The Outskirter's Secret (14 page)

Bel substituted patience for skill, and
repair was a long process. "Yell if you like," she said cheerfully.
"It won't bother me."

"I don't care to," Rowan replied, or tried to
reply; the sounds emerged from behind her clenched teeth as a
rasping hiss, oddly intonated.

Bel found it perfectly comprehensible. "Suit
yourself." But Rowan did yell, at another unexpected dousing, when
the icy water found a way to wash in directly against one finger
bone. It was like being struck by a hammer.

The sound left her too exhausted to struggle,
and she sat limp, unable to raise her head. Her face ached where
she had pressed it against her leg. "What was that thing?" Her own
voice sounded distant.

Bel spared a glance from her work—and to.
Rowan's utter astonishment, she replied with an outrageous
imitation of the steerswoman's own style of speech, complete with
the throaty vowels and crisp consonants of Rowan's northern accent.
"An Outskirts plant, called a lichen-tower. It grows along
watercourses, and possesses—", She paused to find a suitably
pedantic phrase. "—a stiff spiraled internal structure, permitting
it to grow to extreme heights—"

She did not finish her explication, as Rowan
became weakly hilarious. Bel paused to watch her. When the gasping
laughter ran down she gave, for the first time, what Rowan
considered fair warning, "Again." She pulled Rowan's hand into the
water, pulled it out, treating the limb as if it were not a part of
Rowan's body, but only attached to it. She resumed her repairs,
this time on the palm side.

Rowan eventually found her voice again. "It
should be tall," she said, of the lichen-tower; Bel had mentioned
such plants before.

"It was a young one."

They did not travel the rest of that day, and
in the afternoon, as Rowan watched blearily, Bel systematically
destroyed eight immature lichen-towers growing on the creek's bank,
all of which Rowan had assumed to be boulders. Whether the
destruction represented revenge, custom, or had some useful
purpose, the steerswoman was too tired to ask.

Rowan learned to fear the Outskirts, and
remembered that she ought to have done so from the outset.

She was accustomed to fearing specific
dangers in the Inner Lands: wolves, bandits, lightning, storms at
sea, and, eventually, the enmity of wizards. But the world was
background to those things, and they inhabited it. Bel had told her
of specific Outskirts' dangers, and Rowan now knew many by name and
habit; but they seemed discrete, separate, existing within no
comprehensible framework, so that the next day, when Bel stopped
her with a gesture and the merest touch on her arm, Rowan froze
instantly, scanning for danger. "What is it?"

Bel replied only by pointing. Rowan followed
her finger to the horizon, but saw only the chaos of moving colors.
There was no way to discern anything unexpected against such a
view.

She looked at her friend. Bel's expression
was not one of caution, but amusement. "You don't see it?"

Rowan relaxed somewhat, spreading her hands.
"Where?"

Bel continued to point, but walked forward,
circling to the left. When she came around to face Rowan again, her
finger indicated the space between them.

Rowan squinted. "Insects?" She realized that
there was a cloud of insects at just head height, some circling,
some hovering. Bel gestured Rowan forward, and the steerswoman
circled as Bel had, keeping her eyes on the insects, puzzled. They
seemed unable to move beyond some defined boundary; some of those
hovering appeared to hover with motionless wings—

When she reached Bel's side, the angle of
sunlight caught slim silver traces around the insect cloud. "Is
that a spiderweb?" The cloud was in midair; there was nothing
nearby from which to hang a web. Bel's finger moved carefully,
outlining a shape.

The flying and suspended insects were
contained within a canted oval dome of gossamer, its long axis
pointed downward. Below the axis Rowan saw a bit of redgrass blade,
less than an inch long, apparently floating at knee height, then
saw the line that attached it . . .

Bel's finger traced again, along a ghostly
line that slanted down from the open side of the dome. The line
came to ground, upwind, and the configuration came together in
Rowan's eyes—but she shook her head in disbelief. "A kite?"

She followed the tether to its root, and met
the kite-flier: a skinny four-limbed bug, some six inches tall,
standing knock-kneed among the redgrass. One sticky arm clutched a
redgrass reed of extremely dubious stability; the other held a ball
of spittle from which the fine line extruded, ascending to the
aerial web.

Moving quietly, Rowan lowered herself to the
ground beside it, cradling her injured hand in her lap. "What is
it?" She grinned at the bug, enchanted.

Bel tilted her head. "I thought you'd like
it. It's a trawler."

" 'Trawler,' as in a fishing boat?" Rowan
laughed out loud. "It's trawling the air!"

"I don't know about fishing boats, but
'trawler' is its name. When it's caught enough flying bugs, it will
pull its shoot to the ground and have lunch."

"The shoot is its net?" Rowan leaned closer
to the bug and sighted up along the tether. The bit of redgrass
hanging from the shoot provided stabilizing weight. The trawler,
outraged by the steerswoman's proximity, voiced two sharp clicks.
Rowan startled, and the creature took the opportunity to transfer
the spittle-ball onto a grass stem, then clambered quickly away
through the redgrass, all knees and elbows.

"That's right. If a hawkbug catches a
trawler, sometimes it will save the shoot, and drag it through the
air itself. The shoot can last for days."

That afternoon, as they rested before dinner,
Rowan drew out her logbook, clumsily, with one hand and one elbow,
and settled down to update the entries. She had had no inclination
to write since leaving the last tribe, and no mental effort to
spare; but it occurred to her that an attempt to notate her
observations might aid in her comprehending them more completely,
and provide a distraction from the pain of her hand.

Bel had her own occupation: smoothing a patch
of ground near her bedroll, she painstakingly began drawing letters
in the dirt with a stiff redgrass reed, practicing writing. Rowan
had found that the Outskirter had a sharp memory for the shapes and
sounds, but unused as she was to small work, her letters tended to
look very peculiar, starting large and growing larger as she
tired.

As she worked, Rowan became aware of a faint
humming sound, like the passing phantom noises one's own ears might
manufacture. In retrospect, she realized that it had been
continuing for some time. Experimentally, she blocked her ears, and
the noise vanished. Bel looked up from her laborious writing.
"What's the matter?"

"An odd sound," Rowan replied, trying to
pinpoint its direction. It was impossible; the dim sound lay at the
threshold of hearing and was intermittently masked by the sound of
redgrass.

Dropping her reed, Bel stood and scanned the
land, then closed her eyes, listening. "I don't hear it."

"It's very faint."

"What does it sound like?" But at that moment
the breeze died, the grass quietened, and Bel caught the noise. She
froze, then smoothly and soundlessly dropped into a sitting
position on the ground. She said nothing, but held Rowan's gaze
with an expression of warning.

"What—" Rowan began, but a minute motion of
Bel's hand silenced her, and she froze. The noise became somewhat
louder.

Minutes passed, and eventually Rowan
attempted to move one leg to a more comfortable position; she
received a look, a widening of Bel's eyes more communicative than
words.

The Outskirter was afraid. It took Rowan a
long, stunned moment to believe it.

Bel was her guide, Bel was the native, Bel
was the warrior, wise in the ways of her land. Never before in the
Outskirts had Rowan ever seen her truly afraid. It came to Rowan
shockingly that if Bel was frightened, then her own survival
depended upon following instructions instantly, completely.

Bel wanted silence and stillness. Heart
pounding, muscles yearning for action, Rowan complied.

More time passed. Rowan listened to the
inhuman humming, watching Bel for more unspoken signs. Their two
shadows slowly lengthened.

The noise grew again, and Rowan found that
she could locate its direction: south by southeast, behind her, to
Bel's left, distance unknown. Bel visually gauged the distance
between her own hand and her sword hilt, a mere foot away within
easy reach. Rowan carefully did the same.

The sound faded slightly, stopped, then
abruptly returned, much quieter. Rowan thought of the low hills
that lay behind her; the source of the humming had passed behind
one and emerged again, farther away.

At long last it diminished to
near-inaudibility, regaining a directionless quality. Bel relaxed,
then caught Rowan's eye with a questioning expression, pointing to
one ear. Realizing that her hearing was sharper than the
Outskirter's, Rowan moved only her fingers in a cautioning
gesture.

At last the noise disappeared, and she spread
her hands to communicate the fact, not presuming to decide for
herself whether the danger was over.

Bel drew and expelled a deep breath. "Close,
but not too close." She rose, somewhat stiffly, her eyes still
wide, her gaze flicking about the landscape.

"What was it?" Rowan found that her jaw
ached. She had been sitting with teeth clenched for over two
hours.

"A demon," Bel said. She turned slowly in a
complete circle, making a careful study of the surroundings,
listening and looking. Rowan attempted to rise, stumbled as a cramp
took her left leg. "They're rare," Bel continued. "They make that
noise, constantly. We're lucky that your hearing is so sharp. I
might not have noticed in time."

Rowan massaged her left calf awkwardly with
her right hand and followed Bel's example in searching the horizon
for she knew not what. The land was empty, the grass near-silent in
the stillness. "What would have happened?" There were legends of
demons in one part of the Inner Lands, but legends only.

"It would have come for us, and killed us."
Bel looked at the direction where the sound had vanished, and began
to relax. "They're attracted by sound."

"All sound? Do they chase goblins,
tumblebugs? Tanglebrush?"

"I don't know. But if one hears you, it
comes. They've destroyed entire tribes." She began gathering their
equipment, urgently. "Let's leave. Now."

Rowan packed her pens, her ink stone, her
book, her bedroll. "Is there no way to defend against them?"

"If you stand in front of one and wave your
sword, it sprays you with a fluid that melts your flesh from the
bones."

Rowan grimaced. "And if you don't wave your
sword?"

"It does the same."

"What do they look like?"

"No one I know has seen one." Bel rolled her
cloak, tied it to her pack. "I know some tales, and one song where
a demon appears. They're said to stand as tall as a man, colored
silver or gray, and have arms like slugsnakes. They have no head,
and no face."

Rowan attempted to envision it. "How do they
see?"

"No one knows."

Their camp dismantled, the women moved off
quickly, in a direction opposite from the demon's last known
position. The new route headed more to the north than had been
planned. Rowan made no complaint. She walked behind her silent
friend, listening to the Outskirts.

T
hey did not
hear the demon again, but began to sleep in shifts, for fear of
missing its approach. With less rest, they traveled harder in the
mornings, when they were freshest, paused more briefly for noon
meal, and stopped earlier in the evening. Soon, Bel was again
searching for tribe signs; Rowan dizzied herself by trying to do
the same, scanning horizons that daily became more obscured as the
travelers approached and entered an area with many small, high
hills.

Bel paused on one crest, again signaling
Rowan to a stop beside her. The morning was windy, the grass
raucous, roaring, and the contrasts of color across its surface
flaring, bright and alive, like fire. The sky above was blue and
white, motionless, frozen. Rowan felt trapped between the land and
sky, had a wild impression that she might suddenly fall up, away
from the jittering, burning hills into the icy heights. The
Outskirter gazed eastward, and Rowan waited; with the slackening of
her wearied concentration, the landscape collapsed into visual
chaos.

Eventually she realized that Bel was not
examining the land to the east, but only facing in that direction;
her attention was elsewhere. Rowan studied her: a clear and
familiar shape against the writhing background. Bel stood with a
lazy nonchalance that to Rowan's eyes communicated total alertness.
Rowan spoke, quietly and cautiously. "What?" Her thoughts
immediately went to the demon; above the grass noise, she could not
hear any hum.

Bel gestured at the landscape: a motion so
elaborately communicative that the steerswoman instantly recognized
it as false, designed to deceive. "We're being followed. Look
confused."

Rowan gazed at the distance, slowing, forcing
the view into some semblance of true land, hills, rocks. She shook
her head as if perplexed. "Is it a person?" she asked.

"I don't know. If it is a person, he's very
good. It might be a wounded goblin, going along the ground, or a
small goat."

"Can you tell where it is?"

"Not exactly. Behind us. West."

Rowan startled at a noise. "What was that?" A
brief rattle, not behind, but ahead.