The Books of the Wars (49 page)

Dust rose from beneath the hooves of their mounts, but Aden could see it only as gold. The ten deaths, more gorgeously attired than those he had seen the day before, trotted with agonizing slowness behind the magicians, at a speed calculated to allow enough of their stench to reach the crowd and give proof of their immortal decay. Strange and frightening devices, suggestive of the price the magicians had extracted from them for their release from their graves, spangled their tunics.

That was all there was, suggestion, hints, outlines drawn with nighttime darkness in the morning, extending backward through all the perspectives which the loss of the eye had denied to him. Aden felt the mystery of the City as its people did and cowered before it. Yet he could not look away.

The dragons strode behind the deaths, hazed with the golden dust, moving at a half-march with their long, reptilian legs, the natural armor of their chitinous hides indistinguishable from the light camails and segmented breastplates their masters had given them. Their eyes shone with internal light and revealed a murderous intellect.

They paid no attention to him and passed. Evidently they were not privy to the knowledge Donchak was. The noise struck up again, as it had the day before; the ritual of that hour ended.

Beggars rushed away from the wall and into the street, scraping at the chinks between the paving stones where the magicians' dust had settled. Aden looked down and saw their fingers beginning to bleed before they were knocked over by the renewed progress of more sober-minded persons.

The man grunted and resumed walking. Aden felt his fear replaced by shame and then by the morning's confusion. His sense of personal abandonment became impenetrable and he did not notice when Donchak's man had to get him out of the way of another passing man of power as his palanquin was borne across their path by eight cyclopes.

The Fishers' Door had been erected where the canneries had been in the old city of Cape St. Vincent, when there had been such things as oceans, and before there was any need or thought of walls for the City or doors carved from fused bodies of the wizards' vanquished enemies.

Aden passed through the Door and stared dully up at the thousands upon thousands of forms, faces contorted in agonies that might be still continuing; arms, limbs, hands, all intertwined around each other and frozen into the two huge slabs of the Door. Their endless features were blurred and remote, as if a layer of smoked glass held them together instead of the power of the City's wizards, but Aden's remaining eye could still see enough to be sickened. As with the two magicians, though, he could not look away. The brutality of the Door was too monstrous for him to encompass, and even with the eye, he suspected that the motives for it might have escaped him. Again, he was left with the mystery and found it quite enough.

The man abruptly released him into the currents of men and beasts that compressed themselves into the Fishers' Door as they entered the City or left it, spreading out onto the branching, marble-paved roads that led out to all the other kingdoms of magic. He had said nothing, shared none of Aden's confusion or Donchak's apparent panic. Aden wondered if the man even had a face, for he was able to remember only blank, dark skin, outlined with traceries of purple tattoos. He also recalled the attendant of the unicorn, who had also been faceless, yet as warm with lives and patterns. Perhaps, he hypothesized as the crowds swept him past the Door's thousands of tormented eyes, it was the function of such blind and faceless men to guide creatures like unicorns and secret police spies before the former had gained their eyes and after the latter had had theirs taken from them.

The City's walls soared above him, their height impossible to estimate with his single eye, covered with murals and mosaics that raced away from him into blurred, violent luminescence. The Door's traffic carried him away from the City and pushed him off to the side of the road. The land around the walls was gently rolling prairie and the light colored it the same gold and bronze that the light in Donchak's house had been; Aden saw that it did not reach into the Fishers' Door and the eyes there shone with light the magicians had put there, and none other.

"They" knew. Donchak had said so. But the mission was mostly completed, with rather more success than his superiors had probably anticipated at its beginning. The wisdom of Donchak's suggested route still seemed correct, despite the way the man chose to make sure he took it. Imaginary alarms might have been sounding in the City. He thought that he could hear the deep tolling of bells above the roaring of the road's traffic.

He walked for most of that day. Once he learned to compensate for the false distances his eye conveyed to him, the miles passed with comparative ease.

There were few magicians abroad, for there was little need for them to resort to mere walking or riding where long distances were concerned. The road was a wearisome place for them, and perhaps evocative of restlessness and questing, and therefore to be left to ordinary folk and commerce. The familiar tiredness of the road and the harmless pageantry of its traffic replaced his fear. The memory of Donchak's faceless servant vanished first, for there seemed so little to the man. Then Donchak fell into some kind of perspective of his own, that of a simple traitor or harmless lunatic.

The unicorn remained, however, dimly attended by the metallic giant, floating alternately through the darkness of the cathedral's nave and then through the new emptiness of his eye socket, waiting in both places for the summons of their master, carrying the Office's treason with it to spy on his designs and plottings.

People spoke to him, reassuring in their trivialities. Strangers remarked upon nothing more sinister than the beauty of the weather or the fields of wildflowers that the road gradually climbed into as it left the City. Drunken centaurs yelled and screeched to themselves as they pulled cargos of women to the City's markets. Despite the obvious poverty of his dress, men still approached him to peddle ornaments and charms of indifferent workmanship. There were also other fellows who cautiously approached him and offered articles that could not be purchased where the magicians were closely watching: prisms, rusted ball bearings, charred printed circuits picked up on centuries-old battlefields. The road was more open than the City, even though he often saw rocs patrolling the skies above it.

Following Donchak's directions, largely because he had no others, he continued on the road as it went north. It became less grand as it left the immediate territories of the Holy City, losing its marble paving blocks and turning to cobblestones and then to packed dirt, but the people on it became no less fascinating. If anything, Aden marveled at how easily they had fitted their mortality around the presence of magic. Palaces rose distantly through forests of sapphire-oak and diamond vine, or perched on fairy tale escarpments too eccentric to permit any real menace to flourish. The formations of rocs diminished until only solitary eagles with wings of translucent carnelian watched the road for the magicians. Magic was always in evidence, but usually as ornament or backdrop. Women wore necklaces of were-light and occasional seers had wildly grotesque familiars perched on their shoulders, but there was never the hint or implication that forces of illimitable power were being kept and refined, or that vengeances were being harbored against entire nations and philosophies.

Aden wondered if it had been like this on the roads he had taken on his way to the Holy City. He could remember nothing on them but brutality and oppression by omnipresent powers. Even when the magicians or their retainers or tentacles of power had not been detectable to the eye, he recalled a different spirit in the people. He could not believe that the loss of the eye, great though it may have been, could have changed his perceptions this much. Donchak's suppressed rage at the Border Command or his ostensible panic were different, more complicated things. Here he sought only to know if a person was smiling or walked with his weight on the balls of his feet so that he could move suddenly to this direction or that. Surely he did not need the eye to understand such things.

Perhaps it was simply that the hold of the City or its belligerent sisters was not so strong in these places. Or, he thought again on the next day, perhaps this was just a sign that the war was ending. The reasons became less important as the beauty of the countryside increased.

Clairendon seemed a reversed image of the Holy City, where the constructions of magic underlay those of the old world, rather than the other way around. It had once been a port and it remained one despite the magicians' dislike of the ocean, anciently the highway for his world's battle cruisers and submarines. Its clapboard houses were intact as were its open, wandering lanes, the palaces of the mighty hidden among them as discreetly as they had been in the forest. Its men of power did not seem to have the morbidity of taste that their brothers in the other cities of magic did; they could be seen tacking through the harbors of the city in magnificently carved pinnaces, the visible display of their power limited to the filling of their sails when they moved against the wind.

He spent more time there than he had intended. Its magic, like that of the road, was made of soft, intensely human stuff, even when it was wielded by immortals. Its sky glowed only fitfully at night, and then as much from the auroras as from the battling of the magicians.

But the season was progressing. It was already midsummer and he guessed there would be at least one stretch of high country to traverse before he could reach his own lines. He took the road that bordered the river flowing into the ocean near the city, as Donchak had suggested, climbing back into the emerald and turquoise forests and their singular peace.

The first attack came one week after he had left the ocean city. The road followed the river in a gently curving arc to the west and southwest.

At first Aden was pleased that his remaining eye was sharp enough to see them approaching up the river valley, utterly silent because of their speed. They seemed like motes of dust, anchored in a gently shifting space that did not quite match up with the one the river and the road occupied.

Their size also grew according to different laws of perspective than the river's. They were small for an overly long time and then their dimensions exploded outward, instantly growing wings and vertical stabilizers, gun pods and iron bombs slung from hard points, aerials, turrets, blisters and canopies, their proportions suddenly gigantic.

Aden thought his heart to be stopped; but he had perceived all of their approach in the space between its beating. They were bombers and the alternating black and red stripes on their wings showed that they were from the fortress at Dance. The span of their wings bridged half the river's width. Their leading edges and noses were glowing yellow from the speed of their flight.

The people on the road looked up calmly, wrenching their shoulders and necks to keep the aircraft in sight, and then looked back to their fellows or to the oxen they were leading. No one but Aden showed any surprise. Fearing discovery, he forced himself to stay on his feet and keep walking.

The sound of the ships and the blast from their weapons hit him simultaneously, knocking him to his knees and compressing all the air from his chest.

Two men dressed in turbans and satin robes grasped him by the shoulders and helped him to his feet. "Are you all right?" the shorter of the two inquired mildly.

Astonished, Aden turned to face the man. His features were long and finely drawn despite his lack of height. A column of thick smoke was rising from the river shore directly behind his head. "Just a surprise. I didn't. . . " Aden wondered dimly if he was using the correct accent.

"Of course. The land around here is so enchanting. It is so easy to forget about the War." His voice was patronizing but Aden detected no suspicion in it. The two men then stepped back, bowed slightly and merged into the crowd. Aden followed in their direction, edging toward the river's shore.

He found a shaded spit of land and walked out onto it. The strain of trying to appear unconcerned made his limbs move in jerks and he felt that all the magicians' spies were now watching while their masters decided whether it would be worth their while to crush him.

Nothing happened. He turned his head downriver. The line of smoke reached up far above the bordering ridge line of the river's valley. But it shifted and bobbed uncertainly as the aircraft had, subtly out of phase with the world around it. Aden saw a large river trireme at its base and guessed that it had been the planes' target. It was untouched, suspended within the smoke like the eyes of the vanquished people in the Fishers' Door, its oars moving with their own slow rhythm. People moved nonchalantly about its decks; the water around the ship was smooth, broken only by its wake.

Aden watched the smoke thin away and disperse. The trireme stayed, moving downstream. Its flags and rigging remained motionless, the crew and passengers showing no more acknowledgment that anything unusual had happened than the people on the road.

On his way to the Holy City, he had seen occasional evidence of his world's assaults on this one, but he knew that these were usually ancient freaks, when the laws of probability had allowed the destructions of his world's weapons to coincide with the constructions of magic's. He had never seen one of the futile attacks before this, and he thought he felt a careless, languid triumph in the people on the road. The ships had come, raging with their geometric fires, and done no more than cast a shadow across the sun.

Aden got up and back onto the road. The feeling of invincibility grew stronger, reaching into him and sparking something that might have been contempt for the futility of the way his world was fighting this war. Midday fireworks, but little else. He found it equally difficult to understand what Donchak had so feared about the implantation of the eye. It had been there for over two months, yet even the ships from Dance could do nothing.