Warrior Witch

by J. D. Lakey

  “Sam does not believe that,” Che protested.

  “Sam is young and his time in the Spider War has broken the link between his father’s life and his own. In the crucible of such trials, far from his father’s house, a young Father must find the truth inside himself,” Mora said.

  Che puzzled over this. Was this a criticism or a compliment? It was hard to tell with Mora.

  “Even Fathers can find the Goddess if they turn their eyes inward,” Menolly recited, her left palm held in the air, pointing upwards.”

  “Truth,” repeated all the Mothers in the circle as they nodded, their palms lifted to the sky as well.

  Che looked around at them. Was this meeting going to devolve into a Temple ceremony? She ignored the High Priestess, her mind busy with other things. “So. Those who seek to harm us are those Robert calls friends and invites to dinner. It is a strange circle of power-brokers. They are not friends, but they are not enemies, either. At least at River’s house I can control who gets invited into the inner sanctum. The admiralty and the governor send envoys to petition me for meetings. I grant few such meetings for their messages are much in the same. Megan has taken to holding tea parties in the garden for those who will fight on our side. I am seducing Sam away from his father. He comes because Doreeth brings Willa and Willa makes him laugh.”

  Brigit nodded. “It takes a Mother’s magic to temper the steel of a Father and make him great.”

  Che nodded at this, but it puzzled her. Why were her Mothers reminding her of all the lessons they had ever taught her?

  “Enough chit-chat. What brings you here, daughter,” Mora asked. “Surely not just homesickness.”

  “Mmm, no,” Che agreed. She put her cup down. “The rivermen and the Watch are at odds with each other. The Spacers have fired upon boats full of pirates and secret police alike. Dominick is plotting his revenge against the Wheelwright household. The governor, who is without honor or loyalty, is playing every side against the other, thinking he will solidify his power base through conflict he creates. I have reminded Spider why they first thought to step off into the stars. He has agreed to help me take my revenge. As a consequence, I have started your war for you. It is time to come down and broker a peace.”

  “Did you?” Amabel said, suppressing a laugh. “How did you know we wanted War?”

  “It seemed the only logical choice,” Che said, nibbling on a cookie. “I will gather all the injured parties in one room. All you have to do is show up and talk them into preferring peace over a war with me. I will be amenable to anything you arrange, peace or war, life or extinction.

  Mora leaned forward, a gleam in her eye. “Extinction? Is this a new strategy in the game of War? I thought we had every possible gambit already mapped out. Tell me about it.”

  Cheobawn smiled. “First, answer a question.”

  “We will try,” Mora said.

  “The first colony ship. What did it bring besides humans?”

  “What you see in our barns and fields, all are descended from the original stock,” Mora said.

  “They are and yet they are not. The first ship brought a Maker of the Living Thread, didn’t it?”

  “The first colonists, your ancestors, did not call them that. Geneticists they were called before they fled and came up the Escarpment with the first of the First Mothers.” Mora said.

  “What did you do to change them, those first animals?” It was not Mora she was looking at when she asked that question.

  Amabel smiled. “Ah, she has stumbled on our secrets. What do you think my predecessors did?”

  Cheobawn scowled. Forever with their games. Goddess curse all secret keepers. “Something simple. Like changing the chemistry of their gut to digest the alien landscape,” Che ventured.

  “Why would you think that?” Mora asked, intently studying the cookie in her hand.

  “Because the newer animals that have come from the stars are tragically maladjusted to this world. Is there a way to fix it? Do you have a Little Maker tab that can heal that?”

  Amabel, who had a whole infirmary full of equipment that could create nano-bots that delivered the viruses programmed to do micro surgery on the DNA of a living human host, frowned.

  “Human or animal?” the Maker asked.

  Cheobawn suppressed a shudder at the thought of a human catching a virus and waking up changed. “Animal.”

  “Feral or domestic?”

  “Feral,” Che answered, already hating what the final answer would be.

  Amabel shook her head. “Not in retrograde. For future generations, perhaps. Is that what you want? Before you answer, consider the schism that this would create between the original stock and the modified animals. Parents would eat their children.”

  Cheobawn flinched and shook her head. She already had a taste of that with her rat war. “But you send the Little Makers down the Escarpment to change the Lowlanders,” Cheobawn insisted. “I have seen the tabs, seen the lightning bolt sigil printed on them.”

  “Genetics is neither simple nor straightforward, girl,” Amabel said with a long suffering sigh. “Survival is a complicated thing. Humans have a dozen genes that help it to survive a specific situation, all predicated on the level of health of the individual organism. Illness may rise from an error in the code and I can fix that error. That is what I send down the Escarpment. But I cannot turn off a gene that will ensure that at least ten percent of the population survives in times of catastrophic change.”

  “You have been playing god with the Lowlander genome for two thousand years. Surely they have been cured of all their illnesses.” Cheobawn was not going to let this go. For the first time in her life, she meant to get whole and complete answers.

  Amabel grimaced. “There are genes for the individual and there are genes of the human herd. It ordains how we live in a community. Humans are oddly paradoxical creatures. In times of plenty, certain genes get turned off. Others get turned on. There is a primitive gene that makes us fall asleep and sleepwalk through our lives, eating, mating, procreating. Intelligence is a disadvantage in such a time while xenophobia rises. It is a horrible trait that sees planets fill to the breaking-point with humans who think nothing of consuming everything until they are forced to build ships and cross the dark of space in search of new places to exploit. That is how humans ended up here, on Tearmann. Those first Makers of the Living Thread understood this. The children of the domes will never catch that malaise because we have actively chosen for those traits that enhance dome living.”

  Cheobawn looked around the circle of the Coven. “Bit by bit, you are changing them, aren’t you? The Lowlanders. Into what?”

  “Do not judge us, girl,” Mora sniffed regally. “You will thank us, you who must rule the domeless.”

  Cheobawn stared at her Truemother. There was an assumption in this circle of Mothers that she had agreed to any of this.

  “Do you want a Little Maker?” Amabel asked.

  “Yes. No. I would not know what to use. No. I will solve it in my own way.”

  Amabel studied Cheobawn, her mind working on some problem. This conversation was not over.

  “Now, my turn,” Mora said. “Explain extinction as a strategy in the game of War.”

  Che began to talk.

  Sometime in the middle of the night Cheobawn stepped down lightly onto the center stone of River’s garden. Much to her surprise, the entirety of Blackwind Pack stood, ranged around the edge of the great circle, watching her. River stared at her reproachfully. He did not like her leaving without a guard.

  “So, what did the Coven say?” Megan asked.

  Che beamed at her heartsister. They had spent two weeks at Robert Wheelwright’s house waiting for her to heal while a parade of irate rivermen, hopeful merchants, insistent messenger boys, political envoys, and every hedge-witch within a three-days’ journey paraded through Robert’s front parlor. The messengers were agents of those who thought themselv
es too important to come courting an eleven-year-old warrior-witch.

  The Admiralty and the Hegemony sent ministers on an almost daily basis, but Kander Hess and Kirr had been surprisingly missing from this list. Hess perhaps had not forgiven her yet for entangling him in her convoluted plans. Kirr, surely, had caught a whiff of her insanity and was wise to keep clear of it.

  But it was Kirr and Kander who had come with a dozen burly warriors from the Space Port when Megan was officially healed. Robert had warned them that Blackwind Pack would be moving through the city. It was Kander who arranged the cars and the guards when they moved down to River’s house under the cover of darkness. Despite Che’s protest, Kander had set up a perimeter around River’s property and set his men to guard it. Kirr had stood, a silent witness, cold and still, just outside the entrance to River’s school until everyone was settled. When all was said and done, he met Cheobawn’s eyes and reached into her mind.

  I know what you saw, the day the guns tried to kill you. Do not judge us all by the sins of the few.

  Che stayed out of the misty place he created. Only her voice manifested there. I know who is innocent and who is wicked, she said.

  It was a new word she had just learned. Wicked. Wicked was the place Evil went willingly, with knowledge aforethought, to work its mayhem. The word hung in the air between them. Kirr heard what was in her mind and went white across the nose, turned on his heel, and left with Kander.

  There, in River’s house, she found peace for a small while. A short while.

  Now the magic of the world told her things. It was time to finish this. Stepping out onto the depiction of a dome footprint, Che smiled at all those she loved and asked the question that she already knew the answer to. “How did you know where I had gone?” Che asked.

  Megan pointed at the six scarlet carrion dragons hanging off the edge of the roof. “They do not follow you when you go to the Temple Tower.”

  Connor tapped the coil of silver wire on his cheek. The Pack loved their ear-coms and had taken to wearing them constantly “Plus your com went dead. Where else would you go that was too far for the bloodstones to find you?”

  Che smiled. Tam, taking his right as Alpha, hugged her first. “How did it go?”

  “We are on. Two weeks should be enough to make all the arrangements,” Che said.

  Tam groaned. “Arrangements. It is not like we are preparing a tea party. These people hate us.”

  Che sighed. Then exhaustion hit her. She felt frail and old beyond her years. It took too much out of her, this leaping about from place to place on the planet. Both Megan and Tam wrapped their arms around her.

  Alain, Connor, and River went back into the house. It was near dawn. Too late to go back to bed, too early to open the shop and start sparring sessions. By the sound coming over the com on her ear, the others were in the kitchen preparing breakfast. Cheobawn suddenly remembered that she was hungry.

  “I’m starving. Let’s eat.”

  She fell asleep over griddle cakes with berry compote and dreamed of Bear Under the Mountain dancing her across the stars, Eater of the Worlds playing tag around her feet. Tomorrow she would go to Flynn’s shop and have him explain com-spheres, quantum images, and the nature of time inside the quantum fields generated by a bloodstone.

  Chapter 21

  In the heart of Dunauken, midst the glass spires of other towering office buildings, stood the monolithic Governor’s Tower. It was the source of all law and order on the planet Occonomara. This was what Sam Wheelwright said as he explained planetary politics to Blackwind Pack, and because the building was symbolically so important, some past governor had decreed that no other building could be built taller or more ornately. As the years passed, the governor’s office would have workers add carvings to the outside facade and raise the spire at the top by another thirty feet so that the construction around it did not overshadow it. Sam found this amusing when he was briefing them in preparation for this day.

  Cheobawn found it confusing. She suspected Lowlander “law and order” meant something entirely different than the dome’s belief in harmony and balance. It reminded her of the Old One in the bottom of the River Liff, each year adding another layer to its armor, each year adding another inch to its length, each year becoming more rigid and unmovable. The rule of the High Coven was the exact opposite, forever on a quest to be as malleable and fluid as possible, their fearless quest for change a shield that kept all fools at bay.

  Cheobawn had asked Robert about the untenable rigidity of Lowland rule. Robert had just laughed, perhaps thinking her simple. Megan had pulled her away when she opened her mouth to argue with Sam’s father.

  “Hush, Ch’che,” Megan whispered.

  “I will not have him thinking the Mothers of the domes are simpleminded,” Che had growled.

  “It is a lost cause, arguing with a male Lowlander,” Megan whispered. “They make up rules and then create a line of logic to justify their thinking that is so convoluted it makes your head spin.”

  “Why?” Che asked. It was a question she asked far too often when it came to Lowlanders.

  “They hunt for the impossible. A set of universal rules that can govern every human.”

  “Every human is different. No such rule is possible.”

  “Yes,” Megan said softly, a smile playing across her mouth, “but don’t tell them that. They think it is a failure of their own intelligence that nothing ever works and instead of rethinking the problem, they create another law even more convoluted than the last.”

  “You are making that up. Is that a joke?” Che had asked suspiciously.

  Megan put her hand on her heart. “I swear. Alain tried to explain it to me. I had to beg him to stop, it was so painful to hear.”

  Cheobawn shook her head. How was she to heal such insanity? She looked up at the towers around her from the back seat of Robert Wheelwright’s enormous electric car. So. Here she was, in the heart of Lowlander Law, bent on negotiating with madmen.

  Kirr and Kander Hess stood stiffly on the edge of the sidewalk in front of the Governor’s Tower, a phalanx of Spacer guards arrayed around them. The pair had dressed in their finest black uniforms, the medals on their shoulders flashing in the sunlight. The chauffeurs eased the line of cars through the barricades and around the checkpoints to stop in front of Kander.

  Robert Wheelwright got out of the front car. He brushed the wrinkles out of his formal coat, straightened his spidersilk tie, and turned to wait patiently for his guests to disembark.

  Two guards leaped forward to open the back doors, then leaped back in shocked dismay.

  The day they had come down the bluffs from Robert Wheelwright’s house, River had been waiting for them with a small mountain of packages piled in the courtyard. Flynn had been busy. The weapons and armor were splendidly crafted. Golden vines curled down blades and hafts, and similar embellishments were pressed into the leather of the armor.

  Connor and Alain exited the long car first, the tips of their bladed sticks preceding them. Connor still sported a short riverman’s haircut. Alain had shorn his own copper locks off to match. Che smiled. This would be the first time a Pack—dressed in their well-polished leather armor and armed as a Father might dress were he to stand as shield-man to his Alpha Mother when she challenged the rule of the Coven in the Temple Tower—revealed themselves to the Lowlander mob standing behind the barricades on the sidewalk. The curl of the com units around their ears was a new addition. There was no tradition when it came to com-units, but no one knew that but Blackwind. Nor would anyone take note of the extra crimson bloodstone in Cheobawn’s unit. A control crystal. Flynn had added it to her earpiece while he taught her the lessons of com-spheres and quantum imaging.

  The crowd behind the barricades murmured uneasily.

  Tam and Megan stepped out next, both in the ornately painted armor of Alphas. Both had their hair drawn back tight in a well-oiled braid tied off tightly with a l
eather thong. Megan had been given the choice between wearing a spidersilk dress or armor. She had refused the softness of a dress when Cheobawn could not reassure her that she would not have to fight her way out of the audience rooms when the time came.

  Blackwind Pack moved into formation around the door of Che’s car. Sam stepped out and turned to give Cheobawn his arm. Che was grateful for it. The long skirts of the spidersilk shifts wanted to tangle around her ankles. Her hair was as short as Connor’s and Alain’s and she had used sweet nut-oil to make it stand up straight from the top of her head. It was a warrior’s hair-cut in honor of Distar and Jilly, symbolic, just as the color of her dress was symbolic. All the layers of silk were brilliant white, much as Menolly would wear during the ceremonies of the High Tower. That color was a message, if you knew enough about the High Temple to read it. Che was to be a non-combatant in any conflict that arose. Sort of. There were many forms of combat. The decrees that came from the High Temple could be every bit as deadly as a challenge to combat. She was Dunauken’s High Priestess. It was up to her to decide if today would see an execution or simple euthanasia. It was too soon to tell.

  Sam waited patiently as she shook out her gown and straightened to her full height. She was still shorter than everyone around her, but not by much. Despite all the trauma of the past year, her body had still managed to grow another inch or two.

  Che surveyed the great tower, tipping her head back to study its spires. A phalanx of carrion dragons flew in lazy circles around its tip.

  Find me a rat. Alive and healthy. Bring it when I call.

  Which kind? The angry ones or the ones to whom you have given a new heart?

  The angry kind, Cheobawn said. The angrier the better.

  Kirr cleared his throat. Che met his eyes. His gaze swept the nearby men. The Spacers around them were fingering the hilts of their guns. Move, Kirr was saying. You are making the soldiers nervous with your armed silence.