The Books of the Wars (56 page)

"I imagine," Aden began quietly, the journey down from the mountains having wearied him, "that the men of power have left."

"Not left, sir. They are simply gone. I perceived their going though I permitted myself to understand only part of it."

"How did they go?" Flies circled around the man's open lesions. Out in the wasted fields, figures scraped and dug along irregular furrows of corn and stunted wheat.

"They fought among themselves."

"They had been doing that before."

"This time there was desperation in their acts. They sought to extract or prove"—the ancient man faltered—"some understanding beyond the understanding shown to them during the testing of their mysteries."

"Did they find any?"

"No. None at all. What can lie beneath the truth but itself?" Like Aden, the man was very tired. "And not even they could make it otherwise. Some of them turned their powers on themselves, others upon their retainers and familiars." The man touched himself when he said this, the expressive blind man's touch implying betrayal. "And upon their enemies. Others, upon the people." He held his withered arm out to the houses around the square and reached out to include the entire village and its surrounding field. "It was a terrible time, sir. Endless plagues, marauding creatures which had been harbored especially for the enemy were turned loose upon our lands."

"Those were probably the only places they would still work." Aden rubbed his single eye; the other was covered by a leather patch with an eye engraved on its surface.

The man nodded. "I had a form of power once myself, you know. But I kept getting it confused with what I understood, and that was not power at all but something else."

"Something more?"

"Less. It could be more than power only if you did not have it inside of yourself. You—I could not live with it that close. It was too much to be carried inside." He turned in the dust to face south. "Out there, do you see? It was the most beautiful palace where princes of one family had lived for four hundred years. Waterfalls, gardens, game forests that reached up to our walls, wise men and poets singing . . . "

"The epics of Thorn River and Heartbreak Ridge." He knew that the remark was uncalled for.

Though Aden had used his own world's names for the battles, the man seemed saddened by their mention and turned his eye downward. "I understand that those songs were sung everywhere." He roused himself, as if the frailty of his body could not withstand Aden's remarks. "To your question: no, some must remain, I imagine. Fugitive, probably as mad as I." He permitted himself a laugh to show that no harm had been done. "And some of their works too."

"In the Holy City?"

"If not there, then not at all. Were you ever there?"

"You don't remember much of that, do you, Donchak?"

"Donchak?" shaking his head. "Ah, yes, yes. No, I do not, but I am very old, sir."

Joust Mountain's antenna arrays moved with an imaginary wind. The vague humming of their radiant energies had diminished noticeably, and the air did not smell so strongly of ozone as it usually did, though the wind was from the east.

Bridge walked before its walls with conscious dignity. A double line of hovercraft and tracked vehicles waited between him and Joust Mountain, men standing by their sides, shifting against the unaccustomed weight of sidearms.

Stamp was too caught up in the sight to realize that Etridge was speaking to him: " . . . complete mapping of the areas?"

Stamp walked quickly over to him and held up a notebook. "Yes. The traces turned out to be a little more numerous than I discussed with you, but nothing which substantially alters the picture we had last week. This readout is an hour old, and the strongest concentration is still here." Stamp opened the notebook, selected a small-scale map and pointed to where a great number of shaded radii intersected. "Area Twelve, the Holy City."

"Holy, I'm sure, only in comparison to the rest of the other kingdoms." Etridge was amused. Behind him, a loose formation of wind ships rode the thermals over the dead lake, engines out, spiraling lazily up into the morning.

Aden watched the imagist for an hour before he slipped him a coin. "A beauty," he said. In response the man shut his eyes and then plucked up the thought that Aden held at the edge of his mind.

He moved his hands, and the air between them shimmered and condensed into the shape of a woman. She was very well shaped, and this was clear despite the loose robes she had been dressed in. A good imagist knew the touches that compliment memory, and those which blatantly exaggerate it and thereby offend. She was tall, which was also correct, and with fine delicate features overlain by pale skin that was nearly translucent. The nose was small, and the eyes hovered between green and slate and blue.

Aden nodded approvingly. The man was very good, much better than the sort the smaller towns usually got by with. But the most common subject of a public imagist was lost loves. They acquired, if only from sheer repetition, some facility in gathering from a man's mind what he chose to remember, rather than any great truth about what the person might have really been like.

When magic was whole, the best imagists were prized by even the mightiest men of power. They could read secrets of startling depth or shape extravagant fantasies from the surfaces of other men's thought and then build them into visions of unbearable intensity. Not surprisingly, most of them succumbed to their own talent, drugging themselves as their visions fed and multiplied on each other.

Aden waved the image away. As he expected, the sight of her touched him, but not deeply. The magic of the imagist functioned like the gunsight's marvelous technology. Both allowed him to see Gedwyn, but only from a distance that existed in addition to those of time and memory. Both reduced and quantified her, both could be dismissed with a gesture.

He felt something like relief when the picture was gone. It was as if her memory, which might otherwise grow out of control, had been removed from his heart. It would grow back again, but each time it would be proportionately weaker.

He was growing, acquiring a manly depth of memories and history, but did not know why there should be a feeling of self-disgust left in the place the imagist had taken the picture of Gedwyn from.

Aden threw the man two more corns and smiled stiffly. The men around them made comic groans that he had not permitted a more explicit insight into his affections.

"Allow us the design of mystery and power." In ordinary times this would have been a joke, for common people could not bear to see such things any more than a street imagist would be able to conjure them.

"You are from the past, my sir," the imagist replied in a professionally respectful voice, scooping up the money. "There are none left."

"I have been away from my home, and did not know that the question is no longer asked."

"Only rarely." Pain crossed the faces of the imagist and his other patrons; some of them rubbed their jaws in their hands and drifted back into the street. Still, the man seemed to feel an obligation to his trade and for monies already received. He became silent again, moving his hands until the outlines of an onion-domed temple formed, stained from the weather, alabaster windows blank and dark. It faded quickly and was replaced by another picture, this one of a slim aircraft, propeller-driven and like the one that had flown over Aden in the mountains. The plane wove and turned like a weaver's shuttle between the man's hands.

Aden attempted to look shocked for it had been heresy to so portray the devices of the enemy. "Apologies, my sir. It was all I could show you." The plane evaporated. Aden saw that only he and the imagist were left in the tiny park. The others had left when the temple had appeared and then started to vanish. "I took it more from my own mind than yours."

The man was staring directly into Aden's good eye. As he did so, his face relaxed into a familiar weariness. Aden said: "Office?" slurring the word so that he hardly recognized it.

"My sir?" with forced astonishment. He whirled his hands again, and the picture of an eye formed between them, suspended in a web of copper wires. It lasted a second before going. "Your money's worth, my sir?"

The imagist's village was bitterly cold in winter, and the fields and ruined palaces near it were encrusted with ice. But when the wind died and the sun was not hidden by storm clouds, people still found it pleasant to come out into the wide, barren streets to spy on their neighbor's food supply and conduct themselves as they had before, when great enchantments protected them from the weather.

The imagist was out at his usual place, the hood of his sheepskin cloak thrown back for the sun, practicing the same tired round of illusions for the same crowd of idlers and bored farmers. He took care to make a picture different each time the same person requested it, and many in the village remembered his picture better than the actual events on which they had originally been based.

He sometimes thought of himself as not only the shaper of the village's memories but as one who created its present as well. He knew this to be a fantasy and the progressive intensity with which it asserted itself troubled him. He had thought of going home, but that would not have solved the problem of illusion. If anything, it would have only intensified it, because that world, unlike the one he presently inhabited, had not been stripped of all its closest dreams. It still abounded, he guessed, in thought and life enough to bloat his imagination. He decided that he was safer in this world, where almost everything of the heart and mind had been carried off by the magicians when they fled.

On this morning, however, he was thinking of his own world, testing his memory with the picture of severely uniformed men who never smiled and from whom light never shone. His audience had no idea what he was doing and thought it only to be some long, diverting myth about the imaginary time before their War.

Because of his absorption, the imagist was not particularly surprised when the gray man edged his way forward through the crowd and threw him an unfamiliar coin. It merely seemed that one of his pictures had found a mirror in the people around him.

The man was of medium height and the skin lay easily about his mild features: blue eyes, long, artistic hands and fingers unscarred and uncalloused, well-fitting clothes with archaic lapel flashes on the jacket. He smelled oppressively clean.

"You wish to see, my sir?"

The other man inclined his head. "The design of power." He had at least studied some of the local idiom. The imagist decided the man was real, or at least an illusion sustained by someone else.

The picture was an easy one for the young man carried its component parts constantly before him, as if he were afraid they might slip from his grasp if they were not held so tightly.

He began with a line, formed it into a triangle, which thereupon expanded into a square, to a pentagon, hexagon, octagon, a sphere growing tangents that curved off into diminishing radius arcs that, before the image was completed, hinted at Llwyellan Functions.

"I had wished the image to be yours rather than mine."

"I have no images of that sort left to me, nor do the people around you. Yours was the only one I could find." The man looked up the street and the imagist caught the picture of armed men also dressed in gray, reflected on the surfaces of his mind. Beyond them were vehicles painted white and olive, caked with frozen mud and dust and much too large to fit into the village's streets. The imagist noted that all of them carried one or more antennas, mostly dished units or flattened cylinders, and found the one that was examining him.

He felt his hands wavering in their movements, and stopped before the image disappeared into abstraction by itself.

"Anything else, old man?" Another person dressed like the first, but taller and with fiercely ascetic features had come up to him.

The imagist sensed his own fear as strongly as when the men of power had begun to leave or destroy themselves. He instinctively closed his eyes and searched the land around the village. He found other things in the silence but he was now badly shaken and could not identify them. "Yes."

"A picture then," the second man ordered too loudly. "A picture of the powers in this land!" The younger man looked embarrassed.

"Lost the knack so soon? Allow me to assist." A third man joined them and handed the speaker a green notebook. The imagist heard the sound of motors grinding at the still air. A low fog of crystallized ice rose from under the plenum skirt of the hovercraft parked at the end of the street, lending it the appearance of slow burning. The man raised his hand and pointed to the northeast. "You may find some form of power . . . "

"Sir!" the imagist shouted as the picture blasted across his mind.

The bolt hit and leveled the block of houses on the opposite side of the park. There was no sound or shock wave, just an intense heat that drove them back behind the nearest wall.

"No power? Goddamn bastard!" The second man grabbed the imagist by the front of his cloak and nearly lifted him off his feet.

His mouth working through the usual signs of terror, the other man yelled, "I don't understand this. It can't be this! It hasn't for years!"

Etridge smiled back and dropped the other man. "Relieved, Stamp?" he hissed as another block of houses and godowns detonated. Then he stepped back and began trotting along the undamaged side of the street, back to the vehicles. Stamp followed uncertainly.

The imagist and the man who had brought the book to Etridge stayed for a moment. They saw that the fires left by the two bolts were made from extraordinary colors; despite the rush of heat released by their impact, they now danced above the ruins without warmth, as if they had used themselves up all at once and remained only as an after-image in their eyes. One or two people staggered from the houses, seemingly unaware of the gold and scarlet flames that were eating at the backs of their skulls.

The third bolt consumed the burning people, the imagist and the man beside him.