We were the Destroyers that time. Not us exactly, not Rigg and me and the others, but we humans. Ram Odin. The expendables. Garden has had bad luck with living through the arrival of ships from Earth.

Still, this meant that Umbo’s map of time extended from the last moment before humans came until nearly the last moments that humans survived. Almost all his time-shifting had been within the past dozen years, but they had gone back to a time only a few centuries after the establishment of the colonies, when they all went to witness, in Vadeshfold, the battle between the people with facemasks and the people without them. That is, they had all gone except Umbo, because he had had to stay behind as their anchor, so they could return to the time they had left.

Now, though, I don’t need an anchor. Now I could go with them on such an expedition, and bring us all back. Because the whole history of Garden, up to the end, is the past in my mind.

He reached Leaky’s Landing with a few hours to spare. He didn’t want to walk into the roadhouse before he left to go save Kyokay, lest he should cause a copy of himself to pop into existence or, worse, deflect his earlier self enough to make it so he did not figure out the plan that worked to save the reckless boy.

He was looking for an out-of-the-way place to wait, one where he wouldn’t be noticed by his earlier self while he was waiting for an upriver boat. Then he realized: I don’t have to wait. I can jump to the right time. Just because it’s only a few hours doesn’t make it any less possible.

Umbo chose an out-of-the-way place to make the jump in privacy. Not for the first time he wished for Rigg’s path-sense, because Rigg would have known just how heavily trafficked any spot might be. Then again, Rigg couldn’t help him in this case because the paths that would be most pertinent had not yet been laid down in this place. Rigg could not see into the future.

Umbo tried to keep from thinking, Rigg can’t do what I can do. But the effort not to think it was nothing more than another way to think it, while feeling even more guilty and frustrated.

He made the jump forward to the exact time he wanted. To Loaf and Leaky, he would have been gone only an hour.

He walked to the roadhouse door, opened, came inside. “Well, I’m back,” he announced.

Loaf and Leaky looked up from behind the bar, where Loaf was putting away glasses and mugs on the highest shelf.

“Took you long enough,” said Loaf.

“Sorry,” said Umbo.

“Well, did you save him?” asked Loaf.

“Mostly,” said Umbo. “Pulled him out of the water before he drowned. His arms were—no, his legs were broken.”

“You can’t remember the difference?” asked Loaf. “Remind me not to let you tend to my injuries.”

“That’s my job,” said Leaky.

“The first time, he broke his arms. The second time, it happened a little differently. He landed legs-first, so those are what broke.”

“So you didn’t interfere with events until after everybody thought he had died in the water.”

“The first time I was so stupid I carried him home before Rigg and I had even left town, and that wrecked everything. So I had to do it over.”

“Well, now that that’s done,” said Leaky, “Let’s set out for the Wall.”

“Give the boy a chance to rest,” said Loaf.

“He’s only been gone an hour,” said Leaky impatiently. Then she gave a sheepish grin. “I haven’t had as long as you two to get used to how things work now. He’s been gone for weeks, hasn’t he?”

She said it to Loaf, but spoke it while looking Umbo up and down. “Not a very cleanly expedition, it would seem,” she said.

“I haven’t done much clotheswashing.”

“You never do.”

“I keep thinking I’ll just jump back to a time when they were clean.”

Loaf glowered. “That really doesn’t make sense.”

“It was a time-shifting joke,” said Umbo. “I don’t have many people I can tell those to.”

“Lucky them,” murmured Loaf. “We’ll leave for the Wall in the morning.”

“One tiny problem,” said Umbo. “We can’t go through the Wall now.”

“Rigg set it up so any two of our group can go through,” said Loaf. “That’s how we got back here to Ramfold.”

Umbo shook his head. “Rigg hasn’t set it up that way yet. And Vadeshex hasn’t even met us. We don’t want to arrive with you wearing that facemask. Who knows how differently he’d act if he already knew he would succeed.”

“So we do have to wait,” said Loaf.

“Not necessarily,” said Umbo. “We have two choices. One. We can go back in time to before the Wall was made. Two. We can skip forward to right after we passed through on the way here.”

Loaf looked at Umbo for a split second and then began a low chuckle. “You sly barbfeather,” he said. “You’ve learned how to make forward jumps.”

“I’ve been to the end of the world,” said Umbo. “All of the future that we can possibly use has already been the past to me. So I can jump there now.”

“This,” said Loaf to Leaky, “is a very useful boy. I’m not sure any child of ours wouldn’t make us feel disappointed at the clever things he couldn’t do.”

“But he’ll be bigger, stronger, and not half so smug as this one,” said Leaky, “so I’ll take ours over him any day.”

CHAPTER 10

Lord of Walls

“So am I a Finder of Lost Things again here?” asked Rigg.

“Not in Gathuurifold, no.” Ram Odin chuckled. “No, for this wallfold you’re going to have to go back to the rich-young-man pose you carried off so well in O when you were just starting out.”

“I ended up in prison,” said Rigg.

“Because they believed you were a royal, not because they didn’t believe you were rich and educated.”

“But I’m not educated in Gathuurifold. I won’t know anything about their history or customs.”

“Gathuurifold is as large as any other wallfold. You can be from one part of it and know nothing about the other parts. Science you’ll know—more of it than they do—and ­mathematics. As for economics . . .” and here Ram Odin chuckled again, “they’ll have a bit to teach you, though I hope you don’t come away a true believer.”

“So I’m a rich young man.”

“No, you act like a rich young man. What you are, in terms they’ll understand, is this. You are my owner. And you, in turn, are directly the property of the Lord of Walls.”

“Property!” Rigg was appalled. “They have slavery here? That was done away with in Ramfold a thousand years ago. Long before the Sessamoto came out of the northwest.”

“Slavery was abolished fifteen separate times in the past eleven thousand years in Ramfold, though admittedly I’m rather proud of Ramfold that this last time it was the whole wallfold that got rid of it, and it hasn’t been reinvented yet. Though the People’s Revolutionary Council was getting close.”

“You’re saying slavery is one of those universals.”

“When you have wars, what do you do with the prisoners?” asked Ram Odin. “You can kill them all. Bloody work, that, and it encourages your enemies to fight to the death. You can send them all back home again as soon as the war is over, but in the meantime you have to feed them, and after they go home they’re a ready-made, fully-trained army.”

“I’m getting your point.”

“You can sacrifice them to your gods, which makes a difference only if they believe in the same gods. Or you can put them to work as forced labor, to earn their keep. Or, let’s see . . . keep them in prison camps, not working but having to be fed, until they die of old age. Which is the cruelest course?”

“You’ve made your point. So Gathuurifold is unusually warlike? So they’re constantly generating new slaves?”

“Not at all. In fact, I’d say Gathuurifold is unusually peaceful. War is quite rare. Because of all the things that slaves have been known to do, provoking wars is rarely one of them.”