Rigg kept his eyes open only so he could find where the paths went in relation to the building. He could sense all the paths, no matter how many walls rose up between. The outside walls of the house were clear—for six hundred years at least, there had been no passage that crossed those barriers.
Rigg had many things to learn, but he attached first importance to the path of the person who had placed the half-dozen akses in a flimsy cage under the bed he was supposed to have slept in. Without quite knowing how he distinguished them, Rigg had learned when very young how to identify a particular person’s path and recognize it when he saw it again in another place. The older the path, the harder it was to do this, as if they lost detail and resolution with age—though Rigg could not have described exactly what the details were that he recognized. He simply knew.
The would-be assassin had come in through the servants’ door in the alleyway, and from the way his path moved—smoothly, until, inside the large pantry, it lurched upward and then down—he concluded that he had come into the house inside something, most likely a barrel. He had emerged last night at the same time Rigg arrived inside the courtyard in a sedan chair; that’s when the akses had been placed.
What Rigg needed to see was whether the assassin had had any contact with anyone in the household. He also had to know whether he had used any of the secret passages. No, to both questions. The assassin had moved unerringly and without encountering anyone else or even pausing to hide somewhere, straight to Rigg’s designated room.
But he did not go back to the pantry. Instead he went up onto the roof by way of the steep ladderway used by the workmen who fixed leaks, removed the nests of birds and wasps, and washed the skylights and the windows in the attic cupolas. There he had been until the exact moment Erbald had walked Rigg to the gate—for Rigg had also learned to discern the relative ages of paths, to a high degree of precision with very recent ones.
At that point, the assassin had emerged onto the roof, scooted over the top of it, and down into the next-door neighbor’s courtyard. No one had been awake in that house, and though it was almost as fine a house as Flacommo’s, it had no need for a guard beyond the sleepy old man who was apparently dozing at his post—for the assassin passed right by him, vaulted the gate, and went into the street without the old man waking.
The assassin had moved with the confidence of someone who had been in the house before and knew his way, so Rigg began looking deeper and deeper into the past, finding older and older paths. In a way his eyes could never have done, it was as if only the paths of the age he was looking for were visible, while the newer and older ones attenuated until he shifted his attention to yet another set. It was time-consuming work, and required iron self-discipline, like forcing himself to read fine print in a dim light and refusing to give up just because the letters were hard to focus on. But he had trained himself to peel away each layer, examine it thoroughly and methodically throughout the entire house, then start with the next layer back, and so on.
The assassin might have been sent to scout the layout of the house only in the days since General Citizen’s report arrived, or he might have come the moment the first rumors of Rigg’s existence reached Aressa Sessamo nearly two months ago. Or the assassin might have learned the house before the royal family ever moved into it, in the expectation that at some point his services were bound to be needed. If his previous visit was that old, Rigg was unlikely to be able to find it—a slow, methodical search would take months to get back that far, and a quicker, skimming search would be likely to miss a single visit.
Realizing this, Rigg chose a different strategy. Instead of searching the whole house, he searched only at the gate. On his first visit, the assassin would surely have entered on some legitimate pretext; he would be someone with a cover story so bland as to make him forgettable. If he hadn’t come through the gate, he would have come through the servants’ door; if Rigg didn’t find him in a thorough search at the one place, he’d search again at the other.
Found. The assassin had come through the gate, and it had been only a month ago. Before General Citizen’s messenger could have made it here, but not before a different messenger might have come, from some spy in O who might have investigated Rigg before Citizen even arrived.
Still, it was something of a relief to know that whoever sent the assassin was not someone who depended on General Citizen to inform them. Rigg had come to rather like, or at least respect, General Citizen, and he didn’t want him to be the type of man who resorted to assassination.
Who ushered the assassin into the house on his first visit? The normal servants who greeted everyone, and then Flacommo himself—but that meant nothing except that the party was of some lofty social standing. Most of the party went on with Flacommo to meet with Mother in a room just off the garden where her paths showed she spent most of her waking hours. But the assassin was left behind.
That suggested that he was posing as a servant,
and his master had dismissed him. The assassin prowled the bedroom level of the house, exploring every room. No one challenged him, though he took at least an hour doing it.
Then he went straight to the room where the rest of his party was conversing with Mother, and the whole group left almost at once.
If only he had Umbo with him! Then he could slow down the paths to see whether Mother knew about the plan to assassinate Rigg when he showed up there.
This much was certain: Mother spent an hour talking with the people who brought the assassin along with them.
But there was no indication whether the rest of the party knew the assassin’s real mission, still less whether Mother knew about it. And just because Flacommo never encountered the assassin on either of his visits to the house said nothing about what he knew, or what the Revolutionary Council knew. Rigg’s gift told him many things that no one else could know—but it did not tell him a tenth as much as would have been useful to him.
Someone was in the garden with him.
He could see the path, and it was new—it was being created even as he watched. But it moved incredibly slowly, and faded more quickly than usual, and when he looked with his eyes, there was no one there.
There were folktales about invisible people, about saints who had the power to walk through a crowd unseen, or people who had offended a wizard and been turned invisible so they were always alone. But he had never believed them for a moment. Since Father had explained to him how vision worked—the photons of different wavelengths variously reflected or absorbed, and the retina of the eye detecting them—it seemed impossible to Rigg that someone might be able to make it so every atom of his body became transparent to photons.
But hadn’t Father said, “Only a fool says ‘impossible,’ the wise man says, ‘unlikely.’” That had become a joke between them for several months—instead of “no,” they told each other “unlikely.” Now it occurred to Rigg that Father might have had a specific example in mind when they were discussing whether invisibility was impossible or not.
Stubbornly, Rigg decided he would not yet believe in a human being transparent to photons. There must be some other explanation, and he closed his eyes and studied the slowly moving path for some kind of clue.
There was the fact that it was moving more slowly than any human being could possibly move. More important, though, was the fact that the path faded far too abruptly. The beginning of the stranger’s path into the garden was actually earlier than Rigg’s own path as he came in.
And at the head of the path, right where the person should be visible, but wasn’t, the path flickered.
Not blinking on and off, but the color of it—or flavor, or whatever sense you might want to use as a metaphor—seemed to be changing slightly in abrupt shifts.
Rigg opened his eyes again. If this was another assassin, Rigg would certainly have no problem getting away from him, his progress was so slow. Then again, he might move slowly when invisible, then turn visible and leap upon Rigg like a stooping hawk.
Still, Rigg had to learn more. So he stood up, walked directly to the head of the slow path and blocked it.
It took a few moments but the path stopped moving, and then began moving backward. But in that moment of hesitation, when the invisible one did not move forward or back, his shape became faintly visible to Rigg’s eyes. Not enough that Rigg could see him clearly, but he knew where the eyes were, could see the height. He could see the outline of the clothing and the hair, telling him that this was a woman. And in the eyes, he caught a glimpse of—what, fear? Startlement?
Rigg knew that he had revealed to the invisible person that her invisibility was not complete. But he had also learned that when the invisible person ceased moving, she became somewhat visible again.