Pathspace: The Space of Paths

by Matthew Kennedy

  Chapter 27

  Kristana: “the rhythm of blood and the day”

  She was listening to the water drain out of the tub and pulling her boots on when the knock at the door intruded. Sighing, she stood, regarded herself in the mirror, stopped being just a relaxed woman and became the Governor of Rado again. “What is it?”

  “The prisoner are here, Governor.”

  “All right,” she said, “I'll be right down to welcome them to Denver.” She fastened her shirt and adjusted the shoulder boards. There were stars on them. Robbie's stars. I never knew two stupid bits of obsolete rank insignia could be so heavy, she thought. On days like today it seemed the weight of them was crushing her.

  “Are you getting out of that tub?” she snapped. “or are you just going to still there dripping until you get pneumonia?”

  “Are those my only two choices?” he said. Old but not too-badly muscled legs swung over the edge of the bathtub and planted themselves on the tiles. “It's about time they showed up.”

  “They couldn't have picked a worse time,” she said. “Aria's birthday is in two days. We ought to be planning that instead of figuring out how to hold a trial that's fair but brief.”

  “There's a lot of things we ought to be doing,” he said. “Like taking longer baths.”

  She shook her head. The man was relentless. “We take too many chances as it is. If the others knew what we – “

  He silenced her with a kiss. “What we do alone is our own business,” he said. “And don't worry, I understand why it has to stay that way.”

  “You know I wish it didn't have to be a secret,” she said. “But it is what it is.”

  “No worries,” he said. “You go on ahead. “I'll wait and follow after your guards lead you to the stairs.”

  She closed the bathroom door behind her and strode to the outer door of her suite. Charles and Terence were waiting for her. “What shape are they in?” she asked.

  “They walked in,” said Terence. “As far as I can tell, they're in better shape than they have any reason to expect. If it weren't for Xander the boys would've strung 'em up already.”

  “There will be no lynchings while I'm Governor,” she said. “And they'd better not accidentally fall down stairs or walk into a door in my building. Is that clear?”

  “Absolutely” said Charles.

  They entered the stairwell and headed down. “Have we found any living relatives of the Ferrero family?”

  “No ma'am. His wife's parents died in the last war. And Gus's were carried off by the plague we had five years back. I'm afraid there's no one.”

  “Damn. I suppose they burned his crops, too?”

  “Yes, Governor.”

  Yet another problem. Who would take over the farm? Especially one so near the border with Texas. Maybe, she thought, we need to push the border a little further south, this time.

  The prisoners were a sorry-looking bunch. But few people would look better after losing a fight with a wizard and being dragged up to Denver. The Governor looked them over. “Well?” she demanded. “What do you have to say for yourselves?”

  They all looked at the tallest one. He must be the leader, she realized. What a surprise.

  He surprised her by grinning. “Glock, Brutus, Commander, First Recon, Lone Star Empire. Service number eight five eight oh three one seven.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Give me a reason why you should go on living, Commander.”

  He just smiled. “Glock, Brutus, Commander, First Recon, Lone Star Empire. Service number eight five eight oh three one seven.”

  “If that's what you plan to say at the trial,” the Governor told him, “we might be able to finish in one day. You must be very eager to die.”

  The redhead with the scar above his left eyebrow didn't even blink. His grin did not waver. “Glock, Brutus, Commander, First Recon – “

  “Yes I heard you. Service number eight five eight oh three one seven.” She glanced at the others. “Any of you got lunkheads have more sense than your commander?”

  One of them opened his mouth, as if to say something. But then his eyes strayed to the big redhead and he closed his mouth again.

  “I could just hang the lot of you,” she mused out loud. “Then again, my people are likely to petition me to try torture on you first.”

  “But you won't,” the big guy said. “You haven't the guts for it.”

  “Is that what you call what you had at that farm? Guts?” She wrinkled her lips in disgust. “You must have different definitions for things down there in the Honcho's country.”

  “Sure do. For example, 'Governor' ain't a word for 'woman' down there. We stop taking orders from women soon as we're old enough to ride, fight, and drink.”

  Her guards Charles and Terence bristled at that. She didn't blame them. “Up here we obey whoever's in charge, which happens to be me at the moment. What about your boys? Did your Honcho order you to rape and kill non-combatants?” She shook her head. “Somehow I doubt it. Peter's a lot of things, but he'd never sink that low. You know what I think?” she said, studying the redhead. “I think he won't care what we do to you when he hears what you did.”

  His face darkened, but he had no reply to that, so she turned and left the room. Her guards accompanied her. As the three of them headed for the stairs she told Charles “Put together a jury as soon as possible. We'll do this legally, but I don't want that guy to live any longer than necessary.”

  Chapter 28

  Lester: “Struggling with the Devil”

  After the Governor left the men in the cell finally began to talk. Sitting against the wall in darkness, Lester decided that meant she hadn't left any guards behind.

  “You shouldn't have made that crack about women,” said a younger voice. Not the same one who had been speaking to her, he thought.

  “Shut your mouth,” the more familiar voice said. “Never show weakness in front of the enemy. If she goes ahead with executions, Texas can use that for recruiting propaganda. It doesn't matter how legally she does it. Our people won't believe a word of it. All she'll do is make our army bigger.”

  “You idiot. You think she'll brag about executing us? We'll just disappear. Like you made that farmer's family disappear. A vanished recon team won't recruit anyone.”

  “I said shut it! The Honcho's got resources you know nothing about. Likely as not we'll be sprung out of here before the boss lady can get her trial ready. Keep your cool and don't make me have to report you to your daddy for cowardice in front of the enemy.”

  “Huh! I should have at least tried to stop you. Maybe I deserve to die for just standing there and doing nothing while you raped the women. I don't know. Maybe if it had been just you and me I could have stopped you. At least you won't get the chance to do it again.”

  “I already told you to shut your yap, runt. I'm not going to repeat myself. The next time you open that mouth it'll lose some teeth.”

  Lester listened with interest. Had he really heard what he thought he heard? This hadn't been a total waste of time, after all. He could hardly wait to get out of here and talk to Aria. There were ramifications here that neither of them had considered.

  And then it got even more interesting. As he stood up, preparing to leave the room, he heard sudden inhalations of astonishment.

  “What the hell? Who are you, another damned wizard?”

  He started, sure he'd been seen. But no, his cloaking spell was still working, or he wouldn't be in darkness any longer. So what had startled them?

  “Who am I?” said a new voice, one he'd never hard before. “I, gentlemen, am your salvation. Stay calm and don't tell them anything. I'll have you all out of here as soon as I can find out who has the key to that cell.”

  He heard the door to the outer room open again. Whoever opened it didn't close it this time, or at least not all the way, as if they didn't want anyone who might be outside to hear it. Trying not to pant with excitement and the effort of re-weaving the shi
eld around him as he moved, he groped his way around to the door, hugging the wall, then slipped out into the corridor.

  Once he was clear of the door he flattened himself against the wall of the corridor and tried to calm down. Whoever that was, he thought, I can't let him know I heard him.

  Chapter 29

  Xander: “we thank Thee for our little light”

  Alone, unseen, Xander performed his daily regimen. First was the thing with the mirror. He picked up a wooden cup from the table and stood in front of the full-length speculum. Then he tossed the cup off to the side. As soon as he heard it hit the floor, he made himself vanish, weaving the pathspace as fast as he was able. He did this ten times.

  Then he did the second exercise. This was like the first, except that he watched where the cup ceased its motion, and made it vanish. Then he turned back to the mirror, vanished himself, and practiced the moving invisibility, walking to the cup's location by his memory of the room's layout, and reaching down to retrieve it before undoing both weaves. He did this another ten times.

  He seized his staff and swizzles it on and off rapidly, making it hum its bass roar, then adjusting the flow up and down with his mind, sometimes reversing it entirely, as if he were doing push ups. From this he proceeded to target practice, firing little roughly-carved wooden balls at various targets around the room. When he was done with this part, the balls all lifted gently into the air and replaced them selves in a bowl in the corner.

  He was perspiring a little by now. But he did not let up. There were still spinspace and tonespace to practice. He stepped through the rear doorway into his storeroom and withdrew several conical tops and gyroscopes, all treasures salvaged from the remains of an ancient toy store. From under the sofa he pulled a wooden board with numerous dimples in it, into which he set the various tops and gyros, setting each one to spinning. That was the easy part. Then he worked at canceling their spinning, stopping their rotation and making them topple over as quickly as he could manage. After he had stopped them all, he spun them with his mind again, this time in the opposite direction, and repeated the process. As before, he repeated this ten times.

  He took a deep breath, wiped his brow with the end of a sleeve, and replaced these items to their storage places. With scarcely more than a minute or two for rest, he gulped a cupful of water from the sink and tossed a handful of coins onto the table-'s surface. Concentrating, he made the discs into everflames, focusing the tonespace until all of them glowed with pinpoints of red light hovering above the coins. He then forced the intensity up and down with his mind, making them cycle ed to blue-white motes and back to red over and over again, singly and in groups. By now he was freely perspiring. He extinguished the everflames and made the air around him an imaginary coldbox, cooling himself in the sudden fog that condensed out of the silent air and poured down his body like a reversed fountain, a cylindrical waterfall of blessedly refrigerating mist that cooled him.

  He was canceling out this weave when he heard the sound of the door's bolt being thrown back. Lester rushed into the room, clearly agitated.

  “Where have you been, Lester? Spying on ladies? I mean, I'm glad you are making enough headway with your vanishing to be able to come and go as you please, but, really, we must have a talk about ethics. You must underst – ”

  “It's not that,” the apprentice interrupted. “Aria overheard you telling the Governor about the men you captured and she wanted me to see if we could learn something.” He stopped to catch his breath “So she snuck me in and I sat invisible outside the cell when they brought them in. There's something you need to know.”

  Xander sat down on the sofa with a grunt. “There are a lot of things I need to know. Like how she overheard us, for one thing. The Governor and I were alone.” He regarded the boy. “Have you been teaching her invisibility?”

  “No. I've no idea how she heard you. Maybe she was just outside the door. Who cares? That's not the point. She was worried about the trial.”

  Xander grimaced. “She's not the one who should be worried about the trial,” he said.

  “Well, she was. Obviously when word gets out the citizens will be howling for blood. And with the possibility of an army on the way, she was afraid the Governor might be tempted to use torture to get confessions and a quick trial so she can move on to more important things, like mobilizing the army.”

  Xander pursed his lips. “If you think even think that's possible,” he said, “you have a lot to learn about the Governor. And so does Aria. I would have thought she knew her mother better than that.” He got up and paced across the room to the table and picked up an apple. “So, did you learn anything useful?” He took a bite of the fruit and chewed.

  “You could say that.” Lester sighed. “Unfortunately, Aria must have had to go to a lesson or something, so I haven't been able to tell her yet. But yes, I did learn something, and it's big. It changes everything.”

  When Xander heard what he said next, he nearly choked on his mouthful of apple.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Pretty sure. If he is, and he's innocent, the trial could get complicated. I couldn't see which one he was, but I'll recognize his voice. ”

  “Damn. And I thought life was complicated enough already.” He sat down on the sofa again.

  “Oh it gets worse. The Texans have a wizard in the building. I heard him reveal himself to them and tell them not to worry, that he'd rescue them.”

  “WHAT? Xander was on his feet before he could think. “How do you know he was a wizard?”

  Lester fidgeted. “Well,” he said, after a moment. “I couldn't see him, but from what I heard they were pretty shocked to learn he was there, as if he had been lurking in the room invisible like me and just suddenly appeared in front of them. One of them even said something about it, asked him if he was a wizard.”

  Xander began to pace back and forth. “Right under our noses? But how could he be Texan? The Honcho in a sort of partnership with the TCC, the Texan Catholic Church, and they're dead set against wizards or anything to do with the Tourists.”

  “I'm just telling you what I heard. Are you just going to pace around and eat that apple? We have to get word to the Governor!”

  “Quiet, please. I need to think. We need to anticipate his actions, not just react to them. How is he planning to get them out? I could sneak in and out of here any time I wanted to. But take a whole group of prisoners out with me? Probably more than I could manage without being seen. Either he's better than me, or he's thought of something I haven't.”

  “Are there wizards better than you?”

  Xander exhaled. “Anything is possible. I'm good, son, but when you become a wizard, never make the mistake of assuming there couldn't be someone better than you. For all I know, there's tricks I haven't even thought of. If this guy knows invisibility, then we have only one chance to stop them. Once he gets 'em outside, we might never see them again.”

  “Before you stop to make a plan, we need to keep them bottled up in that cell. One of us needs to guard them, and that's you, wizard. You need to get down there, now, before this guy locates the key to that cell.”

  Xander was moving toward the door as Lester was speaking, but at this, he halted in his tracks. “He said he was looking for the key? Then maybe he's not as good as I thought.”

  Lester stared at him. “Why not?”

  “Because a real wizard wouldn't need a key,” Xander told him. “All ordinary locks are just collections of moving parts. And anything that can move can be controlled with pathspace.”

  “How?”

  “Because it's already in motion.” He picked up another apple and held it in front of Lester. “The Earth like a ball, spinning and also moving in a circle around the Sun. That means the Earth and everything on it, every rock and blade of grass, is already moving. Already on a path. Once you can control pathspace, you can change that path, influence it. And that means you can make things move.” He released the apple and let it float
back to the bowl on the table.

  Lester's mouth was open. He closed it.

  “Come on, let's move,” said Xander. “You're right, there's no time for a lesson now.”

  Chapter 30

  Ludlow: “I have trodden the winepress alone”

  It didn't take him long to find the key. He already knew where the keys to all the cells were kept, so he simply walked into the guard room and pocketed all eight of them. It was just barely past noon now. The watch had just changed, which accounted for the absence of the room's usual occupant. That meant he had maybe a few minutes before they noticed the keys were missing from their drawer.

  Strolling to the nearest staircase, he ran up the stairs two at a time to the roof. He paused to catch his breath. This was going to take some finesse.

  Hollings was on duty on the roof. He turned in surprise as he heard the footsteps behind him. “Hello, Mr. Ludlow. What brings you all the way up here?”

  Ludlow grinned. “A vice,” he said, pulling a cigarette from a pocket. “One the Governor doesn't approve of.” Then he pretended embarrassment. “Oh, dear, how rude of me. Would you care for one? I always keep a couple rolled just in case.”

  “Sure.”

  He handed it over, then patted his pockets theatrically. “Oh damn, I forgot my everflame. Could you be us both a favor and go see if they have one on the next floor down?”

  Hollings hesitated. “I'm not supposed to leave my post.”

  Ludlow raised his eyebrows. “Oh come now, it'll only take you a minute. I'll take your place and keep watch for you until you get back. The watch just changed, after all. It's not as if your replacement will come up here and find you missing. Unless it takes you eight hours to fetch an everflame or a candle.”