Doomstalker (18 page)

Chapter Eight

I

Marika could not stay away from that strange part of the packfast where her brain and talent scrambled. Three times that day of discovery she returned. Three times she reeled away, the third time so distressed her stomach nearly betrayed her.

There had been a true qualitative difference that last time, the strangeness being more intense.

She leaned against a wall and tried to hold her dinner down, panting, letting the chill north wind suck the sudden fever from her face. Finally, she pulled herself together enough to move on.

She ducked into the first doorway she encountered. The vertigo was less intense inside.

She halted. She heard odd voices ahead. Strange lights flickered around her. Lights without flame or much heat when she passed a finger near them. Quiet lights, constant in their burning, hard to the touch when she did rest a finger upon them. What witchery was this?

She became very nervous. She had been told she could go wherever she wanted and see anything she wanted. Yet the silth must have their ritual places, like the males and huntresses of the packstead, and those certainly would be off limits. Was this such a place? She dreaded the chance she would interrupt the silth at their black rites. They had begun to seem as dark as her packmates had feared.

Curiosity overcame fear. She moved forward a few steps, looked around in awe. The room was like nothing she had ever imagined. Some yards away a female in a blue smock moved among devices whose purposes Marika could not pretend to fathom. Some had windows that flickered with a ghostly gray light. The voices came from them. The female in the blue smock did not respond.

Devils. The windows must open on the underworld, or the afterworld, or... She fought down the panic, moved forward a few more steps toward the nearest of those ghostly portals.

She frowned, more confused than ever. A voice came through the window, but there was no one on the other side. Instead, she saw squiggles arranged in neat columns, like a page from a book in reversed coloration.

Flicker. The page changed. A new set of squiggles appeared. Some of those altered while she watched. She gasped and stepped closer again, bent till her nose was almost against the window.

The meth finally noticed her presence. “Hello,” she said. “You must be the new sister.”

Marika wondered if she ought to flee. “I do not know,” she replied, throat tight. She was confused about her status. Some of the meth of the packfast did call her sister. But she did not know why. No one had taken time to explain. She did know that the word “sister” did not mean what it might have at home: another pup born of the same dam. None of these meth seemed to be related by blood or pack.

The society was nothing like that of a pack. Hierarchies and relationships were confusing. So far she had figured out for sure only that those who wore black were in charge and everyone else deferred to them in a curious set of rituals which might never make sense.

“What is this place?” Marika asked. “Is it holy? Am I intruding?”

“This is the communications center,” the female replied, amused. “It is holy only to those hungry for news from the south.” It seemed she had made a great jest. And was sorry to have wasted it on a savage unable to appreciate it. “You are from the stead in the upper Ponath that the nomads destroyed, are you not?”

Marika nodded. That story had gotten around fast once she had told the sentry. Many of the meth who wore colors other than black wanted to know all about the siege of the Degnan packstead. But when Marika told them the story, it made them unhappy. For themselves, not for the meth of the upper Ponath.

“Nomads running together in thousands. Ruled by a wehrlen. Times are strange indeed. What next?”

Marika shrugged. Her imagination was inadequate to encompass how her life could turn worse than it had already.

“Well, you are from the outside, so all this will be new to you. The upper Ponath is as backward a region as can be found on this world, bar the Zhotak, and deliberately so. That is the way the sisterhood and the brethren want it kept. Come. There is nothing here to fear. I will show you. My name is Braydic, by the way. Senior Koenic is my truesister, though blood means nothing here.”

“I am Marika.” Marika moved to the female’s side.

Braydic indicated the nearest gray window. “We call this a vision screen. A number of things can be done with it. At the moment this one is monitoring how much water we have stored behind each of the three dams on the Husgen. That is what you call the west fork of the Hainlin. For us the east fork continues to be the Hainlin and the west fork becomes the Husgen. If you have been up on the ramparts at all, you must have seen the lower dam and its powerhouse.”

Marika feared she might have walked into a trap quite unlike the one she had suspected. Meth did not chatter. They became very uncomfortable with those who did. Talkers were suspected of being unbalanced. Generally, they were just lonely.

Braydic poked several black lozenges among the scores ranked before the vision screen. Each lozenge had a white character inscribed upon it. The squiggles left the screen. A picture replaced them. After a moment Marika realized it represented a view up the west fork of the Hainlin, the branch Braydic called the Husgen. It portrayed structures about which Marika had been curious but had felt too foolish to ask.

“This is the powerhouse. This is the dam. The dam spans the river, forming a wall that holds back the water. The water comes down to the powerhouse through huge earthenware pipes, where it turns a wheel.” Braydic poked lozenges again. Now the screen portrayed a big wooden wheel turning slowly as water from a pipe poured down upon blades. “The wheel in turn turns a machine which generates the power we use.”

Marika was baffled, of course. What power? Did the silth generate the touch artificially?

Braydic recognized her confusion. “Yes. You would not understand, would you?” She stepped to a wall, touched something there. All the lights, except those near the vision screens, went out. Then on again. “I meant the power that works the lights and vision screens and such. I am monitoring the water levels behind the dams because the spring thaw will begin before long. We have to estimate how much to let water levels drop so the three lakes will be able to absorb meltoff without risk of overflow.”

Marika remained lost. But she nodded, pretending to understand. If she did that, maybe Braydic would keep talking instead of sending her away.

She was lonely, too.

At home adults got impatient when you did not understand. Except for the studies in books, which said nothing of things like this, you were expected to learn by watching.

“Do not be afraid to say you do not know,” Braydic told her. “Nor ashamed. If you do not admit ignorance, how are you to learn? No one will bother teaching you what you pretend to know already.”

Marika studied the black lozenges. They were marked with the characters and numbers of the common symbology, but there were a dozen characters she did not recognize, too. Braydic pressed a larger lozenge which lay to one side. The vision screen went blank.

“Do you read or write, little sister?”

She wanted to say she was Degnan. Degnan were educated. But that seemed a fool’s arrogance here. “I read. I do not write very well, except for ciphers. We had very little chance to practice writing, except when we made clay tablets or bark scrolls and could use a stick stylus or piece of charcoal. Pens, inks, and papers are all tradermale goods. They are too dear for pup play.”

Braydic nodded. “I see. Think of a written word, then. All right? You have one?”

“Yes.”

“Pick out the characters on the keyboard. Press them in the order you would write them. Top to bottom, the way you would read them.”

Tentatively, Marika touched a lozenge. The first character of her name appeared on the vision screen. She pressed another and another, delighted. Without awaiting permission she pecked out her dam’s name, and Kublin’s.

“You should place a blank space between words,” Braydic said. “So the reader knows where one ends and the next begins. To do that you press this key.” Swiftly, all her fingers tapping at once, she repeated what Marika had done. “You see?”

“Yes. May I?”

“Go ahead.”

Marika tapped out more words. She would have tried every word she knew, but one of the silth interrupted.

Braydic changed. She became almost craven. “Yes, mistress? How may I please you?”

“Message for Dhatkur at the Maksche cloister. Most immediate. Prepare to send.”

“Yes, mistress.” Braydic tapped lozenges swiftly. The vision screen blanked. A single large symbol took the place of Marika’s doodlings. It looked like two comets twining around one another, round and round, spiraling outward from the common center. “Clear, mistress.”

“Continue.”

Braydic tapped three more lozenges. The symbol vanished. A face replaced it. It said a few words that Marika did not understand.

She gasped, suddenly stricken by the realization that the vision screen was portraying the image of a meth far away. This was witchcraft, indeed!

The silth spoke with that far meth briefly. Marika could not follow the exchange, for it was in what must be a silth rite tongue. Still, it sounded trivial in tone. More important the wonders surrounding her. She gazed at Braydic in pure awe. This witch ruled all this and she wasn’t even silth.

The silth sister finished her conversation. She laid a paw on Marika’s shoulder. “Come, pup. At your stage you should not be exposed to too much electromagnetic radiation.”

Baffled, Marika allowed herself to be led away. She glanced back once, surprised a look on Braydic’s face which said she would be welcome any time she cared to return.

So maybe she had found one meth here who could become a friend.

The silth scooted Marika through the door, then turned back to Braydic. In an angry voice she demanded of the meth in blue, “What are you doing? That pup came out of a Tech Two Zone. You are giving her Tech Five knowledge. Gratuitously.”

“She is to be educated silth, is she not?” Braydic countered, with some spirit.

“We do not yet know that.” The silth shifted from accented common speech to that she had used while speaking through the vision screen. She became very loud. Her temper was up. Marika decided to get away from there before that wrath overtook her.

II

They took her before the taller silth who had brought her out of the upper Ponath. That one, whom they all called Khles here, was confined to bed yet. Her one leg, only lightly wounded in the nomad attack, had begun to mortify during the long struggle to reach the packfast. She had spoken neither of the wound nor infection during the journey.

The sisters who brought Marika chattered among themselves beforehand, gossiping about the possibility that Khles’s leg would have to be amputated. The healer sisters were having trouble conquering the infection.

“So,” the tall one said, “they all forgot or ignored you, yes?” She seemed grimly amused. “Well, nothing lasts forever. The easy days are over.”

Marika said nothing. The days had not been easy at all. They had been lonely and filled with the self-torment brought by memories of the packstead. They had been filled with the deep malaise that came of knowing her entire pack was going into the embrace of the All without a Mourning. And there was nothing she, Grauel, or Barlog could do. None of them knew the rites. Ceremonies of Mourning were the province of the Wise. The last of the Degnan Wise had perished — Marika was morally certain — through the agency of the silth.

When she slept, there were dreams. Not as intense, not as long, not as often, but dreams still edged with madness, burning with fever.

“Pay attention, pup.”

Marika snapped out of a reverie.

“Your education will begin tomorrow. The paths of learning for a silth sister are threefold. Each is a labor in itself. There will be no time for daydreaming.”

“For a silth sister? I am a huntress.”

“You belong to the Reugge sisterhood, pup. You are what the sisterhood tells you you are. I will warn you once now. For the first and last time. Rebellion, argument, backtalk are not tolerated in our young. Neither are savage habits and customs. You are silth. You will think and act as silth. You are Reugge silth. You will think and act as Reugge silth. You have no past. You were whelped the night they brought us through the gates of Akard.”

Marika responded without thinking. “Kropek shit!” It was the strongest expletive she knew.

As strength goes.

The silth was on her own ground now and not inclined to be charitable, understanding, or forgiving. “You will change that attitude. Or you will find life here hard, and possibly short.”

“I am not silth,” Marika insisted. “I am a huntress to be. You have no other claim upon me. I am here by circumstance only, not by choice.”

“Even among savages, I think, pups do not argue with their elders. Not with impunity.”

That did reach Marika. She had to admit that her lack of respect left much to be desired. She stared at the stone floor a pace in front of her toes.

“Better. Much better. As I said, your education will follow a threefold path. You will have no time to waste. Each path is a labor in itself.”

The first path of Marika’s education was almost a continuation of the process she had known at the packstead. But it went on seven hours every day, and spanned fields broader than any she could have imagined before becoming a refugee.

There was ciphering. There was reading and writing, with ample materials to practice the latter. There was elementary science and technology, which expanded her amazed mind to horizons she could hardly believe, even while sensing that her instructors were leaving vast gaps. That such wonders existed, and she had never known...

There was geography, which astounded her by showing her the true extent of her world — and the very small place in it held by the upper Ponath. Her province was but a pinprick upon the most extreme frontier of civilization.