Pathfinder (Pathfinder 1)

“We children did,” said Umbo. “We all called him that. But not in front of him, and not in front of you.”

“But the Golden Man is the Undying One,” said Rigg. “I think my father’s no longer eligible for the title.”

“He gave the jewels to you, and so they’re yours. Besides, what good would they do me and Loaf and Olivenko if we go into hiding? I think we found out just how much good selling one of them would do.” Then Umbo reached for the sheath at his waist that held the knife Rigg had stolen from the past.

“Keep that,” said Rigg. “It’s yours now.” When Umbo made as if to protest, Rigg added: “A gift.”

Param took a deep breath and said, “Rigg, I don’t understand why we have to divide. Umbo can take us into the past, all of us, all at once. He proved that the day he took us into Olivenko’s time.”

Rigg didn’t have to answer, because Umbo did. “It’s not the getting into the past that Rigg is worried about. It’s getting back to the present.”

“But you’ve done that again and again,” said Param. “The messages you sent to yourself, to Rigg, to Loaf.”

“It’s different when I just appear to somebody and talk. Part of me stays in the present, and only part of me goes back. Or I’m in both times at once. But when I go completely—like the time Loaf and I went back to take a single jewel from the stash near the Tower of O—when I brought us back to the present, we didn’t go all the way. We came back to a time a day before we actually reached O. More than a day before we stepped into the past.”

“But what’s a day? Who cares about a day?” asked Param.

“Begging your pardon, ma’am,” said Umbo. “We don’t know if it’s a day every time. It might be just a day. But it might be the same proportion. We went back six months, and I returned a little over a day early. A year might be two days off. A thousand years could be more than two thousand days. Eleven thousand years might be twenty-two thousand days. Almost fifty years.”

Param nodded. “But if we’re leaving this wallfold, will that matter?”

“What if we want to come back to this wallfold someday?” asked Rigg. “What if we find a way to break the power of General Citizen? Because I have a feeling that he and Mother are about to remind everybody why the People’s Revolution happened in the first place. What good can we do if we arrive thirty years before we were born?”

“Or three hundred years,” added Umbo, “because it might be random.”

“Or maybe,” said Rigg, “going so very far into the past, he couldn’t move forward again at all, and we’d be stuck there in a world before the human race ever arrived here. It’s an experiment we can’t afford to perform when everything’s at stake.”

“So I stay in the present,” said Umbo, “and send Rigg and Loaf and Olivenko into the past, before the Wall existed. Then they wait for us to pass through the Wall, using your power to be invisible. If we can.”

“What if we can’t? What if the Wall blocks us even in slow time?” asked Param.

“Then I come back across,” said Rigg, “and bring you over, too.”

“Leaving Umbo behind.”

“Without us around,” said Rigg, “Umbo won’t be in any particular danger.”

“What would they care about me?” asked Umbo. He sounded lighthearted, but there was an edge to his voice. It occurred to Rigg that it really bothered Umbo that he was nobody much, in the eyes of history.

“You’re right,” said Rigg. “Nobody cares about you—but that’s because they’re stupid. You’re the most powerful of us. You’re the one who actually travels in time. You’re the one who can change things. The only one.”

Rigg saw Param look again at Umbo. Perhaps it had never occurred to her—raised as she had been in a world where only the royals mattered—that Umbo was anything special. He was a peasant’s son from upriver. But he was also the world’s only time traveler. It wouldn’t hurt Param a bit to realize that nobility of birth meant nothing. It was only what you could do, and chose to do, that made you important or genuinely noble.

They walked only a little further, topping a rise, and Rigg saw that this was the right place. It was not ideal—there were outcroppings of rock, and places that had certainly been eroded by wind-borne sand. But it was a crown of a hill in a dry landscape; no rivers cut through their path. And there were paths of ancient animals crossing right through the Wall, their placement showing that the ground had not changed level very much at all.

“This will do,” said Rigg. “As Loaf said—if it works at all.”

They brought the horses to the very edge of the Wall’s influence and unloaded them. They began grazing on such scant food as they could find.

Rigg climbed up onto an outcropping of rock that gave him a view tha

t extended farther across the Wall. Umbo came up after him. Finally Rigg spotted the distant paths that told him just how far it would take to cross the Wall.

“It’s about a mile,” said Rigg. “Do you see that bent-over scrub oak, next to the spear of rock? When we reach that spot, you can bring us back to the present.”

“That’s more than a mile,” said Umbo.

“Probably,” said Rigg.