Moonscatter (19 page)

Tayyan reaches a long-fingered hand to the Noris. Pale hand closes on pale hand. Riding the dust macai with her knees, Tayyan pulls the Noris astride facing her, his long narrow robe riding high on thin muscular legs. He leans to her, they kiss, a long slow terrible kiss where they seem to melt together. He is suddenly naked, enormously rampant. Serroi stares, knowing this is impossible, forgetting why she knows this is impossible. Tayyan is naked too now. It is absurd. Serroi would laugh but she cries instead, sobs her hurt and pain as Tayyan and the Noris couple, though frantic, somehow manage to maintain their balance on that walking dust macai. Eyes burning until tears blur away the scene, sick yet unable to look away until she sees nothing but the sliding dust, until she rides blind and sobbing, fighting a terrible sense of loss, a chill anguish of betrayal, a hurting beyond healing.

When at last she fought back to reality and wiped her eyes of muddy tears, the hurtful images had faded into the dust. She glanced at Hern. There was a scowl on his face and as she watched he seemed to wince away with a look of horror in his eyes. She wondered what he was seeing, then decided that she didn't want to know.

Beads of light begin gathering about Serroi, sharpening into moth sprites, their tiny glowing bodies weaving a lace before her of mind-dazzling beauty. She gasps with pleasure, gasps with horror as one by one the lights begin to die, the small forms breaking like puff balls, the broken husks raining against her face, dead and gone with the world worse off for lack of them.

Chini pups play beside her, jumping in exuberant delight at the wonder of being alive; chini pups run beside her, silent, eyes calling her betrayer and murderer. “I couldn't help it,” she cries. “He was too strong for me. I fought him, yes I did. You know I did.” The pups run together, melt together into a great black beast that lopes beside her, grinning at her until it too melts into the dust.

Dead men, her dead, dead at her hands float around her, grinning at her, cursing her, each curse simply her name:
Serroi. Serroi. Serroi. Serroi
.

The land began to rise. Slowly, painfully they left behind the level of the dust devils and climbed into a cleaner wind. Serroi had wept herself empty; she rode with her hands clamped on the saddle ledge before her, sunk in a dull stupor that stayed with her until the wind carried the clean spicy odor of vachbrush and snowline conifers strongly to her, the smells of vigorous life rekindling her own life. She sat straighter, scrubbed at her face, drew in several cleansing breaths that flushed the last of the poison dust from her lungs. When she tilted her head back, following the steepening slope to the peaks, she saw not far ahead two great horns of stone. The Viper's Fangs. The Gullet ran between them. An hour or two more, that was all. An hour or two and she'd be pouring cold clean water over her. She closed her eyes, swallowed with difficulty. Cold clean water, outside and in. She let her shoulders sag; her back curve into a weary arc.

The macai went steadily onward shifting from its sluggish walk to a jolting trot that broke her rapidly from her daze of exhaustion. She glanced at Hern. He wore his court mask, his bland rather stupid smile, a face he could put on without effort while his mind worked busily behind it. For a moment only she wondered what he was thinking, then shrugged her curiosity away, and settled herself as comfortably as she could in the saddle while her macai turned into the first of the switchbacks.

CHAPTER VII:

THE MIJLOC

The hour before dawn was silent and cool, as cool as the blanket of clouds would let it be, and the Traxim were gone from over the Players' camp when Rane woke Tuli and Teras. She gave them food, hot cha, more grain for the macain and sent them on their way with a thoughtful scowl on her long face.

Teras and Tuli kept to the trees though the riding there was not especially easy or quick; they had to work their way around tangles of dying, thorny underbrush, through root mazes and past thickets of saplings where a viper would have had trouble wriggling between the trunks. When the color had faded from the east and the sun came clear of the horizon, bloating as it rose, Teras worked cautiously to the outer trees. On the edge of shadow he watched the sky above the road for a long time and still saw nothing. “They've really gone off,” he said. “Come on.” He kneed his mount to a quick walk and started up the embankment to the Highroad, Tuli coming quiet and thoughtful after him, glancing repeatedly at the empty sky. The clouds were gone now, burnt away by a sun that had already grown half again as big as it should be.

They had the Highroad to themselves until about an hour before noon when a brownish dot popped up from the northern horizon, resolving itself eventually into a Pedlar coming south, ambling unhurriedly beside his esek, a small brownish-orange beast padding steadily along on three toed feet, the pack on its back almost as big as it was and far noisier. Metal pans dangled from the side of the pack, along with clutches of spoons and forks, long-handled ladles and digging tools, all of them clattering musically with each of the esek's swinging strides. The Pedlar—a small dark man with long thin arms and legs—waved as the macain trotted past him, called a greeting. Teras grinned back, waved. Tuli heard the clank-clunk-clang for a long time before it finally faded into the distance. When the cheerful noise was gone, she sighed. “I wonder how much longer the Aglim will let folk like him and the Players be?”

“Don't know.” Teras uneasily rubbed at the back of his neck.

“What is it?” Tuli rode closer, anxiously scanned her twin's face. “Gong?”

“Not exactly.” Teras pulled his hand down. “Sorta like someone's staring at me, you know, you get that itchy feel on the back of your neck.”

She twisted around, “There's no one back there now.”

“I know that.” He kicked his macai into a trot and pulled away from her and her questions. Tuli sighed and rode after him.

About midafternoon when the heat was so bad they were beginning to think about leaving the Highroad and moving back under the trees, a stenda lordling and three stenda herdsmen brought six macai yearlings out of the foothills and drove them up onto the Highroad in front of the twins. Arrogant as always, the young stenda ignored them as beneath his notice, didn't offer them the customary traveler's greeting but the herdsman on their side grinned at them and waved as the twins took to the steep grassy slope alongside and edged their way past the boisterous young macain. Teras and Tuli returned both grin and wave, Tuli's spirits rising as she was taken for the boy she pretended to be.

The heat grew oppressive. The wind fell and the air twisted and distorted ahead of them as the black paving turned to an oven floor. They left the the Highroad to ride along at the edge of the trees, letting the macain drop to a shuffling walk, stopping frequently to water the beasts and splash a little water on their own reddened, burning faces.

Near evening when the road became passable again, they began meeting other riders. Two Sleykyn assassins were moving south.
I wonder who they're after
, Tuli thought. She shivered, hoping it was no one she knew. She only relaxed where they were small figures far behind. They passed guards, traveling craftsmen, passed tithe wagons going south after grain flanked by more guards, footloose laborers hunting work from Tar to Tar, scattered young men much like the twins appeared to be, rootless and ragged with a feral lost look to them even when they laughed and joked together. Most of them were walking. Teras and Tuli got a number of speculative looks, the macain they rode drew more. Teras grew edgier. He began keeping the width of the Highroad between them and the larger groups they met. And he began looking back more often. “Tuli,” he said finally. “The itch is a lot worse.”

“Someone following us?” She twisted around, stared along the Highroad behind her. There were several riders wavering in mirage riding north just as they were, but no one close. “I can't see anything to worry about.”

“Let's stop a while.”

“What about Da?”

He moved his shoulders irritably, leaned over the saddle ledge and scratched at the spongy fringe on the macai's neck. “They need rest. Look ahead there.” He pointed. “The Blasted Narlim.” A high pale pole of a tree (dead for a hundred years or more but still standing as a landmark because the oils in the wood repelled insects and retarded decay) the narlim was like an ivory needle rising above the blue-green leaves of the broader, squatter brellim. “We stopped there when we went to Oras, remember? It's got a well.” He shook the limp waterskin by his knee. “We're about out of water.”

“We can't camp there.” Tuli scratched at her chin. “You saw how those landless looked at our macain.”

“You always argue,” he burst out. “No matter what I say.” He kicked his mount into a heavy run, leaving Tuli gaping at this unexpected and quite unfair attack. She followed without trying to catch him, a cold hollow spreading under her ribs. Not that she and Teras never had arguments, but there was a different, sound to this, an angry resentment that troubled her. He slid from the saddle and began working the pump handle with a vigor that seemed to ease some of the tension in him. Uncertain how to act with her brother now, Tuli rode her macai down the embankment, silent and hurting. She slid from the saddle and led her macai to the water trough, stood patting his neck as he gulped down the cool water.

When the trough was full, Teras untied the grainsack given by Rane, pushing past Tuli to do so. He felt dark to her, dark and closed away from her. Then she saw him glancing at her, not meeting her eyes, glancing repeatedly and shyly like a chini pup who'd misbehaved and she saw that he was ashamed but didn't know how to speak to her again. The coldness under her ribs went away. She grinned at him and led her protesting mount to the pile of grain he poured for her. He smiled back tentatively then left the macain whuffling at the grain and moved under the trees. He settled on a thick air-root, his back to the spikul's scratchy trunk, his eyes on the Highroad.

Tuli straddled a root on a neighboring spikul, leaned forward, arms braced, hands circling the shaggy wood. “Will you know who it is?”

Teras leaned his head against the trunk and closed his eyes. He scratched slowly at his thigh, his fingernails pulling wrinkles into the heavy material of his trousers. “I think so.”

“How long we going to wait?”

“An hour, mayhap.” He opened his eyes and smiled dreamily at her. “If he's not by us before then, he's not coming. The macain will be rested enough by then so we can go along for a while more.”

Tuli bounced a little on her root, then jumped off. She stretched a while, bent and twisted, until she remembered she was hungry. She edged toward her macai. The beast was licking up the last grains, the ones sunk in between the stiff springy blades of grass. He shied as she set a hand on his flank but kept his head down, wrapping his tongue about the grass, tearing it up and swallowing it. She dug into a saddlebag and pulled out a packet of cold meat, bread and cheese.

After sharing with her twin, she settled herself back on her root, chewing vigorously and watching the thin trickle of passersby. Floarin's moves in the past few days obviously hadn't touched everyone in the mijloc, not like Cymbank anyway.

As the sun moved slowly toward the peaks of Earth's Teeth, losing a portion of its swollen coppery strangeness, the twins spoke at intervals, exchanging only a word or two. More seemed unnecessary now, the rents in their accord healed (at least on the surface) as if they'd never occurred. When she finished eating, Tuli was up again, too restless to relax as Teras was doing. She began prowling through the quiet sun-dappled grove, watching tiny talkalots running about the limbs, watching the abasterim swooping after near-invisible bugs, listening to wild oadats rustling through brush, airroot tangles and fallen leaves. Eased by these comforting reminders that some things weren't changing out of all recognition, she strolled back to Teras. “We going to wait much longer?”

He was staring intently at the Highroad. His head jerked a little when Tuli spoke behind him, but he didn't turn. “No.”

She looked from him to the empty road, then started past him to see more of it. He stopped her, his hand hard and nervous on her arm. “Wait.”

She stepped back reluctantly and stood at his shoulder in the shadow under the drooping limbs. A single figure rode slowly toward them. He looked thin and short though he was still too far away to judge the actual length of arms and legs. He wore a cowled jacket, the hood pulled up over his head in spite of the lingering heat of late afternoon. His mount looked lean and rangy with powerful legs longer than the average—mountainbred, a racer by the look of him.

When the rider came even with them, he pulled the fractious macai to a stop. While it jerked its head about, clawed at the blacktopping, sidled and backed, the rider stared intently into the trees, his face a circle of darkness under the cowl. Teras slipped his hand into the pocket of his jacket and brought out the sling, draped it over his knee, slid his hand back and closed it about one of the stones. He sat tense, waiting.

“Gong?” Tuli whispered.

“No.” He didn't relax. “It doesn't always,” he whispered back.

The macai continued sidling about, whoomping softly until the rider urged him off the Highroad and down the embankment. The man's long-limbed body moved easily and gracefully with the dip and sway of the racer. He rode straight toward them, stopped the macai at the edge of the shadow, lifted a hand to the cowl with a familiar angular grace. Even before the gesture was completed, the cowl pushed back, Tuli knew. “Rane,” she breathed.

Teras stuffed the sling back into his pocket. “Why?” he demanded.

“Why?” Rane shrugged. “Say curiosity. I was leaving anyway this morning.” Her eyes moved from him to search the shadow behind him. She smiled at Tuli. “How go the sores?”