The Steerswoman's Road (99 page)

A voice spoke from behind. “Rowan?” She turned.

Averryl was there; and behind him, Kree, and the rest of the
band. There was something in their midst. Averryl said, “We’re going to cast
Fletcher.”

Rowan looked at the shrouded form lying among the warriors;
not standing invisibly behind her, not waiting to speak, not one moment away
from touching her shoulder.

“Cast him?” she said uncomprehending. An Outskirter rite of
honor for a wizard’s minion, a man who had been sent for Slado’s purposes, to
aid in a plan which had caused only horror and death?

A man who had taken up Outskirter ways, Outskirter life; who
had come to love the world he lived in, and each person who had stood beside
him, for their beauty, for their strength, for their honor. A man whose every
word was a lie, but whose every chosen action was driven by only truth, the
truth that was his love of the life; who had declared, with laughter, with joy,
his love of a tribe’s old cook, of a hand-woven rug, of a rough pottery bowl,
of a steers-woman. A man who had discarded unimaginable powers and accepted
the simple sword, striking at the enemies of those he loved, knowing he could
die in the attempt and believing it worth his death.

A man who had stood by his tribe, by his seyoh, by his
chief. A warrior of Kree’s band. Fletcher.

Outskirter rites for an Outskirter. Rowan stood, rain on her
clothing, her hands, her face. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, of course. I’m coming.”

Dust Ridge was appropriately named.

They saw it first as a smoky line on the horizon. Rowan took
it to be a low cloud; but it did not follow the rest of the weather. It grew
larger as they approached, and at last they could see that it was a long cliff,
with winds from above spilling dust from drier land beyond, over the edge.
Rowan worried about climbing up into that dust, but it was only with the wind
from the east that the phenomenon occurred. When the wind faded, or changed,
Dust Ridge stood bare and calm.

They had traveled with Kammeryn’s people for two months as
the tribe slowly recovered. The Outskirters had survived by replenishing their
flock with goats strayed from tribes that did not survive the tempests and
tornadoes. But when they reached land too grim to support the tribe, they
paused to wait, and Rowan and Bel went on alone.

Dust Ridge should have been out on the blackgrass prairie;
the report of Bel’s father had placed it so. It was not. It was on the Face.

Rowan wondered at her own surprise. The Outskirts moved, she
knew, shifting forever eastward. The Face moved as well, she now saw, staying
always ahead of the Outskirts themselves. When Bel’s father had been here, it
had been prairie; now it was the Face.

Rowan had before given little thought to the fact that Bel’s
father had been to Dust Ridge; the steerswoman had not before fully comprehended
the nature of life in the Outskirts, on the Face, on the prairie. Now she
wondered at his interest in a land so inhospitable. But Bel could provide no
good answer: it had been her father’s way to always travel, she told Rowan,
often alone, and often to places that did not much interest other people. Bel
found it not at all surprising that he should have seen fit to take himself out
onto the blackgrass prairie, for no other reason than that it existed.

But there was no blackgrass at Dust Ridge now, nor were there
goblins. The heat had come to the Face for the first time in decades, earlier
that year, and had destroyed all life then present, leaving the tanglebrush
bare and brittle, the lichen-towers weirdly desiccated, their internal spiraled
spines bare and dead against the sky.

But there was new life: redgrass, spreading in from the Outskirts,
meeting no natural competitors at all. Rowan and Bel walked across dried mulch
composed of dead and rotted plant and insect life, merged and mixed by the
intervening rains. Here and there were small and larger stands of redgrass,
rattling sweetly, promising pastures to come.

Rowan’s calculations of the location of the fallen Guidestar had
a limit to their accuracy: she could not narrow the possible area to anything
less than twenty miles. But Rowan had no plan to scour the face of the ridge
for the Guidestar.

Instead, she and Bel made their camp on the plain below the
cliffs and waited.

At sunset, Rowan stood facing the ridge; and as the sun fell
behind her, illuminating the cliffs with gold and rose, she saw a streak, a
smear of white glints on the raw face of the ridge, glowing brighter as the
light changed, then fading when it disappeared. She marked the place in her
mind, and sat staring at it long after dark.

They found a path up to it, certainly the same path Bel’s father
had used; there was no other. It was rough, and switched back and forth. They
left their equipment below, taking only Rowan’s logbook, pens, ink, and a
waterskin, in an otherwise empty pack.

Rowan and Bel stood at last at a place where a thousand
glittering blue jewels lay at their feet, in the shadow of a huge, shattered
shape that thrust out from the cliff itself.

It was as large as a large house, and had once been larger;
they could see that one side was torn, and open. Inside, there might once have
been a chamber; but the body of the Guidestar was itself crushed, and that
possible chamber was collapsed, extruding trusses, beams of metal, blackened
with the heat of its burning fall.

Rowan clambered over it, probing, peering. She found more
wires, their coatings melted like wax from the copper cores; more mysterious
surfaces etched with copper on one side, black with soot, brown with corrosion.
She pried one loose and saw for the first time its opposite side. It was
festooned with tiny objects, partially melted, like square insects with their
metal legs thrust through to contact the copper on the other side.

Most of the Guidestar was metal; some was ceramic, and Rowan
found something like a wide, broken ceramic plank, wedged under one edge of the
body of the Guidestar. Bel helped her tug it out. It freed by breaking, leaving
most still under the hulk.

The plank was some four feet wide, perhaps six long. When it
was freed, Rowan saw that one edge was hinged. She and Bel pried at the
opposite edge, and the plank opened like the cover of a book. Inside, both
faces were coated with perfect, unbroken jewels, their opalescent colors
fracturing the light within them, their surfaces crossed by a grid of tiny,
silver lines. Rowan knelt beside the plank for many minutes, running one hand
across its eerie surface.

“Rowan! Take a look at this!”

Bel had wandered off to one side and made her own discovery:
a large rectangle of metal, once flat, now twisted like taffy. Rowan went to it
and sat beside it, bracing her legs against a boulder to keep from sliding downslope.

Bel was wedged on its opposite side. “Look at this.” She had
wiped dust from is surface with one palm, showing only corrosion beneath. Now
she wiped again, widening the clear area. “Isn’t that writing?”

Rowan would not have recognized it as such at first glance;
it was too different from the forms she knew. But Bel, perhaps because she was
new to writing, had recognized it as belonging to a category: shapes designed
to communicate.

Rowan cleared more dust from it. The letters were an inch
tall and consisted purely of deeper areas of corrosion lined up below a hole in
the object itself. She puzzled out the shapes, compared them with known forms,
found similarities, and guessed at the words.

“‘Turn left,’” she read, “‘and latch.’”

Bel looked at her. “Latch? Like a door?”

Rowan inserted her fingers into the round hole and felt the
works within. “Exactly like a door.”

Rowan settled down on a flat rock with her logbook, laying her
pens and ink stone carefully beside her, to sketch and describe the Guidestar.
Above her, Bel leaned back against the hulk itself, warming herself in the
sunlight, with sun-warmed metal at her back.

Rowan filled the final pages of her book. The sun slowly
shifted.

At last she set down her pen and paged through what she had
written, moving forward and back, helplessly. Then she closed the book.

What she had written and drawn was mere description. Even
standing beside the Guidestar, even touching it, she could not wrest from it
the secrets of its magic, of its purpose, nor the reason it had fallen from the
sky.

All she knew, she had learned earlier: the Guidestars sent
down killing heat, at the command of wizards; and they watched the world from
high above.

Rowan herself was high, halfway up a cliff, with
sun-drenched air all around. She looked out, down.

Far to the west, the wild colors of the distant veldt merged
into a single mass of brick red. Ahead, to the north, the land was gray and
earth brown, with the sparse stands of redgrass discernible only directly
below. To the northeast, just at the limit of sight, the line of the cliffs
disappeared into a sudden blot of darkness: the near edge of the blackgrass
prairie, where humans could not survive.

Blackgrass poisoned human skin. The goats could not live by
eating it. Blackgrass was stronger than redgrass; where blackgrass was established,
redgrass would not thrive. There were demons, goblins, other stranger
creatures, beyond the Outskirts, beyond the Face.

“The Outskirts move.” She had always assumed that it was the
growth of the Inner Lands themselves, the cultivation of green life that pushed
back the redgrass, the spreading of farms and towns that pushed back the
barbarians themselves. But the Outskirters could only be pushed so far, to the
Face, where there was more blackgrass than redgrass. Movement would be stopped
there.

But then came the killing heat. The blackgrass, the
poisonous plants, the monsters, were destroyed. And with no competitor,
red-grass, always quick to grow, spread into the dead area. The Face people
followed it, even as the living prairie sent new blackgrass back, eventually
meeting and intermingling with the red, creating the mix of life common on the
Face. And twenty years later, the cycle repeated.

But if the Face itself moved, then the zone of heat must
move. Each time it appeared, it must appear farther to the east; destroying,
clearing the way for the expansion of the Outskirts.

And the western edge of the Outskirts also shifted east, as
the Inner Landers claimed new fields for cultivation. But as blackgrass was
stronger than redgrass, so redgrass was stronger than greengrass. Farmers
always needed to pull any redgrass that appeared, or it would choke their
crops. But at the edge of the Outskirts, there were no farms, but young
forests, bramble, greengrass fields. Green life spread of its own power.

She realized with a shock that it did so because it was free
to do so. The Outskirters themselves cleared the way.

The goats ate the redgrass to the roots, their feces killing
what they did not eat. The Outskirters themselves destroyed more, with their
waste, offal, corpses. They pulled down lichen-towers, they hunted goblin eggs,
purely for the sake of destruction.

Goblins, blackgrass, lichen-towers, insects: these were
native to the Outskirts, and to the prairie beyond. Humans and goats were not.
The redgrass stood between; and it was the only thing that stood between, the
only link.

As if from a Guidestar, Rowan saw the world spread below
her. She saw a band of heat destroy the Face and a portion of the prairie; and
redgrass fill and spread into the dead area; and Outskirters using the
redgrass, clearing it behind them as they moved east; and sweet green life following
their path, feeding on the fertilization they left behind.

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?”