Ruins Read online

  “What do you want me to do, Param, kill it?”

  “Isn’t that what you and your father—I mean Ram—isn’t that what you did with animals?”

  “We killed the ones whose fur we could sell,” said Rigg. “Do you want a coat made out of that?”

  “Gloves,” said Loaf. “I think Leaky could use gloves like that—for punching some of our customers who drink too much and won’t leave the roadhouse quietly.”

  They left the barbfeather and set about making camp. But soon it joined them again. Their provisions were meager, but they had been on the road for a while and they were used to them. Rigg offered some of his food to the beast. It sniffed and then wandered away. “Must not smell like anything edible to him,” Rigg said.

  “Doesn’t taste like anything edible to me,” said Olivenko.

  “Wonder how that barbfeather would taste,” said Loaf, “if we could talk him into climbing into a stewpot for us.”

  “I don’t think our bodies could make much use of his meat,” said Rigg, “even if we could keep it inside long enough to digest it.”

  “Pretty image while I’m eating,” said Param.

  “I had no idea you were so fussy,” said Rigg, with a grin. Param rolled her eyes.

  “Why couldn’t we eat it?” asked Umbo.

  “When they were testing me to see if I should get access to the library,” said Rigg, “I met a scientist in Aressa Sessamo who was separating out the plants and animals that came to this world with our ancestors—which is most of them—and the ones that evolved here, which is only a few. Every single one of them, Father and I had already identified as plants and animals that we can’t eat. Even dead, only certain carrion eaters will go after them. It’s as if we had two separate ecologies twined together. Father called them ‘mildly toxic’ and my guess is he knew.”

  “So maybe that parasite can’t use our bodies either,” said Olivenko.

  “But Vadesh says it can,” said Rigg.

  “And yet you touched it,” said Param.

  “Tomorrow let’s go back in time,” said Rigg. “When we’re rested and fresh. Come on, we passed through the Wall today. People tried to kill you and Umbo not that many hours ago, Param! Can’t we get some sleep?”

  But when they finally cleaned up supper, laid out their dosses, and took up their sleeping positions, with Loaf on first watch, Rigg couldn’t sleep. Because as soon as he knew what the facemask’s path looked like, he began to find the same kind of path riding along with humans ten thousand years ago. Vadesh was telling the truth—humans had been infested with facemasks.

  And the more of them Rigg followed, the more certain he became of a pattern. At first the facemasks had been rare and were never inside the city. Then they came along with humans when they approached the city in large groups. It looked to Rigg like war, or raiding parties.

  But abruptly, about five hundred years before the city emptied out, all the facemasks were inside the city, and the only human paths without facemask paths traveling with them were outside the city—again in raiding parties.

  The conclusion was obvious to Rigg. Halfway through the history of humans in this city, the ones infested with the facemask parasite became the possessors of the city, and the uninfected people were the ones who lived outside.

  And the tallest buildings were not built until the city belonged to the infested ones. Rigg knew this because none of the human paths rose up into the sky inside those towers until the relatively newer ones, the ones with facemask companions.

  This is a city whose greatest buildings were erected by people with parasites embedded in their brains.

  Now that was something Vadesh might have told them, if he were actually obeying the command to tell them everything. Which meant that he was deceiving them. He must have found some logical loophole in the orders Rigg had given him. Or maybe there was no deep law that required him to obey the first humans to pass through a Wall.

  Eventually, exhaustion won and Rigg slept.

  CHAPTER 3

  Night Watch

  From the moment Vadesh walked up to them on this side of the Wall, Umbo had felt a sick dread. Now it was clear to him that passing through the Wall had been a very bad idea. At the time it seemed they had no choice. But that was because back when they had choices, they had chosen to come so near to the Wall there was nowhere else to go. They had pinned themselves there.

  Only now did it occur to Umbo that it was Rigg who had decided that going through the Wall was something they needed to try. Maybe it was because of the way Rigg’s real father, Knosso, had died trying to get through the Wall by sea.

  Whatever Rigg’s reason, when they escaped the city of Aressa Sessamo, knowing that General Citizen and Rigg’s and Param’s mother, Hagia Sessamin, would pursue them, Rigg made sure they headed for the Wall and then had no choice but to get through it, somehow.

  But had that been the only way to evade General Citizen’s army? Couldn’t they have split up, hidden among the people? Rigg was the only person who could follow all the paths that humans and animals took through the world—no one else could have traced their movements. Yet whenever someone spoke of another course, Rigg dismissed it. In the long run, they’d get caught; inside the wallfold they couldn’t hide for long. Yet people did hide. So why didn’t anyone argue with Rigg? Why didn’t I?

  Not that Rigg bossed people around or even argued much. He just kept bringing up the Wall again and again, making it all seem so rational. And eventually everyone just took it for granted they were heading for the Wall.

  Even at the last minute, the very methods they used to get through the Wall might have taken them away from it just as easily. But they went through because Rigg wanted to.

  Who put him in charge? Why did everybody listen to him?

  Like Vadesh. He made it clear that Rigg was the person he would obey. But they had all passed through the Wall. In fact, Umbo and Param had passed through it first. And Umbo had done all the time-shifting. First Umbo had pushed Rigg and Loaf and Olivenko into the past—to the time that Rigg determined by finding and following the barbfeather. Then, when they were nearly across, Param had grabbed Umbo by the hand, leapt off the high rock they had been perched on, and then vivisected time the way she did, slowing them down. And once again, Umbo had pushed back in time, dragging himself and Param to a point a couple of weeks before they had arrived at the Wall. That’s how Umbo and Param ended up on the far side of the Wall even before the other three set out.

  Ultimately it all depended on Umbo. Yes, Rigg could carry the time-jump much farther into the past than Umbo could; yes, Rigg made it precise, by linking with some ancient path. And Param could section the flow of time—they were both talented. But the actual time travel, that was Umbo alone.

  So why didn’t Vadesh defer to him? Why did Vadesh say Rigg was the “actual time traveler,” when Rigg had never learned to time-shift on his own, as Umbo had? Why was Umbo nothing, when he could do things no one else could do?

  Right from the start, Umbo had come to Rigg as a supplicant. Please let me travel with you, please! Remembering his own groveling begging attitude now made Umbo feel humiliated and angry. They both had compelling reasons to leave the village of Fall Ford; why did Umbo put himself in a subordinate position?

  It couldn’t be because Rigg was a Sessamid, born to be a prince; none of them knew it until he was arrested in O. Besides, Sessamids had been out of power ever since the People’s Revolutionary Council took over, and if they had been in power, they would have killed Rigg as a baby because Queen Hagia’s grandmother had decreed that no male could inherit and that all male Sessamids must be killed upon birth.

  So how did Rigg end up making all the important decisions and getting them into this terrible place on the wrong side of the Wall?

  Be rational, Umbo told himself. Rigg is in charge because that’s how Ram, the Golden Man, the Wandering Man, our copy of Vadesh, raised him.

  Ram had given Umbo some trai
ning in the way to control his power over time, and by disguising himself as a gardener had helped train Param, all the way downriver in Aressa Sessamo. But Ram had taken Rigg from babyhood and raised him as his son, teaching him constantly. Ram trained Rigg to be a ruler. Ram decided everything, and Rigg and all the rest of them were just following his script.

  And now here they were with Ram’s identical twin, Vadesh, lying to them and controlling them. They couldn’t even get water without Vadesh’s help or some terrible parasite would get them. They were completely at the mercy of this machine shaped like a human. A machine created in such a form as to deceive everyone about its very nature. Ancient humans made these immortal machines and now they rule over us because they know everything and we know nothing.

  Now Umbo lay there in a grove of trees not far from the empty ruins of a city, staring up at the bright Ring overhead in the sky, boiling with the same resentment that had been building up inside him since they passed through the Wall. Umbo was honest enough to recognize that while the feeling was the same, it was no longer directed against Rigg. Now it was directed against Ram and Vadesh. But was it them that he really resented? Was it anybody, really, that was making him feel this way? Or did he simply have these feelings and searched for someone outside himself to blame them on?

  I’m angry and bitter and despairing but Rigg doesn’t deserve it, and Ram and Vadesh are nothing but machines and . . .

  Umbo rolled up onto his arm and looked at the others where they lay sleeping. Loaf—there was no reason to resent him. He had been nothing but generous and protective, and he, at least, had cared about Umbo and remembered him when no one else did.

  Olivenko? Umbo barely knew him. Only Rigg knew him, and Rigg seemed to value him because Olivenko had watched Knosso die. Yet Olivenko had worked hard and abided by the group’s decisions—which meant Rigg’s decisions—and there was no reason for Umbo to resent him, either.

  And there was Rigg. Umbo knew that Rigg was his true friend, and if people deferred to him it was only natural, because Ram had trained him to be ready for anything, to know something about practically everything.

  Param was almost the opposite. Same bloodline as Rigg—you could see it in how much they looked like each other—but she had spent so many hours of her life invisible in her sliced-up slowed-down timeflow that as she lay there sleeping in the lee of Loaf’s large body, she seemed almost younger than Rigg. Which made sense, though she was his older sister by two years; she hadn’t actually lived through all the years since she was born, for when she was in her sectioned-up timeflow, she lived through only one second for every three or four or more seconds that passed for everyone else.

  She’s younger than me, thought Umbo.

  And with that thought, he felt himself filled with such rage and despair and . . . and longing that he wanted to cry out from the power of it; it could not be contained, yet he had to contain it . . .

  By all the Saints, thought Umbo, the first princess I meet, and I fall in love with her.

  So this is love, he said to himself, trying to examine his own overwhelming feelings with the rational fragment of his mind. This is the powerful, horrible longing that made Mother marry that miserable tyrant I had to call Father. How many unbelievably stupid heroes in stories did insanely dangerous things because they were in love?

  More to the point, how many insane things am I going to do because of it?

  Now all of Umbo’s feelings made sense to him. Yes, Rigg had made too many decisions, but the main reason Umbo resented him was the easy, comfortable way Param behaved with him. They had been together in the same house for months, and they were brother and sister and they had planned their escape together and had saved each other’s lives and . . .

  I saved her life too! And she mine!

  But only the once, only this morning as they leapt from the rock. She had taken Umbo by the hand and pulled him to his feet and then jumped off the rock with him. Then, holding his hand, she had taken him across the Wall.

  He could still feel her hand in his. Or, rather, the tingle of the memory of her hand. She isn’t two years older than me and Rigg, not really. She’s my age, more or less, and who cares if she was born a princess? Her mother the queen tried to kill her over and over—if that doesn’t constitute getting fired as princess, what does? She’s a commoner like me, now. It’s not impossible.

  A commoner by law, but still royal by breeding. She must think I’m a filthy ignorant unmannered low-speaking vulgar privick, while Rigg knows how to talk just like her, with all that high, fine language. Rigg has lived in her house, has eaten at table with her, he knows all the right manners. While I have journeyed with her, lit fires for her at night, but mostly I’ve behaved like a menial. As if I were Rigg’s manservant. And not some lofty valet who knows all the correct manners—no, I’m like a boy Rigg hired for the afternoon, to help do the work of their journey from the city to the Wall.

  No, thought Umbo. I can’t let myself go back to resenting everybody. I’m in love, and so, as the Wandering Man—no, Ram—once explained, I have the instinct to fight any potential rivals for the woman I covet. Not that Rigg is a rival, exactly—he’s her brother, not her lover—but he has her trust, her affection. She talks to him, little secrets and asides, all the things I want her to have with me. Only with me.

  What made Umbo so angry was the knowledge that she must despise him, that she was out of his reach no matter what he did. And yet he knew that he didn’t know that, couldn’t know it. They were both so young, what did he expect?

  This is insane, he told himself. I’ve got to get my mind off her, now that I know that she’s what’s been on my mind.

  He reached into his pocket and took out the thing he had picked up when he came into the grove of trees.

  It was a stone. Specifically, a jewel. Even more specifically, a jewel that looked exactly like the one that Rigg had tried to sell in O, and which was now in the possession of a bank in Aressa Sessamo. The stone that Umbo and Loaf had tried repeatedly to steal back, so that Rigg’s collection of nineteen stones would be complete.

  That was what he had seen at a glance, when he was picking it up from among the fallen leaves. But since it could not possibly be that stone, Umbo tried to make sense of it another way. He drew it from where he had tucked it into the waistband of his trousers and tried to study it by ringlight.

  It wasn’t the sight of it that mattered anyway, except to confirm that it was indeed the right size and color to be the missing jewel, which he’d realized the moment he saw it. Now he examined it by heft and texture. It was as hard as any of the jewels, as smoothly polished, and its weight felt right.

  He tucked it into his trousers and rolled over onto his back. He recalled the moment of finding it. The jewel was not so much amid last year’s fallen leaves as atop them. Resting right on the surface, as if it had been left in order to be noticed and found.

  But who could have left it? Rigg sounded absolutely certain when he said no human had come near this grove in a long, long time. The jewel could not have been sitting there so long—it would have been buried under leaves and probably deep within the soil.

  The lack of paths suggested that the jewel must have been left by an expendable like Vadesh and Ram. They left no path that Rigg could see. But why would Vadesh leave it lying there, when he could just as easily have handed it to Rigg?

  Maybe it was some kind of test, to see what Umbo would do with it. But no one could have known in advance which of them, if any, would enter the grove exactly where Umbo did. And when could Vadesh have done it? Wouldn’t they have seen him? There was no place to conceal himself between the empty city and this grove. There were no footprints or other woodsy signs of his passing—the leaves on which the jewel rested looked completely undisturbed, exactly like all the leaves surrounding them.

  And why this jewel? Even though it could hardly be the very one that Rigg had once carried and tried to sell, it was certainly just like it in app
earance. Suppose Vadesh had an identical set of nineteen here in this wallfold? How did he know to pick the one jewel that was missing from their set? Rigg had laid out the eighteen for him to see, but when had Vadesh had a single moment in which to fetch his own jewels to replace the missing one?

  “You awake?”

  The whisper came from just above his head. Umbo didn’t flinch or startle, but his heart raced. Olivenko’s voice. How had he gotten from his watch position to here without Umbo hearing?

  “Your watch,” said Olivenko.

  Of course it was Umbo’s watch. And the reason he didn’t hear Olivenko coming was because Umbo must have fallen asleep. And the reason he didn’t feel as if he had slept at all was because he took so long with his thoughts before falling asleep that all he got was a nap at best.

  Bleary, Umbo got up. Loaf stirred—he slept lightly and woke at every change of watch. Rigg and Param remained oblivious. The sleep of royalty.

  What an unfair thing even to think of, Umbo told himself. If there’s anyone in the world who can’t sleep peacefully, it’s royalty. When rebels aren’t trying to kill them, or warlords who think they should be king, then royal families are always killing each other.

  Just how stupid are my resentments and jealousies going to make me?

  “Speak to me,” said Olivenko. “If you’re sleepwalking, you won’t keep much of a watch.”

  Umbo opened his eyes fully and stretched. “I’m awake,” he whispered.

  “Keep moving until you’re really awake,” said Olivenko. “You only fell asleep a few minutes ago. I felt bad waking you, but . . . your turn.”

  And we can’t change turns around if it might mean waking one of the royals.

  No, Umbo told himself. Stop thinking that way.

  He got up and walked briskly out of the center of the grove, not caring how much noise he made among last year’s fallen leaves. Then he was on the closely grazed meadow, where his steps made almost no noise at all, and where the breeze was unimpeded by the trunks and leaves of the trees.