Skeen's Return (39 page)

“Every little bit helps. Petro, if they haven't attacked by morning, and we'd better keep watch to make sure they don't try surprising us, activate the Gate as soon as we move out of camp. Let me think … um … there's a recent burn-over about an hour from the Fountain Glade. Flattish land, some sapling thickets, a lot of open space. Were I their warleader that's the place I'd choose; their numbers will count for a lot more in that kind of terrain. Can't be sure that's the place—it might be, that's all. Ti gives the word, you turn the Hunger loose. Be a good idea to have the excavator ready. Will the rain damage it?”

“No. Now?”

“Out in the rain again, sorry.” Skeen sighed, looked up at the sagging canvas over them. “And it's time I got my slicer ready. I should have done it before but I didn't want to cut off a foot or something.” She shrugged off the blanket and crawled into the rain.

The morning came dull and gray, the drizzle diminished to a light mist. Timka gave the horses more grain, helped Lipitero fold the canvas and tuck it down tightly over the gear; there was a curdle of despair in her stomach, her hands were unsteady, sounds roared in her ears as the Holavish pressed their hate at her, raptor and predator, the many-shaped Min army—out there, around them, hating Lipitero, hating Skeen, most of all hating her, that hatred hardened and sharpened by their own terrors. And behind them, beyond them, the Ever-Hunger silent-howled its need. As her fumbling hands worked, she cried silently—believe Lipitero, Holavish, believe the Ykx, sister. Believe the Hunger will be loosed on you. Let us go, let us leave. You'll be rid of me that way, rid of me as surely as if you ripped out my S'yer and burned it. Over and over she flung the silent plea to them as if by will alone she could drive the truth through their malice, through the complex of needs that impelled them to their own destruction, maybe the destruction of all life here.

Skeen returned from her prowl through the trees. “They're keeping back.” She moved her shoulders. “I can feel them out there.” She looked up at the thin mist shrouding the treetops. “This should burn off before long. We'd better get started.”

Timka stripped and shifted to the Pallah cat-weasel; she had to freeze the horses several times before they'd accept her anywhere near them, but she finally got them started. Skeen stood in the body of the cart behind her, holding onto the back of the driver's seat. The whippy knife that looked like flexible glass was bound into a slot in the end of a staff of polished hardwood, she held the staff securely in the elbow crease of her right arm; the flap on the darter's holster was tucked behind the belt, the lanyard was clipped in place, the slide on spray, not singleshot. There weren't even ruts to follow now, they were threading through trees and brush, picking a route around the bulge of the last mountain before they reached the narrow rambling valley where the Gate was. Timka fought her discomfort and struggled to keep track of the Min around them, like following an ocean current, water flowing in water, an ocean of Min flowing and flooding around her. A bit over two hours after dawn when they were close to the burnoff Skeen remembered, she felt the flow surge forward, the blast of determination from the dominants. “Skeen,” she whispered, “it's starting.”

“Petro, turn the beast loose. Now!”

“Ti, you're sure they're going to do it?”

“Yes, yes, the fools, yes, if you could feel them like I could, Lifefire, yes.”

Lipitero squeezed gently at the lock, tightening and releasing it in the code pattern that would reduce to almost nothing the field that kept the Hunger penned. “It's done. Ten minutes and it's here.”

Timka glared at the swaying grass ahead of them. The Pallah cat's pale blood was burning. She pulled her tongue over her lips and felt herself salivating; her enlarged, mobile ears twitched, not that she heard any physical sounds.…

The Min will crystallized.…

“IT COMES,” she cried. She stood, slapped the reins hard on the team's haunches, yowled a hunting cry that sent them into a blind panic. They ran full out, eyes wild, the cart bounding behind them. Petro braced the excavator on the cart's side, touched on the light blade; it was a meter wide, ten meters long and barely more than an atom thick. She swung it in a great arc, slicing through vegetation, stone, flesh. She felt no resistance beyond the weight of the instrument, but saplings fell and beast Min shrieked. On the other side of the cart, Skeen set herself to ride its leaps and lurches like a surfer in rough water. She swung the darter in a matching arc, her aim point about a meter off the ground, pulsing out sprays of darts whenever she saw something to shoot at. Timka leaped about between them, plucking fliers like ripe plums whenever they got close enough to be dangerous.

The team began to slow. Three times, someone among the Holavish with a little more sense than the others tried to stop the careering of the cart by freezing the horses, but Timka undid their efforts the moment they acted and the run went on; she even found time to steer the groaning beasts around the worst obstacles, pricking them right, turning them left as the terrain demanded. She danced on the seat and yowled, had to restrain herself from leaping down among the Min and slashing with handclaws and feetclaws until she drowned in Min flesh and Min fluids.

She heard a deep thrumming like horses running, coming out of the West, a great herd of them spread horizon to horizon, running wild. From her precarious perch on the seat she saw Min at the rear of the horde break and run.

Earth and sky throbbed with the beat of the beast.

The darter ran dry. Skeen shoved it into the holster and reached for the bladed staff.

The horses screamed and dropped. The cart rocked wildly, then settled as the weight of the beasts anchored it. In the next instant the flesh began melting off their bones until the harness straps held a set of bones and a few wisps of hair.

Everywhere Min screamed.

Lipitero shut off the excavator and set it down. “Skeen, Ti, get over here. Close to me. You're all right for a few minutes but no more.”

Life emptied out of the Min around them, then their flesh spun away. The SOUND filled the space between earth and heaven, it vibrated in their various bloods and bones. Timka shuddered with loathing and terror and guilt. The SOUND wasn't eating her, but it was inside her, she'd never be free of it, never clean again.…

After an eternity that might have been five breaths or ten, the sound diminished, flowed away from them moving south and west, lapping up the life that had run from it.

Lipitero closed down the shunt, fiddled with her harness again. “There,” she said. “The Ykx at Fellarax will begin herding the Hunger back into its pen.”

Skeen stood slowly, looked around. “The thing's thorough, you'll have to give it that.” She vaulted over the side and went to look at the heaps of horse bones. “So much for horsepower. Come on, Ti, shift and help me cut the harness loose.”

Timka snarled, a soft deadly sound.

Skeen set her hand on her hip, waved her stump. “Come on, use your head, Ti. We've got to get out of here and we need the cart, or can you turn yourself into a mule and haul the gear for us?”

It took several minutes of interior struggle, but Timka finally threw off the Pallah cat-weasel and reverted to the standard Pallah form. Listlessly she dragged on her robe, pulled the tie tight and tumbled herself over the side. “You should have left me cat,” she muttered. “I'm about as much use as a sick cow this way.”

“You'll manage. Get a move on, I need your hands. Djabo's nimble digits, I'll be biting my elbows before I get to the Tank Farm.”

With a lot of grunting and cursing but no real difficulties, Skeen and Timka pulled the cart through the drying smears of dead Min, Lipitero walking beside them with Skeen's darter, its reservoir refilled from the water bag. In less than an hour they reached the eerie motionless glade where the Gate was. Skeen retrieved the cached swords and other items from the hollow in the tree, and dug the Min jewelry from the rodent nest in the rockpile beside one of the Gate posts. She set these things in the cart, then scowled at the swirls of dust that filled the space between the posts. “I think it's wide enough,” she said finally. “Ti?”

Timka blinked at her, but didn't seem to see her. The bright green gaze was absent, turned inward. She pulled the ties loose; with a kind of whole body shrug she threw the robe off, shifted to her earlier, simpler form, the cat-weasel, and loped toward the Gate. She gathered herself and leaped through the dustclouds.

“Oh, fuck.” Skeen snatched the darter from Lipitero and ran after the Min.

Two cats were kicking up more dust in a snarling vicious battle, banging from ruin to ruin, wrestling, clawing, heads striking like serpents. They were covered with that cream-yellow dust; impossible to tell who was which. Skeen swore and darted them both, darted them again when they looked like they were starting to shift.

She heard a scraping noise behind her, whirled, went to help Lipitero ease the cart through the Gate and wheel it into a rutted pot-holed street. The Ykx looked round the ruins and the dry-bones valley. “Wonderful.”

“Patience, my friend. Things get more interesting after we get out of here.” Taking Timka's shabby robe, she went to the cats and flicked some of the dust off them. Now that they were lying still, it was easier to tell the difference between them. Telka-cat was a shade or two darker, had a blunter muzzle (more cat than weasel), and small round ears; she was chunkier than Ti-cat and somehow not so lethal. Skeen wrapped her hand in the loose skin at her nape and began dragging her toward the Gate. Lipitero started to help, but Skeen waved her away. “Keep watch,” she said. “No telling what's hanging about here.”

She muscled the cat through the Gate, took a last look around. Nothing had changed. The air hung still and silent, not a leaf was moving. No insect or bird noises. Trees like painted images. Short thick grass, not a blade moving. From the west the faint sound of water falling. “Well, Mistommerk, it's been interesting.” With a flourish of her single hand, she stepped back through the Gate. “Any problems, Petro?”

“Not even a hungry gnat.”

“You'd better shut down the Gate. I don't know what kind of sensors the Junks might have scattered about here.” She walked to the cart and stood scratching her back against a corner as she frowned at Timka. “Too bad I had to dart Ti. That sister of hers just about gave me a hernia and now her.” She wiped at the sweat beading on her brow, swore, then bent to lift the comatose Ti-cat.

“Still the same sweet temper,” Tibo said.

Skeen swung around so fast she staggered; she steadied herself, slipped the knife from her arm sheath and started for the man standing in the ragged gap between two of the higher walls.

“Get a hitch on it, love.” He raised the stunner he'd been holding casually against his thigh. “Just to make sure you listen.”

She straightened, looked at the knife, slid it back into its sheath. “Tibo you baster, where's Picarefy?”

Tibo stood in the opening, the stunner steady on her, lithe compact little man, his walnut brown skin gleaming in the white searing light of the sun, his black eyes laughing at her. “Safe. That's the point of the exercise.”

“What? Never mind. Where is she? That's the only thing I want to hear.”

“Marigold Pit.”

She gazed at him a long moment, then sighed, tension draining out of her so completely she barely found the energy to keep standing. “Why?” It was a question she dreaded asking, its answer something she dreaded even more.

“Abel Cidder.”

“What! Where?”

“I was working on Sessamarenn the Aviote. He'd hinted he wanted to finance a backcountry dig outside channels. We were in the Golden Wheel, in one of the privacy alcoves, a high hole, he said it reminded him of his perch back home; we had the field up and tight and were doing some of the preliminary chat, both of us looking down at the main floor. Abel Cidder came in with a Junk, the Brolmahn no less. They were talking, friendly as tronchai in a cold winter.”

Skeen ran her hand through damp sweaty hair. “I thought a lot of things, but never Abel Cidder.” She ran her tongue over dry lips. “We're going to have to do something about him.”

“You'd get a lot to agree with you. So, after Cidder went upstairs with the Brolmahn, I chatted a bit more with Sessamarenn; it felt like I was sitting bare ass on a zarb mound, but old Sam's no fool. If I ran out right after Cidder showed, well, you see what I mean. We finished the meal with each understanding the other pretty well, about where I expected when I sat down with him, so I must have handled myself well enough. I tell you this, there was just one thing in my head. Picarefy. Cidder had the clout to confiscate her if he nosed her out. The name change and the papers were good enough for the Junks but once Cidder started sniffing through reports which we both know he does, may his nose get the tichzenrotte and fall off, he'd have us cold. I caught a jit to the shuttle port, my gut in knots. When the shuttle ferried me up with no trouble and there were no sett buoys anchoring her, I relaxed a little, but I knew there might be no time left. I didn't dare go back down, not even to leave you a message. I didn't know where you were and there was no time to hunt for you and going through Picarefy's com, well, I didn't know who might be listening. I explained the situation to Picarefy; we agreed you could take care of yourself well enough while we were gone, that I'd get back soon as I could manage it and collect you once I'd calmed you down enough so you'd listen. Marigold was the closest Pit. I left her at Ambo's. Cream was in and hungry. I hired him to bring me back and hang around looking like he was planning to buy something. He's not one of Cidder's pets, not like us.” Tibo grinned. “Cidder only persecutes the very best.” He sobered. “I figured you'd be ready to roast me over a slow fire, but I didn't expect you to vanish. I've spent the last five months going slowly crazy, Skeen. I even broke into Records to see if they'd shoved you into a work camp, sweating blood the whole time afraid they'd killed you. You know what I found, a record of a saayungka chase that ended in this valley and a lot of notes about mysterious disappearances here. Folk who melted into air and never showed up again. This is the third time I've come here; I've just about wiped out my stash in bribes. Yours too, I'm afraid.”