The Books of the Wars (67 page)

Wailing, more terrible than what he remembered from the convoys of refugees fleeing Thorn River, reached him over the ship's engines. He was witnessing a battle being fought completely on the terms of his own world for there were no more men of power left to shape new energies to confound the inductive apparatus of the ship.

The unicorn with its attendant had stopped. Drawn like sleepwalkers, their guard of gryphon-cavalry and archers left them and proceeded cautiously toward the ship. They looked stronger than the taper bearers or chamberlains. Muscles built from essential energy pulsed under the gryphons' golden fur; the riders were armored like knights, protected by terrible charms and talismans.

Their strength would mean nothing. The ship was luring them with its open challenge to their power and to their belief that their own reality was ultimately sacred and therefore beyond knowing.

He considered shooting them. If they died, it would be as whole, functioning beings; their lives' mystery would be translated into the greater mystery of death. They were only the created, not the creators, and so would not know of the possibility of this escape. But they were not the ones he should risk revealing himself for.

The gryphons and their riders ended in the same way the memorialists had. Some vanished so quickly and completely that Aden had trouble being sure if they had existed at all; since they were only thoughts to begin with, their end erased their memory as well as their present physical reality. He recalled them, seconds after they were gone, only in impossibly distant suspicions and flashes of déja` vu.

The rest went more slowly. They reached the twenty-meter line around the ship, stood there a moment, and then faced around to Aden, walking, it appeared, into the earth as their bodies crumbled. The ship had shown them the dark that had always been under their feet. They had been created as lights and beacons against it, but the gulf had been larger than the magicians had suspected.

This kept on for half an hour. Then all of them were gone. Aden estimated that there had been three to four thousand individuals, every one of them fashioned from some kind of magic. Within an hour all their lives had been transformed into formulae, Llwyellan Functions, micro-dots and Henschel profiles.

The four men began walking toward the unicorn, and the ship followed them like an immense pet. Its air cushion kicked up thick clouds of the funeral dust into the air, where a new breeze caught it. The gunsight showed the cloud to be comprised only of static elements, devoid of energy or animation.

The dust fell on his clothes and the gun's barrel. Aden worried for a moment that it might clog the weapon's delicate mechanisms, then decided that it was too late for such thoughts. He leaned out from behind the column. The unicorn and its attendant were where they had stopped when the hovership first came into the square. The dust of their thousands of retainers and protectors also settled on the unicorn's flanks and on the attendant's shoulders, dulling the brilliance of its coverings and tumult of his skin.

The City was empty with shocking finality. Even that morning, there had been the promising threat of lingering magic strong enough to survive the ship. Now the City was a complete ruin, occupied only by its conquerors and its last refugees.

Stamp watched them becoming shrouded in the fog of their own dissolution. They spread out as they came toward the ship, tripping over the ones that had fallen in front of them. He saw them piling up in a wide sweep before him, their colors and hideous forms blurring together, sinking into the paving stones as they milled forward and then away.

Anderton spoke to them from inside the ship. The parade's wailings did not drown him out for he was talking in frequencies the dying could not scream in; the ship adjusted that for him. The effect was comforting, for it lent a feeling of detachment from the horror meters in front of him. It was as if they were only watching a film or hologram of something that had happened long ago.

There had been no sorrow in anything he had seen since they left the forest. Small fractions of pity and curiosity, but little else. The city had proven itself to be as fragile as Etridge accused it of being. The self-destruction of the magicians' servants outside the walls had repelled him. It was a stupid exercise in self-indulgence.

All he had wanted was a gesture worthy of their own myth. Instead he faced the dried-out husks of puppets, phony, impotent monuments to millennial frauds. Everything faded before Etridge and the coldness of his ship.

As they had walked down the Avenue of Wisdom, the ship's radars had discovered an actual magician, locked and embalmed inside an egg of frozen time, in a garden near the square. In a fit of unbidden helpfulness, the computers had come up with the formula explaining how it had been done five seconds after they had charted its location. Two minutes later they produced a formula to crack the spell. Etridge did not think it worth the trouble for the printouts also showed that the magician had died as a consequence of its casting.

Anderton's voice continued, needlessly explaining the mechanics of the ruin occurring in front of them. He noted that the number of creatures was rapidly diminishing, but that the unicorn had not joined in their march; it remained behind, five hundred thirty-two meters from the prow of the ship. Its attendant was with it. It had the eye.

Anderton also noted that the presence they had detected that morning was with them again, hiding in an arcade directly west of where the unicorn was standing. He was human and had been with the Special Office before its official closing. Would Etridge require more?

"No." The parade had destroyed itself. A last memorialist ran back and forth through the dust of his companions, gibbering repulsively. He tripped and fell, exploding into white ash like a dandelion blossom. Etridge raised a set of field glasses, surveyed the square and then motioned them ahead.

Stamp found himself walking easily, taking long, relaxed strides. He could make out the contours of the unicorn and its attendant. Their scale was diminished by the emptiness of the square, and the spaces around them were vacant of any enchantment. There were no memorialists left, no bearers of candles or honors, nothing to block the intrusion of his own world into those spaces, to stop it from extending outward around the isolated unicorn, over the City, over the half of the planet occupied by the men of power, outward too, into the sky and the regions closed to god.

Anderton's voice acquired a relaxed assurance as they crossed the paving stones. The air bubble of the ship kept blowing the creatures' piled dust into the air, lifting it and sending it over them as they walked. At times the dust shoaled thickly, becoming a tan mist that permitted him to stare directly into the sun; it hid the walled horizon and the buildings enclosing the square, suspending the unicorn and its companion like raindrops in a blank sky.

Stamp could not believe that this was what Etridge and the other Border commanders had wanted. All Anderton and Bock wanted was an end. But the commanders must have spent their waking nights expanding strategic maps into tactical diagrams, smothered with continually increasing numbers of arrows: green, brown, silver, black arrows thrusting against the shadow-enemy, enfilading his flanks, blocking his routes of escape, herding him and his enchantments into indestructible, sterile bell jars. And then, more explicitly, the reality of where the arrow points and the shadows interfaced, smeared with fire and lights rocketing back and forth against the parallel spectrums.

This, he thought as he walked through the coarse haze, should have been the time when the ramjet bombers would have finally sought out the aristocratic men, dressed in their splendid robes, attended by legions of fabulous beasts.

He glanced at Etridge, but found that he could not tell if the man had ever conceived of the ending in such a way. Whatever sort of idea Etridge may have saved for this time, it would have been molded by the thought of Thorn River and what he had done there; it could not have helped but act like a lens upon the man's perceptions and dreams. Like the eye of the Special Office, or that of the unicorn, or Joust Mountain itself.

The wind dispersed the dust and the air was clear again. Stamp cradled his rifle in the crook of his left arm and brushed some of it from his sleeves. He did not realize the arrogance of the gesture until he watched Etridge do the same.

Etridge came closer and handed him his binoculars; they had a small gyrostabilizer in them, so they were no problem to use while walking. The man-being did not surprise Stamp. He had seen any number of animated statues and artificial humans as they had traveled through the City, and one more, no matter how wondrously constructed or covered with miniature universes, could not do much more to his senses.

The unicorn, however, touched him across the distance that remained. Like the attendant, it was covered by what might have as easily been its skin as armor, all of it etched with designs of elusive complexity. Its right eye glowed and flickered in its socket, flame like, having no iris or pupil to indicate the direction of its stare. There was a burning in its left eye socket too, but it was dimmer, behind, or possibly inside the jeweled humanness of the Special Office's eye; that one was clearly fixed on them.

Stamp unconsciously slowed, becoming absorbed in the perfection of the unicorn's features and proportions. It was, he conceived with the exaggerated distance of memory, everything he had once thought the kingdoms of magic to be: outwardly magnificent, with an interior reality so foreign to the thinking of his world as to be beyond its mortalities and brutal, knife-edged hungerings.

The eye fit into its lines and presences. In theory, that should have been impossible. The eye should have qualified and flawed the unicorn; instead it strengthened the creature with its knowledge, turning it into something that did not need the magicians.

"We're under attack from them," Anderton reported over the ship's speaker. His voice again sounded harsh and strident without the screaming of the dying underneath it.

Etridge held out his free hand with the palm toward the ground. The three other men and the hovercraft obediently stopped. Stamp heard nothing beyond Anderton and the ship's drag skids.

"Any problems?" Etridge asked conversationally. He motioned again, and Stamp returned the binoculars.

"A bit more than we'd anticipated, sir. Could you come closer to the ship? It'd be easier to protect you here." Grant and Halstead backed up with their rifles raised across their chests. Etridge walked casually back, half turning away from the unicorn.

Stamp reached the ship and pressed his back against the flexible plenum skirt. Air escaping from it felt cool against his ankles. They had been on their feet since they entered the City at the Teachers' Door.

The coolness emphasized the noontime heat in the square. Though it was late summer, the temperature was rising above any possibly normal level. Stamp felt sweat collecting under his arms and dripping down along his ribs. He looked at his watch: 1:00. They had been in the square one hour and five minutes.

The fear building inside of him hinted that this was neither a season of their own world or of magic's, but something new which Etridge might not understand and which, in its understanding of him, could escape, hiding and stalking them through interwoven thickets of magic and rationality.

Stamp knew his mouth and throat were dry. It was inconceivable that the eye would not have been discovered by the men of power without the unicorn participating in the deception.

The centuries of the war had been defined sharply. Betrayal and treason were nothing more than the maintaining of an allegiance for one side while serving the other. Then there was the Special Office, becoming lost to the services and then to itself; now the unicorn. They were
apart
from either world, he thought in his fear; a universe of ungovernable multiplicities suddenly rose before him.

"Signals into the area showing up too." Anderton's voice was disjointed and implied a great deal of preoccupation with the defense against the unicorn.

"From where?" The heat made Etridge's words sound more emotional than they really were.

The pauses between Anderton's replies became longer. "Outside. From home, somewhere. It's very weak and we're only getting it through augmentation with the other unit." A full minute of silence from the ship. "The broadcast . . . This is remarkable! I'd never thought that thing capable of so much new stuff!"

"The broadcast?" Stamp found himself saying ingenuously.

"No, goddammit! The goddamn horse out there!" The loudspeaker roughened Anderton's irritation and turned the rebuke into defensive anger.

Quiet.

"Are we losing?" Etridge inquired mildly. He was looking toward the unicorn and so addressed it, rather than the ship.

"Ah . . . " Voices were undercutting Anderton's. "No. No, I don't think so."

"What about the signal, then?"

"It's to a receiver in this area, using a cross-spectrum wave front. Looks like a variation on what the people at Lake . . . " More delay, more voices from the men away from the speaker mike; " . . . from Lake Gilbert."

"Special Office character?" Etridge's words were melting with the heat and his outward calm could not protect them.

"Yes. Or at least like it. Our man is in the area of reception."

Etridge's face closed its protective planes, muscles bunched under his dry skin and scar lines that had been invisible flamed into redness, spelling out the memory of Thorn River and all the suppressed agonies that revolved around it. He feels the world breaking apart too, Stamp thought; something is thrusting upward, underneath us. "All right. I want it, and the thing beside it if you can get him. Shoot to block its path of travel until we can get some kind of control on it."

Etridge walked through the furnace air. Stamp's palms were still slippery, and he had trouble grasping his rifle when he followed. He raised it tentatively. The unicorn and its rider swam in the space above the iron sights, more insubstantial and equivocal than they had been in the dust.