“Not while you’re looking at me,” said Umbo.
“Why not? What happens, your pants fall down?”
“You weren’t looking at me when I did it up on the cliff,” said Umbo. “And shouldn’t you be watching the road so that nobody bumps into you?”
“Umbo, I can’t look both ways at once. No matter where I look, somebody’s going to be coming up behind me and walking right through me.”
“You’re going to die.”
“Maybe,” said Rigg. “And maybe my body will just disappear in our time here and I’ll show up as a mysterious corpse in the past. Maybe I’ll be the Magical Dead Kid and they’ll build a little temple for me.”
“I really hate you,” said Umbo. “I always have.”
“Slow down time for me,” said Rigg.
And, just like that, with Umbo glaring at him, it started to happen. Umbo hadn’t waved his hands or muttered something like the magicians did when traveling players came to town.
Rigg deliberately kept his eyes out of focus—it was pretty easy, considering what came into view when time slowed. The middle of the road was so full of blur that Rigg was grateful he had moved to the edge. Because here the blurs became more individual, he could see people’s faces. Just glimpses as they blurred past, but he finally picked one man and watched how he hurried, looking neither left nor right. He seemed to be a man of authority by his attitude, and he was dressed opulently, but in an outlandish costume whose like Rigg had never seen before.
At his hip, his belt held a scabbard with a sword in it. On the other side, the side nearer to Rigg, a sheathed knife had been thrust into his belt.
Rigg fell into step beside him, reached down, snatched the knife and drew it out. The man saw him, reached out immediately to grab him or take back the knife—but Rigg merely looked away and focused on somebody else, a woman, and at the same time he called out to Umbo, “Bring me back!”
Just like that, all the blur people became mere paths of light, and Rigg and Umbo were alone on the road.
Rigg was still holding the knife.
Now he could see that it was quite a lavish thing. Fine workmanship in the metal of the hilt, with jewels set in it that seemed the equal in quality of any of those Father had left for him, though they were smaller. And the thing was sharp-looking; it felt wicked and well-balanced in his hand.
It had been in the past, and Rigg had brought it into the present.
“That knife,” said Umbo, staring at it with awe. “It just—you just reached out and suddenly it was there.”
“Yes, and when the owner of it tried to take it back, to him it must have seemed that suddenly I was not there. Just like the demon.”
Umbo sat down in the grass beside the road. “The Wandering Saint story—it really happened—but it wasn’t a demon.”
And then Rigg had a sudden thought, and just like that, he burst into tears, nearly the way Umbo had. “By Silbom’s right ear,” he said, when he could speak. “If I had just been able to take my mind off him, the W.S. would have disappeared and I could have saved Kyokay.”
They wept together then, sitting by the side of the road, realizing that if either one had understood at all what their gifts were doing, Kyokay might still be alive.
Or, just as likely, Kyokay would have fallen anyway, dragging Rigg with him. Who knew whether Rigg could really have drawn him up onto the rock? Who knew whether they both could have hopped from rock to rock and made it to safety even if Rigg had dragged the younger boy back up?
The weeping stopped. They sat in silence for a while. Then Umbo said a really foul word and picked up a rock and threw it out into the road. “There was no demon. There was just us. You and me, our powers working together. We were the demon.”
“Maybe that’s all the demons ever are. People like us, doing things without even knowing what we’re doing.”
“That temple back there,” said Umbo. “It’s a temple to us. The Wandering Saint was just an ordinary guy like the one you took the knife from.”
“He was actually pretty extraordinary.”
“Shut up, Rigg. Do we always have to have a joke?”
“Well, I do,” said Rigg.
“So let’s fix it,” said Umbo. “Let’s go back to before your father got killed, and stop him and tell him what happened and then he won’t have a tree fall on him and you won’t be out on the rocks upstream from the falls just when Kyokay—”
“Two reasons why that’s a really bad idea,” said Rigg. “First, if I’m not there, Kyokay falls. Second, you can’t watch him more closely because I’m the one who experiences the time change, not you, so you won’t know anything about what’s going to happen, you’ll just keep doing the same thing. Third, we can’t go back and talk to Father. Or shove him out of his path. Ever.”
“Why not?”
“Because Father doesn’t have a path. He’s the only person—he’s the only living thing—that I’ve ever known that didn’t have a path of any kind.”
“Are you sure?”
“After ten years of seeing and watching and studying paths, you think I might be wrong when I say that the one person I was close to all the time had no path?”
“Why didn’t he?”
“I don’t know,” said Rigg. “But I think you and I can both agree that Father was a really unusual man.”
“Why do we have these abilities if we can’t go back and save Kyokay?” demanded Umbo.
“Are you asking an invisible saint or a god or something? Because I don’t know. Maybe we can save him—that time. But how do we know he doesn’t just get himself killed the next day doing some other stupid thing?”
“Because I’d watch him,” said Umbo.
“You already watched him,” said Rigg. “He couldn’t be controlled. And meanwhile, we might change a thousand other things that we don’t want to change.”
“So our gifts are completely useless,” said Umbo.
“We have this knife,” said Rigg.
“You have a knife,” said Umbo.
“At least you’re not suddenly remembering a whole bunch of stories about men who appear out of nowhere and steal fancy knives and then disappear,” said Rigg.
“If Kyokay stays dead, then all of this is useless.”
“All of this,” said Rigg, “us being together, talking, finding out what we can do together—all of this happened because Kyokay went up on the falls and I tried to save him, and failed. So if we save Kyokay, does that make it so none of this happens? Then how would we go back to save Kyokay?”
“You already proved that you can change the past!” said Umbo.
“But I never did anything that mattered,” said Rigg. “Or at least I wasn’t able to accomplish anything I wanted to.”
Umbo reached out his hand for the knife. Rigg handed it to him at once. Umbo pulled it out of the sheath and pressed the point of it against a spot on the heel of his hand. It punched in almost at once, and blood welled up around the blade.
Rigg snatched the knife back. Umbo stared at his palm, making no effort to stanch the bleeding. Rigg wiped the blood off the blade with a handful of dewy grass, but he didn’t say anything to Umbo. Whatever crazy thing Umbo was doing, he’d explain it when he felt like it.
“Now the past is real,” said Umbo softly. “I’ve been wounded by it.” Then he, too, tore up a wad of damp grass and pressed it to the wound in his palm. “That stings like a hornet,” he said.
“I guess now you know why your mother taught you never to poke yourself with a knife.”
“She’s a smart one, my mom,” said Umbo. “Even if she did marry some angry idiot of a cobbler.”
“I hate the way you make a joke out of everything,” said Rigg.
“At least mine wasn’t funny,” said Umbo.
They picked up their things. Rigg dried off the clean blade on his shirt, and slid it into the sheath. Then he tucked the knife he had stolen about two thousand years ago into his belt, and they set off down the Great North Road toward Aressa Sessamo.