by Dan Allen
“Thanks.” She tapped her foot. “So we’re both on the first contact mission?”
Jet wasn’t sure whether she was mad or elated.
“I guess the High Council liked our rescue operation,” she said. Then she punched him in the shoulder and sauntered away. “But you still don’t outrank me!”
Best arm punch ever.
“Hey, where are you going?” Jet said. “We only have twelve hours until launch. We should do something—”
She stopped and turned.
“—fun.”
“Sorry, I’ve got a date.”
“A date? With who?”
She turned on her heels. “An elf.”
“An elf? Don’t tell me you let Yaris ask you out.”
She turned away and waved over her shoulder with her fingers.
Jet hoped the elf was a jerk. But then he changed his mind. Twelve hours was all she had left on the Excalibur. It was all she had left before her life changed forever. She deserved a good memory, something to hang onto.
“Hey, Monique.”
She looked over her shoulder.
“Good luck.”
He got a quarter of a smile.
Chapter 15
Dana made up her mind quickly. “Let me off on the south bank.”
“Are you mad? How are you going to cross the jungle?” Turigan shook his head, wagging his glossy, unkempt black hair. “I can’t let a girl like you end up like that poor greeder.”
Jila gestured haplessly. “Or fried by a rhynoid and your guts sucked out of your face.”
“That’s a lovely image, Jila. Haven’t you got a lick of manners? She’s an adept, a gift of the Creator.”
Dana’s breath froze. A feeling like a warm blanket wrapped her soul. For the first time in her life someone had considered her a gift. Not cursed. Not tainted. It was a moment she had waited for her entire life. Still, she could hardly believe her ears. “What did you say?”
“An adept,” Turigan repeated. “A gift of the Creator. You showed us yourself, high druidess.”
High druidess?
Dana’s jaw slackened. She clutched the front of her shirt near her collar and then turned to that middle-aged man. “No, Turigan. You are a gift of the Creator.” She turned to Jila. “And you, as well, my friend.” Tears twinkled in the corners of her eyes.
“Don’t cry, Dana. There’s a way out of this.”
“I’m not crying because I’m sad.” Dana held out her hands, and her two adoptive uncles wrapped her in an embrace.
Two great tears ran down her cheeks. She looked up into the faces of the Torsican men. “Thank you.” She buried her head against Jila’s chest, as Turigan stroked her hair.
“You’re a brave one. You’ll make it through.”
Dana nodded. She sniffed and drew her hand across her eyes to clear the tears.
Turigan took her by the shoulders and looked her in the eyes. “I meant what I said—a gift of the Creator.”
“And perhaps,” Dana said, smiling through another wave of emotion, “the Creator sent you to save me.”
“But I’m afraid we can’t fight through a posse,” Jila noted. “There’s just two of us, and Turigan is no use in a fight.”
“Yes, I am!”
“You won’t have to fight. I’m crossing the jungle.”
“It’s suicide.”
“I’m a druid,” Dana said. “The animals will show me way.”
“Well, you had better take my flask.” Jila unslung his canteen from his shoulder and offered it. “We’ll be at the port in a few hours.”
“I won’t forget this,” Dana said, cradling the canteen.
Turigan lowered his pole into the water, preparing to lever the barge toward the southern shore. “Promise me you won’t die—and you won’t get caught by the ranger?”
“I promise.” Dana laughed. “Thanks for everything.” She leaned up and kissed Turigan on the cheek. The man’s stubbled face tickled her lips. Then she turned to Jila.
“Oh, I got a miss back on Torsica.”
“And I’ve got a green feather on my fanny!” Turigan cried. “Bend down, you oaf, and get your thanks.”
“I . . . I don’t deserve it.”
Dana put her hands on her hips. “It’s either a kiss on the cheek, or a kick in the crotch for being stubborn.”
“If you put it that way . . .” He leaned forward, and Dana kissed his bearded cheek.
“You’re a kind spirit,” Jila said. A smile wormed on his face and he blinked a few times.
Turigan chuckled. “Grace of the chosen ka—the big lug is going to cry.”
“I’ll drop my pole on your head before I drop a tear!”
“Just give me a hand to shore, Jila. Then you can fight as much as you like.”
“Ah, I’ll give you that, Miss Dana.” Dana held out her arms, and Jila gave her a big heave through the air.
She landed on a mossy slope and turned to wave as the two men dropped their poles on the shoreward side and levered the raft back into the stream. Then they waved until the bend in the river took them out of her sight.
Dana turned and faced the shadowed jungle. “I’m going to need a guide.” She closed her eyes and reached out, touching every tree, every root, every—
“Gotcha.”
Dana gave a tug, and a frilled scamper bounded down a nearby tree and up her leg to a prominent position on her shoulder. “Now,” Dana whispered as she reached up to stroke the lizard’s scaly back. “We’re going to work together. Aren’t we?”
The lizard nodded, following Dana’s prompt.
“Very good.”
There was an art to this. A scamper’s mind was weak and easily dominated. If she pushed too hard, it would lose its sense of self and forget its instincts—she needed those desperately. So she had to keep it on a long leash.
The cold-blooded creature settled comfortably on her shoulder, which was warm with the heat of the morning sun.
Dana took a first hesitant step into the jungle, eyes watching the canopy for the first sign of descending rhynoids. The problem was that they were plants. She could neither sense their intentions, nor press her will upon them. People were no different. She was no enchantress, nor an alchemist with the will to coerce the chemicals in a concoction. The Creator’s veils over those were as strong as the unseen wall that blocked her will from touching the forces of nature like a warlock.
But she was a high druidess, as the Torsicans had called her—a gift of the Creator.
“Sandy,” Dana said, voicing her chosen name for the frilled-neck lizard. “When you sense danger, you throw out that frill and give a hiss.”
The lizard made a demonstration, flaring its frill and stretching its fluorescent orange tongue as far out of its gaping mouth as it would reach.
Gross.
“Very good . . . you can put your tongue back in your mouth.”
The lizard slowly returned to its posture, as if enjoying the added attention it got for obeying as slowly as possible.
“A boy—typical.”
Sandy licked his lips.
“Not lunch yet. We’re just getting started.”
Dana resisted the urge to look back at the river. Instead, she pressed forward through the trees for several hundred yards, until Sandy flared his neck frill.
“That’s a centipede, you coward. You’re twice its size.”
She kicked the centipede out of her way. The six-inch-long creature sailed through a tuft of thin-bladed grass. In a flash, five limb-like vines lashed out and caught the creature in midair. Blue light danced along the edges of the vines, and the twitching centipede was hauled back into the center of the tuft of “grass”—a rhynoid’s disguised feeler vines.
“By the brother moon—they grow out of the ground, too?” She side-stepped the pothole rhynoid, heart pounding in her chest. “Is there anything else you’d like to say before we continue?”
Sandy shook his head and then relieved hims
elf on her shoulder.
“Why? That is just . . . ugh.”
Dana pressed ahead until she came to the trade road. She wasn’t enough of a ranger to spot any fresh greeder tracks headed for the port. She simply hurried across the road and ducked back into the cover of the tall ferns on the far side.
In a half hour Dana had passed half a dozen more pothole rhynoids and then stopped when Sandy looked up into the trees. For half a minute she stared into the canopy of the towering jungle trees, until she spotted the curled forms of lasher rhynoids. Their bulbous sucker heads mimicked the broad leaves around them.
“Oh, there’s only ten rhynoids on that tree. What’s the big fuss?” It was enough vines to eat an entire mounted patrol—perhaps even a massive thunder bison, though the bison rarely left the grassy foothills to venture into the jungle.
Dana swallowed and backtracked several dozen yards to avoid the predatory garden. “Thank you, Sandy.”
As she crept through the dense foliage, Dana kept her own lookout for the thorned trees that hosted the pothole rhynoids at their base and the broad-leaved variety the lasher rhynoids favored. And there were other dangers in the jungle, too, especially the Aesican saber panthers. But they hunted at night.
Dana drained her canteen before dinner and learned to refill it from honey pitcher blossoms by pulling on their petals to get them to spread, another trick she learned from Sandy.
Luck reached Dana just before nightfall when she stepped around a toadstool-laden fan-leaf tree onto a hunter’s trail.
“Ah. This will do. I can take it from here.”
She released Sandy, and he scampered back into the forest in the direction of a thornwood spider nest. He would get his pay after all.
Dana turned east, the direction of the port, following the well-worn path through the trees. In places, the trail was wide enough to make out the parallel marks of wagon wheels in the mud.
The rangers would never look for her on a trail like this. She could approach the port at night, find a place to stay, hitch a ride with a trading company headed for Shoul Falls, and bid farewell to the pursuing rangers and the controlling government of Norr forever.
Dana was desperately tired, though she kept a wary eye out for the shapes of leaves that warned of rhynoids.
As the darkness grew, brother moon rose, followed by his sister, who would soon catch up and pass her sibling at Dana’s time of transition. It came only every eighty-two days, but Dana looked forward to the change of emotion, the feeling of newness and the passing of a small chapter of her life.
Someday she would join a husband at the crossing of the moons.
The fine hairs of her inferior sifa flared at the thought.
But not until those finish growing.
She was not a full adult yet. Anybody could see that. Although each transition brought another layer of fine hairs to her sifa, starting from just behind her ears until now the feather-like hairs grew to nearly the tip of her lower sifa.
Hopeful emotions swirled within Dana as she walked among the trees, with the stars rolling overhead and the brother and sister moon running their nightly race across the sky.
Perhaps they were not brother and sister but lovers.
It was a blasphemous thought to put the feelings of a mortal to objects in the heaven.
But why not?
Is Xahna not made in the image of heaven?
Dana pressed a fern out of her way, and her nose caught the scent of salt air.
“The ocean.”
Dana sprinted ahead on the widening path. She crossed a stone-paved trade road that ran north and south along the coast and headed over a grassy berm. The sound of waves lapping gently at the shore reached her ears.
Then all at once she broke onto a white, sandy beach that glistened in the moonlight like a thousand tiny diamonds.
“I made it!”
Dana fell to knees and dug her hands into the sand.
The harbor lights of Port Kyner, and lanterns on the decks of dozens of anchored steamships, twinkled safely in the distance, several miles to her left.
I made it. And they won’t find me out here. They think I’m coming on the river.
Dana wrapped herself in her blanket and lay on the warm sand of the berm, watching for shooting stars until her eyes blinked shut and sleep drowned her exhausted body.
* * *
In the morning, Dana woke as the sun rose over the eastern sea. In the long light, thousands of ovals took shape on the water.
Across the shallow sea that spanned the great expanse between the Aesican and Torsican continents, the sayathi ruled.
Dana walked to edge of the beach, where one of many walls of coral rose three feet out of the water, bending in a circle some thirty feet wide. Small waves lapped her feet as the seawater at low tide splashed gently between the coral circle and a neighboring one.
Dana leaned over coral wall and looked inside.
Clear, fresh water, still as a frozen pond, showed her reflection back at her.
Small fish swam contentedly in the isolated pond, along with the millions of unseen sayathi, like so many of the millions of colonies that spanned the shallow ocean. The only passages across were man-made channels that meandered through the sea of warring corals.
Dana’s eyes followed the many faintly pulsing, blue-green lines from the edge of the pool to their source at the center. At the center of the coral ring, beneath the water, lay a faceted stone wrapped in an eerie green glow and sending out regular pulses like a slow heartbeat.
“Marvelous, isn’t it?”
Dana gasped and turned to see a woman draped in a coarsely woven white shawl standing nearby.
“First time at the Sayathi Sea?” she asked.
Dana nodded. “There’s nothing like this in Norr.”
The woman looked to be in her late twenties, with bright hazel eyes. The glow of her person was instantly present. She, too, was obviously blood-bound. The woman gave a kind smile and reached a hand out of her shawl, indicating the nearest glowing ridges radiating outward along the bottom of the watertight pool. “The colony runs on electricity, pumping salt out through the reef wall to make fresh water.” The woman reached out over the edge of the pool, and her hand took on a blue-green glow.
Dana gasped in surprise. “You’re bound to this pool?”
The woman nodded. “The sayathi send energy to each other with light.” She dipped her arms in the fresh water of the coral pool and smiled as the tiny carnival fish in the round pond swam between her fingers playfully. She reached over and ran her hand along one of the charge conduits to indicate one of the many sayathenite nodules. “This holds the blood of my family.”
“That exact crystal?”
The woman nodded. “When I was seven, I came here with my father. I cut my own hand with a knife. I bled until the entire pool was red.”
“You had to cut yourself—I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t be. It takes the sayathi a while to become immune to your essence, like a Xahnan getting over a nasty cold. But once the colony has the antidote to your essence, a new nodule forms to protect the formula.” The woman leaned over and cupped the clear water to her mouth.
Dana was immediately entranced by the act and repulsed. Memories of the dying greeder’s pain gripped her with steely fingers.
“They make your eyes beautiful,” Dana said.
The woman gave a laugh. “Only a drale—er, unbound—would notice.”
“And that?” Dana pointed to the glow in the center of the pool.
“The bloodstone,” said the woman. “One at the center of every pool. It is the hub of all the signals. The pulsing determines how quickly salt is removed. If foreign sayathi are splashed in by a storm, the bloodstone tells the colony to attack. If the wall is damaged, the colony follows the signals to quickly repair it.”
With one bloodstone in every pool, there must have been hundreds of bloodstones along the beach.
But of course, it
wasn’t the stones that granted will to a ka. It was the Xahnans bound to it. The fact that there were so many small pools made them all equally feeble. And the pools that fed cities had to have a large source of water, such as a spring, not merely rainfall or a storm tide.
Dana looked into the blue-green water, but her eyes could discern no sayathi. The organisms were indeed tiny, yet there was something there, a feeling like somebody in the next room. “Can you feel them?”
The woman shook her head. “Only the strength they give me. I cannot remember what it was like being without it.”
Dana looked at the pool. “I can feel them. It’s like a cloud in front of me.”
The woman inclined her head. “You’re a druidess?”
Dana nodded.
“No wonder you left Norr.”
“So,” Dana wondered aloud, “you can’t drink from any other pools?”
The woman nodded. “It would be death. The sayathi bound to me would fight to kill the others, but I would die before the fight was won.”
Dana had heard as much, but asking a blood-sworn was the only way to guarantee her secondhand knowledge was correct.
“Perhaps you don’t know,” the woman said cautiously. “There’s a warrant for your arrest in the port.”
An icicle stabbed into Dana’s heart. “A warrant?”
“A ranger from Norr arrived yesterday. The civic guard at Port Kyner posted his letters. You are Dana, aren’t you?”
Suddenly, despite the low altitude, Dana could hardly get a breath. She looked at the woman, mentally sizing her up. Not only was she taller, and certainly better rested, but she was blood-bound. Dana tensed, on the verge of reaching into the forest for some kind of defense. “Are you going to turn me in?”
The woman appeared astonished by the question. “You’re an adept. I could never betray you to a bunch of ignorant drales.”
Drale—their word for an unsworn. Dana was already enjoying the change of culture. Here, drales were outsiders—the things to be feared—not adepts. “Well, thank you. I’m just trying to get away.”
“Yes.” The woman looked over her shoulder. “You should get going, Dana of Norr. Many of the far-sworn visit their colonies on the rest day.”
“Far-sworn?”