The Outskirter's Secret (60 page)

The Outskirters were the destroyers, and the
seed. They conquered the evil land, used it, and made it ready for
better life to come. They gave the land a human soul.

"And then killing heat stopped," Rowan said
to the blot of black on the horizon.

"What?" Bel leaned forward to look down at
her.

The Face People had been stopped against a
barrier, constructed of life that could not support humankind. They
had tried to push into the prairie, and could not. They starved.
And then they doubled back, to prey on the inhabitants of the
Outskirts proper.

"It's the end of the Outskirts," Rowan
said.

"What do you mean?" Bel scrambled, slithered
down to stand beside Rowan.

The Face needed the heat; the Outskirts
needed the Face. Rowan looked up at her. "Slado is destroying the
Outskirts. That's his plan, or part of his plan . . ." But such a
process might take centuries; even wizards did not live so
long.

How might the process be made to move
faster?

Don't wait. Destroy the Outskirts directly.
Test the heat spell, see that it works, and then move its aim away
from the Face and into inhabited lands.

Outskirters would die in the path of the
heat, and from the weather that came after. Those who survived
would have a harder life—

And would turn in on the Inner Lands. "It
will be war," Rowan said. "Your people against mine."

"How soon?"

"I don't know." The Outskirts was huge; even
if Slado continued his accelerated destruction, years might pass
before the situation became critical.

"We'll have to find Slado," Bel said simply,
"and stop him before it happens."

But who could win such a war? The Inner
Landers? And what then?

With the Outskirts destroyed, the Inner Lands
would continue to grow as before; but there would be no
intermediary zone between it and the deadly life beyond the Face.
Eventually, expansion must stop. And as the people increased in
number, there would be shortages, hunger. They would prey on each
other. "Slado will destroy the Inner Lands . . . How can he
possibly want that?" She scrambled to her feet. "Bel, what can
possibly be the point?"

Bel had her own answer. "Slado is mad."

"No." Madness was the inability to recognize
and deal with reality. Madness could not control, could not be so
clever, so powerful, as to design and execute a plan of this scope.
"I must be wrong. He can't mean to do this."

Rowan turned back to the shattered Guidestar,
went to it, and laid her two hands against its sun-warmed surface.
She had learned nothing from it, nothing. It was the Outskirts that
had given her what knowledge she had, and the Outskirters, with
their traditions, poems, their very names. But there was one answer
they could not provide. "Why did this Guidestar fall?"

Then she remembered an answer provided,
perhaps unwittingly, by a wizard's man. At Rendezvous, after plying
Efraim with erby, Fletcher had said of Slado: "I think that he did
it. On purpose."

Guidestars made it possible for humankind to
spread to new lands. This Guidestar had hung over the opposite side
of the world. It had been planned that humans would one day live
there. Now that would never happen. Rowan said, "He's stopping
everything. He'll destroy us all." She thought of her home village
and her family; she thought of the Archives. She thought of
Kammeryn and his tribe waiting for her and Bel's return, friends
and comrades all, two weeks' travel away across the Face.

All would die.

She turned back to the open land, where far
on the horizon, a small blot of black stood. And now it seemed to
her that it was not retreating, but advancing, moving in to swallow
the Outskirts, the Inner Lands—all the world she knew.

People could not survive in the world that
the world would become.

Rowan picked up her pens, her ink stone, her
books. She thrust them into the pack.

"Let's get out of here," the steerswoman
said. "This place was never meant for human beings."

END

Rosemary Kirstein
is the author of the
Steerswoman
series:
The Steerswoman,
The
Outskirter's Secret
,
The Lost
Steersman
, and
The Language of
Power.
Work is underway on Volumes 5 and 6.

Paperback versions of the first four volumes were
originally published by Del Rey Books.

Kirstein's short fiction has appeared in
Asimov's
and in
Aboriginal SF
. She blogs at
www.rosemarykirstein.com
,
and occasionally tweets random non sequiturs on Twitter as
@rkirstein
.