The Books of the Wars (48 page)

"But we do." A hint of condescension.

Donchak exhaled lightly and it might have been a laugh. "Not entirely, not perfectly. For all I know, we might have made a trade and the essence of the unicorn's eye is now coexistent with mine, and the picture of your face is hovering before some gentlemen of power."

Fear crossed Aden's face. With his grid, Donchak could see the deepening flush and the sparking of loose connectors inside his left eye socket, like a brooch or pendant. "Could the unicorn ever learn to see with it? I mean, apart from whether it works for us or the enemy uncovers it?"

"Impossible." The Thorn River voice again, but more slowly as if the possibility hadn't occurred to him until Aden mentioned it. "No. I think we have the advantage in this. If the eye was like the devices I remember, you could not have scratched its capabilities in less than a decade. It could be addictive, you know. Such a perfect analytic tool as that could come to control you. One keeps looking, forever looking and discovering, peeling back layer after layer of apparent truth until one begins to wonder if the layers are infinite or whether, weighing it all in your hand, you have not felt its mass fractionally diminished, and know that you possess a device that, with patience, will reduce it to nothing."

"Could, will that happen to the unicorn?" Aden was wondering just what the Office had given away, and why.

"No. I told you that. The two, the unicorn and the eye are mutually exclusive. Interaction is impossible." Donchak might have sounded irritated, but Aden could not tell; he had forgotten how to read faces with his own eye. "Anyway, you are rid of the eye and, I presume, the main object of your mission. You should thank me, Aden. I have saved you from some agony."

"The war demands a great deal from all of us," Aden responded, hoping to say the correct thing and guessing that he had not.

Donchak turned the blank side of his face to him, saying nothing more until they reached his house.

"Will you stay?"

"You have asked me that. In any event, I doubt that the men of power would let me leave."

"Are you that closely watched? They apparently didn't know what we were doing last night." Aden sipped the tea Donchak had warmed.

"They watch me in the manner of their world, as I elude them in the manner of my own. I only wonder if I can survive myself in all of this."

He could not stop some of the tea from drooling down the right side of his mouth. "I have many things here. Friends, though all secular and powerless, a prosperous trade, the sympathy of some ladies for my face and for my blindness. If I were to go back, I fear that the desire for complete understanding would overtake me again. I understand enough."

"But you refuse to understand any less. You understand so much of this City, Donchak. The unicorn and its attendant. There's nothing back home that can begin to guess at them." Despite what he had just done, Aden found himself becoming irritated with Donchak again. The fellow speaks as much nonsense as everyone in this place. The locked doors and shuttered windows allowed Aden enough room to think that way.

"It is a question of perspective. At this moment, I feel up against some kind of limit. I have seen and taken apart all the things I can. I can feel the edge of my abilities here because to go beyond them would require a kind of seeing which I am not capable of.

"But, at our home, I remember things having been different. We were still beginning when I left. We had been looking for only a century or two, but we were aimed for . . . " Donchak's slagged features hardened. "We had only been looking for a century or two before we could see things like Thorn River. See ourselves seeing it, dissecting and analyzing ourselves as much as the magicians.

"They only look at themselves, you know. And did you know how repulsed they are by us? How sickened?"

"It's their fear." Aden replied.

"That as much as their pity and disgust." Donchak's voice was as it had been when he first mentioned his hatred for the Border Command and reluctance to help them. His condescension and unctuous sympathy frightened Aden as much as it had the first time; it seemed to be founded upon an elusive base of contradictory vision that not all the Office's deft equivocations could equal. "They see us as thieves and desperados, intent on destroying everything of any beauty or life."

"What beauty has their war been fought to keep safe? They declared it, fought the first battle at the Burn, murdered their first town there."

"The beauty they are fighting is their own," Donchak said with even malice. "They know it. They will protect and keep it safe from everything."

"From the eye, too?" Aden used his best point and exhaled with the effort of its saying.

It worked with more visible impact than had his threats of exposure. The conversation was fixed on treasons and betrayals, Aden thought, and was it not therefore proper to remind Donchak of his own most recent one? "That was done for you and the Office. The information—if there is any that can be understood by you—must be kept apart and guarded. The unicorn has access . . . " his voice trailed away in its own sudden weakness.

"I'm sure they know, but I'll tell them again when I get back." There was some genuine feeling to Aden's words, and he was surprised by this.

"Then for that alone, and for them"—he gestured to the dimly luminous spy entities—"you should go. In the morning you should go." Donchak started to walk away from him when his expression shifted again. It was so slight that Aden could not be sure if it was not his imagination, which was only now coming back under his control. The eye, he told himself bitterly, the eye would have seen it, and the electrical and fluid currents that had flowed beneath his skin through nerves and vessels torn apart by the enemy at Thorn River and imperfectly repaired by his enemies at home. Or perhaps it could not. Donchak, Aden was becoming more and more aware, while not a total traitor or adherent of magic, was something of an alien, a foreign creature whose lunar features and moods did not function according to the dynamics of his home world.

"You should not, I think, go the way you came."

"What?" Aden could not remember saying anything about his route to the Holy City.

"You should not return the same way. Things, clues, hints of what you were might still be lingering in those places, though they might not have been traceable to you here. They can still read your mind, you know, if they want to badly enough."

The idea struck Aden as amusing: rather like trying to read a book with all its pages torn out. "Then how? Air pickup would be impossible even if there were some way of notifying the Office I needed it."

Donchak's voice shifted as subtly as his expression, with such indefinition that Aden missed some of the words as he tried to confirm or dispel his suspicions. "No need for anything so daring. I would only suggest that a more cautious and relaxed route be used." He walked around the room, idly tracing the designs in his rugs with his burned fingers, sometimes gesturing so that it seemed he was caressing the waverings in the air that Aden guessed were the spy entities. "Go north from here, through the Fishers' Door, to the City at . . . " He spoke a name that escaped Aden, saw the man's ignorance and used its old name: Clairendon. "The ocean is still there, and if it has continued to please the men of power who hold sway there, there will also be a river. Follow it inland." Donchak went on describing landmarks and reference points that Aden only half paid any attention to. He thought the general outlines were clear enough, however, and found that his conception of the route Donchak was suggesting fit his recollection of the central kingdoms. After some time he thought he had matched enough foreign place names with remembered aerial photographs and radar composites to be fairly sure of the way.

He was intensely tired, and that might have been part of his mood too. The trip would take much longer, but the prudence of Donchak's suggestion could not be ignored. Now that the eye was gone he could easily miss traps set by his enemies or by his own inattention. The way it had been, as he reconsidered it when Donchak had left him in a second-floor storeroom, was almost easy; trying it a second time, in reverse and half blind, would probably be much more difficult. He recalled crossing the square to the fountain, and then the part when he had run from there to the cathedral without the eye.

The rugs on which he lay were hard and stiff with newness; the blind weavers' designs framed him in Donchak's darkness, and he wondered if they were ones with magic woven into them. He wondered if they were floating in the air; the room was without windows and there was no way to tell if he was not, or if the magic was of another sort.

He studied the dark around him again and found nothing. But the Office, whatever its intentions, would surely give him another eye when he returned, and that would permit him to understand.

"Wake up! Wake up! They know! You must leave!" Aden bolted awake. His right eye was filled with the bright rectangle of the door and Donchak's face centered in the middle of it. "You must go! Now!" There was nothing in his left eye but the coolness of morning air. He felt that he had awakened inside a narrow pipe. The previous night and the memory of who he was came back with painful slowness while Donchak was holding him and shaking madly.

He tried to read Donchak's face. He saw no temperature or conductance differentials, infrared differences, muscle movements or nerve signals; the man's back was to the lighted door and he could not even simply see his expression.

The panic came without any knowledge. That had not happened for years and he was sickened by his own lack of control. He tried to stand, fell from his new, unarticulated fright at the knowledge Donchak's "they" had stolen from him in his sleep, then rose again.

"Here." Donchak shoved a wadded bundle of clothing into his hand. Another man came into the room, took him by the shoulders and propelled him out into the hallway. It was lit by animal fat lamps and stank as the City's alleys had.

Aden pulled on his shirt as they half ran along it. They turned, entered a stairwell that was lit by a single panel of stained glass that ran the height of the building; the pattern was of a golden serpent and the sun behind it burned into Aden's eye, dispersing the bits of rational thought he had managed to arrange in the hall.

"They know, they know!" Donchak kept repeating with monotonous panic.

They reached the ground floor. Donchak grasped his hand once, and the other, silent man took him out through the same back gate they had used the night before.

The sun was unbearable for a moment, though at that hour in the morning the alley was still screened by the houses on the other side. Aden choked on his own helplessness, and therefore let himself be guided down the reeking alley and out into the turquoise streets. He thought that they were heading in the opposite direction from that the temple had been in, but that was of no consequence.

The streets became wider and more populated. Food sellers' and spice merchants' stalls flashed by along the limit of his vision. Aristocratic ladies escorted by parties of elaborately armored men walked among them, sampling the newest delights in jewelry from the South, carved furniture from the East, the skulls of centuries-dead admirals just recovered from the bottom of the City's exiled sea and set with gemstones, gold and tourmaline for those among the City's powerful who were inclined to the unusual and ironic.

The man beside him remained silent, guiding his steps with a strong and certain hand on his elbow or shoulder that always seemed to be intended to keep him slightly off balance. Aden considered trying to escape, but doubted if he could break the larger man's grasp; if he was trained, he would sense the tensing of Aden's muscles in preparation for any violent movements. And even if he did escape, he would be lost and a prisoner of the City itself instead of Donchak's man.

The City's life swirled around them. Grand houses, palaces, temples and government buildings rose on either side of the street. Their gates were guarded by animated statues that challenged some who came too close, welcomed others or simply watched with their enormous gemstone eyes. Aden shrank away whenever his stare met them. His eye had shown him that some did emit some kind of rudimentary power, while in others the effect was purely psychological. It was impossible to tell the difference now and the weight of their presences fell over and against him with disturbing substance.

This is what they see, this is what they feel, every day of their lives, he thought to himself.

There was shouting ahead and the man drew him from out of the road and alongside the wall of a garden. They stopped and waited as the noise grew louder; like his vision, Aden felt that his sense of hearing had become flat and two-dimensional, with the depth taken from it. The difficulty in breathing which he had experienced in the cathedral came back to him, although the sun was now fully into the sky and ordinary people thronged around him.

The party broke through the crowd to his right. There were two magicians, ten mounted deaths and four dragons without riders. In the cathedral the newness of his blindness had helped dilute the sight of the unicorn and its attendant as much as it had accentuated their unworldly beauty. He had had some hours now to remember how he had been before the eye was implanted and to think and reflect upon how he had become even less.

He could not tell whether they were great men of power returning from their work or if they were of lesser state, going to attend their masters and to learn the lessons of the night's battles, for they both wore masks of beaten silver. So perfectly idealized were the faces on them that Aden was momentarily convinced that his own features had been placed on them. Then he found the courage to blink his eye and the masks returned to gods or demons, depending on how the light struck them.

The crowd's babble grew as the magicians approached, and then stopped abruptly; comparative silence encircled the party at a radius of twenty meters. They came within five meters of where they stood and Aden heard the pounding of his heart explode into the quiet that enveloped their passage.