Against this and his own self-disgust, the overpowering logic and perception of the bomb was comforting. It, in contrast to everything he had touched since he had reached the Holy City, met Donchak and yielded up his eye, was made of immovable things. It had spoken in a single voice whose one meaning carried across every part of the parallel spectrums that it chose to address.
The valley's winter instantly stripped away the artificial warmth of the garden. He fell on the ice that edged it and hit solidly on his right side. His hands skidded across the rough surfaces as he levered himself up and plunged into the snow. That also was only a border. The ground beyond it was still warm from the bomb.
He continued running downhill. The cold air stank of burning flesh and all the cargoes that had been traveling the road twenty minutes before. His feet moved erratically in the mud. The guttering line of the road grew before him, deadening his night vision so that, even when he did look back, he could not see where the pavilion was. He ran along its edge, an uninterrupted tangle of intertwined caravans, wagons, corpses, blurring into long smears of color on his left. Eventually he was able to generate enough pain so that he did not think about Gedwyn or try to decide whether the dreams to which she was so irrevocably tied were worth that much sorrow, or, if they were, whether it was because he had nearly made them his own.
The bomb's summer deceived the flowers and trees that the magicians had scattered along the length of the road, triggering profusions of stunted blossoms that contrasted uneasily with the black and brown wreckage.
That lasted for five days. Then the bomb's presence faded and the valley's winter came back in a single night, freezing all their colors and snapping off new stems like glass. Aden emerged from the blasted caravan in which he had spent the night and saw the borders of the road marked by trees that were half in bloom and half in winter, like cheap china figurines. The wind was enough to break them, and all day, as he walked, he heard this sound like a fire, inhabiting the frozen mud and tangled corpses.
The weather did, however, reduce the smell.
The road ended ten days after he left the garden at a walled city whose minarets were all jagged, broken stumps. From there, other roads led back to the east, or to the south or north, but they all curved away from the west, where the alpine plain sloped downward toward a pink-and-salmon-colored wilderness.
Aden searched through the city for a day and concluded only that it had been deserted for some time. There was fresh water and he managed to trap a roebuck who had broken a leg trying to escape from a complex of empty alchemic laboratories.
The altitude dropped quickly. The patches of frostbite on his feet and hands healed and scarred over as the weather improved. The country, also, became scarred and barren. It was crisscrossed with rills and dry riverbeds that slowed his progress. But the land protected him from thinking of Gedwyn; its clean brutality drew lines of distance and memory between her and his mind.
The comings and goings of aircraft increased. Their contrails served the same function as the riverbeds, drawing lines all around the world, quantifying it according to their inflexible wisdom. Gedwyn became lost inside of their limitations. She was again the enemy sorceress and he, again, the escaping spy.
The first evidence of his own world was a mound of slagged and rusted metal. Sections of gears and I beams protruded from it. Aden could not guess what it had been. Aden guessed it to have been left over from the very first engagements that magic had fought with science. From here, the wreckage should get progressively more recent, like the geologic ages of the fossils pressed into the stratified sandstone cliffs that he passed under.
Instead, one hundred meters from the wreck, Aden found a sentry tripod. It consisted of three braced legs, a central column which housed its perceptors and a laser ring; two blue and orange beacons were stacked on top. The whole mechanism was made out of machined stainless steel.
The sand had blown up around the base plates on its legs so it must have been there for some time. Magic had not moved against the tripod but allowed it to stay and watch, serving as a base point for the triangulations drawn by the surveillance planes and cruise missiles.
The man was dressed in a khaki walking suit with a wide-brimmed hat against the world's sun. He was sitting on a shooting stick and looked quite at ease, despite the two wrecked bombers on the lake bed behind him. "They've been like that for about eight years now. Experimental stores, you know. Pity they hadn't been dropped on our friends over there." He got up and pointed at the hulks with his stick. "Havinga." The man went up to Aden and shook his hand; his skin was rough and cool and tanned a shade darker than his clothes.
"Are you from Dance?" It was the first Border fortress that came to mind; his lips were cracked and it hurt to talk.
"Only the Office. We've seen you coming for some time. We, ah, picked up a trace when you left the eye and Donchak turned you in, and then later . . . "
"Donchak?" Aden found the man's memory distant enough to question who he had been.
"Ah, yes. Really nothing we could do about that. You were just too far in and the only thing we still had planted on the old fellow were perceptors in that eye. I don't think he has any idea he's still a little wired to us." Havinga had a large, open face and the sort of coarse features that a tan looked good on. Aden liked the man immediately, despite what he was telling him. Donchak was another age and place. His profession had been treason and betrayal and he could not find any reason to reproach him for it. "Of course we got a clear fix on you in that garden, but the Border Command had other ideas by then. I really can't tell you how sorry we are about that." The Office knew of Gedwyn, as it had of Donchak, and he quickly changed the subject. "But, you know, the war's been going rather well lately—that eye of yours has helped us enormously—and it may be that we're finally getting ourselves out of a job. Have to recall even old Donchak and pension him off."
Aden felt himself suppressing laughter at the absurdity of the conversation. Havinga must have seen this, for he smiled more broadly and clapped him on the back. Aden almost collapsed but kept on chuckling, louder and louder. "My eye?"
"You can't believe how friendly the Border people have been to us since we let them have some of it. But don't worry, only enough to let them win their war, nothing much else."
Enough to find the garden and the valley? Aden was laughing too hard to ask.
"Certainly wish we could plant one of those eyes on the appropriation committee at Castle Kent, though."
Havinga took him by the elbow and led him away from the burning airplanes, toward an open car parked beside a grove of blood-colored thorn trees. The dry lake bed dropped away behind it to the horizon, where Aden thought he could make out green hills, topped with the magic whiteness of his world's Border fortresses.
Etridge was nearly old, and he thought: They are dying. The scopes and visual readout arrays in front of him reflected the idea on three-dimensional graphs. Above him, the aerials interrogated the mages' world. At regular intervals, silence engulfed the world and they listened to it in bunkers a hundred meters below the nickel-steel roofs. Then the active ranging units would cut in and their energies blasted across the land, probing at the shrinking frontiers of magic, raining down tropospheric and stratospheric scatterings, or battering horizontally against them, streaming through the passes and valleys of the Cameron Hills.
For months the reflected energies had shown them less and less. The static and carrier waves had come back to Joust Mountain unmarked for twenty-one consecutive days. The recordings were restudied and reanalyzed, because the traces were undoubtedly there; the skies above the sacred cities had to be glowing, the secrets of the wizards could not have been completely unraveled.
After seven hundred years there was quiet. The people at Joust Mountain, and at the other Border fortresses of Dance, Whitebreak and First Valley hypothesized progressively more subtle stratagems and deceits of the vanished enemy. Perhaps, instead of leaving, the enemy had only set them back to where they had started through one stupendous feat of magic, so enormous and pervasive as to have its limits drawn beyond the range of their instruments. Perhaps, then, all the green-and-yellowbound notebooks of computer and special group analysis were now invalid, the universe upon which they were premised and toward whose understanding they had pointed discarded and irrelevant to the future centuries of the war.
Because of this and his age, Etridge also felt anger and frustration. They could not be permitted so easy and conclusive a victory; they chose this universe as their battleground and they had no
right
to move to another. Neither could they die, he raged inside his tightly locked heart; we have worked too hard to understand everything about them.
"Well, where are they? Where?" He was aware of how clearly his irritation showed.
"That, I should think, is your job." The man from Lake Gilbert was the same age as Etridge, but since he had not spent his years at places like Joust Mountain, his voice contained only bewilderment and a shading of relief. The enemy had vanished. That was enough. If it continued that way for a thousand more years without a single new fact being uncovered about them, he would be satisfied.
"Are you sure the regular services haven't taken any offensive actions—commando raids, plagues, new sorts of bombs, missiles, anything we might not know about that might have thrown a scare into them?"
"Your rating is higher than mine. The services have left that part of the war to the Border Command. We only move against the enemy when he appears inside our lines. And then we always give you people a chance to look them over before we try to cancel them."
Eighty-three thousand people had died under the mages' basilisks or been turned into blocks of fire, while reconnaissance drones instead of attack ships overflew the slaughter at Thorn River. Etridge had helped supervise that observation. He had watched his scopes as he did now, and seen the thousands of deaths individually translated into quanta of light, energy, plasma, and magnetic disassociations. He remained convinced of the correctness of what he had ordered there and was bitterly defensive at any hint of its being questioned.
"If there had been anything like that, you would have known."
Etridge was glaring at him, pale olive eyes clear for his age, focused on a point within the other's skull. The man from Lake Gilbert self-consciously edged away; he felt as uncomfortable with Etridge as he did with everything else at Joust Mountain. He told himself that this was wrong. Etridge had often proved himself a fine and courageous man, and the fortress itself had been the place of his world's first blind victory against the men of power. The lake that had separated it from the Cameron Hills had been destroyed in that battle, drained and evaporated by the forces that had contended above its surface. Its bed was a featureless plain, seeded with the wreckages of hovercraft and dragons. After five hundred years fragments of the dragons' animating power remained, turning their skeletons from ivory to obsidian to shell, twitching and shifting, gradually working themselves down into the dust.
Etridge had ordered a study of their disintegration as contrasted to that of the aircraft and tank hulls. They found the decay was more orderly in the latter case; the steel and aluminum proceeded through various forms of oxidation, or else their radioactive fuels decayed through their half-lives, pacing through the periodic table with planetary certainty, their paths described by straight and predictable paths that always ended in known, stable elements.
The variables which controlled the dragons' rot took much longer to understand. Before that had been achieved, Etridge liked to think that the servants of each culture retained their masters' perspectives of the universe after death. The decay of machines was mechanical; the decay of the dragons was, like their life, pure mystery. But in the act of discovering the mechanisms of the dragons, he came to believe that he had converted them to his conception of the world, that he had reached across the lines to grasp their peculiar and individual deaths and summarize each one in the notebooks held prisoner in the fortress. Ultimately, he discovered an allegiance of their deaths to the life of his world.
He could do this because Joust Mountain was also where the first inquisitory antennas and computer banks had been installed, one hundred and ten years before Heisner's suicide. As the world's mania for understanding deepened, it became surrounded by whirling dish antennas, and the walls and revetments protecting its guns were buried under latticed towers.
It covered a ridge five kilometers long. To the east the grass and cottonwood trees grew up against its walls. On the eastern side, where the land sloped down to where the lake had been, all obstructions had been removed to provide open fields of fire. This land was charred and crystallized into rough glass where the antennas' energies had burned and ended every living thing in front of them.
The use of such high energy levels was unavoidable. It was often the only way the enemy's secrets could be penetrated. On evenings when the passive aerials were shut down and the active ranging systems monopolized the parallel spectrums, the sky over Joust Mountain flared as it did over the Holy City when the men of power were sharpening their skills.
Now, at Etridge's recommendation, all of Joust Mountain's facilities were on line. Passive and active systems operated together by occupying alternating sections of each spectrum.
Etridge stalked along the oddly formal terraces where the turrets of siege guns had been replaced by side-looking radars. The man from Lake Gilbert, several inches shorter and more adequately fleshed, walked behind him, then dropping back and nearly becoming lost in crowds of uniformed fanatics clutching the colored notebooks that seemed to be the fortress' main currency.