“And Rhetors,” Paphlagon reminded him.
Moyra laughed. “It is Third Sack politics all over again! Except infinitely more dangerous.”
“And the problem you—we—face is that there is nothing you can do to convince them that such things as Rhetors and Incanters don’t exist,” said Jules Verne Durand.
“Quickly—Atamant and the copper bowl?” asked Lodoghir.
“Loosely based on a philosopher of Laterre, named Edmund Husserl, and the copper ashtray he kept on his desk,” said the Laterran. If I was reading his face right, he was feeling a bit sheepish. “I fictionalized his story quite heavily. The part about making the scratch disappear was, of course, a ruse to draw you out—to get you to state plainly whether anyone on Arbre possessed the power to do such things.”
“Do you think that the ruse worked?” asked Ignetha Foral.
“The way you reacted made those who control me even more suspicious. I was directed to bear down harder on it this evening.”
“So they are still undecided.”
“Oh, I am quite certain they are decided now.”
The floor jumped under our feet, and the air was suddenly dusty. The silence that followed was ended by a succession of concussive thuds. These rolled in over a span of perhaps a quarter of a minute—twenty of them in all. Lio announced, “No cause for alarm. This is according to plan. What you’re hearing are controlled demolition charges, taking down sections of the outer wall—creating enough apertures for us to get out of the concent quickly, so we don’t bunch up at the Day Gate. The evacuation is under way. Look at your badges.”
I pulled mine out from under a fold of my bolt. It had come alive with a color map of my vicinity, just like the nav screen on a cartabla. My evacuation route was highlighted in purple. Superimposed over that was a cartoon rendering of a rucksack with a red flashing question mark.
The doyns took the momentous step of pushing their chairs back. They were looking at their badges, making remarks. Lio vaulted up onto the table and stamped his foot, very loud. They all looked up at him. “Stop talking,” he said.
“But—” said Lodoghir.
“Not a word. Act!” And Lio gave that command in a voice I’d never heard from him before—though I had once heard something like it in the streets of Mahsht. He’d been training his voice, as well as his body—learning Vale-lore tricks of how to use it as a weapon. I sidestepped past a stream of doyns who were headed the other way, shouldering their rucksacks. I entered the corridor, where mine was waiting. I hoisted it to one shoulder and looked at my badge again. The rucksack cartoon had disappeared. I strode out to the kitchen. Tris and Lio were helping Jules Verne Durand package what was left of his food into bags and baskets.
I walked out the back of Avrachon’s Dowment and into the midst of a total evacuation of the ancient concent of Tredegarh.
Thousands of feet above, aerocraft were landing on the tops of the Thousanders’ towers.
All of this business with the badges and the rucksacks had seemed insultingly simpleminded to me and many others I’d talked to—as if the Convox were a summer camp for five-year-olds. In the course of a fifteen-minute jog across Tredegarh, I came to appreciate it. There was no plan, no procedure, so simple that it could not get massively screwed up when thousands of persons tried to carry it out at the same time. Doing it in the dark squared the amount of chaos, doing it in a hurry cubed it. People who had mislaid their badges and their rucksacks were wandering around in more or less panic—but they gravitated to sound trucks announcing “Come to me if you have lost your badge or your rucksack!” Others twisted ankles, hyperventilated, even suffered from heart trouble—military medics pounced on these. Grandfraas and grandsuurs who failed to keep up found themselves being carried on fids’ backs. Running through the dark, mesmerized by their badges, people banged into one another in grand slapstick style, fell down, got bloody noses, argued as to whose fault it had been. I slowed to help a few victims, but the aid teams were astoundingly efficient—and quite rude about letting me know I should head for an exit rather than getting in their way. Ala had really put her stamp on this thing. As I gained confidence that the evacuation was basically working, I moved faster, and struck out across the giant page tree plantation, heavy with leaves that would never be harvested, toward a rugged gap that had been blasted through the ancient wall. The opening was choked with rubble. Lights shone through from extramuros, making the dusty air above the aperture glow blue-white, and casting long, flailing silhouettes behind the avout who were streaming through it, clambering over the rubble-pile, helped over tricky parts by soldiers who played flashlights over patches of rough footing and barked suggestions at any avout who stumbled or looked tentative. My badge told me to go through it, so I did, trying not to think about how many centuries the stones I trod had stood until tonight, the avout who’d cut them to shape and laid them in place.
Beyond the wall was a glacis, a belt of open territory that locals used as a park. This evening it had become a depot for military drummons: simple flatbeds whose backs had been covered by canvas awnings. At first I saw only the few that stood closest to the base of the rubble-pile, since these lay in the halo of light. But my badge was insisting that I penetrate the darkness beyond. When I did, I became aware that these drummons were scattered across what seemed like square miles of darkness. I heard their engines idling all around, and I saw cold light thrown off by glow buds, by the spheres of wandering avout, and by control panels reflecting in drivers’ eyes. The vehicles themselves were running dark.
Something overtook me, parted around me, and moved on. I felt rather than heard it. It was a squad of Valers, swathed in black bolts, running silently through the night.
I jogged on for some minutes, taking a winding route, since my badge kept trying to get me to walk through parked drummons. Another blown wall section, with its mountain of light, passed by on my right, and I saw yet another swinging into view around the curve of the wall. All of these gaps continued to spew avout, so I didn’t get the sense that I was late. Here and there I’d spy a lone fraa or suur, face illuminated by badge-light, approaching the open back of a drummon, eyes jumping between badge and vehicle, the face registering growing certainty: yes, this is the one. Hands reaching out of the dark to help them aboard, voices calling out to them in greeting. Everyone was strangely cheerful—not knowing what I and a few others now knew about what we were getting into.
Finally the purple line took me out beyond the last of the parked drummons. Only one vehicle remained that was large enough to carry a cell of any appreciable size: a coach, gaudy with phototypes of ecstatic gamblers. It must have been commandeered from a casino. I could not believe that this was my destination, but every time I tried to dodge around it, the purple line irritably re-vectored itself and told me to turn back around. So I approached the side door and gazed up the entry stair. A military driver was sitting there, lit by his jeejah. “Erasmas of Edhar?” he called out—apparently reading signals from my badge.
“Yes.”
“Welcome to Cell 317,” he said, and with a jerk of the head told me to come aboard. “Six down, five to go,” he muttered, as I lurched past him. “Put your pack on the seat next to you—quick on, quick off.”
The aisle of the coach and the undersurfaces of the luggage shelves were lined with strips that cast dim illumination on the seats and the people in them. It was sparsely occupied. Soldiers, talking on or busy with jeejahs, had claimed the first couple of rows. Officers, I thought. Then, after a few empty rows, I saw a face I recognized: Sammann, lit by his super-jeejah as usual. He glanced up and recognized me, but I didn’t see the old familiar grin on his face. Instead his eyes darted back for a moment.