The Visitor (34 page)

What he saw was not new to him. Both he and the doctor had seen mutilations of this kind more frequently of late, mostly to women and children, occasionally to men, but never to old people. Almost always, the people were left alive. Which meant, so the doctor had told him in secretive whispers, that the continued life of the victim was an important ingredient of the ritual. “My theory,” Jens had told
him, “is that a black art cannot come from any natural thing, for its power is against nature. Death is natural, so black art cannot take power from death. Continued pain, however, is not natural. Nature soothes, or nature lets die; rarely does it permit continued agony. So, the ritual takes its power from pain, from death withheld, the longer and more dreadful the agony, the more power it produces. Thus, we have mutilations as the method of choice, for coping with mutilation is a continuing agony even when wounds have healed…”

Despite having seen it before, this was the first time Ben had seen so many parts taken from one still living victim. Ben went into the outer room and wrote a note to the guards. “Do you have any idea who she is?”

The guards, who had been half asleep, shook their heads. She hadn't been carrying anything, they said, as was quite understandable considering she had no hands to carry anything with. The younger guard offered a bit of jewelry that had been around her neck, a silver pendant set with an obsidian image, and bearing an engraving on the back. “For my dear friend on the occasion of her promotion. MM.”

“It's set in a design,” said one of the guards, peering over Ben's shoulder. “I know that design. It's the insignia of Inexplicable Arts, see, the I and the A woven together that way.”

“Mace Marchant is head of Inexarts in Apocanew,” said the other guard. “Maybe the woman's from there. Is she gonna die?”

“Not of her injuries,” Ben wrote. “When she regains consciousness, perhaps she can tell us who she is. If not, you will perhaps ask the man at Inexplicable Arts?”

When the guard had read this, he shook his head. “Sorry, Ben. It'd be against orders to leave her here. We only brought her because Dr. Ladislav wants every victim brought to him, no matter how bad they are, and once he has 'em, he's got the rank to decide what to do with 'em. But he's not here, him nor his rank, and you an't no officer, Ben. Hell, you an't even in the department! Look at her. She'll
never be able to work, or have children, if a woman can't work or have children…”

“Preferably both,” said the other guard.

“…then she's no good to the Spared and we're s'posed to put her in the demon locker near the Praise Gate, to be bottled.”

The woman inside the room may have heard this, for she began to thrash madly to and fro, emitting horrid, grating sounds. It was only then that Ben discovered she had no tongue.

“Wait a bit,” he wrote. “I'll stop the pain.”

He shut the door to the outer room. The doctor had shown him where all the drugs were: the red containers from Chasm by way of the demons, to fight infections: the blue containers, vials and bottles from the west, to sedate and kill pain. The individually labeled green-packaged herbs shipped from far Everday to reduce anxiety, to promote healing, to reduce fevers. He went to the shelf and looked for a certain small blue bottle. The doctor used the same colors to code his own drugs, for some of his assistants read little if at all. The small blue bottle had been here last time Ben was at the clinic.

No such bottle. Well then, the last of it had been used! Or, there might be more in the storage closet. After a search he found an old, scratched blue bottle at the back of the highest shelf, not quite the same color, size, or shape as the one he'd been looking for, but then, the woman was so bad off that any calming drug could only help her.

She would be unable to swallow, so he carefully filled a syringe attached to a tube and fed the tube into the back of her throat. When he had dosed her, she stopped thrashing and howling almost at once. Her breathing slowed. Her heart rate slowed. Ah, well, perhaps he had killed her, but the demons would have done that anyhow, after they took some of her to be bottled. He wrapped her closely in a sheet, opened the door to the hallway, and let the guards take her away. Though he felt great pity for the woman, he was not reluctant to let her go. She would either be dead before the demons came, or
she would sleep through whatever they did to her. If Ben himself was on that stretcher, he would not want to go on living in that condition, even if it were possible.

He stared at the bottle a long moment, considering. If it had killed her, best it not be left around where he or any other nincompoop could make a mistake with it. The bit of silver jewelry lay on the table beside the bed. He still felt it would be a good idea to send a note to Mace Marchant. Needn't tell the man the details. Just advise him there was an accident victim, so tall, so old, such and such color hair. Maybe he could identify her by her description.

W
hen dawn came, the doctor told them to pack the wagon, but also to make up small packs of necessities for a long hike. When all this had been done, they drove on up the road until midmorning, then left the wagon and horses in a clearing while they went on foot to a path in the woods that very soon became steep and after that, perpendicular.

At noon, when they stopped for a much needed rest, they heard the creak of wheels and saw through a gap in the trees their own wagon, now driven by a horned demon.

Dismé stared questioningly at the doctor.

“Regime guards are instructed not to see any demons who are moving about on ordinary demonish activities,” he told her. “They would definitely see me, however, and neither general nor bishop would approve of my taking a wagon into demon territory.”

“How do you get away with these journeys?” asked Michael.

The doctor stopped to mop his forehead with a kerchief. “The farther from Hold one gets, the less Regimic the people are and the less the Regime knows or cares about them. Meantime, the Regime has become so smug it can't tell the difference among the revolutionary, the innovative, or the merely various. The high command knows so little about the outside that if I came back with a fully equipped chemical
laboratory and told them I'd found it in a cave, they'd probably believe that, so long as I brought it back piecemeal in my saddle bags, thus proving I hadn't known it was there beforehand.”

“So it's the wagon that's troublesome,” murmured Dismé.

“At this pass, yes, because this pass has guards. If I hadn't really wanted to see the Lessy Yard for myself, we might have gone another way.”

“How do we get the wagon back?”

“This path we're on meets the road on the other side.”

The path, if so it could be called, continued to be a hard, rough scramble up a rock wall and down another, during which Dismé blessed all her tree climbing days. Bobly and Bab climbed like squirrels, while furry beasts with large heads and short tails came out of the rocks and whistled at them, ducking for cover whenever Michael pretended to throw something.

By early afternoon, they had crossed the pass out of sight of the road and descended a way down the far side of the mountain. Following the smell of smoke, they came upon horses and wagon hidden from above by rock outcroppings and leafy copses. Rabbits were roasting over a fire.

“Heya,” called the doctor.

One of the demons approached them, holding out his hand. “Jens Ladislav,” he said. “Who's this. New assistants?”

“Dismé,” said the doctor.

“I know you,” said Dismé, who had stared hard at him when she heard his voice. “You're Wolf.”

The doctor looked at her in confusion, which was echoed to some extent by the demon himself.

“You never saw me,” he challenged.

“I heard your voice,” she said. “Yours and your female friend's. Is she with you? At least she was less insulting!”

“Insulting?” the doctor asked, his eyebrows raised.

“He called me a dead snake,” she said. “A limp rag. A do-nothing, know-nothing.”

“I had no idea we had friends in common,” said Michael, laying his hand on Dismé's arm. “Are you sure he wasn't
trying to provoke you into taking an appropriate action? That's what he did with me.”

“By all the Rebel Angels and their golden footstools,” said the doctor. “Is this a reunion? Someone please enlighten me?”

Dismé gave a concise account of her encounter with the demons in the cavern below Faience, to which Wolf added his own explanations: “What was really happening was…” while Michael offered: “We have to take into account that…”

“How do you know this horny one?” demanded Bab of Michael.

“Because I spent a year with him and his kin,” said Michael.

“And what is it Wolf put in your head?” Bobly asked Dismé.

“The female demon called it a dobsi,” Dismé replied. “A creature that transmits information to them. Everything I see or hear. Or, I should say, did transmit. I don't know what Dezmai allows to be seen.”

“Thank you for the warning,” said the doctor, somewhat snappishly to Wolf. “I may have said certain things I did not want transmitted!”

“But they arranged for me to meet you,” Dismé cried. “I thought you were in on it; you sent the letter.”

“In on what?” the doctor cried.

“Shhh,” said the demon. “You'll frighten the horses. We didn't arrange it, Dismé. It was Arnole who sent the letter to the doctor. He didn't tell us he'd done so until you'd already left Faience, and since it took you precisely where you could be best helped, we simply let it be. We kept our word. We did make a plan for you, but it wasn't half as good as Arnole's.”

“Arnole?” The doctor threw up his hands.

“Ayward's father,” said Dismé. “My friend. Who also had a dobsi in his head.” She turned back to Wolf. “And you also know Michael?”

Michael flushed and dug his toe into the ground, as the
doctor's eyebrows threatened to escape his head. “Well, well,” he said. “You didn't enlighten me, Mr. Pigeon.”

“I didn't think it mattered,” said Michael. “So, I'm a rebel spy! A spy for them, a spy for you, rebel either way, what's the difference?”

“We'll discuss it later,” said Jens, beckoning the others to join him on the blankets spread around the fire. When Wolf had seated himself, he unwound the turban, displaying a complicated bony structure attached to the horns. To Dismé's amazement, he slowly lifted the entire assembly, which separated from his head with a decided snap. He set it down beside the fire, where the horns remained for a moment upright, like a stringless lyre, then lowered slowly to a horizontal position. The bony structure between them emitted legs, and the leg part dragged the horn part off into the undergrowth. Neither the doctor nor Michael showed any surprise.

“We let them wander around sometimes,” Wolf said to Dismé, scratching his head vigorously with both hands. “They like to nibble bits of foliage and mosses…”

“They?” she faltered.

“The Dantisfan. A race of small, psychosensitive creatures who exist in symbiotic relationships with larger, less perceptive beings, such as humans. The dobsi are the juvenile form, flat, thin, capable of inserting themselves inside the skull without at all injuring the brain. We protect the Dantisfan from predation, we feed them and give them a protected place to spawn, and they accompany us and alert us to any hostile intent in the area.”

“Where did they…” she asked, astonished.

Wolf said, “They came with the Happening, along with the Visitor and the other Un-Earthlies. Some of them were predatory monsters, most weren't. The Dantisfan are among the most useful, at least to us. The horns are full of tissue rather like brain tissue and the outsides are studded with receptor cells, like eyes, ears, barometers, thermometers, tastebuds, smell sensors, and, most important, some organ that detects emotions in the vicinity. The middle part has the
legs, and what we call the pressor organ, the one they use to tell us what they feel, or what they see and hear through their dobsi's sensors.”

He took a comb from his pocket to restore his hair to order, continuing, “In addition to transmitting what the dobsi sees and hears, they'll show you what they sense as well.” He cast a quick glance at the doctor, whose habitual smile seemed somewhat strained about the edges.

“No doubt it was a survival characteristic, wherever they evolved,” said the doctor with a dismissive twitch of his nostrils. “It would be an advantage to be able to leave your offspring by itself and still be able to see everything that was going on around it. Do they hear only their own offspring?”

Wolf shook his head. “Their own by preference, but if any dobsi yells loud enough, all Dantisfan within range pick it up.”

“And who is the Visitor?” asked Dismé.

“The big something that came with the Happening.”

Dismé nodded, recognizing it as part of the story she had told her students. “The part that split off.”

Wolf said, “Those of us from Chasm started calling it the Visitor because that's a relatively comfortable label. It implies the stay is temporary, that the thing will go away. We think the Visitor must be part of a race of beings who live in space, though we're guessing at that. We also postulate that they hitch rides on bits of space trash that are moving somewhere, like the huge one that came at us. Anyhow, the Visitor is getting closer by the day.”

“What does it want here?” Dismé asked. “What does it do?”

“Nobody knows. It's headed inland, now, toward a wide stretch of dry prairie where there's some kind of building. We have a few Chasmites out there, to keep an eye on it.”

“So demons are just…people?” Dismé asked.

“Quite right. People.”

“Then why…why all this secrecy?”

Bobly said, in an amused voice, “She wants to know why you don't make friends with the Regime?”

Wolf snorted. “Why doesn't the damned Regime make
friends with us? Because we're heretics. We don't believe in sorcery. We don't believe things happen by magic. We don't pray to Rebel Angels. We don't have a Dicta that answers all questions. Also, we don't go along with all that bottle and chair nonsense, even though we make the hardware for them. Among ourselves, we tell jokes about keeping the Regime well seated and bottled up. We don't need a hundred thousand fanatical killers out here.”

“But there is magic,” cried Dismé. “I've seen it!”

“I'm sure you saw what looked like magic,” said Wolf, in a kindly tone. “Nonetheless, I'm also sure there was a natural explanation for it.”

“Heya…” someone called from downhill.

“Flower,” said Wolf. “I'll fetch her.” He got up and strolled away, pausing to stroke the Dantisfan, which had thrust itself against a rock and was busy scraping lichen with a ridge of emerald chitin that evidently served it for teeth.

The doctor murmured, “Demons are no less doctrinaire than the Spared. They refuse to believe in anything they can't measure and explain. The Regime believes implicitly in magic and thinks that Scientism is heretical, but the demons already have carts that move without horses as well as a few mechanisms that carry people through the air. They have a great many other technological things as well, and they have no patience with magical thinking.”

“So I shouldn't blather like a classroom monitor about the end of the world, or how the Spared will be saved.”

“Or about angels. Most particularly not angels. They see the idea of angels as a threat to their own dominance of the physical world. We're not here to debate Wolf or his people. We just need to warn them about the army, so they can spread the word to everyone who lives out here.”

“Can't anyone do anything to stop the army?” Dismé asked.

The doctor shook his head. “Most of the rebels aren't fighters. They do, however, make up at least a third of Bastion's population. The night before we left, I sent messages in all directions. By the time we were at Lessy Yard, most of
Bastion knew what the army planned. When the army moves, a third of Bastion's population will leave, leaving only the Regimic types behind. The Fortress at Hold will still be full of Turnaways, but there'll be no food grown or cooks in the kitchens.”

“No support for the army, in other words,” said Michael. “But no active opposition, either.”

The doctor shook his head. “What are they supposed to oppose? From what General Gowl said, there will be monsters joining the army, but Chasm believes all the real monsters died out centuries ago, and it doesn't believe in magical ones. Chasm will have to see them before they can plan to fight them.”

Dismé said angrily, “Michael, why didn't you tell me this?”

“How could I with Rashel right there?” Michael protested.

“Arnole must have been a rebel, and he didn't tell me. How could there be so many rebels without the Regime knowing it?”

It was Wolf's partner, Flower, just arriving, who replied, “It was inevitable. Once the Regime said that one living cell is a life, real living became irrelevant, and the Regime started bottling everyone who was troublesome. Meantime, it was Regimic policy to capture young people from outside. Follow that pattern for a few generations, bottling people who believe, replacing them with outsiders who don't, and before long most of the people in Bastion pretend to be Regimic but aren't.”

Wolf nodded. “Meantime, the leaders are so proud they believe pride will hold Bastion together, and as an extra incentive, they say everyone outside Bastion will be wiped out.”

“Which, if true, might have made Bastion alluring,” said Flower.

Wolf nodded. “We outsiders based our strategy on keeping the Spared where they are, keeping them satisfied, bleeding them out slowly while replacing their people with our people, until they wouldn't be dangerous anymore.”

“It was working fine until the general had his visions,” the doctor growled. “And that brings me to the reason I came this way…”

The warning took some time, allowing for Wolf's explosive digressions into disbelief and anger, particularly on the subject of the Guardian Council. “They've upset things already. People doing magic. People causing miracles. Bastion's bad enough without some power hungry cult gaining influence among the rabble by doing a little legerdemain.”

“Is it legerdemain?” murmured Dismé.

“Of course it is,” snapped Wolf.

“And do they bear a sign, on their foreheads?” she asked, innocently.

“Dismé!” warned the doctor.

Wolf said, “They are said to, which is more trickery, though I haven't seen them myself. Luminous paint, most likely.”

Dismé removed her scarf and turned so the demons could see her face. Flower rose and came to her, bending to touch the sign, jerking her finger back at the sensation.