The priest was inside Tecmessa’s effective range and Aristide parried desperately as he fell back, kicked to the priest’s knee, and fell back again. The priest hissed, thrust. Aristide dodged inside the thrusting spear and cut upward beneath the priest’s arm, slicing through the triceps. The spear fell from nerveless fingers; the tall black-robed figure staggered with shock. Aristide drove upward again, this time with the point, through the ribs and to the lungs and heart.
Blood fountained past the priest’s needle teeth and the tall, slender body began to fall. Aristide cleared Tecmessa from the corpse and rolled just in time to avoid a blast from the third priest.
Aristide rolled to his feet, the sword on guard. The third priest hobbled toward him. He had got an arrow through his left knee early in the fight, and had spent most of the combat kneeling, protecting his followers from inbound arrows. Now he had no choice but to take the fight to the enemy.
The clay ball quested out from his right hand. The left carried a long, curved sword.
Aristide took a step back, keeping his distance.
“May I suggest that you surrender?” he said. “By now your position is quite hopeless.”
The priest snarled and continued his lurching march. An arrow whistled past his head.
“You should fire all together,” Aristide told the archers in a loud voice. “And from as many directions as possible.”
Archers fanned out on either side. The few remaining outlaws—they were down to eight or nine—crept along in the wake of their priest. Many were badly wounded. Desperation clung to their faces.
“You can’t defend against the arrows,” Aristide told the priest. “The second that ball of yours moves to cover an arrow coming from one flank, either I’ll take you or you’ll be hit by arrows from another quarter. So I suggest you drop your... weapon, and we can discuss your fate like reasonable men.”
The priest hesitated. He seemed to consider the matter.
Apparently he decided that Aristide’s analysis was correct, because in a single purposeful motion he raised his sword and slashed his own throat.
The bandits gave a collective moan as their leader fell.
A few fought to the last, but most tried to surrender.
The Free Company of Grax was not in either case inclined to mercy.
Aristide did not participate in the brief, bloody massacre, but instead retreated to the body of the second priest he’d killed and squatted before the clay ball that lay by its tangled, knotted cord. There was a dab of blood on the end of the cord, which caused the swordsman to examine the hand of the dead priest. The cord was not tied onto the priest’s finger, but grew out of it—the cord had been alive.
Aristide wiped Tecmessa on a clean part of the priest’s robes, then sheathed the sword. He took his dagger out of his belt and wound a bit of the cord around the tip, then raised it to examine the ball more closely. It was a dusky red in color, and plain-featured, without runes or script or magic signs.
Bitsy dropped from one of the palms and came up to rub her cheek against the swordsman’s free hand before she gazed up at the dangling ball.
“It seems harmless,” she said.
“I imagine it is. Now.” He rose, took a cloth from his pocket, and wrapped the ball carefully before returning it to his pocket. He looked up.
The battle was over. Overexcited convoy guards rode furiously over the grove, kicking up dust and looking for someone to slaughter. Aristide went looking for whoever was in charge.
Grax’s deputy, Vidal the Archer was trying to properly organize the looting.
“Where’s the plunder?” he demanded, arms akimbo as he glared at the field. He was a dark-skinned man with short, bandy, horseman’s legs and a long, broad trunk, perfect for drawing his bow. He gave a bandit corpse a kick. “All we can find is their tents and their spare trousers.”
“I’d look behind the waterfall,” Aristide said. “If memory serves, it’s a traditional place for fabulous treasure.”
Vidal turned his horse and galloped to the waterfall. Aristide followed on foot. By the time he arrived, Vidal was peering behind the fall of water and calling for treasure.
“Grax promised me a double share,” Aristide said.
Vidal gave him a narrow, impatient look. “You’ll get it,” he said.
“I don’t want it,” Aristide said. “What I want is the three fastest animals you have here, and a bag of silver coin for remounts and supplies.”
Vidal looked at him with more interest. “You have an urgent errand?”
“Yes. I need to take the news of these priests to the College. The scholars there might be able to understand what they are and what they represent.”
Vidal nodded. “Very well,” he said. “You may have what you ask.”
“I would like a few other things as well,” Aristide said. “I would like the heads of the priests, their right hands, and the balls they used to make your troopers vanish.”
Vidal gave him a curious look. “Do you think you can get our people back?”
Aristide considered this. “It might be possible. I doubt it, though.”
Vidal made a pious sign. “May their next incarnations give them wisdom.”
“Indeed.”
Some of Vidal’s guard turned up with improvised torches, and they and their commander ventured behind the waterfall. As Aristide walked away he heard exclamations of delight and avarice at the riches found there.
He collected the hands, the heads, the clay balls, then retrieved his barb and fed him some of the sultan’s grain. He took off the saddle and laid out his sleeping rug in the palm plantation, as far from the sight and smell of bodies as possible. There he drank water, ate some dried fruit, and reclined with the tail of his turban drawn across his eyes. He reckoned it had been eighty turns of the glass since he had last slept.
When he awoke the camp was still, most of the guards asleep after celebrating their victory and their newfound fortune. He found Vidal, who had not yet slept, and greeted him. Vidal gave him his bag of silver and led him to the corral, where he chose his three mounts. Vidal offered him food for himself and grain for the animals—any grass or bushes had already been grazed out by the bandits’ beasts—and then Aristide mounted the first of the horses he planned to ride that day.
“If you hear of any more of these priests operating in the world,” he said, “find out as many details as you can, and send word to the College.”
“I will,” Vidal said simply.
Bitsy leaped to her nest behind the swordsman’s saddle. Aristide rode away, leading his horses down the side canyon that led to the Cashdan and the route back across the desert to the Womb of the World.
It had taken him eight months to walk the route that had taken him to the Vale and the Venger’s Temple.
He would return in three, if he had to kill a hundred horses to do it.
The wall was transparent and looked out at the great metropolis beyond. No one had ever imposed any kind of architectural uniformity on the city, and the result was a skyline of fabulous extravagance. There were obelisks, pagodas, and minarets. Columns supported arches, arches supported domes, domes supported cupolas. Towers brandished horns, bartizans, mooring masts, and carved stone pinnacles with crockets. Triumphal arches crowned boulevards, and so did torii. There were stoas, cloisters, and pergolas. An enormous wheel continuously carried entire apartments high into the sky before lowering them gently to earth, and stopped in its rotation only when someone wanted to get on or off. A brace of towers circled each other as they rose, a pair of helixes frozen in a dance.
Buildings were made of stone, of metal, of marble, of glass, of diamond, of carbon fiber. Domes were plated with gold, with bronze, with light-absorbent fuligin, and in one case with the teeth of human children.
Connecting the towers were arching metal bridges, transparent tubes, or cars hung from cables. Swirling between the structures were bright spots of color, people in lightweight gliders risin
g on the updrafts that surrounded the tallest buildings. Below, people moved in carriages, in gondolas, in cars that traveled along tracks.
Aristide, hands in his pockets, viewed the prodigality of Myriad City and said,
The city alive with noise and light,
The flame of youth ablaze.
And I, in my stillness, content to be old.
“That’s the Pablo I remember.” Daljit, seated at her desk, looked up from her work. “Why are you Aristide these days?” she asked. “Why aren’t you Pablo any longer?”
“There are too many Pablos. I am bored with Pablos.”
She smiled. “I thought you were content to be old.”
“I can’t help being old,” he said, gruffly. “Pablo I can do something about.”
“Wielding a sword in some barbarian world isn’t exactly the stuff of old age.”
He turned from the window, took his hands from his pockets. He wore a pale shirt, white trousers, and a dark spider-silk jacket in a style twenty years out of date.
“The swordsmanship was incidental,” he said. “I was actually doing scholarship.”
“Of what?”
“The implied spaces.” He walked to look over her shoulder at the spectra glowing on her display. “Anything?” he asked. “Nothing yet.”
The room was long, with two conventional doors that swung on hinges. The walls and ceiling were tuned to a neutral color so as not to provide distraction. Long tables with polished surfaces held a broad assortment of machines and small robots, most of them inactive. There was a smell of heat, of ozone.
Aristide contemplated his companion. Daljit seemed compact as opposed to small and gave the impression of having a highly organized, responsive body that didn’t require size or reach for its effects. She had expressive brown eyes beneath level brows, and a mole on one cheek that provided a pleasing asymmetry. She wore a silver bracelet with a bangle and numerous rings, which indicated that she was aware of the grace of her long hands and fingers. She wore a white high-collared tunic, knee breeches, and silk stockings with clocks.
She and Aristide were old friends, and they spoke with the ease of a long acquaintance. Though they’d kept in touch, he hadn’t seen her in person in sixty years, at which time she had been tall and bosomy and was crowned by hair of a brilliant henna-red shade.
She rested her chin on her fist as she looked at him. “What are the implied spaces, exactly?”
He considered for a moment. “If we turn to the window,” he said, and illustrated the point by turning, “we observe the Dome of Parnassus.”
She turned. “We do. It wants cleaning.”
“The dome, you will observe, is supported by four arches, one at each cardinal point.”
“Yes.”
“Presumably the architect knew that the dome had to be supported by something, and arches were as meet for the purpose as anything else. But his decision had consequences. If you stand beneath the dome, you’ll see that there are blank triangular spaces beneath the dome and between the arches. These are called ‘squinches,’ believe it or not.”
Dal jit smiled at him. “I’m delighted to know there are things called squinches, whether you invented the term or not.”
He bowed to her, then looked out at the dome again. “The point is, the architect didn’t say to himself, ‘I think I’ll put up four squinches.’ What he said is, ‘I want a dome, and the dome needs to be supported, so I’ll support it with arches.’ The squinches were an accident implied by the architect’s other decisions. They were implied.”
“Ah.” She straightened and took her chin off her fist. “You study squinches.”
“And other accidents of architecture, yes.” He turned to her, put a hand down on its reflection in the polished onyx surface of her desk.
“Say you’re a die-hard romantic who wants to design a pretechnological universe full of color and adventure. Say you want high, craggy mountains, because they’re beautiful and wild and inspiring and also because you can hide lots of ores in them. Say you also want a mountain loch to reflect your beautiful high-Gothic castle, and a fertile plain to provide lots of foodstuffs that you can tax out of your peasants—many of whom are brain-clones of yourself, by the way, with a lot of the higher education removed, and inhabiting various specially grown bodies of varying styles and genders.”
“You know,” said Daljit, “I would have liked to have been a fly on the wall when the medieval scholars and the Compulsive Anachronists, or whatever they were called, discovered that they couldn’t afford their own universe without financial aid from the fantasy gamers, and that their tidy little recreation was now going to be full of trolls and dinosaurs.”
Aristide grinned. “Perhaps you’re underestimating the percentage of medievalists who play fantasy games.”
“Perhaps.”
“But in any case, the fertile valley has to go adjacent to the ocean, because the river’s got to go somewhere, and in the meantime you’ve got this mountain range with its romantic tarn over here . . . so what goes in between?”
She looked at him. “You’re going to tell me it’s a squinch.” “Bingo. By the time you’ve got all your computations done and dumped all the energy into inflating a wormhole from the quantum foam”—Aristide made little rubbing gestures with his fingers, as if he were sprinkling alchemical powders into an alembic—“and you’ve stabilized the wormhole gate with negative-mass matter, then inflated a soupçon of electrons and protons into a pocket universe complete with a flaming gas ball in the center... Once you’ve got your misty mountain range and your misty river valley, what goes between the mountain range and river valley is implied by the architecture, and is in fact a high desert plain, like the Gobi, only far less attractive.”
A whirring began as one of the machines in the room turned on its fans. Daljit looked briefly at her displays, then turned to Aristide again.
“So you study this desert?”
“I study what adapts to the desert. The desert wasn’t intended, so whatever lives there wasn’t intended to live there, either. It’s all strayed in from another ecosystem and adapted to the desert, and it’s adapting with surprising speed.”
“And what lives there?”
He gave a private little smile. “Ants and spiders, mostly.” “Your chosen field seems less than enthralling.”
“The sword-swinging bandits provided all the excitement necessary.”
She gave him an appraising look. “So you really fought bandits with your sword? And murderous priests devoted to human sacrifice?”
Aristide reached to touch Tecmessa, which was at present carried in a long, flat case with a carrying strap, and which leaned against Daljit’s desk.
“I cheated,” he said. “And in any case, the certainty of reincarnation devalues heroism as well as tragedy.”
“But still. It’s not the same as pressing a button and killing them at a distance, is it?”
“No.” His expression was grim. “Though I didn’t actually kill any human beings—just the priests, who I imagine were constructs.”
Even so, he thought, it was very personal. When he ran them through he could feel their life trembling right through the hilt of the sword. Felt the tremor fade as the life left them.
Still it hadn’t been anything nearly as bad as the Control-Alt- Delete War. You were always terrified then, terrified every time you saw someone sick, every time you heard a sneeze or a cough. Every time you sensed sickness in your own blood, you had to wonder if it was the Seraphim or a common cold that had a hold of you.
You would wait for your friends or loved ones to go into a coma, and then you knew they would have to die. Because you knew that if they woke up, they would not be themselves anymore, they would be pod people.
Sometimes, when the authorities were overwhelmed or sick themselves or out of reach, you had to kill the sick yourself. No matter how much you loved them.
Strangulation was best, because that way there was no blood t
hat might contaminate you, or not much. But however you did it, you would have to go into quarantine, to wait in a little room with a bed and water and canned food, and if you shivered while you waited, or felt a prickle of sweat on your forehead, you would sit in silent cringing agony and wonder if it was the first touch of the Seraphim.
Aristide turned away from Daljit, faced the nearest wall. He didn’t want her to see the memory in his face.
There was no point in frightening her. If something like the Seraphim was happening now, she would be frightened soon enough.
“I understand that the priests were constructs,” Daljit said, “but why were they made so conspicuous? You’d think they’d want to hide among the population.”
“Except for the adventurers and anthropologists who come through the Womb,” Aristide said, “the people of Midgarth are stranded in the pretechnological world their ancestors built. They’re superstitious, and the priests were designed to be terrifying examples of the power of their god.” He felt moisture on his palms and wiped them on his jacket, where the intelligent spider silk began the business of decomposing sweat.
“One of the bandits we captured was a sincere convert, I think. He led us to the priests’ lair firm in the belief that we’d all be sacrificed alive.”
The nearest machine gave a chiming sound. Daljit turned to her displays.
Her even brows knit as she looked at the display. Aristide turned and looked over her shoulder. She gave the display instructions and viewed the data from another angle. Then she sighed and threw herself back in her chair.
“I’ve examined your object with chemical sniffers,” she said, “with microimagery, with ultrasound, with microwaves, with spectrometry and X-rays and with lasers, and all I can tell you is that the damned thing is ordinary terra-cotta. I can give you the precise amount of trace minerals in its makeup, but it doesn’t look unusual.”
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