Pathfinder (Pathfinder 1)

“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.”