The Outskirter's Secret (55 page)

Just before first light, Rowan stopped short,
realizing that she had walked the last ten paces alone.

She turned around, unconsciously adjusting
the map in her mind to take that fact into account. She walked
back, forcing herself to see and hear what was immediately
present.

The leading edge of the tribe had stopped,
the rest slowly easing to a halt. There was a clot of activity
directly before Rowan.

Kammeryn's aide was stooping to the ground,
speaking to someone. "Give us a name." Rowan could hear Garris
shouting for Mander. She stepped closer.

Kammeryn was half-prone, attempting to rise;
his aide would not permit it. "Mander's coming," she said. "Seyoh,
give us a name." Kammeryn attempted to speak, but failed. Behind,
the tribe members, helplessly, one by one, dropped to seats on the
ground.

The healer approached, Chess following close
behind him. By starlight, Mander looked into Kammeryn's face and
said immediately, "He's going no farther." Kammeryn no longer tried
to rise, and was breathing in long breaths, slow but shallow.

Rowan looked at her mental chart,
triangulating from known landmarks, comparing distances.

"Seyoh," the aide repeated, trying to get his
attention. Rowan stooped down beside them and cautiously permitted
herself to be aware of Kammeryn's face.

The seyoh saw and recognized her, and Mander
bending over him, then looked past the healer's shoulder. "Chess,"
he said.

The cook grunted in surprise. "Right." She
heaved herself erect and looked about in the dim starlight. "You!"
she called, and pointed. "What's on that train? Never mind, clear
it off! Mander, Jenna, get him over there." They hurried to obey,
raising the seyoh between them. He spoke weakly; Rowan could not
hear his words.

Chess did, then turned to the steerswoman.
"He says you know where we are."

Rowan checked her figures, checked the time
by the stars.

"Where do we go now?"

She looked at the route ahead and became
briefly confused; she thought there was one number that she had
neglected to take into account . . .

"Rowan!"

The map glowed in her mind, as if lit by a
fire behind it. And then a second chart overlaid itself: Fletcher's
information, longitude, latitude, area. The features of both charts
merged, matched.

They vanished. Rowan stood shivering with
cold, shuddering in exhaustion, redgrass chattering around her,
with Chess's gnarled face before her, dim in starlight.

The steerswoman swallowed. "No farther. We
make camp here."

"
C
hess, I need
to speak to Fletcher."

It was now full light. The tribe had slept,
struggled back to wakefulness, and set to work.

The old woman pulled her attention from the
rising tents and eyed Rowan. "Sounds like a good idea to me." They
passed together through the standing and sitting tribe members.

Fletcher was seated on the ground, looking
down, weaving in place. Half of Orranyn's band was seated in a
circle around him, watching him with eyes feverish from exhaustion;
the other half sat leaning against their comrades' backs, asleep.
One of them was Orranyn.

Chess kicked his foot. "Wake up. We're going
to talk to him."

Orranyn came awake with a violent start.
"Kammeryn said—"

"Kammeryn's asleep. He put me in charge.
Stand up when you talk to me, boy."

"Chess—"

"If I can stand, you can stand, and I'm
standing, so stand!"

He stood.

"We've got a captive wizard here," Chess
said, "and we want to know some things. Move aside." And she led
Rowan into the circle, which shifted at their chief's gesture to
make more room within.

Fletcher looked up at the two women. One side
of his mouth twitched. "Shall I stand?" He looked too weak to do
so.

"We'll sit." They did. Chess jerked her chin
at Rowan. "You ask. I don't know what to ask."

"Rowan—" Fletcher said.

She put up her hand. "Fletcher, just don't
ask me anything. Answer." He nodded, jerkily.

"Girl, your laws are stupid," Chess said.

"Yes," Rowan said without thinking,
"sometimes." And if the survival of these people she loved, and her
own life, had depended upon breaking those laws at this moment, she
would have done so, on the instant. But that was not necessary.

She said to Fletcher, "Rendezvous
weather."

He nodded. "We're safe from the heat, but
we'll catch the weather that follows it."

"How soon will it come, and how bad will it
be?"

"I'm not sure." He rubbed his face. "Before,
when I was looking back at the twenty-year cycle of routine bioform
clearance, the weather started reacting about two weeks after the
start of the heat. But looked at another way, it came one day after
peak."

She shook her head in annoyance; she was too
weary to puzzle through his language. "Peak being a high point? The
moment of greatest heat?"

"Yes. And there's no buildup this time. It's
coming all at once. We might have as little as twelve hours from
the moment the heat starts."

"At nightfall, today?"

"Yes."

Chess leaned back and shook Jaffry awake.
"You. Go to Steffannis." One of the cook's assistants. "Tell him to
start a fire, slaughter twenty goats, and start cooking them now.
And to set a crew to making bread."

The young man made to protest in confusion,
but Orranyn sent him off with a gesture.

Chess turned back to Fletcher. "How long will
it last?"

He spread his hands. "The heat? Twenty-four
hours. The weather, I don't know; weeks, months, perhaps,
altogether. But it will be worst for a much shorter time. Days,
perhaps."

"What do you mean by the worst? What exactly
happens?"

He moved his shoulders. "Winds, to start. On
the Face, they reached over a hundred miles an hour."

This was incomprehensible; she had expected
him to say "very high winds," or "gales" or "hurricane," if he knew
such terms. But miles an hour was a measurement applied to the
movement of objects. The wind was no object. Rowan tried to imagine
an object caught in such a wind; but its speed of motion would
depend not only upon the wind force, but on the size, shape, and
construction of the object. Perhaps the greatest danger would come
from loose objects, such as bushes, or bits of lichen-tower, flying
at high speed. She thought of ships' sails, when a sheet gave way
from stress. The loose end moved suddenly free, and powerful, like
a great thrashing hand, smashing everything before it—

Sails. She stood up suddenly. "This is
wrong."

"What?" Chess asked.

Rowan looked around the camp, at the tents
now almost all erected: vertical walls of skin, with no great
masts, no yards to brace them. The lines and poles would never
hold. "We have to dig in."

Chess had stood up beside her. "Wind'll knock
all this down?"

"Yes."

Chess called out. "Stop everything! You, you,
and you, over here!"

Rowan looked down at Fletcher. "Where will
the wind come from?"

"At first, east to west, toward where the
heat was. A few hours later, northeast to southwest. Sometime
later, southwest to northeast."

Rowan spoke to Chess. "We dig into the
ground, wide holes, and erect the tents' skins as roofs over them,
with a low peak, running northeast to southwest. Cross-lines for
bracing, inside and out."

The mertutials whom Chess had called over
stood by, weaving, bleary-eyed. Chess's face lost all expression.
"The people can't stand digging like that," she told Rowan.
"They've been walking for three days. They're at the end of their
strength."

"I know."

Chess chewed her lip. "I'll divide the tribe,
and assign each group to the tent it'll be using. They'll dig at
the best pace they can manage, for as long as they can. Erect the
roofs at sunset."

"That sounds like the best we can do."

Chess jerked her head at those waiting. "Come
on."

Rowan watched them depart, then scanned the
skies above, blinking blurred eyes. The sky was decorated with
small clouds slowly shifting east. The blue between them was as
cool and pure as a jewel.

She turned back to Fletcher. "Other than
wind, what else?"

He had been watching intently; now he moved
his hands in a vague gesture. "Rain, hail; maybe even snow, I don't
know."

She knit her brows, thinking; her mind seemed
not slow but vacant, airy and empty. Information entered it, to be
used and then to vanish into some underground chamber. Ideas
appeared seemingly from nowhere. "Hot air expands," she said.
Sealed, heated bottles burst. "Why would the wind move
toward
the heated area?"

"Don't know." And he looked up at her,
plaintive, helpless.

Directly behind him, silent throughout the
whole conversation, sat Jann.

The tents were down, with groups of people
gathered about each of the previous locations. At each site, a
handful of people were digging, with knives, swords, their hands.
Others watched. More slept.

She found Chess sitting beside a group of
diggers. Kammeryn was nearby, asleep or unconscious, Rowan could
not tell. His aide dozed close by. "Assign me to the same tent you
put Fletcher in," the steerswoman said to Chess.

The old woman pointed to the ground. "Right
here. And we're in with you." She spotted movement off at the edge
of the camp. "Ha. The inner circles are coming in."

An old man digging stopped, gaping up at her.
"The inner circles left position?"

"At my order. You don't like it? Do you want
to take over? Do you think anyone will listen to you?"

"But—"

Chess heaved herself to her feet. "The inner
circles are coming in," she announced, and people stopped to
listen. "And the outer, and the scouts. Everybody's coming in. When
this wind hits, any tribe nearby will be too busy to think about
attacking us." And she sat down.

When the people returned to their work, she
spoke to Rowan quietly. "There's another tribe spotted, just
southeast of us. Your friend Bel went to warn them."

Bel's last reported position was some
eighteen miles away. "But she doesn't know what to warn them
of."

"Rendezvous weather. We knew that. Just
didn't know how bad it would be."

R
attling,
tapping, hissing—and Rowan thought: The rain has started.

She tried to turn over and rise; something
seemed to press down on her, heavily. She struggled, and gasped at
the pain of movement.

"Hush, girl." It was Chess, nearby.

"What?" The weight holding her down was the
weight of her own body; the pain was of muscles pushed past their
limits of strength by days of walking, now locked into knots by the
hours of exhausted, motionless sleep.

Rowan was curled on her left side. She tried
to straighten, slowly. "What's the hour?"

"Must be near dawn."

Rowan managed to roll up to a sitting
position. The tent roof was close above her head; a bare earth wall
behind her sent waves of coolness against her back. "I need to move
a bit." She opened and closed her hands; even they were stiff, from
digging.

"Not in here." There was no room. Nineteen
people were sleeping side by side; and at one end of the tent, six
more warriors were sitting upright, in an inward-facing circle.
Along one wall of the shelter, and complaining intermittently, ten
goats lay on their sides with their legs trussed. The light was
barely enough for the steerswoman to see.

"Where's the door?" There was one, she knew;
she had suggested its location herself. Now she could not recall
where it was, or where in the tent she was.

Chess reached out a dim hand, and Rowan used
it to get herself into motion. She crawled over the two sleepers
between herself and the mertutial. "Over there," Chess said, and
pointed her on.

A triangle of gray light above, just this
side of the goats. Rowan made her way painfully across to it. None
of the sleepers she clambered over were disturbed by her
passage.

At the entrance, she pulled herself erect,
hissing in annoyance at her body's complaint. Standing, she had not
the flexibility to climb out.

It was not raining; the sound had been only
redgrass. Above, the sky was too light for most stars, but still a
deep blue too dark for day. It seemed ominous, as if purposely
emptied of all but the twin Guidestars, and waiting.

The Eastern Guidestar looked no different
from the Western. Rowan considered its angle. The magic heat, if it
came from the Eastern Guidestar, must certainly pass above the camp
to reach the area west. And if there were heat crossing the sky
above, surely the area immediately below must also become warm.

And yet it was cold outside, quite cold.

All around, lying close to each other within
pockets of crushed grass, were scores of goats. Some began to stir
and stand, shaking their flop-eared heads, the weight of their
horns lending a ludicrous drunkenness to the motion. Among them,
only slightly taller than the redgrass, were the low peaks of the
other shelters.

And one standing figure. She waved it over.
"Help me out, please."

"Is that Rowan?" It was Averryl. He gave her
a hand, then two, pulling her from the ground purely by his own
effort.

"How long have you been up here?"

"Hours. Since just after midnight. I slept
some, then I couldn't any longer. I wanted to see. And . . . and
it's not comfortable in there . . ." He nodded toward one of the
shelters, presumably his own.

"Comfortable?" she echoed. His voice had lent
the word a meaning beyond the merely physical.