The Outskirter's Secret (57 page)

She felt the wind slowly shift, slowly veer
to the northeast, then felt it start to slack, even before its
roaring voice began to fade.

She tapped Bel's knee to gain her attention
and alerted Chess. In the growing quiet, amid the cries of relief
from the huddled people, the three women made their way across the
shelter.

They entered the circle of Fletcher's guard
and settled beside him. He was fast asleep. Rowan gently shook him
awake.

He came to awareness slowly, swinging his
head about in the gloom, confused. Rowan spoke his name, her voice
small in her noise-deadened ears.

He became alert, peering about in the gloom
as if amazed to be alive. "Is it ending?"

"You tell us," Bel said.

"How long was I asleep?"

"All morning. It's past noon, now, at a
guess," Chess supplied.

The hope on his face vanished. "Then it's
just begun." As if to put the lie to his words, the rain ceased
drumming overhead. On one side of the shelter, someone was keening,
continuously, and possibly had been doing so unheard all
morning.

"How do you know?" the steerswoman asked
him.

He flung an arm out in frustration, nearly
striking one of his guards. "I
don't
know. The track from forty-eight years ago showed high winds and
storm, on both sides of the print. I don't know how long it will
last this time, but—more than one morning. There's more
coming."

Rowan let out a pent-up breath of
frustration. Track, print—he had again begun to use words almost
completely incomprehensible to her, words that only hinted at
meaning, that relied upon knowledge and understanding outside of
her experience.

She turned to Chess. "If you want reports
from the other shelters, this may be your only chance to get them."
The old woman nodded, then clambered off, calling to her dazed
warriors.

Rowan turned back to Fletcher, thinking,
Track, like the track of an animal, left behind for hunters to
follow—does the weather leave tracks, and by what means can one
possibly see them? "Forty-eight years is a long time ago," she
began. Could any marks made still be visible? "Didn't you look at
the recent track?" Behind her, someone threw open the entrance, and
a wash of pale light entered the shelter, painful to dark-adapted
eyes. Voices complained reflexively, and people began to shift
stiff limbs. "The Rendezvous weather, the mild version we had, that
caused the Face People's tribe to think it was time to Rendezvous;
that was quite recent, by comparison. There must have been heat on
the Face then; did that make a track?"

His blue eyes were wide on hers. "I looked
for one. It wasn't there."

"There was no track?"

"None."

She thought. "But it must have occurred . .
." How were tracks eliminated?

A clever person who wished not to be followed
would obliterate his tracks by dragging branches over them, like
sweeping chalk marks off a slate . . . "It was erased?"

He looked at her in quiet amazement. "Do you
know," he said in a small voice, "sometimes you frighten me. Yes,
that's exactly it. The information was erased. And there's
something else." He held his hands Out, then moved them together,
defining a small space. "The gap, the time span—it was little. It
wasn't as long as the time it used to take for the heat, when it
came before, every twenty years. I think . . . I think it might
have been a test; someone seeing if the heat still worked, if it
was worthwhile to use it for . . ." He dropped his hands and looked
around, up. "For this."

One covered one's tracks when doing something
one wished kept secret. "It was Slado himself who erased the
information?" She used Fletcher's own turn of phrase; it seemed
properly abstract, and apt.

"It must have been. Any number of people know
how to do it; but none of them would bother to. It doesn't matter
to them. And I don't even know why it matters to him . . ."

"He didn't tell you?" It was Bel who
asked.

"Tell me?" He seemed to find the idea
incomprehensible.

"Yes, you," Bel said, tightly. "He was
getting messages to you, somehow, wasn't he?"

He leaned back, confused. "No—"

"He sent you here!" And the warrior's eyes
were full of fury. "He put you in the Outskirts, for reasons of his
own. Didn't he tell you why?"

"Bel, I've never spoken to him—"

"And when he heard that Rowan and I were in
the Outskirts, he sent you to find us—"

"No!"

"—and do what? Follow us? Gain our
confidence? Stop us? Kill us?"

"Bel, I never meant you or Rowan any harm; I
didn't even know you exist—"

"You're a wizard's man. You showed up, right
where we were. It's too big a coincidence."

He stopped short and made one small sound,
half a helpless laugh. "You don't know. It
is
a coincidence—but not a big one. I'm not the
only one in the Outskirts." He gestured with one hand, indicating
the whole windy wilderness. "You come out here, wandering all
over—one way or another, sooner or later, you would have met one of
us."

"How many? How many of you wizard's dogs are
there in the Outskirts?" Bel sat straight; her dark eyes glittered.
"How many exactly?"

He looked to Rowan, perhaps for reassurance.
But she, too, wanted an answer. "I don't know," he said to Bel,
"not for sure. I think they started with fifteen, years ago. And
then they lost a couple, no one knows what happened. It could have
been anything, disease, a battle, an assassin . . . It was before
my time.

"But when they lost another person, two years
ago, I heard about it, and I did some checking. I could see that
they were short; but nobody seemed to care. No one wanted to take
the job. But when I heard about it, I wanted it. I was in
logistics." He looked suddenly weary. "I hate logistics," he said
quietly. "I'm so bad with numbers." He became exhausted. He stopped
speaking.

Rowan wished she could let him rest. She did
not. "Why did you want this particular work?"

He looked up from his lap: a child's look, a
dreamer's. "It was a hard job. It would be life and death, every
day. I wanted . . . I wanted to do something big."

She heard a sudden echo of the old Fletcher,
the bored young baker who had wanted a life of excitement and had
found something he loved more than he had expected.

Fletcher's gaze dropped again.

Half of Orranyn's band had taken the
opportunity to step outside. Now they returned and traded places
with their comrades. From the corner of her eye, Rowan noticed a
silent argument between Orranyn and Jann. The woman warrior did not
wish to leave. Her chief physically pulled her from place, angrily
directing her outside. He took her former position himself.

"And of what precisely did your duties
consist?" Rowan asked Fletcher.

"Looking," he said. "Reporting."

"Passing on information?" Fletcher had been
able to dispatch messages, she knew. "Using your cross?" she asked,
then recalled the term he used; "Your link?" A link: a connection,
as if the cross had been magically joined to something else. She
thought of the guy line in her hand, telling her the stress on the
tent above her, the direction of the wind outside—information at a
distance, through a physical connection.

"That's right."

"That's all?"

"For the most part."

"We don't want to know the most part," Rowan
told him. "We want to know the least part. Everything."

He stirred himself. "I was supposed to report
everything I found out about the Outskirts, every detail. When Bodo
found the demon's egg, I reported that. Then I called up a trace of
large animals for that sector and ran it back. Some things don't
read well, like goblins. I always reported goblins, and their eggs,
when we found any. But something big and warm always shows up. I
ran the record and watched a large creature passing through that
area two months before. I followed along part of its path, and
found the egg."

Both women were a long time considering these
statements. They were incomprehensible. Rowan grasped at one small
fact among the confusion: "You could see into the past?" Outside,
the wind's low tone altered, ascended.

"No . . ." Fletcher began. "Well, yes, in a
way . . ." He struggled for analogy. "It's like your logbook. You
write things down, and years later people can come and read it. So
they're seeing into the past."

"Who writes it down?"

"No one. I don't know how to explain it, it
happens by itself . . ."

"A spell?"

He accepted the term. "Yes."

Rowan imagined a room filled with books,
where a pen moved across an open page, as invisible hands recorded
everything seen by distant, invisible eyes.

"Where are the eyes?"

"What?"

But she was already thinking: to see the
movements of animals over a long period of time, to see Fletcher's
invisible banner, would require a very high point of vantage indeed
. . .

"The Guidestars," she said. "The Guidestars
are watching us." She was hardly surprised.

"Yes."

"And the Eastern Guidestar sent down the
heat?"

He nodded.

"And it's stopped now?" she continued.

"Unless the schedule was changed again."

"Why didn't we
see
it?" Her voice was desperate in confusion, at
impossibility. "Something so hot, why didn't it glow, burn? It was
going on all last night; why couldn't we see it?"

"I don't know."

A voice spoke close behind the steerswoman.
"Rowan?" It was Jaffry, crouched close beside her. "Chess says come
outside. And bring him." He jerked his chin at Fletcher.

"What's happening?"

He paused. "There are slugsnakes in the sky."
The wind was now keening.

Bel was incredulous. "Slugsnakes?" But Rowan
instinctively reached up to the tent roof, feeling for the external
bracing lines outside the skin. Despite the sound, touch told her
that the wind was nowhere near strong enough to send animals flying
through the air.

Jaffry's expression did not alter. "Big
ones."

Rowan clambered out of the shelter and
crouched on the ground beside Chess. The wind was no longer steady,
but gusting wildly, and the air was filled with a continuous
distant rumbling, overlaid by a sourceless high-pitched scream. The
sound was uncanny; it seemed to enter Rowan's skull, move through
her body, and exit through her skin, leaving it crackling with
warnings of lightning to come. She looked east.

Directly ahead, far out on the brick-red
veldt: a slugsnake in the sky.

It was small in the distance, huge in fact.
It hung below churning clouds that were lit by internal lightning
that writhed in colors such as she had never seen: bright, glowing
green, orange, red, an evil pink that pained her eyes. From the sky
to the ground, the body of the thing swayed slowly, its top merged
with the clouds above, its lower end obscured by a moving brown
haze. The haze, she suddenly knew, was earth; the thing was tearing
at the earth itself.

"Fletcher!" And he was right beside her,
beside Chess, beside Bel. Orranyn was with him, still uselessly on
guard; Rowan thought it stupid. "Fletcher, what is that thing?"

He looked to be in shock. He answered, but
could not be heard above the rising noise. The slugsnake was
stretching, swaying, approaching. Fletcher repeated, "A
tornado!"

"What?"

His hands made a shape: two curves, as on
each side of a cylinder. "Like a hurricane!" he shouted, then
closed his hands, collapsing the shape into a single narrow
funnel.

A small hurricane; it sounded like no
dangerous thing. But then she thought of the vast force of a
hurricane's winds; thought of that force channeled, tightened. The
force would multiply, into a power far beyond her scope of
comprehension.

"Inside!" she called; but none could hear.
She clutched Bel's arm, and Fletcher's, and tugged at them. The
five people struggled together back toward the shelter. But when
Fletcher was about to duck into the entrance, he suddenly stopped,
looked up and past the low tent peak, then stood. Rowan shouted to
him; he could not hear. She rose to pull him down—

Past the tent peak, out to the west, dim in
the gray storm light, seeming silent against the shriek and roar of
wind: more tall shapes, slowly tilting and shifting. There were
three of them due west, two more south beside them, and diminishing
southward in the distance, masses of cloud that seemed to touch the
ground, seemed to be churning and spinning into more distant
funnels . . .

They were lined up along the western horizon,
swaying like drunken soldiers. And over the ridge that obscured the
northwestern sky, Rowan could see flickering, burning colors within
the clouds; and she knew there were more behind the ridge.

And then she was inside, and the others with
her. Someone struggled to secure the entrance. Rain rattled, and
then rattled harder; Rowan thought it was hail, then thought it was
earth, then knew it was, by the choking dust that suddenly filled
the shelter. Something heavy fell on the roof; the tent skin
sagged, dropping, and then rose again, and Rowan knew that whatever
the weight was that had struck above had been taken back into the
sky.

The roaring was continuous; whether thunder
or the wind itself, she could not tell. But over it all, that
impossible screaming, shaking her brain until she thought her ears
would die from the force.

Light dimmed further. Only Bel was clearly
visible, crouched beside Rowan, watching the shuddering ceiling
with wide eyes. With no words able to pass between them, Rowan
reached out one hand to the Outskirter's wrist and held it. It was
the most basic of human statements: I am here, you are here, we are
both alive.