Implied Spaces

by Walter Jon Williams

  He eased himself backward into the fluid. It was the temperature of blood. The silver liquid lapped over his ears, his throat. He closed his eyes.

  In his ears he heard a deep throbbing. The throbbing was regular, hypnotic. His breathing shifted to match the rhythm of the throbbing.

  He slept. He sank, the silver fluid of the pool of life filling his mouth and nose.

  A few forlorn bubbles rose, and that was all.

  The glass turned twice before Aristide rose to the surface. He opened his eyes, took a breath of humid air. Slowly he swam to the rim of the pool, found a step beneath his feet, and rose.

  As he stepped from the pool the silver liquid poured off him in a single cascade, the last rivulets draining from his legs onto the flags, then slipping into the pool like some covert boneless sea creature seeking shelter beneath a coral ledge. Not a drop was left behind. There was a salty taste in his mouth. Aristide accepted his clothes from the attendant and donned them. He slipped Tecmessa’s baldric over one shoulder, shouldered his pack, and tipped the attendant.

  “May the pool give you many lives, warrior,” the attendant said.

  “And you.”

  He stepped out into a courtyard filled with dust and noise. A turbulent circle of gesturing travelers had formed around the towering figures of Nadeer and Captain Grax, both of whom were gesturing for order.

  Nadeer’s patience was exhausted. “Silennnce!” he bellowed, each hand drawing a curved sword that sang from the scabbard.

  The crowd was struck dumb by sheer force of character. In the sudden hush Aristide shouldered his way through the crowd, and laid eyes on a bruised, bleeding young man kneeling before Nadeer, surrounded by Free Companions brandishing arms. The seneschal stood by, watching in silence.

  Grax looked at Aristide and grinned with his huge yellow teeth. “Your advice was good, stranger. We caught this spy riding from camp to alert the bandits.”

  The young man began what was obviously a protest, but Grax kicked him casually in the midsection, and the man bent over, choking.

  “Confess!” roared Nadeer, brandishing both swords close over his head. The prisoner sought for resolve, and somewhere found it.

  “You but threaten to send me to my next incarnation,” he said through broken lips. “I welcome such an escape.”

  Nadeer snarled around his tusks, then replied in his booming lisp.

  “You miss the point, spy. We don’t threaten to send you to the next incarnation, we threaten to make this incarnation an extremely painful one.”

  With a flick of the wrist, he flashed out one sword, and the flat of it snapped the prisoner’s elbow like a twig. The prisoner screamed, clutched his arm, turned white. Sweat dripped slowly from his nose as he moaned.

  The seneschal watched this in silence, his expression interested.

  “Who are you?” Grax asked. “Who sent you? What are your orders?”

  The captive’s breath hissed between clenched teeth. “It won’t make any difference,” he said. “I may as well talk.” He seemed to be speaking more to himself than to his audience.

  Though speak to the others he did. His name was Onos. He was a younger son from the Green Mazes, his only inheritance a sword, a horse, and a few bits of silver. In a spirit of adventure, he and some friends joined the army of Calixha. At this point the horse disappeared from the narrative. Finding service during the siege of Natto not to his taste, he and his friends stole horses, deserted, and became caravan guards. Finding this tedious as well, they became robbers.

  “He isn’t good even at that,” Grax remarked. “What the lad needs is discipline.” He looked down at the captive. “If he were in my company, I would make a proper soldier out of him.”

  Onos bled quietly onto the flagstones. “I thought a life of adventure would be more fun,” he muttered.

  Grax kicked him once more in the midsection. “It’s fun for me,” he said. “Perhaps you lack the proper attitude.”

  The captive gasped, spat, and swore. Nadeer looked down at him. “You have my leave to continue,” he said.

  Onos wiped blood from his mouth with the back of a grubby hand. “Our gang joined another gang,” he said. “We weren’t given a choice. So now we’re servitors of the Brothers of the Vengeful One.”

  “Never heard of them,” said the seneschal, the first words he had spoken.

  “Neither had we,” said Onos. “Neither had anyone, until a few months ago, and then all the freebooters heard of them.” He grimaced and put a hand to his ribs. “We joined them or we died.”

  “Who are they?” Grax asked.

  “Priests. Monsters. Monsters and priests.”

  “Monsters how?” asked Aristide.

  “They’re—” Grimacing. “Another species. Ones I’d never heard of, or seen. Blue skin, eyes like fire. And they sacrifice captives, and anyone else who disappoints them.”

  There were gasps from the listeners as this terrifying rumor was confirmed.

  “Your mission?” Grax asked in the sudden silence.

  “We knew the caravans were delayed here for fear of us. I was told to travel to the caravanserai and report on your plans—whether you’d come on, or try to retreat.”

  “Would you attack us either way?”

  “That wouldn’t be for me to decide.” Grax raised a foot. “Probably!” Onos said quickly. “Probably we’d attack!”

  The questions turned to the bandits’ strength, and where they would most likely strike at the caravan. The bandits were said to have two hundred riders, though not all of them would be available at any one time, since they raided not just the caravan routes but the plain of Gundapur, below the great desert plateau. The route down from the plateau, through the Vale of Cashdan, was the usual ambush site.

  Aristide stepped forward. “I would like to ask some questions of the prisoner, if I may.”

  Nadeer looked at him. “You may proceed.”

  Aristide looked at Onos. “How long have you been here at the caravanserai?”

  “Fifteen or twenty days.”

  “You have a mount?”

  “I have a horse, yes.”

  “And during that time,” Aristide said, “you could have left for Lake Toi whenever you desired. You could have abandoned your fellow bandits and those disagreeable priests and got away with your skin. And yet you remained…” He let this thought linger in the air for a moment.

  “Why?” he asked finally.

  Onos swiped at his brow, leaving a dusty track on his skin. “I’m afraid of them. They’d come after me.”

  “You could have asked the seneschal, or some other official, for protection.”

  Onos looked at the seneschal. “He’d just hang me from the tower and announce a great success at suppressing the bandits.”

  Aristide’s brief acquaintance with the seneschal had not been such as to make this implausible. The seneschal himself, looking on, declined to be offended, and in fact seemedamused.

  “My point,” said Aristide, “is that you could have run, and you didn’t. Therefore you aren’t merely a thief whose gang was annexed by a more powerful outfit, but a willing member of the organization.”

  Onos looked at Aristide with a kind of sulky resentment. The others glared at Onos with increased malevolence.

  “How many caravans have you plundered?” Aristide asked.

  “Eleven, while I’ve been with the brotherhood.”

  “And the people in the caravans killed or sacrificed by the priests?”

  “All those we could catch,” Onos said. “Yes.”

  “What happened to the loot?”

  “It’s still there. At the Venger’s Temple.”

  There was a stir among the onlookers. A calculating look appeared on the faces of Grax, Nadeer, and the other caravan guards.

  “The Venger’s Temple is your headquarters, I take it?”

  An affirmative nod.

  “The spoil is there with the other loot, from the raids onto the p
lains?”

  “Except for that which was used to purchase supplies, yes.”

  Aristide looked at Nadeer. “I imagine that avarice is never far from our friend Onos’ mind,” he said. “A share of that loot would give him a comfortable life far from here, perhaps even make him rich. That is why he hasn’t fled from his monstrous priests.”

  Onos, defeated, slumped on the flagstones, did not bother to deny it.

  Grax turned to the seneschal. “He is convicted out of his own mouth. Shall we turn him over to you, to dispense the sultan’s justice?”

  The seneschal began to walk through the crowd to his office. He waved a hand in dismissal.

  “Why bother me with it?” he said. “Do what you will.”

  Grax looked at Nadeer, and they both shrugged. Nadeer’s shoulders had barely returned to their normal position before one of his swords sliced out to separate the bandit’s head from his shoulders.

  The body was wrapped in an old cloak and given to the pool of life, to feed the chthonic spirit believed to dwell in the menhir. The head was stuck on a spear in front of the caravanserai’s gate.

  The head bore a disappointed look. Onos had probably expected more excitement than this.

  “I wonder if his next incarnation will have learned anything,” Aristide asked, as he and Nadeer paused to view the head on its spear.

  Nadeer only snorted at the swordsman’s question.

  “May I have the bandit’s mount?” Aristide asked. “I would be more useful in this adventure if I were mobile.”

  “It’s that barb yonder.”

  The horse was a cream-colored gelding, a little long in the tooth but deep in the chest and strong of spirit. The saddle and tack were serviceable. Aristide took the barb for a brief ride over the desert to get acquainted, then fed the animal and watered him. He sorted through the bandit’s belongings but found nothing of interest.

  He helped himself to another of the sultan’s free meals, then slept in the bandit’s tent for a few hours, until the sound of trumpets, conchs, and ram’s horns told the travelers to ready their mounts and assemble.

  Aristide walked his new horse through the bustle. Dust rose, obscuring the sun, and he drew the tail of his headdress over his mouth and nose. By chance Aristide passed by Ashtra, who was struggling to lift her heavy water bag to its place on her palfrey’s saddle-bow.

  “Permit me, madam,” he said. He performed the task, bowed, and departed, his senses alert in case she called him back.

  She didn’t. He walked on.

  The caravan, big as a small army, didn’t actually get under way for another three turns of the glass. Once it moved, it moved slowly. The guards were mounted on horses, bipedal lizards, or the red six-legged lizards that moved with a side-to-side motion, like giant snakes. The lizards were cold-blooded, but in the high desert, beneath an unmoving sun, that scarcely mattered.

  The others in the caravan rode horses or Bactrian camels, mules or asses. There was one forest elephant. Their carts and wagons were drawn by oxen, horses, or ridge-backed dinosaurs. No small number proceeded on foot, sometimes accompanied by a dog pulling a travois.

  Aristide had his own difficulties, in that his new horse was afraid of his cat, snorting and backing away whenever Bitsy approached. It was an unfortunate fact that many animals disliked Bitsy—perhaps she didn’t smell right—and in the end Aristide had to hide her, making her a nest on the saddle blanket behind the high cantle of his saddle, where the horse couldn’t see her. The horse still scented her from time to time, snorted and gave a nervous look backward, but these alarms only increased its desire to move faster along the trail.

  Nadeer and the other leaders worked in a desperate fury to get the huge convoy ordered, and to move them at a steady pace. A huge cloud of dust rose above the column and turned the sun red.

  “The bandits will see this for fifty leagues,” Grax said, as he and Aristide rode ahead of the column. “We may as well have let the spy live.”

  “He won’t be able to tell them how we’re organized.”

  Grax showed tombstone teeth. “We’re organized?”

  The caravan only made five leagues before Nadeer called a halt, but at least the day had been useful as a training exercise. The guards had got used to working with one another, and had developed a system for scouting ahead. As the caravan laagered, as guards were posted, the last of the dust drifted away on the wind, and the curses of the drovers and the captains and one large, green ogre echoed through the camp, Aristide thought that perhaps the little army had done better than Nadeer knew.

  The glasses turned sixteen times before the trumpets blared again, and the vast column heaved itself onto its feet and began its trek. Everyone had got practice by now, and though the caravan didn’t move appreciably faster, it was more orderly and better-behaved. The guards were efficient, organized into an advance guard, flankers, and a rear guard that complained of wandering in the dust. Patrols regularly trotted ahead to the next hill, or rocky outcrop, to make certain no ambush was lurking therein.

  The principal delays occurred at water holes. It took hours to water the animals.

  The terrain grew rougher and began to descend. Each hill gave a broader view than the one before it, though the farthest views were always hidden by heat-haze.

  After eight or nine leagues the group came upon a battlefield, the water hole where the bandits had routed three caravans and their sixty guards. Dead animals and bodies lay in the sun amid broken wagons, flesh turning to leather, lips snarling back from teeth. It looked as if the caravans had been attacked when in camp, their tents strewn across a valley floor in no particular order.

  “A lesson in forming a proper laager,” Aristide told Nadeer. But Nadeer was busy shouting down those who wanted to stop and give the bodies a proper burial.

  “Do you want to join them in death?” Nadeer demanded. “Our lives depend on moving quickly through this place!”

  Nadeer lost the argument, chiefly because the convoy took so long to re-water that there was time for the burials anyway.

  The caravan rolled on. Halfway to the next water hole Nadeer called a halt, and the laager was formed by grim-faced drovers who made sure their weapons were within easy reach. Aristide wandered through camp until he found Ashtra. He observed her as she brewed tea over a paraffin lamp. She was in the company of a family moving to Gundapur, the father, a pregnant mother, and three children traveling in a two-wheeled cart. They were sharing their bread and dried fruit with her.

  Aristide watched for a few moments, then left unobserved.

  The next watering hole was a spring that chuckled from the foot of a great slab of basalt that towered like a slumbering giant over its little dell. Guarding the source of water was a deserted military fort, its tumbled walls having been breached at some point in the dim past. A black and unnaturally flawless menhir stood above the empty pool of life. Though the gates had long since been burned for firewood, the fort nevertheless provided more protection than the open desert for the most vulnerable members of the caravan.

  The next march took them along the watercourse. The spring water was absorbed by the ground before the convoy had gone very far, but the dry river bed was full of scrub that testified to the presence of water below the surface. The watercourse widened in time into the Vale of Cashdan, the great zigzag slash in the wall of the plateau that led down to the plains of Gundapur. White birds floated far below, like snowflakes drifting in the wind. Crags crowned with trees loomed above the narrow caravan route that wound through green patches of mountain grazing. The blue of a stream was barely visible before the Vale vanished into a huge floor of brilliant white cloud that stretched to the far horizon. Never would the convoy again be without water.

  Aristide stood with the captains on the edge of a precipice overlooking the Vale, peering down and pondering their options.

  “At least we no longer have to worry about a mounted charge over flat ground,” Eudoxia said, her blue arms
crossed on her chest. “I was troubled the whole body of them would charge in and cut us in half—they would have wrought such havoc that we might not have recovered our balance.”

  “Now we’re going to have to worry about people rolling rocks on us,” Aristide said.

  “Ay,” said Nadeer. His single eye glittered. “Like those fellows over there.”

  “Where?” Scanning the jagged walls of the valley ahead.

  Nadeer bent and picked up a rock the size of Eudoxia’s head. He hefted it for a moment in one green-skinned hand, then reared back and pitched the rock up into the grey sky. They all watched as it fell onto a granite pinnacle two hundred paces distant. There was a thud, and a cry, and a clatter as of a weapon dropped over the edge.

  “Good shot!” said Grax, impressed rather in spite of himself.

  “There’s one more.” Nadeer chose another rock, hurled it. There was a clang, and then they saw a body pitch off the crag, landing some thirty paces below.

  Aristide looked at the ogre. “Your depth perception,” he said, “is better than I expected.”

  Nadeer dusted his hands. Aristide turned his attention once more to the valley below.

  “We’re going to have to keep them from getting above us,” he said. “May I suggest small parties to secure each height before the main body arrives?”

  They grumbled about that, and Grax pointed out that his Free Companions were mounted soldiers, not mountain goats. But in the end they worked out an arrangement, much as Aristide had suggested, and the convoy again began to advance.

  Hours passed before every beast and cart at last began the precarious descent into the Vale, and then finally a rest halt was called with the convoy stretched along the headwaters of the Cashdan River, with every beast and every person within easy reach of water. It was impossible to laager, because there was no single place level enough to hold the entire body. On the other hand the possibilities of attack were severely limited, and the air was fresh and cool. Dry tongues, dry skins, rejoiced.