Coyote Rising (45 page)

Carlos glanced back at me. “Wendy, don’t provoke him. He’s—”

“I have no intention of hurting her.” Although Zoltan scarcely raised his voice, we could hear him clearly. The sandthieves were all quiet now, and I noticed that most had fallen to their knees. “In fact, if you want her back, then I’m happy to oblige.”

Before Susan could react, he bent forward and swept her up in his arms. And then, holding her tightly against his chest, he stepped off the platform.

I think I screamed. I must have, because I heard the sound echoing off the cliff. Yet, as the two of them plummeted toward us, Zoltan’s wings unfurled, spreading out to their maximum span, catching the air and braking their descent as if he was wearing a parachute. Zoltan couldn’t fly—his wings, grafted onto his body long ago on Earth, didn’t have the
muscle structure necessary for that—but apparently he’d learned how to use them to glide short distances in Coyote’s lesser gravity.

Nonetheless, it was a long fall, and he was burdened with Susan’s extra weight. He hit the ground hard, taking the impact on bent knees, his breath whuffing from his lungs. He managed to hold on to Susan the whole time, though, and as soon as they were down, she wiggled out of his arms and dashed toward us. Carlos knelt and caught her; she wrapped her arms around him, sobbing and refusing to let go as he murmured into her ear.

From the cliff dwellings, the sandthieves leaped up and down, chattering and squawking to one another, out of their minds from what they’d just seen. I couldn’t blame them; I was pretty much out of my own mind, although for different reasons. “What the . . . ? Who the hell do you think you are?” I demanded, ignoring both husband and daughter—in fact, forgetting everything else—as I marched toward him. “What do you think you’re doing, pulling something like—”

“Quiet!” Zoltan raised a hand as he slowly stood erect. He winced as he did so—no doubt he’d pulled muscles in his thighs and calves—yet he maintained the unholy charisma that had allowed him to gather more than two dozen disciples to his side and lead them across time and space to an unknown world. “I’ve done as you’ve asked, in the quickest way possible. Aren’t thou grateful for the miracle you’ve witnessed?”

He turned to Carlos. “And you . . . you, I know. Once already I’ve saved your life. Now I’ve saved that of your daughter. Have you no gratitude in your heart?”

“What’s he talking about?” I looked at Carlos. “When did he . . .”

“I’ll tell you later.” Carlos shot me a sidewise look—
not now
—as he stood up, still holding Susan in his arms. “I remember. You didn’t give me a chance to thank you before, but . . . well, thanks. And thank you for letting her go.”

Obviously, there was more to all this than I knew. I’d have to get the whole story from Carlos at another time; as before, he’d been keeping secrets from me. Just then, though, I was more concerned with the present. “Why did you take her?” I said, looking at Zoltan again. “She’s just a little girl. She means no harm to you.”

“Exactly. She’s just a little girl.” Zoltan smiled, revealing the tips of his fangs. Not very comforting. “The
chirreep
 . . . that’s what they call themselves . . . had never seen a human child before you came here. Adults, yes, but never a kid.”

“You know their language?”

“Only a little. They actually have to show something to you and tell you what it’s called before you know what it means. So when they told me that a group of small outsiders . . .
kreepah-shee
, their word for you . . . had appeared in the valley, I tried to get them to explain what they meant.” An apologetic shrug. “So they found one and brought her to me. They didn’t know she was a child . . . just an immature
kreepah-shee
.”

Now I understood. As Carlos had told me, the sandthieves—the
chirreep
—were an alien race, very primitive, that had only recently felt the hand of man. Zoltan had asked an innocent question, and they’d done their best to oblige him: take one, bring it back, and show it to him. By their nature, they were used to stealing things, so why stop at a child?

“So what are you to them?” Carlos handed Susan over to me, being careful never to turn his back on him. “Their leader? I mean, either you found them, or they found you, but obviously they respect you.”

“Can’t you tell?” I nodded toward the
chirreep
; they were still silent, their heads lowered into supplication. “He’s not their leader . . . he’s their god.”

“Thank you for recognizing that.” Zoltan’s wings rippled slightly as he stood a little straighter. “Many years ago, when I received divine inspiration to come to this world, I believed the Almighty wanted me to lead the human race to a higher plane. Since then, I’ve come to realize that I misunderstood His message. Man is a flawed creature, beyond redemption. I learned that when my followers . . . all but one, whom I saved as my consort . . . perished because of their inadequacies, and the one whom we’d trusted as our guide betrayed us. He paid for his sins. Cast out, he died alone, and now his soul suffers in—”

“You mean Ben Harlan?” Carlos shook his head. “Alive and well. He told us all about—”

“Be quiet!” His wings stretched out once more, and the
chirreep
quailed in alarm, squeaking among themselves at this outburst. “I won’t tolerate blasphemy in my house!”

“Sorry,” I said. “I apologize for my husband.” If Zoltan wanted to believe that Ben had been his own personal Judas, then let him. We might have found Susan, yet we were still on dangerous ground. “Please, go on, Reverend Shirow. I’d like to hear more about—”

“I no longer acknowledge that name. It belongs to the man I once was, before the final station of my transformation. I am now
Sareech
 . . . the messiah, the one who has come from the stars.” He beckoned to the
chirreep
behind him. “These are now my people, the ones I was truly meant to lead. Unspoiled, innocent, without original sin. Man is lost, but they . . . they are my flock. And they are under my protection.”

If Zoltan hadn’t been insane before, he certainly was now. When he’d come to Coyote, he’d been satisfied with merely being a prophet. With his original followers gone, having stumbled upon a primitive species willing to worship him, he’d elevated himself to godhood. And indeed, there was no one else who could challenge that claim. He was the only human on Coyote who looked the way he did . . . and the
chirreep
didn’t know any better.

“I understand this,” Carlos said. “Believe me, I do. I found some sand . . .
chirreep
, I mean . . . several years ago, on an island south of here.”

“You have?” Zoltan peered closely at him. “The
chirreep-ka
? Their cave drawings tell of another tribe across the waters, lost many years ago, but I didn’t . . . they didn’t . . . know they still existed.”

Some god. He didn’t even know about another group of sandthieves only a thousand or so miles away. “They’re there, all right,” Carlos went on, “but I didn’t let anyone know about them. I wanted to protect them, keep their existence a secret. And I won’t tell anyone about your
chirreep
if you’ll just . . .”

“It scarcely matters, does it?” Zoltan looked at Susan, huddled in my arms. “When she was taken, you came after her, and in doing so you found this . . . and I have no doubt that others will follow you. Perhaps this is part of my destiny. To save them from you and your kind.”

For a moment, he’d almost sounded human again. “Then we can go?” I asked. “We can . . .”

“Leave. No one will harm you.” He smiled, once again exposing his fangs. “Besides, it makes very little difference what you may say or do.
Corah
will soon speak again, as it did many years ago. It once changed all life on this world, and soon it will do so again.”

“Corah?”

He pointed toward the summit of Mt. Bonestell. “
Corah
. The destroyer.” When he looked at us again, his eyes promised fire. “Now go. Make peace with yourselves, if you can. The end of the world is near.”

Then he turned and began to walk back toward the cliff dwellings. Seeing that their god was returning to them, the
chirreep
broke their silence; once again, they began to twitter and chirp amongst themselves, bounding in and out of the doors and windows of their city. It wasn’t hard to figure out what they were saying. All hail mighty
Sareech
, our lord and savior. He confronts the
kreepah-shee
and sends them packing.
Sareech
is our man. . . .

“Let’s go,” Carlos murmured. “I don’t want to give him a chance to change his mind.” He took Susan from my arms. “C’mon, Scout. Piggyback ride down the mountain.”

Susan nodded, but didn’t smile or say anything as her father swung her up on his shoulders. She’d lost a bit of her innocence that day, although it would be many years before I knew just how much. But for the moment, we had our daughter back, and that was all that mattered. . . .

Just before I turned away, I caught a glimpse of something moving on the parapet where we’d first seen Zoltan and Susan. Looking up, I spotted a lone figure: a woman, wearing a frayed and dirty white robe, its cowl raised above her head. Thin and terribly frail, she leaned heavily against a walking stick, like someone who was ill; she peered down at us, and in the brief instant that our eyes met, I felt a sense of longing, as if she was silently begging us not to go.

Zoltan had mentioned having a consort, someone whom he’d claimed to have saved. And Ben had told us that he’d left someone behind. I struggled to remember her name. . . .

“Greer?”

I didn’t speak very loudly, yet Zoltan must have heard me, for he turned and looked back at me. There was a flash of anger in his eyes, and again I realized just how vulnerable we still were. Carlos must have heard me, too, because he stopped at the edge of the clearing. “What’s that, honey? You say something?”

“I just saw . . .” But when I looked up again, the figure had vanished from the parapet. Like the ghost of a dead woman, seen only for a moment in the half-light of winter’s day. “Never mind,” I murmured. “Let’s just get out of here.”

So we took Susan and made our way back down Mt. Bonestell,
saying little to each other as we followed our own footprints through the forest. About halfway back, we met up with Marie; she was leading a group of men from Shady Grove, all of them armed with carbines, ready and eager to take on whatever we might have found. It took a lot of double talk, yet we managed to convince them that a posse wasn’t needed. Some strange aboriginals had taken off with our girl, but they’d abandoned her after a while, and we’d found her on the mountain. More a nuisance than anything else. We just wanted to go home.

We didn’t tell Ben about finding Zoltan, nor did I tell him about having seen Greer. Ben had suffered enough already; he was already half-convinced that Zoltan was dead and that the woman he’d once loved had joined him. Why rip open an old wound? At best, the knowledge that they were both still alive would have broken his heart all over again; at worst, it might have prompted him to go charging up the mountain, in the vain hope that he might be able to save her. But if that was indeed Greer, then she was beyond hope of redemption; she’d become the consort of an insane god, and there was nothing that could be done for her.

So we swore Susan to silence and kept this knowledge to ourselves. That evening, though, after everyone had gone to bed, Carlos and I met once more with Fred LaRoux. In the quiet of the main lodge, with a fire in the hearth and drinks in hand, we came clean, telling him everything
that we knew, while insisting that the
chirreep
posed no direct threat to Shady Grove. He was disturbed to learn that Zoltan Shirow was still alive. His first impulse was to send some of his people up the mountain to find him, but Carlos and I managed to make him realize that doing so would probably cause more harm than good. So long as Shady Grove kept the gates locked at night, Zoltan and his
chirreep
would probably leave them alone so long as they left him alone.

We remained in Shady Grove for a few more days, then we loaded the Scouts and Dauphins aboard the shags and began to make the long journey back to Defiance. This time, though, we didn’t make the trip alone. Nearly two dozen men and women came with us, those willing and able to take up the fight against the Union. They were only the first; through the remaining months of winter, word would spread to other camps and settlements scattered across the Gillis Range, until an army was assembled for a final assault on Liberty, the colony we’d been forced to abandon so long ago.

In the end, Zoltan Shirow—
Sareech
, the mad god—was right all along. War wasn’t the worst thing, and even
Corah
wouldn’t have the last word. We’d seen the shape and form of spiritual slavery; only the apocalypse itself would bring salvation.

Part 7
LIBERATION DAY