Growling to himself, Elrabin went off to find Foloth.
He had no luck in his search—not that he tried very hard—and finally he came tramping back into camp, with twigs and leaves caught in his fur, his stomach gnawing a hole out his back, and his temper in shreds.
The others had finished eating whatever was left of the ruined supper, and had gathered for the meeting. Velia slid a half-empty bowl of cold soup into Elrabin’s hand and he drank it in three angry gulps.
Giving her a quick lick on one ear, he handed back the bowl and saw Harthril beckoning him.
The tall skinny Reject looked very stern tonight in the flickering illumination of their small fire. Everyone else sat on the ground in a circle around the fire, but Harthril remained standing. Elrabin stood before him, feeling like he was on trial.
“You punished them?” Harthril asked.
“One of ’em,” Elrabin replied. “Ain’t found the other one yet.”
“I hope you beat them,” Frenshala said.
Elrabin glared at her. “No one asked you.”
She jumped up in outrage. “I have a right to speak,” she said shrilly. “We are part of this group now. I can say what I wish to say.”
“Just keep your muzzle out of my business, see?” he said.
Harthril held up his hand before Frenshala could reply. She snarled an insult and sat down. The other Kelths murmured to her, yipping and growling among themselves.
“We have bigger decision to make tonight,” Harthril said, raising his voice slightly to be heard. “Is time to break camp. Already we stay here too long.”
“Now wait,” Elrabin said. “Don’t get so hasty, Harthril. We promised to wait for Ampris.”
“Yes, but three days past her time to come,” he said harshly, flicking out his tongue.
“Three days?” Elrabin tilted his head to one side and scoffed. “When you’re walking across the Plains of Filea with your feet on fire and your brain melting inside your skull, maybe you find it takes a little longer than you meant for it to. Get it?”
“We give her extra time,” Harthril said. “She not come. Now we go.”
“Where?” Elrabin asked him. “Going someplace special or you intending to roll a dice bone in the morning and strike out the way it points?”
“Elrabin,” Velia said from across the circle. He glanced at her, and she shook her head in reproof.
Elrabin shrugged his shoulders under his tattered coat. Things used to be pretty good, but he was tired of the way the camp ran now. Everyone at each other’s throats all the time. No leadership worth spitting at. Too many fool decisions, like this one.
“I ain’t going to Vir,” he announced, baring his teeth.
“There is food in Vir,” Luax said quietly as she leaned forward. “We must eat.”
“Sure, I like to eat, but I ain’t going back to that stinkhole just to get dinner,” Elrabin told her. “Listen to me, all of you. Ampris had a plan to keep us out of there. When she gets back—”
“We listened to her and we agreed with her,” Harthril broke in. “But Ampris did not come back.”
“Give her time.”
“We have no time,” Harthril said. “The game is gone. Foloth scared the Kaa, and now the guards want our hides. They hunt us, every day, and they will catch us soon. We must go.”
“Give Ampris a chance to come through,” Elrabin said. He faced them in the firelight, pleading with them. “Have faith in her, folks. When’s she ever failed you?”
“Ampris does not fail,” Harthril said fairly. “But maybe Ampris is hurt or dead. Is long way to Vir.”
“Yeah, and a long way back. We can hold out another couple of days,” Elrabin said. “Give her a chance. Come on.”
Robuhl rose to his feet, tottery and white-maned and frail. “We shall wait for Ampris!” he declared, his voice quavering.
Tantha lifted her hand. “I vote we wait.”
Elrabin stared hard at Velia, who backed her ears and snarled at him. But obediently she rose to her feet. “We wait,” she said in a soft voice.
“But how long do we wait?” Frenshala asked. “Till we starve? Harthril be speaking right, and we know it.”
“She’ll come,” Elrabin insisted.
“But she has not come yet,” Frenshala said fiercely. “Do we wait forever?”
“If we have to,” Elrabin said stubbornly.
An outcry rose at that, and he lifted his hands. “Hey, slack yourselves. I know we can’t do that. So we compromise, see? We wait a little longer.”
“How long?” Luax asked.
“Five more days.”
Frenshala howled, and Harthril’s rill turned red. He shook his head. “One day, Elrabin. Only one more day.”
“Four,” Elrabin said.
Harthril flicked out his tongue. “Two.”
“All right, all right,” Elrabin said, giving in. “Three days.”
“Two.”
“Come on! Three days is fair. She’s probably almost here—”
“Three days already we have given her,” Harthril said, lowering his rill. “Two more is all we can spare. Then we must go.”
Elrabin stared at their faces, shadowed by the uneven firelight. They looked tired and gaunt. He knew none of them could hold out much longer, no matter how much they might want to. Worry gnawed at him, and he wondered what would happen if Ampris couldn’t make it back? With that crippled leg of hers, she was an inviting target. She could be lying out there, fevered with thirst, with carrion eaters circling her.
Desperately he closed off his imagination. He could tell Harthril wasn’t going to budge. The Reject had been pushed all he would go. Elrabin sighed and bowed his head.
“Okay,” he said, knowing he’d accomplished more than he expected. “We wait two more days, and then we strike camp.”
In the airless dark of Elrabin’s shelter, Nashmarl crouched with his back against the wall and panted for a while. He hated Elrabin. He was tired of the old Kelth’s lectures, tired of being told what to do. Like Elrabin was anybody in the first place. He was just an old thief and a slave, street filth, as Foloth called him behind his back. He couldn’t even hunt as well as the others, but he thought he should always be telling Nashmarl and his brother what to do.
From a distance, Nashmarl could hear what was being said at the council. He had extremely keen hearing. Sometimes he considered it a curse, especially when he overheard someone making fun of him. But tonight the adults were talking about Mother. They wanted to leave without her, and Elrabin didn’t want them to.
Nashmarl sighed. He guessed the old Kelth had a few uses, after all. But not many.
From outside the shelter, he heard a stealthy sound like someone walking on the grass.
Nashmarl turned around and listened. He picked up Foloth’s scent, and relaxed.
“What do you want?” he asked. “You got me in trouble tonight, so I don’t—”
“Shut up,” Foloth’s voice came to him. “Start digging.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m going to help you escape.”
Nashmarl rolled his eyes in the darkness. Sometimes Foloth was very clever. But ever since he saw the Kaa, he’d been daft. “You’re crazy,” Nashmarl said. “All you have to do is unlock the door.”
“Dig!” Foloth said. There came the sound of dirt being scratched away from the bottom of the shelter.
“I’m not crawling out through a hole,” Nashmarl said. “Not when I can leave by the door. Quit fooling around and unlock it.”
“No,” Foloth told him. “I’m going to dig you out. That way when Elrabin comes by to check, he’ll think you’re still trapped inside.”
Nashmarl sighed. Tonight his brother really was stupid. “So if you pull out the stick and let me out, you can’t put the stick back?”
Silence fell outside the shelter. After a few seconds the door opened and moonlight shone in over Foloth’s shoulder.
Nashmarl hurried out
side, giving his brother a shove of scorn.
Foloth shut the door behind him and fastened it again before hurrying around behind the shelter to scoop the dirt he’d dug back into place.
Nashmarl followed him, feeling superior. “Seeing the Kaa really broke your wits. You ain’t been right in the head since then. Got us wearing cloaks like courtiers and pretending we’re Viis—”
“We are,” Foloth insisted. “Half, anyway, which makes us better than everyone else in camp. They can’t tell us what to do anymore.”
“Listen,” Nashmarl said to him. “I overheard the council—”
“So did I. They aren’t leaving.”
“No. They’re going to wait for Mother like they promised,” Nashmarl said in relief. “I was worried that they’d—”
“The agreement ended three days ago,” Foloth broke in. “They’re fools to wait.”
“But—”
“Listen to me,” Foloth said. “Mother isn’t coming back.”
Furiously Nashmarl glared at him. “That isn’t so! That isn’t—”
Foloth shoved him down and sat on him, mashing his face into the dirt. “She isn’t coming back. Why would anyone come back to this once they’re in the city?”
Nashmarl felt the old sense of abandonment twisting his stomach into a knot. There were always other things more important to her than her cubs. She was always leaving them with Robuhl or Harthril or Elrabin while she went on her adventures. He scraped his face on the ground and wanted to weep, but he couldn’t while Foloth was sitting on top of him. He didn’t want Foloth to know he still cried.
“Besides,” Foloth said eagerly. “I’m tired of living out here like an animal. If we go to Vir, we can live as Viis. We can—”
“We’ll be going soon enough,” Nashmarl said dully. His voice was choked behind a knot in his throat.
“I don’t want to go to Vir with the others,” Foloth said. “Look at how they treat us. We can’t even sit at the council as their equals.”
Nashmarl lifted his head. “That’s because we’re cubs.”
Foloth thumped the back of his head, hard enough to hurt. “Don’t be stupid. It’s because we’re different.”
Bitterness filled Nashmarl’s heart. “Yeah, we’re freaks.”
“No, we’re half-Viis. I want to live like the Viis do,” Foloth said, letting him up at last. “They have all the privileges. They get—”
“We don’t look like Viis either,” Nashmarl said bleakly. The world seemed like a pit to him, and he was at the bottom of it.
“It doesn’t matter. In a city like Vir, everyone is sophisticated. I’m sure they’re used to seeing exotic creatures from everywhere in the empire. We’ll blend in,” Foloth said with confidence. “Anyway, you can do what you like, but I’m going.”
“How?”
“Like Mother did. I’m going to walk there.”
“By yourself?” Nashmarl snorted. “You won’t last a day.”
“I will if I take supplies.”
“What kind?”
“The kind that Harthril has hidden in his shelter.”
Nashmarl caught his breath, intrigued in spite of his doubts. “What?”
“Want to come see?” Foloth asked him. But then he slapped his palm against Nashmarl’s chest. “Only if you agree to go with me.”
“I don’t want to run away,” Nashmarl said. “It’s too far.”
“Fine,” Foloth said coldly. “Then stay here and let Elrabin keep you locked up.”
“I’m not going back inside that shelter,” Nashmarl said fiercely.
“You will if he puts you in there. He’ll have you scrubbing cooking pots and digging latrines again.”
Nashmarl clenched his fists, hating the humiliation he’d gone through recently. It had been unfair to punish him for Steegin’s fall. He hadn’t pushed her, but everyone treated him like he had.
Suddenly he was tired of all of them, tired of being criticized, tired of the angry looks he got just for hanging around and breathing. Nothing he and Foloth did ever measured up. Without Mother here, it was worse.
He thought of the large, special, golden presence of his mother. He missed her with a deep, intense ache of loneliness he dared not reveal because Foloth would only make fun of him. But if he went to Vir with his brother, then he could find Mother. Of course, she wouldn’t really want him with her. She never did. The thought of her rejection made him both angry and sad. Oh, she’d promised she would come back, but this time she hadn’t. This time she’d gone farther away than she ever had before. And if Foloth was right, if she wasn’t ever coming back, then Nashmarl knew he had to find her. He couldn’t let her get away. He would make her keep him this time. And maybe, if Foloth was right about Vir being a place where people of all kinds lived, maybe his looks would no longer shame Mother. Maybe in Vir she would stop giving him that sad, pitying smile while she stroked his head and sang softly in the evenings. She thought she was giving him comfort when she did that, but she only made him unhappy.
“If Mother is staying in Vir, then I want to go there,” he said, making up his mind.
Foloth clapped him on the shoulder. “That’s more like it. Come on. Let’s go get Harthril’s food stash before the meeting breaks up.”
CHAPTER•THIRTEEN
Ampris and Israi stared at each other for what seemed like an eternity, then Israi regained her wits and drew back with a hiss. It seemed impossible that this large, gaunt creature could be Ampris, her once adorable, golden Ampris, whom she’d romped with so happily as a chune. Although Israi was taller than Ampris, the Aaroun was still quite large, with heavy shoulders and muscular arms. She looked dreadful, however, all scarred and battered. A cheap, ridiculous-looking bauble hung from her neck on a leather cord, and her clothing was the tawdry, synthetic stuff slaves and common laborers wore. She still had her distinctive dark brown mask of fur across her eyes, but her golden pelt was dull, and there were multiple scars in her ear, showing where she’d worn ownership rings.
As once she wore my cartouche, Israi thought. She shuddered and coiled her tongue inside her mouth. Clearly Ampris was now some kind of renegade. She had a feral, dangerous look in her dark eyes, a look that bored into Israi in a way the Kaa found offensive as well as uncomfortable. No abiru slave had the right to look at the Imperial Mother in such a way, as though judging her, as though finding her somehow lacking.
Israi pulled her wide skirts close to herself and turned around to leave, but quicker than comprehension, Ampris jumped ahead of her and blocked her path.
“No,” Ampris said in the impeccable, aristocratic Viis that Israi had once, so innocently, insisted she learn. “We will talk, you and I.”
Israi hissed again. “There is nothing to say.”
Again she tried to push past Ampris, but the Aaroun stepped in close and gripped Israi’s arm. Astonished that she would dare risk death in this fashion, Israi opened her mouth to call her guards, only to remember that she had slipped away without them. Quickly she pressed the inside of her wrist, only to remember that she had deliberately taken off her miniature hand-link so that no one, especially the Bureau of Security, would be able to trace her movements. Even a Kaa needed some secrets.
But twice now, in recent days, she had gone off impetuously without her guards, and twice she had needed them. Israi drew in deep breaths, holding her alarm under tight control. In these troubled times, it seemed she could no longer get away with such recklessness. Well, she had learned her lesson. Never again would she leave her guards behind.
Still gripping her arm, Ampris shoved Israi deeper into the Archives. “Quiesl,” she said to the Myal archivist who was gawking at them both, “a room where we can be private. Quickly.”
“Yes. Yes.” Wringing his hands, he shook back his mane and hurried away on his short legs, preceding them down a short corridor and into a dusty room where artifacts that looked like brown daubs of dried mud lay scattered on a table in need of cleaning.
But the short archivist had disappeared, and Ampris was shutting the door. Israi heard locks engage, and a hollow feeling opened within her at the root of her tail. Yet she knew better than to show any fear, for that was to hand the first advantage to an enemy.
Yes, she thought, studying Ampris through slitted eyes, an enemy. Even as a cub, Israi recalled, Ampris was always rebellious and full of improper questions. She frequently forgot her place, and she required endless reprimands. With a chune’s innocence, Israi had thought her pet quite spirited. She realized later, of course, that Ampris was all the trouble the courtiers had always expected her to become. Ampris the traitor. Ampris who tore Israi’s young heart in two, without a care for how she wounded her mistress. Ampris had been the first betrayer of many. But Israi knew how to deal with betrayers—ruthlessly and without mercy.
But that would have to wait. For the moment Israi was Ampris’s captive. Israi raged inside. Ampris would pay dearly for this insult, Israi promised herself; she would have her skinned alive and her hide tacked to the wall. Outwardly, however, she remained poised and regal, staring haughtily with her rill extended, prepared to let Ampris remember Israi’s behavior as a sign of trouble, if she could.
Ampris seemed unconcerned. She let the silence stretch between them, her intelligent brown eyes calm and watchful.
“You are insane, Ampris,” Israi said, unable to let the silence continue. “You have lost your wits. This goes too far.”
“In what way too far?” Ampris replied coolly. To Israi’s fury, she had not bowed once. She now spoke in a crisp tone, without deference. No respect shone in her eyes. “Too far for me? Officially I was killed in the destruction of Vess Vaas. I do not exist.”
“That status will change immediately!” Israi promised her. “Let us go!”
“Not until we have talked.” Ampris looked her up and down. “The years have been kind to you, Israi. I hope you have laid many healthy eggs.”
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