“Pray I did right . . .” She muttered the words, staggered, then vanished, leaving only several drops of a sticky black substance on the tiles.
Outside the doors, the lasers hissed a moment longer.
Across the solar system, five satellite launch doors opened, waiting for the return signal that would unleash sunfire on the Enemy.
XI
AGAIN, THERE WAS the dream of the crossroads, the red and the blue, the black and the gold, and they were even more real, as if I only had to wish to step through the black curtain and stand upon that uncertain intersection.
I held back, almost as if there were something to wait for.
Then—perhaps it was a door opening, a footstep on the staircase, but the faintest of sounds— and I was awake, heart beating quickly and staring at the closed door.
Although the room was dark, except for the dimness of the glow rod, it could have been morning for all I knew. I did not think so, not with the tiredness and the soreness I still felt. Finally warm, I was wrapped in the two old quilts that Allyson had laid out for me.
Another faint step, and I relaxed slightly. The tread was too light for Jerz Davniads—he shook the floors when he moved. Even the stone of the cellar hallway would have resounded. That meant either Allyson, her much older sister Isolde, or their mother.
Whssssppp . . .
A robed figure slipped inside the doorway, carrying a second glow rod.
“Sammis?”
I nodded, relieved that it was Allyson, then whispered as I realised she couldn’t see me. “Here. On the bed.”
By now I could see a rueful grin. “Where else would you be?”
“What time is it?”
We were still whispering.
“Close to midnight.” She sat down on the very edge of the bed, her high-necked robe wrapped tightly around her. “Father stopped by your drive, not long after you left . . . Sammis, those were ConFed Marines, and they wouldn’t talk to him. They wouldn’t even let him go until they had checked his name and position and searched the runabout.”
“I know. I know. They burned the house . . .” My voice caught. Despite myself, I had trouble talking. “. . . kept watching the house, with weapons, ready to shoot anyone who tried to get out . . .”
“Sammis . . . why? What were you doing?”
“Nothing . . . you know Dad . . . all the trouble he took for the court . . . all the years . . . and his father . . .” I shook my head. In the darkness it seemed only half real, yet I was hiding in the Davniadses’ servant’s quarters.
“Your mother?” She extended a hand, and I took it.
“I just don’t know . . . never . . . never would have believed it . . .”
“We’re leaving in the morning, Father says. That means midday.”
“Leaving . . . ?”
“Sammis, things are much worse than we thought. Father says that the whole Mithradan expedition was wiped out, including the space stations there. The power link was destroyed. There were riots in Inequital, and the broadcast video channels are off the air. There are some audio channels broadcasting, but from the east. Nothing from the capital.”
I was tired, and sore, and my back was still bruised from the dream fall I had taken—had it only been a day earlier? None of it made sense.
All I could do was shake my head. I couldn’t even say anything. I think my cheeks were wet, because even with the glow rods I had trouble focusing.
“Are you all right? No, that’s a stupid question . . .” Allyson put an arm around my shoulders, and until she steadied me, I hadn’t realised that I was shaking all over. “You can hold on to me. Just hold on to me.”
I did. As if she were the only thing solid in a dissolving world, as if she were the only warmth in winter.
One of her hands, cool and warm at the same time, brushed my hair out of my face, kneaded the back of my neck to ease some of the hurt, some of the stiffness.
“Move over a little,” she suggested. “My feet are cold.”
And I did that too, as she lay down next to me, holding me almost as tightly as I held her.
When I could see again, clearly, Allyson was staring at the ceiling, even though she still had one arm around me, and I had both of mine around her.
“Worried?” My voice was unsteady.
“Me?” She kept looking at the ceiling.
“You.”
For a while, neither one of us said anything. I thought I could hear the whistle of the wind outside. Otherwise, the house was silent.
“Yes. Father says that we’ll be safer at the summer place in Olviad. It was originally a family refuge from the Ronwic times. The grey steamer . . . is special . . . too. Father used to race, you know.”
“Your father wants to wait out the storm?”
Allyson nodded. “He wasn’t happy about that, but he said there wasn’t any choice. The marines upset him. He didn’t say much, but I could tell he was worried. Mother doesn’t understand anything. And Isolde—she was in Inequital, but father says there’s nothing to be done . . . nothing to be done . . .”
By then, Allyson was shaking. So I told her, “Hold me. Just hold me. I’m right here.”
And she did, and I think we both shook, hanging on to each other, knowing that a familiar world was coming apart, and not knowing why.
Outside, the wind whistled softly, on and off, as if the storm might be dying down.
Inside, behind the timber and stone and plaster, Allyson and I held each other, trying to hold off the storm, or what it had so suddenly come to represent, our feelings jumbled together between us and the quilts.
“I need to get back upstairs . . .”
“I know . . .”
“Father will be checking here in the morning, and . . .”
“I know that, too.” Jerz Davniads was a friendly man, but he would certainly not hesitate to turn me in to the marines if he thought it would improve the chances of his family’s survival. He might not think so, and wouldn’t turn me over unless it would help. But there was no sense in risking it.
“Sammis . . . ?” Allyson turned her face toward me, her long hair brushing my cheek.
“Ummm.”
“I wish it had turned out differently.”
“So do I.”
She leaned toward me, letting her lips touch, then warm, mine.
I held Allyson more tightly, feeling for the first time, really, how soft she felt against me, and how sweet she smelled.
“I have to go . . .”
“I know . . .” I knew, but I didn’t have to like it. If her father woke up and went searching for his daughter, or couldn’t sleep and wanted to prepare for the trip, I didn’t want him making his way to the cellar. Neither did I want to let go of Allyson.
“I don’t want to go, Sammis.”
“I know.”
“But I have to.” She kissed me again, and then pushed away from me and swung her feet to the floor, reclaiming her slippers. “I have to . . .”
“I know.” I felt stupid and helpless repeating the same words time after time, and all I wanted then was to keep holding on to Allyson.
She took her glow rod and slipped to the door. “I’ve left everything I could get for you . . .” Her voice was a whisper.
“If you hadn’t . . . I don’t know what . . .”
Her shoulders trembled as she took the three or four steps from the sagging old bed to the door. She was gone before I could even finish my sentence, and I was staring at a softly closed door. A closed door on what might have been. A door closed on . . . but there was no point in dwelling on that.
Queryan memories are long, and the round-ups and the burnings of the Eastron sympathisers, and of the witch-wraiths before that, had been pounded into my head by my own father.
For a long time, I lay in the jumbled quilts as the room cooled, thinking about nothing, then trying to decide what I could do, or where I could go. For everyone in Bremarlyn would know me, and in this time of chaos,
no one would stand up for me—no one but Allyson, and she had done what she could. That was more than enough to get her burned should anyone discover it.
I got up and smoothed out the bed, folding the quilts as I recalled they had been folded. I checked my own uniform, which remained slightly damp, and put it on. Strangely, my cloak was dry, and my boots had never been damp inside.
After dressing as quietly as possible, I looked through what Allyson had brought—and thanked her mentally again. Not only was there the food and the tool kit, but also a small hatchet and a folding knife with several blades, and a folded square of waterproof ground cloth. All the non-food items were dusty, which probably meant that they wouldn’t be missed, but all looked serviceable.
I took my nearly empty pack and placed everything in it, except for the knife, which went into my pocket, and the gloves Allyson had given me earlier. Then I pulled on the cloak and the gloves and swung the pack into place.
The door from the room opened easily. I stopped to listen. Not a sound from upstairs—although I had not expected any, since it had to be well before dawn. Still, my steps were light, if not noiseless, as I slipped to the big latched door.
Hsssst. . . click. Despite my best efforts, the latch rasped.
I held my breath and listened. No sounds, except for the moaning of the wind outside.
Holding the door against the wind so it would not swing inside and hit the wall, I stepped into the night—or the predawn darkness.
Overhead, I could see some stars between the swirls of fast-moving clouds. The wind was light and skitterish, with gusts of warm air, then cooler air. From what I could see in the dim light, most of my tracks had been covered by snow and wind.
Since there wasn’t much I could do about hiding my tracks, I walked to the far end of the wall, where the double stone steps came down to the lawn. The higher ones were clear of snow. Glancing up at the windows and seeing no light, I walked up two steps in the snow, and then turned and retraced my path to the lower door. From there I walked backwards along the wall until I neared the point where the other set of steps went up toward the courtyard and the kitchen. They were clear in the centre, and my prints did not show.
The courtyard was dusted with snow, but only in the west corner had it drifted more than a finger deep. By scuffing my boots side to side, I obscured my prints enough that they did not look recent, and with the hint of warmth in the wind, after sunrise they might not be visible at all.
Like our drive, the Davniadses’ was raised a handspan or so above the lawn, and the centre part had been windswept. I checked the house, but there were no lights. Going down the drive was a risk, but Jerz Davniads wasn’t the sort to chase me without considering the consequences— assuming he saw me at all. And taking the drive left fewer tracks.
It might be days before snow left parts of the woods path. Besides, anyone could be coming or going down the drive. Only Sammis Olon would be using the woodlands path.
At the curve in the drive, just before it entered the woods on its slope down to the road, I looked back at the house. In a way, I had hoped to see a single candle, or something. But the windowpanes were dark, and the hot-cold wind whistled across my cloak. I watched for another moment, then waved to Allyson, or no one, and began the hike downhill.
XII
“THE WITCHES OF Eastron? What a strange conceit, coming as it did from the only non-monarchical culture in Queryan history. Yet the thread of the so-called ‘witches’ appears in folklore, literature, and even in diaries for a period of close to a millennium.
“The references span four phases of government, including the Fylarian Fragmentation, and demonstrate remarkable consistency . . .
“. . . women (or men) who did not age, who were seen in places too far apart for them to have travelled the distance, who displayed remarkable skill and dexterity, who avoided war and violence, even for the best causes . . .
“None of the attributes of the so-called ‘witches’, except for the rapid travel, and that could have been mere coincidence, are that remarkable, especially given the extraordinary hatred that devolved, either in Eastron or Westron, upon those accused of being witches. Yet even into modern times, the witchcraft charge has been used . . .
“All in all, the remarkableness of the conceit has been its continuation, given the mildness of the evils attributed to such witches—they lived a long life, possibly an endless one, and they could travel far distances in the blink of an eye. Yet such charges destroyed whole families in the early days of Eastron and even into the founding of the Westron Chartered Monarchy . . .”
Archival Text Fragment
Temporal Guard Archives
Quest, Query
1200 N.G.E
XIII
I KEPT TO the side of the Davniadses’ drive, and to the edge of the road after that. There was nowhere else to go—not by the road.
Father said that there had been talk of extending the road until it reached the Wayland Highway on the other side of the hills, but the Engineers had never started the work. My choices were clear—blunder through the still snowy hills or risk the road in the darkness before dawn, accompanied by wind and chill, before the marines started their usual canvass of the area and all the residents.
Like the Davniadses’ drive, the crown of the road was clear.
Click . . . click . . . crunch . . .
My steps sounded louder in my ears than they probably did in fact, but the sound spurred me to set my feet more carefully on the down-grade.
Once I reached the sweeping ninety-degree turn above our driveway, I stopped and listened. Silence, but that didn’t mean anything. Not where the ConFed Marines were concerned. I edged off the road and into the snow-covered grassy depression that was almost a ditch—on the opposite side of the road. Stepping through the snow, I kept my head low. Before long, I reached the point across the road from the low stone pillars that marked our drive.
Whhhsttt . . . whssssss . . .
Only the whisper of the wind broke the stillness—that and the sound of my breath.
Was there still a guard by the pillars? A marine detachment watching the smouldering ruins of the house built by my great-great-grandfather?
I glanced toward the pillars, but could see nothing but two smudges of grey against the shadows of the evergreen hedge and the overhanging trees. As I strained to make out whether there was a guard posted, the dream impression of the red-blue, gold-black intersection returned, somehow right behind my eyes, even closer than in my dreams.
Crack.
The sound had come from behind me. I could feel eyes on my back, and I grasped in some way for the dark intersection, knowing that only that could save me, if anything could.
Without understanding how, I was on the other side of the black curtain, seeing through a veil the snow-drifted depression where the three marines looked down on a set of footprints that came from nowhere and went nowhere.
From that no-time place, I could hear nothing, but one of the ConFeds made the ward gesture from the Verlyt rites. Another had a shredder aimed at where I would have been, where I had been instants before.
Suspended there, I dared not move, not that I could. So I watched as the three marines stomped through and around where I had been. Finally, one followed my tracks backward until they reached the hard stones of the road and disappeared.
My unplanned disappearance in plain sight might lift suspicion from Allyson and her family, since I hoped that the marines would not walk hundreds of rods back uphill and through the Davniadses’ courtyard to compare footsteps in the snow. At least, I hoped I had left no tracks in the snow between the two places.
As I hung out of time, waiting, a marine reappeared with an officer, a tall and burly man. The marine pointed to my footprints, gesturing, then shaking his head. The burly man seemed to be exasperated, doing some pointing himself, jabbing a finger toward the marine, who kept backing up.
Even though I could feel nothing where I was
suspended, I could tell that I was getting tired. The veil, or curtain, seemed to flicker in front of my eyes. What could I do?
My thoughts jumped back to the ConFed Marines guarding the house, and as they did, the scene through the black curtain wavered, then refocused, and I was standing in the orchard, still behind the curtain of time or place. But this time I knew that as soon as I willed it, I could be in the orchard.
With the marine tents, and the row of coffins laid out, some drifted over with snow, I did not want to reappear there. Not at all.
The Academy? No . . .
Finally, I concentrated on a place where I used to hike with Mother—the Long Wall Trail above the town, on the far side of Bremarlyn. I knew I could not go very far, but I had to go somewhere.
I thought, hard, and tried to visualise the trail and the way station, especially the way station, the one-windowed old log cabin.
Crrshhh . . . thud . . .
Sprawled on the trail, perhaps fifty rods from the way station, I looked around quickly. By now, the dim light of predawn lent everything a ghostly aura.
Chiichiii . . . chchiichii . . . An enormous grossjay stared down from the overhead branch at the interloper stretched out on the trail.
On this side of Bremarlyn, the snow did not seem to have been quite so heavy, and the temperature was markedly warmer. Not enough that I could do without cloak and gloves, but enough that I was comfortable in what I wore.
Sitting up slowly, I continued to look around. I did not stand. My knees felt like water, and I had a splitting headache.
Even the idea of trying to call up that contradictory mental intersection made me wince. Right now, that was for emergency travel.
Chichiii . . . chchiiichi . . .
No other recent footprints marked the mix of loose dirt and drifted snow, and the grossjay’s scolding seemed more of a greeting.
The Long Wall Trail was more of a summer path, anyway.
Finally, I gathered my feet under me and lurched upright in the dawn. And, after a time, I managed to stagger to the way station.
Timediver's Dawn Page 5