Crecheling (7 page)

She turned her head slowly, slightly, in time to see Jak, his own knife at Cheela’s throat, unclip her whip and both bolas from her belt and hips. He tossed all three items into the churning foam at the base of the waterfall, and then her bow. Finally, he stepped back.

“That’s much better,” he said.

***

Chapter Seven

“What—” Dyan started, not even sure what question she meant to ask.

Jak slapped her across the face. “Shut up!”

Her cheek stung, and she said nothing.

“Easy, Jak,” Eirig said. The one-armed boy took away Dyan’s weapons, but rather than tossing them, he slung the bow over his shoulder and tucked the monofilament weapons into a big leather purse on his belt. He trembled as he did it, and where his skin brushed against Dyan’s, he felt feverish. He dug into the pockets of her coat, too, and came up with her light stick.

“I’m sorry about your arm,” she said softly.

“That’s twice!” Jak barked. “The third time, I kill you. Now put your hands on top of your heads and walk.”

Dyan did as she was told. After a second’s hesitation, so did Cheela, and they sloshed back down the river. For the first time, Dyan felt the chill of the evening, biting into the skin of her legs and feet, wet inside their tall rider’s boots, and blowing into her open coat with the stiff breeze.

She was puzzled at first about Jak’s insistence on silence; no one could possibly be around to hear them, unless maybe the renegades of the Wahai had come this far downriver. But then she realized that Jak didn’t know the Crechelings and the Magister had split up. For all he knew, the others were close by, following or watching.

They sloshed back around the arch, following Dyan’s footsteps in the riverbed rather than climbing up and under the stone vault like Cheela had done. At the furthest bend of the river, she realized that Eirig was humming.

He was humming the Gallows Song.

“Shh,” Jak urged him gently, and Eirig fell quiet.

The moon rose above the edge of the canyon wall, throwing silver light over the stone, sand and grass. Everything solid looked gray, and the river was a ribbon of dark blood at the bottom of it all. The moon’s light made the shadows that remained look even more impenetrable. More walking, and they reached the bottom of the chimney where Dyan had mistaken the bats for swallows.

The moonlight shone down into the bottom of a chimney, and Dyan saw a rope dangling.

Cheela cursed.

Jak ignored her. “Can you still climb?” he asked his friend.

Eirig chuckled. “It’s just an arm,” he said. “It’s not like I lost anything
important
.”

Dyan thought of Wayland, who couldn’t be serious about anything.

“Here’s how this is going to work,” Jak told them all. “Eirig, you climb to the top. I’m going to send the girls … the
prisoners,
up one at a time, and you tie them. I’ll come last.”

“Done,” Eirig agreed.

“You’d better give me their weapons,” Jak added. “Just in case.”

Eirig handed his purse over to Jak and shimmied up the rope. He was surprisingly agile, given how tentative and feverish he seemed, and given that he had recently lost half his arm. But he gripped the rope with his feet and his one hand, and in short order was scrambling onto the ledge above.

“It’s like that old riddle,” Dyan said, remembering a brain-teaser a former Magister of hers had once told her. “You have a cabbage, a sheep, and a wolf, and you have to get them all across the river in your canoe, only your canoe only holds one of them, and you can’t leave the sheep along with the cabbage, or the wolf alone with the sheep.”

Jak snorted. “Except in this case, the two wolves have to get the two sheep up the hill without leaving them alone.”

“Ha!” Cheela snapped. “In
this
case, two really stupid sheep have gotten in way over their heads and kidnapped wolves. And if the sheep had an ounce of sense between them, they’d drop their weapons right now and run for the Wahai.”

Jak laughed. “Give me the saddlebags,” he ordered his prisoners. Dyan and Cheela did, and he slung them both over one shoulder. Their combined bulk made him seem small and frail, but he held up under the weight.

“Send them up!” Eirig called down in a stage whisper that echoed loudly in the chimney.

“You first, wolf girl,” Jak prodded Cheela, and up she went.

“I don’t hate you,” Dyan said softly, watching Cheela’s coat billow out and swirl in the moonlight. “I don’t think you’re a bad person. It’s just the way things are. It’s just the requirement of the System.”

Jak spat into the river. “You Systemoids are totally crazy.”

Dyan faltered. “Don’t you … kill sick animals, to protect the herd? Burn pest-infested fields?”

Jak’s laugh was hollow and cynical this time. “Do I look like a weevil to you? Was my sister a sick animal? Or does your precious System just kill to remind everybody that it can?”

Cheela disappeared over the lip of the ledge.

“The herd is more important than individual animals,” Dyan tried to insist. In her heart, she felt a pang of doubt about the truth of her own words. “The System isn’t a bully. It doesn’t need to prove anything to people.”

“She’s tied!” Eirig called down.

“Yeah? Tell that to my sister.”

Dyan wanted to say something, but didn’t know what.

“I thought so.” Jak pointed at the rope. “Up!”

Dyan climbed. Being shorter and scrawnier than Cheela at least gave her an advantage at this, and she was quickly up the chimney to the height of the bats’ ledge. The physical demands of climbing, and the attention it required of her, gave her something other than Jak’s words to think about it, for which she was grateful.

The ledge was narrow, just a strip three feet wide and jutting up like a defiant lower lip over the river, but at its base the cliff face was cracked and the ledge slid back into darkness. Sour-smelling bat guano carpeted the ledge and the crack, and the furry creatures flapped in the gloom about Dyan’s head.

Eirig crouched on the ledge, more rope coiled in his one hand and at his feet.

“Where’s Cheela?” Dyan asked.

“I ate her.” Eirig grinned, his expression revealed in a strip of moonlight that cut across his face. He nodded at the crack. “She’s inside. Now come on, turn around, or I have to throw you into the river. Hands behind you.”

Dyan turned around. She put her hands behind her back, trying to look as cooperative as possible, but also tensing her muscles. The Magisters had never taught her anything about escaping from bonds, but she’d seen a few funvids, and more than once the captured, outgunned Outrider escaped from her captivity by tensing her muscles while she was being tied up, so that when she relaxed them later she gained a little slack.

Eirig fumbled a bit in tying her up, but only a bit. Again, Dyan noticed the heat of his touch, and felt terrible.

Two days ago, she thought, getting her Lot Letter from Magister Zarah’s hands and looking forward to being Blooded and becoming an adult, she hadn’t expected anything like what had actually happened. The Hanging, yes. But everything after that had been a shock, a world-changing trauma.

As it must have been meant to be, she realized. As the System must want it; as the Cogitant Council and the Magisters designed it to be.

“Is she tied?” Dyan heard Jak call from the bottom of the chimney.

“Yeah!” Eirig called back. “Come on up!” Dyan heard the scuffling sounds of climbing in the chimney and then Eirig pulled her back, gently. “Lie down,” he whispered. “You’re going to need to roll sideways.”

Dyan felt a little sick to her stomach, realizing that she was lying back in bat guano, but she steeled herself and did it. Then Eirig pushed her shoulder, and she rolled from shadow into darkness. She spun like a wheel several times, struck her head on stone, and then came to a halt against flesh.

“Cheela,” she said.

“Get off me!” the other girl snapped back.

Bats shrieked about them. Dyan rolled away from her Crechemate and tucked her face into the collar of her own coat for protection.

The cold beam of a light stick snapped across the two girls and Dyan struggled to inch away from Cheela. She managed to get herself backed up into a sitting position against a rough piece of stone, and then Jak scraped into the cave on his belly, climbing down through the same crack through which Dyan had rolled. He pulled the saddlebags in behind him, and Dyan’s bow, tossing them into a corner.

While Eirig crawled in, Jak stomped over to the girls. He flipped Cheela over first, looked at the ropes around her wrists, and grunted. Then he pulled Dyan forward, away from her boulder, and checked her similarly.

“Good job, Eirig.” He dragged his friend to his feet. They were dirty and wet, and their ragged wool trousers and shirt made them look like oversized children, so much so that Dyan had a hard time not laughing.

“I’m just glad they had a light stick.” Eirig looked pale and his voice quivered slightly as he spoke. “Now if someone goes to hold my hand tonight, at least I’ll be able to tell who it is.”

Jak sat beside the saddlebags and began to dig around inside them.

“Any good snacks?” Eirig wanted to know. He squatted in a corner and then rolled back, disturbing two fist-sized balls of fur that instantly flapped away, shrieking angrily. “I hear that food is always the first order of business for a Wahai outlaw.” He wagged his eyebrows suggestively at Dyan. “I’m afraid that love can only come second for a rogue such as myself, my dear.”

“Love’s third,” Jak disagreed, “if it even ranks that high. Our first order of business has to be medicine.”

In the splashy, reflected light of her stick, Dyan looked around. The crack opened into a roughly cylindrical shaft, choked with boulders and rubble that ascended at a forty-five degree angle. The stink of bats was so strong she couldn’t smell anything else.

“Here it is.” Jak threw aside the saddlebags he was rummaging in, holding up a medikit. He pulled at it, twisted it, gnawed at it, but the kit wouldn’t open.

“You have to pop the seal, idiot,” Cheela growled.

“You could tell us how,” Eirig pointed out.

“Why?” Cheela stared at him. “So that when you kill me, your boo boos will feel better?”

“Hey,” Eirig objected, “I don’t know that we plan to kill you.”

“We do,” Jak confirmed.

“I’m sorry I didn’t slice your head off,” Cheela said to Eirig. “I’m sorry you didn’t bleed out, and I hope you die of infection.”

“You started it,” Eirig pointed out. “You tried to kill my friends.”

Dyan felt sick.

Jak slammed the medikit against a boulder. With a hiss, it popped open.

“Nobody’s going to die of infection,” he announced, coming up with a tube of topical antibiotic.

Cheela closed her eyes and feigned sleep while Jak knelt to take care of his friend, but Dyan couldn’t look away. She saw now that Eirig had a tourniquet around his arm, and that the wound at the end of his stump was bandaged with strips of wool that had been torn from Jak’s shirt and were now soaked through with blood. Jak peeled away the bandages, smeared antibiotic ointment over the wound, and then wrapped it in gauze from the medikit. Eirig bit his lip the entire time, in obvious pain but not crying out.

“On the plus side,” the injured boy said, “it’s a clean injury. No bone fragments or anything. You have to admire the precision of an Outrider’s bola.”

“Outrider-designate,” Dyan said. She said it automatically, not meaning anything by it, but Cheela obviously took offense. Without opening her eyes, she kicked Dyan hard in the shin.

“You’ll want a painkiller,” Jak said, digging through the medikit again.

“I’m fine,” Dyan said, though it smarted enough to bring tears to her eyes. “I just wish my hands were free so I could rub it.”

“I’d rub it for you,” Eirig offered. “You know, if I had two hands.”

“Funny,” Cheela snarled. “I’d have thought one hand was enough to accomplish everything a guy like you ever does.”

“Painkiller’s not for you, Systemoid,” Jak said, popping open a canister of pills. He tapped two of them out into his palm and gave them to Eirig, who swallowed them.

“Thanks.” The injured boy leaned against the wall of the cave and closed his eyes.

“Stop calling me that,” Dyan murmured, but too softly to be heard.

Jak stood and faced his prisoners. He looked tall, standing over them, and Dyan turned her face away.

“You look like you know what you’re doing with the medikit,” she said. She meant it as a compliment, though it sounded painfully tiny in the cave.

“In addition to carefully marking which of us should be slaughtered,” Jak told her, “Magister Stanton occasionally dispensed minor medicines. I think it made him uncomfortable that I paid such close attention to what he was doing.” He paused for long seconds. “Now,” he said slowly, “tell me why I shouldn’t kill you.”

“Because,” Cheela growled, “when the Outriders catch you, they’ll make you wish you’d never been born.”

Jak’s laugh was hard and thin. “Too late. And if you mean they would
kill me
, that’s obviously already on the table.”

Cheela spat on Jak’s shoes.

“We could plead for mercy,” Dyan suggested. “For you, I mean.”

“Mercy for what?” Jak asked. He looked amused. “I haven’t committed a crime. All I did was do well on the tests in school.”

“Kidnapping,” Cheela suggested.

Jak ignored her and kept talking to Dyan. “You said it yourself, no one hates me, I’m not a bad person. The System just wants to kill me because I’m smart.”

“That’s not true,” Dyan said, too quickly.

“You’re right.” Jak bowed and grinned. “It wants to kill me because I’m smart …
and a Landsman
.”

Dyan had nothing to say to that.

Eirig popped his eyes open. “We may need them,” he said. “We may need hostages.”

Jak scrutinized the girls. “That’s a good reason to keep
one of them
alive,” he admitted. “I don’t see that a second hostage is going to make any difference, unless we literally use them as shields.”

“Please do,” Cheela snarled. “I’ll beg the Outriders to cut right through me.”

“I should warn you,” Eirig said, his voice heavy and slow, “it’s not as fun as it looks.”

And then his head tipped back against the stone and he began to snore.

“I don’t want you to die,” Dyan said. She hadn’t meant to say it, the words just popped out of her spontaneously. Before her mouth was even closed, Cheela shot her a look of pure disdain. “I mean,
personally
,” she added, trying to cover her mistake. “None of this is personal.”