“So they’ll believe, right enough.”
“And that’s just what we want. Now, I’ve got the signed papers and permits that will open the prison doors, allowing us all the way into the very cell of the condemned man. We are to present ourselves as members of his family—his sisters, cousins, and so forth.”
“How old is this prisoner?” Songbird inquired.
“About twenty-five.”
“That old! Perhaps I can be his niece.”
“Yes, that will serve.”
“The two of you are a pair, by your talk and ways, even with the one of you all bundled up. You could be sisters,” Gyppix observed. “And the man in the Witch is the like.”
“Almost,” Jianna decided, after a moment’s reflection, and then realized, She knows him.
“But I’m not; I’m odd woman out. Who’d believe I’m any kin of yours?”
“Everyone will believe it, so long as you don’t speak. Don’t say a word, just cry a lot. Can you do that?”
“I’ve never been one for the whimpers, ’tisn’t my nature.”
“It’s pretense,” Jianna pointed out. “And it’s all to save the life of a resistance friend. Can’t you manage a little artifice for that?”
“Oh, aye.” Gyppix nodded. “For that, I can.”
“Good. Now, on the day that we go to the Witch, your sole aim will be to convince everyone—guards, turnkeys, and so on—that you are grieving kinfolk of the condemned, come to bid him a final farewell. This in itself should be easy enough, but the task is complicated by the need of frequent exit from and return to the cell. You’ll be forever asking the guard at the door to let you out for a few minutes, and then to let you back in.”
“If we’re there to visit the condemned, then why should we wish to leave?” Songbird inquired.
“You might say that you’re faint with emotion, and need a breath of fresh air. You could say that want to go out for something to eat, or that you need to relieve yourself. You could say that you want to run to the Cityheart to beg the Deputy Governor Gorza for a pardon. You could declare yourself unable to face the prospect of life without your beloved kinsman, and thus in need of a quiet secluded spot where you can kill yourself. It doesn’t matter much what you say—you need only find some pretext to go out, come back, and go out again, repeatedly.”
“If you’re meaning to fuddle the guard at the door with all this hopping about, you’re in for a surprise,” warned Gyppix. “Maybe he’s no educated man, but that don’t mean he’ll be so easy to fool.”
“He will be by the time I’m finished with him,” Jianna returned.
“Aye? And what will you do, then?”
“I am sorry to interrupt.” The sweetly youthful voice of Songbird broke in. “But what do you suppose those Wanderers over there are up to? And why are there so many of them?”
Jianna’s eyes followed the pointing finger, and her breath caught. The undead group had swollen, increasing in number to—how many? She counted quickly. Twelve. Twelve of them gathered there; far more than she had ever before seen assembled in a group, and the effect was eerie. Twelve stiff-jointed puppet-figures; twelve emaciated, deteriorating bodies, visible through minimal ragged coverings; twelve empty greyish faces. Where had they all come from, so quickly, as if obeying some silent summons? Why did they seem so indefinably, atypically purposeful?
Wanderers did display signs of organization and purpose, from time to time. She had heard of such things far too often in recent days to dismiss the tales. But communal undead activity always seemed to aim—if the term applied—at the dissemination of the plague, and the group before her possessed no such intention. Its members displayed no interest in or even awareness of the living in their vicinity. Certainly they attempted no approach or contact; quite the contrary. Their attention focused upon one another. They had drawn themselves into a tight, inward-facing knot. They had linked hands. They were still as mummies, save for the serpentine stirring of their wisps of hair and rags of clothing in the breeze. But the new growth on the ground and the tree branches in the distance never moved. There was no breeze.
Jianna’s innards fluttered. For once, all thought of Falaste Rione fled her mind.
“What are they doing?” she whispered. She realized, almost to her own surprise, that she was terrified.
“Naught,” opined Gyppix. “They are but lost, sorry things. They seek the life they once had, but won’t never find it.”
“Oh, do be sensible,” Songbird advised. “Just look. They’re up to something or other. We simply don’t know what.”
But what can they do? Jianna wondered. Apart from spreading the sickness, what have they the power to do?
The answer did not come in words, but the world spoke.
The atmosphere went dim and subtly red in color, as if the smoke from the pyres were tinged with blood. She imagined for a moment that something had blocked or obscured her eyepieces, and she wiped them both. It did not help, and she tweaked the mesh guards aside, then gasped, for the alien hue of the air intensified, and certain distortions of line and form that she had attributed to defects in her mask remained prominent. Appalled, she gazed around her at a world twisted and misshapen, but impossible to analyze, for she could not see it clearly. Somehow it seemed that the nature of daylight had altered, that the rays of the sun bent and curved like flexible wands, refracting and reflecting at unpredictable angles incomprehensible to the human eye and mind.
“Oh, what is it?” Jianna gasped aloud, and stiffened at the sound of her own voice, which seemed to clang and reverberate like a gong. Her own words, lost in the aural chaos, were unintelligible. Springing to her feet, she repeated the query, which emerged as plangent gibberish. She heard other noises, other echoes, either near at hand or traveling across wide spaces, but she could not judge the distance. Turning, she beheld her two companions likewise standing, and for a moment it was difficult to distinguish between the two, for their outlines wavered, and harsh coruscations wreathed their forms in a red glare punishing to the eye. She raised a gloved hand to shade her eyes, and saw a little better. Gyppix had both palms pressed tightly to her ears, and her eyes were screwed shut. Songbird’s arm flailed, and deep, echoing noise came out of her mouth. Some message was doubtless intended, and Jianna guessed the sense at once, for her own instincts were screaming the same message: that the Wanderers were responsible for this transformation of their surroundings. In some manner that she could not begin to fathom, the Wanderers were doing it.
“Let’s get away!” Even as the words left her mouth, Jianna recognized their futility. Speech was useless—she would have to rely on gestures to convey meaning. But Gyppix’s eyes were shut; she would see nothing.
Jianna stepped forward, hand outstretched to touch the other’s shoulder. Her foot came down upon ground that felt insubstantial and unreliable, as if the soil and rock had lost solidity—almost as if they were fading out of physical existence. Her hand halted in midair, for the tall and sturdy figure of Gyppix was likewise losing solidity. Her frame seemed to flicker—one moment substantial, quite material; the next, blurred of outline and hinting at translucency. Jianna set her jaw and forced herself to touch the other, whereupon her worst fears were confirmed. She felt next to nothing beneath her hand; a resistance scarcely greater than the resistance of thin air. Worse—Gyppix herself seemingly felt nothing. Her eyes remained tightly closed, and she evinced no awareness of the pressure upon her shoulder. And Jianna, regarding her own gloved hand, her own outstretched arm, beheld a phantom. The light of day shone through her flesh and bone. She did not truly exist. She was a ghost, a delusion, and the world of reality held no place for her.
Panic roared through her, conscious thought lapsed, and she knew nothing beyond the primal need to escape an alien universe. She was running, running through red mists, across land that shuddered like a stricken beast. Sometimes she stumbled and fell to the ground, but knew no pain, for neither the ground nor her body posse
ssed real substance. The air that she breathed seemed to have lost its power to sustain life, but she did not die; perhaps the present metamorphosed universe did not include death.
She had no idea how long she ran or how far she went. At last she realized that her pace was flagging, and she became aware that the red tinge had bled from the smoky air. The sights and sounds all about her were those of present-day Vitrisi, grim and discouraging, but comfortable and familiar by comparison to Strenvivi Gardens. She was whole, sound, and back in her own world. She halted.
Blind panic receded, and her intellect resumed function, but the fear did not leave her. It retreated into the marrow of her bones and the deep crevices of her mind, and there waited.
She understood next to nothing of what she had just experienced. She sensed that the outlandish disruption had somehow been connected to the assembled Wanderers, but she had no idea what they had done, how they had done it, or why. She likewise did not know how large the area or areas of the city affected; whether such phenomena were transient in nature—or permanent. She suspected that Uncle Innesq would have been able to explain all of it to her. Just now, however, it was difficult to believe that she would ever see Uncle Innesq again.
There was no telling what had happened to Songbird and Gyppix. The meeting had terminated before she had finished explaining the rescue plan to them. Assuming they had survived Strenvivi Gardens, another meeting could be arranged by way of Lousewort. This should not be difficult, but would impose additional delay, and she did not know how much time Falaste Rione had left.
Jianna resumed progress, striving hard to keep her mind fixed on practical matters. Impossible, however, to bar her thoughts from the Strenvivi Gardens. She was there again amid the red mists, where the conjoined powers of the undead somehow contrived to shatter the laws of nature. She was a ghost in an unimaginable universe that did not want her; but it seemed that she could not stay away.
The Strenvivi Gardens were all but empty of living human beings. A corps of corpses loitered, its presence presumably supporting the new Pocket, as such discrete environmental aberrations would quickly come to be known.
One man remained. He stood beside the stone bench, overlooking the empty pond. A long cloak shrouded his figure, concealing the stick on which he leaned. A wide hat shaded his ruined face. If the transformation of his world troubled him, he showed no sign of it. The hungry gaze of his single eye ranged the reddish mists, unaware of impediment. He drew deep breaths as if searching for a scent, indifferent to the lifeless quality of the air. He studied the stone bench at length. He bent and ran his hand across the surface, undisturbed by the absence of familiar solidity. He examined the surrounding ground with care, then straightened and stood for a time like a weathered monolith. Finally he took his leave, his slow progress bringing him within a few yards of the assembled Wanderers, upon whom he did not waste so much as an incurious glance.
THREE
The land was changing, its contours sharpening. The hills rose higher and steeper, their granite bones jutting through coverings of soil and vegetation that sometimes seemed flimsy as beggars’ rags. Great grey outcroppings brushed with flecks of rose broke the long swathes of burgeoning ground cover. The trees were hardy, squat, and gnarled, as if bowed by the winds of centuries. Those winds blew ceaselessly, and they carried no scent of smoke, cooking, farmyard, tilled fields, or anything else connected to the activities of humankind. Here, the air smelled as if the world were uninhabited.
Despite the rugged strength of the terrain, its foundation was flawed. From time to time, the ground trembled, ever so slightly.
The Magnifico Aureste detested these episodes of instability. They were disconcerting, and disruptive of progress; hence a waste of valuable time. They threw him off balance and threatened to pitch him face-forward to the ground; an embarrassment he preferred to avoid within sight of a group already viewing him with jaundiced eyes. His popularity, never of a high order at the best of times, had plunged to new lows since the death of Vinz Corvestri. Occasionally he fancied that even Innesq regarded him with some constraint. But Innesq would soften, eventually; he always did.
Although unsettling, the tremors of the hills were in fact an encouraging sign. The Quivers could not be far off, and soon the party would reach its destination. The arcanists would perform whatever peculiar ritual they deemed appropriate. The Source’s ailment, whatever it was, would be corrected. The world would be speedily set to rights, and then they could all go home to resume the interrupted business of real life; in Aureste’s case, the hunt for his missing daughter.
Unless, of course, she had returned home in his absence. In his mind’s eye, he saw Jianna in her cloak of garnet wool trimmed with bands of black fox, her dark hair drawn back into a very grown-up twist—just as she had looked the last time he had set eyes on her—hurrying up the wide stairs to the grand front entrance of her home. He saw Belandor House as it had always been—magnificent and pristine—then realized with a pang that he was looking into the past. The pure and perfect Belandor House of his imagination no longer existed. And the pure and perfect Belandor daughter?
Such imaginings were profitless. Better by far to fix his thoughts upon immediate matters. These days, the Overmind was immediate; excessively so. To date there had been no reappearance of those eerie wraiths whose first manifestation had sent the expedition’s servants running for home. But They—or perhaps more properly, It—although unseen, were always close at hand. Aureste could feel the pressure upon his mind from the moment he woke in the morning until he fell asleep at night. Sometimes sleep itself offered no refuge, for It pursued him into his dreams. He had long since abandoned his view of It as the incorporeal equivalent of a human aggressor, motivated by familiar and comprehensible desires, to be opposed and conquered in the manner of human adversaries. It was something altogether different, invulnerable to conventional assault. Its attempted incursions could be resisted. It could be excluded and thwarted, but never defeated and banished by ordinary human agency; that task belonged to the arcanists.
With Corvestri gone, were there enough of them left to perform it? He wanted to ask his brother, but circumstances scarcely permitted a quiet exchange. Even when he took his turn pushing Innesq’s wheeled chair along the short stretch of endlessly self-replicating pathway, there was no privacy, and he could almost have imagined that his brother preferred it that way—a new and disturbing thought.
There was likewise no hope of conversation at the end of the day, when they paused to make camp. At such times, Innesq invariably sought the company of the two youngsters, Vinzille and Nissi, with whom he would spend the remaining wakeful span. Perhaps the girl Nissi did not exactly qualify as a youngster. Her age was impossible to gauge, but her otherworldly fragility and extreme timidity seemed childlike.
Narrowly, almost jealously, Aureste observed the trio, and soon realized that Innesq was instructing the two neophytes in the arcane arts. Their rapt expressions as they listened, their precise echoes of his gestures and expressions told the story. Moreover, something of Innesq’s own attitude unconsciously revealed itself. Clearly he esteemed and respected both of his talented pupils, yet perceived the need for improvement. If he entertained any doubts or fears, he concealed them.
Well, Innesq would lift the two brats to the necessary level of competence. He had to, that was all.
It was twilight, and he was at work with them now, his wheeled chair stationed amid the deepening shadows some yards removed from the evening’s cookfire. The two youthful forms were, as usual, seated on the ground before him; the two faces raptly upturned. No doubt they were attentive and diligent students; impressively gifted, too, or so his brother maintained. It would all conclude satisfactorily, Aureste assured himself. Innesq would mold and fashion this raw material as required, thus confirming the group’s ability to function in the absence of Vinz Corvestri. Corvestri was no great loss.
His cogitations were interrupted by an onslaught of ex
ceptional suddenness and intensity. There was no warning, no expressive thrill of the atmosphere. One moment, normality reigned; the next, the Overmind was battering the gates of his mind.
Aureste drew his breath in a gasp. The world around him blinked out of existence as his full consciousness turned inward, where the will of the Other struck like a battle-ax. Never before had he felt It so strongly. For a moment resistance seemed futile, and he felt himself hurtling down some steep slope, at whose bottom lay the surrender of identity. Almost, in that instant, this seemed as peaceful and comforting as it was inevitable. Then his very well-developed sense of self came to the fore, allowing him to slow the capitulatory slide. He remembered who he was—the Magnifico Aureste, master of House Belandor, master of himself and of others. Not a man to be invaded and absorbed by some presumptuous incorporeal subversive.
He clung to this recollection, and it halted his descent, but the support was fragile and the assault overwhelming. The vastness of the Overmind enveloped his intellect, and there was something in that ancient force at once imperative and seductive. Beyond the raw power there was a voice—not a voice that traveled through matter to reach mortal ears, but a voice that spoke at the dark bottom of his brain. He had the feeling that he would hear and comprehend the words if he chose to listen closely, and some treacherously pliant part of him desired it, while the strong self, the Magnifico Aureste, refused to hear.
But for a time, it was not certain that refusal was possible. The purposeful pressure upon his mind was gigantic; his thoughts and will buckled beneath it. The alien syllables trembled on the verge of intelligibility. If he let them in, he would hear them always, and he would hear nothing else.
It took all the strength and determination at his command to preserve his identity intact, and more than once he believed himself lost. At length some combination of rage and desperation fueled a mental explosion that blasted the invasive presence from his mind. He shuddered, and was himself again.
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