The Visitor (29 page)

“We're going down a great many stairs to the cellar where the device is.”

“We're going to see the device?” Her face lighted up with excitement.

“We are. The place has been fully excavated by now, and it's well lit. When you enter the chamber, there will be a short stair in front of you. You'll go down it, and the device will be directly before you. All you need do is go down the steps, walk up to the device and look at it. Really look at it. Stare at it. As though you are…memorizing it.”

“Why?”

“Observe the picture in the book. That's what she's doing.”

“What is this device? It looks like a frozen wave.”

“It's what you see there, a shape, like a chunk of dark glassy stone, yes, a featureless mass except for a place halfway up one side where there is a good deal of cloudy discoloration. Everyone thinks it's magical, of course. The bishop is staking his career on it…”

“The bishop?”

“He's ambitious. If this thing turns out to be magical, it comes under the Division of Culture, which is BHE, which is the bishop's purview. The thing certainly looks sorcerous, doesn't it? Though, oddly enough, the text says nothing about it.”

She nodded. “It sounds simple enough.”

“Your sister will be there. You'll put in an appearance, then turn around and leave. If she follows, I'll delay her while you come back here.”

Dismé reflected, trying to decide if that made a difference. If she was covered in this costume, if her face was painted, if the doctor was there, it was unlikely Rashel could do her any harm. “If you think Rashel is going to be impressed by me, or you, or the surroundings, I doubt it.”

“Let's try,” he said, smiling at her. “Meantime, I presume you're all packed? Good. Did I tell you, Michael's going with us when we leave here early tomorrow.”

“Michael said he was going,” she replied, returning his smile. “He wasn't delighted when I said I was to play the part of your wife. I think perhaps he's…fond of me.”

The doctor turned away and busied himself at his desk while Dismé went into the adjacent room, where there was a mirror. When she had shut the door behind her, the doctor sighed deeply and murmured, “Fond of her. Well. And of course. Why wouldn't he be?”

C
ame a knock at the doctor's door. With a quick look to be sure the door to his bedroom was closed, he opened the door only slightly to see the unremarkable face of one of his spies.

The spy whispered, “The woman's headed down there, Doc.”

“The procession's coming? As we planned?”

The spy nodded, scratching his head. “They're happy with the money, Doc, but a bit confused about the detour.”

“Tell them several people along the route are celebrating promotions. They should be Praisers, as they are all the time, and keep on being Praisers down five flights of stairs. When they get to the bottom, they go away. Surely they can manage that.”

“Yes, sir. I'm sure they can.”

Jens shut the outer door and went to knock on the inner one. “Are you ready?”

When the door opened, his jaw dropped. Dezmai of the Drums stood before him, true to the picture in every detail except for the slightly flustered expression.

Jens shut his mouth and offered his arm. “Lady?”

Wordlessly, she took it, and they arranged themselves in readiness as the doctor murmured, “When the musicians come by, walk behind me, just as though we are part of their procession.”

They waited for some time before they heard music. The doctor cracked the door and peeked through, waiting until the masked and costumed musicians and dancers filled the corridor, capering and weaving while playing a joyous tune, the whole punctuated by the juggling of brightly colored flags and the occasional thwang of a three-stringed harp. As they went past, the doctor stepped out and Dismé fell in behind him, losing themselves in the noise and action.

The procession descended stairs that widened all the way to the ground floor and narrowed below that. At the bottom, a low hallway extended toward an open door, the curtains behind it hiding the interior of the room beyond. The musical troupe turned back well short of the spearmen standing guard, la-la, twiddle and thwang-banging along the walls and thus creating an aisle down which the doctor proceeded, Dismé close behind.

With a ceremonial salute, the doctor uttered the password of the day. The men flourished their spears, and stepped aside. From behind the curtain the doctor could hear Rashel's voice, solemnly explaining the research which she proposed to do upon the device or artifact or “crystallized process,” punctuating her words with low, seductive laughter.

The doctor glanced back, as though to be sure the musicians had dispersed and feigned surprise at the presence of the figure behind him. He bowed and held the curtain widely aside, peering curiously within. The ladder had been replaced with a rough though solidly built stair that gave access to the central area of bare soil, now considerably lower than when he had seen it last. He stepped inside only when Dismé was at the stair.

Rashel, behind the dark slab of curving stone, was still talking enthusiastically to the intent group around her. She did not see Dismé descend the steps and approach the device from the other side. As for Dismé, she saw nothing in the cellar at all: not the people, not the circling arches, not the packed earth, not the device, but only an amorphous cloud swarming with stars, exploding with light and movement.
Two galaxies lay before her, and a distant voice told her to reach out, which she did, covering the star clusters with her hands.

Some of the functionaries from Inexplicable Arts were far enough to the side that they had seen Dismé enter. Her appearance startled them into immobility, but her approach made them move to stop her. They had taken only a step, however, when a beam of light emerged from the device first to strike Dismé's forehead and then to detonate a blast of effulgence that staggered everyone in the chamber.

The functionaries howled, Rashel screamed, the guards outside, who had seen only the light reflected from the corridor walls, shouted an alarm. For a moment the doctor saw a towering giantess, taller than the ceiling of the room, extending upward into non-existent space, her face glowing with a light that dazzled him. Within the chamber, people groped sightlessly, confusion compounded by deafness when a voice thundered:

“This is a kinswoman of Elnith of the Silences. Let no person lay hands on this woman for she is of the Guardians.”

The device or artifact or crystallized process—for in this case Rashel had quite possibly been correct—at once separated into its constituent atoms, a shower of silver dust sparkling at the top and proceeding downward until nothing was left, the whole disappearing in the space of a few deep breaths. This left Dismé standing face to face with a woman she scarcely recognized, a blank-faced female who stared blindly, dumbfounded and deaf, with no idea who or what it was before her.

Dismé turned. For a moment she faced the doctor, only long enough for him to see the curled line of light that flamed upon her forehead, before she leapt up the stairs and passed swiftly before him out into the corridor. Once there, she moved to the nearest door, her action so fast that it blurred.

The doctor, who had seen as much as anyone could have seen of what had happened, gritted his teeth tightly together and swallowed several curses at himself for meddling with
things that he understood so imperfectly. So, she resembled the drawing! So, wouldn't it stir things up to lend some support to the idea of a Guardian Council! Oh, yes, very bright of him to do a great deal more stirring than he'd intended!

“Colonel Doctor Jens Ladislav Praise,” grated one of the blinking men from Inexplicable Arts. “Is this your doing?”

“I am as surprised as any of you,” he said with complete honesty, meantime casting another glance over his shoulder to be sure that Dismé was indeed out of sight, though that in itself was a cause for worry. She had taken a door that led into the bowels of the Fortress; it was easy to lose oneself in there; and some places could be dangerous, especially for a woman alone.

As though echoing his thought, Rashel cried, “It was a woman, wasn't it. I heard a woman's voice. Where is she?”

“The voice came from the artifact,” said the doctor, though he was not at all sure that was true. Certainly it had come from the vicinity of the device. Dismé had been very much in that vicinity though the voice had not sounded like hers.

“But there was someone here!”

“The person left,” someone said.

There was a babble among those assembled, Rashel showed signs of emerging from shock, and though she had not recognized Dismé, the doctor decided not to wait until she had a chance to replay the event in her mind. He left them jabbering behind him and achieved his apartment by the quickest route known to him. He found Dismé already there, however, in the tiny bedroom, staring alternately into the mirror and at the Book of Bertral, open upon the bed.

“What happened in there?” he asked.

She turned on him glowing eyes and a face that seemed carved of stone. “Later.”

“Dismé,” he cried. “I need to know. How did you find your way back up here?”

“You need to know no more than I,” she said in a voice like boulders rolling together under the sea. “And I have no
idea how I got here. Something knew the way, and I followed the something.” She took a deep breath and said, in a slightly calmer voice. “Perhaps matters will come clearer with a little time.”

The tone of her voice was so forbidding, so different from her normal intonation, that he dared not pursue the matter. Instead—assuring himself repeatedly that he was not frightened of her, that he had no reason to be afraid of her, that he had not ever, in any way harmed her—he fetched a bottle from the bedside cupboard and poured himself a drink. When she moved away from the book, he retrieved it. The illustrated Dezmai of the Drums bore a twisted line of light upon her forehead. The line had been on the page before, but it had not glowed until now. He leafed through the book, finding that other illustrations also glowed with light. Camwar of the Cask, glowing. Tamlar of the Flames. Rankivian of the Spirits. Among others. He read the concluding lines once more:

“Let him who reads pay heed…”

He turned. Reading over his shoulder was Dismé—a somewhat more familiar Dismé except for the blazing sign.

“Did you know this would happen?” she asked in an angry voice more like her own, brushing the sign on her forehead with her fingers, as though to verify it was there. She stared at him imperiously, awaiting his response.

“I didn't expect anything like this to happen,” he said, flushing. “I was just throwing odd rabbits into the pot.”

She turned, her long sleeve dragging across the table where the small drum lay. It fell to the floor. When she picked it up, it roared like a far-off peal of thunder, and went on roaring until she set it down. She looked at it in astonishment.

She said, “Where and when did you find that book?”

He laid it down, gripped his hands together to keep them from shaking, and told her how he had found it. “…and it was wrapped in oiled canvas and stitched tight. There were tools there. I took a shovel and dug it up.”

“Ah,” she murmured. “So.”

He gulped, drily. “I retained presence of mind enough to fill in and litter the hole. No one else knows it was there.”

Her lips quirked in a smile. “If the Regime were aware of this, you wouldn't last long, Doctor.”

He shrugged, saying wryly, “As you may have gathered, I have no great confidence in the Regime. I think some things are safer buried. I've spent days looking at this book, at your name in it. Dismé—Dezmai. Close, as you said…”

“Who sent you the letter you mentioned?”

He frowned again. “I don't know. I assumed it was someone who knew both you and me quite well, but it was unsigned and delivered in an unconventional way. All the mystification was intended to be intriguing, so I sent for you as soon as I knew where you were. You came, and everything…just seemed…”

“Foreordained,” she said, with stone in her voice once more. “Yes, Colonel Doctor, it seems that something certainly was.”

“There's something else,” he said, reaching into his pocket. “When I was a child, very young, my own mother gave me this little book. See here, there's a prayer for the soul of a departed one. Can you read that?” He handed it to her.

“It calls upon Rankivian, Shadua, and Yun,” she said.

“And I have called on them, from time to time. Now see here,” and he turned to the gray pages that followed the blue ones in the Book of Bertral. “Here are Rankivian, Shadua, and Yun. Here, evidently, they have been from the beginning. Who knew that? How did their names come to appear in a book given to me decades ago? It is a puzzle, like the puzzle of the letter I received with your name in it.”

“Your letter writer may have desired my downfall, or yours,” she snarled. “Did you think of that?”

“I always think of that,” he said, slightly angry himself. “Among the Spared, someone always desires another's downfall. However, if we are paralyzed by that, we never do anything.”

“True.” She took a deep breath. “So what do you plan now?”

He murmured, “For tonight, we hide you, Dismé. So your sister won't see you or that sign on your face.”

She looked at herself in the mirror once more. “It's nice to know you can be sensible on occasion.” She went into the adjoining room, where she had left her own outer clothing.

He wiped his forehead, saying, “There's a cloak in there for you. We leave tomorrow at dawn, as planned.”

“We can't leave without our children. We cannot travel without them.” Her voice was still remote and echoing, but it sounded amused, for all its distance.

“I meant to introduce you to them early tomorrow morning but now will be better. In fact, it may be best if you don't go back to your room until much later. I didn't count on all this much disturbance. Though I doubt it, your sister might realize who she saw down there, and decide to visit you at once.”

“All my things for the trip are under the bed, so the keeper wouldn't see I had packed for a trip. You have my book.”

He fetched the Latimer book from his cache, then attempted his former insouciance. “We'll get your clothing after everything calms down. Let's go call upon Bobly and Bab.”

“Bobly and Bab?” She came into the room, neat and ordinary, the gleaming sign upon her brow hidden by a scarf.

“They are brother and sister, which is good, since those are the roles they play. They are in their thirties, which is also good, since they have acquired circumspection and reason.”

“Children of thirty? I'm not that old myself!” Her voice was now almost itself once more. “What am I to do about this?” she gestured at her forehead. “We don't want this seen, do we?”

“You've hidden it well enough, for now.”

“I'll take the Nell Latimer book. Have you read it?”

“Yes. With some understanding and more confusion.” He handed it to her, and she put it in the pocket of her cloak. He
led her out onto the window ledge—which he noted she walked along freely, unafraid of its height—and into the narrow maintenance hall, down that to a precipitous stair leading to other narrow corridors, one of which had several cobweb festooned doors along it. The doctor knocked twice on one of these, then twice again, then once.

The door opened and a tousled head looked out from sleepy eyes. A little light-haired person, perhaps five or six years old, dressed in an child's pink nightgown, saying, “Well, Doctor, it's a bit late for it, but how nice of you to call. Come in. Don't disturb the spiders.”

They stepped inside, ducking to avoid the webs, as another little person came sleepily into the room, a male version of his sister, neither of them any larger than a small child, and each with a child's voice, face, and manner.

“Dismé, may I introduce Abobalee Finerry and her brother, Ababaidio. Otherwise known as Bobly and Bab.”