Pathfinder (Pathfinder 1)

“He thought of passing through the Wall in a boat.”

“Surely that’s been tried a thousand times—by accident, if no other way—as fishermen got carried off in a storm.”

“You know the Wall puts a madness on people who try to pass through. The nearer they get to the Wall, the madder, until they either flee from it screaming, or completely lose their minds and wander around in a stupor from which they never emerge. Fishermen who get swept through the Wall are almost certainly madmen when their boat reaches the other side—none have returned.”

“You shared my father Knosso’s interest?”

“Not at all,” said Mother. “But I loved him, and so I listened to all his theories and tried to serve him as I’m serving you now—by raising objections.”

“Then tell me how Father Knosso thought he might solve the problem?”

“His idea was to pass through the Wall unconscious,” said Mother. “There are herbs known to the surgeons. They create distillations and concentrations of them, and then inject them into their patients before cutting them. They can’t be aroused by any pain. And yet in a few hours they wake up, remembering nothing of the surgery.”

“I heard that such things were possible in the past,” said Rigg. “But I also heard that the secrets of those herbs had been lost.”

“Found again,” said Mother.

“In the Great Library?” asked Rigg.

“By your father Knosso,” said Mother. “You see, you weren’t the first royal to think of becoming a scholar.”

“Well, there it is!” cried Rigg. “Did they let Father Knosso have access to the library?”

“They did,” said Mother. “In person. He would walk there—it wasn’t far.”

“And now the surgeons of Aressa Sessamo—and the wallfold, too—I mean, the Republic—have benefitted!”

“Your father lay down in a boat, which was placed in a swift current that moved through the Wall in the north, far beyond the western coast. He injected himself with a dose that the surgeons agreed was right to keep a man of his weight deeply asleep for three hours. There were floats rigged on the boat so it couldn’t capsize, even if it ran into shore breakers before he could wake up. And he brought along more doses, so he could row himself to an inflowing current and repeat the process and return to us.”

“Did he make it through?” asked Rigg.

“Yes—though we have no way of knowing if he was made insane by the passage through the Wall. Because he died without waking.”

“And you know this because he never returned?”

“We know this because no sooner was he beyond the Wall on the far side than his boat sank into the water.”

“Sank!”

“Trusted scientists watched through spyglasses, though he was three miles away. The floats came off and drifted away. Then the boat simply sank straight down into the water. Knosso bobbed on the surface for a few moments, and then he, too, sank.”

“Why would a boat sink like that?” asked Rigg.

“There are those who say the boat was tampered with—that the floats were designed to come loose, and a hole was deliberately placed in the boat with a plug in it that was soluble in salt water.”

“So he was murdered,” said Rigg.

“There are those who say that,” said Mother. “But one of the scholars who was observing it—Tokwire the astronomer—was using a glass of his own making, which was filled with mirrors, so the other scholars did not trust his observations. But he swears it let him see the sinking of your father’s boat much more clearly than anyone else, and he says he saw hands rising up out of the water, first to tear the floats away, and then to pull straight down on the boat.”

“Hands? Human hands?”

“No one believed him. And he quickly dropped the matter, for fear that insisting on the point would ruin his reputation among scholars.”

“You believe him.”

“I believe we don’t know what’s on the other side of the Wall,” said Mother.

“You think there are people there who live in the water? Who can breathe underwater?” asked Rigg.