The Visitor

  Gohdan Gone chuckled, such a clatter as a gibbet load of bones might make, rattling in a cold wind. “You work best when you do what you were told during your dedication. You were perhaps distracted at the time? I will tell you once more. The Lost Book of Bertral says there is or will be a Guardian Council. There are a score or more members of this Council. We read this in the Book of the Great Fell, whom I serve, whom you serve. Whoever or whatever this council may be, it will be inimical to us, and the Latimers have something to do with it. We of Fell don’t want a Guardian Council. Now, what will you do?”

  She drew herself up. “I’ll visit her in Hold! I intended to go there in any case. I am part of the commission studying The Artifact. There is a meeting there in a few day’s time.”

  “Of course you are part of the commission,” he murmured, looking her full in the face. “Another of the little benefits we have provided you.” He hummed under his breath. “Have you learned yet what it is?”

  “No. No one has any idea. Not at this stage.”

  “What do you think it is?” he demanded.

  She took a deep breath. “I believe it is a crystallized process, something which was ensorceled into being but never potentiated.”

  He pinned her with his glance, his eyes red in the fireglow. “An interesting concept. And was there a book with it?”

  “No one has seen a book. The whole cellar has been excavated, and all that’s there is the thing itself.”

  “While you are in Hold, take care of Dismé. Somehow, you must take her back to Faience.”

  She licked her lips again, and murmured, “I found a recipe a few years ago, in one of the old books Caigo Faience had collected. It was an account of a potion used by black magicians in the deep past. The drug seems to kill, but the one dosed and seeming dead may rise again, subservient to the will of the person who does the raising up. It uses the liver of a certain fish, which I’ve obtained through trade channels.”

  “Does it work?”

  “I’m not sure I have the incantation right, but the drug part works well enough. I’ve done several dogs, buried them, dug them up, brought them back.”

  “Pfah. Chemistry. We of Fell do not trust in that.” He opened a box beside him on the table and took from it a curled pale scrap of skin, scant hair still sprouting from it. “Here on this parchment is the recipe for Tincture of Oblivion, all the ingredients spelled out. You will create this, and you will use this. If you let her escape, all our confidence in you will be gone. And once we have no further use for you…well, you know. What the Fell did to you before, but slightly, he will take pleasure in doing again, and this time you will die of it.”

  She was sweating, not only from fear and the heat of the fire, but also from the words she read on the parchment and the wrath that consumed her inwardly. Though it was a fury she dared not show, she said stubbornly, “I wish I understood all this focus on her, her father and her brother and her kin!”

  He leaned back in his chair, seeming to ruminate for a moment, chewing over the alternatives. When he spoke, it was almost a whisper. “One time, one time only, I will tell you why. You will never ask why again.

  “It was revealed to me that Latimer would rise up against me. Therefore, I sought Latimer and found a lineage that began at the time of my arrival on this world with one couple and their two children. He, Latimer, was the founder of the Spared. His first woman was gone in the Happening, but the children remained, two of them, male and female, who sired or bore into successive generations. I took the Spared as my people, and I guided them to make a source of power for me. I have identified the descendants of that line, and have set a watcher over each of them against the time one of them will rise up against me. So I found Val Latimer and his children, so I set your mother, and so I have set you as watcher.”

  “Why don’t we kill them all?”

  “To do so would change a future which benefits me. Now do not ask me why ever again.”

  She bowed, fighting to maintain control of herself.

  Gohdan Gone purred, a sound like the warning rattle of a snake. “She’s perched there in Hold. Don’t let her get away. And if, by chance, she eludes you, waste not a minute in following after her, for we will be following you.”

  She had neither resolution nor obstinacy left. For the moment she was beaten. “Yes, Master,” she breathed. “I won’t let her get away.”

  When Rashel emerged from the gate on the street, the small boy was still busy bouncing his ball off a flight of steps at the corner. He saw her emerge and went swiftly around the corner and down an alleyway, where he found Michael leaning against the carriage eating a sausage roll.

  “She went into a hole down the block,” said the boy. “There’s a gate and a keeper.”

  “Ah?” murmured Michael, expectantly.

  The child gave him a shrewd, completely adult wink. “Once she was in, I made myself useful. There’s an apartment up above, with a window looking down on the hole, and there’s an old woman living there. I helped her carry her marketing up to her rooms. She says she’s seen this one and that one coming and going. She’s heard one of them ask for Hetman Gone. Strangeness is…”

  “Strangeness is what, Bab?” asked Michael, wiping the grease off his chin with his kerchief.

  “Strangeness is, people go in and come out, not staying long, in and out, several over a few days, then nobody for some long time, then several again…”

  “So?”

  “But nobody ever goes in and stays. So, if there’s somebody living in there, they get in there another way.”

  Michael felt in his pockets, discarding splits and bits until his fingers found a Holdmark. He tossed it to the boy, who caught it in one snatching fist and put it into his pocket. “You helped her carry her shopping, eh?” he said, looking up and down Bab’s toddler body and babyish face.

  “Well, you know,” smiled Bab. “I’m stronger than I look.”

  32

  dismé in hold

  As Hetman Gone had said, Dismé was indeed perched in Hold, though she was not singing. There was no time for singing among the books she was to read, the dialects she was to learn, the bare-handed fighting technique she was to master. Since it was less troublesome to delegate this last than to worry over it, she put the matter in Roarer’s paws and told it to learn well. Though Dismé herself was not conscious of making progress, the master seemed satisfied.

  Arriving via the back stairs and the ledge outside the doctor’s window—a secret way, he had told her, that could never be disclosed to anyone else—she spent many evenings in his quarters, reading pre-Happening books aloud to him over dinner, or joining him in learning country songs that were, so he said, current outside Bastion. He had prided himself on his voice until he heard hers, which was remarkable.

  “You must have sung a great deal to get a voice like that.”

  She shook her head. “Only to myself, when I was alone, out in the woods. It went along with my twiddling.”

  “Twiddling?”

  “You know, pounding on things, making a rhythm.”

  Though she had begun with some suspicion of his motives, as the days wore on she came to trust him. He remained unfailingly friendly and appreciative without ever indicating he thought of her as anything but a useful person who might as well have been sexless. She was incapable of imagining that this cost him some effort.

  She made one trip to Newland on the doctor’s behalf, where she visited Gayla and Genna and retrieved the book of Nell Latimer. Since her quarters were subject to periodic housekeeping inspections, the doctor kept it for her among his secret things; after reading it, he was extremely thoughtful.

  At the end of several spans she entered his office via the reception area, her face closed and dull, responding to Captain Trublood’s greeting with a murmured “morning,” and was admitted into the doctor’s presence. Here she was greeted with his assessment, gratuitously offered, that she was beginning to shape up. She, who had com
e to his office for quite another reason, was much flustered by this.

  “That was a compliment,” said the doctor, sternly.

  “Yes, sir. Yes, thank you, sir.”

  “The Fight Master says you are becoming quite skilled. He wonders how this is possible, in such a short time.”

  She flushed. “I…I really don’t know, Doctor.”

  “He is impressed. He would like to know the secret, so he can impress it upon other students. Take it as a compliment.”

  “Thank you,” she murmured. “But I came about something else.” She handed him the letter she had just received.

  “You are to receive a visit from your sister,” he commented, looking at her quizzically over the top of the letter.

  “My step-sister,” she said, quietly. “She has never wished me happiness. I think she may be trying to kill me.”

  “Ah,” he said, quirking his eyebrows at her, as he did from time to time when she did something momentarily puzzling. “Why?”

  “I don’t know. I suspect that she killed my brother and father, though I don’t know her reason for that, either. I do know she uses people, uses them up, and when they’ve been used up, they are chaired or gone. She has never finished with someone then let them go on to something else. She goes on sucking the life out of them long after she’s through with them.”

  “She says business brings her to Hold. Would you have any idea what that may be about?”

  “Wasn’t some mysterious artifact discovered here in the Fortress not long ago? Down in a cellar, I think. She is a member of some study commission for such a device.”

  He stared at her, unblinking. “Did she mention that?”

  “To her husband. I overheard.”

  “Well. Since you already know about it, perhaps we can give her a surprise. She says she arrives day after tomorrow. There has been a good deal of conjecture about this artifact, and some people have drawn conclusions—unwarranted ones I think, but understandable nonetheless. Let’s arrange that your meeting shall be in an unexpected manner and place, in my presence, and immediately thereafter we will depart, which will give her no time to harm you. Does that solve the problem?”

  She frowned, suspecting he was up to mischief, but sure that he grasped her feelings well enough. “I suppose it solves that one. Isn’t our departure rather sudden, though?”

  “Not really, no. I didn’t tell you everything about our making the trip. The foremost reason for going is to warn the harmless people near the borders to get out of the way before Bastion boils over and scalds the countryside. Again.”

  “Again,” she murmured, remembering the demon’s words in the cavern.

  “The Regime used to do it quite regularly. Then the demons took to picking us off…but you don’t know about demons…”

  “I know they come into the cities,” she said quietly. “I was only eight when I first saw them, going out of the city and adding to a bottle wall. I was up on the wall, in a place my mother had shown me.”

  “You astonish me,” he said. “You remember your mother?”

  “Yes. She went away when I was very young. I never knew why, though since I’ve grown up I’ve wondered if perhaps she wasn’t threatened by the Regime. I came to know later that many of the things she told me were not…Regimic.”

  “I had a mother like that, as well,” he said, his eyes crinkling. “And I, too, was very young and bereft when she departed, though my father seemed impervious to grief. He married again, very soon.”

  He mused for a moment as she stood patiently before him, then came to himself. “Is there something else?”

  “Yes. I received another message, this one from Michael Pigeon, our driver at Faience. He has been working here in Hold for a short time. He wants to take me to dinner tonight.”

  “Aha,” said the doctor, his voice tight. “Young love.”

  She frowned. “He’s older than I, by a little bit; neither of us is really young, and love has never been mentioned, but I do…value Michael. I just don’t know whether continuing the acquaintance is a good idea…”

  The doctor peered at his desk for a moment, then said, “He’s a driver, you said?”

  “Yes, sir. He has an instinctive understanding of horses, or so I’ve been told. They seem to think he is another horse, or at least the ones at Faience did.”

  “In that case, I direct you to meet with him tonight, as he asks, and arrange for him to meet with me tomorrow.”

  Amazed, she agreed.

  Michael had suggested a small café not far from the Fortress. She did not realize how much the separation had changed her until she saw his face.

  “You look…marvelous,” he said, his eyes wider than usual.

  “It’s the hair, I think. I learned a new way to do it.”

  “Not just that.”

  “The clothes, then. They make a difference in how I feel.”

  Michael flushed. “You never seemed to care about your clothing, but you were always beautiful.”

  “Michael! That’s nonsense. As for clothes, Rashel always picked them, so the less I cared, the better.”

  He shook his head ruefully. “I came here thinking maybe I could help you, but you seem to have helped yourself.”

  “I fell into a job that suits me, that’s all. Speaking of which, my colonel at BHE wants to meet you. Tomorrow.”

  “Why?” he asked, pulling from the table in sudden alarm.

  “Don’t get upset,” she cried. “He’s a very good sort of person. It’s possible he needs a driver.”

  “Him? He can get drivers by the dozen!”

  “Well, it was when I said you were a driver that he got this curious look on his face and said ‘hmmm.’” She peered into his face, then said in a disappointed voice, “But then, you probably already have a job you like.”

  “I have a job I don’t like,” he said angrily. “I took a post with a Turnaway family, and I did it too quickly. The only thing good about the place is they have a Praiser cook! The Mister is a dainty lay-about, something or other in the Division of Taxation, and the wife, one he obviously married for reasons of conformity, is the worst flirt I’ve encountered in my thirty years. She’ll get me gelded or die in the attempt.”

  She laughed. “Poor Michael. Come to the Fortress tomorrow. About mid-morning, Doctor Ladislav said. You may say you were summoned, if your current employer objects.”

  “Oh, he’ll object,” muttered Michael, still unable to take his eyes off Dismé.

  That settled, they had their dinner. When it was over, Dismé had shared some of her secret thoughts, as Michael had, and the two knew a good deal more about one another, enough, Dismé found herself thinking, to lead to other such occasions.

  When Michael returned to his quarters, he spent a few restless hours reviewing his life and questioning what he had done with it. The first twenty years had been spent on a horse farm on the Praise border, working with his father and half-brothers in the breeding of horseflesh. When he grew older he’d discovered that the same focused gentleness that worked well with horseflesh also seemed to work well with women. Though he’d had no feminine influence in his life since his mother vanished when Michael was two, Michael seemed to understand women almost as well as he understood horses.

  The farms were widespread thereabout, set at the toes of the mountains, with forests full of strange creatures, earthly and unearthly, almost at the doorstep. People on the border still buried their dead without bottling any part of them, the accepted local fiction (for BHE ears) being that the old folks had just walked up into the hills and disappeared. One might go to grandpa’s funeral one day (which, in local argot, was called “visiting the sick”) and the next day tell BHE a long story about how grandpa disappeared, with all the other mourners chiming in, correcting details, and nodding their heads in agreement. No one felt it was lying. It was just a way of getting along.

  At age twenty, Michael had gone to Apocanew in search of excitement, and he’
d worked for the BHE for a while, keeping their horses, long enough to figure he didn’t want to be there long. Everything was twisted in the BHE, sanctimonious reasons covering unspoken motives that were far from holy. The only thing worse than making waves was making eyes at some high-up’s wife or daughter. At that level, women were a kind of coin used to obtain advancement, and if they fell in love it greatly reduced their value.

  Men were also said to be chaste, except, that is, with outlanders. Rapine among outlanders was overlooked. Since outlanders weren’t really people, what one did with them wasn’t really sex. Some authorities even held that it was impossible for a Spared One to impregnate an outlander, since they were no doubt of different species. In the stables he’d heard a good bit about “hunting trips” outside the borders, from elderly men who’d gone on such raids when younger, for the enjoyment of the hunt.

  In the stables he’d learned if a man kept his mouth shut and looked both busy and stupid, people would forget he was there. As a result, Michael learned more than he cared to about the inner workings of the BHE. At twenty-six, he’d taken leave from the BHE, planning to go back home for a while, but on the journey, he’d fallen in with some people. After a few days of their company, he’d sent word home that he’d been delayed, and he didn’t actually get there until well over a year later with a story about prospecting in the highlands above Comador, where he’d found a source of gold, showing, as proof, a pocketful of little nuggets.

  Then a particular someone asked him to go back to BHE, where his good credentials were still in effect, and get himself assigned to Faience. It hadn’t taken a great deal of doing. He was good with horses, and he didn’t mind the solitude. Of the candidates for the job, Michael had been obviously the best choice. He’d been told what to look out for, and he had looked out for it.

  He hadn’t been told to look out for Dismé Latimer, but it was due to her he’d stayed as long as he had. Women as a class, he liked very much just as horses, as a class, he liked very much, but a woman who made him feel protective, careful, almost brotherlike, that was new. He’d never felt for any woman what he had come to feel for Dismé, a feeling he could not name.