Pathfinder

CHAPTER 8 The Tower

Ram thought about it sitting, standing, walking, lying down. He thought about it with eyes closed and open, playing computer games and reading books and watching films and doing nothing at all.

Finally he thought of a question that might lead to a useful bit of information. “The light of stars behind us—blue or red shifted?”

“By ‘behind us,’ do you mean in the spatial position we occupied moments ago? Or in the direction of the stern of this vessel?”

“Stern of the vessel,” said Ram. “Earthward.”

“Red shift.”

“If we were moving toward Earth, it should be blue-shifted.”

“This is an anomaly,” said the expendable. “We are closer to Earth with the passage of each moment, and yet the shift is red. The computers are having a very hard time coping with the contradictory data.”

“Compare the degree of red shift with the red shift when we were in the same position on our way to the fold.”

The expendable didn’t even pause. It was a simple data lookup, and to a human mind it seemed to take no time at all.

“The red shift is identical to what was recorded on the outbound voyage.”

“Then we are simply repeating the outbound voyage,” said Ram. “The ship is moving forward, as propelled by the drive. But we, inside the ship, are moving backward in time.”

“Then why are we not observing ourselves as we were two days ago on the outbound voyage?” asked the expendable.

“Because that version of ourselves is not moving through time in the same direction as we are,” said Ram.

“You say this as if it made sense.”

“If I started crying and screaming, you’d stop taking me seriously.”

“I’m already not taking you seriously,” said the expendable. “My programming requires that I keep your most recent statements in the pending folder, because they cannot be reconciled with the data.”

“It’s really quite elegant,” said Ram. “The ship is the same ship. Everything about it that does not need to change remains exactly as it was on the outbound voyage. It occupies the same space and the same time. But the flow of electrical data and instructions through the computers and your robot brain and my human one, and our physical motions through space, are not the same, because our causality is moving in a different direction. We are moving through the same space as our earlier selves, but we are not on the same timestream, and therefore we are invisible to each other.”

“This is an impossible explanation,” said the expendable.

“Come up with a better one, then.”

This time the expendable waited a long time. He remained completely still while Ram deliberately and without hunger pushed food into his mouth and chewed it and swallowed it.

“I do not have a better explanation,” said the expendable. “I can only reason from information that has already been reasoned from successfully.”

“Then I suppose that’s why you needed a human being to be awake after the jump,” said Ram.

“Ram,” said the expendable. “What will happen to us when this ship reaches Earth?”

“At some point,” said Ram, “either the two versions of the ship will separate and probably explode, or we will separate from the ship and die in the cold of space, or we will simply reach Earth and continue to live backward until I die of old age.”

“But I am designed to last forever,” said the expendable, “if not interfered with.”

“Isn’t that nice? Expendable yet eternal. You’ll be able to go back and observe any part of human history that you wish. Watch the pyramids being unbuilt. See the ice ages go and come in reverse. Watch the de-extinction of the dinosaurs as a meteor leaps out of the Gulf of Mexico.”

“I will have no useful task. I will not be able to help the human race in any way. My existence will have no meaning after you are dead.”

“Now you know how humans feel all the time.”

They were at the docks, all their new clothes packed and the trunks ready to be loaded onto a much better grade of boat, when Rigg looked back at the city of O. From here, he could barely see the tops of the white stone buildings over the ramble of houses and warehouses near the wharf. But he remembered what he would see again as the boat pulled farther and farther from O.

“We’d be fools, wouldn’t we,” said Rigg, “if we spent these weeks in O and never visited the tower.”

“That’s what I thought,” said Loaf. “But you were determined to go as soon as the money came in.”

Rigg wanted to say: Then why didn’t you advise me to see it? But then he remembered two things: First, Loaf had said, in a hinty kind of way, things like, “All these pilgrims heading for the tower—what do they care for the city?” and “People live here in O all their lives and never visit the tower.” This was not at all the forceful way Loaf used to give advice, so Rigg didn’t hear it as counsel, he heard it as mockery of the pilgrims and the locals.

And second, this was exactly the kind of change that Rigg dared not criticize for fear of making it worse. Loaf was treating him now the way he treated wealthy customers who by some bit of ill-fortune were reduced to stopping at his tavern. Deference bordering on cringing was the order of the day—Rigg saw it in the people who served him in his lodging house, and he saw it in Loaf as well, a side of him that had never surfaced before, not even when he and Leaky found the jewels.

They had known they were worth a lot of money, but had not been able to conceive how much; nor had they really believed that Rigg was capable of holding on to his wealth. Hadn’t Loaf come along precisely so Rigg would not be cheated? He had said more than once, “Looks like I wasn’t needed after all, you handled them just fine,” and each time Rigg would reassure him that without Loaf there, no one would have taken Rigg seriously at all—he would have lost everything as soon as someone reached out to take it. “I’m not a fighter, Loaf—you are. So they’d look at you, and then they had to listen to me.”

But Loaf only believed it for a moment, if at all. He was in awe of the negotiating skill Rigg had shown. “You sounded like an officer,” he had said.

Well, if sergeants gave such limp, irresolute advice to their officers, it’s a wonder anybody ever won a battle!

So Rigg made no argument with Loaf’s mild I-told-you-so. “You did say it was worth seeing, didn’t you,” said Rigg. “Well, let’s see it now.”

It took only a wave of the hand to have a coachman bowing to Loaf, who was still as forceful as ever when dealing with people he regarded as his equal or lower. In a minute Rigg, Umbo, and Loaf were inside a coach, their luggage left in the care of the boat’s captain.

It took two hours to get to the Tower of O—one hour to get through a mile of maze-like streets leading to the nearest city gate, and the second hour to go the five miles along the road to reach the base of the tower. The road they took was really the cleared area outside the city wall, intended to force an enemy to come uphill, fully exposed to projectiles from the defenders of the city, so they stayed so close to the wall that they could not see the tower at all until suddenly they rounded a bend and there it was, looming over them, looking as tall as Upsheer Cliff.

“But it’s not as tall,” said Umbo, when Rigg said so. “We’re two miles away, and the cliffs don’t look like that until you’re five miles back.”

“It’s the tallest thing I’ve ever seen,” said Loaf.

“You need to come upriver more,” said Umbo. “Become a true privick.”

“The ambition of my life,” said Loaf.

The stream of pilgrims coming and going made it impossible to bring the coach as close as they might have wished. “Just as well,” said Loaf. “You need to let me and Umbo go ahead and make our offering for three people, or the keepers of the tower will get one look at you and triple the price. Or more.”

“Then I’ll pay the coachman—I’ll pay him enough to wait for us. How long does it take in there?”

“Never long enough,” said Loaf.

“Enough for what?”

“To see it all, or understand what you’re seeing,” said Loaf.

Loaf and Umbo alit from the carriage—that is, Loaf stepped and Umbo fairly leapt from it and ran on ahead. Rigg talked to the coachman, who kept saying, “I’ll be here waiting, young master, see if I’m not,” and Rigg kept saying, “But let’s agree on a price or you’ll think I cheated you,” not adding “or vice versa,” and the coachman would reply, “Oh, young master is generous, I seed that right away, I trust in young master’s generosity,” which was enough to make Rigg crazy. He looked over and in the near distance saw Loaf and Umbo talking to one of the extravagantly uniformed tower guards, and wondered if they were having half the trouble he was having getting a price set.

As he stood there, gazing at his friends, he heard a voice at his side. Umbo’s voice. And he was speaking so rapidly that Rigg couldn’t understand him.

Rigg turned to face him, then glanced back at where he could see Umbo right beside Loaf. The two Umbos were dressed differently, and the Umbo standing beside him looked distressed, frightened, and deadly serious. Rigg knew at once what was happening. Somehow a future version of Umbo had managed to learn the trick of following a path back in time—Rigg’s own path. And he had done it in order to warn him of something.

Umbo slowed down—Rigg could see that he was mouthing the words with difficulty, and yet they came so rapidly that Rigg could still only just barely understand him.

“Give the jewels to Loaf to hide them at once.”

Rigg nodded to show he understood. He could see Umbo sag with relief—and in that moment he disappeared.

Rigg walked around to where the coachman was watering the horses. “I’ve changed my mind,” he said. “There are plenty of coaches here, I can see, so let me pay you for bringing us here and then if we happen to meet for the road back to the dock, so much the better. But meanwhile you’re free to take another fare.”

The man named a price for the one journey, looking vastly disappointed. Rigg knew the fare was much too high, but he doubled it and paid the man, who bowed and fawned and made himself so obnoxious with gratitude that Rigg was glad to turn and jog away from him, trotting toward the others.

They came to him at a walk, and Loaf brandished a pass for three visitors for the whole day. Rigg thanked him, but then drew them away from the tower.

“Where are we going?” asked Umbo.

“We’ll go to the tower soon enough,” said Rigg. “But something must happen first.”

“What?” asked Loaf.

“I’ll tell you where we can’t be overheard by half the pilgrims here.”

They headed for the men’s latrines but then passed them by. Not until they had found a secluded place behind the latrine wall did Rigg stop and, facing the wall, draw the small bag of jewels out of his trousers.

“What are you doing?” whispered Loaf harshly. “Get that back in your pants.”

“No sir,” said Rigg. “I’m giving it to you for safekeeping.”

“Why? A pickpocket’s as likely to get it from me as from you.”

“Quieter,” said Rigg. “I had a warning.”

“Who from?” asked Umbo.

“You,” said Rigg.

Umbo blanched, then looked at Loaf and back again. He seemed nervous. “I’ve been with Loaf the whole time, I didn’t say a word to you.”

“The warning came from you—you in the future. You were very upset. You told me to give the jewels to Loaf, and he should hide them at once.”

“What are you talking about?” asked Loaf. “How could Umbo warn you about anything when he doesn’t know what you’re talking about?”

“He knows all right,” said Rigg. “He’ll explain it to you later. For right now, Loaf, take this bag and hide it—someplace where it will be safe for a few days or a few weeks or a year. I don’t know how far in the future Umbo had gotten before he was able to come back and warn me.”

“I suppose this means I actually learn how to do it,” said Umbo. “Since it was me who came, and not you.”

“If I’m understanding you aright,” said Loaf, “then you’ve lost your mind.”

“Take it on faith for now,” said Rigg. “If I can trust you with wealth like this, you can trust me and Umbo not to be insane.”

“I don’t think the two things have anything to do with each other,” said Loaf, but still he took the little bag in his massive hand. “I’ll hide it all right, but if someone sees me do it or finds it by chance, it’s on your head, not mine.”

“Exactly,” said Rigg. “And to be safe, don’t tell Umbo or me where you hid it. I don’t know what the danger is, but there must be an excellent reason for me not to have the jewels, and it seems to me that it’s best if I also don’t know where they are. I think Umbo will be safer, too, if only you know.”

“So if I die, they’re lost forever,” said Loaf.

“I already have wealth beyond my wildest dreams,” said Rigg.

“Just like a child . . . easy come, easy go.” But Loaf turned away and walked into the park-like woods that surrounded the tower grounds, while Rigg and Umbo started off toward the trail of pilgrims headed back to the tower from the latrines.

“We might as well go, as long as we’re here,” said Umbo.

“Who knows when we’ll get a chance again? Something’s going to go seriously wrong or you wouldn’t have come back to warn me, and it’s probably going to be soon or you wouldn’t have warned me right when you did.”

“Maybe that was the only time I could find you.”

“Who knows?” said Rigg. “I don’t like knowing that something’s going to go wrong. Here I spent the past couple of weeks thinking I was handling things rather well.”

“But things going wrong, that’s the usual, isn’t it?” said Umbo. “My brother died. Your father died. Whatever happens next can’t be as bad as that.”

“Unless I get killed,” said Rigg. “Falling out of the boat into the water and I drown and so you had me give the jewels to Loaf so—”

“I’d tell you not to drown,” said Umbo, “and if I wanted to steal the jewels, I’d tell you to give them to me.”

“So you’ve already thought about this?” asked Rigg.

“Just keep peeing,” said Umbo.

By the time they were through, Loaf was back.

Umbo asked, “Where did you go?”

“Shut up,” replied Loaf. “What now? What’s this all about?”

“Rigg and I decided that whatever it is, it’s probably not the worst thing in the world. I mean, we know that you and I are still alive, whatever happens to Rigg.”

“I thought I told you to shut up,” said Loaf, sounding more like he meant it now.

They showed their three-person pass to a different set of guards from the ones Loaf had talked to before, so they wouldn’t see Rigg’s rich-boy clothing and decide they had been defrauded of their rightful bribe. Then they joined the throng of pilgrims going in.

Though the outside was metal, inside the structure was massive stone, with a long narrow ramp climbing in a spiral up the inside walls. There wasn’t a window in the place, and yet it was brightly lighted by magical globes hanging in the air.

“This ramp is steep,” said Loaf.

“You’re getting old,” said Umbo. “I could run all the way up.”

“Do it then,” said Loaf.

“No,” said Rigg. “The ramp is narrow, and all it takes is one pilgrim getting irritated and giving you a shove.”

“But I can’t die,” said Umbo. “Because I’m alive in the future to come back and warn you to do whatever.”

“Maybe you came back from the dead,” said Rigg.

“Come on, that’s impossible,” said Umbo.

“Coming back from the future is impossible, too,” said Loaf. “If you can explain one, you can explain the other.”

Rigg wasn’t at all sure he could explain anything, at least not well enough to be sure Loaf would believe it. After all the years Father had pressed on him the importance of telling no one, he had no practice in explaining anything to anyone. Nox already knew, and Umbo had a gift of his own. Yet to tell Loaf less than everything now was to make it plain that he was not trusted. That would make him resentful—and therefore less trustworthy. If future-Umbo thought it was safe to trust Loaf with the jewels, it seemed pointless not to include him in the secret of their shared power to reach backward in time.

All the other pilgrims on the ramp ahead and behind them were engaged in their own conversations. Keeping their voices at a normal volume, Rigg and Umbo told him about their abilities, and what they were able to do together. Between Loaf’s questions and Rigg and Umbo correcting each other, it soon was clear enough.

“You still have that knife?” asked Loaf. “It didn’t disappear or anything, did it?”

“In my luggage,” said Rigg.

“Well, not actually,” said Umbo.

Rigg sighed. “What, future-you came back in time to tell you to take it and put it in your own luggage?”

“Loaf’s luggage, actually,” said Umbo.

“I was joking,” said Rigg. “Are you telling me you already knew that some future version of you was paying social calls on us?”

“He—I—woke me up this morning and told me to do it and then disappeared before I could ask any questions. I think me-in-the-future isn’t very good at it and a few seconds were all I could manage. Anyway, I didn’t tell you because why would you believe that I wasn’t just stealing it? Then you got your warning and it seemed way more important than mine. I mean, that’s a fortune in jewels, and you gave it right to Loaf.”

“And if he had told you he took your knife, would you have trusted him when he told you to give me the jewels?” asked Loaf.

“Yes,” said Rigg. “Probably.” He thought a little more. “Maybe not.”

“I think he handled it right,” said Loaf. “Unless he is stealing stuff, but then why would he have you give the jewels to me, and put the knife in my luggage? No, I think whatever happens will make it so I’m the only one who doesn’t lose all my stuff.”

“What could make us lose our stuff?” asked Rigg.

“If the boat sinks,” said Umbo, “Loaf would lose his stuff, too.”

“If the boat sinks we all drown,” said Loaf.

“I can swim,” said Umbo. “So can Rigg. Like fish. Can’t you?”

“I’m a soldier. I was always wearing armor, I would have sunk right to the bottom. And since then why would I learn to swim?”

“It’s a useful skill,” said Umbo. “Especially for people who live by the river and might get tossed in by rivermen.”

“Most rivermen can’t swim either,” said Loaf.

“You still haven’t answered,” said Rigg. “Can you swim?”

“The idea is to stay in the boat,” said Loaf.

“Try again,” said Rigg.

“If you never admit you can swim,” said Loaf, “people think they can kill you by throwing you in the water.”

“Look,” said Umbo.

They had finally climbed up just higher than the balls of light and now the glare no longer prevented them from seeing the upper half of the tower. They could see that the stone ended not far above them, with a wide porch that ran all the way around the inside of the tower. It was crowded with pilgrims.

“Keep moving,” said a gruff man behind them. They walked on.

But glances upward told Rigg that from the platform ring, more than a dozen stone pillars rose to form vertical ribs that supported the metal walls. He remembered observing outside the Tower of O that from about the middle, the metal shell tapered in. So he was not surprised that the stone pillars leaned inward, right up against the metal, until the pillars were joined together by a metal-and-stone ring high above them. Beyond that, the metal formed a simple dome with no stone supporting it at all.

It was a marvel of engineering and design, making the stone support its own weight, and then the weight of the metal. It occurred to Rigg that the metal must be very, very thin, or it would be too heavy for the stone to support.

They got to the platform and moved far from the upward ramp. The beginning of the downward ramp was on the opposite side, and between them, hanging in the air, was an enormous ball. The globes from below and fewer globes from above lighted the entire surface of it. Now, though, they could see that wires from the top ring supported the globes of light, and probably there was some wire arrangement supporting the bigger ball.

The surface was painted in a way that Rigg did not understand. It didn’t seem to be a picture of anything, and the colors were drab and ugly and didn’t go together. There were brighter yellow lines making divisions on the largest areas of green and brown, and those seemed to shine. But the pattern of them made no sense. Perhaps a honeycomb made by drunken bees?

“There’s the world,” said Umbo. “It’s a picture of the world right there.”

Umbo was pointing to a particular place on the surface of the big globe. “See? That spot of red, that’s where Aressa Sessamo is. And that white spot, that’s O. The blue line is the Stashik River. So Fall Ford would be a little lower down.”

“Then the yellow lines are the Wall,” said Loaf. “I’ve patrolled the Wall, and that looks about right. But what’s the rest of it?”

“The whole world,” said Rigg, understanding it now. “It’s a globe, round in every direction, just like this.”

“Everybody knows that,” said Loaf. “Even the most ignorant privicks.”

“That’s crazy!” said Umbo, in mock dismay. “We’d all fall off!”

Rigg made a joke of explaining it to him, as if to a little boy. “No, no, little Umbo, the center of the world pulls on us, holding us to the surface. ‘Down’ is really toward the center.”

“This map of the globe is impossible,” said Loaf. “Nobody knows what’s outside the Wall. No one in the whole history of the human race has passed through it to see.”

“But you can see through it, right?” said Rigg.

“Not far enough to know things as distant as this map shows. Not just the neighboring wallfolds, but all of them. If it’s a map.”

“It’s a map,” said Umbo. “Come on, it can’t just be random chance that they show the course of the river and O is a white dot and the capital is a red dot.”

“And we can’t be the first to figure it out if it is,” said Rigg. “Why haven’t we heard about this?”

“Well, we have,” said Loaf. “I have, I mean. Why do you think the pilgrims say, ‘The Tower of O lets you see the whole world’?”

“I thought they meant you could see really far from the top of it,” said Umbo.

“But they also say, ‘All of the world is inside the tower,’” said Loaf.

“I thought that was mystical booshwa,” said Rigg. “Or maybe just talking about how many pilgrims come here.”

“It’s weird to think of the world that way. Very disturbing. I mean, the world is the land inside the Wall—that’s what the word means. How can there be more of the world than the whole world itself? How could anybody know what’s outside the world?”

Rigg had been counting. “There are nineteen of them—nineteen lands surrounded by yellow lines. And quite a bit of land that isn’t inside any of the yellow lines.”

“So there are nineteen worlds on this same globe?” asked Loaf. “Is that what the Tower of O is saying?”

“No wonder people don’t talk about it after coming here,” said Umbo. “It’s just too crazy. Even if they think of it this way—and Rigg’s father was no fool and no liar, either, so if he says that we live on the surface of a ball, it’s probably true. Somehow. Even if they think of this as a map of nineteen worlds on the face of a globe, who’s going to believe them? People would think they were crazy.”

“I think you’re crazy,” said Loaf. “Except the map of the world—of our world—is accurate enough. The military keeps maps like that—all the world inside the walls, all the roads and towns. It’s illegal for anyone else to make them, though. So I wonder how you knew it was a map, Umbo.”

“Our schoolteacher showed us a map. Smaller than this, but it had the river on it, and Aressa Sessamo at the mouth of it, and the big bay. And the line of the Wall.”

“It was against the law for the schoolteacher to have a map like that,” said Loaf.

“Oh, he drew it himself, I think. On a slab of wood. With chalk. And . . . then he went away.”

“How long after he showed you that map?” asked Loaf.

“I don’t know. After. He only showed it to us the once.”

Rigg had been scanning the walls while he listened. “There are nineteen pillars of stone holding up the walls. Nineteen ribs to the tower. A map with nineteen lands surrounded by walls. Nineteen isn’t a convenient number to work with mathematically. To divide the circle of the tower by nineteen—that’s just crazy, unless they were doing it to have the same number as the number of lands.”

“Do you think if these really are other wallfolds,” said Umbo, “there might be people in them?”

“There are red dots and white dots and blue dots in all of them,” said Rigg.

“Boys,” said Loaf, “you have no idea how illegal this conversation is.”

“You’ve been to the Wall,” said Rigg. “Were there people on the other side?”

“Nobody goes right up to the Wall,” said Loaf. “The closer you get, the more fearful and sad and desperate you get. You have to get away. You’d go crazy if you didn’t. Nobody gets close. Even animals stay away—on both sides.”

“So you only saw it from a distance?” asked Rigg.

“We patrol the edge, because that’s where a lot of criminals and traitors and rebels like to go—close enough to the Wall that other people stay away, but not so close they actually go crazy. In a way, it’s a fitting punishment for them, living with the dread and grief and despair. But it was our job to go into the zone of pain and force them out. So they wouldn’t keep coming out and foraging or raiding or recruiting.”

“If it’s the same way on the other side,” said Rigg, “then even if there are people there, they won’t come any nearer the Wall than you did. So they wouldn’t see anybody on our side and we wouldn’t see anybody on theirs.”

Loaf drew them closer, his hands tight on their shoulders. “You’ve been talking way too loud. Now I think I know why your future self came back to warn us.”

“No,” said Umbo. “If we got arrested for talking, I would have told myself and Rigg to just shut up.”

“Well, I’m telling you to do that,” said Loaf. “Your teacher probably came here and thought about what he saw and memorized the map as best he could. I’m betting that’s what happened. Because any soldier—well, any sergeant or higher officer—might recognize this map for what it is, if he happened to come to this side of the sphere. And then he might memorize it. But soldiers would know to keep their mouths shut. And never, ever to draw an unauthorized copy.”

“Why not?” asked Umbo.

“Because,” said Rigg, putting things together the way Father had taught him, “the army doesn’t want any of its enemies to have an accurate map of the world.”

“Exactly,” said Loaf. “Now let’s get out of here before somebody notices us lingering so long looking at the globe.”

But Rigg would not leave, not yet. He looked at the maps of the other eighteen wallfolds and tried to imagine the cities. In one, the wallfold just to the north of the one they lived in, the cities were out on the blue part, even though the blue had to be the ocean and the rivers that feed into it. The blue covered more of the globe than Rigg had imagined possible, though Father had told him there was more ocean than land in the world. It never crossed his mind to wonder how Father could know such a thing. Father knew everything, Rigg took that for granted, but now he had to ask himself, how could Father have known how much ocean there was in the world, when you couldn’t get through the Wall?

Father has been through the Wall.

No, thought Rigg. Father merely came here to the Tower of O and reached the same conclusion we did.

But someone must have been through the Wall, or this map could never have been made.

Until today Rigg had never even worried about the Wall. He knew it was there, everybody knew it was there, and so what? It was the edge of the wallfold, which meant it was the edge of the world. You didn’t even think about it. But now, in this moment, knowing that there were eighteen other wallfolds, all of them surrounded by an invisible Wall, Rigg longed to get to one of the other wallfolds and see who lived there and what they were like.

And the only thing blocking him was an invisible Wall, one that supposedly drove you crazy if you got too near. But you could see through it. You should be able to walk through and get to the other side.

At last Rigg gave in to Loaf’s prodding, and they set out on the downward ramp. “I’m going to go to the Wall,” said Rigg softly.

“No you’re not,” said Loaf. “Unless you’re a criminal or a rebel, and then it will be the job of somebody like me to hunt you down and kill you.”

“I’m going to go there and see the paths,” said Rigg. “If anybody ever crossed the Wall, I’ll be able to see where. And if I have you with me, Umbo, I’ll be able to go back and ask them how they’re going to do it. How it’s done. Just before they cross I’ll ask them.”

“Unless it was somebody like your father,” said Umbo, “who made no path.”

“True. If Father crossed I wouldn’t know it.”

“Or anybody like your father.”

“There’s nobody like my father,” said Rigg.

“That you know of,” said Umbo. “Because if there were others before him who left no path, you wouldn’t know about them.”

“That’s kind of an important hole in your talent, there, Rigg,” said Loaf. “That’s like saying, ‘We have a spy network that sees all our enemies . . . except the ones we can’t see.’ How sound do you think that sergeant will sleep at night?”

“There could be hundreds like your father,” said Umbo.

“Father wasn’t invisible,” said Rigg. “If we had ever run into somebody else without a path, I would have known it.”

“But you never saw many people,” said Umbo. “You just went out into the woods and then came to Fall Ford and how many other villages did you even visit?”

“A few. Mostly tiny ones above Upsheer,” said Rigg.

“Hardly anybody,” said Umbo. “So that means there could be hundreds like your father, and you wouldn’t know it.”

“Father would have told me,” said Rigg.

“Unless he thought it wasn’t good for you to know,” said Umbo.

Rigg had to admit, that was the truth.

At last they reached the bottom and passed through the entrance of the tower into the bright noon sunlight. It had taken at least an hour to get up, and almost as long to get down, and despite all the things they said and observed up in the tower, they hadn’t been there all that long.

“They’re checking people,” said Rigg.

He only noticed it because he saw the converging paths of many guards—people who were not part of the general flow of pilgrims to and from the tower. There was a choke point, and they were heading for it. Rigg felt the dread from future-Umbo’s warning come to the surface. “They’re looking for someone,” he said.

“That’s why they check people,” said Loaf.

“Separate from us,” Rigg said to Loaf.

“No,” said Loaf.

“There are too many guards, you couldn’t fight them. We need you to stay free. That’s why Umbo warned us to give things to you, don’t you see? Separate from us. Drift back, don’t make a sudden movement the wrong way.”

“I know how to do it, thank you, boy,” said Loaf. And he began to walk a little faster, drifting forward through the crowd. As he went, he took off his outer jacket and carried it, tucking his hat under the jacket as well.

Rigg was pleased to find out that his instinct had been the same as a soldier’s knowledge.

But after a while, Loaf drifted back to them. “It’s Cooper, the banker,” said Loaf. “He’ll know my face.”

“Cooper?” asked Rigg.

“There are two officers of the People’s Army with him, letting him look at everybody who passes. One of the officers is very high, a general I’m sure.”

“I thought the People’s Army had no ranks,” said Umbo.

“They have no insignias of rank,” said Loaf dismissively. “But a general is a general. Look, Rigg, if Cooper hadn’t been scrutinizing all the nearer faces, he would have seen me—I was in plain view.”

“Maybe he’s looking for someone else,” said Umbo.

But Rigg knew that for some reason, on some pretext, Cooper had betrayed them. “Go back into the Tower of O and wait for a couple of hours.”

“Cooper will just tell them to look for me inside,” said Loaf.

“No,” said Rigg. “We’ll tell them you left us hours ago because you were tired and didn’t want to climb. Do you have the money?”

“Most of it. But they’ll still search my luggage,” said Loaf.

“I’ll try to get them to turn Umbo loose, too,” said Rigg. “I’m the one Cooper wants.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because I’m the one who owns the money,” said Rigg. “I should have known it was too good to be true.”

Umbo spoke up, his face reddening. “Loaf, I didn’t put the knife in your luggage.”

“Why not?” asked Rigg.

“Where did you put it?” asked Loaf.

“Behind a barrel of salt pork in the boat’s galley,” said Umbo.

“Got it,” said Loaf. Then he drifted back in the queue, made a show of looking for something, and then went back against the flow of the crowd, ostensibly to find it.

“Why did you lie about the knife?” asked Rigg, as he and Umbo continued forward toward the checkpoint.

“I told you I put it in Loaf’s bags so you wouldn’t think I was trying to steal it. You even said yourself that you wouldn’t trust me if you thought I was stealing.”

“Umbo,” said Rigg, “I was wrong when I said I wouldn’t trust you. I trust you with my life.”

Umbo said nothing.

Rigg tried to keep other people between him and Cooper—he wanted to give Loaf plenty of time to get back inside the tower.

“Father always accused me of the worst thing,” said Umbo. “Whatever it was, he always said I was planning to do it. I’m just . . . used to it.”

“We’re friends, Umbo,” said Rigg. “Now try to act stupid and confused.”

“That won’t be acting,” said Umbo.

“I’m going to try to get you out of this,” said Rigg.

Then the people in front moved quickly forward and Rigg was staring Cooper in the face.

“That’s him,” said Cooper. “That’s the boy who’s claiming to be a prince.”