Moongather (13 page)

The Nyok'chui roared its agony, writhing, biting at the arrow its curved teeth couldn't even reach, swallowing and swallowing the gouts of blood that poured from a pierced artery. It would not die. With two arrows driven into its brain, with a third in its throat bleeding it to death, it would not die.

Serroi cupped her hand a moment over her eye-spot, closed her eyes and switched off the draining night-sight. Ignoring the noises from the struggling Worm, she unstrung her bow and laid it aside, then settled onto the cold, gritty soil, the storm winds tearing at her. She pulled on her boots and her tunic, then sat still, waiting as the Nyok's struggles lessened and finally ceased.

A few large raindrops splatted down on her head and shoulders. The night was velvet black now, the wind more erratic than ever. Lightning flared, struck below her. The circling winds brought her the sweet strong odor of burning flesh.
The dead beast
, she thought.
The worm
. She rubbed at her nose.
I've heard … what have I heard … something … something
. The shuri fidgeted beside her then started moving downhill. Absently she noted his departure while she continued to dig for the elusive memory.
The Worm of the Earth. The many-souled Worm that crawls through the living rock. Worm. Eye
. She touched her throbbing eye-spot.
Yes. That's it. The inner eye, dead and alive
. “Tajicho,” she breathed.
Maiden be blessed for this gift
. In a frenzy of excitement she scrambled to her feet and raced downhill to the coiling pile of dead worm. In the intermittent flashes of lightning she could see the shuri dancing in triumph on the Nyok's head.

She stumbled and slid the last few feet to rebound from the cold rubbery flesh, shuddered, then began climbing the coils until she reached the collapsed mane. The coarse hair was long and thick, more like copper wire than hair. Even with the Worm thoroughly dead, the mane had sufficient charge left to send tingles through her body as she pulled herself up onto the domed skull. The shuri stopped its dance and jumped to a lower coil where it crouched, watching her with bright-eyed curiosity.

Nerving herself, she knelt on the broad snout and drove her grace blade into the web of sinew and nerve between the bulging eyes, trying to avoid looking at the translucent orbs bleeding a greenish ooze that bubbled around the fletching of the arrows. While she worked the shaft ends tilted and dropped away, the wood burned completely through. Serroi shivered and kept more carefully away from the fumes beginning to boil up from the eyes.

In a complex of nerves, nesting in a special hollow in the skull, she found an egg-shaped object small enough to fit comfortably in the palm of her hand. The unripe focus of the Nyok's power. She cut carefully around it and worked it loose, then scraped at it, freeing it as carefully as she could from the fragments of flesh and sinew.

She wiped the knife on the coarse hair then slipped it back in its sheath. Fingers closed tight about the eye, she raised herself slowly onto her feet and stood balancing carefully on the Worm's head, feet half-buried in the mane, the draining charge still strong enough to nip at her.

“Meie?”

She glanced down and saw the shuri. “Shurid, dangerous it be what I next do, but it I must do.” She pointed. “Up the hill. Go. Wait.”

When the lightning showed him halfway up the hill, she looked down at the dull bloody thing in her hands, trying over the chant she hadn't used for fifteen years, letting the words and rhythm focus her mind and will.

Remembered pain was a sudden sharpness distracting her from needed concentration. The chant brought back too vividly the sweetness of the early days in the tower, days like a paradise gone forever. She looked up at the clouds, sighed, then tightened her mind about the chant. Singing the words into the storm wind howling about her, whipping her hair into a wet tangle, shuddering against her body, she held the eye above her head and called the lightning down to her. A bolt flashed beside her, struck at the Worm's head. The reek of burning hair and charred flesh wheeled around her. She sucked in a breath, spat it out, called again.

A great jagged streak struck at the eye; her body quivered with shock and pain. She fell to her knees, started sliding down, bumping helplessly from coil to coil of already rotting flesh until her head slammed against stone and she knew nothing more.

She woke on the earth beside the Nyok'chui, her body sore as if her bones had been wrenched apart then allowed to snap back into place. She was bleeding from abrasions on arms and knees, a burn on one cheek. But the eye was still clutched in her hand. The shuri crouched anxiously beside her. She smiled at him as soon as she noticed him, but winced as the muscle pull hurt her seared cheek.

The eye was warm in her hands. When she opened her fingers it nestled in the curve of her palm, a new-made crystal with a soft orange-amber glow at its heart. She touched it with her other forefinger, smiled as it resisted being separated from her palm. “Tajicho,” she whispered. “Ser Noris, my Noris, you taught me this.” Tears blurred her eyes. “Do you like what you made, my Noris?” She wiped her eyes, sat back on her heels, exhausted by her ordeal.

Tajicho. Twister
. Talisman of immense power, it was keyed to the person who made it, useless to anyone else. It twisted spells, turned them back on the spinners unless they were unusually agile: more than this, it wiped its master from the world as far as the Norim were concerned even the most powerful of them—except perhaps her Noris. No magic mirror, no beast-eve. no demon could see her even if she stood in front of it. This Ser Noris had taught her and in so doing had given her a weapon against him. how potent she couldn't tell. For a moment she wondered about the coincidence of the Nyok-chui turning up just now, wondered if this were some part of his torturous schemes, then she shook herself out of her dismals, irritated at herself for falling into futile speculation. She tucked the crystal into her money sack where it clinked musically against the small store of gold coins, moved fingertips over the small lump, lifted a corner of her mouth in a one-sided smile. “Finished this be,” she told the shuri.

The rain began coming down hard. Lightning still flashed, though less often. Serroi's hair was plastered against her head. Her leather tunic and divided skirt were treated with the juice of the nu-frasha herb that grew high on the slopes of the Biserica valley: they shed water a long time, staying supple and comfortable after many a soaking. The rain beaded up off the surface of the leather and funneled into her boot tops until she sloshed as she moved her feet. She was cold and desperately tired as she collected her bow, clipped it to its strap, and followed the shuri around the mountain to the flat where Dinafar waited.

The girl was huddled against the crouching macai, soaked through. Her head lifted as she heard them coming. Eyes wide in her drawn face, Dinafar said, “That roar?”

The Nyok'chui is dead.” Serroi bent and took hold of the girl's cold hands. “Come, it's time to move on.” She tugged gently, helping Dinafar struggle up. She stood silent, pulling her waterlogged skirt away from her legs while Serroi urged the reluctant macain back onto their feet.

After shoving Dinafar into the saddle and slapping the bulky skirt into a modicum of order, Serroi swung up into her own saddle, wincing at the contact with the cold wet leather. “Shurid!” She shouted to be heard above the storm noise. “Ride with me so I don't lose you.” A tardy flash of lightning showed her the water streaming off the shuri. The upper layer of his fur had changed under the rain to a sleek, water-shedding surface that glistened like brown glass. Water sluiced off the coarse skin of his face and divided around the blunt muzzle with its wide-set nostrils and perpetual smile. She felt his small three-fingered hands close about her ankles, then he walked up her body until he was perched on the saddle ledge in front of her.

With the shuri guiding her, with Dinafar silent behind her, Serroi rode up and up, winding, twisting, sometimes having to dismount, and struggled up impossible slopes and over unstable scree. She coaxed the macain on, whistling and cooing to them, stroking them into moaning content with her eyespot after they'd managed some difficult task. The rain fell, endless and cold. The wind tugged and battered at them, drove gusts of icy water into faces or backs as it shifted continually in sinuous currents funneling through the mountains.

The hours passed in noise and weariness. Overhead, the clouds began to tear apart, letting a glimmer of moonlight through. Once the breakup began, it spread quickly until the slopes were darkly visible. In a moment of comparative calm Serroi heard Dinafar gasp; she glanced back and saw the girl looking down at the perilous track, eyes wide with horror.

The track they followed was littered with loose rock; it hugged the side of the mountain, falling off on the right into an abyss so deep its bottom was lost in shadow. The girl was swaying in the saddle, close to the end of her endurance. “Dina!”

Dinafar's head came up slowly, her face a mask of weariness, her eyes gleaming liquidly in the strengthening light.

“Hang on a little longer,” Serroi shouted. “A little longer.” The wind caught the words and shredded them but she saw Dinafar nod and try to straighten her back. Satisfied, Serroi turned and rode on.

The hours passed, cold endless hours. They left the abyss behind and slid steeply down into a narrow crack, the walls on either side rising higher and higher as they twisted deeper into mountain-heart. Seated in cracks that branched off on either side, groups of shurin watched them move past, large round eyes greenly phosphorescent. Equally silent, perched like a furry lump in front of her, the curve of his back fitting against the curve of her front below her breasts, the shuri began humming, his song transmitted through bone and flesh to her. He had led them through the worst of the peaks and across the divide, through the secret paths of his people. Once this crack was negotiated they'd be well on their way to the gentler slopes of the landward side of the Earth's Teeth.

They wound on and on. The straggling Dancers hung low behind them, gifting the stone with triple shadows, lighting the way with their deceptive cold glow. Serroi glanced up and saw dark silhouettes cutting across the starfield. Five black not-birds with long narrow wings and oversized heads circled high over her.

She began shaking, then remembered the tajicho and grew calmer. They were traxim, demon-servants of the Nearga-nor. Flying eyes. She touched the lump in her money sack and felt its warmth through the thin leather. She smiled. It was working as it should, sheltering her from dangerous eyes. The traxim went away without seeming to notice her.

The wind dropped abruptly, freeing the crack for a few moments from its whine, freeing the riders from its continual battering. Serroi shifted wearily in the saddle; a little apprehensively she looked over her shoulder. Dinafar was lying against the macai's neck, her arms circling its thin neck, her hands locked together. She shook her head.
Hang on, Dina
, she thought.
We can't stop yet
.

They rode out of the crack into a steep descent and into a predawn wind that helped pull the wetness from their bodies. By the time the eastern sky showed a pallor near the horizon and the peaks behind them had caps of crimson, Serroi was dry and only a little cold.

The shuri held up a hand. When Serroi pulled the macai to a halt, he climbed down her leg and crossed a few paces of bare earth to a pile of rock. He perched on top of the pile and looked about. In the dawn light she could see that the reddish fur around his blunt muzzle was stippled with white. He was growing old, not many seasons left for him as season-mother or season-father.

As if he read her thoughts the shuri nodded sadly. “Next year season-mother I be, Meie. For me the last of seasons.”

“My sorrow, shurid. I intrude.”

“The right you have. With three arrows the season for me you have won.” He stretched out a thin arm and pointed to the glow in the east. “A Stenda hold there. Half-day riding. The Stendam to Oras have gone for Gather, though two be left for watching hold and stock. The hold they leave each morning and each night they come back to sleep within walls. No closer than this go I.”

“By the pact then, peace between us be, shurid.”

“By the pact peace be, Meie.” The shuri sketched a gesture of respect, then scurried past the macain and vanished among the rocks behind them.

Serroi looked up at the thin scatter of paling stars. The traxim were gone. Touching the bulge in her money sack, she smiled then sighed as she rode back to Dinafar.

Still damp, the heavy skirt was plastered against the girl's legs; as she lay along the macai's neck, her face in the spongy frill, violent shivers coursed along her thin body. Serroi lifted a hand, dropped it. Dinafar didn't need encouragement. A fire, some hot cha, those wet clothes off, sleep, those she needed. Serroi sighed and swung the macai back around so she could scan the ground in front of her.

Though a thick band of trees obscured much of the slope, she glimpsed a shimmer of water winding in a narrow line. Without looking back again she kicked the tired macai into a slow shuffle toward the stream, the other beast following close behind.

She followed the water to a grassy clearing, stopped the macai and looked about. Because the soil was shallow and stony only grasses spread their matted roots here, holding the small space free of trees and brush. She slid off her macai, stretched, yawned, bent and twisted her aching body to work some of the stiffness and soreness out.

Dinafar groaned and pushed herself precariously erect, face flushed, eyes glazed.

“Dina?” The girl swayed; her swollen lips trembled but she couldn't speak. “Dina, lean over like you did before.” Serroi sang the words past the barrier of Dinafar's exhaustion. “Loose your hands, little one, let go, let go, I'll catch you, let go.” She kept up the quiet chant as she watched the girl's fingers begin to uncramp from their hold. The drooping body swayed, then dropped like a stone into Serroi's waiting arms. Serroi felt the cold clammy skirt slap against her, felt the fever heat in the girl's body, the shivering cold in her hands. She lowered her gently onto the grass then stripped off the sodden clothing, ignoring Dinafar's weak scandalized protests. She tossed the clothing aside and ripped the blanket roll from behind her saddle, snapped the blankets open, tossed one blanket aside and wrapped Dinafar in the other.