“Waking nightmares,” Rolls said, opening his eyes and looking without expression at his smaller companion. “Yes, you might very well be right.”
“But I would rather,” Fortin continued, picking his words with the care of a climber negotiating a cliff face, “that my visit to Ruby didn’t come to North’s attention. My father doesn’t—”
A look of fury momentarily transfigured Fortin’s face, though his features were no less perfect for the purity of the emotion they displayed. “My father doesn’t trust me.”
Rolls laughed, an easy, deep-throated sound. “Nobody trusts you, Fortin,” he said.
The anger left Fortin’s visage, leaving behind a coldness like the blue heart of a glacier. “Because my mother was an android,” he said.
“Because you’re Fortin,” Rolls said, still smiling. He’d never been a good liar, and acceding to godlike powers had leached away even the impulse to say less than the absolute truth as he saw it.
And Rolls saw very clearly indeed.
“Maybe it’s in the genes,” he added, his expression untroubled by Fortin’s wintry glare. “After all, Fortin, nobody really trusts North, either.”
Fortin turned away. He drew in a deep breath and pretended to look for another chip of stone to throw.
“I can’t prevent North from seeing whatever he chooses to see,” Rolls said. “But he observes for reasons . . . and I observe because it’s my life.”
For a moment, a look as bleak as a snowfield wavered across Rolls’ soft, handsome features.
“I won’t be the one to inform your father that you’re visiting Ruby,” he said.
Below and beyond them, scouts rejoined the army. A trumpet call quavered through the discontinuity and the wind skirling past the crag.
“All right,” Fortin said. His voice and visage were carelessly without expression again. “If you can occupy Penny outside her room—and without her necklace—for half an hour, say—”
Rolls chuckled again. “That should be possible,” he agreed.
“—then I’ll see about `borrowing’ it for you.”
There were two armies visible now. To the men on the crag, they seemed to be fighting as though mirrored in the flat surface of a pond.
Chapter Seven
Hansen felt the shock of landing before he knew he was alive. The ground was solid enough to knock his breath away.
He could see again. He still existed—or existed again.
Hansen hadn’t fallen far. In fact, he’d just gotten his feet tangled during the moment—or however long; maybe he didn’t want to think about that—during which Diamond forced itself through the space of Hansen’s being. The sun here was a little past midpoint.
He was on a forty-meter bluff, overlooking a considerable floodplain forested with scrub conifers as well as willows. The river which had carved the bluff was now an occasional glint through the trees a kilometer away. On the far horizon was a conical mountain from which trailed wisps of yellow vapor.
There was snow on the leaf mould and in the creviced bark of the trees around Hansen, but the air didn’t seem particularly cold. A fieldmouse gnawed audibly nearby, rotating a pinecone with tiny forepaws to bring hidden seeds in range of the glittering incisors.
Hansen wasn’t on Diamond. He could be quite sure of that, because riders carrying lances and crossbows were picking their way from left to right through the trees below.
A trumpet called from nearby to the right. A living creature out of sight on the left answered the horn with its own louder, angry echo. Two of the riders turned their shaggy, big-headed ponies and trotted back the way they’d come. Their fellows, perhaps a dozen of them, checked their weapons and resumed their careful progress through the trees.
Hansen looked at his laser ring. The stone remained as dull as it had been on Diamond, and even the metal had the false sheen of plastic.
The band crumbled as he tried to work the ring off his finger. He dropped the bits on the snowy ground in disgust.
One of the horsemen below took a curved trumpet from beneath his fur jacket, set it to his lips, and blew a three-note call.
Hansen sighed. He wasn’t trained to survive alone in the woods. The sooner he brought himself to the attention of the men below, the better . . . though of course, `better’ might amount to a swift death instead of a slow surrender to cold and hunger.