Crecheling (12 page)

Dyan settled against a low ridge of stone. A cool breeze blew against her, and she opened her coat. The chill would help keep her awake.

She rubbed her wrists, chafed where she had been tied. The skin on her face and the back of her neck scratched and felt raw, and she guessed it had been burned by the sun. She thought about using some of the salve on herself, but decided to save it for Eirig. Besides, the pain would also help keep her awake. And in her heart, she knew she deserved all the pain she was feeling, and more.

“They’re asleep,” she heard a voice in the darkness. “Good. Now we can talk.”

A black shadow detached itself from the ink of the night, and dropped its hood to reveal the lean face of Magister Zarah.

***

Chapter Thirteen

“I’m armed,” Dyan warned the Magister. “I could cut you down where you stand.”

“Then I’ll sit,” Zarah said. “If I am to die, I’d like to do it comfortably.” She settled carefully onto an arm of the same ridge of stone against which Dyan leaned.

“I could yell,” Dyan told her, “and warn the others.”

“So could I,” Zarah agreed. “And if we are to tell of all the tragic and terrible things we might do, for that matter, I could have simply killed you in the darkness before you noticed me.”

Dyan hesitated. Zarah didn’t sound like she’d come to arrest Dyan. “How can you talk about
tragic and terrible things
so lightly?” she asked. “Do you know what happened to Wayland?”

“He was cut in half,” she said instantly. “I was almost caught in the same trap myself, only Deek noticed the whip. Very clever.”

Dyan was silent, remembering the sudden weight of Wayland’s torso slamming into her body and the smell of his blood.

“If Cheela is to be believed, it was your doing.”

“It wasn’t,” Dyan said. She wasn’t sure she should be talking to the Magister, but she had to admit that if Zarah’s purpose in coming had just been to kill her, she could have done it before Dyan noticed a thing. “And she isn’t.”

“I know.” The moon shone on Zarah’s face where she sat, giving it a soft, silvery glow. “She’s in love with Shad, I see it. Young people do crazy things for love.”

“I thought I was in love with Shad, once. It seems like a long time ago now.”

“If ever you were in love with him,” Zarah said softly, “then, on some level, you always will be.”

Dyan bit back a sudden sob, managing to twist it into something like a cough. “Is it like that for everyone? That’s terrible.”

“Not for everyone,” Zarah said. “But it’s like that for some people, and I know you, Dyan. I’ve been watching you.”

“You’ve been my Magister for four years.”

“I’ve known you for longer than that.” Zarah chuckled. “I knew you in the nursery, when you were a chubby little thing who wouldn’t pick her feet up, so static electricity kept your hair standing nearly vertical.”

Dyan laughed, slightly. She didn’t want to wake Jak and Eirig. “I don’t remember that.”

“You wouldn’t. Do you remember that you were the most tactile child in the nursery? That you insisted on touching all the other children, all the time?”

“No.” Dyan lost herself a little in the images that Zarah was producing.

“The combination was a disaster.” Zarah slapped her own knee in silent mirth, shaking. “You’d shuffle from child to child, shocking each of them in turn.”

“That sounds like I was a mess.”

“You were a human being. The difference can be difficult to spot.”

Dyan didn’t know what to say. She felt like she was being led into a teaching moment, but the point of it still eluded her.

“You’re the kind of person who will love forever, Dyan,” Zarah said. “You’re also the kind of person who will always love easily. You have powerful empathy, the ability to know what other people are feeling, or at least to imagine what you would be feeling if you were them. It’s a wonderful thing. It can give you great insights into people. It can also lead you into great disaster, and injury.”

“I’m a human being,” Dyan countered. “The difference between a human being and a disaster can be difficult to spot.”

“You must realize that others don’t feel as you do, and don’t see as you do.”

“What do you mean?” Dyan had had many conversations with Magisters over the years, including Zarah. They were frequently one-on-one interviews, but she’d never had a conversation this intimate before. She felt a little bit invaded. Zarah seemed to want her to understand something, but Dyan still couldn’t see it.

“Take Cheela. You look at Cheela, and you see that she has feelings for Shad. How does this make you feel?”

“Betrayed.” Dyan felt tiny. She wasn’t enjoying this lesson very much.

Zarah reached over and patted her knee. “I’m sorry, Dyan. How do you feel about Cheela?”

Dyan shrugged, miserable. “Sad. It’s bad luck for me that she likes Shad, and worse luck that Shad likes her back. I guess I envy her. How’s her ankle?”

“She, on the other hand, sees you as a bug. She doesn’t care what your feelings are. She couldn’t imagine herself in your situation if she tried. If you two had traded places there on the riverbank today, she would have sliced you in half without a second thought.”

“She did try to slice me in half,” Dyan remembered.

“She doesn’t care about other people’s feelings because she can’t really see them. Shad, by the way, is more like you. If those two have a Love-Match and it ends, Shad will remember it with happiness and pain years later, and Cheela will simply move on.”

Dyan suddenly felt cold, and closed her coat. “That seems brutal.”

Zarah shrugged. “It’s a kind of person. Cheela isn’t alone, and there are others who are similar in their small feeling for their fellow human beings, but more extreme. She lacks empathy.”

“Maybe it would be nice to be that way,” Dyan mused. “It would be nice to just forget about Shad.”

“Cheela’s lack of empathy is also a sort of gift,” Zarah said. “It will make her a good Outrider. When she is tasked with bringing in an outlaw, it won’t occur to her to wonder what the outlaw’s feelings are. If she has to be harsh with him, or take extreme measures in capturing him, it won’t bother her.”

“Capture or kill,” Dyan said sadly.

“Once the System has made sure of Cheela’s loyalties, it can use her to great effect.”

“That’s what the Blooding is, isn’t it?” Dyan asked. “It has nothing to do with the Landsmen, or maybe that’s only incidental. It’s about testing loyalty, and about hurting people in a way that makes them cooperative. Loyal. Submissive to the System.”

“The System is complex and subtle,” Zarah murmured. “Little of what it does can be reduced to single purposes. Yes, one of the purposes of the Cull is keep the Landsmen submissive. They lose their best and their brightest, the natural leaders of any rebellion. And they are in the habit of thinking that all their relationships, all their society, are subject to the consent and veto of the System. They submit.

“And also, another purpose of the Cull is to keep the Urbanes submissive. Every Urbane you have ever met …” Magister Zarah hesitated, and a secretive smile played around her lips. “Every Urbane has submitted to the Blooding. That means that every Urbane shares the secret, common guilt. Every Urbane knows he is complicit, and knows he will submit to the very last crossable line. Every Urbane knows the secret of life—that it is cheap, and easily taken. So every Urbane also submits to the System.”

“But the System is just people,” Dyan said. “We could just change it.”

Zarah was silent for a long time. “I have not come to talk with you about changing the System,” she finally said. She sighed heavily. “Do you love that boy over there?” she asked.

“Jak?”

“I understand why you pretend to be surprised,” Zarah said. “You do it for my benefit, and also for your own. You don’t want to admit that a Landsman might have captured your heart. Especially one whom the System has designated you to Cull.”

“It’s horrible.” Dyan’s whisper was tiny.

“It
is
horrible.” Zarah leaned in closer. “Life is horrible, Dyan,” she said softly. “It is a series of terrible tragedies, and we choose the things we choose in life in order to soften those tragedies, and brighten the dull stretches between them. Do you understand me?”

“I think so.”

“I’m like you, Dyan. I can imagine myself in your place. I can do it better than you can, because I am older than you. I’ve seen many things, experienced many things, stood in strange and unexpected places. Your gift is a Magister’s gift, and the System is right to think that it can use you in that Calling to great effect.”

“Once it can be sure of my loyalties,” Dyan conclude. “Once it has placed on me the burden of collective guilt, and taught me that life is cheap, and that there is nothing so horrible that I wouldn’t do it to save my own life. Once it knows that the thing I will choose to soften my tragedies and brighten the dull stretches between them is participation in the System.”

“Life as an Urbane is not the worst life there is,” Zarah whispered. “Urbanes have the best food to be had, and shelter. And medicine.”

“And funvids,” Dyan said bitterly.

“Distraction is a powerful and important thing,” the Magister said. “And funvids can be considerably more than mere distraction.”

“They don’t teach you how to escape from having your hands tied,” Dyan told her. “I know, because I tried.”

Zarah chuckled dryly. “There are other things to be learned.”

“So I’m finding out.” Dyan huddled into her coat. The moonlight about her felt stern, and the stars cold and remote, and she wondered how Zarah could possibly be comfortable wearing only her simple clothing and cloak of office against the cold. “Magister Zarah, what are you doing here?”

Zarah sighed. “Most Creche-Leavers walk a pre-determined path,” she said. “We show them blood, we lead them into the wilderness, we show them joy and community, and then we make them dip their own hands into the blood they’ve seen. We bring them back to the community sober and adult, broken down and rebuilt again.”

“I see now that this is the heart of what a Magister does.”

“It is. And you see that because it is in your gift to be a great Magister, a great builder, breaker, and re-builder of human spirits.”

“But it went wrong this time.”

Magister Zarah hesitated. “Something unexpected happened,” she said. “Death has resulted, but death was always going to result, death always does result from the Cull. Some people have been Culled who were not supposed to be, and others, who were supposed to die, have not. Yet. But death still shows us that he is king, that he is the darkness around life’s flickering match, the eternal silence around life’s short, tuneless warble. No mysteries have been disturbed, no revelations cast into doubt. But a new path has opened. A different choice. Perhaps.”

“For me,” Dyan realized.

“For you.”

“You’re saying I have a choice.”

“I am.”

“I could come back to you.”

“You would still have to be Blooded.”

“What about Cheela?” Dyan asked. “She told Shad that I attacked her. She told you that I killed Wayland.”

“You would have to do something sufficiently … dramatic … to convince everyone that Cheela was mistaken.”

A thick, cold feeling of horror choked Dyan’s windpipe. “I could Cull Jak and Eirig,” she said. She wished the cold had rendered her completely numb, but it hadn’t, and she felt sick at her own words. “For instance.”

“Shad would remember that you spared Cheela when you could have killed her,” Zarah predicted. “Others would be persuaded. Then you would cease to be a Magister-designate and become a Magister. You would soften the horrors of life with the pleasures of the System and the company of its people.”

“Shad would still love Cheela.”

“I don’t imagine that Shad will ever forget the image of you standing over Cheela, threatening to cut her head off,” Zarah said. “Do you?”

“No,” Dyan agreed. “He won’t.”

“Nor would you ever forget Jak, a boy for whom you once had feelings.”

“And whom I had to kill, to make my own life easier.”

“Don’t say
easier
. Say
bearable
.”

“Would it be bearable?” Dyan asked.

“Eventually.”

“And the other choice?”

Magister Zarah was quiet. “What do you think the other choice is?”

“The other choice to is to go with Jak and Eirig,” Dyan said.

“There is life in the Wahai. There are outlaws, to be sure, but there are also the Shoshan and the Basku.”

“Are there other Systems?” Dyan asked. “Other cities, like there were before the Cataclysm?”

Zarah shrugged. “If anyone knows the answer to that, it isn’t I. I can tell you that in my travels, I have heard many rumors, and never anything more definite than a rumor. But there’s something else I can tell you, something that will interest Jak a great deal more than the possibility that there might be other Systems.”

“What’s that?”

“Jak’s sister Aleen is not dead.”

Dyan inhaled sharply. “Is she in Buza System?”

“She escaped the Cull. That makes her an outlaw. I believe she is in the Wahai.”

“So I would be like Aleen. I would fill my life with Jak.”

“And he would fill his life with you. If he feels about you like you feel about him.”

“I’m not sure.”

“Maybe he isn’t sure yet, either. There’s time. You’re leaving the Creche now, but you’re still young.”

“That might mean children,” Dyan mused.

In the System, when a Love-Match resulted in the birth of a child, the child was turned over to the Nursery. Mothers delivered their babies and were not allowed to see them, not at all, not once. Dyan had witnessed more than one birth, through one-way glass and under Zarah’s supervision. In the Wahai, she assumed, if you gave birth to a child you had to actually raise it. Which made every mother a Magister. It didn’t sound horrible to her.

“But no funvids.”

“This doesn’t sound quite like the Blooding,” Dyan said.

“No?” Zarah asked. “Maybe all of life is the Blooding. Maybe life in the Wahai will be its own Blooding to you, and that will be enough.”

“Is that how the System sees it?”

“Or maybe my role as Magister is to prepare you for life, whether that is through the Blooding and transition to being an Urbane … or otherwise.”

That definitely wasn’t how the System saw it. The choice to become anything other than an Urbane was a choice to run away. That meant being an outlaw, and a special kind of outlaw at that: a renegade. Renegades were hunted.

“Cheela might come after me,” she said. “If I were a renegade, and she were an Outrider.”

“Which she will be. She’s not Blooded yet, but with her attitude, it’s inevitable. For that matter, Outrider Shad might be sent to capture you.”

“Capture or kill.” Dyan considered. “Are you going to get another Landsman for Cheela to … Cull, then?”