Numenera

by Monte Cook

  “Trust the plan,” he said. “Trust us. We’ll find a way.”

  The time dilating windrider wasn’t, it turned out, a time dilator or a windrider. At least not in any way they were expecting. Thorme’s supplier had it wrong, or their supplier’s supplier had it wrong. Either way, somewhere down the line, the message of what was wanted and what actually arrived had gotten miscommunicated.

  What showed up at their rendezvous spot, half a mile or so away from the base, was a girl who couldn’t have been more than six riding a floating skiff with a pistal engine that burped solargasses strong enough to make Kyre’s eyes water. It had no seat, nothing visible to steer it with, and no matter how fast and far it went, it damn sure wasn’t going to do it quietly. Forget falling off a cliff in it. He thought he’d be lucky if he could get the thing to move.

  “Thorme. What. In the skist. Is that?”

  “I’m not sure,” she said. “Give me a moment.”

  Kyre had never seen Thorme work her trading magic. Did she talk a lot? Grow sweet? Use tongue-clicks and rude hand gestures? He couldn’t help but pay attention just to see what kind of person she became in this element of her life.

  The girl – six long blue braids hanging down her back and a mass of orange facepaint that ran down her neck and stained her shirt – was neither subtle nor quiet. She revved the engine, which kicked out a stream of bright red smoke. When she coughed in the fumes, the whole skiff shook.

  He heard Thorme say something to her in a very low voice. Thorme couldn’t be heard over the engine. The girl obviously couldn’t hear her either, because a moment later, she turned the engine off.

  “Where exactly,” he heard Thorme say with quiet precision once the engine had died, “is your mother?”

  “Ma’s down sick with the buzzes,” she said. “But she says I’m a big girl and I can deliver the equipment my own self.”

  Kyre had no idea what the buzzes were. Some kind of disease? Something else? Was it something that Thorme could fix? He had no idea and couldn’t tell from her face.

  “Your mother’s an idiot,” Thorme said conversationally.

  Kyre felt his face change at Thorme’s easy tone. He didn’t laugh, but he was tempted. He thought his mouth might be hanging open.

  “Yeah,” the girl said, throwing her mother under the rug as easy as taking a breath. “I’m not an idiot though, right?”

  “You tell me,” Thorme said. “You were supposed to bring a windrider. Does this thing you’re sitting on look anything like a windrider to you? It’s got no wings.”

  “No, but–”

  “This is called a skiff,” Thorme said. “A windrider has wings. You should tell your mom that.”

  The girl chewed her lip, squinted one eye closed to look around Thorme. “Is that your boyfriend?”

  “No.”

  “Your dad?”

  “No.”

  “Hey! Are you her boyfriend?! My ma has a boyfriend. Is that your boyfriend?”

  Kyre looked at Thorme helplessly. What was unraveling right here, right now? Things seemed to have degraded rapidly, if he was looking at Thorme to carry the conversation back where it needed to be.

  “Hush, Hern,” Thorme said. “You’ve got a bigger mouth than a cragworm.”

  “What’s a cragerm? Like this?” The girl opened her mouth wide, as if to prove Thorme right. Or maybe wrong. He wasn’t sure. Either way, she was temporarily quiet, and that was a relief.

  It didn’t last long.

  “I need my money,” the girl said. “Mom said… Five hundred shins.” He could tell by her eyes, the slide to the side, that she was lying. Whatever her mom had told her to come home with, he thought it was a great deal less than five hundred shins.

  “That’s not what we agreed on,” Thorme said. “Your mother and me.”

  “Mom says yes, or no windrider.”

  “It’s not a windrider,” Thorme said. “What is it?”

  “It’s a skift… skifter.”

  “Skiff.”

  “Skiff!”

  “Right,” Thorme said. She lowered her voice, and even her body a little. Who was this person, this hustler and jiver? He realized he had no idea what Thorme had been like before she’d become part of the Night Clave. “Listen, the buzzes are very, very bad. Your mom has them big, right? Did she say that? Is she very sick?”

  The girl seemed to think about this for a moment and then nodded solemnly. “She said they were bad, yeah. Too bad for her to come today. She said she’s all the sicks.”

  “Well, she’s going to need something to make her feel better. Otherwise…” Thorme didn’t say that the girl’s mother might die without the medicine, but it was in her voice anyway.

  The girl’s eyes were very big, white eggs inside her orange-painted face.

  “I can give you something for her, and we’ll trade for the skiff. All right?”

  Thorme pulled a long thin vial from her bag. It had a label, but Kyre couldn’t read it. Neither, apparently, could the girl.

  “This,” Thorme pointed at the label, “says ‘Help for the buzzes. Makes the buzzes go away and never come back’.”

  She held it out to the girl. “But you’ll have to walk home. My boyfriend and I are going to ride the skiff.”

  Thorme actually winked at him. And he had no idea what to do with that.

  “Boyfriend in the skifter!” the girl yelled, taking the vial.

  “Take that carefully all the way to your mother,” Thorme said. “And make sure she reads the label, so she can take it properly. Yes?”

  “Yes.”

  “Be careful, Hern. There are things in the woods far scarier than I.”

  They both watched, silently, as the girl ran away through the forest, her blue braids bouncing, one hand held high, clutching the vial. In a few short seconds, she was out of sight and out of earshot.

  Kyre reached out and pushed the skiff, a gentle nudge. It floated in midair, swinging softly. “Well, at least it’s not a windrider, I guess. Although this looks… well, less stable, actually.”

  “It is,” Thorme said, matter-of-factly. “But it will carry you where you need to go. And it’s nearly impossible for it to go over a cliff, since it’s got anti-gravity pinions. Probably better for our needs, actually. And we got it for a song, to be honest. Less than a song.”

  Kyre could feel how round his eyes were. How slack his jaw.

  “What?” she said. “Do you think I can’t talk, just because I don’t?”

  “I think…” He had no idea what he thought. “What are the buzzes anyway?”

  “I have no idea,” Thorme said.

  He glanced at her. Her face was as expressionless as it always was, but he thought he saw a twinge of smile lines at the edges of her gaze.

  “But,” she continued, “if I had to guess, I’d say it’s something her mother made up so that she could send her daughter out to barter for her. Pull the ‘woe-is-me and look at how cute I am’ trick. What I don’t know is if Hern actually grabbed the wrong machine or if her mother never had the right one to begin with.”

  “What was in the medicine you traded it for then?”

  “Medicine?” Thorme asked. “Did I say there was medicine in that vial?”

  Now that he thought about it, she hadn’t. He shook his head. “Good,” she said. “I don’t like to lie.”

  “What was in the vial then?”

  “Berried water.”

  “You carry berried water in your med bag?”

  “It helps with dehydration.”

  “But it… What did the label say then?”

  “It said, ‘Next time don’t send your daughter to barter’.”

  He felt his mouth fall open a bit more and tried to close it quickly. Still, Thorme saw it.

  “Sometimes you just know what people are going to do,” she said. “Just like I know you’re going to push this skiff back to the base, because you don’t want to get on it until you absolutely have to.”
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  “I don’t know if I like this new you, Thorme,” he said, even as his hand was already reaching out to grab hold of the side of the skiff and tug it along next to him.

  “Not new me,” she said. “More like old me.”

  Finally, the question he couldn’t resist asking, “What did you do before you came to the Stere, Thorme? Before you were part of the Night Clave?”

  Her footsteps crunched in the underbrush. “Did you ever hear of Ossam’s Traveling Menagerie and Soaring Circus?”

  “No,” he said.

  “Good,” she said.

  She walked beside him, and didn’t say another word all the way back to the base.

  Moving through the woods boldly and in broadlight is the last thing Aviend expected to be doing anytime soon. But Rillent’s eyes are elsewhere and haste matters, so fast and direct is the way. It’s her best chance of reaching Quenn, convincing him to help, and getting back in time.

  Convincing him will be another matter. The harder of the two tasks set before her, and surely the most important. She is looking forward to telling him about the temple, though. For that alone, he might agree to come back to the base.

  The ghosts are getting louder. Not noisier, but fuller. Harder to ignore. They no longer stalk the edges of her vision, but step in front of her. She swears it’s purposeful, their slide and stand. She’s learning to stride through them, to ignore the sensation that she swears prickles on her skin, even though Delgha said it couldn’t be so.

  “There’s nothing actually happening,” she’d said. “Now that we know that it’s transdimensional energy funneling through the kubrics, we know that it doesn’t have a feel or sensation. It’s just because they look like people that we expect them to touch us in some way.”

  It’s just because they look like people.

  And they do. Mostly strangers, indistinguishable from each other. Flickered faces and features. Sometimes they look like the dead. No one that she knows. Small comforts. She wonders, now that she knows, if they see her too. Is there an Aviend in the other world? Does she look like a ghost to someone over there, bumping into trees that don’t exist on this side?

  She runs and then walks and then runs. Somewhere in there it rains, soft and light. The wet leaves touch her as she steps through them, turning everything she wears to water and weight. This section of the forest is wetter than where she grew up or where they are stationed now. She remembers traveling through marshes and puddles, downpours that she and her mother had huddled against when they’d visited this section of the Stere. The memory is instilled so deep, rises with such force at the first gust of water-threaded wind, that she isn’t surprised to realize she’d chosen a cloak with a wide, capped hood. She pulls it up, lets it take the brunt of the rain.

  The town of Nalloc is also much as she’d remembered, although the last time she’d been here she was barely a girl. It’s small enough, she guesses, that it has mostly passed beneath Rillent’s eye. At least so far.

  A few buildings cluster in a clearing. The space has been man-made purposefully, long ago, from the rigorously square shape of it. Two short streets intersect each other, cut across by worn paths. A few yol graze, their yellow wool dripping with water. They lift their heads as she draws near, but otherwise pay no mind.

  Everything is wet here. You can smell it in the air, how things never get fully dry. Not the wood that the homes are built from. Not the yol and their moss-tinged wool. Not the paths or the bark or even very many eternally wet people.

  One of those eternally wet individuals steps into Aviend’s path just as she enters the square. The movement isn’t deliberate, she doesn’t think. She isn’t sure it isn’t a ghost at first. And then she realizes it’s definitely human and her hand falls to her weapon.

  They both wear hoods pulled down, walk with lowered heads. The shape is wide, nearly twice as much so as her, and moves with the slow careful step of someone of old age. Aviend sidesteps without colliding, says a low apology and moves to keep forward. She isn’t sure exactly where she is heading to find Quenn, but with so few buildings, she has no worries that she will quickly track the boy down.

  Provided he is still here, still alive.

  “Aviend?” The voice at her back is Quenn’s, although the shape is not. She can’t begin to imagine what has happened to the impoverished boy she saw only a short time ago.

  “Quenn?” she asks, mostly to be sure. She turns, and it is Quenn, beneath the now-pushed-back hood. Of course she would know that face anywhere. It hasn’t changed. How could it possibly have? Although it seems like eons, it has not even been a full season.

  “What are you doing here?” Quenn asks. He seems older, and Aviend isn’t sure how she’d ever thought to call him a boy.

  Something wiggles inside the large rain drape he wears, drawing her attention downward.

  “Orphan,” Quenn says in response to her gaze, just as a small woolen face pushes itself up out of the drape, bleating. A tiny hoof, no bigger than Aviend’s thumbnail, appears a moment later. “Shhh…”

  “For a moment there, I thought you’d been eating more than your fair share, to make up for your time in the trenches.”

  Quenn laughs – has she ever heard him laugh before? She doesn’t think so. Then shakes his head, mostly at the creature, who seems determined to jump out of the protective drape and into the wet muck.

  “I’d hoped…” she starts, and then shakes her own head. “Could we talk somewhere?” She wants to add “dry”, but knows that is likely out of the question here. But she is shivering inside her soaked cloak, her fingers too cold to bend.

  “This way,” Quenn says.

  She follows his lumbering, orphan-loaded gait. The waddle of him is enough to make her smile, particularly as a single hoof again makes an appearance and knocks him softly in the chin. She’s glad to see that he no longer limps. His leg seems to have healed well. She bets that beneath those very wet pantlegs, Thorme’s tiny crisscross of scars are barely even visible. Unless you know them as intimately as Aviend does. The imagined shape of them makes her heart hurt a little.

  A building is tucked into the hollow where the grove hasn’t been cleaned out, carved into the side of risen stone.

  “It’s more cave than building,” Quenn says as he pushes open the door and leads the way into a large carved room. It is mostly hollowed from the rock, with a bit of white caulked along the edges of the walls. “But it’s better than wood to keep out of the rain.”

  It is also, Aviend is delighted to note, surprisingly dry. And warm.

  The front room has very little. A few benches and a table. A drape of a curtain – crosshatched and patched, mismatching fabrics – separates this room from another. Little else to draw the eye other than a large steel orb in the middle of the room. It has large slits in it, carved out in an ornate design. Through the design, she can see flickering orange light.

  She lowers down, looks inside. A fire burns bright enough in there that she can feel the heat pushing forward to her face.

  “That’s ingenious,” she says. It really is. Much cleaner and safer than an open fire, and she bet it cooks better than the cookstove’s accidental output. Holds the heat inside, radiates it out through the metal. She’d never have thought to build such a thing. Thorme would love it.

  “Rillent’s is much larger,” Quenn says. “More… people-sized.” He doesn’t look at her. She thinks about what that means for a moment. About what it means that Quenn has done. About what it means for what she is about to ask Quenn to do.

  Still not looking her way, Quenn kneels and lets the creature out of his drape. The tiny yol jumps sideways with a half-kick that nearly sends it toppling. Water drips from its wool despite having been under Quenn’s coat. It shakes its head and then goes toward the fire ball. Lays down near, but not too near. It has clearly been here before. It’s figured out the perfect “get warm but don’t burn up” ratio.

  “Here, lay your wet stuff out by the firegl
obe and it will dry before you leave.” The “leave” isn’t Quenn saying anything, like it might be with someone else. He is just stating facts. Trying to be helpful.

  “Thank you,” she says. Quenn strips away his wrap and she is pleased to see that he has gained some weight. He’s still skinny, but he no longer looks gaunt. His cheeks are less hollowed, and his lanky frame has some fat over the muscles.

  The yol lifts its head and bleats at her, quiet as a dream, when she lays down her wet coat.

  “I call him Ollie,” Quenn says. “And this is my sister, Vesi. She built the fireglobe.”

  How long the woman has been standing there, Aviend doesn’t know. She clearly came from the room behind the curtain, though. Silent. Swift. Sure. The fabric’s not even moving.

  From Quenn’s description of his sister, his need to protect and return, she’d expected her to be younger than him, a girl even. She is neither of those things. She might be older than Aviend. More likely close to the same age. She looks like Quenn, more in the body than in the face. The coloring matches too. Where Quenn’s face is pointed, all angles, hers is soft. A circle filled with other circles. Even her eyes are large and round.

  Her voice, however, is angular all over. It carries the same lilt and swallow as Quenn’s. Obvious as soon as she says Rillent. “It’s just like Rillent’s,” she says. Rilnt. “Except we don’t burn people alive in ours. We just use it for tea and such.”

  “Vesi,” Quenn says; the word is sharp but his voice is warm.

  “It’s true,” she says as she comes forward. “You’re Aviend?”

  Aviend is surprised, but not overly so. Surely Quenn’s talked about them, about her, in some way. She hopes he wasn’t overly effusive about the life-saving part.

  She isn’t sure if an answer is needed, but she gives one anyway. “I am.”