Jiana! Doomstalker! Twice!
The voice in her mind was the voice of a ghost. She could not make it go away.
The hills of the Ponath gave way to plains. The snowfall faded. And the flying cross fled with the breath of the north wind licking behind.
II
For months Marika had seen nothing but overcast skies. Always the bitter north wind had been present, muttering of even colder times to come. But now the gale could not catch her. She mocked it quietly.
Cracks began to show in the cloud cover. One moon, then another, peeped through, scattering the white earth with silver.
“Hello, strangers,” Marika said.
“What?”
The response startled Marika, for she had been enclosed entirely within herself, unmindful of her bizarre situation. “I was greeting the moons, Grauel. Look. There is Biter. One of the small moons is running behind her. I cannot tell which. I do not care. I am just glad to see them. How long has it been?”
The huntress shifted her weapon and position gingerly. It was a long fall to the frozen river. “Too long. Too many months.” Sorrow edged Grauel’s voice. “Hello, moons.”
Soon Chaser, the second large moon, showed its face too, so that shadows below looked like many-fingered paws.
“Look there!” Marika said. “A lake. Open water.” She too had not seen unfrozen water in months.
Grauel would not look down. She clung to their transport with a death grip.
Marika glanced around.
Five strangers, five friends. All astride a metal cross the shape of a dagger, running with the wind a thousand feet above the earth and snow. Grauel and Barlog, known since birth. Bagnel, known only months, strange, withdrawn, yet with the aroma of someone who could become very close. At that moment she decided he would become an integral part of her destiny.
Marika was silth. The Akard sisters had called her the most powerful talent ever to be unearthed in the upper Ponath. Sometimes the strongest silth caught flashes intimating tomorrow.
Braydic. The only friend the exile pup had made in her four years at Akard. Marika was glad that Braydic had survived.
Finally, two pups of meth who had served the silth, holding one another, terrified still, not yet knowing their fates. She realized that she did not know their names. She had saved them, as she had saved herself, for redoubled exile. Shared terror and last-second salvation ought to account for more intimacy.
“So,” she said to Grauel and Barlog. “Here we go again. Into exile once more.”
Barlog nodded. Grauel merely stared straight ahead, trying to keep her gaze from taking in the long fall to the silvered snows.
The Hainlin twisted away to the west and out of sight for a time, then swept back in beneath. It widened into a vast, slow stream, though mostly it remained concealed behind a mask of white. Time passed. Marika shook off repeated fits of bleak memory. She suspected her companions were doing the same.
Meth were not reflective by nature. They tended to live in the present, letting the past lie and allowing the future to care for itself. But the pasts of these meth were not the settled, bucolic pasts of their foredams. Their pasts reechoed with bloody hammer strokes. Their futures threatened more of the same.
“Lights,” Grauel croaked. And in a moment, “By the All! Look at the lights!”
Ten thousand pinpricks in the night, like a nighttime sky descended to earth. Except that the sky of Marika’s world held few stars, filled as it was with a dense, vast cloud of interstellar dust.
“Maksche,” Senior Zertan said. “Home. We will reach the cloister in a few minutes.”
The flying crosses pacing them suddenly swept ahead, vanished into the darkness. The lights ahead bobbed and rocked and swelled, and then the first passed below, maybe five hundred feet down. Marika felt no awe of the altitude. She exulted in the flying.
Soon the cross settled into a lighted courtyard, to a point between crosses already arrived. Scores of silth in Reugge black waited silently. The cross touched down. Zertan stepped off. Several silth approached her. She said something Marika did not catch, gestured, and stalked away. The other silth left their places at the tips of the cross.
A meth female in worker apparel approached Marika and the others. “Come with me. I have been instructed to show you quarters.” She assessed them cautiously. “Not you,” she told Bagnel, diffidently. “Someone from your Bond is coming for you.”
Marika was amused, for she knew this meth saw only savages out of the Ponath. Even her, for all she was silth. And she knew this city meth was frightened, for savages from the Ponath had reputations for being unpredictable, irrational, and fierce.
Marika gestured. “We go. You, lead the way.”
Bagnel stood aside, looking forlorn, one paw raised in a gesture of farewell.
Grauel followed the worker. Marika followed her. Barlog stayed close behind, weapon at port. Braydic and the pups tagged along at the end.
The Degnan refugees searched every shadow they passed. Marika listened with that talented silth ear that was inside her mind. She felt silth working their witcheries all around her. But the shadows were haunted by nothing more dangerous than projected fears of the unknown.
The servant led them through seemingly endless hallways, dropping first the pups, then Braydic. Marika sensed Grauel and Barlog becoming edgy. Their sense of location was confused. She grew uncomfortable herself. This place seemed too large to encompass. Akard was never so vast or tortuous that she had feared for her ability to get out.
Get out. Get out. That built within her, a smoldering panic, a dread of being unable to escape. She was of the upper Ponath, where pack meth ran free, at will.
The worker detected their mounting tension. She led them up stairs and outside, to the top of a wall at least vaguely reminiscent of the north wall at Akard, where Marika had made her away place, the place she went to be alone and think.
Each silth found such a place wherever she might be.
“It is huge,” Barlog breathed from behind Marika. Marika agreed, though she knew not whether Barlog meant the cloister or city.
The Maksche cloister was a square compound a quarter-mile to a side. Its outer wall stood thirty feet high. It was constructed of a buttery brown stone. The structures it enclosed were built of the same stone, all topped with steep roofs of red tile. The buildings were all very old, very weathered, and all very rectilinear. Some had corner towers rising like obelisks peaked by triangles of red.
The worker said, “A thousand meth live in the cloister, separate from the city. The wall is the edge of our world, a boundary that is not to be passed.”
She meant what she said, no doubt, but the fierceness that rose in her charges made her drop the subject. Marika growled, “Take us where we are supposed to go. Now. I will hear rules from those who make them, and will decide if they are reasonable then.”
Their guide looked stricken.
Grauel said, “Marika, I suggest you recall all that has been said about this place.”
Marika stared at the huntress, but soon her gaze wandered. Grauel was right. At the beginning she had best submit to the local style.
“Stop,” she said. “I want to look.” She did not await approval.
The cloister stood at Maksche’s heart, upon a contrived elevation. The surrounding land was flat all the way to the horizons. The Hainlin, three hundred yards wide, looped past the city in a broad brown band two miles west of Marika’s vantage. Neat squares of cropland, bounded by hedgerows or lines of trees, showed through the snow covering the plain.
“Not a single hill. I think it will not be long before I become homesick for hills.” Marika used the simple dialect of her puphood, and was surprised when the worker frowned puzzledly. Could the common speech be so different here?
“I think so. Yes,” Grauel replied. “Even Akard was less foreign than this. It is like ten thousand little fortresses, this thing called a city.”
The buildings
were very strange. But for Akard and Critza, every meth-made structure Marika had ever seen had been built of logs and stood under twenty-five feet high.
“I am not allowed much time away from my regular duties here,” the worker said, her tone whining. “Please come, young mistress.”
Marika scowled. “All right. Lead on.”
The quarters assigned had been untenanted for a long time. Dust lay thick upon what tattered furniture there was. Marika coughed, said, “We are being isolated in some remote corner.”
Grauel nodded. “Only to be expected.”
Barlog observed, “We can have this livable in a few hours. It is not as bad as it looks.”
Feebly, the worker said, “I must take you two to… to…” She fumbled for a word. “I guess you would say, huntress’s quarters.”
“No,” Marika told her. “We stay together.”
Grauel and Barlog snarled and gestured toward the door with their weapons.
“Go,” Marika snapped. “Or I will tie a savage’s curse to your tail.”
The female fled in terror. Grauel said, “Probably whelped and raised here. Scared of her own shadow.”
“This is a place where shadows are terrors,” Barlog countered. “We will hear from the shadow mistresses now.”
But Barlog was wrong. A week passed without event. It was a week in which Marika seldom left her quarters and had no intercourse at all with the Reugge of Maksche. She let Grauel and Barlog do the physical exploration. No one came to her.
She began to wonder why she was being ignored.
The time free began as a boon. In her years at Akard she had spent most of every waking hour in study, learning to become silth. The only respite had come during summers when she had joined hunting parties stalking the nomadic invaders who brought Akard and the Ponath to ruin.
Once her quarters were clean and she had sneaked a few exploratory forays into nearby parts of the cloister, and had penetrated the rest of it riding ghosts, and had found herself an away place in a high tower overlooking the square where she had arrived, she grew bored. Even study became appealing.
She snarled her dissatisfaction at the worker who brought their meals. That was on her tenth day in Maksche.
Things seemed to move slowly in Maksche. Marika’s complaints continued for a week, growing virulent. Yet nothing happened.
“Do not cause trouble,” Grauel cautioned. “They are studying our conduct. It is all some sort of test.”
“Pardon me if I am skeptical,” Marika said. “I have walked the dark side a hundred times since we have been here. I have seen no indication that they even know we are here, let alone are watching. We have been put out of sight, out of mind, and are imprisoned in a dungeon of the soul.”
Grauel exchanged glances with Barlog. Barlog observed, “All things are not seen by the witch’s inner eye, Marika. You are not omnipotent.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“It means that one young silth, no matter how strong, is not going to use her talent to see what a cloister full of more practiced silth are doing if they do not want her to see.”
Marika was about to admit that that might be possible when someone scratched at the door. She gestured. “It is not time to eat. The drought must be over.”
Barlog opened the door.
There stood a silth older than any Marika had encountered before. She hobbled in, leaning on a cane of some gnarled dark wood. She halted in the center of the room, surveyed the three of them with rheumy cataracted eyes. Her half-blind gaze came to rest upon Marika. “I am Moragan. I have been assigned as your teacher and as your guide upon the Reugge Path.” She spoke the Reugge low speech with an intriguing, elusive accent. Or was it a natural lisp? “You are the Marika who stirred so much controversy and chaos at our northern fastness.” Not a question. A statement.
“Yes.” Marika had a feeling this was no time to quibble about her role at Akard.
“You may go,” Moragan told Grauel and Barlog.
The huntresses did not move. They did not look to Marika for her opinion. Already they had positioned themselves so that Moragan stood at the heart of a perilous triangle.
“You are safe here,” Moragan told Marika when no one moved.
“Indeed? I have your sworn word?”
“You do.”
“And the word of a silth sister is worth the metal on which it is graven.” She had been studying the apparel of the old sister and could not make out the significance of its decorations. “As we who were under the sworn guardianship of the Reugge discovered. Our packsteads were overrun without aid coming. And when we fled to the Akard packfast for safety, that too was allowed to be destroyed.”
“You question decisions of policy about which you know nothing, pup.”
“Not at all, mistress. I simply refuse to allow policy to snare and crush me in coils of deceit and broken oaths.”
“They said you were a bold one. I see they spoke the truth. Very well. We will do it your way. For now.” Moragan hobbled to a wooden chair, settled slowly, slapped her cane down atop a table nearby. She seemed to go to sleep.
“Who are you besides Moragan?” Marika asked. “I cannot read your decorations.”
“Just a worn-out old silth so far gone she is past being what you would call Wise. We are not here to discuss me, though. Tell me your story. I have heard and read a few things. Now I will assess your version of events.”
Marika talked, but to no point. A few minutes later Moragan’s head dropped to her chest and she began to snore.
And so it went, day after day, with Moragan doing more asking and snoring than teaching. That day of her first appearance, she had been in one of her more lucid periods. Sometimes she could not recall the date or even Marika’s name. Most of the time she was of little value except as a reference guide to the cloister’s more arcane customs. Always she asked more questions than she answered, many of them irritatingly personal.
Her role, though, provided Marika with a role of her own. As a student she occupied a recognized place in cloister society and was answerable principally to Moragan for her conduct. Safely knit into the cultural fabric, Marika felt more comfortable teaching herself by exploring and observing.
Marika liked little of what she did learn.
Within the cloister the least of workers lived well. Outside, in the city, meth lived in abject want, suffering through brief lives of hunger, disease, and backbreaking labor. Everyone and everything in Maksche belonged to the Reugge silth Community, to the tradermale brotherhood calling itself the Brown Paw Bond, or to the two in concert. The Brown Paw Bond maintained its holdings by Reugge license, under complicated and extended lease arrangements. Residents of Maksche who were neither tradermale nor silth were bound to their professions or land for life.
Marika was bewildered. The Reugge possessed meth as though they were domestic animals? She interrogated Moragan. The teacher just looked at her strangely, evidently unable to comprehend the point of her questions.
“Grauel,” Marika said one evening, “have you figured this place out? Do you understand it at all? That old carque Moragan cannot or will not explain anything so it makes any sense.”
“Take care with her, Marika. She is more than she seems.”
“She is as All-touched as my granddam was.”
“She may be senile and mad, but she is not harmless. Perhaps the more dangerous for it. It is whispered that she was not set to teach you but to study you. It is also whispered that she was once very important in the order, and that she still has the favor of some who are very high up. Fear her, Marika.”
“I should fear someone I could break?”
“As strength goes? This is not the upper Ponath, Marika. It is not the strength of the arm that counts. It is the strength of the alliances one forms.”
Marika made a sound of derision. Grauel ignored her.
“Marika, suppose that some of them hope you try your strength. Suppose some of them w
ant to prove something to themselves.”
“What?”
“Our ears are sharp from many years of hunting the forests of the upper Ponath. When we go among the huntresses of this place—and sorrier huntresses you will never see—we sometimes overhear whispers never meant for our ears. They talk about us and they talk about you and they talk about the thinking of those around Senior Zertan. In a way, you are on trial. They suspect—maybe even know—about Gorry.”
“Gorry? What about Gorry?”
“Something happened to Gorry in the final hours of the siege. There was much speculation, overheard by everyone. We said nothing to anyone about that, but we are not the only survivors brought out of the ruins of Akard.”
Marika’s heart fluttered as she thought of her one-time instructress. But she felt no remorse. Gorry had deserved the torment she had suffered, and more. All Marika felt was a heightened apprehension about being ignored. It had not occurred to her that it was that sort of deliberateness. She would have to be careful. She was in no position of strength.
Grauel watched expectantly while Marika wrapped her mind around the implications.
“Why are you looking at me that way?”
“I thought you might have some regrets.”
“Why?”
“She was—”
“She was a carque of an old nuisance, Grauel. She would have done it to me if she could have. She tried often enough. She got what she asked for. I do not want to hear her mentioned again.”
“As you wish, mistress.”
“Have you found Braydic yet?”
“She was assigned to the communications center here, as you might expect. Students are not permitted entry there. And technicians are not allowed out.”
“Why not?”
“I do not know. This is a different world. We are still feeling our way. They never tell you what is permitted, only what is not.”
Marika realized that Grauel was upset with her. When Grauel was distressed, she insisted on using the formal mode of speech. But Marika had given up trying to interpret the huntress’s moods. She was exercised about something most of the time.