Shadowkill sq-3, page 10
part #3 of Shadith's quest Series
Arring Pirs tapped Aghilo’s shoulder, pointed at the door.
As if she could see through closed eyelids, Matja Allina said, “No. One last bit. The chapa Tinoopa is to have full authority as sub-Housekeeper. Let Polyapo keep the title Ulyinik…” She stopped, turned to them at the foot of the bed. “That means Mistress of the House. But don’t confuse that with Mistress of the Kuysstead. I am the Matja.” She coughed, waited while Aghilo bent with a warm, damp towel and wiped her face. “Leave her the Name, Mi-arring, but nothing more. Make that very clear to her and everyone else. I’m tired to death of her sniping and incompetence. Establish the chapa Kizra as my personal companion and servant, under no one’s orders but mine. Make that clear also. Especially to Kulyari who has already shown her spite. Will you see to this for me, Mi-arring?”
“With pleasure, Mi-matja.”
Kizra caught a grim satisfaction in the words. Obviously Pirs was not all that fond of his niece.
“Um, Aghilo love, see that they have clothing and supplies suitable to their status. And rooms in this wing. And see that Kizra has the arranga with her at all times from now on.” She opened her eyes. “Meals and a hot bath for each. I believe I heard someone saying she’d KILL for a hot bath.”
4
The room on the third floor was long and narrow, with pegs in a white plaster wall instead of closets and paneling. There was a narrow bed with a coverlet white as the walls, loosely woven in an intricate pattern, pretty in the candlelight that picked out the texture and emphasized the pattern and turned the whiteness pearly.
Kizra pulled the door shut behind her, edged around the bed and set the candle on the table. She sat on the bed with her slippered feet hanging beside the boots flopped on the floor next to her wadded-up coverall. She didn’t care if she ever saw that coverall again; it was stiff and stinky with old sweat and clogged with white dust, and her chafed places were still burning from the fifteen days she’d worn the thing. Remembered wearing it anyway. She thought about kicking it out the door but was too relaxed and drowsy from the bath to want to move.
She sucked in a long breath, let it out. She was clean. She smelled good. The candle gave the room a warm welcoming glow. It smelled good, too; it was one of the fancy ones from the Matja’s supply. Aghilo told her to enjoy it while she had it; the next one she got would be tallow and not nearly so nice.
She pinched the candle out, took the robe off and got into bed, shivering a little as her warm body hit the cold sheets.
She had on a blousy nightshirt, very soft and flowing, but it didn’t help at all with the cold. She wriggled around until she was comfortable, then shut her eyes and arranged her mind for sleep…
Moonlight streamed through the narrow window beside the narrow bed, white and chill and far too bright. Moonlight. It was eerie. Things looked different. She pulled her hand from under the covers, stretched it out to intersect that slant of moonshine. The color was leached from her skin; the fingers seemed bonier, they trailed light like smoke.
She wiggled her fingers and watched the shadows play inside the beam, then pulled her hand back into the dusk where it took on an ordinary dark solidity.
Sleep, sleep. She flopped over, the nightshirt twisting about her body, pulling tight against her neck. She humped herself about, tugging at the cloth, smoothing wrinkles that felt like ridges under her.
The inside of her knee itched. She twisted around and down, scratched and sighed. The itch moved to the middle of her back. She chased it as high as she could reach, shuddered all over, kicked the covers off, and rolled out of bed.
Scratching at her arm, she padded to the window and stood frowning out it at a strange colorless landscape, at roofs with pantiles like humpy scales, at a wall two stories high and wide enough to drive the landrover on, with merlons along the outer edge and towers black against a sky hot with stars, so many stars even the huge yellow-gray moon couldn’t blot them out-a full moon rising into a cloudless sky, limned against it a pair of strange mountains, black silhouettes like pointy breasts with hardened nipples.
And a river like a streamer of silver silk, splitting around the Kuysstead. Moat, she thought. Gods. Tumaks? Brushies? Those what they’re this spooky about? I wonder what they look like. All we saw was empty land. Empty land the guards were watching like it could hatch trouble any instant. Did, too. She shivered as she remembered the shooting.
North and west for fifteen days, looong days, had to be at least two thousand kays from where they’d started. Thirty days of misery for Matja Allina, coming and going. And for what? For us. Twenty-six women. If that was the measure of her desperation… ay-yai!
. Matja Allina, is she crazy? Thinking up enemies for her baby? Or is it real? Will she do what she promised? Can she? He backed her, but maybe he’s just humoring her. He doesn’t like us much; that was so thick in the air I could sink my teeth in it. He said he’d back her promise with his. He meant it, I think. Now. That doesn’t say anything about later. When the time comes. He might and he might not. If she’s crazy… paranoid… then what she said, it’s just words and we’re stuck for the duration. Ten years. Gods, I hope not. I don’t like it here. I don’t like having to kiss up to a bunch of… Hmm. Does that say something about what kind of person I was before?
She leaned on the windowsill and contemplated her reactions since she woke in that miserable hut. Up and down, elated, depressed, angry, excited. And tired. Sometimes she felt a hundred years old, sometimes about six. Sometimes she felt in charge of herself, sometimes she felt utterly helpless, though mostly she was somewhere in between. Like now. And right now she was so tired she ached, but her eyes simply wouldn’t stay closed and her body was giving her the fidgets of hell.
She blinked, startled. A small red dot bloomed high on one of the black mountains. A fire. It flickered at her, vanished as if a wall had been put in front of it, reappeared, vanished, reappeared. Then was gone altogether.
It’s a piece with everything else. Conspiracies to suppress a fetus. Things in the brush that need to be shot at, not just shot at but machine-gunned. Signals from a mountainside, aimed at… who? Someone in here? What did that mean?
She yawned, suddenly so heavy-eyed that she wasn’t sure she could make the bed before she melted in a puddle of sleep. Another turn in… in the fog. Wasn’t it fog for everyone, who could read the future? Not me. Not anyone… She stumbled the few steps to the bed, fell onto it and wriggled awkwardly about until she’d got the covers where they should be, over her, not under. She wriggled a last time, like a cat kneading a pillow, getting it right. Then she dropped into the abyss.
If she dreamed, she didn’t know it.
Dyslaera 5: Training Trials
Savant 1 (speaking into note pad):
Removed cap and restrainers from subject 3F (native name: Kinefray)… using CPF24sub2 as a reinforcer… subject continues docile, emotional reaction damped down… under orders, cut the hand off subject 7T (native name: Tolmant), showed no reaction to subject’s protests or struggles… satisfactory contrast to earlier reactions to this subject.
RECOMMENDATION: Continue this regimen for another month without reinforcement other than the CPF. Important to know how permanent this change is. If temporary, important to know how long the treatment lasts.
##
IMAGE: Kinefray sits in the cell like a lump; Azrarrz is talking and talking at him, agitated, crying as he tries to reach his cousin. He shakes Kinefray, slaps him, then retreats to the far side of the cell and sits there, suffering.
##
Savant 1 (speaking into note pad):
Subject 3Tj (native name: Tejnor)… youngest of the subjects… perhaps the most intractable, despite his youth… which might be considered to contradict trends suggested by previous data… probably an anomaly due to individual differences within the species… the subject sample is, unfortunately, too small for anything more reliable than a hint…
NOTE: recommend immediate attempts to enlarge the sample.
Have broken through the trance state repeatedly… made it impossible for 3Tj to retreat from attack, while maintaining intelligence levels and some degree of free will… have managed also to breach the strong ties between this apprentice and his master, subject 7T (native name: Tolmant)… to the point that he was willing to participate in a pain-inducing session with 7T as subject… during this session he proved so enthusiastic that 7T was accidentally killed… no great loss, the subject was badly mutilated at the time…
NOTE: Tech 1 Rivas has suggested the killing stroke was deliberate, not accident; 3Tj was questioned under probe, results inconclusive-the drugs present in his system hinder analysis of his reactions.
TENTATIVE CONCLUSION: Rivas is mistaken. If 3Tj were still feeling the pull of the kin-bond, he could not harm 7T; if he were not, he’d have no reason to harm 7T.
RECOMMENDATION: Continue testing, gradually decreasing dosage. Necessary to determine the holdover strength of the regimen, how much of the change is permanent, how much transitory, what is the overall effect on intelligence and agility.
##
IMAGE: Tejnor lying on his cell bed, curled into a fetal knot, his body twitching at long intervals, his head cradled in the curve of his arms.
Shadith (Kizra) On The Farm 2
1
Morning.
When the housemaid knocked at her door, Kizra groaned and crawled out of bed.
Aghilo had given her leather sandals to wear with the long gray skirt, the smocked shirt with the narrow scarf for a belt. She thought about wearing them, but something made her pick up the old boots and hold them and sit gazing at them. Her link with the past. She slid her feet into them, laughed a little as nothing happened. No epiphany. No magic rebirth. Not today anyway. She went downstairs, feeling vulnerable and tentative till she came up with Tinoopa and smelled the meat frying and the new baked bread waiting for them.
##
… says auntee Akitha caught ol’ Tinkkar playin fumblefinger with young Impanni, you coulda heard the noise in the next aynti over…”
“… you see that redhead?”
“Gonna be trouble with that one.”
“Taljee even sniff in that direction, he gonna…”
“… Jarrin says the young ’un she some kinda witch, she got healin hands or somethin…”
“Talking about witches, that Kulyari, she was in some kinda snit, made my life even more a misery than usual. She…”
The chattering housemaids seated about the long table fell abruptly silent as Tinoopa and Kizra stepped through the arch into the servant hall off the kitchen’s south end.
Cook had the armchair at the head of the table, a big woman, with massive arms and breasts like pillows. She didn’t say anything, just sat waiting for the newcomers to greet her; she reigned here and wanted no doubt of that in their minds.
With Kizra a nervous shadow in her wake, Tinoopa swept in, stopped beside Cook, held out her hand. “I greet you, Kuriya Kuma chal. May your shadow never grow smaller.”
“That’s as it may be.” Kuma chal touched the hand. “Aghilo chal tells me it’s you’ll be doing the ordering and such from now on, what is it, that fancy word? liaison, that’s it. Liaison between us ’n the Ulyinik Polyapo. Eh so?”
“I have become… um, shall we say acquainted with the Ulyinik.” Tinoopa put what was impolitic to say aloud in the dry tone of her voice, the quick lift of a brow. “I shall study to make life easier all round.” She bowed her head. “With your help, Kuriya Kuma chal, since I’m new to this place and don’t know the sweet ways, the clever ways to get done what has to be done.”
Kuma chal contemplated her for a moment, then she nodded her large head. “Yes. Jilipa, fetch a chair for the chapa Tinoopa, set it here,” she patted the table beside her. “And you, girl, yes, you, the little one, don’t hang about like an addled mouse, you too skinny as it is, sit down, eat eat.”
##
The morning was cool and damp with dew. In the distance Kizra could hear the blatting of some kind of beast, a fussy, irritated sound. She could hear men’s voices mixing with the blats; she couldn’t make out the words, but she thought that they were swearing. Probably at those beasts, sounded like the kind of misborn creatures who stubbornly and perversely refused to do what they were supposed to do.
And how do I know that? Gods, I wish… I wish the wipe had took all the way, then I wouldn’t have these ghosts… no, 1 don’t, no…
She could hear squeals and loud whinnies. She could hear a rhythmic thudding, with a second thudding just off the beat, she could hear singing that wove around that thudding. She could hear birds twittering, insect buzzes, a thousand small sounds that blended into a sense of peaceful purpose, a pleasant background hum for a bright sunny morning at Winter’s End.
Matja Allina stood on the steps pulling on her gloves and letting Aghilo tuck shawls about her to keep her warm.
Her daughters were there, a short distance from their mother, Ingva the older, thirteen, almost as tall as her mother and thin. An austerely pretty child, with the promise of beauty later on, intelligence sparkling in violet-blue eyes, spirit in the set of her body, the alertness of her face as she looked about. There was a wildness in her that burned through the patina of control. Kizra thought she looked like a deer about to start running, not because it was afraid but from the sheer joy of stretching its muscles.
Three years younger than her sister, Ylapura was shyer and less appealing, a wispy child with a worried little face. She had her mother’s eyes, pale shining aquamarines set in sooty lashes, but she lacked her mother’s vigor, maybe her intelligence.
The Jili (tutor) Arluja stood behind them, a thin gray woman with a tired, too-intelligent face.
Kulyari was there, too, hanging about the edge of things, looking very pretty, her hair braided and wired into intricate whorls, her skin milk white and rose pink; her mouth was a soft rose and her eyes a dark blue; they glared hate when she glanced at Kizra and a sullen dislike when she looked at Allina, a dislike that melted into demure shyness whenever Pirs was around.
Polyapo was there, Tinoopa beside her; the Ulyinik was a sour woman, full of vague resentments, but she’d pasted a simpering smile on her face in honor of the occasion.
Kizra couldn’t understand why Allina kept these two around, what constrained her. It wasn’t Pirs’ doing, he was indifferent to both women, barely noticed them. He was indifferent to everyone but Allina and his children.
Leaning heavily on Aghilo’s arm, Matja Allina walked down the stairs and across the courtyard to the long table where her female overseers waited with the new women lined up behind them.
2
After she was settled in the cushioned armchair, Matja Allina set a roll of papers on the table in front of her, flattened them, and held them down with two bits of slate set there for the purpose. From where she stood just behind the Matja, Kizra could see a list of names with a brief notation beside each. Anitra, Beba Mahl, Eeda, Ekkurrekah…
Matja Allina pulled out the second page, let it roll up beside the stone weight. “Nunnikura chal Weavemistress,” she called out, and waited until a heavy middle-aged woman with thick gray braids came to the far side of the table. “I have seven for you, one with some pre-existent skills, the others trainable.” She looked beyond Nunnikura chal at the labor cadre. “The chapa whose names I call, you will go with the Weavemistress. She will show you where you will sleep, equip you with clothing and other necessities, and put you to work. Lyousa va Vogl. Sabato. Bertem. Luacha. Tictoc. Enke. Dorrit.”
Matja Allina waited patiently until that was sorted out, then called, “Intoyo chat Dyemistress.”,
Kizra clasped her hands over the arranga case hanging from its shoulderstrap and withdrew her attention. Tinoopa had been heavily into aphoristic advice after they left the breakfast table.
It’s all very well, the big woman said, being backed by the local bosses, but I have to make that backing stick.
I got that Polyapo soothed down, Tinoopa said. It was easy, some butter and a sweet or two, mostly a sympathetic ear and agreeing with her vision of herself. She thinks because she’s Irrkuyon born and bred the rest of the world should flatten themselves at her feet and say yes’m and no’m and do everything she says ’cause it’s her that says it. Stupid woman. Just as well, though, Kiz. If she weren’t blind and an idiot and pretty well loathed by everyone who knows her, I wouldn’t have this cushy job.
Vindictive bitch, that Kulyari, Tinoopa said. She’s going to make my life a hell, yours, too, unless… Hmm. I wonder what they consider unforgivable around these parts.
Kizra shivered at the memory of that predatory look in Tinoopa’s eyes. Allina was right. The Shimmaroi must have found Tinoopa far too formidable to want her anywhere near their world.
She was impressed when she found out about the mind-wipe… Funny thing to be impressed by. I suppose it was because I somehow scared someone enough he had to wipe me out like that.
Mindwipe. Things keep leaking over from somewhere… last night she’d dreamed… most nights she dreamed… things… that she couldn’t quite remember when she woke… except the feelings. And the day ghosts… ideas and images that slid into her head and out again before she could catch hold of them…
##
“Ingalina chal Beastmistress.”
A thin wiry woman came forward, tanned leathery skin, sun-bleached blonde hair cut short.
Matja Allina took the last of the rolled up sheets, passed it across to the Beastmistress. “Ommla. Jhapuki. Fraji. Rafiki. Zhya Arru. Tsipor pa Prool. Go with the Beastmistress and do what she tells you.” She settled back into the cushions, accepted a cup of hot broth from Aghilo. “That ends that,” she said. “Ulyinik Polyapo, come here, please.”
