“Lies!” I bellowed. “Lies!”
Gormon laughed. And drew his hand from the Mouth of Truth, intact, unharmed.
6
Numb with confusion, I fled with my cart of instruments from that gleaming sphere and emerged into a street suddenly cold and dark. Night had come with winter’s swiftness; it was almost the ninth hour, and almost the time for me to Watch once more.
Gormon’s mockery thundered in my brain. He had arranged everything: he had maneuvered us in to the Mouth of Truth; he had wrung a confession of lost faith from me and a confession of a different sort from Avluela; he had mercilessly volunteered information he need not have revealed, spoken words calculated to split me to the core.
Was the Mouth of Truth a fraud? Could Gormon lie and emerge unscathed?
Never since I first took up my tasks had I Watched at anything but my appointed hours. This was a time of crumbling realities; I could not wait for the ninth hour to come round; crouching in the windy street, I opened my cart, readied my equipment, and sank like a diver into Watchfulness.
My amplified consciousness roared toward the stars.
Godlike I roamed infinity. I felt the rush of the solar wind, but I was no Flier to be hurled to destruction by that pressure, and I soared past it, beyond the reach of those angry particles of light, into the blackness at the edge of the sun’s dominion. Down upon me there beat a different pressure.
Starships coming near.
Not the tourist lines bringing sightseers to gape at our diminished world. Not the registered mercantile transport vessels, nor the scoopships that collect the interstellar vapors, nor the resort craft on their hyperbolic orbits.
These were military craft, dark, alien, menacing. I could not tell their number; I knew only that they sped Earthward at many lights, nudging a cone of deflected energies before them; and it was that cone that I had sensed, that I had felt also the night before, booming into my mind through my instruments, engulfing me like a cube of crystal through which stress patterns play and shine.
All my life I had watched for this.
I had been trained to sense it. I had prayed that I never would sense it, and then in my emptiness I had prayed that I would sense it, and then I had ceased to believe in it. And then by grace of the Changeling Gormon, I had sensed it after all, Watching ahead of my hour, crouching in a cold Roumish street just outside the Mouth of Truth.
In his training, a Watcher is instructed to break from his Watchfulness as soon as his observations are confirmed by a careful check, so that he can sound the alarm. Obediently I made my check by shifting from one channel to another to another, triangulating and still picking up that foreboding sensation of titanic force rushing upon Earth at unimaginable speed.
Either I was deceived, or the invasion was come. But I could not shake from my trance to give the alarm.
Lingeringly, lovingly, I drank in the sensory data for what seemed like hours. I fondled my equipment; I drained from it the total affirmation of faith that my readings gave me. Dimly I warned myself that I was wasting vital time, that it was my duty to leave this lewd caressing of destiny to summon the Defenders.
And at last I burst free of Watchfulness and returned to the world I was guarding.
Avluela was beside me; she was dazed, terrified, her knuckles to her teeth, her eyes blank.
“Watcher! Watcher, do you hear me? What’s happening? What’s going to happen?”
“The invasion,” I said. “How long was I under?”
“About half a minute. I don’t know. Your eyes were closed. I thought you were dead.”
“Gormon was speaking the truth! The invasion is almost here. Where is he? Where did he go?”
“He vanished as we came away from that place with the Mouth,” Avluela whispered. “Watcher, I’m frightened. I feel everything collapsing. I have to fly—I can’t stay down here now!”
“Wait,” I said, clutching at her and missing her arm. “Don’t go now. First I have to give the alarm, and then—”
But she was already stripping off her clothing. Bare to the waist, her pale body gleamed in the evening light, while about us people were rushing to and fro in ignorance of all that was about to occur. I wanted to keep Avluela beside me, but I could delay no longer in giving the alarm, and I turned away from her, back to my cart.
As though caught up in a dream born of overripe longings I reached for the node that I had never used, the one that would send forth a planetwide alert to the Defenders.
Had the alarm already been given? Had some other Watcher sensed what I had sensed, and, less paralyzed by bewilderment and doubt, performed a Watcher’s final task?
No. No. For then I would be hearing the sirens’ shriek reverberating from the orbiting loudspeakers above the city.
I touched the node. From the corner of my eye I saw Avluela, free of her encumbrances now, kneeling to say her words, filling her tender wings with strength. In a moment she would be in the air, beyond my grasp.
With a single swift tug I activated the alarm.
In that instant I became aware of a burly figure striding toward us. Gormon, I thought; and as I rose from my equipment I reached out to him; I wanted to seize him and hold him fast. But he who approached was not Gormon but some officious dough-faced Servitor who said to Avluela, “Go easy, Flier, let your wings drop. The Prince of Roum sends me to bring you to his presence.”
He grappled with her. Her little breasts heaved; her eyes flashed anger at him.
“Let go of me! I’m going to fly!”
“The Prince of Roum summons you,” the Servitor said, enclosing her in his heavy arms.
“The Prince of Roum will have other distractions tonight,” I said. “He’ll have no need of her.”
As I spoke, the sirens began to sing from the skies.
The Servitor released her. His mouth worked noiselessly for an instant; he made one of the protective gestures of the Will; he looked skyward and grunted, “The alarm! Who gave the alarm? You, old Watcher?”
Figures rushed about insanely in the streets.
Avluela, freed, sped past me—on foot, her wings but half-furled—and was swallowed up in the surging throng. Over the terrifying sound of the sirens came booming messages from the public annunciators, giving instructions for defense and safety. A lanky man with the mark of the guild of Defenders upon his cheek rushed up to me, shouted words too incoherent to be understood, and sped on down the street. The world seemed to have gone mad.
Only I remained calm. I looked to the skies, half-expecting to see the invaders’ black ships already hovering above the towers of Roum. But I saw nothing except the hovering nightlights and the other objects one might expect overhead.
“Gormon?” I called. “Avluela?”
I was alone.
A strange emptiness swept over me. I had given the alarm; the invaders were on their way; I had lost my occupation. There was no need of Watchers now. Almost lovingly I touched the worn cart that had been my companion for so many years. I ran my fingers over its stained and pitted instruments; and then I looked away, abandoning it, and went down the dark streets cartless, burdenless, a man whose life had found and lost meaning in the same instant. And about me raged chaos.
7
It was understood that when the moment of Earth’s final battle arrived, all guilds would be mobilized, the Watchers alone exempted. We who had manned the perimeter of defense for so long had no part in the strategy of combat; we were discharged by the giving of a true alarm. Now it was the time of the guild of Defenders to show its capabilities. They had planned for half a cycle what they would do in time of war. What plans would they call forth now? What deeds would they direct?