Umbo wasn’t sure he was happy about this. “Is it because you want me or because you need my ability to slow you down in time?”
Rigg rolled his eyes. “I’m the guy with the paths, you’re the guy with the ability to slow time for me. But it’s still me, and it’s still you.”
“So even if I can’t do everything you hope I can, you’d still want me with you?” asked Umbo. He hated how pathetic the question made him seem, but he wanted the answer.
“If you have an ability I desperately need, and you refuse to use it, then are you any kind of friend?” asked Rigg.
“I’m not refusing to—”
“Rigg, it’s such a pleasure to see you again,” said Loaf. “You’ve managed to pick quarrels with both of us now.”
“I’m not quarreling with anybody,” said Rigg, visibly calming himself down. “I’ve been trying desperately to survive day to day, and to learn how to survive year to year. I don’t want to align myself with any of the factions in the government. I don’t want to restore the Sessamid Empire, and I certainly don’t want to rule it. I want to get through the Wall so I can stay alive. And I want to bring my sister and mother with me.”
“So it’s all about what you want,” said Umbo.
“You asked me what you could do to help me!” said Rigg. “I’m telling you!”
“Well, to start with,” said Loaf, “you could get out of the middle of the street and stop attracting all this attention.”
“You’re the one who stopped here—” Rigg began, and then realized Loaf was joking. Or at least might be joking.
Rigg turned and walked away from them.
Umbo trotted after him. “Where are you going?”
“I’m getting out of the street,” said Rigg fiercely.
“Can I come with you?” asked Umbo.
“I hope you can,” said Rigg. “Because I need to talk to you, and I need your help.”
“Where are we going?” asked Umbo.
“To your lodgings,” said Rigg.
“Are you even going to ask me where we’re staying?” asked Umbo.
Rigg stopped and looked at him as if he were insane. “It’s me. The guy who sees paths. I know where you live.” Then he took off walking again, only this time Umbo realized that he was heading on the shortest route to their lodgings.
“What’s your sister like?” asked Umbo.
“Invisible,” said Rigg.
That was no answer. “Are you still mad?” asked Umbo.
“I’m scared,” said Rigg. “Total strangers want me dead.”
“If it’s any consolation,” said Loaf as he caught up with them, “for a minute there I saw their point.”
When they neared the inn, Loaf stopped them. “The bank has been watching us. They probably know where we live. What if they also know something about our connection with you? We did jump from a boat while in custody.”
“And Rigg is the only living prince of the royal house,” said Umbo.
“Nobody knows my face.”
“I think you told us about spies in the house,” said Loaf. “They know your face. Do you know their faces?”
“I know their paths,” said Rigg, “and they’re nowhere near here.”
“I’d feel safer going somewhere else.”
So they fell in behind Loaf as he made his way to a cheap little noodle bar. “Don’t order anything that claims to be meat,” said Loaf.
“You never warned me about that,” said Umbo.
“I didn’t think I had to, since you had two days of dysentery after ordering the lamb.”
“Are we sure it was the lamb?” asked Umbo.
“Eat it again and see,” said Loaf, with perhaps too much relish in his tone.
They sat at the bar and slurped their way through peppery broth-soaked short-noodles. Umbo didn’t have the lamb; he liked the radish-and-onion chicken broth better anyway.
“I’m not leaving without my sister,” said Rigg quietly, between slurps.
“That’s not our problem,” said Loaf. “We can’t get into your house anyway. We can’t get near your house.”
“I think General C. is getting ready to make a move,” said Rigg. “I only wish I knew whether he was in the group that wants me dead or the group that wants to make me . . . boss.”
“Does it matter?” asked Umbo. “You want to stay away from him either way.”
“But it’ll help to know whether they’re trying to get to me or my sister.”
“For all you know the whole thing is being orchestrated by your mother,” said Loaf.
“Everybody connects with everybody, eventually,” said Rigg. “So I can’t say it’s impossible. But I don’t think it’s likely. I think she just wants to be left alone.”
“And so she lives in that fancy house and meets with important people?” asked Loaf.
“She doesn’t meet with anybody.”
“They say that everybody who matters has some kind of connection with Flacommo’s house,” said Loaf. “They say that your mother is already boss in everything but name.”
“Trust me,” said Rigg. “From inside the house, it doesn’t look that way. She receives visitors, yes, but she’s never alone with them. She’s never alone with anybody except my sister.”
“So what?” asked Umbo. “I mean, so what either way? I thought you didn’t care about intrigues and plots and conspiracies. I thought you just wanted to get away.”
“I do,” said Rigg.
“So why not just go? Get your sister and your mother and get out of the house and go?”
“It’s not that simple,” said Rigg.
“I think it is,” said Umbo. “I think you like being . . . in the boss’s family. I think you like being important. I think you don’t really want to go anywhere.”
Rigg looked like he wanted to snap back a sharp answer, but restrained himself. “All right, yes, I like some things about being there. The food is . . . amazing.”
“And the famous and educated people?”
“I’ve met some interesting people, yes,” agreed Rigg.
“And access to the library? You said you spend a lot of time there.”
“The library is the closest thing I’ve found to being with Father. Like him, the library knows everything, even if I haven’t found a way to get it to tell me all that I want to know.”
“Well, we know stuff, too,” said Umbo. “Like for instance I know how to go back in time whenever I want. Going back a few days, I can get to the time I want within a few minutes. It’s harder when I’m going back more than a few months. I haven’t even tried to do a year. But still.”
Rigg looked genuinely impressed. “Was it hard? To learn to calibrate it like that?”
“Yes,” said Umbo and Loaf together.
“It was really annoying for a few months,” said Loaf.
“I can only find people when I know when they stayed in the same place—and I have to get to that place.”
“You have a better gift than mine, Umbo,” said Rigg, “and that’s the truth. But we both have better gifts than my sister. Hers is great when she wants to disappear, and when she’s doing it, she doesn’t age as fast as other people because she doesn’t actually live through most of the time when she’s . . . that way.
The countergirl wasn’t paying attention to them; nor were any of the other customers—but then, a good spy wouldn’t look like he was paying attention, would he? So they tried to be at least a little cryptic in the things they said.
“But she also moves so slowly,” said Rigg. “Like she’s half-frozen. And it’s dangerous. When people walk through her, it . . . damages her a little. When she walks through solid objects, it makes her dangerously sick.”
“Then she shouldn’t do that,” said Loaf.
“And she doesn’t,” said Rigg. “I’m just saying—her gift isn’t as useful as you’d think. But here’s the real question, Umbo. You’ve always been able to spread your gift to include me, even when w
e weren’t in physical contact. Does that only work with me? Or have you brought Loaf back in time with you?”
“It’s harder,” said Umbo. “Well, not harder, it just takes more concentration and makes me tireder.”
“So you’ve tried it with him?” asked Rigg.
“When we went back to steal one of the . . . items . . . from ourselves,” said Loaf, “he took me along. Yes, he can do it.”
“Steal from yourselves?” asked Rigg. “What would you do that for?”
“Ask Mister I’m-So-Funny,” said Loaf. “It never made sense to me.”
“Don’t pretend you didn’t enjoy it,” said Umbo to Loaf.
“We need to try something,” said Rigg. “When you put your whatever-it-is on me so I could see the people on the paths and go to their time, I went alone.”
“That’s because I didn’t know how to do it to myself yet,” said Umbo.
“So we need to see if you can put all three of us into that slowed-down time thing, and then see if I can drag all three of us back into a much earlier time. Not months, centuries ago.”
“Centuries? Like when we got the dagger?”
“Millennia,” said Rigg.
Loaf leaned over to Umbo. “That means thousands of—”
“I know what it means,” said Umbo. “Do you have a particular time in mind?”
“Yes,” said Rigg. “Eleven thousand, two hundred years ago.”
Umbo and Loaf both sat in silence, contemplating the implications of this.
“Before the calendar began,” said Loaf finally.
“Before humans existed on this planet,” said Rigg.
Umbo’s mind reeled. “Are you saying we’re not from here?”
“When we have more time,” said Rigg, “I have a lot to tell you—things I learned in the library, things I learned from the scholars. From Father Knosso’s research and from a guard named Ovilenko who was his apprentice for a while.”
“You’re trusting a guard?” asked Loaf.
“You don’t know him and I do, so don’t waste our time,” said Rigg. “I have to get back to Flacommo’s house, and soon, before somebody misses me. If they search the house and don’t find me, then when I do get back where will I say that I was? I came here to see if we could actually travel in time together.”
“So,” said Umbo, “let’s do it.”
Rigg started to stand up. Loaf immediately put a hand on his shoulder and pushed him back down into his seat. “Where do you think you’re going?”
“Somewhere with privacy,” said Rigg.
“Do it right here,” said Loaf. “Sitting right here. When we travel in—when we go back—we don’t disappear in the present time, do we? We’re in both places at once, right?”
“Yes,” said Rigg. “Or that’s how it worked before, when Umbo was providing the power and I was the only one actually traveling.”
“Then pick the oldest path you can find here, and see if Umbo can get all three of us to see it at once.”
“But this place isn’t all that old—there won’t be stools,” said Rigg.
“But if our butts remain in this time,” said Loaf, “then we won’t fall into the swamp or whatever.”
Rigg nodded. “All right, Umbo. I’m going to concentrate on a particular path . . . I’ve got it. Slow me down—and yourself and Loaf too.” All three of them held on to their noodle bowls, as Rigg stared into the distance, and somewhat downward, apparently concentrating on a path.
Umbo had never tried to slow down two people besides himself. It took some real concentration on his part. And it felt as if Rigg was pulling him just as much as he pulled Loaf. Rigg was taking him farther back than Umbo had ever gone. Like the time Umbo’s father had set him up on a peddler’s horse and the beast had taken off with him for a few rods. Umbo almost lost the connection a few times, and could hardly hold on to Loaf at the same time. But after a while he was able to hold it all together.
He could no longer see the noodle bar—though he was still sitting down on something. There was no town at all, nor any building. Just a man poling a boat slowly along a bayou among tall reeds in the dusky light of evening.
The man and the boat were much lower than Umbo, as if Umbo were on the top of a hill instead of on a stool on the floor of a noodle bar. They must have raised the ground level of Aressa Sessamo very high above the original delta.
Rigg whispered, “Can you see him? The boat? The reeds, the water?”
The man might have heard him, for it was nearly silent in the marshland in mid-day. He looked up from the boat and saw them; they must have been quite a vision, a man and two teenage boys sitting in the air, holding bowls of noodles.
The man staggered in surprise, which overbalanced the boat and sent the man toppling backward into the water.
Umbo mentally let go of Rigg and Loaf, and eased himself back into the present. He felt dizzy. Mentally exhausted.
“A time before Aressa Sessamo even existed,” whispered Loaf.
“This isn’t the oldest city in the wallfold,” said Rigg. “And anyway, it was first built up about six miles from here. Floods have forced a lot of relocations over the years.”
“I feel sorry for the boatman,” said Umbo.
“He got a soaking—he’ll recover,” said Loaf.
“A vision of three men in the air, eating noodles,” said Rigg, and then chuckled. “What could the saints have possibly meant by that! Do you think somebody built a shrine there? The ‘Three Noodle Eaters.’” Rigg laughed a little louder. The bargirl glared at him.
“He was so far below us,” said Umbo.
“At the original level of the delta,” said Loaf.
“So the builders of the city brought all that dirt to build up such a high mound?” asked Rigg.
“They didn’t have to,” said Loaf. “The river brings down silt every year. You just start building up a higher island, and then after each flood season, you dredge out the silted-up channels so boats can pass, and what do you do with the silt? You pile it up, extend the edges of the island the city is built on. A few thousand years and you have a very large and fairly high island.”
“Which is why there can be so many tunnels and sewers under the city,” said Rigg, “even though we’re in the midst of the delta.”
Umbo looked up and saw something on the wall. He reached out and touched Rigg’s hand and then looked up again at a shelf high on the wall of the noodle bar. A statue of a man and two boys, holding noodle bowls.
Rigg murmured, “Ram’s left elbow.”
Loaf covered his face. “We were the origin of the Noodle-eaters.”
“I don’t know that story,” said Umbo.
“Why didn’t I recognize what was happening when the boatman looked at us?” asked Loaf.
“Because it hadn’t happened yet,” said Rigg. “I still don’t remember any such legend, but—it seems like whenever we do something that changes things in the past, there’s a new hero story.”
“The fertility of the land,” murmured Umbo, as the “memory” of the legend of the Noodle-eaters came to him. Just like the “memory” of the legend of the Wandering Saint had come to him at the shrine when he and Rigg were just setting out on their journey. “They symbolize a plentiful harvest, I remember now,” said Umbo.
“And it was us,” said Loaf. “How many of these legends were just . . . us!”
“If we’re not careful,” said Rigg, “all of them. But I had to know that we could do it.”
“We all three went together,” said Umbo. “Right?”
“It was flickery,” said Loaf. “At first I kept seeing the boatman and then not seeing him.”
“But the flickering had stopped by the time he saw us, right?” asked Umbo.
Loaf nodded.
“I want to go back to the time before the Wall existed,” said Rigg. “And then just walk on through. But if we’re in both times at once, what if the—influence, whatever it is, the repulsion from the Wall in
our present time—what if we still feel it as we’re passing through?”
“Maybe it’ll be less,” said Umbo.
“I hope so,” said Rigg. “But maybe we’ll need my sister, too. So we won’t exist in any one moment or any one place for longer than a tiny fraction of a second.”
“Can she extend her . . . talent to other people?” asked Umbo.
“She had to be touching me, but yes, we’ve done it.”
“What do you need me for?” growled Loaf.
Rigg shook his head. “We don’t need you—to get through the Wall. But we’ll need your experience, and maybe your fighting ability, once we’re on the other side. When Father Knosso found a way through the Wall—drugged unconscious and drifting in a boat—some water creatures on the other side dragged him out of the boat and drowned him.”
“Ouch,” said Loaf. “I have no experience fighting murderous water creatures.”
“We’re not passing through where Father Knosso did,” said Rigg. “We don’t know what we’ll find. Umbo and my sister and I are really smart and important and powerful and all, but we’re also kind of small and weak and not particularly scary. You, on the other hand—you make grown men cry when you look at them angrily.”
Loaf gave a short bark of a laugh. “I think we have several messages from your future self, Umbo, to prove that we can get the crap beaten out of us.”
“Only when you’re seriously outnumbered,” said Umbo.
“Which might happen thirteen seconds after we get through to the other fold,” said Loaf.
“If it happens, it happens,” said Rigg. “But I know this—if we don’t go where nobody from this wallfold can follow us, then my life—and the lives of my mother and sister—aren’t worth a thing.”
“Can your mother do . . . anything?” asked Umbo.
“If she can, she hasn’t confided in me,” said Rigg.
“If we don’t like it in the fold next door,” said Loaf, “we can always go back.”
“You’ve been stationed at the Wall,” said Rigg. “Have you ever seen a . . . a person, or something like a person, beyond the Wall?”
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