by Jo Clayton
Face impassive, eyes cool and patient, the hunter stood a few paces off and watched her struggle.
“Point?” she said finally.
Yseyl lay still, lids lowered to hide the rage in her eyes. “Point,” she said. “Let me go.”
“Not quite yet. Not till you stop thinking about how to kill me. No, I don’t read minds, but what you’re emoting is like print to me. You’re set to come at me the minute you see a chance.” She clicked her tongue against her teeth, a series of small irritated sounds. “All that means is that I’d use your own stunner on you and then have to wait around till you woke up again. Stupid waste of time.”
Yseyl drew a long breath and tried to calm the roar in her blood. After a moment she said, “A clue?”
“I told you, Digby collects talents. I’m one of those.”
“Ah. What are you going to do now?”
“Well, first I take care of the damage those birds did to you. Then we get back to negotiating.”
While the hunter bent over a backpack, fitting the medkit into its pocket, Yseyl brought the hands the woman had freed around in front of her, smoothed her fingers along the fake skin sprayed over the wounds from the black beaks; it was as if she were a photograph and the wounds had been painted out, no pain, no give to the touch, no nothing. She reached down and tried to pull loose the tape about her ankles.
A chuckle brought her head up.
The hunter was sitting on her heels, watching her. “My name’s Shadith,” she said. “Call me Shadow. There’s not a knife made that will cut a tangler tape. I have to key it loose.”
“Do it.”
“In a while. I’ve a strong feeling you’ll listen better if you can’t disappear into the mountains.”
“Then give me something to listen to.”
“Right. The Fence is created and kept in being by a group of satellites, ancient clunkers that have been up there since the Ptaks drove your ancestors out of the rest of Ambela. Ptaks being what they are, they do as little as possible to keep them maintained and operational. Why fiddle with something that works perfectly well with a minimum of attention?”
Yseyl grimaced. “Your idea is we go up there and do something to those satellites?” She’d kept picking at the tape but was ready to concede defeat; it was too snug to push over her feet, and she hadn’t managed to loosen it to any perceptible degree.
“Simpler than that. The Ptaks do oversight from the ground, course corrections and other routine things that don’t require replacing components. The ground they’ve chosen to do it from is here on Impixol. Secrecy, I suppose. Or convenience-in Ptak terms, at least. Or maybe it was a requirement of the tech they used way back when they set up the system. Hunh! If it ain’t broke, don’t mess with it. Waste of good coin. I got a fair look at the place.” She grinned, the outline of the bird branded into her face jumping as the muscles moved. “Through the eyes of a bitty creature like a worm with fur.”
Ysey1 fought to resist the seduction of that voice, the warm rich tones that caressed the ear, the laughter that seemed to lie just below the surface. Shadith… Shadow. that’s a good name for her… remember she’s a shadow, you can’t get hold of it and it changes when the sun moves. Shadow was doing it deliberately, Yseyl was convinced of it, using her voice to ooze behind the thinking mind. Don’t let her get you, Pixa. Keep your eyes on the cards so the trickster won’t slide one in on you. “Worm with fur? Must have been an ulho. So what are you saying?”
“Get me into that building, and I can give those satellites such a chewing over that the lot of them will have to be replaced not repaired. And the minute they go, the Fence is gone. All of it.”
“What’s to stop the Ptaks from doing what you said, replacing the satellites and putting the Fence back up.”
“Not my business, that. Me, I’ll be on to my next. assignment.” She grimaced. “If Digby doesn’t give me the boot for getting involved with locals.”
Yseyl glanced at Shadow, then looked down. She picked up a dead leaf, began breaking pieces off it, watching them fall. “Why do you need me?”
“I don’t. I may find the Fence and the mindset that made it appalling, but I find lots of things appalling. I’m not about to go round setting the universe right. I’m not even sure I know what right is. I’m being lazy, you know. If I worked at it, I could probably find reasons enough to blow a dose of babble into you, go get the gadget and take off. Don’t push it, Ghost. Where was I? Oh, yes. To get into the Control Center without rousing the whole base, I’ll need the disruptor. Their security’s laughable, but that one building’s shielded and I don’t have your talent for fooling scanners.”
Yseyl dropped the last of the leaf, brushed her hands together. “But I could get in?”
“I expect you mean I should tell you what to do and let you go do it. If it were something simple like punching a flake in a slot, well, no problem. But from what I’ve seen, that equipment is so old, the software so overlaid with layer on layer of accretion, centuries of accretion, I have to be there to work my way through it. You couldn’t, you don’t have the training.”
So very plausible, Yseyl thought, anger acid in her throat. So very good at making lies taste sweet. If they are lies. I don’t know what to think. I don’t know your kind. She plucked at the narrow white tape around her ankles. If I could just get loose…
“Why should I trust you?” she burst out. “If I decide to go with this, I have to bring out the disruptor. All you have to do is take it and leave me with nothing but a memory of pretty words.”
“I don’t have to deal. Remember?” Shadow tapped the pack resting beside her knee. “One squirt from the pharmacopoeia and you’ll tell me anything I want to know.”
“You keep saying that. Why don’t you just do it?”
“That a challenge? All right. You’d babble, but I’ve a feeling you hid the gadget in a hole in the ground. You could tell me where the hole is and chances are I’d walk right over it without seeing it. I’d find it eventually, but why waste all that time? More practical for you to fetch it yourself.”
Shadow twisted her face into a grimace she probably thought was comical. Yseyl found herself unable to appreciate the hunter’s attempts at humor. The tape round her ankles was strangling more than bones. “If I say do your worst, what happens?”
“I give you a few minutes to think it over, then I shoot you full of goop and record the pearls that fall from your lips.”
“Do we do this thing with just the two of us, or do you have friends waiting for your call?”
Shadow smiled at her. “I do my recruiting on the ground. You saw some of my troops a little while ago. No, I know you meant people. If I could guarantee everything would go by plan, the two of us could handle the job.”
“Hun/a. That never happens. There’s always a crack you have to patch.”
“You’re so right. You think you could come up with say five or six people you can trust? When I say trust, I mean they won’t shoot themselves in the foot, they can take orders without playing games, and they won’t chatter about this once it’s over.”
For the first time Yseyl’s doubts began to fade. She dropped her eyes to hide the glow, then swore at herself because she’d forgotten that Shadow could read every emotion that passed through her body. She felt a surge of distaste; it was almost more of an invasion than reading minds. She drew in a long breath, let it out, and looked the hunter in the eye. “I’ve walked alone for thirty years. I’ll have to find strangers and it won’t be easy. In Linojin, either people are religious and sworn to serve without arms or they’ve had their fill of fighting.” She sighed. “But if you went where the real killers are, out among the phelas, I also doubt you’d find many interested in stopping the war.”
3. The search
Zot grinned and came trotting over when Yseyl beckoned to her. “Missed you,” she said. “The incomers the past week have been mostly real boring.”
Yseyl led Zot around a corner to
get away from the ears of the guidepack overseer, handed her half a dozen coppers. “Pay off your whip, hm? Tell her you’ve got a client for the next three, four days.”
“Four days? Akamagali!” She rubbed the elastic tip of her nose, stared at the ground. “You know I got to be back in Hall by an hour after sundown? I stay out all night, I lose my place in the pack.”
“No problem.”
Zot’s grin flashed again, then she whipped around the corner, was back in half a breath. “She wanted to know who and what I was gonna do, I said it was a Pilgrim I took to the Grand Yeson a couple days ago, now she wants to pray at all the shrines.”
“Zot, if I was the kind to worry, I’d fuss myself about how fast and easy you lie.”
Zot giggled. “Vumah vumay, you aren’t, so you won’t.”
“True. Had breakfast?”
“Yeh. They shovel us outta bed round sunup and feed us. Usual slop.”
“So you could eat some more.”
“I can always eat.”
“That teashop’s open?”
“Yeah. And they make graaaand womsi buns, and it’s still early enough they’ll be hot from the oven.”
Yseyl watched Zot devouring the big soft bun, a dot of the white icing on the tip of her nose. A powerful wave of affection for the femlit rolled over her, something she couldn’t remember ever feeling before.
Zot pushed in the last bite, looked up; her cheeks distended like a yeph at nut-fall. “Good stuff,” she said, the words muffled by the bread in her mouth. She gave the mouthful another few chews, washed it down with a gulp of tea, then sat waiting for Yseyl to tell her why she was here.
Yseyl shifted around so she was leaning against the wall, one knee crooked and resting on the booth seat; she lifted the tea bowl, took a sip, cradled it against her chest. “I’ve been up in the mountains for the past week. Anything interesting happen?”
“Funny you should ask. Yeh. There’s a huge hoohaw going on. This femlit, s’posed to come from way over in Khokuhl, least that’s what she says, me, I think she’s got futhus eating her brain, anyway, she says a Messenger of God brought her here with her anya, anya’s kinda sick, xe was in egg and the anyalit that hatched out, it bit her wrong and she almost went off, but the femlit says the Messenger of God saved her anya, anyway something did, but that’s not what’s got ol’ Humble Haf running to talk to her, and the Venerable Whosit the Prophet Speaker and even ol’ Noxabo went squinnying around to get the tale from the jomayl’s teeth and the Anyas of Mercy are lighting candles and just about everybody’s talking like they got the runs of the mouth. No, it’s ’cause the femlit she says the Messenger of God told her the Fence is corning down. Before the moon is new again, she says, the Fence will be gone. All gone.”
“Folks believe her?”
“For sure. Lots of ’em. Well, most of this lot would believe anything just about. Long as someone said God said it anyway. And them that don’t want it to happen, even they gettin’ nervous.”
“That is interesting.”
“You sound like you think it’s maybe true. I know. You saw something out in the mountains, din’t you. Tell me, huh?”
“Zot…”
“No. Tell me, or I’m going back right now.” She pushed along the seat until she was perched at the very edge, her hands flat on the table, that absurd dot of icing falling away as she glared at Yseyl.
Yseyl was briefly angry, then amused. “T’k, young Zot, try that on someone who doesn’t know you. I’ll say this much. I think I met your femlit’s Messenger Not from God.”
Zot’s grin threatened to split her face in half. She slid back along the bench, leaned across the table and whispered, “You gonna do it, aren’t you. You gonna take down the Fence.”
“Think what you want.”
Zot straightened, snatched the last bun and broke off a big piece. “So. What you want me to do?”
“I need some people with guns who know how to use them. Not crazies and not types who’ll use them on me.”
“Yeep, that’s not gonna be easy. How many?”
“Five maybe six.”
“Hm. There’s One-Eye Baluk, he’s got a stable of face-breakers he rents out when one of the merchants wants to collect a debt or a coaster captain is after a sailor who went for a walk and forgot to come back.” She scratched alongside her nose, shook her head. “They’re all dumber’n rocks. ‘Sides, I think Baluk don’t want things to change, and he’d be apt to bop you on the head if he thought you could really do something about the Fence. Nah, you want fighters, you not gonna find them inside Linojin.” She chewed on the bun, her brows drawn down, her eyes focused on air.
Yseyl leaned against the wall feeling peculiar. She’d been alone since Crazy Delelan disappeared. Whenever she was with other people, she didn’t connect with them, only used them. She was using Zot, that was the same, but how she felt about the child, that was different. Like the femlit was hatched from her egg, learned from her hand. It made her queasy, as if she’d picked up some kind of disease.
Another thought struck her suddenly and curdled the tea in her upper stomach. If she messed up Zot’s life, she’d have to do something to make up for that. She couldn’t just walk off and say tough and forget about it as she’d done before. Vumah vumay, she could, but she’d feel like the stuff you scrape off your foot if she did.
Zot straightened, wriggled her nose. “I think maybe hohekil who just got here would be the best place to look. Whyn’t you let me go talk to a couple people I know. How soon you need the shooters?”
Yseyl pushed away from the wall. “Keep it easy, Zot. No hurry.” She slid along the seat, got to her feet. “No hurry at all.”
The next several days while Zot ferreted about, Yseyl did her own looking and listening.
Pilgrims swarmed about Mercy House, waiting to see the femlit. Slipping around the edges of the crowd, Yseyl heard them calling for the Holy Child, heard excited, incoherent chatter about miracles. Fem, mal, or anya, it didn’t matter; tone, sign and fervor were the same.
Each day the excitement built. The Pilgrims walked the streets between the House where they waited for the Anyas to bring out the Child and the wharves where they stared at the golden flickers of the Fence wondering aloud if they were going to be among the blessed who got to see the Fence come down.
In the market the merchants were ambivalent. If the Fence vanished, none of them could figure how it would affect them. Life in Linojin hadn’t changed in generations, and they wanted it to stay like that. Maybe they grumbled about irritations and inconveniences and the idiocies of the Council of Religious who ran the place, but these were familiar irritations. Moving from the familiar to the unknown frightened many of them.
Along the wharves there was a similar mix of feeling with a spicing of wary skepticism and a lot of tentative preparations. The captains of the coastal steamers kept an eye on the Fence and each other and sent their navigators to the Yeson’s library for any information they could scrounge about the world beyond the Fence. These mats and ferns knew what Yseyl had picked up from the hohekil who came into the city to listen to the Child. In the villages along the coast there was impatience, irritation, a pent up need for space that was going to explode soon, whether the Fence came down or not. Zot was wiser than me. I should have thought of the villages before. Hm. Don’t need to worry about getting the word out. Soon as the Fence goes down, the coast is going to look like a futhu nest somebody’s kicked. She contemplated the thought with considerable satisfaction. It made her dealings with the offworlder easier to swallow.
She certainly didn’t regret giving up on the Arbiter. He drew his power from the hohekil running from the war. This was their last hope and he controlled access to it. Let the Fence be removed, and there was no more reason for anyone to listen to him. I was really stupid, she thought, I didn’t think it through. Even Cerex knew I couldn’t get anyone actually to use the disruptor, no one important, anyway. Politics, pah! I’m a thief and I
fall on my face every time I forget that.
Yseyl came back to her room on the fourth day to find Zot sitting on the bed, her biggest grin blooming as the door opened.
Zot bounced on the mattress, so full of herself she almost took flight as she slid off it and came running toward Yseyl. “Kumba did it,” she said. She caught hold of Yseyl’s hand, tugged her through the door. “He’s this mallit I knew before he got in trouble because he sorta stole things, I mean he could wiggle into places you wouldn’t even think was places…” She broke off as she reached the stairs, clattered down them and stood waiting impatiently in the foyer for Yseyl to join her.
When they were in the street, Zot kept her voice low, but her excitement was such the words seemed to burst from her. “… but this mal who used to buy what he got, he was cheating him, and when he got smart enough to know what was happening, he wouldn’t bring him stuff anymore, and the mal sent a whisper round, and Kumba got booted out from the Hall.” She gulped in a breath, looking round to make sure no one was paying attention to them. “Anyway, we stayed friends and sometimes he banks his stuff with me till he can find a buyer, so I thought about him, but it took a while to find him. I told him what you wanted and why, don’t get mad, he had to know so he’d know what to look for, but I din’t tell him who. Anyway he says there this Pixa ixis or what’s left of it, there’s one old fern and her bond anya, xe’s got joint problems and don’t get around too good, two femlitsone of ’em kinda sick, she’s in the Mercy hospital with the old anya-three young ferns, and two anyas. The bunch of ’em went hohekil and just got here and already they got trouble.”
She tapped Yseyl’s arm, and they turned into a narrow alley between two large hostels. “Over one of the anyas, well, you know anyas are kinda sparse on the ground these days, free anyas anyway, and even the Anyas of Mercy they got to watch themselves. This mal he started hanging round the anya, xe’s living outside the wall in Fishtown, things get kinda wild there sometimes. That’s where we’re going now, I wanna show ’em to you. Vumah vumay, he wouldn’t leave xe alone, kept offering money and other stuff and paying xe no mind when xe say back off. The mal he tried grabbing xe and xe’s fembond she beat the thuv outta him, but he’s kin to one of the Arbiter’s guard, so he goes and gets himself some bigtime help…” She grinned at the guard lolling beside the small archway, tossed him a coin and darted through, then stood dancing from foot to foot, once again waiting for Yseyl.