Doomstalker

by Glen Cook

  Grauel ignored the hint. “They’re talking about you down there, pup.” Marika noted the familiar form of speech — which even now Grauel turned to only when she was stressed — but maintained her aloofness. Grauel continued, “I just heard them. I had the duty. Gorry again. Talking to the senior. As viciously as ever, but this time I think she may have found a sympathetic ear. What have you done?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Something, certainly. You’ve frightened Gorry so badly she is insisting you be sent to the Maksche cloister come spring.”

  That startled Marika. It was an about-face for Gorry, who till now had wanted her very existence concealed from the cloister at Maksche, of which Akard was a subservient satellite. Though she had done nothing specific to alarm Gorry, the old instructress had read her better than she had suspected. Yet another argument for exercising caution. The old silth counted experience and superior knowledge among her advantages in their subtle, bittersweet, unacknowledged duel.

  “I still don’t understand them, Grauel. Why are they afraid of me?” Gorry she understood on a personal level. Gorry feared because she had whelped a powerful hatred in her pupil. But Gorry’s fear was far more than just a dread of Marika’s vengeance. Without comprehending, Marika knew it was far more complex than that, and knew that part of Gorry’s fear was, to some extent, shared by all the older silth of the packfast.

  Grauel said what had been said before, by herself, Barlog, and especially by Braydic. But Marika did not relate to it any better now.

  “It’s not that they fear what you are now, Marika. They dread what you might become. Gorry insists you’re the strongest pupil she’s ever encountered, or even heard of. Including those with whom she trained, and she claims those were some of the strongest talents of the modern age. What truth there? Who knows? They’re all self-serving liars. But one fact remains undeniable. You have an air of doom that makes them uneasy.”

  Marika almost turned. This was something a little different from what she usually heard. “An air of doom? What does that mean?”

  “I don’t know for sure. I’m just telling you what I’ve heard. And what I’ve heard is, Gorry believes you are something more than you. Something mythic. A fang in the jaws of fate, if you will. Gorry came up with the idea a long time ago. The others used to scoff. They don’t anymore. Even those who try to find ways to thwart Gorry. You have done something that makes even your champions uneasy.”

  Marika reviewed the past few months. There had been nothing at all that was different from what had gone before. Except that she had reached the brink of physical maturation and been ordered to take a daily draft of a potion which would prevent the onset of her first estrus.

  “I don’t see it, Grauel. I don’t feel like I’m carrying any doom around.”

  “Would you know if you did, pup? Did Jiana?”

  Gorry’s word. Jiana. In a moment of anger the old silth had called her Jiana one day recently. “That’s a myth, Grauel. Anyway, Jiana wasn’t even meth.”

  The demigoddess Jiana had been the offspring of a rheum-greater and the all-father avatar of the All, Gyerlin, who had descended from the great dark and had impregnated Jiana’s dam in her sleep. It was not accepted doctrine. It was a story, like many other tales from the dawn of time. A prescientific attempt to explain away mysteries.

  When Jiana had become an adult, she had carried curses around the world, and in her wake all the animals had lost their powers of speech and reason. All but the meth, who had been forewarned by Gyerlin and had hidden themselves away where Jiana could not find them.

  It was an ancient tale, distorted by a thousand generations of retellings. Any truth it might have held once had to have been leached away by the efforts of storytellers to improve upon the original. Marika accepted it only as what it was upon its face, an explanation of why the meth were the only intelligent, talking animals. She did not see that the myth had any connection with her present situation.

  She said as much to Grauel.

  “Myth or not, Gorry is calling you her little Jiana. And some of the others are taking her seriously. They are certain you have been touched by the All.” Which expression could have two meanings. In this case Marika knew she could interpret it as a polite way of saying she was insane.

  “Someone has been touched by the All, Grauel. And I don’t think it is me. These silth are not very down to earth when you look at them closely.”

  Marika had been very much surprised to discover that the silth, for all their education and knowledge resources, were far more mystically and ritualistically inclined than the most primitive of nomads. They honored a score of days of obligation of which she had never before heard. They offered daily propitiation to both the All and the lesser forces with which they dealt. They made sacrifices on a scale astonishing to one for whom sacrifice had meant a weekly bowl of gruel set outside the packstead gate, with a pot of ormon beer, and a small animal delivered to Machen Cave before the quarterly conjunction of the two biggest moons. The silth were devil-ridden. They still feared specters supposedly cast down when the All had supplanted earlier powers. They feared shadows that had come with the All but which were supposed to be enchained irrevocably in other worlds. They especially feared those — always wehrlen — who might be able to summon those shadows against them.

  Marika had observed several of the higher ceremonies by sneaking through her loophole. Those rituals had almost no impact upon those-who-dwell, as the silth called the things Marika thought of as ghosts. And those things were the only supernatural forces Marika recognized. At the moment she seriously questioned the existence of the All itself, let alone those never-seen shadows that haunted her teachers.

  The ghosts needed no propitiation that Marika could see. Insofar as she could tell, they remained indifferent to the mortal plane most all the time. They responded to it, apparently only in curiosity, at times of high stress. And acted upon it only when controlled by one with the talent.

  Doomstalker. That was Jiana’s mystic title. The huntress in search of something she could never find, something that was always behind her. Insofar as Marika could see, the doomstalker was little more than a metaphor for change.

  The doomstalker was a powerful silth myth, though, and Marika suspected that Gorry, fearful of what her own future held, was playing upon it cynically in an effort to gain backing from the other older sisters. None of the Akard silth liked Gorry, but they grudgingly respected her for what she had been before being sent into exile.

  Even so, she would have to do some tall convincing before being permitted more blatant excesses toward her pupil. Of that Marika was confident.

  Caution. Caution. That was all it would take.

  “I am no doomstalker, Grauel. And I have no ambitions. I’m just doing what I have to do so we can survive. They need not fear me.”

  She had slipped into a role she played for Grauel and Barlog both, in their rare meetings, for she feared that Grauel, at least, in her own effort to survive reported her every remark. “I sincerely believe that I will become the sort of sister who never leaves the cloister and seldom uses her talent for anything but teaching silth pups.”

  Were her suspicions insane? It seemed mad to suspect everyone of malice. One meth, certainly. In any packstead there were enmities as well as friendships. Every packstead had its old-against-young conflicts, its Gorry-against-Marika. Pohsit had been proof of that. But to suspect the entire packfast of being against her, subtly and increasingly — even though the suspicion was encouraged by Braydic, Grauel, and Barlog — particularly for reasons she herself found mystical and inaccessible, stank of the rankest madness.

  So it might be mad. She was convinced, and being convinced she dared do nothing but act as if it were true. Any concession to reason would be folly.

  Why did the silth play their games of sisterhood? Or did every silth sister come to stand to all others as Marika was coming to stand to hers? Was sisterhood just a mask shown the outside worl
d? An image with which the rulers awed the ruled? Was the reality continual chaos within the cloister wall? The squabble of starving pups battling over scraps?

  Grauel intruded upon her thoughts. “I can’t make you believe me, Marika. But I am bound to warn you. We are still Degnan.”

  Marika had definite, powerful feelings about that, but she did not air them. Grauel and Barlog both became sullen and hurt if she even hinted that the Degnan pack was a thing of the past. They had taken the Chronicle from her when they had discovered she was no longer keeping it up. Barlog had gone so far as to learn a better style of calligraphy so she could keep the Chronicle.

  They were good huntresses, those two. They had given the packfast no reason to regret taking them in. They served it well. But they were fools, racked by sentimentality. And they were traitors to their ideals. Were they not working against her, their own packmate?

  “Thank you, Grauel. I appreciate your concern. Please excuse my manners. I had a difficult morning. One of Gorry’s more difficult tests.”

  Grauel’s lips pulled back in a fierce snarl. For a moment Marika was tempted to press, to test the genuineness of the show. To employ Grauel as a blade in her contest with Gorry. But no. That was what someone had tried against her on the Rift. And the effort had earned nothing but contempt for the unknown one who had manipulated another into acting in her stead. The reckoning with Gorry was something she would have to handle herself.

  So, when Grauel showed no sign of departing, she continued, “Thank you, Grauel. Please let me be. I need the song of the wind.”

  “It is not a song, pup. It is a death wail. But as you will.”

  Give Grauel that much. She did not subscribe to the clutch of honorifics which Marika was due, even as a silth in training. Had there been witnesses... But she knew Marika abhorred the whole artificial structure of honor in which the silth wrapped themselves.

  As Grauel stalked away, cradling her spear-cum-badge of office, Marika reflected that she was becoming known for communing with the wind. No doubt Gorry and her cronies listed that as another fragment of evidence against her. Jiana had spoken with the wind, and the north wind had been her closest ally, sometimes carrying her around the world. More than one sister had asked — teasingly so far — what news she heard from the north.

  She never answered, for they would not understand what she would say. She would say that she heard cold, she heard ice, she heard the whisper of the great dark. She would say that she heard the whisper of tomorrow.

  Chapter Eleven

  I

  Gorry failed in her effort to rid Akard of its most bizarre tenant. Marika did not go to the Maksche cloister with the coming of spring. The senior was not yet sufficiently exercised with her most intractable student silth to accept the loss of face passing the problem would bring.

  Hopeless as their hopes were, the exiles of Akard tried making themselves look good in the eyes of their distant seniors. Sometimes the winds of silth politics shifted at the senior cloisters and old exiles were derusticated. Not often, but often enough to serve as an incentive. A whip, Marika thought. A fraud.

  Whatever, the senior did not wish to lose face by passing along such a recalcitrant student.

  She was not shy, though, about getting her least favorite pupil out of Akard for the summer.

  The orders had come not from Maksche but from beyond, from the most senior cloister of the Reugge sisterhood. The nomads were to be cleared from the upper Ponath. No excuses would be accepted. Dread filled Akard. To Marika that dread seemed unfocused, as much caused by the sisterhood’s far, mysterious rulers as by the more concrete threat of the hordes close by.

  Marika went out with the first party to leave. It consisted of forty meth, only three of whom were silth. One young far-toucher. One older silth to command. Thirty-seven huntresses, all drawn from among the refugees. And one dark-sider. Marika.

  Maybe they hoped she would be inadequate to the task. Maybe they hoped her will would fail when it came time to reach down and grasp the deadly ghosts and fling them against the killers of the upper Ponath. Or maybe they had not had the webs drawn over their eyes the way she thought. Maybe they knew her true strength.

  She did not worry it long. The hunt demanded too much concentration.

  They went out by day, in immediate pursuit of nomads seen watching the fortress. The nomads saw them coming and fled. The huntresses slogged across the newly thawed fields. Within minutes Marika’s fine boots were caked with mud to her knees. She muttered curses and tried to keep track of the prey. The nomads could be caught up when night fell.

  Barlog marched to her left. Grauel marched to her right. The two huntresses watched their own party more closely than they watched the inimical forest.

  “You look smug,” Marika told Grauel.

  “We are.” Both huntresses were in a high good humor Marika initially assessed as due to the fact that they were outside Akard for the first time in six months. “We tricked them. They thought they would be able to send you out without us along to look out for you.”

  Maybe that explained the scowls from Arhdwehr, the silth in charge. Marika peered at the older silth’s back and expressed her own amusement.

  The hunt was supposed to follow the north bank of the east fork of the Hainlin as far as the nether edge of country formerly occupied by settled meth. Then it was to swing through the hills to the south, loop again north almost to the Rift, drift down to the east fork again, then head home. That meant five hundred miles of travel minimum, in no real set pattern after leaving the Hainlin in the east. Basically, they were to wander the eastern half of the upper Ponath all summer, living off the land and slaughtering invaders. Marika’s would be but one of a score of similar parties.

  For a long time very little happened. Once again, as in the summer of the journey to the Rift, the nomads seemed capable of staying out of their path. When the hunt passed below the site of the Degnan packstead, Marika, Barlog, and Grauel gazed up at the decaying stockade and refused to take a closer look. The Laspe packstead they did visit, but nothing remained there save vaguely regular lines on the earth and cellar infalls where loghouses had stood.

  Stirring a midden heap, Marika uncovered a scorched and broken chakota doll — and nearly lost her composure.

  “What troubles you, pup?” Barlog asked.

  Throat too tight for speech, she merely held out the broken doll. Barlog was puzzled.

  Marika found her voice. “My earliest memory is of a squabble with Kublin. I broke his chakota. He got so mad he threw mine into the fire.” She had not thought of, or dreamed of, her littermate for a long time. Recalling him now, with a chakota in her paw, brought back all the pain redoubled. “The Mourning. We still owe them their Mourning.”

  “Someday, pup. Someday. It will come.” Barlog scratched her behind the ears, gently, and she did not shy away, though she was too old for that.

  Approaching the Plenthzo Valley, they happened upon a packstead that had been occupied till only a few hours before. “Some of them have changed their ways,” Grauel observed.

  It was obvious the place had been abandoned hurriedly. “They do know where we are and what we are doing,” Marika said. She frowned at the sky for no reason she understood. And without consulting Arhdwehr — who was plundering deserted food stores — she ordered a half dozen huntresses into the surrounding woods to look for signs of watchers.

  Arhdwehr was very angry when she learned what Marika had done. But she restrained her temper. Though just a week into the venture, she realized already that the savages with whom she traveled responded far better to the savage silth pup than they did to her. Too strong a confrontation might not be wise.

  Marika had sent those huntresses that Grauel felt were the best. So she believed them when they returned and reported that the party was not being stalked by nomad scouts.

  “They must have their own silth with them,” she told Grauel and Barlog. “So they sense us coming in time to scatt
er.”

  “That many silth?” Barlog countered. “If there were that many, they would fight us. Anyway, sheer chance ought to put more of them into our path.” The only encounters thus far had been two with lone huntresses out seeking game. Those the Akard huntresses had destroyed without difficulty or requiring help from the silth.

  While searching for the best food stores, Arhdwehr made a discovery. She told the others, “I know how they are doing it. Staying out of our way.” But she would not explain.

  Marika poked around. She found nothing. But intuition and Arhdwehr’s behavior made her suspect it came down to something like the devices Braydic used to communicate with Maksche.

  Which might explain how the packstead had been warned. But how had the reporter known where the hunting party was?

  Ever so gently, so it would seem to be Arhdwehr’s idea, Marika suggested that the party might spend a day or two inside that packstead, resting. It had been a hard trail up from Akard. Arhdwehr adopted the idea. Her point won, Marika collected Grauel and Barlog. “Did you find any of the herbs and roots I told you to watch for?”

  “Everything but the grubs,” Grauel replied. She was baffled. Almost from her first contact with them after their arrival at Akard, Marika had had them gathering odds and ends from the woods whenever they left the fortress.

  She replied, “I did not think we would find any of those. It is far too early yet. And too cold. Even the summers have become so cool that they have become rare. However...” With a gesture of triumph she produced a small sealed earthenware jar she had brought from the fortress. “I brought some along. I found them the summer we went to the Rift. Find me a pot. And something I can use as a cutting board.”

  They settled apart from the others — which drew no attention because it was their custom already — and Marika went to work. “I hope my memory is good. I only saw this done once, when Bhlase made the poison for our spears and arrows.”

  “Poison?” Barlog looked faintly distressed.