by J. D. Lakey
Sybille. Bear Under the Mountain did not want Sybille or Hayrald coming here. She could feel him, there, just outside her walls, whispering things. Crazy things that tasted of revenge and retribution and sacrifice. Bear had given up so much. Old Father might have lived another thousand years had Bear not brought the old lizard down the mountain to offer him up as a sacrifice to the Lowlander appetites. It was such a small thing he wanted from Cheobawn in return.
She put her arms over her head to block out the ambient as she tried not to cry. What was she to do? She did not want to go forward yet she was unable to go back. What was done could not be undone.
The sound of snuffling nearby made her look up. A bat-eared fox stared at her, its nose quivering. It started a bit when she moved but did not retreat. She stood up and waved her arms at it. It backed away but stopped after only a few steps.
“I am not dead yet, you stupid pest,” she hissed, stamping her feet. The fox did not believe her. She did not exist in the ambient therefore she must be dead. Not obviously dead but mostly dead. The fox waited, certain that her brain would catch up with her body and remember dying. Soon, she would become still and the fox could begin to feed.
Cheobawn put all her frustration into a bubble of energy and then pushed it out as hard as she could beyond the limits of her body. Something surprisingly strong exploded out of her. The fox yipped in pain as it jumped away, disappearing into the night.
She held her breath, listening. A calmness filled the space behind the wave front of energy as it traveled away from her. Then she noticed that her head stopped aching. Just for a moment. When the pain eased stealthily back around her, it was not as intense as if it feared offending her.
“What was that, I wonder?” she muttered out loud to no one in particular. “Is that the spiral out without the spiral in? I wonder if Sybille might know. Remind yourself to talk to her after this is all done. You know you are talking to yourself, right?” She snorted, shaking her head. “Maybe I just need to be like Sybille, all snarly and sharp edged.”
She paused. That was not a bad idea. She took a deep breath and pressed her wards back in place around her. Shielded from sight and mind, she crept down the game trail. As she drew closer to the fire, she realized there was no need for stealth. The Pack of Lowlanders were making as much noise in the real world as they were in the ambient. A herd of fenelk could have come crashing down the trail and they would not have heard it.
She crept closer, trying to stay out of sight. When she thought she was close enough, she popped her head from around the trunk of a great cedar for only a second before ducking back again.
The after image of an enormous bonfire made her blind for a moment. She closed her eyes and started counting. While she waited, she tried to analyze what she had seen. A fire burned, hot and bright, its circle of light illuminating a clearing made by the spring floods. The sudden rush of snow melt had scoured out the stream bed and deposited a bar of sand and gravel at a sharp turn of the creek bed. The fire had been built at its center, wood taken from the mounds of fallen scrub trees deposited by the floods close at hand. The resinous wood crackled and spat, sparks flying up into the air, intent on setting the entire forest aflame. Did the fools not realize it was the dry season?
There had been three shadows moving around the flames. Males. Cheobawn relaxed a little. None of them appeared to be armed and all three stared into their fire, light blind.
Where was their Ear? Had they lost her to predators already? That made her sad. Without an Ear they were doomed to fail. Why were they still here?
She retreated a bit and circled around the edges of the sandbar, using the jumbled detritus around the creek as cover. On the far side of the clearing the flood waters had jammed a long log against the underbrush and cedar trunks. She crept up to it on all fours to peek over the top.
What she had thought was a trunk of an ancient and gnarled cedar was something else entirely. Old Father had died in agony, his body twisted, his jaws wide, even now, as if he were still screaming his defiance at the thing that killed him. She ducked down to press her face into her hands, trying to forget the feel of the Old Father dying, trying to ignore the rage and pain that clung to the body. It tainted the very air of this small valley from ridge to ridge. Bear Under the Mountain fed upon the power of Old Father’s death, taking perverse pleasure in the pain as he set his revenge into motion.
She took a long, steadying breath and looked again. From her vantage point she could see the massive wound in Old Father’s back, just in front of the hind legs. What would cause such a wound? It had not been fatal, that wound but it had broken the great lizard’s spine. She could see the drag marks filled with blood. He had come down off the ridge, intent on getting to water but had never made it. Another wound had destroyed the near eye socket, crushing the skull around it. Had it been accident, intent, or the hand of Bear guiding them? The Lowland hunters had managed to find the only place a bhotta was truly vulnerable, delivering the fatal blow that ended its agony.
The three men were busy doing things around the body of Old Father. The one standing near Old Father’s belly stood up and howled his pleasure at the sky, waving something bloody in the air. His face turned towards the light for a moment, revealing a series of scars that puckered the skin of his cheek. A chunk was missing out of the eyebrow on that side of his face and his nose had been broken and badly set, perhaps more than once. The wounds distorted his expression and gave him a sinister appearance.
Scar Face, she called him in her head. Dressed from neck to boots in hunter’s camo, his black hair standing up from his head like the bristles on the back of a grunter, he looked no different from any experienced warrior of the tribes if one ignored the scars and the array of odd lumps hanging from his belt.
Scar Face crossed over to one of his companions, a tall, muscular man with hair as white as an oldpa’s, who was sitting on a large log beside the fire. The oldpa straightened. It was a small motion, innocent enough but she was reminded of the way a hunting cat moved; fluid and controlled, taut muscles sliding under a velvety skin. There the comparison broke down. No cat she had ever seen had skin like this. Light danced oddly along the tight cloth of his suit, sparkling in the fire light.
Scar Face offered him the bloody object. The oldpa, whom she named Sparkly Man, shook his head, annoyed. He turned away, returning his attention to the object he had in his hands. Undaunted, Scar Face turned away to wave the bloody thing under the nose of the third man. This man recoiled in disgust. Smaller than the other two in height as well as frame, his clothes not too dissimilar from her own except for his lumpy belt, he turned his face towards her for a second. He was much younger than the other two, perhaps not much older than Sigrid. The nature of this Pack jarred her sense of order. The age differences were too great. What Ear in her right mind would agree to bring them out on a foray together?
Scar Face laughed, saying something harsh that angered the boy. The boy said something back. The ugly man snarled and pulled a long knife from somewhere. It flashed in the light of the fire. Cheobawn nearly ducked down, not wanting to watch but a sharp word from the Sparkly Man stopped the death match before it started. Instead of killing the boy, Scar Face put the bloody thing between his teeth and used the knife to cut the chunk away from the rest. The boy closed his eyes and looked away. Scar Face chewed, chortling and then swallowed before taking another bite.
Understanding dawned in her mind and Cheobawn gagged. She pressed her palm against her mouth, sucking air into her nose while she waited for the nausea to pass. Scar Face was eating Old Father. Not just any part of Old Father. He was eating organ meat of the worst kind. The thing in his hand was Old Father Bhotta’s liver.
Her mind raced. She had to do something. She had to say something. Bear Under the Mountain did not want her to interfere. He raged at her from the ambient. She ignored him. What could she do? Her first aid kit was back in the Meetpoint dome, stored safely in the bottom of her pack. E
ven if she had it, she was fairly certain it did not contain the antidote for bhotta meat poisoning. Her eyes looked around her, trying to see by the flicker of the firelight what was growing around her, looking for any of the familiar herbs the domes used to stock their pharmacies. Not scheduled to take the class on emergency field medicine for another year, she had only a rudimentary knowledge of the medicinal herbs of the forest. She recognized feverwart and rotroot, neither of which would help unless one of them got a headache or an open wound.
She looked back into the clearing to watch as Scar Face leaped up onto Old Father’s back and danced on the top of his skull, all the while shouting something that might have been a song or perhaps a prayer to his gods. Cheobawn cringed as he sank his teeth into the liver and cut off another bite. No one in their right mind ate bhotta meat from an animal larger than the length of a man’s arm and even then, the meat was soaked in a chemical bath for at least a day. If the organs were damaged in the hunt, then the entire carcass was burned as toxic waste.
She couldn’t just sit here and watch while the man killed himself. She had to act, even though it was probably too late. Her intentions only vaguely formed in her head, she rose.
She was half over the log in front of her when Bear Under the Mountain took matters into his own hands.
It all happened so quickly. A duff pig broke free of the undergrowth with an enraged squeal. They were not very bright, duff pigs. The smell of so much blood must have driven it mad with blood-lust, otherwise it would not have dared the fire or the menace of the three men. The boy froze as the pig charged directly at him then fumbled at something hanging from his belt. Sparkly Man merely glanced up, picked up a lumpy piece of metal off the log next to him, and pointed it at the pig. There was a flash from the hollow end, then a sound cracked the air apart. The pig went from a being there to being mostly not there at all.
Cheobawn screamed and threw herself backwards, tumbling end over end. She landed on her hands and knees then scrabbled frantically back to her hiding spot under the curve of the log.
It was as if the weapon had vaporized her brain instead of the pig’s. She could not think, she could not feel, she could not breathe. All she could do was press her body against the ground and pray that she did not die. The ambient roared, all order fallen into chaos, echoing the roaring in her own mind. Cheobawn went blind on every level, in every sense. She dug her fingers into the dirt under her face while she drove her mind deep into the flesh of the mountain, trying to anchor herself in the world.
Self-control came back in bits and pieces. The harsh sound of her breath whistling out of her lungs scared her. She stopped breathing, holding her breath for a few moments before beginning again, drawing the air in slowly, sucking it deep into the center of her body before she released it to flow out again, silent and soft. She pressed her will against her wildly beating heart and the roar of blood in her ears. It settled, smoothing its beat inside her chest.
The roaring in her ears would not stop. She realized it was coming from outside her head. Scar Face’s delight at the pig’s death was unbounded. He roared his pleasure into the night sky, defying the very stars their dominion over death, it seemed. Sparkly Man shouted something, then repeated it, his voice cutting sharply through the din. Scar Face fell silent. The boy’s voice called from somewhere close to her hiding place.
“By all the gods, shut up! It came from over here.” he said distinctly. The sound was more than close. He had to be standing next to her log. She was very nearly found.
A new wave of terror set her heart racing again. Cheobawn leapt to her feet and ran. She felt sick and she was still light blind. All things being even, she could not win a race against a boy twice her height but she was quick and she carried a sense of the flow of the terrain around her. She knew where she wanted to go. She sprinted toward the game trail that led back up the ridge. A sharp oath followed by the thud of feet behind her spurred her on. Scar Face howled like a boar hound on a scent trail, a truly terrify sound. Boots pounded the earth behind her, closing in. She dodged right, throwing herself through a gap in a stand of whiptrees and then dodged left, trying to misdirect him in the deep shadows outside the circle of light from the fire. Her pursuer cursed as the sound of snapping branches came from behind her. He had collided with the brittle saplings. She raced towards the next copse, intending to repeat that trick. Then she realized that the sound of snapping wood came from in front of her as well as behind.
“Grab him, fergawdsake!” Scar Face yelled, crashing clumsily through the whiptrees less than ten paces in front of her. Cheobawn screamed. She had veered right into Scar Face’s path. Fear tore at her mind. There were no more walls. Bear howled his pleasure and Eater of Worlds lifted its head and stared at her through the chaos of the ambient, pinning her with his stare, seeing her clearly for the first time. Images washed through her. She was a bennelk lying down in the jaws of Old Father. She was a grunter pig with the leopard’s jaws closing around her throat. She was a buzzer caught in a spider web. Somehow, in the chaos of shadow and sound, Scar Face had morphed into Eater of Worlds. She screamed again and twisted away, reversing her course, intent on doing everything within her power not to get eaten.
Chapter Eighteen
The boy caught her, his strong arm scooping her up, driving the breath from her lungs. Cheobawn tried to get away, pummeling frantically at his arm with her fists and kicking out with her heels. Barefoot, she could do little damage. Her heels found nothing but the solid meat of his thigh.
“Settle down. We’re not going to hurt you,” he grunted shifting his grip to pin her arms and settling her on one hip.
Scar Face skidded to a halt before them, wearing Eater of World’s form. She writhed, unable to stop the high pitched keening that escaped from her lungs. The boy’s hold on her slipped a bit. She jerked an arm free. Using it as a lever she tried to climb up his shoulder and down the other side. The boy’s arms crushed her against him, pressing her face against his throat. This was not so bad. At least she would not see the teeth of the thing that wanted to crunch her bones.
“Don’t let him eat me please don’t let him eat me don’t eat please please please don’t eat me,” she whispered frantically against the boy’s neck.
The boy swore, hard and long. His grip eased a bit. She wrapped her arms around his neck, locked her legs around his waist, and prayed as hard as she could.
“Give it here. Let’s see what we caught,” Scar Face said with a cruel laugh. Cheobawn tightened her grip and began to keen again.
The boy shifted his body to put himself between her and Scar Face.
“Back off, Garro. You’re covered in blood and you are scaring her.”
“Getting all soft, bug?” Scar Face sneered. “We ain’t seen nothing so far on this trip that didn’t want to kill us and eat us for breakfast. It ain’t a puppy. If you’d take the time to notice, that thing snugged up so nice and cozy against your guts has a sharp little fang hanging off its belt. Hold it still.”
Cheobawn was not going to let go of the boy willingly. She tightened her grip, ready to fight but the only thing Scar Face wanted from her was her knife. She felt him jerked it out of its sheath.
“Ask the little bug what this is for, why doncha. What’s it doing here? Where’s its mummy and daddy, huh?”
The boy did not reply. Instead, he turned and began to retrace his steps through the undergrowth, the heat of his anger beating like a drum through the veins of his neck. Cheobawn pressed her face against that, letting it wash through her.
“Report.” The voice crackled faintly out of the air. She hiccuped in surprise. Blinking away her tears, she looked back over the boy’s shoulder.
Scar Face pulled something off his belt and held it in his palm.
“Caught it. We’re on our way back,” he said into the device.
“What was it?” the device asked. She assumed the voice came from Sparkly Man.
“You’ll never believe it. Bug ca
ught hisself a kid.”
Wonder of wonders. Scar Face had a mobile com unit. She had been thinking the Lowlanders were primitives but here they were with technology every bit as sophisticated as anything the domes might have.
But wait. Were they Lowlanders or off-worlders? Did the technology mark them as Star Woman’s children?
For all that she did not know, she now knew one thing. Eater of Worlds knew Scar Face well. Scar Face as an off-worlder.
That was the last logical thought she had for a bit.
If Sparkly Man answered Cheobawn did not hear it. She was too busy. She was skin to skin with an untrained and unshielded mind for the first time in her life and something very odd was happening to her. The faintly musky smell of the velvety skin under the boy’s ear came into sharp focus in her mind. His heart pounded against the inside of his chest. She could feel it through her shirt, feel it under his skin where her cheek rested against his neck. The place where she ended and he began grew frayed, blurred, and then disappeared.
He was angry and frustrated which left no room for fear. Her own fear found no place to stand midst his anger. It slipped under the dark water in his heart and drowned, unnoticed.
How could she be afraid with his strong arms wrapped around her body? He wanted to protect her from the other two. He did not like his Packmates for some reason. It was a little hazy, the source of that dislike. She tried to listen better. The boy tasted wonderful. His mind was full of sky, water, and stone. She caught just a whiff of what it felt like to climb the Escarpment; pitting the strength of mind and body against the forces of the planet, the feelings of being wildly fearless and infinitely alive jumbled up with images of ropes, metal loops, and pins that bit into the cracks between rocks.