Skeen's Return (11 page)

Lipitero sat in the cage and gloomed at the distant wall where the cells were.

Angelsin hadn't bothered drugging her, just sent in a swarm of children with a large net. When she was tangled so thoroughly she had nearly strangled herself, the children called a pair of Funor shorthorns; these hauled her to the cavern and dumped her in the cage. At a word from Angelsin, they slashed most of the net clear and went out.

Angelsin stood outside the cage, leaning on a cane. She watched Lipitero tear away the fragments of net. “Take off the robe,” she said.

Lipitero snarled, then started jerking the neck ties loose. There was no point in refusing; Angelsin would just call the hardboys back and have her stripped. She pulled the robe over her head and dropped it to the floor of the cage.

Leaning heavily on the cane Angelsin walked around the cage making murmurous sounds as she inspected Lipitero. When she was around in front again, she was smiling. “Put on the robe,” she said, then labored to the throne chair that lost size and impact the moment she sat in it. She clicked her tongue. Hopflea took the cane, tucked it behind the chair, then scuttled around to crouch by her feet. She gazed at Lipitero a long time, saying nothing.

Feeling like a side of meat, not knowing what to do, how to react, Lipitero looked away—then stiffened. The cavern was a huge knobbly thing, filled with shadows; most of the torches were set up close about the cage and the chair and very little of the light reached as far as the walls, but she could see dark shapes carrying in other shapes. She counted these new prisoners. One, two, four, six. Skeen, Timka, the Aggitj. Chulji was spending the night out with his farmers, Pegwai must be with his cousin. The Boy? She looked around. Not here. She glanced at Angelsin; the huge Funor woman was watching the parade with a brooding satisfaction. Lipitero closed her hands into fists, a tightness in her throat, a deep ache between her shoulders. She sold him—that wombless mistake sold the Boy to the Kalakal. Or killed him. She watched the limp forms carried into the cells, one to each cell, the doors slammed shut, the bars dropped into the clamps. She pulled her hands inside the robe and slid her fingers along her harness. Cutter. Lift field. Shunt. Stun beam. One by one she counted them off, the operations worked into the metal decorations that seemed only ornament. Tiny weapons, tiny aids, powerful but limited, Lifefire, so limited. She had to make a plan somehow. Had to free Skeen even if she couldn't free herself or the others. Nothing must stop Skeen finding Rallen and bringing Rallen Ykx to shore up Sydo Gather. To open the Gate, to free the Ever-Hunger if she needed the defense, Skeen didn't need her, only her harness. She squeezed her hand about one strap; the node there was modified so Non-Ykx hands could trigger it if need be, she'd insisted on that. She closed her eyes and visualized the flight of Ykx moving through the nights over Suur Yarik, shadows against the moon, heading for the Fellarax Gather caves near the Gate, caves abandoned millennia before when the Waves started coming and the turmoil in the Mountains made life too uncomfortable there. The Remmyo had arranged the flight because he couldn't in conscience agree to release the Hunger unless there were Ykx in position to corral it again before it devastated Mountains and Plain. Another reason for preserving Skeen, ten members of the shrinking Gather put in jeopardy, if Sydo lost them for nothing.… Something, I have to do something. It was painful to realize how little she knew about the otherWavers and the Pass-Throughs. Until the desert Chalarosh had swarmed into Coraish Gather she'd lived a contented but circumscribed life, knowing nothing of the great outside, wanting to know nothing of the folk that lived there.

When the slaughter was over, she crawled from beneath a pile of bodies—dead Chalarosh, dead Ykx, dead adults, dead children—her fur matted with blood, feces, urine, stomach contents let out through slashes. For hours, dazed, too shocked to grieve, she hunted through the dead for her children, for anyone at all left alive. She found her children huddled in a wall niche meant to hold a zocharin and a flower; her son's head was smashed, his small body shattered, mingled with the butchered body of her daughter. She touched an arm; she thought it belonged to the boy but couldn't be sure. Cold. The cold entered into her. She walked away, no longer looking at the dead, no longer caring if any besides herself still lived. She walked away and went out onto the lip. For a long time she stood staring out into the desert, then she sat and waited to die. She expected to fade as Ykx had faded before, separated from the Gather, staked out for torment in Chala clanspace. She sat all day waiting for the fade to start, but when the cold evening shadows crept over her the only emptiness she felt was hunger. She scrambled to her feet and screamed fury and frustration into the darkness, but there was no answer, not even an echo. She flung herself off the lip, meaning to let herself tangle in the downdrafts and crash on the stone below, but a freak blast of cold wind swept over the mountains, caught hold of her and automatically she extended her flightskins and rode that wind on and on, out over the desert, on and on. She was in a state of shock, the only thing she knew was she could not let herself fall here, could not give her life to the Chalarosh as if she were ripe fruit falling into their bloody hands. When the wind faltered, she exerted herself and spiraled up to catch the highwinds. On and on she went, hunger a beast gnawing at her belly, occupying the whole of her mind, or that part of it the thirst-fire left free.

She soared all that day, strength draining from her, a slow leaching that blurred her eyes until she saw nothing but a blue haze surrounding her, that blanked her mind until hunger and thirst were a distant thing hovering about her but not part of her. The highwind blew her on and on; she left the desert behind, she left the rind of farmlands behind, she glided out over water. Aware, she might have loosed that wind and drowned, but she had left purpose somewhere in the desert and was a leaf on the wind, mindless as any leaf. Late in the afternoon on the second day the wind turned capricious, dropped her, caught her, dropped her yet lower, caught her again, then vanished altogether. She plummeted toward the water. Shocked out of her numbness, her body worked desperately to save her; she felt the powerful drive of a will to live she had not known was in her. But the long flight had weakened her; she was too feeble to do more than sketch at attempts to catch an updraft and rise again. The water caught her trailing feet and pulled her down.

When she woke she was in a Balayar fishcanoe. The young men working it had bathed her face and trickled water into her, then the cordial all Balayar kept for times when the boat was far out and there was no wind. Drop by drop they got that rich sweet liquid into her and coaxed the lifefire within from ashes to a crackling blaze. She was alive and knew she was going to keep on living; the time was past when she could have killed herself.

They asked her no questions when they saw that she would live; they went back to their lines and nets, working with a noisy cheerfulness, a mixture of joking and song that fed strength into her as surely as the cordial did. They cooked her one of the fishes they tumbled like oily silver rain into the well of the boat and the youngest of them fed it to her bit by bit, chatting without expecting any answer, telling her about the girl who had him dying from love and exasperation because she was a darling, a pearl among pearls, but she would flirt with every cousin he had, even Jikkitoh who was too young to have any notion what girls were for. He didn't seem unduly alarmed about her wanderings, nor upset by the distinct possibility she'd choose one of those cousins over him. There was this other girl a couple of islands over who could dance fire into the blood; he didn't like her as well as Meromerai, but maybe that was because he didn't know her as well. He stroked the soft silver fur on Lipitero's arm, taking so much pleasure in the feel of it and how it changed color with the angle of light, that she could not feel insulted or ashamed at being handled and found herself seduced into an unexpected pleasure in the durability of the body that had brought her so far, a satisfaction with the shapes and textures of that body. This astonished her. She smiled at the boy. He laughed and handed her the bowl. You're fine, he said, I expect you'd like to do this for yourself.

She stayed with the Balayar for two weeks, gathering strength of mind and body; they were a contented folk, their lives at once simple and complex, changing yet mostly the same, repeating patterns their ancestors had repeated, the rebellious and the misfits going out on the trading ships that came from the larger islands, coming home and going out again. They found her a wonder and pleasing to have around; Balayar babies were delighted with her fur, they crawled over her knees and cuddled in her flight skins; their sleek round warm bodies comforted her and let loose her grief. The Balayar gathered about her, patting her, listening to her laments, singing wordless tenderness and understanding to her. They wanted her to stay with them and she was tempted, but after those two weeks had passed, knew she could not. She needed Ykx around her for her mind's health, and she was honest enough to admit that she did not enjoy living with the Balayar; she missed the comforts of a Gather, the stimulation of Ykx who talked about something more than fish, sex and infants, and most of all she missed her studio and workshop and the crafting of delicate electronic gear for the use of the Gather and for her own pleasure. Sadly, but with that deep understanding of need they had always shown her, the Balayar went with her across a narrow strait to a tall island, a desert of stone and ash; she rode in the canoe that had picked her out of the sea, crewed by the same young men who brought her in. These youths made a cradle for her out of cord and climbed with her to the top of the cone (they climbed as well as they swam, reading the stone like they read water). They squatted and began singing a farewell song they'd made for her that was a mix of sadness and excitement. She hesitated, waiting for them to be done, but after a while they waved their hands at her, telling her to leave while they were singing. She felt for the wind, took hold of it and leaped into it. The sound followed her as she spiraled up and up. During the last turn, she snatched a look at them. They were dancing precariously on the lip of the cone. Down below, the little boats that had come with her were filled with Balayar waving energetically, singing. Snatches of sound came up to her as she started the long soar north and west.

The healing that was the gift of the Balayar babies slipped away from her on that endless increasingly desperate flight across the ocean; even the Balayar cordial could not keep her blood stirred to a living heat. She retreated as she'd done before, shut off mind and let body carry her; if it wanted to live, it would get her to the Sydo Gather with life enough left to power its engines.

Arrive she did, a ghost with flesh. For a terrible while, she existed in a half-life where turn and turn about either everything about her was unreal and she couldn't touch it or she herself was a nightmare drifting through things that couldn't touch her. She made everyone around her uneasy, unhappy, uncomfortable, but the Sydo Ykx would not put her out of the Gather; that was not their way.

After an especially depressing day, she left the intricate caves of the Gather and went to the rim of the cliff above the mouth, sat where she could look out across the lake. I can't continue like this, she thought. I should go away; they won't make me go; I should take it on myself to go. She felt a powerful revulsion drive up through her body and knew she couldn't make herself leave; if she left she would surely die. At the front of her head she wanted that surcease; she was a walking wound with the kind of pain no one ever got used to. At the back of her head, though, where her will was, where her body spoke, she clung with an equal determination to life.

Sometime near dawn a cub came climbing up the scratch, went past her without seeing her and went scrambling up a clump of boulders dangerously close to the lip of the cliff. He stood teetering on the topmost rock, flapping his soft little flight skins. Chewing her lip to keep fear from spilling out, moving as silently as the ghost she'd been, she eased onto her feet and crept up behind him. He crowed with delight as the sun peeped up behind the lake, waved his arms and tottered precariously. She snatched him off the rock and cuddled him against her chest; she was trembling with relief but the cub was loudly indignant. He screamed with frustration and fought against her hold. The hot hard-rubber body, all knees and elbows, banging into her broke a hard thing inside her; she didn't realize this at first, just kept on soothing him, cooing calmness into him. When he was quiet she took him down the scratch into the Gather. His mother was darting about searching for him, turning out the whole Gather with her cries of grief. She was very young for having a cub that age, her youth and inexperience intensifying her grief at losing her baby, her joy when Lipitero gave him to her. She bubbled with a wordless gratitude, then turned and ran away, shouting out the cub was found, he was all right, the naughty boy was found and fine.

Lipitero watched her vanish around a curve. She touched her lips, outlined them with the tip of her finger because she was astonished to find herself smiling. The dawn outside was slipping down the mirror ways and turning the Grand Round into a bright warm soup that dripped into her veins. Yes, it felt like that as she suddenly knew with a clarity which matched the clarity of that light that the cub was her child, that the cub's young mother was her child, that every Ykx in the Sydo Gather was her child; she was buoyantly, extravagantly, indescribably happy. The glow didn't last, but the half-living half-dead state she'd been drifting in was gone forever—unless that monster Angelsin destroyed Skeen and with her, Sydo's hope.

Angelsin was talking at her, something about why she was traveling with the Company, was she a captive, that sort of thing, but Lipitero let the noise wash over her without listening to it. Skeen. Ah, Skeen, what do I do? Wake up, Skeen, do something. She slid down one of her magnifiers, sacrificing some of the light to bring the far wall closer and sharpen her focus. Twelve doors. Twelve cells cut into the stone. Twelve cells, the farther cells filled, but who was where?