The Books of the Wars (61 page)

The man did not even give him the comfort of reprimand or rebuke; there were only his opaque syllogisms, each one of which made Stamp feel like he was being shoved along more and more certainly by the velocity of the man's obsession.

He thought he had felt the air of the forest cutting more deeply into his heart as Etridge guided them along, peeling the stabilities of the regular services from his memories with the same reductivism that he used to shatter the remnants of magic. His family, his ambitions, dead lovers, the peace his home had established against the encircling violence of the war, they had all been eroded by Etridge, their definitions erased by the course and direction he had chosen for the ships.

Stamp shook himself and opened the appropriate channels. He left the "voice" switch off; video readout would be more discreet.

He slowly typed his inquiries and accusations, and when the screen in front of him was filled with luminous green letters, pressed the "transmit" button. The information went out in two block transmissions of a fifth of a second each to Lake Gilbert; identification, location, force, personnel, course, casualties, destination, the code for suspected incompetence of command.

Stamp received no immediate response and repeated the message. On the third try, Lake Gilbert answered by correcting all of his information. They were, Lake Gilbert silently, unctuously informed him, thirteen hundred and seventy kilometers northwest of his reported position; they had sustained only two casualties due to enemy action; one tank and three half-tracks remained with them; their line of travel roughly paralleled the fortress line between Kells, Joust Mountain, Dance and First Valley. The reconnaissance was, Lake Gilbert trusted, going well but it reminded the sender to refrain from aggressive activities against the enemy or any deep penetrations into his territory until the strategic parameters of the war had clarified. Interference with their operation by Special Office was impossible in that no such organization had ever existed.

Finally, reports of incompetence, unless sent from a "recognized combat area" were ineffective if not confirmed by a medical officer. Since both their doctors had been killed, Stamp left this item out of each of his three succeeding attempts at attracting Lake Gilbert's attention. Each time, he encountered the same response. He thought of opening voice channels and arguing with whoever was on the other end of the transmission, but decided against it since it was probably a machine.

The words from the last reply stayed on the screen for a minute and then erased themselves. He could hear only the ventilators. Television monitors on the panels above his head reported the flat gleam of moonlight on the sentry tripods around the ships; their beacon lights shone an alternating blue and orange.

The faces on the trees were gone and lost now. There were just the beacons and the white, silent bulk of the other hovercraft on the aft monitor screens. Even at rest, the ship implied motion, silent and imperial across a night paved with glass made by laser cannons. In his frustration and loneliness, he imagined the faces of all the creatures of magic upturned and staring under the surface of the glass road, acting as its foundation, absorbing the shocks of passage that began with the whispering of the high wind ships, descended through the captive storms of the hovercraft, and led, eventually, to the grinding of tank treads and hobnailed boots. They would scar the surface of the glass road, until those who marched upon it could no longer see down into all the lost myths crushed underneath, and they, in turn, were spared the sight of their enemy's triumph and rightness.

He thought, that is happening now, and I find it progressively more difficult to preserve whatever dreams I might have had about this magic. Since the raising of the fire-minotaur, I have seen nothing to indicate that there is anything more than parlor tricks left, dragons pulled from silk hats, as Etridge put it. They were more real when I looked at them through the radio telescopes at Joust Mountain, or read of their barbarities on commemorative plaques at Thorn River and Heartbreak Ridge.

"You see the logic of it?" Etridge had come into the room behind him. Stamp felt broken and far away enough to mask any surprise.

"I see the necessity of it, even for myself," Stamp answered after a while, with some bitterness staining his words. Etridge did not dispute it.

From the hills above the Holy City, Aden could see a line of blue gray along the southeastern horizon: the ocean was coming back. Soon the place would be known as Cape St. Vincent again. The ocean would advance and drown the palaces and pavilions the magicians had built on the dry seabed as evidence of their power.

He had watched the City for two days, sitting in the same place, trying to fit the patterns of its overgrown gardens and rubble-choked streets into his memories. Three and a half million people had lived there, ruled and overawed by two hundred and seventy men of power and a horde of lesser magicians, monks, acolytes, apprentice sorcerers.

Now only occasional figures moved across the blasted plazas. Pegasuses in tattered liveries, their wings the color of canvas, wandered out of the City and came close enough for him to identify them. Packs of wild dogs harried those that could no longer fly, easily encircling two or three at a time and destroying them.

As he watched, the line of the ocean thickened at the edge of the world, though that could be an illusion brought on by the setting sun. Dark specks that were probably islands seemed to move and acquired the silhouettes of battle cruisers and aircraft carriers.

The 18x scope sight was fitted into the front of his holster. Aden removed it and locked it onto the barrel, just forward of the action's lug pivot. He reversed the holster and clipped its narrow end to the butt to form a shoulder stock.

The scope perceived the City, as it had Gedwyn, in eight of the parallel spectrums. It reviewed each one in turn, progressing outward from normal, visible light, revealing the completeness of the City's desertion. The gun's magazine vibrated in a different harmonic with each filtering system the scope used.

The core of the City retained hints of beauty and power. Aden recognized the domed temple where he had found the unicorn and its attendant and where his eye had been taken from him. The scope revealed successive dimensions of beauty as it interrogated the temple's minarets and vast mosaics, found its alabaster windows unbroken and its bronze doors locked and awaiting the arrival of men with powers sufficient to open them.

The fountain was there too. There was no water coming from it, but the dolphins and seraphim gushed luminous scarlet and turquoise plasmas that poured over the fountain's rim and across the plaza with the insubstantiality of clouds.

The quarter where Donchak's house had been was a tumble of gutted shells, freestanding walls and piles of masonry. There were also traces of sorcerous power left in that area of the City, but it was mostly of the minor sort, orphaned homunculi, incantations stopped in mid-casting, one demon assassin, exhausted by the vengeance locked in his heart, hunting a man who had died by his own choice months before.

The wires woven into his head sang as they had for the past two days. Instead of the intermittent monotone he had grown used to, Aden read another level into their pain. Perhaps it was the unicorn that was reaching out to him; he had not admitted to that possibility before. Perhaps it had used the eye in the way that he could have, had he had the time and the peace, had he not worked in the interests of his world, had he not fallen in love with someone from the other.

He rubbed his hand against the leather patch, testing the emptiness behind it and the carved ridges of the perpetually open eye on its front. It was conceivable that the Office had rigged the patch for perception and transmission without telling him. The doctor-machine had seemed pleased when he had shown it to him, just before he left for the Taritan Valley. But, even if this was true, the motives of a mythic organization embarked on missions consisting principally of self-deception could hardly matter to a man in his situation.

That situation being one of treason. The classical offense against the deities, someone had pointed out to him, was vanity, hubris. But there were no gods left to offend in the world, only nations, and the highest attainable sin was therefore treason. In distracting the tanks and possibly allowing the castle to escape into death, he had committed the first treasonous act in the kingdoms of magic, where emulation of the godhead had formerly been the worst a man, commoner or magician, could aspire to.

Iaffirm my world, even when I act against it to preserve magic against transmutation into numbers and equations. Good; that implied that there was still some room left between the two worlds for him to function in.

The land to the south of the City, between the flattened hills and the ocean, was thick forest. Aden examined it through the scope sight, noting the broken towers of obsidian and tourmaline that rose through the green cover. Strangely colored birds the size of men and dressed in armor soared above the land, darting back and forth above the forest to catch the thermal currents rising from its borders with the hills.

There were sourceless flashes of light too, that suddenly illuminated irregular patches of the woods, rushed through the various spectrums and then faded. The explosions or signals were rarely accompanied by any sound, but he could usually pick out wisps of smoke and plasma rising lazily from their general location. One such area appeared to be at the end of a dark, twisting avenue that had been cut through the forest. It had not been there the night before.

Aden examined it through the scope. The path followed the contours of the land, holding to implied, geometrically precise curves and parabolas as it wound along the ancient drainage and rills.

There were other blast traces scattered through the forest. They marked the destruction of isolated pockets of magic and power and the trees had grown thickly over where they had been. They had imploded upon themselves and left nothing behind. The avenue was different; it was rich in heavy particle radiations and the peculiar resonances which exotic alloys often touched off in adjoining spectrums.

The vehicles were at the end of the road. They were fast and well armed. The army of occupation. Aden imagined the land collapsing in on itself, rushing to surround and smother the last few secrets it held—not quickly enough.

The gun murmured to him, sentient, probing the asylum death offered the men of power and their works from the pursuit of the Border Command. Death remained special and singular, but the war had merged it with love and loyalty and hatred and all other mysteries. Aden could think of nothing which could truly differentiate death from the rest of them, aside from the fact that it had been the first and was now the last. There was nothing which showed it to be beyond the reach of the men in the hovercraft and those that would follow, any more than the other mysteries had been.

Aden dropped the gun onto his crossed legs and found himself shivering despite the warmth of the air. He ran the gun's barrel along his sleeve, absently tracing the veins and scars and lines left from the skin grafts and emplacement of wires.

He should feel differently. This was the end of the war. Instead he felt as deserted as the City, spoken to only by buried scar tissue and memories of unicorns more distant than that of the one woman he had been able to love. Is this not, he asked the gun, how all old men feel? Then, knowing that he had always felt that way, he further considered that the Office had always been old, too.

As the air darkened, crystallized tree stumps reflected the first ship's laser cannons. Around it, the fires of the dying kingdoms incinerated the tombs of mages, fertilizing the land with their transmuting ashes, luring vines and seedlings into the charred clearings to hide their shame and defeat.

Aden stayed on the rock outcropping for most of that night. The two ships had settled to the ground just after dusk. Their clearing of a wide security perimeter would have blinded him if the gunsight had not automatically shifted its filters.

Blue and orange monitor light marked sentry guns posted around the encampment. A complete darkness reached more than three kilometers beyond them into the forest. After that border, the forest resumed its decay, exploding quietly and burning away or dumbly stalking enemies who had made themselves invincible.

Dragons sometimes roared out, seeking the bidding of vanished masters. Enormous blocks of stone that had been welded into towers and redoubts by ineffable forces broke apart and fell into moats filled with the glowing skeletons of ichthyosaurs.

The gun could not hear this, it could only see. Aden lay against a rock with cabalistic inscriptions chiseled above his head and drifted from the forest's night to his own, then out to the night that was demarcated by the orange and blue beacons. At some intervals he thought he could hear the ocean, at others Gedwyn's voice.

He was sure the eye was still in the unicorn, though much had changed in the world since he had left the hospital. This, despite the fact that it was much more reasonable to presume that the unicorn was gone and the eye simply remained along the floor of the cathedral's nave, staring fixedly at the high altar, reporting the monthly accumulations of dust on the chalices and sacred books to the Special Office.

It will be there, he thought. Its image, hard and glistening, swam through the dark interior of his eye socket, immune to the understanding of whatever devices the men in the forest had brought with them.

He saw the unicorn again, the purest embodiment of legend and mystery, moving incomprehensibly through the world, as remote and present as dreams. Ah, he thought, the Special Office's heart may be at one with it. He conceived of the single creature as the underground, guerrilla army of the defeated kingdoms. It would be possible to live in a world where such forces still operated, and it would be necessary for the Special Office to return to protect it.