Crecheling (21 page)

but stopped.

Off to her left she saw the second horse tethered to a wiry tree, no thicker than her wrist, that sprouted stubbornly out of an earth-filled crack in the stone. To her right, at the edge of the rock shelf, lying on his belly and looking down at something, was Jak.

Whatever he was watching, he was obviously hiding from it.

***

Chapter Twenty-Two

Dyan felt delirious with relief, and in her imagination her skin suddenly cooled. Jak had the horse.

But he was hiding. Something was wrong.

Where was Eirig?

Dyan crouched down and tried to creep quietly, rolling her feet from heel to toe as she walked. She felt like a giant, tromping great thundering holes into the ground, but she couldn’t have been that loud in others’ ears.

She was almost to Jak before her boot sole scuffed the stone and he turned to look at her. He beckoned her to join him, and shushed her with a finger across his lips.

Dyan meant to continue creeping on her feet but stumbled. She caught herself, mostly silently, she thought, and then wormed forward on her belly to see what Jak was looking at. Insects of fear gnawed at her stomach in anticipation.

What she saw felt like a punch in the eye.

A spring of water gushed out of the rock at the foot of the shelf on which she stretched out. It bubbled maybe fifteen feet below Dyan’s head. Water bottles, skins, and flasks lay on the ground around the spring, some filled and some empty. The cliff face was sheer below Dyan, though off to the right, where the main canyon wall came down past the shelf to the ground, there was a slide of stone that was less steep.

“I can’t help you.” Eirig knelt at the spring, holding a flask in the crystal stream of water to fill it. He coolly kept his back turned to the three figures whose appearance nearly made Dyan’s heart stop.

Cheela, Shad, and the Magister from the Hanging and from Narl’s cabin, the jowly blonde-haired woman with the drooping nose and one fluttering eye. They all rode big Outrider horses, fully kitted-out for the wilderness.

And Cheela rested her hand on her whip handle.

“Don’t think I don’t recognize you,” Shad said evenly. “You’re the boy who intervened at the Cull this year, at Ratsnay Station.”

Eirig stoppered the flask by pinching it between his knees and putting the stopper in with his one hand. “Sure,” he agreed. He set the flask down. “I didn’t recognize you at all, actually, but my arm here”—he waggled his stump around his own ear—“did, and it reminded me that you’re the Mother-blasted son of a goat who killed my friend Dimon. Took his head clean off his shoulders, as I recall. He bled a lot.” He picked up a waterskin.

“So what?” Cheela was belligerent.

“You have a good memory.” Shad’s voice was flat, maybe a little sad. Dyan was shocked to see him. She had felt so proud of all her tricks and evasions, and they had failed. What had gone wrong? Had Shad been closer behind her all the time than she had imagined?

Or had her disguise worked against her? She thought of the trader on the ship, who expressed surprise at being paid by an Outrider, and the bandit with the nightvision goggles, who didn’t think she could really be an Outrider at all if she was willing to sell her equipment.

Of course, the bandits’ fresh bodies—the ones sawed neatly in half by monofilaments—must have been a clear sign to Shad that he was hot on Dyan’s trail.

Eirig turned to kneel again at the spring, filling the waterskin. “And now you’re going to kill me, too,” he said. “Take my head off, I suppose. Ah, you can’t deny it. I heard your Magister, didn’t I? She said you would not only hunt us down, but kill our families if we told.”

“Blazing right,” Cheela muttered.

Eirig finished the waterskin and stood again. “Go ahead,” he told them.

Shad raised his eyebrows. “You want to die?” he asked.

Dyan pulled both bolas from their holsters and held them quietly in her hands. She didn’t think she could throw them safely from a position lying on her stomach, and she was afraid that the moment she stood, she’d be spotted. So she might get off one shot. She might not even get off one, she felt so shaky and fragile. She asked herself which of the three she should target.

“No,” Eirig said. “All in all, I guess I don’t. But my friends moved on and left me, thanks to this.” He waved his stump in demonstration. “I can’t hunt, you see? Can’t shoot a bow, can’t fight, can’t even really get into the saddle by myself. So they left me here and headed out on their own.”

Eirig said his words like they were a joke, straight-faced. He was a good liar, Dyan realized, and she felt perversely proud of him.

In her heart, she wanted to kill Cheela or the Magister. It was totally unreasonable, but she had a feeling that Shad didn’t really condone what he was participating in. It wasn’t fair, it denied Shad responsibility for his own actions, but she had to believe that some part of him resisted what he was being made to do. She had to believe it because … she just had to.

“Because you’re a cripple?” Cheela sneered. Dyan remembered that it had been Cheela who had taken off Eirig’s arm, as well as the head of his horse, back at that first deadly encounter.

“Life’s hard, isn’t it?” It wasn’t really a question. “They left me by water, at least. And there are little animals here to trap, and pine nuts.”

The Magister narrowed her eyes at Eirig. “And whom did you tell about the Cull, Landsy?”

“Landsy,” Eirig chuckled. “I kind of like that. It makes me sound like I’m connected to something, and can stand on my own two feet, doesn’t it? Like I’m solid as these rocks, and not just some mutilated kid without a home.”

But Dyan knew that if she could only kill one of the three, that one had to be Shad. He was the tracker, and if he survived, whether he liked it or not, he would track Dyan down.

“Don’t waste my time with this,” the Magister said. “I have no tears to shed for you. Your life is hard. So is mine. So are all the lives that the System exists to protect, and who are you to decide that it is wrong for the System to pluck a few withered flowers to protect the entire garden?”

Eirig shrugged. “I’m nobody,” he admitted. “Just a kid who doesn’t think his friends deserve to be murdered.”

“Whom did you tell?”

“Does it matter?” Eirig asked. “I don’t have anyone left for you to kill. My old dad’s long dead, and you already killed Aleena, who was like a mother to me. Now what? Are you going to threaten to kill Jak and Dyan? You’re trying to kill them, anyway.” He shrugged. “No, I’m happy they’re in love, and they rode off without me. They can go have a good life somewhere, and you can take off my head and put me out of my useless misery.”

Shad grimaced, and Dyan felt a twist in her gut.

In love?

“I have a plan,” Jak whispered softly into her ear.

“We can’t leave Eirig.”

“Eirig came for me. I’m not going to leave him.”

“Aren’t you going to tell me what you have in mind?”

“Be ready,” Jak said. “Get Eirig and get out of here.”

“You dying is no better than Eirig dying,” Dyan whispered. “In fact, it’s worse.” She grabbed his hand.

He squeezed her hand tight, once, and drew her to him and kissed her. “No time,” he whispered and began his move.

Jak backed away on all fours and then quietly rose to his feet. His shoes, cut of soft leather, were much quieter than Dyan’s riding boots, and he tip-toed along the long shelf of stone and over to the horse. Untethering the animal, he gave Dyan one last look and nodded at her.

Then he led the animal away.

Dyan couldn’t worry about Jak. Instead, she crouched on the stone on all fours, bola in each hand, and watched the scene below.

“Hooves,” Shad said, tilting his head to one side. “Do you hear?”

Cheela drew her whip, but the Magister maintained her hawklike focus on poor Eirig. Dyan tried to relax, to breathe consciously and be ready for whatever came.

She shifted her balance to free one of her hands and readied a bola. In her mind’s eye, she aimed it at Shad, and she imagined hitting him with it.

The sound of Jak’s horse approaching became louder. From a slow scrape of horseshoe on stone it changed to the faster beat of a canter.

“Perhaps,” the jowly Magister smiled slowly, “your friends have not quite abandoned you after all.”

Eirig scratched his head. He looked for all the world like he didn’t care, and was completely calm. “Or maybe it’s more bandits,” he said. “I guess if you folks are as good as Dyan is with those whips of yours, you might not be too worried.”

Shad palmed a bola and moved away from the spring, laying his body beside a clump of tall grass on a low rise of sand. Propped up on one elbow, he waited for the horse.

“This is your last chance,” the Magister said to Eirig. “Tell us where your friends are.”

Eirig shook his head slowly. “Maybe that’s them,” he said. “I have no idea.”

The Magister moved fast. From somewhere under her cloak she produced a bola. Dyan had barely noticed it clutched between the woman’s thumb and first two fingers when the weapon was already spinning through the air.

Thwack!
The bola and its counterweight struck the stone behind Eirig and splashed down into the spring—

along with Eirig’s other arm, severed near the shoulder.

Inside her head, Dyan screamed. Nothing came out of her mouth.

Eirig stumbled. His feet, boots stolen from Wayland’s dead body what now seemed ages ago to Dyan, slipped in the muddy sand around the spring, and he fell forward onto his knees.

“Now do you have anything to say?” The Magister’s smile looked maternal and generous, but her eyes glinted hard and bright and her voice was cold.

“Mother blast you to blazes,” Eirig murmured.

“Enough of him,” the Magister snapped her fingers. “Here comes another.”

Cheela drew her whip and cracked it in one fluid motion. The invisible line sliced through Eirig vertically and he split apart like a gourd opened with an ax. One moment he knelt in the mud mouthing his defiance, and the next he was a mess of blood and flesh, watered by the little desert spring.

Dyan felt a scream about to explode within her. She jammed the meat of her own thumb into her mouth and bit down on it, hard.

Shad rolled over in his ambush-ready position and stared.

At that moment, Jak rode into view around the corner. Too late.

“Eirig!” he shouted. He immediately wheeled his horse around. The horse protested loudly, but turned, and with a great kick of its hind legs raced away, carrying Jak up the canyon.

“After him!” the Magister snarled.

Shad continued to stare. He looked surprised and disgusted.

“What?” Cheela asked him. “I did what an Outrider has to do.”

“Capture or kill,” Shad said. His voice was heavy and bitter. “We can sometimes capture them, Cheela.”

“Not this one,” the Magister said. “The Cull is a sacred thing, Outrider. It is to be protected from defiling by Crechelings and by Landsmen alike. Their knowledge is defilement, and threatens the System. He had to die, for the same reason his friends must die. For the same reason Magister Zarah will die.”

Cheela arched her eyebrows defiantly at Shad. He shook his head and staggered to his feet. He looked as shaken as Dyan felt.

Magister Zarah?

Dyan ripped her thumb out of her mouth and looked at it. She had left deep teeth marks in her own flesh, and it hurt. She didn’t think Jak had seen Eirig die. He had been in view for only a split second, and she thought he would have reacted strongly to his friend’s death if he had been aware of it. He probably expected now to lead some members of the System party away so that Dyan could rescue Eirig. Instead, they would all chase after him.

And Dyan couldn’t help. She was on foot, and by the time she ran up the sluice to retrieve her mount, it could all be over, and Jak could be dead.

“After him!” the Magister snapped again.

Cheela raced to her horse and leaped into the saddle. Shad followed. His footsteps seemed heavier than usual, but he shook his head at the last step and swung easily into his seat. “Gee yap!” he cried, and both their horses sprang into motion after Jak.

As the Outriders disappeared out of sight around the side of the shelf, the Magister walked towards the spring. This was her chance to even the odds, Dyan realized. The smartest thing she could do was to hit the Magister by surprise with her bolas, right now, before she could see what was coming.

Only she had heard this Magister say that Magister Zarah would die. Because she had not kept the secret of the Cull. And Magister Zarah had spoken very privately with Dyan on a cold night above the Snaik River, about the Cull and about life, and she had let Dyan go.

Dyan absolutely had to know what had happened.

She stood. Distracted by kneeling to retrieve her own weapon in the gory mess that had once been Eirig, the Magister didn’t see her. Dyan whipped one bola around her head and slammed it down into the spring immediately in front of the Magister’s face.

“Stop!” she cried.

The Magister froze, retreated a pace, and looked up.

Dyan raised her second bola over her head.

“Disarm yourself,” she ordered the Magister. It felt profoundly wrong to be giving an order to a woman in the black cloak of authority, but she forced herself to do it.

The Magister slowly drew a whip from under her cloak and tossed it to the sand. She followed it with a bola, and then she held her hands out to Dyan, palms up.

“Step away from the spring,” Dyan told her. “Stand by the pine tree, and put your hands on your head.”

The Magister slowly complied. “My name is Haika,” she said.

“You have no name,” Dyan said. “If you move, I’ll slice you in half. If you doubt my nerve or accuracy, you can ask Outrider Lorne.”

She walked sideways to the rockslide where the canyon wall swept down past the edge of the stone shelf and fell into the spring. She took slow steps and kept an eye on Magister Haika.

The Magister stood calmly and held her hands carefully on top of her head as she’d been told. “Outrider Lorne wasn’t looking,” she said. “You killed him from behind.”

“From above,” Dyan said. “Get your facts straight, or I won’t be able to take you seriously.” She planted her feet carefully on the rockslide and left herself skid down it. She kept her eyes on Haika the entire time and wished she didn’t feel brittle and overheated.

How far away was Jak now? And was he still running?