The Books of the Wars (47 page)

Aden grunted affirmatively, not trusting his voice. He was used to examining those around him, knowing their precise reactions to specific words, tones and gestures. Such information had benefited him greatly in the taverns and brothels of the enemy's land; it had also saved him from the inquiries of the civil government and the mages' spies on numerous occasions. Now Donchak was closed to him, as the creatures inside would be.

But the man seemed to be functioning properly. He had obviously planned and anticipated Aden's arrival and the most effective way to expedite his mission. That was why the Office had sent him in years ago, long before it had any idea that a man like Aden would be sent later, or perhaps even what his task might be.

Donchak's actual loyalties, however, were becoming academic. As he had pointed out to him, the wizards knew they were being picked apart, deciphered, understood, their arts reduced to formulae easily duplicated and subverted by ordinary men and machines. They were getting scared, underneath their silk and velvet trappings, and some people at Lake Gilbert had seen panic infecting their habitual illogic. The risk of carrying the eye, even with its nearly undetectable energy leaks, therefore increased daily, and became almost suicidal during the monthly block transmissions of compressed data. Soon, the wizards must begin looking carefully at their world and they would see him as clearly as the eye had seen them. It had to be discarded and the orders were to leave it in a place where it could continue gathering information.

Possibly, Donchak had had similar instructions for whatever might have been placed in his right eye socket before Thorn River and the Border Command snatched it away from him.

The main doors were made of brass, engraved with the same complex designs that were set in the alabaster windows above them. Donchak nudged Aden away from the columns and led him through a small door to their left.

Aden blinked his right eye to adjust to the interior. Spheres of were-light hovered distantly in the nave, turning the marble floors to dusted silver but failing to give any indication of where the building's roof might be. Aden found himself straining to define the building's distances and colors; all his remaining eye allowed him were gray lights and pools of impenetrable shadow.

Most churches are built with many subtle distortions and trompe l'oeils concealed within the alignments of their masses. The idea is to deceive the worshiper's sense of perspective and to make the building as much a part of his devotions as the words of the liturgy—or at least to make him feel as if he is in a grander place than he really is. Assuming such tricks were present here and that the building was not under the spell of one or another of the men of power, the unicorn and its attendant were about one hundred meters away, in the center of the nave, twenty meters before the main altar.

Donchak led him down the northern aisle, the nave's supporting columns screening them from the unicorn. To his left Aden noticed various recessed chapels and crypts. Occasionally the drifting were-light illuminated one, but the contents remained closed to his comprehension.

The attendant was kneeling, his head resting against his chest, hands hanging straight down along his sides. The unicorn stood patiently behind him. Neither showed any sign of life. The figures on the unicorn's caparison had melted into a spider web pattern that hid its contours like fog. The figures on the mancreature's skin remained distinct but were frozen in attitudes suggestive of prayer.

Everywhere, everything was silver-gray with only the ivory and cinnamon of the high lancet windows to relieve it. They stepped through this hazed atmosphere like swimmers, moving with great care so as not to cause eddies in the air around them, vortices that might brush against the unicorn and its attendant, intrude upon its devotions and alert it.

Donchak stopped behind a column and watched. Aden knew it was possible that Donchak was seeing the physical reality of what held the creatures so transfixed. He might also have come here to pray.

He pressed his thumb and little finger against each end of his left eye socket, and brought them together gently. The optic nerve and the muscles that manipulated the eye were already severed. It compressed noticeably and he felt the last retention links breaking under the pressure.

The eye fell out into his other hand. He thought: There I am, my third and twentieth dimensions, my ability to see and understand, reduce, particularize, analyze. For a moment he expected the rest of his limbs to begin dropping onto the floor until he was nothing but a heap of individual components. That was how the computers at his home knew him; was it not, therefore, reasonable to think that that was how he truly was?

But there was a feeling of relief that he did not fully admit to himself. He was unsure if he wanted to see what the eye could show him in this most powerful and disturbing of places. He could turn his own eye away from the chapels, but, if the Office's eye thought it necessary, he knew that it could see through his closed eyelid.

Aden touched Donchak on the shoulder and held the eye out to him. Donchak took it, weighing it in his hand and doing little to conceal his distaste.

Donchak edged around the column and out into the nave. He grew smaller to Aden's remaining eye, but seemed to get no further away.

Aden again felt the designed terror and grandeur of the cathedral. Deprived of the eye, he could no longer reduce light or motion to their component parts or analyze the transmutation of physical substances into etherealizations by covert spectrometry. For a moment, Aden thought himself to be sinking to one knee, but found he was still standing, pressed against damp limestone. Balls of were-light dipped and wandered about him, patrolling the length of the nave. Infrequently, one would venture between the columns, illuminate one of the chapels and then return.

With great effort, he focused his attention on Donchak. The latter was walking obliquely toward the unicorn. Aden hoped the other man's sandals made no sound, but the rush of his own, unmonitored blood made hearing tricky and deceptive. He imagined groups of the lights to be clustering above Donchak, following him across the nave, spotlighting him for whoever else might be worshiping or was worshiped in the chapels.

But these were surely random gatherings. As soon as he had one formation clarified, it would slowly shift and scatter. Anyway, if Donchak was being watched, the patterns of the lights' watching would be those of high magic and not rationally perceptible. They could only be suspected and felt, never diagramed.

Donchak was alongside the unicorn now. The top of its jeweled saddle was level with his head. Donchak seemed to be moving his lips and speaking inaudibly to the creature. If it heard, it gave no sign.

The man-creature remained immobile, his posture frozen into an expression of remote listening. Aden's mind roared within itself for more information, more lines, more colors, more movement, more known factors and dimensions. He had not even been able to see the attendant's face. He did not know if the attendant had one. Nor did he know whether man and unicorn were slave and master, equals or perhaps the component parts of a single being. All he could perceive in the metallic light was the robed fat man moving as carefully as a mountaineer along the flanks of the unicorn, his hands suspended over its caparison and chanfron.

So suddenly as to make Aden nearly gasp from surprise, Donchak spun upon his right foot and stepped squarely in front of the unicorn. Its horn appeared to be made of twisted strands of gold and ebony and was over a meter long. Donchak stared up at it for a moment, as if he were examining the design on one of his blind weavers' looms. His back was to the attendant, but he did not seem to care. His lips kept moving, and Aden heard certain unidentifiable words.

Donchak twitched and shifted with a multitude of small, painfully circumscribed gestures and muttered phrases. Bloated and maimed as Aden found him, he managed to imply that some feat of enormous physical and spiritual strength was being performed, as if he had made himself some kind of fulcrum for the balancing of violently opposed forces. Aden knew that if he was right in this feeling, that he and the unicorn, its attendant, the cathedral itself, the two eyes of the Office and uncountable other forces were part of the balancing. He could not immediately decide whether he was more frightened by the fact that Donchak might be able to do such a thing, or by what the consequences might be if he failed.

His right hand describing intricate traceries, Donchak carefully reached inside the shield that protected the unicorn's right eye. He held himself like that, perched on his toes, his legs visibly shaking from the effort.

Then he brought his hand down and walked backward alongside the animal. He followed his original path across the nave, reentering the aisle several meters from Aden. He did not wait there, but continued to the door.

Aden watched the unicorn and the attendant. They were precisely as they had found them, frozen, perfect, lost in the contemplation of their own terrible infinity. Then he imagined that Donchak had left him there and rushed after the man as quickly as his fear and blindness would permit. The alternating avenues of silver light between the columns played across his eye, distorting and confusing his sense of distance so that he almost tripped and fell over non-existent obstacles several times.

There were noises behind him. Scrapes and shufflings that could have been the unicorn and the attendant rousing themselves, or the echo of his own breathing trapped by irrational forces in the chapels and crypts on his right.

Donchak was waiting for him at the door. He shoved Aden through with startling strength, but then checked himself long enough to close it with no sound louder than that of the tumblers in its lock.

He was cradling his right hand in his left, and his blasted features flowed without interruption into his functioning half, poisoning it by its pain alone. Aden dug into his pocket and offered him the remainder of the anesthetic. Donchak accepted it and rubbed the substance into the palm of his right hand, and then outward on his fingers.

When he had finished, he walked down from the portico. Instead of directly crossing the square, he turned south and entered the first side street. The road narrowed quickly. The houses became more dilapidated and the smell worsened in proportion to the distance they traveled.

Aden nearly walked on the other man's heels out of fear of becoming lost. Inside his new blindness he knew that his threats of exposure had been a terrible thing, but if Donchak had meant to dispose of him and thereby protect himself, he would have done it on the way to the cathedral, not after he had left the eye with the unicorn. But that, he reconsidered, might have been the whole point of it, to trick him into giving up the eye . . . The Office could have foreseen these variables, made allowance for them, given him reliable contacts and firm alternatives for action. But that was not the Office's way.

The mage-fires glistened over them. Now that Aden could see only within a narrow range of the electromagnetic spectrum, he thought that they had dimmed somewhat. Paradoxically, he felt more awed by them; he could not see and isolate the heavy particle bombardments that were directly affecting the workings of his cortex, producing the feeling.

"Are they still there?" he finally whispered, after the streets had begun to twist toward where the City's docks had been.

Donchak shrugged and looked to the sky. "Possibly. Perhaps there were no wars or assassinations or upheavals desired by their master tonight. Or perhaps he had a particularly terrible act in mind and they are still gathering their courage and powers for it." He spoke more to the paving stones than to Aden. "They are strange things. At times I wish . . . " He broke off as they passed by a party of lepers butchering the inexplicable smoking corpse of a dray horse.

"What did you do? My eye . . . ?"

"The eye is with the unicorn." Donchak turned down another, still filthier street. The houses soared above them, leaning together so closely that in spots their gables and balconies touched, cutting the sky down to irregular slits of auroral brightness. "They go there every night to pray. I do not think even their master knows fully why. They are totally creations of magic, more completely than any other thing in this part of the world, even more than the beings the magicians have created out of pure thoughts. They are weapons, healers, vessels of great power and vulnerability. They are very old. Some say they were alive before the War itself." Donchak's voice grew tired and he stopped to rest against a wall.

He resumed walking after a minute, picking up another street. They were probably circling back toward Donchak's shop, but there was no way to be sure. "I simply made sure that they were both oblivious to us and then placed the eye into the socket of the unicorn. I hope I was correct in assuming the Office was still using K-type connectors?"

"N. Very little difference, but much more reliable." Aden felt himself regain some control over his feelings; shop talk does it every time.

"Then the thing will function by itself."

"Yes, fully. But I still can't imagine how you did it. The thing had its own eyes. It just wouldn't stand there with its groom or companion a few meters away and let you mangle it." Aden had meant to say more, but he remembered how easily the eye had lived inside of him for the past few years.

"I understand both of them. Not their purpose, I admit. I have no wish to do that. But I do understand their presence and the way they define themselves to you and me and to their master and to each other." Aden thought that he had heard the refugees coming back from Thorn River using the same tone of voice that Donchak was. It was a sort of chanting, internalized, polished and given to an artificial syntax which only emphasized the speaker's bewilderment with the things he was explaining. "The unicorn and the man are things of purest magic. The eye is a thing of irreducible logic. It exists in the same place as the unicorn's true eye. The two are hardly aware of each other's existence. Each one reports the things that it was designed to see, in the language suited to those perceptions. The creature should feel or detect no more than a remote irritation. It just does not have the capability to understand or guess at what we have done and neither does its companion."