The Singers of Nevya (12 page)

It was only later that Sira had time to wonder why, as the Cantors and Cantrixes clustered around her, Sharn’s smile faded as she resumed her seat. Her mouth set in hard lines and her eyes were distant. She looked angry.

In celebration of their time together, the Cantors and Cantrixes retired to bathe before beginning their journeys home. In the
ubanyix
, Sira marveled at the Singer energies it must take to keep the water warm. Forty people could recline in this tub at one time, though now there were just eight Cantrixes. Sira folded her long form on the bench next to Sharn, tucking her legs under her. Dried flowers floated on the water that lapped gently about her shoulders.

Sharn opened her mind.
Sira, I must tell you of our concerns about your assignment.

Sira watched her, wide-eyed.

We at Lamdon feel that something political may be happening at Bariken.

Sira shook her head slightly.
I have heard nothing, Cantrix.

I know Rhia
, Sharn went on.
I have sensed her desire to rule Bariken.

She already does in many ways,
Sira ventured.

Sharn nodded.
Yes. So I understand. But I believe she does not find it satisfying.
She leaned back against the side of the tub and closed her eyes.
She wants to be Magistrix.

Sira gazed into the gently rolling clouds of steam that floated from the surface of the water to the ironwood ceiling high above. Sharn had broken their psi connection, but Sira understood what she had been told. Sharn had trespassed on Rhia’s thoughts. Sira could guess that Rhia had accompanied Shen to Lamdon on some occasion, bringing her into Sharn’s range. Perhaps Sharn had even done so under instruction from her own Magister.

Sharn was warning Sira, and Sira had already had a warning from her own instinctive mind. Should she tell Sharn of her dream? But what could it mean? And how, Sira wondered finally, could any of these circumstances be a threat to her, a Singer?

Sharn’s eyes were still closed, her lashes as pale and delicate as the rest of her body. She sent, very faintly,
Your first responsibility is to protect yourself, whatever happens. Nevya needs its Singers. It is possible for some to forget that.

Sira felt a sudden chill, and she rubbed her cold shoulders.

Come, Sira you are getting cold. Let us get something hot to drink.
As if their enigmatic conversation had never taken place, Sharn led Sira to the stack of linens, and they dried and dressed themselves.

Later, as they said good night, Sharn appeared as serene as always. Sira moved away from her down the hall, tired after an exciting day, preoccupied. She didn’t mean to listen to Sharn’s private thoughts, but she caught the echo of them as she turned toward her room. Sharn was regretting the need for a Singer so young to bear the burdens of a troubled world.

Chapter Ten

It was a dull group of travelers that headed back into Ogre Pass on the return journey from Lamdon to Bariken. Snow fell heavily, and a nasty wind snapped at them as they rode. Even the middle hours of the day were shaded and gloomy. Sira huddled in her furs, rocking with the
hruss
’s movements, lost in her own thoughts.

Shen, debilitated by too much of Lamdon’s wine two nights in a row, was also withdrawn. He had not mentioned either the Magistral Committee meeting or its purpose. Alks and Mike rode ahead, and Rollie, getting little response to her occasional tries at conversation, also lapsed into silence.

They left Lamdon very early, and rode until late that day, covering half again the usual distance for a day’s travel. Darkness was closing in, and Sira’s
quiru
in the evening took a few extra moments. The cold reached frigid fingers inside everyone’s furs to chill any skin it touched. Sira’s lips were stiff with it, and it was difficult to play.

When the
quiru
bloomed above them, Mike started the cooking fire. The party relaxed with the light glowing securely about them. Alks and Shen gossiped about Lamdon and its people while Rollie prepared the
keftet
and boiled water for tea. Only Mike remained impassive. When Sira looked at him, her psi prickled, and she thought something must be troubling him.

As the group settled down for the night, Sira spoke to Shen. “Magister, I think this
quiru
may need replenishing before morning. The wind may break it down.”

In fact, the snow was falling slantwise, and the tops of the irontrees soughed and danced above their campsite.

“All right,” Shen said. “Rollie, you waken the Cantrix mid-night, then sleep.”

Rollie nodded, and propped herself on her furs to take the watch. Mike and Alks had already gone outside the
quiru
with the Magister to relieve themselves. Now they stepped outside for the second time that evening, ducking their heads against the icy snow.

Sira was kneeling, unrolling her bedfurs and thinking only of warmth and sleep, when her psi suddenly screamed a warning. Her nerves flared, and she dropped her bedfurs and threw up her head. Instinctively, she cried, “Rollie!”

It was too late. Even as she heard her voice ring across the
quiru
, she whirled toward Rollie. It seemed to her shocked senses that a fur-tipped arrow simply appeared in Rollie’s bare throat. The rider’s face went slack as she fell backward, sprawling off her furs and into the snow.

Sira turned swiftly to Shen. A second atrocity unfolded so quickly she had no time to absorb it. An arrow pierced the Magister’s furs, and a long-handled knife followed a heartbeat later. His shock of graying hair reddened as blood leaped across it. He gave a long groan, and fell to one side to lie unmoving on his bedfurs.

Sira bit off another outcry. She could see no escape for her. She could not see the assailants in the darkness, while she and Rollie and the Magister were perfectly illuminated by the warm glow of her
quiru
. She straightened her back where she knelt, and was still. Her own arrow, bitterly punctual, pierced her body just below her collarbone. She, too, was meant to die.

Sira knew instantly that her wound was not mortal. By instinct, just the same, she let its impetus drive her down, prostrate her like the others. The point of the arrow drove through her flesh, and dug into the freshly fallen snow. She lay still, as if her spirit had fled beyond the stars, and she waited.

Hushed, tense voices sounded from outside the
quiru
. The killers were coming to assure themselves that everyone within was dead. The cold would have driven them into the warmth in any case. Assuming it was Alks and Mike, how were they planning to save themselves once the
quiru
dissipated?

All this Sira thought in a flash, while she lay motionless. She felt little at the moment, though she knew that when her body’s reaction to the danger wore off, she would feel the pain of her wound. Shen and Rollie were already dead, their minds past her hearing. She must convince the assassins that she was, too.

She allowed herself no surprise when not two, but four people came into the
quiru
. She knew them all. It was Mike who came to confirm that the three victims were dead. Sira sensed him leaning over Shen, with his double wounds, and poor Rollie, who had at least died instantly. As he came toward where she herself lay, she drew a veil over her mind, the darkest she could imagine. Mike bent low for a moment, as if listening for her breath. He could not bring himself, it seemed, to touch her. She sensed, even through the veil, his inability to overcome the tabu. She also sensed his repugnance for the task he believed he had accomplished.

Sira’s breaths were as shallow as she could make them. She lay listening to the voices.

Alks and Mike crouched around the fire with the two new arrivals. Wil, Housekeeper of Bariken, was there, speaking to the two riders. Another voice joined in, a voice that shocked Sira, a voice she could hardly believe. There was no precedent for a traitorous Singer, but she was there: it was the former Cantrix, plump, sly Trude.

Sira thickened the veil over her mind. She dared not react to the double betrayal. Trude, despite her years of undisciplined living, would pick up her thoughts if she did not bury them. Sira smoothed the waves of her mind until they were as flat and opaque as the lifeless rock beneath the snow.

Wil said, “We’ll cover the bodies as soon as we’ve had a chance to get warm. This campsite is enough off the trail, I think.”

“What about their things?” Trude asked.

“Their gear stays,” Wil answered. “If the story is that they got separated in the storm, their
hruss
and possessions would be lost, too.”

“It’s just—” Trude’s voice dropped. “Her
filla
. . .”

“Everything,” Wil said flatly. “No exceptions.”

There was a silence. So deeply had Sira forced herself below conscious thought that he heard their voices as if in a dream, a slow nightmare of cold and pain and shock. She hardly noticed as Alks and Mike piled snow over her body and the others. She suppressed even the faint hope that flickered at the knowledge that her
filla
would be left, still tucked beneath her tunic.

Through her blanket of snow, she heard the slaughtering of the
hruss
that had carried her. Like herself, it was buried in snow. It seemed an unnecessary cruelty.
Hruss
, after all, could survive the cold on their own, though they preferred the company of people. But Sira could not risk reacting to this, either, nor allow herself to experience her own rising pain, or the deep cold of her tomb of snow. Her infrequent breaths kept a pocket open above her mouth. Otherwise, she perfectly mimicked the corpses whose grave she shared.

A few hours before dawn she heard Trude playing a
filla
, competently enough, apparently, to strengthen the
quiru
. Sira waited. Some deep level of her mind knew her body was getting dangerously cold, but she suppressed her instinctive need to move, to warm herself. She lay still through the long hours, listening, breathing, but not thinking.

At last she heard shuffling and brushing sounds as the men obliterated the traces of the campsite. Distantly, Wil asked Trude some question.

“It will be gone in two or three hours, in this wind,” Trude said. Sira knew they meant the
quiru
, her last hope of survival. Still, she could not react, could not feel. Her hands and feet had gone numb, and she feared frostbite. She had been feigning death for hours.

The sounds of
hruss
and their riders faded away from her hearing. Sira thought she would wait another hour before attempting to break through her covering of snow, but when she began to feel warmer, she knew she did not dare. All Nevyans learned as children that the illusory sensation of warmth was the first sign of freezing to death. She feared her spirit might drift away after all if she did not move.

The snow was the dry, powdery snow of the mountain passes. Her searching arm reached the air quickly. It hurt to move, but she dug in reverse, making a hole upward through the drift until she could see the remains of the
quiru
. Mike’s arrow, crusted with snow, ground against her bones as she struggled.

Her left arm, the side where the arrow was, caused her too much pain when she tried to use it. It took half an hour of flaking away the snow cover, a single handful at a time, until her torso, and at last her legs, were free. She was too cold to know if she was still bleeding.

Her
quiru
faltered around the site, inadequately strengthened by Trude. She thought she had perhaps an hour before the last shreds of it dissolved. The remnants of the fire had been covered with snow, along with all other signs of human or
hruss
presence.

Sira feared using her
filla
now. Her betrayers could not be more than an hour’s ride away, and Trude’s ears, though dulled by years of abuse in everyday House life, might still be sharp enough to hear its bright timbre at a distance. Falling snow obscured the sun, which she supposed must be well overhead. The cooling
quiru
would be warm enough to sustain her for a little while, and she could address the problem of her wound.

As her body began to warm again, the pain of the offending shaft sharpened and grated, and its position inhibited her movement. It had to be removed. She felt fairly strong, considering the horror of the night she had just passed, which led her to think she could not have lost too much blood.

Casting about for a way to extract the arrow, she dug in the snow until she found a long thong that had been used to tie her pack onto her saddle. Rollie had fallen closest to her, and Sira reached, shuddering, beneath her friend’s furs to take the long-handled knife from her belt. She paused a moment with her hand on Rollie’s frozen one, offering a silent prayer for her safe passage beyond the stars.

It took her some minutes of sawing on the shaft of the arrow to cut all the way through it. The movement made the wood chafe against bone and flesh, and Sira had to rest several times until the nauseating pain subsided. Perspiration trickled over her body, and she gasped for breath. When the knife finally broke through the wood, the furred flight fell at her feet, and she drew a deep breath of relief.

She tied the thong around the smallest of the nearby trees. The hardest part was to reach behind her with her right arm to try to secure the other end of the thong around the arrowhead. She tried to stretch her arm over her shoulder, then down behind her back, but pain forced her to stop short of her goal.

After some thought, she made a loop like a
hruss
’s noose in the thong. She turned her back to it, and wriggled, trying to catch the arrowhead in the loop. She twisted and writhed, trying to find it, gritting her teeth against the pain when the arrowhead scraped the trunk of the tree. It was like trying to thread a needle in the dark, and it seemed impossible to accomplish. When she finally succeeded, her eyes stung with tears of pain and triumph.

She pulled the little noose tight, not wanting to chance the arrowhead slipping free again. When it was as tight as she could make it, she stood for a moment, effectively lashed to the tree behind her. She calmed her breathing and her mind. The last step would take mental as well as physical strength.