The Hero Strikes Back (16 page)

Heh. He was the one who brought it up. “Speaking of which . . .”

He groaned. “No, Lee! Not today.”

“Have some water, Taro. It'll perk you right up.”

“We've tried every day and we've learned nothing.”

“That's why we've got to keep trying, until we learn something.”

“Lee,” he sighed.

“That was the deal, Taro.”

“Argh!”

I chuckled. “You're very . . . ah . . . vocal today, Taro. It's endearing.”

He didn't appreciate my most sincerely delivered compliment. “Fine, let's get this done.”

“So enthusiastically you dive into your duty, my lord.”

“I'm going to smack you.”

The mental image of Karish striking anyone in anger was ludicrous. “Promises, promises. Ready.”

He straightened in his chair. A little. That was all the warning I got before his internal shields lowered.

As he had complained, we tried this every watch, he lowering his inner shields and just feeling what was out there, letting me see through him. And every time, it seemed I could “see” just a little more clearly. I didn't know what I was seeing, and I hadn't told him about what I considered my progress, because my last attempt to describe what I saw had been so disastrous. I didn't really know how to start putting it into words myself. But the forces, which to me “looked” like huge shapeless waves of overpowering sensation, were developing more subtle elements. Smaller swirls of temperature and color began appearing to me, like threads in a cloth. Each time I saw them, there was more detail, more movement. The last time, I'd almost reached out to touch one of them, though I wasn't sure with what. Not my fingers, of course. So, what? My mind?

This time, what I “saw” shocked me. Not only a subtle elevation in my perception of detail, which was all I had seen before. But change in the detail itself. Great drastic change. Orange blazed into my eyes. Only not in my eyes. Into my brain? Sounded stupid. Sounded bad. The orange was off key.

“Taro!”

“What?” he said, sounding uneasy.

“There! Can you see it?” He had to notice something this time. It was so strong, so obvious.

“See what?”

I clenched my fists. “How can you not see it?”

“I'm not
seeing
anything, Lee,” he said impatiently. “There's nothing to look at.”

How could he say that? It was there. It was right there. “Are you pretending not to see it?” I demanded.

“Why would I be doing that?”

How was I supposed to know? He'd always been a strange one. Didn't want to know what he could do. Didn't want to find out if he could do anything else. “It's
orange,
Taro. It wasn't before.”

“What's orange?” he demanded through his teeth. “What are you looking at?”

“It's right there!” All around us. In the forces right around him. The forces he could touch, he could manipulate. “Will you just look?”

“Damn it, Lee, stop trying to tell me how to do my job!”

What the hell did that have to do with anything? What was wrong with him? Why didn't he just look at it?

I wish we'd done this when we'd first come to High Scape, before all this bizarre weather. It should, I was thinking, be the first thing a Pair did upon coming to a new post. Just take a “look,” see what all the colors and shapes were, so they'd notice if there was a change. I mean, all right, fine, neither of us could be sure what High Scape was like when it was normal. We'd never experienced it when it was normal. Creol had been playing with the forces in High Scape long before we showed up. But still, if I had known we could do this sort of thing I would have definitely taken a look, to see how things had changed. Because what I was seeing now, it was different from what I'd seen the day before, and it wasn't normal, either.

Yesterday it had been unseasonably cold. Today it was brutally hot. And now the forces—or at least the details within them—were different. And wrong. I could feel they were wrong, even though I didn't know what they felt like when they right. Why couldn't Karish see the connections? How could he not hear how bad it sounded? The flattened tones scraped against my nerves and made my teeth ring. Surely even a tone-deaf man could feel that?

And man, that orange was ugly. Nothing in life could be that color. Except maybe poison. Aye, it made me think of poison, for some reason. Thick orange sluggish fluid oozing out of a bitterly fatal plant. How could he not see that?

Although even if he could perceive it, I wasn't sure how he could do anything about it. I doubted this could be fixed by channeling. The forces weren't rushing around in the same way as when there was a natural disaster coming. And for some reason I was sure this wouldn't be like healing, either. Both of those were just about letting the forces funnel through the body. This was more like reaching out to the forces and adjusting them, changing how they moved without drawing them in. Kind of like what I did, I realized, when I was steering external forces away from Karish, keeping the forces he was not manipulating from crushing him. I didn't draw those forces into me. I kind of reached through Karish and warded those forces away.

Huh. Interesting. Could this possibly be something I, rather than Karish, could do? Maybe if I reached out, maybe if I just nudged it a little like that . . .

The swirls turned green. The sound skewered into something sharp and piercing. I gasped.

And Karish was immediately asking, “What's wrong?”

“Didn't you feel that?”

A pause. “We're stopping this now,” and he snapped up his shields.

I felt a shiver run through me. It was cold.

Karish had seen my reaction. “All right, so what's happening?”

I told him. Because he had asked. But there was no way he was going to believe me. It was too impossible.

Except he did. He hissed in frustration. “Why can't I see any of this?”

How could I respond to that beyond a shrug?

“Have you always been able to see that sort of thing?”

“I don't know,” I said. “I never looked before you came back and we started trying.” I frowned. “No, that's not quite right. I kind of saw things during the Rushes Creol sent. Images. I could feel and hear things too.” A second shiver tried to jolt through me. Bad memories. “But I'm not sure if that's the same thing. The images were much more concrete with Creol, and at the time I thought my brain was just making them up, to help me fight him.” And it had hurt like hell. “This is very different, and seems more . . .” I was floundering for words, it was so hard to explain, “more connected to the forces, I guess. Arising from them, rather than being imposed upon them.” I shook my head, disgusted with myself. “I'm sorry, I don't know how to explain it. But it never happened before my match, that's certain. And I've never heard of anything like it from anyone else.”

He stared at me curiously, dark eyes narrowed, and I suddenly felt I should be pinned on a board somewhere. He reached out, cupping my chin and tilting my face a little to one side.

I couldn't help smiling. “What do you expect to see?”

“I don't know,” he confessed. He drew back. “But at least now you know what it's like.”

“What what's like?”

“Being able to do things other people can't.”

I've always been able to do things other people couldn't. That was all part of a Shield. But I knew that wasn't what he meant. “I'm sure other Shields could do this, too, if they tried.” Probably other Sources could, too, if they'd just open their eyes. “I think I did something though.”

“What do you mean?”

“I'm not sure. It was orange and flat. I made it green and sharp.”

“Oh.” He clearly had no real idea what I was saying. That was fine. Neither did I. “Is it supposed to be green and sharp?”

“I don't think so. It still didn't feel right.”

“Well,” he pulled his damp collar away from his throat, “nothing's changed out here.” He leaned his chair back on its hind legs, crossing his bare feet on a corner of the table. I repressed the urge to tickle them.

“That's true.” I bunched up my hair and held it off the back of my neck. How big an idiot was I that I hadn't hesitated in my apartment long enough to tie up my hair? But then, I wasn't used to this kind of heat, was I? I'd forgotten how annoying long hair could be.

Karish left the table, poked around the shelves a bit, and came up with a deck of cards. “I didn't feel anything the whole time I was in Erstwhile.”

That wasn't a surprised. “Erstwhile is a cold site.” There hadn't been an event there in decades.

“And I haven't felt anything here.”

“There's been nothing going on here to feel.”

“But you're sensing something here, now.” He sat back at the table and began shuffling the cards with deft hands.

Ah. I understood. Nothing so petty as jealousy, probably, but perhaps it was difficult for him, used to being able to solve all the problems, finding himself in the position where he could not. “I don't know what it really is or if it means anything.”

“Aye, but I'm not
feeling
anything.” He shuffled faster.

Hm. “There haven't been any disasters, Taro. What else is a Source supposed to feel?”

He started dealing out the cards. He had an odd habit of dealing. He didn't just toss cards into a pile. He placed them into neat stacks with a snap of each card. “It's just—” He cut himself off, and shrugged. “It's been so long since I've channeled,” he said. “I guess it makes me feel strange.”

“You mean useless?” I asked dryly. He looked up quickly, frowning in shock, and I raised a hand. “No, no, that wasn't a crack. That's just how I've been feeling.” Useless. And oddly disconnected from things.

“Aye. I guess. But it's more than that. It's just,” he watched his shoulders. “I guess I'm feeling antsy.”

That, I could understand. I hated not being able to do my job. Though I supposed it could be said we were doing our jobs, just by keeping watch. It was stupid and irresponsible and childish to wish for a natural disaster just so I could shield. Really shield. The shielding I did when Karish was healing or during our little experiments lacked all the intensity of shielding during an event. I missed it.

It was like how I felt when I hadn't danced the bars in too long. Like my muscles weren't being properly used. Stiffiness and a heavy feeling and the worry that important skills were melting away. I got irritable, which made no sense at all, but there it was.

Karish set the remainder of the deck in the middle of the table. A come-here nod of the head. “Time for you to win my first born.”

“First born?” I joined him at the table. “Aren't we down to the eighth by now?”

“So you get to have all my children. Seems like a good deal to me.”

I didn't frown as I tried to decide whether that was supposed to be a double-entendre or not. I was a little shaken by the results of our experimentation and I wasn't really up to responding to Karish's teasing. Or thinking about what any of this meant, if it meant anything at all. A mind-numbing game of half-draw sounded good to me right then.

I scooped up my cards. A truly horrendous hand. Good. Maybe I could lose a couple of those kids.

Chapter Ten

Instead of losing children, I gained two more, which Karish found hysterically funny. Fortunate that the debonair card sharp could find entertainment in being continually trounced by his amateur partner. I hoped to sometime play against someone who wasn't Karish. I was pretty sure it was only our bond that gave me some kind of hunch about what kind of hand Karish had. The only way I'd know if I had any talent was if I played against someone else. Only I didn't have any money to make it worth their while.

It started raining during our watch. Hard. I could hear the rain bouncing off the roof. It didn't get any cooler, though. Wet and hot is just a nasty combination.

Uh, sometimes.

It was still raining when Riley and Sabatos came to relieve us. They were good enough to offer to lend us their rain gear, but we refused them. It was too likely it would still be raining once their watch was over, and while it was a crazy idea I couldn't help feeling I might have been responsible for the rain, as I had been playing with the patterns.

No delusions of divinity here.

Of course, about a dozen steps from the Stall I was regretting my nobility, but I refused to go back and ask for the rain gear. I could be petty that way.

And hey, no objection to seeing Karish with his shirt soaked through. It was clingy while in the Stall, but a few drops of rain had it completely plastered to his shoulders, chest, back and stomach. His black hair was slicked close to his head. Rain streamed over his face and throat and clung to his eyelashes. He made a beautiful drowned rat.

Unfortunately, Karish's shirt wasn't the only garment to be quickly soaked through. I couldn't carry off the look with the same panache.

“We'll stop somewhere and get slickers,” Karish said, right into my ear. He had to. The rain was that loud.

Well, we'd be soaked, but at least we wouldn't have to march through the city looking one step away from naked. Which I was not going to think about. Karish was walking a couple of steps ahead of me, perhaps intentionally, and wasn't seeing anything. What a gentleman. But thank whim that I avoided light colors for my clothes. My gown was green, not white or yellow or light blue. Just the idea of wearing white under the circumstances—how humiliating.