The Waters Rising

by Sheri S. Tepper

  Well, it was in the hands of fate. They would do as they liked. She went back to her horse between the two huge stones and led him past them into a narrow wash well hidden from the road, where she made her own fireless camp. She slept well until dawn, when she was awakened by shouting, then screaming, then the panicky whinny of horses, everything subsiding into silence.

  She took a large water bottle from her saddlebag and went back to the other campsite once more, still hiding among the trees. She did not approach the barely smoking fire, reading the signs of what had happened from a distance. The tall one lay in his blankets, dead, his throat slit. Next to him, the bulky man was on his knees with a knife in his back and his hands tight around the throat of the young one. Bulky wakes up, decides to kill thin man, probably father or uncle of young one; young one sees him do it, knifes him, fatally but not immediately, and gets choked to death before Bulky dies.

  Stepping softly, leaving no footprints, she went from water bottle to water bottle, emptying them on the ground, rinsing them out, partially refilling them, recorking them, returning them to their place. One would not want an innocent person to drink from those bottles by accident, even though no truly innocent person would ever suffer thereby. So few of us, she thought, are truly innocent. So few of the truly innocent survive for very long. She let the horses go, untying one end of the picket rope as if it had come loose by itself. The tie ropes slipped easily off the loose end, and the horses wandered away into the woods. Left to themselves, they would probably return to the abbey.

  She stopped suddenly, conscious of eyes on her. She turned, slowly. Oh, yes, eyes indeed. She made a questioning sound in her throat. The muzzle turned toward her, amber eyes staring hungrily. Wolves. They had smelled the blood. Well. Why not? These men had forfeited the right to any sanctified burial and the herb had used up its potency. It could not make a wolf be more wolf.

  “Take them,” she said, staring into those yellow eyes. “Leave the horses alone!”

  She went away, back to the place where her own horse waited. Behind her was the sound of feeding, the usual furor over reinforcement of status: it was the way of wolves.

  She reviewed what she had heard the men say about the prior. Now she knew who. Now she had an idea why. She returned to her campsite, breakfasted, saddled her horse, and rode back to the trail that had entered the road from the west. If she was not wrong, this would be the way to the Vulture Tower.

  The track, obviously the way the woodcutters went, was well traveled in its earlier stages, wagon-wide and rutted deep, though any wagoneer who tried it in snow time would find it muddy going. Precious Wind rode beside it, where the mud was somewhat mitigated by grasses. Other trails led away on either side, as wide and as mired, though not as deep. The newer the trail, the newer the stumps cut along the way. The men from the abbey were making clearings, not cutting the forest down from edge to edge, and she nodded approvingly. Clearings were good for game.

  The final few side trails were only horse or deer trails, leading vaguely north or south, but Precious Wind continued west. She estimated that from the place she was now, it would be the better part of a day’s ride to the abbey, and it was only moments later that she saw the top of the tower thrusting up through the trees ahead. Leaving the horse hidden, she approached on foot, stepping where she would leave no footprints. It was a stubby, cone-roofed tower, a privy built at the south side, a stable on the north, the rooftop barely taller than the closest trees. She went around the stable and found the tower had been set on the very rim of the valley. The ridge at her feet fell away a lethal though not towering distance. It ended in a stony flat with another ridge at its outer edge. These precipitous ridges alternating with wide, flat ledges continued westward, each corrugation a bit lower than the one before, a giant’s washboard, the whole extending south farther than she could see. This was the west edge of the so-called Highlands of Ghastain. The cliffs went on north, around the corner, where they formed the south wall of the valley they had traveled through to Benjobz. Far to the west, all the way down, a pale line of roadway cut through the lighter green of pasture in a straight north-south line. This was the road that ran gently downward toward the Lake of the Clouds after passing the Old Dark House, its location marked only by the top of an ugly, black tower thrusting above the trees.

  Everything between the place where she stood and that distant road was a patchwork of brush, broken trees, and stone—stone piled in enormous heaps or fallen in avalanches that had broken through the ridges farther down. Every flat surface reflected sunlight from barely hidden pools or pits; every slope was awash with little runnels of meltwater. Maps had told her that this vast slope ended far to the south in the marshes around the Lake of the Clouds. In its current flooded state it was the mid to northern end of the legendary Dragdown Swamps. Precious Wind felt no urge to explore it.

  Inside the tower, a cistern had been built at the left of the door, the stairs at the right, spiraling a quarter turn onto a lower floor where the cells were, then on around the tower wall once more and through a hole in the floor above. The trap that closed the access was leaning against the wall, but she went up the steps as she went everywhere: very carefully, making sure no one was above her. The stairs entered a half-circle room with one window and one door. A half-full water bucket sat beside the fireplace, where a dry kettle was suspended above a pile of powdery ashes. A small cupboard stood in the corner, and she used her handkerchief to open the door to see a small store of food: bread, cheese, dried meat, dried fruit, a few potatoes, a tightly lidded box of tea, a few bottles of cider, a basket of candles—scant comfort for anyone who had to stay here long. A plate and an empty mug stood on the table along with a box holding a man’s personal belongings, presumably Jenger’s: a razor, soap, cloths and sponges for washing himself. Also a comb cut from tortoiseshell and a well-made brush with clumps of hog bristles set into tiny holes in a carved wooden back. Both the comb and the brush held long, dark hairs.

  Carefully, still using her handkerchief, Precious Wind removed all the hairs from the brush and comb, wrapped them in a bit of paper she found on the table, and put them in her pocket. She washed the comb and the brush in the water bucket and dumped the water out the window. Then she took the handkerchief Xulai had given her, unfolded it, removed half of the duchess’s hairs, and put them into the comb and the brush, winding them deeply. They were somewhat longer than the hairs Jenger had left there, though they were the same color. She used the knife to cut the hairs shorter before replacing brush and comb, restoring the handkerchief and remaining hairs to her pocket.

  The narrow door let her into the loft where the birds were. She opened it only a crack, enough to see two of the cages. A large arrival cage had a door that was propped open. It held about twenty birds, the ones who regarded the tower as their home. The other cages, now empty, should have held pigeons that homed on other locations. As she moved her head forward to peek around the door, she saw the side of a frame on the back of the door.

  She stepped back. A picture? Unlikely in this place. A map? Possible. A mirror? Unlikely, and yet . . . She stood in thought, thinking of mirrors and curses and a tactic called the mirror defense.

  A blanket was folded at the bottom of the bed. Holding it high before her, she entered the room and draped the blanket over whatever it was, holding the blanket there as she lifted the thing. Chances are it would reflect only a particular person, but she would not take the chance. It was only hanging from a hook by a wire. She rubbed a finger against the blanket, feeling it slide easily: probably glass, so very likely a mirror. Holding the wrapped bundle, she examined the room. In addition to the cages and food for the birds, it held another small table and a little shelf of supplies: a pad of thin papers sewn together along one side with strong thread; a spool of the same thread, to tie the messages when they were rolled; a box of little message tubes; pens; an inkstone; a water jug.

  She wrapped the blanket into a package, using the threa
d to tie it fast. Moving quickly but carefully, she went down the stairs and out to the privy. It had a board seat, but it was hinged as she had thought it would be. The pigeon droppings had to have been disposed of somewhere and this seemed the likeliest place. She heard nothing when she dropped the bundle into the evil-smelling pit, which meant it went straight and very far down, as it would if this were a natural fissure in the stone. The deeper, the better.

  With the mirror gone, she felt somewhat more at ease as she went back to the cage room, where she shut the cage door and sorted among the birds to see whether any carried messages. Three of them did. She removed the tiny metal vials from their legs, putting the vials in her pocket. Another vial, capped, lay on the table, and she took that one as well. She would not take time to look at them now. If the thing she had dropped down the privy had been a mirror, someone might be trying to look through it from the other side, and that someone might already be on the way here. There were scribbled papers in a small box on the table; she rolled them together, tied them, and put them in her pocket.

  Finally she took away the props that held the cage door open and broke the door in a way that could appear to have been an accident. Abasio had been here; presumably he had freed the birds in the smaller, empty cages along the wall where birds for various destinations were kept. With the arrival door broken, any birds still here or still to arrive would not be trapped inside.

  Downstairs, she stopped to examine the cell, looking closely at the shackles. Xulai might have been held there, and when she rubbed the shackle with her handkerchief there were stains that might have been of blood. She did not know if the stains were old or new, but they could not stay there if Xulai’s blood was in them.

  She returned to the loft to fetch several message papers and a candle, noticing as she picked up the pad that it bore the impression of an earlier message. That one and several beneath it she thrust into her pocket with the others. Downstairs again, she lit one of the papers with her flint lighter, lit the candle from that, and carefully held the shackles in a fold of her cloak as she burned the edges and the surfaces of the cuffs, including even the chain links that might have pinched flesh. The leg shackles were clean. Xulai had been wearing boots. She searched for hair, skin, anything that Xulai might have left behind. Nothing. Xulai had been fully dressed; her hair had been braided; it would have been unlikely that anything was left behind. Still, Precious Wind went over the top of the stone bench, inch by inch, over the wall behind it, over the floor itself, all of which were very slightly damp, as though they might have been washed. Perhaps they had. Abasio was no fool.

  She tossed the candle down the privy and made sure the seat was down. On the way back, she rode through the trees, not coming near the trail until she had passed the first woodcutters’ trail. Even so, she stayed alert, stopping every now and then to listen for the clop of hooves. She was almost at the road before she heard them, just in time to slip away once more into the forest.

  Four mounted archers. She had seen them before as part of the mounted group that had stopped them on the road when they first met the duchess. She did not want to be on a road that those men might take. She did not want to be near enough that they could hear her horse if he whinnied. Far better to be behind them than before them. She crossed the trail and rode southward through the woods until she found a little glen where it would be safe to leave the horse. She tied him on a long rope near a grassy patch. No one would hear him but he would be close enough that she could get to him quickly. She took food and a blanket, just in case she had to spend the night, and returned the way she had come, this time cutting westward to intercept the trail to the tower.

  She found it and followed it until she was near the tower itself. Four horses and two pack animals were picketed among the trees. Two of the men were outside.

  “There’s no sign of Jenger anywhere out there,” said one. “Me’n Gabler have been all over the place. His horse is gone and there’s nobody outside, alive or dead, not anywhere close, and there’s no birds circling to show where a body might be.”

  His fellow nodded in agreement. “Well, one thing, he let all the birds go. There’s none here except tower birds. None for the House. None here for the queen. None for the duchess’s friend at the abbey. No sign of a prisoner. No sign anything happened to anybody, no blood, no nothing.”

  “Why did she send us here anyhow?” the first speaker asked.

  “To bring him back to the House. She says he’s been actin’ funny.”

  “You think he’s tryin’ to disappear? People try to disappear, she finds them.”

  The other man dropped his voice. “How does she do that?”

  “Nobody knows, and I’m not gonna ask her.”

  “She said bring him, bring anything that belonged to him. Clothes, that kind of stuff.”

  The one who had searched the tower said, “I’ve got everything in a sack: his clothes, his comb and brush, his razor. She doesn’t want the food, does she?”

  “She said everything! You better figure that means everything.”

  Both men went inside. Precious Wind stayed where she was. In a few moments the two who had gone inside came out again with new burdens, there to be joined by two others, one from the privy, one who came from the forest beyond the stable. They conferred in low voices for a few moments, then, shaking their heads, they arranged the bags on the pack animals, mounted up, and rode slowly back along the track.

  Precious Wind retrieved her horse and went back to the road, arriving in time to see them riding away northward on the Wilderbrook road. She counted the days. Day one, Xulai had disappeared. Early morning of day three, a message had arrived saying she had been rescued on day two. Day three, she herself had set out and had spent one night observing the abbey men who had come after her. Three days. The archers had arrived here on the afternoon of the fourth day. If Jenger had sent a message the minute he arrived here with Xulai, it would have been late that night or the morning of the next day before it was seen by the duchess. If the archers had set out at that moment, they still would not have had time to get there by road today. So, they came another way, or they had been dispatched earlier—or some combination of those factors. They had been sent because Jenger had been acting funny.

  And how would the duchess have known that except by the mirror? Precious Wind knew how the special mirrors worked. They were made by a machine. Each of a pair of mirrors had a unique pattern based on the genetic codes of the two individuals. Tingawans knew about that. The two could speak to one another through the mirrors. In each case, what one reflected the other showed. When Jenger stood in front of one mirror, the other mirror looked out at the duchess. She saw him, he saw her. Yes. She had looked back at him, read his expression, seen what he was doing, how he was acting. He didn’t need to be looking at her at the time. He didn’t have the mechanism to start up the mirror; she did. She could look through and see him, if he were within sight of it, without his knowing it.

  All it required was some cells from the body of each of them, plus the machines to prepare the glass, and the knowledge of how to use both. Pity she hadn’t kept the mirror. Perhaps she could have done something to send a false picture to the duchess since it no doubt reflected only to her. Best not! Too dangerous. What she had already done might well be sufficient.

  “The mirrors utilize a power source. What passes between the mirrors are transient energies. They are not spirits or ghosts,” her Tingawan teacher had said. “They never were anyone themselves. They are neither good nor evil. They are merely little vortices that for a time have a separate existence. If exactly the same pattern exists in two different places, what happens to one set of energies will influence the other, regardless of the distance between.”

  The lecture had not ended there. The teacher had gone on: “Using a similar technique, one set, while remaining complete, may have an additional pattern element included that changes or warps it so that it will eventually be unable to hold to
gether. The warped element destroys the complete pattern, that is, the person from whom the pattern came.”

  “You could kill someone with it?”

  “Yes. If you knew how. If you had the pattern. If you had the machines. The augmented pattern would have to be held in a kind of suspended animation until it was released in close proximity to the target. It does not last long enough to seek its matching pattern over a great distance.”

  That was how the princess had been killed. Before she became so weak that she could not talk, when they all thought the attack had been thwarted, the princess asked Precious Wind to explain what was happening.

  “Long ago, we found some ancient machines in Tingawa . . .”

  “I knew about that, but no more than that.”

  “In the Before Time they had a disease called cancer. Parts of one’s own body began to grow and attack other parts. It took them generations to learn how to fight it. Among the machines, we found one that we think might have originally been used to fight that disease. It could reproduce the code for individual people, or animals, or anything living. Our people experimented with the patterns of simple plants. To the pattern of the plant, they added part of the pattern of bacteria that killed those plants. The combined pattern sought out the plants and killed them. In the Before Time, if the pattern had been of the cancerous cells, they could have added something to kill them and only them. We saw the danger, the temptation. We put the machines where they could not be used. We never have used them.

  “I believe that there, in the Old Dark House, some old machines had survived. I think the duchess first took your code, then added something that would feed upon it. She carried it with her. She probably drove by here in her carriage—she often did that—and she set it free outside the castle.”