The Peytabee Omnibus

by neetha Napew

  “Fingaaaaaard, where are your manners, you great oaf?” A woman, nearly the size of him, clambered up to the road-way, smiling at Yana before she continued to berate her husband. “Drink, first: eat, second, and you’ve all the night to talk and get the needful done. Don’t mind him, missus. He means well.” This was directed at Yana. A hand, not quite as large as Fingaard’s, was shoved at Yana, who gripped it, steeling herself for a viselike crush; but the fingers only pressed gently and withdrew. “I’m Ardis Sounik, and wife to Fingaard. Welcome, Yanaba Maddock.”

  It was no surprise to Yana to see the cats clustering around Ardis’s feet, somehow avoiding being trampled on or swept away by the leather skirts the woman wore. They were beautiful1y tooled with remarkable patterns, all inter-linked in a way that looked so familiar to Yana that she tried to remember what the design was called.

  She didn’t have much time for coherent thought after that, because the rest of the village and there seemed to be far more people than twelve, fourteen, or even forty houses could accommodate comfortably—gathered about them. The ponies were led away, while the dogs and cats disposed themselves in places particular to them under benches, and on ledges. Sean and Yana were seated on the longest bench and given a cup of the “warm” to drink.

  Her first surreptitious sniff told her this was nonalcoholic, and not at all similar to Clodagh’s “blurry”. Her first sip filled her mouth with flavor so skillfully blended that she couldn’t name any one taste, but the overall effect made for one of the most satisfying drinks she had ever drunk. She sipped as Sean did, sipped and savored, and tried to remember the names of the folk introduced to her. They were so glad to have visitors, so glad it was the Shongili himself who had come to tell them how to help in this emergency, for even here the planet had told them that their help was needed and they would be shown what could be done.

  Yana cast a sly glance at Sean to see how he was taking that news, but he nodded as wisely as if he had been well briefed. Probably he had. So she kept on sipping.

  Then there was eating. Trestle tables appeared like magic, and torches were set around so that even as daylight faded, the hastily prepared banquet remained well lit. Yana had never seen so many ways to prepare fish: poached, grilled, spread with spicy sauces, deep fried with a coating that was seasoned to perfection, pickled in a sharp liquid, a chowder with potatoes and vegetables—“the last of dried from the year gone out but well kept.” And then sweets—made of fish jelly and flavored by Herb’s—and a funny thick paste that dissolved in the mouth. And more “Warm” drink.

  Singing began, and before she had a chance to dread it, Yana was asked to sing her song of the debacle of Bremport, for one of the boys from Harrison’s Fjord had been there, too. Whether it was all the “warm” or not, Yana just lifted her head and sang her song, and this time she had no trouble meeting the eyes of the parents of the lad lost when she had nearly died, too. This time she knew she eased their hearts, and that eased hers, too. Maybe there would come a day when the awful nightmare of Bremport would be no more than the words of a heart-sung song.

  Eventually, torches lit their way to their accommodation. Yana was so weary, it took her two attempts to get one boot off. Sean’s chuckle and her immediate supine posture told her that he would take care of her, so she helped as much as she could as he undressed her, and shoved her under warmed fur robes. The last thing she felt was his arms pulling her against him.

  She had dreams that night, of wandering amid teeth, down tongues that were white, through bones that were like rib cages, yet she wasn’t afraid in that dream, merely curious as to what she would see next. And throughout the sequence, which repeated, she kept hearing murmurous voices, like singers distant and unintelligible. Yet she knew that the song was joyful and the tune uplifting, with the odd descant of what sounded very much like a purr.

  As they entered the cavern, Bunny said to Krisuk, “So this is the place where Satok speaks to the planet.”

  “No. This is the place where he tells us what the planet says.”

  “But he doesn’t give anyone else a chance to talk to Petaybee?”

  “Oh no,” Krisuk said bitterly. “He wouldn’t do that.”

  “What I don’t understand is why, if your people have been in communication with Petaybee all their lives, this guy can suddenly come and shut them up,” Diego said. “I mean, so maybe he gets his bluff in on the people ‘cause they don’t get around much and he’s a smooth talker—okay, I can accept that. But how does he shut the planet up?”

  Bunny scarcely heard his last words. As she picked her way forward in echoing darkness, she suddenly felt as if she couldn’t draw a breath, as if something inside her, a presence that she always had with her, was walled away from her, withering. The sudden terrible loneliness of being without that presence was crushing. She backed away, stumbling toward the sound of Diego’s voice.

  He was still talking when she reeled against him, clutching at his jacket. “Bunny? Bunny! What’s wrong?”

  “Dead,” she said. “It’s—dead. Out—gotta get—out!”

  Alarmed, the boys helped her out of the cave. She sat down on the path, gulping to get air in her lungs. After a dozen deep inhalations of the cold wind she looked up at Krisuk.

  “How can your people stand to go in there?” she demanded.

  “Why? What’s wrong?”

  “It’s dead, that’s what! Somehow that bastard has killed part of the planet.”

  “How could he do that?” Diego asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “I don’t much like the place,” Krisuk said, “and everybody else is uncomfortable there, too. I hear the songs about the joys of singing with Petaybee, and I remember when I used to love to come here, and I don’t understand it. I sort of put it down to Satok’s charming personality.”

  Bunny shook her head. “It’s more than that. I’m surprised you didn’t feel it, too. Diego, did you?”

  “Maybe,” he said, frowning thoughtfully. “When I was a kid one time, a ship hauled a derelict back to our station. They put it in the cargo bay. I wanted to see what it was like and I snuck in. I couldn’t get out of there fast enough. Was that what you felt?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.” Having escaped the suffocating sensation in the cave, she was too drained to describe it properly. The wind and icy rain were oddly comforting.

  “I’m going back in there,” Diego said suddenly. “Krisuk, maybe you should stay with Bunny.”

  “No.” the boy said. “I’ll go, too. It’s forbidden for any of us to go in without Satok’s say-so. Some who have disobeyed have never been heard from again. But if there’s any kind of proof in there that Satok’s not who he says he is, then my word will carry more weight than an outsider’s. I don’t think my folks would give up a second kid to that creep as easy as they let Luka go.”

  “Will you be okay, Bunny?”

  Dinah chose that moment to press her wet nose against Bunny’s ear and lick it.

  “Yeah,” Bunny said slowly. “Maybe I could even go back in now that it wouldn’t take me so much by surprise.”

  “I don’t think that’s such a good idea,” Diego said, eyeing Bunny’s pale face and eyes staring wide with shock and grief. “Besides, somebody should stand guard. I wish we had a light, though—

  “Oh, there’s lamps in there,” Krisuk said. “Come, I’ll show you.”

  Bunny heard their voices grow fainter as they penetrated farther into the cave. Her fingers folded Dinah’s fur and stroked her soft, pointed ears. Dinah whined and laid her head in Bunny’s lap. Bunny felt like whining herself.

  The little lamp threw the boys’ shadows into grotesque skeleton dances around the smooth walls of the cave room. It was a large room, but it stopped abruptly about forty feet from the entrance. “Has it always been this small?” Diego asked.

  “No. There was this accident, oh, a couple of days before Satok came. It was the first latchkay we’d had here since old McConac
hie died. People were goin’ back into the place like we’d always gone, when all of a sudden there was what sounded like an explosion, and showers of rock and dust came spewin’ out after us. We all ran, but the first few people, McConachie’s family, his apprentice, they were all killed. I remember my Da and the other men diggin’ for bodies. I was just a little kid then. I couldn’t understand where my friend Inny McConachie had gone. That was old Mac’s grandson, a good mate of mine.”

  “That’s rough,” Diego said, feeling along the walls “I lost a friend not too long ago, too.”

  “The woman in the song.?”

  “Yeah. Wait a minute. What’s this?”

  “What?”

  Diego’s fingers dipped into a notch and a panel slid open; reaching out, his hands touched only empty space.

  “How long did it take them to clean up the cave-in?”

  “They didn’t. Nobody wanted to. When Satok came, he pretended to be real sympathetic and went in to look for bodies. He brought out a couple of pieces of clothing and insisted we all go back into the cave to give a proper memorial service. I don’t know why people went along with it. Guess everybody was kind of in shock. It’s got to be about the worst thing that ever happened here.”

  “Not quite,” Diego muttered under his breath. “Bring the light over here.”

  Krisuk did. The fumes from the mare’s-milk lamp stank, but the acrid odor was almost welcome in the sterility of the cave. As Krisuk raised the little lamp, it illuminated an area of clean stone floor and clean stone walls.

  “There may’ve been a cave-in here,” Diego said with a snort, “but someone worked real hard to tidy it all away.”

  “It can’t be!” Krisuk said. “The cave’s been blocked off for years. Nobody comes in here except with Satok. Everybody’s sort of afraid of the place.”

  “That’s too bad,” Diego mumbled, the thought coming to him like a stray line of poetry. “It should be the other way around.”

  “What?”

  “Seems like the place had more reason to be afraid of the people—“

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I dunno. It just popped into my head.”

  “Look, my people may be mistakenly following a sleaze bag but I still don’t like them being insulted by an outsider . . .”

  “Okay, okay. I didn’t mean anything by it. Come on, let’s see the rest.”

  “There’s more?” Krisuk held the light up head high, advanced a step inside the new opening, and emitted a low whistle. “There sure is.”

  Even in the weak light of the lamp they could see that a good-sized tunnel had been cleared through the cave-in.

  The floor still was mainly stone overlain with dust, but the walls and ceiling had an odd white sheen. Krisuk ran his fingers over it and sniffed. “No smell.”

  Diego leaned in closer and dragged his fingernails down the wall, leaving not so much as a scratch in their wake. “No, there wouldn’t be. It’s bonded with Petraseal.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s what they use in mines these days to prevent cave-ins. They bond the rock surfaces to each other with this stuff. It’s very strong. Nothing gets through. I wonder where Satok got it in this quantity.”

  “You think he did this?”

  “Who else?”

  The other boy gave a quavering groan. “Oh, no. I can’t believe he did this.’

  “What?” Diego asked, peering in the direction Krisuk was looking with a transfixed stare. Then he saw the outlines of skulls, large and small, and all sizes and lengths of bones, jumbled in with the rock, like so many fossils.

  “Bastard! He could have brought them out for a decent burial!” Krisuk said.

  “Looks like they’re still half-crushed by the rocks,”

  Diego said fairly. “Maybe he couldn’t get them out without bringing down another cave-in. So he just sealed them up.”

  “Without even a proper song?”

  “You did say there was a memorial service for them in the cave.”

  “Yes, but. . .”

  “Look, I’m not trying to defend the guy, but the bonding wasn’t put on until they were already skeletons. My guess is that it took him a while to dig this out and seal it up. Would have had to. Come on, let’s see how far this goes.

  “I was only a tad, mind you,” Krisuk said, swallowing convulsively, “but it seems to me like the cave was really long. The floor sloped down because it was a hard walk up when we came back out: Mum used to have to carry me. I also remember that the cave used to have little teeth farther on.” Krisuk pointed to the darkness ahead, beyond the reach of the light.

  ‘You mean stalactites and stalagmites?” Diego asked. “Pointy things dripping down from the ceiling or sticking up from the floor like anthills?”

  “Yeah. I never saw an anthill like them, but you got the idea.”

  They walked back farther, their footsteps at first scuffing on the grit across the floor, then sounding with a ringing echo as the floor, too, became coated with the Petraseal and metal grates had been placed along the corridor. For a time the floor sloped down, as Krisuk had remembered, but then another corridor, of fresh, jagged rock, still sharp through the sealant, branched off and twisted upward.

  “That wasn’t there before!” Krisuk said and turned into the new passage.

  Diego followed him up for a few feet, enough to see that the Petraseal covered the floor and from the ceiling dangled the roots of trees and bushes, preserved for all time in death-glossy bones.

  Diego shuddered, in spite of himself. “This probably leads to Satok’s place, if he lives above the cave, like you said “

  “He did all this stuff ?” Krisuk asked. “How could he?”

  Diego shrugged. “It’s not that hard with the right tools. I just wonder where he got them. Come on. I’ll bet if we look further we’ll find out why he’s doing all this.”

  They didn’t find out why, but they did find out what it was he was doing when they took the descending path into the lower cavern Krisuk remembered.

  Lower, farther from the entrance, everything was not covered with the stone bonder. But where the stalactites and stalagmites had been were only round craters, and sometimes small tunnels, like the holes of giant snakes, burrowed deep into the rock walls.

  When she was finally able to retire from the elaborate welcoming dinner Torkel Fiske had arranged, Marmion asked Faber to arrange transport for her the next morning to see Kilcoole from ground level.

  “Ask Sally and Millard to see what they can hear round and about, too, would you, dear Faber?” she added, allowing herself the luxury of a yawn she didn’t have to stifle.

  “Shall I pull rank if I run into obstruction? Faber asked. He was a bird colonel, currently detached to her service on a long loan basis.

  “Hmmm, I’d rather you saved that for later, if at all possible. Torkel did mention somewhere in the gabble at dinner that we could make use of any facilities we needed in our investigations. So we will.”

  She was up and out at what would have been considered by many of her peers an obscenely early hour. She wasn’t as surprised to see Whittaker Fiske as he was to see her emerging from her apartment.

  “Why, Whit, what on earth are you doing up at this hour?”

  He chortled. “The question applies more to you than me, Marmie.” He bowed gracefully over her hand with a real skin-touching kiss. “Early birding?”

  She smiled, and the arrival of Faber driving the antiquated rattletrap 4x4 vehicle spared her the necessity of replying to the obvious.

  “Can we give you a lift?” she asked.

  “Depends on where you’re bound.”

  “Kilcoole. Didn’t see very much from the air yesterday, and it seems the best place to start.”

  Whit cocked his head at her, laugh lines crinkling at the comers of his amused eyes.

  “It’s safe today,” he said, handing her up the first high step to the passenger seat.


  “Oh, your leg!” Marmion said, starting to get down.

  “Don’t mind me.” Opening the rear door, he agilely swung himself into the back.

  “What’d you mean by ‘it’s safe today,’ Whit, dear?” Marmion asked as she snapped on her seat belt and Faber pulled the vehicle away.

  The ride was going to be bumpy over the mangled plascrete, but later she would have exchanged that for the slip and slide of the mud-track to Kilcoole.

  “Ah, well, Matt had his boys up before breakfast, scurrying about the place, accessing all kinds of records and reports so he’d ‘have the overall picture and the demographic levels’ and stuff like that.” Whittaker snorted. “No chance of your running into him today out at Kilcoole.”

  Marmion smiled. She had hoped to do her research first without stumbling over those physically fit types. As the vehicle hit a particularly large bump, she clung to the handle above her head. She could feel Whittaker taking a firm grip on the back of her seat.

  “Should still be able to use snocles this time of year,” Faber said. “Thaw caught everyone off guard.”

  “So much so,” Whit said with a chuckle, that no one came close to winning the Pool.”

  “The Pool?” Marmion asked, clinging tightly to her handle.

  “The betting pool the locals have on when the river breaks up. The thaw was so early this year it took everyone by surprise. See?” he said, pointing to the river at their left, where soldiers were working at the water’s edge. “Still retrieving sunk snocles from their watery grave.”

  From what Marmion could see as they drove by, the soldiers were having trouble: the tires of the tow truck were slipping on the muddy bank, unable to find enough traction to pull the vehicle on the end of its cable out of the fast-running river.

  “Faber,” Whit said, leaning forward to point over the driver’s shoulder to the woods, “see that opening? I’d take that route were I you. Make much better time. I usually walk.”

  Both Marmion and Faber were happy they’d taken his advice, for the narrow track gave a much smoother ride than the churned mud by the river.