Стивен Браст - Tiassa

Okay, so, where was I? Right. The guy was on his knees. I walked behind him, wound up and swung with the dagger hilt like I was serving in courtball (I’ve never played courtball, though I’ve seen it), and he went down. I took the time to see if they were both really good and out. I couldn’t be sure, but from their eyes and their breathing I was pretty confident. I put my weapons away and looked up at the top of the castle; no one seemed to be watching us. Good, then.

My plan was to take a walk around the place, noting what I could, until either I attracted attention, or the strange properties of the manor told me I’d reached some sort of boundary by transporting me to somewhere. In fact, I didn’t get very far: I was maybe a quarter of the way around what I guessed was the back of the place, walking just to the side of a narrow cart road, when my eye was caught by an odd door: It was almost parallel to the ground, angled up just slightly. I’d seen a door at just that angle.

I made sure no one had spotted me yet, and approached it. It was a single door but nearly as wide as two, and secured by a padlock. If we were to rate padlocks by time, this one was only about ten seconds. I did the thing, it made the click, and I removed it. I put it aside, pulled the door open, and descended three steps into the same wine cellar I’d seen at the manor.

I stood for a minute at the bottom of the stone stairway, looking around to convince myself that, yes, this really was the same wine cellar, and trying to figure out what it meant. Same size, same number of racks, and what sealed it was the drip of water in the corner exactly where there had been a brownish stain in the manor. As I stood there, it occurred to me that I might as well steal a bottle. And my thought after that was, what if I took a bottle that still existed back where I was going? What would happen if two wine bottles from different times existed together? How often have you had to worry about that?

I poked around a little more, enough to convince myself that the hallways and storage rooms—now full of fruits, vegetables, bolts of cloth, and boxes of nails—were also the same. I stopped short of going through the door out of the cellar, but I looked through it, and there was a wide stairway.

I went back the other way, and eventually found the stairway that, in the manor, had gone down to a cave. Here, too, there were torches, but they weren’t burning. I stopped and lit one with the flint and steel they sell in the Easterners’ quarter, and without which I don’t know how I’d have lived for the last few years. Once the torch was burning well, I followed the stairway down. In the manor, this had let out into a cave, here it was—

A cave, but a completely different one. Lower, narrower, a lot sandier. For a minute I was completely disoriented, I guess because my brain wanted to orient itself by a sea that wasn’t there, but then it gave it up and got back to work. I went left, and the cave unceremoniously ended after a dozen paces; there were no marks on the wall. I turned and went back. As I passed the door, I thought for a moment I was smelling the ocean-sea again, but no, it was all wrong.

It was a long walk, and at times I had to turn sideways when the walls narrowed. What makes caves? Why do they behave like that? Someone must know.

I saw light ahead of me, and took some consolation that at least the back of the cave and the front went in the directions they were supposed to. I stepped out of the cave and into the fading light of early evening. Not the ocean-sea, it was a river, the cave opening onto its bank, perhaps thirty feet from the water, flowing from my right to my left. It was not a big river, and not a fast river, certainly puny compared to the one that cut through Adrilankha, but I could tell it was navigable because I have a good eye for such things and because there were a couple of small barges poling their way along it, both heading downriver.

I waited until the barges were past, just out of habitual sneakiness, then walked down to the edge.

There were tall weeds growing almost up to the water, but right on the bank was sand. It was soft, but not wet. As I said, it was slower than the Adrilankha River, and that meant quieter. I studied it as it went by. The day was still bright enough that I was able to locate the Furnace, and I concluded that, as before, it was late afternoon, which was what it had been when I left the cave, and made sense for when I’d last been outside of the castle. That meant I might still be where I had been, in what was the past, walking around merrily a few hundred years before I was born. What could possibly go wrong? I watched the river, speculating. I kept wanting to make a connection between the river and the fountain, but the source of the fountain was Dark Water, water that had never seen the light of day, and this river was exposed to the daylight.

I knelt down, scooped up some water, let it dribble through my fingers. Another barge came around the bend upriver. I thought about hiding, decided I didn’t care. I watched it as it went by. They came close enough so I could see the features of the bargemen, and they stared at me as they passed; one of them almost went into the water from staring so hard, and the others laughed at him. The barge was full of casks; I had no idea what was in them, but that was okay because I had no idea where they were going, either.

There were a few trees of a kind I didn’t recognize—short and spindly, with few branches—amid clumps of reeds. The water was a dirty brown. I turned back, but I couldn’t see the castle, although my guess was that I’d only walked around fifty rods. I turned back to the river as if it could explain what was going on, make sense of the whole thing. I walked with the water, caught a hint of motion from ahead of me, and stopped. The motion continued, too small or too far away from me to see anything but a sort of darting movement on the other side of the river, near the bank. I got closer, and it didn’t stop. Still closer, and about the time I was directly across the river it stopped. I froze and waited, and in a minute or so it started again.

As I watched I picked up more detail, until I was able to make sense of what I was seeing. It was a vallista, of course, because how could it not be? On a riverbank, just where it belonged. As I watched, it would tear off the top of one of the reeds with a quick motion, then chew it for a while, and set it down. At some point it stopped, fiddled around with something—presumably the chewed reeds—then went down to the water holding something in its mouth. It transferred what looked like a box of some kind into its paws, set it carefully in the water, then returned and began chewing more reeds.

I watched, fascinated, for at least a quarter of an hour until the fading light made it impossible. I looked around, and there was a glow coming from behind me. It took a while to realize that it had to be coming from the castle. They must have lit the place up for the night. The light dispersed well enough that I was able to pick out general features of the area, though I couldn’t make out details. Loiosh and Rocza had better night vision than me, so presumably they could keep an eye out for anything that needed eyes out. What now? Find a place to sleep, try to make it back to my own time, or wander around aimlessly until something ate me?

All right. Wander aimlessly it is, then.

I continued farther downstream since I’d been going that way to begin with.

“Do you know what it was doing, Loiosh?”

“The vallista? Fishing.”

“Fishing.”

“Building a fish trap.”

“Oh. Hmmm. I’ll bet that’s significant or something.”