SIMURIA · SIX MONTHS AFTER LANDFALL
"I'd like to tell you something I have never had to say," Gin said, and he was not smiling. "I don't know what he is."
Aizen set down the slide and gave him the whole of his attention, which he did perhaps four times a year.
Outside the mountain it was still dark. The shelf country ran east under a sky with no colour in it yet, and every stone out there was singing.
"The one from the slope."
"The one from the slope." Gin folded himself into the chair across the bench, boneless, alien frost still going off his collar.
"I can see through a mountain if I care to, Aizen-san. I look at him and it comes back empty, like a bucket sent down a dry well."
The smile arrived, thin and not at all happy.
"It isn't that I read him wrong. There's no him to be wrong about."
"Empty. Not blocked."
"Empty. If he were hiding there'd be a shape where the hiding was, and I'd have that much. I can read the dust off his robe the instant it leaves him."
He shrugged.
"The one fact I got, I bought off a woman at a cistern. They call him Varek Sol Nayen."
For a moment Aizen said nothing.
"Sol means answered by none," he said. "It is not really a name. It is the empty space where a name goes. Somebody gave it to him when he was small, and he has carried it for forty years."
"The priests call him cursed. Every one of them."
Gin's eyes came open the width of a coin and shut again.
"And when one of the gods goes bad out on the salt pans, a Kalyan turned wrong down in the ground, they send a rider for him and pay him in salt."
Aizen opened the file. Two sentences, unchanged since landfall.
A robed figure at the foot of the eastern slope, looking at a place rather than at a thing. And a note that they would not go near him until Aizen had thought about him for a very long time.
Six months was not, by his own standards, a very long time. It would have to do.
He wanted to look at the man with his own eyes.
At the door Gin stopped with his hand on the frame and let the fox back into his face all at once.
"Aizen-san. When you say we don't touch him." A pause of exactly the right length. "Is that because we won't, or because we can't?"
"Ask me tomorrow evening," Aizen said.
* * *
They lay up before dawn in a fold of rock two kilometres above the settlement. The three barriers around them had taken Aizen eight minutes.
Below, the shelf was forty huts and one cracked cistern on dry rock, with no water within an hour's walk.
It was where the Deskunte, the tribe that ruled this world, sent everyone it had written off. Rumelians.
Aizen had come down with one question. Whether the man could be killed, and what the killing would cost.
Varek Sol Nayen came out of the third hut from the end at first light with a yoke on his shoulders.
The walk to water and back took two hours. He made it six times, and nobody came out to help him.
Aizen watched where the jars went. Not to all forty doors. To eleven, the ones with nobody in them who could make the walk.
Everything on the shelf was praying, the way a body breathes. The dog asleep in the road was praying, and so, faintly, was the road.
Aizen kept losing the man in the middle of it and finding him again with his eyes. So he tried the other thing.
He had never in either life needed to hunt for a person. To his eyes a living thing arrived with its whole time attached, past and future together, like a page already written.
His techniques were written onto that page. They could not touch what they had not first found.
The woman at the cistern ran back forty-one years and ran forward as far as the writing stayed legible. That told him where to put his hand, and nothing else about her at all.
He tried the boy chasing the dog, and then the dog. Both came with pages.
Then he tried the man with the yoke, and there was no page.
Not a page he could not read. Not a page torn out. No page.
After that he built a sphere, small as a marble, and did not throw it.
Chronostasis, the technique that stopped a man's time. Before it could stop anybody it had to be told whose time to stop, and it read that off the page.
The sphere went looking. It hung there, blue and patient and useless.
When he put it out he understood. He had written nothing on its surface, because there had been nothing to write.
He watched the rest of the morning with his eyes. He had not had to do that since he was a child in his grandfather's house.
At the well two households were arguing over an allotment, and had been for years. Varek set the yoke down between them and filled his jars. He took longer over it than the jars needed.
By the time he lifted the yoke again the argument had gone out, like a fire nobody was feeding.
On the way back a knot of children scattered from his shadow. All but one, a girl of perhaps four, who fell in behind him and talked the whole length of the settlement.
He said nothing, and did not send her away, and shortened his stride.
Her mother took her inside fast and without looking at him.
The riders came out of the east at noon, six of them and a Saddled. A Saddled was a man the gods could come down into and ride.
This one was young. The village went down on its knees before he had finished dismounting.
The grey-gold ore had come up through the skin of his cheek and throat, so that he glowed faintly even in daylight. When he spoke there were two voices in him. The second was not a person.
Varek did not kneel. He walked past the horses at the pace he had kept all morning, water swinging.
The young one did not care for that. He put his god into it properly.
The ground came up at Varek in a fist of grey-gold. It came apart six paces short of him.
All Varek had done was breathe out. No flash, no noise. The light in the ore just stopped meaning anything, the way a word said too many times stops meaning anything.
"I can't see him," Gin said at his shoulder, pleasantly. "I can see where things stop working, which is a different job, and I'd like that written in the file in those words."
He tilted his head.
"The lamps nearest his door go dull. The praying down that end goes thin. Nobody living there has ever noticed."
"So I walk the outside of it and mark where it starts, the way you find a buried magnet by watching which iron filings move. Thirty paces this morning. Fifty just now."
The smile came and did not stay.
"And I've no idea what that cost him. That's the part I mind."
The riders went on west. The young one's face was the colour of the sky. The older one was already wording his report.
Varek carried the water to the last of the eleven doors and set the yoke against the wall.
He unslung a staff from his back and stood it against the door frame. It was bone.
"Kalyan bone," Gin said, chin on his folded arms. "I can read it the moment it leaves his hand. Off something long dead, and the knife hilt at his hip is the same colour."
"Everything on this rock wants something, Aizen-san. The ore asks. The lamps ask. The priests ask in their sleep."
"Whatever he is, asking is the thing that dies around him. A dead god has finished asking. There's nothing left in that staff for him to refuse, so it stays a staff."
Below, the settlement lit its lamps and thanked a god for a day that had held nothing worth thanking anyone for.
The man who had carried their water sat down outside his own door and did not join in.
* * *
"You asked me a question last night," Aizen said.
"I did."
"Then hear the answer. I want a witness that I looked." Gin said nothing, which from him was a courtesy.
"I have no domain yet. So whatever I did to him, I would do out in the open, on a world where every stone is awake."
"And my technique is not a hammer, Gin. It is a schedule. I arrange the order in which things happen to a person."
"That man has no order to arrange. I cannot even find him to begin."
"There's the other way."
"There is. Something heavy dropped on him from outside those fifty paces, with nothing clever in it at all. A falling rock is not asking him for anything."
"I could put the side of this mountain on him, and it might simply work."
He watched the lamps below.
"And I would get one try. Neither of us heard him come to the slope. If he lived through the first attempt he would know at once who had made it."
"A second try is a war. A war this year costs me the year, the base, and the way home."
"Best case?"
"I win slowly, in the open, in front of a world that afterwards knows what I am and where I sleep. That is the good half of it."
"The bad half is the war. Put the two together and it comes out even, Gin. A coin. Maybe a little worse than a coin."
"So it's can't."
"Today it is can't." Aizen closed the file. "I do not flip coins. I make them land. There is nothing in that man to make land."
He stood, and did not walk away.
"This is the first thing in two lifetimes I have wanted and am not going to take. It costs me, and I would rather you heard me say so."
"A man who cannot say that sentence starts telling himself a story instead. The story always ends with him surprised."
* * *
Two kilometres below, Varek Sol Nayen came out with the yoke on his shoulders for the last trip of the day. He took four steps toward the well road and stopped.
He turned around.
He looked at the fold of rock. Not near it. At it.
Three barriers stood in the way, and a shoulder of stone, and two kilometres of failing light. The barriers hid by making the place inside them read as nothing whatsoever.
Nothing alive on this world could have found a seam in that.
Aizen became aware, with perfect clarity, that he had gone completely still.
The man held it. Ten seconds. Twenty.
He was not searching. He had already found the one place on the shelf where there was nothing, the way a man finds the single cold spot in a warm room.
What it meant to him, his face never said.
Then he picked up the yoke and went on down the road, unhurried. The water swung. He did not look back.
Aizen did not move until he was out of sight. It took some time.
"So what do I write in the file, Aizen-san?"
"Write that we did not touch him." Aizen watched the empty road a while longer.
"And write the date. I should like to know, afterwards, precisely when I began owing him."