Etridge kept walking at his deliberate pace. The sun lit up his face and uncovered a symmetry identical to the hovership's, calm and immovable and ultimately unaware of the strength the cyclops might retain because they were looking through him, using what magic remained to him as a lens that focused the antennas and reflector dishes on the more distant secrets of its dead master.
Anderton said something and Etridge raised his gun. The small weapon hardly bucked and for a second the monster stopped and stood, glaring ridiculously at them. His skin then lightened and granulated like sand drying after a wave. When he was almost white his eye dusted away, the particles falling straight down in the windless air, and then his head, and then the torso, all falling down upon themselves.
Etridge made a point of walking through the powder that was left. Stamp wondered if they might not be going too far out of their way to trample on graves. But that, he remembered from the notebooks, was the idea.
The ship passed over the dust too, and when it was gone the paving stones were clean.
Aden was gratified to find the house so easily. He had taken only two wrong turns before coming upon it. The flags and carpets were gone, so he did not immediately recognize it. But the blue tiled street was the same, as were the perilously overhanging houses and the smell, though all of this was now thickly overlain with rain-clotted dust.
Except for the desertion and neglect, the quarter had survived the wizards' retreat much better than he had first thought. From the hills, the scope had shown him disintegrating roofs and walls, their edges chipped and charred as if a burning rake had been drawn over them. But the walls here were put together with solid stone and cement and faced with marble slabs hung on iron pegs. The statues in front of the more prosperous establishments were respectfully immobile, though they did copy the style and pose of those in front of the magicians' palaces. If the materials were merely physical, their design, the twisting streets and high towers reflected the tastes of magic.
Some of the businessmen of the City had perceived that they could not take it with them, or did not care to go to the places where you could, and so felt no need for memorialists or animated gryphons fanning their grave sites with stone wings, reciting their genealogies until time ended.
Aden struck his hand against his head to drive these thoughts away. The wires were on fire again, the voice of the dead Office leading him on to claim what they had specifically denied him.
The houses leaned over the street. This might have been what Donchak was feeling, he told himself, because this might have been what he was trying to do.
The eye, he repeated to himself, the eye. I must move toward it. If I do not then it may be shown that I am only responding to pressures and stresses imposed by magic, my world, and the Office standing between the two, and that I have no will of my own.
He entered Donchak's house, brushing aside cobwebs and decayed rugs. No power remained in the latter, or at least none that the gunsight could show him. As it had in the merchant's house the dust in the air masked everything in afternoon light, slowing it as if the place had already been removed from present reality and into memory. He asked himself why nothing in his own world had ever seemed so tender and remote. Gedwyn's face rose before him from underneath the Office's healing scars. The sound of his own sharpened breath drove it away.
Aden focused his eye; it seemed more acute in this half-light. He had been in the building one evening, years ago, but still remembered the placement of the furniture, now overturned, the arrangement of the rooms and where Donchak's elaborate tea service had been.
He went over to the serving table, opened the teapot and saw a crust of dried sugar on its bottom. He smelled it and caught a lingering hint of a drug that had been fashionable in polite society when he was last there.
He put down the service and walked into the back room. His orientation, though it was now in daylight instead of by the moon, brought him to the garden in the rear of the building. There were burn stains on the flagstones where the trivial magics Donchak's customers once paid him with had turned from luminous flowers back into the sulfurous compounds from which they had been made.
The wrought iron gate had been blasted off its hinges and lay half-embedded in the stucco wall across the alley.
Aside from the dust, Aden noticed that the ruin was clean. Though deprived of souls, the artificial beings and homunculi the magicians had left behind had still hungered. Apparently, they had fed on the City's garbage while they waited for their masters to order them to war upon themselves. The favorites of the kingdoms fed on year-old fish guts and offal while his world ate sparingly of meat and knowledge, waiting in its air-conditioned bunkers for the screaming and chanting from the east to end.
He stayed in the neighborhoods of the common folk for more time than he should have. The streets continued their turnings with more sensuosity than he recalled, but the course of his progress traced his memory with surprising accuracy. The nondescript contours of the merchants' quarters had impressed themselves as deeply upon one section of his intelligence as the majesty of the City's greater works had on another.
When he reached the square, he found its dimensions as foreign as those of Donchak's building had been reassuringly familiar. The gun came to his shoulder and showed him lemon and saffron plasmas pouring from the fountain. They curled and spurted from the splintered necks and craniums of mermaids; contradictory shadows played over the statuary and the paving blocks around the fountain, blanketing the midmorning light through all the dimensions perceptible to the gun.
The plasmas rose more than a hundred meters and then fell in asymmetrical arcs to the fountain and the square. From there they ran in broad streams that reached to the surrounding buildings before they disappeared into the paving stones or evaporated into a whiskey-colored mist. Through it, twisted homunculi limped, blowing on bone flutes or on bagpipes with bellows made from the scrotal sacs of gryphons.
Aden gasped and ducked back into the alley, as Donchak had made him do ages ago. The memorialists walked past him. None that he had seen on his way into the City had done more than play their instruments or sing; they had never moved from the site they were meant to commemorate. That was their function; that was why they had been created.
Aden felt his heart quicken. Sweat accumulated on his skull and seemed to increase the conductance of his cranial net; it was singing with a volume that threatened to drown out the memorialists. If only he could find some kind of sense in the electric humming, something beyond mere suspicion or feeling to tell him what the Office wanted. If only, for once in its vague centuries, the Office would say something clearly, specifically, definitely, even if it was nothing more than, yes, we still live and exist, and, therefore, so do you. That would be enough. Enough to assure him that the song was not the sympathetic resonances that the hovercrafts' searching radiations struck in the wires.
As he watched, two memorialists came through the opened doors of the cathedral. They were transfixed in the sight's crosshairs, framed by the melted forms of mermen and shrouded by the billowing plasmas. The two circled around the square and passed in front of where he hid; then out of the plaza to an avenue which he remembered to have been named after a woman.
More artificial beings appeared in groups that became loose formations, all dragging themselves out of the cathedral's darkness, down its monumental stairs and across the plaza, each one stumbling along to his own discordant tune, each new group prodding a surprised burst of electric thought from the Office's gun. He felt its weight and texture changing against his cheek as it modified the composition of its ammunition to deal with each successive creature, and then modified its own structure to deal with the recoil and firing of its transmuted bullets.
The gun was a thing of infinite consideration and accommodation, continually adjusting itself to suit both the worlds of science and magic. If the creatures of magic were to be slain, it would be with bullets that were, ultimately, made of magic, rather than its tangible duplication. If the target was from Aden's world, as the tanks had been, the instrument would operate along lines of rigidly defined masses and energies. What, he wondered briefly, painfully, had the gun formulated for Gedwyn.
In its every aspect, the gun was an extension of the Office. Aden wished that its strength would fill the gaps so many years of equivocation and balancing between the absolutes had left in him. There should have been a normal history inside of him where conviction and doubt alternated, as did the feelings of love and hatred, loyalty and deceit, defining a median between the opposing extremes. Instead there was only the attempt at the median itself without supportive feelings on either side.
The magical creatures increased in number and variety. Tall humanoids draped in dignified togas of jet silk marched down the wide steps to the square. In contrast to the memorialists, they neither played nor sang but maintained silence in the one auditory spectrum open to Aden. They carried long tapers that were unlit in the spectrum of visible light, but which his gunsight showed to be blindingly aflame in three others; the fires, gold, turquoise and amethyst, swirled upward around their heads, illuminating their austere and unnaturally drawn features with a startling radiance.
Tame cerberuses paced quietly at their heels. They wore chains of linked and beaded diamonds around each of their three necks.
Other creatures in the shapes of men followed the taper bearers. The gunsight showed them to be made and motivated by simple enchantments; even Aden had some rough idea of the physics upon which the magicians had unconsciously based their lives. They were cast from metal, and the chromium brightness of their skin reflected the noon sun as brilliantly as dragon's hide; the lines of their idealized faces suggested the wounded severity that Aden had observed in some Border fortress commanders.
They were dressed in dark blue velvet knickers and tunics with white hose, trimmed in a lace that was yellow and then ruby in successive spectrums. Each one carried a black cushion upon which rested some crown or decoration or medal.
The gunsight brought the decorations close enough for Aden to marvel at their intricate beauty. Although static and limited, the coronets and medals not only occupied distinct presences along each of the spectrums open to him, but also clearly implied honors that could be understood only through a grasp of all the worlds in which the men of power had held sway.
Understood.
These too, were memorialists. They were deafeningly silent, but they expressed the memory of someone powerful beyond imagining, who had won these tokens of honor and courage in adventures near the borderlines of death and unreality.
So great a man as that, the gun reminded him, was gone. Not killed, or driven into exile, but fled before something more terrible than himself or any power he might dare summon to stand with him against it.
Aden wondered if he could hear the wailing of the hovership over the silence of the creatures. Not yet.
Diamonds, rubies, opals and sapphires that held all the darkness of the ocean the wizards had sent away glimmered on the chains of knightly orders, locked and suspended in filigrees of platinum and iridium, stitched as the memorialists had been in the crosshairs. Their mystery and symbolism should have been unapproachable. Aden whispered: yet I have defined them, calculated their range, atomic weights, compositions, meanings, constructed projectiles to shatter them, and all with a machine that is at least half magical itself and therefore incapable of such complete understanding.
Grave and imperial, twelve ranks of the silver-skinned men walked down the steps of the cathedral. Straggling memorialists scampered around them, baiting the cerberuses, blowing on flutes and pipes, their grating songs emphasizing their silence. It reminded Aden of nothing so much as a funeral.
When the great men of his own world died, either naturally, or by the assaults of magic turning them to stone in their studies or into salt on a battlefield, much was done to mark their passing. Perhaps it had only seemed like a great deal in contrast to the cold, unrelenting rationality his world had adopted in all its other dealings with life and the enemy.
First, there had always been the regiments of foot and horse and their bands playing the slow songs of mourning. The pipers from the highland units were always the most poignant to Aden. They marched with a briefly halting step that seemed to dam up the skirl of their instruments until what reached the listener was an essence of wild sadness.
After that would be chamberlains and other functionaries, displaying the honors of the deceased on velvet pillows. On the dead men's orders and medals, Aden suddenly remembered, there had been dragons and centaurs and all the other mythic creatures that had been driven from his world when they assumed actual, physical reality. But, at these times, they still attended the great, dead men of his world in miniature, surrounded by jewels and mottoes in archaic languages, wrapped about with the music of regimental pipes.
If one continues the parallel, he thought, and if it truly is that creatures of magic serve the men of power in life, but in death shift their allegiance to those of my own world . . . where has their treason occurred, and why? Magic had always been thought of as having been reborn; Gedwyn had told him that. What had drawn the unicorns away from it the first time and convinced them that they should live their fragile, eternal lives on the medals, commemorating the achievements of his own world?
I am personifying again, he muttered through closed jaws. But (always
but,
never
if,
as it had been before the Wizards' War) that was the first hinge of the conflict, that the allegories and metaphors and stories had regained literal truth and power.