I Can See Clearly Now (2 page)

Eleven minutes
yet. Not exactly hours, but no call to be pushing him around. Rel
looked up. The peak of the vaulted roof was twenty feet up; he’d
never been in a building with higher, though there were towers in
the old city a dozen times that.

He called,
“Pevan!” His voice echoed slightly, but he knew his sister was up
there somewhere.

Of course, she
chose to step out of the pillar behind him. He yelped as she dug
her fingers in under his ribs. “Tut, tut, Relvin. Keep it down! Van
Raighan might hear you.” She put her hands on her hips and cocked
her head at him, grinning. Clearly she’d talked Pollack, and mother
and everyone else involved, into letting her wear trousers. She was
boyish at the best of times, all straight lines and narrow bones,
and why was he thinking about this? Trousers made her look stupid,
but she did need to be able to grapple with Van Raighan. Her Gift
gave her an edge no-one else in Federas had when it came to
sneaking up on people.

He shoved the
bag at her, hard enough to make her stumble backwards. At least she
caught it. “Put that back at the house. There isn’t time for me to
walk there and back.”

She glared at
him, but made a Gateway on the pillar and slung the bag through.
Rel couldn’t quite stop himself twitching at the thump, but nothing
in there was really breakable. He opened his mouth to speak, but
the Gateway flickered and Pevan stepped through before he got a
sound out.

With that done,
all they had to do was wait. Rel took Willer’s place behind the
pillar furthest from the door - the scrawny guard slouched out,
doing an excellent impression of a bored guard making the rounds -
and tried to focus on keeping his legs awake without moving. The
only sound was the clunk of the clock’s minute hand. Rel tried
counting the minutes in his head, but lost track around... six?
Seven?

Van Raighan’s
footsteps were like a feather falling on linen, only audible
because there was nothing else to hear. This time, Rel managed to
keep count, edging ever-so-slowly around the pillar, keeping it
between him and the thief. The other guardsmen did likewise. Then
there was a series of grunts and muffled curses, and it was time to
move.

Pevan had Van
Raighan in a hug, of all things, her arms wrapped around him,
pinning his to his sides. He was even smaller than he’d looked in
the Clearviewing, scrawny enough to make Pevan look sturdy. The
guardsmen surrounded them quickly, and Van Raighan stopped
struggling as soon as he spotted them.

Rel stood
slightly back from the huddle as the Sherriff grabbed Van Raighan’s
arm, holding it up so the thief was almost lifted off the floor. So
far, everything was going as predicted.

Pollack said,
“Chag Van Raighan, I arrest you for grand theft and abetting
Wildren.”

Van Raighan
gave a sharp, bitter chuckle. “Abetting, huh. When did I do
that?”

“Two people
were eaten at Af, boy. Or was that beneath your notice?” Pollack’s
face had gone red.

“I appeal on
grounds of Coercion.” Van Raighan spoke quietly, but Pollack
exploded all the same. Now he actually did hoist the thief off the
floor, slamming him against a pillar, one hand planted firmly on
his chest. Van Raighan grimaced, and Rel found himself stepping
forward, pushing between the guards.

“People died,
boy,” Pollack growled. “Seven towns without their Stable Rods. We
were lucky it wasn’t worse. And you dare make jokes about
Coercion?” The law was clear. If a criminal could prove he’d been
the victim of Coercion by a Child of the Wild, he was exonerated. A
victim in truth.

“If I might...
have a moment... to explain?” Van Raighan gasped.

Pollack
actually snarled. Pevan and a couple of the guardsmen stepped back,
but the Sherriff knew the law. He let Van Raighan drop to the
ground. The thief staggered slightly, but straightened with a glare
at the big man. He glanced at the circle of guardsmen, raising an
eyebrow when he saw Pevan, then raised a hand in front of him. That
was where the Clearviewing had ended. Rel took a clumsy step
forward on legs suddenly stiff with anticipation.

A bubble formed
in air above his hand, growing until it settled into his palm, less
than a foot in diameter. Rel caught his jaw as it dropped open. Van
Raighan’s Gift was
Witnessing
? Not even a strong Gift, by
the way the bubble seemed to flicker occasionally. Witnessing was
the most useless Gift, certainly not of any use to a thief. How had
he pulled off seven robberies?

Colours burst
across the inside of the bubble, grey, black, yellow, orange,
green, spreading out into vague shapes and starting to resolve into
focus. A huge, dark space, a ledge overlooking a chasm, underground
somewhere. Tall, narrow patches of colour that had to be
brightly-clad people. Sweat rolled down Van Raighan’s brow. The
Gift must be weak indeed in him.

The people were
Wildren; one had silver skin, another a face far too long and
aquiline to be human. At their feet lay a human in tattered grey
wool, a huge bruise visible on his cheek. Someone gasped as the
silver-skinned wilder kicked the man on the floor, sending him
sliding into the wall. Rel realised the wall was artificial, not
bare rock. Concrete. Something from before the Realmcrash.

There was no
sound with the Witnessing - just as with Clearsight - but the
figures clearly exchanged words. One grabbed the human, pulled him
to his feet, then lowered him slowly into the floor as if it was
mud. He ended up buried to the waist in solid stone, pawing
frantically at it. The Wildren turned to leave, and the bubble
popped neatly.

Rel jumped.
What was he supposed to have done? He’d been too surprised by Van
Raighan’s Gift to pay attention. Fortunately, the Sherriff was
still focussed on the diminutive thief.

Pollack said,
“What was that supposed to prove?”

“My brother
Rissad.” Van Raighan cringed slightly, then shot a frown straight
at Rel. “Those Wildren will kill him.”

“That’s not
Coercion and you know it,” Pollack’s voice rumbled until Rel was
sure he could hear it in his own gut. Or maybe that was just the
nagging suspicion he’d messed things up. He should have stepped in
by now, surely? What could he have done?

Van Raighan
gave him a longer frown, then turned back to the Sherriff. The
thief’s face was red, twisted with emotion, maybe even terror.
“He’s my brother, Sherriff! What else could I do? They said I could
have him back if I got them twenty rods.”

Too many things
didn’t add up, and Rel could see it as clearly as he could see that
the Sherriff wasn’t buying it either. The Wildren
made
Stable Rods. And why hadn’t they used actual Coercion on Van
Raighan? His Witnessing couldn’t be false - that was the point, a
reliable record so that human grievances could be brought to Second
Realm justice - but could he be lying about it?

Rel pushed in
between Pollack and Van Raighan. “Show me the Witnessing
again.”

“What are you
playing at, boy?” The Sherriff tried to brush him aside, but Rel
held his ground.

“Something
strange is going on here, sir. I’ll use Clearsight on it, and we’ll
get to the truth.” The thief had to be lying. Rel thought he heard
Van Raighan sigh, but the his face was strangely neutral. Not the
face of a man about to be caught in a lie.

Rel let the icy
claws of Clearsight slide around his eyeballs as the bubble
appeared between him and Van Raighan. The thief had the faint glow
of the Gifted around him - brighter than Rel expected, though not
as bright as Pevan’s aura - and the bubble glittered, but little
else changed. Pevan’s aura blended at the edges with Van Raighan’s;
what on Earth did that mean? The dancing colours in the air were
less pronounced in town than they had been up on the canal path,
but still there like a whisper on the edge of hearing.

The figures
appeared in the bubble again. Through Clearsight, Rel could clearly
see the resemblance between the human and Van Raighan; the same
thin face and pointed features. The man in the bubble was taller
and broader than his brother, but brothers they were. So where was
Van Raighan’s lie?

The angle was
strange. Witnesses could only record what they’d seen, but if Van
Raighan had seen that view with his own eyes, he’d been dangling
from the roof of whatever the cave was. Clearsight pierced the
depths of the abyss, but only enough to reveal just how far down it
went - miles, if not more. Again, Van Raighan’s brother - Rissad? -
slid across the rough stone floor and slammed into the back wall,
and Rel’s enhanced sight told him something broke in the man’s
shoulder. Rissad was Gifted, more strongly than his brother; to
Clearsight, the rock behind him shone with the reflection of his
aura.

There was some
sort of old machinery on the back wall, a hinge of some sort,
surrounded by rods and piping. A hinge meant a door, but there was
no door, unless the entire back wall... Even as he thought it, Rel
saw the shape of the concrete slab that would slide out and swing
open. It had to weigh tons. If it opened, it would sweep Rissad and
the Wildren clean off the ledge.

One of the
Wildren was missing, Rel realised. Clearsight revealed one fewer
than had been present in Van Raighan’s original Witnessing. But a
Gift-Giver would never extort a human into stealing Stable Rods.
Would they?

The bubble
flickered as the Wildren turned to leave Rissad trapped in the
stone, and Rel flicked a glance at Van Raighan. The thief was
staring at him, face pale. Clearsight revealed every line of his
frown. Rel couldn’t quite read Van Raighan’s mind, but his emotions
were written all over his face. For a fraction of a second, Rel
even caught a glimpse of a second face hovering just behind the
first. Not that he needed it to tell him Van Raighan was still
hiding something.

The Witnessing
kept playing out between them, past the point at which it had
stopped the first time. Rissad squirmed in the stone, then pounded
on it, obviously screaming. Suddenly, he stopped, folded his arms,
and seemed almost to relax. Rel concentrated on the man’s face,
trying to read it as he had Van Raighan’s.

Rissad’s eyes
were half-closed, his brows level, his lips straight. No, not quite
straight. A twitch tugged at the corner of his mouth, the vaguest
hint of a smile. It was impossible to squint while Clearviewing,
but Rel felt his own eyelids pressing at his eyeballs as a dim
pressure through the ice. What was he seeing?

He jerked back
as the bubble burst, but his eyes felt frozen open. The sensation
of losing touch with the Witnessing was of the front of his brain
running into a stone wall, but the figure of Rissad still hung in
the air. Rel tried to grab at it with his eyes, pushing away the
niggling worry that this was impossible. Little was known about how
the Gifts interacted, and if he’d never heard of a Witnessing
turning into a Clearviewing, it didn’t seem completely
unreasonable.

The stable
image of the Witnessing had vanished with the bubble; Rissad was
surrounded by flickering ghosts of the Second Realm, swirls of
colour that vaguely outlined the shapes of the ledge and chasm, and
the vaguest sense of a creature hulking over him. The abyss exuded
a light uncomfortably similar to the colour of the Realmlessness, a
sickly effect that lay across the image like oil.

Rel fought the
waves of confusion and distraction and brought his attention back
to Rissad’s face. Three faces, one of top of another. Rel saw each
of them through its fellows, clearly provided he didn’t try to
focus on two at once. The first bore the relaxed expression from
the Witnessing. The second was smiling, eyes narrowed and teeth
showing slightly, the face of a predator about to strike. The third
was twisted to the point of comedy with faked terror, nostrils
flared, trembling, neck muscles twitching.

Taking control
of the Clearviewing - as much as such things were ever controlled -
Rel went looking for what Rissad was up to. The faces flickered,
growing vaguer, and hunger ate at them. The fake-terror face
vanished, and the other two became gaunt. Moving into the future,
then.

The aura around
Rissad flared, and he vanished through a Gateway. His own? He
reappeared standing by the hinge, his legs still buried in a
cylinder of stone. The sides of the stone were glass-smooth where
the Gateway had cut them. The image flickered, and Rissad was
falling from the ceiling, legs still encased in stone. Rel had to
fight not to wince as he slammed into the ledge and the stone
shattered. For a moment, it looked like the fall had killed the
elder Van Raighan, but he started crawling towards the machinery of
the hinge, favouring his injured shoulder and dragging a leg bent
the wrong way at the knee. Despite the injuries, though, a smile
spread across his angular face.

The viewing
froze, lingered in the air for a second, and faded away. Rel
blinked in surprise, then blinked again and again, trying to clear
the cold from his eyes and convince himself they were still
attached to his face. The Clearviewing ending like that could only
mean he’d be there when Rissad escaped.

Someone jostled
him, almost knocking him off his feet, and he looked around. Two of
the guardsmen were running for the door and Pevan was gone. So was
Van Raighan. The Sherriff was shouting. The front of his brain felt
like frozen fog. What was going on?

Pollack grabbed
him by the shoulders and shook him. “What the hell was that,
boy?”

“What?” Rel’s
voice sounded distant in his own ears, but the inside of his skull
felt a little warmer.

“That...
vision. What did you see?”

The vision,
right. Rissad Van Raighan, and a huge door that a Gift-Giver wanted
to keep him from. Well, if Chag Van Raighan was a master thief,
what must his elder brother be like? Rel explained as quickly as he
could. If it was possible, Pollack’s face seemed to get darker with
every word.