The Healer (31 page)

It was what she wanted to hear. “I never had a brother or sister, but if I did, I hope I'd say the same.”

“I wish you wouldn't hide things from me. I wish you'd trust me.”

She was quiet for a moment. “What he did—what we did—it's not something I'm proud of. I'm sorry I didn't tell you, but that's why.”

“Tell me the rest.”

“I was intrigued by what he said. What did he mean ‘worth my while‘? I had everything I wanted, and I wondered what he thought that he could bribe me with.” She paused. “You can probably guess.”

“I don't want to guess.”

She glanced at him, then looked away. “He offered to heal me. ‘But I'm not sick,' I told him. He replied that everyone was sick with something. It didn't have to be big; what I had probably wasn't. He dared me to let him try to do it. He was so full of himself. So cocky. I told myself he needed to be taught a lesson. He needed to be brought down a notch. So I let him.”

Payne waited for her to say more, but that didn't happen. She fell silent instead.

“What did he heal you of?” he finally asked.

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“Nothing important. A little spasm in a muscle, but that's not the point.”

“Why don't you tell me the point?” He was exhausted, and this conversation, this confession, was the last thing he wanted to hear.

“I am telling you. Don't you understand? I'm the reason he's the way he is. I'm responsible for that thing inside him. Not my father, but me.”

Bolt had misgivings, grave misgivings, but for the most part he kept them to himself. With Payne he was out of his element, and as for Meera, it wasn't his place to meddle in her affairs. Still, he insisted on a few basic precautions. For their own safety, they had to wear protective clothing and arm themselves. And for the safety of everybody else, they had to do what they had come to do within the confines of the Pen.

He drove them out in the daily convoy. Meera brought food and water in a satchel. Payne slept virtually the entire way.

“He's gonna do a lot of good like that,” Bolt observed at one point.

“He's exhausted. He can use the rest. He'll be okay.” She hoped that this was true, but something else was bothering her. “It's not like we had a choice.”

“Who does?”

She gave Bolt a look. “We might if you called off your thugs.”

“I don't know what you mean.”

“I think you do.”

He shrugged and wiped the sweat off his neck. “Can't stop you thinking.”

Sometimes talking to him was like talking to a sponge. Her words just disappeared, as if they'd never been spoken.

“Then tell me I have time to wait,” she said.

A fly was crawling up the windshield. Bolt swatted it away, and it circled the cab before landing precisely at the spot where it had started. Bolt flicked it off again, and the same thing happened.

“Now there's a homing creature if ever I saw one. Got an instinct sure as it's got a wing.”

“The Pen's the home I gave him,” said Meera, taking his meaning, or what she assumed his meaning, at once. “He doesn't have a choice.”

Bolt said nothing.

“He's sick,” she reminded him, a position she had maintained for years. It was safer ground with the superstitious drivers and guards than saying what she sometimes thought, which was that Wyn was possessed. Being sick was blameless and demanded patience, whereas possession demanded action.

“No one's planning anything,” he said at length. “There's only talk so far.”

“And what's the talk consist of?”

“I expect you know.”

“Enlighten me,” said Meera.

He shrugged. “Self-protection. Watching our backs. No one else is going to do it for us. We need to organize our own defense.”

“In other words, you're taking matters into your own hands.”

Bolt liked her, he truly did, but there were times she acted so stupid, so out of touch with how things were.

“With all respect,” he said, “our own hands are all we got.”

From the rear their Conk let loose a peal of almost human-sounding
laughter. Unbroken by the need to take a breath, the sound went on and on without pause, its pitch steadily ascending.

Meera got out the box of earplugs, but abruptly, the noise ended.

“I don't envy him,” said Bolt. “Or any of them. Having to lie down next to all those sick people. Get mixed up with all that nastiness. Then having to spit it out of their own selves.” He gave a shudder. “Makes me ill just to think of it.”

“He likes it, Bolt.”

“That's not normal.”

“He's a healer.”

“Like I said.”

Payne had settled against the door, his eyes closed, his face upturned. He looked so innocent, too innocent she thought, to be woken up, much less woken up to risk his life. She took heart in what he'd told her about Valid, that pompous, dangerous man. How a part of him, a tiny part, was tesque. It gave her hope that Payne would be able to heal his brother. Unconsciously, she rubbed the scar beneath her ribs where Wyn had bitten her.

“He told me once that what he makes is beautiful to him. Not all of them feel that way. It's one of the things that makes him special.”

Bolt cocked an eye at her. “Special?”

“Yes.”

“The other one, he's special to you, too.”

“That's different.”

“None of my business, but you get in trouble having more than one.”

“I don't,” she said.

“Even one can be a handful.”

“Thank you, Bolt. I'll remember that.”

“Especially how it is. You and him.”

This was as close as he ever came to commenting on her relationship with Wyn. He was not an advocate of tesque and human intermixing, and he was not alone. Few tesques, and fewer humans, were.

“You came from us,” she reminded him. “We're mixed up from the very beginning.”

“That was a long time ago. And you got it backward. It's you who came from us.”

It was an old argument of theirs. Typically, she invoked the scientific point of view, which prevailed among humans; he, the ancient stories and beliefs of his own race.

But she was in no mood to argue today. “However it began, we're mixed up now.”

Bolt had no quarrel with that, except to repeat his earlier observation that Payne, who was now soundly snoring, seemed an unlikely candidate to get anyone unmixed.

They arrived at the Pen without incident, rumbling down in a cloud of dust, then waiting their turn to unload. Afterward, Bolt led them to the guardhouse, a stone-walled building dug into the ground to insulate against the heat. Stairs led down to a thick, tight-fitting wooden door. Several of the drivers sat inside, cooling their heels before heading back. One of them was smoking something pungent. He offered it to Bolt, who took a drag, then passed it on.

Beyond this common room was a smaller room where a guard was cooking. Meera led Payne past this to yet another room, where the equipment was stored.

Here were the pikes, the gloves, the meshwork vests, the helmets that every guard wore. The helmets were constructed of a variety of metal plates that were fastened together. In order to accommodate the motley topography of the tesque skull, these plates were made of different sizes and curvatures. No two helmets were exactly the same, just as no two tesques were. The final product resembled the cranium of a newborn, with its floating continents of bone not yet fully joined or fused. Needless to say, the helmets were not nearly so soft or penetrable.

Meera divided up the food, leaving a portion behind. From a guard she found out where Wyn had last been sighted, then, shouldering the
pole she used for feeding him, she left Payne inside to get what final rest he could and headed out to bait the trap.

He was standing in a pool of dust about a hundred yards up-canyon, arms at his sides, jaw set, staring down the sun. He had taken to doing this often, further proof to her of his deterioration. In the desert—even to a blind man—the sun was not a friend.

The pole was long and had a wire basket on one end, which she filled with the food she'd brought. Stepping back, she levered the shaft atop the fence, then twisted it, dumping the offering on the ground. Wyn turned his head, sniffing the air. Enjoy, she told him silently, hurrying back to pick up Payne. Next time at the table.

Bolt was talking to the two gate guards when she returned, and they were looking none too pleased with what they were hearing. They had their own plan for Wyn, and it wasn't the one that Bolt, on her behalf, was laying out. One of them offered to drive a pike through his midsection. The other suggested a lethal blow to the head.

They quieted down when she arrived, scuffing their boots in the dirt and looking merely surly. A few minutes later, Payne joined them. The sun had reached the canyon rim, and the day's Concretions were dispersing.

Meera pulled Bolt aside. “What did you tell them?”

“What you told me to.”

“What else?”

“To not let things get out of hand.”

“Meaning what?”

He ran his thumb down his scar, considering. “I told them that if your harebrained idea doesn't work, they were on their own.”

She nodded, satisfied at least to know where things stood. “That's what I thought you said.”

There was a bucket beside the gate containing a grayish, viscous substance, and the guards dipped their pike tips into it before setting out. Meera did the same with hers, and Payne, bringing up the rear,
did likewise. The guard in front stopped and told him to grab the bucket.

“What is it?” he asked.

The guard shook his head and turned away, as though offended by his ignorance.

“Conk juice. Wha'dya think?” the other guard said brusquely.

Rather than take the shortest path, which would have led them through the heart of the Pen, they took a more circuitous but safer route around the periphery. All of them wore earplugs to muffle sound. They passed a low mound of dug-up sand similar to the one Payne and Meera had seen before. Beside it was a shallow hole. A grave? he wondered. A hiding place? The beginnings of a tunnel? In the hole lay a glistening substance that looked like hardened sap. From nowhere came a curdling screech, bone-chilling even through the plugs. Payne froze and blindly groped behind him for the fence.

The lead guard halted and with a curse came back. “Don't stop. Keep moving. If you act scared, they'll come after you.”

Payne tried but couldn't get his legs to work. “Go on. I'll catch up.”

“Not likely.” Wedging his shoulder under Payne's arm, the smaller but stronger man got him off the fence and moving. “We should be going the other direction.”

Payne twisted out of his grip. “You want to go back, feel free.”

The guard snorted.

“I mean it.” He was tired of their contempt.

“You can't even walk.”

“I'm walking now.”

The guard grumbled something under his breath, but in the end wouldn't leave. “She's a witch. She'd have my head.”

They reached Wyn without further incident, stopping downwind of him, a safe distance away. He was stuffing food by the handful into his mouth and took no note of their arrival. There were several Concretions
in various stages of dissolution in his vicinity, and, pikes drawn, the guards cleared the area of them. Then they sprinkled Conk juice in a wide semicircle around Wyn, beginning and ending at the fence.

The sun by now had set; the first star was not yet out. In the twilight the four of them positioned themselves at equal distances along the circumference of the semicircle. Wyn glanced up, then seemingly unconcerned, went back to eating. A moment later, Meera gave the signal, and stealthily, like bandits, they moved in.

It was over almost before it started. Wyn put up a fight, but he was no match for the four of them. Each attacker took a single limb, pulling it out straight and locking the joint, then sitting on it to guarantee it wouldn't move. Slapping leather thongs around his wrists and ankles, then driving spikes through loops in the thongs, they staked him out spread-eagled on the ground.

“Now there's a pretty picture,” remarked the lead guard, standing back to admire their work.

“Not so tough,” said the other one.

Tough enough, thought Payne, who until now had never been a match for his brother. He would have liked to see how any one of them, any two for that matter, would have stood up to him in a fair fight. Even now he half expected Wyn to break loose and overpower them.

Removing his gloves, he unbuckled his chin strap, then worked his helmet over his forehead until he got it off.

The lead guard eyed him. “Wouldn't do that, if I was you. There's plenty here'd have your head without sending an invitation.”

“But here's the prime suspect,” said the other, prodding Wyn with the blunt end of his pike. “And here we are, standing around nattering.”

“Get away from him,” Meera warned him, and when he hesitated, she took a swift step forward and kicked his pike away.

He responded by turning on her, prepared to fight. “C'mon. You want me, too?”

“I don't want anybody.”

“Tell Gird that.”

Gird, the lost driver, was this man's son. Upon hearing of his disappearance, Meera had immediately offered a reward for any relevant information. She reminded him of that and repeated the offer now.

The lead guard tried to get his mate to drop the matter. The light was bleeding from the sky, and he wanted to get back. But Gird's father was not appeased.

“She talks all nice, but she don't care. She's more interested in this.” He kicked dirt at Wyn. “But me, I'm more interested in her.”

He took a step toward her. “It's you that's fed him. You that's kept him alive. Why, I wonder? What's your plan?”

“You know the plan,” she said.

“Humans lie.”

“Then stay. Make sure we don't.”

“Let's go,” said his companion.

But he had a better idea. “We got a golden opportunity here. I say we kill him.”

At the mention of “kill,” Meera raised her lance, leveling it at his chest. In response he strained forward, as though daring her to be the first to draw blood.

At which point Payne intervened. Pushing Meera's spear aside, he placed himself between the two of them.

“You're not enemies. Stop acting like you are. Look.”

They followed his finger to where it pointed, at his brother, whose head was thrashing side to side. His arms and legs were straining at the thongs, every muscle taut and ridged with tension. At first it seemed that he was trying to free himself of his bonds, but this was not the case. Rather, it was the thing inside that was trying to free itself of him.