Changer’s Moon

5

Julia drifts.

Blocky building, floodlit, inside a double electric fence, patrolled by guard-pairs with dogs running loose, scouting ahead of them. Mobile antennas opened like flowers to the stars.

A car painted official drab moves steadily, unhurriedly along the winding mountain road. It stops at the gate. A brief exchange. The gate swings open.

Watching with Anoike and the rest of the band, hidden on the hillside above the complex (with the rocket launcher and rifles in case of trouble) Julia follows them in her mind, closing her eyes because the waiting is making knots in her stomach. Present papers to the officer in charge. Wait. Papers passed (if they’re passed). Escort to the control room. Night shift-only three monitors. Unless the schedule has changed since the press aide took her through when she was researching her thriller. That was before all this, when even a quasi-military operation like that below was eager for favorable publicity to ensure the continuation of its funding. It was amazing where a writer could get when Parliament was debating the budget. She opens her eyes a moment. They are already inside the building. Michael as driver, their expert on electronics. Georgia, career military until ordered to shoot into a peaceful though noisy march of protesters, handling atmosphere. Pandrashi, silent and muscular as aide and bodyguard and carrier of official papers in a neat though rather large leather briefcase. Inside the building. Marching with crisp, unhurried steps into the throat of the enemy.

She counts the seconds. Opens her eyes again. The car sits undisturbed. No alarm of any sort.

Control center. There by now. Escort darted and unconscious. Guard likewise. Nightshift tucked away in a storeroom, thumbs wired to big toes, gags in place. In the center of the main board a locked black box. Inside, six fat red buttons that trigger the destruct charges in the six armed spy satellites in orbit above the UD. Any attempt to pick the lock or break it sets off very noisy alarms and transmits a warning to the nearest base. But the guard has a key. If nothing has changed. Boasting of their efficiency, the press aide volunteered this bit. If there’s ever need, if the country is invaded or one of the satellites is knocked from orbit, the Colonel doesn’t have to be on the premises. He can phone instructions to the guard, give him the proper password and wait on the phone till the guard reports the destruct charge is activated.

She remembers the look of the box, sees Michael keying it open. No alarm. Sees him lift off the guard rings, press all six of the thick red buttons, then lock the box again and pocket the key. It’s done by now.

The silence goes on and on, the tension in her rises until she feels like she’s choking on her heart. Tranquil lovely night, cool but not cold, clear, frost-painted sky. Moon’s not up yet; but the stars hang low and very bright.

Julia wants to scream.

The door opens. Three men come out. Michael. Georgia. Pandrashi. Michael opens the back door for Georgia. Pandrashi gets into the front without waiting on ceremony, a small mistake but there is no one about to notice. And no one to notice he is no longer carrying the briefcase.

The car backs smoothly, turns onto the exit road. Another leisurely exchange at the gate. It passes through and moves off the way it came.

Julia lets out the breath she has been holding unawares. Anoike makes a soft little sound like a squirrel’s snort, all the satisfaction in the world packed into it.

The ten watchers get to their feet, stand a moment looking down at the placid complex, then they start away, moving at an easy lope through the scrubby trees.

When they are several miles away, the explosion reaches them as a soft crump and a shiver and a brief glow near the horizon.

Again the clamor to speak. Hern looked them over, chose the battered, drawn man who’d been one of the rescued prisoners.

“Francis Connolly,” he said. “You don’t look like a trusting man. What makes you think we won’t decide to sit this one out once we’re safe? And who’s to say we don’t use those weapons you’re licking your lips over to boot you out and take over?”

Hern grinned at him. “Nearga Nor,” he said.

Serroi watched him, amused. He clasped his hands behind him and stood with his feet apart, enjoying all this more than a little (though he didn’t let it show to anyone who knew him less well than she). He’d been absorbing impressions from these people, doing that instinctively, now he was giving them truth, but feeding it to them in ways that more and more fitted with their expectations. She covered her smile with her hand, watched the loosening of the listeners, their tilt toward acceptance.

“Here’s what I mean,” he said. “Your supplies are limited. You don’t know the world or the kind of life my people live. Fight alongside me, you use up your supplies and are no threat. Turn on me and join them, you’ll get exactly what you deserve, abject slavery. Sit out the war and try to take over from the Nor, same thing. Your weapons mean nothing without the protection of the Shawar. The Nor will explode them in your hands.”

“No resupply.” Connolly eyed him skeptically. “You sure of that?”

“I see your machines and your weapons and I don’t understand how they work; I doubt any of our blacksmiths, skilled as they are, could repair them or build more.”

“Blacksmiths. Everything hand-made?”

“How else?”

“I see.” He smiled. “Clever.” He pushed at the lank reddish hair falling forward into his pale gaunt face. “Sam, rest of you. I say go. Nothing for us in the shithole this country’s turning into.” He sat.

Hern smiled, nodded to the square blond man. “Georgia Myers.”

“You’ll be in command?”

“Yes. With a staff of meien and your people. I know the land and the enemy.” He raised a brow, grinned. “Believe me, Georgia Myers, I’m not going to waste you on futile charges or suicide forays, nor am I stupid enough to believe you’d waste yourselves in anything foolish.”

“Good enough.” He sat.

Hern looked over the folk who surged to their feet. “Professor… um… Zagouris?”

“You have been watching us. “ He tucked his thumbs behind his belt, unconsciously falling into his casual lecturer’s pose. “Being a historian, I take the long view. Say the battle is over. You’ve won. What happens then?”

“Maiden knows. Too much upheaval. Too many ties and taroms forced off the land. The Heslins out of Oras for the first time in five hundred years. People starving, angry, desperate. Outcasts back from the mountains. No Keepers in the Shrines.” He spread his arms, smiled wearily. “I was born into a position I never wanted. For the past thirty years I’ve been courtier and mediator, wagging my tongue endlessly; I’ve been judge of last resort and overseer; I’ve lived with folk fawning on me while they wormed about to get their hands on gold or power. I’m tired. I want out.” He looked at Serroi a moment, looked back to Zagouris. “I have a dream for the time when there’s peace in the mijloc, the two of us on our wandering again, greeting old friends and making new ones. What I’m trying to say is if you’re worried about putting a tyrant back in power after his people rose against him and kicked him out, forget it. I’m a lazy man and I want a simpler life.” A small throwaway gesture with his sword hand. “But I’m Heslin and I’ve been Domnor since my sixteenth year. Until there’s someone else to do it, I take care of my people.”

“Mmmm. Right. Maybe you’d better tell us more about what your role is right now. I’m a bit hazy about that.”

As Hern began the convoluted explanation of how he’d arrived where he was, Serroi strolled away to stand in the shadow of one of the conifers that surrounded the smallish grassy meadow, more comfortable at the sidelines, watching the faces of the listeners, interested in the response Hern was drawing from them. After a short while she saw a girl come from under the trees and walk purposefully to the man sitting at the end of the council row. There was a familiar tugging, something like a string tied about her liver; she blinked, surprised. Somehow she hadn’t expected to suffer that healing urge away from her world. The girl bent close, whispered to the man. A little round man with a shock of yellow-white hair, his face went grim as the whispering continued. When the girl had finished, he patted her arm and got to his feet, scooped up a black satchel resting against a leg of his stool, and started after her. The string tightened until it was a pain beneath Serroi’s ribs. She hurried after the man, caught up with him as he moved into the trees, put a hand on his forearm. His shirt had short sleeves and the stiff white hair on his arm felt like wire under her hand. “Let me come,” she said. “I must.”

His pale brown eyes were shrewd, his expression unhelpful, but he nodded. “If you must.”

The girl looked over her shoulder, a desperate urgency in her gaze as if by rushing she could avert whatever it was that troubled her. The man plunged after her, a furious frustration in the drive of his walk, the set of his face.

Serroi followed a half step behind him, though she needed no guide to what waited. Then there was another tug at her, a tiny nip almost lost in the greater pain. She looked back and was not overly surprised to see the dark woman Anoike Ley following her. His bodyguard, she thought.

The woman inside the tent was groaning and twitching, too weak to move much or cry out louder. The man was kneeling beside her, touching her face; he started to take her pulse, swore under his breath, put the arm down across her body. “Wait outside, Lyn,” he said. “Don’t argue, child.” He summoned up a smile. “Go to the meeting, we’ll sit with Julia for a while.”

Lyn hesitated, looked from Serroi to the man, to the dying woman, back at Serroi; after a moment she nodded and slipped out. Serroi gazed after her, startled. The healing gift was very strong in that child; the woman’s sickness was churning in her, but she’d sensed Serroi’s Gift and it calmed her a little. Serroi shivered, turned to scowl at the sick woman; the pull was becoming unbearable.

The man was flicking open the latches on the black bag; when he finished, he didn’t pull it open, but rested, his hands on the smooth leather and looked up at her. “Damn them,” he said, a violent whisper; his face went red and he snapped the satchel open, sat staring into it. “They knew she was sick, they knew she…” He clamped his mouth shut, took out a small glass bottle with a milky fluid in it and a slightly bulging paper packet. “No sanitation, no life support… you’re a healer, that man said. Magic. God I can’t believe I’m saying this. All I can do for her here is try to block some of the pain. Can’t even do that much longer. Not without killing her. It’s obscene to be relieved she’s let it go too long so she can’t ask for a massive overdose…

Serroi stopped listening. She knelt beside the woman, touched her; the wrongness was knotted through most of her body, it fought her as she probed at it. She bowed her head, closed her eyes, let the strength of this alien world flow into and through her, clean and fresh, strong as the stone of its bones, the soil that was its flesh. An old and powerful world. And as it flowed into her and through her into the woman, she felt the wrongness breaking up and changing and being re-absorbed into the healthy flesh. She opened her eyes and smiled down at the woman, seeing only the glowing green glass of her hands and the healing body beneath them.

And when it was finished, she took her hands away, looked dreamily at them, sighed and dropped them on her thighs. The earth fire drained out of her, leaving her a little tired, but cleansed and invigorated, rather like a plunge into icemelt. She yawned, surprising herself, lifted a belated hand to cover the gape.

The man-healer looked up. “What did you do? She’s not in pain.” He touched the blanket over her stomach; the swelling was gone. “God, if what I think… I don’t believe it. Everything I know, everything I believe, everything I learned in thirty years of practicing… only charlatans…” He stopped babbling, took hold of the thin wrist, checking the pulse against his watch. “Strong and steady. Natural sleep, better leave her like that long as we can. What did you do?”

Serroi shook her head. “I don’t know. Except that I provide a pathway for a strength that teaches the body to heal itself.” The nip she’d noticed before was pricking hard at her. “I haven’t much choice in this, you know. Where there’s sickness or hurt, I must heal. Sometimes… well, never mind that. Now that it’s begun here, you might as well call in the rest of the sick and wounded. Starting with your bodyguard.”

“What?”

“Anoike Ley. She followed when I came with you.”

“I didn’t know.”

Serroi chuckled. “I’m not angry. It was a good sensible move, tactfully handled. She reminds me a lot of a shieldmate I had once.” She shook off the old pain that time and the hurry of events had reduced to a gentle melancholy. “Call her in.”

“You’re upsetting a lot of dearly held notions, little friend.” He began taking items from the satchel, putting them on a tray. “By the way, my name is Louis Grenier. Doctor Grenier to the general, but Lou to my colleagues, colleague.” He grinned at her, went round her to the door slit, thrust his head out. “Anoike, come in here, will you.”

She came into the tent, wary, ready for anything. “How’s Julia?”

“Hard to say. She’s sleeping. Sit down. I want to look at that shoulder wound.”

Anoike frowned. “Why? You saw it a couple hours ago when you changed the bandage.”

“Now, Anoike, a big girl like you shouldn’t be afraid of this friendly old doctor.”

“Yeah sure, friendly old butcher more like.” She kicked Lyri’s cushion around, folded down and unbuttoned her shirt, letting him ease it off her wounded side.

“You know, Anoike, you’ve got what my down-home grandfather used to call the luck of the devil.” He used a pair of blunt scissors to cut away the tape and gauze over the hole in her shoulder. “A fraction of an inch in any direction and there’d be a lot more damage.” His hands very gentle, he cleaned the wound with a liquid he poured onto a bit of white fluff. Anoike grimaced at the sting. “Anoike’s luck,” he said. “You’re making me a believer. Anyone else would have to spend the next weeks hurting and itching.” He sat back on his heels. “It’s a puncture wound, Serroi. That’s your name, isn’t it. I got it right? Good. A clean wound, very little laceration of the flesh. Except for what I did when I was looking for the bullet. Gone back three hundred years to the age of probe and forceps.”

Serroi shifted to kneel beside him. The wound was a little thing, not to be taken lightly, but nothing to incapacitate the tigress before her. She looked down at her hands, felt earth fire gathering in her again. Reaching out, she flattened her hands on either side of the hole. The woman started to pull back.

“Don’t move.” Grenier’s voice was calm but commanding. “Let Serroi work.”

Serroi watched the flesh of her hands go translucent again, shining with the earthfire that sank deep into the woman’s body and rebuilt the injured cells, layer by layer, until new skin closed over the wound and erased the last signs of it. She dropped her hands, moved back a little so the doctor could get a closer look.

“I see it and I still don’t believe it. How’s it feel, Anoike?”

The woman probed at the spot with shaking fingers; she wiggled her shoulder, moved her arm. “Me either, Lou. Shit, it’s like it didn’t happen. Julia too?”

“I begin to think so.” He reached out, touched Serroi’s arm. “Are you tired? How do you feel?”

“A little drunk. This world of yours is like strong wine.” She thrust her fingers through her hair, yawned again and didn’t bother covering it. “Bring ’em all, Lou colleague.” She giggled. “This doesn’t exactly tire me.”

“Ram,” Anoike said. She shoved her arm back into her sleeve, did up the buttons and pushed the tail back into her trousers.

“Tell Dom Hern where I am, Anoike Ley,” Serroi said quickly. “He worries and might decide to come looking for me.”

“He don’t look the worrying kind.”

“About me he is.”

“Come through whatever in his way?” She looked skeptical. “Little man, not so young anymore.”

“Through or over.”

“He don’t look it.”

“Lot of dead men thought that.”

“He got him a two-ended tongue.”

“He’s giving you the truth.”

“Truth he sees.” Anoike shrugged, a quick lift and fall of her shoulders. “Wasn’t talking ’bout truth. He a good politician.”

“Politician?”

“Guess you never had no election campaigns.” She grinned. “Hey Lou, I vote we go for sure. No politicians.”

The doctor’s chuckle was warm and filled with contentment. “Never be a world without politicians, Anoike. I suspect they just call them something else.”

“Glass half-empty, hey, Doc?” She grinned affectionately at him. “Right… uh… Serroi. Message to Dom Hern, then Ram for here. Then what? Connolly, I think. He some messed up inside. You want I should round up everything down to mosquito bites, or just bad-off?”

Grenier frowned thoughtfully at Serroi, then nodded. “Stick with the bad-off until we see how much time we’ve got. Anoike, tell the council what’s happening.”

“Uh-huh.” Anoike moved her shoulder again, grinned, then went through the slit with a quick energetic twist of her lean body.

“How long before Julia wakes?”

“I’m not sure.” Serroi strolled over to him. She clasped her hands behind her head and stretched, feeling a deep pleasure in the pull of her muscles. “Don’t worry, Lou. Her body’s worked hard. Takes time to recover from that.”

Anoike leaned through the door. “Want them in here?” She looked around. “Make it some crowded.”

Serroi pushed the hair off her face. “Better outside where we won’t disturb Julia’s sleep. What’s happening at the meeting?”

“Prior, he making a speech saying we wrong to run out on our country. Should stay and fight. Not many agreeing with him. Your man, he got him his army.”