Oran sat, drawing her robe away from the soiled ground. “You Yena have no idea what it’s like here in the cold.” A peace offering?
“No, we don’t,” Aryl agreed. Not the time to mention the dreams. “We’re not ready for winter, let alone what will happen afterward. We could use what you know about living in the mountains, about growing food. We need your Talents and training. If you stay and help—when I’m ready, I’ll share what I can do with you as well as the others.”
“You tried to leave me there. Tried to kill me.” Oran’s hair came back to life, lashing the air around her head. “You expect me to trust anything you say?”
Aryl gazed at the Adept. This was no friend. The best she could hope for was the kind of truce that existed in the canopy, when two predators avoided each other during their hunts.
I expect you, she sent, just to Oran, through the M’hir that now so readily connected them, to be afraid of the dark.
Nothing troubled their return journey. It was much like their first, Aryl thought. The Grona Adepts hadn’t talked to her then either. They’d collected their coats—she both of hers—and the Adepts had tucked up their robes, however filthy. The rock hunters were piled closer to the line where shadow conquered light, a line moving steadily inward from both sides as the sun left the sky, but she didn’t bother to mention it. They were adults, after all, Chosen and powerful and Adepts.
If they were blind to danger, it suited her. They were blind to other things as well. Like the occasional glint from overhead, a reflection from what followed them, something cautious and discreet.
A comfort, to know a friend was watching. Aryl would have given anything to look up and smile at Marcus, but not even Grona were that blind.
They also didn’t see—or care to mention—the lines of compressed dirt here and there on the paving stones. She’d seen such paired tracks before. An Oud machine. It must have taken this road while they were at the Cloisters.
Since they hadn’t encountered it, the Oud traveled away from them, down the valley. Aryl kept them to the fastest pace Hoyon could manage, but the machine didn’t come in sight.
Stupid Oud. If it wanted to talk to the Sona Speaker, it should have waited here.
The only Om’ray who knew more about Oud were with her. Aryl chewed her lower lip a moment, then decided. “There’s an Oud ahead of us, “she informed them. “Going to the village.”
“Oud go where they will,” Hoyon said in a patronizing tone. “There’s no way to know where they—”
“What makes you say that?” Oran interrupted.
She’d learned there were things to fear. Aryl wasn’t proud to be the reason, but it was useful. “These tracks.” She pointed. “They go down the valley. There are no others. Plus…there’s this.” She pulled the pendant from its place under her tunic. “They promised to come and talk to me.”
Hoyon burst out laughing. “An unChosen?”
“I asked them to release water into the river,” Aryl said evenly. “We need it for the fields.”
He ducked his head deeper into his coat, for all the world like a offended flitter, but didn’t slow his pace.
“If this is to be an official Visitation,” Oran offered after a moment, “the Oud will ask for lists.”
“Lists. Of what?”
“Of everything.” Hoyon snorted. “Not that you have anything.”
“We have you,” Aryl countered. “Lists are records, are they not? Written down? That’s what you do.”
“You know something of our work. Were you training as an Adept?” There was a new eagerness in her tone, as if Aryl being of their kind mattered to Oran.
“No,” she replied evenly. “But I’ve seen lists.” There had been lists made by Yena’s Adepts. Lists of their diminished supplies. Lists of what could be spared for the ten unChosen sent on Passage—including Bern Teerac and Yuhas Parth, who’d made it to Tuana Clan. Two had died. The other six? Aryl wished she’d disobeyed custom and law and reached to follow them. There were so few Yena left. “Why do the Oud want them?”
“No one knows.”
And no one cared, Aryl corrected to herself. Until now. “Do you trade with them?”
“What would we trade with Oud?”
This was different. Yena had always given dresel and seeds to the Tikitik who came after the Harvest, receiving in turn the glows and power cells, the metal and oils they needed for the coming year. Enris told her how the Tuana grew large numbers of a plant the Oud wanted, how the creatures took that harvest when ripe. In turn, the Oud left glows and other supplies at the mouth of their tunnel. “Provide food the Oud want. Receive glows and power cells in return. Metal.”
“We go in the tunnels and take what we need. The Oud don’t care. They just want their lists. Crops. How much food we were able to grow,” she clarified at Aryl’s puzzled look. “They don’t want any of it. Whatever we built or used. How many of us there are, who died and how, who was born. Lists. Our Speaker—” with emphasis “—reads them out.”
Aryl doubted that. The Grona Speaker was not, like her mother, an Adept, and no other Om’ray in a Clan were taught to read or write. But she didn’t doubt the rest. For whatever reason, the mountain Oud treated their Clan differently.
Had it been the same for Sona?
Would it be?
Firstnight and the Oud made it to the village before they did. Aryl had worried her way through several scenarios during the final tenth of their journey—during the worst, she’d forced the Adepts into the best run they could manage, only to have Hoyon collapse on the road, wasting valuable time. The Oud, however, waited on this side of the dry river. It lay on its machine, shrouded in brown, dusty fabric. Her people lined the other bank to watch it, those who weren’t perched on a roof for a better view.
They’d have sensed Aryl and the Adepts returning. She could only imagine how they’d felt before. The Oud here. Their Speaker not.
Not every day the First Scout was wrong.
To be fair, the Oud were the least predictable beings Aryl had met. They made the Human seem normal.
His tiny airborne eye had left them before the final turn of the valley. She’d been sad to see it go. Not that Marcus could or should have helped—but it had been nice to have a companion who didn’t hate or fear her. Or want something.
About to send reassurance to the others, Aryl stopped herself. Don’t use Power near Oud unless you must. Enris’ advice—which she trusted more than anything the Grona might say.
Instead, she waved her hand as they approached, made sure to smile. The Speaker’s Pendant glittered against her coat. She hoped the creature recognized it clean.
Hoyon and Oran walked past the Oud, barely glancing at the creature, and clambered awkwardly down the river’s bank. Their heavy clothing didn’t help. Hoyon fell again; Oran didn’t wait for him. He stumbled to catch up to her.
That figures detached from those waiting, prepared to help them up the other side, wasn’t a compliment.
Aryl walked to the dusty dome she assumed covered the head of the Oud. Small biters scurried away from her, but stayed near the machine as if they belonged. So long as they bit Oud hide and not Om’ray, she didn’t care.
Only the biters appeared to notice her.
Was the Oud asleep? Dead?
It would be dark soon. She’d rather not be on this side of the river then. Behind the Oud, the far side of the road was edged in hopeful rocks, some daring enough to roll into the lingering sunlight. Not that they moved when she looked.
Aryl drew herself tall and straight. “I see you,” she said. Loudly, in case the Oud was asleep.
No reaction.
It was the right creature. A Speaker’s Pendant was attached to the fabric below the dome.
She fingered hers, frowning, then leaned forward and rapped her knuckles on that smooth surface.
“Whatwhatwhatwhat!” The creature reared violently upright, clattering limbs and words, then fell off the machine to
one side. Disturbed biters whirred and clicked into the air, then subsided around its limp form.
Had she killed it?
Aryl didn’t glance over her shoulder. Not the time to seem as if she didn’t know what was going on. “Get up!” she urged.
Black limbs, some disturbingly like hooks, waved weakly.
Not dead.
She wrinkled her nose at a musty odor but stepped closer. “Are you—” The word “hurt” died in her mouth as she saw the green stain spreading across the dirt and stone.
Ready to leap back at the slightest excuse, Aryl lifted the heavy fabric draped above the stain. It took both hands and all her strength to raise it high enough to look underneath.
The flaccid, pale body was slashed open along three lines. The cuts were precise and too straight. Powerful strokes, she judged. Skilled. Possibly using a weapon made for this purpose.
Another Oud?
She’d tried to kill her own, Aryl thought grimly. She eased the fabric down. “Who did this? Why?”
“Let it die in peace, Speaker for Sona.”
She spun, knife out.
The Tikitik rose from its crouch, hands empty at its sides.
She hadn’t seen it, Aryl thought numbly. How could that be?
It wasn’t like the Tikitik she knew. This was gray on gray, its skin and cloth a perfect match for the stone. The same body shape, the same intent four-eyed stare.
The same threat. She kept her knife ready. “What are you doing here? This is Oud land.”
“Is it?” The Tikitik bobbed its head, as if amused. “Forgive my trespass, then. I was…curious.”
A familiar symbol on its wristband caught her eye. “You’re a Thought Traveler,” she guessed.
“That is part of my name. Curious indeed.” It sounded pleased, as if a puzzle was what it sought. “Do you know what it means?”
“It means you go between factions—” Tikitik, she’d learned, didn’t count themselves as part of a place or village, but grouped themselves by belief. Thought Travelers were something else, individuals outside any one faction, yet in service to them all. “—and share whatever you’ve learned.”
“If I think it wise,” the Tikitik qualified, its mouth protuberances stirring. “Knowledge can be dangerous, can it not, little Speaker? Our unfortunate companion discovered that.”
They loved word games. She remembered that, too.
“This is Sona,” Aryl said carefully. “Our neighbors are the Oud. Tikitik don’t belong here.”
“New Om’ray,” it mused, its smaller eyes flexing on their cones to aim at those on the other side of the river. Who must, Aryl thought worriedly, be trying to decide whether to come to her aid or not. Not, she wished desperately, but didn’t lower her shields. “New ideas. Do you change the Agreement?”
“Change…?” The pit that swallowed the river was nothing compared to this. Aryl stared at the Tikitik, then at the Oud. “I don’t know what you—”
A clatter of limbs. A faint rasp of voice. “Om’ray. GoodGoodGoodGood. Sona Oud.”
“Precipitous being.” The Tikitik rose to its full height and focused all its eyes on the dying Oud. “Look where misjudgment and haste has brought you.”
Hanging from a belt around its narrow hips was a double-tipped blade, like the one Enris had found but plain. The metal shone, from frequent or recent use.
She had to know. “Did you attack it?”
The small eyes swiveled toward her. “That would certainly change the Agreement.”
Not yes or no. The consequence.
Aryl felt cold. She shouldn’t be hearing this, shouldn’t be stuck between the other races. It wasn’t right or fair.
Which didn’t change the fact that she was the one standing here, responsible for the safety of those on the other side of the empty river. Or that she had a dying Oud and its machine to deal with, and truenight approaching rapidly. She eyed the Tikitik dubiously. “Is there something we can do—some way to contact its kind? Help it?”
The Tikitik barked its laugh. “The Hard Ones come to help it.”
“Hard Ones” had to mean the rock hunters rolling closer with the dusk. When she looked up the road, they pretended to be random piles of stone. Except for a small one that tumbled along until it ran into a larger and bounced back.
The Oud twitched. Because she discussed its fate with its murderer? She shuddered.
Thought Traveler kicked dirt at the Oud’s vehicle, scattering a cloud of whirr/clicks. “This will be retrieved. They value their machines more than their flesh. Remember that, little Speaker.”
Something in its tone reminded her of the other Tikitik she’d met—it had seemed to enjoy enlightening her. “What else should I know about the Oud?” she dared ask.
Disconcerting attention from four eyes, then another bark. “You amuse me, little Speaker. For that, I will tell you something more. A gift.” Its mouth protuberances writhed as if it relished the words. “The Oud cannot comprehend your fragility. They expect Om’ray to be here. That there was a time without Om’ray confounded them. You are, to them, the beings whose bones decorate the ground.”
With that, the gray Tikitik turned and ran into the shadows, its long toes soundless on the stone and snow, its longer legs covering ground with terrifying speed. Rock hunters in its path tried to roll aside with almost comic haste. She didn’t blame them.
The Oud’s limbs moved, passed a small object up the length of its body from one set to the next with agonizing slowness. Aryl thought about helping, but stayed still.
At last, the object—another small bag—was clutched in the limbs closest to those it used for speaking. “Sona…Sona…” It paused between each word as though the effort to speak was too much for it. “Take…”
Aryl took a step back.
No one would see her refuse. The rock hunters—the Tikitik’s “Hard Ones”—would crush whatever it meant her to have.
Gifts from other races brought nothing but trouble.
“Take…goodgood…go—” The limbs relaxed their hold. The little bag tumbled free, landing in unstained snow.
What was inside?
Her own curiosity, Aryl fumed to herself, was worse than the Tikitik’s. She bent and picked up the bag.
“Good.” A last shudder of limbs. “Here…Soon.”
The Oud’s body sagged beneath the weight of its fabric cloak, its limbs folding neatly together.
It was dead. Aryl tightened her fingers around the small bag. She glared past the corpse at the line of Hard Ones waiting not too far away.
So something was coming, here.
Soon—whatever that meant to an Oud.
Aryl hopped down to the riverbed, resolutely turning her back.
Behind her, the slow grind of rock.
Interlude
ENRIS STOOD IN THE TALL arched window, gazing out at Vyna, and wondered about many things.
Chief among them, his future.
The Tikitik had helped him get here. Why, he didn’t know, unless it was the creature’s cruel nature.
There was no soil here to farm, no giant stalks to climb or bear fruit. Only black rock shaped into this island and the enclosing wall that towered on all sides—or was this the hollowed inside of a mountain? When the sun penetrated the haze overhead, the black absorbed its light and cast even darker shadows into the water that lay between island and wall. Water like nothing he’d ever seen. It was warm, warm enough to produce the mist that hung above its surface most of the day and all truenight. Its smooth surface glistened with the colors of congealing metal: purples, reds, flares of iridescent blue. He wasn’t sure if he’d have drowned falling into it, or been poisoned.
It held life. Life the Vyna hunted from wide-bottomed craft able to float on the water. There was no obvious control or mechanism pushing the craft, yet they moved with precision and sometimes speed, leaving a froth of lingering yellow bubbles behind. Platforms along the island’s shore received them when they returne
d; steps carved in the black rock led upward, for the sides of the island were sheer, its people perched every bit as precariously as the Yena in their canopy.
He half smiled, thinking of Yena. Aryl wouldn’t call the Vyna’s technique hunting. From what he could see, what they pulled wriggling from the water was as eager to be caught as the Vyna were to catch them.
Do you understand what you see?
His mother’s uncle, Clor sud Mendolar, had come on Passage from Amna, with fascinating stories of life on the shore of the bitter water. Though, from what he remembered, those swimmers weren’t so easily caught. “They’re catching swimmers,” he answered out loud.
Fikryya came to stand beside him and covered her ears. Hush, Enris.
“It’s you I don’t understand,” he whispered.
Vyna didn’t speak. The ones he’d met understood what he said. None replied in kind. They wanted him to use mindspeech, an intimacy he wasn’t prepared for—not without more answers.
I’m here to answer your questions.
No emotion. Fikryya’s shields were perfect. Better, he was sure, than his own. Another reason for caution.
The Vyna was his height, though so slender he could have spanned her waist with his hands. Her hair was hidden beneath a tight red-and-gold cap; its curled ends framed her face. Twists of sparkling blue fell from small knots on the cap: an illusion of hair to brush her back and shoulders.
Her face—she was Om’ray, his inner sense knew it—her face wasn’t right. Her eyes were too deeply set; the bones of her jaw too pronounced, chin thrust forward. Her skin was so pale he could see blood vessels; her lips were almost blue. The color of her shadowed eyes eluded him. Her eyebrows had been replaced by a doubled line of glittering red dots.
She wore a robe from shoulder to toe as revealing as her skin, a flow of symbols in red and gold the only disguise to parts of her body he found remarkably distracting.
As was the second thumb on each elegant hand, opposed to the first.
A Chooser. Something deep inside responded to her presence in a way he couldn’t ignore. Not that he’d rush to take her hand, if offered. She was intriguing, but…no. Not for him.
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