring came up when he put the tip of his knife under the edge. The cache he had expected to find was there, a quantity of spells written on pieces of skin with hair still attached to them. Not pigskin. The hair wasn't pig hair. It was human skin, and the bones with them were human bones. From the hair pattern on one or two, he could suppose the belly hair of a mature man or woman. From the texture of others, he presumed young children. His eyes skimmed one or two of the spells, and he sat down quickly, eyes closed, trying not to be sick all over the warden's possessions.

One of the skins was a love spell, so named, though it actually subordinated the will of the ensorceled to the will of the sorcerer, which did not describe what Mace had thought of as love. The spell called for bits of the…victim's hair. Rashel had several times taken bits of Mace's hair, as keepsakes, she had said. The words of the ensorcelment were words she had said to him—so he had thought—in the heat of passion.

He wiped angry tears from his cheeks. Well, well, then why was he trying to avenge her? He owed her nothing! Except, said a small voice he heard from time to time, you owe yourself something, surely?

The warden had recently said some rather odd things during lectures at the college, odd enough that they had been remembered and mentioned, here and there. The warden had said that the very words of a spell, and the stuff on which those words were written, could have a power of their own that was separate from the putative purpose of the spell. Like the boxes the demons used to power the Chairs: those boxes could be taken out of the Chairs and power other things, and they, too, were dangerous if one tried to open them. So, if the power was a separate thing from the spell, then that power could be used for other things that the magician didn't even know about. There could be fatal spells that ate the magician who used them while increasing the power of someone else.

Which was no doubt what had happened to the warden. Mace could almost feel the gathered menace that attended these parchments. It seemed to him that the room was full of hazy ghosts, watching him, tiny vortexes where their heads should be.

Shaking his head to clear it, he sat for some time in thought, then replaced the parchments where he had found them, though not before laying a trail of candle wax into the recess beneath the floor. There were explosive powders in the cabinet, used for magical effects, and he poured some of these into the recess also, and from there in a trail leading under the warden's desk, where he placed a candle stub in a pile of the same stuff. He poured the lantern oil about and under the desk, then gathered together a folder or two, lit the stub of candle with a striker (it would not take it long to burn down) pulled the shutters closed across the only window, and let himself out, locking the door behind him.

“Did you find what the warden needed, sir?” The aide, being officiously concerned.

“I think so,” said Mace, consciously summoning up the reality of himself as he had been yesterday—a little pompous, a little sarcastic, a little too sure of his own importance. He adopted a slightly admonitory tone, “He said
he wanted the lecture he'd given to the graduates last spring. I presume this is it.”

The aide took the folder and looked into it. “Yes, sir.”

“And also his notes on the Inclusionist Selectivist controversy. Which is what this seems to be.”

“Again, yes sir, it is.”

“I don't know why he couldn't simply have sent a note asking you to bring them to Hold. I'm sure if you were too busy, someone could have done it.” Mace strained to sound a trifle haughty.

The aide shook his head. “As a matter of fact, sir, I'd have been hard put to it to find anyone. All our ordinary workers seem to have disappeared! Just quit. None of them showed up for work since before last span-end. There were only two workers here this morning, besides me, and they've both gone!”

“The professors? The students?”

“It's vacation time. We don't expect them back for summer term until summerspan six. I don't know if they'll show up or not. There were no farmers at the market this morning, either. And the butcher's shop was closed. The barber, too.”

“What's happening?” Mace was honestly curious.

“I don't know. No one knows. It's just, all the ordinary folk seem to have gone somewhere.”

“Nonsense,” said Mace, striving to remain in character. “Where would they have to go?” Except where he, himself, intended to go, as rapidly as possible. Away.

The aide shrugged and followed him to the door, so intent upon sharing his worry that he didn't ask for the warden's key.

From the corner Mace watched the college entrance. Very shortly the aide came out carrying the cash box and locking the door behind him. Mace retreated to a tavern he sometimes frequented, only a block away. Aside from the couple who owned it, it was occupied only by a few aimless people crouched over beer pots. Mace ordered a meal and was halfway finished with it when people began yelling
Fire.
Not to seem uninterested, he went out to the street with the
tavern couple and the other drinkers still capable of movement, where they all gaped at the fire and waited for the firemen. A horrid purple smoke rose from the fire, with a stench that drove the crowd inside, where they peered out through the windows. No firemen appeared. By the time everyone realized that no firemen were coming, the fire had completely gutted the College of Sorcery and the adjacent buildings were burning from foundation to roof.

In Mace's opinion, the least traveled way out of Apocanew was the road that ran past Faience and on into the mountains to a little used and unguarded pass. From there, he would go to the nearest village and seek work as…a teacher. He was literate, his only real skill, and he intended to leave Bastion forever.

 

In Chasm was a cold place of blue-white light and glittering machines where voices came from the walls. Rashel was standing when she woke. She opened her eyes with a sharp click, click, to peer down at her shining self. Inside this polished skin were polished parts, metal and silicon and ceramics of various kinds, all of them impervious and almost eternal. Only the crinkled gray matter well protected in the center of her was fleshy. She was unaware of this, and also uninterested.

“Me,” she said with her speaker, raising her metal hands, clack, clack, in a gesture of defiance. “Me. Rashel. Nemesis of Gone and all his beings.” The hands were three-fingered, two hooks with one sharp blade opposed, good for cutting things off.

“That's right, Rashel,” said the voice from the wall where someone twisted a tiny wheel that sent a signal to one of Rashel's new parts, a tiny reservoir, which flowed, briefly, producing an intensity of pleasure she had never felt in her life before, a total ecstacy.

“Good Rashel,” said the voice. “Good Nemesis of Gone.”

“Go?” she asked, eager to go, eager to kill, maim, destroy, feel ecstacy again. “Go now?”

“No,” said the voice. “Not now. Soon. Soon Rashel can go
and earn many hours of happy. So many hours of happy. Later.”

“So many,” she murmured, clack, clack, folding back the hooks, the blades, the lower arms, the upper arms, into their resting position. “So many,” closing her eyes, click click.

Elsewhere in the hard, blue place one person asked another, “Who's this Gone it always mentions?”

“No idea,” said the other. “It really doesn't matter.”

A
rnole, Nell, Bobly, and Bab were in the light wagon pulled by four horses; Dismé, Jens, and Michael were on fresh mounts with spares on lead ropes. By the end of the day, the group remained well ahead of the army, or so Dismé told them, having received word from demon, dobsi, or Dezmai. When it grew dark, they stopped, unhitched, hobbled the horses, and settled themselves to a cold supper, knowing they could not risk a fire. On the flat and seemingly endless plain, they could not hide a blaze. Instead, they drank tepid water from the water barrel and tried not to think about hot tea.

Despite exhaustion, Dismé could not relax. The dobsi in her head was picking up urgent emanations from many sources, and she could not shut off the sensations that fled through her mind too quickly to consider or even, in many cases, to recognize. She murmured fretfully to Arnole. “I'm not sure it's actually telling me what I think it is! Arnole, you have a dobsi too, and you have more experience with it than I do! Why aren't you doing the listening?”

Arnole rolled his head about, trying to get rid of the neck stiffness that resulted from a day spent sitting in an unsprung wagon. “A few years ago, a friendly demon in Chasm had its Dantisfan whistle my young one out of my head. They grow
slowly, but they have to come out before the host starts having headaches.”

“You're from Chasm, aren't you?” said Dismé. “That's how you knew so much.”

He nodded, smiling. “From near there.”

She went on, “I don't think the thing in Bastion reads people's thoughts. I think it tracks them by their…brain waves, like a dog tracks a smell. I was tracked like that, once when I was just a child and again in Hold, the first time I went there. Rashel said something once about ‘Watching all the damned Latimers,' and I wondered if that's what the thing was doing, watching all the Latimers.”

Arnole mused, “None of the other Guardians we've found were named Latimer. Latimer wasn't Nell's birth name, and it was probably pure coincidence that Skulda chose Val Latimer to father you. Whoever was watching picked the wrong person.”

The doctor said, “Whatever, not whoever. Gohdan Gone isn't human. Perhaps he came with the Happening.”

Nell, who had been very quiet for most of the day, stood up with startled suddenness and said, “We must travel tonight!”

Michael shook his head. “It's dangerous. There's no moon until late. We could cripple the horses.”

“We have to go tonight, no later than moonrise,” she said. “Elnith just showed me. The army travels at night. We have to get farther ahead of it before we can really rest.”

“Bab and I'll watch,” said Bobly. “We can sleep in the wagon later, so we'll wake you at moonrise.”

They agreed to this, rolled themselves in their blankets, and fell into restless sleep. Bobly and Bab had already made a comfortable nest of blankets in the wagon where they sat back to back, swiveling their eyes over the flatland around them.

North were mountains, invisible in the dark. South and east of them were the prairies, all the way to New Chicago, and beyond that, the ocean. It was a smaller world they looked out upon than the one Nell had known. At the Hap
pening, ocean bottoms had been raised, spilling the seas over the lower land. The Arctic and Antarctic ice had melted, driving the waters still higher. Under the weight of water, the continental plates had riven and thrust up new ranges of mountains to tower under the slow wheel of the stars.

Bobly and Bab poked one another occasionally to be sure they were awake, the intervals becoming less, the need more urgent, both of them becoming inexplicably anxious as their eyes swiveled from side to side.

Bobly put her hand on Bab's arm. “What's that there?” she asked, pointing to the east, in the direction they had come. “In the sky, see, a kind of shadow?”

It could be seen when it crossed the stars, a thin shadow, moving north to south then north again.

“Get doctor's distance glasses,” directed Bobly, her eyes fixed on the flying shadow. “Let's try to see it closer.”

“If it isn't too dark to see anything,” murmured Bab as he searched. “Here they are, in his bag. I'll look.”

He put the glasses to his eyes and fiddled with them, drawing in a horrified breath. “A flying thing. Like a huge dragonfly. Bigger than anything. Its eyes shine. They give enough light to see it's got fangs and talons. It's searching, down here, below. Oh, by all the Guardians, Bobly. It'll see us.”

“Wake the others,” she said. “And do it quietly.”

 

Deep in the redoubt, far at the end of a winding access tunnel that ran through solid rock toward the reactor room, a storage compartment hatch slowly opened. After a time Jackson's ashen face peeked out, remaining hidden for some time before protruding itself farther into the aisle, eventually to be followed by his body, crouching, then slinking slowly down the tunnel to the sealed door that opened on the storage area. It was locked from his side, and it squeaked slightly as he unlocked and opened it. At the sound, Jackson shrank visibly, as though trying to dissolve into shadows. Nothing. No sound. No movement. Eventually, he gained the courage to open the door far enough to get through it,
leaving it open behind him as he went down the corridor he had traveled…when? The day before?

He had heard the monsters not long after dark. With the upper door and the panel next to it sealed—he had sealed them himself—the entrance became invisible. Though it looked like the stone around it, it was stronger than stone, and it did not admit sound from the outside. He should not have been able to hear anything smaller than an earthquake from outside. When he woke to the sound of howls and falling stone, he knew at once that the door was unsealed and that Janet, as part of her quixotic rejection of Nell's advice, had done it.

The knowledge moved him into frantic, unhesitating action. He made no effort to save the others. He simply fled, down through the labs, past the food storage, and through a small access door to the maintenance tunnels, which he sealed behind him. The tunnel was so low that one had to stoop to walk through it, and at its far end, he had crawled into a storage compartment and curled himself into a tight ball. If he had gone to Trayford, with the others, he would not have been here at all. If it hadn't been for Janet, he would have gone to Trayford. If he had been in Trayford, he wouldn't have been here to save the people in the redoubt, so he would pretend he had gone.

It became a litany, over and over, one recited alternately with another: “I closed the upper door. I remember closing it. I sprayed stuff around on the rock. I wouldn't have done that and leave the door open. So I didn't leave it open. I closed it. That damned fool Janet opened it. She's determined to prove Nell wrong. She was going to prove it by opening the door.”

She'd had plenty of time to do it while he'd been clearing space for the people who were staying behind, more of them than the redoubt had been designed to house. The thought of double-checking the door had crossed his mind, but the recently awakened needed help, so Jackson hadn't thought, and Janet hadn't believed, not until the moment the monsters came in.

Now, after a full day in hiding, he expected to find the place empty. Bodies maybe, but otherwise empty. There had been terrible sounds as he fled, but once the maintenance tunnel door was locked behind him and he was deep into the innards of the place, he couldn't hear anything. Now, as he approached the living quarters, he heard sounds again, sounds that told him he was wrong about finding only bodies, sounds that led him to them, each of them in turn: moans, screams, a terrible grating noise some of them made in their throats, the horrible look in their eyes. “Kill me,” the tongues said. The eyes said, “Oh, for the love of God, kill me.”

He would not. He could not. He did not believe in killing. He had never believed in killing. Instead he wept, crouched, put his head between his knees and howled, made useless by fear, pity, horror, and an empathetic ghastliness of pain.

 

On the prairie, the doctor peered through his glasses.

“What is it?” breathed Nell.

“A monster,” he answered, in an expressionless voice. “A flying one. Evidently Gowl—or the other thing, whatever it is—isn't content with the speed of his approach and he's decided to catch us out here in the open. The moon is rising! Is there anywhere we can hide?”

Dismé searched inside herself. Dezmai was away, as, indeed, all of their inhabitants seemed to be. No Bertral, no Elnith, no Galenor.

“Can you panic your dobsi?” Arnole suggested. “If you work up a good fit of fear, it'll pick up on what's bothering you and broadcast it. There may be a demon close enough to hear you.”

Dismé put the glasses to her eyes and had little trouble in working up a fit of horrors. The thing had huge, multi-lens eyes. It did indeed have fangs dripping from complicated jaws, and many legs with long, cutting talons.

Nell asked for the glasses and examined the creature for herself. “It's one of the ancient ones. I've seen that kind before, during the long darkness. The fangs are venomous. One touch and the victim is past help.”

“Add to that,” said Dismé, “that compound eyes like that are extremely useful in detecting motion.”

The doctor took the glasses from Nell, leapt upon the wagon seat and began to search the area around him. “I'm looking for shadows,” he said. “Any kind of swale or wash we can drive into. Hitch the horse, Michael. If we move it will have to be quickly.”

Michael did so, as Bobly and Bab ran to help him, and very shortly, the doctor pointed a little way to the north. “There's a shadow that way, some kind of low place.”

The others had already put their belongings in the wagon, and as Arnole took the reins, the others mounted their horses and went northward, slowly, both to reduce the chance of injury and to keep the noise and movement to a minimum. Bobly had the glasses again, and she lay supine in the rocking wagon, trying to keep the flying monster in sight.

When they arrived at the shadow, the doctor was already there, regarding it with dismay. It was indeed a wash, but one little wider than the wagon and quite short, a mere cut in an otherwise rounded, smoothly eroded bank separating the level prairie from a wide, dry riverbed.

Without a moment's hesitation, Michael jumped onto the wagon seat, drove the wagon into the riverbed, then lined the wagon up with the wash and made the horses back up, which they did unwillingly, tossing their heads to show their displeasure. When the wagon was as far back as it would go, both it and the horses were below the level of the surrounding land. “Get the canvas cover off,” said Michael. “There are tent stakes in the wagon. Peg the cover to the sides of the wash. Throw some grass on it.”

He was dropping the wagon tongue, talking to the horses, twisting their ears gently in his hands, murmuring sweet nothings, getting them to lie down in the traces, backs together, feet to either side.

“No time to take off the harness,” he said to no one in particular. “And besides, we may need to leave in a hurry.”

“What about the riding horses?” asked the doctor.

“Bring the saddles in here, hobble the horses, and let them
graze. There are other horses here on the prairie, wild ones or escaped ones. That thing won't know the difference, and in this deep grass, it won't be able to see the hobbles.”

Everyone scattered, tossing saddles into the wash, pegging the cover from bank to bank, cutting handfuls of grass to toss atop it. The gravelly soil of the wide river bottom was grown up in tufty grasses where the riding horses settled to graze. The others were in or under the wagon while Michael lay prone among the wagon team, murmuring to them, keeping them down. Dismé knelt in the wagon bed, only her head thrust over the lip of the wash, watching the sky through the glasses. The monster quartered the sky, north and south, then came farther west to do it again, over and over.

“It's coming closer,” she murmured, panic threatening to take her by the throat. “It's coming much closer.”

“Oh, by all the…” said Nell suddenly. “What are we thinking of! That thing is a predator, and it's huge. What does it normally eat? What will it do when it sees the horses?”

“Damn,” said Michael, feelingly. “I assumed it was hunting us…”

“It is hunting us,” said the doctor, “but that doesn't mean it isn't hungry enough to eat horse. If it comes down on the horses, it won't need to hunt us any further. We'll be right in front of it, like dessert.”

 

The army had turned westward at the bottom of the mountain road. It had not gone on to Trayford, for when the ogre arrived at dusk, it did not arrive alone. With it was a thing, a monstrous ropiness, a heaving slime, an amorphous stink which could, when necessary, compress itself into a loathsome cloud that half rolled, half crawled alongside the marching monsters of General Gowl. Worse than any other aspect of the thing was its voice, a slimy insinuation which slipped like a slug through the ear into the skull and ate holes in the mind. Upon arrival, the loathsomeness ate ten or a dozen soldiers and called up several monsters, including
one that could fly. Then it sniffed the ground and pointed southward, toward the village. The flying thing went there while the army itself turned westward, toward some unmentioned goal that none of the men including the general knew anything about. This evening there had been no rain of blood, and the men were more or less themselves, so the bishop took the opportunity to ride up beside the general and ask a few whispered questions.

“General Gowl, do you know where we're going?”

“Um,” said the general, nodding. “The thing that came down from the north is out this way, somewhere. We're going to kill it. My friend, Hetman Gone, doesn't want the thing to come closer. Also the Council of Guardians. We're going to kill the Council, too. And on the way, we're going to find Latimers and kill them because they have something to do with the thing from the north.”