Pathfinder (Pathfinder 1)

They had come downriver carried by a boat. At every second between Leaky’s Landing and O, they still existed, somewhere in the world—on the boat. For the knife and the jewel, though, there was no boat. No river. The movement was instantaneous. And Umbo didn’t want to think about it anymore. Mostly because Loaf looked so smug, for having made him think of a problem that kept him silent.

That, too, was a kind of game, wasn’t it? And Loaf had won it.

They didn’t try to board an upbound boat in O, in case someone there recognized them, realized they must have escaped, and took them back into custody, jewels and all. Instead they went back downriver to a small ferry, crossed to the other side, and then caught an upriver boat.

They didn’t take the first one that passed, or even the first one that came close to shore and somebody called out if they wanted passage. Umbo didn’t understand why none of these boats was good enough, until Loaf called out to one boat—it wasn’t even coming to shore—by shouting the name of the pilot. “Rubal!” he cried, and then again, louder. Then Loaf waded out from the shore and waved and shouted “Rubal” again until finally the pilot heard him, or saw him.

“Loaf, you old poacher!”

“I didn’t poach, she just liked me better!” Loaf called back. But under his breath, to Umbo, he said, “I really did poach his girlfriend, but we were soldiers then, almost children. I’d never do it now.”

“Good thing,” said Umbo, “or Leaky’d kill you.”

“True. She might kill me for bringing Rubal back to our inn—I’ll have to put him up for the night, it’s only fair.”

“What’s wrong with him?”

“He can’t stop gambling at stones, and he cheats all the time. He’s pretty good at it but not good enough that a sharp player won’t spot him doing it.”

“You a sharp player?”

“No,” said Loaf. “But I had to kill a sharp player once to save Rubal’s neck.”

“So he owes you this passage.”

“We’ve saved each other’s necks about twenty times. He’ll do it as a favor, not as a debt.”

“How did you know he was coming?”

“I didn’t know it would be Rubal. I knew that soon enough there’d be somebody I knew well enough to trust he wouldn’t rob us and float our bodies downstream. I live and work on the river, Umbo. There’s only so many boats and only so many pilots, and after a while you get to know a lot of them.”

The passage upriver was uneventful. They stopped here and there. Loaf introduced himself to other innkeepers. They always got along cheerfully, because there was no competition between them. Rivermen stopped at the nearest inn when darkness approached; it was not as if they would continue upriver in the dark to stop at a favorite place. So unless your beds were so bugridden or your food so rancid that rivermen went out of their way to avoid it, the money was there to be made for all of them, but with steadily diminishing trade the farther upriver you went.

Loaf joined in with the poling and rowing from time to time—his muscles weren’t shaped to the work, but he was strong and learned quickly enough. Umbo, though, was so little that when he offered to help they only laughed at him. “Besides,” murmured Loaf to him, “you have other work to do. Inside your head.”

Thus Umbo spent hour after hour lying in the shade of a sail, when the wind helped them upriver, or a tarpaulin, when it didn’t. It was an easy thing to speed up the perceptions of the crewmen, so that they were more alert and had plenty of time to deal with obstructions or possible collisions on the river. None of them suspected they had had any help from Umbo, except Loaf himself, who squinted and glared at Umbo the few times he did it. Now that he was trying to study what he was doing—something he hadn’t done since Wandering Man stopped his lessons—he realized some useful facts.

First, the speeding up lasted for several minutes after Umbo stopped imposing it on the other person.

Second, it worked rather like the quick rush of energy that came when you were in danger—only it didn’t cause the racing heartbeat, the panting for breath, and the sheer terror that usually caused such intense concentration and speeded-up perceptions. Umbo’s gift to them was really a kind of panic without the fear.

So to cause himself to have the effect, he tried for a while to make himself afraid, in order to speed himself up. It didn’t work. For one thing, he didn’t really believe it. For another, it simply wasn’t the same thing at all, so fear had no effect.

If he had had a mirror he might have tried looking in it in order to cast the spell on himself, but the more he thought of that, the more ridiculous it seemed. He knew that mirrors worked by reflecting light—but there was no reason to think it would reflect whatever power it was that he wielded.

He tried looking at his hands or feet, the way he looked at the person he was targeting, but again, there was no effect that he could discern—no quickening, no perceived slowing down of the world around him.

Finally, he gave up in despair and just lay there in the shade, letting the boat surge upstream with each call of “Pole!” or “Stick!” then slacken as half the poles were reset at a time. It was almost smooth, but not quite, and lying there on the deck he could feel each surge, each slackening. He concentrated intensely on it, and it seemed to him that they were slowing down, the calls coming more slowly, each surge lasting longer, each slackening more sharp.

Then he fell asleep.

And when he woke up—nudged awake by a boatman’s toe, with a muttered, “Supper, lad”—he had almost forgotten that feeling just before he slept, of everything moving slowly, and even when he remembered it he did so only to think, I wonder if that’s how it feels to be under the time-slowing spell.

“Fool,” he whispered.

“What?” asked the riverman nearest him. They were pulled up along shore for the noon meal and a bit of a rest, so no one was at the poles right now.

“Myself,” said Umbo. “I called myself a fool.”