Surely, she had the power of transmutation. Aden therefore lay on his back, staring up through the ghost pines and wondering if any of the hawks or pegasuses he saw circling above him could be her. He wondered if it had felt this way seven hundred years ago—before the war came and crushed all but some of us. The war, he had often read, had swept away all the dreams, as all wars had the habit of doing. But Heisner had demonstrated that the way this one was being fought would not only prevent their returning with the peace that might be won, but would destroy them along with their enemy.
Instead, he saw the cruise missiles gliding along the ridge lines, dipping and shifting clumsily with the rough mountain updrafts. There were four of them in a diamond formation, holding tightly to one another so their ECM boxes and radars could protect them from the pegasuses.
They banked to the right and drifted down the slopes toward where he was. Aden got up after a moment. The intrusion of his world registered slowly at first. Then their geometricity cut against his mind and he felt enraged that they had presumed to disturb the peace of Gedwyn.
"Aden." She was at the end of a path, terraced on either side with banks of orchids.
He opened his mouth to warn her, but could not define the peril to her.
The first one struck a kilometer behind her, where the pavilion might have been. The shock wave blew the folds of her dress forward in the direction she was walking; her hair was also lifted like a nimbus, diffusing the following light of the explosion around her face and turning the paleness of her skin to gold.
The two flanking missiles struck down on either side of the path. Their concussions pressed her clothes back against her body, dissolving the violent abstraction that the first had given her.
The inside of his head roared to him, but Aden found the noise remote and hardly noticeable. Aden saw the fireballs thin away as they ballooned outward from their impact points, until they were only veils of yellow white when they reached her.
Small bits of litter, individual leaves on trumpet vines burst into sharp flame, like the one that Gedwyn wore on her right hand. They, like the veils of fire from the three explosions, wrapped themselves around her, as the were-light had around the unicorn and its attendant. Aden marveled at how easily the anamorphosis of this world transformed the structured violence of his own into its serenity. He watched with his single eye, seemingly able to detect the individual molecules that chose to give themselves over to the missile's combustions, and those that remained as they were. The abilities of the Office's eye diminished in comparison to the perceptions of his own, and he briefly wondered if the Office's wires and antennas were listening and watching what he now saw. The fourth missile struck against a waterfall in the grove behind him. His cranial net screeched as the outer currents of its explosion reached him. He was not Gedwyn nor was he made of the garden's magic. More flowers ignited on the ground as he fell toward it, his personal blackness obscuring her, but allowing him to see the look of concern that crossed her features. Aden, in turn, felt ashamed that his death should in any way cause her displeasure.
The missiles had been hunting their enemies in dimensions other than those which Aden or Gedwyn or her garden occupied. Aside from some burns on his back and a persistent ringing that hovered about his cranial net, Aden suffered no serious damage.
The star on Gedwyn's hand, however, was gone. She said nothing about it, but he associated its extinguishment with a dark shading to her voice. He found her awake at night beside him, holding her hand up against the night sky, the orbits of the Office's imagined satellites tracing across the sky behind it. His eye could see a thin line of scar tissue running along the finger that the star had been on; its texture was rough, but it reflected the silver of the sky and the glowing cones of the ghost pines with a gentle parody of what had been there. His one eye saw that even her wounds were made of enchantment.
She did not. With the passage of days, the uncertainty that he had discovered in her voice grew deeper. She spoke, instead of his own secrets, of her concern for the safety of the garden.
She was an immortal and had planted the garden during the first, great flowering of magic, before the triumph of rationalism and the discovery of light and empiricism. She and the garden, like many of the creatures of power, had gone into hiding in those centuries that followed.
She had emerged when the alignments of the universes shifted to summon them back. Before the cruise missiles had found the garden, she had held bitterness and unbelief only for the fact that a war had attended their return.
Her references to the first, ancient retreat of magic increased. Aden noticed that she spent less time in the contemplation of her book, and more staring at the road or up to the sky. She fell into the habit of rubbing the scar that the four cruise missiles had inflicted upon her against her lips, perhaps talking to it and asking it where the star had gone.
Aden wondered if the star had been the intended target of the missiles. He asked Gedwyn this once, as they sat on the rim of a fountain, watching butter-colored hollicks building their miniature caves in the boles of ghost pines. She only shrugged in reply and looked again down the meadows to where the road twisted away from them, toward the border.
In contrast to what he perceived of her changing mood, he felt his enchantment for her growing to such an extent that he wondered if she might not be using her powers to do more than simply pry an occasional secret from his mind. But this seemed both unlikely and presumptuous. He was, he constantly reminded himself, but a fraction of her real age and an agent of the nations that had sent the missiles against her.
The second attack came when winter had closed in around all of the mountains but the garden. The snow line reached down to the road and the people on it were dressed in fabulously dyed furs that gave them the appearance of hollicks from the distance of the pavilion.
The garden kept its summer. The water from its streams and fountains ran freely and then froze into crystal glass mounds where it crossed out into the countryside. The tracks of hollicks and chamois led to and from the garden through the surrounding perimeter of snow and ice. The nighttime air had the same clarity and sharpness that he remembered it to have had in his home. But he could lie naked in the garden's evening beside Gedwyn, seeing her hand sweep across the galaxies, and wonder what he might possibly have brought to the garden, aside from the missiles and his own dead circuitries, that could have caused her to let him stay. He had never had the occasion of asking such questions at his home.
No warning this time. The sky simply turned white, as if a light had been turned on in a small room.
The wave fronts reached his cranial net and shouted a warning before the light was fully perceptible. Still, he almost opened his eye, as if he thought he could see what was happening and tell Gedwyn that a fusion bomb had been set off at the top of the atmosphere, and that by the time he had finished telling this one thing to her the snow would have been melted from the valley and the travelers on the road for a hundred kilometers would be charred husks within their furs.
But she placed her hand over his eye, protecting it, he imagined, with the finger and its scar; he thought there was a sense to this, the wounds of his own world protecting them both from later, more terrible ones.
He felt warmth beating against his body, casting web-patterns of shadow along the shallow ridges of buried wires, revealing the few trivial secrets that he had managed to keep from Gedwyn. This lasted for a minute, and then ended.
She took her hand away. There was a lavender blur of light centered in his field of vision, but that was all. The garden was intact; the hollicks picked up their quiet night conversations with the nesting rocs and pegasuses.
"That was ours," he said unnecessarily; the wizards' combat had never been so quick or monochromatic.
"Do you know what it was?"
He told her, and then: "But, like the missiles, it doesn't seem to have been meant for us. Not even a near miss this time." Aden stretched himself on the summer grass, feeling its contrast to the sharpness of the stars.
Gedwyn sat up and then rose to her feet; like someone whom intruders had wakened from a half-sleep. "That was the garden, I'm afraid"—addressed as much to the hollicks as to Aden. The animal sounds fell and then stopped.
She put on a cloak and padded carefully away from him. Aden got to his feet and followed, again embarrassed at the clumsy barbarities of his world and at his own uneasiness with being left alone in the quiet.
Low flower beds opened onto the meadows, now clear of snow. The length of the road seemed to be on fire and its thin guttering line was suspended in a featureless, smoking dark. The quiet of the world outside the garden was absolute, and Aden's cranial net reminded him of the "dead rooms" the regular services kept at Lake Gilbert, where every sound and echo was absorbed by fiber cones and the men who were being tested in them were suspended in chicken wire cages in their centers.
Gedwyn drew her breath in sharply, and continued like that, as if she were breathing through a gag of coarse fabric. She held her left hand out before her; the scar on her finger picked up the light of the burning road as it had the winter stars. Aden could sense her trembling. He wanted desperately to comfort her, but he felt all her endless centuries of grace and power beside him, facing his blind eye socket, visible only in two dimensions, and that only if he turned his face away from the valley.
The road kept burning. In areas that he thought might have been those she was pointing at, the fire seemed to flatten out and verge toward cooler, more metallic colors. But it flared back to its original intensity as soon as she moved.
He thought that he could hear snatches of foreign languages between her sharp inhalations. For the first time in months he was reminded of the nighttime streets of the Holy City and the pathetically majestic battles that were always being fought over them.
Gedwyn stepped away from him, seating herself on the pavilion's throne and continuing her mumblings and gestures. Shoals of winter air drifted past his skin. Processional instabilities could be felt at the edges of the garden's interface with the new, burning winter that his world had brought.
It, they had "known" of this part of the world, Aden slowly realized, his heart shriveling with sickness and shame. Information that had not been available before had become known; they had deciphered it and explained it to the bombs they sent out. This one had understood, more completely than the fighters on the river, or the artillery shells or the cruise missiles.
He wished for the eye. Gedwyn's mystery was enough, so long as it was her own; now the bomb had posed one that surrounded it. While it could not touch her, it destroyed everything that surrounded her wonder, isolated it and left it spinning in its own dark patch of existence. Its knowledge placed Gedwyn into a crushingly reduced perspective, and, with it, Aden's feelings for her.
He had last felt this exposed when he had fled the Holy City; after that the road had hidden him from everyone but the two men. Now he stepped away from Gedwyn, conceiving against his will that whatever he felt for her had been treacherously lured out from behind the Office's defenses. The two men did not need to watch him any more for his presence would be easily perceptible to any magician who cared to look, even if Gedwyn did not.
The bomb had seen him, the satellites must have, the side-looking radars of the planes that constantly traced the borders between science and magic had seen. He was part of their war again. Gedwyn's withdrawal, if such it was, meant nothing. She was still tied in all her beauty and gentleness to the war, as much as the eye and the cruise missiles were.
Aden felt his nakedness and how the burning winter dark brushed against it. He turned and walked into the garden. Gedwyn was still standing in the pavilion, moving her hands in disconnected arcs. Aden wondered whether she was trying to reassert the authority of magic over the valley, or simply trying to keep the garden's summer intact.
Aden walked toward the center of the garden, seeking whatever warmth magic's laws of thermodynamics had concentrated there. He became aware that he was being propelled as much by his own confusions as by any desire for immediate safety or revulsion with the bomb's casual incineration of the valley.
The war was back inside of him. Unconfirmable lines of force tying the bomb's spent power to that of Gedwyn, and Gedwyn to Donchak and the Holy City, and Aden to all of them proposed themselves. The wires inside his skull stayed silent, but their matrices provided convenient frameworks for his speculations to attach themselves to and replicate.
Heisner's mythologized fear stood beside his shame, both watching his mind begin to shake itself apart. Gedwyn was becoming lost in her own bewilderment and in the brutal shroud of perception that the remembrance of the war infected Aden with.
He was running. His clothes were piled under some laurel trees, a hundred meters from the pavilion. Aden scooped them up and pulled them on clumsily, without losing much speed except when he got his boots on and laced. More hypotheses came to him, unbidden. The possibility that what he felt for Gedwyn was love was more disturbing than if she had simply enchanted him as she so obviously could; the spells would be her own and, like her other mysteries, unknown to him. But Heisner had dissected love and found only two pages of calculations. Aden was no mathematician, but imagined scraps of equations intruded into his mind, coolly chipping away at Gedwyn's image, invalidating and falsifying what he felt for her.
All the fragile, humanly scaled relationships that he had discovered since leaving the Holy City frayed and came apart. The forces and threats that they had held in equipoise strained abruptly at the limitations that they imposed; they spun wildly at the ends of the tethers of Gedwyn's beauty, the garden, the gentle chaos of the road and of Clairendon.