Crecheling

by D. J. Butler

  She saw the Hangman in her mind’s eye too, burly and merciless, and she heard the condemned man’s tune. She knew it, she was certain of it, though she still couldn’t place her finger on what it was.

  An elbow in her ribs snapped her out of her train of thought.

  “Dyan!” Shad hissed.

  She realized that she’d actually been humming the tune. “I’m sorry,” she mumbled, mortified. She looked up at Magister Zarah, hoping to see a forgiving smile, or, even better, to hear a retraction. It isn’t true, she wanted to hear, you were being tested, but there’s no need to go through with it. Tomorrow we’ll ride back to Buza System with Jak and the others, and you can help him find his sister.

  She heard none of that, and she saw only the black silhouette of the Magister in her cloak.

  And she realized that Jak’s sister Aleen was dead.

  “This is the Cull,” the Magister intoned. “Tomorrow you will be Blooded. Tomorrow you will no longer be my children, but Urbanes, adults, fully-grown and Called into the System. “Do you see it, my children?”

  Dyan couldn’t hear the others respond. The world spun around her and her heart felt hard and cold, like a fist punched into the center of her chest.

  “Aye,” she whispered.

  ***

  Chapter Five

  The entire population of Ratsnay Station turned out to send off its best and brightest children—unknowingly—to their doom. Dyan couldn’t look at their faces, and hoped that they took her staring at their feet for a sign of the lingering effects of alcohol. More than a few of the Landsmen looked groggy and sick from the previous night’s beer-fest, including the Selected youth.

  The Landsmen whistled and stomped their feet and cheered as the Magister rode away with ten children in tow, the Station’s five brightest youth riding its five best horses. Conversation was muted by headaches, the early morning hour, and, at least in Dyan’s case, by a heavy weight on her mind.

  She had to kill Jak.

  And he kept staring at her.

  “What is it?” she asked him, trying to force a smile. “What’s wrong?”

  He shrugged but didn’t look away. “I’m just wondering how Aleen must have felt when she rode away on this very same road. I think it was even the same Magister … what’s her name?”

  “Magister Zarah.”

  “Zarah,” Jak chewed on the name. “That sounds right. I think it was your Magister Zarah who led her away.”

  “Are you looking forward to meeting her?” The words were charcoal in Dyan’s mouth.

  “I’m looking forward to this whole thing very, very much,” Jak agreed.

  Zarah led them by a different road, a thin trail that led west rather than north.

  “This isn’t the road to the System,” Jak observed. Finally, he looked away from Dyan, at the cottonwoods and tall, dry grasses banking the road. “You’re sure your Magister Zarah isn’t taking us to join some pack of Wahai renegades?”

  Dyan’s mouth felt very dry. “The Magister is a teacher. Maybe she has something to show us.”

  “That must be it.”

  At midday they ate, parched corn and dried beef and water from a spring that bubbled from a seep above the trail and slid down over red rocks into the Snaik. Magister Zarah said little, and though conversation picked up among the Landsmen youth and the Creche-Leavers, it never became better than sporadic. Dyan felt the dark secret of the Cull divide the two groups of youth like a chasm.

  As the shadows lengthened into evening, Magister Zarah turned the party off the trail across a great sheet of slickrock. Once they’d dropped over a swell in the stone and gotten out of sight of the trail, she stopped and tied her horse to a stunted juniper.

  “Follow me,” she said tersely, and struck out across the sea of sand and stone, her black cloak making her look like the shadow of some great bird of prey passing overhead. Dyan tethered her horse to the same tree and followed. She didn’t want to look at Jak, and definitely didn’t want to be close to him, but he pressed close to her, walking at her shoulder.

  The sky was an empty blue, slowly darkening from a pale chalky shade into a richer azure that brought out the presence of the moon. The sudden appearance of a crisp border to the slickrock on Dyan’s right, where the stone fell away sharply into a canyon, brought home to her the imminence of the moment of terrible truth.

  Jak was unarmed, the Landsmen all were. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t execution, it was murder.

  Fairness had nothing to do with it. Magister Zarah had explained this all the previous night. This wasn’t punishment, it was weeding the garden. It was the System’s regulation of life and death within its human self.

  The rock on Dyan’s other side fell away, and she realized that they were climbing out along the edge of a promontory. Below them must be the Snaik River, and as she made the connection, she thought she could smell the water and the plant life it sustained.

  The Magister reached the end of the promontory and turned. She stood and raised her arms to the sky, facing all the youth. “Children,” she said—

  Thump! Cheela hit the ground.

  Dyan started to laugh, despite the obvious solemnity of the moment, but the sound caught in her throat. The jug-eared boy, the one matched with Cheela, stood over her with one arm raised above his head.

  In his hand, he held one of Cheela’s bolas.

  “We know!” he shouted.

  Jak slammed his shoulder into Dyan’s side, knocking her staggering sideways. As she went, she felt his hand grab at her belt, and come away with her monofilament whip. She managed to regain her footing and not fall, but felt a vertiginous sucking in the pit of her stomach.

  The other Creche-Leavers struggled briefly with their counterparts, then pulled away, fists up.

  The world was still for a long moment.

  “Who knows?” Magister Zarah asked. “What do you know?”

  “We know!”

  Dyan spun around at the sound of the new voice behind her, and saw Eirig, the boy who had been sneaking around in the grass the previous night. He was mounted and he led a second horse by its reins. He held a bundle of spears in his arms across the saddle, five of them, tied with a leather thong. He wore a coil of rope around his chest, shoulder to hip.

  “I heard you last night,” Eirig said. “I’m not going to let you kill my friends.”

  “What do you plan to do?” Magister Zarah was surprisingly calm.

  Dyan looked Jak up and down. He held her whip in his hand, but obviously didn’t know how to use it. His finger was nowhere near the button that would release the monofilament and turn the device from an inert club into an unstoppable slicing instrument of death. Before he could figure the weapon out, she was confident she could cut him down with a bola.

  Which she didn’t really want to do.

  Shad punched his counterpart, the girl with the white hair, in the jaw. It was a sudden attack, snake-like and quick, and she fell to the stone and lay still.

  Jug Ears pointed a finger at the Magister. “One more move, Outrider-designate,” he sneered, “and I cut your precious nursery master in half.”

  Cheela climbed to her feet, rubbing her jaw and glaring.

  “Don’t do that,” Zarah said. “You’ll only hurt yourself.”

  Jug Ears laughed. “Are you going to tell on me?” he asked. “Are the Guards going to come riding down from Buza System and catch me? You won’t leave here alive, and if by some miracle of the Holy Mother you do, by the time you’ve told anyone in Buza, all of Ratsnay Station will know the truth.”

  “That would be a grave mistake.” Zarah looked completely calm. Dyan’s heart raced like a galloping horse.

  “Of course it would!” Jak snapped. He still focused on Dyan, whip raised, and she felt like he was yelling at her. “Then the System would lose its yearly tribute of blood, and the Station would stop losing all its natural leaders.”

  “Anyone you tell,” Zarah explained quietly, “you m
ark for death.”

  “You do this at every settlement?” Jak demanded.

  “The System does.”

  “And all the Systems do this?” Jug Ears pressed.

  Dyan snorted. “There are no other Systems.”

  “We’ll rise up!” Jak shouted. He shook the whip in his fist as he said it, and Dyan worried he’d accidentally activate the device.

  “You’ll die,” the Magister said. “You’ll all die. Your families and friends. Your mother, Jak. Better that you surrender yourselves peaceably, isn’t it? Choose to sacrifice yourselves to save the rest of the settlement.”

  “Save them for what?” Jak wanted to know. “For more sacrifices next year?”

  “Yes,” the Magister agreed, “but only five. Five is the number of death.”

  “Five is the number of life!” Jak spat back bitterly.

  Zarah nodded.

  “You killed my sister,” Jak accused her.

  Magister Zarah hesitated. “I was a Creche-Leaver many years ago,” she said finally. “Far too long ago for me to have killed Aleen.”

  “We’re leaving!” Jak yelled. “Anyone tries anything, the Magister dies!”

  Magister Zarah just shook her head.

  Deek’s counterpart, who was still grinning like an idiot, and the girl with missing teeth bent to scoop up their unconscious friend.

  “Enough!” Cheela snapped, and went for her other bola.

  Dyan jumped and grabbed for her whip, nervous that Jak might accidentally activate it and turn her into mince. Instead, he clubbed her in the face with it, hard. She stumbled back.

  The world spun, but she still saw Jug Ears. He managed to finger the right spot because the monofilament’s weight ejected from the body of the weapon.

  But he was holding it all wrong.

  He spun the bola around his head, Cheela dodging sideways to get out of the way and Shad jumping at Magister Zarah. If he’d released it at that moment, Jug Ears might have sliced Shad and Zarah both to pieces.

  But he kept swinging. A second time around his head, and then Dyan hit the ground hard.

  A third time around his head, and Shad tackled Magister Zarah, knocking her out to the ground and falling on top of her.

  Jug Ears released the bola. The weight was behind him, though, the momentum was all wrong—

  the bola whizzed off into space, over the lip of the canyon—

  and Jug Ears stared down at his own chest in horror. For a moment, he looked fine. Then blood began to seep through his wool shirt in a perfectly straight line across his torso, from hip to shoulder.

  “Wow,” Deek muttered.

  Jug Ears collapsed in a fountain of blood, head, shoulders and arms falling one direction while the rest of his body fell another.

  “Go!” Jak yelled.

  He grabbed Dyan and threw her out of his way, in the direction of her Crechemates. She was too stunned to resist, but aware enough to be surprised at how strong Jak was. He certainly didn’t look as muscular or big as Shad, but he threw her like she weighed nothing. She tumbled into Cheela and they collapsed in a tangle, and then Jak was on his horse.

  The grinning boy charged at Magister Zarah, a spear in hand. Shad’s whip jumped into his hand, quicker than Dyan would have expected, and with a single smooth crack of it, the grinning boy’s head fell from his shoulders. His body kept running for the half dozen paces it took it to charge off the edge of the cliff and disappear.

  “Get off me!” Cheela cursed, pushing at Dyan.

  The girl missing teeth ran at them both, holding a heavy rock over her head. Dyan didn’t see the bolas in motion, but she saw the girl’s hands suddenly separate from her wrists, and the rock bounce off her head as it fell. The girl looked at her own blood-pumping stumps in confusion, and then a second throw sliced off the top half of her head.

  “Sorry,” Deek muttered, scrambling after his bolas. “Bad aim!”

  The white-haired girl stirred, and struggled to sit up.

  “Jone!” the boy Eirig shouted, and spurred his horse towards her.

  “No time!” Jak raced past his friend, grabbing the reins of the other boy’s horse and pulling him along in his wake.

  Wayland lumbered forward with another spear in hand—somehow, in the confusion when Dyan wasn’t watching, the spears had been scattered around the promontory—Eirig must have tried to arm his friends—and impaled White Hair, Jone, from behind. She sat up facing Dyan, and Dyan saw the steel spearhead protrude from her chest in a sudden spurt of blood and a look on the girl’s face that resembled disappointment, and then she crumpled forward, dead.

  Shad raced to intercept the two mounted boys, whip lashing.

  Jak threw himself off his mount, saving himself—

  but in the process, the horse lost its head completely. Its charge carried it in Shad’s direction and its head fell at his feet, tripping him. He lurched aside in a maneuver that was part dodge and part stumble, thwarted from making a further attack.

  Cheela threw Dyan off and snapped off a quick shot with her bola. The boy Eirig and his horse both took the blow, right through its neck and his arm. The animal exploded into an exsanguinating mess of dead meat. Eirig hit the ground hard, screaming.

  Jak pulled his friend to his feet and they both ran. They left the arm behind.

  “Stop him!” Magister Zarah called, rising to her feet.

  Dyan pulled a bola from her belt, raised it over her head to throw, but couldn’t quite bring herself to do it.

  Jak slammed the butt of his spear into Shad’s face as he passed the other boy, knocking Dyan’s Crechemate to the ground with a heavy thud. Then he ran at the Magister, spear up and aimed at her chest.

  She stood unflinching. Dyan saw acceptance in her eyes, and didn’t understand it.

  But, however conflicted and terrible she felt about the Cull, she couldn’t let her Magister die. She snapped off her bola, not at Jak—

  but at his spear.

  Her throw sliced off the tip of the weapon, turning it into a staff of a club, and then her bola vanished out into space. Cursing, Jak pummeled Zarah once with the wood and then turned, leaping out into midair over the edge of the cliff—

  and disappearing from sight.

  Eirig followed him, and his scream seemed to echo forever.

  Dyan was standing, though she wasn’t sure when she had stood up. She bent over and vomited, throwing up into the sand and the blood.

  “Are you alright?” she heard Shad ask.

  She looked up to smile at him and felt punched in the stomach. He was asking Cheela.

  “I’m angry!” her Crechemate snapped. “That Landsy stole my bola, and then he didn’t even have the decency to stick around so I could kill him.”

  “No,” Wayland agreed. His voice sounded far away and his eyes didn’t quite focus. “But he did a pretty thorough job without your help.”

  “Which leaves us with a problem.”

  Dyan heard the Magister’s words and felt an uncomfortable premonition. She wiped sour bile from her lips and stood up. She was unsteady on her feet and would have liked Shad’s arm to lean on, which made the fact that he was supporting Cheela doubly bitter.

  Magister Zarah stood with her back to the cliff and her arms at her sides. On her face she wore an expression Dyan had never seen on her before: fatigue. She looked tired, and maybe a little sad. “Wayland,” she said. “Shad. Deek. You are all Blooded. You are no longer my children, you are not Crechelings. You are adults and Urbane. Welcome to the System.”

  Dyan suppressed another urge to throw up.

  “Cheela,” Magister Zarah continued. “Dyan. There are two fleeing Landsmen who must not be allowed to escape. You are not yet Blooded.”

  She arched her eyebrows at them wearily, and gestured over the cliff behind her.

  ***

  Chapter Six

  Dyan stumbled down the draw, Deek’s bola on her leg replacing the one she had lost in saving the Magister. The orange s
tone walls scratching towards the indigo sky on either side of her expressed neatly the tunnel she felt she was in. Magister Zarah had talked about choices, but she had none. She couldn’t refuse to kill Jak—kill the Landsman, she forced herself to think—because that would make her a rebel against the System. Rebels were criminals. They were executed for the good of the System, and if they managed to escape, they lived short, brutal lives as desperadoes in the Wahai. So Dyan had no meaningful choice.

  Would it be different when she was Blooded?

  Cheela was ahead of her because she was faster, tall, strong, and long-legged to Dyan’s short and slight. No wonder Shad was attracted to her, Dyan thought.

  She tried to shut down that train of thought, too.

  The ravine was choked with boulders and treacherous to descend. Ascent would be even harder. Dyan heard Magister Zarah and her other Crechemates following behind at a more relaxed pace. She hoped that when she got to the bottom she would find the two Landsmen dead, and the ordeal would be over.

  But would it? Or would it just start again, from the beginning? Or would Dyan have failed, and would she become an outcast, or be executed, removed as a failure from the System in order to protect the successful life inside it?

  She shook her head and dropped six feet over the crumbling lip of a jagged rock onto powdery sand. No, she should hope that Jak was in great pain and dying anyway, so she could put him out of his misery and still be given credit, still become Blooded.

  Ahead of her, Cheela splashed into water. Dyan cursed, realizing suddenly that if there was only one survivor of the fall, and Cheela killed him, or if the Outrider-designate simply killed both boys, Dyan would be a failure and an outcast anyway.

  And then Cheela would have Shad all to herself.

  Dyan nearly jumped down the last twenty feet of steep slope and landed in cold shallow water on her hands and knees. Forcing herself up, she staggered around the base of the cliff and found Cheela standing with her arms crossed over her chest, surveying the scene. The canyon walls were high, mostly unbroken by ravines, handholds or other ways of getting out. A river, wide and flat, wound around sandy hills silted up within the elbows of the canyon and small groves of desert trees that clung to them.