The Books of the Wars (58 page)

The windows cleared. Eighty-three deaths remained before the hovercraft, most of them charred and shredded. Their mounts were similarly mauled, some running comically on two opposed legs, the stumps of their other legs repeating the movements of running, their balance presumably held by the same power that sustained the lives of their riders.

Stamp could see stars inside their lances, more absence than presence, as they swayed drunkenly against the gun and lightfire. He felt himself sickening, equally from the grotesquery of the spectacle and from an overwhelming sense of pity and sorrow. "They're done," he whispered, and was astonished when Etridge raised his hand and ordered cease fire.

Instead of turning about and attending to their wounded, Etridge added: "Pace them. This distance is fine."

"They're dead."

"Quite. I'd say they were before we attacked. Now they are truly dead. That might be death they hold in their hands." Etridge smiled. "Mr. Anderton, please direct our antennas and those of the other unit entirely to those fellows. I don't think our man of power has anything else for us today. And see if you can get those two wind ships down low enough for some close looking."

The officer behind them spoke into his microphone.

"They've been understood, sir. We know them!" Stamp was aware of how tenuous his ground might be. "The graphs have all placed and fixed them on the spectrums. Why not wipe them out and end it? The others . . . "

"The others should be watching them as closely as we are. As you should be, Stamp." Etridge was parental; he might actually enjoy Stamp's little treason. "We know them and the chemical and atomic reactions that sustain them. See?" He pointed to patterns of luminous dials along the right side of the cabin. "We know how they're dying. We have wounded them sufficiently to give their own form of death enough momentum to proceed on its own. They are heading for that death, real and absolute. But we musn't hurry them. No, no need for that. Just pat them along with a little flash of light or a kiss of the Mountain's choicest amatol, just enough to keep the bastards moving along that path so we can watch them running, watch how their gifts of power run off and try to hide themselves."

At irregular intervals one of the antennas above them or on the other ship went active. Quanta of light drove into the functioning riders who were not dying at an appropriate speed.

They followed them until the smoke from the village and the wreck of the first hovercraft was below the horizon. They fell individually, taking with them whatever plan they might have had to attack the ships and the tank column. Etridge directed the ships to pass over them as they dropped. Articulated arms inside the plenum chambers snatched samples of bone and armor and chitinous skin as they died and transmuted back into the elements and energies from which they had been formed.

The ventilators opened. The screaming of the last deaths entered the cabin, instantly captured on wall-mounted oscilloscopes and written into spinning globes of frozen helium. Later, the computers at Joust Mountain would take this information, their agonies and pain, and relate them to all the mysteries they had accumulated over three hundred years of watching, understanding their meanings as they had been reflected in the carbonization of battlefield flowers and in the blinding faces of distant stars. Their inquiries had to be made on such a scale for the ways of men of power were vast and infinitely devious.

"Bring the planes down and block them," Etridge said.

They maintained the distance, devouring the stragglers as they fell. Stamp saw the aircraft turning into the wind far ahead of them.

After ten minutes of casual pursuit, he could see the two aircraft on the ground. They faced the approaching ships, noses high and resting on their tail wheels, momentarily suggesting foreshortened crucifixes. The featureless plain gave no hint as to their size; Stamp knew the wingspread of each one was over ninety meters. The wings themselves were antennas. Everything that Etridge had chosen to accompany him was devoted to perception.

They played their questioning radiations back and forth against the hoverships, through the knot of ghostly cavalry. Opportunities for such examinations occurred only when magic erupted within the heartlands of its enemy's world, and there had not been such a thing since Foxblind. The tape banks and helium spheres choked on the rush of information that poured into them.

Etridge was pleased. When there was less than seventy meters between them and the aircraft, he said to Anderton, "End them all."

Light, this time in pale, fan-shaped arrays, beat against twenty-two survivors. The planes laid down their own light too, and the deaths faltered and dove into the ground. Some of them melted into the surface ice, hazings of steam rising from under their disintegrating bodies.

The two hovercraft deployed their drag skids and eased to the ground. Etridge waited a moment and stepped outside. Stamp followed and was overwhelmed by the smell. He had not imagined that anything could have so fouled winter air.

The wind ship crews jumped down from the wings and strolled into the wreckage. Every one of them carried hand analyzers of one sort or another, machines that tested the discoveries of the other machines. They chipped at the fairyland armor with geologist's picks, placed samples in glass bottles and watched as the fragments cracked and vaporized the glass. These fragments, in turn, were deposited in successive containers until something was found to hold them.

There was some joking, but most of the conversation was taken up with numbers and code references. Except for Etridge: "Is that death?" He pointed with his boot at one of the black lances the riders carried; its owner was dust and damp rot beside it.

"Will it kill you? Probably. Its form and composition derive from . . . " Anderton's voice, flat and metallic over the hovercraft's loudspeaker.

"No! Is it death? True and actual death. Not just a device that could cause it." Etridge stared down at the tapering shaft; it appeared more of a hole or tear in the ground than something that lay on top of it.

Stamp squatted and found the perspectives the thing reported to his eyes violently contradictory. Starlike objects flickered inside of it, but these were fading.

"No, sir," Anderton answered after a pause. Stamp imagined that he sounded as disappointed as Etridge looked; but that was probably the effect of the scene and the amplifier.

"The lines are gone," Anderton continued. "Our man of power has left."

"Before we told him too much about himself." Etridge addressed the hovercraft.

"That may have happened. The sounds of those things couldn't have been entirely their own. As you said about the minotaur."

Etridge stopped listening and turned to Stamp. "If that has happened, if he has left us now, how can we follow him? How will we know where to look?"

He's really asking me, thought Stamp, and held his ignorance like a precious secret.

Aden recognized more landmarks as he left the ruins of Clairendon and neared the Holy City. The fields, as with the rest of the enemy's lands, were blasted and sterile, waiting for the rains and the ancient, alien seeds they would bring. The ruins of fabulous palaces and villas sat against charred hillsides or along the drained channels of rivers that the magicians had summoned only for their sound. He remembered how, when he fled the City, the towers of these great houses had risen above the forests, flaunting their gardens and erotic sculptures against the patient watching of Joust Mountain and Dance.

A few of the shells hinted at inhabitation, if not by princes, then possibly by powers which had detached themselves from their makers to become self-sustaining, as the gravitational fields of celestial black holes had been thought to be.

Shadowed lights could be glimpsed behind the stained glass remnants of windows. There were also signal fires on isolated hill forts, and Aden occasionally thought he could see the sky flickering and glowing as it had over the Holy City. But this was not much; these mysteries were not being swallowed up by his world's understanding but by the emptiness around them.

He now walked through a field becoming lush with spring grass and the wildflowers of his world. There was a small herd of pegasuses grazing there, strong and powerful. Their caparisons were slitted to allow free movement to their wings; these rested against their flanks, colored like golden cock pheasants. Their armor was meant for flight, being limited to quilting under the caparisons and a crinet of silver mesh.

All their saddles were empty. Aden guessed they had been the scouts of a man of power, such squadrons usually affecting the most extravagant liveries, as he guessed that all their uniforms and bravado and the power they had served had been explained and unraveled by Joust Mountain. Because their task had been reconnaissance, as his had been, they would have discovered their own reality and that of their master before anyone else.

Anderton pointed to a diamond fixed on the moving map grids and reference lines. "I thought we were going to be the only ones out here." He went on with ponderous, Border-bred irony. "And there, and there, and there again."

"But nothing like this," said Etridge, moving closer and pointing to the first diamond.

"No, sir," referring to the rows of dials and linear readouts to his right. "It almost seems to be one of ours. Except . . . "

"Well?"

"Multiple fixtures and nets within the subject's cranial structure. The readings are indefinite, but we can't hope for much more at these distances."

"Active?"

"No, not for some time. Conductance indicates that the nets haven't been used for anything for over two years. It's all very well hidden," Anderton concluded, hoping for approval.

"The Special Office used to wire up people like that." Etridge seemed to be addressing the rows of dials.

"The Office has closed."

"It never existed. Right, Anderton?"

The other man looked to Stamp for assistance; Stamp turned away. "That's supposed to have been the way of outfits like that."

"Like what?"

Anderton fidgeted with his headpiece. "The undercover people, the spies . . . "

"Imagists," Stamp mumbled involuntarily.

"Ah, my aide was watching after all." He returned to Anderton, whose look of relief accordingly vanished. "As you say, that is the way of outfits like that. That one is closed, but that act of organizational death is, itself, an admission of the life they steadfastly denied. Interesting, don't you think?"

Stamp saw Anderton mustering his courage in the set of his facial muscles. "That can't matter much to us. If the thing existed, all its lying couldn't change that fact."

"Our opinion is secondary to what they were thinking of themselves," Stamp cut in, irritated with the way Etridge was playing with the man. The strategy of his world permitted no fascination with paradox and contradiction for its own sake, and Anderton was innocent of such things. "People listen mostly to themselves."

"And eventually one comes to speak and think in a warped shorthand, comprehensible only to one's self or to others who live in the same dream," Etridge finished for him. He smiled his approval to Stamp and this increased the other's anger. "That's what our princes of power did until we accidentally showed them a more captivating dream, the one we're sleeping through right now."

"Sir?" Anderton was honestly puzzled at the equation of his own world with that of the enemy.

"Don't worry. Our dream's the right one. Isn't it, Stamp?"

"It appears to be the only one, sir." Stamp turned on his heel and left the bridge, Etridge looking after him as if it had been some kind of triumph.

"Get on the channels to Lake Gilbert and ask them if there're files open on the person with the readings you've picked up at that first position."

Anderton nodded to a man farther down on the console. Circles of yellow and green light switched on and then off, and the other man pressed his earphones to his head. "The files are closed," he reported after some minutes. Anderton busied himself with his instruments before he could be drawn back into his commander's disturbing way of discussing a target with wires in its head. Range, speed, weight, respiration, molecular composition: the man obviously existed, so what was the use of talk of nonexistence?

Aden knew that the wires and grids that remained unplanted in his body were without power sources. They had no way to gather information from around him, nor did they have any place to store signals from the Office, had it, too, been functioning.

Because of this, Aden first suspected that one of the pegasus riders had survived. There was nothing visual, but rather tentative movements and half-formed ideas turning like shadows beneath his conscious mind. He vaguely connected this feeling with those the unicorn and its attendant had inspired in him years ago. But the grazing pegasuses had no intimidating cathedral to help propel his mood from discomfort to terror.

Also, there seemed to be only one concept now, quite different from the spectrum-wide wave fronts of thought that the unicorn had hinted at. It swam out of reach, its texture metallic and sharp for all its lack of definition.

Aden touched his fingers to the sides of his hand. The old patchwork of wires branched out from the inside of his skull through an occipital hole grommeted with a ring of pure gold. His thick, ash-colored hair made the pattern invisible to one who did not already know of its presence.

The wires moved under his fingers. Again, so small and elusive that he might fairly judge it as imagination.

"That's over, gone," he muttered to the pegasuses. Two of them looked at him in momentary agreement.

The sound of his own voice startled him, as if it had suddenly revealed him to covert watchers. But he had been in the open since he had left Dance. Hiding was impossible, particularly when he had entered the abandoned kingdoms of magic. If he had not been seen, it was because no one was looking for him.

Now there was something. The Office, perhaps, attempting to contact him in its appropriately non-existent way, to call him back or to urge him on.