Maeve (3 page)

“Why did you leave the place where you belonged?” Disapproval was sharp in his tenor voice.

“Belonged!” A bark of unhappy laughter was startled out of her. “They were going to burn me for a witch.”

Her mount shied as a knobby little reptile fled in panic from under its feet. Almost immediately, a dark shadow plummeted from the sky and sailed off with the reptile wriggling in its talons. Aleytys frowned. She continued to watch a moment, then closed her eyes. The bird vanished from her senses, not even the faint flutter of awareness that proximate life usually stirred along her nerve paths unless she consciously blocked it out.

When she looked up again the black, triangular shape was soaring upward on a thermal, too high to see if the whippy reptile still dangled from its beak. “Hey!” She pulled her eyes down. “Gwynnor!” He was riding slumped over, deep in unhappy thoughts. “Gwynnor!”

He straightened his narrow shoulders and looked around.

“Is there a bird up there, or am I dreaming?”

His eyes rounded. “An eryr. Why?”

“When I close my eyes, he's not there. Why can't I sense him as well as see him?”

“You SEE?”

“If that's what you call it.”

He fixed his eyes on the eryr as it sailed past the sun. “Prey animals on Maeve SEE. Most of them. So do some of the cerdd. I … I did once. No longer.” He slid rapidly over the words, then slowed as he continued to explain. “Since they'd starve without it, some predators developed the ability to be invisible to the SIGHT.” He swung bright, nervous eyes across the sky. “I was forgetting. There's worse than the eryr in these skies.”

“Worse.”

“Peithwyr.” He shuddered. “Six meters of leathery wing and teeth with a poison sting in the tail.” He dug his heels into the kaffa's side. With a snort of disgust the animal speeded up, the dip and sway of its gait increasing alarmingly. “I forgot,” he threw back at her over his shoulder.

Aleytys goaded her own mount into faster movement and drew up alongside him. “I won't be able to sense it coming?”

“No.” He looked around warily. “No,” he repeated after a while. “If a peithwyr attacks, get off the kaffa first. Get as far off as you can the first jump. If you're lucky, it'll start tearing up the kaffa and let you get out of sight behind the first rock you can reach. Then you've got maybe a chance in fifty getting away alive.”

“Why not shoot it? You're armed.”

“Holy Maeve! No, Aleytys.” His face was a study in consternation. “A wounded peithwyr? It wouldn't stop till the ground itself was shredded. In small pieces.”

“Even if you killed it?”

“Peithwyrn are hard to kill. You'd have to be lucky. Make good an eye shot.” She could feel tension mounting in him. “Where eryr are, the peithwyr haunts.”

Aleytys shuddered and shifted uneasily in the saddle. “I've been able to mind-control predators before.”

“Don't waste your time.”

The afternoon deepened slowly. Aleytys dropped into a tired, half-dozing state, lulled into carelessness by the uneventful passage of hours. The flat stone surface stretched away to the horizon with scraggly plants here and there that were a dusty gray-green, hard to separate from the stone. Occasional reptiles scurried away from the feet of the kaffon but no eryr broke the sterile silence of the sky.

“Hit the ground!” Gwynnor's shriek sent her tumbling off the kaffa, diving for a tumbled pile of rocks, disregarding the frantic scrabble of the beast's feet. A sudden foul stench wafted past on a surge of air driven by great wings. Blackness flowed over her. The kaffa screamed, then silence filled with tearing sounds. She scrambled away. A boulder. She slammed into it. Crawled around it. Peered cautiously back.

The kaffa was down in a boneless heap, throat torn, blood gouting in a steamy diminishing arc. Stench again. Something struck her shoulder, a numbing blow. Was gone. A scream. Cut off.

Keeping low, moving with fear-born caution, she peered around the boulder briefly. The other kaffa was down and spouting blood. The peithwyr beat its leathery wings with tremendous strokes, driving its huge hollow-boned body into the air again. It circled over the butchered animals then came plummeting at her, bloody talons reaching.

She scrambled backwards hastily, pulling at the hem of her tunic to get at her gun.

The peithwyr dropped like a bomb. Desperately, she drove her body away, still trying to get the gun free.

The peithwyr dropped, talons glittering in the russet light.

Pain. Not her throat. Her shoulder. Pain. It thrust her toward the comforting blackness pooling beneath the agony. Her shoulder was on fire. Fire spread outward from the white-hot center where a pumping artery spurted away her strength. Scarcely noticed, wings beat over her then veered off. As she faded, she heard a crunching of bones. The peithwyr crouched dark and ominous, tearing at the kaffa. Her sight blurred. Blackness was warm, the pain distant, a great grinding agony distant … her life spurted away through the torn artery.

Something prodded at her.

Amber eyes opened inside her head. “Aleytys!” The contralto voice was familiar … familiar … she didn't want to know …

Memory was a flood of agony She wanted to deny it but she had no strength. “Harskari.” Aleyty's lips moved with the name. “Why?” A cone of red licking out. Killing. Killing my love. Why?

Black eyes opened. “Freyka!”

Go away. I don't want you. I won't let you … I won't acknowledge you … I won't …

Delicate chimes whispered around her head, delightful butterfly notes singing around the sounds from the gorging peithwyr. The amber eyes altered. A thin, dark face framed in shimmering silver hair formed around them. “Aleytys! Heal yourself. Now, girl. You can rest later.”

“No.” The word was harsh in her mind through her trembling lips moved with only a breath of sound. She tried to reject the presence, feeling a pain that went far deeper than the simple physical hurt from her mangled shoulder.

Violet eyes snapped with annoyance as a pointed elfin face materialized around them. Shadith's aureole of coppery curls quivered like tiny springs. “Move ass, Lee. You can wallow in self-pity when you've got the leisure for it. Come on, let us help you. Lean on us. Reach out for your river. Come on, dammit! Reach!”

Cool, ironic black eyes slanting down at the outer corners set in a rugged, intensely male face, Swardheld grinned at her. “Glad to see you with us again, freyka. Now!” He narrowed his eyes, then bellowed, “Move it, woman!”

Prodded by the phantom images in her head, Aleytys focused her mind on reaching for the black river that fed her talents. And as she reached, she felt phantom arms cradling her body, lending her the strength she lacked. She shuddered with that wrenching psychic pain inflicted by the memory of love and death. Weakly, she tried to push the memory away, shutting out the three in her head along with it. For a moment the hands supporting her faltered, seemed to retreat. No. The word roared at her. No. Don't shut us out. Not again.

The black water came pouring over her. She writhed and shrieked … pain … pain … tearing at her … and worse … tormenting itch as the torn flesh grew back. As blood cells doubled and redoubled. Then the thunder of the water died to a whisper.

“Aleytys.” The quiet word vibrated through her head. “Remember Irsud. Remember that ill-fated world. Remember Burash, your lover. Face your anguish. Don't run away from it again. You're a woman, not a child.”

“No …”

The peithwyr beat its way into the sky, sending great gouts of wind to batter her. Then it dropped again, talons reaching for her, screaming, a battering of sound that shocked thought from her head.

The diadem chimed, and the air turned stiff. Aleytys shuddered as dead men's faces came tumbling back, triggered into consciousness by the sound. And Swardheld shoved her aside, knocking her loose from her body, shouting, “Verdamn, freyka, move over!”

He flipped her body over the nearest boulder, diving with a smooth continuation of the movement to end on his feet behind the plummeting bird. The diadem chimed again.

The peithwyr squalled with rage and muscled its great body around.

Swardheld cursed and jerked the tunic up, snatching the energy gun from the waistband of her trousers. As the monster dived toward him, he cleared the sensor and sent the thin red beam searing first into the chest region, then, with his usual calm accuracy, he sent the ruddy beam into the mad eyes of the beast. Immediately, he leaped the body back, wheeled it, put six meters between body and dying bird, dropped body behind one of the piled boulders and waited.

The peithwyr tumbled out of control, cracking the air with shrieks of pain and rage. Then it fell onto the rock and writhed, snapping haphazardly, tearing at its own flesh. Grinning his triumph, Swardheld let go his hold on her body.

With the weakening cries behind her, Aleytys slid back into control and tried to get to her feet. Her legs were so weak she fell, bruising her knees. She felt sick.

Shaking, she pulled herself onto the boulder, pushed her legs back against the stone and leaned forward, resting her head on her hands, elbows pressed against her knees, breathing in great shuddering gasps that wrenched her body. Gentle hands, immaterial hands, moved over her, comforting her.

Harskari materialized in her head. “Aleytys, look to the boy. He might be still alive.”

“Ahai Madar!” She pushed up on wobbly legs and stumbled across to the second kaffa.

The cerdd was crouched behind his mount, blood seeping sluggishly from the shredded flesh of his back. He lay very still.

Grimacing with distaste, Aleytys knelt beside the pool of blood and touched him. Life beat faintly under her fingers. Arching her body over the blood to keep the sticky mess off herself, she placed her hands on the cerdd's back and let the healing power flow.

After awhile, back aching from the unnatural position, she straightened. Gwynnor's flesh was whole again, the only sign of the savage wounds a faint pink tracery crossing the thick, grayish fuzz growing on the pale skin of his body.

He blinked and sat up, looking at her, eyes staring wildly, he quickly focused on the gelatinous blood pooled around him. He tugged at his tattered tunic and glanced briefly at the bloody rags that barely covered her torso.

Uncomfortable in the silence, Aleytys said abruptly, “I heal.”

“So I see.” He chuckled, a sudden flash of humor born from his near-brush with death. “The peithwyr?”

Aleytys jumped up and looked back across the stone. “Still dying.”

Holding onto her, Gwynnor pulled himself onto his feet and stared at the slowly writhing form of the killer bird. “How?”

She touched her waist. “Energy gun.”

“Come on.” He scrambled over the corpse of the kaffa and began tearing at the saddle bags.

“What's the hurry?”

“Its mate. We might not be lucky a second time.” He pulled the knots loose and swung the waterskin over his shoulder, the bags over another. Aleytys hurried to follow his example.

As they moved along a path, clinging to the side of a ravine that opened out a few meters from the battered corpses of the kaffan and the still struggling peithwyr, Aleytys glanced nervously at the sky. “You think the peithwyr won't see us down here?”

Gwynnor shrugged, then edged around a curve, pressing his body tight against the side wall. His voice came back to her. “Be careful. The stone is crumbling badly here.”

After they negotiated the dangerous area, Gwynnor said suddenly, “Their wing spread's too great. We should be safe as long as this keeps going in the right direction.” Then he added, “I think.”

She looked back at the sun, still stubbornly high above the western horizon, fully visible even from the depths of the ravine. “How long till sunset?”

“Four, five more hours. Why?”

“I'm about out of push. My home world has a shorter day. And the standard one I've got used to since is shorter than that.”

“Oh.”

A shattering scream battered at them. The peithwyr's mate, wings folded back, plunged at them in a steep suicidal dive.

“Swardheld.” Aleytys surrendered her body, scarcely waiting to be sure he heard. Black eyes blazing, he took her body, snatched the gun from her trouser belt. An eye shot. Then he scrambled back frantically to avoid the plummeting body.

Breathing hard, Gwynnor and Aleytys stumbled around a bend in the ravine, the screams and papery rattle of the dying bird following them.

Gwynnor eyed the blunt, ugly gun with a touch of envy. “If we had those instead of …” He flicked contemptuous fingers over the butt of the darter shoved behind his belt.

Aleytys shuddered, still loathing the feel of the deadly thing. She thrust it away and pulled her tunic down. “The Captain couldn't sell them to you,” she said quietly, absently. She breathed a swift flash of gratitude to Swardheld, felt his answering grin, then moved away from the wall and continued along the bottom of the ravine. “The Company men would hunt him down without mercy if he did that. You, too, and your companions. So be grateful the situation is as it is.”

“Tchah!”

Behind them, the peithwyr tore at the stone and groaned as it fought death fiercely. The sound lessened and died away as they turned more corners in the torturously winding ravine.

“Will we reach the edge of the plateau anytime soon?”

“No.” He stumbled, caught himself, then rearranged the straps of the waterskins and the saddlebags. “We have to change the plan. There's not enough water to go the way you wanted. And we can't move as fast as the kaffon. So we head due east. Should get to the edge in a couple of days. Can you climb?”

Aleytys was silent a minute. She let Gwynnor draw ahead, then narrowed her eyes and unfocused them. “Harskari. Shadith. Swardheld.”