Crecheling (6 page)

She arched her eyebrows at them wearily, and gestured over the cliff behind her.

***

Chapter Six

Dyan stumbled down the draw, Deek’s bola on her leg replacing the one she had lost in saving the Magister. The orange stone walls scratching towards the indigo sky on either side of her expressed neatly the tunnel she felt she was in. Magister Zarah had talked about choices, but she had none. She couldn’t refuse to kill Jak—
kill the Landsman
, she forced herself to think—because that would make her a rebel against the System. Rebels were criminals. They were executed for the good of the System, and if they managed to escape, they lived short, brutal lives as desperadoes in the Wahai. So Dyan had no meaningful choice.

Would it be different when she was Blooded?

Cheela was ahead of her because she was faster, tall, strong, and long-legged to Dyan’s short and slight. No wonder Shad was attracted to her, Dyan thought.

She tried to shut down that train of thought, too.

The ravine was choked with boulders and treacherous to descend. Ascent would be even harder. Dyan heard Magister Zarah and her other Crechemates following behind at a more relaxed pace. She hoped that when she got to the bottom she would find the two Landsmen dead, and the ordeal would be over.

But would it? Or would it just start again, from the beginning? Or would Dyan have failed, and would she become an outcast, or be executed, removed as a failure from the System in order to protect the successful life inside it?

She shook her head and dropped six feet over the crumbling lip of a jagged rock onto powdery sand. No, she should hope that Jak was in great pain and dying anyway, so she could put him out of his misery and still be given credit, still become Blooded.

Ahead of her, Cheela splashed into water. Dyan cursed, realizing suddenly that if there was only one survivor of the fall, and Cheela killed him, or if the Outrider-designate simply killed both boys, Dyan would be a failure and an outcast anyway.

And then Cheela would have Shad all to herself.

Dyan nearly jumped down the last twenty feet of steep slope and landed in cold shallow water on her hands and knees. Forcing herself up, she staggered around the base of the cliff and found Cheela standing with her arms crossed over her chest, surveying the scene. The canyon walls were high, mostly unbroken by ravines, handholds or other ways of getting out. A river, wide and flat, wound around sandy hills silted up within the elbows of the canyon and small groves of desert trees that clung to them.

“They hit here,” the other girl said as Dyan arrived, and pointed. “Where the water makes a deep pool under the edge of the bluff.”

“The mud is still disturbed,” Dyan agreed.

“All the better,” Cheela snarled. “I’ll kill my Landsy any way he comes, but I’d rather he be standing, facing me, and preferably armed.”

Dyan stared at her Crechemate. “For honor, you mean?”

Cheela snorted. “For glory,” she said.

Dyan splashed back to the bottom of the ravine. Magister Zarah stood above her, with Deek and Shad at her side. Wayland, Dyan guessed, hadn’t been able to get this far down the draw.

“Are they dead?” Zarah called.

“No.” Dyan shook her head as Cheela joined her.

“I’ll track them,” Cheela assured the Magister. She patted her whip. “They won’t get out.”

Zarah nodded. “If they do, you understand that Outriders will destroy Ratsnay Station.”

“Do they have to?” Dyan asked. In her mind’s eye, she imagined herself as one of the people of the settlement, being chased down by Outriders whose faces were hidden by bandannas and broad-brimmed hats. She remembered the jug-eared boy, slicing himself in half with Cheela’s bola, and shuddered.

“The System kills,” the Magister reminded her, “to protect life.”

“We brought your things!” Shad called, and Dyan saw that he had saddlebags over one shoulder and a bow in his hands.

He grinned, but not at her, and then he tossed the saddlebags and bow to Cheela. She let the bags fall into the water and then picked them up, but she caught the bow neatly with both hands.

“Here’s yours, Dyan!” Deek yelled, but Dyan’s bags were already splashing into the water. She looked at him just in time to catch her bow, partly with one hand and partly with her head, the string snagging around her neck and almost choking her.

“We’ll have to divide our forces,” the Magister said. “We’ll leave someone to cover this ravine, and we’ll go to the nearest exits up and down river to watch them.”

“I’ll kill the Landsies,” Cheela agreed.

“
We
,” Dyan butted in, feeling she was being left behind. “
We will
 … we’ll complete the Cull, Magister,” she said.

Zarah nodded. “We’ll meet again here, when it’s over.” She pointed above her head, to the site of the massacre.

The Cull, Dyan reminded herself.

Dyan picked up her saddlebags and slung them over her shoulder. The cold water felt good on her body now, in the last heat of the day, but she knew that temperatures would soon plummet, and she’d be grateful for her coat, as well as for all the supplies in the bags.

Magister Zarah turned to lead Shad and Deek back up the draw, and Dyan and Cheela plodded back out into the middle of the river. The last of the sun left the surface of the water even at the canyon’s broadest point, retreating in a slow blaze of orange up the wall. Dyan shivered.

Without a word, they plodded together over to the sandy hill that filled the far corner of the canyon. Scanning its edges, they saw no tracks.

“We’ll have to split up,” Cheela said.

“They won’t have split up,” Dyan said. “Jak … the Landsy Jak wouldn’t leave his friend injured. They’re together.”

“Of course they are,” Cheela sneered. “But we can’t be sure which way they went, can we?”

And Dyan knew instantly which way Jak had gone. Downstream meant back to Ratsnay Station, and Jak would never have done that. That would only bring danger on his people, and his mother. Upstream meant the Wahai, where everyone knew people could live, because people
did
. Renegades and outlaws, and Dyan had been trained to think of them with fear and disdain, but Jak might feel differently. He might think of the Wahai outlaws as people who might take him in.

He probably did.

“I’ll go upstream,” Cheela said. Without waiting for an answer, she turned and headed for the shallowest part of the river.

Dyan hesitated, but only for a second. She plunged after her Crechemate, calling, “I’m coming with you!”

Cheela snorted in disgust, but Dyan let her think what she wanted. Going downstream, she knew, was a waste of time. It prolonged the inevitable, maybe, or it led to life as a solitary outlaw. It didn’t lead to Jak, or back to the System, or to recognition as a full Magister.

The girls trudged upstream, bows in their hands and bags on the shoulders. The saddlebags held their arrows as well, in tubes of leather attached to the side of the bags and snapped shut at the top against inclement weather. Dyan hoped her arrows were still dry, after their fall into the river.

If they were real Outriders, Dyan knew, they’d have infrared goggles in their saddlebags, too, and other really useful devices, instead of just blankets, food, pure water tablets, and a few basic medical supplies. Of course, real Outriders in pursuit of renegades would be mounted and in large numbers.

But Jak was unarmed. Well, practically. He and Eirig had spears, but Eirig was badly injured, and maybe even already dying. They’d be easy to capture, once the girls found them.

Capture or kill, she heard Shad say in her head.

No, not capture. Just kill. And she again saw Jug Ears, slicing himself neatly in half and collapsing into the sand.

“Are those swallows?” she said idly, seeing small black shadows flitting in quick circular motions overhead.

“Bats,” Cheela huffed at her. “You should know that.”

“You’re right, I should.” Dyan felt embarrassed for having forgotten something so obvious. She watched the little beasts dive through clouds of evening insects, gorging on their prey and returning again and again to the cliff face. Their home seemed to be a ledge high up inside a chimney in the canyon wall, and Dyan wondered how the infant bats were fed. Maybe the adults were flying back to them even now and regurgitating half-digested bugs into their open baby-bat mouths.

The canyon wiggled left and right, back and forth, like a snake’s trail, which was no doubt how it had its name; the Buza River, on which the System lay, flowed in a much straighter, lazier line across the north end of the Treasure Valley. Dyan knew enough about geology to imagine that maybe in a million years, or ten million, the Treasure Valley might be the top of a plateau, and the Buza River might have cut deep, winding channels like the Snaik.

In the next bend, the canyon wall was pierced by an arch that cut over into the next loop of the canyon. Within the natural bridge, the ground rose up to a tumble of boulders, large chunks of stone that had fallen out of the arch itself over the millennia. Cheela stopped and looked up into the shadowed arch in the last deep blue light of evening before darkness fell. Already, the first stars twinkled in the zig-zagging visible sky above them.

Dyan pulled her hand-held light stick from her saddlebag and snapped it on the sand around the base of the arch. “No footprints,” she confirmed. “Are you thinking this might be a good defensible place to stay the night, and continue searching in the morning?”

“I’m not staying the night anywhere,” Cheela growled in a whisper. “I’m killing those Landsies before the sun comes up. She pointed at the river upstream. “I’m wondering if they might have gone around the bend, and then snuck up into the arch as a way to ambush us, or get behind us when we pass.”

“We have to split up,” Dyan suggested softly. “One of us go under the arch, and one of us follow the river. Could be dangerous. Could be a trap.”

Cheela nodded, a specter in the reflected glow of the light stick. “I don’t really trust you for either job,” she said. “But I guess I’d rather you took your light and splashed your way around the bend, making as much noise as you can. I’ll sneak up under the arch.”

“Do we need a code?” Dyan whispered. “Like a whistle, or something?”

Cheela laughed under her breath. “If you hear the Landsies screaming in pain, that’s a signal that I found them. Otherwise, I didn’t, and I’ll see you on the other side.” She pressed herself deep into the shadow of a boulder at the river’s edge and hissed through her teeth. “Now go!”

Dyan obeyed. She kicked the water as she went, and when she came across a long stick protruding like a signpost from a sandbar in the middle of the river, she plucked it out and carried it with her, striking the water with it.

Her shoulder was sore from the saddlebags.

And, she realized,
she
might be the one walking into the trap. Jak and Eirig might be waiting in the furthest point of the bend with their spears, ready to stab her to death. She kept hitting the water and kicking up big sprays of it with her boots, but she stared into the gloom around her and poked it with the beam of her light stick, trying to spot boulders, caves, thickets, or other likely places in which to mount an ambush.

She realized that she was humming.

Puzzled, she listened to herself. It was the tune hummed by the hanged man, the song she was beginning to think of as the Gallows Song, though it still had no words.

Or did it? She tried to relax into the song, let her unconscious mind do the work and find whatever words went with the melody that she might know. “Mmm mmmm, she married a soldier,” came from her lips, but then the elusive thread slipped from her grasp and she couldn’t think of any more.

Dyan realized that, in her intense concentration on the slippery melody, she had dropped the stick. Oops. Also, she had turned the corner of the bend and was almost to the other side of the arch.

At least no one had ambushed her; that was good.

Also, she hadn’t heard any sounds of Cheela killing the Landsmen.

She sloshed to the steep, rubble-strewn slope at the bottom of the arch and scanned the sand and pebbles there for signs of disturbance. Seeing none, she looked up the slope for her Crechemate.

“Cheela?” she called softly.

“Snap!” Cheela barked from behind her, and at the same moment a pebble thumped into the slope beside Dyan. “You’re dead!”

Dyan turned around. “If you really wanted to kill me, I think you could do it at any time.”

“Don’t forget it.”

Dyan studied Cheela. The stars overheard cast a silvery sparkle of light down on her, but her face was entirely hidden in the shadow of her hat brim. She was taller than Dyan, stronger, and almost certainly faster. She was probably prettier, too. Dyan’s hair and skin were too fair, she burned easily in the sun, and freckled, and she wasn’t chesty and curvaceous like Cheela was.

“You didn’t hate me when we were younger,” she said to her Crechemate.

“I don’t hate you now.” Cheela’s voice was hostile, despite her words.

“You want Shad for yourself.”

“So do you. Does that mean
you
hate
me
?”

Dyan didn’t know what to say. “Come on,” she finally managed. “Let’s find these Landsies.” She plodded ahead, leaving the light stick off and wishing she had a horse.

The canyon curved under a busy rock seep, bristling with dark clumps of watercress. A heavy patter of
drop-drop-drop
mixed into the sluggish sounds of the river’s water hugging its course, and then, gradually, another water noise rose in the mix, a heavy crashing.

“Rapids?” Cheela wondered.

They rounded another corner in the canyon, and Dyan’s first impression was that the canyon had simply ended, in a tumult of water noise. When spray hit her in the face, she realized what it had to be.

“Waterfall,” she said. Gauging its height in the darkness was a haphazard enterprise at best, but she tried anyway. “Thirty feet?”

“There must be a way up,” Cheela said.

“There isn’t.” It was Jak’s voice.

Dyan felt something sharp poke her in her lower back.

“Don’t move,” Eirig whispered into her ear. Over the silty stink of the river and her own sweat, she suddenly detected the iron-rich whiff of blood.