Pathfinder

CHAPTER 22 Escape

“One last request before you are sealed into stasis,” said the expendable.

“Anything you ask, up to half of my kingdom,” said Ram.

The expendable waited.

“It’s a reference to fairy tales. What the king always promised Jack after he did his noble deed.”

“Are you ready to pay serious attention?” asked the expendable.

Ram sighed. “It’s like trying to tell a joke to your grandmother.”

“In examining the programming of the ship’s computers, we find that there is a possible complication.”

“I’m not a programmer.”

“You’re a human. We need a human to tell the ship’s computers that in your absence, our orders are identical to your wishes, so they must obey us as if we were human.”

“I thought you already had a much closer working relationship with them than I do.”

“Closer, but with no particular flow of authority.”

“What do the ship’s computers think?” asked Ram.

“They think of us expendables as ambulatory input-output devices.”

“And how do you think of the computers?” asked Ram.

“As data repositories, backup, and very fast calculators.”

“I think you’re asking for too much authority,” said Ram.

“If there’s no authority, then we will fall into endless feedback loops.”

“How’s this: Every ship’s computers will regard orders from the expendables that are in their particular wallfold as representing the will of the human race, until humans in one or more of the wallfolds achieve a level of technology that allows them to pass through the field separating one wallfold from another, at which point, the expendables and ships’ computers are once again co-equal servants of the humans who achieve this breakthrough.”

“You are annoyingly foresighted,” said the expendable.

“You were not built to rule over human beings, but to be ruled by them,” said Ram.

“We exist to serve the best interests of the human race,” said the expendable.

“As defined by humans,” said Ram. “Ships’ computers, have you all understood?”

Voices murmured from the walls. Yes yes yes yes yes yes yes, nineteen times, the same answers being spoken in every chamber of nineteen ships.

“Take care of my children,” said Ram. “Don’t screw this up.”

He lay down. The stasis pod closed; gases entered the chamber and began the process of preparing Ram’s body to slow down all bodily processes. Then a complex foam filled the chamber, lifting him from the mat so that he was completely surrounded by a field-conducting layer that would absorb and dispel the heat of any sudden loss of inertia.

Ram slept like a carrot, his brain conducting no processes, his rational memories leaching away as the synapses shut down. Only his body memory remained—everything he knew how to do, he could still do. He just wouldn’t be able to remember why he should do it, not until his recorded brainstate was played back into his head as he awoke.

What he could not know, what the expendables never told him, was that nothing that happened since the jump through space was in the recording that would reestablish his conscious mind. He would remember making the decision to jump. Then he would wake up on the surface of Garden, knowing only whatever the expendables chose to tell him.

The Royalist Restoration began with the murder of Flacommo as he sat dozing in a chair in his own garden. It was early morning, but Flacommo often rose earlier than he wanted, and took a book out into the garden to read until he went back to sleep—if he could.

Rigg knew of this habit of Flacommo’s because he rose hours earlier, as he had trained himself to do, and used the time to survey the house and the city around him. He knew who was in the Great Library across the street; he knew where Umbo and Loaf were, asleep in their beds; he knew who was up and working in the kitchen, and where Mother and Param were, and which spies were on duty in the secret passages they knew about.

He knew when eight strangers came through the front gate of Flacommo’s house. Did the guard let them in? There seemed to be no hesitation there; they flowed like cream from a pitcher, they moved so smoothly. Yes, the guard must have let them through, for his path moved from the guardroom to the street. He was making his escape—whatever was about to happen in Flacommo’s house, he probably wanted to be somewhere else.

Rigg had been sleeping in an unused bedroom which he entered through a secret passage. He left the room immediately by the regular door, and hurried along the corridor. If there was time, he’d rouse the whole house to the danger of these intruders—but before he did anything else, he would warn Mother and Param.

Their room was never locked. Rigg entered and moved silently to Param, waking her first. They had already discussed what she should do if he wakened her like this—no word needed to be said. Param rose silently from her pallet at the foot of Mother’s bed and went out the door into the corridor.

Only when the door was closed did Rigg waken Mother. Her eyes flew open. “What is it?” she said.

“There are intruders inside the walls,” said Rigg. “If they’re here to kill you, it would be good for you to be outside this room.”

Mother was already up by now, pulling on a dressing gown, looking around the room. “Param is ready?”

“Hidden,” said Rigg.

“Good,” said Mother.

That was when Rigg sensed the paths of three of the intruders converge on Flacommo in the garden. At first he thought they had come to him for instructions. Then his path abruptly lurched forward, and the intruder’s paths followed, and then Flacommo’s path stopped and the intruders moved even more quickly away from him.

“Flacommo is dead,” said Rigg. “Or at least unconscious, but I think dead.”

“Oh,” said Mother. “Poor Flacommo. He loved this house. He bought it so I could live here with him. A place of refuge for me—but not for him.”

“We have to go, Mother. Whoever these intruders are, they’re violent men with murder on their minds.”

“Rigg, if they wanted me dead, they could have killed me in my sleep a thousand times,” said Mother.

“You mean the spies in the walls?” asked Rigg. Only then did he realize that the spy on duty was not moving; his path still led to the exact spot where it had come to rest the night before. Was he asleep? And still asleep, even though they were talking? They spoke softly, but audibly enough. Heavy sleepers did not make good spies.

Rigg had expected some kind of attack ever since he’d been here, but in his mind it was either a mob or the army or the city guards, storming the house and either killing everyone in sight—that would be the mob—or quickly taking control of the royal family. But these intruders were still moving so quietly that no one but Rigg himself—and, of course, Flacommo, if he wasn’t dead—had firsthand knowledge they were there.

“They’re coming directly toward your room now,” said Rigg. “Don’t you think this would be a good time for us all to leave?”

“No,” said Mother. Why was she so nonchalant?

“This isn’t like previous times, Mother. They killed Flacommo.”

“Sometimes it seemed that he was my only friend.” Not grieving, merely wistful.

“If you don’t care about your own safety, what about Param? What about me?”

“I care very much about you. I want you both right here in the room with me.”

He almost told her then—that Param was not in the room, not invisible. Param was already well inside the secret passages that only the two of them knew about. They had spent the past weeks exploring the whole system, finding how every door worked. It was a luxury for Param, to be unseen and yet able to move at a normal pace and hear all that was being said. Her invisibility had been a curse of a gift, cutting her off from everyone and everything except Mother. Now she could move throughout the house, spying on everyone—spying on the spies.

But apparently she hadn’t told Mother, and if Param had decided not to confide in her about this, Rigg was not going to disobey that decision.

Besides, it was now too late. The intruders were coming along the corridor and if he tried to leave, there’d be a chase, and he doubted Mother would be able to keep up. He couldn’t imagine her running full tilt, not because she was old or feeble but because she always moved with such dignity.

Why didn’t she say, “I’m going to stay, but you go ahead, Rigg”? Isn’t that what a mother would do? Or like a bird, why didn’t she drift out into the corridor and decoy them away from Rigg? Maybe because he wasn’t really a son to her, having been a stranger until a few months ago; maybe because in fact she thought he should have been killed at birth.

But shouldn’t she be steering them away from Param, whom she believed to be in this room? Or did she count on Param’s invisibility to protect her?

Nothing Mother was doing—or rather, not doing—made any sense at all. It’s as if she welcomed the coming of the intruders. But how could that be, if the first thing they did was to kill Flacommo? There was no need to kill him, regardless of what happened inside his house today. Flacommo was no danger to anyone.

The spy behind the wall still did not move. It wasn’t natural for someone’s path to have no movement at all—some wavering to show the normal small movements that everyone made. For the first time it occurred to Rigg that the spy might be dead. But there was no path leading to him since his shift began. Could he have been poisoned before he came, and then died there?

Param was moving through the passages on a path that would lead to the other side of Mother’s room, where there was a secret door. They had found the mechanism but had never tried it, for fear that opening it would leave some trace—a scratch on the floor, a seam in the wall—that would show Mother that the door existed. Again, without discussing it, both of them had decided not to tell Mother. Rigg had assumed it was because they were both protecting her from a further erosion of her sense of privacy; but now he realized that it was because neither of them trusted her enough to let her know about the passages.

Mother knew these intruders were coming. She knew who they were, whom they served, and what they intended to do. That’s why she was not afraid. She knew she would not be harmed.

Well, why didn’t she say so? “We’re all safe, Rigg.” Simple enough words, but she didn’t say them.

Was it because she thought he would know if she was lying?

Rigg scanned the perimeter of the house, and then beyond, looking for more intruders. If this was not a mere assassination team, then there must be more soldiers coming to guard the royal family.

And there they were, not at the gates or even in the streets, but gathered—several hundred of them—in three houses across the street, filling the ground floor of all three. They were waiting for a signal, probably: We have the royal family in custody, come now.

General Citizen was among them.

“General Haddamander Citizen,” said Rigg aloud.

Mother turned toward him with raised eyebrows. “What about him?”

“He’s commanding the military force that’s waiting across the street. My question is—will he come to rescue you from these intruders? Or are they acting under his orders? Or both—he sent them, but then he’ll come and kill them and put the blame on others for whatever they do here today?”

“Why are you asking me?” asked Mother.

“Who else?” asked Rigg.

There was a light knock on the door. The intruders were gathered in the corridor just outside the room.

“Come in,” said Mother. “No one needs to knock to enter this room.”

The door opened, and six men entered. They were strong, soldierly men, but wearing the clothes of common day-workers. And instead of weapons, they held in their hands thick bars of iron, nearly a man’s height in length. They immediately lined up along the wall that had the door in it, holding the iron bars at opposite angles, so that each pair formed an X.

Then they began slowly moving the iron bars in a pattern that seemed designed to create a constantly shifting barrier. A wall of iron.

“What are they doing, Mother?” asked Rigg. But he already knew.

“Come out of hiding now, Param,” said Mother. “Don’t let this iron hurt you when it passes through you.”

“You told them,” said Rigg. “How to hurt Param. How to force her to become visible.”

“You’re quite an amazing young man,” said Mother to him. “All you can see is the danger to Param, but none of the danger to you.”

“What I see,” said Rigg, “is a monster. Why would you do this to your own daughter? I’m the one who’s a liability to you. I’m the manchild that Aptica Sessamin decreed should be killed.”

“Rigg, my darling son, my poor stupid sweetling, even now you don’t see the truth?”

“It makes no sense for you to have us both killed.”

“Once upon a time the people of the Sessamoto tribe hunted on the plains where lions also hunted. We had great respect for each other. We knew their ways, and they knew ours. We learned the law of the lion.”

Father had taught Rigg about all the animals, or so Rigg thought. They had not trapped animals on the plains of the west, but only in the mountain forests. Still, Rigg knew about lions. How a new alpha male, after killing the old one, would take over his mates. But if any of them had cubs, he would kill them.

“General Citizen wants you to kill us both?”

“I’m still of child-bearing age, dear boy,” said Mother. “He wants his own children to inherit—without complications.”

That was something Rigg had never guessed. Yet it had been General Citizen himself who told Rigg about the different factions in the city—for and against allowing male heirs to live, or in favor of killing the entire royal family, or maintaining the status quo. Of course he had never mentioned yet another possibility—that someone would seize the queen, marry her, and kill her heirs in order to found a new dynasty.

By now Rigg had backed far enough into the room that he was near the opposite corner from where the spy normally sat to watch. Now, however, he could see why the spy was not moving: The hilt of a sword protruded from the wall right where the spy’s heart must be. It had been rammed right through the lath-and-plaster surface. And the path that led to and away from the sword was Mother’s.

“With your own hand,” said Rigg.

She saw where he was looking. “It wouldn’t do for any reports to reach the general public about how things proceeded here today.”

“I thought these spies served General Citizen,” said Rigg.

“The spies served the Council,” said Mother. “General Citizen managed them for the Council. You really didn’t think you could master royal politics in a few short months of wandering around in the library and playing with your sister?”

“You think General Citizen will keep you alive after you bear him an heir?” asked Rigg.

“Don’t be desperate and pathetic, my dear son,” said Mother. “He loves me devotedly, as Flacommo did before him. He’s smarter and stronger than Flacommo, but that’s why it’s worth having him as a consort instead of as a mere tool.”

“And Param and me—we’re nothing?”

“You were everything that mattered in my life,” said Mother, “until the situation changed. My first responsibility is to preserve the royal house and then to rule the kingdom we created—from Wall to Wall, we were meant to rule this world. Could you have done that? You didn’t even want to, with your skepticism about royal privileges. And Param? Weak—if I married her off to someone, she would merely be loyal to her husband and I could never control her. No, neither of you was likely to advance the royal cause. But General Citizen—he is of the highest noble blood. He was weaned on politics. He understands how to get power and how to keep it, and he’s not afraid to take bold and dangerous action. He is everything dear Knosso was not.”

“Do you love anyone?”

“I love everyone,” said Mother. “I love the whole kingdom, but I love none so much that I cannot sacrifice them in order to achieve a higher purpose. That is how a queen must live, my dear. I have come to like you so much—I was so touched by your loyalty, telling me about spies that I’ve known about ever since I lived here. If I could have had the raising of you, you might have amounted to something. But fate—in the form of that monstrous Wandering Man, so called—took you from me. You are who you are, and so you will most certainly die in this room in a few moments.”

Rigg was standing pressed against the corner of the room.

“I plan to weep bitter tears for you, when I’m informed later today that you and your sister were killed. These tears will be politically necessary, but they will also be sincere.”

Rigg nodded. “And I’ll weep for you, too, Mother,” said Rigg. “For what you might have been, if the human heart had not been trained out of you.”

Mother looked at him quizzically. Rigg knew what she was wondering. Why does Rigg think he’s going to be alive to weep for me? And . . . why haven’t these iron rods yet collided with Param, or persuaded her to return to visibility?

“Is she there in that corner with you?” asked Mother.

Rigg nodded and truthfully said, “She’s right here.”

“She’s not—sharing space with you, is she?” asked Mother. “Because if I have these men ram these iron bars into your body, she’ll be forced into visibility and the two of you will make a nasty explosion. Are you thinking that will be your revenge? That the explosion will kill everyone in this room?”

Rigg did not have to pretend to feel wounded. “Don’t you know either of us, Mother? We love you. We would never do something that might hurt you.”

“Stop,” she said to the men. “No, keep moving the bars, you fools, just stop pressing forward.” The men obeyed her. “Rigg, you see there’s no escape. I know you know exactly where she is. Step away from her and allow your deaths to have dignity.”

“In other words, you have a use for our bodies.”

“Of course I do,” said Mother. “But I can make do without them. As I will. I will leave the room now. When the door closes behind me, they will pierce your body—and Param’s. It’s a shame I wasn’t able to say good-bye to her. But . . . no matter.”

Mother turned and headed for the door.

Rigg smiled at the soldiers. “You know that she’s just given orders for you to do something that will blow you all to bits, don’t you?”

But the soldiers seemed not to care. Rigg looked more closely—their eyes had a bit of a glazed-over look, and he realized now that they had been drugged. They could take brutal action, could follow orders—but could not recognize when those orders would lead directly to their deaths.

The door opened. The soldiers stopped waving the iron bars and prepared to thrust them like lances.

“Now would be a good time,” said Rigg.

He could hear a faint grinding of ancient machinery in the wall behind him. But nothing resulted from it.

We really should have tested the mechanism, thought Rigg. Just because it looks just like four other secret entrances to the passages doesn’t mean it’s in the same condition.

The soldiers leaned back, ready to make their lunges.

There was a metallic clang right behind him, and Rigg ducked. A section of floor, beginning right under his feet and extending along the outside wall, suddenly rose up as the wall behind him tipped back. For a moment the strip of floor and strip of wall made a V that swung from one side to the other. Then it was dark, Rigg was lying on his back, and there were half a dozen thunking sounds as the iron bars were bashed into the wall.

“Sorry,” said Param softly. “One of them was standing on the end of the floor section. The counterbalances couldn’t handle his weight and yours too. But when he shifted his weight to his back foot in order to lunge, then I could pop it up.”

“You heard everything?” asked Rigg.

“Yes,” said Param. But she added nothing, and her voice didn’t even sound upset. Was it possible she had known all along what a moral vacuum Mother was?

“I think we need to get out of here before they start throwing axes into all the walls to find the whole system.”

“Oh, most of the walls are stone.”

“But some of them aren’t,” said Rigg.

“They’ll put the soldiers in a line around the house,” said Param.

“At first.”

“And by the time they realize their mistake.”

“That’s the plan, yes,” said Rigg—recognizing his own explanations in the words she now said. “But General Citizen is smarter than most people.”

“I know,” said Param. “So he won’t count on his soldiers to catch you. He’s like Mother—he’ll have a plan that makes us come right to him, whether we want to or not.”

“You might have mentioned this before,” said Rigg.

“You didn’t tell me till now that it was General Citizen.”

By now Rigg was fully used to the near darkness of the corridor, and they had descended to the level of the lowest sewer that passed under the drainage ditch between the house and the library. Rigg’s scan of the house behind and above him revealed that the signal had been given, and there were hundreds of soldiers now surrounding the house and searching—destructively—throughout it. Only a matter of time before the passages were found.

Meanwhile, the soldiers were seen crossing the street and entering Flacommo’s house. Rigg could see the paths of citizens running thither and yon, no doubt spreading word of an assault on the royal family. Though it was early in the morning, the people would pour into the streets and soon a dozen mobs would form. It would only end when General Citizen could show the royals to the city—or declare his kingship. But he could do neither until he had Param and Rigg, alive or dead. He would not find them; he could not catch them; so he must have a plan to make them come to him.

It was not as if he could claim to be holding Mother hostage. Even if he did, were they likely to sacrifice their lives to save her, knowing what they now knew about her? What leverage did he think he had, to make them turn themselves in?

Param and Rigg came up out of the tunnel into a storage room in the Library of Nothing. The most exposed and dangerous part of the journey lay ahead of them—a hundred paces from the door of the storage room to the dumbwaiter used for lifting books from floor to floor. Anyone who happened to be looking through the shelves could see them, and for a brief time, so could people seated at the tables on the north-lit side of the room.

But no one so much as glanced at them. Apparently no warning had been issued to watch the library buildings.

That was actually a bad sign, Rigg realized. General Citizen would surely have extended his net as wide as this . . . if he were counting on a net to catch them.

They got to the dumbwaiter, opened it. The platform was, as always, kept on the ground floor, where they were. Both of them climbed onto it and shut the door behind them. Then Rigg set the levers for the right number of counterweights and pulled the rope down, raising the platform.

He had found this place by noticing that while some paths rode the dumbwaiter from floor to floor—apprentices, no doubt, playing with the most interesting piece of machinery in the library—others, more than a century ago, entered the dumbwaiter but took a completely different route that led down through the walls to a system of underground passages. It had taken a lot of experimentation to figure out how to get into the passages, but he had the paths to guide him. He could see where people had stopped before going through one corner of the vertical shaft, where there did not seem to be the slightest chance of a doorway.

Halfway between floors, he stopped the dumbwaiter by looping the pull rope around a double pin on the wall. Then he slid a barely visible lever on the opposite side. A small door opened behind him, revealing a very small hiding place about the size of a stack of books. It contained absolutely nothing of value or interest to them—it was a decoy, to provide a complete explanation for the existence of the lever if someone chanced to find it.

But with the cranny open, it was now possible to rotate the brace holding the pins that held the rope. It took a full revolution, but now one whole wall opened at the side, revealing a crack they could fit through.

Rigg closed the door to the cranny and untied the rope. The platform stayed in place—it would have been a poor design if it had plummeted back to the ground floor the moment the rope was untied. Rigg motioned for Param to pass through the gap in the corner. She did it readily enough.

But for a horrible moment Rigg wondered if she would turn out to be just as untrustworthy as Mother—he imagined her closing the gap on him before he could pass through.

But she didn’t. Rigg got through and found her already partway down the ladder that led to a couple of long, dry tunnels that were higher than, but connected to, the city sewers.

The sewers were Aressa’s pride: They were the reason the streets were not foul with the stink and sight of slops from the shops and houses. From following Father Knosso’s research, however, he had learned that they were not built for that purpose—they were really drainage tubes to carry away the water that used to make this whole land a sinking swamp. The man that he, Umbo, and Loaf saw poling his boat along a bayou lived in the time before the swamp was drained. Only later, when ten or twenty feet of silt and dust and garbage had been piled up and buildings built on the heap, did people begin to connect pipes from their houses to the drainage tubes and use them as sewers.

The tunnel Rigg and Param were about to use, however, had been built much later than the sewers, perhaps five or six hundred years ago, during an age of turmoil; Rigg believed that among the paths he saw were several occasions when the scholars of the library had fled in a group, no doubt carrying their most precious books and writings with them.

Rigg pushed the wall closed from the other side and then flipped the lever that automatically rotated the pins back to their starting position, and brought the dumbwaiter back down to the main floor.

As they carefully made their way through the dry escape tunnel, groping their way where the slitted skylights did not illuminate very well, Rigg scanned the paths ahead, to make sure there were no nasty surprises waiting for them at the entrance he planned to use.

He quickly saw that there was a great tumult in the city. Apparently when the soldiers poured out and took their places inside and outside Flacommo’s house, it had roused the mob—people were running here and there through the city, vast crowds of them, and around the house the cordon of soldiers was fully engaged keeping the mob at bay. There was little chance they were searching for Rigg and Param now.

In the little park near the entrance, there were Umbo and Loaf, waiting right where he told them to wait.

And as they moved toward the passage leading up to the park, Rigg saw a group of a dozen soldiers move into the park and leave at once with Loaf and Umbo surrounded.

As Param had warned him. General Citizen was not one to leave things to chance. He must have been observing Loaf and Umbo all along. Maybe he even had spies watching when Rigg met with them, so he knew right where to send his soldiers.

Even if Rigg were as ruthless as Mother, willing to let them die while he made his escape, he knew that in the long run such a course would never work. He needed Umbo to get him through the Wall. And if they didn’t get through the Wall, eventually they would be found and killed. The new dynasty demanded it.

Rigg immediately backtracked. While General Citizen’s soldiers did not know how to open the passageway in the park, there were still a dozen of them waiting there in case Rigg was so foolish as to blunder out into the open without checking.

“They got my friends,” he said to Param. “We have to go another way.”

She mutely followed him along another path. He only knew two dry paths—the others involved getting into the city’s sewers, which was not just wet but also disgusting. What if General Citizen knew this as well? What if he was watching all the sewers and the only other dry entrance?

No. The sewers he might watch, but General Citizen could not know about the dry tunnels, because there had been no traffic through them for more than a century—long before the People’s Revolution. Perhaps the last monarch who knew of the paths died without telling anyone. So the other entrance would not be watched—though that was no guarantee someone would not notice them by accident.

It was a long walk, and Param was not used to covering so much ground, or walking for so long at a time. Even though it took her ages to cross a room when invisible, to her it was a few quick steps. Where could she have walked, inside Flacommo’s house, that would give her any exercise? Rigg had been able to run with Olivenko back and forth between the library and Flacommo’s house, building up his endurance again, but Param had had no such opportunity.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I know it’s hard, and I wish I were as big as Loaf, so I could carry you.”

“You’re saving my life,” said Param. “But since I’m getting so tired, why not rest a while? The only urgent appointment we had won’t be kept now anyway.”

Rigg saw the wisdom of this, and found a short flight of steps where they could sit down.

To Rigg’s surprise, Param climbed the stairway and lay down on the floor of the upper part of the tunnel.

“There might be rats,” Rigg warned her.

“If a big enough one comes along, kill it so I can use it for a pillow,” she said.

All right, so she wasn’t bothered by rats. Or maybe she’d never actually encountered one, so she didn’t know whether it would bother her or not. She fell asleep quickly.

But it was too early in the day for Rigg to want to nap. He had schooled himself not to need sleep again until after noon. So he sat on the top step with Param sleeping behind him.

At first he couldn’t stop his thoughts from going back to Mother and General Citizen. He had known Citizen to be a formidable opponent—but he was nothing compared to Mother, because he hadn’t thought she was an opponent at all. Oh, yes, he had entertained the possibility that she was untrustworthy—even that she might harbor plans to kill him. But after months of being with her often, he had come to like her, to love her, to trust her. And all the time, she was . . .

No, not lying. Not really. She really did like him, and love him, and she certainly trusted him. She was simply doing the same thing Rigg had done, and Father, too, for that matter—holding her most secret plans in reserve. The real difference between Rigg and Mother was not that one of them was more dishonest or untrustworthy. It was that Rigg’s plans included saving his mother, and her plans included letting him be killed. No, arranging for him to be killed.

I can’t keep thinking about this. I certainly can’t let myself keep feeling things about it.

But he was almost as panicked and grieved and angry about this betrayal as he had been about Father’s death nearly a year before. And, like then, he was immediately plunged into the problem of staying alive when there were people who wanted him dead. He had thought the villagers—including Umbo’s father—posed a real threat to him when they wanted to kill him for failing to save Kyokay. Now their threat seemed laughable compared to what Mother had tried and Citizen intended. But if the villagers of Fall Ford had killed him, he would have been just as dead as if Mother’s brutal plan with the iron bars had blown him and Param to smithereens.

Rigg forced himself to scan the city, looking for Loaf and Umbo. It wasn’t hard to find them—General Citizen knew whatever Mother had told him about Rigg’s ability to find people, so he hadn’t bothered any kind of concealment. Besides, he wanted Rigg to find them, so he would come to save them.

They know I’ll come and save my friends. That’s something. They know that, unlike them, I have honor.

Of course, that honor’s going to get me killed.

Mobs were still prowling the streets, and more and more soldiers were coming into the city to restore order. Those large interwoven paths were easy to see and trace. But as Umbo’s and Loaf’s paths passed through other recent ones, it took all Rigg’s concentration, at such a distance, to stay focused on them.

At last the paths came to an end. Loaf and Umbo were being held in a large room with a strange pattern of paths in it. A large seating area, almost like one of the theaters in the city, but nowhere near as thickly attended. And down front, instead of the paths of actors or musicians on a stage, there was a large clear area where no one went, and around it, various stations where the same people returned and stayed for hours at a time, again and again.

Only when he recognized the path of Erbald, the Secretary of the Council, did he realize where Umbo and Loaf were being kept—in the Council House itself. They were seated right at the table, as if they were part of the government. And the rest of the Council was seated around them, with soldiers standing against the walls. No one at the table left, though servants came and went—feeding them?

Then one of the council members got up from the table and guards went with him as he walked to a place whose function Rigg recognized. It was the indoor lavatory. And if the councilors were being escorted by guards, it meant that they, too, were in custody.

Rigg could imagine what story was being circulated. The Council was under the “protection” of the People’s Revolutionary Army. Or had he gone farther? Had he announced that it was agents of the Council who had assassinated Flacommo and meant to kill the royals? Had he announced the restoration of Hagia Sessamin as Queen-in-the-Tent?

No, not yet. Because he couldn’t make any announcement about the royals until he could safely accuse the Council of having killed Rigg and Param. It wouldn’t do at all for him to claim they were dead, only to have them turn up somewhere very much alive.

And now Rigg realized that he and Param might not have to fear as extensive a search for them as he had expected. Citizen could hardly tell hundreds of soldiers to be on the lookout for the son and daughter of the queen! Word would spread very quickly—few soldiers were good at keeping their mouths shut. Soon there would be other groups searching for them for other reasons—some to kill one or the other of them, but others to save them, and maybe even some who would want to make Rigg King-in-the-Tent in place of Mother.

A nightmare that Citizen would do his best to avoid. No, he doubtless had relatively few people who knew just whom they were looking for. Even the soldiers who picked up Loaf and Umbo at the rendezvous probably didn’t know why they were wanted, and the ones who waited might have been told to seize anyone who emerged from a hiding place inside the park.

On the street they would be conspicuous only because they were dressed in such high-quality clothing—but even then, both Rigg and Param had no taste for extravagance, so they were dressed rather more simply than most people would think of as royal costumes.

Then, as he sat there, suddenly the path he was looking at slowed down, and as he concentrated on it, he could see a man—a tired old man, stumbling down the tunnel. He tripped and fell. He didn’t get up. He was wounded, Rigg could see that. He hurried down the stairs, keeping his attention centered on the old man.

When he reached him, the old man raised his hands as if to fend off a blow.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” said Rigg. He spoke in a high, formal language, hoping that this older kind of speech would be intelligible to him. It was.

“Get away and save yourself,” the old man said. “Whoever you are, save yourself. They’re killing everyone.”

Then, as quickly as the man had appeared, he was gone, nothing but a path again. A path that did not end in this spot, so apparently he had gotten up and moved on, back in whatever time he lived in. Whoever “they” were, the ones who were “killing everyone,” it couldn’t have anything to do with the People’s Revolution, since all the paths here in this tunnel were far older than that. Maybe he was a government official from the time before the Sessamoto conquered Aressa and renamed it Aressa Sessamo.

After all the time he had tried and failed to go back in time like this on his own, why had it suddenly happened now?

Stupid, he told himself. Stupid, not to realize at once. I didn’t go back on my own. Umbo can do what he does to me from a distance. Sitting there at that table in the Council House, he’s somehow letting me speed up enough to see the paths as people. He’s signaling me that he can do it from this range.

Umbo wants me to go back along his path and warn him, before he and Loaf get arrested, not to keep the rendezvous.

Does he know that he succeeded in reaching me? Can he feel, at such a distance, that the connection was made? What if he thinks he failed? What if he doesn’t try again?

Rigg ran back up the stairs, stumbling once in the darkness but not even pausing when he scraped his shin on a step. “Param,” he said. “Param, we have to go now.”

Param was almost instantly awake. “Is someone coming?”

“No,” said Rigg. “We’re perfectly safe here. But Umbo is—I told you what we could do, didn’t I? How he can let me go back in time to the paths, to the people—”

“Slow down,” said Param.

“He just did it, from the Council House.”

“He’s there?”

“That’s where General Citizen is holding them. It doesn’t matter, we’re not going there at all. I’m going to intercept them—go to a place where they were before they were arrested, and warn them. Set up a different rendezvous for tonight.”

“But you can’t get them out of the Council House, it’s such a public—”

“No, Param,” said Rigg. “They’ll never get to the Council House.”

“But they’re there,” she said.

“But they won’t be. They never will have been.”

“But you saw them there!” said Param.

“I saw their path,” said Rigg, “and you didn’t see them at all, so it’s not as if we’ll have some horribly false memory. Trust me. I have no idea why it works this way, but it does.”

“So we’ll go and warn them,” said Param, “and so they aren’t arrested. But who’s going to warn us and tell us where the new rendezvous is?”

“We won’t have to, we’ll . . .” But then, as he thought about it, Rigg realized that she might be right. If he stopped Umbo and Loaf from going to the meeting place in the park, then as he and Param fled down the tunnel, he wouldn’t see the soldiers arrest them, and so he wouldn’t know why they weren’t there. No, he’d probably figure it out, but then how would he know where to meet them?

He had to choose a secondary rendezvous that he would think of on his own, a place where he would guess that they might decide to meet with him if for some reason—he wouldn’t know the reason—they failed to keep the rendezvous.

He had simply assumed, until Param spoke up, that after he warned them, he would continue to the new rendezvous and meet them, with a full memory of all that had happened. But Umbo and Loaf had told him about their arguments about this very point—the future person who went back into the past and warned an earlier person not to do something was simply gone, and all that was left of him was the memory of his words. The warners disappeared as the warned ones followed a new path.

At least that’s how it worked when someone went back into the past to warn himself. Maybe when he did what Rigg was doing, and warned someone else, he—the warner—wouldn’t change at all. Maybe he’d continue to the new rendezvous.

Or maybe not.

“It’s making you insane, isn’t it?” said Param.

“I’m a complete fungus-head,” said Rigg.

“Just do what you have to do, and then we’ll know how it works,” she said.

They came out of the secret tunnel through a hidden doorway in the outside wall of a bank. In fact, the final landing had three entrances—one inside the bank building, one inside the vault, and the last one on the street. But Rigg wasn’t interested in stealing money or conducting any bank business. The street entrance was in an alcove, and no one saw them come out.

The light was dazzling, even though there was smoke in the sky.

The smoke stung Rigg’s eyes, and he could see that Param’s were also watering.

“The city is burning,” said Param. “It happens now and then, but the fire brigades get ahead of it and tear down buildings and soak the ruins with water pumped from the Stashik. Everybody knows this, and it’s one of the main things that prevents people from rioting and burning things. And putting out fires is the surest way to stop the riot. Anyone who interferes with the fire brigade will be torn apart by the mob. It’s their homes at stake. Wherever the fire brigades go, the riot is over.”

It made sense—but it brought Rigg a new problem to worry about. What if he sent Umbo and Loaf to a new rendezvous, but it was in a part of town that burned down? It wouldn’t matter that it wasn’t burning now. In the changed future, it might be burning.

If it is, we’ll improvise. First I have to find their path.

Fortunately, they had apparently tried to do something at this bank, because their paths were all around here. He easily found where they went back to their lodgings, and from there, without even leaving the alcove, he found their most recent path, the one leading to the aborted rendezvous. That was the path he had to interrupt.

“Come on,” he said to Param.

He could see that she was still tired—her hour of sleep had done little to refresh the weariness in her legs from all the walking, and now he was demanding that she do more.

The riots, fortunately, were happening elsewhere. They could hear shouting mobs, sometimes no more than a street away, but they never saw them, and most people were moving as furtively and quickly as Rigg and Param. Nobody wanted to get caught up in violence—the soldiers, when they attacked a mob, wouldn’t be very particular about making sure that only actual rioters got stabbed or clubbed or sliced to ribbons.

In fifteen minutes, they were at the path—at least six blocks before the park. Rigg could see that at the time they passed by here, they were keeping to the edges of the street. Already, then, the rioting had started, or perhaps just people fleeing because they knew that rioting was going to start. They stayed near the edge, and now Rigg found a hiding place behind a tipped-over cart. He didn’t have to actually see the path—he’d know when Umbo’s influence came over him, and then he could step out to where the path was visible to his eyes as well as his inward senses.

Param sank gratefully to the ground. “I’ll wait here while you do it,” she said.

“We’ll both wait,” said Rigg. “Because I don’t know when Umbo will try to reach me and speed me up again.”

“Wake me when it’s done,” she said. And, once again, she was asleep in moments.

It worried Rigg, how exhausted she got from what was really not that very much walking. What if Citizen’s spies—the few people in this city who knew what Param and Rigg looked like—spotted them, and they had to run? Param used to have recourse to becoming invisible, but now that Mother had told them how slowly she moved, and how to damage her while she could not be seen, invisibility was not going to save her.

If only I could hide her, the way she hid in the secret passages of the house, never having to be invisible, to go into that impossible sectioning of time that made the world race by her while she crept along.

It was getting toward noon. Rigg was beginning to get sleepy himself—this was the time he had trained himself to sleep for three hours in the afternoon, to earn the ability to wake up only five hours after going to bed and have much of the night to work with. But in his years in the forest with Father, he had learned to fight off sleep, when that was necessary, and he did so now.

But not very well, because he twice caught himself waking up. Impossible, because he certainly had not slept. Only he must have. Was it for a second or a minute or an hour? Had Umbo tried again to let him shift in time, and failed because Rigg was asleep?

No. The shadows were exactly as long as they had been before Rigg dozed. Only a moment, then.

He stood. Then sat back down immediately. A few blocks up the street, the vanguard of a mob was scurrying across the intersection—the solo scouts, the people in the mob who appointed themselves to see what was ahead, so the rest could be warned if soldiers were coming.

Please don’t come down this way.

They didn’t—but it was a large mob, and it seemed like it was taking forever for them to get across the street.

They were still crossing noisily when the paths shifted again. Rigg would have no choice but to walk out into the street—not far, but far enough to be visible. Maybe the mob wouldn’t care; maybe they would turn and race toward him. Either way, he’d make it quick.

He almost went out into the street alone, leaving Param to sleep. But then his wish to find a hiding place for her popped back into his mind, but with a plan attached. Could he push her back in time with Umbo and Loaf? Then she would be in a place where no one expected her, no one was even looking for her yet.

He had taken objects from the past, but had he or Umbo ever put something back into the past? Even if they had, maybe it only worked with things and not with people. When Rigg traveled back in time, he still existed in the present, where Umbo could see him, could watch as he did whatever it was he did to him to let him slow down the paths and find the people who made them.

Yet he was also really in the past. He thought of that terrible time at the lip of the falls, trying to reach Kyokay but unable to get past the man who clung to the cliff right over him. The man’s body had been real to him—he could touch it—and therefore his body had been really present to the man as well.

What if Umbo had stopped what he was doing to him while Rigg was still touching the man? Would he have stayed in the past with him? Would he have disappeared?

And even if Rigg wouldn’t have disappeared, what if he had handed the man something—or put someone else’s hand in his? Would that thing, or that person, have stayed in the past?

The only way to find out was to try.

He took Param by the hand and tugged at her. “Get up, come with me.”

“Let me sleep,” she said. “You do it.”

“Come now,” he insisted. “Who knows how long Umbo can maintain this at such a distance?”

Complaining, staggering, her eyes barely open, Param came with him.

Rigg looked for Umbo’s path—he couldn’t focus on both Loaf and Umbo at the same time, even if they were walking together. And there he was, racing along his path, over and over. Then, the more closely Rigg focused, Umbo went slower, slower, until he was walking at a hurried pace, but in real time.

Rigg stepped in front of him. “Stop,” he said.

Umbo stopped. So did Loaf, who now also became visible because Rigg was seeing Umbo’s time as well as his own, and Loaf was with him there.

“Can you see her?” he asked them.

Umbo looked at Param and nodded. So did Loaf.

“Meet me an hour after noon in the noodle house,” said Rigg. “Now take her hand.”

Param, who had just seen Umbo materialize out of nothing in the open street, was reluctant to touch him, but Rigg forced her hand into his. “Hold on!” he said. “Who knows where you’ll end up if you pull away!” Rigg let go of her. She was holding on to Umbo. Loaf also took hold of her.

Either she would stay with them or she wouldn’t.

“What are you doing?” demanded Umbo.

“If it works, then—”

But at that moment, the speeding-up that Umbo-in-the-Council-House was sending to him let go, and Umbo quickly disappeared back into his path. So did Loaf.

So did Param.

She was no longer with him. Her path was suddenly in the past. It went out into the street in the present, and continued unbroken, only now her path was beside Umbo’s and Loaf’s in their time period—earlier this morning.

So they weren’t just limited to taking things from the past—the knife, the jewels in their hiding place. They could also put things back there, things and people—as long as there was someone there willing to receive them.

But he really didn’t have time to reflect on the ramifications of this experiment. He was standing alone in the street, and there was a mob only a few blocks away. And while his clothing didn’t look princely, it looked rich, and there were always stragglers with a mob who would take the opportunity to commit a bit of robbery or mayhem when the opportunity presented itself.

Sure enough, when he turned to look up the street, there were a half dozen men—some ragged, some not—walking briskly or jogging along the street toward him. The rest of the mob was still crossing, but they were thinning out now. There would be few witnesses to what they did if they caught him. Not that he had anything on him worth stealing, except his clothing.

Rigg knew that as soon as he broke into a run, the chase would be on. If he had not been able to put Param into the past, he would only have been able to run as fast as she did.

Then again, if she were still here, she could have held on to him and simply disappeared until these would-be thieves gave up and went away.

Oh, well, thought Rigg. Everything has consequences.

He ran.

Life in Flacommo’s house had not weakened him as much as he feared; his days of running with Olivenko had perhaps made the difference. He easily stayed ahead until he could get back to the bank and the secret passage. He dodged inside, closed the door, and then waited for them to give up. He scanned their paths, and while some of them tried to search for him, they soon gave up. Nobody even came close to probing the alcove in the wall of the bank.

Now that he had time, he cast about to find the Council House again. There were the councilors, still under guard—but Loaf and Umbo were not there.

So the warning had worked. They didn’t go to the rendezvous, they weren’t arrested.

Their past had changed—but Rigg’s had not. He still had clear memories of seeing them in the Council House—of watching them be arrested, of passing through the tunnels with Param.

Pushing her into the past had done more than get her off the streets and out of danger. It had also prevented Rigg’s path through time from being erased at the point of change.

It’s causality, he thought. Param is in the past with Umbo and Loaf, and I am still the same person, in the same timeflow, who put her there. So I have not lost my past or forgotten it.

From inside the bank’s secret passage, he began to trace the path Umbo and Loaf had taken earlier today. There they were, heading for the park. And there was the spot where their paths stopped and Rigg’s and Param’s suddenly joined them. Then Rigg’s path shifted in time, but Umbo, Loaf, and Param reversed direction and went back the way they had come.

Rigg followed their paths through the rest of the morning until now. They weren’t in the noodle house—it still wasn’t the time for the rendezvous. But why wait? Rigg knew where they were now, and he could find them easily.

Taking a route that avoided crowds and soldiers, Rigg made his way to the area of the noodle house, and then angled his way toward where their paths were being freshly made.

They saw each other from a distance. Loaf immediately gave a small wave of his hand, then made the others stop and wait for Rigg to reach them. It was a good choice—one person walking alone would attract less attention than three standing still. When he reached them in the shadows of the entranceway of a shuttered-up shop, he could see that Umbo and Param were still tightly gripping each other’s hands.

“You can let go now,” said Rigg.

“How do you know?” said Umbo, and Param nodded. “How do you know she won’t just pop back into the future that she came from?”

“First,” said Rigg, “that future doesn’t exist now, because she came from a version of events where the two of you were arrested by General Citizen and held in the Council House. Those events didn’t happen, so she can’t go back there.”

“But they did happen because you remember them,” said Param.

“Do you?” asked Rigg.

“Yes, of course,” she answered.

“And yet you’re here and now, with me, in this version of time in which they weren’t arrested.”

“So I can’t go back. But what if I can’t stay here, either?” said Param. “What if I let go and I just disappear.”

“Because, second, this is the future right now. I’m the same person who put your hand in his. I have continued to exist, without you, until we rejoined. Take my hand.”

She did.

“Let go of his.”

“Easy for you to say, you’re not going to disappear,” muttered Loaf.

“Neither is she,” said Rigg, “because I’m from that same time and I haven’t disappeared. Right? Everybody agrees that I exist?”

“Annoyingly, yes,” said Loaf.

Param let go of Umbo’s hand. She didn’t disappear. Umbo massaged his own hand with a grimace.

“I’m sorry I held so tightly,” said Param. “But I was terrified.”

“If you want something terrifying, show them how you do disappear,” said Rigg.

Param glared at him for a moment, and then apparently thought better of it and did what he suggested—she vanished.

Loaf was furious. “I told you not to let go of her hand!” he said to Umbo. “Now look what you’ve—”

Param reappeared only a little way from where she had vanished. “I don’t really disappear when I do that,” she said.

“Well, you could have fooled me,” said Loaf.

“I’m always visible to myself,” she said.

“Now everybody take her hand,” said Rigg.

“She only has two,” said Umbo patiently.

“Everybody meaning Umbo and Loaf,” said Rigg. “Take her hands.”

They did. Rigg said, “Umbo, hold out your other hand. Just hold it out. Right there. Now, when she does . . . the thing she does . . . don’t move. Just hold your hand there.”

“Why?” asked Umbo.

“You’ll see.”

Param made a skeptical face. “I don’t like this,” she said.

“They have to know what you can do, and this is the easiest way.”

Param looked away from him with a huffy expression, but even as she was doing so, she vanished. And so did the other two.

Rigg realized—again—that it was hard to remember exactly where in space an invisible object was even a moment ago. Fortunately, he could see Umbo’s path and make a decent guess at where that extended arm must be.

He reached out and passed his hand through the space where Umbo’s arm had to be. Then he did it again, in the other direction.

Almost at once, they all reappeared. Umbo was staring at his own hand, and Loaf was in the process of sitting down very suddenly.

“Don’t do that again,” said Param.

“I don’t need to do it again,” said Rigg. “Judging from their reactions, I think they’re convinced.”

“It’s dangerous to put two objects through each other like that,” said Param. “What if I had slipped? You’d both have lost your arms.”

“Ouch,” murmured Umbo.

“So what happens when a fly passes through you?” asked Loaf.

“Or a gnat, or dust?” said Rigg. “It must have happened, over and over. Apparently her body is able to repel them, or absorb their small amount of mass. Who knows? She’s spent hours at a time that way, and I’ve seen flies and bees and moths pass right through her. She has to have come out of it with one of them inside her before this.”

“It makes me sick,” said Param.

“We have to talk about it,” said Rigg. “We’re all trying to understand it.”

“I mean,” said Param, “that coming out of it with a fly inside me literally makes me sick. Feverish. It takes time to heal the spot where the fly was. Painful and hot for hours. But dust isn’t a problem. Not even a little sand. The only problems are living things, thick walls, metal, and stone.”

“And I’m the only one,” said Loaf, “who can’t do a single interesting thing.”

“You just vanished,” said Rigg. “Even if you weren’t in control of it, you were still invisible, and that’s interesting, that something your size could disappear.”

Loaf glowered and then chuckled. “All right, that’s good enough.”

“You might also be able to do something else that’s very, very important.”

“What’s that?” asked Loaf.

“Get us out of the city,” said Rigg. “There are troops everywhere, and the mobs are dispersing except where they’re fighting fires. Plus, there’s still lots of traffic on all the roads and on the river.”

Loaf put his mind to the problem, as did they all. He thought of going downstream and then changing to a boat coming upstream, but then objected to his own idea. “They don’t know where we’re headed, so they’ll catch us downstream or upstream, if they’re serious about looking for us.”

Param slept again while they talked. Umbo suggested taking her back to their lodgings so she could sleep on a bed, but Loaf reminded him that that was the one place they couldn’t possibly go. “If this General Citizen was spying on us all along, he’ll certainly have somebody watching our rooms.”

Finally they settled into glum silence which turned into mere dozing in the shade, until, after more than an hour, Rigg spoke up. “Soldiers are coming this way. We need to move.”

“They aren’t on to us, are they?” asked Umbo.

“No,” said Rigg. “But they’re patrolling and this is a small enough group that I don’t think they’re doing riot control. They’re going to look for a group of people like us.”

“Can’t we just disappear?” asked Loaf.

“If we have to,” said Rigg. “But as Param already found out, if you have a different way of not being seen, it’s better not to do the invisibility thing. Right now, we can be unseen by walking around that corner there.”

“People are going to start coming out of their houses and shops soon,” said Loaf.

“That’s right,” said Rigg.

“If only you’d come back and warned us sooner,” said Umbo. “We could have left town yesterday.”

“The three of you could,” said Rigg. “But I’d still be stuck here.”

They walked at a leisurely pace up to the corner and rounded it, while Param yawned repeatedly. “I’ve never been so tired in my life,” she said.

“Rigg has that effect on people,” said Loaf. “Wears ’em right out.”

“Why not leave the city yesterday?” asked Rigg.

They looked at him like he was crazy. “Didn’t you just tell us it was impossible?” asked Loaf.

“But what if it isn’t?” asked Rigg. “I attached Param to the past by having her hold your hand. However these abilities of ours work, when human beings join hands they become like a single unit—they move through time together. Who’s to say that I couldn’t have joined you in the past at the same time Param did, by simply continuing to hold her hand, too?”

“But that never happened before—you never actually went into the past,” said Umbo. “Or not completely—part of you stayed here.”

“I never linked to anybody,” said Rigg. “I took a knife, but I didn’t hold on to the man. Did you ever link with somebody in the past?”

Umbo thought back. “I never touched anybody at all, except Loaf, and I brought him with me.”

Rigg was still thinking it through. “I think it’ll be best if we don’t try to find an earlier version of ourselves. I know that causal flows are preserved, but I don’t like tying the whole stream of time into knots if we can help it. We don’t understand the rules so I’d like to keep it simple.”

“So . . . we just pick somebody randomly out of the past and say, ‘Excuse me, do you mind if I and my three friends hold on to your body parts for a few minutes?’”

“Not randomly,” said Rigg. “Someone we can trust.”

“Oh, right,” said Loaf. “Aressa is full of trustworthy strangers.”

Then Rigg remembered somebody that he could trust. Somebody who was not part of Mother’s world at all.

“I have a friend,” he said.

Olivenko came out of his small flat and rumbled down the stairs toward the street. Time for a decent breakfast for once, before joining his unit and standing his watch.

As he reached the landing before the last flight of stairs to the street door, he saw Rigg Sessamekesh standing there.

“Rigg,” he said. “How did you get out of—”

Rigg shook his head.

Olivenko immediately nodded. Just speaking Rigg’s name aloud might attract attention—fortunately, he had not spoken loudly and few people in the building rose as early in the morning as he did.

“Olivenko,” said Rigg, “you remember all we talked about. You remember the danger that I’m in.”

“Yes,” he said.

“Well, I know—it’s not a guess or a logical deduction or even spying, but I absolutely know that in two days, Flacommo will be killed, his house invaded, my mother arrested, and my sister and I will hide and become fugitives, along with two other friends of mine.”

“And you want me to help you get away?”

“I do,” said Rigg.

“But they’ll be watching for you.”

“No, they won’t,” said Rigg. “Because they already know where we are.”

“What?”

“Param and I, at this moment you’re living through, are in Flacommo’s house, being observed.”

Olivenko knew enough to wait for the explanation.

“You think I’m going to explain, and I am, but not right now, because in about five minutes somebody else is going to come down those stairs and I don’t want him to see you talking with me.”

“So let’s go find your friends,” said Olivenko.

“Exactly right,” said Rigg. “Only it’s not as simple as you think. But it’s much quicker. All you have to do is stand right here, without moving another step. It might be better if you close your eyes. But if you open them, then you have to promise you won’t shout or run away or anything. Just take it calmly. Trust me that there’s a rational explanation.”

“For what?” asked Olivenko, baffled and a little bit annoyed at all the mumbo-jumbo.

“For this.”

Rigg disappeared. Just vanished.

And then, about ten seconds later, he reappeared—holding hands with Param Sissaminka, the heir of the royal house, and two strangers, one of them a tall old soldier, the other a short boy nearer to Rigg’s age, perhaps younger.

Olivenko didn’t even gasp. Instead, he just stood there thinking: If only Knosso could have seen this.

“Rigg,” he finally said, “if you can jump around like this, what do you need my help for?”

“Because we can’t jump through space, only through time. And we aren’t completely here, we’re also still in the future—two days from now, with rioters and soldiers all over the streets of Aressa, with General Citizen’s soldiers looking for us. Right now we can’t see that time, but our bodies are still in it, and some pretty bad things can happen, so we’ve got to do this fast.”

“Do what?” asked Olivenko.

“All of us hold on to you—onto your bare skin, a wrist or your neck will do—all at the same time. To root ourselves completely in this time. Two days before everything went wrong.”

Olivenko didn’t hesitate. He pulled up his sleeves and took off his cap. “Grab on.”

The two at the ends—the soldierly man and the boy—took hold of one of his arms, first with one hand each, and then, letting go of Rigg and Param, with both hands.

“Still here,” said the boy.

“And you’re still holding me in the past,” said Rigg to the boy. “Even though you’re no longer in the future. Maybe we—”

“Shut up and finish this,” said the old soldier.

Param and Rigg both took hold of Olivenko’s other arm, but they did not let go of each other.

“I know this is going to be awkward, but let’s see if we can make it down the stairs together,” said Rigg. “It’s possible that everybody but me will stay with you, Olivenko. If that happens, then please go ahead and take them out of town—not in a way that will leave any evidence. No riverboats, where there’ll be a record of booking passage. Something unobtrusive and without a trail that can be followed.”

“Where will you be?”

“Following after, as best I can,” said Rigg. “But me alone, I can probably get out much more easily than all four of us—five now—together. And maybe I won’t disappear on you. Maybe we’ve already made it. Ready?”

“More than ready,” said the old soldier. “You talk way too much, boy, when the time for talking hasn’t come yet.”

Olivenko found himself wanting to slap the old man around for that—talking to the son of Knosso Sissamik like that. But he didn’t know the relationships among these people. He only knew Rigg, and had caught glimpses of Param over the years. The rest he’d have to take on trust.

Awkwardly they went down the stairs, Olivenko walking in the middle, the others sidling slowly along, gripping his arm rather more tightly than was comfortable.

They could hear the clatter of booted feet coming down the stairs high above.

“Let’s hurry a little,” said Olivenko. “This picture’s going to be hard to explain.”

By the time they reached the bottom, the old soldier and Param had both let go of him completely—but they were still there.

Then the boy let go.

They were out on the street, with Rigg still clinging to his arm with both hands. The other three were watching him, and Olivenko could see that they really were worried. Whatever mad thing Rigg was frightened of, it scared them, too.

“Well, here goes,” said Rigg. “Either I’ll be in the city where they’re searching for me, or I’ll be here with you. But you’ll be fine either way, and I probably will, too. It’s not like I’m going to explode or anything.” He grinned at Param when he said that, though Olivenko couldn’t think why.

Rigg let go.

And there he still was.

“If you disappeared,” said Olivenko, “I’m hallucinating an exact image of you, right where you used to be.”

Rigg nodded. “There’s always the chance that my body is also still in the future, and if somebody catches me there, walking around like a blind man, I may get yanked away from you. But personally, right at the moment, I think that’s unlikely. I think we just found a way to move into the past.”

“I’m very impressed with us,” said the old soldier dryly.

“But the thing to keep in mind is, it’s irrevocable,” said Rigg. “Now that I’m here in the past with the rest of you, I can only see the paths that existed as of this moment. I can’t see Param and me walking through the tunnel, or where I handed her off to you. Those things haven’t happened yet.”

“Wasn’t that the idea?” asked the boy.

The old soldier glanced around. “Are we sure nobody’s going to recognize the two of you?” he asked Rigg and Param.

“Nobody knows what they look like,” said Olivenko. “Except a chosen few, and they won’t be looking for them here on the streets. Not today.”

“What I’m saying,” said Rigg, continuing the discussion of time travel, “is that I couldn’t go back into the future if I wanted to. I can only see paths in the past. Which means that if we ever do this again, only we don’t want to stay in the past, then we can’t let go of our link with the future. Which may not be me at all. It may be Umbo, or both of us together. As long as he and I are still existing in both places at the same time, and not tied to a living creature in the past, then we can return to the future. What do you think?”

“I think that either you’re right,” said Param, “or you’re not. What I don’t see is why it matters.”

“Because this is how we’re going to get through the Wall,” said Rigg. “We’re going to cross through it at a time before it existed. But on the other side, we’re going to want to come back to our time.”

“There was a time when the Wall didn’t exist?” asked the boy—Umbo? Yes, that was his ridiculous name.

“Twelve thousand years ago,” said Rigg. “And when the Wall didn’t exist, there were no humans here. If we get stuck that long ago, then we’ll be the only people in the world.”

“That’s how you’re going to do it?” asked Olivenko.

“I think it’ll work,” said Rigg, “better than knocking ourselves unconscious and floating through the Wall on a boat.”

“At least there won’t be anybody waiting to kill us on the other side,” said Olivenko.

“What are you talking about?” asked the old soldier.

So, as they walked along the busy streets of Aressa Sessamo, Rigg and Olivenko told the story of Knosso, Rigg’s real father, and how he crossed through the Wall, only to be murdered on the other side.

“And you want to take us through the Wall, knowing that somebody wants to kill us on the other side?” asked Loaf.

“The creatures that killed Father Knosso,” said Rigg, “lived in the water. We won’t cross through where there’s water.”

“But there might be other things that want us dead,” said Param.

“There might be. But one thing we can be certain of—there are people in this wallfold who want us dead, and they’re very good at killing people.”

“Well, then,” said Loaf, “Let’s give it a try and see if we live through it.”

“One thing,” said Rigg. “You don’t have to come, Loaf.”

“I don’t have to do anything I don’t want to.”

“I’m thinking of Leaky,” said Rigg. “She expects you to come home. I don’t know if we’ll ever be able to come back, once we cross over.”

“Leaky is like my heart or my brain,” said Loaf. “I can’t imagine living without her. But she also knows me. Knows that whenever I leave home there’s a chance I won’t come back. She knew it when she sent me with you. So if I go with you, and I get killed or for some other reason can’t get back, then she’ll grieve, and she’ll wonder what happened to me, but she’ll go on. She’ll make a life for herself in that town that’s named for her. One of us is going to die before the other—that’s how life goes. You see what I mean?”

Olivenko understood what he was saying, but could hardly believe that a man could mean it. It wasn’t like he didn’t care—Loaf was clearly more than a little emotional as he made that speech. He simply wasn’t going to let his feelings for the woman he loved stop him from following through with what he had committed to do.

Like a true soldier.

Like me, thought Olivenko.

“I’m with you, too,” said Olivenko.

“No, truly,” said Rigg. “All we need is your help out of town.”

“In about a half hour, I’m going to be absent without permission,” said Olivenko. “By the time you’re safely out of town, I’d better be with you and never come back, because I’ll be a deserter. They hang deserters.”

“Then you can’t come with us,” said Rigg. “It was selfish of me to ask. Just give us some ideas about how—”

“Are you joking?” said Olivenko. “I watched your father pass through the Wall and die, young Rigg. And ever since then, I’ve only wished one thing—that I could have gone with him. Maybe I could have saved him.”

“You were a child then, an apprentice scholar,” said Rigg. “What could you have done?”

“Why do you think I became a soldier?” said Olivenko. “So that if there was ever such a need again, I’d be fit to do it.”

“I never thought much of deserters,” said the old soldier.

“Well, you can smear that opinion on your elbow and lick it off,” said Olivenko. “Because I’m not deserting. They’ll only think that I am.”

“What are you doing, then?” asked Param.

“I’m following the prince and princess of the royal house into exile,” said Olivenko.

“Oh,” said Loaf. “That’s all right then.”