Shadowkill

2

The air was fresh and sweet. They’d come down through a rainstorm into a mountain dawn and when Kikun emerged and looked around, crystal drops clung everywhere, picking up the sunrise, glittering red and gold and brilliant white. The local life was already recovering from the intrusion; there were grunts and whistles and a sudden soar of melody. Then the pattern repeated with changes.

He rode the lift down and walked into the middle of the meadow, absorbing shape and color, sound and smell, relaxing into this new world. The reprocessed air on the ship was clean and properly humidified, even faintly perfumed with touches of leaf and flower-choice air, one might say, pampered air. Despite this, it smelled of metal to him, as artificial as Ginny’s arm. He breathed deeply and his soul expanded.

They’d landed on the narrow isthmus that was the spine connecting the north and south nodes of Haemunda Chajiari, a sparsely populated area because the land was mostly vertical and stony, interrupted with steep narrow fjords where cliffs dropped a hundred meters straight down into the ocean water; the isthmus could support trees, grasses and small mammals, but a man would starve to death.

Kikun chanted under his breath, apologizing to the local life for the shock of the landing. Eyes watched from the treetops and the brush, looked up at him from the grass. Not much fear here, because no one came, just an ordinary wariness.

He settled his backpack more comfortably, leaned against a tree stump, and waited.

The lift hummed again. He turned. Autumn Rose was coming down with her pack leaning against her leg and two miniskips like hobbyhorses resting by her feet.

“Help me, Kuna,” she said when the lift reached the ground. “I want to run west with the edge of dark and we’ll miss it if we don’t start soon.”

He hauled his emskip onto the grass, shaking the icy dew over his feet and over its metal surfaces, then stood back, watched the lift rise, fold itself in until the skin of the skip was sealed tight once more.

“West by north,” Rose said. She touched on the effect, swung into the saddle. “Set the tonc at two seven four corrected. Got it? Good. Let’s go.”

They reached the Tola Hills above Tos Tous with dawn pinking the sky ahead of them, landed the emskips on a brushy ledge with a good ten meters of weathered stone rising above them and a drop over the lip of fifty meters straight down. Once the emskips were wrapped in a camouflaged groundcloth, it would take some hard looking to spot them; besides, as Rose said, who in their right mind would look there.

Despite the awkward weight of the pack, Kikun climbed the crumbly stone face like his looksake garden lizard going up a wall; Rose followed more slowly, grumbling all the way. She didn’t like heights, she wasn’t going to have any skin left on her front or her hands, besides she was freezing and starved. There had to be a better way, Z’ Toyff, there had to be. She reached up, Kikun caught her hand and helped her onto the flat above the cliff.

Tos Tous rambled around the curve of a wide lovely bay; the city was a quilt of many colors all of them gray or brown, thousands of small buildings gathered in haphazard clusters. No street-if they were streets, not merely gaps between adjacent buildings-went straight for more than a few meters.

“Lovely place. Anthill someone stepped on, squashed all to hell and gone.” Autumn Rose unfolded the map she’d had the kephalos print up for them, looked from it to the city below. “That’s the part we want.” She pointed. “There, near the middle of the curve where most of the wharves and warehouses are. Um. We’ll be going through the main market-if we’re lucky enough, and this is market day, you should be able to collect quite a lot of coin. Do the best you can, Kuna, we need the cash.” She chuckled, nudged him with her elbow. “You should be about the best pickpocket alive with that Talent of yours.” She sobered. “I can use my crecard in emergencies, but I’d rather not. I don’t know who or what’s watching readouts round here.”

Kikun sighed. “That’s the third time you’ve said that, Rose. I heard, I heard.”

“Nerves, Kuna. Always get ’em when I’m about to jump in something I don’t know anything about.” She frowned over her shoulder at the eastern horizon where the tip of the sun was poking up, a brilliant vermilion blob of light. “Twenty kays we have to walk. At least that. Well, better safe than sorry. Come on, Li’l Liz, let’s go.”