The sun was going down and the sky over the walls was illuminated by pink and golden clouds spectacular enough to compare with the fraternal wars of the magicians.
If he had the Officer's eye he could carry on the search at night. It was better that he should rest, wait and hope that the ships would be doing the same. He found the town house of a merchant that did not depend on magic to hold its walls together.
He slept on a bed with blue velvet hangings around it, embroidered with the stars the wizards had decreed should hang in the skies of their universe. The room was paneled with oak, carved with bas-reliefs of the commerce of the kingdoms of magic: merchants bartering over spices and rare essences, the trade in slaves (dispirited scientists and soldiers shocked at the irrelevance of their inherent rights and dignity), the dragon-runs where the great beasts were bred and strengthened.
Etridge had personally supervised the placement of the tripods around the ship. There was a moon, so the City was visible in the normal spectrum. The energies that bound it together could be seen through the scopes and sensors, overlaying the walls, rising along with the towers and minarets or running along portions of the avenue that showed through the open Teachers' Door.
"Only the Special Office has seen it like this," Etridge remarked to Stamp as he swung the monocular away from him. "Or like this." The City's jagged outline shone like mercury.
"Until they gave their eyes away." Stamp was intensely depressed.
"I'm sure they kept some for their own. How else could they be able to watch their beloved magicians turn the rest of us into toads?"
"They were not like that."
"No? They were like you, then? Maybe a little more caught up in their own dreams. Enough so they could turn the wizards' crimes into gold and drop their own weapons when they became too powerful and too true for them to handle."
"And
we
are not that way?" Stamp continued, looking at the City and, from the sound of his voice, aging perceptibly.
"Of course not. You've known that for some time," Etridge snorted.
Stamp did not reply, but looked back through the left side windows, up to where the lights of the other ships were bright enough to reveal their colors and keep separate from the stars.
Before he went to sleep, Aden made sure that the room's eastern windows were open and that the bed was positioned in front of them. He was on the fifth floor of a building which was, in turn, set atop a slight rise. The gunsight's infrared range showed that the horizon would be visible over the walls in the morning.
The sun and the morning breeze carried salt air. Gulls circled in front of the windows. Their sharp calls reminded Aden of the morning singing of the City's muezzins when they had come to announce the end of the wizards' testing of each other and that it was safe to honor them again.
Aden awoke quickly. As he had during his first operations for the Office, he waited for his eye to reach through the closed lid and make sure it was safe to move. He had continued doing that after the unicorn had taken the eye, forgotten it and then picked up the habit again in the Taritan Valley, safest and gentlest of all his world's places.
When the engraved eye told him nothing, he opened his own. A thick layer of dust coated the room's furnishings and diffused the sunlight into dream tonalities.
The air muffled the sounds of the City's continuing disintegration and of the gulls singing to the fleets that would follow the ocean to this spot. Aden stretched in the quiet, not wishing to get out from under the blankets.
He swung his feet over the side of the bed, put on his trousers, shirt and boots, and found some dried meat in his pack.
He finished eating and sipped night-cooled wine from his canteen. It comforted him as did the dusty air, and set the various realities that hovered near to him at a bearable distance.
He guessed the hour to be around seven when he reached the street. The sun was coming over the City's walls; it caused the facing buildings and mosaics to flare with stunning radiances. One mosaic, unable to bear the touch of the world's sun, crumbled soundlessly into white dust and drifted down from its supporting wall to the cobblestones.
From Donchak's old store he could orient himself and reach the center of the City. He clipped the holster-stock and the sight onto the pistol. Ranging the nearby streets, he found nothing more than residual energies and lines of force mortaring buildings together or animating decorative statuary.
He could not believe that the City was so deserted. Surely the despair of the magicians could not have infected the common people to the point of suicide too. But a great and fundamental underpinning had been removed from their society. Like the men who had ruled them, they had lived for seven centuries in the demonstrated rightness of a certain universe. Then something had suggested that they were wrong, that the deaths of their sons and fathers had meant nothing, that they had served shadows. The only ones who could have reassured them had discovered the same thing and left. Aden
had
seen the people of the City. They stood dumbly around the imagist in the village park, tried to start farms that would need water and fertilizer, wandering through the mountains seeking gardens where magicians had stopped time.
He walked through the confused streets the wizards had built. At intervals his path was blocked by the rubble of collapsed buildings. His gunsight showed him one heap that was only an illusion of some complexity. This disturbed him for it implied that there might still be some magicians left in the City who could be aware of his presence. Then he examined it more carefully and found that the pile of marble and splintered hardwoods merely represented the decay of an equally imaginary palace.
It had been common to retain a lesser man of power or his assistant to create the illusion of a grander building than that which one really occupied. The practice was much favored by petty merchants and parvenus of all sorts. After all, the City was founded on subjectivity. The power of magic defined reality and such illusions were often appreciated as much as the more respectable mansions built of actual stone and mortar.
Aden stepped into the debris. It offered no resistance, became invisible once he was inside of it and then regained its apparent solidity when he came out on the other side. The comic aspect of the scene was undeniable, and he laughed out loud for the first time since he had left the Taritan.
Etridge, Stamp knew, was tall and sparely built, and would have passed for a banker or a diplomat in any city of his world. He was also strong for his age, and the unhurried arcs of his movements indicated exceptional reserves of energy and strength.
The City was before them, the sun hidden below its walls. The tapering shadows of domes and spiked minarets pointed their darkness at the foothills to the east. The bones and the other hovercraft shone in the new light as it swept down the hillsides toward them. Stamp moved closer to Etridge, holding his automatic riflein both hands. If one of the magicians or enough of their power remained, and if he found himself still capable of believing in it, he conceived that it would be a sign to overpower or eliminate Etridge. But if the fraud continued to expose itself and if the City kept dissolving before his world's reality, he also knew that he would need Etridge, as desperately as he had once needed his parents and then a woman named Sarah in the places they had each controlled.
Grant and Halstead were standing in front of the hovercraft, waiting for them. Both looked like younger models of Anderton, stocky, well muscled, unexceptional features; perhaps it was a blandness of spirit that permitted them to stand in front of the Holy City with no detectable emotion. Stamp recalled the emotion Anderton had shown before the lights, and thought that it might also be simple courage. They were good, strong men who wished only to end the force that had produced Thorn River as well as the fairy castles; because they followed Etridge did not necessarily mean that they followed his dreams too.
Their uniforms were scrupulously correct. Packets of electronic equipment studded their tunics. Stamp noticed that their weapons gleamed with cold and constant light when the sun reached them. The mosaics and frescoes on the City's walls remained in shadow, and the contrast between the men and the hovercraft, and the City was startling.
Illusion; it means nothing, he thought, and shielded his eyes. I'm starting to think like him.
Etridge carried a small carbine that looked like a hunting piece. Its stock was made from finely grained wood and the engine turnings on the action lent a softness to the metal. It seemed to be intended more as an insult to the City than a threat to whatever might be left inside its walls.
The sentry pylons had been taken down and stowed inside the ship. As always, it suggested the sea with its canted bow and enclosed superstructure. In a few years the ocean would be back and the true ships would be on it, as they should, rather than floating over deserts and the deserted highways of the enemy.
Again: momentum, convergence, inertia building up in amounts sufficient to overwhelm magic's beauty or the sorrow for its passing, and propel them past anything the men of power had dared to dream or question.
"Ready?" Etridge said to the City. He was distinct and sharply defined before Stamp, as if the sound of his voice had closed the final perceptive circuits necessary for the other man to see the world that stood around him with guns and telescopes in its hands.
"We've got as much as we can right now, sir. There's new activity around the central location." Anderton was commanding the ship. No one questioned the wisdom of Etridge walking outside.
"How so?" Communication would be by voice with the ship following them, watching over their progress.
"Customary variations on existing wavelengths and resonances."
"Anything unusual in that?"
"Only in concentration and variety. It doesn't look like anything we couldn't untangle if we waited."
Etridge considered this for a moment. "No reason to wait. Gentlemen." He glanced at Stamp on his right and at Grant and Halstead back alongside the ship, and stepped forward.
The air was quite still. In between the sounds of the decaying city were those of the men walking, quickly joined by the whistling of the hovership's engines. Stamp looked back and saw the dust clouding out from the inflating plenum skirt. The ship rocked a little and then rose a meter from the road.
Up in the foothills, the sun reflected off the armored surfaces of the other ship. Stamp felt more relaxed than he had thought he would be, neither did he feel desolate as he had before.
Etridge set an easy pace so it took a few minutes to reach the Teachers' Door. It was built from slabs of pale granite that had been fused into a single archway, seventy meters square. Strangely wrought projections of black iron and bronze were spotted along its inner surfaces; they were the physical points on which many of the Gate's non-corporeal doors were attached. Behind them the two main doors had been left open.
In contrast to the frescoed and mosaiced walls around them, the doors were blank metal, charred like wood along their edges. Anderton informed them over the loudspeaker that the other doors of magic had provided the color and ornamentation the wizards so loved.
Stamp gripped his rifle more tightly to stabilize himself against the sight of the interior City. Its exterior had been unitary, complete, bound together by its muraled walls against their approach. Inside, it fragmented into innumerable parts, as if it were a diadem suddenly hurled against a wall in a fit of anger.
They entered upon an avenue leading directly east, so that it appeared to end in the new sun. On either side its light gilded the rotting buildings. Statues and allegorical figures with the limbs and faces of beasts moved in abbreviated, repetitive gestures.
"See it?" Etridge confided from the side of his mouth. "Just as it was outside the walls with the bone heaps and the singers. Everything devoted to show and ornament." He waved condescendingly at the ruined statues, and several of them obligingly cracked and fell apart as they passed. Etridge had known that they would before they had gone in, but the effect was worthwhile. Grant and Halstead joked to each other and Stamp found himself fighting back a tentative smile.
"The Avenue of Wisdom," Anderton informed them.
"The appropriateness of our path continues, don't you think?" Etridge, again looking straight ahead and speaking conversationally.
Stamp had memorized the aerial views of the City, so he knew the name of the street as it was spoken in the magicians' speech. He also knew, as did Etridge, that many of the triumphal columns and gesturing figures that lined the street commemorated the victories of magic: Heartbreak Ridge, the Third Perimeter, Kells.
If Etridge was as human as he pretended to be, his calculated arrogance might be as much defensiveness as from any intoxication with anticipated discoveries in the ash heaps. Stamp looked about him as he walked, and decided that if it was true, Etridge's capacity for absolutes would render such a distinction meaningless. Etridge could carrying the guilt of a hundred Thorn Rivers inside of himself and still chase his enemies, or their ghosts, or their founding gods until they all dropped from exhaustion.
A dying cyclops limped toward them from a side street. Its single eye was blank and yellowed, and its skin was gray with the mortal rot of Etridge's world. Stamp guessed that it lived because it was too stupid to understand itself. Etridge could understand it and he signaled Grant and Halstead to hold their fire while the ship examined the creature.
It continued to move toward them, obscene, shredded genitals hanging between its legs, the remains of quilted silk and gold mesh armor on its shoulders. Three years ago it had been happily passing its eternal life crushing the enemies of its master; three nights ago, Stamp would have cried to see its ruin so clearly.