The Books of the Wars (45 page)

At length, the shop emptied. With the evening, the greater wizards of this City and the other towns that thought themselves Holy would be abroad on their chosen work and not on parade for the adoration of the rabble.

The owner sent his attendants home and then turned to Aden. He was fat and rather older than Aden had expected. Half his face had been burned away by some kind of fire. A flap of skin skirted the edge of his right eye, crossed a scar line and then angled downward over part of his mouth. His words were partly masked by it, as if he were speaking from behind a confessional screen.

Aden bowed in respect to the man's rank and deformities, but then raised himself and looked directly into the other's face. The Office's eye evaluated the man's retinal pattern and found a grid of synthetic sapphire implanted there; nothing obtrusive or complex, but useful for vision in the far infrared and ultraviolet ranges. There was, therefore, no need for the password he had been taught.

Aden smiled as lightly as he could at the remains of the man's face. "I imagine . . . "

The other let the right side of his mouth drop and abruptly held up his hand; it, like his face, was scarred and half obliterated. "I cannot help you."

Aden hesitated a bit. "You are Donchak?"

"I am."

"And the rug, the one with the running legs, that's yours too? Is it not?"

The other man nodded politely, but his right eye stayed directed toward the floor. "It is the Office's, as is the eye that recognized it." He said this in the consciously ornate merchant's speech. He had, Aden reminded himself, been sent in over seven years ago to wait for the training of a person such as himself to be completed, the undesigned equipment tested, and the cover established by his own years of wandering through the kingdoms of magic. Still, he had hoped for a guarded wink, or something like "Thank God you've come, Carruthers."

"I imagine . . . " Aden began again.

"I understand," Donchak countered, "and I understand too much besides that. That is why I cannot help you." His half-face was arranged in planes of sadness. "You are too late for my help. Please go."

"With the eye?" Aden suppressed a twinge of confusion. For all its wonders, the eye was feeling more and more like a detonator, threatening to ignite unstable elements both in the City and within his own mind. "I can't stay here with it grafted onto me. You must know that even the small amounts of energy it leaks and the block transmissions can't go unnoticed forever."

"Then leave."

"It's shielded here." Aden heard himself getting impatient. "The mass of energies and spells. The air's so thick with them that it's a wonder anyone can breathe. The only way I got it this far is because it didn't start working and sending until I was through the borderlands and into the middle of this lunatic nation . . . "

"If you feel that way, you must correct the problem yourself." Donchak brought his left hand up and covered the erased portions of his face, further softening the sound of his words.

"Were you betrayed?" In desperation Aden shifted the conversation back against the man.

"Only by myself."

"But this shop? You must be fairly well off."

"The building is mine only so long as I remain the private joke of some men of power. They view it in the nature of a game to occasionally pit their arts against my desire for understanding them." Donchak looked around him. "My rugs are also reputed to have some abilities of their own, which one properly trained could use."

Gone native, thought Aden, and more than a little crazy too. "But you mean the rugs that you sell. The weavers . . . "

" . . . are blind, as tradition specifies. That is correct, as am I." Donchak smiled at Aden for the first time. "That is my one secret from them. My eye is blind, but the last apparatus the Special Office gave me that I kept still lets me see into areas few of them care exist."

"Your patterns, then . . . " Aden's words trailed off as he thought that Donchak must be seeing him as a dancing glow of cobalt, saffron and orange.

Donchak's fractional smile continued. "Simple understanding of the interrelation of the chromatic, spatial and auditory spectra and the responses that can be coaxed from their various combinations." The man could still talk, at least, in the language of the Office. The abstractions of Heisner's successors sounded out of place among the rugs and gilt work of the shop's interior.

Outside, muezzins sang warnings to the City and to their masters' enemies. They vied with each other in the lyric intricacy of their threats, each seeking to exceed the one before him in describing the horrors that waited those who opposed his master's designs. The civil government abandoned the City at dusk and retired to its barracks and offices.

"Are you watched?"

"Tomorrow I shall be. If you are still here tomorrow, I shall be questioned too." Donchak began walking away. "There are spy entities here, and there and there." He pointed with his flabby arms at points in the air as he walked. "I have masked their sensitivities. At any rate, I presume that they will not be looking in the areas where your eye's power drain could be detected. But they see you are here and probably discern that I am talking to you, though they cannot understand the words. Please go."

"But the war. The Office cannot . . . " Aden had spotted insubstantial stains of light hovering in the places that Donchak had gestured toward. He felt his throat and stomach tighten.

"I cannot afford to concern myself with either."

"Myself, then?"

"I know nothing of you. You were a child when I was modified and sent in." Donchak paused, resting his hand on the silver tea service. "You can stay if you choose, if you judge you can hide from my companions"—he waved again to the spy entities. "Wait until the effects of the Office's surgeries wear off and use your understanding to make a place for yourself. It's more than you'll be allowed to do if you reach home again." Donchak continued to stare at him, his eye moving in minute arcs across his body as it gauged the temperature differentials between veins and arteries, and perhaps deciphered the electric crown of wires buried in Aden's skull, reading his fear.

"Then I'll betray you." Intending to be coolly threatening, Aden over-controlled and the words came out brittle and hinting at irrationality.

"I have told you that the men of power know . . . "

"They do not know of your eye, only your mind."

"They have not thought it worthwhile to look beyond my mind."

"But wouldn't they be disturbed to know that some of the powers they've bought, however slight, came from graphs that you learned in a secret police school, or that the patterns that so please their women . . . ?"

"They probably already know."

"If they did, you wouldn't be here. They'd permit your training and your former allegiance, but not that grid. That would be too much. They'd take it from you before they found themselves asking you what you saw with it, as if you were some kind of mirror they couldn't resist looking into. And if they take it from you . . . " Aden shrugged theatrically, only later thinking that Donchak saw his fear and not the gesture. "If you consider yourself a joke now, Donchak, think how their powers of illusion will eat at your understanding when you're left in the dark." Aden felt almost proud that he should have thought of such a tack to use on the other man; it was fortunate he had studied the man's psychological profile before he had been sent in. "Anyway, they cannot be ignorant to what has, or has not been going on. They're edgy and nervous with the way the war has been going."

"But we aren't?" Donchak whispered icily.

Aden ignored him. "That's why they've been going at each other even more than usual lately. All that dammed-up ability and power. They don't dare use it, because that would give the Office and the Border Command and Lake Gilbert a chance for more study."

"Study their power? Had they not studied it enough at Thorn River?"

"That was important. It added a great deal . . . "

"But didn't they see enough?" Donchak drifted on in the same remotely irritated tone. "I was there, you know. The thing that the Office had put into this eye"—he gestured toward the scarred side of his face—"was like what yours must be now. I was caught there and, unlike the others, I could see the magicians coming through the sky and striding across the plains to crush us."

Aden let the advantage of his argument slip away as he listened. Thorn River had been among the last great engagements between science and magic, and the largest to have occurred in his lifetime. He remembered, for an instant, the streams of starved and brutalized refugees that had passed his home for days, heading for the sanctuaries of the Taritan Valley, and thought he found Donchak's face among them.

"And I could see the Border Command ships circling it during the first three days. I could see the masses of attack planes and bombers that waited behind them, waited for three more days, three more hours, three seconds while another variation of the magicians' power was expended on someone, picked apart and catalogued. I saw the face of the wizard that burned me, and I saw the face of the man who examined it and hoped for my death because that would tell him even more about the magic. I even remember their names, though I cannot say the wizard's with the way my mouth is now. The man's name was Etridge." Donchak paused for a moment. "Do you truly want your eye to serve people such as that, people who could watch such things as if they were lessons drawn on blackboards?" Donchak seemed to be genuinely amazed with his own question, as if its articulation had preceded his thoughts and accidentally proposed something that he would not have otherwise considered possible.

"Of course. They're not monsters."

"They watched, cold and bloodless. They did nothing when they might have stopped it, or at least drawn their enemy away. Is that not something worse than simple monsters?"

"Not at all. They were pursuing a"—Aden found the words coming with more difficulty than he would have wished—"a duty. That was the only thing they could do if we were to get anywhere."

Donchak fixed him suddenly with his functioning eye. "There were other ways! A hundred other ways. Mine, the Office's, the regular services', the Academy's."

"It worked. It's working now. Look at what happened to them at Foxblind."

Donchak softened his voice; his eye returned to looking at the floor. "The price was excessive, wouldn't you say? Thousands and hundreds of thousands at Thorn River, myself, the killing of this." He swept his hand toward the door.

"This? The City?" Aden forced outrage back into his voice; Donchak was playing on treasonous grounds again, Aden's.

"There is not enough beauty here for you?"

"Beauty destroying itself."

"If it tried to understand itself thoroughly enough to defeat us, to fight us according to our own rules, it would no longer be beauty. It would just be numbers and knowledge, circling round its own grave. Do you want that?" he asked again.

"I must," Aden said at once, but did not know where the words had come from for he had not felt his tongue move.

Donchak waited for a moment and then nodded, either to the younger man's threat or to the logic of his position. The muezzins finished their arias. Aden glanced through the door-grill and his eye picked up auroral waverings in the gaps between the houses. He saw the distorted reflections of other lights on the glazed paving stones. The mages often said they were practicing their arts for their own perfection and in preparation against the other half of the planet. The fact that they practiced so often and so enthusiastically on each other spoke for itself.

"Where am I to leave this?" Aden pointed to his left eye. "The Office must have a place that is mobile, if at all possible, and protected."

"I am aware of the Office's wants and needs." Donchak muttered and walked toward the back of the shop. A barred door led out to an alleyway.

They left the perfumed rug shop and the stench of the City closed over Aden again. The paving stones were fired turquoise, even in the alley, but the piles of filth and garbage behind each building dulled the reflected light of the magicians' practice.

They passed three brave, or particularly hungry figures digging into the trash heaps. The spectrographic abilities of Aden's eye informed him that at least one of them was a leper.

The City had been named Cape St. Vincent before the war. Then the wizards had come to it and brought their reborn powers and mysteries with them. Within a decade after they had consolidated their rule over the area, they had grown powerful enough to send away the ocean that had faced the city, because it displeased them. The old city's marble quays and granite boulder jetties still surfaced from under newer buildings only a century or two old. With either marvelous whimsy, or, more likely, invincible blindness, the wizards had often built on and around these structures. Aden saw one house that was partially supported by a corroding rolling derrick that one of the first engagements for the city had welded solid; his eye traced the crane's outlines in the facing wall and he thought it to be more of a superimposition of distinct worlds, rather than a single structure.

The geometric grid of the original city had dissolved into a tangle of wandering streets and alleys. This, the men of power often declared, more aptly expressed the subtlety and complexity of their personalities. The men of power regarded it as a great humanizing process, an affair of the spirit as much as anything else. Aden's world watched the process in aerial photographs and regarded it as retrogressive, chaotic, medieval.

Aden speculated how the leper would have regarded the matter. He, personally, had not noticed any great disparity in the number or character of the garbage piles in the cities of either world.

Donchak's eye led them easily through the night streets. Ironically, Aden's more versatile unit was often confused and blinded by the reflected energies that the City's wizards were playing off the ionosphere.

The avenues broadened and straightened themselves. The closely packed houses and shops gave way to the barred entrances of substantial mansions, government buildings and the great halls of the City's guilds. Many were left over from the ages when there was but one reality on the planet, and they were defined by straight lines and euclidean masses. The structures of magic had overgrown and smothered them, like the crane, with intricate masonry and marble traceries. Eccentric balconies, turrets, minarets, arches, colonnades and porticoes softened the old, harsh outlines; mosaic overlays glittered in the wizards' lights.