Shadowkill

AND

A black Raven flew before her, feathers glinting like shards of jet.

She followed it out of the turmoil. Nothing touched her, cutter nor missile, rot grains nor melt fields. Nothing touched her.

She got the skimmer to ground on a grassy meadow some distance up one of the smaller mountains west of the Compound.

For several moments after the web loosened, then slid into its receptacle, Rose lay in the chair shaking all over, teeth chattering as she cursed Kikun, Digby, Seyirshi, the Dyslaera, and everything and everyone in her life that had brought her to this point. She’d never been this close to death, even when she was sitting in that condemned cell waiting for the Strangler’s cord. Never this close, never this helpless, never…

When she calmed enough to reason, she remembered the Bear and the Raven. Kikun’s gods? She laughed, stopped laughing when the sound went crazy on her. “Never imagined I’d be the subject for miracles,” she said aloud “Kikun, you all right?”

No answer.

Shakily she pushed herself upright, groaning as every muscle protested; she was bruised all over, battered, scraped, bonesore. She twisted around and frowned toward the co-seat.

Kikun lay limp in the seat, one arm tangled in the semi-retracted web, a trickle of blood drying at the corner of his mouth. Blood bubbles formed and burst in his nostrils as he labored to breathe.

“Goerta b’rite!”

A tiny ancient crone of a dinhast came dashing at her like a puppet on strings, a glass puppet brightly colored but so translucent it was hard to see, yammering soundless words from a mouth snapping open and closed like a puppet’s jaws. Soundless words-yet Rose knew the ancient was crying at her to get on her feet and do something for Kikun. Something, anything. Get on her feet. Get moving. Help him. Comic and terrible, the crone swept at her, through her. Her skin prickled all over as if from a thousand tiny pinches.

Rose struggled from her chair, stood with her hand on the arm, gathering herself so she wouldn’t fall on her face. The knee she’d injured at Koulsnakko’s was sore again, she’d bumped it or something. She was still shaking, nauseated by her brush with dissolution and her brush with the inexplicable…

A dark, musky smell spread through the cabin from a great, deerlike creature looming over Kikun, shaking his antlers, roaring soundlessly, his dark eyes ringed with white. His head was clearly visible though translucent like the crone, colored glass lit from within, but the rest of him was vague, shapeless.

Rose stood clutching at the chair arm, swallowing, hair standing stiff along her spine. What she saw was ancient beyond counting, immensely powerful and essentially uncontrollable, a demiurge in beast form. Terrifying…

She forced herself to cross the short distance between the chairs; it was hard, walking into the ambience of that beast.

The Bear was there, too; she couldn’t see him, but he was present in the darkness that boiled in the corners of her eyes…

As she bent over Kikun’s trapped arm and began working the web free, she couldn’t see THEM anymore, but she knew THEY were still there, she could feel them, feel the pressure of their demands, their fears.

There was no sound in the cabin and the musky aroma had vanished with the deer form. With that gone, she could smell the acrid stench of burning insulation and the more elusive odor of hot metal.

The web came loose finally, slid home. She examined Kikun’s arm, wrinkling her nose as she felt bones grating under her fingers.

The crone came back, tiny hands, long for their size, curling round Rose’s wrists, pulling at them. Rose yielded to the pull that wasn’t there and let Grandmother Ghost guide her as she straightened Kikun and eased him as much as she could without injuring him more than he was already.

Freed by his coma, Kikun’s gods swirled round her, at times merging into an amorphous shimmer, at times hardening briefly into Raven, Otter, Bear, Antelope-deer. Grandmother Ghost stayed beside her, seen sometimes, sometimes unseen, as Rose plundered the emergency medkit, gave Kikun painkillers, splinted his arm, stabilized his chest so the broken ribs wouldn’t do more damage to his lungs.

Time passed.

She finished all she could do down here, locked the crash-web properly in place over him so it would support him, keep him motionless. Everything was set for liftoff…

The pressure faded; Kikun’s gods folded back down into him.

Autumn Rose straightened her aching back, wiped at the sweat, pushed the hair off her face and spent a moment staring blankly at her hands, not at all sure what had just happened.

“All right,” she said aloud. “So. You want me to get him back to the ship and the ottodoc? Well, then, show me where they are, Rohant and the Singer. I can’t leave till I have them.” She felt like a fool talking to herself or worse, to figments of hysteric imagination.

The screen turned itself on. In the darkness outside, glinting in the uncertain glow from the beams that still walked round the Compound, a large black bird flew in tight circles, squawking.

“Well.” Rose limped back to the pilot’s chair, lifted off a few meters, then followed Raven through the clearing storm until he began flying in circles again, this time over a line of thickly set trees growing along the creek that ran past the Compound.

Grandmother Ghost pinched her.

Gaagi faded.

Feeling a fool again, Autumn Rose settled the skimmer onto a patch of grass and gravel, activated the external speakers: