The Outskirter's Secret

by Rosemary Kirstein

  There was thunder, intermittent, and then almost constant. Lightning became a continuous flicker, outlining the shelter roof, the crack in the door; someone hurried to secure it tighter. The rain was heavier, seeming to fall like stones. The air shook, constantly, as if the shelter were a drum continuously ruffled, with the humans trapped within. It was not far from the truth.

  Outside, heard only in the short gaps between thunder peals, the goats cried out in their weirdly human voices, seeming quiet and distant against the roaring wind. The animals tried to hide behind the tent peak, crowding, shoving each other onto the tent itself. The ceiling sagged, writhed, and threatened to collapse. Rowan and three others quickly stood to push up from below, spilling the animals off; and they did the same again moments later, and again; more helpers joined the work. At last there were nine people standing with bent backs, supporting the laden roof against their shoulders.

  One of Garris’s warriors, at his own initiative, tied a safety line about his waist, handed its end to his comrades, and exited the shelter. There was a tense half hour of waiting; then, one by one, the weight of each goat on the roof vanished. When he returned, exhausted and rain-drenched, the word made its way slowly across the shelter, from shouting mouth to noise-numbed ear: “He killed them.”

  Rowan wanted to know what else he had seen; whether the inhabitants of the other shelters had done the same as he; whether the other shelters were still intact.

  Such detailed communication was impossible. Rowan returned to a seat beside Bel, who was now awake, looking about with a sharp gaze, thinking, waiting for an opportunity for useful action.

  There was nothing to do but wait. More people slept than Rowan thought possible amid the noise: they were still too spent to do otherwise. Others sat, huddled, as if the sound of wind and rain were itself wind and rain, as if it were necessary to brace and protect oneself from the mere noise. With painful slowness, the hours passed.

  Kammeryn had awakened briefly. In the near-blackness of the shelter, it was impossible for Rowan to evaluate his condition. He attempted to sit up; Chess did not permit him to do so. He acquiesced so quickly that Rowan was concerned.

  Chess tried to fill him in on the situation, shouting each sentence near his ear. Eventually the seyoh was made to understand that all persons within the shelter were currently safe; that the condition of others was undetermined and indeterminable. He nodded at the information—weakly, it seemed to Rowan—and gripped Chess’s shoulder once in response. Then he closed his eyes and lay quiet, possibly asleep; and Rowan assumed that Chess was still in command.

  Rowan’s own weariness began again to overtake her. She did not want to sleep. She wanted to observe, to notice every detail of experience—but not for the sake of a steerswoman’s endless search for information.

  It was not her being a steerswoman that made her want to know; she had become a steerswoman because of her own need, the need to know and understand. And at this moment, she merely wished, for herself, to be aware, and could not bear the thought of being otherwise.

  Hoping to husband her strength, she braced her back against the bare earth wall. The contrast between the shuddering air around her and the utter stability of the earth against her back confused her senses; she was immediately, horribly nauseous. She leaned forward, away from the wall. The conflict vanished, and she was instantly more at home, in the midst of every sailor’s proper element: motion. She sensed it on her skin and behind her eyes; it gently trembled her bones. She reached back and groped along the earth face, finding one of the internal guy lines where it dove into the dirt. She wrapped her fingers about it, and it was like a living tendon in her hand. The taut tent skin above spoke to her through the line, through her fingers, and she listened with her body to the tale of wind, force, and power driving across the land above.

  She felt the wind slowly shift, slowly veer to the northeast, then felt it start to slack, even before its roaring voice began to fade.

  She tapped Bel’s knee to gain her attention and alerted Chess. In the growing quiet, amid the cries of relief from the huddled people, the three women made their way across the shelter.

  They entered the circle of Fletcher’s guard and settled beside him. He was fast asleep. Rowan gently shook him awake.

  He came to awareness slowly, swinging his head about in the gloom, confused. Rowan spoke his name, her voice small in her noise-deadened ears.

  He became alert, peering about in the gloom as if amazed to be alive. “Is it ending?”

  “You tell us,” Bel said.

  “How long was I asleep?”

  “All morning. It’s past noon, now, at a guess,” Chess supplied.

  The hope on his face vanished. “Then it’s just begun.” As if to put the lie to his words, the rain ceased drumming overhead. On one side of the shelter, someone was keening, continuously, and possibly had been doing so unheard all morning.

  “How do you know?” the steerswoman asked him.

  He flung an arm out in frustration, nearly striking one of his guards. “I don’t know. The track from forty-eight years ago showed high winds and storm, on both sides of the print. I don’t know how long it will last this time, but—more than one morning. There’s more coming.”

  Rowan let out a pent-up breath of frustration. Track, print—he had again begun to use words almost completely incomprehensible to her, words that only hinted at meaning, that relied upon knowledge and understanding outside of her experience.

  She turned to Chess. “If you want reports from the other shelters, this may be your only chance to get them.” The old woman nodded, then clambered off, calling to her dazed warriors.

  Rowan turned back to Fletcher, thinking, Track, like the track of an animal, left behind for hunters to follow—does the weather leave tracks, and by what means can one possibly see them? “Forty-eight years is a long time ago,” she began. Could any marks made still be visible? “Didn’t you look at the recent track?” Behind her, someone threw open the entrance, and a wash of pale light entered the shelter, painful to dark-adapted eyes. Voices complained reflexively, and people began to shift stiff limbs. “The Rendezvous weather, the mild version we had, that caused the Face People’s tribe to think it was time to Rendezvous; that was quite recent, by comparison. There must have been heat on the Face then; did that make a track?”

  His blue eyes were wide on hers. “I looked for one. It wasn’t there.”

  “There was no track?”

  “None.”

  She thought. “But it must have occurred …” How were tracks eliminated?

  A clever person who wished not to be followed would obliterate his tracks by dragging branches over them, like sweeping chalk marks off a slate … “It was erased?”

  He looked at her in quiet amazement. “Do you know,” he said in a small voice, “sometimes you frighten me. Yes, that’s exactly it. The information was erased. And there’s something else.” He held his hands Out, then moved them together, defining a small space. “The gap, the time span—it was little. It wasn’t as long as the time it used to take for the heat, when it came before, every twenty years. I think … I think it might have been a test; someone seeing if the heat still worked, if it was worthwhile to use it for …” He dropped his hands and looked around, up. “For this.”

  One covered one’s tracks when doing something one wished kept secret. “It was Slado himself who erased the information?” She used Fletcher’s own turn of phrase; it seemed properly abstract, and apt.

  “It must have been. Any number of people know how to do it; but none of them would bother to. It doesn’t matter to them. And I don’t even know why it matters to him …”

  “He didn’t tell you?” It was Bel who asked.

  “Tell me?” He seemed to find the idea incomprehensible.

  “Yes, you,” Bel said, tightly. “He was getting messages to you, somehow, wasn’t he?”

  He leaned back, confused. “No—”r />
  “He sent you here!” And the warrior’s eyes were full of fury. “He put you in the Outskirts, for reasons of his own. Didn’t he tell you why?”

  “Bel, I’ve never spoken to him—”

  “And when he heard that Rowan and I were in the Outskirts, he sent you to find us—”

  “No!”

  “—and do what? Follow us? Gain our confidence? Stop us? Kill us?”

  “Bel, I never meant you or Rowan any harm; I didn’t even know you exist—”

  “You’re a wizard’s man. You showed up, right where we were. It’s too big a coincidence.”

  He stopped short and made one small sound, half a helpless laugh. “You don’t know. It is a coincidence—but not a big one. I’m not the only one in the Outskirts.” He gestured with one hand, indicating the whole windy wilderness. “You come out here, wandering all over—one way or another, sooner or later, you would have met one of us.”

  “How many? How many of you wizard’s dogs are there in the Outskirts?” Bel sat straight; her dark eyes glittered. “How many exactly?”

  He looked to Rowan, perhaps for reassurance. But she, too, wanted an answer. “I don’t know,” he said to Bel, “not for sure. I think they started with fifteen, years ago. And then they lost a couple, no one knows what happened. It could have been anything, disease, a battle, an assassin … It was before my time.

  “But when they lost another person, two years ago, I heard about it, and I did some checking. I could see that they were short; but nobody seemed to care. No one wanted to take the job. But when I heard about it, I wanted it. I was in logistics.” He looked suddenly weary. “I hate logistics,” he said quietly. “I’m so bad with numbers.” He became exhausted. He stopped speaking.

  Rowan wished she could let him rest. She did not. “Why did you want this particular work?”

  He looked up from his lap: a child’s look, a dreamer’s. “It was a hard job. It would be life and death, every day. I wanted … I wanted to do something big.”

  She heard a sudden echo of the old Fletcher, the bored young baker who had wanted a life of excitement and had found something he loved more than he had expected.

  Fletcher’s gaze dropped again.

  Half of Orranyn’s band had taken the opportunity to step outside. Now they returned and traded places with their comrades. From the corner of her eye, Rowan noticed a silent argument between Orranyn and Jann. The woman warrior did not wish to leave. Her chief physically pulled her from place, angrily directing her outside. He took her former position himself.

  “And of what precisely did your duties consist?” Rowan asked Fletcher.

  “Looking,” he said. “Reporting.”

  “Passing on information?” Fletcher had been able to dispatch messages, she knew. “Using your cross?” she asked, then recalled the term he used; “Your link?” A link: a connection, as if the cross had been magically joined to something else. She thought of the guy line in her hand, telling her the stress on the tent above her, the direction of the wind outside—information at a distance, through a physical connection.

  “That’s right.”

  “That’s all?”

  “For the most part.”

  “We don’t want to know the most part,” Rowan told him. “We want to know the least part. Everything.”

  He stirred himself. “I was supposed to report everything I found out about the Outskirts, every detail. When Bodo found the demon’s egg, I reported that. Then I called up a trace of large animals for that sector and ran it back. Some things don’t read well, like goblins. I always reported goblins, and their eggs, when we found any. But something big and warm always shows up. I ran the record and watched a large creature passing through that area two months before. I followed along part of its path, and found the egg.”

  Both women were a long time considering these statements. They were incomprehensible. Rowan grasped at one small fact among the confusion: “You could see into the past?” Outside, the wind’s low tone altered, ascended.

  “No …” Fletcher began. “Well, yes, in a way …” He struggled for analogy. “It’s like your logbook. You write things down, and years later people can come and read it. So they’re seeing into the past.”

  “Who writes it down?”

  “No one. I don’t know how to explain it, it happens by itself …”

  “A spell?”

  He accepted the term. “Yes.”

  Rowan imagined a room filled with books, where a pen moved across an open page, as invisible hands recorded everything seen by distant, invisible eyes.

  “Where are the eyes?”

  “What?”

  But she was already thinking: to see the movements of animals over a long period of time, to see Fletcher’s invisible banner, would require a very high point of vantage indeed …

  “The Guidestars,” she said. “The Guidestars are watching us.” She was hardly surprised.

  “Yes.”

  “And the Eastern Guidestar sent down the heat?”

  He nodded.

  “And it’s stopped now?” she continued.

  “Unless the schedule was changed again.”

  “Why didn’t we see it?” Her voice was desperate in confusion, at impossibility. “Something so hot, why didn’t it glow, burn? It was going on all last night; why couldn’t we see it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  A voice spoke close behind the steerswoman. “Rowan?” It was Jaffry, crouched close beside her. “Chess says come outside. And bring him.” He jerked his chin at Fletcher.

  “What’s happening?”

  He paused. “There are slugsnakes in the sky.” The wind was now keening.

  Bel was incredulous. “Slugsnakes?” But Rowan instinctively reached up to the tent roof, feeling for the external bracing lines outside the skin. Despite the sound, touch told her that the wind was nowhere near strong enough to send animals flying through the air.

  Jaffry’s expression did not alter. “Big ones.”

  Rowan clambered out of the shelter and crouched on the ground beside Chess. The wind was no longer steady, but gusting wildly, and the air was filled with a continuous distant rumbling, overlaid by a sourceless high-pitched scream. The sound was uncanny; it seemed to enter Rowan’s skull, move through her body, and exit through her skin, leaving it crackling with warnings of lightning to come. She looked east.

  Directly ahead, far out on the brick-red veldt: a slugsnake in the sky.

  It was small in the distance, huge in fact. It hung below churning clouds that were lit by internal lightning that writhed in colors such as she had never seen: bright, glowing green, orange, red, an evil pink that pained her eyes. From the sky to the ground, the body of the thing swayed slowly, its top merged with the clouds above, its lower end obscured by a moving brown haze. The haze, she suddenly knew, was earth; the thing was tearing at the earth itself.

  “Fletcher!” And he was right beside her, beside Chess, beside Bel. Orranyn was with him, still uselessly on guard; Rowan thought it stupid. “Fletcher, what is that thing?”

  He looked to be in shock. He answered, but could not be heard above the rising noise. The slugsnake was stretching, swaying, approaching. Fletcher repeated, “A tornado!”

  “What?”

  His hands made a shape: two curves, as on each side of a cylinder. “Like a hurricane!” he shouted, then closed his hands, collapsing the shape into a single narrow funnel.

  A small hurricane; it sounded like no dangerous thing. But then she thought of the vast force of a hurricane’s winds; thought of that force channeled, tightened. The force would multiply, into a power far beyond her scope of comprehension.

  “Inside!” she called; but none could hear. She clutched Bel’s arm, and Fletcher’s, and tugged at them. The five people struggled together back toward the shelter. But when Fletcher was about to duck into the entrance, he suddenly stopped, looked up and past the low tent peak, then stood. Rowan
shouted to him; he could not hear. She rose to pull him down—

  Past the tent peak, out to the west, dim in the gray storm light, seeming silent against the shriek and roar of wind: more tall shapes, slowly tilting and shifting. There were three of them due west, two more south beside them, and diminishing southward in the distance, masses of cloud that seemed to touch the ground, seemed to be churning and spinning into more distant funnels …

  They were lined up along the western horizon, swaying like drunken soldiers. And over the ridge that obscured the northwestern sky, Rowan could see flickering, burning colors within the clouds; and she knew there were more behind the ridge.

  And then she was inside, and the others with her. Someone struggled to secure the entrance. Rain rattled, and then rattled harder; Rowan thought it was hail, then thought it was earth, then knew it was, by the choking dust that suddenly filled the shelter. Something heavy fell on the roof; the tent skin sagged, dropping, and then rose again, and Rowan knew that whatever the weight was that had struck above had been taken back into the sky.

  The roaring was continuous; whether thunder or the wind itself, she could not tell. But over it all, that impossible screaming, shaking her brain until she thought her ears would die from the force.

  Light dimmed further. Only Bel was clearly visible, crouched beside Rowan, watching the shuddering ceiling with wide eyes. With no words able to pass between them, Rowan reached out one hand to the Outskirter’s wrist and held it. It was the most basic of human statements: I am here, you are here, we are both alive.

  Bel twisted her hand around and clutched Rowan’s desperately, with fingers strong from years of wielding a sword. She turned her gaze on Rowan, and the steerswoman saw the look she had seen only once before on the Outskirter’s face, when she and Rowan had sat helplessly silent, listening to the approach of a demon: terror.

  And Rowan understood that here was the only thing that her warrior friend feared: helplessness. When the demon had approached, Bel could do nothing; she could not attack or defend, but only wait for whatever fate would occur. And she could not strike at these tornadoes. She could do nothing. Her skills were useless, her will impotent, her own life, and the lives of her comrades, completely out of her hands.