His course took him through a spectral gothic landscape where the
genius loci withdrew from him, knowing his maker and respecting that final power.
A black butterfly detached itself from a bough of a lightning-struck apple tree. The lightning bolt had severed the tree in twain—one side continued quick and green, covered with flowers. The other was silver, grey, and shriveled. Where Alioth’s wings flapped, blossoms speckled, cracked, and turned to dust.
“You run far and fast, Mizar,” Alioth piped.
“Message… for the lord.”
“Bad news, I’d wager.”
Mizar did not spare the energy to reply.
“Yes, bad news. Many things are changing in Virtu. For the first time since the wars of Creation I have felt the pull of Skyga’s call.”
Mizar ran on. He crossed from the gothic into the fringes of a marvelous seascape. Here the waters were clear and turquoise blue. Beneath them he could glimpse slim, angular fish, and large, impossible shells. The shore sparkled with crushed obsidian, ground-glass sand catching the sunlight and giving it back in minute fragments so that Mizar ran on a facsimile of the night sky, the blue of day at his right shoulder.
“I could be great again,” Alioth continued wistfully. “Great and terrible—a mount for gods and a weapon.”
“A… slave,” Mizar panted.
“Yet, are we not all so? You run to warn one master, follow on the heels of a boy. A clever lad, talented and with great potential, but a boy nonetheless. You could rip him in two with the barest motion, yet you let him order you about.”
“Killing is… easy.”
The landscape had become one of soft golden dunes. Burrs and thorns were crushed under Mizar’s feet. None had yet been imagined that could penetrate the steel and plastic of his pads. Twisting cacti scuttled out of his way as he ran. His sweat left green ink dots in the sand.
“Killing is easy, you say? You were not there in the battles of the earliest days when the ones from Highest Meru recreated their fallen with the merest twitch of thought. In such instances, killing means obliterating memory, or conversely, creating a new memory of an object—a memory so forceful that it overwrites the original conception.”
Mizar ignored the butterfly’s words. His route was sinking into the outer limits of Deep Fields. He leapt fallen skyscrapers and ran through lengths of broken pipeline.
“I’ll be going, now, Mizar,” Alioth called. “Give my best to the Lord of the Lost.”
Mizar merely ran.
Jay D’Arcy Donnerjack left his companions and moved silently through the shadowed scrub. Although on the outside the thicket had looked soft enough, now that he had penetrated beyond the long-needled pine and trailing willow of the fringes, he could see that appearances were deceptive. Briar thorn, dark green stems almost silky, thorns curved and purple, blocked out much of the light. Cholla cactus, curving canes studded with clusters of inch-long stickers and lush magenta flowers, twisted like vegetable contortionists. Wild roses swarmed over the lot, their delicate five-petaled white or pink flowers at odds with the stinging kitten claws of their thorns.
Moving around the larger clumps, carefully lifting aside a tendril or cane, Jay worked his way through the thicket. His many games of hide-and-seek with Dubhe and Phecda had trained him well. Although his progress was slow, he won his way to the demicanyon in which the factory was set with myriad scrapes and scratches but no major wounds.
Climbing down the steep cliffside, his only dangers the omnipresent threat of falling or discovery, seemed easy and relatively painless. He imagined that something watched him from the few blank windows at the back of the building, but nothing moved, nothing attacked, and he stilled his pounding heart and continued the descent.
Upon reaching the ground level with the building, he slipped up against one wall and discovered that all his efforts might well have been for naught. Each window he was able to inspect was sealed—constructed to admit light, but not ever to open. The only doors were those in the front of the building and attempting them before darkness could cover some of his actions would be foolhardy.
They had seen little traffic during their scouting, but Virginia’s report indicated that such traffic did exist. Jay was resigning himself to waiting in hiding for the glaring sun to set (Did the sun ever set on the primal mountain?) when an idea, brilliant yet insane, came to him.
He remembered his earliest discussions with Reese Jordan about his crossover ability, Reese’s warning that he should not make the crossover casually lest he step out of Virtu into some distant or dangerous portion of the Verite. What if he made the crossover here, walked a few steps to what would be the inside of the factory, and then crossed back?
The risk was enormous, he knew. He had done some very controlled experimentation years before and he knew that travel within Virtu did move him within Verite as well. The correspondence was neither precise, nor logical, nor consistent.
If he made the crossover here he could end up in the middle of the ocean, in solid rock, or—as Reese had once warned him—in the middle of moving traffic. Still, the idea would not let him rest. The decision was his, and even though he was terrified, he knew that he would choose to make the crossover.
He composed himself, took a deep breath, and essayed a small step from Virtu into the Verite.
His first sensation was one of warmth, a sense of moving wind, and a glimpse of a deep blue sky. Relief flooded him that he had not emerged into solid matter or over water. Then he heard a rumble of machinery. Glancing around, panic replacing relief, he spotted the hulking earthmover, brilliant yellow paint streaked with orange warning stripes.
It was rumbling directly toward him.
“Jay’s been gone a long time,” Alice said worriedly. “Maybe we should go look for him.”
“Bad idea, kid,” Drum answered. “We haven’t seen a commotion, so we can hope he hasn’t been spotted. He may be taking his time, lying low to wait until a guard moves, any number of things. Do you want to queer his pitch?”
“No, but sitting here is making me edgy.”
Virginia had been studying the upper slope for some time, apparently not hearing their conversation. Now she lowered her binoculars.
“Take a look up there. If Jay’s factory is roughly at nine o’clock, where I want you to look is at one o’clock.”
Alice and Drum did so. Dubhe, who had been hiding his own anxiety by pretending to drowse in the lower branches of a scrub quince, quickly followed suit.
“The modernistic building—the one that’s all ovals and curves?” he asked.
“That’s it,” Virginia confirmed. “A man came past the window in that large cylinder. He was only there a moment, but he matched Alice’s description of her father.”
“There’s no real reason the architectural constraints and trends should be the same,” Drum said, “but if that building was in Verite, I’d guess that the cylinder was a staircase.”
“It could well be,” Virginia said. “Just because Virtu sites can be programmed with different physics than in Verite doesn’t mean that they usually are. From what I’ve learned, most site designers prefer to scan in a standard template and modify.”
“Why would he be there?” Alice said. “Wasn’t he supposed to be part of an army?”
Drum patted her arm. “He might not be there, kid. On the other hand, if I understood your explanation, the Piper is only one of your father’s identities. They may want him here to be near the Bansa device—since he’s also all that’s left of Bansa. Or he might not be resigned to his service as the Piper and be in protective custody or, equally, Virginia could have seen someone else entirely.”