The Outskirter's Secret (59 page)

"If Slado sends soldiers," Bel said quietly,
"we can fight them, face-to-face. And if he sends too many soldiers
to face, then we can fight them from behind: hiding, sneaking.

"If Slado sends wizards, we'll face them
until we learn the limits of their magic; and then we'll vanish
into the landscape, strike when they're not looking, or bait them
until they fall into some trap."

She raised her hands, made them into fists,
and drew them down as if forcibly, to rest on her knees. "If they
build fortresses," she said, "we'll break them down. If we can't,
then we'll infiltrate. If they take up residence, we'll become
their servants and their lovers and murder them in their sleep . .
." The rain returned, spattering, hissing. Bel ignored it.

"Rowan," she said, water trailing down her
face, "I can fight people; any people that he sends here, I can
find some way to fight. Any wizard who comes here, despite magic,
despite guards—if they come, I can strike them. Anything that I can
touch, I can fight . . ."

And she gathered her strength and shouted, as
if it were the last shout of her life: "Rowan,
I cannot fight the sky
!"

And the warrior sat silent on the torn earth.
She dropped her head and closed her eyes.

The steerswoman gazed down at her. "I
can."

Bel looked up.

"One person has caused this, Bel," Rowan
continued. "One single man: Slado. And I can fight him.

"I'll find out what this is all for, what
it's meant to accomplish. I'll find out how it's done—and put a
stop to it." She dropped to her knees beside her friend. "I need to
know more. I need to learn, to learn everything I can. And when I
know enough, then will come the time to act."

Bel gazed at her. "Can you learn where Slado
is?"

The steerswoman nodded. "Eventually.
Yes."

"We'll find him, and kill him."

"If that's what it takes."

"If it's not what it takes, it's still what
we'll do. I'll slit his throat myself. He's a murderer, Rowan.
Murderers die." And the steerswoman could not argue.

A voice spoke from behind. "Rowan?" She
turned.

Averryl was there; and behind him, Kree, and
the rest of the band. There was something in their midst. Averryl
said, "We're going to cast Fletcher."

Rowan looked at the shrouded form lying among
the warriors; not standing invisibly behind her, not waiting to
speak, not one moment away from touching her shoulder.

"Cast him?" she said uncomprehending. An
Outskirter rite of honor for a wizard's minion, a man who had been
sent for Slado's purposes, to aid in a plan which had caused only
horror and death?

A man who had taken up Outskirter ways,
Outskirter life; who had come to love the world he lived in, and
each person who had stood beside him, for their, beauty, for their
strength, for their honor. A man whose every word was a lie, but
whose every chosen action was driven by only truth, the truth that
was his love of the life; who had declared, with laughter, with
joy, his love of a tribe's old cook, of a hand-woven rug, of a
rough pottery bowl, of a steerswoman. A man who had discarded
unimaginable powers and accepted the simple sword, striking at the
enemies of those he loved, knowing he could die in the attempt and
believing it worth his death.

A man who had stood by his tribe, by his
seyoh, by his chief. A warrior of Kree's band. Fletcher.

Outskirter rites for an Outskirter. Rowan
stood, rain on her clothing, her hands, her face. "Yes," she said.
"Yes, of course. I'm coming."

D
ust Ridge was
appropriately named.

They saw it first as a smoky line on the
horizon. Rowan took it to be a low cloud; but it did not follow the
rest of the weather. It grew larger as they approached, and at last
they could see that it was a long cliff, with winds from above
spilling dust from drier land beyond, over the edge. Rowan worried
about climbing up into that dust, but it was only with the wind
from the east that the phenomenon occurred. When the wind faded, or
changed, Dust Ridge stood bare and calm.

They had traveled with Kammeryn's people for
two months as the tribe slowly recovered. The Outskirters had
survived by replenishing their flock with goats strayed from tribes
that did not survive the tempests and tornadoes. But when they
reached land too grim to support the tribe, they paused to wait,
and Rowan and Bel went on alone.

Dust Ridge should have been out on the
blackgrass prairie; the report of Bel's father had placed it so. It
was not. It was on the Face.

Rowan wondered at her own surprise. The
Outskirts moved, she knew, shifting forever eastward. The Face
moved as well, she now saw, staying always ahead of the Outskirts
themselves. When Bel's father had been here, it had been prairie;
now it was the Face.

Rowan had before given little thought to the
fact that Bel's father had been to Dust Ridge; the steerswoman had
not before fully comprehended the nature of life in the Outskirts,
on the Face, on the prairie. Now she wondered at his interest in a
land so inhospitable. But Bel could provide no good answer: it had
been her father's way to always travel, she told Rowan, often
alone, and often to places that did not much interest other people.
Bel found it not at all surprising that he should have seen fit to
take himself out onto the blackgrass prairie, for no other reason
than that it existed.

But there was no blackgrass at Dust Ridge
now, nor were there goblins. The heat had come to the Face for the
first time in decades, earlier that year, and had destroyed all
life then present, leaving the tanglebrush bare and brittle, the
lichen-towers weirdly desiccated, their internal spiraled spines
bare and dead against the sky.

But there was new life: redgrass, spreading
in from the Outskirts, meeting no natural competitors at all. Rowan
and Bel walked across dried mulch composed of dead and rotted plant
and insect life, merged and mixed by the intervening rains. Here
and there were small and larger stands of redgrass, rattling
sweetly, promising pastures to come.

Rowan's calculations of the location of the
fallen Guidestar had a limit to their accuracy: she could not
narrow the possible area to anything less than twenty miles. But
Rowan had no plan to scour the face of the ridge for the
Guidestar.

Instead, she and Bel made their camp on the
plain below the cliffs and waited.

At sunset, Rowan stood facing the ridge; and
as the sun fell behind her, illuminating the cliffs with gold and
rose, she saw a streak, a smear of white glints on the raw face of
the ridge, glowing brighter as the light changed, then fading when
it disappeared. She marked the place in her mind, and sat staring
at it long after dark.

They found a path up to it, certainly the
same path Bel's father had used; there was no other. It was rough,
and switched back and forth. They left their equipment below,
taking only Rowan's logbook, pens, ink, and a waterskin, in an
otherwise empty pack.

Rowan and Bel stood at last at a place where
a thousand glittering blue jewels lay at their feet, in the shadow
of a huge, shattered shape that thrust out from the cliff
itself.

It was as large as a large house, and had
once been larger; they could see that one side was torn, and open.
Inside, there might once have been a chamber; but the body of the
Guidestar was itself crushed, and that possible chamber was
collapsed, extruding trusses, beams of metal, blackened with the
heat of its burning fall.

Rowan clambered over it, probing, peering.
She found more wires, their coatings melted like wax from the
copper cores; more mysterious surfaces etched with copper on one
side, black with soot, brown with corrosion. She pried one loose
and saw for the first time its opposite side. It was festooned with
tiny objects, partially melted, like square insects with their
metal legs thrust through to contact the copper on the other
side.

Most of the Guidestar was metal; some was
ceramic, and Rowan found something like a wide, broken ceramic
plank, wedged under one edge of the body of the Guidestar. Bel
helped her tug it out. It freed by breaking, leaving most still
under the hulk.

The plank was some four feet wide, perhaps
six long. When it was freed, Rowan saw that one edge was hinged.
She and Bel pried at the opposite edge, and the plank opened like
the cover of a book. Inside, both faces were coated with perfect,
unbroken jewels, their opalescent colors fracturing the light
within them, their surfaces crossed by a grid of tiny, silver
lines. Rowan knelt beside the plank for many minutes, running one
hand across its eerie surface.

"Rowan! Take a look at this!"

Bel had wandered off to one side and made her
own discovery: a large rectangle of metal, once flat, now twisted
like taffy. Rowan went to it and sat beside it, bracing her legs
against a boulder to keep from sliding downslope.

Bel was wedged on its opposite side. "Look at
this." She had wiped dust from is surface with one palm, showing
only corrosion beneath. Now she wiped again, widening the clear
area. "Isn't that writing?"

Rowan would not have recognized it as such at
first glance; it was too different from the forms she knew. But
Bel, perhaps because she was new to writing, had recognized it as
belonging to a category: shapes designed to communicate.

Rowan cleared more dust from it. The letters
were an inch tall and consisted purely of deeper areas of corrosion
lined up below a hole in the object itself. She puzzled out the
shapes, compared them with known forms, found similarities, and
guessed at the words.

" 'Turn left,' " she read, " 'and latch.'
"

Bel looked at her. "Latch? Like a door?"

Rowan inserted her fingers into the round
hole and felt the works within. "Exactly like a door."

Rowan settled down on a flat rock with her
logbook, laying her pens and ink stone carefully beside her, to
sketch and describe the Guidestar. Above her, Bel leaned back
against the hulk itself, warming herself in the sunlight, with
sun-warmed metal at her back.

Rowan filled the final pages of her book. The
sun slowly shifted.

At last she set down her pen and paged
through what she had written, moving forward and back, helplessly.
Then she closed the book.

What she had written and drawn was mere
description. Even standing beside the Guidestar, even touching it,
she could not wrest from it the secrets of its magic, of its
purpose, nor the reason it had fallen from the sky.

All she knew, she had learned earlier: the
Guidestars sent down killing heat, at the command of wizards; and
they watched the world from high above.

Rowan herself was high, halfway up a cliff,
with sun-drenched air all around. She looked out, down.

Far to the west, the wild colors of the
distant veldt merged into a single mass of brick red. Ahead, to the
north, the land was gray and earth brown, with the sparse stands of
redgrass discernible only directly below. To the northeast, just at
the limit of sight, the line of the cliffs disappeared into a
sudden blot of darkness: the near edge of the blackgrass prairie,
where humans could not survive.

Blackgrass poisoned human skin. The goats
could not live by eating it. Blackgrass was stronger than redgrass;
where blackgrass was established, redgrass would not thrive. There
were demons, goblins, other stranger creatures, beyond the
Outskirts, beyond the Face.

"The Outskirts move." She had always assumed
that it was the growth of the Inner Lands themselves, the
cultivation of green life that pushed back the redgrass, the
spreading of farms and towns that pushed back the barbarians
themselves. But the Outskirters could only be pushed so far, to the
Face, where there was more blackgrass than redgrass. Movement would
be stopped there.

But then came the killing heat. The
blackgrass, the poisonous plants, the monsters, were destroyed. And
with no competitor, redgrass, always quick to grow, spread into the
dead area. The Face people followed it, even as the living prairie
sent new blackgrass back, eventually meeting and intermingling with
the red, creating the mix of life common on the Face. And twenty
years later, the cycle repeated.

But if the Face itself moved, then the zone
of heat must move. Each time it appeared, it must appear farther to
the east; destroying, clearing the way for the expansion of the
Outskirts.

And the western edge of the Outskirts also
shifted east, as the Inner Landers claimed new fields for
cultivation. But as blackgrass was stronger than redgrass, so
redgrass was stronger than greengrass. Farmers always needed to
pull any redgrass that appeared, or it would choke their crops. But
at the edge of the Outskirts, there were no farms, but young
forests, bramble, greengrass fields. Green life spread of its own
power.

She realized with a shock that it did so
because it was free to do so. The Outskirters themselves cleared
the way.

The goats ate the redgrass to the roots,
their feces killing what they did not eat. The Outskirters
themselves destroyed more, with their waste, offal, corpses. They
pulled down lichen-towers, they hunted goblin eggs, purely for the
sake of destruction.

Goblins, blackgrass, lichen-towers, insects:
these were native to the Outskirts, and to the prairie beyond.
Humans and goats were not. The redgrass stood between; and it was
the only thing that stood between, the only link.

As if from a Guidestar, Rowan saw the world
spread below her. She saw a band of heat destroy the Face and a
portion of the prairie; and redgrass fill and spread into the dead
area; and Outskirters using the redgrass, clearing it behind them
as they moved east; and sweet green life following their path,
feeding on the fertilization they left behind.