The Books of the Wars (50 page)

The second attack was an artillery barrage directed at a palace made of malachite. Aden knew that he was still at least six hundred kilometers from contested border areas, so it must have been rocket-boosted shells launched from diminishing caliber Gulrich guns. Aden spoke the words to himself and marveled at how out of place they sounded.

They poured down from the stratosphere into a tight circle around the castle, wrapping its towers and turrets in spheres of gold and scarlet fire. The barrage lasted for half an hour, and Aden watched all of it from a grove of dwarf pines by the side of the road.

Whenever there was a break in the shells, he saw the castle's emerald beauty inside the fires, inviolate, too indifferent for contempt, its flags and pennants rippling lightly in the winds of this world alone. Large hawks and gryphons from the castle occasionally rose through the detonations, containing their explosive ferocity with the simple grace of their flight.

There was the light and the vision of destruction, as there had been on the river, consuming themselves without reference to their intended targets. But this time, there was also a singing inside his mind and wild, incoherent bursts of electric shrieking coming from the places where the Office's annunciators were buried.

Aden thought that it might be evidence of the gunfire reaching out into their target world, touching it with more certainty than the smoke column's shadow. Again, the people on the road reassured him; they turned to observe the attack, or stopped and chatted with their neighbors against the backdrop of the explosions, but then moved on showing no more interest than they had for the attack at the river.

The sounds came in step with the explosions. Aden recalled as much as he could of his own circuitries, tracing their patterns under his skin as if he were reading a map of a newly alien country. If it was not the Office, calling and asking him to range in the distant batteries, then it might be the detonations themselves.

The eye could have seen the lines of electromagnetic force whipping outward from the inviolate castle, prodding sympathetic currents by induction from the wires and dead, metallic masses. He was still of his own world; he could see and hear the violence of its war, however futile the kingdoms of magic rendered it, and he was again surprised at how saddened this made him.

The shelling stopped. Aden got back to his feet and stepped back onto the road. His ideas of balance and accommodation remained consciously intact, but he felt the reasons for them dissolving before the invulnerable beauty of the castle and the countryside. The power of his world was becoming as shrill and panicked as he had imagined the wizards of the Holy City to be.

Emerald light engulfed the people in front of him. He watched as they jerked themselves around to stare directly at and then through him. His heart folded in upon itself and he was momentarily convinced that he had shown his guilt too clearly. But they were looking past him.

He turned also, and found that the southern half of the castle was gone, replaced by a dense cone of green light. He glanced back to the road and saw the teamsters and merchants squinting silently at the new light; their faces were suddenly as unreadable as those in the Holy City had been when he had first lost the eye.

Aden pushed himself into the standing crowd, excusing himself quietly in the deafening silence, moving as carefully as he could around their gaze. "They have found us," a man muttered as he passed; his voice was not upset, but the words were there. Aden thought within himself that he was the man's and the castle's "they," just as the man might have been one of the "they" Donchak had warned him of. He turned involuntarily and found that the man was looking in his general direction and that his face was covered by a mask of woven gold with faceted, obsidian eyes.

"Only this once," a companion said, and Aden thought that the man had raised his voice just enough to permit him to hear it. The second man's face was also covered, this time with a smooth chromium mask whose eyes were closed and whose mouth was locked shut.

Aden slowed and almost replied to the two men. But he found that the only words in his mouth were embarrassed assurances that the explosion had been an accident, just the odds playing that had characterized most of the war's centuries. He said nothing, but the men adjusted their blank and closed eyes to stare pointedly at him.

Aden knew that it was early fall, but it appeared as if the magicians of this area, however discreet their palaces and ways, favored spring and summer. The road left the river and climbed steeply into highland plateaus; snow-edged mountain ridges could be seen on either horizon, but he found the meadows full of blooming wildflowers. The groves of ghost pine were speckled with their white and turquoise cones; in Aden's world, they produced such cones only once every five springtimes.

The land had been but recently conquered by magic, and many of its cities and villages were still half ruin. Glowing hulks too far away to tell whether they were of rocs or gutted half-tracks spotted the mountainsides at night. Aden found the effect not as sinister as he recalled it to have been in the lands in front of Joust Mountain or around Castle Kent and Everwhen, where such wreckage had been allowed to remain as memorials to what had happened there.

He left the road and climbed up into the alpine meadows to examine one of these memorials, vaguely thinking that, if it proved to be a device of his own world, he should be somehow obligated to discover what he could about it, so that the descendants of its crew would know.

Halfway there, he saw that the light had been reflected by a white pavilion whose fanciful tangle of columns and ornamental beams resembled a roc's skeleton from the road. A garden spread out from the structure, lighting up the mountain with long splashes of brilliant color. Rose vines and morning glory, still in flower though it was afternoon, climbed up and through the structure, ornamenting it as gorgeously as any of the gold-encrusted temples that the lowland kingdoms had erected to their patron deities. Streams of silver water ran down past him, and he crossed over them on footbridges of rock crystal.

Aden recognized the magic in the place, but by now found himself able to enjoy it. The destruction of the castle had been largely forgotten; the small victory of his world had been buried in tens of other futile attacks on the road or upon the cities it linked together. He had watched, first in fear and in shame after the castle's destruction, then with greater calm as the rockets or shells curved down from space, imperfectly guided by satellites which, after twenty years of probing, had still not found an immovably fixed point in the kingdoms of magic on which to fix their ranging lasers. Inevitably, they missed, falling into streams or groves of flame-willows that smothered the violence of their detonations.

The fighter-bombers were always the same. They bobbed and wavered through the air as the first ones he had seen did, their crews probably sick and disoriented with the way the world outside their windscreens or radarscopes refused to conform to what they sensed were the motions of their ships through it.

Aden found a clarity of vision in the fires that they left. As they burned themselves out, seldom touching anything, they acted as a lens for the beauty and strength of his enemy.

Before, the eye had disassembled and explained the world in rigorously comprehensible forms. The fires acted in the same way. He watched the world's beauty, sometimes inverted or split apart in simulation of a prism, its components arranged and recombined, not according to any final scheme of priorities or energy potentials, but according to the way they were formed by the men of power. He watched them growing through the explosions of his own world, saw the individual brush-strokes of their creators expand apart, suggest their genesis in the loves and triumphs of other mages. He believed that he could feel a great substance and weight of emotion underlaying the creations of magic, entirely separate from the realities that his world assigned to them in the parallel spectrums.

He briefly wished for one of his world's attacks, but then reconsidered that the fragility of the pavilion's grace needed no explanation or analysis.

There was a chair in the center of the pavilion. Aden stopped and turned around, looking for someone who might occupy it. He saw the two men several hundred meters away, in the direction of the road, one with the chrome death mask and the one with the black stone eyes. They stood apart from the traffic of the road, staring in the direction of the garden with their undirected gaze.

They were as they had been when they observed the destruction of the emerald castle. In memory, he also found their opaque faces in the crowds that watched the attack on the river trireme; and after the castle, during a rocket barrage that fell upon an astrological observatory that had spread outward four kilometers on either side of the road, and when squadrons of dive bombers from the fortress at Whitebreak had emerged from the sun and squandered their fury on the ice gardens that some magician had carved from his personal winter.

Donchak's "they"; possibly, but he could read as much serenity and mystery into their masks as he could menace and pursuit. They seemed primarily watchers, as was he.

There was enough, however, to dry his mouth and accelerate his heart perceptibly. He turned away from them. The chair in the center of the pavilion was now occupied by a figure in pale blue robes, with a loose cap of darker material.

He had previously avoided any approach to persons of obvious power, but this one appeared relatively mortal. The person was only seated amongst magical works and not clearly magical herself.

Aden began walking again. If the men from the road were following him, it was unlikely that he could do anything to throw them off now. He also found the presence of the woman in the pavilion resolving itself into terms he could understand. First, he had seen only the beauty, without immediately assigning any gender to it. Then, like the beauty of this world seen through the lens of the other's obsessive destruction, he recognized her as something human and impenetrably mysterious, composed of parts that could be seen, detected, yet never quantified.

The whores of this world had been decipherable to the Office's eye as biological and elementary mental functions; at times the eye had hinted to him that he had seen their souls. The eye of his own world, having been trained and selectively fed and starved on the Office's peculiar diet of perceptions, had seen less clearly, but had nevertheless understood enough. This was different; at last his eye had come upon a new way of seeing on its own.

Her hands were flawless. She was over fifty meters away, and he saw that clearly. The nails were closely trimmed and her fingers were long and had almost no creases between them.

She was holding a book. As she shut it and looked up to him, he saw, first, that its cover was of light tan leather into which many designs and emblems had been patiently worked.

The bone structure of her face was precisely drawn beneath pale skin, but her nose was smaller than most and her eyes correspondingly larger. She might have tended toward the sterile idealization that the mask of the man on the road had, or those of the two magicians who had so terrified him when he was leaving the Holy City; but instead of stepping over this line to inhuman abstraction, her beauty veered slightly before its own mirror. Enough reality remained to reach into his own world; she instantly summarized all the racial perfections he had seen in the kingdoms of magic by being, ultimately, unlike any of them.

"Aden?" she said over the distance that remained between them. He did not think it at all remarkable that she knew his name.

He nodded and smiled up to her, wishing for something to cover the emptiness of his eye socket. He was in rags, his beard was tangled and he smelled.

Her eyes were gold and olive, but shifted into gray and then back into a turquoise as he tried to decipher them. She brushed a strand of auburn hair from her face and he saw a spark of blue light, dancing at the end of one of her fingers like a miniature star freshly picked from the night.

"Is this yours?" he said when he thought himself close enough to be heard; he was delighted that his voice came out with some clarity and strength.

"Yes. This and most of the mountain behind it."

Aden felt the enemy's world rushing away behind him, and he involuntarily looked around to check his own position in it. The road was still below him, choked with riotous pageants, but the two men who had been watching him were gone.

Surprisingly, she was still in the pavilion when he turned back. "You seem to know my name. What's yours?" The war twisted and heaved distantly within his mind; it coursed up and down the limits of his cranial net, trying to prod more echoes from the attacks he had witnessed from the road. Not even Donchak had known his real name; only the Office's eye had known.

"Gedwyn."

"Are you part of the war?" the wires and dead annunciators inside of him asked transparently.

She laughed as if he had said something amusing, and put down her book. "No more than you are. Have you come to take all my secrets from me?"

Aden pointed to his eye. "I'm afraid such things are a little beyond me right now. I . . . "

Her features saddened, and Aden was instantly embarrassed that the suggestion of his blindness should have made her feel that way. The fact that she had known the secret of his name but not of his wound occurred only to his crippled parts, his wires and semiconductors; they strained against the unaccustomed warmth and peace that they sensed around them.

The garden was attacked four days after Aden had arrived. Gedwyn had left him for the morning to watch, she told him brightly, for the different sorts of peace that she could see traveling along the road. Aden nearly pointed out that he had seen very little peace on the strategic maps at Castle Kent. But he did not want to risk her displeasure, and was not sure he had ever seen such maps in the first place.