Father had warned Rigg how the rules changed when you traveled far, and he always warned that the bigger the city, the lower the level of civilization, which had seemed to make no sense to Rigg until now. Because the rules of civilization might be obeyed by however so many people you choose, it only took a few who despised those rules and you’d be in danger. “The worst of predators is man,” Father had said, “because he kills what he does not need.”
“Like us,” Rigg had said. “We leave the meat behind, most of the time.”
“The meat feeds the forest scavengers,” Father had answered, “and we need the pelts.”
“I’m just agreeing with you. We kill like men,” Rigg had said, and Father had replied in a surly voice, “Speak for yourself, boy.”
Now Rigg was seeing it for himself. “Seems to me,” said Rigg, “the baker who cheated us harmed us more than anyone here.”
“That’s because you haven’t left my tavern yet. They wouldn’t dare attack you in here, but I can promise you’ll have many companions joining up with you the moment you leave the place, and you’ll be lucky if they only turn you upside down to shake out the coins and leave you with your skin and bones unbroken.”
“How does anyone get through here alive?” murmured Umbo.
The taverner turned sharply, his hand flashed out, and this time his hand was not so gentle resting on a boy’s head. “To get through here safe, two boys wouldn’t be traveling alone—they’d have adults with them. They wouldn’t be barefoot, and dressed in oafish privick homespun. They wouldn’t come any nearer the river than the road out there, and that in daylight only. They’d never enter a riverside tavern. They’d never spread coins across the bar or take out more than was needful. And if they break all these rules, they still survive if they happen to run into me on a day when I feel particularly magnanimous. Now, the supper rush is about to begin, and then it’s a night of drinking and whoring for rough men whose money I mean to have, with a minimum of breakage. You’re going to stay in this room.”
“In here?” asked Rigg. “What do we do in here?”
“One of you lies on the table, the other underneath it, and you sleep if you can, but you don’t sing, you don’t talk loudly, you don’t show your face at the window, and you don’t—”
“What window?” asked Umbo.
“If you can’t find the window, I guess you can’t show your face at it, so you’ll actually obey me,” said the taverner. “The last thing is, when I lock the door from the outside, you don’t panic, you don’t start thinking I’m making you my prisoner, you don’t scream for help, and you don’t try to escape.”
“Isn’t that exactly what you’d say if you were holding us for ransom?”
“Yes,” said the taverner. “But who’d pay?” He walked to the door, closed it behind him, and they heard the chunk of the lock as he turned the key.
Immediately Rigg was on his feet, scanning high along the walls.
“Looking for the window?” asked Umbo.
“Found it,” said Rigg. He pointed up, high on the wall above the door. It might be facing toward the inside of the tavern, but what was coming through the slats of an old shutterblind was daylight.
“How did you know it wasn’t on the outside wall?” asked Umbo.
“I can see the paths of the builders. Few others have climbed that high on the walls, but now and then someone does, and that’s where they went.”
“It occurs to me,” said Umbo, “that your little talent with pathfinding only works to see what people did, not to help us with what they’re about to do.”
“True enough,” said Rigg. “But what’s your little talent good for, either, when it comes to defending ourselves?”
“I slow down time,” said Umbo.
“I wish,” said Rigg. “That would be useful.”
“I think I know what I do!” said Umbo.
“I’ve been thinking about it,” said Rigg. “You weren’t slowing down time for me—I walked at the same speed as the man I saw.”
“And picked his pocket—”
“Do you want me to find him and put it back?”
“If I don’t slow down time, what is it I’m doing when I make it so you can see paths turn into people?”
“You speed up my mind.”
Umbo threw his hands in the air and sat down. “Speed you up, slow down time, it’s the same thing. I already said so from the start.”
“You’ve lived with it all your life, Umbo, you decided what you thought it was when you were little, and you’ve never had a need to change your mind. But think about it. When you slowed me down, and I walked along with other people, what did it look like to you? You could still see me, couldn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Did I walk slower? Or faster?”
Umbo shrugged off the proof. “Then what am I doing? Because I’m sure doing something if you can see people that you never ever saw before I did it.”
“You’re speeding up my brain. The speed at which I see things, and notice them, and think about them. All those people who left those paths behind them, they’re always there, but only when my brain starts seeing and thinking faster can I actually see them. And only when I really concentrate on one person can I touch him and take things from him and pry up his miserable fingers to try to get to Kyokay.” Saying that, Rigg felt the grief of it rise inside him again, and he stopped talking.
Umbo closed his eyes and thought for a while. Finally: “So I make you smarter?”
“I wish,” said Rigg. “But I can see things that I couldn’t see before, and touch things I couldn’t touch.”
Umbo nodded. “I always thought of it as slowing down time, because when I first started doing it around other people, they’d say things like, ‘Everything slowed down’ or ‘the whole world started going slower.’ They didn’t know I was doing it, they thought it was something that just . . . happened. And that’s how it seemed to me, too. And then your father heard my mother talking about a time like that, and he looked at me and somehow he knew that I had done it. That’s when he took me aside and started helping me learn how to control it. To be able to affect only one person. Myself or somebody else. Whoever I chose.”
“At the falls, you were aiming at Kyokay, and you got me, too, by accident.”
“I didn’t say I got to be perfect at it. You and Kyokay were kind of far, and I was climbing up the cliff, and I couldn’t even see you most of the time.” Umbo leaned his elbows on the table and hid his face in his hands. “But what good is it, anyway, whatever it is we do. If you can only see the past and I can only make other people think faster, then what can we even do with it?”
“I got a knife.”
“A nice sharp one,” said Umbo, holding up the palm he had cut with it, now mostly healed, though the scar was red. “Can you fight one of these rivermen with it? What about three of them?”
“If you really could speed me up,” said Rigg, “I could run around so fast they wouldn’t see me, and I could kill six of them before they knew what was happening.”
“Wouldn’t that be nice,” said Umbo. “Meanwhile, they’re beating me up because I’m just sitting there, so as soon as one of them hits me, I stop speeding you up, so then they catch you.”
“Well, it’s a good thing we can’t do it, then, isn’t it?”
Through the walls Rigg could hear the noise from the common room of the tavern. Nothing angry-sounding, but lots of talking. Shouting, really. When he could make out words, they were cheerful enough. Even horrible curses sounded like joking between friends.
“Wouldn’t it be nice if he brought us food?” said Umbo.
“Suppose somebody beats us up. But doesn’t kill us,” said Rigg.
“Let’s hope for that.”
“But then later, we go back to the place and I find the path they took to get to us. You slow down time—”
“I thought you said that wasn’t what I—”
“That’s wh
at I’m used to calling it,” said Rigg impatiently. “You do that thing, and I’ve got a sledgehammer and as they’re stepping toward us, ready to beat us up, then one by one I smash them in the knees. Every single one who takes a step toward me.”
Umbo was smiling. “I bet after a couple of them fall over screaming with their knees all bent the wrong way, the rest hop away like ebbecks.”
“And we don’t get beaten up after all,” said Rigg. “So actually we’re perfectly fine.”
Umbo laughed. “It’s better than revenge, because we stop them before they do it in the first place!”
“The only thing I don’t get is how it could possibly work,” said Rigg. “The only reason we’d be doing it is because they beat us up. But then afterward, we can’t remember why we attacked these guys, because we don’t have a bruise and they never laid a hand on us.”
Umbo thought about that for a while. “I don’t mind that,” he said. “Who cares if we remember? We’ll just trust ourselves that we wouldn’t do that kind of thing unless we had a good reason.”
“But if all we remember is smacking people with sledgehammers, and never the reason why . . .”
“Well, don’t worry about it,” said Umbo. “With any luck they’ll kill us, so we won’t be able to go back in time and stop them, and so we won’t remember anything cause we’ll be dead.”
“That eases my mind,” said Rigg.
Then something dawned on Umbo. “You remembered growing up without any stories of the Wandering Saint, right? So you still remembered the way things were before you changed things in the past.”
“And you didn’t.”
“I think that’s convenient,” said Umbo. “One of us will remember how it was before we changed things, and the other one will remember the way it went after we changed it.”
Something still bothered Rigg about Umbo’s analysis, if he could only figure out what it was. “So let’s say we get beaten up, like I said. I don’t forget the part about getting beaten up. So I remember all the things we did after getting beaten—how we hid, how somebody nursed us back to strength, and then how we went back to the place and got even. But you don’t remember. All you remember is the new way, where they almost beat us up but some of them fall over with their knees broken and the rest run away. So . . . you didn’t go anywhere to recover from your injuries, because you never were hurt. So in this new story, where you didn’t have to recover from injuries, what did you do instead? And why did you end up coming back with me to prevent something from happening, when you don’t remember it happening at all? It’s just impossible.”
“Here it is,” said Umbo. “We both do both things. Only right at the moment where you break their knees, you lose one memory and I lose the other.”
“It still doesn’t work,” said Rigg, “because if we both see the bad guys fall over and we walk away, then we have to somehow do the things we did before so we end up at the place at the right time to break their knees. How will we know when that is?”
Umbo leaned over and started beating his forehead softly against the table. “I’m so hungry I can’t think.”
“And it’s too cold in here to sleep,” said Rigg.
“And we’ve still got the ability to change the past together, only whatever we do, we just figured out that it can’t be done.”
“And yet we do it,” said Rigg.
“We’re like the most useless saints ever. We can do miracles, only they’re pretty worthless.”
“We can do what we can do,” said Rigg. “I won’t complain about it.”
“Remind me why we didn’t go back in time and rob enough people in the past that we could afford passage on a downriver boat?”
Rigg lay down on the floor. “Ack! It is cold.”
“So get back up on the chair where it’s warm.”
“We’re going to die in this room,” said Rigg.
“That solves all our problems.”
The door opened. A woman almost as large as the taverner came in carrying two bowls with spoons in them.
“Speaking of saints,” said Umbo, “here’s one with the miracle of food.”
“I’m no saint,” said the woman. “Loaf will tell you that.”
“Loaf?” asked Rigg, smelling the stew and staring at the bowls. She set them down on the little table and Rigg and Umbo instantly sat down.
“Loaf is my husband,” she said. “The one who locked you in here instead of throwing you and your money out into the street the way I would have.”
“His name is Loaf?” asked Umbo, his mouth already full.
“And my name is Leaky. You think those names are funny?”
“No,” said Rigg, stopping himself from laughing. “But I do wonder how you got them.”
She leaned against the wall, watching them shovel in the food. “We came from a village out in the western desert. Our people name their babies before the next sundown, and they pick the name because of what we do or look like or remind somebody of, or from a dream or a joke or any damn thing. And we have to keep that name until we earn a hero name, which almost nobody ever manages to do. So Loaf looked like a big loaf of bread, somebody said, and I drooled and puked and peed in a continuous dribble of something so my father started calling me Leaky and he wouldn’t let my mother change it on my naming day, and I’ve beaten about a hundred people into the ground for laughing at my name. Do you think I can’t handle you?”
“I have a deep abiding faith that you can,” said Rigg, “and I’ll do my best not to earn a beating. But I have to wonder, when you came here why didn’t you change your name? Nobody in these parts knew you, did they?”
“You think we’re the kind of folks to start out in a new place by lying to everybody?”
“But it wouldn’t be a lie if you changed your name. Then you just say, ‘My name is Glorious Lady,’ and since that now is your name, it isn’t a lie.”
“Anybody calling me Glorious Lady is a liar, even if it’s my own self,” she said. “And you’re getting closer to that beating every time you open your mouth. Next time just put food in it.”
Rigg had food in his mouth the whole time he was talking, chewing and swallowing in the pauses, but he knew what she meant.
“You’re sleeping in here tonight,” Leaky announced. “I’m going to bring you some blankets.”
“A lot of blankets, I hope,” said Umbo.
“Plenty, compared to sleeping outdoors on a night like this. Isn’t that what you’ve been doing for the past few weeks?”
“But we don’t like it,” said Umbo.
“I don’t mind,” said Rigg.
“And I don’t care what you like or don’t like,” said Leaky.
“I like this soup,” said Umbo.
“It’s stew,” said Leaky. “Trust a privick not to know the difference.” As she left, she relocked the door behind her. They buckled down to the serious business of eating every scrap of food they could see.
As they neared the bottoms of their bowls, they slowed down enough to talk a little.
“I’m still hungry,” said Umbo, “but my stomach is packed solid and I can’t fit anything in.”
“That’s how you get fat,” said Rigg. “Eating even after you’re full.”
“I guess I just remember being hungry so clearly that being full doesn’t wipe out the hunger.”
“If the people of Fall Ford named babies the way Loaf’s and Leaky’s village did, I wonder what your name would have been,” said Rigg. “‘Turdmaker’!”
“Yours would be ‘Crazy Baby.’”
“The craziness didn’t show up till later,” said Rigg. “Mostly since knowing you.”
True to her word, Leaky returned quite soon and seemed surprised that they had already finished eating. She held up their bowls and made a show of looking for some trace of the stew. “If you barf because you ate so fast, make sure you keep it all on the blanket or I’ll have you scrubbing the puke off the floor till it smells like fresh-cu
t lumber in here.”
“It smelled a lot worse than puke when we got here,” said Umbo. “We’d be improving it.”
“It’s the only reason I’d ever be glad you came here. Strip off those filthy traveling clothes before you get into these blankets. And I mean all of them.” With that she left again. Again they heard the door lock—but only just barely, as it was so noisy out in the common room.
“She likes us,” said Umbo.
“I know, I could feel it too,” said Rigg. “She’s really glad to have us here. I think she loves us like her own children.”
“Whom she murdered and cut up into the stew.”
“They were delicious.”
Rigg stripped off his clothes and even though he really was cold now, he had the promise of the blankets to encourage him. There was such a great pile of them that he wouldn’t have to curl up with Umbo to stay warm. That would make a nice change, because out in the woods, Umbo had moved around a lot in his sleep, leaving them both to wake up freezing cold five times a night.
The door opened.
“Hey, we’re naked in here!” protested Rigg. Umbo just dragged a blanket up to cover himself.
As Leaky set down a chamber pot, she said, “Don’t splash when you use this, and for the sake of Saint Spider, keep the lid on tight when you’re done or I’ll never get the stink out of this room.” She set a basket of large leaves beside the pot. “These go inside the pot when you’ve used them.”
“We’re from Fall Ford,” said Umbo. “That far upriver, sheeshee don’t stink.”
“You just don’t notice, sleeping with the pigs like privicks do.” She closed the door and locked it again.