Pathspace: The Space of Paths (3 page)

While he waited, he amused himself by
watching the people in the inn, trying to divine the threads of
life that connected them to each other. The preacher in the
opposite corner he ignored as a known quantity. The girl sitting in
the center table was obvious enough. She must have gone to Denver
to seek work, perhaps as a seamstress, and found little to her
liking in the decaying metropolis. The oaf with her was as plain as
a book, although he doubted the fool had ever opened one. His
clothes spoke of local privilege, perhaps the son of a prosperous
farmer or merchant back from a carouse in Denver. The girl beside
him knew him from around here, that much was clear, as was the fact
that she didn't care for his company. But better the devil you
knew, eh? Xander guessed that the jerk had a local flame and was
hoping she might spot them and get jealous.

The front door opened and two more
young men sauntered in. Farm boys, by the look of them. No rooms
for them, then. He guessed there was no other convenient place for
them to get soused after a hot day in the fields. It was a small
town.

Was there someone here for him? He
trusted his instincts. A faint echo had led him to step off the
coach.

Remembering the coach and
all it signified, he grimaced. A school bus, drawn by a team of
horses! The days of the Texas oil barons were truly over. He
doubted anyone here had ever even
heard
of internal combustion.
I can't let it end like this.

Eventually the boy brought him a bowl
of stew. As before, he made no mention of payment. It was just as
well. He often forgot to bring money on these little excursions,
having no need for it back at the Governor's skyscraper. Lucky
someone here knew him.

There it was, that mental echo again.
Someone here was a possibility.

He took the included spoon and ate
sparingly, fishing out pieces of chicken and carrots. The meal was
adequate, if limited. But they didn't have the resources of Aria's
herb garden. He thought of the girl and wondered if she would ever
resign herself to filling her mother's boots. But someone had to do
it. One stray arrow had changed her life forever.

Once the big chunks were gone from the
bowl, he amused himself with a couple of bits of a cracker from an
inner pocket of his cloak. He dropped two bits onto the surface of
the liquid and reached out with his mind to weave the pathspace.
Soon they began orbiting in the bowl like little planets, in
concentric circles.. But that bored him, so he added another layer
to the trick, and sent them drifting round in opposite directions,
the inner one clockwise, the outer one counter to that.

He was so preoccupied with this that
he did not see the staring eyes. It wasn't until he heard the
little gasp that he realized his indiscretion.

“
How did you do that?”

He looked up and saw the
serving boy watching. His hair was fair, his eyes blue as a summer
sky. An observant lad. Well, well.
Rather
e
asily
, he projected at him, and was
rewarded with a blink. Aha! He looked around the room quickly, but
no one else had noticed.

“
That's pretty good ventriloquism,” the boy said, looking
interested. “We had an entertainer come through once but I didn't
get a chance to learn it.”

Alert, then, but ignorant. That could
be changed. Indeed it could. Things were looking up. This trip was
not a waste of time, after all.

“
I wasn't throwing my voice,” he told the boy, who looked to
be almost a man. “It was something else entirely.”

He could see he had the boy's
attention now, for sure.

“
The beer was cold,” he mused. “Almost frosty. Too cold for a
mere spring house. That means your inn still has a functioning
coldbox, doesn't it? And you're the one who fills and empties it,
aren't you?” He cast his eyes about and saw the empty fireplace.
“Is there an everflame, too? There is, isn't there? I
knew
I didn't smell any
woodsmoke.”

The boy shrugged. “So? The smith has
one too. What's that got to do with throwing your
voice?”

Of course he didn't know. How could
he? “Listen,” he said. “We might not have much time. Very soon some
men are going to come looking for me. Before that happens, I need
to tell you some things, things you probably don't know about
coldboxes and everflames.”

The lad frowned at that. “What's there
to know? They work or they don't.”

“
What you don't know,” said Xander, “is that they also work
on
you
. And
they've been working on you for years, I'll wager, else you
wouldn't have heard me, just now.” He pushed the bowl away from him
and interlaced his fingers on the tabletop. Ignored, the bits of
cracker continued round and round in the cooling surface of the
stew. “How long have you been working here?”

A shadow seemed to pass
over the boy's face, his features tightening as if an unpleasant
subject had come up. “I don't see as how that's any of your
business,” he said. “And you never answered
my
question. How did you stir the
bowl without touching it?”

He was about to answer that when
something he had been waiting for finally arrived: the sound of
hoofbeats. Drat! This discussion would have to wait. He drained the
cup quickly and turned. “Could you get me another beer? Explaining
is thirsty work.”

The boy shrugged and picked up the
tray. As he turned to head back to the kitchen, Xander grabbed his
staff where it leaned against the corner, then reached out again,
this time with his mind, and wrapped pathspace around him quickly
and thoroughly, enfolding himself in a private pocket of darkness
as the light flowed around him.

The boy was interested, but not yet
hooked. There was no way he was going to let the men take him back
before he'd gotten what he'd come looking for.

He was halfway to the kitchen when the
front door opened and the men came in. There were four of them, and
he would have known they were soldiers even without the dark blue
uniforms. For a second he stiffened, thinking they were an advance
scouting party from Texas, but then he saw the red C enclosing a
circle of yellow on the outside of their upper arms, and knew them
for Rado men.

One of them glanced at him. “Have you
seen an old man with a staff, dressed in gray?”

He turned to the corner, but the
stranger was no longer there, it seemed. “He was in here just a
minute ago. But I don't see him now.” He set the tray down on the
kitchen counter. “Who is he?”

The man didn't answer him, but turned
back to the others instead. “Jefferson, Morgan, you check the
rooms. We'll try the street.”

The two he indicated bounded up the
stairs like dogs after a rabbit. Lester watched them curiously,
then went back to the common room to collect dishes. He had nursed
the faint hope for the past hour that Burton would be on some trip
further south, but there was scant hope of that. Burton was
escorting Nellie out the front door, no doubt to prolong the
pleasure of her company walking her back to her mother's, when the
soldiers came back down the stairs.

They spared a moment to glance into
the common room again, then followed Burton and Nellie
outside.

“
Here,” said Preacher, waving for his attention. “Can I get a
refill?”

Lester nodded, collected
his empty bowl and headed back into the kitchen. Descending the
stairs to the basement again, he was reminded about what the old
man had said about the coldbox working. Working on
him
. He had never
thought about it in that way before. All a coldbox did was, well,
keep things cold. And he only reached into it for a second or two
to put things in or take them out again. But according to the old
man, it was affecting his hearing.

As he swung the lid up
again to pull out another bottle for Preacher, he realized that he
had never wondered about exactly
how
the box kept things cold. It
just did, was all. But how did it work? Ordinarily, cold things
always warmed up, and hot things cooled down, once you fetched them
from a coldbox or the stove..

He inspected it. It was just a wooden
box, after all, the wood now dried to a strength like iron the way
most wood did after a while. Thick wood, anyway. The coldbox was as
thick as the four fingers of his hand, though the lid was a trifle
thinner.

The outside of it was neither hot nor
cold. The metal hinges on the lid, of course, were cool to the
touch, but that was the way metal was, unless it was warmed by a
fire or the smith's forge. He thrust his hand back down into the
interior, disturbing the layer of fog that always appeared when it
was open. The air inside was as chilly as a breeze in January, and
the inside surface of the wood was also cold, which of course made
sense, because it was in contact with all that cold air. But what
made the air cold?

Frowning, he closed the lid and took
the bottle back up the stairs.

His mother was ladling out their
dinner when he passed through the kitchen. He watched her stroke
the tip of a finger around the edge of the everflame, turning down
the heat until the flame hovering in the air above the old bronze
disk was only a tiny red dot, barely visible under the stubby
tripod legs of the iron cauldron.

Satisfied, she replaced the cauldron's
lid and handed him his bowl. “We'll finish the rest for breakfast,”
she said.

He nodded agreement and
took Preacher's refill out to him and brought his coin back before
settling himself down at the table in the corner where the old man
had been. His mind couldn't stop thinking about what the stranger
had said about the coldbox working on him. Was the everflame
working
on Mary, too?
And now that he thought about it, how did the everflame work? He'd
always taken it and the coldbox for granted, he
realized.

“
You're a quiet one,” said the old man from the other side of
the table.

Lester nearly jumped out of his skin.
There he was, as if he never left. How did the guy move so
silently? “Where did you go? There were soldiers here looking for
you.”

The other just smiled. “I never left.”
He glanced as Lester's bowl. “You've barely touched your stew.
Better finish it before it goes cold on you.”

He grimaced at that, but the old man
was right. He picked up his spoon again.

“
Leave him alone and leg it while you can, Xander,” advised
Preacher from across the room. “You know they'll be back for
you.”

The old man's bushy eyebrows lowered.
“Mind your own business, Carl. I know what I'm about. Go drink
yourself to sleep like always.”

Preacher scowled at that but picked up
his Bible and stood to leave. As he trudged toward the door, no
doubt on his way back to the little chapel down the road, he paused
to give Lester a piece of advice. “Lie down with dogs, get up with
fleas,” he said. “I'd stay away from old Xander if I were you.
Otherwise, you'll be itchin and scratchin the rest of your
life.”

Lester watched him go as he finished
his bowl of stew. When the front door closed behind Preacher, he
turned back to the old man. “You two know each other?”

“
We've crossed paths. There's some wisdom in the Book he
carries, but he hasn't absorbed much of it.” Xander met his gaze.
“But he's right about one thing. They will be back for
me.”

“
Why do they want you?” Lester asked him, curious. “What did
you do?”

“
You've been thinking about what I said earlier about the
coldbox, haven't you?” said Xander, ignoring the
question.

Lester decided the man was used to
doing what suited him, and answering questions, apparently, didn't
always fall into that category. “A little,” he admitted. “What do
you know about them, coldboxes and everflames?”

“
Oh, I know a lot more than that,” said Xander, leaning his
chair back against the wall. “About the Tourists and what they did
to us with their Gifts from beyond the sky. About a lot of things
that aren't in the preacher's Book. Or in other books, come to
that.”

“
We've got a few books,” Lester said. “Sometimes travelers
barter them for few days of room and board. My Ma lets me keep them
in my room.”

“
You can read, can you? Precious things, books.”

“
Better than Gerrold can. There's not much else to do in
Winter, when the snows are deep and almost nobody travels. She
taught me. Gerrold thought it was a waste of time.”

Xander glanced toward the front door.
He appeared to be listening to it rather than Lester. “What kind of
books?”

“
Stories, mostly. Why
are
those soldiers looking for you?”