Black Bead: Book One of the Black Bead Chronicles (10 page)

Wait,
whispered Bear.
 

Cheobawn skidded to a halt, confused. The overwhelming need to race towards home was an excruciatingly painful feeling. Once again the next bright place lay just beyond her reach, dark. She stamped her foot in frustration. Wait? Wait for what?

One of the children clicked a query behind her. She held up her hand, wishing them silent as she put all her energy into listening for the moment that would tell her it was safe to move.

A bull fenelk bugled somewhere south of their position. Cheobawn found it in the ambient and tasted its mood. Nervous that the sky hunters circled high overhead, it headed downhill towards the southern forests where it would spend the night. She followed it in her mind as it strode beneath an ancient blackoak, its horns laid flat along its back, its tusks up and ready for anything that would be so foolish as to attack it.

A dubeh leopard lifted its head from where it rested on a blackoak branch, watching the elk. The giant cat was on its way up to the needletree forest where the grunters grazed in the evenings. Cheobawn’s heart twisted painfully in her chest. She and her demi-Pack stood in its path.

The leopard was in no hurry. It rose to its feet and stalked the fenelk along the high branches. If they hurried, they would avoid the leopard. She turned towards home but the bright spot in the ambient was not in front of her. It was somewhere uphill. Cheobawn peered up the slope but saw nothing, felt nothing. She did not understand the need for the detour.

Tam clicked another query.

Cheobawn looked back at him.
Dubeh leopard,
she signed.
Wait.
 

Tam’s eyes widened.

She checked the dubeh once more. It had grown bored with its game and now paced the trees in their direction.

She looked towards home again and took a step in that direction. All the threads in her mind died and turned dark.

Fine.

Cheobawn flashed Tam a grim look and turned to face up the slope. Her first step told her she was going in the right direction. She began to run in earnest. Alain groaned behind her. She did not pause or slow her speed. A dubeh was not something any of them could face.

The tracks of many grunters crossed the slope just below a vast expanse of scree. She stopped and turned. Her friends staggered to a stop. Pointing towards the deep hoof prints, she signed.
Do what I do.
 

Then she ran alongside the hoof prints for a hundred paces before leaping away downhill. Tam danced over the grunter trail, following her lead.

When the dubeh turned to go hunting in earnest, it would find their scent trail and follow it. The grunter spoor would remind it that it was hungry and that humans were a poor meal, by comparison.

The next bright place in the ambient pulled her onward. Cheobawn did not slow her pace. She gradually worked her way down the hill, mindful of her exhausted companions.

The roosting tree of a flock of carrion lizards blocked their way south. She turned west and ran on.

The black water bogs lay in that direction. She did not want to cross the bogs. She tried to veer north and west, hoping to take a path between the cliffs and the vast pools of stinking black water but the threads of their future died inside her mind. Cheobawn tried to sense what blocked the way. A hive of stinging nasties infested the rocks there and a fenelk mother and her small calf stood dozing just beyond that. She backtracked and found another way around the pool, picking her footing on ground that oozed black mud if you stood too long in any one spot. They were now in the heart of the bogs, a place not even the most experienced trackers ever went.

Bear Under the Mountain danced around her, enticing her on. She snarled at him, tired of his games. She did not want to be here. She wanted to veer north, away from the sucking mud and the clouds of tiny biting flies, but rock slides blocked that retreat. She thought about heading south and west towards the well traveled South Road where they would have been unhindered by rough terrain and thick vegetation but black water blocked every turn.

Life on the mountain was in motion, pressing at her psi sense. She pressed back, pushing with all her might at things that threatened to cross in front of them and cut off their only route, wishing them to pause, as the dubeh had done, to stay, to turn and find another direction.

Sight and psi sense began to blur dangerously. Reality twisted inside her head. She moved the world by running. Running was all she could do.

Cheobawn tried to stay focused by making it into a game. Pluck the threads of their future, pick the strongest, and follow it until it ran out. Choose another. She would adjust direction, run for a while until the thread ran out in her mind, then she would change directions to follow the next. It was like navigating in a pitch black room. She knew this game. The Mothers played it with their daughters as soon as they could walk. Find the dolly. No coming out until you found dolly. Cheobawn really hated dollies.

Another bright spot in the ambient approached. At just the right moment, she pivoted and raced straight up the slope towards a point where the ridge jutted out into the valley. Here the rock had collapsed under its own weight, leaving a lone stone spire standing sentinel over an expanse of rock slides dotted with patches of vegetation trying to find a foothold in the unstable ground.

The sound of snuffling and the click of claws on the loose rock above them greeted her ears as she clambered up to the base of the spire. The sound was faint and she heard it only because she was expecting it. They were nearly out of time, once again.

Climb,
she signed frantically. She did not wait to see that they obeyed. She jammed her hooked stick into the loops on her belt to free both hands. Jumping up as high as she could reach, her fingertips caught a knob of rock as a handhold. Using her momentum, she swung her knee up to wedge the toe of her boot into a crack. From this precarious perch, she pulled herself up to reach for the next irregularity in the face of the rock.
 

Taking the holds dangerously fast, the climb took less than a minute but it felt like forever. A large flat stone crowned the pinnacle. She threw her arm over the lip and clawed at the rough stone as she inched over the rim on her belly. Safe at last, she collapsed and tried to get her breath back.

Was it fear or fatigue that turned her muscles to jelly? It was hard to tell. She had not taken a drink since well before the bhotta and the last food she had eaten had long since disappeared, making her belly feel hollow. Cheobawn pulled all the power she could handle out of the mountain’s reserve, postponing the needs of her body for some future time.

When she thought she could handle it, she crawled to the edge to help the next person up. Megan was almost to the rim. Cheobawn spread herself flat and pulled the older girl up the last few feet by her belt. Alain was next, with Tam climbing by his side, though there was little Tam could do if Alain lost a hold point and fell.

She risked a glance up the slope but dense brush blocked her view. Whatever it was, it had caught their scent. A deep, excited moan came from just beyond a thicket of thornberries. The hairs on the back of her neck stood on end.

She grabbed Alain’s hand, Megan grabbed the other and between the two of them, they hauled him over the rim. He collapsed
face down on the tiny plateau nearly sobbing with exhaustion as Tam pulled himself up and whirled around to reach down towards Connor.
 

The youngest boy was still too far down. He was having a hard time of it for some reason. Every gain up the rock face twisted his face in agony. Cheobawn measured the distance between him and the ground and then checked up-slope. They were out of time. A large prehensile nose pushed its way clear of the greenery and sniffed deeply. Massive shoulders parted the stalks as the rest of the animal followed its nose towards the desperate Pack.

A treebear. The thing was as tall as a grown man at the shoulder and standing on its hind feet it surely would be taller than three grown men. They were good climbers, these animals, if their claws could find a purchase.

Cheobawn felt sick. She may have doomed them, bringing them up here with nowhere to retreat.

The treebear rose on its hind legs and lifted its nose high in the air. It had not spotted them yet but surely it would soon. What it lacked in vision and psi abilities it more than made up for with its nose.

Megan pushed Cheobawn out of the way and lay down on her belly, inching forward as far as she could. Alarmed, Cheobawn grabbed the older girl’s ankles and braced her heels against the rock, holding on as tight as she could. Alain did the same for Tam as Tam leaned out over the edge, though Alain looked as weak as a baby and probably could not hold on for long if Tam started to fall.

Connor came up at last, clawing his way over the bodies of his friends. Cheobawn grabbed them all, pulled them away from the edges, and pressed them down into the stone. Alain shuddered, trying to smother a cough with his fist, his exhausted lungs betraying him. There was so little room in the center of the cap stone they were forced to overlap arms and legs, forming a solid ball of child flesh. Cheobawn spread herself thin around the edge of the ball, hugging Megan with her legs and Connor with her arms. Every moment or so, she lifted her head just enough to keep track of the bear.
 

The treebear whuffed deeply and dropped back down on all four feet. Rocks shifted and skittered under its weight. Its claws, large enough to rip open dead trees in search of honeybuzzer nests and treehopper dens, gave it an odd, toed-in gait as it clambered down the loose stones, swinging its head from side to side to catch their scent. Cheobawn watched as it approached the base of their roost and then disappeared below them.

Now was when she would find out how good their Luck was. She buried her nose in the small of Connor’s back, held her breath, and waited.

All sound of movement stopped right below them. The snuffing intensified. That could mean only one thing. It knew they were up here. Cheobawn cursed their rotten Luck and tried to figure out where she had gone wrong. On the surface, walking right up under the nose of a treebear with the breeze at their backs seemed suicidal. But getting above its nose should have confused it. If they had truly been blessed, the bear should have followed their backtrail down the slope.

Claws scraped against the rock face and the stone under them quaked slightly. The bear had not been fooled. It was trying to climb. It paced the base of the spire, trying every crack and crevice with a tenacious thoroughness, circling once, twice, and then again a third time, the sound of its excited whuffing marking its progress. Occasionally it would find a purchase for its claws but the stone was too brittle. They listened to the tiny pops as the rock fractured under the bear’s weight, the surface of the spire shedding flakes of itself, the chips clattering down the steep incline to add themselves to the already unstable scree.

The treebear’s frustrated moan gave her hope. What

had afforded small children a toe hold was not enough for something as massive as a treebear. Perhaps Luck was still on their side. Cheobawn lifted her head and then clutched frantically at anything within reach as the stone shuddered, then shuddered again.

For a moment she thought it was an earthquake. Then it hit her. The treebear was trying to knock the stone spire over using its massive strength.

The stones shuddered once more.

She had not thought she could be more afraid than she already was but true terror exploded in her mind like fire, stripping away any illusion of control she might have thought she had over what lay in her core. Adrenaline fueled a firestorm of psi that caught her up in its pressure wave and blew her out into the world.

For a moment, the world became nothing but light and sound and she was the formless thing unraveling at its core. She clutched at the fabric of reality, trying to find an anchor point. Cheobawn became a frightened ball of children, but she could not hang onto that thought, the winds of her fear too strong. In succession, she became a stone spire, then a treebear intent on toppling this great stone tree.

Cheobawn could not stop the storm that was blowing her away from herself. She became the stones and bones of a ridge line that held back the weight of half a mountain. She became the mountain, perpetual snowfields on her crown, the forest living flesh upon her flanks, the bones of her roots sunk into a hot mass of the plastic rock that seethed restlessly under the weight of its rigid shell.

Not even a planet could contain her. She was preparing to leap off into the vacuum of space after becoming the ball of living rock caught up in the tyranny of a star’s orbit when sanity returned. Little girls did not belong in the darkness between stars. Little girls belonged in little bodies. She released her hold on the expanding bubble of psi energy and sank back towards the fragile vessel meant to contain her life spark.

Cheobawn remembered, as she let go of the place where she existed as a mountain, that she was still in mortal danger. As she contracted down to tree size, she found the treebear, standing on its hind legs, front paws planted against a puny mound of rock. She settled into it, pulling its life close around her like a warm blanket on a cold morning.

Cheobawn found herself staring at her paws, confused. Why was she trying to tip this stone? Then the faintest smell of blood reminded her. She had treed a thing without a name and it was wounded. The promise of an easy dinner was hard to ignore. She reared back and hit the spire one more time, putting the weight of her massive shoulders behind that blow. Though stone ground against stone, nothing big seemed to be shaking loose. It was very frustrating. She lifted her nose high and tasted the air, her mouth watering, imagining warm furry bodies struggling in her jaws, the blood flowing hot, bones cracking.

No!

Revulsion flooded her mind. Cheobawn shied away, landing on all fours. She shook her head to clear it of the thoughts that buzzed around inside her like a swarm of flying nasties. She did not want to eat the nameless ones. She loved them. Didn’t she? She moaned, rocking from paw to paw, love and hunger mixed up in her mind.