Visitors (Pathfinder 3)

Param and Rigg waited outside the open door. They could see right through the large room to the door on the other side as it opened and light streamed in. There stood Mother, looking as she always had, and a step or two behind her, General Haddamander Citizen, a bit more posh than in his old People’s Army uniform.

Mother and Haddamander stepped into the room. “Please come in,” Mother said.

Param stepped forward, holding tightly to Rigg’s hand. If she had to slice time, she didn’t want to have to search for his hand before disappearing.

Mother and Haddamander walked to the center of the room. Mother held up a paper. “Here is our instrument of surrender. For all of us to sign.”

“Perhaps if we had a table, Mother,” said Param.

Haddamander turned and shouted toward the other door. “Bring in the table!”

“We wanted the room empty when you arrived,” said Mother. “So you’d see there was no trap.”

“Which means,” murmured Param, “that there’s a trap.” She spoke so softly that she couldn’t hear her own voice—but she knew that Rigg’s facemask would let him hear.

He squeezed her hand in reply.

A servant came into the room, carrying a very small table with only a single leg. He fitted it into a prepared notch in the floor.

Param wasn’t a genius of mechanical reasoning, but even she could see that the table would easily serve as a lever now, if there was some sort of control embedded in the floor. But could they really expect she and Rigg would fall for such an obvious device?

Well, yes, they could, because they were falling for it, not in ignorance, but with eyes wide open.

“What a clever little table,” said Param. “Mother, you planned for everything.”

“Come and sign, my dears. When the war is over, I hope we can sit and have a wonderful conversation.”

“That would be very nice, Mother,” said Rigg.

Param and Rigg now stood right up against the table.

Haddamander, reached across the small table, gripped the side nearest Rigg and Param, and pulled the whole thing toward himself.

There were sounds of shifting metal from the walls, the ceiling, the floor.

“Good-bye, Mother,” said Rigg.

Param took that as her cue, and began slicing time, not the way she used to, but so deeply that Mother and Haddamander were barely a blur as they threaded their way out of the room.

No one else came in. No one had to.

For the shifting metal had been a series of counterweights and controls. Thick slabs of metal rose up out of the floor and down from the ceilings. None were right where the table was—nothing would have struck their bodies immediately. But if Param were still slicing time the way she used to, she would have recoiled from this metal, because the pain of trying to pass through it would have been excruciating.

It was possible to thread their way out the way Mother and Haddamander had gone, but Param was quite sure there were archers ready to shoot them if they appeared through that door.

To go through any other door, however, would have forced them to pass through metal.

Even at this level of slicing, there was some heat from passing through the metal bars. But it was trivial—rather as passing through plaster walls had been, back in Flacommo’s house.

The only problem with slicing time at this pace was that their movement across the floor was maddeningly slow. Especially considering that only moments after Mother and Haddamander had left, the house caught fire.

The wood of the house must have been soaked in something highly inflammable. The fire seemed to start everywhere at once.

Param sliced time even more sharply.

The fire was out in only a few moments, though they felt the searing heat of it, like one blast of hot air from standing too close to a furnace.

The ceiling collapsed onto them—with all its metal bars and the heavy framework holding it together from the top. But slicing time this drastically, even the frame caused them little pain.