Quest (24 page)

'Yes. But we can't stay here. Is he still unconscious? What did you hit him with?' She forced herself to turn and look at her attacker. Only then did she see the knife sticking out of the man's back and the sticky redness around it. She turned chalk white. 'You killed him!' She whispered the words, as if she couldn’t bear to say them aloud, then flung herself on the body, testing it for signs of life. But the man was most definitely dead. 'The God preserve us from violence!' she moaned. 'Oh, dear Brother, forgive me! What have I done?'

'Katia!'

She did not hear him. 'To take a life! And it's my fault, all my fault! I should have been more careful. I should have noticed someone was following me.'

'Katia, listen to me!' But Davred had to take her by the shoulders and shake her before she would do that.

'Katia, I
had to
kill him.'

'Had to?' Her voice was a hysterical shriek, which the rocks bounced back at them. 'No one
has
to kill anyone else!

They
choose
to!'

'Then I
chose
to kill him. It was necessary, believe me, Katia.'

'No! No, it was wrong. It's always wrong to kill.'

He took her by the shoulders. 'You're not thinking clearly. I'm a weakling compared to him, and I'm still limping badly. If I'd tried to overcome him, I'd have been captured like you were. He was not only as strong as an ox, but cunning with it. I watched him herd you up the hill. I listened to his obscenities. I had to stay here and watch. I longed to come to your help, but I didn't dare leave the cave until his back was turned. The Sisterhood teaches its women self-defence tactics, I know, and look how quickly he overcame you. I've never fought anyone in my life, Katia. Personal physical combat is extinct on all our advanced worlds, or it was until recently. Those who crave such things go out to settle new planets. I'm not that sort of person.'

Katia swallowed and looked across at him. She hated the fact that his words made sense. She did not want to be convinced.

He pressed his advantage. 'Herra said you must kill to save me, if necessary. She said I'm important enough to the Quest to justify killing. She made a point of it.'

'In that case, you should have stayed in the cave and let him take me. I'm not important and I don't want anyone to be killed for me.'

QUEST Shannah Jay 88

'You're wrong. We're both Key Lives in the next Stage, according to Herra. Doesn't the Quest come before everything? And would
you
have stayed safely out of sight if it had been me who’d been captured?'

She gazed at him numbly, then slowly shook her head. A tear trickled down her cheek and she brushed it away. 'No.

No, I couldn't have. But oh, to kill him! To take a life!'

'Katia, you must pull yourself together. I can't hide this body on my own. We must move it now then get back into the cave. It's a miracle no one's come along. We're in full view here. Katia, are you listening?'

She shuddered, but the blankness had left her eyes. She looked around and swallowed her nausea, running through a quick Discipline of Self-control. 'We can't bury him in this rocky ground,' her voice was dull and flat, 'so we'll have to find a crevice and cover the body with rocks.'

'Where?'

'I don't know. I'll look round. You'd better go back into the cave until I return.'

'And him?'

'We'l pull him behind this rock. They won't be able to see him from below.'

'Will you be all right?'

'I must be.' Her voice was toneless, her cheeks ashen.

Katia found a crack in the rocks, not large enough to call a cave, but large enough for their purpose. With Davred's help, she rolled the body into it and they covered it with rocks. She tried to say the words of passing from this life, but couldn’t. In the end she gave up trying, whispered, 'I'm so sorry!' then went to retrieve her bag of food before rejoining Davred in the cave.

'Would you like something to eat?' she asked, looking dazedly at the food.

'Not yet. Would you like to talk about it?'

'No.'

'Come and sit next to me, then.'

'No. Please - just leave me alone for a while.'

'Do you have a Discipline to deal with this?' he asked gently, still worried about her ashen face and stricken expression.

'Yes. But I can't do it now. I need to stay alert, to keep watch. Over you. Over Herra.' She gestured to the Elder Sister, still lying near the front of the cave like a serene marble statue.

'How long will she be like that?'

'A few days. You can never tell. She's so old she's a law unto herself. Since she's well over two hundred years old, her body will take longer to regenerate than others would.' She didn’t tell him how worried she was about Herra, who ought to have had a Healer's help.

'Well then, I think I’d like something to eat. I practised your Discipline, and it helped, but the hunger is still there.

Am I such a poor subject?'

'No. But when you're hungry, it's best to do something else as well as run through the Discipline. If you continue to think about your hunger, then you'll stay hungry.' Listlessly she stood up and went over to the bag of food. As she looked down at it, she suddenly sobbed, cast an anguished look at Davred and crumpled to the ground.

'He's dead! We killed him! We took a life!'

Davred gathered her in his arms and let her cry against him. Gradual y her tears lessened and she stopped her bitter self-recrimination. When she was quiet, he said in his most gentle voice, 'Say the fifth verse of the prophecy, my Katia.'

'What?'

QUEST Shannah Jay 89

'Say the fifth verse. The one after our meeting.'

She took a deep breath and recited quietly,

Like tempered steel, those two shall learn,

Through hardship, pain and woe.

No ease, no peace, though they may yearn,

Small respite from the foe.

'It's coming true already! My Katia, shall we be strong enough to face such a future? Hardship, pain and woe?'

'We must be.'

'Then we can't let this death, which we both hate, overset our reason and imperil the Quest. Can we?'

Her eyes were brimming with tears again, but she didn’t allow them to fall. 'No. No, we can’t, my Davred.' She sighed and leaned against him for comfort.

'And who knows how many lives we've saved by killing such a man?' he said, thinking aloud.

Katia jerked abruptly away from him. 'That's
their
reasoning! It justifies the killing. We must never do that.'

'What would you say instead, then?'

'I'd say - I'd say we lost the chance to save that man - his soul, his - whatever your people cal it. There was an evil in him that I've seen occasionally before in Those of the Serpent. Herra can sense them because of it, you know.' She looked at him sternly. 'Say, rather, my Davred, that you saved me by a most abhorrent expedient, because I'm vital to the Quest. But even that sort of reasoning does little to heal the pain I feel at being responsible for someone's death.'

'You aren't responsible; I am. And I'd kill him again without hesitation. I couldn't have left you in his power. The way he taunted you . . . ' He pulled her fiercely into his arms. 'You're
my
Katia! And twice in the last few minutes you've called me
your
Davred. Come to me, Katia! Let us become man and wife now.'

'At such a moment?' Horror etched shrillness into her normally soft voice. 'It would ruin our love.'

'It would make us whole again.'

'I can't. I must not.'

He jerked away from her and went over to stand at the front of the cave. As he turned to gaze out at the hillside, the shadow of a cloud crept towards the cave. Katia shivered. Davred stood motionless, staring blindly at the rocky slope.

Gradual y, the conviction grew in him that this was a special moment. The sensation of
knowing
crawled up his spine and made his temples tingle. Unconsciously, he straightened up and threw back his head. '
The God whispers within me
,' he said, and even his voice was different. Power was lambent within him.

A cold breeze whirled round the cavern. Katia stared in amazement at the rigid figure silhouetted against the returning brightness outside.

Davred raised his hands in a salute to some invisible presence. '
The God speaks through me
.'

Katia filed what was happening into prime memory, every nuance of every sound. She would record this later in the Archives. The first prophecy of the Lord Davred. She was filled with awe.

Slowly Davred turned to face Katia. His face seemed slightly luminous, although it should have been shadowed, since his back was now towards the light. 'I
know
the rightness of what I’m saying. I speak the words of the God of our Quest.'

She bowed her head. 'I hear you, Lord Davred.'

QUEST Shannah Jay 90

'My Katia, now, in this cave, we must begin our life together. We shall be as one, body and soul, linked in the service of our God. This is our time. Go and wash your body!
From this day shall our first daughter spring – a life to replace the
life we took
.' His voice echoed back from the fractured surface of the rocky walls. His eyes glowed with certainty.

Katia recognised the look in his eyes. It was the same as that in Herra's whenever she prophesied. The God in him had indeed spoken. She bowed her head as his certainty washed over her and began to cleanse her of guilt. A life created for a life taken. It was right.

He led her to the back of the cave and helped her to remove her robe. With gentle hands and almost ritual gestures, he washed her bruised body. Her pulse began to beat more rapidly and her breathing quickened to match his. When he had finished, she helped him to remove the blue suit and wash his body in turn. His limbs gleamed palely in the darkness.

When they were ready, they lay down on her robe beside the spring, and she closed her eyes with a sigh, for she too was now caught up in the hands of the fate they were to share. This was their time for union. It wasn’t passion, but destiny, which drew them together this time. The power of the God was within them. But from their union, passion grew. At Davred's touch a fire began to burn in her body and a trembling made her cling to him. His kisses drowned her in such sweetness that she began to forget the evil of the day.

At the front of the cave, Herra smiled slightly in her sleep, as if she could sense that things were happening as they should.

* * *

Soo had kept watch on Davred every moment she could, though Robler had decreed that she and Mak were not to be trusted alone with that duty.

'Is that our Davred, our cold logical Davred, who has always made it quite clear that he isn't interested in even temporary pairings?' Soo stared at the tiny com-screen area in her quarters, wishing the visual radius of the tracer Herra carried allowed her to see what was happening at the back of the cave, instead of broadcasting only the voices of Davred and Katia. 'He doesn't even sound like the same person!' she said. 'I know it's his voice, but . . . ' She couldn’t put the difference into words.

'He doesn't look the same, either,' said Mak. 'He’s always seemed - I don't know, a trifle colourless. Special only in his intellect. Pleasant, but detached. Now he's vibrant with life. And if that prophecy about a daughter comes true, then we'll have further proof of the powers of the Sisterhood to send to Confex.'

'Robler will call it coincidence. Mak, I'm glad we're not able to record what they're doing. It would be wrong. It would spoil the beauty of the moment.'

Soo took Mak's hand and began playing with his fingers, wondering if he would ever suggest that they become permanent partners. It seemed to her now that the two of them had wasted several years together on the satellite.

Davred had not been the only cool and logical person in the group. Mak had been notorious for his lack of emotion, and Soo herself had been so engrossed in her work that she had kept her colleagues at arm's length. Now it seemed that they were all changing, coming to life. Was it the influence of this planet?

'Robler spoils everything he touches nowadays,' said Mak. 'He's become sour and twisted, and he's spreading that sourness over us all. He's taken Davred's defection as a personal insult and I'm beginning to believe that he's become unsuited to manage this project. Has he found out yet that you've rigged up your own private com-board in here, Soo?'

'No. He hasn't enough technical knowledge to check things like that. And the privacy laws forbid him to enter anyone's quarters, unless invited - except in emergencies. Even then, he couldn't get in here. I've made myself a very special lock, keyed by several things, impossible for anyone else to open, except by brute force.' She reached out suddenly and switched the transmission off. 'I think this is one time when Katia and Davred deserve total privacy, don't you?' She erased the last few moments of the recording.

Mak put his arm round her. 'They aren't the only ones to deserve a little privacy.' He kissed her, and though his eyes were soft with affection, his expression was even more serious than usual. 'I'm becoming very fond of you, Soo. I've never been able to enter into even a short liaison lightly, but I think I'm coming to love you in a permanent way. I didn't
QUEST Shannah Jay 91

believe such love was possible, let alone desirable, but now . . . '

She smiled at him. 'And I love you, Mak. Is love contagious, do you suppose? Does it come from the Sisterhood and their ways?' She spoke without thinking, but the idea made them both stop and wonder.

He looked down at her, so fragile and tiny against his chest, and he frowned, his sandy brows a straight line across his pale freckled skin. 'I don't know. But then, love is something we in the Confederation don't know much about, isn't it? No one teaches our young about it. It's rarely mentioned at all. Only sex is taught. Love is something I've never experienced before. On Delta Macros, it didn't seem to occur.'

'No. Nor on Tiangan.' It was her turn to frown. 'In the Confederation, everything else is carefully researched - but not love. We know only about satisfying our physical needs, and I'm beginning to think that sexual gratification is not nearly enough.' She stood on tiptoe and kissed the beautiful lean planes of his face gently. 'I think we can learn a great deal from the people of Sunrise.