Pathspace

by Matthew Kennedy

Chapter 29

  Xander: “we thank Thee for our little light”

  Alone, unseen, Xander performed his daily regimen. First was the thing with the mirror. He picked up a wooden cup from the table and stood in front of the full-length mirror. Then he tossed the cup off to the side. As soon as he heard it hit the floor, he made himself vanish, weaving the pathspace as fast as he was able. He did this ten times.

  Then he did the second exercise. This was like the first, except that he watched where the cup ceased its motion, and made it vanish. Then he turned back to the mirror, vanished himself, and practiced the moving invisibility, walking to the cup's location by his memory of the room's layout, and reaching down to retrieve it before undoing both weaves. He did this another ten times.

  He seized his staff and swizzles it on and off rapidly, making it hum its bass roar, then adjusting the flow up and down with his mind, sometimes reversing it entirely, as if he were doing push-ups. From this he proceeded to target practice, firing little roughly-carved wooden balls at various targets around the room. When he was done with this part, the balls all lifted gently into the air and replaced themselves in a bowl in the corner.

  He was perspiring a little by now. But he did not let up. There were still spinspace and tonespace to practice. He stepped through the rear doorway into his storeroom and withdrew several conical tops and gyroscopes, all treasures salvaged from the remains of an ancient toy store. From under the sofa he pulled a wooden board with numerous dimples in it, into which he set the various tops and gyros, setting each one to spinning. That was the easy part. Then he worked at canceling their spinning, stopping their rotation and making them topple over as quickly as he could manage. After he had stopped them all, he spun them with his mind again, this time in the opposite direction, and repeated the process. As before, he repeated this ten times.

  He took a deep breath, wiped his brow with his sleeve, and returned these items to their storage places. With scarcely more than a minute or two for rest, he gulped a cupful of water from the sink and tossed a handful of coins onto the table. Concentrating, he made the discs into everflames, focusing the tonespace until all of them glowed with pinpoints of red light hovering above the coins. He then forced the intensity up and down with his mind, making them cycle from red to blue-white motes and back to red over and over again, singly and in groups. By now he was freely perspiring. He extinguished the everflames and made the air around him an imaginary coldbox, cooling himself in the sudden fog that condensed out of the silent air and poured down his body like a reversed fountain, a cylindrical waterfall of blessedly refrigerating mist that cooled him.

  He was canceling out this weave when he heard the sound of the door's bolt being thrown back. Lester rushed into the room, clearly agitated.

  “Where have you been, Lester? Spying on ladies? I mean, I'm glad you are making enough headway with your vanishing to be able to come and go as you please, but, really, we must have a talk about ethics. You must underst – ”

  “It's not that,” the apprentice interrupted. “Aria overheard you telling the Governor about the men you captured and she wanted me to see if we could learn something.” He stopped to catch his breath “So she snuck me in and I sat invisible outside the cell when they brought them in. There's something you need to know.”

  Xander sat down on the sofa with a grunt. “There are a lot of things I need to know. Like how she overheard us, for one thing. The Governor and I were alone.” He regarded the boy. “Have you been teaching her invisibility?”

  “No. I've no idea how she heard you. Maybe she was just outside the door. Who cares? That's not the point. She was worried about the trial.”

  Xander grimaced. “She's not the one who should be worried about the trial,” he said.

  “Well, she was. Obviously, when word gets out the citizens will be howling for blood. And with the possibility of an army on the way, she was afraid the Governor might be tempted to use torture to get confessions and a quick trial so she can move on to more important things, like mobilizing the army.”

  Xander pursed his lips. “If you even think that's possible,” he said, “you have a lot to learn about the Governor. And so does Aria. I would have thought she knew her mother better than that.” He got up and paced across the room to the table and picked up an apple. “So, did you learn anything useful?” He took a bite of the fruit and chewed.

  “You could say that.” Lester sighed. “Unfortunately, Aria must have had to go to a lesson or something, so I haven't been able to tell her yet. But yes, I did learn something, and it's big. It changes everything.”

  When Xander heard what he said next, he nearly choked on his mouthful of apple.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Pretty sure. If he is, and he's innocent, the trial could get complicated. I couldn't see which one he was, but I'll recognize his voice. ”

  “Damn. And I thought life was complicated enough already.” He sat down on the sofa again.

  “Oh it gets worse. The Texans have a wizard in the building. I heard him reveal himself to them and tell them not to worry, that he'd rescue them.”

  “WHAT?” Xander was on his feet before he could think. “How do you know he was a wizard?”

  Lester fidgeted. “Well,” he said, after a moment. “I couldn't see him, but from what I heard they were pretty shocked to learn he was there, as if he had been lurking in the room invisible like me and just suddenly appeared in front of them. One of them even said something about it, asked him if he was a wizard.”

  Xander began to pace back and forth. “Right under our noses? But how could he be Texan? The Honcho's in a sort of partnership with the TCC, the Texan Catholic Church, and they're dead set against wizards or anything to do with the Tourists.”

  “I'm just telling you what I heard. Are you just going to pace around and eat that apple? We have to get word to the Governor!”

  “Quiet, please. I need to think. We need to anticipate his actions, not just react to them. How is he planning to get them out? I could sneak in and out of here any time I wanted to. But take a whole group of prisoners out with me? Probably more than I could manage without being seen. Either he's better than me, or he's thought of something I haven't.”

  “Are there wizards better than you?”

  Xander exhaled. “Anything is possible. I'm good, son, but when you become a wizard, never make the mistake of assuming there couldn't be someone better than you. For all I know, there's tricks I haven't even thought of. If this guy knows invisibility, then we have only one chance to stop them. Once he gets them outside, we might never see them again.”

  “Before you stop to make a plan, we need to keep them bottled up in that cell. One of us needs to guard them, and that's you, wizard. You need to get down there, now, before this guy locates the key to that cell.”

  Xander was moving toward the door as Lester was speaking, but at this, he halted in his tracks. “He said he was looking for the key? Then maybe he's not as good as I thought.”

  Lester stared at him. “Why not?”

  “Because a real wizard wouldn't need a key,” Xander told him. “All ordinary locks are just collections of moving parts. Anything that can move can be controlled with pathspace.”

  “How?”

  “Because it's already in motion.” He picked up another apple and held it in front of Lester. “The Earth like a ball, spinning and also moving in a circle around the Sun. That means the Earth and everything on it, every rock and blade of grass, is already moving. Already on a path. Once you can control pathspace, you can change that path, influence it. And that means you can make things move.” He released the apple and let it float back to the bowl on the table.

  Lester's mouth was open. He closed it.

  “Come on, let's move,” said Xander. “You're right, there's no time for a lesson now.”