Not known means not caught, if they weren’t taken in the moment of the crime, because the rivermen could be many leagues away by morning-or merely asleep on their boat, and their fellows reluctant to admit it or let a stranger go on board to search.
Father had warned Rigg how the rules changed when you traveled far, and he always warned that the bigger the city, the lower the level of civilization, which had seemed to make no sense to Rigg until now. Because the rules of civilization might be obeyed by however so many people you choose, it only took a few who despised those rules and you’d be in danger. “The worst of predators is man,” Father had said, “because he kills what he does not need.”
“Like us,” Rigg had said. “We leave the meat behind, most of the time.”
“The meat feeds the forest scavengers,” Father had answered, “and we need the pelts.”
“I’m just agreeing with you. We kill like men,” Rigg had said, and Father had replied in a surly voice, “Speak for yourself, boy.”
Now Rigg was seeing it for himself. “Seems to me,” said Rigg, “the baker who cheated us harmed us more than anyone here.”
“That’s because you haven’t left my tavern yet. They wouldn’t dare attack you in here, but I can promise you’ll have many companions joining up with you the moment you leave the place, and you’ll be lucky if they only turn you upside down to shake out the coins and leave you with your skin and bones unbroken.”
“How does anyone get through here alive?” murmured Umbo.
The taverner turned sharply, his hand flashed out, and this time his hand was not so gentle resting on a boy’s head. “To get through here safe, two boys wouldn’t be traveling alone-they’d have adults with them. They wouldn’t be barefoot, and dressed in oafish privick homespun. They wouldn’t come any nearer the river than the road out there, and that in daylight only. They’d never enter a riverside tavern. They’d never spread coins across the bar or take out more than was needful. And if they break all these rules, they still survive if they happen to run into me on a day when I feel particularly magnanimous. Now, the supper rush is about to begin, and then it’s a night of drinking and whoring for rough men whose money I mean to have, with a minimum of breakage. You’re going to stay in this room.”
“In here?” asked Rigg. “What do we do in here?”
“One of you lies on the table, the other underneath it, and you sleep if you can, but you don’t sing, you don’t talk loudly, you don’t show your face at the window, and you don’t-”
“What window?” asked Umbo.
“If you can’t find the window, I guess you can’t show your face at it, so you’ll actually obey me,” said the taverner. “The last thing is, when I lock the door from the outside, you don’t panic, you don’t start thinking I’m making you my prisoner, you don’t scream for help, and you don’t try to escape.”
“Isn’t that exactly what you’d say if you were holding us for ransom?”
“Yes,” said the taverner. “But who’d pay?” He walked to the door, closed it behind him, and they heard the chunk of the lock as he turned the key.
Immediately Rigg was on his feet, scanning high along the walls.
“Looking for the window?” asked Umbo.
“Found it,” said Rigg. He pointed up, high on the wall above the door. It might be facing toward the inside of the tavern, but what was coming through the slats of an old shutterblind was daylight.
“How did you know it wasn’t on the outside wall?” asked Umbo.
“I can see the paths of the builders. Few others have climbed that high on the walls, but now and then someone does, and that’s where they went.”
“It occurs to me,” said Umbo, “that your little talent with pathfinding only works to see what people did, not to help us with what they’re about to do.”
“True enough,” said Rigg. “But what’s your little talent good for, either, when it comes to defending ourselves?”
“I slow down time,” said Umbo.
“I wish,” said Rigg. “That would be useful.”
“I think I know what I do!” said Umbo.
“I’ve been thinking about it,” said Rigg. “You weren’t slowing down time for me-I walked at the same speed as the man I saw.”
“And picked his pocket-”
“Do you want me to find him and put it back?”
“If I don’t slow down time, what is it I’m doing when I make it so you can see paths turn into people?”
“You speed up my mind.”
Umbo threw his hands in the air and sat down. “Speed you up, slow down time, it’s the same thing. I already said so from the start.”
“You’ve lived with it all your life, Umbo, you decided what you thought it was when you were little, and you’ve never had a need to change your mind. But think about it. When you slowed me down, and I walked along with other people, what did it look like to you? You could still see me, couldn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Did I walk slower? Or faster?”
Umbo shrugged off the proof. “Then what am I doing? Because I’m sure doing something if you can see people that you never ever saw before I did it.”
“You’re speeding up my brain. The speed at which I see things, and notice them, and think about them. All those people who left those paths behind them, they’re always there, but only when my brain starts seeing and thinking faster can I actually see them. And only when I really concentrate on one person can I touch him and take things from him and pry up his miserable fingers to try to get to Kyokay.” Saying that, Rigg felt the grief of it rise inside him again, and he stopped talking.
Umbo closed his eyes and thought for a while. Finally: “So I make you smarter?”
“I wish,” said Rigg. “But I can see things that I couldn’t see before, and touch things I couldn’t touch.”
Umbo nodded. “I always thought of it as slowing down time, because when I first started doing it around other people, they’d say things like, ‘Everything slowed down’ or ‘the whole world started going slower.’ They didn’t know I was doing it, they thought it was something that just… happened. And that’s how it seemed to me, too. And then your father heard my mother talking about a time like that, and he looked at me and somehow he knew that I had done it. That’s when he took me aside and started helping me learn how to control it. To be able to affect only one person. Myself or somebody else. Whoever I chose.”
“At the falls, you were aiming at Kyokay, and you got me, too, by accident.”
“I didn’t say I got to be perfect at it. You and Kyokay were kind of far, and I was climbing up the cliff, and I couldn’t even see you most of the time.” Umbo leaned his elbows on the table and hid his face in his hands. “But what good is it, anyway, whatever it is we do. If you can only see the past and I can only make other people think faster, then what can we even do with it?”
“I got a knife.”
“A nice sharp one,” said Umbo, holding up the palm he had cut with it, now mostly healed, though the scar was red. “Can you fight one of these rivermen with it? What about three of them?”
“If you really could speed me up,” said Rigg, “I could run around so fast they wouldn’t see me, and I could kill six of them before they knew what was happening.”
“Wouldn’t that be nice,” said Umbo. “Meanwhile, they’re beating me up because I’m just sitting there, so as soon as one of them hits me, I stop speeding you up, so then they catch you.”
“Well, it’s a good thing we can’t do it, then, isn’t it?”
Through the walls Rigg could hear the noise from the common room of the tavern. Nothing angry-sounding, but lots of talking. Shouting, really. When he could make out words, they were cheerful enough. Even horrible curses sounded like joking between friends.
“Wouldn’t it be nice if he brought us food?” said Umbo.
“Suppose somebody beats us up. But doesn’t kill us,” said Rigg.
“Let’s hope for that.”
“But then later, we go back to the place and I find the path they took to get to us. You slow down time-”
“I thought you said that wasn’t what I-”
