Shadowkill

5

A useful being to have about. Kikun turned on his side, drew his legs up. The bed shifted gently under him, adapting to the changing weights and arrangement of his body. Useful being. Shadith worried about using him. Rose was more practical. And less attached.

His gods were shadows, his friends were dead or gone. He was empty, a skin stretched over a void.

He couldn’t go home, not yet awhile.

The daiviga K’tawal… Lissorn called her a subqueen which was close enough… who governed the Grass had put a price on his head and the Dawadai priests would haul him to the nearest stake and torch him the minute they got their hands on him.

How long was it?

Only five years? That was standard years.

Dunya years were longer. A little. He didn’t know how much.

Say five years.

That was close enough.

Five years. The K’tawal Ilafur wouldn’t have lost a feather in that short stretch, let alone her memory of the dinhast who’d hung up caricatures of her on every corner of Ootlakil.

Even without that, he couldn’t go home, not really home. His sept had cast him out, he was a non-being among the Dinhastoi. That was always the fate of the Clowngod’s avatar, according to the songs.

Clowngod was uncomfortable company.

A sport of nature fitting nowhere.

A singleton rogue in a people of triads and triad multiples.

A god who didn’t believe in gods, at least, not for worshiping, more for trading with or getting round.

A breaker of laws, disrespecter of persons, rebel and iconoclast, bad enemy and worse friend.

Personification of Change in a world more comfortable with day after day of the same thing, no matter how miserable that might be, where nearly everyone was frightened of the turmoil and chaos that change invariably brought.

Avatar. He was the avatar for this generation. He’d been given no choice about that. If the proposition had been put to his formless soul before it was seeded into his fetal body, he would have rejected it indignantly.

He tried rejecting it later. He shared the dinhast mind-set that was much like the Dyslaera mind-set when it came to kin and kind. He NEEDED friends and family.

It was no good. He was what he was.

He suffered because he couldn’t make dinhast life fit him or make himself over to fit it.

The alien friends he’d found helped fill the emptiness. He’d invested first in Lissorn, then in Rohant and Shadith. Friendship wasn’t enough, but it helped.

Lissorn was dead.

Rohant was gone.

Shadith was gone.

Shadith. He lay wondering what had happened to her. Was she alive or dead? Surely the Omphalites wouldn’t go to the trouble to capture her just to kill her?

Shadow girl, don’t do anything foolish. We’re coming for you. You must know we’re coming. Hang on. Wait. Wait…

He sighed and slept.

Shadith (Kizra) On The Farm

Kizra jumped down. Her knees went and she would have fallen if Tinoopa hadn’t caught her.

“Long day,” the big woman said absently. She was watching the man standing before large double doors at the top of a wide flight of s-curved steps. He was a tall, lean man, a gold and bronze man; he shone like a hem in a stained glass window. The bronze coal lamps at the upper comers of that door turned his fine blond hair into a shimmering halo about his lined face, sank his eyes into glinting shadow.

He came down the stairs, crossed to the landrover where Aghilo and the handmaids were helping Matja Allina down the folding steps. There was an urgency in him that filled the whole of the irregular courtyard, melding with the urgency in the woman. Their greeting was a simple touching of fingertips, eye meeting eye, the woman bowing to the man, the man lifting her. It looked formal, but the formality was on the surface. Beneath…

The force of the feeling that lay beneath those heraldic surfaces woke an ache in the emptiness where Kizra’s memory had been. Her eyes prickled, but she refused to cry, just turned away to inspect what lay around her.

The court was paved with squares of dusty blue-gray stone webbed with cracks. The court walls and the walls of the Great House were sod and cement. Short stiff grass grew on the sod like patches of coarse fur. Coal lamps smaller and less elaborate than the two giants by the house door were scattered about those walls, throwing inky shadows into deep-set doorways and arched window openings. Beyond the broad court and the House, towers like snag teeth stood black against the crimson of the setting sun, towers everywhere, round and square, fat and thin, with flattop roofs or conical caps. There was construction in every direction she looked, scaffolding, upper stories half complete. The smell of the sod was pungent as the heat leached out of it, mixing with the smells of people standing quietly in shadows. Hordes, it seemed to her, of small fair people waiting in shadow for the signal to move, to talk.

The other women in the labor cadre stood beside her, a ragged group lingering by the only thing they knew, the truck. The youngest and newest to Contracts (Tictoc, Eva-lee, Dorrit, Vuodee, and Vassikka) were looking eagerly about, poking each other, whispering and giggling. The rest stood silent, waiting for someone to tell them where to go, what to do.

Tinoopa watched the Matja and the Arcing meet, then nudged Kizra away from the others. She turned her shoulder to the landrover, set her hands on her hips, and gave what she could see in the growing dark a good lookover. “Quite a place,” she said. She’d pitched her voice to carry.

“Uuuuh HUH!” Kizra said. “Considering how many rifles it took to get us here, lovely walls.” She stretched, groaned. “I would KILL for a hot bath.” She, too, let her voice carry, made a song of the words, a song to remind Matja Allina how much ease they’d given her during that miserable journey. She snatched furtive looks at Allina as the woman stepped away from her Arring and raised her hands in a ritual greeting to her household, then spoke quietly to Aghilo, pointing as she did so at Tinoopa and Kizra.

“Hey, it worked,” Kizra murmured.

“Maybe,” Tinoopa said. “Maybe she meant to all along.” The Shimmarohi tapped Kizra on the shoulder, a habit she had before she dropped into aphorism disguised as advice. “Good intent is a fine thing, but you don’t chance you life on it, Kiz. Rules say they have to pay us, treat us right. Yeh. Tell you this and you remember it. Rules mean shit-all out here. Forget everything else, but remember that.”

“If I’m allowed.”

“A weel a weel, that’s not like to happen twice, luv. Not here, anyway.”

Leaning heavily on her Arring’s arm, Matja Allina went up the stairs and into the house.

Aghilo took Tinoopa and Kizra in behind them.

The rest of the women were lined up and marched into the women’s quarters in one of the side wings.