Pathspace: The Space of Paths (34 page)

“
I'm not after your
relics,” he said, “because I can make my own. I can also un-make
them.”

Xander stretched out a hand and held it over
the pipe and the disk. After a few seconds the hissing from the
pipe died, and the hot spot over the disk vanished.

“
There,” he said. “You
don't have to protect them anymore. But you're still in danger.
Unless you want to suffer for no reason at all, you'd better come
with me.”

The Honcho was lifting a forkful of sausage
when his son burst in. “He's in the city!” said Jeffrey. “He's not
dead.”

Peter patted his lips with a napkin.
“Who?”

“
The wizard. Did you send
your men to St. Farker's?”

His father frowned. “What are you talking
about?”

The Runt took a breath and let it out
slowly. “Some of your men decided to impress you. It turns out
there was a shrine with a swizzle and an everflame in it. They
accosted one of the priests caretakers to get him to hand 'em over,
but the wizard showed up and interfered. The officer in charge ran
off and got reinforcements, but when he got back to the shrine the
priest was gone.”

“
I see. And he took the
artifacts with him?”

“
No, that's the puzzling
thing. The soldiers waited for another priest to show up, then
talked him into opening the shrine. Everything was still there, but
nothing we could use. Looks like the artifacts lost their magic a
long time ago. They're inert.”

Peter swore. “Get over to the prison and
have them reinforce the guards. If he sees it's impossible to get
in and break his apprentice out, even if he's invisible, maybe
he'll go back to Rado.”

As Jeffrey turned to leave his father said
“Wait! One more thing.”

He turned. The Honcho tossed him a silver
Texas dollar.

“
See if he can make an
everflame out of that. Don't give it to him until you collect any
swizzles he has with him. Wouldn't want him to use it as ammo. And
let him know time is running out.”

“
Right,” said Jeffrey. He
dashed out the door and raced off.

By the time he got to he Prison, he realized
his father hadn't seemed all that surprised. Was that just
self-control, or had he known about the attempted seizure? Perhaps,
but he couldn't have known about the wizard. Those men hadn't
wanted to advertise their failure. They'd waited at the shrine
until another caretaker showed up at eight in the morning, hoping
to report success.

Jeffrey roused the guards and had them
physically block the doorway. He set another group of guards behind
the first with loaded crossbows. Then he went to visit Lester.

The apprentice wasn't surprised to see him.
“I made another one,” he said, and tossed a short length of pipe to
Jeffrey. It hissed faintly.

“
That's good,” said
Jeffrey,” and tossed him the silver dollar.

Lester caught it. “Gee, thanks, but I've got
nothing to spend this on, in here.”

“
Very funny. Can you make
it into an everflame?”

“
I don't know.”

“
Well, try. The more you
can do, the more valuable you are to my father. It keeps him from
handing you over to the Church.”

“
Does it?” Lester turned
the coin over in his hands. “I'd have thought keeping me alive
would cause friction with them. Why would the Honcho want
that?”

“
Relations with them are
getting tenser. They want you bad enough to have offered him some
artifacts in exchange for you. But if you can learn to make 'em, he
can keep you off their bonfire.”

Lester looked at the coin again. “I don't
know how to make an everflame,” he said.

“
You didn't know how to
make a swizzle, either, until you tried,” Jeffrey pointed out.
“What have you got to lose? I'll bring you another pipe soon. You
need to learn how to make the swizzles stronger, too.”

“
What does he want the
swizzles for?”

“
Wells. From what they
tell me, a weak swizzle won't pull from a deep well. Something
about the weight of the fluid column opposing the
suction.”

Lester registered puzzlement. “Don't you
have hand pumps in Texas?”

“
They have the same
problem. There's only so much you can do with a hand
pump.”

Lester regarded him silently for a moment.
“Okay,” he said. “But it's going to cost you some more donuts.”

He went back into the car and closed the
door. “Is everything in readiness?”

“
Yes,
Holiness.”

“
What are the
numbers?”

“
According to our
intelligence, there are ten guards inside armed with swords and
crossbows. We have 144 protesters armed with torches to assault the
front and back doors and ten snipers armed with crossbows covering
the exists.”

“
I suppose that will have
to be considered adequate,” said Enrique.
Even if he's
invisible, he can't slip out a door past the crush of 72 people. If
he comes out, we have him, and if he doesn't come out we go in and
find him, or burn the prison down.
“Let's
go.”

At the center of the crowd, a man struck
flint to steel. As soon as his torch was lit, those next to him
reached in concentrically toward him with their torches, then the
ones near them reached toward them. The fire spread out as a wave
through the crowd. In less than a minute all of the torches were
brining, and the crowd began to move.

His driver set the horses walking, and His
Holiness followed the protesters at a discreet distance.

“
Do you think there will
be violence?” asked Cardinal Fuentes.

“
That is entirely up to
His Excellency,” said Enrique. “He would prefer to prevail without
resorting to violence, as would I. But since we cannot both
prevail, I fear there will inevitably be violence.”

“
Then why are we doing
this, Holiness?”

“
We are
doing
it for the violence.”

“
Holiness?”

“
You have to think of the
big picture, Ernesto. Either the protesters will prevail and the
devil-worshiper will be handed over, or the protest will be crushed
by government brutality, Either the Church will be more respected,
or more empathized with. Either is a victory.”

He was getting better at the transparency
weave. At first he had been only able to make an object or a
surface see-through. This sufficed to peer through the walls or
ceiling to see the hallway or the sky, and he practiced it every
day. But he needed more. It was not enough to be able to see
whether a guard was coming – he wanted to see them farther away,
not merely in the same corridor as his cell.

And so his practice had entered into a new
phase. While he had been at the Governor's building in Denver he
had read of telescopes, things that used carefully shaped pieces of
glass to bend light and make distant objects appear larger. If he
had one of those, now, he would have been able to make his cell
walls transparent from his side and see things and people miles
away.

Well, what of it? If the
telescopes did what they did by bending light, by affecting the
pathspace the photons traversed before reaching the observer's
eye...then why couldn't he do the same thing
without
glass lenses? When he thought about it, he
decided that all he really needed to do was make the light rays
diverge as they approached him.

His first attempt to do
this did not succeed. After lunch, he made a transparent patch on
the wall as before, warping the pathspace so that the light
went
around
the wall. To give
himself added incentive, it was an outside wall, so that when the
transparency appeared he was looking outside the prison. Once he
had the pathspace configuration stabilized, he had a window to
watch people walking by. The light came from outside, warped around
the wall in other unseen dimensions, and reentered his space inside
the cell.

Now for the magnification. Concentrating
upon the space between him and the wall, he visualized a patch
coming toward him, growing as it approached. As he concentrated on
this, the view of a building across the street wavered and then
grew distorted, as if it were painted on clay that had been
stretched unevenly in several directions.

Frowning, he tried again, imagining a circle
of light that came toward him from the wall and did nothing other
than grow to a larger circle. After several passes, as if he were
mentally combing invisible threads of pathspace into a symmetrical
cone-shaped region fanning out toward him, he finally managed to
improve the clarity of the image, until he was looking at an
individual brick on the wall of the building across the street..
Better.

But when he tried to steer his seeing, and
move his gaze to another brick, the image distorted again. Sighing,
he wiped sweat from his forehead and tried again. After what may
have been an hour or so, he found he could magnify the seeing to
telescopic vision as long as he held the sight-line absolutely
still. No matter how he tried, the image still distorted and broke
up when he tried to move the sight line left or right to see
something else.

He took a break to growl
and release his frustrated tension. How convenient it would have
been to just use one of the ancient telescopes instead of this! All
the warping of pathspace accomplished by the lenses in a telescope,
he imagined, would be stable no matter what direction you turned
it, because the lenses would turn automatically with the scope. But
he had no such advantage with his weaving. Without a material
abject to anchor the weave on, such as the pipe of a swizzle or the
disk of an everflame, he had to re-form the pathspace shaping every
time he moved his eyes to look in another direction.
If I
just had a length of pipe
, he thought,
I could anchor the weave on it and have a woven
telescope.

Motion out of the corner of his eye alerted
him in time. The guard was strolling down the hallway. Lester
canceled the weave and the “window” to the outside disappeared just
before the guard glanced in through the barred window in the
door.

Seeing the guard reminded
him that he had other things to practice. He picked up the silver
dollar and tried to imagine how to make it into an everflame.
Xander had said that was done using something called
tonespace
, but he hadn't explained what he
meant.

The only context he could remember hearing
the word 'tone' in before, other than referring to the way someone
was speaking (as in, “don't use that tone with me”) was in
reference to musical tones. He could still remember the feeling of
wonder that had possessed him when he had realized, for the first
time, that different sized bells produced different musical notes.
Like other boys in the village, he had played with empty ale
bottles, blowing across their tops to make them resonate, and
partially filling them with water to make them sound different
notes.

None of this helped with making an
everflame, however. As far as he knew, it had nothing to do with
music. The one his mother cooked over back at Gerrold's inn never
made a sound. But he tried anyway, imagining music in the space
around the coin. Nothing happened.

A wave of mingled sadness
and despair swept over him as he remembered that Xander was
gone.
How can I hope to learn any of this without
him?

After indulging in that
angst for a few moments, he growled at himself.
Get a
hold of yourself, fool! Sadness never helped anybody.
If he, Lester, was all the Governor had now to
help her defend Rado and start the school, then he would have to
do. Somehow. And that meant he had to escape from this
prison.

All right. He had a way to see through
walls, and around corners if it came to that. He could make a
swizzle on short notice, and make his supper tray levitate, but he
didn't see how any of that was going to break him out of here.

He spent the rest of the afternoon until
dinner trying to work out a plan, using what he knew how to do.
What he finally came up with was risky but not, he was certain, as
risky as remaining in the prison until the Honcho tired of waiting
for everflames and decided to turn him over to the TCC.

After the guard had brought the dinner tray
and departed with his lunch tray, Lester wove another window to the
outside. He had no way of telling time in the cell, so he couldn't
simply wait for darkness. He would have to watch for it.

While he waited, he thought about Xander.
The wizard had not mentioned any mentors. The implication was that
he had learned everything he knew on his own. That was encouraging,
in a way, because it showed that it was possible to become a wizard
by teaching yourself, without a more experienced practitioner to
guide your training. On the other hand, it had taken him a long
time, obviously, and it seemed likely that there was a lot he had
never learned. If he knew the trick of telescopic seeing, he had
never mentioned it to Lester.

Outside, the streets were darkening. There
was still an orange-yellow glow reflecting off some of the
buildings, but soon it would be dark enough for him to act, and
then...