Shadowkill sq-3, page 3
part #3 of Shadith's quest Series
Kikun!
Hound heard the name, turned his head. The fine white threads that ran behind him were raveling, on the point of breaking and dissipating, leaving him stranded.
Kikun!
The name pulsed along the threads. Their white brightened, thickened. They twitched at him, tried to pull him back.
KIKUN!
The twitch was harder. Spirit Hound hesitated; he wanted to go forward, but there was no more forward to go into. He turned and ran back along the threads.
##
Kikun opened his eyes, stared blankly at the heart-shaped face hanging over him. Autumn Rose. He was weary, so weary it was almost too much effort to breathe.
“Kikun?” She lifted his hand, let it fall. “Goerta b’rite!”
She went away, came back with a cup of broth. Gathering him up, bracing him against her knee, she began feeding him the broth, sip by sip, slipping in an occasional bite of hipropaste.
When she was finished with that, she straightened his cramped arms and legs and tucked a pillow under his head, then she went off again, came back with a mug of hot tea and a drinking tube. She set the mug beside his head, helped him with the tube. “You feel like talking?”
He sucked at the tea, let the cleansing warmth trickle through him as he considered the question. “Why did you call me back?”
“Didn’t want you killing yourself.”
“Just as well. I’d lost them. What’s happening?”
“Right now, we’re drifting-pointed the same way your last turn took us.”
“Where are we?”
“The Callidara Pseudo-Cluster.”
“What’s that?”
“A very busy place. Nearly a thousand systems less than a light-year apart, two hundred of them inhabited, mostly colonized from other places, only ten of them have native pops. Kephalos tells me we have to go carefully. Sometimes the insplit round here is so busy its fabric shakes.”
Kikun sucked at the tea, frowning. “That doesn’t sound right. Omphalos wouldn’t want close and inquisitive neighbors.”
“Well, it’s where you brought us. Omphalos?”
“Tlee!” He flattened his hands on the floor, tried to push up but his arms had no strength in them. “Help me up.”
“No need to go rushing about. I have to purge the ship before we go near any of those worlds.”
“Purge?”
“Pull her flags. We stole her, remember? I don’t purge her, the first port we hit, zap, straight to jail.”
“Ah. How long will that take?”
“I don’t know. Depends on what system the PO used, previous owner, that is. Don’t worry, I will get it. Digby sees that his Ops know a lot of things most powers say they shouldn’t. You comfortable there, or would you rather go lie down in one of the staterooms?”
“I’ll stay here.”
“Right.” She got to her feet. “First I find me a nice little planet with no people on it. One with air I can breathe so I can get the outside clean, too. Then I suppose I’d better call in and see what Digby has to say. Nothing much is going to be happening for a while, so you might as well get some sleep.”
2
It was a nameless little world, a pretty world with nothing more than its looks to recommend it, the usual range of metals, no large deposits. No moons. There were a lot of lakes but no great, uninterrupted stretches of water. In an area with hundreds of other worlds much like it, it had been scanned a few times but mostly ignored. And it was close by-only a day off.
Autumn Rose set the ship down in the middle of a temperate long-grass prairie in the northern hemisphere, choosing a flat barren area near a large lake and one of the streams feeding into it.
Kikun wandered aimlessly about the ship as Autumn Rose settled to work. He stood behind her, watching her play with the kephalos until she swung around and snarled at him. “I loathe people looking over my shoulder. Haven’t you got SOMETHING you can do?”
Kikun shrugged his narrow shoulders, ambled to the co-seat, turned on the scanners so he could look out over the land around the ship.
Tall grass stretched to the horizon, nodding in the wind, green and silver moire silk, fading to a washed-out blue in the distance. There were scattered interruptions of a darker, stiffer green where trees grew along a stream or deep in a wash. A few kilometers off, an immense herd of horned beasts grazed, leaving a strip of shorn land half a kay wide as they passed on. Overhead, a number of feathered fliers were black specks against the ice-blue of the sky.
Kikun was hatched on a tall-grass prairie much like this one, so much like it he might almost be looking across his sept’s home range. He sat gazing at the scene and aching with a separation anguish he’d been too busy to feel since Lissorn rescued him from the stake and brought him away. Strange places, strange peoples, nothing to remind him until now.
“Kikun, do you mind…” The image vanished, the screen went gray. “I need the kephalos’ full attention for this.” She scowled at the console, then at him. “It’s going to take forever as it is. Barakaly Lak Dar, that’s the PO of our chariot, he had a mind like a snake with hiccups. Why don’t you take some lunch and a stunner and go for a walk or something?”
3
Kikun rode the lift to the ground and stepped onto patchy grass. The lightness of his body startled him. Autumn Rose hadn’t warned him about the lower g. Moving was a little like walking in water without, the resistance of water. A very peculiar feeling.
He held tightly to the rail of the lift and sucked in a long breath as he listened to the faint susurrus of the grass. That sound, ah that sound, it was an ache in the heart. A wound.
The morning sun was warm on his face, but the air was nippy; it smelled of pollen and grass, of fish and weed, mud and decay. Something dead a long way off added a faint pungency to the mix. It wasn’t exactly his homesmell, but near enough to evoke a stream of memories.
He closed his eyes and let them flow over him, the good and the bad.
For the past three years he’d been caught up in Ginny Seyirshi’s plots. No time to stop and think, no urge to let go and drown in memory.
Now there WAS time.
Too much time.
He panted and his fringed ears trembled, his eyes flooded with tear gel. He leaned against the railing, head down, remembering, remembering, remembering… until the spasm was finished, then he sighed and scrubbed away the gel.
After shrugging out of the backpack, he left it on the lift floor and walked cautiously across cream-colored sand to water blue as shattered sapphire.
He squatted beside the tender wavelets that lapped at the sand and scooped up a handful of the water. Lissorn would have scolded him until his ears rang: one does not eat and drink promiscuously on strange worlds; bad things can happen to one’s insides. He smiled at the memory, tasted the water. It was fresh and cold, with a clean green flavor. He spread his fingers and let the rest of the liquid run away. There was a spiky weed growing a short way out in the lake. Balancing on one hand he stretched over, broke off a branch, sniffed at it, bit into it. Not much taste but a good crunchy texture. He squatted and chewed until all he had left was a wad of strings which he spat out. He scooped up more water, swished it around to clean his mouth, spat that out also.
He knew well enough what he was risking, but a certain recklessness drove him on, a recklessness that was his by godright and a plague on his comfort more than once.
He got to his feet, ran along the beach, restless, nervous, while the day got colder instead of warmer.
The wind rose. The sky was a pale pale blue, almost white, empty now except for a few, high rat-tails of cloud that merely emphasized the blankness of the blue.
His bare foot touched a length of driftwood bleached almost white by water, wind, and sun. Wood. He stared down at the section of branch for a long moment, then bent and picked it up. Yes. Fire. I’ll build me a fire. Four fires. Fires to send a tocebai home. Yes.
Driven by a new urgency, he strode along the sand gathering pieces of wood small enough to carry. As soon as he had an armload, he took it to a long narrow spit where the feeder creek entered the lake, dumped it, and went back to hunt for more.
##
When he had the wood he needed, he went into the prairie and gathered grasses.
##
He settled on the sand and began smoothing and knotting the grasses into a sacred mat, his fingers twisting and pulling in a pattern so familiar he didn’t have to think what he was doing. On DunyaDzi he would have whistled an ancient sin-di while he worked, the music gathering his forces and feeding power into the grass. Here, he was empty, there was no music in him and the grass felt dead in dead fingers. He went on knotting anyway.
Not so long ago, when Shadow had hinted for a reading-she wanted reassurance before they hit Koulsnakko’s Hole and went for Ginny-he couldn’t answer her, Gaagi wouldn’t come. He told her he wasn’t worried. It had happened before, his gods going off somewhere and leaving him to himself. They’d always come back.
This time felt different. Voices had come to him in the Hole, but they were chilly whispers as alien as this alien wind.
He was bereft. Yes. Good word. The right word. His gods were his tie to his home-earth and the personification of his several Talents. He needed those god images and they had to be REAL. Ghosts conjured by his imagination were worthless as guides.
He knotted and wove and wondered if he’d been too long away from DunyaDzi, if he’d worn his gods thin and finally to nothing at all. If that was true, he didn’t know what he’d do, what he’d be. The thought frightened him.
He wove the ends into the mat, spread it on the sand, and went to stand at the lake’s edge, watching the waves leap and sparkle in the wind. Nothing came to him. The water was alien, it rejected him. The sand beneath his feet rejected him, the wind would not speak to him.
##
He went back into the ship, collected food offerings, brought them to the mat.
Using the gathered driftwood, he built four small fires, east, west, north, south. He put the mat at the mid-point between them and sat on it, his shadow going out before him to touch the western fire.
He used the play of flames to ease himself into the god-trance where he could call them. Gaagi the Raven. Ellas-Xe the Lynx. Jadii-Gevas the Antelope-deer. Xumady the Otter. Spash’ats the Bear. Lael-Lenox, the Grandmother Ghost. ’Gemla, the Mask that was himself. He called them urgently, his need for them in every syllable of those potent Names. Especially he called to Gaagi Raven-who-flies-before, Raven who had marked his path for him over and over since he was hatched, Raven who spoke with a clarity and brevity that could be more deceptive and more confusing than the deliberate smokiness of Lael-Lenox, the Grandmother who delighted in leading him her grandson into situations that made him scramble to stay alive, who always said: See what you learned you wouldn’t ’ve, Kiki. Listen to your Gramma and you’ll never be sorry. That wasn’t true. It wasn’t even close to true. Gramma’s advice. It’d taught him how miserable he was when he was having his tail twisted by someone stronger or smarter than him. She told him that WAS the lesson, but he figured there were easier ways of learning it. Xumady scolded him each time he fell for her so-convincing arguments, but Otter wasn’t much better; he was the comic grumbler, the joker who took nothing too seriously; he was also sneaky and murderous, with no limits to what he’d do to survive, what he’d tweak and trick Kikun into doing. Spash’ats was the dreamer, the ethicist, big and black and powerful, never seen quite clearly, the Bear who smacked Xumady down when Otter got too outrageous.
He called them and they came, but they were not the powerful mythic figures he saw most times, only cartoons, animation cells, translucent, flat, no force to them. They came and stared at him and were silent. One by one they retreated until only ’Gemla Mask was left, hanging before him, a silent summons to return home. Not now, he told Mask, speaking in the mind. Not yet. You see. You see I need her. You see.
Mask hung there, smoke wreathing about it, mingling with the white lines chalked across the black ground. It was silent, enigmatic, then it was gone. Recognizing the need.
Gaagi was there, suddenly returned, fluttering black wings, a male dinhast painted black, his head half-bird, half-dinhast, the webs between arms and legs glittering with black scales on the inside, black feathers on the outside. Transparent and cartoonish, but there.
Gaagi turned to show his backside and Kikun saw the threads spinning from him, delicate white threads, thin as Rose’s head hairs, knotted and twisted, bunched into torturous tangles, going back and back until they touched a sphere floating in darkness. DunyaDzi. Immensely far away. Gaagi showing him that they’d come so far he was almost unraveled, reminding Kikun as Mask had reminded him that if he went much farther, stayed much longer away, he would rip himself loose from what nurtured him.
Gaagi turned again and pointed.
Kikun followed the finger and saw a patch of darkness, a pattern of stars spread across it, one of them redlighted the target star. He stared until the pattern was burned into memory, along with whatever characteristics he could pick out of the image of each star and the sense he had of distances and directions. When he looked round again, the fires were down to red flickers over black coals and Gaagi was gone.
He had three griefs. Now one was gone from his heart. He had his gods again.
The second grief was lessened; he wasn’t helpless any longer and Shadow was no longer wholly lost. In a little while Rose would have the ship ready and they’d go after her.
The third grief remained and there was no curing it. Lissorn was dead and gone. But there were services he could do for his friend, things he had to do.
Lissorn’s tocebai-he’d left it to wander without direction. That was bad. The better and stronger the living, the more dangerous his ghost, the more harm it could do to the living. Lissorn’s tocebai, his heartsoul, had to be summoned, prepared and guided to Hoz’zha-dayaka, the Garden of the Blessed. It was time. Now was the Proper Time.
Kikun rebuilt the fires, then settled himself on the sacred mat and remembered Lissorn:
the sun shining through a slit in heavy clouds turning Lissorn’s short silky fur to molten gold…
Lissorn’s laughter as his tiny golden daughter came running to him, still uncertain on her stubby feet… as he tossed her into the air, caught her and ticked her under her chin… as he brought her to Kikun, saying this is, my friend, he’s funny…
Lissorn roaring into the circle of chanting daiviga Dawadai, alone, acting against training that said don’t get involved with locals, armed only with a stunner and a knife… That knife, ah that knife, it was a young sword that looked small in Lissorn’s big hand, its blade red with firelight but not yet with blood…
Lissorn scattering the little daiviga males, tipping them onto their tailfeathers, destroying the Dawadai Circle… Lissorn kicking the fogga bundles from under Kikun’s feet, sparks flying like shooting stars. Roaring again as the daiva’vig gathered themselves against him, warbling their kill-chants, laying the daiva’vig out one by one until they broke and ran into the scrub…
Lissorn slashing Kikun loose and tossing him over his shoulder when he saw Kikun’s swollen, broken feet, Lissorn running with him, irresistible and powerful…
Kikun went again to the lake’s edge. This world’s water would not speak to him, but it would clean him; that was water’s nature. He knelt in the water and yielded once more to the flow of memory.
Lissorn facing off that mob with a red-lining stunner, the charge in it exhausted by the last daivig he’d flattened, the rest of them running from him just in time, all he had left was the knife…
Lissorn’s body shaking as he laughed while he ran, taking a huge pleasure in what he’d done…
Lissorn in his father’s arms; sobbing, his baby daughter dead, killed by Ginny’s surrogates, torn apart by the bomb in the Korlach courtyard…
Lissorn running at Ginny, silent this time, caution forgotten in his rage…
Lissorn caught by four cutter beams, gone to ash in an instant…
Kikun knelt and gazed with glazed eyes out across the lake until Lissorn stood solid and shining in his mind’s eye, then he stripped naked, waded out farther, knelt and began scrubbing himself with handfuls of sand and singing the ritual chant. Except for the lightness of the lesser gravity-which contributed strongly to the sense that he was inside a dream-he might have been on the shore of Plibajatsi Toh, the sacred lake in the middle of his home-grass.
“Ah de an po to ah,” he chanted, ritual words, words so ancient their meaning was a blur in the mind. “Hu ha apho hae la ceh. E’mo boya can: O to encee eh.”
He shifted to a song celebrating his friend:
“There came a man pace by pace across the grass
He wore a lion face and lion eyes
The sun caressed him
As she watched him pass
Lissorn
The shining man.”
Kikun slid beneath the surface; his body was dense, heavy, even here. The water would not hold him up unless he swam hard and steadily. He undulated himself, washing off the last grains of sand, then got to his feet and walked out of the lake, singing as he walked.
“There came a man bold and hot into the shadowsea
He wore a lion face and lion eyes
The shadows could not touch him
He put out his lion hand and lifted me
Lissorn
The shining man.”
The wind was sharp as knives, cutting to the bone. He ignored it. “Ah de an po ta ah,” he chanted. “Hu ha a ho hae la ceh. E mo boya can: O to encee eh.”
He set out the food from the ship, fine small things the ottochef had made for him, fruits and meats and pastry, miniatures in small paper dishes. When he was finished, he ate a morsel from each dish, then folded them up and brought them to the west fire. He set them in the flames, sang as the white paper turned black and the pale blue-gray smoke also blackened with the burning food. He took two straight hard pieces of wood and sat again on the mat.
