Brightness Reef (68 page)

Dwer motioned for one boy to come forward.

“Yeah, that’s right, you! Don’t worry, I won’t bite.”

He squatted down in order to seem less imposing. The boy, a filthy urchin, looked like one for whom bravado was as important as life. Dwer knew the type. With others watching, the lad would rather die than let himself show fear. Puffing his chest out, the kid took several steps toward Dwer, glancing back to make sure his courage was being noted.

“What a fine young man,” Dwer commented. “And what would your name be?”

The boy looked nonplussed, as if no one had ever asked him that before. Didn’t everybody in the world grow up knowing each other’s names?

“Well, never mind,” Dwer said, aware the throng was growing larger as curiosity overcame dread. “I want you to run an errand for me. If you do, I’ll give you something special, understand? Good. Please go to Rety. Tell her someone she knows is waiting for her—“ Dwer turned and pointed the way he came. “—over there. By the trees. Can you remember that?”

The boy nodded. Already, calculating avarice had replaced fear. “Whatll I get?”

Dwer pulled a single arrow from his quiver. It was made by the best fletchers of Ovoom Town, perfectly straight, with a tip of razor-sharp Buyur metal that gleamed in the sunshine. The boy reached out, but Dwer snatched it back.

“After you bring Rety.”

Their eyes met in brief understanding. With a blase shrug, the boy swiveled and was gone, squeezing past the crowd, shouting for all he was worth. Dwer stood up, winked at the staring tribesmen, and began sauntering back toward the forest, whistling casually. Glancing back, he saw a good part of the clan following at a distance. So far, so good.

Oh, hell, he cursed when he saw the glavers. Get out of the way, will you?

They had finished browsing at the rotten log and now sauntered toward him. Dwer worried-when they saw the villagers, might they panic and bolt toward the prisoners’ pen? The female glaver turned one globelike eye

toward the approaching crowd. The other eye then followed, a sure sign of concern. She snorted, and her mate reared backward in surprised dismay. They whirled- and fled in exactly the direction Dwer feared!

With a tracker’s sense of light and shadow, he noted Jenin Worley crouching by a tree, where the forest came nearest the prison-corral. One of Dwer’s objectives had been to attract notice away from there.

He had the bow off his shoulder and an arrow drawn when Mudfoot suddenly reared out of the tall grass, waving its forepaws in front of the glavers, hissing. The glavers skidded to a halt and reversed course with astonishing spryness, cantering away with the noor yipping close behind.

For some reason the locals found all of this terrifically funny. It didn’t seem to matter that they had never seen a noor before. They guffawed, pointing and laughing uproariously at the glavers’ distress, clapping as if Dwer had put on a show for their benefit. He turned around, grinning as he reslung the bow. Anything to keep their regard riveted this way.

Abruptly, the crowd fell silent as a shadow fell across Dwer. A low, eerily familiar whine raised shivers up his spine. Shading his eyes against the sun, he looked up toward a hovering black shape, all jutting angles and hanging tendrils, like a certain demon that still haunted his dreams-the fire-spitting monster that had finished off the old mule-spider of the mountains. Despite a pen-umbral glare surrounding it like a fierce halo, he made out the same octagonal symmetry. Only this one wore a rounded silhouette, perched on one jutting shoulder.

“So. You made it all the way here, after all,” the silhouette commented. “Not bad for a Slopie. You’re no fluff-baby, I guess-though the trip seems to’ve wore you down to a rag man. I seen you look better, Dwer.”

“Thanks, Rety,” he said, edging aside so the sun would not blind him. He also wanted to get closer to the forest. “You, on the other hand, never looked so good. Been taking it easy?”

She answered with a curt chuckle that sounded husky, as if she hadn’t laughed a lot lately. “I turned down the offer your sages made-to have me hike all the way back here afoot, guiding a bunch o’ geeps. Why walk, I figured, when I can ride?”

Now he could make her out clearly. Except for the old scar, she seemed quite made over, as they said in certain parts of Tarek Town. Yet the same sullen wariness lay in her eyes.

It was also his first chance to have a good look at an alien machine. Eight even rectangles made up its sides, black without highlights, as if sunshine had trouble glancing off it. Below, a pair of tendril-arms dangled menacingly on either side of a globe that was studded with glass facets and metal tubes. Danel had warned him to watch out for that globe. On top, where Rety sat in a lashed-on saddle, the robot’s surface looked flat, except for a spire rising from the center. An “antenna,” Danel had identified it.

Dwer nodded toward the hovering machine.

“Seems you’ve been making new friends, Rety.”

The girl laughed again-a sharp bark. “Friends who’ll take me places you never saw.”

He shrugged. “I’m not talking about star-gods, Rety. I mean the friend giving you a ride, right now. Last time I saw one of these things, it was trying to kill us both-“

She cut in. “A lot’s changed since, Dwer.”

“—and oh, yeah, it was burning the hell out of that bird thing you cared so much about. Ah, well. I guess sometimes it just pays better to join those who—“

“Shut up!”

The robot reacted to its rider’s anger by bobbing toward him. Retreating, he noted movement by the spherical cluster of lenses and tubes under the machine’s blocky torso, turning fluidly to track him. On a hunch, Ozawa had called it a weapons pod, and Dwer’s every clawing instinct confirmed the guess.

A crowd gathered beyond Rety, most of the human tribe, watching this confrontation between a ragged stranger and one of their own who had harnessed a flying devil. It must seem a pretty uneven matchup.

Some things are exactly as they seem.

Dwer caught a flash of movement toward the prison-pen. Jenin, making her move.

“Well?” Rety demanded, glaring down at him.

“Well what?”

“You sent for me, idiot! Did you hike halfway round the world just to try and make me feel guilty? Why didn’t you stay away, once you saw what’s going on here?”

“I could ask you the same question, Rety. What are you doing? Showing off for the folks? Getting some payback? Did the star-gods have some special reason to need a guide to this armpit of Jijo?”

Complex emotions crossed her face. What finally won was curt laughter.

“—armpit? Heh. That just about tells it all.” She chuckled again, then leaned closer. “As for what Kunn is lookin’ for, I can’t tell ya. It’s a secret.”

Rety was a lousy bluffer. You don’t have the slightest idea, Dwer pondered, and it galls you.

“So, where’s that pack of Slopies you were gonna lead out here?” she demanded.

“In hiding. I came ahead to make sure it’s safe.”

“Why shouldn’t it be? Nothin’ dangerous here, except maybe my nasty ol’ cousins . . . an’ a bunch of smelly hinneys—“

When she said that, a piping whistle, like faint, piccolo laughter, vented from a padded pouch at her waist.

“And killers from outer space?” Dwer added. “Planning to wipe out every thinking being on the planet?”

Rety frowned. “That’s a damn lie! They ain’t gonna do it. They promised.”

“And what if I showed you proof?”

Her eyes darted nervously. “More lies. They just wouldn’t do nothing like that!”

“Like they wouldn’t shoot a poor, unsuspecting bird-thing, I suppose. Or attack those urs without warning.”

Rety turned red as Dwer hurried on.

“Come along. I’ll show you what I’m talking about.”

Before she could refuse, he turned to walk back toward the forest. “I left it over there, behind that stump.”

The girl grumbled but followed on her robot steed. Dwer worried that the machine might be more sophisticated than Ozawa guessed. The reference works the sage had studied were three hundred years out of date and sparse on details. What if the robot both understood speech and could tell he was lying? What if it could read his thoughts!

The tree stump was thicker than most. The sooners must have worked hard with their primitive tools to hack it down, when they made this clearing. Dwer bent to pick up two things he had stashed on the far side. One, a slender tube, he slid up his tunic sleeve. The other was a leather-bound book.

“What is it?” Rety demanded, nudging the robot to drop closer. Atop the machine’s flat upper surface there protruded short tentacle-things with glossy ends. Three swiveled toward Dwer, while the fourth watched for danger from the rear. So far, Danel Ozawa had been right about the robot’s mechanical organs. If these were “eyes,” then that narrow spindle jutting up from the robot’s center-

“Show me!” Rety demanded, dropping closer still, peering at the small volume, containing about a hundred paper pages, a treasure from Danel’s Legacy.

“Oh, it’s a book,” she muttered with contempt. “You think you can prove anything with this? The Rothen-kin have pictures that move, an’ talk, an’ tell you anythin’ you want to know!”

Exactly, Dwer thought. They can create images to show exactly what you want to see.

But he answered with a friendly nod. “Oh, sorry, Rety. I forgot, you can’t read. Well, open it up, and you’ll find this book has pictures, too. I’ll explain them, if you like.”

This part had been Danel’s idea. Back at Gathering, the lesser sage had seen Rety flip through dozens of picture books in apparent fascination-when she felt no one was watching. Dwer was trying to mix insult with encouragement, shame with curiosity, so the girl would have no choice but to look at this one.

Wearing an unhappy grimace, Rety reached down further and accepted the book. She sat up and riffled the paper leaves, clearly puzzled. “I don’t get it. What page should I look at?”

The robot’s hover-fields brushed Dwer’s leg, making all the hairs stand on end. His mouth felt dry, and his heart pounded. He fought a wave of anticipation-weakness by pure force of will.

“Oh, didn’t I open it to the right picture? Here, let me show it to you.”

As Rety turned toward him, the robot dropped lower. Dwer raised his arms, reaching toward the book, but staggered when he bumped the robot’s side.

It was fiery death if the thing thought it was being attacked. Would the machine recognize normal human clumsiness and make allowances?

Nothing happened. The robot didn’t fear his touch.

“Hey, watch it,” he complained. “Tell your pal here to take it easy, will you?”

“What? It’s not any o’ my doin’.” She kicked the machine. “Leave him be, you stupid thing!”

Dwer nodded. “All right, let’s try again.”

Both hands went up. His legs were like coiled springs-and Dwer’s life seemed to float above him like a sound, ready to flee on the wind.

He leaped.

The robot’s brief hesitation ended in a sudden yowl, joined instantly by a series of sharp detonations, coming from the nearby forest. Heat flared between Dwer’s legs as he yanked two of the sensor-heads, using them as hand-holds to swarm desperately up the machine’s flank, away from the deadly ball. Pain erupted along one thigh the split instant before he hauled his torso atop the gyrating machine. He clutched the bucking thing with his left hand while his right brought forth the slender tube.

The world was a blur of trees and clouds and whirling sky. More explosions pealed, accompanied by horrible sizzling sounds. Desperately, Dwer shoved the tube at the robot’s central spindle and squeezed.

Traeki enzymes combined and emerged in an acrid, fizzing stream, vanishing down openings at the spindle’s base. Dwer kept squirting despite the robot’s wild pirouettes, until his aim was spoiled by Rety, shoving his arm away. Only then did Dwer note her screams amid the general tumult. When her teeth clamped on his wrist, Dwer’s own howl joined in. The half-empty tube escaped his convulsing hand, tumbling away.

Purple steam rose from the robot’s center. The spindle began to slump. Dwer shook Rety off and with a reckless cry threw himself on the drooping antenna, taking it in both hands, heaving with all his might. He shouted an ululation of triumph when the whole thing tore free at the base, though it left him rolling across the flat surface, clutching futilely for a hold.

Flailing, he tumbled off the edge, falling toward the meadow floor.

Dwer never worried, during that brief interval, about striking some rock or jagged tree stump. The machine would likely dice him to bits before he ever hit the ground.

But he was not sliced. Nor did he strike the rough meadow. Blinking in surprise, he found that a pair of arms had caught him!

Relief was tempered when he saw the arms belonged to the robot.

Oh, great. Out of the frying pan and into the-

There came another series of detonations, and the hovering machine rocked as if slammed along one side. Hanging below the octagonal body, Dwer saw part of the globe underneath explode in a spray of steel and glass. The weapons-ball was already a smoking ruin. Not a single lens or tube appeared intact.

Great work, Lena, Dwer thought, proud of how well she used the terrible devices that only she and a few others on the Slope were trained to use. Firearms that did not use a bit of metal. He turned his head in time to see more brief flares as Lena or Danel fired again from the forest edge. The machine rocked as another exploding shell impacted. This time one of the dangling tentacles holding Dwer shuddered and went limp.

That was definitely Lena’s work. What a clever girl, he thought, half-dazed from pain. The sages chose well. I would’ve been a lucky boy, if things had gone according to—

He got no chance to finish the thought, as the robot whirled around to flee, zigzagging across the meadow, using his body as a shield between it and danger. Dwer saw Lena rise and take aim with her launcher, then lower it, shaking her head.

“No! Shoot, dammit!” he screamed. “Don’t worry about me!”

But the rushing wind of flight carried off his words. Lena dropped her weapon and hurried to a figure lying on the ground nearby, slumped beside a second missile tube. She turned Danel Ozawa over, revealing a red river pouring from his chest.