Shadowkill sq-3, page 37
part #3 of Shadith's quest Series
The Dyslaeror snorted, then groaned, lifted his head and sneezed. “Sar! What…”
Shadith scrambled back to him, pinched his earlobe hard. “Move, we’re in the middle of a war.”
A section of the Compound shuddered then fell in on itself, the debris melting into stone liquefied by the heat seeping through from that seething boiling ring outside the shield.
Rohant got unsteadily to his feet. “My head…”
Shadith caught hold of his arm. “Move it, Ro. Lean on me. Come on.”
A lander turned too late, exploded; the pieces pattered down among the trees, starting small fires that died when sap gushed forth from the injured branches and cup-shaped leaves flipped over, dumping the rain they’d collected.
They staggered through the tree clumps and brush thickets until they reached the stream. The water was hot, steaming, but they got across at the cost of some minor burns and sank onto the relatively cool earth on the far side.
##
Rohant leaned against the trunk of a tree, winced as his weight shook a spatter of drops from the leaves overhead. The rain was almost finished, but there was still a steady drip here under the trees as their leaves released what they’d captured.
The creature in his hair shifted position hastily to avoid being drowned, burrowing deeper into his tangled mane.
“What…” He reached up, touched it. “What happened? Who…”
“I was about to tell you… be careful…”
Rohant sneezed again, held his hand still so the creature could crawl onto it. He grinned as he set it on his knee. “Miji,” he said. “He’s a sakali. Friend of mine. You were about to tell me?”
“Right. About to introduce my rescuer and sometime partner. Ginny Seyirshi.”
“What!”
Miji eeped with fright, went running down Rohant’s leg. He sat on the Dyslaeror’s ankle, tiny hands pressed to his ribs, black eyes shifting from Rohant to Shadith and back again.
“Long story how that came about, tell you later. Looks like he decided to dissolve the relationship.”
Rohant ch’ch’ed at the sakali; without looking at her, he stopped his coaxing a moment, said, “So why are we alive?
“He gave his word, said he wouldn’t kill me for at least a year. It was Omphalos he was after.”
“You trusted him?”
“Didn’t have much choice right then.” She ran her hands through her hair, shivered as a vagrant draft hit her soaked undersuit. “Besides, he keeps his word. You just have to be careful you know what he means by it. Like, he’d be clam-happy if Miralys ashed us both, but he wouldn’t do it himself. Um, not too long from now, this place isn’t going to be very healthy.”
Deflected by the defense shield, a missile hit the ground, blew a hole in it, and sent fragments of stone scything through the trees a short distance downstream.
Rohant coaxed Miji onto his arm, drew his thumbclaw down his mustache, raised a brow at her. “Don’t know why you say that. Consider our gently salubrious surroundings.”
“Hah!” Shadith pulled herself onto her feet. “Discounting little things like…” she waved a hand at the shattered trees and steaming water, “this is going to be ground zero of a humongous meltdown.”
Rohant stood, scowled at her. “Meltdown?”
“Yeah.” Shadith shivered as another explosion shook earth and air. “Ginny’s sent his special EYEs at the kephalos. They’re going to trigger Mimishay’s self-destruct. Good-bye island, good-bye all of us, them included.” She jerked her thumb upward, waved her hand in a circle to include the attacking landers.
“How much time?”
“God knows, not me.”
Rohant scratched absently behind the neckfrill of the sakali. “Shadow, could you reach Miralys?”
“Not Miralys. Kikun maybe and that’s only if his gods have him looking.”
“Well, try it.”
“Not here. Hunh.” She began walking upstream.
Cuddling the sakali, Rohant shook himself all over, spat, and started after her. “This doesn’t work, we can always climb on a rock and dance. Hope they see us and don’t shoot us.”
Autumn Rose/Kikun
Autumn Rose booted the skimmer away from the Cillasheg, started descending in a wide spiral, keeping her distance from the attack zone. Without taking her eyes from the board, she said, “Just where is it you want me to put down?”
Kikun scratched at the skin folds under his chin. “North side, close as you can get.”
“Big place. Mountainside north or seaside?”
He frowned. “Tlee! I don’t know.”
“Then we better go too… Z’ Toyff!”
An immense elongated form went rushing past the skimmer, sending it into a wild tumble, falling end over end toward the ground.
Autumn Rose’s crashweb snapped tight and the emergency pad popped up under her hand. With the argrav spurting out streamers of blue smoke while the skimmer flipped over and over and Kikun lying unconscious in the co-chair, twisted under his crash web, half strangled by it, Rose rode the wild oscillations, praying for time, widening and flattening the curves, holding the skimmer longer and longer in the flat mode until she had control over the drives again and took a look round to see where she was…
And found herself in a descending slide across the top of the Compound with cutter beams dancing around her and the swarm of Dyslaera Landers swinging in and out of view and she was heading straight for a broad beam that was also sweeping toward her seconds away…
A black Bear fifty meters high reached out a smoky paw and the beam was deflected, turned downward, the blade-end slicing through the already tortured earth.
AND
A black Raven flew before her, feathers glinting like shards of jet.
She followed it out of the turmoil. Nothing touched her, cutter nor missile, rot grains nor melt fields. Nothing touched her.
She got the skimmer to ground on a grassy meadow some distance up one of the smaller mountains west of the Compound.
For several moments after the web loosened, then slid into its receptacle, Rose lay in the chair shaking all over, teeth chattering as she cursed Kikun, Digby, Seyirshi, the Dyslaera, and everything and everyone in her life that had brought her to this point. She’d never been this close to death, even when she was sitting in that condemned cell waiting for the Strangler’s cord. Never this close, never this helpless, never…
When she calmed enough to reason, she remembered the Bear and the Raven. Kikun’s gods? She laughed, stopped laughing when the sound went crazy on her. “Never imagined I’d be the subject for miracles,” she said aloud “Kikun, you all right?”
No answer.
Shakily she pushed herself upright, groaning as every muscle protested; she was bruised all over, battered, scraped, bonesore. She twisted around and frowned toward the co-seat.
Kikun lay limp in the seat, one arm tangled in the semi-retracted web, a trickle of blood drying at the corner of his mouth. Blood bubbles formed and burst in his nostrils as he labored to breathe.
“Goerta b’rite!”
A tiny ancient crone of a dinhast came dashing at her like a puppet on strings, a glass puppet brightly colored but so translucent it was hard to see, yammering soundless words from a mouth snapping open and closed like a puppet’s jaws. Soundless words-yet Rose knew the ancient was crying at her to get on her feet and do something for Kikun. Something, anything. Get on her feet. Get moving. Help him. Comic and terrible, the crone swept at her, through her. Her skin prickled all over as if from a thousand tiny pinches.
Rose struggled from her chair, stood with her hand on the arm, gathering herself so she wouldn’t fall on her face. The knee she’d injured at Koulsnakko’s was sore again, she’d bumped it or something. She was still shaking, nauseated by her brush with dissolution and her brush with the inexplicable…
A dark, musky smell spread through the cabin from a great, deerlike creature looming over Kikun, shaking his antlers, roaring soundlessly, his dark eyes ringed with white. His head was clearly visible though translucent like the crone, colored glass lit from within, but the rest of him was vague, shapeless.
Rose stood clutching at the chair arm, swallowing, hair standing stiff along her spine. What she saw was ancient beyond counting, immensely powerful and essentially uncontrollable, a demiurge in beast form. Terrifying…
She forced herself to cross the short distance between the chairs; it was hard, walking into the ambience of that beast.
The Bear was there, too; she couldn’t see him, but he was present in the darkness that boiled in the corners of her eyes…
As she bent over Kikun’s trapped arm and began working the web free, she couldn’t see THEM anymore, but she knew THEY were still there, she could feel them, feel the pressure of their demands, their fears.
There was no sound in the cabin and the musky aroma had vanished with the deer form. With that gone, she could smell the acrid stench of burning insulation and the more elusive odor of hot metal.
The web came loose finally, slid home. She examined Kikun’s arm, wrinkling her nose as she felt bones grating under her fingers.
The crone came back, tiny hands, long for their size, curling round Rose’s wrists, pulling at them. Rose yielded to the pull that wasn’t there and let Grandmother Ghost guide her as she straightened Kikun and eased him as much as she could without injuring him more than he was already.
Freed by his coma, Kikun’s gods swirled round her, at times merging into an amorphous shimmer, at times hardening briefly into Raven, Otter, Bear, Antelope-deer. Grandmother Ghost stayed beside her, seen sometimes, sometimes unseen, as Rose plundered the emergency medkit, gave Kikun painkillers, splinted his arm, stabilized his chest so the broken ribs wouldn’t do more damage to his lungs.
Time passed.
She finished all she could do down here, locked the crash-web properly in place over him so it would support him, keep him motionless. Everything was set for liftoff…
The pressure faded; Kikun’s gods folded back down into him.
Autumn Rose straightened her aching back, wiped at the sweat, pushed the hair off her face and spent a moment staring blankly at her hands, not at all sure what had just happened.
“All right,” she said aloud. “So. You want me to get him back to the ship and the ottodoc? Well, then, show me where they are, Rohant and the Singer. I can’t leave till I have them.” She felt like a fool talking to herself or worse, to figments of hysteric imagination.
The screen turned itself on. In the darkness outside, glinting in the uncertain glow from the beams that still walked round the Compound, a large black bird flew in tight circles, squawking.
“Well.” Rose limped back to the pilot’s chair, lifted off a few meters, then followed Raven through the clearing storm until he began flying in circles again, this time over a line of thickly set trees growing along the creek that ran past the Compound.
Grandmother Ghost pinched her.
Gaagi faded.
Feeling a fool again, Autumn Rose settled the skimmer onto a patch of grass and gravel, activated the external speakers:
SHADOW. ROHANT. IF YOU’RE OUT THERE, SHIFT ASS OVER HERE. THIS IS AUTUMN ROSE. KIKUN’S WITH ME. MIRALYS SENT US TO COLLECT YOU.
After a tense eternity when all she could see were trees and all she could hear was silence, two small figures broke from the shadows and ran for the skimmer.
Autumn Rose/Rohant/Shadith
“Get me through to Miralys. Fast. Then get the hell out of here.”
Autumn Rose raised her brows. “Well, hello, the two of you,”
Rohant growled.
Subdued, weary, Shadith ignored both of them and went to inspect Kikun in his support cocoon of foam and bandage.
“All right, all right, keep your hair on.” Autumn Rose got through to the Cillasheg. “Anyagyn, Rose here. Give me Miralys. Quick, huh? Got something to show her.”
Miralys bloomed in the mid-cell of the screen; when she saw Rohant, her ears snapped up, her eyes shone, she sang without being aware of it a wordless croon of joy and yearning.
Rohant leaned toward the image, his ache matching hers; he reached toward her-then he shook himself all over, wrenched himself back to more pressing needs. “Toerfeles, get ours out of there. That thing’s going to blow any minute and it’ll take them with it.”
Light shimmers fled about the cabin, power thrummed through it, a deep subsonic CH’M that poured into Shadith.
“Go, go, go,” she cried, her singer’s voice driven by the immediacy of the threat, filling the space. “Go.”
Autumn Rose felt the gods come back, Grandmother Ghost was pinching her and pinching her and the antelope/ deer was belling terror in her ear. She booted the skimmer up and went racing along the mountainside, rising at a steep angle, going for distance rather than altitude; she crossed the mountains, dropped again, putting those tons of stone and earth between her and the Compound, then she fled out out over the sea…
Miralys/Cillasheg
“Get out now, get out, get out, going to blow, get out,” Anyagyn sang into the speaker, her voice rising and falling in Dyslaer Warn.
Miralys watched the skimmer dart away, her Ciocan inside; as it vanished below the mountaintops, she brushed the back of her hand across her mouth, turned her attention to the Compound.
It rested on the ground like a gray clenched fist.
The fist cracked-leaked a blinding blue-white light-opened wide-spilled light like molten milkglass-filled the bay and flats-rolled up the mountainsides-boiled up and up into the clouds…
Specks of light lost in the great glow, the ganders fled from the expanding explosion.
##
“How many?”
Anyagyn smiled wearily. “Hannys got her tail singed, that’s all. Everyone’s tucked in and hitting the freshers.” She scratched at the fur between her ears. “Autumn Rose is on her way back, passengers intact, except Kikun who needs the ottodoc rather badly, she says. Once she’s docked, any reason we should hang around here?”
“No. Let’s go home. We’ve a business to whip into shape.”
Epilog
1
Digby wore a white linen suit imported out of the mists of memory and sat in an elaborate wicker chair with a soft white hat on his knee and the shimmer-glimmer of his bubble around him.
Rohant and Miralys came in; she was quieter than usual and dressed in mourning white, a long robe, cream colored velvet that complimented the fading bronze of her fur and moved elegantly with the vigorous shifts of her lean body. She looked around. Her ears twitched. “This is… different.”
He’d changed the decor of his meeting room to a deliberately exotic simplicity, recreating a room in a house where a family had lived for generations, perhaps a farm house, comfortable, but far from rich. The furniture had the feel of age and hard use, the fabrics were faded and frayed, the colors muted. There was a fireplace with logs burning in it and oil lamps spread their flickering amber glow in patches that left the corners dim where paintings and shelves of trinkets sprang into jewel clarity one moment and sank into shadows the next.
Digby smiled. “Nostalgia lives,” he said. “Hello, Rohant. It’s been a long time.”
“Digby.” Rohant bowed his head, then settled himself in a chair close to the fire and sat gazing into the flames. His robe was crisp and starched, snow white, cold white. He was withdrawn, physically present, mentally absent. The Dyslaer way of grieving was to sink into the minutia of mundane life as Miralys had, to grow excessively busy, exhausting themselves with work and planning. The Dyslaeror way was to create stillness within and without, to withdraw from the world and contemplate meanings-the meaning of particular deaths and generic DEATH, of particular lives and generic LIFE. Voallts Korlach had an estate in the Sarinim, a patch of gentle wilderness they kept to soothe their spirits when urban life became unbearably abrasive; Rohant was leaving tomorrow to spend his Mourning Year in a shrine Miralys had built there. His mind was already in retreat.
Miralys wandered restlessly about the room Digby had created for her, lifting objects, setting them down again. Over her shoulder, she said, “Who all’s coming?”
“Shadith, Kikun, Autumn Rose. They’ll be here any minute now.”
“Ah.”
##
Shadith came in, moving with a crackling energy and impatience, even her hair seemed about to explode from her head. She wore traveling gear and her harpcase was slung across her back. She dumped it on the floor beside a chair, flung herself down. “Well?”
Kikun unfaded, kicked a hassock over and sat beside her; he shared her impatience, sat with his orange eyes fixed on Digby as if by will alone he could bring this final conference to its end and be off about the matter that was troubling him now, the freeing of his homeland from its invaders.
Autumn Rose walked in a moment later, glanced quickly around and dropped into a chair beside the door, sat gazing at her hands. They had a newly pampered look, manicured, the skin creamed to a moist delicacy; her tunic was avrishum, a glowing dark blue-green with fine white piping, her trousers wide and flowing, more like a long skirt; she wore silver and takka-azul earrings, matching silver and takka-azul bracelets. Like Shadith, she was ready to go; she’d booked passage on a Gancha Worldship leaving the Transfer Station later today. Back on the Gamer Circuit. This is the last I’ll see of her for a while. Until she gets bored and is ready for a reality connection.
Digby contemplated his guests and thought they looked like the seeds on a ripe and ready pfeffri plant, primed to explode at a touch and scatter to the corners of the universe.
He crossed his legs, tented his hands. “This, my friends, is the denouement, where we tie off dangling ends and get on with our lives. Questions?”
