Ruins (Pathfinder Trilogy) (7 page)

“Those bastards in the tower ought to be hanged,” muttered Loaf. He was standing at the stockade beside her.

“They don’t seem to aim their rod of fire very well,” she said.

“They’re hitting nobody,” said Loaf. “Useless.”

Olivenko, from the other side of her, said, “What makes the attackers so nimble? I’ve never seen soldiers who dodge so well.”

“The defenders are good soldiers,” said Loaf. “Trained, disciplined. But they hardly land a blow.”

Olivenko agreed. “It takes two of them attacking the same man at once to bring him down.”

“Maybe it’s because they don’t have any armor,” said Loaf. “Keeps them lighter on their feet.”

It’s the facemask, Param wanted to say. The facemasks help them to react more quickly. But she said nothing. Loaf and Olivenko were soldiers; they knew what they were seeing, and she didn’t.

With both of the soldiers watching the battle, it occurred to Param that neither of them was protecting Rigg. What if the women took him for some kind of enemy? What if they were armed? Param could at least take Rigg out of harm’s way, if danger threatened.

The women were speaking a language that Param had never heard before, yet she understood them. She realized that she was not mentally translating their speech into any tongue that she actually knew. Rather she simply understood them at a level below language. The Wall really did give languages to those who passed through it.

The women were angry and frightened, and like Loaf they were condemning the wielder of the firebeam. But the women did not speak of “them” who aimed; rather it was “him.”

“He won’t use it to kill them,” said the tallest of the women. “And he won’t let any of us use it—we’d have no qualms about burning them.”

“They aren’t human anymore,” said the eldest woman—the mother? “Killing them should be like killing grass, but he won’t do it.”

“He’s no friend of ours,” said the youngest.

“He has no choice but to be our friend,” said the tall one. “It’s in the way he was made.”

“He does what he wants,” said the young one.

Rigg was merely listening to them, letting them talk to him; Param understood why. He was learning vital information with everything they said. If he probed, he might not learn as much, because they would become more aware of him. Param wished she knew how he had explained who they were, these four who had suddenly appeared inside the stockade. But maybe it didn’t matter. Maybe it was enough for these women that the strangers wore no facemasks.

“We can’t build the city without him,” complained the old woman. “But he won’t let us make a wall of fieldsteel—this miserable stockade is all we can make without him. We’ve depended too much on him! We haven’t any skills in our own hands.”

Param guessed who “he” was; who but Vadesh himself? No one else could build with fieldsteel; no one else could create a beam of pure heat, then bar the people of the city from using it themselves.

“He does us no good,” said the young one. “The city is eternal, but what good is that when we can’t defend it?”

“We can’t live anywhere else,” said the tall one. “Where would we get safe water? We’d become like
them
.” Having seen the men with facemasks, Param understood the woman’s dread and loathing.

Finally the old woman took notice of Param. “Are you his sister?” she asked.

Param had forgotten how much Rigg resembled her. “I am,” she said.

“I wish I could offer help,” said Rigg.

The tall woman pointed at the stockade, where Loaf and Olivenko stood. “They look like stout soldiers, and well-armed.”

“But inexperienced against such a quick and clever enemy,” said Param. “They would be beaten almost at once.”

“Where are you from?” asked the old woman suspiciously. “You speak like feeble-minded children.”

“Your language is new to us,” said Rigg.

“Our language?” said the young woman incredulously. “Is there another?
They
don’t speak at all, except the grunting of beasts. Where are you from?”

“Beyond the Wall,” said Param.

“The future,” said Rigg.

Param found it interesting that while they had chosen different truths to tell, neither she nor Rigg had thought of lying.

It made little difference. The women drew together as they shrank back from Param and Rigg. “Liars,” said the old woman.

“Spies,” said the young one.

But the tall one, though she was as frightened as the others, still cast a hungry, appraising gaze upon them. “The future? Then you know. Do we win this war?”

Rigg turned to Param and addressed her in the elevated language of the court. “I have learned all that I think we can. Let us get the others.”

Param glanced at the women. They had not been through the Wall; they didn’t know the language Rigg was using, and it must be frightening to hear speech they couldn’t understand. “Aren’t you going to answer her?” said Param.

“I don’t know the answer.”

“We know that the city is empty!”

“But is it
this
war that empties it? Telling her might change things.”

“All of her people are dead for ten thousand years. Any change would be better.”

“I can think of worse outcomes,” said Rigg. He glanced toward the stockade—toward the battle raging beyond the stockade. “What if these people despair, knowing they do not win, and so they give up and
those
people, the afflicted ones, survive?”

“What are you saying?” demanded the old woman.

“That isn’t language,” said the young one. “It makes no sense.”

The tall one now had a knife in her hand, long and sharp. “They’re spies.” She lunged at Rigg.

Instinctively, Param grabbed Rigg’s arm and took a leap toward what she thought of as her “hiding place”—invisibility. But as she did it, she realized she mustn’t. If she detached herself and Rigg from the timeflow that the others were in, there was no guarantee that Umbo could bring them back. So she stopped herself in the very moment of her panicky shift.

But she stopped herself too late. The women had already disappeared.

It was night. They stood in ringlight, just herself and Rigg.

She cursed her habit of hiding; she should have pumped her arm, signaling to Umbo to bring them all back, but that would have required thought, and she acted before thought was possible.

Then she realized—her talent didn’t work like this. People
didn’t disappear when she sliced time, they merely sped up and stopped being able to see her. She couldn’t change day into night.

“What did you do?” asked Rigg in a fierce whisper. “When are we?”

“I don’t know,” she answered, trying to stay calm. “I stopped myself almost at once, we should only have jumped a moment or two.”

“We can talk, so we’re out of it now, right?” asked Rigg.

“I didn’t really go into it. We never disappeared.”

“Obviously we
did
,” said Rigg. “Vanished right out of their time. But how far, and in which direction?”

“I can’t move backward in time, not ever,” said Param. “I just make little jumps forward.”

“This wasn’t a little jump. It got us all the way into night. Or two nights—or a hundred years, into some distant night.”

“The stockade is still here,” said Param. “And the fires are burning.”

They went to the stockade, Rigg holding tightly to her. A few patches of grass were still burning, and there were bodies lying here and there, but there was no more fighting.

“Who won?” asked Param.

“What matters is that we’re still in the past. Does that mean Umbo has lost us, or that he still has us? If he lost contact with us, wouldn’t we bounce all the way back to Umbo, to the time we came from? Or are we stranded here and he can’t find us to bring us back? I wish I understood how any of this works.”

But Param had seen something else, not out on the battlefield, but closer to the city. “Rigg, a section of the stockade is down. It’s broken through.”

“No,” said Rigg after a moment, “it was burned through. That bastard betrayed them.”

A loud cry sounded in the dim light. It was not language. Nor were the cries that answered it. The shouters were not close by, but neither were they very far.

“I think that answers our question about who won,” said Rigg. “Those shouts came from the direction of the city.”

“Do you think they’ve seen us? I think the cries are coming closer.”

“I can’t see anybody,” said Rigg.

“But maybe they can see
us
,” said Param. “Those facemasks made them quicker, sped up their reaction time. Maybe it gives them better eyesight, too.”

Rigg held up his arm, pumped the air, signaling Umbo.

Nothing happened.

“He’s lost us,” said Rigg.

“He can’t see us,” said Param at the same time. She couldn’t keep the fear out of her voice, but Rigg seemed so calm.

“Let’s get back to the spot where Umbo pushed us into the past,” said Rigg. “We jumped half a day into the future, so I should be able to find Loaf’s and Olivenko’s paths.” He drew her away from the stockade.

Now Param could see the facemask men who were shouting. They had clubs and spears and they were running straight toward Rigg and her. It was a terrifying, fascinating sight.

“I think this would be a good time for you to make us disappear,” said Rigg.

“But Umbo will lose us!” She knew how stupid that was even as she said it. Umbo had already lost them.

“We won’t be able to figure anything out if we’re dead,” said Rigg. “They have nothing made of metal. Make us disappear.”

This time there was no jump, just the sudden silence from the sectioning of time, the mental buzz she always felt.

But the facemask men showed no sign of having lost sight of them. They showed no confusion. They were still coming straight for Param and Rigg, as if she had done nothing at all.

All Param could think to do was push harder, make the buzz more intense and more rapid, so time was getting sliced into thinner bits, and she was leaping forward farther between moments of visibility.

It made the enemy seem to be even faster—far faster—so they were instantly upon them. But to Param’s relief the facemask men were confused now, looking around, swinging clubs and jabbing or sweeping with spears. They raced back and forth, some of them running off in different directions to search, some of them remaining in place to stab or slice the air.

Unlike Mother’s soldiers, though, they had little staying power. Having lost sight of Param and Rigg, they soon gave up. Well, perhaps not so soon as it appeared to Param, since she was pushing herself and Rigg into the future at a headlong pace, so that the few moments the facemask men kept searching might have been a half hour, an hour, more.

Most of the facemask men went away, but some stayed as
sentinels, and as soon as morning came—only a few minutes, at the pace Param was keeping—the rest came back. Now they knelt and examined the grass, and in only a few moments they had found Rigg’s and Param’s footprints in the grass. Not the footprints they had left behind them—the grass there had long since sprung back up. What they found were the footprints Param and Rigg were making
right now
, for the grass had little chance to spring back up during the microseconds of their nonexistence between the tiny jumps she was making into the future.

The facemask men probed the footprints. When they used their fingers or clubs, it was not a problem, but the stone heads of the spears could damage her, Param knew. She pressed harder on her sense of time, shoving herself and Rigg farther and farther into the future with each tiny jump, so the stone spear points coexisted in the same space as their feet for ever-shorter slices of time. The buzzing sense was now a deep, rapid throbbing. The day ended, the facemask men were gone. Then it was day again and they did not come back, then night, then day, then night, day, night, day . . .

Gasping, she eased up on the pressure inside herself. Her heart was beating so fast. She was exhausted. She had never pushed herself so hard, not even in the panic coming down from the rock.

They returned to realtime. They could hear again.

The stockade had been knocked over completely, some of the poles broken off just above the ground, but most of them uprooted. They had been shallowly set; it had not taken superhuman strength to put the thing down, especially pushing outward.

The bodies were also gone from the battlefield, and all the fires were out.

“Thank you,” murmured Rigg. “I thought we were dead.”

“We might as well be,” said Param softly. “I’ve stranded us ten thousand years in the past.”

“Minus about five days,” said Rigg. “Maybe a week, I’m not sure I was counting right.”

“They could have crippled us by holding those stone spear-points in our footprints.”

“In our feet, you mean,” said Rigg. “It was the strangest feeling. My feet were getting hot.”

Then Param, who had been scanning the battlefield and the city while they talked—as Rigg was also doing—spotted Vadesh. He was standing where the gap in the stockade had been, surveying the battlefield just as Param and Rigg had been doing.

Rigg must have seen him, too, because he gripped her hand tightly. “Don’t call to him,” he murmured. “He’s never seen us before.”

Of course he hadn’t. The Vadesh of this era would have no idea who they were.

But talking softly had done them no good. The machine had been made with extraordinarily acute hearing. He was walking toward them.

“Turn your back on him,” said Rigg. “Don’t let him see our faces.”

“I have seen your faces,” Vadesh called. After the silence of time-slicing, his voice was shockingly loud. “I will never forget them.”

“Umbo’s lost us, or we’ve lost him,” said Rigg. “And the only paths I can see are here, where you and Olivenko and Loaf stood looking at the battle. But Umbo can’t see us, so he can’t push us back into the past to rejoin them.”

“Can you see the moment where Umbo took them into the future?” asked Param. “Maybe if you hold on to the path right at that point . . .”

“I can’t
hold
a path,” said Rigg. “I don’t even
see
them, not really, not with my eyes, I just know where they are, I—I can’t
touch
them.”