Sundowner

by Claremont, Chris

  It bared its fangs in a ritual challenge and Nicole knew she was marked. The fight had become personal and the p’m’taie wasn’t going to quit until one of them was dead.

  Without warning, it doubled back up the ravine. She barely had time for a snap shot—that missed—as it disappeared around the bend and then heard a tremendous noise, partly the cries of the beast as it made its ultimate effort, partly the consequences to the local flora. The next sound was the snapping of the tree she’d used to hold her lamp as the p’m’taie hit it with full force. The light spun crazily as the tree fell into the ravine but Nicole wasn’t there to watch. She was running for her life, praying there was enough of the predawn quasi-light for her to see her way. Not that it mattered much. The p’m’taie was not only faster, even wounded as it was, it could bull its way through the obstacles Nicole was forced to duck around. With each step, it gained.

  The ground disappeared from underfoot and Nicole cried out as she pitched into space. She made a hard pratfall onto a modest slope and cascaded full length to the bottom. Her clothes were torn by the impact, probably her skin, too, but she wasn’t really interested in either as she fumbled for her bow and remaining arrows. The p’m’taie thundered off the edge, same as she had, but with a leap that took it well over Nicole’s head; bad mistake, because it gave her another shot at its belly and then her last bolt into its already bloody flank before it could face her once more.

  She crab-scuttled back up the slope, looking for a way out, finding nothing, hardly aware of her more immediate surroundings until a pair of infant tusks scored her forearm and another set jabbed at her back. A roar from the animal was answered by a chorus of falsetto peeps from the den behind Nicole, and with only a marginal awareness of what she was doing, she grabbed for the shape nearest her, catching it by the scruff of the neck and covering its throat with the honed blade of her knife.

  Whatever sounds the p’m’taie had made thus far were nothing compared to those Nicole heard now. Hardly surprising, when a mother sees her babies threatened. Nicole’s teeth were chattering and she moved the knife a little clear of the baby so as not to inadvertently cut it. She could make out four shadowy humps in the opening to the den, plus the one in her grasp, and assumed they had to be fairly newborn because of their size.

  Terriffic, she thought sourly, and wondered what was taking everyone so long to come to her damn rescue. One of the other babies made a lunge for her arm—quick strike, quick retreat—and she hissed as it drew more blood. Nervy little buggers, she thought in admiration, and then noticed there weren’t as many lumps as there’d been a glance before. She couldn’t keep constant watch, not with Mom to consider, but when another slash caught her attention she saw only the one baby left. The others had withdrawn deep into the den, probably far out of her reach.

  Shit, she thought in one language, and then, O blessed water, in the other. The kid would keep coming at her until she let its sibling go, which was all Mom was waiting for. Or, just as ominously, Mom might decide to hazard—even sacrifice—the life of one baby to protect the rest. Either way, Nicole had no more time.

  She sensed a movement, dropped her knife, grabbed for the kid coming in for another attack, aware that Mom was charging, forcing her to a stop as Nicole came up with both infants wriggling in her hands.

  The p’m’taie uttered a shriek pitched so high into the upper register it made Nicole want to scream. At the same time, it was so close—hardly a couple of its body lengths away—that she could feel the gusting stench of every breath.

  “Back,” she said, in a fairly impressive snarl of her own. “Back off, Mama!”

  The babies were upset, as were their siblings in the den.

  Mama looked ready to trample Nicole to sludge but at the same time she didn’t want to risk her offspring. Nicole knew the stalemate couldn’t last much longer, she could feel blood flowing down her arm from the baby’s gashes, she simply didn’t have the strength to hold them.

  She pitched the babies, in an underhand toss up over the top of the bank behind her. In the same movement, she hurled herself in the opposite direction, following the wall of the ravine. She figured she had about five steps, tops, before Mama nailed her, but the freight train passed her by as the p’m’taie went for her babies first.

  As she rounded the bend and came into the light field of her lamp, she caught sight of a shape hammered into the ground, broken and disemboweled. Up ahead was the fallen Hal. Nobody else.

  Deep ocean take you all, she snarled silently, where are you?

  She didn’t know she could run so fast or move with such flawless abandon. She marked her launch point and target, hit each perfectly, put herself onto the bank above the Hal as though the leap had been rehearsed. She anchored herself on an exposed root, then reached to her full extension for the Hal. As she caught the woman by the collar, she heard a sharp crunching sound and both light and siren went out.

  The p’m’taie waited until she looked up before lifting its hoof from the shattered lamp and stepping delicately aside.

  Aw hell, she cried to herself. And then, aloud, in asperity, “What’d you do, Mama, creep up on us on bleeding tiptoe?” She could’ve sworn the creature laughed in response.

  Hobson’s choice. If Nicole broke and ran, chances were the animal wouldn’t follow, not and leave its babies unprotected. But the Hal below would die for it. Assuming she wasn’t dead already. If Nicole stayed to defend her, that would probably condemn them both.

  Even as the alternatives presented themselves, Nicole knew it was no contest. She measured the distance to the woman’s broken spear, and then rolled off the top of the bank to grab hold of it.

  No words, no bravado, she braced herself as best she could and looked the animal in the eye.

  A flare burst overhead, its effect muted against the lightening sky, and in the near distance voices could be heard calling Nicole’s name. Near enough to avenge, possibly, but not to save. Nicole didn’t take her eyes off her foe.

  The p’m’taie took a deliberate look up at the falling, guttering flare, then towards the sound of the other hunters, and Nicole had a sudden chilling sense of the carnage that would ensue should each encounter the other. It squared off against her once more, but didn’t charge.

  Instead, it turned away, trotting up the ravine to its den.

  Nicole sank down onto the ground, unwilling to wholly relax her vigil, unable to accept that the duel was over and that she had somehow survived.

  “Shea Shavrin’s-Daughter,” came from close beside her, in a voice just this thready side of consciousness.

  “I’m here. You’re alive. We’re safe.”

  “Why did it leave?” There was pain in the woman’s voice, but mostly wonderment.

  Nicole was about to answer when the thought struck her that she might be the only one to know about the babies. And with that realization, she decided to keep it that way.

  “Damned if I know,” she said.

  The local physician spoke of scars won in honorable battle but Nicole would hear none of it and an emergency summons went out for Jenny Coy.

  Kymri arrived with her but immediately went into conference with the Lords Councilor who’d brought her here. Nicole didn’t pay any attention, she had a more pressing engagement—with the young Hal she’d rescued.

  Her name was Sirat’s’ai, and she was first cousin to Matai, the Hal Speaker who was Nicole’s friend and who she was forced to kill six years ago. The skin patterning—which is what most Terrans used as the means of telling Hal apart—was totally different, it was the facial structure that marked them as biological family. She was big for her age, as a glance at her stats told Nicole just how young she was, in the first blush of adolescence. Probably her first Hunt, Nicole thought.

  She wasn’t in Intensive Care, thanks in some measure to youthful resilience, but the wounds she’d suffered would be a fair while healing. A multitude of broken ribs, two of which had punctured and collapsed a lung, com
prised the bulk of the damage. She was tagged into a brace of medical scanners, with numbers towards the low end of the acceptable range. Her appearance echoed the telemetry; her skin looked sort of collapsed on the bone, as if all the cushioning fat—of which the Hal invariably had little to begin with, being by nature an infuriatingly lean species—had drained away, and there was no sheen to her fur. There was a purplish undercast to her skin tone that extended across her breast, above the bandages wrapped snugly about her rib cage, and up over one shoulder.

  “Nice bruise,” Nicole muttered softly.

  Sirat’s’ai’s eyelids flickered as the woman groaned acknowledgment. Her breaths were shallow, with a beat between every one, as though each was a conscious decision, accompanied by an effort that left her exhausted.

  “Does it hurt?”

  Another groan, plus a tightening of the lids.

  “Can I get you anything for the pain?”

  “Not pain, really.” Her voice was, impossibly, even less powerful than the night they’d met. “More of an ache. And I’m injected to the legal limit. Don’t see how they can call this ’flying.’ Me, I feel positively leaden. Suppose I should be thankful I can feel. Considering my brother’s position.”

  At that, Nicole leaned forward, to speak in a hard, commanding tone.

  “Stop it, Sirat’s’ai. None of us knew that p’m’taie was out there; none of us were equipped with the proper weapons to fight it.”

  “And that excuses all fault, Shea Shavrin’s-Daughter?”

  “There is no fault. Bad fortune, perhaps, but nothing more. I saw your brother’s body, Sira. He was right on top of her den. At that distance, under those circumstances, I doubt even a rifle blaster would have made any difference for him. He died with honor. You survived with honor.”

  “Thanks to you. There is alach’n’an between us, a debt of blood. You will have Heart Right to the p’m’taie when I claim my just vengeance.”

  “Alach’n’yn, you mean? Blood price.”

  Sira weakly bared her fangs.

  “One on one, you and the p’m’taie? You’ve nothing to prove, girl; one or the other of you—maybe even both—will be slaughtered to no good purpose.”

  “I do not expect you to understand our ways... ” she began, but Nicole gruffly cut her off.

  “I am a Speaker, Sirat’s’ai, and Heir to Shavrin,” and Nicole shot her wrists out from the cuffs of her jacket to flash the markings on her lower arms. “I know more of your ways than you can possibly imagine.” She shifted gears at that point, turning to the formal dialect that Speakers used during Arbitrations. “You claim blood price on the p’m’taie for the life of your brother... ”

  “Blood must answer for blood,” Sira cried as passionately as she was able.

  “Not always so,” Nicole said. “The alach’n’an is owed, not to me, but to the p’m ’taie. Yes, I stood between you, but it still could have slain us both and escaped long before help arrived. It chose not to.”

  “Out of respect for your prowess!”

  “Who knows? What matters, though, is that it made the choice to walk away. The life you hold, you owe to the one who spared it.”

  Sira blinked rapidly, masking her eyes behind their nictating membrane, features twisting into an expression of such grief that Nicole wanted to reach out to her. Instead, she sat more straightly in her chair, gathering about herself as formal and remote a demeanor as she could manage, reaching to an image of her own mother laying down the law after Nicole had broken curfew during exam week in junior high. Comparatively, she was pretty much the same age back then as Sira was now. She’d been racing all day (with permission) and was having so much fun hanging out with the crew and their sailing buddies afterward that she deliberately lost track of the time. She’d never dreamed her mother had such anger in her; Siobhan Shea didn’t raise her voice, or her hand, to her eldest when Nicole finally returned home, but made it abundantly plain that Nicole was never to break these rules again. That was the last she would ever speak of the moment; trust had been betrayed once, it was Nicole’s responsibility to earn it back.

  The next day, of course, Nicole learned the reason: a classmate, raped and murdered by an off-islander. There hadn’t been an immediate ident on the body so when the word went out, Siobhan had feared it was Nicole.

  “It isn’t fair,” Sira sobbed.

  “What blood the p’m’taie had to offer has already been shed. No good will come of more. Let it go, Sirat’s’ai.”

  “Do you command, Shavrin’s-Daughter?”

  Half smile and bared foreteeth, her wry response a blend of human and Hal. “Is that the Speaker’s way, Sira? I offer the resolution I think is just and appropriate. Yours is the choice, whether or not to take it.”

  She stroked her palm gently up the girl’s forehead, smoothing her hair on the pillow. “Grow wise, little lion,” she said, “that you may grow older. Now get some sleep, I’ve kept you too long, and you’ve a lot of mending to do.”

  Nicole made her way stiffly back to her suite and then onto the balcony overlooking the forest valley, her own bumps and bruises making themselves more and more felt with each passing hour. It was a lovely view, and she’d been assured time and again by the staff of the lodge that she was high enough above the ground to be guaranteed safe. Having seen a p’m’taie in action, Nicole wasn’t anywhere near so sanguine, but she also didn’t think she had anything to fear. If she and “Mama” met again, and somehow she sensed they never would, it would be for a fair fight.

  When Kymri found her, she was happily ensconced on a day bed, basking in the rays of the lowering sun.

  “Scouts report that the immediate vicinity is clear,” he told her and Jenny both, sequentially.

  “So they said before,” was Nicole’s reply.

  “So I understand.”

  “So—either they’re not very good at their job... ”

  He lifted her bandaged arm gently, prompting a warning cough from Jenny.

  “Very small wounds,” he noted.

  “From very small tusks.”

  He understood. “That’s probably why they missed her. A pregnant mother, or one nursing newborns, isn’t about to attract attention.”

  “I hope she got away.”

  “If she hadn’t, we’d have heard by now.”

  “I’m glad. There’s been enough bloodshed.”

  “We come from predator stock, Nicole. Hunting is in our nature. And when the prey is very much our equal... ”

  “I put six arrows into her, Kymri,” Nicole marveled, “all solid hits. Hardly made a difference.”

  “You were very lucky, Nicole.”

  “Tell me about it. I saw the boy’s body.”

  “You saved his sister.” The term he used meant birth siblings, not fosterlings.

  “Tell me, Kymri, how strong was the faction that wanted to view us as prey? A challenge to be overcome, a foe to be conquered?”

  He looked down at her, all humor gone from eyes and features.

  “Wrong tense,” he said simply. “ ‘Is the faction’ is the more applicable query. As with your kind, too strong to be ignored but not enough to make policy. We are hunters, yes, and warriors of necessity. But we don’t have the racial taste for wholesale organized annihilation that you appear to.”

  “Is that why you came to make friends, because you’re afraid of us?”

  “Among us, conflict is resolved... personally. The fate of a Household, or a Clan, or even the entire race, is entrusted to a single individual, to stand surrogate for all the rest.”

  “And you all buy into that? Everyone accepts the outcome, no matter what?”

  “Why do you ask me, Nicole, when you can find the cultural bases for your answers in your own memory?”

  “I find them, Kymri. I accept them. They make perfect sense and none whatsoever. The cognitive dissonance makes me nuts.”

  “Because you’re still looking through human eyes. Nicole”—he knelt down besi
de her, putting his face almost level with hers—“the inner music must be in harmony—heart, soul, mind, body—if you are to survive the Harach’t’nyn, there can be no such dissonance. All this”—and he opened his arm as though to encompass the lodge but Nicole knew he meant the interrogation of the past weeks and that yet to come—“is for show. The Challenge Quest is the only test that matters.”

  “Does every Hal pass?”

  Kymri straightened to his full height and turned away. There was a long pause before he answered and even then, he chose his words carefully. “That’s a question time and custom has rendered somewhat... moot. We are evolved, that is a fact of birth, so the Challenge Quest is generally considered the celebration of an accomplished fact. A symbol more than a reality.”

  “But not for all.”

  “No,” he continued, with that same deliberation. “Some look on the Challenge as a means of returning to the traditional heritage of our people.”

  “You don’t approve?”

  “Each must make their own choice, that is the most fundamental tenet of our society.”

  “And likewise bear responsibility for the consequences.”

  “It is not simply a physical ordeal, and those other aspects cannot easily be described. You seek the origins of our very being, you stand naked—to the core of your essence—before the face of God.”

  “What happens when you fail, Kymri?”

  “I had a friend. We had flown together, fought together, there were blood bonds between us, the alach’n’an. We were as close as two Hal can be. It was his choice to accept the Challenge, my responsibility as his sidi’n’an chai to cover his back.”

  “And?” she prompted when he fell silent. There were early evening clouds scudding across the sun, bringing a cool breeze that made Nicole wish for a jersey to go over her gauze blouse.

  “Whatever he sought was not what he found. Something broke inside him, that neither physician nor Speaker could heal. He withdrew into himself, beyond the point where I—or anyone—could reach.”