The Singers of Nevya (23 page)

Sitting by the fire in the evening, Theo asked Sira to bring out her food supplies so they could measure what they had together. “It looks a meager pile,” Sira said doubtfully.

There were two little cloth sacks of grain, and just a few packets of dried meat. “It’s enough,” Theo said. “If we don’t take side trips, we should be able to eat three times a day until Lamdon.” He kept the softwood, and stowed all the food supplies in Sira’s saddlepack. “Take care of that,” he admonished, grinning. “Empty bellies make cold company.”

He did not try to persuade her to go back to Conservatory. He told her of Magister Mkel’s concern and Isbel’s fears. She nodded acknowledgment, but did not answer, and he let the matter rest. He had been hired to find her, not force her to return. If Magister Mkel felt otherwise, he would return the bits of metal Conservatory had paid him.

They went to sleep early, snug in their bedfurs. Theo watched Sira peacefully close her eyes, though she had told him how uneasy the sounds of the wilderness made her when she was alone. The night was windless and clear, and the smoke from the embers of their fire drifted in a narrow spiral high into the empty purple sky above the Pass. Theo had to admit that he, too, felt peaceful. It was nice to have company. Especially this company.

Theo woke with the sun bright in his eyes. The morning was quiet, but the hruss held their heads high, ears turned forward, staring at something beyond the sun-faded quiru.

Theo rolled over, and sat up. Squinting up into the light, he found a semicircle of men, conspicuously armed with bows and knives. They sat their hruss around the campsite, luminous ghosts in the glitter of sun on snow. His belly clenched in the sure recognition of trouble.

Sira lay in her bedroll, her face turned toward him, her eyes closed. Without stopping to think, he sent to her. Wake up now, but move very slowly. Sira! Wake up now. Slowly.

Sira opened her eyes at once and looked directly at him. She said nothing, and no reaction showed on her face. Deliberately, with no sudden movements, she pushed back her furs and sat up to face the riders ranged around their camp.

The scene held a moment in complete silence, until a hruss outside the quiru stamped impatiently, and one of those inside the envelope of light whickered.

“Sorry to disturb you, Singer,” came a raspy voice. His accent was thick and guttural. “You will break camp now. One of us will give you a hand.”

Theo slid barefoot out of his bedfurs and reached for his boots while Sira watched in a tense silence. He felt for his long knife where he had left it in one boot. He and Sira were only two against six, but he put his hand on the knife just the same, and measured the distance between himself and the leader.

“Chad will take the knife,” the man rasped, pointing to one of the riders.

Theo straightened with the knife in his hand. The man closest to Sira drew his own knife and pointed it, almost casually, at her throat.

Theo sighed. He reversed the knife and held it out to the man called Chad, hilt first. Chad tucked it inside his own boot. Sira’s knife, Theo remembered with regret, was in her saddlepack with the cooking things. Her filla, though, like his own, was safe inside her tunic.

She sent to Theo, Who are they?

He responded, Watchers. Even in the stress of the moment, he took pleasure in his growing ability to hear and send. He pulled his boots on one by one.

What next?

Careful, he sent back. He couldn’t tell if she understood him, but surely she could guess. He was standing now, fully dressed and grim-faced.

“What do you want with us?” he asked the newcomers.

The raspy-voiced one nodded at Chad. “Saddle the hruss,” he said, then to Theo, “We need you at Observatory, Singer. Your traveler can stay or come, as she wishes.”

Chad dismounted and busied himself with hruss and tack. Sira set about dressing herself to ride, looking to Theo for guidance. He nodded to her, then turned back to the leader. Through a tight jaw, he said, “By what right do you abduct us?”

The Watcher was unmoved by Theo’s ire. “By right of need,” he said. He barked instructions to some of the others.

“We don’t enjoy this, Singer. We have no choice.” This was Chad, who was handing the reins to one of his own group, and rolling up Sira’s and Theo’s bedfurs to tie onto their hruss.

“You would leave me alone here, without hruss?” called Sira to the leader. Her deep voice rang across the campsite. Theo caught his breath. The Watchers had no idea what they had found. They assumed he was the Singer and Sira the traveler. He hoped Sira understood.

The leader took a closer look at her. He was short and squat of build, with hard, intelligent eyes. “We need hruss almost as much as we need Singers,” he said. “But we need people at Observatory, too. Come with us. You would likely die out here in any case.”

“Mount up, traveler,” said Chad. “You too, Singer. We don’t waste sunlight.”

Theo moved toward his hruss. He caught Sira’s eye and tried to send to her, Do not. She raised her scarred eyebrow in question, but kept silent as she walked to her own beast. They mounted, and settled into their saddles, but two of the strangers kept their reins. Chad picked up all the remaining equipment from the campsite, cooking pots, a packet of dried meat, a sack of grain, and stowed all of it on his own saddle.

Once again Theo tried, Cantrix. Not tell.

Sira’s face was a frozen mask. Do not tell them I am a Cantrix?

Yes. Yes! he responded. A nod from her told him she had received the message.

I will not. She leaned back on the cantle of her saddle and folded her arms across her chest. She looked more angry than afraid. “I can guide my own hruss,” she snapped at the man holding her reins.

“Soon enough,” said the raspy-voiced one. “When we are out of the Pass.” He clucked to his own animal, and led the party away from the campsite.

What will they do with us? Sira sent.

He did his best to answer. They want me to work. To sing, but he was fairly certain she could not get much of that. The group around them rode in heavy silence. As they rode south through the Pass, away from Lamdon, Theo inspected them as closely as he dared. Their furs were bulky and well-worn. Their hruss looked underfed. That they were a determined, even a desperate, group was clear. Theo held little hope for an escape.

The group traveled southeast across the Pass. Ahead, it seemed their direction would lead them straight into a mountainside. After two hours of riding, with Watchers still keeping Sira’s and Theo’s reins, they left the Pass through a litter of snow-capped boulders, climbing into a narrow snowy canyon. Their path had been invisible from the Pass itself. For another hour they traversed twisting, treacherous slopes where the firn, growing deeper every day, seemed almost to hang above their heads. The way was so steep that Sira had to hold on to her saddle horn at times to keep from sliding off. Theo watched their route, but could not see how he would ever remember it. It was nearly featureless, an unmarked way through a tangled landscape.

“Now you can have your reins,” said the leader, whose name they had learned was Pol. “You could never find your way back alone from here.” He fixed Theo with a stony stare. “Believe me, Singer. Too many men have died trying.”

Theo mustered a cheerful grin. “Must be some House if men die trying to get away.”

Unexpectedly, Pol gave a short bark of laughter. Sira glanced at him, then away.

When the party rode out onto a cramped, terrifying path that circled an immense cliff, Theo looked back over his shoulder to gaze in wonder at the vista below. The broad reaches of the Pass they had left hours before swept from the southwest to the northeast, seemingly almost beneath the hruss’s feet. Beyond the Pass the Mariks rose in majestic, forbidding splendor. He understood how their abductors had found them. The smoke from their fire and the light of the quiru must have been beacons of invitation.

But hard as Theo tried, he was unable even now to trace how they had climbed to this spot. Their route was lost in a jumble of rocky cliffs and canyons.

He took the reins that Chad handed back to him and glanced ahead, where the hruss were strung out along the cliff path. He would have sworn the path ended in a cul-de-sac, but even as he watched, the lead rider turned right, as if straight into the bare rock of the cliff, and disappeared. Theo’s heart sank. Pol, it seemed, was right.

When he arrived at the turning, he and his hruss had to squeeze through a narrow opening. The rock walls scraped his legs as he passed. Ahead was another steep path, winding further and further into a wilderness of rock and snow. They rode on for some time before the leader turned downhill into a broader and easier road across a mountain valley.

Theo found his shoulders tingling from the tension of the climb. He rubbed them to restore circulation as his hruss found easy footing on the descent.

It was almost dark when they approached the House. Pol raised one thick arm and pointed. “Observatory. Home.”

Theo was astonished. The Watchers had made the trip out and back in one day. They had to have started very early, risking the pre-dawn darkness, riding without a Singer. Had anything gone wrong, their whole party would have been lost to the cold.

The House clung stubbornly to the southeastern slope of a narrow peak that towered over those around it. Observatory looked smaller than most of the Houses Theo knew, with an odd, circular addition high on its roof, like a knob or a bowl dropped upside down. Its quiru was pale around it, touching its roof and walls with faint illumination.

We will not sing, Sira sent to Theo. He heard her quite clearly. His only response was a shrug. These men had shown their willingness to let them both die.

I will not, in any case, she sent further. They cannot force me. He looked at her face, its narrow mouth set firm, and he hid a smile. She would not be an easy one to subdue, he thought with rueful pride. Cantrix Sira would surprise these Watchers.

They rode up to the House in purple twilight. No welcoming party greeted them. Sira looked down at the rough, slanting steps leading to the door, realizing they had once been straight, but had shifted and broken as the ground moved below them, and had not been repaired.

The House was cold, with dank, moldy corners and icy floors. Without ceremony, Sira and Theo were led to narrow, dark rooms furnished with only the simplest of cots and chairs. They were not treated roughly, but matter-of-factly, saddlepacks and bedfurs dropped on the floor, empty of all valuables. Sira’s knife was gone, and all their food. Fortunately, no one had offered to search her. They could not suspect, she supposed, what she carried inside her tunic.

In Nevyan fashion, they were taken to bathe next, as if they were guests. Sira found the water in the ubanyix dark and tepid. Three other women were bathing. They looked at her in silent curiosity, and she turned her face away. She hid her filla in a fold of her tunic when she undressed, and endured a cold and unpleasant bath rather than reveal herself by warming it. She wondered how long it had been since the water had been changed. She took a perverse satisfaction in knowing that the other women must also be cold, but she shivered in angry misery as she dressed again in the same clothes she had been wearing.

Her dismal cubicle was at the end of a dark corridor, with empty rooms around it. She was grateful for that. In her own room, at least, she thought, she would have light and warmth. She brought out her filla and used it, softly, to brighten the air around her. The room grew warmer, but hardly more cheerful, as the increased light revealed creeping fungus in the corners of the ceiling, and beads of condensing moisture here and there on the walls. Sira sighed as she tucked her filla away.

They had apparently missed the evening meal, and no one offered them food or tea. There was nothing to do but go to bed. Sira piled her bedfurs over the ragged blanket on her cot and slid under the mound. The chill from the wall made the cot frigid, and she could not sleep until her body’s warmth had heated it. She curled herself against the cold, waiting for warmth.

What this House needed, of course, was a strong, healthy quiru. A warm House quiru, established by a full Cantor or Cantrix, and maintained for some weeks with a daily quirunha. That would put an end to the molds and fungus and damp.

But I will not do it, Sira insisted into the darkness. Not for them.

Sira found her own way to the great room the next morning. She and Theo sat in silence with the rest of the community of Observatory, who were almost as silent as they were. The indifferent food, consisting almost entirely of meat, was eaten quickly and without ceremony.

They look ill, Sira sent to Theo.

His answer was jumbled, but she understood Cold. Damp.

She nodded, then caught Pol’s eyes on her.  Careful. Pol watches us.

He is not stupid, Theo responded, with surprising clarity.

Sira admired the quickness with which Theo’s listening and sending were improving. What a talent, she thought, to have been wasted by not properly training it. She remembered young Zakri sending a ball spinning away from him, and she felt a sharp pang of sympathy. She looked around the gloomy room, seeing the reddened cheeks and noses of the House members here, and she grew angry again.

I would like to teach you more, she sent to Theo. But they will find me out. And we must not sing for them or we will never get away.

A hard cough from a child at one of the tables distracted her. She turned toward it, and found Pol’s short, powerful figure in her line of vision as he came toward them. “If you have finished your meal, Singer,” he said, standing before Theo with his arms folded.

Sira rose with Theo. Curious eyes followed them as they left the great room to follow Pol down a corridor, where he opened a heavy door.

“Our Cantoris,” he said in his grating voice. He waved a hand into its shadows. Sira could just make out the dais in its center. “Here you will sing.”

Theo put his head to one side and gazed down at Pol, an amused smile on his lips. “You must think you’ve captured a ferrel, Pol, when all you’ve got is a poor little wezel in your trap.”