by D. J. Butler
“Let Jak go,” Dyan said simply. “I’ll come home.”
“Don’t you see?” Haika spread her arms, a gesture of explanation that made her look very much like a Magister. “The Landsman can’t go. He can’t tell his fellows about the Cull. It’s not my choice, Dyan. I don’t want this Landsman hurt any more than you do. He simply has to die, I have no choice in the matter and neither do you. If you accept that his death is your task, at least you can make sure it’s painless.”
Dyan struggled. Her arm, holding up the bola, felt heavy as lead. “You killed Eirig.”
“The one-armed Landsman had to die for the same reason. I had no choice. You must understand that. I know that when your hand is forced, you, too, do the necessary thing.”
Magister Haika smiled and her voice was soft. Dyan felt tired, her skin crispy and hot, and her head spun a little. Haika’s words made some sense to her. She had killed Lorne when she had to. She would kill others if she had to. It wasn’t her fault or her choice. She was being forced.
And then, wavering in the heat-shimmering air between her and the Magister, she thought she saw Eirig. Eirig looked directly at her and winked.
“He wasn’t one-armed anymore by the time you finished with him,” the phantasm quipped.
Eirig wasn’t a nameless one-armed Landsman. He was her friend, and when he had had no choice, he had chosen anyway, and stood up to Magister Haika and the Outriders. He had done it and taken the consequence, which was to die. He had done it to protect Dyan.
And Jak.
“Tell me where Magister Zarah is.” She shivered, cold despite the heat.
“Zarah isn’t a Magister anymore,” Haika told her. “She’s a prisoner, and will die in the next Hanging.”
Dyan choked.
“Why?” she asked. “What do you mean … you said earlier, she defiled the Cull? What do you mean?”
Haika’s face took on a curious expression. It wiggled slightly, like she was keeping something funny to herself. The look made Dyan want to punch the Magister, but it passed quickly. “Former Magister Zarah let you go,” she said. “She let you choose to flee the Cull with the Landsman youth.”
Dyan was astonished. “How could you know that?” she asked. “Was someone following her? Did she confess?”
Haika laughed. “Every Magister is recorded,” she explained. “All the time. The Magister’s Calling is too important to leave any room for human weakness.” She let her arms fall by her sides. She took a slow step forward.
Dyan felt rivulets of sweat running down her back. “Why are you telling me this?” she asked. “You said I’m still a child.”
Haika nodded, and rubbed her biceps under her cloak. “Very good,” she said. “I’m telling you this because either you will make the right decision, complete the Cull and become an Urbane—in which case you will become a Magister as you have been Called to be, and this knowledge is appropriate for you—or you will make the wrong choice, in which case you will die, and it won’t matter what you know.”
She took another step.
“So … this conversation is being recorded right now,” Dyan said. “By what?”
Haika held the five-armed tree medallion with one hand. “The recording device is in here,” she said.
Dyan heard the words and they felt like a cool breeze coming down the canyon, refreshing her with a sudden realization. She felt strength flood into her trembling limbs.
“But that means,” she said, “that when you told me that no one would ever know that I killed Outrider Lorne … you were lying.”
Haika said nothing.
“There is no deal,” Dyan said. “You just want to distract me with this talk. It’s all lies.” She took a step back. “You just want to kill me.”
“Look,” Magister Haika started and moved closer again.
“Stop!” Dyan clenched the bola tight in her fist and raised it over her head.
“Wait!” Haika raised a hand. “Wait … please.” She slowly removed her medallion of office, raising its chain over her head and then dropping it aside to the ground.
“It’s Zarah,” she said. “Don’t you understand?”
“What?” Dyan’s arm sagged in surprise.
Haika attacked.
Dyan had not seen her palm the bola, but there it was, flashing in the Magister’s fingers as she snapped her arm over her head to throw. Dyan had no time to do anything but hurl herself backward. The bola sliced through the air over her head with a whooshing sound and she heard the crunch of boots on the sand.
Dyan hit the ground hard and rolled. She flung her body to the side, trying to avoid the attack that she thought must be coming—
only it didn’t.
She tumbled to her knees, bola at the ready, and saw Haika snatching her whip off the ground. The Magister wheeled to face Dyan. She was faster than she should have been, for a woman with so much extra flesh on her frame.
Haika spun her arm around and Dyan snapped off a shot, flinging her bola at the Magister’s upraised arm.
Haika cracked her hand down and Dyan flinched, expecting to be sliced in two. Instead, nothing happened. She hesitated from surprise for a moment, and Haika stared down at the whip in her hand.
The counterweight was gone.
Splash!
A chunk of stone from the lip of the shelf where Dyan had lain to witness Eirig’s murder fell off the front of the cliff and dropped into the spring. The rock broke apart as it fell, some of it throwing up gouts of water and some of it thunking heavily on top of Eirig’s mutilated form.
She had cut the weapon in two, Dyan realized. The line of her bola had crossed the line of the whip in midair, severing them both. It was sheer luck that the detached monofilament line hadn’t sliced through her in its flight.
Haika must have reached the same conclusion at the same moment—she roared in rage and hurled the whip handle at Dyan. The blunted stump banged into Dyan’s shoulder, and Haika dashed for the spring.
Two bolas lay in the cold pool, under the rubble that had once been the cliff face and the gore that had once been Eirig. Dyan couldn’t let Haika get to them. She drew her own whip and snapped it at the Magister.
Out of intuition or calculation, Haika dove to the ground at the last moment. Dyan’s whip snapped through the air over her head, carving a shower of stone chips out of the cliff face. Dyan drew back her arm again as the whip’s counterweight snicked home, aiming to slice right through the large middle of the cloaked woman—
Haika rolled back and threw at her.
Dyan ducked, fearing and yet already resigned to being cut in half. The thrown object thumped into her and she stepped back, stumbling on the lowest end of the rockslide. She lost her footing and crashed to the ground—
losing her grip on the whip handle.
As she sucked in a lungful of air, she saw the object that had struck her. It wasn’t a bola, or even a rock.
It was Eirig’s severed arm.
Dyan screamed. She couldn’t tell whether her scream came from rage or pain, and didn’t know if she would even be able to tell the difference at this point. She grabbed for the whip and couldn’t find it.
She hurled a rock instead, but it wasn’t a big one and it bounced off the Magister’s back. Dyan lurched to her feet, picking up a bigger rock with both hands and charging. She screamed, raising the rock over her head and bringing it down as hard as she could on Haika’s head.
Except that Haika twisted at the last second and Dyan missed. The rock thudded hard into Haika’s shoulder and she fell back, with Dyan on top of her.
For a blind moment, Dyan could make out nothing but flailing arms and legs. She heard a growling sound and didn’t know who was making it. She felt hands at her throat, with fingernails digging into her flesh, and her mind focused.
She knelt over Magister Haika, punching the larger, older woman in the face and shoulders repeatedly. The Magister had her hands around Dyan’s throat and squeezed, and Dyan fel
t the air in his lungs running out. Her vision began to blur.
Dyan picked up a rock.
Haika squeezed tighter.
Dyan smashed the Magister. Dyan’s arms and hands felt broken from the force of her own blow, which jarred loose Haika’s hands and knocked Dyan off and to the ground. She lay stunned, beside the still Magister, and felt sand and pine needles dig into her skin.
Then Haika groaned.
It wasn’t over. Dyan needed something to end the fight, permanently. She hit the locator switch on her bola holster—one of her bolas was destroyed, but the other should be in the spring. She raised herself to her hands and knees, moaning from pain and effort, and looked into the water. She couldn’t see the light. That could only mean that the bola was buried under the fragments of rock.
“Blast and blazes,” she muttered.
Haika’s hand shot out and grabbed Dyan’s wrist. Her fingers were tense and strong, claw-like, and her nails dug into Dyan’s skin. Dyan looked at the Magister, and saw blood streaming down over her face from a gash in her forehead. Dyan had caused that wound, she realized.
And no amount of blood flow would hide the anger in Haika’s face.
“Vixen,” she snarled.
Dyan punched the older woman again, right in her bloody forehead.
Haika fell back with a yelp.
Dyan hit the locator switch on Haika’s holster.
She immediately saw one of the Magister’s bolas. Its locator light winked red, and Dyan reached for it—
but stopped. The bola sat in a red, bloody mess that had once been Eirig.
He wouldn’t care, she tried to tell herself. He would want her to grab it.
But she couldn’t force herself to do it. Instead, she shambled to her feet and stared at the rockslide.
There, above her head among the red rubble, winked the light of the Magister’s second bola. Her legs screamed with pain. Her skin burned. Her tongue felt like a toad in her own mouth, and she tasted blood. Dyan kicked herself into a lope, and ran for the bola.
Behind her she heard scrabbling sounds. She hit the slide and stumbled forward onto all fours. Like a dog she pushed forward, scraping her hands and breaking fingernails on the rock as she dragged herself up it.
Her hand closed around the bola and she rolled over onto her back.
Haika knelt in the blood and bone mess of Eirig, blood smeared on her forearms as she snatched the other weapon.
Dyan jumped to her feet. At the same moment, the older woman stood.
They both raised their weapons. Dyan snapped her arm in a throwing motion—
Haika threw—
but Dyan didn’t release the bola. Instead she let herself fall down and forward. She hit the ragged rocks hard, pinching her ear and bruising her shoulder, but the cracking sound behind her and the shower of rock dust that rained down on her told her that Haika had thrown and missed.
Dyan somersaulted forward and came up in an unsteady crouch.
Haika charged. She raised her arms like a wild animal’s, talons extended.
Dyan threw the bola. It snapped through the top of Haika’s head, and winged off into the pine trees, scattering severed branches and clouds of yellow-green needles as it went.
Haika ran three more steps. Dyan staggered aside to get out of the way, and when the Magister collapsed onto the stones of the rockslide, she was dead.
***
Chapter Twenty-Four
For a moment, Dyan could do nothing. She sank back onto her haunches and then sat, with a rough bump, onto the rockslide. She felt the sun on her skin, which burned her but failed to warm her inner core. She felt cold.
Cold and very, very tired.
Magister Haika was dead. Weight dragged Dyan’s body down and pressed on her chest, making breathing difficult. The sun’s light suddenly seemed much too bright, and she shivered and hid her face in her hands.
Magister Haika was dead, and Magister Zarah soon might be. And if she died, she died because of Dyan, because she had let Dyan go.
Even worse than that, Jak might die, too, and for the same reason.
She forced herself to think. Jak was outnumbered two to one by enemies with better weapons. He’d outwitted Cheela and Dyan before, back on the Snaik River, but that would only make Cheela more wary this time. He’d need help, if he wasn’t dead already.
And Dyan wasn’t sure she could help him. She trembled in all her limbs, dry as a bone in her mouth and eyes, and she burned and froze at the same time.
She stood.
First, she would deal with the recorder. With blocky, puppet-like steps, she crossed to the sand where Haika had laid her symbol of office. She picked up the five-armed tree medallion and examined it. It looked solid at first glance, made of some ceramic or metal Dyan couldn’t immediately identify. When she looked closer, she noticed that in the joints between the trunk of the tree and its arms were tiny pinprick-sized holes.
To let in light and sound to the recording device, she guessed.
She dropped the medallion on the sand and limped back over to the rockslide. She tried to avoid looking at it, but couldn’t help seeing Magister Haika’s corpse with its open brainpan. She’d bled surprisingly little from having the top of her head severed, less than she had from the face wounds Dyan had inflicted.
Dyan shrugged off a feeling that was half-fascination and half-revulsion. She bent at the knees and picked up a rock the size of her own skull, and then turned and carried it back to the medallion. She knelt, stared down at the little device, and raised the rock over her head.
Dyan meant to cover the medallion, to render it harmless. But something unconscious in her body took over, and when she brought the rock down she slammed it. At the same moment, she burst into tears, and then raised the rock and smashed it down again. And again and again, until the Magister’s emblem of office was cracked into pieces and pounded deep into the sand, and Dyan lay huddled on the top of the rock, weeping.
She came back to herself a few minutes later with a deep panic and a sense that she had run out of time. She collected her whip, and the three bolas she could recover, resetting them to respond to the locator switch in her own holsters. She had no plan but to race to catch up with Jak. Hopefully, she could at least even out the odds a bit, or at least give him a chance not to die alone.
She was about to climb onto the back of Magister Haika’s horse when she had an idea. Stiff and shaky, she shrugged out of her Outrider’s coat. After a moment’s hesitation, she draped it across Eirig’s mutilated body, shedding a fresh burst of tears as she did so.
Then she set about stripping the Magister’s body.
Haika’s glazed eyes accused her of theft and murder, and she ignored them. She peeled away the woman’s cloak and then her clothing, leaving her exposed, limbs askew and head gaping open. Stripping down to her own underclothes, Dyan felt weak and alone, but as she stepped into the Magister’s trousers, tunic, and boots, and finally pulled the cloak about her shoulders, her strength returned.
Haika’s horse shied away and whinnied nervously as Dyan approached. She patted its neck to calm it before climbing into the saddle. Then she pulled her hood over her face and rode up the canyon at a quick trot.
She was significantly smaller than the Magister, so her sleeves sagged, her trousers were tucked into her boots and, when she stood, her cloak dragged on the ground. In any case, the tiniest glimpse of her face would give her away, so the disguise would gain her only a very little time at the most.
The tracks were impossible to miss. Three horses galloped up the canyon, disturbing sand and grass and shrubbery. Dyan couldn’t gallop quite as fast as they had, but the trail was wide and obvious and she cantered quickly.
There were opportunities to turn, to get off the sand and onto rock, but Jak hadn’t taken them. He’d stayed in the center of the main canyon, obvious and enticing and fast. He hadn’t been trying to escape, Dyan realized.
He’d been trying to lead the Out
riders away, so Dyan could ambush Magister Haika and rescue Eirig.
Had Jak planned on surviving? Dyan wondered.
It didn’t seem like it.
Still, he’d ridden far. She followed the trail several miles, crossing and recrossing a shallow brook that flowed out of a side canyon and zig-zagged across the sandy floor. As her strength flagged, she rounded a corner and saw the Outriders.
Three horses waited tethered to a thorny bush on the near side of a bend in the canyon. On the far side, across the stream, a stand of huge cottonwood trees dotted a raised bank and pressed up against the canyon wall. Cheela stood back from the trees, staring up at the wall behind them.
Shad had his whip out, and was systematically chopping down trees with it. With two flicks of his wrist, any trunk lost a wedge-shaped divot from near its base and quickly toppled over.
Cheela turned at the sound of Dyan’s approach and waved a lazy salute. “Magister Haika,” she greeted Dyan, and then turned back to watch the cliff.
Dyan looked up the cliff face and saw Jak. A ledge creased the stone below the tops of the trees where the face of the wall retreated in steps from the brink. Jak had climbed up there, Dyan guessed, and now squatted, shielded in part by the tree branches and by the ledge itself. A thrown monofilament bola would slice through wood and stone as easily as flesh, of course, but if either the bola or its counterweight struck anything solid in midair, the bola would be knocked off course.
Which was why Shad was chopping down the sheltering trees.
Dyan rode up to Cheela’s side.
“He’s up there, Magister,” Cheela said. “He can’t get off the cliff, so once we get down the trees, we can pick him off at our leisure. Or starve him out.”
Dyan dismounted, carefully getting down from her horse on the side opposite Cheela. She walked around behind Cheela, palming one of her bolas.
She only had one shot at this, and then she would find that she was the one who was outnumbered two to one, with Jak up in the treetops unable to do anything about it.
Cheela chuckled, an ugly, gargling sound. “Or just ride away and leave him to the vultures.”
Dyan wrapped her arms around Cheela’s chest from behind.