Shadowkill

4

The room on the third floor was long and narrow, with pegs in a white plaster wall instead of closets and paneling. There was a narrow bed with a coverlet white as the walls, loosely woven in an intricate pattern, pretty in the candlelight that picked out the texture and emphasized the pattern and turned the whiteness pearly.

Kizra pulled the door shut behind her, edged around the bed and set the candle on the table. She sat on the bed with her slippered feet hanging beside the boots flopped on the floor next to her wadded-up coverall. She didn’t care if she ever saw that coverall again; it was stiff and stinky with old sweat and clogged with white dust, and her chafed places were still burning from the fifteen days she’d worn the thing. Remembered wearing it anyway. She thought about kicking it out the door but was too relaxed and drowsy from the bath to want to move.

She sucked in a long breath, let it out. She was clean. She smelled good. The candle gave the room a warm welcoming glow. It smelled good, too; it was one of the fancy ones from the Matja’s supply. Aghilo told her to enjoy it while she had it; the next one she got would be tallow and not nearly so nice.

She pinched the candle out, took the robe off and got into bed, shivering a little as her warm body hit the cold sheets.

She had on a blousy nightshirt, very soft and flowing, but it didn’t help at all with the cold. She wriggled around until she was comfortable, then shut her eyes and arranged her mind for sleep…

Moonlight streamed through the narrow window beside the narrow bed, white and chill and far too bright. Moonlight. It was eerie. Things looked different. She pulled her hand from under the covers, stretched it out to intersect that slant of moonshine. The color was leached from her skin; the fingers seemed bonier, they trailed light like smoke.

She wiggled her fingers and watched the shadows play inside the beam, then pulled her hand back into the dusk where it took on an ordinary dark solidity.

Sleep, sleep. She flopped over, the nightshirt twisting about her body, pulling tight against her neck. She humped herself about, tugging at the cloth, smoothing wrinkles that felt like ridges under her.

The inside of her knee itched. She twisted around and down, scratched and sighed. The itch moved to the middle of her back. She chased it as high as she could reach, shuddered all over, kicked the covers off, and rolled out of bed.

Scratching at her arm, she padded to the window and stood frowning out it at a strange colorless landscape, at roofs with pantiles like humpy scales, at a wall two stories high and wide enough to drive the landrover on, with merlons along the outer edge and towers black against a sky hot with stars, so many stars even the huge yellow-gray moon couldn’t blot them out-a full moon rising into a cloudless sky, limned against it a pair of strange mountains, black silhouettes like pointy breasts with hardened nipples.

And a river like a streamer of silver silk, splitting around the Kuysstead. Moat, she thought. Gods. Tumaks? Brushies? Those what they’re this spooky about? I wonder what they look like. All we saw was empty land. Empty land the guards were watching like it could hatch trouble any instant. Did, too. She shivered as she remembered the shooting.

North and west for fifteen days, looong days, had to be at least two thousand kays from where they’d started. Thirty days of misery for Matja Allina, coming and going. And for what? For us. Twenty-six women. If that was the measure of her desperation… ay-yai!

. Matja Allina, is she crazy? Thinking up enemies for her baby? Or is it real? Will she do what she promised? Can she? He backed her, but maybe he’s just humoring her. He doesn’t like us much; that was so thick in the air I could sink my teeth in it. He said he’d back her promise with his. He meant it, I think. Now. That doesn’t say anything about later. When the time comes. He might and he might not. If she’s crazy… paranoid… then what she said, it’s just words and we’re stuck for the duration. Ten years. Gods, I hope not. I don’t like it here. I don’t like having to kiss up to a bunch of… Hmm. Does that say something about what kind of person I was before?

She leaned on the windowsill and contemplated her reactions since she woke in that miserable hut. Up and down, elated, depressed, angry, excited. And tired. Sometimes she felt a hundred years old, sometimes about six. Sometimes she felt in charge of herself, sometimes she felt utterly helpless, though mostly she was somewhere in between. Like now. And right now she was so tired she ached, but her eyes simply wouldn’t stay closed and her body was giving her the fidgets of hell.

She blinked, startled. A small red dot bloomed high on one of the black mountains. A fire. It flickered at her, vanished as if a wall had been put in front of it, reappeared, vanished, reappeared. Then was gone altogether.

It’s a piece with everything else. Conspiracies to suppress a fetus. Things in the brush that need to be shot at, not just shot at but machine-gunned. Signals from a mountainside, aimed at… who? Someone in here? What did that mean?

She yawned, suddenly so heavy-eyed that she wasn’t sure she could make the bed before she melted in a puddle of sleep. Another turn in… in the fog. Wasn’t it fog for everyone, who could read the future? Not me. Not anyone… She stumbled the few steps to the bed, fell onto it and wriggled awkwardly about until she’d got the covers where they should be, over her, not under. She wriggled a last time, like a cat kneading a pillow, getting it right. Then she dropped into the abyss.

If she dreamed, she didn’t know it.

Dyslaera 5: Training Trials

Savant 1 (speaking into note pad):

Removed cap and restrainers from subject 3F (native name: Kinefray)… using CPF24sub2 as a reinforcer… subject continues docile, emotional reaction damped down… under orders, cut the hand off subject 7T (native name: Tolmant), showed no reaction to subject’s protests or struggles… satisfactory contrast to earlier reactions to this subject.

RECOMMENDATION: Continue this regimen for another month without reinforcement other than the CPF. Important to know how permanent this change is. If temporary, important to know how long the treatment lasts.