He was aware of the City's splendor in spite of the darkness. In Aden's home, when men chose to care, they concentrated on the definition of whole, integrated units. Their processes of understanding allowed for little else but the finishing of broad sweeps of brushed steel or oiled hardwood. Straight lines always ended cleanly or merged into precisely defined arcs and parabolas, always so complete that a building, and sometimes an entire block or town might be seen, weighed and comprehended with a single glance. This aesthetic had been pursued with such single-minded devotion that Aden had come to believe that it was as much an expression of his world's hatred for magic's passion as it was an affirmation of its own beliefs.
Aden shook his head as he walked to free himself of these thoughts. In everything he saw and remembered, there was such perfect counterposition. The devastated middle ground had narrowed, allowing each kingdom to press more closely against the other, compacting their energies until each was immobilized by its own fury. The worlds orbited each other, duplicating the death-cycles of stars, until they might become the equivalents of black holes, self-sustaining fields of annihilation.
After years in the enemy's land, he could still be shocked by this. Working for the Special Office meant that he had to keep himself suspended between the two worlds. Too much understanding and he would give himself away to the men of power or their spies; too much belief and he would come under the spell of the world. It was a difficult balancing act, no matter how much insulation the Office's surgeons and psychologists had provided. Donchak had apparently failed in this balancing, though Aden could not say upon which side he had fallen; perhaps on both, and he was being gradually pulled apart like a rope of potter's clay, becoming thinner and thinner until he broke.
Donchak slowed and pointed the way across an immense plaza. Aden's eye read the other man's skin conductance, temperature, pulse rate and blood pressure. He was tense and very agitated, but that was understandable considering their exposed position.
There was a large building across from them, set apart from the others that bordered the square and topped with onion-shaped domes. Mages' light burst across the sky from the left and the strange wavelengths of its luminescence struck against them. The eye mapped alternating serpentines of gold and silver leaf, their twistings separated and defined by raised borders of rock crystal.
Minarets, taller than anything else he had seen in the City, were posted at the building's corners; their upper portions were made of pierced stonework and both of his eyes could see the mage-light through them. There were subtler fires glowing inside them, too, near their peaks; some his right eye could pick up, while others were visible only to his left.
Aden nearly stepped out into the plaza, but Donchak threw out his arm and drew him back into a recessed gate. A quiet gray structure four stories high loomed behind the wrought iron gate. It was covered in halfhearted mosaics and heroic friezes that did little to enliven its studied dullness; another remnant of the old days, probably inhabited then, as now, by the local government.
Aden looked back to the plaza. His left eye immediately became entangled in a ragged interference pattern of the sort he had not seen since it had been calibrated by the Office's scientists and theologians. He wondered if the trouble might be with his own circuits, but his vision remained clear along its peripheral limits. The eye, the spheres of helium and the wire net buried in him conversed among themselves, exchanging small, professional tricks they had picked up during the past years. Eventually his vision resolved itself upon a unicorn.
Donchak whispered the name of a man of power. "That is his cavalry," he breathed.
"Only one?" Aden found his voice strained.
"No need for more."
It moved with such deliberate smoothness and grace that Aden speculated if that might not be the only way the creature could contain its own power. Sudden movements, unnecessary gestures, unguarded turnings of its limbs might accidentally release the energies penned up inside.
The unicorn had a short caparison of electric blue on which were sewn intricate devices, fleur-de-lis, coronets, crossed arms and banners. Illuminations like those held captive in the minarets blazed in its eye sockets with an unexplainably inverted light that sucked the mages' brilliance from the sky and concentrated it into the embroidery of its coverings.
The man walking beside the unicorn appeared to be armored, though Aden thought that he was, instead, naked and the polished metal surface only his skin. Baroque swirlings of men and improbable creatures covered him. As the unicorn and the man walked across the plaza, drawing their light from the air around them, the interaction between the figures on their dress became apparent. Ships and dragons set out from the mountain-bound harbors upon flame-colored seas and ventured from the man's greaves, upward along his thigh and torso, and then leapt onto the swarming heraldry of the unicorn's caparison, instantly compressed into two dimensions and idealized into gold and silver monotones on the blue field. Barbaric hunting parties descended along the man's cuirass, pursuing chimeras with diamonds for each of their twenty eyes, onto the unicorn's saddle and then, with sudden dignity and abstraction, along its crinet and chanfron like engravings in the metal, until they all disappeared with the mages' light into the creature's eyes.
The day's parade of wizards was comprehensible within the meaning of the City, but the unicorn and its attendant occupied another order of perception. Aden thought them to be among the most beautiful things he had ever seen. The sight of them drained his fear away for a moment, as they had the sky's light; perhaps this was why Donchak had fallen as he had. "Where is it going?"
Donchak pointed to the domed building.
"On its master's business?" Although the unicorn was moving diagonally across the square, and therefore away from them, Aden found it increasingly difficult to speak.
"To pray."
Aden's eye glanced at the other man and found that Donchak was inexplicably growing calmer. Blood pressure and heart rates dropping, skin conductance dropping, muscle tension relaxing. "To whom?" he asked, somewhat bewildered, for is not a servant to render allegiance to his master alone?
"To god."
"Which one?"
Donchak smiled with the functional part of his mouth. "Why, to its own, of course." He faced Aden with the sky illuminating the left half of his face, making him look almost normal. "Neither magic nor science has any real claim to theology, yet. Only the Office really concerned itself with that. I would have thought you knew that." Then, moving his head away from Aden to face the unicorn, showing his rutted, slagged right side: "But I have been away from the world for years now and have no idea how far our efforts at understanding have taken us." Blood pressure and heart rate increased a bit. "No. Not in that direction or else there would have been tanks in this square months ago and the jets would have shot down all the gryphons. Wouldn't they?"
Aden thought the man was speaking mostly to himself and so divided his attention between Donchak's unconscious physiological signs and the unicorn. The truth of the immediate situation, he felt sure, lay somewhere between the two.
"We will leave your modification with the unicorn." Pulse and heart continuing to accelerate, Donchak crouched low and then pushed off into the square.
The fountain in the plaza's center commemorated some proto-battle whose specific identity changed as the brass plaques at its base were changed. Again, the counter-positions: in Aden's world the thing would stand for what it was originally built for. When the commemorated victors later became the remembered defeated, it would be torn down amid the shouts of the populace, and a new one erected. Its figures would have the features of actual men, not blank idealizations to serve as the templates for the identities of the mob. Faces, names, dates, crests and arms would have been set and locked solidly within historical experience.
Here the fountain was purely allegory, infinitely flexible and adaptive to a world shared by more than one dominant race.
The unicorn and its attendant passed behind the fountain. Donchak, an indefinite shaft of red and yellow in the infrared, shifted and dodged, keeping the fountain between him and the two creatures. He did not move so badly for one of his age and weight; still, he nearly fell once or twice. Aden felt the beauty of the unicorn being edged aside by his own returning fear and distrust of the City's world.
He waited until Donchak reached the fountain and then followed, running carefully, avoiding the random spells and anomalies that Donchak's eye had not been able to pick up. His own eye showed him how exposed they were. With the magicians practicing their abilities, the only things absent were the limited wavelengths of visible daylight. Great floodings of every other form of radiant energy showered down from the sky or from the towers and minarets of the City's palaces and temples. Strange shadows radiated outward from him as he half ran toward the fountain, each one outlining a different presence.
He was breathing heavily when he joined Donchak. "All right, just keep behind me and get ready to make the transfer when I tell you." Donchak's voice was nearly normal again, but somehow regretful.
"Here?"
"No. In the cathedral." The selective blindness of his eye understood Aden's expression. "It is the only possibility, when it is in prayer, in communion."
"Just who do they serve?" Aden cut in, frightened by something that evaporated before he could capture it.
"A man of great power. I told you. We have to make the transfer then if you want it at all."
"Will we have another chance?"
"Not with the unicorn. There are many other places, static things like reliquaries, memorials, perhaps those heroic figures there"—pointing up to the battling mermen and dolphins. "But none of them would be as close to the men of power as that one. None of them would be mobile or able to report on so many, an infinity . . . " Donchak became momentarily lost in his own words and their meanings.
"Nor would any of them be so easily detected." Aden rushed to keep the talk going. "If we're going to put this on,
in
that servant, how can it avoid knowing what's going on? It's not just going to prance around here, looking over its master's shoulder and turn all his secrets over to us."
"It will not understand, so it will not know," Donchak answered hazily. "Some pain, disorientation, especially when the block transmission signals go out, but to its conception of things, very little else will seem amiss. Anyway, it is continually under attack from its master's current enemies and being reinforced by its master's momentary allies. The suppression of its natural eye and the addition of your own will be lost in the usual input to its senses and emotions." Donchak raised his hand again, this time past the fountain and up to the zenith. "You see those jagged streaks of long-wave radiation?" Aden obediently shifted the filters within his eye; the waves were deep lavender, edged with ruby, though they might have been close to blue for Donchak's less sophisticated eye. "An attack from outside the City. That bar, transiting the waves above the northern skyline, there, is a defense set up by friendly princes. It is aware of all this, but cannot, by its nature, understand as we do."
While Donchak spoke, elaborating on the strategies deployed through the air above them, Aden stripped a piece of soiled embroidery from his shirt and kneaded it between his fingers. The threads softened and twined together in a putty-like ball.
Donchak finished speaking, but kept watching the sky. After some moments, the multiple spectrums detectable to Aden calmed. Saying nothing, Donchak stepped away from the fountain and began running in a curving line toward the domed building. The unicorn and its attendant were gone.
He judged the time and pressed the putty against his left eye. The hydrophilic plastic absorbed the anesthetic quickly. Within a minute his vision dimmed away from the most remote spectrums, then from those nearer to the electromagnetic until only visible light remained; then nothing. Sensory and analytic input ended at the same time. Cued by molecular keys, microscopic transmission links shut themselves off and withdrew into protected sockets.
He felt instantly crippled. Though he had practiced this many times, he had not thought the loss would be so absolute and that the suddenly limited world should press upon him so closely. It was as if the air had thickened around him, compressing him into the two dimensions his loss of depth perception left to him, blinding, gagging, muffling and blunting his mind. This was approximately what was truly happening, but the Office's surgeries and psychological training prevented him from fully understanding it; the Office had determined that irrational terror was preferable to the effects of complete understanding in circumstances such as these.
He started running, staying low to the pavement as he had before. But this time his steps were clumsy and he continually misjudged the distance he had to move his feet. Lines and ridges of magic, now hidden to him, brushed against his legs like insect wings, repulsive in their lush, invisible softness.
There was a huge echoing in his mind, which he thought to be like carrier-wave static, interrupted by the thudding of his heart and the sound of his breath. This was not what he wanted. It could not be what he and the Special Office had worked for.
The frozen balls of helium inside his ribs came to a stop. Their magnetic fields cut out and the motion of his running smashed them against the walls of their cylinders, turning them to colorless dust. The wire net buried in his skull and the lines grafted into his neck and torso went dead too, leaving cold tracks that he thought he could feel.
He had no idea how far it was to the cathedral's steps. He climbed them and stumbled into the shadows of the columned portico. Donchak whispered to him from the dark, and Aden's fear almost overwhelmed him. "This should be simple. You have prepared?" Aden nodded and pointed to his eye; if its circuits had shut down, the only traces Donchak would be picking up would be from the retention links holding it in place. "Good. Then you are, yourself, useless now. Follow me and keep as quiet as you can. Just follow. If you become lost in the dark, stay where you are and wait for me to find you."