There were only two of them gathered that night who had no doubts that it would be Sku’ord who would fall. One of them was Sopharndi. The other was Cochta. The younger woman was sacrificing her friend to better know her enemy. She knew brute strength alone could never overcome Sopharndi. Cochta was a cold one, all right.
Sku’ord took two quick steps forward and adopted a fighting stance. Her feet were planted wide apart, her heavily muscled arms were close to her body, ready to strike. Her claws were unsheathed. They glinted in the light of the moons.
Sopharndi stood absolutely still: listening, feeling, sensing, aware of her body and the dirt under her feet. Aware of the stilling of her mind and the breath of the wind. Aware of the unreachable past and the unknowable future.
Laak stepped forward onto the bloodspace, her old features hidden by the hooded cloak the Elders wore on ceremonial occasions.
“Begin,” she said and stepped back into the crowd.
Sopharndi felt the rush of bloodlust like a storm breaking inside her. She placed herself at the silent eye of the storm and nodded at Sku’ord.
“For the Singer,” she said, following her words with a whisper. “And for Cley.”
The young female moved fast, but her intention to charge was so obviously signposted that Sopharndi had time to consider her options. Should she dodge left, then strike? Dodge right and trip her? Meet the charge with a well-placed kick and knock the knee bone out of its joint? The fight would be as good as over then. Too quickly, though. Cochta thought losing Cley would unbalance her. Let her see the truth.
Sopharndi moved to the left and watched her opponent swipe a clawed hand uselessly through the air at the spot where she had been standing a moment before.
She took a step backward and waited.
Sku’ord recovered fast, using the momentum of her strike to spin her body and face her opponent again. Sopharndi nodded at the unexpected agility of the move, acknowledging a certain level of skill in her opponent. She saw nothing but rage in the other female’s expression. Rage was useful, certainly. More than useful - essential. Without it, the fight was often already lost. But a true fighter must be the master of rage, not the other way around. Sku’ord was driven purely by the bloodlust and was relying on her physical advantage to bring victory.
She did, at least, have enough intelligence to change strategy when her first approach failed. Sku’ord came forward more cautiously this time, looking for an opportunity to get in close, where her sheer bulk would give her the upper hand.
“Nothing to say, Sophi?” she whispered as she advanced. ‘Sophi’ was the contraction Sopharndi had been known by as a child. No one among the People would ever show such little respect. As attempts to goad went, it was fairly lame. Sopharndi said nothing. She started to dance on the balls of her feet, staying out of reach of the powerful arms and looking for indications that her opponent was about to attack.
“Maybe that’s where Cley got it from, Sophi. You think so? Maybe you’re just too stupid, and Cley couldn’t learn from you. You were too old to bond with him. Too old to be a mother.”
This was a better approach. If Sopharndi hadn’t been watching from the eye of the storm, she might have reacted to personal taunts about her fitness to be a mother. There was some truth in it, after all.
“Either that,” whispered Sku’ord, as her shoulder muscles tightened almost—but not quite—imperceptibly, “or the Singer is punishing you for something. I wonder what that could be. Eh, Sophi?”
With that, she feigned a stumble and launched herself at Sopharndi. The tightening of the shoulder muscles indicated she was attempting to grab her opponent by the waist or upper legs and force her to the ground, where her bulk would give her a huge advantage. But her arms closed on air again, as Sopharndi jumped in perfectly-timed anticipation of the move. She landed on top of the younger woman, expelling all the air from her lungs in one painful, huff.
Sopharndi thought of Cochta watching.
No more free lessons tonight.
She slashed her unsheathed claws across Sku’ord’s legs, just above the back of her knees. She cut both legs as a kindness. The challenger would be unconscious in three minutes, rather than six. Dead in eight minutes, rather than sixteen.
Sopharndi withdrew to the edge of the bloodspace and waited silently with the rest of the People while Sku’ord’s body twitched in its death throes. Then she turned to the Elders and nodded. All three nodded back. Only Laak spoke, as tradition dictated.
“Sopharndi is First,” she said. The people raised their right arms and shouted her name as one. “Sopharndi!”
Traditionally, the celebrations should have started immediately, as supporters of both fighters accepted the result and reaffirmed their commitment to the community they loved. This time, as the echoes died away, an unnatural silence descended on the assembled group. Sopharndi, facing the Elders, had her back to the fire. She wondered, for a fraction of a second, if her killing blow had failed. Then she dismissed it as impossible. She looked at the Elders and those around them. They were all staring at something on the far side of the fire. Something that was moving closer.
Sopharndi spun around to face the threat, whatever it was. Sku’ord’s corpse still lay on the ground. The fire burned strongly. A figure walked around it and came toward her. A few paces away, it stopped.
It was Cley. And he was looking at her. Really looking.
He wasn’t humming.
“Hello, Mother,” said Cley.
Chapter 23
Seb stood at the edge of the clearing, taking long, steady breaths. It felt good to breathe again, even though he knew it wasn’t real. He had taken great lungfuls of air as he ran across the Parched Lands, his arms pumping, his legs settling into a kind of lazy-looking loping stride which propelled him across the ground at a rate that turned the surroundings into a moonlit blur. The burn he felt in his muscles put a grin on his face as he ran. If this was a simulation, how did reality stake its claim to being any different? All his senses told him that he was here, wherever here was.
Within minutes, the alien body he now inhabited had begun to feel entirely natural to him. By his own estimation, he stood just over four feet tall, his body compact and tightly muscled. His skin was dark and tough, like the skin of an armored avocado. His eyes were closer to those of a cat than a human and sat further apart than a human’s on his hairless skull, giving him a bigger field of vision than he had ever experienced. His hearing seemed better too, but it was hard to know if that was just his imagination, as there was no way to measure it. Before he’d started running, he had easily been able to identify the sounds of small animals, snakes, and lizards scuttling around the mountain, as well as similar noises further away. He had a surprisingly accurate mental picture of the precise direction from which the more distant sounds emanated. His ears were fairly humanoid, just a little more prominent and tapered at the bottom as if Mr. Spock had accidentally placed his auditory organs upside down. But the information they sent resonated in some way in the physical skull itself, giving an almost radar-like picture of his surroundings to add to his vision.
He certainly felt gloriously conscious, and wonderfully, physically alive.
Mentally, the picture was less clear. At the surface level of consciousness, Seb was completely present, but if he probed deeper, where Cley’s memories and unformed personality lay, the picture became more confusing. All of Cley’s history was accessible to Seb, and as he had run toward the distant lights of the Settlement, he had begun to tentatively explore them. The sensation was extremely strange, as the memories now belonged to Seb as much as Cley. Seb felt like he was a curious hybrid of some sort. Bok had led him to believe that he would totally dominate the mind of the creature he inhabited. But Seb found that Cley was far from absent. Although the boy—who had never been able to speak—was not present as an inner voice of any kind, his way of seeing the world nevertheless subtly colored the way Seb saw it. Seb knew he was no longe
r Seb, at least not here. He was one of the People, a tribe of creatures at a pivotal point in their societal development. He would never be able to achieve what he had come here to do, unless he was, in some sense, Cley, son of Sopharndi, the First.
He stood in the clearing, aware that every single eye was on him, and faced the woman who had birthed this body and cared for it for so many years without a single response. As he looked at Sopharndi’s face, he saw an expression Cley had never seen before. Shock, for one thing - then happiness and hope mixed with disbelief. Sopharndi had never lowered her guard sufficiently to display such naked emotion. Seb watched her take a few hesitant steps toward him before stopping and simply staring.
He looked at the corpse on the ground, the blood around it reflecting the sparks leaping from the fire. He noted the blood congealing on his mother’s claws. He felt a curious calm rather than horror at the scene. This was the traditional way the People settled power struggles. As First, no one came above Sopharndi in the warrior caste. She must have been challenged. She must have prevailed. Even as he accepted the scene as a common one in this society, part of Seb still recoiled at the violence, the waste of life.
Every face was still turned toward him. The Elders had yet to react to the situation. No one had ever expected to see Cley again. To see him now, not only alive and unharmed, but somehow, miraculously able to speak, had silenced everyone.
Laak stepped forward and joined Sopharndi, but came no further. She was Leader. She delivered the law, made judgments. Along with the other Elders, Laak guided her tribe through the seasons, her leadership delivering wisdom, certainty, and continuity. The People lived by their traditions, formed over countless generations, passed on orally through the songs, as well as laws and stories. Every situation could be dealt with according to one tradition or another. Not this situation, though. No song had ever been sung about a Blank finding the power of speech or becoming a functioning member of the tribe. Blanks were pitied, but—these days—they were taken care of. Long gone was the time that they had been left to die, shunned because of their condition. Silmek, the Leader two generations before Laak, had taught that traditions could change. She said the way the People treated the weakest among them was one of the ways they showed they were more than wild beasts. The Singer could be merciful - perhaps the kindness they showed the Blanks would help them earn that mercy. Her edicts had stood from that day until this.
Seb felt the almost unbearable tension grow as he stood opposite Sopharndi and Laak. He knew whatever he said now would never be forgotten by those present. For a moment, he wished he’d spent a little time preparing a speech, rather than running across the desert with a big, stupid grin on his face. Oh, well.
“I have returned from my Journey,” he said. Other than the crackle of the fire, there was no sound. He felt the force of the attention focused on him. He turned his head, slowly taking in everyone gathered around the fire, from infants on their mothers’ laps, to those who had nearly reached the end of their songs.
“I went into the Parched Lands, where nothing grows but the blacktree. I climbed the Last Mountain. In a cave, I fought a skimtail.”
Sopharndi’s head twitched at this as she remembered her own Journey. Seb smiled a little.
“I prevailed, but I did not kill it. I spilled no blood on my Journey.”
At this, Sopharndi’s face clouded, and there were small sounds of confusion from the crowd. How could anyone fight a skimtail without either killing it or dying in the attempt? No one had ever returned from their Journey without spilling another creature’s blood. It wasn’t that it was a necessary part of the ritual, rather a case of survival. No one took water on the Journey, so the blood of snakes or lizards had to provide vital fluids.
Seb walked to the edge of the circle and gently took an empty waterskin from a wide-eyed child who handed it over without a sound. Every eye followed him as he walked back and knelt on the dry earth.
Time to find out if Bok was right about a T’hn’uuth’s abilities inside a Gyeuk Egg. Let’s see if a miracle or two can kickstart a religion.
The sensation Seb felt as he reached out with his Manna was, seemingly, identical to that which he felt in the real world. He willed the dusty soil to become water. The physical process now felt almost as natural as reaching out to pick something up. There was a slight change in his state of consciousness, but it happened seamlessly as he moved his attention to the task. It was the same mental state he entered when writing music, a kind of letting go in order to allow something to happen. He’d always felt that songs—or, at least, the best phrases in songs—were already out there somewhere, waiting for someone to find them. He just had to train his mind to notice. Manna use was very similar; a letting go of familiar mental processes in order to allow others to become known.
There were gasps of disbelief as a few people noticed what was happening. Seb heard hissed prayers to the Singer as the waterskin swelled. He held up the skin, and the cries of disbelief grew as the water spilled from the opening and ran over his hand and arm, continuing to do so for long enough that it became obvious that more water than the skin could hold had already flowed from it onto the ground. They were witnessing the impossible.
Seb couldn’t help smiling to himself. He was not unaware of a certain irony. He still found his own abilities almost as impossible to comprehend as did the tribe watching him. His power felt completely natural, but that only proved it was easy to get used to pretty much anything, given enough time. To him, the appearance of fresh water from thin air was no less magical than it appeared to the People. He might try to explain it by imagining particles in the atmosphere being somehow changed and reassembled into molecules grouped into two parts oxygen and one part hydrogen, but, in truth, it was still a complete and utter mindfuck.
He walked back to the child whose waterskin he had borrowed and returned it. The boy sniffed it cautiously, then—before a nearby male could stop him—upended it and took a long drink. He smiled reassuringly at the adults around him.
Water was held in high regard by the People; in the hot season, the river sometimes dried up to a muddy brown trickle, and the oldest among them remembered their own grandparents’ stories of the terrible drought that wiped out half the tribe.
Over the course of the next minute, there was pandemonium as urgent whispers grew into frightened shouts. Some looked scared, or angry, struggling to accept the impossibility of Cley’s return, his sudden intelligence and the miracle he had just performed - the like of which had been unknown since the earliest songs. Pockets of almost hysterical laughter broke out around the gathered crowd as members of the tribe tried, and failed, to make sense of what was happening.
The Elders recovered first and stepped forward from the crowd, Laak raising her hands for silence. Such a gesture would normally be instantly obeyed, but this time she was ignored. Laak looked around her in dismay at the excitement and panic building around her. Such a heightening of emotions could only lead to trouble. Already, scuffles were breaking out as individuals argued over what this could mean. Those who weren’t fighting among themselves seemed either frozen with fear, staring at Cley, or overcome with a kind of fervor that left them almost mesmerized.
Laak shouted, “People! Listen!” but she could barely hear herself over the noise. She turned to her fellow Elders. Their eyes betrayed almost as much fear and confusion as the crowd around them. For the first time as Leader, Laak felt her control over the tribe slipping away. She was losing them. She looked to her First, but Sopharndi was stock-still, staring at her son, an unreadable expression on her face.
Laak took a deep breath, preparing to shout with all the authority she could muster, but before she could say a word, the ground beneath her feet began to tremble, then shake.
Seb was reaching out with his Manna just as he would have done outside the Gyeuk Egg, hoping that Bok’s promises were correct. Bok had assured him that, as long as he remembered who he really was, he would have lim
ited abilities similar to those he enjoyed outside the simulation.
He wasn’t sure he liked the word limited, though.
He guessed this must be the “little drama” Fypp had promised, saying it would help his cause at the beginning. She obviously had a talent for understatement.
Around the clearing, the People fell to the ground, scrabbling to hold on to those around them in a desperate attempt to stay upright. Earthquakes were rare, but not completely unknown. Songs told of entire settlements being destroyed by them. The tribe wailed with fear in anticipation of destruction and death.
The noise of the shaking earth was louder than the screams of the crowd. It was a fearful sound, as if the Land itself was crying out, rock grinding against rock, deep below their feet, as though a giant was grinding its teeth. Great cracks were heard as trees split at their roots and fell in the forests. Sparks leaped high from the fire and flew into the sky.
Then, slowly at first, the quake began to subside, the ground no longer feeling as if it were about to break apart, but still rolling and tipping. The roaring sound diminished in volume steadily. After about a minute, it was just a steady rumble, the ground now vibrating rather than shaking.
Seb had watched the response to his return escalate into panic and violence. He knew this moment would be pivotal in his quest to turn Cley’s tribe toward a new approach to religion - one that would encompass all aspects of their lives. He had to inspire, not terrify.
Now that he was here, Bok’s warnings about losing himself in the simulation seemed almost understated. There was no hint of artificiality about the scene around him, and the emotion of the people was raw, unfeigned and utterly compelling.
“People!”
Seb stretched his arms above his head, just as Laak had done; but this time, everyone turned toward him and listened. He began to lower his arms and, as he did so, the rumbling diminished still further, as did the noise of the crowd. By the time his arms reached his sides, there was silence, broken only by the whimpering of a child.
The Unnamed Way (The World Walker Series Book 4) Page 13