Pathspace: The Space of Paths (30 page)

“
You can blame that on
your grandfather,” she said. “Inviting the Pope to move his Vatican
here was a mistake, if you ask me. North Texas was a lot greener
before his loyalists began confiscating all the swizzle pumps.
Irrigation is a joke now, except for areas near rivers.”

“
I didn't ask you,” he
said, his jaw tightening. Then he sighed. “But you're right. The
grass extended much farther out from the lake when I was a boy.
Sometimes I miss the sight of the whirligig sprinklers spinning out
their water over the lawn, making rainbows in the sun. But of
course grandfather had to set an example for the people. Without
the pressure from the swizzles, they never spun again.”

The door behind them opened. She turned.
“Jeffrey! How dashing you look in your new leathers, and how cruel
it is of your father to keep such a sight from all the girls across
the lake.”

“
It's not always pleasant
to feel like an earthworm among a flock of chickens,” he said. “I
can always sense their mothers pointing me out to them, urging them
to snap me up.”

“
So you think all mothers
are terrible,” she noted. “You'd rather make war than
love?”

“
Not all mothers,” he
said. “Don't worry, you'll get your grandchildren soon
enough.”

“
I'm glad you're here,”
she said, “but you should really ride around the lake and encourage
some swooning. It's a good day for getting some flagrante, and
there are plenty of bushes.”

He blushed. “Mother,
sometimes I think you are
still
the
scandalous girl my father married. Aren't you supposed to be
rearing me to be a proper gentleman?”

“
Oh nonsense,” she said,
making a dismissive gesture with her hand. “Proper is for peasants
and priests. There's nothing wrong with being young and lusty. Do
you think I married your father because he had power?” She shook
her head. “It was because of the way he – “

“
Dear,” said the Honcho,
“you'll shock the lad. Has Esmeralda been too zealous in refilling
your wineglass today? Let's go and investigate what the cook has
waiting for us.”

She sighed at her son. “The oppression is
inescapable, it seems,” she said, and glided into the house. Peter
was about to follow her, but his son moved to intercept him and
withdrew something from a pocket.

“
I just came from the
prison,” he said. “Tale a look at this.”

The metal tube was
unremarkable, until he turned one end toward his face and felt the
slight breeze it emitted.
A swizzle!
All thoughts of the cotillion, Frank, and dinner vanished.
“He made this? I thought he was just an apprentice without a
teacher.”

“
He's making progress,”
said Jeffrey. “I know it's too small and weak for your needs, but
it's progress, nonetheless. With more practice, he might be able to
free you from any need to make a deal with Pope Ricky.”

“
Tell no one,” said the
Honcho. “But bring him more material to work with. His Holiness may
have to get used to disappointment, after all.”

Standing up was the hardest part. Once he
had managed that he was past the worst. His chest still ached, but
the wound was sealing, and the scab was beginning to flake off. He
suspected, despite what Daniels had said, that there was still a
little blood gurgling around in the bottom of his lungs, but he
would ignore it. He'd learned it was best to let his body carry out
its business without interference from his conscious worrying
mind.

Once out of the bed, he reclaimed his
trousers, tunic and cloak. His staff was not in the room. Had it
been left behind on the roof? He hoped not, rain and sun might
split the wood eventually, and he much preferred holding the wood,
especially in cold weather or on those disagreeable situations in
which he was forced to fly, when the air rushing through the pipe
at its core would tend to chill the metal even more than usual.

Now the trick was to evade his minders. He
knew Daniels well enough, and vice versa, that he was certain the
doctor had installed guards outside his recovery room. That would
be comforting if he were the sort to cry out for assistance.

Stepping into a corner, he reached out and
wove pathspace, wrapping himself in darkness. If he could make them
think he'd escaped, they might stop guarding the door.

Huddled in his silence, he
wondered how Lester was doing in Texas. While lying in the
infirmary bed, recovering, he'd tormented himself with fears that
the apprentice had been shot by soldiers, fallen victim to some
foreign plague, or been executed by Church fanatics. The boy had
real potential. It would be a terrible loss if he were killed. And
then he'd have to start hunting all over again for an apprentice.
There was no way he could start the school until he had a helper.
Someone had to teach, and someone else had to find students. One
person could not do both.
Stay alive Lester! No matter
what you have to do, stay alive!

And he himself could not afford to just lie
here until Daniels and the Governor were satisfied. No army would
free the boy, deep inside Texas territory. His only chance, as
Xander saw it, was an incursion by someone who could arrive unseen.
There was no one but him who could pull it off.

The sound of the door opening reached him.
He began to edge toward it.

Then the door closed, and he heard
Kristana's voice. “Xander, I know you're still in here. What do I
have to do to make you stay put? Do you want me to hide your boots
and scatter broken glass on the floor? Stop hiding!”

Damn! He un-wove the pathspace and light
flooded back. She was facing away from him, but he could tell from
her stance that she was annoyed. “You wouldn't really do that would
you?” he asked. “It would be a nuisance to Daniels and put me at
risk for further infection.”

She turned to face him. Her front was just
as annoyed as her back. “I'm worried about Lester too,” she said.
“But I'm not about to lose a wizard as well as an apprentice, just
because an old fool won't give himself enough time to recover from
a near-fatal wounding.”

“
He needs me,” Xander
growled.

“
You don't even know if
he's still alive,” she said.

“
Well, how am I supposed
to find out if I'm trapped in this infirmary?” he
demanded.

She eyed him. “The future of Rado,” she told
him. “is more important than a mere apprentice. I'm sorry if that
seems cold, but we both know it's true. If you run off while you're
still in a weakened condition and get yourself killed, your school
is finished before it's even started. You're too valuable to risk
like that.”

“
I need him, damn it!” He
glared at her. “
We
need him. I
can't have a school without students, and I can't stay here and
teach them while I'm out trying to find more.”

“
You can't do either one
if you're dead. And you won't have the chance to do either one if
Texas invades and conquers us.” She stood there, studying him to
see if he was hearing her. “If I have to, I'll station guards
inside the room as well as outside it. They'll bring you a chamber
pot, and watch you squat and pee into it if that's what it takes to
make sure you finish your recovery. Don't make me treat you like a
child. Start behaving like an adult, wizard!”

He sat on the bed and put his head in his
hands. “My only apprentice,” he said, “is in a hostile country, run
by a man who lets the Church burn wizards at the stake. How can I
just sit here and do nothing?”

She sat down next to him. “You won't be
doing nothing,” she told him. “You'll be planning the defense of
Rado. I've been getting some very alarming reports from my
operatives in the Lone Star Empire. It appears that the Honcho has
been making plans to produce massive quantities of fuel and ammo
for the Ancient motorized war vehicles he uncovered under
Abilene.”

“
If he succeeds in making
enough fuel, we're in real trouble.”

“
Yes. So stop worrying
about Lester and help me come up with a plan.”

He spared a glance through the transparent
wall to make sure no one was coming, than focused on the wooden
tray on the floor, trying to weave the pathspace.

After a minute, it wobbled, and rose an inch
from the floor.

Lester wiped sweat from his face with the
sleeve of his robe and pushed the weaving tighter. The tray rose
another inch and rocked, as if in a breeze.

It had been a day since Jeffrey returned
with more metal tubing. This time he had brought a couple of old
coins as well. Obviously, he was hoping that Lester would find a
way to make everflames, too. But why? Whatever the reason, it
couldn't be good for Rado. He had to get the hell out of here, and
soon.

Movement in the corner of his eye alerted
him. Quickly, he un-wove the pathspace that was levitating the tray
and mad the wall opaque again. As the key turned in the door, he
dropped to the floor and began doing push ups.

A new guard, whose name he didn't know
pushed the door open and brought in his dinner on another tray. As
he set it down and reached for the old one Lester struggled to his
feet and then sat on the edge of his cot wiping sweat off his
face.

“
What's with the workout?”
the guard asked. “Are you cold in here?”

“
Not at the moment,”
Lester said. “But it's hard to get proper exercise in a room I can
cross with a few steps. When do I get to spend time out in the
exercise yard?”

“
How should I know? From
what I hear, you're lucky they don't let Brutus visit you in here.”
He swung the door open to leave. “Word is, he's still having
headaches from that rock you bounced off his head. He'd love to
have a chat with you about it.”

“
That wasn't me, that was
the wizard who did that.”

The guard shrugged. “Whatever.” He shut the
door and locked it.

Lester made the wall transparent again and
watched him leave. “You've got that backwards,” he muttered.
“Brutus is the lucky one. For now.”

After the guard was gone he waited to see if
there would be a visit from Jeffrey. Unless the Runt appeared, he
might have a few hours before the watch changed and the new guard
glanced in the barred window in the door. Time to get to work.

He had discovered that the key to moving
objects with pathspace was circular weaving. The pathspace was more
effective if it consisted of closed paths – like the multitude of
circles that made up the donut-shaped vortex that made the swizzle
work. Straight line paths were temporary, and faded. But closed
circular paths tended to regenerate, to maintain their strength.
And if you wove them tighter, they seemed to get stronger in the
push they imparted to whatever was within their paths.

To make the tray rise, all he had to do was
imagine a tube sticking up through it, and weave the donut
pathspace. Matter in the center of the pathspace vortex to move
upwards, so the effect was as if something pushed the tray up
against gravity.

Now it was time to see if
he could use a similar weaving to manipulate the lock in the door.
Standing up, he paced over to the door and made a portion of it
near the doorknob transparent. By fuddling with the weave, he found
he was able to control how deep the transparency went. Instead of
seeing all the way
around
the door,
he experimented until he could see the locking mechanism inside
it.

Now for the hard part.
This was going to be trickier. He had to make the pins engaged by
the teeth of the guard's key push into their slots without the key
to do it. He'd gotten a look at the key several times, so he knew
it wasn't very complicated. In the days of the Ancients, this would
have been harder, maybe even impossible. From the books he'd seen
in Xander's room, many of the locks of the Ancients used
electronic
keys. He had no idea what that
meant, but obviously it wasn't something he could manipulate with
pathspace. Fortunately, no one used locks that anymore, since the
electricity of the Ancients was a thing of the past.

He imagined tiny donut-shaped pathspace
weavings, their holes pointing toward the edge of the door, one for
each of the lock's three pins. He had to do this individually at
first, playing with each of the three spring-loaded pins
separately, until he could hold the images well enough to try to do
more than one at a time.

It took more than an hour to do. By the time
he was ready for the next step, he was drenched in sweat and had a
splitting headache.

Taking a break, he drained the water the
guard had brought and devoured the bread and meat, striving to
replenish his strength. After what seemed like fifteen minutes or
so, the worst of the headache was fading, and he was ready to try
again.

Once more he wove the three donuts of
pathspace, this time leaving each one in pace as he continued on to
the next. After a minute or so he turned the knob and opened the
door.

That's another thing Xander never showed
me,
he thought with satisfaction. But there
was no time to waste breaking his arm patting himself on the back.
He faced down the corridor and wove pathspace again. This time he
did it from behind him, making the light from behind bend around
him so that he would be hard to see from the front, but could see
the light coming
toward
him so he
could see where he was going. As long as no one came up behind him,
he ought to be able to pull this off.