Crecheling (23 page)

Chapter Twenty-Four

For a moment, Dyan could do nothing. She sank back onto her haunches and then sat, with a rough bump, onto the rockslide. She felt the sun on her skin, which burned her but failed to warm her inner core. She felt cold.

Cold and very, very tired.

Magister Haika was dead. Weight dragged Dyan’s body down and pressed on her chest, making breathing difficult. The sun’s light suddenly seemed much too bright, and she shivered and hid her face in her hands.

Magister Haika was dead, and Magister Zarah soon might be. And if she died, she died because of Dyan, because she had let Dyan go.

Even worse than that, Jak might die, too, and for the same reason.

She forced herself to think. Jak was outnumbered two to one by enemies with better weapons. He’d outwitted Cheela and Dyan before, back on the Snaik River, but that would only make Cheela more wary this time. He’d need help, if he wasn’t dead already.

And Dyan wasn’t sure she could help him. She trembled in all her limbs, dry as a bone in her mouth and eyes, and she burned and froze at the same time.

She stood.

First, she would deal with the recorder. With blocky, puppet-like steps, she crossed to the sand where Haika had laid her symbol of office. She picked up the five-armed tree medallion and examined it. It looked solid at first glance, made of some ceramic or metal Dyan couldn’t immediately identify. When she looked closer, she noticed that in the joints between the trunk of the tree and its arms were tiny pinprick-sized holes.

To let in light and sound to the recording device, she guessed.

She dropped the medallion on the sand and limped back over to the rockslide. She tried to avoid looking at it, but couldn’t help seeing Magister Haika’s corpse with its open brainpan. She’d bled surprisingly little from having the top of her head severed, less than she had from the face wounds Dyan had inflicted.

Dyan shrugged off a feeling that was half-fascination and half-revulsion. She bent at the knees and picked up a rock the size of her own skull, and then turned and carried it back to the medallion. She knelt, stared down at the little device, and raised the rock over her head.

Dyan meant to cover the medallion, to render it harmless. But something unconscious in her body took over, and when she brought the rock down she slammed it. At the same moment, she burst into tears, and then raised the rock and smashed it down again. And again and again, until the Magister’s emblem of office was cracked into pieces and pounded deep into the sand, and Dyan lay huddled on the top of the rock, weeping.

She came back to herself a few minutes later with a deep panic and a sense that she had run out of time. She collected her whip, and the three bolas she could recover, resetting them to respond to the locator switch in her own holsters. She had no plan but to race to catch up with Jak. Hopefully, she could at least even out the odds a bit, or at least give him a chance not to die alone.

She was about to climb onto the back of Magister Haika’s horse when she had an idea. Stiff and shaky, she shrugged out of her Outrider’s coat. After a moment’s hesitation, she draped it across Eirig’s mutilated body, shedding a fresh burst of tears as she did so.

Then she set about stripping the Magister’s body.

Haika’s glazed eyes accused her of theft and murder, and she ignored them. She peeled away the woman’s cloak and then her clothing, leaving her exposed, limbs askew and head gaping open. Stripping down to her own underclothes, Dyan felt weak and alone, but as she stepped into the Magister’s trousers, tunic, and boots, and finally pulled the cloak about her shoulders, her strength returned.

Haika’s horse shied away and whinnied nervously as Dyan approached. She patted its neck to calm it before climbing into the saddle. Then she pulled her hood over her face and rode up the canyon at a quick trot.

She was significantly smaller than the Magister, so her sleeves sagged, her trousers were tucked into her boots and, when she stood, her cloak dragged on the ground. In any case, the tiniest glimpse of her face would give her away, so the disguise would gain her only a very little time at the most.

The tracks were impossible to miss. Three horses galloped up the canyon, disturbing sand and grass and shrubbery. Dyan couldn’t gallop quite as fast as they had, but the trail was wide and obvious and she cantered quickly.

There were opportunities to turn, to get off the sand and onto rock, but Jak hadn’t taken them. He’d stayed in the center of the main canyon, obvious and enticing and fast. He hadn’t been trying to escape, Dyan realized.

He’d been trying to lead the Outriders away, so Dyan could ambush Magister Haika and rescue Eirig.

Had Jak planned on surviving? Dyan wondered.

It didn’t seem like it.

Still, he’d ridden far. She followed the trail several miles, crossing and recrossing a shallow brook that flowed out of a side canyon and zig-zagged across the sandy floor. As her strength flagged, she rounded a corner and saw the Outriders.

Three horses waited tethered to a thorny bush on the near side of a bend in the canyon. On the far side, across the stream, a stand of huge cottonwood trees dotted a raised bank and pressed up against the canyon wall. Cheela stood back from the trees, staring up at the wall behind them.

Shad had his whip out, and was systematically chopping down trees with it. With two flicks of his wrist, any trunk lost a wedge-shaped divot from near its base and quickly toppled over.

Cheela turned at the sound of Dyan’s approach and waved a lazy salute. “Magister Haika,” she greeted Dyan, and then turned back to watch the cliff.

Dyan looked up the cliff face and saw Jak. A ledge creased the stone below the tops of the trees where the face of the wall retreated in steps from the brink. Jak had climbed up there, Dyan guessed, and now squatted, shielded in part by the tree branches and by the ledge itself. A thrown monofilament bola would slice through wood and stone as easily as flesh, of course, but if either the bola or its counterweight struck anything solid in midair, the bola would be knocked off course.

Which was why Shad was chopping down the sheltering trees.

Dyan rode up to Cheela’s side.

“He’s up there, Magister,” Cheela said. “He can’t get off the cliff, so once we get down the trees, we can pick him off at our leisure. Or starve him out.”

Dyan dismounted, carefully getting down from her horse on the side opposite Cheela. She walked around behind Cheela, palming one of her bolas.

She only had one shot at this, and then she would find that she was the one who was outnumbered two to one, with Jak up in the treetops unable to do anything about it.

Cheela chuckled, an ugly, gargling sound. “Or just ride away and leave him to the vultures.”

Dyan wrapped her arms around Cheela’s chest from behind.

Cheela started and began to raise her arm to struggle—

but froze when she saw that Dyan had pulled out the bola’s counterweight with her other hand. A wire of death stretched invisible in front of Cheela’s chest, an unseen and unstoppable garrote. If Dyan so much as stepped backward, Cheela would fall apart in two pieces.

“Magister?” Cheela asked in a small voice.

Shad snapped his whip and another tree groaned as it collapsed sideways. The cottonwoods mostly lay in a heap of splintered lumber now.

“Guess again, my child,” Dyan growled.

“Blazes!” Cheela snapped.

“Drop your whip and your bolas and your vibro-blade,” Dyan whispered. “And do it really slowly. I’d hate to stumble, and get blood all over my fancy new clothes.”

Shad took down another tree, oblivious.

Cheela carefully drew her whip and dropped it on the ground, followed by her bolas and her knife.

“Good,” Dyan approved. “Now cover them with sand.”

“I don’t have a shovel,” Cheela sulked.

“Use your boot,” Dyan told her. “Unless you want me to cover them with your headless corpse instead.”

Cheela kicked sand over the weapons, careful not to get too close to the monofilament garrote. Dyan’s hands trembled, and she realized she didn’t have the strength to drag this confrontation out very long.

“Well done,” she said. “Now stand on them.”

Cheela stood on her own buried weapons. “You’ll die for this,” she snarled.

“Death isn’t a consequence,” Dyan said. “We all die. The consequences of our choices are all the things that happen between the moment of choice and the moment of death.”

“I’ll kill you myself. I should have killed you on the Snaik.”

Shad took down another tree. Only one remained.

“Yeah,” Dyan agreed. “Probably you should have. Now call Shad.”

“Shad!”

Shad stopped and turned around. He looked puzzled, and Dyan remembered that she still had the hood down, obscuring her face. Also, he probably couldn’t see the bola, so to him she probably seemed to be Magister Haika, resting her feet by leaning on Cheela’s back.

“Magister?” he asked.

Dyan shook her head back, letting the hood fall away from her face. Cheela sucked in a sharp breath at Dyan’s movement, but Dyan was careful not to bring the monofilament into contact with her prisoner.

“Dyan!”

The look on Shad’s face was one part surprise, one part anger, and one part something else that Dyan couldn’t identify. She didn’t have time to think about it now, or time to look up at the cliff and try to see Jak’s reaction, about which she was more curious.

She rested her elbows against Cheela’s sides to try to keep her arms propped up.

“What do you want?” Shad asked.

“To kill us, you idiot!” Cheela snapped.

“I don’t think so,” Shad said slowly. “I think if she wanted to kill us, we’d already be dead.”

“I don’t want to kill anybody,” Dyan agreed. “Too many people have already died.”

“You know about … the one-armed boy, then,” Shad said.

“Eirig,” Dyan agreed. “I also know about Outrider Lorne, because I killed him. I killed Magister Haika, too, just a few minutes ago. This is her clothing I’m wearing. I don’t want any more deaths, but don’t think I won’t happily kill you both, if I have to.”

Shad nodded. “So what do you want?”

“Drop your weapons.”

He did.

“Kick sand over them and stand on top of them,” Dyan ordered him. While he did as she had told him, she risked a glance at the last cottonwood tree. Jak had already leaned out from the cliff face and climbed into its branches. He was coming down fast, falling as much as he was climbing.

“So you were watching at the spring,” Shad said.

“Yes.”

Jak was almost to the ground now, moving a little slower so he wouldn’t fall and impale himself on a stump or a splintered branch.

“I’m afraid I can’t leave you any horses.”

“What?” Cheela hissed.

“I understand,” Shad said. “We’ll be fine.”

“Not that she cares,” Cheela growled.

“True,” Dyan lied. “I don’t care.”

“Are you going to go after Magister Zarah?” Shad asked.

“What do you mean?” Dyan remembered again that Zarah had been imprisoned because of her, and was going to be executed at the next Hanging. That was little more than two months away, she realized, and knowing the number of days made her feel sick. “I’m not interested in revenge,” she bluffed. “She only did what she thought she had to do.”

Cheela laughed out loud.

Jak splashed across the little stream and headed for the picketed horses.

“Zarah’s your mother,” Shad said.

Dyan froze. Her vision swam in and out of focus and she almost lost her balance and fainted before she managed to draw another breath.

“Why would you say that?” she asked.

“Because it’s true, you blasted vixen!” Cheela snapped. “Didn’t you wonder why she would let you go?”

“But …” Dyan was dumbfounded. “I don’t have a mother.”

“Did you think you hatched from an egg?” Cheela taunted her. “Everybody has a mother!”

Dyan looked into Shad’s eyes and saw that, whether or not it was really true, at least Shad believed it. “How would she know?”

“She’s been watching you all along.” Shad shrugged.

“That’s not allowed,” Dyan said.

Shad shook his head. “Of course not. I guess her superior Magisters knew, or maybe they just suspected. And they let her be your Magister for the Blooding, to see what she would do.”

“And when it went wrong, she let me run,” Dyan said softly. In hindsight, Zarah had almost
encouraged
her to run. Why had she done that? She must have known she was putting herself at risk.

And how had she not realized she was being recorded while she did it? Maybe the knowledge that the medallions were recorders was restricted to senior Magisters, or to certain Magisters anyway.

There was so much, Dyan realized, she didn’t understand about the System.

Jak gathered up the reins to the three horses and joined Dyan.

“I can’t give you a headstart,” Shad said. “I can’t promise any mercy.” He looked sad.

“I don’t need your mercy,” Dyan said. “I’m taking your horses instead.”

Jak mounted one of the Outriders’ horses, still holding the reins of the other two.

“I’m going to kill you,” Cheela repeated herself.

“I’ll leave you your weapons,” Dyan said, “so I suppose you’re free to try. But right now you’re going to run over and touch that tree trunk.”

“I’m sorry about your friend,” Shad told her. Their eyes met, and Shad looked away. Then he looked at Jak, too. “I’m sorry.”

Cheela snorted.

“I’m sorry about all my friends,” Dyan said.

She carefully raised the bola over Cheela’s head, keeping the line extended so that it remained a threat. Cheela stepped out of Dyan’s grasp, shuddering.

“Go,” Dyan said softly.

Shad and Cheela turned and jogged across the brook. While they splashed through the water, Dyan climbed into her saddle, and then she and Jak rode away. Before the young Outriders had returned to their cached weapons, Jak and Dyan were around the corner of the canyon and out of sight.

***

Chapter Twenty-Five

“Where’s Eirig?” Jak asked.

Dyan restrained a sob. “They killed him,” she managed to get out. “Just as you were riding away.”

They rode in silence for long minutes.

“Thank you,” he finally said. Then again, a few minutes later: “Thank you. I thought they had me back there.”

“I’m glad they didn’t.”

They kept riding.

“I don’t know what to do with the body,” she told him, as they cut through the bola-mangled pine trees and up to where Eirig lay.

Small animals scattered away from both bodies as Dyan swung a leg over the saddle and dropped off her horse.

“At home, we’d bury him,” Jak said, and shook his head. “But …”

“What do you do in an emergency?” she asked.

“We’d burn him.” He dismounted and looked over at Magister Haika, who was a little worse for wear for the nibbling at her face and hands of wild dogs. “Her, I don’t care.”

“I do,” Dyan said. She reached out and took his hand. “Not as much, of course.”

“Poor Eirig,” Jak said. He picked up the Outrider’s coat and stared with a steady eye at the mangled remains of his friend. Dyan couldn’t bring herself to look without flinching, so she looked at Jak instead. “This is all my fault,” he said.

“It’s no one’s fault,” Dyan corrected him. “Not yours, anyway.”

“No?” Jak’s voice was bitter. “And if I’d just gone along quietly with the Cull?”

“Eirig made choices,” Dyan said, “and those choices had consequences.”

“He stuck up for me and lost his arm.”

“And he saved your life, too. And he stopped me from becoming a murderer. And then he saved both of us.”

“A kindness for which your friends killed him.” Dyan must have looked uncomfortable at that description, because Jak sighed and squeezed her hand. “I’m sorry,” she added.

Dyan felt more fragile than ever. A breath of wind would have whisked her away. “We don’t have much time,” she reminded him.

Dyan poured petrofuel over Eirig’s body before Jak covered it again. She also soaked the coat for good measure.

“Do we … sing?” she asked. “Or anything?”

“There are prayers to the Holy Mother,” Jak said. “And songs.” He took the sparker from Dyan’s hand and lit the mound of coat and flesh that had been Eirig on fire. “I don’t remember them.”

The flames whooshed high immediately. Dyan knew funeral dirges of Buza System, but none of them seemed appropriate. Instead, she sang the song she had learned from Eirig, and despite her exhaustion and pain, the words all came to her.

“Sally she married a soldier,

A Captain named William Lee,

And I guess in his fashion he loved her,

But Sally always loved me.

Now I sit by this stone and remember

Her blue eyes and tresses of gold,

And how we said when we were younger,

We’d be together when we grew old.

Oh, sweet Sally,

Dear Mrs. Lee,

Your footsteps are gone,

But your memory lives on,

And you’ll always be Sally to me.”

It was all she could get out, and it seemed to fit, more or less. She thought Eirig would have enjoyed it even more because her sung farewell to him made him sound like a woman named Sally, with blue eyes and blonde hair. She still didn’t know the name of the song, and she wondered whether it had been written about real people, some doomed couple who lived and were separated by death before the Cataclysm.

Jak mounted his horse. “We don’t have long.”

Dyan poured out the rest of the petrofuel on the dead Magister. A lizard scurried away as the liquid splashed down on it, but ants and beetles continued to crawl on her flesh without taking any notice. Dyan took one last look at Magister Haika. Without her robe, her smashed medallion, or her weapons, she was nothing. She was an unlovely and unintimidating corpse, missing the top of its head and only half-dressed.

When Dyan sparked Haika’s body, the insects burned with her.

Both burning corpses stank, but in Dyan’s mind all the stench came from Haika. She remounted, shushing her skittish horse and patting it on the neck. The gesture didn’t do much for the animal, but it helped calm Dyan.

They rode north, away from Shad and Cheela and back towards the Lull Sea.

Late that afternoon, Jak directed them across a bar of stone and up a side canyon. “They’ll hit this place in the dark,” he explained. “If it doesn’t throw them off completely, it should at least slow them down.”

Dyan nodded, too tired and sick to do anything more.

“They’re still Outriders,” Jak pointed out. “And we’re still on the run.”

“Maybe we always will be,” Dyan said. The thought made her feel defeated.

Their path led them up a knife-edged ridge as the sun set and down into a broad, grassy valley on the other side. Two well-trodden trails intersected in the middle of the valley, quartering the world between them, and they camped well back from both of them, in the notch of a hill that made the wind whistle over their heads.

Jak sat up for the first watch. Dyan lay awake what seemed like a very long time, watching a yellow moon creep up through the notch and slowly dominate the field of glittering, indifferent stars.

Then she woke up, her face scratched by the wad of wool blanket on which her head rested.

“Let’s go south,” Jak said to her. He squatted on a saddle, huddled into a microfiber blanket.

She sat up. Her body ached all over. “South?” She stretched. “Satulak?”

“If you want, sure,” he agreed. “But we wouldn’t have to go that far to get away from the System.”

“Ratsnay Station?”

“That’s more east than south, really. I was thinking—look, we could just find a place in the hills somewhere with water, and make a go of it.”

“Farm? Herd sheep?”

“Both. Whatever.”

Dyan hesitated. “Are you asking me to be your Goodwife?”

“Yes,” Jak agreed. “I haven’t said it in a very romantic way, I know. But I don’t think it would be a very romantic life. But we’d be Goodwife and Goodman.”

Dyan considered. “Is that even possible?” she asked.

Jak nodded. “There are people who live out in the hills alone. One here, another there, I mean, and no one bothers them.”

This was news to Dyan. “Who is
no one
?” Dyan yawned and tried in vain to chase fatigue from her head. “You mean that people from Ratsnay Station don’t bother them?”

“Yes, that. But also the Collectors.”

“They don’t contribute to the System?”

“I guess not. I suppose they’re so small it’s not worth the effort.”

“And outlaws?”

Jak shrugged. “It isn’t perfect. But you’re great with those weapons, and we’d choose some place really out of the way. We’d be fine.”

“We’d be hunted,” Dyan said. “By the Outriders, and by any outlaws who happened to learn of our existence.”

“Satulak, then.”

“I would like to go to Satulak with you,” Dyan agreed. “Or Sayatil, or Portolan. But there’s something I have to do first.”

“What’s that?”

“Magister Zarah. The woman who … who came to Ratsnay Station to Cull you.”

“I remember.” Jak’s voice was hard and his eyes narrowed in the bright morning sun.

“She came to me on the night after we left the Snaik River …” She fumbled for a better description, “the night after Wayland … died.”

Jak’s eyebrows shot up his forehead. He opened his mouth as if to say something and closed it again.

“She let us go,” Dyan told him. “Looking back at it, I think she almost told me to run, to get away.”

Jak shook his head. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

“While you were climbing down the tree this afternoon,” she continued, Shad and Cheela told me that Zarah … Zarah’s been imprisoned. She’s going to be executed.”

“For what?”

“For letting us go.”

Jak frowned. “Why would she do that? She must have known the System would consider it treason, or at least some kind of crime.”

Dyan took a deep breath. “Magister Zarah is my mother.”

Jak stared.

“I only found out today,” she told him.

“You mean that your System friends told you?” He looked skeptical. “The same ones who chased me up a tree and then tried to chop the tree down?”

“Yes,” she admitted. “But it’s the only explanation that makes any sense to me.”

Jak looked at her a long time, and then laughed. “Okay,” he said. “North it is. Do we have a plan?”

“No,” Dyan said, and thought about Shad and Cheela. “But I think we have a head start.”

***