normal, the man simply disappeared without Rigg seeing whether he fell or somehow managed to clamber back up onto the rock, and Rigg’s fist struck only stone.
A moment later, Rigg heard a scream. It couldn’t be the boy-he would already have been so far down before the scream began that he could not have been heard where Rigg was, and the scream went on much too long. Yet it was not a man’s scream-the voice was too high.
So there was someone else on the shore, someone else who had seen the boy die. Someone who might help Rigg get himself back off this rock.
But of course no one could help him. It would be insane for anyone to try. It had been insane for Rigg to try to save the boy. For here he was, his body bridging two stones, barely out of the water himself, and if he even bent his knees he would be carried away by the torrent.
He inched backward, trying to get his knees back onto the rock where his toes were. Already his arms and shoulders were aching with the strain of holding himself like a bridge. And now, when he might have used the slowing of time to help him pay attention to even the slightest move he made, his fear gave him no more than the normal degree of heightened concentration.
Yet after a while his knees were on the hind rock, and he was able to rise up on his hands till he was as high as he could get above the water, and his fingers still had enough strength in them that he could shove himself up and back, and…
He shoved, rose up, and then teetered for a moment that felt like forever, unsure whether he had pushed too lightly and would fall forward again, or pushed too hard and would tumble off the back of the rock.
But he found his balance. He stood up.
A rock hit him in the shoulder just as he was standing up. For a moment he lost his balance, could have fallen, but he recovered and turned to see a boy of perhaps his own age, maybe older, standing on the first rock from the shore, where the dead boy had started his fatal journey, and he was preparing to hurl an even bigger rock.
It was not as if Rigg had anywhere to hide.
So he had no choice but to try to slap the rock away with his bare hands. Rigg quickly discovered that his own slapping motion caused him to lose his balance as surely as if the rock had hit him. Somehow, though, he managed to twist himself and turn his fall into a lunge that got him, barely, onto the next rock back from the falls.
“Stop it!” cried Rigg.
But the rock-throwing boy couldn’t hear him. Only the boy’s scream had been loud enough to be audible over the roaring of the water.
Now Rigg recognized him-this was Umbo, a village boy, son of the cobbler, who had been his best friend when they were both much younger, and Father had kept him longer in Fall Ford than in recent years.
Now Rigg realized why he had known the boy who fell-it was Umbo’s little brother, Kyokay, a daredevil of a boy who was always getting into trouble and always taking insane chances. The boy’s arm had been in splints, healing from a break, during the time Rigg and Umbo had been friends, but even then he would climb impossible trees and leap from high places onto rough ground, so that Umbo constantly had to go and stop him or rescue him or scream at him.
If I could have saved Kyokay, it would have been a gift to my friend Umbo. A continuation of the many times I helped Umbo save the boy back when he was even smaller.
So why is Umbo trying to kill me by throwing stones? Does he think I made Kyokay fall? I was trying to save him, you fool! If you were there on the bank, why did you let him go out on the rocks? No matter what you saw, why didn’t you try to find out what really happened before you passed a death sentence on me? “People are never fair, even when they try to be,” Father said more than once, “and few are the ones who try.”
Rigg made it back to the rock where he had been when he first saw Kyokay. If I had just stayed here, he thought, and let the boy take his chances and, of course, die, Kyokay would be no more dead than he is now, and I would have been so far from him that no one could possibly have blamed me for his death.
And I’d still have my furs, and therefore I’d be able to take money with me on my journey to wherever in the world my mother and sister might be.
Umbo was still throwing rocks, but few of them came close now, and with so much rock to stand on, Rigg could dodge those easily. Umbo was weeping now in his fury, but still Rigg could not hear his words, nor hope to be heard himself if he tried to answer. Rigg could think of no gesture that would say, “I did nothing wrong, I tried to save him.” To an angry, grieving boy like Umbo, a shrug would look like unconcern, not helplessness; a bow would look like sarcasm instead of respect for the dead.
So all Rigg could do was stand there, waiting until Umbo gave up. Finally he did, running from the water’s edge back into the woods.
Either he’s heading down Cliff Road to the village, where he’ll no doubt tell everybody whatever he believes happened here, or he’s lying in wait till I come closer.
Rigg hoped Umbo was waiting to ambush him. He was not afraid of fighting Umbo-Rigg was strong and agile from his life in the forest, and besides, Father had trained him to fight in ways that a cobbler’s son would never have learned to counter. Though if it came to driving tiny nails through thick leather, Umbo would no doubt prevail. Rigg only wanted to get close enough to explain what happened, even if they were fighting while he talked.
When Rigg got to the other side, Umbo was gone-Rigg could see his path, bright and clear and fresh in the air, heading right down the difficult part of Cliff Road.
Rigg would like to have taken a different way, in case Umbo set some trap for him, but there was no other way down the cliff, except of course the ever-present option of falling. That was half the reason for Fall Ford’s existence as a town, this road up the cliff. At the bottom it was a road, an ancient one, high-curbed and paved with large stones, switching back and forth up the steep slopes at the base of Upsheer.
But then the switchbacks got narrower, the ramping road gave way to a high-stepped path, and paving stones gave way to carved and weathered rock, with makeshift repairs or detours where some ancient calamity had torn away the original path. Still, it was just possible for someone to carry a burden in both hands up the road, and for a boy like Umbo, bounding down, energized with grief and rage, it would take very little time to reach the bottom.
If Rigg still had his huge bundle of pelts and skins, that would be a problem. Umbo would have plenty of time to get to the village and back again, no doubt with men who would believe his story and who, in their rage, might not listen to Rigg’s version of events.
As it was, if Rigg hurried, he would be at the bottom of Cliff Road and away before Umbo could get back. And unless he or someone else in the village had an ability like Rigg’s, there would be no tracking him. An expert tracker was hard to track, Father had told him, since he knew what signs a fugitive shouldn’t make in the first place.
Father! Rigg felt another pang of grief, as fresh as the first, and tears came into his eyes. How can I live without you? Why couldn’t you hear the groaning of the wood and get out of the way before the tree fell on you? Always so quick, always so perceptive-it’s almost unbelievable that you could ever be so careless.
And I still need you. Who will explain to me what caused time to slow, caused all those people from the past to appear, caused that man to block my way so the boy died?
Tear-filled eyes don’t find a good path. So Rigg stemmed his grief, cleared his eyes, and continued through the woods, looking for the back way to get to Nox’s rooming house.
CHAPTER 3
Nox’s Wall What training could they have given Ram Odin that would help him when the seven years of tedium ended and it was time for his decision?
The ship’s computer already knew the entire procedure for the fold. The process was far too complicated for a mere pilot to be able to take part in it. Ram’s job was to read and hear the reports of the computers, and then decide whether to go ahead.
But the decision was not an easy or an empty one. As the ship began its strangely twisted acceleration into the fold, data would be generated on a vast scale. The computers would begin their reduplicated analyses and fuzzy
