The Steerswoman's Road (97 page)

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 hack, 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.

Bel twisted her hand around and clutched Rowan’s
desperately, with fingers strong from years of wielding a sword. She turned her
gaze on Rowan, and the steerswoman saw the look she had seen only once before
on the Outskirter’s face, when she and Rowan had sat helplessly silent,
listening to the approach of a demon: terror.

And Rowan understood that here was the only thing that her
warrior friend feared: helplessness. When the demon had approached, Bel could
do nothing; she could not attack or defend, but only wait for whatever fate
would occur. And she could not strike at these tornadoes. She could do
nothing. Her skills were useless, her will impotent, her own life, and the
lives of her comrades, completely out of her hands.

It became difficult to breathe, and Rowan gasped through her
open mouth. Her ears popped. The roof belled up, taut against its braces. Light
vanished—

—and returned. Rowan found herself braced against the wall,
her fingers driven into the earth. Against her back, the wall itself was
shaking.

And rapidly, so rapidly she could hardly believe it, the
scream faded.

The air became still. People slowly raised their heads,
gazing at each other in disbelief.

Chess pulled at Jaffry’s arm. “Check outside.” She had to
shake him to get him to heed; then he recovered himself suddenly and hurried
to obey.

Across the tent, Fletcher was seated upright, shaking his
head slowly; he was saying something, apparently one single sentence, over and
over. Rowan felt just as dazed and wished she herself had something coherent
to say, that perhaps could bear infinite repetition. Beside her, Bel sat
leaning slightly forward, very still, and seeming very small. Rowan gripped the
Outskirter’s shoulder. “Are you all right?”