by Jaine Fenn
Like the skykin who’d visited the crèche, this one wore only a loincloth, and she was bald. Dej’s hand went to her own head. She felt scales, the last of her shorn hair gone. Her final link to what she had been, gone.
“If you really want to die, I’ll go away and leave you to it,” stated the skykin. Her voice was low and flat, no clues in its tone. But Dej sensed unspoken undercurrents: amusement, an edge of scorn.
“I don’t want to die.” Her own voice sounded higher than the skykin’s. Still off though, still no longer hers. No longer a singer’s voice.
The skykin had stopped several paces away. When Dej focused on her she had a sense of unmoving motion, sweeping up all her senses. The two of them circling, appraising, all without physical movement. Finally, the skykin said, “What’s so terrible you have to yowl at the sky?”
Dej answered without thinking. “I can’t sing anymore.”
“Well no. You wouldn’t. But that’s the least of your problems.”
“What do you mean?” This skykin had to be here for her, but this wasn’t the welcome she’d expected.
“If you really do want to live, you’ll need to come with me now.” The skykin turned on her heel and walked off down the defile.
Dej followed.
The rocks provided welcome shade, but even more welcome was the pool at the far end. Dej ran over and threw herself down beside the water. As she looked up from her first few desperate gulps she noticed the other woman watching her. Dej stared back, holding her gaze, before bending down again for another drink. Finally, innards sloshing with chill water, she stood up.
Dej got the impression the skykin was older than her, though not properly old. Skykin didn’t get old. She could sense how healthy the other skykin was. The skykin was fit and relaxed… and amused. Laughing at her, still.
“What’s so fucking funny anyway?” Dej didn’t swear. Min swore, and Dej pretended to be shocked; then they’d both laugh. But Min wasn’t here.
The skykin strode over. Dej stood her ground. Too fast to see, the skykin raised her hand to strike. Dej tensed but didn’t flinch.
The blow didn’t come. The skykin dropped her hand. She nodded, like something had been agreed. “You hungry?”
“Yes I am.”
“Good.” And they were off again, back into the rocks.
The new everything-at-once world was settling down, though it was easy to get distracted by this softly hissing moss-like growth or that mint-scented trace of some large creature’s passing.
They came out from the rocks to where a scruffy-looking rhinobeast waited. Its wedge-shaped head swung round to look at Dej and she got the sense of slow chewing, that irritating itch, warm sun on skin. The head swung back, and the rhinobeast’s presence receded.
Her companion rummaged in one of the packs strapped across the beast’s back.
“Put this on.” She flung a bundle of cloth at Dej. She caught it easily – surprisingly easily. It was a rough linen loincloth. Dej did as she was told while the other woman checked straps on the rhinobeast.
“Breasts hurt?”
“What?” Dej looked up from tying the loincloth. “Uh, yes. They do.”
“They’re still being reabsorbed. Might take a few days.” The woman threw another bundle Dej’s way. She caught this too. “That’s jerky. Chew it slowly, get all the goodness out of it. Eat too fast and you’ll puke. Puke on me and I might decide you’re not worth my effort.”
Dej mustn’t take offence. Without help, she’d die out here. “Thanks,” she said. “My name’s Dej, by the way.”
“I’m Kir.”
Just Kir: no title, nothing to show what she was to her clan. Dej recalled whispered rumours, lights-out horror stories to scare crèche-mates.
The other skykin’s eyes were fixed on Dej. “Are you…” Dej tried again, “are we clanless?”
Kir nodded. “Yes. You shocked?”
The clanless had been one of the less credible dorm rumours; degenerate, imperfectly bonded half-skykin who sometimes turned on their own. Dej affected a shrug and said carefully, “Beats being dead.”
“So it does.” Kir put a foot in the rhinobeast’s harness and swung herself onto its back, then reached down to help Dej.
Dej took the skykin’s hand – the contact sizzled, setting off sensations and emotions gone as soon as Dej focused on them – and let Kir pull her up.
As she settled behind the other woman Kir said, “You have been fed lies.”
“All my life.” Dej sensed Kir’s amused approval. This could work. She was used to being an outcast. Kir was an outcast. Two outcasts together.
Kir kicked the rhinobeast into motion. Dej looked for something to grab onto, saw only Kir, and concentrated on holding herself upright.
Dej had stuffed the cloth-tied bundle of jerky down her loincloth to climb onto the rhinobeast, and now she eased a strip out. She bit into it, letting her spit soften the dried flesh, then gnawed the jerky down to nothing and licked her fingers.
As she settled back Kir spoke over her shoulder, “You’re adjusting well.”
“To the bonding, you mean?” She had bonded. She only had to look at her hands to know that.
“To the incomplete bonding.”
“So sometimes… it goes really badly?”
“Some die or go insane. I’m glad not to’ve had a wasted journey.”
Rather than agree how inconvenient it would have been for Kir had she died, Dej said, “I’m glad you came for me.”
“I came because there’s always a chance of a partial rejection.”
“At every bonding?”
“Always a chance, like I said. So when we can, we send someone to watch.” We presumably being the clanless.
Dej ate another piece of jerky. Ahead, past Kir’s shoulder, she saw mountains: the Northern Divide. Not that she knew much more than their name: no shadowkin ever saw them by day. Kir’s rhinobeast was setting a steady pace and Dej watched the view ahead for a while, in case the mountains got nearer. They didn’t. When she couldn’t stay silent any longer she asked, “Why didn’t they just kill me, if they knew the bonding hadn’t worked right? The other skykin, I mean.”
She thought Kir wasn’t going to answer. Finally, she said, “Kill you and they kill your animus. An animus is sacred, even imperfectly bonded. So, they left you where you fell. You’d have died soon enough, starved or got eaten. But that would have been the world killing you, not the clan.”
“They wouldn’t have tried to get the animus out of me, to save it?”
“Your animus is like mine. It’s flawed. When you die it’ll go back to the world.”
“Flawed? How?”
“Damaged perhaps. More likely just old.”
“Old? I thought an animus lived forever.”
“There’s another lie. No, they live for a very long time but not forever. Did you have a parting-gift?”
“What? No. No I didn’t.”
“That’ll be the reason you were chosen.”
“Chosen?”
“To receive a flawed animus. Most likely your mother was clanless.”
She remembered Pel’s question. “Or maybe my father was a shadowkin?” Somehow that thought was easier to take than being born to skykin rejects.
“Perhaps. Though no true skykin would go with a shadowkin.” Kir spat the word true.
“You’re saying the skykin knew I had no parting-gift, decided that meant I had bad blood, and gave me an old animus?”
“Yes.”
So the skykin who’d come to the crèche, who hadn’t bothered to get to know her, had set her up to fail.
But they might have known about her. They’d have spoken to Mam Gerisa. The crèche-mother could have told them Dej was no good, so they’d decided she’d get a no-good animus. No, it was worse than that: Mam Gerisa had set her up to fail from the start; she’d known Dej would never be a full skykin from the day she arrived. When skykin came along saying they had a faulty a
nimus, Dej was their girl, even though she was too young. Min would have been the one, if she hadn’t been pregnant. Well, in that case, fuck them. Even Min. Fuck them all.
Kir half turned, and gave her a smile, the meaning of which Dej wasn’t sure, but which smelled like approval. “Are we going to meet the other clanless now?” she asked her guide.
“That’s right.”
“How far is it?”
“Far enough.”
“And–”
“There’ll be time for questions later.”
Chapter 20
Soon after dawn the next day, the caravan entered the mountains. The light from the vents dimmed as the ground on the left-hand side rose. Some creature outside gave a daft tittering call, half horse’s neigh and half drunken giggle. The sound sparked brief, nervous laughter amongst the travellers.
By midday the wagon was tilting so much Rhia kept sliding down the bench. She followed the lead of the other travellers and grabbed the leather strap attached to the wall just above head height. She had wondered what that was for. People on the central benches had to make do with using the seat edge to keep themselves steady.
No one attempted to sleep during siesta. Conversation died away. The only sound was the huffing of the rhinobeasts and wheels grinding over rock.
She distracted herself by further refining her idea about modelling the sky; yes, a contraption of wooden rings, with pegs and holes to stand the model Sun and Moons and Strays in; that might work. But putting theory into practice would have to wait. In the meantime, what might the sightglass reveal about the other Strays, when they next rose? Logic, and the writings of other enquirers, said they must be spheres too.
They were almost halfway to Zekt. She had travelled farther than any member of her family, save Uncle Petren – and Etyan himself, of course. Father had wanted to see the world, but felt bound to Shen by his duties. Rhia put that thought aside; after all, this was House business.
Petren had been to both Oras and Xuin in his youth, and told her tales of both shadowlands. Her uncle never could settle. When Father’s death left him the head of House Harlyn, he had rebelled and run away, though unlike Etyan he had planned his escape. The duke stopped him before he reached the umbral and brought him home to marry a woman he did not love; if the rumours were true he could never love a woman. That was the final straw. Alone at the villa one night, Petren had drunk hemlock, an act of combined bravery and cowardice Rhia could never reconcile.
The caravan did not slow when darkness fell. When Sorne mentioned this to his neighbour the man said, “Not many places flat enough to camp up here, so we keep going till we reach one.” Once it became evident that Rhia kept herself to herself, her fellow travellers’ curiosity had abated, and they ignored her, which suited her fine.
When they finally halted it was in a steep-sided valley rising to a forbidding escarpment. Even if it had not been too late in the day to see the Maiden, the high walls blocked much of the sky and Greymoon was up, washing out a lot of the stars. Moonlight, and the intrinsic glow of the skyland, revealed a strange landscape of eerie shapes. An orchestra of sounds came from beyond the fire: a murmur like the breeze through trees – except there was no breeze, and no plant out here resembling a tree – low whines, odd hisses and clicks, alongside the familiar sound of running water.
There would be no better night to examine the skyland itself. She walked up to Sorne. “I am going to observe, though not from under the wagon.”
“I’ll come with you.”
“I’ll only be over there.” She pointed at some relatively flat ground near the back of the passenger wagon. “I won’t go out of sight.”
“All right, then.”
The valley walls were a mixture of bare rock and hanging vegetation. She could tell the difference between the two by the glow the vegetation emitted; dimmer than in the open land, and with a different colour palette, mostly deep red or bruised purple. She turned her attention to the ground.
A soft-looking mat covered a depression a few paces off, glowing a gentle mauve: ground-fur. Naturalist of Menb warned against being lulled by its too-slow-to-see movement: ground-fur exuded a noxious sap that immobilized and poisoned its victim prior to leisurely digestion.
Other plants stuck up from crevices like bunches of pale spikes. She had no idea what they were.
Movement caught her eye. A thin dark line meandered across the pale rock, as though an invisible child was drawing with a thick quill. She crouched down and narrowed her eyes. The front of the line twitched and wavered. Ah yes: follower-worms. Each worm was as long as her hand but no thicker than her little finger. They were said to form chains, travelling nose-to-tail for many miles in search of who-knew-what. She could not remember if they were harmful; probably, as they would need some defence against being eaten. They were heading towards her, so she shuffled to one side. When the creature at the front reached the impacted earth left by the wagon’s wheels it stopped. Its dark snout scanned about. Then it made an abrupt turn to the right, leading its followers along the outer edge of the wheel-rut.
Rhia smiled, delighted to observe such peculiar behaviour.
She continued to watch while the rest of the line followed the course set by the leader. She gave up counting how many worms there were when she reached a hundred. Finally, the end of the line emerged from the darkness.
As she stood up she realized how cold she was. She checked on the ground-fur – it had moved a handbreadth, though away rather than towards her – then hurried to the luggage wagon to fetch her cloak, having first checked the wagon was unoccupied. When she emerged, food was being served.
After the meal, Sorne went over to Mella, then off into the wagon with her. Rhia bit her tongue rather than comment in front of his men.
The skykin who had been watching her before still paid her excess attention. Rhia had a theory about him. Before testing it, she wanted to speak to the prostitute again.
Mella and Sorne did not take long, and neither returned looking particularly satisfied. Rhia got up and went over to Mella, who nodded by way of a greeting.
Rhia, trying not to think how odd it must be to make a living doing something so personal and intimate, crouched next to her. “How well do you know the skykin?” she asked, nodding across the gust-pulled fire at their travelling companions.
“Well enough.”
“I was wondering whether you might introduce me?”
“Introduce you?” Mella put her head back and guffawed. “What is this, the duke’s court?”
“Well, no.” Rhia cursed her good manners. “Do I just go up and talk to them, then?”
“Did you want to thank Tan-Ufara for the stew? Particularly tasty tonight, I thought.”
Rhia ignored the whore’s jibing manner. “That’s the cook’s name?” It was weird hearing the skykin named. Weirder still, it was only now, halfway through the journey, that she considered they had names.
“Yep.”
“Actually, I was more interested in one of the others.” Rhia looked past the fire to the skykin. “The one who keeps staring at me. He’s doing it now, in fact.”
“She.”
“That’s a she? How can you tell?”
“By paying attention.”
Rhia flushed at being called unobservant by a caravan prostitute. “So what differences should I look out for?”
“Well, the women still have breasts, of a sort. That and the voice. A skykin woman’s voice is not as low as a man’s.”
“I see. So why is she so interested in me?”
“Because she’s the Yrif and you’re going to smell funny to her.”
“Yrif is the title for their seer, is that right?”
“That’s right.”
“Does she have a name, this seer?”
“No, she’s their seer.”
Sophist of Jhal said skykin added a suffix to their birth name on bonding to denote their place in the clan. Except seers. Seers were the wisest among
st the skykin. And this one was female. Rhia looked across at Mella. “What do you mean, I smell funny to her?” Although Rhia most certainly did smell – by now they all did – she suspected this was not what Mella meant.
“How can I put this?” Mella pursed her lips. “I don’t know what your story is, but if you’re Mam Rhina the poor widow then I’m the duchess of Shen.”
Rhia’s already hot face flushed further. Several enquirers had noted the skykin talent for sensing – Wanderer of Prin called it smelling – deception.
When she said nothing Mella added, “You aren’t the first person to pass this way who isn’t what they seem, and you won’t be the last. Don’t worry about it.”
Rhia nearly asked Mella outright whether she had seen Etyan. But what would that achieve other than to confirm Mella’s suspicions?
She looked up and met the seer’s gaze. The skykin did not look away. Rhia stood and, before she could lose her nerve, strode round the fire. A couple of skykin looked up. The Yrif stood slowly, still watching her.
She stopped in front of the seer. This close she could see how the muscles beneath the skin were normal enough, even though the skin was coarse and scaled. The only changes to the underlying morphology were the flattened nose and heavy brows. And the seer exuded a faint but not unpleasant smell, like a book open under the hot Sun. Rhia realized she was staring, and said, “Can I talk to you?”
For a moment she thought the skykin hadn’t heard her. Or maybe was ignoring her. She only had Mella’s word that this was how to speak to them. Then the skykin said, “Why do you wear the mask?”
“I… sorry. I’m not sure what you mean.”
A shadowkin would explain, or at least repeat themselves, but the skykin just kept staring. Waiting. Rhia wondered how long she would wait. Quite a while, probably.
Rhia took a deep breath. “I wear this mask to cover a scar. When I was younger I burned my face.”
“Why?”
“What? No, you don’t understand. I mean my face got burnt. In an accident.”
“No.” The skykin turned, fast as a cat, and walked off.
Rhia stood dumbfounded. Then she walked back round the fire the long way, avoiding Mella. The soldiers watched her approach then looked away as she sat.