Bhotta's Tears: Book Two of the Black Bead Chronicles (7 page)

Cheobawn followed Amabel through the North Gate but when Amabel turned off the North Promenade, she paused, confused. Amabel strode away, not bothering to look back. Racing to catch up, Cheobawn found herself playing Dancing Molly behind the Master Maker as she wound her way through
the gardens, apartments, and communal spaces in a meandering path that eventually led to the fenced-in medicinal garden that grew along the back of the infirmary. The Master Maker took a small metal probe out of her pocket, inserted it into the hole in the middle of the gate’s lock plate, and turned it. There was a soft snick of metal sliding against metal and the gate swung open.
 

Locks fascinated Cheobawn. In her mind, locks and their keys were magical talismans that conveyed special powers to their holders, perhaps because so few existed under the dome. Private places did not need walls and doors did not need locks when common courtesy and respect would do in their place. This garden was one of the few places that were forbidden to any but the privileged few who had keys.

When she was little, she thought Amabel had buried treasure in her garden, like in the fairytales. She had been sorely disappointed when she found out it only contained plants. Dangerous and poisonous, to be sure, but plants all the same.

Amabel waved Cheobawn through, locked the gate behind them, and continued with a purposeful stride up the path between the beds of innocuous-looking greenery. If stumbled upon in their natural setting, one would hardly notice these plants. Most had tiny colorless flowers except one. Cheobawn paused near a verdant plant topped with a spectacular flower with orange petals and a hot pink heart. The plant quivered under her gaze, then seemed to shrivel and turn black. She caught a whiff of the stink of rotten flesh and backed away quickly.

“Please don’t annoy my plants,” called Amabel over her shoulder. Cheobawn scampered to join Amabel, who waited impatiently as she held the back door to the infirmary open.

“I didn’t touch it. Honest. It just got …” Cheobawn turned to look at the rotting plant. Her words died, forgotten. The orange
flower with the pink heart stood tall and unblemished. “Oooo, did you see that?”

“Every day,” Amabel said dryly. “Get inside before the whole world sees you.”

Cheobawn slid into the dark interior, puzzled by Amabel’s words. Was the Maker breaking the rules about locks and keys by letting Cheobawn in the garden?

When her eyes had adjusted to the light the room revealed itself. Cheobawn hissed in surprise. She was in the heart of Amabel’s domain. The room contained banks of complicated machinery and equipment whose use she could only guess at. One wall contained glass fronted cupboards full of neatly labeled bottles and boxes. Another wall contained doors set with pressure and temperature gauges both mechanical and electronic, as if Amabel could not trust either so settled on both. Cheobawn sidled closer to glance at the dials. The numbers made no sense. Surely it was impossible for something to get that cold?

“What do you …”

“Never mind that. Come along,” Amabel said, her hand on the handle of the door that led further into the heart of the infirmary. Amabel waited for her and then put a hand on Cheobawn’s shoulder to hold her in place while she opened the door. The Maker stuck her head out into the hall, looked both ways and then pulled Cheobawn after her as she strode quickly down the hall and in through another door.

Cheobawn nearly laughed but managed to hold it in. Was Mora’s Second reduced to sneaking about in her own laboratories like a kid trying to evade her nestmother? Cheobawn suddenly had an image of Amabel as a young, mischievous girl bent on being naughty. If it were not for the frightening place in which she suddenly found herself, Cheobawn would have enjoyed this moment more.

The second room was as surprising as the first. They stood in a birthing room, but unlike any Cheobawn had ever been in before. The birthing chair was familiar enough, but it was hung with what only could be called restraining straps. Nor was this the only difference. Instead of soft chairs, calming art work, and piles of fluffy towels and gowns, the room was as sterile and utilitarian as Amabel’s laboratory. Some of the same laboratory equipment lined the walls of this room, bizarre mechanical sentinels to whatever ritual Amabel preformed in here.

Cheobawn balked and tried to back out.

“None of that,” Amabel said, pushing her towards the table. “Hop up and let me get a look at what you have done to yourself this time.”

Cheobawn looked around the room, her mouth gone dry. A frightening thought suddenly occurred to her. By coming in by the back way, no one knew she was here in this room. Amabel could do whatever she pleased without interference. She watched Amabel’s back as she put on a white apron and gathered swabs and antiseptic on a plasteel tray. Cheobawn wondered what would happen if she started screaming.

Probably nothing. Even if someone heard her, no one would question Amabel’s right to do what she thought was best. As the village’s resident Maker of the Living Thread, Amabel was the primary source of health care. She was also the Master Geneticist making her the arbiter of all procreation within the village. No baby was born in Home Dome that did not have the mark of Amabel’s approval on it. And marked they were. Cheobawn thought the Windfall tribe lucky that Amabel had never felt the need to visibly mark her progeny. They all could have auburn hair and green eyes like Alain’s natal tribe.

Cheobawn swallowed her panic. Even if she could get someone to listen to her protests, what could she say? She was hurt and Amabel was a healer. What could be more innocent
?
 

There was just one small problem. Cheobawn was fairly certain Amabel hated her. Well, perhaps hate was a strong word. Offended. The Maker was offended by Cheobawn’s existence in her well-ordered world.

The fact that Cheobawn had failed the first and simplest test of her psi ability on her Choosingday when she was three had been catastrophic on so many levels. The entire village thought her Bad Luck to be toxic, tainting them all by association. The Fathers thought her presence caused contention among the Mothers, a thing, in their view, not to be tolerated. Mora and the Coven stood as a wall between her and the village, but Mora could not protect her from Amabel.

Amabel took every opportunity to remind her that she was a broken thing in need of fixing. This was not just her childish fantasy. The Maker used any excuse to poke her full of holes, taking tissue samples for study. Was she hoping to find out where she had gone wrong? Perhaps. But one thing was very certain. Every encounter with Amabel became a bitter reminder to Cheobawn that she was a Black Bead, set apart, outside the norms and standards of the tribes.

Amabel added a syringe to her tray. Cheobawn tried to be brave. She tried to hold her ground. But her heart failed her. She backed away only to be brought up short against the side of one of Amabel’s electronic sentinels.

Catching the movement out of the corner of her eye, Amabel turned, anger flashing across her face. She followed Cheobawn, cutting off her escape towards the door.

“We do not have time for foolishness. Get up on the table. You will not like it if you resist me.”

Cheobawn believed the threat. She sidled around Amabel and crawled up on the table, using the stirrups as a ladder.
 

“Take off your tunic and let’s have a look.” Amabel said, filling her syringe from a vial of amber fluid.

“What is that?” Cheobawn asked, her voice nearly failing her.

“A broad based nephrotoxin just in case you picked up any one of twenty spores that can grow inside the human body and come out in all sorts of nasty ways. Dirty open wounds are a serious business.”

But poking Cheobawn full of holes was not the only torture Amabel had on her agenda. As proof of Cheobawn’s suspicions, Amabel opened a box and pulled out a wire reader. Cheobawn mentally sighed. What was the Maker looking for? It was not like her genetic code had changed from the last time Amabel had read it.

Cheobawn lifted her chin obediently. Amabel used the end of a fingernail to depress a switch on the side of the reader, a tiny machine no longer than the first joint on her thumb, before she placed it on Cheobawn’s omeh. The machine latched onto the plasteel cord. Cheobawn felt it vibrate slightly as it oriented itself before beginning its long crawl around her collar. Embedded in the 23 hair thin wires woven into her omeh was Cheobawn’s own unique genetic code, recorded at the moment of her birth and knotted around her infant throat by her truemother, the High Priestess, and the Maker of the Living Thread in a sealed room high in the Temple tower during her naming ceremony. Babies sometimes did not come out of that room, judged wanting by the Goddess or the Mothers or Amabel’s finer esthetics. Cheobawn was convinced that Amabel regretted letting Cheobawn leave that room when it was her turn to be judged. Cheobawn suspected that Mora’s need of a Truedaughter outweighed Amabel’s need for logic and order, else she would not be sitting here.

While Amabel waited for the reader to finish, she pulled out a lancet, grabbed Cheobawn’s hand and poked the tip of her finger, blotting the resultant beads of blood on a strip of paper. Cheobawn looked away to stare at the wall. The reader clicked softly around her neck while the village ambient whispered inside her mind, a comforting presence even here, deep within the bowels of Amabel’s logic.
 

When Amabel had taken all the blood she needed, she fed the paper into one of her machines. The Maker studied the data that streamed across its small screen, then scowled, perhaps displeased at what she saw.

The reader hiccuped and stopped. Amabel retrieved it. Returning to her machine, she plugged it into a slot. Another steam of data filled the screen. Amabel grunted.

“Someday, little chit,” the Maker said softly, tapping a fingernail on the screen, “you will have to tell me how you do that.”

“Do what?” Cheobawn asked, hoping, for once, that Amabel might share her secrets.

“What? Oh, never you mind,” Amabel said, rising from the work station. She swabbed a point on the inside of Cheobawn’s elbow and then picked up the syringe full of amber fluid. “Hold still.” Amabel said as she jabbed the needled in. Cheobawn watched the plunger depress, sending the medicine into her bloodstream, proud that she did not flinch or cry out.

Amabel noticed the long scratch down the back of Cheobawn’s arm and grunted in annoyance. “Most little girls have enough psi sense to stay out of trouble. Why is it that you don’t? You re-earn that black bead with every scratch, you know. Your mother is not pleased. Must you forever disappoint her?”

Cheobawn tried not to snarl, but was only partially successful. Instead of revealing all her teeth, her lip twitched in a momentary sneer. This jab had found its mark where the needle had not. No matter what her failings, Mora would never say that. Amabel assumed too much.

“You are not Mora,” Cheobawn hissed softly.

“Tsk,” said Amabel, tossing the syringe onto the tray and grabbing a swab and a bottle of antiseptic. “Lucky for you.”

There was a threat in those words that hung ominously in the air. Cheobawn’s psi whispered warnings that ran like a dark river around Amabel’s intentions. It suddenly occurred to Cheobawn for the first time in her life that Amabel, with an entire deadly garden
at her disposal, might carry death in her syringes along with all her medicines and potions. The injection might have carried more than an anti-fungoid serum. Cheobawn pushed that terrifying thought away. It did one no good to succumb to the fancies of an over-active imagination when the ambient carried no such warning. All the same, it was hard to shake the thought from her head while her brain tried to build castles out of its ramifications. Were there rules that governed the behavior of the Makers or were they free of constraint? Cheobawn wondered who she could ask. Hayrald, perhaps. He had few reasons to lie.
 

The exam continued. Cheobawn cringed as the scientist ran her fingers over her body, ostensibly to examine her scrapes and check for broken bones but to Cheobawn it always seemed as if Amabel was searching for the part of Cheobawn that was irreparably damaged, that she might pluck it out.

Cheobawn closed her eyes and tried to find the calm place inside herself that would keep her from rising to the bait of Amabel’s cuts.

This, thought Cheobawn, was the undeclared war that stood between them. On one side stood Amabel, who played with human flesh as children played with building blocks, arrogant in her unassailable wisdom, unable to admit that something strange and outside of Amabel’s carefully constructed plans had walked into the world when Cheobawn was born. On the other side, stood Cheobawn, weaponless except for a stubborn refusal to be crushed by Amabel’s cruelty.

Amabel ignored Cheobawn’s dark scowl, busy as she was with scrubbing her abrasions, reopening the cuts so that they bled anew. The healer was not gentle. Cheobawn pressed her lips together, determined that Amabel would not see her flinch. Instead she sucked the pain into her body and fed it, along with her outrage, into that dark place inside her so that she might leave her mind clear.

“Turn over onto your belly,” Amabel ordered. Cheobawn complied. She pressed her face into the soft surface of the birthing bed. It helped to think good thoughts under these circumstances. She remembered the stalker’s love song, melon bugs, and the smell of fresh earth while Amabel cleaned the long scratches on the backs of Cheobawn’s legs; swabbing out the dried blood and pressing the skin taut, looking for any splinters that might become a source of infection.

“This is not just about you, you know,” Amabel said, her fingers ruthless on little girl flesh. “You will realize that when you are older. If you get older. You are so quick to risk yourself without thinking what it would mean if you miscalculate and got yourself killed. I have no back up plan. Mora put all her hopes in you. Yet here you are, doing thoughtless and reckless things. I understand your anger, but that is no excuse for not doing your duty. Do you think to punish us, we who had a hand in your making, by hurting your body?”