You really think they’d do something like that?
I think they might try. Our hosts were unusually antsy today, much more so than just your little hijinks last night should have made them. Something else is definitely going on. So everybody is carrying copies of the whole group’s data, and your own files and mine, compressed and encrypted, have been dumped to all the others as well.
“So I guess I’d better start packing,” Lee said, and then laughed. “I’ve hardly actually had time to unpack…”
“It’ll take you less time, then.”
“Humorist.” She went in to start doing something about her luggage. But what about the Elf-King, Gel?
He at least was in favor of this increased ‘transparency’ and openness we’ve been experiencing. If they kill or depose him, it’ll be all over—that much I could tell from Dierrich last night. And something much worse will follow…
Lee, we’re not going to have any choice. They’re going to ship us out of here tomorrow. Our job now is to make sure that, at the very least, we leave with as much as we can of what we came for: data. What the UN will make of it is out of our hands. And for our own part, we haven’t done badly; we’ve got the proof we need to make the dil’Sorden case stand up in court, even with the unanswered questions.
Lee went into the bathroom, where her toiletries kit was, and started to reassemble it, staring into the mirror there, as if at the Alfen she was sure was watching her, though she couldn’t see him. This isn’t how I see it ending, Gel, she said. Not at all.
How you see it, Gelert said, or how you See it? The remark was pointed, but made gently enough, as from one person to another who knew that opinion and Truth were only rarely the same thing.
Lee just went on packing the kit, and didn’t answer.
*
Everything went much as Gelert had predicted. The next morning, another aircraft was waiting for the committee outside the residence tower: not one from the Miraha, this time, but some more prosaic craft with the gold disk and nothing else. There was no one to see them off but more of the guards who had been outside Lee’s and Gelert’s room all night, and the committee members went up the ramp into the craft with the air of people whose job wasn’t done, and who wouldn’t be at liberty to express their frustration and anger for some time yet.
Lee and Gelert were the first ones to board, their guards having brought them out early. Lee sat there by one of the windows in annoyance as the rest of the committee boarded, bearing their glances. How much any of them knew about what had happened to her, she wasn’t going to inquire right now: she was tired again, and not feeling well, after a night of being awake, with a sense of time running out, and trying again and again without success to bend the local world to her will. Around three in the morning Lee had finally given it up, but not happily. That sense of something bad coming had been assailing her more strongly than it had at any time since she’d first felt it in Ellay, and it hung over her now, unresolved and unresolvable.
The craft sealed itself up after a few final boarders—more faceless uniformed ExAff staff, Alfen who plainly wanted not even to speak a word to the departing visitors if they could avoid it. Lee sat there and watched the ground drop away, wondering what the reality was. No green space outside a tower. Some helipad, possibly, on top of the larger building she’d Seen? No telling, and she wasn’t going to get a chance to find out later.
The feeling of some massive opportunity being lost, some imperative going unanswered, grew on her minute by minute as they lifted away and turned north, gaining altitude. Gelert, sitting in the seat next to Lee with its back down to give him more room, looked at her with some concern. “You didn’t sleep a lot last night…”
“No,” she said.
“And you didn’t eat breakfast, either.”
“No.” She wished just for that moment that he would stop talking to her: she had the most peculiar feeling that someone was trying to tell her something, though she couldn’t figure out who.
“Blood sugar again,” Gelert said.
Lee was ready to snap It is not my goddamn blood sugar! at him, and then caught herself. I feel a little weird, she said at last.
The drug, maybe.
Maybe. She leaned her head against the window of the climbing craft, looking down at the ground. It was sunny there, with only the very occasional patch of cloud; fields and forested places rolled by, the hilly country between the preAlps and the sharper mountains surrounding Aien Mhariseth. Buildings were few. Though there, she thought, there’s one. Odd kind of structure, but you can’t tell with Alfen architecture—
Lee looked at it more closely as the craft started to pass over it. In the back of her mind, something writhed, struggled, as if against a closed fist; and she suddenly both realized what she was looking at, and Saw it. The structure was no building, but a ring of tall stones with their shadows short beneath them, a henge without lintels. Her Sight, though, showed her the energies reaching from stone to stone, and running under them, through the ground, in a ring: and in the back of her mind, at the sight and feel of it, the feeling of what she had done the other night suddenly stirred in sympathy, jumped, as if something had put a shock through it—
It’s the drug, all right, Lee thought. It’s wearing off!
She gulped, then gulped again. “You okay?” Gelert said, looking at her with concern.
“Uh, a little airsick, maybe.” She got up, wondering if she looked pale enough to suit the part. She certainly felt pale, though not from any drug. “Back in a minute,” Lee said, getting up and heading toward the back of the craft. And try not to look so concerned—someone might come after me.
What are you thinking of? Gelert said, suddenly alarmed.
Doing something proactive, Lee said.
She went back to the toilet and shut herself in. Talers to crullers they’ve got this place bugged and spy-eyed as well, Lee thought, but whether they do or not, I’m not just going to sit here. Then, scared as she was, she had to laugh. Though maybe I should. Mom always told me to go before I went anywhere. And if it puts them off watching me for a moment—
Lee steeled herself to the idea that they might be watching and used the toilet for its intended purpose. Then, after she’d put herself right again, she washed her hands, taking her time about it, thinking about what she’d just seen below. This image, Gel, she said down the Palmerrand link, and showed it to him; the ring of stones, the ring of power underlying it. Save this and use it to find me.
What? I’ve got it, but, Lee, what are you doing?—
She had to ignore him. The sharp, stinging sense of that place on the ground was already starting to fade as the craft passed it. Lee closed down the Palmerrand link, afraid to be distracted, and turned to the wall beside her, bending her intention against it as she had bent her intention against the world to hear the voices she couldn’t possibly have been hearing, to pass through the true walls behind the walls of illusion. The stone had shown her what to do, how to manipulate this world. And now, with the drug losing its strength inside her, the feeling grew stronger and stronger that she could “walk” without it—if her will was strong enough. This place is malleable, she thought. It desires to be shaped and managed, desires to have the will of the controlling mind laid upon it. That’s truth; that I can See.
And so—
For a terrible long moment nothing happened. But then the world started to give, just a little. There was still resistance—
Lee pushed for all she was worth, not certain how she was doing what she was doing without the stone, but unwilling to stop for fear she might not be able to start again. The sweat started out on her forehead, ran trickling down her back and down between her breasts under her sweater. She pushed.
The resistance persisted, persisted—then started to give. In front of her, the wall rippled. Past it she could see nothing; it simply looked like someone had taken the laminate of the toilet wall and turned it into a curtain. If I’ve made the wr
ong decision here, she thought, this first step is going to be a long one—
Lee said a quick prayer to Herself, looked once more at the image of that ring of stones in her mind, and stepped through the curtain.
The cobwebs brushed across her, through her—and Lee fell. The first second was the worst, when she felt the bite of cold and knew herself to be falling –
The next second was bad too, as the pain hit her in the knees again, as she came down crooked, twisting her ankle as she slammed down onto the hard ground in the center of the circle of stones.
She lay there gasping in the light for some moments. Alive. I’m alive— Though the sun was warm on her back, the grass she lay on was wet and chilly, with gray stones showing through it and digging into the front of her. Lee pushed herself up to her hands and knees, looked around her. The ring of stones had a clear area around it, with some grass and some bare patches of ground, as if some inhibiting influence was associated with the stones. Past the clear ground, brush began to grow, and some clumps of trees, wind-twisted and somewhat dwarfed, probably by the weather. Any view past them to the horizon was blocked off by surrounding low brush-covered hills.
Lee got up and found herself wobbly. Then she laughed as she staggered over to one of the huge gray lichen-speckled stones and leaned against it. I’ve just walked out of a flying craft at God knows how many thousand feet and lived to tell the tale: I’m entitled to wobble! She looked up and could see, bright in the sun, the thin silvery contrail, way up high, of the craft she had been in moments before. She wished there was a way to let Gelert know she was all right, but there was not the slightest chance that the implant-to-implant connection would work at this range.
She hoped no one had to use the toilet badly, as she had left the door locked from the inside. But they have to have a way to deal with that, Lee thought. And when they discover that I’m not there— Lee laughed again. What are they going to do? It’s got to take at least a little while for them to find me. After all, even if they can figure out what I did, and how I did it, I still could be almost anywhere…
At least she liked to think that. But for the meantime she had to consider what to do next. The first question is… where the heck am I?
To judge by the direction of the sun while they’d been flying, Lee thought she had to be north of the Dolomite chain which held Aien Mhariseth. But how far? Lee stood still for a moment and tried to think in terms of distances and kilometers per hour. The craft had only been aloft for fifteen minutes or so. It hadn’t yet gone transsonic. Which means something less than nine hundred klicks per hour, but more than, say, two hundred. So if you take an average—
She tried to do it in her head, and after several attempts wound up swearing. It was beginning to sound like one of the witless math problems she’d so detested in grammar school, and there were too many imponderables. The closest Lee could come up with was that she was perhaps a hundred klicks northeast of Aien Mhariseth, assuming that the craft had been heading directly toward Ys when she left it.
She stood there in the summer sunshine, looking southward. She could just see the line of mountains there against the horizon, slightly hazed by distance, but the peaks she was looking for were far beyond those. At least several days’ walk, for a good walker: possibly more. Though what do I know about long distance walking, anyway? I’m an Angeleña: I don’t even walk to the convenience store! And here I am with no food, no proper clothes, no idea where to find food or water, and no clear plan of what to do next. Is this possibly the stupidest thing I’ve done since agreeing to let Matt take me out to dinner?
Then Lee had to laugh at herself again. Certainly Gelert would laugh at her, if he ever caught up with her here—because she would bet anything that he’d try. So my business for the moment, anyway, is to keep myself in good enough condition that he finds me and doesn’t immediately have to dig a hole to bury me in. Meanwhile—Aien Mhariseth is the goal. She had gotten the feeling from Dierrich’s conversation with Kil, whoever Kil was, that whatever was planned for the Elf-King would be happening there. I have to get there, stay out of the way of the Alfen who’re out to get him, and find a way to help him.
She had to grin wryly at that. Nothing to it, she thought. So let’s get busy.
Lee turned back to the circle of stones. She could See the power running among them, a thin, fine network of strands and lines of force stretching between and under them. It is something natural, she thought, but God knows how it works, and probably I shouldn’t waste my time right now trying to figure it out. It had served her as an anchor point, a place to transit to; could she also use the circle, somehow, to help her transit between points?
Lee stepped into the circle and felt the power there respond to her as it hadn’t done when she simply dropped into it. Her first impulse was to imagine someplace in Aien Mhariseth to “walk” to. The suite?
…Boy, would that be a dumb move. You turn up there right now, and they just break out another shuttle, hit you with an even bigger dose of anti-‘walking’ juice, and send you home after the others. Also—what’s the point of getting there before the Elf-King does, tonight? It’s when he arrives that—
—something said, not exactly in her ear, that you’re needed.
Lee held very still at that.
All right, she thought, needed. She turned to look at the circle of stones, and beyond them, to see if there was somewhere she could find some cover to wait for a while. The immediate neighborhood was entirely too flat and open for her liking.
But then waiting might not be such a good idea either, Lee thought. The Alfen knew what I was doing, the evening before last: they’ll suspect I’ve done it again. The circle might occur to them as a logical possibility…which would mean it might be one of the first places they’d look. Whether I want to use it for transit or not, I need to get away from it right now.
With that in mind, she tried to think of another place to which she could transit…somewhere she wouldn’t immediately run afoul of hundreds of Alfen. After a moment, The other side of the mountain, Lee thought. Or better still, as a little less obvious, the path leading over the mountain toward it. There were a couple of places we stopped on our hike that I can remember clearly enough to ‘walk’ to.
Lee put her back up against the nearest stone for support, closed her eyes, and worked to See that spot in her mind. The image of it was clear enough. She opened her eyes again, then, and looked at the empty air, leaning her will against it and waiting to see the shimmer and ripple of its response.
Nothing.
Come on— Lee thought. She tried again, and then several times more, but got no result.
Maybe there’s a time limit? she thought. Maybe you have to have a little while to recover from that? Maybe the drug hasn’t worn off completely yet?
Or maybe you don’t have the slightest idea what you’re doing, and you’re screwing it up somehow? Or else it was a one-off, and you’re not going to be able to do it again.
Lee sighed. That was her blood sugar talking. All right, she said to herself, and looked south, to the line of the nearest hills. They looked like a long enough walk—but they were away from here, they might offer some possibilities for cover, and she might run into something to eat along the way. Better than just standing here straining my brain, she thought.
She started walking.
*
The walking went on near enough to what felt like forever. Lee was thanking whatever gods were current here that she favored flat-soled shoes for everything but the most formal occasions. At least she wasn’t having to negotiate the countryside in heels. But she wished again and again for her cross trainers; her flats weren’t meant for this kind of usage, and her feet were blistering. She was hungry, too: now she was regretting not having taken Gelert’s eternal advice about breakfast. And there was also the matter of water. Food I can do without for a while, she thought. But water’s going to be more of an issue, and pretty soon. And on top of everything else,
the day was leaning toward late afternoon, and it was already starting to get cool. By contrast to noontime, it was pleasant at the moment But it wouldn’t stay that way.
The most frustrating thing about the walking, though, was that the hills didn’t seem to get any closer. Lee felt terribly exposed; she kept an eye on the sky for more contrails, but saw none. Not that that’s necessarily a guarantee of anything, she thought. All I can really do right now is keep moving.
So she kept moving, as afternoon leaned toward evening, and it got cooler. Lee hugged herself, in her thin sweater, as she walked. She could only be grateful that she’d decided to wear jeans this morning instead of the summer skirt she’d been contemplating. The growling noises her stomach was making were infuriating, in that they reminded her about once every three minutes how hungry she was; and she needed no reminder of her thirst.
Lee stopped, at one point, and picked up a pebble to suck on—something she remembered from some survival text she’d read long before. It helped a little, but not nearly enough; she had to force herself not to think of water. She also stopped once every half hour or so to attempt to transit again, but still she couldn’t manage it. Lee began to wonder whether there were other ways to keep someone from transiting besides sticking them full of the anti-‘walking’ drug. Anyone who could lay a glamourie over tens of square miles, as the Alfen seemed able to do around Aien Mhariseth, might be able to do something like that.
The problem is that I don’t know what they can do. But at least my Sight works.
Twilight drew on, and night fell, which made Lee feel somewhat better in mood… though physically, she began to suffer. It got cold, and there was no cover. Gelert had always teased her about being a native LA girl, with orange juice in her veins instead of blood; a sun-worshipper, unable to cope with even minor variations in climate, such as anything below seventy degrees Fahrenheit. And if he was here right now, Lee thought, her teeth chattering as she walked along through the dark, I’d tell him, ‘You’re absolutely right,’ and then I’d skin him and make a coat out of his pelt. She was walking with her head down, being very careful of her footing. The landscape that was part grassy, part stony, had now given way to countryside that was almost completely stony, with little tussocks of long stringy grass appearing only here and there. It was bad to walk on, but at least the hills were appreciably closer now.