Fire in the Sky

5

Shadith glanced over her shoulder at the litter ponies. Danor seemed to be handling the jolting all right.

Night before last, after xe had inspected Danor, ignoring the Fior’s agitated complaints, Tokta Burek let Shadith tug xe from the room.

“He won’t listen,” she said.

Tokta Burek had just shrugged, xe’s lichen-web creaking with the movement. “He’ll fret himself dead,” xe said, “you might as well start on again and see if you can get him to rest come nightfall. He’ll not let the jarring stop him getting better, you needn’t worry over that. The chert’s too dammalheaded to die.

You said he’s been drinking smoke. That’s where those blisters come from, his body fighting the need, trying to revert to the way it was before. Can’t be too far gone, or he would be dead. I’ll give you some doses of the roec and a lotion to spread on his skin for the pustules. It will take a few weeks to work the irritants from the smoke out of his system.”

“Hunh! He’s an irritant to my system.”

Burek chuckled. “A talking boil,” xe said. Xe touched her cheek, the one with the hawk etched on it. “I have deeply enjoyed your art, Shadowsong. By next year I will have spun my husk and be dreaming the change time away and you will be part of those dreams.”

Remembering, her eyes stung. Impatiently she drew her hand across them and once again set her mind-touch to probing the dark silent forest that closed in around and over them, only a few flickers of sunlight reaching the road through the heavy canopy. She was riding a few pony lengths in front of Maorgan who was leading the single packer and the two litter ponies and looking a bit strained.

That was because Melech had gone on ahead with Lebesair. With their gas sacs and thin membranes they were vulnerable to pellet guns. One hit wouldn’t bother them much, the hole would seal itself before too much of their lift leaked away. Enough hits, though, and the weight of lead as well as the loss of gas would bring them down. An Eolt on the ground was a dead Eolt.

Wild lives brushed against her touch, feral beasts descended from the fertilized ova brought by the Fior, budding beasts that had developed here, and the curious mixes that she didn’t know how to explain. No, mix wasn’t quite the right word. Blend? Alloy rather than compound? Like the moss ponies, two strands of life style woven into a quirky whole.

In any case, no danger to them.

They stopped at intervals to feed and water the ponies. That was doubly important now that they had no spares. They stopped at noon to eat and let Shadith check Danor’s bandages and see how he was holding up.

Tokta Burek was right, the journey seemed to be speeding up the healing rather than setting him back. His temper wasn’t improved and his weakness meant it came out in spates of complaint and jabs at Shadith and Maorgan. Shadith caught him watching Maorgan with an evil satisfaction at seeing the Ard suffering the absence of his Eolt.

Mid-afternoon Shadith rode round a bend and saw a group of Fior and Denchok leaning on shovels and contemplating the bridge over the creek that crossed the road. The water foamed around rocks and hit the bridge piers with a force that made them shudder visibly. She waved Maorgan to a stop, then rode forward till she reached the group.

“Oso, Meathlan. Is the bridge safe for the crossing? We carry an injured Fior to Chuta Meredel and can’t stretch too much circling.”

They turned and stared silently at her with a blank-faced stolidity that was as intimidating as it was irritating. She’d met this response many times before in her long life, so she simply sat with her hands resting on the pommel, waiting for one of them to make up his or xe’s mind to speak.

A Denchok set hands on xe’s hips, looked from Shadith to Maorgan just visible behind her. “Injured?”

Maorgan raised his brows. When Shadith nodded, he rode a few steps forward, enough so the Denchok could see the litter.

“Chorek,” Shadith said. “Tokta Burek fetched his fever down, but we’ve got to get him to Meredel.”

“Best keep a hard watch out, the choreks’re bad round here. Politicals, lot of them, chased out of Ordumels down Plain and landed on us. And there’s no dumels for shelter ‘tween here and Medon Pass. Take it slow, maybe better get the litter over first. Storm winds last night kicked a couple planks off and the water loosened the piers some when it rose. We were just figuring how to shore them up till we can get a builder from Minach.”

When Maorgan tried to lead the litter ponies onto the bridge, they set their feet, hunched their heads down, and wouldn’t budge. Shadith clicked her tongue, slid from the saddle. “Best let me do that, Ard.”

Danor swore weakly as she edged past the ponies. She ignored him, rubbed the poll of the off bearer and considered how much control she should exert. These tough stubborn little beasts liked ground solid beneath their feet, not shifting about with little screeching whines. She rather did, herself. She could feel uneasiness on the verge of solidifying into fear. That wasn’t good. She eased into the mindfield, not trying to see through the pony’s eyes, only to give him a sense of warmth and security.

After a minute of her massaging his poll and his brain at the same time, he relaxed a little. She repeated the process on the other litter pony, then stepped away from them and pulled off her boots. She tossed them onto the road and walked the bridge, feet clinging to the worn planks, feeling them shudder against her soles. Through the openings left by the windripped planks, she could see the water hammering at the supports. They were right, though, it would hold if she could keep the ponies calm.

She came back. “Ard, your harp, play us across, hm? The Mad Mara’s Lament I taught you a while back so I can serenade our little friends here.”

“Wild things fluttered in my head,” she sang and remembered another time she’d sung that song, sitting in a cage, waiting to be sold to a bunch of bloody-handed priests.

“Wild wings fluttered in my head

And wild thoughts muttered there

In waking dreams I saw you dead

Your body rent, your throat gone red

Your splendid thighs ripped bare.

I cannot sleep, cruel love

Memory’s my Mourning Dove

Cuckoos call out, horned maid

See your faithless lover fade

All oaths broke, all hope betrayed…”

With the last notes, the caцpa stepped from the bridge, snorting as he let her lead him clear. She hitched the leadrope to a convenient sapling and ran back across the swaying timbers, collected her boots, pushed them into a saddlebag, then went back to work coaxing the other caцpas across.

The swaying was worse, the footing more uncertain, so this time it was harder to get them going, even with her mindtouch soothing them, but the harp music helped. They were used to the sound and it covered all but the worst of the noises from the bridge.

As Shadith swung into the saddle, the Denchok on the far side of the swollen creek cupped his hands about his mouth and called, “Watch out for choreks. Thick as fleas.”

She waved to him, then rode Brйou around the litter ponies and took her place in front. “Let’s go.”

It is the peculiar quality of water sounds that they can be quite loud and yet inaudible a few minutes off. Before they’d gone more than a few score paces along the road, all Shadith could hear was the wind creaks of the trees and the pattery sound of the leaves. Now and then a flurry of sound broke across this background and once she saw a small flier turn into jewels when it darted through a sunbeam, ruby and emerald on the carapace, with diamond wings. The Forest hummed around her, the peace as thick as the shadow that lay across the road, the trees giants now, rising ten or twelve times her height. Their trunks were rough textured, the bark deeply incised and so loose that they looked like they had the mange, patches of old bark in place, dark gray and spongy, patches of new pale green and rough as if someone had used a rasp on them. The distance between the trees increased with their height, but the forest didn’t open out like others she’d seen. Even though the light under the canopy was minimal, spikes of fungus rose everywhere, pastel and pulpy, pale pink, ocher, grayish-green, ivory. Lichen vines spread from trunk to ground in fan-shaped webs and giant slimemolds spread like golden syrup across the ground. The air had an odd mixture of conifer bite and fungal musk.

She kept the mindtouch sweeping from side to side, reaching as far as she could. Back and forth, back and forth, almost soothing in its regularity. Back and forth, back and forth, the road a green and pastel tunnel ahead, gently curving, following the swell of the mountains, rising and falling only a little, sometimes a small cut into the mountain to keep the level easy, sometimes a hardpacked fall of scree glued in place with concrete.

They stopped to feed and water the ca6pas. Danor feigned sleep so she’d leave him alone. He needn’t have bothered. She was too tired to fool with him. She sat a while wondering if she should put her boots back on, at the same time rather enjoying the freedom for her feet. Probably not a good idea in this place, no telling what bacteria or parasites she was picking up. She didn’t move. It was hot and the air was heavy and her feet felt good as they were.

Maorgan made her some tea and scolded her into eating some dried fruit he’d cut into small pieces so they’d be easier to swallow. She needed the energy and got the fruit down, though her gorge rose at the thought of eating and her throat tried to close on her.

On the road again. Back and forth. Back and forth. Drowned in deepening green twilight and the heavy odor from the lichen, molds, and other fungi. Back and forth. Back and forth.

Late in the day, when it was almost time to stop for the night, she felt a burn at the farthest point of her reach.

“Hold it. There’s something…”

Rage/satisfaction/anticipation…

Male aura. Fior. About a kilometer on.

She slid from the saddle, walked a few steps from Brйou, set herself and swept her mindtouch in a slow arc, focusing all her attention into the touch, dragging in as much information as she could.

One man. One caцpa. No backup, just him.

With an exploding sigh, she came back to her body, started as she saw Maorgan standing beside her. “What is it?” he said.

“Ambush. One man. Angry. Must be a political.” She untied the thongs on the saddlebag and took her boots out. She sat in the middle of the road, wiped her feet with her kerchief, and began the painful process of getting the boots back on.

“What are you doing?”

“Going after him, of course. You lead the caцpas at a slow walk, I circle round behind him and nail him with the stunner.” She grunted as her heel finally dropped home, then started working the other foot into its boot.

“Shadowsong…”

She looked up. “Don’t be tedious, Maorgan. It was the truth I told you back there on the first day out, not just a story to pass the time. This is what I do, what I have done a hundred times before.” She wiggled her foot, yanked on the boot tops and seated the second heel, got to her feet and brushed herself off. “As far as I can tell-and this isn’t all that accurate, mind you-the chorek’s in a tree about half a sikkom ahead. If I’m not on the road waiting, do what you have to do.”

She waited until she heard the clip-clop of pony hooves and Maorgan’s whistled tune winding lazily past the spears of fungus. Wrinkling her nose with distaste, she began circling around to get behind the chorek, pushing her way through those spears, the pulpy stalks breaking apart and squishing under her boot heels, the smell intensifying with every step. The slimy pulp from the fungus made her bootsoles dangerously slick. She fell twice, the first time when her foot came down on one of the slimemolds while she was concentrating too hard to keeping the touch on the chorek, the second as she was trying to hurry across an open section and get to shelter.

The smell worried her and she stopped to check the wind. It was slow, sluggish-and blowing from the direction of the chorek so that was all right. Have to be careful, she thought, funny to think cracking a stink would be as big a danger as cracking a twig underfoot.

She saw him finally, a dark blot in a rope cradle about three meters up one of the trunks. He’d sunk spikes into the wood to hold the rope ends and pulled the thick loose bark out from the wood, using the curl to mask him from the road. She saw him stiffen as he heard Maorgan’s whistle. He moved slightly, brought something gray and short up from where it had been resting, sighted it on the road, and waited. Not a pellet gun. What is that?

Shadith wiped her hands on her shirt, eased the stunner from the leather sack dangling from her belt. She wiped her hands again, made a last sweep of the surround to verify he was alone, shot him.

The weapon fell with a clank onto the tall roots of the tree, rolled off toward the road. The chorek was draped over the ropes, his mouth open, eyes rolled back, the whites glistening in the murky light under the canopy.

Watching him intently to make sure no twist in his genes made him a tricky candidate for stunning, she made her way to the foot of his tree and collected the thing he’d dropped. She stood staring at it for several moments, deeply shocked. Pellet guns were one thing, in a pinch most smugglers would carry a few for trading, but energy weapons? That was big time trouble. The only time she’d seen it happen was on Avosing, and that was only because there was major value being exchanged. But one ragtag bandit on a nondescript world?

She tested the cutter on the limb of a tree close by, then used it to burn loose one end of the rope cradle, not caring a whole lot whether or not the man survived the fall.

He was limp from the stunning and not that high up. He hit the downslanting roots, rolled onto the ground, and finished the rollnot far from where she’d found the cutter. She checked his pulse, nodded, straightened his legs, then moved to the center of the road, waiting for Maorgan to show.

Maorgan looked down at the man. “Don’t know him. Where was he?”

She flicked a hand at the tree, then frowned as Danor came tottering around the ponies. The Melitoлhn’s eyes were focused on the chorek, his face was flushed, his body tense despite his weakness, there was a bulge inside his shirt that didn’t come from bandages. Where he’d got the knife or whatever it was, she didn’t know. “Danor, no.” She spoke deliberately, then put herself between the stunned man and the Ard. “We need to question him first.”

“Him?” The old man’s voice was stronger than it’d been in days. “He wouldn’t tell you the sun’s shining though you could see it for yourself.”

Shadith smiled grimly. “He won’t have a choice. I’ve got some babble juice that will no doubt kill him eventually so you can rest easy about that, but before then he’ll cough everything he knows.”

He looked at her a long moment, then nodded. “Get on with it, then.”

Maorgan crouched beside the chorek, searching through his pockets, laying out their contents on the ground beside the man. He looked up as Shadith came back, her medkit in her hand. “Nothing here to say who he is.” He flicked a finger through the meager pile, sent a luck charm rolling away, uncovered a bit of paper, passed it to her. “Someone in Dumel Minach, laying out our route and what speed we’re likely to make.”

“Confirms he’s a political, if we needed such confirmation. Here.” She handed him a tape braided from fine colorless filaments. “Wrap that round his ankles and make sure the metal bits on the end touch. You don’t need to tie it.”

He raised his brows. “Looks like it’d melt in my hand, let alone hold a grown man.”

“Try to cut it if you don’t mind dulling your blade. Don’t worry, you won’t even scratch it. Give me room to work, hm?” She took his place, strapped the chorek’s wrists with a second come-along tape. When she glanced at Maorgan, he was looking at a nick in the knifeblade.

He shrugged, wrapped the tape around the chorek’s ankles, touched the locktights. Nothing obvious happened, so he tried to take them apart and redo the seal.

Shadith chuckled. “Useful gadget, right?”

“How do you get the things off?”

“I’ve got, mm, call it a key. Otherwise, to get him out of those loops we’d have to amputate his hands and feet. Well, well, so you’re coming awake on us now.” She got to her feet and stepped back to wait for him to exhaust himself and recognize futility.

The chorek’s eyes cleared. He saw them, and his face suffused with rage; he tried to break loose, throwing his body about, but all he succeeded in doing was cut himself on the filament tapes. After a useless struggle he lay panting and glaring hate at them, especially Maorgan. “Jelly sucker, you a dead man. And all your kind a perverts.”

Shadith opened the medkit, took out the spraycopeia, clicked on the mostly illegal canister of babblers Digby had sent her on the day she’d adopted as her birthday, the day Aleytys had decanted her into this body. She set the blood sampler in the sterilizer and deposited the medkit on the road. “We’re going to ask you some questions, chorek. Now I know you think you wouldn’t tell us the time of day, but you will.” The sterilizer chimed. She took the sampler out, caught one of his hands, set the nozzle against a finger tip and triggered it. In almost the same move, she was back on her feet and he was staring at the red drop welling on his finger.

“You needn’t look like the world fell on you, chorek. All I did was take a little blood from you.” She clicked the sampler into its slot on the spraycopeia. “I don’t want to kill you too soon.” She glanced at the readout, sighed. “In a laboratory with a much wider range of… mm… ingredients, I could probably guarantee not to kill you at all. As things are…” she touched the sensor, made a few fine adjustments, “the least this brew will give you is a course of boils from hell. Now. Such ethics as I have tell me I must ask if you will answer our questions freely and without stint. Well?”

He spat, the glob of spittle landing on the toe of her boot.

“Sit on him a moment, will you, Maorgan?” She detached the canister from the spraycopeia. “Hold his head so I can get at his neck.”

In spite of his struggles, she got the injector against his carotid and triggered the jolt of babble. She straightened. “That’s good. You can get off him now, Maorgan. Don’t talk to him yet, wait till I tell you.”

Glancing now and then at the chorek, she repacked the medkit, set the sampler in the sterilizer, and closed the lid. By the time she was finished, the chorek had gone limp, his face greenish white under the tan, his eyes closed, his breathing deep and slow.

“Good. Maorgan, let me talk first, then you can ask your questions. It might be a good idea to make a note of his answers.” She moved along the road, knelt when she was just beyond his head. “What is your name?” She almost sang the words, her voice soft and unthreatening. “Tell me your name.”

“Ferg. Fergal Diocas.” His voice was dragged and dreamy, the syllables mushy.

“Ferg. You have a friend in Dumel Minach. Tell me your friend’s name. What is your friend’s name?”

“Paga. Her name is Paga Focai.”

“That’s a pretty name. Is she pretty, Ferg?”

He laughed. It was an ugly sound, mocking and angry. “That silly bitch? Big as a dammalt with a laugh like a band saw. Always at you. Chel Dй\, I have to be drunk as a dog to get it up when I do her.”

“I see. It was her gave you news about the Ard and the rest of them?”

“Oh, yeah, and wetting herself because she knows I’ll come do her when I finish the scum. She gets off on blood, nothing gets her hotter.”

“And how does she get word to you? How does she do that, Ferg?” She kept her voice soft and insinuating, slipping the words in between the rustle of the leaves and the dirt grains rattling along the road as the wind picked up strength with the waning of the day.

He snickered. “Leaves me notes, doesn’t she. Silly kueh. Games! Love post she calls it like she was some just blooded girl. Hollow in a tree down by river. Ties a bit a yellow rag on branch when she put something in hole.”

His eyelids flickered, his eyes darted side to side, a buried awareness worked the muscles of his face. Shadith stopped the questions and sang to him, a low, wordless croon like a mother singing a child to sleep. After a moment he relaxed and the smug grin twisted his mouth again. “Kueh,” he said.

“No doubt. You had a weapon. A strange looking thing.”

“Cutter,” he said after a while. “Ol’ frogface he say, point it at a stinking jelly and you got yourself one krutchin’ Summerfire tree high and mountain wide. Hoooeeeshhh!”

Shadith heard a scuffling behind her, curses. She ignored them, crooned a bit more to settle the chorek again. “Old Frogface, hmm, I think I know him, tell me what he’s like.”

“Ugly anglik. Shorter’n me but twice as wide. Skin’s like lehaum bark. Made me want to see ‘f I could peel him like them there.” He waved his bound hands at the nearest tree. He blinked at the hands, waggled them, started snickering. “Peel ‘um. ‘Ould d’t too, he come back at me. Peel ‘um. Peel…” He let his hands drop, scowled at the branches arching high above the road. “Mesuch, filthy…”

Shadith leaned closer to him, began one of the Shalla croons, drawing him back into dream with the help of the drug. “Tell me about his hands. What were they like?”

“Cursed claws, black as his stinking soul.”

“Tell me about his eyes. Was there anything odd about his eyes.”

“Stuff crawled over ‘um sometimes, made ‘um shine.”

“What did he say to you? Tell me exactly what he said to you.”

His eyelids flickered again, then closed completely, the energy drained from his voice as he droned what he’d been told about how to recharge the cutter, about the price on the heads of the University team. Toward the end of the speech he started getting agitated again and this time the crooning only seemed to exacerbate the disturbance. Words drooled from his mouth as he jerked his head back and forth and tried to pull his wrists apart, jerking so hard the tape cut into his wrists. He ignored the blood and kept jerking, as if he meant to saw off his hands and set himself free.

His face got redder and redder, his eyes glassy, his mouth hung open, working, working… until, abruptly his body spasmed, arced up from the ground, then went limp.

“He dead?”

She looked round. Danor was hunched over, his legs drawn up, his head buried in, his arms. Maorgan stood beside him. It was he who’d spoken. “I think so, but I’d better be sure. Bring me the kit, would you?”

Shadith keyed the locktights loose, rolled the comealongs up, and shoved them into a saddlebag. “You heard what he said. There’ll be dozens of others out there hungry for that gold. We’d better start pushing the caцpas as hard as we dare. We’re targets till we get over Medon Pass.”

13. Ploy and Counterploy