She found it and followed it until she was near the tower itself. Four horses and two pack animals were picketed among the trees. Two of the men were outside.
“There’s no sign of Jenger anywhere out there,” said one. “Me’n Gabler have been all over the place. His horse is gone and there’s nobody outside, alive or dead, not anywhere close, and there’s no birds circling to show where a body might be.”
His fellow nodded in agreement. “Well, one thing, he let all the birds go. There’s none here except tower birds. None for the House. None here for the queen. None for the duchess’s friend at the abbey. No sign of a prisoner. No sign anything happened to anybody, no blood, no nothing.”
“Why did she send us here anyhow?” the first speaker asked.
“To bring him back to the House. She says he’s been actin’ funny.”
“You think he’s tryin’ to disappear? People try to disappear, she finds them.”
The other man dropped his voice. “How does she do that?”
“Nobody knows, and I’m not gonna ask her.”
“She said bring him, bring anything that belonged to him. Clothes, that kind of stuff.”
The one who had searched the tower said, “I’ve got everything in a sack: his clothes, his comb and brush, his razor. She doesn’t want the food, does she?”
“She said everything! You better figure that means everything.”
Both men went inside. Precious Wind stayed where she was. In a few moments the two who had gone inside came out again with new burdens, there to be joined by two others, one from the privy, one who came from the forest beyond the stable. They conferred in low voices for a few moments, then, shaking their heads, they arranged the bags on the pack animals, mounted up, and rode slowly back along the track.
Precious Wind retrieved her horse and went back to the road, arriving in time to see them riding away northward on the Wilderbrook road. She counted the days. Day one, Xulai had disappeared. Early morning of day three, a message had arrived saying she had been rescued on day two. Day three, she herself had set out and had spent one night observing the abbey men who had come after her. Three days. The archers had arrived here on the afternoon of the fourth day. If Jenger had sent a message the minute he arrived here with Xulai, it would have been late that night or the morning of the next day before it was seen by the duchess. If the archers had set out at that moment, they still would not have had time to get there by road today. So, they came another way, or they had been dispatched earlier—or some combination of those factors. They had been sent because Jenger had been acting funny.
And how would the duchess have known that except by the mirror? Precious Wind knew how the special mirrors worked. They were made by a machine. Each of a pair of mirrors had a unique pattern based on the genetic codes of the two individuals. Tingawans knew about that. The two could speak to one another through the mirrors. In each case, what one reflected the other showed. When Jenger stood in front of one mirror, the other mirror looked out at the duchess. She saw him, he saw her. Yes. She had looked back at him, read his expression, seen what he was doing, how he was acting. He didn’t need to be looking at her at the time. He didn’t have the mechanism to start up the mirror; she did. She could look through and see him, if he were within sight of it, without his knowing it.
All it required was some cells from the body of each of them, plus the machines to prepare the glass, and the knowledge of how to use both. Pity she hadn’t kept the mirror. Perhaps she could have done something to send a false picture to the duchess since it no doubt reflected only to her. Best not! Too dangerous. What she had already done might well be sufficient.
“The mirrors utilize a power source. What passes between the mirrors are transient energies. They are not spirits or ghosts,” her Tingawan teacher had said. “They never were anyone themselves. They are neither good nor evil. They are merely little vortices that for a time have a separate existence. If exactly the same pattern exists in two different places, what happens to one set of energies will influence the other, regardless of the distance between.”
The lecture had not ended there. The teacher had gone on: “Using a similar technique, one set, while remaining complete, may have an additional pattern element included that changes or warps it so that it will eventually be unable to hold together. The warped element destroys the complete pattern, that is, the person from whom the pattern came.”
“You could kill someone with it?”
“Yes. If you knew how. If you had the pattern. If you had the machines. The augmented pattern would have to be held in a kind of suspended animation until it was released in close proximity to the target. It does not last long enough to seek its matching pattern over a great distance.”
That was how the princess had been killed. Before
