He had always known this about the Sea, but had never suspected it to be so literally true before the voice had told him; that was where the sadness of the ships had come from. In each contact with the land, the ships would grow older and more corrupted; the Sea could never heal them completely, and eventually they would dissolve in harbors or come to the Meadows.
VanRoark heaved himself to his feet and turned around slowly. He saw the great, wrecked aircraft and immediately the sorrow compressed around him, forcing the dreadful bits of knowledge closer to his consciousness; he knew that if he ever allowed them to truly enter his mind, he would die. They were too strong and too deep for him to tolerate without destroying himself.
The thoughts were forced away, but the sea-roaring still surrounded him. The table was still there by the control car with the skeletal warriors sitting at their places; maggots were already devouring the synthetic bread he had set before them. Sea gull defecations spotted their decaying uniforms. Cavandish was not there, though. VanRoark moved around the area until late morning and found the skeleton half submerged in the surf near the causeway. He bent down to lift the corpse up and take it back to the train, but he heard the artificial larynx still talking and bubbling underneath the small waves. That part of him within the fortress called it a whimsical gesture to leave Cavandish there, conversing with the Sea. VanRoark wondered if Cavandish was trying to talk the Sea into giving him back his voice. He also saw that a part of him which hung outside, on the meathooks, was too terrified to touch the body.
He edged back to the train and hurriedly started up the engines. The serpentine vehicle rolled out from under the aircraft's wing and moved west along the causeway. He knew he should be heading north, across the shallow river and up into the Meadows, but that was impossible now with his knowledge.
The road was about two hundred feet wide and, once the great drawbridge had been passed, rose about fifty feet from the water's surface. It was constructed of giant blocks of stone, gray to dull olive; the wheels rolled easily over the ancient roadway.
Once, before he had ever seen the Burn, the causeway might have proved fascinating to him with its immense proportions and obvious skill of execution; now it was just there. It had always been there, just as the Sea had always been around it, giving it the power to resist the horror of the land and the air. The water sparkled bright turquoise and crystal; sailfish and marlin leaped beside the passing train with the gaiety of dying children.
The highland cliffs and Brampton Hall disappeared after an hour or two; he stared out at the limitless ribbon and the Sea, ultimately forced to become insensitive to it Time stopped; the sun hung alongside the knowledge for endless revolutions of the train's wheels until the meaning of both was blurred and lost.
VanRoark fell further into his own isolated well; he drowsed in the summer heat, further alienating himself from any landmarks or reference points. He glanced briefly at the ruined navigation panel and concluded that it would have been of no use even if he could have understood and repaired it. Only his eye and arm of metal and copper wire remained fully awake to take the rest of him and the train westward. He had always been on the bridge, always; seconds shrank into days while the sun stayed nailed at the zenith. Only the Sea with its leaping, playful life moved at the edges of his vision.
It might have been noon when he saw the horizon, the green grasslands atop the Sea. He drove down upon them and crossed their surface. In front of him rolled a prairie much like the Greenbelt might have been when it had been alive; crab apple and dogwood orchards were spotted before him. The road continued to travel directly east (how could one tell the direction when the sun was directly overhead? VanRoark wondered).
The city came upon him gradually, beginning with some infrequent, formal gardens along the side of the road and then progressing to villas and small houses.
The battered train seemed to him ludicrously out of place driving upon the broad avenue. VanRoark looked at the magnificent houses and gardens; their images had been suspended in his mind since last night. He knew what they had been intended for and that made it doubly tragic. For the second time—the first had been when he had looked at the aircraft—a knowledge struck much too close to him. Only with great effort was it suppressed, shoved away and hung back for detached observation.
The tree-lined street widened into a boulevard with alabaster pylons and fountains marching down its center, much like the Avenue of Victories at his home. The villas gave way to soaring buildings of gold and glass; VanRoark recognized banners and crests that he would never see upon the towers. Jade, ebony, silver, ruby, and opal met his eyes at their every turning; every precious gem or metal VanRoark had ever imagined called to his vision.
He saw other things outside himself, reflections of the images which were already within him. The twists and convolutions of the road made driving needlessly difficult. The beautiful buildings seemed to be out of plumb in the smallest, most irritating manner; cracks and imperfections in the masonry and in the mountings of the jeweled crests kept his eyes searching for the perfect surfaces he knew must be there.
Small flaws lay over all of the city like a thin, all-pervading coating of dust, infinitely maddening in that their presence was quantitatively so minor in the face of such an overpowering plan. If only he could stop the train and run out with a mortar board and file, things could be righted. The road passed through the city and again narrowed to a tree-bordered street, flanked by pleasant villas and estates. Around noon he reached the end, a wide sweep of shallow steps flowing down to a landscaped plain, green grass and slightly stunted crab apple. Eight or ten miles from the foot of the steps Van-Roark could see a line of white surf. It should have been an exceptionally fine park, even for this land of flawed perfection, but it was not. The imperfections that had warped the city were still present, the color of the grass was too pale and the crab apple blossoms looked as if they had been made from cheap china.
None of the inadequacies that marred the city and the grasslands on either side of it were present in the Sea. As it had everywhere, it fairly screamed of perfection and life. Its colors, the white of the surf, and the turquoise that turned to blue diamond and cobalt as it got farther from the beach, were vital enough to make him laugh joyfully, and then scream when he remembered the senile, soiled creation that lay to the east of it.
He had not seen a single living thing since he had left the causeway; here, gulls and osprey soared over the coast; dolphins, marlin, and tarpon came close inshore to play, the sun shining on their clean, glistening bodies as they cleared the water and arched through the air.
VanRoark took the train past the steps and across the park to the Sea. There was a thin beach, no more than thirty feet, separating the grass from the water and he halted the vehicle in front of it.
Now the sadness was all but unbearable; it circled close about his mind, threatening to strangle it, shoving the hideous, tragic words of Timonias flat against his sanity. But these words also demanded that he not die yet, that he get up from the driver's seat and move to the arsenal at the back of the cab.
He opened the cabinet and took out a long, bolt action rifle; it was of the classic design with which men had murdered each other for several thousand years. This was not important, though; he held it balanced in the silver web-work of his right hand, feeling its cool weight, despite his knowing that the hand should have been incapable of feeling.
VanRoark fixed the bayonet, silver and lightly oiled like his hand, felt the small, solid shock as the mounting catches locked into place. The world was clouded to him now; nothing but the brilliant hues of the Sea and the shining spike of the bayonet in front of him remained in their proper place and order.
Carefully, he descended the ladder; his left eye was puffed shut from the tears, but the right continued to function, unblurred, unshut, performing as it had been intended.
He could sense a great many things flickering by his mind, behind even the overwhelming sorrow. His boots were so heavy in the sand, his left arm and eye so utterly useless. He reached the waterline, but hesitated to touch the water. Instead, he took the unloaded rifle and the bayonet, whose metallic substance owed nothing to the earth or the other things of the Sea's creation except the basic atoms of their substance.
VanRoark waited until a wave had passed and the water drawn back.
From me?
He thrust the bayonet deeply into the wet sand and retreated.
A wave slid in from the Sea and cut itself upon the metal blade.
VanRoark watched as a darkness spread outward from where the water had touched the bayonet; the surf gradually died and the surface of the ocean became as a sheet of obsidian. The turquoise shifted to cobalt and then to dull black; the fish and birds were suddenly gone from the water; the wind stopped entirely and all the world around him became silent.
The sadness dissolved around VanRoark's consciousness, releasing the knowledge of Timonias and letting it fall away with an odd grace. The Wars were over now. He knew that, for it was one of the last bits of Timonias that still hung before his mind.
The uttermost, last thought continued in front of him, and it was a mirror. It showed him that Creation was at last truly dying; by night it would be dead.
But he still lived and thought and functioned in front of the glass Sea. He looked up to notice that the sun had already dimmed perceptibly in its radiance. It was a huge thing, though, and would probably burn on for several more days.
And when it had gone, his right eye would let him see by the light of the stars. When they had vanished, when the last flickering of light had traveled its billion years to his eye, an infrared filter would let him move about.
The heat from all things would be gone too, eventually. But then perhaps some sort of echo-ranging apparatus might be rigged up by his eye and arm. . . .
I'I desire no other monument than the laughter of the madmen I have caused to be set loose upon the universe . . . '
From the testament of Ahman al-Akhmoriahd,
fifth century of the Holy City,
written in anticipation of the battle at
Quetez (Heartbreak Ridge)
The man was young and thought: they have named this war too grandly, as they have named this place, the Holy City. He reconsidered: but it should at least be denominated as "holy" with a small
h,
for it is choked with tombs and cathedrals, mosques, shrines, places of adoration and prayer, sacred groves, enchanted grottoes and temples of nameless ritual. Priests were as common here as he remembered soldiers and technicians to have been in his own home cities before he left. Their silken and sackcloth robes bracketed the dull tans and greens of the common folk. Some were indistinguishable from princes in the richness of their garments; pearls and diamonds were sewn in swirling patterns to the hems of their cloaks, their saddles inlaid with mother-of-pearl and silver, and their escorts often rode gryphons or lithe pegasuses, as suited the varied tones and nuances they wished to lend to their powers.
The Holy City had named it the Wizards' War, as if it had already been won and enshrined in its history. It had been going on for almost seven hundred years when Aden left his home, and was known there only as "the war," as were all the wars of his people's history during their prosecution.
He stepped from the road and balanced on the edge of a marble fountain while some exalted personage thundered by with his retainers; they were all dead men, which showed their leader to be powerful indeed. Flashes of ivoried bone glinted through seams in their golden armor. The dust their horses kicked up became gold too.
Aden held himself against the fountain's rim and easily hid his disgust with the funereal cavalry; he had seen much worse. Outwardly, he mirrored the awe and reverence of the other people on the narrow street. Certain mages, it was widely known, often allowed the dust of their passage to remain gold and diamond chips, instead of transmuting back into dirt, as a reward to the people for their acclaim. Many were that extravagant. Of course, there were others who loathed such obsequiousness, so one had to be careful not to overplay the role.
Aden watched the party with his left eye. An adept mage could have detected millimetric variations between the pupil dilation of that eye and his other, just as he could have discovered the coldness and conductivity that underlay the left side of his skull. But in three years, Aden had been careful never to give such persons any reason to look.
The crowd solidified behind the party. Trading and haggling resumed. The noise, if anything, was worse than it had been before, as each person sought to compliment the magnificence of the magician's dress and his house's livery to his neighbor. The men of power in that part of the world often kept spies in their pay, some human and some otherwise, and there remained the hope of washing one's clothes that evening and finding the gold still gold at the bottom of the tub. At worst, it assured one that the magician's disfavor would not be incurred. Aden brushed some of the dulling gold dust from his coarse tunic and, as if pondering the magician's greatness, put his smudged left index finger up alongside his nose. His eye watched the dust in the act of its transmutation, sucked dry its spectrums, counted and weighed the opaque interchanges of electrons and subatomic particles, and caught traces of the fading resonances that tied it to the wizard's mind.
The information was transmitted through the wires implanted in his skull, neck and torso, and was transcribed onto spheres of frozen helium, suspended by undetectable magnetic fields in titanium cylinders inside his ribs. The natural conductance of his skin also carried quick and subtle messages as his eye spoke directly to the spheres and to the other augmenting devices that were scattered about his body.