Pathspace: The Space of Paths (18 page)

“
There's a lot of things
we ought to be doing,” he said. “Like taking longer
baths.”

She shook her head. The man was relentless.
“We take too many chances as it is. If the others knew what we –
“

He silenced her with a kiss. “What we do
alone is our own business,” he said. “And don't worry, I understand
why it has to stay that way.”

“
You know I wish it didn't
have to be a secret,” she said. “But it is what it is.”

“
No worries,” he said.
“You go on ahead. “I'll wait and follow after your guards lead you
to the stairs.”

She closed the bathroom door behind her and
strode to the outer door of her suite. Charles and Terence were
waiting for her. “What shape are they in?” she asked.

“
They walked in,” said
Terence. “As far as I can tell, they're in better shape than they
have any reason to expect. If it weren't for Xander the boys
would've strung 'em up already.”

“
There will be no
lynchings while I'm Governor,” she said. “And they'd better not
accidentally fall down stairs or walk into a door in my building.
Is that clear?”

“
Absolutely” said
Charles.

They entered the stairwell and headed down.
“Have we found any living relatives of the Ferrero family?”

“
No ma'am. His wife's
parents died in the last war. And Gus's were carried off by the
plague we had five years back. I'm afraid there's no
one.”

“
Damn. I suppose they
burned his crops, too?”

“
Yes,
Governor.”

Yet another problem. Who
would take over the farm? Especially one so near the border with
Texas.
Maybe,
she thought,
we need to push the border a little further south, this
time
.

The prisoners were a sorry-looking bunch.
But few people would look better after losing a fight with a wizard
and being dragged up to Denver. The Governor looked them over.
“Well?” she demanded. “What do you have to say for yourselves?”

They all looked at the tallest one. He must
be the leader, she realized. What a surprise.

He surprised her by grinning. “Glock,
Brutus, Commander, First Recon, Lone Star Empire. Service number
eight five eight oh three one seven.”

She rolled her eyes. “Give me a reason why
you should go on living, Commander.”

He just smiled. “Glock, Brutus, Commander,
First Recon, Lone Star Empire. Service number eight five eight oh
three one seven.”

“If that's what you plan to say at the
trial,” the Governor told him, “we might be able to finish in one
day. You must be very eager to die.”

The redhead with the scar above his left
eyebrow didn't even blink. His grin did not waver.
“Glock, Brutus, Commander, First Recon – “

“
Yes I heard you. Service
number eight five eight oh three one seven.” She glanced at the
others. “Any of you got lunkheads have more sense than your
commander?”

One of them opened his mouth, as if to say
something. But then his eyes strayed to the big redhead and he
closed his mouth again.

“
I could just hang the lot
of you,” she mused out loud. “Then again, my people are likely to
petition me to try torture on you first.”

“
But you won't,” the big
guy said. “You haven't the guts for it.”

“
Is that what you call
what you had at that farm? Guts?” She wrinkled her lips in disgust.
“You must have different definitions for things down there in the
Honcho's country.”

“
Sure do. For example,
'Governor' ain't a word for 'woman' down there. We stop taking
orders from women soon as we're old enough to ride, fight, and
drink.”

Her guards Charles and
Terence bristled at that. She didn't blame them. “Up here we obey
whoever's in charge, which happens to be me at the moment. What
about your boys? Did your Honcho order you to rape and kill
non-combatants?” She shook her head. “Somehow I doubt it. Peter's a
lot of things, but he'd never sink that low. You know what I
think?” she said, studying the redhead. “I think he won't
care
what
we do to you when he
hears what you did.”

His face darkened, but he had no reply to
that, so she turned and left the room. Her guards accompanied her.
As the three of them headed for the stairs she told Charles “Put
together a jury as soon as possible. We'll do this legally, but I
don't want that guy to live any longer than necessary.”

After the Governor left the men in the cell
finally began to talk. Sitting against the wall in darkness, Lester
decided that meant she hadn't left any guards behind.

“
You shouldn't have made
that crack about women,” said a younger voice. Not the same one who
had been speaking to her, he thought.

“
Shut your mouth,” the
more familiar voice said. “Never show weakness in front of the
enemy. If she goes ahead with executions, Texas can use that for
recruiting propaganda. It doesn't matter how legally she does it.
Our people won't believe a word of it. All she'll do is make our
army bigger.”

“
You idiot. You think
she'll brag about executing us? We'll just disappear. Like you made
that farmer's family disappear. A vanished recon team won't recruit
anyone.”

“
I said shut it! The
Honcho's got resources you know nothing about. Likely as not we'll
be sprung out of here before the boss lady can get her trial ready.
Keep your cool and don't make me have to report you to your daddy
for cowardice in front of the enemy.”

“
Huh! I should have at
least tried to stop you. Maybe I deserve to die for just standing
there and doing nothing while you raped the women. I don't know.
Maybe if it had been just you and me I could have stopped you. At
least you won't get the chance to do it again.”

“
I already told you to
shut your yap, runt. I'm not going to repeat myself. The next time
you open that mouth it'll lose some teeth.”

Lester listened with interest. Had he really
heard what he thought he heard? This hadn't been a total waste of
time, after all. He could hardly wait to get out of here and talk
to Aria. There were ramifications here that neither of them had
considered.

And then it got even more interesting. As he
stood up, preparing to leave the room, he heard sudden inhalations
of astonishment.

“
What the hell? Who are
you, another damned wizard?”

He started, sure he'd been seen. But no, his
cloaking spell was still working, or he wouldn't be in darkness any
longer. So what had startled them?

“
Who am I?” said a new
voice, one he'd never hard before. “I, gentlemen, am your
salvation. Stay calm and don't tell them anything. I'll have you
all out of here as soon as I can find out who has the key to that
cell.”

He heard the door to the outer room open
again. Whoever opened it didn't close it this time, or at least not
all the way, as if they didn't want anyone who might be outside to
hear it. Trying not to pant with excitement and the effort of
re-weaving the shield around him as he moved, he groped his way
around to the door, hugging the wall, then slipped out into the
corridor.

Once he was clear of the
door he flattened himself against the wall of the corridor and
tried to calm down.
Whoever that was
, he thought,
I can't let him know I heard
him.

Alone, unseen, Xander performed his daily
regimen. First was the thing with the mirror. He picked up a wooden
cup from the table and stood in front of the full-length speculum.
Then he tossed the cup off to the side. As soon as he heard it hit
the floor, he made himself vanish, weaving the pathspace as fast as
he was able. He did this ten times.

Then he did the second exercise. This was
like the first, except that he watched where the cup ceased its
motion, and made it vanish. Then he turned back to the mirror,
vanished himself, and practiced the moving invisibility, walking to
the cup's location by his memory of the room's layout, and reaching
down to retrieve it before undoing both weaves. He did this another
ten times.

He seized his staff and swizzles it on and
off rapidly, making it hum its bass roar, then adjusting the flow
up and down with his mind, sometimes reversing it entirely, as if
he were doing push ups. From this he proceeded to target practice,
firing little roughly-carved wooden balls at various targets around
the room. When he was done with this part, the balls all lifted
gently into the air and replaced them selves in a bowl in the
corner.

He was perspiring a little by now. But he
did not let up. There were still spinspace and tonespace to
practice. He stepped through the rear doorway into his storeroom
and withdrew several conical tops and gyroscopes, all treasures
salvaged from the remains of an ancient toy store. From under the
sofa he pulled a wooden board with numerous dimples in it, into
which he set the various tops and gyros, setting each one to
spinning. That was the easy part. Then he worked at canceling their
spinning, stopping their rotation and making them topple over as
quickly as he could manage. After he had stopped them all, he spun
them with his mind again, this time in the opposite direction, and
repeated the process. As before, he repeated this ten times.

He took a deep breath,
wiped his brow with the end of a sleeve, and replaced these items
to their storage places. With scarcely more than a minute or two
for rest, he gulped a cupful of water from the sink and tossed a
handful of coins onto the table-'s surface. Concentrating, he made
the discs into everflames, focusing the
tonespace
until all of them glowed with pinpoints of red
light hovering above the coins. He then forced the intensity up and
down with his mind, making them cycle ed to blue-white motes and
back to red over and over again, singly and in groups. By now he
was freely perspiring. He extinguished the everflames and made the
air around him an imaginary coldbox, cooling himself in the sudden
fog that condensed out of the silent air and poured down his body
like a reversed fountain, a cylindrical waterfall of blessedly
refrigerating mist that cooled him.

He was canceling out this weave when he
heard the sound of the door's bolt being thrown back. Lester rushed
into the room, clearly agitated.

“
Where have you been,
Lester? Spying on ladies? I mean, I'm glad you are making enough
headway with your vanishing to be able to come and go as you
please, but, really, we must have a talk about ethics. You must
underst – ”

“
It's not that,” the
apprentice interrupted. “Aria overheard you telling the Governor
about the men you captured and she wanted me to see if we could
learn something.” He stopped to catch his breath “So she snuck me
in and I sat invisible outside the cell when they brought them in.
There's something you need to know.”

Xander sat down on the sofa with a grunt.
“There are a lot of things I need to know. Like how she overheard
us, for one thing. The Governor and I were alone.” He regarded the
boy. “Have you been teaching her invisibility?”

“
No. I've no idea how she
heard you. Maybe she was just outside the door. Who cares? That's
not the point. She was worried about the trial.”

Xander grimaced. “She's not the one who
should be worried about the trial,” he said.

“
Well, she was. Obviously
when word gets out the citizens will be howling for blood. And with
the possibility of an army on the way, she was afraid the Governor
might be tempted to use torture to get confessions and a quick
trial so she can move on to more important things, like mobilizing
the army.”

Xander pursed his lips. “If you think even
think that's possible,” he said, “you have a lot to learn about the
Governor. And so does Aria. I would have thought she knew her
mother better than that.” He got up and paced across the room to
the table and picked up an apple. “So, did you learn anything
useful?” He took a bite of the fruit and chewed.

“
You could say that.”
Lester sighed. “Unfortunately, Aria must have had to go to a lesson
or something, so I haven't been able to tell her yet. But yes, I
did learn something, and it's big. It changes
everything.”

When Xander heard what he said next, he
nearly choked on his mouthful of apple.

“
Are you sure?”

“
Pretty sure. If he is,
and he's innocent, the trial could get complicated. I couldn't see
which one he was, but I'll recognize his voice. ”

“
Damn. And I thought life
was complicated enough already.” He sat down on the sofa
again.

“
Oh it gets worse. The
Texans have a wizard in the building. I heard him reveal himself to
them and tell them not to worry, that he'd rescue them.”

“
WHAT? Xander was on his
feet before he could think. “How do you know he was a
wizard?”

Lester fidgeted. “Well,” he said, after a
moment. “I couldn't see him, but from what I heard they were pretty
shocked to learn he was there, as if he had been lurking in the
room invisible like me and just suddenly appeared in front of them.
One of them even said something about it, asked him if he was a
wizard.”