Pathspace: The Space of Paths

by Matthew Kennedy

  “Well, I do know where the holding cells are,” she said. “I'll distract the guards and you slip out behind me. Can you make it to the stairwell without me? I'll meet you there.”

  He shrugged and smiled. “I'll try not to disappoint the future Governor,” he said.

  Aria moved to the door. “Count to thirty, then follow me,” she whispered. Then she knocked on the door and raised her voice. “Coming out.”

  There was the sound of the bolt sliding back, then the door opened and she blinked in the brighter light of the corridor. She stepped out, leaving the door ajar.

  Now for a distraction. What works best with men? She let herself stumble against one of the guards and reached an arm around his waist as if she needed support.

  He stiffened for a second, startled, then pulled her against him. “Are you all right, Miss? Did he – ”

  “Oh good grief,” she said, straightening and pulling away after a moment. “Of course not. I just stumbled.” She had the attention of both of them now. She kept it by straightening her belt and tucking in her blouse, making sure to make the fabric press skintight against her breasts as she did so. They were smaller than her mother's but she did not doubt that the men would look at them anyway. And they did.

  Behind the two men she saw the door move slightly, it's edge rippling like the air over a hot stove. She fidgeted with her clothing for a few more seconds, then straightened again and reached forward past them to shut the door.

  “Did you get the answers you needed?” one of them asked, to change the subject.

  Aria rolled her eyes. Maybe she was overdoing that expression, she thought, but it came naturally at the idea that men could be so easily distracted by bumps on a chest. “Hardly. Maybe I'll come back later, when the wizard's back.”

  She strode down the corridor, ears straining for the sound of Lester's footprints behind her. But she heard nothing. Well, the door had moved. He must be around here somewhere. She opened the door to the stairwell and held it open, stranding there for a minute as if deep in thought. After a but, she felt a bump against the door and realized he had made it after all.

  Chapter 25

  Lester: “to mock ourselves with falsehood”

  He groped his way in darkness, barely conscious that she was was saying something to the guards. The blackness was total. He felt his way along the wall, hoping he had taken the right direction for the stairwell.

  After what seemed an eternity, his fingers felt the door. She stepped to the side of is and waited. In a moment he heard her open it, and slipped into the stairwell ahead of her. Once inside, he relaxed and unraveled the pathspace weave.

  Light flooded back into his universe, bringing the welcome sight of Aria with it. “So you made it,” she said. “Why are you sweating?”

  Hi wiped his forehead. “I'm still new at this,” he told her. “It's not easy to maintain while I'm moving. It's a lot easier if I just stand still, so the weave only has to be done once.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Come on, it's several floors below us.”

  As they descended, he tried not to glue his eyes to the tightness of her clothing. Her blouse was tucked into trousers that no one would have mistaken for a man's...given their contents. Mentally slapping himself, he forced his eyes up higher and reminded himself that she was the Governor's daughter. The Heir! Somehow she had neglected to mention that, the first time he had seen her with a tray of food. At the time he had wondered if he might ask her to a dance, assuming they had dances in Denver. Now he had to laugh st such thoughts. One day she would rule Rado, and he would be just a wizard, if he was lucky. And not even the only wizard. If Xander's plans succeeded, he'd be one of many by then, just another member of a growing school.

  But was it true that she had no friends? He considered it. It might be true. Obviously the Governor wouldn't look kindly on her soldiers following her daughter around. Maybe she had something in common with him, after all. Both of them were isolated by their circumstances.

  After many floors, she stopped on a landing. “The holding cell is ti the left,” she said. “It's inside another room. I'll open the outer door for you so you can find a good place to stand or sit before they get here.”

  “Are you sure this is the one they'll be in?” he asked. "I mean, there must be more than one holding cell. Won't they just throw them in the one closest to the ground floor?”

  “No,” she said. “if they're high-priority prisoner, and these will be, given what they've done, they'll want them as far from the street level as possible. That's this one. Ready?”

  He nodded and wrapped pathspace around him as she opened the door. Thew darkness closed in again. As he often did at such times, Lester wondered if there might be a way to let let some of the light in, as long as it didn't get back out to the eyes of others. But there was no helping it, at least for now. He groped his way out the door, turned left, and inched forward, reweaving the pathspace shield every foot or so before he could push out of the darkness into visibility.

  He heard the sound of the door, found it by feel, and slipped in after her.

  “Is there anyone within sight?” he whispered.

  “No,” he heard. “Why?”

  Instead of answering, he undid the weave and squinted as light tried to blind his dark-adapted eyes again. The room was about twenty feet square, and had a wall of iron bars across the middle. The wall was parallel to the corridor outside, so that the rectangular cell it bounded ran the length of the room from left to right. “Shouldn't that window be barred, too?” he wondered.

  Aria looked at him as if he were crazy. He could almost hear the word fool in her mind.

  “No, we're still fifteen floors above the ground. And there's no ledge. Anyone who goes out that window will decorate the sidewalk with their insides. Hey, what are you doing? If anyone walks by they'll see you!”

  “It's easier to pick my spot if I can see it,” he said, trying not to show his irritation. Didn't she realize he had to stand somewhere where there was little chance of anyone walking right into an invisible man? “Once I vanish, I won't be able to see anyone coming to get out of their way,” he told her. “So I have to see to find the best place to hide.”

  “Oh, right. Sorry,” she said, sounding contrite.

  There was a small table and a chair by the right wall, so he planted himself on the opposite side. He leaned against the wall. “I have two questions. First, how long do we have before they get here? If I have to stay invisible for hours I might get tired by the time they arrive and reappear before I hear anything useful.”

  She considered it. “Good point. Tell you what. Vanish here for a bit in case anyone walks by while I'm gone, and I'll go and ask about it and come back in a few minutes. Once we know how long it's going to be, I'll let you know, then hang around in the corridor outside and say something loud when I see them coming. That way you won't have to vanish again until they're practically in the cell.”

  It sounded like a good plan. “Okay,” he said, and wove the pathspace again , letting the darkness swallow him. He leaned against the wall, wrapped in artificial night, and listened to the sound of her opening the door to the corridor.

  How is it, he wondered, that I can hear – and speak – to her when the light is going around me? It seemed to him that sound would do the same thing, avoid him. Was it possible that there was more than one kind of pathspace? He made a note to ask Xander about it after he finished here.

  It was only after she left that he realized he had forgotten to ask her the second question. If she had classes all the time to prepare her for the future, wouldn't they miss her if she stayed down here near the cell?

  He tried to pass the time thinking of new things to do with pathspace. Was it good for anything else besides invisibility? Then he remembered Xander making the bits of cracker circle in opposite direction in the bowl of soup. Xander hadn't seemed to even trying very hard when he did it. Like it wasn't even work. Was making ordinary matter f
ollow a path easier than re-routing the light?

  There was a wooden cup and an empty clay pitcher on the table across from him. Maybe he could practice on that when she got back. It'd be pretty hard to do anything when he was trapped in his own pocket of blindness.

  He thought about the swizzles. Obviously it must be possible to make ordinary matter follow the pathspace, else how could you make air or water shoot through a swizzle? As always, He wondered what it was about his mind that could affect the pathspace so readily as to render him invisible. But, as Xander had already told him, it was more important to be able to do it than to know how he did it. Or at least, at this stage of my apprenticeship.

  Presently Aria returned, bearing several items. The first was a peculiar hourglass. It dripped oil, rather than sand, from the top half into the bottom, and the glass was marked with transparent bands of color. She set it down on the table, and he saw that the oil had filled the red and orange levels and was beginning to fill the yellow band.

  “Where did you get that?” he asked her. “I've never seen anything like it.”

  “Oh, we have a lot of them,” she said. “It's called an Xander glass. He invented it, and they're becoming quite popular. There's even talk of exporting them East. There's a different color for each hour, and oil drips so slowly that it's good for a whole eight hour watch.” She paused. “The thing is, he's the only one who can get the little glow-tube inside to work. If it wasn't for that they'd be all over Rado by now.”

  “It's brilliant,” he said, and meant it. “How did he ever think of such a thing?”

  “He's more than a crazy old wizard,” she said. “But most people don't see that. You know about his idea of starting a school for wizards, don't you?”

  “Yes. At first I thought it was a little nutty. But after thinking about it, I've realized that it's probably one of the best ideas I've ever heard.. Your mother – I mean, the Governor – is lucky to have him.”

  “I'm sure she knows it,” she said. “Sometimes I hear it in her voice – something that makes me think he's even more important to her than she lets on.”

  “Has he been here a long time?”

  “As long as I can remember,” she said. Then she changed the subject. “Anyway, from what I hear, it'll be at least a couple of hours before they get here. They won't be here until it reaches the blue line at the earliest. That's why I brought us a couple of books.”

  He looked them over. Both were hand-bound, obviously expensive. One was called Rise! and it was the biography of the General. The other was The Tourists, a story of the Fall. He picked that one up. “I'd like to read this one.”

  “I thought you might,” she said, “considering the author. The other one's my favorite, anyway.”

  He turned the book in his hands to read the author's name and immediately felt stupid again. “Oh. I guess I should have expected it was by him. Why didn't he show it to me as soon as I arrived here?”

  “It must have slipped his mind,” she said. “But it's hardly surprising. I think only Mother and I have read it. Nobody else seems to care about the Tourists any more.”

  “Even after what they did to us?” He couldn't believe it. “Back where I come from in Inverness, if a neighbor's dog bites someone they still talk about it twenty years later. And the Tourists, they wrecked our whole civilization!”

  “I don't think they meant to,” she said. “And no one remembers what it used to be like before the Fall. Well,” she amended, “maybe a few people like Xander.. But no one else. Well, I''ll go keep a lookout so you won't have to vanish yet.”

  She left, and Les sat down by the wall to read The Tourists, by Xander.

  Chapter 26

  Jeffrey: “daring of a moment's surrender”

  Brutus was in a foul mood when we awoke, and finding himself tied up did not improve his disposition. When he lifted his bruised head, now sporting a fresh bump, the first thing his eyes focused on was Jeffrey. The first thing he said was unprintable.

  “You look about as good as you sound,” Jeffrey told him. “Maybe it wasn't the best idea to threaten the old man, after all.”

  Brutus spat pink saliva onto the floor of the cart. “You seem fine,” he sneered. “let me guess. You cowered in fear, then helped him tie us up.”

  “Not even close,” said Jeffrey. “I avoided a fight with a powerful wizard, and then I tied you up by myself. He didn't help until it was time to finish the job on me.”

  Brutus struggled to a sitting position. “Then we have a chance after all,” he said. “You probably can't even tie your own bootlaces.”

  Jeffrey watched the larger man squirm and pull at the knots that bound his hands behind his back. “Regardless of what you think of me, the fact is the old man checked all the knots himself. I didn't dare try any tricks. After that your boys did at that farm, I think he was almost disappointed that I didn't try anything. My guess is his conscience is the only reason we're all still alive.”

  “Where are we?”

  “Headed north, probably into Denver. They brought some good horses with them, but it might be noon before we get anywhere near their capitol. After that,” he swallowed, “things might get a little more intense.”

  Brutus seemed amused now. “Having second thoughts about being so cooperative, are you? Bet you're crapping in your pants.”

  “Maybe you're not scared, but I am. I'm not ashamed to admit it. I had a lot to look forward to, before you got us in this mess.” Jeffrey looked away, at the bushes and the occasional tree speeding past the cart. By the look of it, the men from Rado were eager to deliver them to the Governor. Too eager. “You should have seen the faces of those men after the old man told them what happened. If it wasn't for him we'd have dug our own graves hours ago.” Jeffrey swallowed again. His throat was raspy, but he knew better than to ask men who looked that grim for a drink of water. “In a way, though, you have. You've killed us all, commander. Do you know how they execute people in Rado? Just curious.”

  Brutus showed him a feral grin. “By hanging. Same as in Texas. Oh, they used to have fancier ways, or so I'm told. But these days your last moments are measured by a length of rope, the good old fashioned way.”

  Jeffrey turned his head to gaze at him. “You don't seem very worried. Do you think you're going to Heaven? I never pegged you for a religious man.”

  Brutus spat again at that. “Fuck no. But so what? I don't believe in Hell, neither. When you die you're just gone. Not what I want, but,” he shrugged, “I won't even know I'm dead, afterwards, so it won't bother me none. Could be worse.”

  Worse? Jeffrey was staring wide-eyed now. “How could it be worse than getting killed?”

  The commander just laughed. “You're happier not knowing,” he said. “But since you asked, if it was anywhere but Rado, they might cut our balls off, tear our tongues out, and put us to slave labor for the rest of our lives, hauling garbage or building walls or some such. That's what they do down in Mexico. Or just torture us to death over a period of a week or so. That's what I hear they do over in the Dixie Emirates. God only knows what they do up in New Israel or over to the west in Deseret.” He roared at Jeffrey's expression, laughed until tears flowed. When he had finished laughing, he continued. “But we're going to Rado. There they put you on a platform with a noose of decent hemp around your neck and send you straight to oblivion. Nearly as painless as a bullet in the back of the head.”

  “Damn you, I don't want to die at all!”

  Brutus grinned. “Do tell,” he said. “Are you religious, sonny boy? Afraid you might kick the bucket before some priest prays you into Saint Peter's loving hands?”

  “I won't give them the satisfaction of begging for my life, it it comes to that,” Jeffrey told him. “But there were a few things I wanted to do before my time here was over. Things you probably don't care about, like falling in love, having kids, stuff like that.” He looked away again. “Instead, I'm going to hang because your men got to rape and kill.” H
e wanted to say there was no justice. But now he was beginning to be afraid that there would be.

  “Well waugh, waugh waugh! Show some backbone, you worm. They were the enemy, and there's no God caring about what we did, or about you. Shit happens, then you die.”

  I wonder what it will feel like? Is he right, and when it's over there's nothing left to know that it's dead? He'd read stories that claimed some people had nearly died, and had seen a tunnel and a bright light and then someone told them to go back. But he'd read other opinions that disputed such claims, saying those visions were only hallucinations brought about by the loss of oxygen to the brain, or something like that.

  He lay there thinking and wondering, or at least that how he thought he spent the time, until a jolt awakened him. He opened his eyes in time to see a high doorway passing over head, then the cart was in a large room somewhere.

  “All right, get out of the cart.”

  He lurched to a sitting position ans squinted as his eyes adjusted to a dimmer light level. “How are we supposed to do that? We're tied up.”

  A man with short-cut dark hair leaned over the side of the cart. The expression on his face was not pleasant. “You're lucky to be breathing. If we'd caught you instead of the wizard, you'd be feeding buzzards by now. Your legs aren't tied, so get out now. Or we'll roll you out, and laugh if you break something. Like your heads. Accidents happen.” He grinned. “We might even put you back in and roll you out again, if it's amusing enough.”

  They managed to get out of the cart. As soon as they were standing on the floor, the men aimed crossbows at them and hustled them though a door and up endless flights of steps. He could see Brutus was looking for a chance to overcome their guards and escape, but there was no chance.

  When they emerged from the stairwell, the first thing he saw was a beautiful girl lounging in the hallway with a book. She must have been deaf or something, because the first thing she did when she saw them was shout “Are these the prisoners I heard about?”