Pathfinder (Pathfinder 1)

“For the good of the royal line,” said Param.

“In other words,” said Loaf, “she wanted to have his babies.”

They all had a good laugh at that.

They came to the Wall four days after leaving the farm instead of two, but that was no surprise, they’d been angling southeast, not east. They found the Wall, not with their eyes, but with their minds.

“You notice how we’ve turned south?” asked Loaf.

“Have we?” asked Olivenko.

Rigg and Umbo didn’t need to ask. “I know,” said Umbo. “The horse won’t go to the east at all anymore.”

“They sense it. The aversion,” said Loaf. “The wish not to go that way.”

Param shuddered. “I didn’t realize that that feeling was the Wall.”

“You just think of going that way, and it makes you a bit tetchy, right?” said Loaf.

“It would be like volunteering for a nightmare,” said Param.

“Very good,” said Loaf.

Olivenko handed the reins of the horse he’d been leading to Rigg. Then he strode out going due east, up a rise of ground. Soon he disappeared on the other side.

“He’ll be back,” said Loaf.

Sure enough, Olivenko reappeared farther south, walking resolutely, until he finally heard them calling him and saw them waving. He seemed genuinely astonished to see them and ran to them. “How did you do that?” he demanded. “How did you get ahead of me like that?”

They laughed, and Loaf explained. “It’s the Wall. It steers you clear. You just kept walking, fast and hard, right? Thought you could bull your way through. But the Wall bends you. Every step you shift direction a little more, bending farther, and then you’re heading away from the Wall. Thinking you’re still heading for it.”

“You didn’t move?” Only then did Olivenko seem to notice how the horses were pretty much where they had been when he left. “You just stood here waiting?”

“So the Wall tricks you into staying away?” asked Param.

“No,” said Loaf. “It fills you with terror and grief. Your brain can’t stand the idea of bearing it, not for a moment, and so you trick yourself into staying away.”

“I wanted to know what it felt like,” said Olivenko. “I didn’t really think I could get through.”

“You have to pick a landmark on the other side. And by ‘pick’ it, I mean write down what the landmark is and keep glancing down at the writing so you can remember it. You pick the landmark and you walk straight toward it, never taking your eyes off it for long. Then you’ll get close enough to really feel it.”

“I want to do it,

then,” said Olivenko. “So I’ll know.”

“You’ve never had a nightmare? Never woken up in a cold sweat, or crying?”

Olivenko shrugged a little. “You’re saying I already know?”

“I’m saying you don’t want to know. Because the closer you get, the more your mind starts coming up with reasons to be as terrified and devastated as you feel. You start hallucinating monsters or mutilations, or your family tortured or dead. And what you remember afterward, for the rest of your life, it’s the things your brain showed you to explain the grief and horror that you felt.”

“Then I wonder how anybody ever understood that it was the Wall, and not a haunted place,” said Olivenko, the scholar in him coming to the fore.

“Didn’t you experience the Wall when you went with Father Knosso?” asked Rigg.

Olivenko shook his head. “Your father made us stay well back. Still, I was near enough to see that the Wall is marked out with buoys. Has been for a thousand years. For fear of boats getting lost. You have a wind in the wrong direction, and sailors can get too close. They go mad. Everyone always knew a boat could get through the Wall—it was your father’s idea to make himself unconscious during the passage.”

“Wasn’t he afraid of dreaming? Nightmares as he crossed?”