Skeen's Leap

by Clayton, Jo;

  Every day the dust cloud was there, never closer, never departing.

  Skeen had carefully not inquired about what the nomads were looking for, better a bland innocence when the boys lost control of their enterprise, which, unfortunately, they were sure to do.

  The fourth day. They started into the foothills. The band set their mounts watching, then one split off from the others and came after the carts. Following. Not trying to overtake.

  At camp that night, Skeen pointed this out to Machimim. “What happens if he offs the watch? And then starts cutting throats.”

  “He won’t. Ignore the scruffy rat. Desert tribes, pah. Wouldn’t believe you if you told them the sky was up.” He yawned. “Always someone plotting against them, or so they believe. Stupid sandheads.” He smoothed his hand down the rattail mustaches that dripped from the corners of his mouth. “Nothing for you to worry about. Forget it.”

  Skeen left him and went prowling in the darkness outside the circle of firelight. He knows what the Aggitj are doing, she thought, and wondered what she should do. What she could do. Tell the Aggitj? Pegwai? Pegwai wasn’t stupid … he didn’t need telling. Or want such confidences. He knew quite well it was her that robbed the Poet, but as long as she didn’t say the words he didn’t have to act on that knowledge. Same here. As long as he could ignore this mess, he would ignore it. The Aggitj wouldn’t take her interference as a warning, not them. They’d grin at her and drag her arse-deep in the shit with them. She glared at the guide sitting hunched over by the fire, chewing his cud like a moocow; resentment stirred in her. Gits like him gave her cramps in the soul. Thugs hired by the respectable to maintain the law that pleased them so much until and unless it was applied to them. Most things to do with authority gave her cramps in the soul. She sighed and went to her blankets. When in doubt, do nothing. But keep the eyes open and be ready to jump.

  Machimim did nothing, kept himself blandly blind to the maneuverings of the Aggitj, even when they created a minor furor in the lakeside village (skillfully done, she’d give the boys that much), and managed in the midst of it to get a large rustling sack on board with the other gear.

  She popped the flap on the darter’s holster and clipped the lanyard to the butt, expecting trouble when they reached the Vana shore. Nothing happened. Machimim put them in more carts and they rumbled through farmlands lush with winter crops. The sun went down, plunging them into a thick darkness, the clouds hanging low overhead blocking most of the moonlight, but they went on toward the city; watchfires at the Gemta Telet burning atop the gate towers grew from red points to broad red glows. She tensed as they approached the Gates, expecting some strike from him. Nothing. They rolled into Vana without a sign of a challenge. Machimim could have called on the Gate guards if he was nervous about dealing with them, but he didn’t. She watched the guard’s faces, what she could see of them (curst veils) as they rolled past. No interest in these late-come travelers, only dull resentment at the duty that kept them from families or other pleasures.

  This was going on too long; they were getting away with too much. The longer it went on, the more nervous she got, the gaudier her expectations of disaster. Under her breath she cursed the Aggitj and their plots.

  They moved through the silent streets of the Chalarosh city and out again onto the wide roadway that ran round the harbor, finally through the gate into Freeport where the guards were alert and aggressive, demanding assurances and identification before they’d open one leaf of the gate and let the party through.

  Machimim took them to a hostel close to the water, saw that their goods (including the Aggitj boys’ precious sack) were stowed inside, then he left, taking the klazits with him. Once she’d settled the fee with the Host, Skeen climbed wearily up the long spiral to her room, dropped her pack on the bed, and went to the window. She spotted the watcher as soon as she looked out. Yes. It was almost a relief to see him making expected moves. The other three klazits were no doubt stationed elsewhere about the hostel, watching exits. Machimim brought us here for a reason. No doubt it’s a place easy to watch and hard to leave.

  She looked at the bed a moment, sighed, and went to see Pegwai.

  “Skeen?”

  “Need to talk to you.” He opened the door wider, she brushed past him and went to the window. “Yes. Come see.”

  He saw the klazit leaning against a wall. “Aggitj idiots.”

  “I don’t think he’d stop you; follow you, yes. Peg, get out of here fast, before Machimim has time to act. You’ve got a lot more riding on you than us, so take your tools and go to ground with the Skirrik. Besides, you can do a lot more there to get us out of this trap. See if you can persuade the High Mother to arrange passage for us on the most reliable ship leaving soonest. Before tomorrow morning, if possible. Timka’s got the gold. The shipmaster should be one who wouldn’t mind having to keep away from here until things calm down, or at least, one who could talk fast enough to keep himself out of trouble. Hm.” She thought a minute. “If she can’t fix passage, see if she at least can get a list of ships leaving.”

  Pegwai caught her arm. “Slow down, Skeen, all right, I’ll go. In a minute. Tell me first what you’re going to do.”

  Skeen ran her hands through her hair turning it into damp spikes, half dark, half pale. “Djabo bless, I don’t know. Shake information out of the Aggitj, yes, then try figuring some way of getting them clear. Get out of this place without cutting any throats, if I can.”

  Skeen sat in the window watching the klazit wander about in small circles; he was so very bad at this kind of thing she found herself forgetting what a thin edge she balanced on. A gap in time that might be smaller than the space between one breath and the next. She chewed her lips as Pegwai puttered about; he wasn’t as slow as he seemed. Not quite. Finally he sighed, gazed regretfully at the pile of discards on the bed, and started for the door.

  “Peg,” she said.

  “I won’t say farewell, Skeen.”

  “No point. Take some advice?”

  “If it’ll make you feel better.”

  “Sweet. Don’t hurry. Stroll along looking like you haven’t a care in the world and don’t try losing your tag. And if he stops you, don’t argue.”

  “I have done this before.” He made a face at her, shook his head, and left.

  Skeen stayed at the window. A few moments later Pegwai walked along the street carrying his pack. He looked calm, his step was unhurried. That’s right, make me feel like an idiot. The watcher stayed where he was, but a second klazit stepped from the shadows and moved after Pegwai, ambling behind him with an unhurried stride that matched his. Skeen let out the breath she hadn’t known she was holding. Follow without interfering. Whatever it was, it was too big to fit in Pegwai’s pack. “Now for the Aggitj.”

  EVERY QUEST HAS ITS COMPLICATIONS AND THIS ONE IS A HUMMER.

  Skeen listened at the boys’ door. The laughter inside, the boasting in the young voices made her feel like kicking a few butts. She wondered for a moment if she’d ever been that young and naive and didn’t think she had. They had no notion their game was about as secret as a rolling fart. She rubbed her hand across her face (feeling a hundred years old and meaner for every year), made a small annoyed sound, and hammered on the door.

  Instant silence inside. Idiots! A confused scurrying. Clothheads! All of it perfectly audible through the flimsy door. Lardbrains!

  Hal opened the door and stood in the gap looking uncomfortable.

  “Stop that and let me in. Young idiot.”

  “Skeen?”

  “It’s not the Doferethapanad. For which you should be grateful. You’ve made trouble for all of us, you nits. The game stops now.”

  He frowned, hesitated, then stepped aside.

  She marched across the room, pointed at the shutters. “Open them and take a look. No, not all of you, idiots. Hal, you. See that man down by the corner there—he should be walking in silly damn circles. Recognize him?”

  “Klaz Inc
hipit.”

  Hart brushed past Skeen and looked out. “Sure is. What’s he doing there?”

  Skeen snorted. “What do you think he’s doing there? He’s watching this hostel.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yes. Oh.”

  Ders jigged about like a fish on land, went to lean over Hart. “Watching? How come?”

  Domi dropped onto the bed. “How come? You know how come. That cursed by Lifefire Machimim. He guessed.”

  Hal hitched himself up onto the windowsill. “Spy. He didn’t guess. He knew.”

  Hart pushed Ders away and went to sit beside Domi. “So what do we do?”

  Skeen clasped her hands behind her. “First thing, my lads. What in Sorn’s seven dingy hells is going on?”

  “We thought you knew.”

  “When you told Hal about the spying.”

  “You didn’t ask, so we were sure you know.”

  “We’d have said if we didn’t think you did.”

  “Hey!” Skeen’s yell shut them up; four sets of hazel eyes stared at her. “Stop nattering. Tell me.”

  The Aggitj looked at each other, then Hal nodded. “Skeen ka, here’s how it was. You and the Scholar were in the Gather all the time and Machimim was gone snooping and the klazits turned snarky and they were a lazy bunch, ’d rather sleep by the watertrough than tag after us.”

  Hart said, “Skeen ka, you know the stream. Well, by the fifth day we’d been most everywhere else so we decided to climb the fall and see what was up there.”

  Ders nodded. “Another fall, that’s what was up there. So we climbed that too. And there was this sort of like cup with a few trees and bushes and grass and a lot of coneys, though they scattered—we made a lot of noise getting over the edge.”

  Domi said, “And Hal caught whiffs of Chalarosh, he’s the best seecher, and then we did, but it seeched weird, not like any of the others we come across. We think it over a sec, then we start looking. And we run down this kid.”

  “Just a baby, not more’n six or seven. He sets his back against the stone ’n waves this beast at us.”

  “We haven’t seen a beast like it before, but we hear of them. Samchak, we think it is, but it isn’t, not a samchak but a mershik which only very special people can have, lot worse any day than a samchak. That’s what the boys tells us after.”

  “Doesn’t matter we don’t know it’s not a samchak, that’s bad enough, spitting poison, so we back off.”

  “Yeah, and the kid has his own mouth open, ready to spit or bite.”

  “So we decide to play polite and we ask him how come he’s up there all by himself. Is he lost, can we take him somewhere? Maybe he wants something to eat, and Hal gets out a sack of honey nuts.”

  “Right away we see we got a problem. Boy doesn’t speak Trade-Min.”

  “We can back off some more and fall off the cliff or something.”

  “Kid’s hissing like he got a leak, no way we turning our backs on him.”

  “We decide we better make the boy understand we don’t mean him nothing. Isn’t that we’re looking for him, we just looking.”

  “So we try talking to him.”

  “Uh-huh. Takes a while, but that’s all right. We don’t have much else to do.”

  “So after a while he calms down some. Hal tosses him the nuts. The kid he’s more’n half starved so that makes him feel friendlier.”

  “This is what we put together from then and after. His father was the To ti Lom of the Sualasual, that’s the boy’s clan. We get the idea that being To ti Lom means he blows big and swallows little winds.”

  “The Sualasual and the Kalakal, that’s this other clan, they start some damn feud over something, nobody much remembers what.”

  “Yah, you’d think they’re Aggitj.”

  “Shut up, Domi. This fight kept on for fifty years about, that’s what the boy says, he’s not sure, but something like that. The Kalakal had more families and were more mean and sly and didn’t fight fair, though what Chalarosh mean by fair I’m not sure I know, so they just about wipe out the Sualasual.”

  “Yah, since the Boy was born there was just him, his mother and his father the To ti Lorn, and a baby sister, and a old aunt. That’s it for the Sualasual.”

  “The Kalakal smell them out again and again. They kill his father and his mother last winter. Old aunt she slip off with the Boy and the Baby and they get away clean. Which really burns the Kalakal, they stake out the unlucky git that lets the Boy get away.”

  “And they go nosing round after the boy, getting closer and closer.”

  “And one day the aunt tells him to run one way while she takes Baby and takes off another.”

  “That was a couple of months ago. The Boy thinks they are dead now.”

  “He thinks that’s why the Kalakal are so hot after him now. They want to finish off the feud.”

  “He’s the Heart of Sualasual, when he’s gone, that’s it. No more Sualasual.”

  Hal dropped onto his knees beside the bed and bent low, slapping his palm against the floor and gabbling a few words of guttural Chala.

  A small boy crawled from under the bed and got to his feet with a swift graceful twist of his body.

  He was a fragile elf, with the vivid beauty of an imperial kitten, a fresh elegance that survived dirt, spider webs, and rags, a glow about him that made her want to stroke him and cuddle him. He was everything that woke protective instincts to the highest degree in woman. In man too, from the besotted looks on the four Aggitj faces. She’d cultivated a natural resistance to such things, but training and nature were barely strong enough to throw off his appeal. She could understand very easily how the good-natured Aggitj were knocked off their feet, could understand why his family had lost their lives to save his. He was bred for this. Bred for survival, because as long as he survived, the clan existed. The Heart. Djabo’s dinky claws, white he lived the Kalakal were a joke to the other clans and while he lived he was poison to anyone who took him in.

  Slender, barely wider than a sapling, skin like olive-amber velvet with touches of rose, large mobile pointed ears, pale hair like spidersilk with a soft ivory sheen. Huge blue eyes. A charmer. She sighed. March him out to the watchers and say: here; take this it’s all yours? Impossible. She ran her fingers through her hair again, knowing how dopey it made her look. That’s how she felt. “No Trade-Min?”

  “He learns fast, Skeen ka. Already a few words.” Hal grinned at the Boy. “Soon be talking more than Ders.”

  “What are you planning to do with him?”

  “Well.…”

  “We don’t want him killed.”

  “He’ll get killed if he stays here.”

  “Nobody’ll take him, they get killed with him.”

  “We thought.…”

  “We thought maybe.…”

  “Maybe he could come with us?”

  Skeen smoothed her hair spikes back down. The absurdity of it all. A Min with murder on her tail. Four brainless but amiable Aggitj extras. A Balayar Scholar with peculiar tastes (no comments about his tastes, old woman, you’re involved too deep for judgment). A seasick Skirrik boy with no more sense than the Aggitj. Now a baby Chalarosh with a whole tribe of assassins after him. “Why not,” she said. “What’s one more?”

  “I’ve got to see Pegwai.”

  “He’s not here?”

  “I sent him to the Skirrik Nests so he could look for transport for us. He’d better be told about this. While I’m gone, you busy yourselves thinking out another hiding place for the Boy. Under the bed, hunh!”

  In her room, she ran a comb through her hair, squinted at herself in the wavery mirror. It’s a haircut for you, old woman, soon as you put foot on a ship’s deck. Djabo bless, that’ll take away a bit more of that bleach job.

  She strolled down the spiral and out the door without attracting any obvious attention—no not-obvious either, as far as she could tell, but before she was three steps on, an inlal of klazits came out of shadow and
moved around her. The folk moving along the street (not many, even here in Freeport the streets emptied at night) took one look at the black veils and got out of there as quickly as they could without running. The Abar of the inlal stepped in front of her. “Nakari-chal, the Doferethapanad would speak with you.”

  Honorific, hey, polite cops, wonder what that means. Well, I won’t be eager, which is pretty damn honest, I’m not eager. “I’ve got things to do,” she said.

  “The Doferethapanad would speak with you, chal.”

  So quickly the politeness goes. Ah well. “I hear you.”

  The Abar nodded, swung round and started off, confident she would follow.

  Disciplining a strong urge to take off for elsewhere, she sauntered along behind him, refusing to hurry herself, enjoying his irritation every time he had to wait for her to catch up. Not tactful. There were those who’d say she was ruining any chance of conciliating her captors, but she’d been through this sort of thing often enough to know that those in power did what they wanted whatever the attitude of their victim. She might irritate them into hurting her more severely than they might otherwise, but her self-respect was more than worth the extra pain. And more than once her insolence had actually brought her better treatment.

  The Abar led her through the maze of twisty streets to the Gate onto the Bayside Stroll. Some acrimonious argument, then the guards valved open a pedestrian door and let them through.

  The long walk to Chalarosh Vana gave her plenty of time to consider escaping. The klazits beside her and behind her were essentially meaningless; if she decided to break loose, there was very little they could do to stop her. She looked ahead to the white peaks that mimicked the curves of desert tents and marked the powercenter of the city. This was the sort of place where her sort of individual tended to vanish without a trace, all those traces scrubbed away by official flunkies kept around for sponging the mud off the official image. Yes or no? Go or jump? The bay was close enough and crowded enough so she could lose them in about three breaths. Be a lot harder to get away once she was in the Residence. When in doubt, do nothing. She touched the handgrip of the darter; none of the Chalarosh knew it was a weapon. When she and the others went before the Cadda Kana, a Klazit questioned her about the darter. She told him it was a brandy flask and waved it by his ear so he could hear the water slosh in the reservoir. Right, then, trust yourself, old woman, things get sticky you can shoot your way out. No bunch of idiot regressed primitives are going to hold me when I decide I want to leave. Right. Find out what this is about, then leave.