Ruins

CHAPTER 4 Battle

In all her life, Param had never been in the presence of more than about fifty people at a time. Even that was unusual, and she had preferred to avoid large dinners or recitals or whatever was being put on in Mother’s honor. And while social events could be full of vicious infighting, it was done with words, looks, and gestures. Nothing had prepared her for war.

She had imagined war, of course—that was what most of history was about, the Sessamoto lords-in-the-tent leading their marauders on devastating raids against whatever village or town looked least protected, and then as kings-in-the-tent forcing the other tribes of the northeast to unite under their rule. Finally the King-in-the-Tent had conquered every nation of the Stashi Plain and subdued every freehold and every wild tribe of the woodlands and every fishing village of the coasts and through all of her study of that history, Param had pictured it all like a combination of the game of queens and the game of clay-casting, with the clay balls alternately knocking over pawns and queens, and dashing to pieces against them.

She had an intellectual knowledge that war was bloody. King Algar One-eye was an obvious example, and General Potonokissu had worn a wooden leg when he walked, though never when he rode. They had been maimed in battle, and if such things could happen to the rulers of armies, Param could only imagine what happened to the ordinary soldiers.

But when all but Umbo joined hands and suddenly dropped into the past, Param was almost overwhelmed by the noise of it. She could hear yelling: fierce cries of warriors, shouted commands from officers, screams of wounded men. And there was a smell of burning meat that almost gagged her, mixed as it was with the other stinks of the battlefield.

Her reflex was to sliver time so she could disappear. She relied on this ability to retreat from anything that frightened her. But she caught herself, realizing that Rigg had not been wrong after all when he worried about her disappearing in the past.

She knelt up and saw that Rigg, who was more used to sudden shifts of time, was already standing up and striding toward three adult women who were watching the battle. Rigg would speak to them; Param had no desire to. The women looked careworn and grief-stricken. They stood near a stockade that surrounded the city and sheltered their party from the view of the soldiers where the battle was being waged.

The stockade looked as if it had been hastily thrown up in a day, braced from behind here and there. She wondered how well it would hold up against a determined enemy. It had been clumsily built; through gaps between the poles it was possible to see the battle.

But Param did not want to see the battle. She had thought that was what she was coming to see, but now that she was here, it was the city that fascinated her, because it was only half built. Only the lower buildings existed, and instead of the uniform black of the towers in Param’s own time, these had been brightly painted, though many were faded and weathered. Yet the colors seemed vivid on this sunny day; it was as if the city had been decorated for a festival.

From the top of one of the towers, a beam of pure heat shimmered the air. Param followed the beam and then strode the five steps to the stockade and peered through. Where the beam landed, the grass was erupting in flame, and men were fleeing from it.

At first Param noticed little distinction between the two armies—they were masses of human shapes brandishing weapons. The numbers seemed evenly matched. But soon, from looking at those nearest her, she realized that all the defenders were better armed—swords and bows against clubs and crude spears.

Yet instead of cutting through the attackers, the swords of the defenders seemed rarely to slice flesh. The attackers always dodged away, avoiding the cuts and blows. However, the clubs and spears of the attackers landed all the time; if it had not been for the armor of the defenders, many would have fallen.

Why were the attackers so much better at fighting?

Then Param realized that the attackers all had large, strangely shaped heads; a moment later she saw that their heads were deformed because they had facemasks almost entirely covering their heads. Many of them seemed to have weirdly misplaced eyes, as if the parasite, having covered the face of a man, grew him a new eye out of its own rough flesh. Param found them repulsive and fascinating. The men with facemasks fought savagely and skillfully. They were quick, dancing to dodge incoming arrows from the defenders, darting forward to strike blows which rarely missed, though the defenders’ armor usually turned away the blade.

Another beam came from the tower. It should have been a devastating advantage for the defenders, to have that beam of fire. But instead of striking into one of the masses of the attacking army, it struck an area that was mostly empty of living men of either side. Again flames gouted upward, and men of both sides ran from the area of flame. The battlefield was dotted with patches of flame or cinders or ash, so that neither army could maintain good order.

“Those bastards in the tower ought to be hanged,” muttered Loaf. He was standing at the stockade beside her.

“They don’t seem to aim their rod of fire very well,” she said.

“They’re hitting nobody,” said Loaf. “Useless.”

Olivenko, from the other side of her, said, “What makes the attackers so nimble? I’ve never seen soldiers who dodge so well.”

“The defenders are good soldiers,” said Loaf. “Trained, disciplined. But they hardly land a blow.”

Olivenko agreed. “It takes two of them attacking the same man at once to bring him down.”

“Maybe it’s because they don’t have any armor,” said Loaf. “Keeps them lighter on their feet.”

It’s the facemask, Param wanted to say. The facemasks help them to react more quickly. But she said nothing. Loaf and Olivenko were soldiers; they knew what they were seeing, and she didn’t.

With both of the soldiers watching the battle, it occurred to Param that neither of them was protecting Rigg. What if the women took him for some kind of enemy? What if they were armed? Param could at least take Rigg out of harm’s way, if danger threatened.

The women were speaking a language that Param had never heard before, yet she understood them. She realized that she was not mentally translating their speech into any tongue that she actually knew. Rather she simply understood them at a level below language. The Wall really did give languages to those who passed through it.

The women were angry and frightened, and like Loaf they were condemning the wielder of the firebeam. But the women did not speak of “them” who aimed; rather it was “him.”

“He won’t use it to kill them,” said the tallest of the women. “And he won’t let any of us use it—we’d have no qualms about burning them.”

“They aren’t human anymore,” said the eldest woman—the mother? “Killing them should be like killing grass, but he won’t do it.”

“He’s no friend of ours,” said the youngest.

“He has no choice but to be our friend,” said the tall one. “It’s in the way he was made.”

“He does what he wants,” said the young one.

Rigg was merely listening to them, letting them talk to him; Param understood why. He was learning vital information with everything they said. If he probed, he might not learn as much, because they would become more aware of him. Param wished she knew how he had explained who they were, these four who had suddenly appeared inside the stockade. But maybe it didn’t matter. Maybe it was enough for these women that the strangers wore no facemasks.

“We can’t build the city without him,” complained the old woman. “But he won’t let us make a wall of fieldsteel—this miserable stockade is all we can make without him. We’ve depended too much on him! We haven’t any skills in our own hands.”

Param guessed who “he” was; who but Vadesh himself? No one else could build with fieldsteel; no one else could create a beam of pure heat, then bar the people of the city from using it themselves.

“He does us no good,” said the young one. “The city is eternal, but what good is that when we can’t defend it?”

“We can’t live anywhere else,” said the tall one. “Where would we get safe water? We’d become like them.” Having seen the men with facemasks, Param understood the woman’s dread and loathing.

Finally the old woman took notice of Param. “Are you his sister?” she asked.

Param had forgotten how much Rigg resembled her. “I am,” she said.

“I wish I could offer help,” said Rigg.

The tall woman pointed at the stockade, where Loaf and Olivenko stood. “They look like stout soldiers, and well-armed.”

“But inexperienced against such a quick and clever enemy,” said Param. “They would be beaten almost at once.”

“Where are you from?” asked the old woman suspiciously. “You speak like feeble-minded children.”

“Your language is new to us,” said Rigg.

“Our language?” said the young woman incredulously. “Is there another? They don’t speak at all, except the grunting of beasts. Where are you from?”

“Beyond the Wall,” said Param.

“The future,” said Rigg.

Param found it interesting that while they had chosen different truths to tell, neither she nor Rigg had thought of lying.

It made little difference. The women drew together as they shrank back from Param and Rigg. “Liars,” said the old woman.

“Spies,” said the young one.

But the tall one, though she was as frightened as the others, still cast a hungry, appraising gaze upon them. “The future? Then you know. Do we win this war?”

Rigg turned to Param and addressed her in the elevated language of the court. “I have learned all that I think we can. Let us get the others.”

Param glanced at the women. They had not been through the Wall; they didn’t know the language Rigg was using, and it must be frightening to hear speech they couldn’t understand. “Aren’t you going to answer her?” said Param.

“I don’t know the answer.”

“We know that the city is empty!”

“But is it this war that empties it? Telling her might change things.”

“All of her people are dead for ten thousand years. Any change would be better.”

“I can think of worse outcomes,” said Rigg. He glanced toward the stockade—toward the battle raging beyond the stockade. “What if these people despair, knowing they do not win, and so they give up and those people, the afflicted ones, survive?”

“What are you saying?” demanded the old woman.

“That isn’t language,” said the young one. “It makes no sense.”

The tall one now had a knife in her hand, long and sharp. “They’re spies.” She lunged at Rigg.

Instinctively, Param grabbed Rigg’s arm and took a leap toward what she thought of as her “hiding place”—invisibility. But as she did it, she realized she mustn’t. If she detached herself and Rigg from the timeflow that the others were in, there was no guarantee that Umbo could bring them back. So she stopped herself in the very moment of her panicky shift.

But she stopped herself too late. The women had already disappeared.

It was night. They stood in ringlight, just herself and Rigg.

She cursed her habit of hiding; she should have pumped her arm, signaling to Umbo to bring them all back, but that would have required thought, and she acted before thought was possible.

Then she realized—her talent didn’t work like this. People didn’t disappear when she sliced time, they merely sped up and stopped being able to see her. She couldn’t change day into night.

“What did you do?” asked Rigg in a fierce whisper. “When are we?”

“I don’t know,” she answered, trying to stay calm. “I stopped myself almost at once, we should only have jumped a moment or two.”

“We can talk, so we’re out of it now, right?” asked Rigg.

“I didn’t really go into it. We never disappeared.”

“Obviously we did,” said Rigg. “Vanished right out of their time. But how far, and in which direction?”

“I can’t move backward in time, not ever,” said Param. “I just make little jumps forward.”

“This wasn’t a little jump. It got us all the way into night. Or two nights—or a hundred years, into some distant night.”

“The stockade is still here,” said Param. “And the fires are burning.”

They went to the stockade, Rigg holding tightly to her. A few patches of grass were still burning, and there were bodies lying here and there, but there was no more fighting.

“Who won?” asked Param.

“What matters is that we’re still in the past. Does that mean Umbo has lost us, or that he still has us? If he lost contact with us, wouldn’t we bounce all the way back to Umbo, to the time we came from? Or are we stranded here and he can’t find us to bring us back? I wish I understood how any of this works.”

But Param had seen something else, not out on the battlefield, but closer to the city. “Rigg, a section of the stockade is down. It’s broken through.”

“No,” said Rigg after a moment, “it was burned through. That bastard betrayed them.”

A loud cry sounded in the dim light. It was not language. Nor were the cries that answered it. The shouters were not close by, but neither were they very far.

“I think that answers our question about who won,” said Rigg. “Those shouts came from the direction of the city.”

“Do you think they’ve seen us? I think the cries are coming closer.”

“I can’t see anybody,” said Rigg.

“But maybe they can see us,” said Param. “Those facemasks made them quicker, sped up their reaction time. Maybe it gives them better eyesight, too.”

Rigg held up his arm, pumped the air, signaling Umbo.

Nothing happened.

“He’s lost us,” said Rigg.

“He can’t see us,” said Param at the same time. She couldn’t keep the fear out of her voice, but Rigg seemed so calm.

“Let’s get back to the spot where Umbo pushed us into the past,” said Rigg. “We jumped half a day into the future, so I should be able to find Loaf’s and Olivenko’s paths.” He drew her away from the stockade.

Now Param could see the facemask men who were shouting. They had clubs and spears and they were running straight toward Rigg and her. It was a terrifying, fascinating sight.

“I think this would be a good time for you to make us disappear,” said Rigg.

“But Umbo will lose us!” She knew how stupid that was even as she said it. Umbo had already lost them.

“We won’t be able to figure anything out if we’re dead,” said Rigg. “They have nothing made of metal. Make us disappear.”

This time there was no jump, just the sudden silence from the sectioning of time, the mental buzz she always felt.

But the facemask men showed no sign of having lost sight of them. They showed no confusion. They were still coming straight for Param and Rigg, as if she had done nothing at all.

All Param could think to do was push harder, make the buzz more intense and more rapid, so time was getting sliced into thinner bits, and she was leaping forward farther between moments of visibility.

It made the enemy seem to be even faster—far faster—so they were instantly upon them. But to Param’s relief the facemask men were confused now, looking around, swinging clubs and jabbing or sweeping with spears. They raced back and forth, some of them running off in different directions to search, some of them remaining in place to stab or slice the air.

Unlike Mother’s soldiers, though, they had little staying power. Having lost sight of Param and Rigg, they soon gave up. Well, perhaps not so soon as it appeared to Param, since she was pushing herself and Rigg into the future at a headlong pace, so that the few moments the facemask men kept searching might have been a half hour, an hour, more.

Most of the facemask men went away, but some stayed as sentinels, and as soon as morning came—only a few minutes, at the pace Param was keeping—the rest came back. Now they knelt and examined the grass, and in only a few moments they had found Rigg’s and Param’s footprints in the grass. Not the footprints they had left behind them—the grass there had long since sprung back up. What they found were the footprints Param and Rigg were making right now, for the grass had little chance to spring back up during the microseconds of their nonexistence between the tiny jumps she was making into the future.

The facemask men probed the footprints. When they used their fingers or clubs, it was not a problem, but the stone heads of the spears could damage her, Param knew. She pressed harder on her sense of time, shoving herself and Rigg farther and farther into the future with each tiny jump, so the stone spear points coexisted in the same space as their feet for ever-shorter slices of time. The buzzing sense was now a deep, rapid throbbing. The day ended, the facemask men were gone. Then it was day again and they did not come back, then night, then day, then night, day, night, day . . .

Gasping, she eased up on the pressure inside herself. Her heart was beating so fast. She was exhausted. She had never pushed herself so hard, not even in the panic coming down from the rock.

They returned to realtime. They could hear again.

The stockade had been knocked over completely, some of the poles broken off just above the ground, but most of them uprooted. They had been shallowly set; it had not taken superhuman strength to put the thing down, especially pushing outward.

The bodies were also gone from the battlefield, and all the fires were out.

“Thank you,” murmured Rigg. “I thought we were dead.”

“We might as well be,” said Param softly. “I’ve stranded us ten thousand years in the past.”

“Minus about five days,” said Rigg. “Maybe a week, I’m not sure I was counting right.”

“They could have crippled us by holding those stone spear-points in our footprints.”

“In our feet, you mean,” said Rigg. “It was the strangest feeling. My feet were getting hot.”

Then Param, who had been scanning the battlefield and the city while they talked—as Rigg was also doing—spotted Vadesh. He was standing where the gap in the stockade had been, surveying the battlefield just as Param and Rigg had been doing.

Rigg must have seen him, too, because he gripped her hand tightly. “Don’t call to him,” he murmured. “He’s never seen us before.”

Of course he hadn’t. The Vadesh of this era would have no idea who they were.

But talking softly had done them no good. The machine had been made with extraordinarily acute hearing. He was walking toward them.

“Turn your back on him,” said Rigg. “Don’t let him see our faces.”

“I have seen your faces,” Vadesh called. After the silence of time-slicing, his voice was shockingly loud. “I will never forget them.”

“Umbo’s lost us, or we’ve lost him,” said Rigg. “And the only paths I can see are here, where you and Olivenko and Loaf stood looking at the battle. But Umbo can’t see us, so he can’t push us back into the past to rejoin them.”

“Can you see the moment where Umbo took them into the future?” asked Param. “Maybe if you hold on to the path right at that point . . .”

“I can’t hold a path,” said Rigg. “I don’t even see them, not really, not with my eyes, I just know where they are, I—I can’t touch them.”

“But you can, when Umbo . . . you have to try.”

Rigg reached out his hand. “Here’s where Olivenko was when his path jumps away. But I don’t know how he was standing. Was his arm here? Here?”

Vadesh was hearing everything they said. No wonder, when they showed up in the far future, he knew all about their ability to move through time. “Vadesh is almost here,” Param said.

“I know, but this isn’t working.” He kept moving his hand, trying to make some kind of contact. “I’d rather not have a conversation with the traitor who got all the uninfected humans killed.”

“They aren’t dead,” said Vadesh, still calling from some distance away. Could he hear even the slightest whisper? “They fled the city as the natives entered it.”

“Don’t argue with him,” said Param.

“He calls them natives,” whispered Rigg angrily. “Because they have that native parasite.”

“At least he doesn’t think they’re human,” said Param.

“But they are, and better than human,” said Vadesh, who was now close enough to speak loudly instead of shouting. “Didn’t you see how quick and clever they were on the battlefield?”

“Native and human,” said Rigg. “Come on, Umbo, see us, take us.”

To Param it sounded as if Rigg was praying. “This isn’t working, he can’t see us, so try something else.”

“There is nothing else.”

“No,” said Param. Her mind was racing. “When the woman tried to stab you, it wasn’t me that made us jump forward in time to the middle of the night, and it wasn’t Umbo because he would have brought us back to the time we came from.”

Rigg was looking at her, listening. But clearly he didn’t understand. Or didn’t want to understand.

“It was you,” said Param. “The knife was coming at you, and you jumped away. But in time, not in space.”

“I can’t do that. It’s Umbo who does that.”

“No, you do it—you’re the one who finds the other time, who pulls us to it. Or at least you join him in doing it. Your body’s been learning how to do it even if your mind doesn’t understand it or control it yet. But you can do it.”

“I’ve tried. My whole voyage downriver I tried, and—”

She didn’t have time for his chat about despair. She remembered how the Gardener—the expendable named Ram—had helped her find her own timesense. “Stop talking and listen,” she said, using the voice Mother had always used to command instant attention. “You feel it in your nose, like the beginning of a sneeze or the start of wanting to weep. But then it draws down, through your throat, down your breastbone, then down through your stomach to your groin. You draw it tight with your diaphragm, as if you were straining to lift something. Draw it tight. Only pull your nose down and your groin up with it.”

He looked baffled and confused as she talked. Clearly Ram hadn’t taught him this, maybe because with Rigg’s gift it wouldn’t work. But he had to do it—her gift wouldn’t get them away from Vadesh because he was a machine and he had heard everything they said, he’d know that if he just waited long enough he’d see them again. Rigg had to get them away, and so all she could do was try to help him get control of the power he had used to jump away from the knife.

She started to repeat the instructions and this time he tried to obey her. She could see tears starting in his eyes, just as they had in hers when she was first learning. A quivering in the muscles beside his nose, a twitching of the lower eyelids. And a clenching of his belly, a slight bend to his body.

His hand was still in midair, trembling, where he expected to find Olivenko.

Vadesh was nearly upon them, smiling, smiling, smiling.

“I can see him,” whispered Rigg. His hand moved.

And then Param could see that there was a sleeve in Rigg’s hand. No arm, just a sleeve. But then the arm was there, and in that instant it became Olivenko, turning now to face them, and there was Loaf, also turning, and the sounds of battle came back again, the stench of war, and Vadesh was gone.

Rigg didn’t hesitate, he turned his head back toward where Umbo had been. Rigg gave a vigorous nod, then cast his chin high, then nodded forward again. Param realized: He’s not going to give the hand signal because that would require him to let go either of her or of Olivenko.

But what if their jaunt to the week after the battle had made them invisible to Umbo? What if they were lost to him no matter what they did?

“Give Umbo the signal!” Param shouted to Loaf, to Olivenko.

But before they could obey her, the stockade was gone, and the stink, and the noise. It was a quiet morning again. Umbo was right where he should be. The city had all its tallest towers again. And Param and Rigg were both there with the others.

“Ram’s left elbow,” exclaimed Rigg in his relief.

“No, it’s my left elbow you’ve got,” said Olivenko. “Where did you come from? I thought you were over talking to those women.”

“You disappeared,” said Loaf. “I thought Param had done whatever it is she does.”

“No,” said Param. “I almost did, but I stopped myself.”

“But I felt you slip out of my control,” said Umbo. “Like having a loose tooth pull away. I’d been holding you so tightly, it hurt when you vanished. I lost you.”

“I know,” said Rigg, and then he grinned foolishly. “Umbo, it was me. Param figured it out. I’ve been learning how to jump without even realizing it. I felt what you were doing, I think I was even helping, but I didn’t know how to make it happen only I did by reflex, when she tried to stab me.”

“Param?” asked Loaf, alarmed.

“No, the woman we were talking to, we scared her, she was in the middle of a war, she was armed, so of course she tried to kill me—but I jumped us forward half a day. But I didn’t know it was me, I thought Param had done it somehow. I couldn’t do it again. So then she did rush us forward a week, and I thought we were completely lost. But Vadesh saw us. The Vadesh of the past. That’s how he knew us again, now, yesterday anyway. Because he was coming toward us while Param was telling me how to get control of it, of this thing you do, we do—”

“Could you possibly be a little more incoherent?” asked Olivenko. “There are bits of this I’m almost understanding, and I’m sure that’s not what you have in mind.”

“I got control of it,” said Rigg. “I had Olivenko’s path, and I was doing what Param said, and then I saw him, I took his sleeve, his arm, he became real and—”

“And that’s when I saw the two of you appear by Loaf and Olivenko,” said Umbo. “Only to me it looked as if you jumped. I felt you slip away from me, and then suddenly there you were.”

“Only in the meantime we had been to the next week and back again,” said Rigg. Rigg was almost jumping out of his skin, he was so excited, and Param understood now how much it must have bothered him that he could only turn paths into time travel with Umbo’s help.

Yet it seemed to her that he had learned it very quickly. Maybe he’d been learning it unconsciously from Umbo, but he got control of it the very first time he tried the things that the Gardener had taught her. It had taken her weeks and he got it with the first lesson.

Which meant that Ram, when he was tramping the woods with Rigg for years and years, teaching him everything else, had never once tried to teach him how to take hold of a path and make it real. He had taught Umbo and he had taught Param, but the boy who thought Ram was his father, Ram had taught him nothing.

“They’re all lying snakes,” she said.

The others looked at her. “The men with those facemasks on them?” asked Loaf.

“How could they lie?” asked Rigg. “They can’t even talk.”

Umbo had understood her, though. “She means the expendables. Vadesh and Ram. Your father, Rigg.”

“All I gave you was the first fifteen seconds of the very first lesson your so-called father gave me when he first started teaching me to control my timesense,” said Param. “Why didn’t he give you those fifteen seconds?”

Rigg’s excitement gave way to realization. “He taught me everything he wanted me to know.”

“Just like Vadesh,” said Param. “They think they’re gods, they think they have the right to just decide, regardless of what we want or need—they think they know best about everything.”

“Maybe they do,” said Olivenko.

Param whirled on him. “Yes, just like Mother, she thought she knew best—she thought she had the right to kill me, the way Vadesh betrayed the people of the city—”

“He did what?” asked Loaf.

“He burned a gap in the stockade,” said Rigg. “He let the facemask people drive the uninfected ones out of the city. He chose one side over the other and it was the parasites he chose. He calls them ‘natives’ but he claims they’re still human.”

“Does it matter?” asked Olivenko. “They’re all dead now.”

“He picked,” said Param angrily, “and he chose the parasites over the human race.”

“We can’t trust him,” said Rigg.

“But we already didn’t trust him,” said Olivenko.

“Now we know he’s our enemy,” said Param.

“At least now Rigg can go into the past without me,” said Umbo. But it seemed to Param that he wasn’t entirely happy about it.

“I could never have gotten us back to the present,” said Rigg. “I can only go into the past where there are paths I can hook onto. How would I get back into the future without you to anchor us?”

Param realized what was going on. Umbo was feeling unneeded and Rigg was trying to reassure him. But the more Rigg said, the angrier Umbo seemed to be getting. Or maybe he wasn’t angry. Maybe he was just hurt. Maybe he hated having Rigg reassure him.

“We’re all talented and we still need each other,” said Param, trying to stop them.

“Not all of us,” said Olivenko. “Loaf and I are completely talent-free, when it comes to time.”

“Except that I’ve lived through a lot more of it than any of you,” said Loaf.

“Is everybody going to be offended or embarrassed because they don’t have everybody else’s ability?” demanded Param. “None of us knows what we’re doing. We’re all still learning, we all still need each other, and we’re up against this expendable who apparently likes monsters more than humans.”

“And here he comes,” said Olivenko. His glance made them all look in the same direction. Vadesh was crossing the lawn toward them, just as he had done ten thousand years in the past, the week after the battle.

“Careful,” said Param softly. “He can hear every word we say, even at this distance.”

“Then he’ll understand my contempt for him,” said Loaf.

“Oh, I do!” called Vadesh. “But now you know why I was so happy to see you cross through the Wall! I’ve been waiting ten thousand years for you! And Ram refused to tell me anything about you when I asked him. Of course, until you were born he might not have known anything. It just occurred to me—maybe my inquiries were the reason he started looking for people with the power to manipulate time. Wouldn’t that be wonderfully paradoxical? I met you, I asked Ram about you, and because of my questions, he started manipulating the bloodlines until you were born! I think perhaps I created you! Isn’t that amusing?”

“Ha ha,” said Loaf. “And you know what’s really funny?”

By now Vadesh was almost there with them. “Please tell me,” he said.

“You still don’t get it that maybe the reason Ram wouldn’t tell you anything is that you managed to get all the humans in your wallfold killed.”

Vadesh reached out and knocked Loaf down. Flicked him, or so it seemed, with a casual brush of his hand, and Loaf staggered backward and fell. When he got up he clutched his left shoulder, where Vadesh had hit him, and he was panting from the pain.

“It’s not broken,” said Vadesh. “I don’t damage human beings. I don’t kill them. We expendables can’t kill people. Why do you think I only burned the grass between the armies?”

“But people died,” said Olivenko.

“People killed each other,” said Vadesh. “But I never did.”

“Just the way you didn’t damage me,” said Loaf savagely. “You were just telling me to shut up, is that it?”

“And yet you still didn’t get the message,” said Vadesh with a smile. “Why did the smart ones bother to bring you along?”

Loaf became even more furious, but he had felt the power of Vadesh’s blow—Param watched him restrain himself.

“Very good,” said Vadesh. “Slow, but he does learn.”

“You’ve made your point,” said Rigg. “You’re stronger than we are. You can knock us around. But we can get away from you whenever we want. So I suggest that you never hit any of us again, or we’re gone.”

Vadesh looked genuinely stricken—but what did any of his humanlike expressions mean? He was as false as Mother; yet, just as with Mother, Param couldn’t keep herself from responding to him as if he were a real person, with real feelings. When he looked so hurt at Rigg’s words, Param found herself wanting to reassure him.

“Just tell us what you want from us,” said Param. “Then we’ll decide if we want to give it to you.”

“And I’ll decide if I want to give you more water,” said Vadesh.

“And we’ll decide if we want to go back to a time before you and your kind ever got to this world, cross back through the Wall, and never let you anywhere near us again,” said Rigg.

Vadesh’s smile never wavered. “Stalemate,” he said. “Come back into the city and you can have all the safe water you want. Then I’ll tell you what I need from you, and you can decide what you want to do about it. What could be more fair than that?”

“Coming from a genocidal traitor,” said Param, “I think that’s a generous offer.”

She half expected him to give her the same little flick of violence that Loaf had been subjected to. But he only winked at her. “You can’t hurt my feelings,” he said. “I don’t have any.”

But to Param it seemed that his violence against Loaf could only be explained by hurt feelings. Vadesh lashed out when Loaf taunted him for getting all the humans in his wallfold killed. Whatever Vadesh might be, he didn’t like being accused of . . . genocide? Or failure? Whatever it was that provoked him, it was clear that he could be provoked, and by words alone. He was dangerous, and they all knew it now.

We fear him. Maybe that’s the new tool he created to manipulate us, when we could no longer be deceived. So maybe he wasn’t provoked after all. Maybe he merely switched from spoon to fork, whatever utensil was appropriate for the dish he’d been served.

Just like Mother, just like most of the powerful people she had known all her life. And if there was one thing Param had learned, it was this: She couldn’t win a game against an opponent who could change the rules whenever things didn’t go his way. All Param had ever been able to do was stop playing.

So she disappeared.