Owlsight v(dt-2

by Mercedes Lackey

  As good as explanation as any, she thought, when she recovered from the startlement she’d felt at his easy acceptance of what she was going to do. At least he knows what to do.

  There was no time to put it off further; she had done everything she could for the boy with hands and herbs. Despite doubts and soul-numbing fears that she had hidden from both Darian and Hywel, she must rely on a Gift she had only recently learned to use. Now only her Gift could help him further; she settled herself at the child’s side, and sank into Healing Trance.

  She was aware at first only of herself, because she was still within the shields that she had managed to make secondnature and automatic. To her own inner eye, she radiated a pure, clear, emerald-green light, contained within a skin of radiant yellow. Taking heart from this, she reminded herself that this was something she had done before; the job was larger, but no different than fighting simpler illnesses. She took the shield-skin inside herself, absorbing the energies, and fixed her attention on the living creature nearest her, the muddled and roiled energy-bundle that was the sick child. Even at this distance, it was obvious to her Oversight that the boy was dreadfully, dangerously ill. To examine the nerve-net she would have to sink deeper than she ever had before, and look more closely. Examining the surface would tell her nothing.

  She moved herself to hover over the boy, then slowly let herself merge with him. Her awareness passed through the skin, a protective envelope of sickly pink energy, damaged here and there by the tiny scratches and cuts any active child could get in playing, and which also had its share of insect bites, which appeared to her as inflamed half-spheres, glowing a sullen red. There was no sign of major infection in the skin, however, and she passed on without soothing the insignificant hurts, saving her strength for a greater foe.

  His muscles were next, muscles that were well-developed for a child so young; tough and strong, flexible ropes that twisted and sent off sparks that meant pain as Jendey tossed in fever. There was something deeply amiss here, but it was not within the muscles themselves.

  So far, I’ve guessed right. Just to be certain that she had not missed something, she did not sink further to examine the nerves quite yet.

  Instead, she went to the torso as she had been taught, to make certain that the source of his sickness was not in the organs, and began with the heart. An infection of the organs could have been pouring paralyzing poisons into Jendey’s blood, poisons that affected the nerve-net, but which originated elsewhere.

  At this time, there was no sign of strain or irritation there either, nor in the gut - but the lungs were congested and irritated, displaying the sullen red glow of inflammation. But they were, as yet, no more serious than a bad cold.

  But there was definitely something desperately wrong, for all the body’s defenses were mobilized. All along the paths of the blood, the body’s defensive armies swarmed, healing energies flowed, yet they traveled to no central battleground, as if they were confused and could not find a target.

  Just as confused and desperate as I am. . . .

  She shoved away the thought. Failure was not an option.

  She turned her awareness to the spine, sank deeper yet, looking for the black miasma of damage, the sullen murk of attack.

  Then she found it - and nearly withdrew, appalled at the magnitude of the problem she faced.

  The enemy was tiny, tiny, but numbered in countless millions. It subverted the child’s own body to create millions more selves with every passing moment. No wonder this fever could not be fought with herbs and medicines - it overwhelmed by sheer numbers, killing the child in the act of spawning more selves from his very substance!

  But she had seen this kind of enemy before - just not so virulent, and not centered in the nerve-net and spine. At least she knew the enemy’s face now - and she knew how to combat it, provided she had the strength.

  She drove down her fear, fear that threatened to send her fleeing back to her own body, all her work left undone. She gathered her own energies, and lashed out at the enemy with lances and light shafts of purest emerald green. The enemy swallowed her energies and millions of attacking creatures perished - a little damaged, but only a little, and in the next moment, the multitude surged back to life and strength.

  Now it didn’t matter; now there was nothing but action.

  This was the moment when she should have been afraid; she should have given up. But now the instinct of the Healer had her in a grip that drove everything else out of her mind; she was caught in the battle, and could not have pulled away if she wished it. She had been warned of this suicidal drive for self-sacrifice, the trap that the strongest Healers were all too prone to fall into, and if there had been another Healer there, he would have pulled her out. It was too late -

  Thought had been squeezed into a tiny compartment cut off from action, crammed in with the terrible, ice-cold fear. Nothing existed for her but the enemy hordes - and the energies with which she lashed them, heedless of what the energy drain was doing to herself.

  And more; energy drained from her faster than she could replace it. This was a battle she was doomed to lose - and when she lost it, the enemy would move to take her. But she no longer cared.

  You know, this would probably be going better if we hadn’t awakened the Captain out of a sound sleep.

  One lantern illuminated the inside of the tent the two Heralds shared; birds twittered outside, expecting the dawn. Inside, Kerowyn made her feelings known, while Eldan had made himself vanish, in a sound diplomatic move.

  “You did what?” Kerowyn shouted, with incredulous wrath, when Darian finished his report. Darian stood his ground, backed by the Valdemaran Healers, by Nightwind, and by Firesong; they made quite a crowd in Kerowyn’s tent, but didn’t quite spill out into the open.

  He was backed by them, but he had insisted on doing his own talking. “I did this, and I’m not a coward who hides behind other people when it comes to standing by what I did; I can defend myself,” he had told them, and had been rewarded by the approval in the eyes of both Nightwind and Firesong.

  He felt a little sorry for Kerowyn’s officers, who by now, if they had intended to sleep until true-dawn, had been denied that opportunity by the shouting. And if it hadn’t been that he’d never been so sure in his entire life that he had done the right thing, he might well have bolted.

  “We had a tactical opportunity that wasn’t going to come along again, Herald-Captain,” he said steadily, looking straight into her eyes and refusing to be intimidated by her fury. “Furthermore, you may be in command of the assembled fighters, but I’m not one of the fighters. I’m a mage, and not one under your command. I’m a mage with four years of field experience, as well, and I am accustomed to being expected to think for myself. We had our primary objective. We’ve gotten the language, which Tyrsell can now take from his own memory and give to anyone else. Keisha and I took the opportunity that was presented to us precisely because, in terms of personnel, it offered a substantial gain - versus, at worst, the minimal loss of a single noncombatant. We had the boy in a vulnerable position, and a moment of opportunity to extract a single fever victim, a moment that was rapidly vanishing. Neither of us is a good enough Mindspeaker to contact superiors for advice. There wasn’t time to do anything but act.”

  Talk to her in tactical terms, was what Firesong had advised him. Don’t talk to her in terms of Healer’s Oaths or humanitarian motives. Give her gains versus losses. I’m not saying she won’t see and appreciate the humanitarian motives, just that she’s a commander first, and that’s how she’s going to react. Once she finishes reacting to the insubordination, she’ll move right into thinking and analyzing.

  Firesong was right; as she listened to him, the scowl faded to a mere frown, and the frown to a grimace. Finally she threw her hands in the air.

  “All right,” she acknowledged. “I can see that. I just thank the gods that I don’t have anyone else in my ranks who’s got the curse of thinking for himself.”


  “Yes, you do, Kero,” Firesong said mildly. “You generally make them into officers if they manage not to get themselves or anyone else killed.”

  “You can make yourself useful by finding that dyheli and having him drop that language into Eldan’s skull,” she replied sternly to Firesong. She waited for his nod and withdrawal from the tent, then turned back to Darian. “You are going to stay here and give me every single detail of what you saw, heard, and did.”

  “What about us?” Gentian asked, with a wink for Darian that told him he’d won this round.

  “Back to your Healer business,” she said, making shooing motions with her hands.

  Everyone else spilled out into the gray light of false-dawn, wasting no time in putting some distance between themselves and their commander.

  Nightwind stayed with Darian, and Kerowyn didn’t object. When everyone else had left the tent, she wearily waved at them to sit; there were only three places to do so in her tent and she was already occupying the only chair, still dressed in the old shirt and hose she wore to sleep in, her hair coming undone from its braid. So he took a seat on a small campaign chest, leaving the stool for Nightwind.

  He went back over the night’s events in excruciating detail, leaving out nothing, not even the changes in Hywel’s expression. He also did not leave out the alleged Ghost Cat, although his description was as vague as his own sighting of the thing had been. When he had finished, Kerowyn brooded in silence for some time, her fingers automatically undoing and rebraiding her hair. Despite the fact that Darian knew they had been right to act as they had, the tension in the tent built until he thought he couldn’t bear much more. Granted, he wasn’t under Kerowyn’s direct command, but she could order him back to the Vale, and the Tayledras would probably enforce her orders.

  Finally: “Dammit, you did right,” she growled as she bound up the end of her braid. “I don’t like it one bit, but you did right.”

  The tension snapped, replaced by the feeling that someone had removed the weight of a horse from his back.

  “Captain, if anything had been different, if Hywel had been less cooperative, if the victim hadn’t been a small child, if that ghost - or whatever - hadn’t been leading him out in the first place, we’d never have done what we did,” he replied with feeling. “I swear.”

  “It’s that so-called Ghost Cat,” Kerowyn said, chewing her lower lip. “That’s the thing that’s - Bothering me isn’t the word, it’s a more spooky feeling than that. It’s not like some shaman’s trick or wishful thinking. It seems as it every time it shows up, it guides these people properly, and I have to wonder if it can - and will - do more than that. You say you saw it, Tyrsell says he thinks it’s real - and whenever anybody so much as mentions it, I get a shiver down my spine that I can’t stop. I’ve had that same shiver before. . . .”

  “And?” Nightwind prompted alertly.

  Kerowyn smiled crookedly. “Let’s just say that it’s a sign of one of my Gifts.” She turned back to Darian. “It’s a good thing that you aren’t under my command, because even if you are right, this is way too close to insubordination for my comfort. However, you aren’t, and that lets me out of having to find a way to discipline you for exercising your brains without orders.”

  “Yes, Herald-Captain,” he said, and deemed it wise to say nothing more.

  “Now you go make yourself useful and try not to get into any more trouble,” Kerowyn ordered. “I’d like to talk to this lady for a bit.”

  Darian left, with the distinct impression he’d had a narrow escape indeed - but also with the nagging feeling, which grew with every moment, that there was something of critical importance that he had left undone.

  He got no chance to think about it, for the situation that had been at stalemate just a moment before suddenly avalanched down around their ears, with no prior warning whatsoever.

  “Oh, hellIires” came the exclamation from behind him. Kerowyn suddenly shot out of her tent as if her hair were on fire, followed by Nightwind who was moving just as quickly. She sprinted up the path and grabbed Darian by the elbow, startling him into an undignified yelp.

  “I need you - now!” she said, as Nightwind grabbed his other elbow. Before he could even blink, the white bulk of Kerowyn’s Companion thundered down on them from out of nowhere, and Kero and Nightwind literally threw him up on Sayvil’s bare back. A heartbeat later, Kerowyn was up behind him, and it was a good thing that he had automatically grabbed a handful of mane, because the Companion launched herself into an all-out gallop as soon as the Herald’s rump touched her back.

  He clung with hands and thighs, the wind of their passing whipping through Sayvil’s mane until it lashed his face and eyes unmercifully, leaving tiny, stinging welts. He’d heard of the legendary speed of a Companion, now he got a firsthand experience, which would have been breathtaking, if it hadn’t been so terrifying.

  In a much shorter time than he would have dreamed possible, they were among Kerowyn’s fighters and Kero slid down off Sayvil’s back, leaving him still perched there in confusion. Just beyond the screening of trees and bushes, someone shouted in a voice torn by anguish, fear, and rage.

  “What’s the situation?” she demanded, as one of the fighters separated from the rest and saluted.

  “Things were dead quiet, then all of a sudden there was a ruckus in the camp,” the scarred and weathered veteran reported brusquely. “Lots of shouting, carrying on, women wailing. Then the men started raising hell over there, and the Chief comes tearing through the barricades and starts waving weapons around and shouting at us.”

  “You!” Kerowyn slapped Darian’s leg to get his attention. “We’re looking for Tyrsell - but until then, what’s he saying?”

  Belatedly Darian realized that he understood the shouting perfectly well, and paused to listen to it.

  What he heard made his jaw drop.

  “Well?” Kero demanded. “ What? “

  Darian licked dry lips. “He says we sent child-snatching demons into his camp last night, and he wants us to bring back his sons right now. Or else - ”

  “Never mind. I can guess the ‘or else.’ “ Kerowyn swore softly. “And it’s just our bad luck that your little friends happened to be the Chief’s offspring - which obviously, the older one didn’t bother to mention.” She chewed on her lower lip, then turned her gaze to her Companion. “Sayvil, go take him back to camp, then get your tail back here; this is no place for him. By now Tyrsell’s given Eldan this language, and we’ll see if his silver tongue can lie us out of this mess when he gets here. And we’ll pray that Keisha can come up with a cure, fast”

  Sayvil didn’t wait for Darian to object; she all but launched herself out from underneath him, and only a quick grab for her mane kept him from tumbling over her rump.

  He had the presence of mind to slide over her shoulder as soon as she reached the edge of camp where his first tent still stood and slowed a little; he hit the ground running to absorb his own momentum and it was a good thing that he did. She didn’t stop, not at all; she just pivoted on her hind hooves and galloped away again, leaving him panting in the path behind her, staring after her, absently recognizing that there was another Companion standing behind him.

  Gods - now what do I do ?

  “What in hell is going on?” a voice shrilled behind him.

  He whirled, to find Shandi, clad only in a knee-length shift and barefoot, staring at him out of confused and terrified eyes. Her sleep-tangled hair had fallen half over one of her eyes, and she shoved it out of her face with impatient fingers.

  “The camp’s gone crazy, Karles is frantic, and Keisha’s gone and there’s something I - we - have to do with her!” she exclaimed, sounding more than a little frantic herself. “What’s happening? Where’s my sister? What is it we have to do?”

  As quickly and succinctly as possible, Darian explained the events of the last twelve candlemarks. He got a little shrill toward the end, himself, and Shandi stared at him w
ith a blank expression, while her Companion fidgeted and pranced with anxiety.

  She hit her forehead with the butt of her palm, muttering to herself. “You - me - Keisha. What do we have in common?” Balling both hands into fists and pressing them into her temples, she squeezed her eyes shut and her features contorted with pain. “What in hell do we have in common? Why am I here? Why do I have to be here?”

  Gods! he thought bitterly, thinking that she meant that she didn’t want to be there. Why couldn’t she be another Healer? Then at least she‘d have been of some use to -

  From out of the thin morning air, the answer came to him, in the dryly amused voice of his teacher, Firesong.