Perfect words, quietly spoken, the small pained gasps for breath the only sign of effort. Why he wasn’t already dead, she couldn’t guess. Bones stood out on his face and hands. The skin of both was purpled by bruises, pale yellow where it wasn’t. His neck had been neatly bandaged; fresh red stains marked a still-open wound. “They took better care of me,” she told him, and planned to ’port their precious Healer into the floodwater at her first opportunity.
“Oran tried. So did Sian.” Naryn was standing on the other side of the bed. She drew the child from Marcus with a gentle hand and handed her a cup. “Yao, our friend’s run out of his drink. Please go and ask Rorn if there’s any sombay left.”
Yao gave Aryl a too-adult look, but disappeared obediently.
“What do you mean ‘tried’?” Aryl asked.
Sian. Healing won’t work, Aryl. Nothing does. With compassion.
Marcus looked anxious, as if he’d transgressed. “Everyone . . . has been kind. Aryl. Don’t . . . be . . . angry.”
Was she that easy to read? Probably. Aryl forced her expression into something calmer. “You haven’t been eating.”
His eyelids had healed, the eyes themselves were unutter ably weary. “Left . . . for the big guy. Not . . . hungry.”
“The real hurt is inside.” Sian touched a forefinger to his own head. Any mindtouch causes pain. He’s severely damaged. There’s nothing I can do.
The mindcrawler.
Aryl sat on the bed and put her hand close to, but not touching, the Human’s.
Aryl? Caution, no more, from Enris.
I have to try.
She waited. Marcus met her gaze for a long moment, then tipped his head on the pillow, the way he had when about to ask one of his odd questions. “This . . . not your fault. You know . . . that.”
“I know.” They’d left him to confront whatever waited at Site Three, alone, because the summons had been impossible to resist. They’d left him a captive, to be abused and hurt, because she’d had no way to find him. They’d saved him as soon as they could, and been too late.
Words. None of it helped. None of it mattered.
But his eyes brightened at her agreement, just a bit. Which did.
Aryl leaned closer. “Marcus, let me try to help you. Please.”
“Problem is me,” he replied. “My fault . . . this, too.”
“No. None of it.”
“You’re a . . . good friend,” this with almost a real smile. “But this is . . . important. The truth between us. Mindcrawler no threat . . . to most Humans. Understand? Only to . . . some. Only to Human . . . telepaths.”
Aryl frowned. What was he saying? He had no Power.
Marcus continued. “Strong Human telepath . . . can talk like you do. Not teleport.” This with relief. “They can protect themselves. Others—” his hand lifted to his own chest “—vulnerable. Understand me? No ability. Only weak mind . . . easy target . . . weak.” A tear slipped from one eye, left a glistening trail along one cheek.
He wasn’t weak, in any way. “I cut off its head,” Aryl assured him. Whatever “it” had been. Not Human. Ugly. “Did they tell you?”
Enris leaned over her shoulder. “Made a mess,” he added. “You know Yena.”
The Human’s eyes widened, then he sputtered a laugh. “Friends,” when he could talk again. “Good friends.”
Now, she urged him silently. While trust was greater than fear.
As if he’d heard, Marcus shifted his hand until their fingertips met.
Aryl had touched his mind before. She knew, as the others didn’t, where the danger of trespass lay within the Human, the whisper-thin distance between emotion and intention, between memory and self. Careful to stay away from his thoughts, she lowered her shields and let her inner sense float outward.
No room for doubt. Sian was trained in healing a mind; she’d done it only once, in desperation, to help someone she loved. Myris.
Well, she loved this not-Om’ray, too, this Stranger who mangled words and smiled with his eyes, who’d set aside his life’s work to protect a people he hadn’t known existed a year ago. Who lay here in trust, more alone than anyone or anything in the world, while she was surrounded by the glow of her kind.
... Something.
There. Aryl didn’t reach. She paid attention.
More. Pain . . . confusion . . . fragments of emotion unwound, like a dresel wing unfurling from its stalk, slowly at first.
Memories came too, rattled like pods drying in the wind, bound in fear and pain. His capture. Rough hands. Waiting . . . waiting . . . knowing the worst was to come. Revulsion. Despair.
Aryl let the memories slide past, didn’t react even to her own face, hair wild, eyes calm, the blur of a knife. Though she smiled inwardly, sharing a joy as fierce as any Yena’s.
More.
Her breathing wanted to flutter like his; she moved somewhere else.
Here!
Discord! NOISE! Every biter in the canopy, buzzing in her head at once.
It wasn’t sound at all.
Aryl stayed. This was important, whatever it was. Her mind raced through words and images, tried to comprehend what wasn’t real. Noise or silence? Old bone or rock? Om’ray or Human? Differences fought each other, weakened her concentration. She became desperate for anything familiar.
Here. Safely distant from Marcus, a presence solid as the buttress roots that held the great rastis so they bent to the M’hir Wind but didn’t fall. Always.
He shouldn’t be with her, not here; that he was meant everything. Aryl steadied, sent sincere affection to her Chosen, then returned to what confused her.
Not-real. And not-Marcus either.
Tracks in moss. V-shaped ripples in a stream.
These—these were the wounds left by the mindcrawler as it ripped through the Human’s mind!
Her mother had scanned her. This wasn’t the same. This was no trained intrusion after a secret, an unpleasant invasion that left its victim whole, if exposed. This was the swarm consuming what it touched, full of greed and heedless of harm.
With mounting horror, Aryl followed the damage. She tried to grasp its extent, to find a place to attempt healing, but the more she looked, the more she found, as if the wounds festered and spread.
Or did they spread because she looked? Is this what Sian meant?
She backed away.
What to do? She had to do something . . . what? She didn’t know how to help an Om’ray with such hurts.
How could she help a Human?
Aryl. Her name; his grief. Stop. There’s nothing we can do.
Enris was right. She knew it, though it was agony to be helpless. She tightened her shields and opened her eyes.
Marcus’ eyes were still closed. He trusted her. Had he believed she could help?
All she’d done was learn she couldn’t, Aryl told herself bitterly. “Marcus—”
He opened his eyes, appeared dazed, but before she could say anything else, a small figure appeared. Yao flung herself on top of the Human and whirled to face her, teeth bared. DON’THURTHIMDON’THURTHIM!!!!
Aryl wasn’t the only one to flinch from the raw Power of that sending.
“We didn’t hurt him—” Enris began.
LEAVEHIMALONE!!
Marcus eased his tiny protector to the side, where she crouched like a quivering stitler about to launch. “Aryl would never . . . hurt me, Yao,” he soothed. “No . . . one here would . . . hurt me.”
Unimpressed by words, Yao continued to glare at Aryl. I won’t let them. Quieter, more polite, but with no less determination.
She should have expected this. Yao was the only one of them who wouldn’t see a not-Om’ray lying here. All she saw was the truth: here was someone kind, like a father, who suffered. Aryl nodded to herself, then consciously thought of Marcus, of her feelings for him, and shared them with the child.
“Oh.” Yao’s eyes opened wide and she settled back. “You’re his friend, too.” She grinned, as content as she
’d been furious an instant before. Her tiny hand found the Human’s. “Have you tried Comspeak yet? I’m very good at it.”
“You are.” Marcus smiled happily at the child, then looked at Aryl. “Aryl, too? Good! Aryl—” A stream of gasps and babble came out of the Human’s mouth.
“I don’t—”
Aryl stopped as the babble reshaped itself into words. “—understand me now? I . . . worried sleepteach could affect . . . fetal development . . . but Naryn . . . found an Om’ray way. All Sona can talk . . . to me . . . to anyone who . . . comes here. Amazing . . . You, too?”
Sona’s Dream Chamber. They’d used it to teach the language of the Trade Pact?
And she’d worried about supplies from the village.
The Strangers will be back. Naryn, flat and sure. We all know it.
Not in time to save Marcus. You should have waited—
Till you woke up? With a flash of irony. Tell that to the other seven hundred.
Marcus enjoys hearing it, Enris pointed out.
Indeed, the Human, oblivious to the emotions of the Om’ray around him, was still smiling. “Aryl,” he urged, “say something!”
She had to smile back. “How do—am I—I am speaking it!” The movements of her mouth and tongue were strange, like trying to shout and whisper at the same time, but he took her hand and squeezed it.
“Comspeak,” he assured her. “Wonderful to hear . . . in your voice, Aryl. Wonderful.”
This in two days, Aryl told herself, appalled. What else could they have done?
“Keep an eye on him, Yao. I’ll be back soon,” she told Marcus.
Once she knew.
Chapter 12
“WE’VE BEEN WORKING, young Aryl,” Husni said, Wwith a look that suggested Aryl could be better employed than asking the obvious. The elder walked between tables dragged into one of the corridors, as if supervising the storing of dried dresel. She had a group of unChosen busily wrapping flat pieces of some brown material in strips of what had been the fabric Sona used for shirts.
Decisions were made. Enris had followed her inside. They had to be.
Right or wrong ones?
That, he didn’t answer.
The pieces were covered in neat rows of symbols. Aryl glanced at them, then stared. “Those are words. Names.” Written in Comspeak. Which she could read!
She wasn’t sure which astounded her more.
“Why are there names?” she asked.
“Did you get her out of bed too soon?” Husni asked Enris, her wrinkles creasing deeper.
“It’s—”
“He did not,” Aryl objected, suspecting her Chosen had let her sleep so long for reasons of his own. “What are these?”
“Parches,” the elder said unhelpfully. “Anaj told us where to find them. As for the names,” Husni correctly read Aryl’s scowl and gave a wrinkled grin, “the Adepts added everyone to Sona’s records, but this Cloisters wouldn’t accept the rest.”
“Rest?” They weren’t, she hoped, expecting more.
“The names for families—in the other Clans. Our Adepts need to know who shares grandparents before they can decide which families should send unChosen on Passage. Everyone’s given us all the names they know. We’ve made two sets, one to leave here, and one ready to take with us—in case we ever leave. These,” Husni waved a hand over the parches, “record the birth of the M’hiray.”
Pride welled from all those in earshot.
Her head threatened to pound. “The ‘M’hiray’?”
“I thought of it,” Enris said modestly. “We needed a name for people like us. What do you think?”
That the world, and her Chosen, had gone mad while she slept? “We’re Om’ray,” Aryl managed to say between clenched teeth. “What nonsense is this?”
“No Om’ray can do what we can!” The outburst came from one of the unChosen at the nearest table. Since all quickly put their heads down to concentrate on folding, Aryl couldn’t tell which.
She didn’t care. She clamped a hand on Enris’ wrist and concentrated . . .
. . . as she’d hoped, the petal-roofed chamber was empty of all but sunlight.
“ ‘The M’hiray,’ ” she repeated acidly. “No more surprises, Enris.”
“Promise to stay still longer than a moment, then.”
“I—” Aryl deliberately sat on a bench and put her hands together, though every nerve screamed to move. Which worked much better as a way to find answers, she thought ruefully, in the canopy. “I promise.”
This gained her a doubtful look, surely deserved, but her Chosen sat across from her and leaned forward to rest his forearms on his thighs. His face was thinner than she remembered. A lock of black hair shadowed his dark eyes. Or was it something grim she felt?
“After the explosion, the water rose quickly,” he told her, sharing images at the same time. “Within tenths, we were trapped inside. There was no choice. We had to ’port for food. That was what everyone was waiting for—proof the M’hir was safe. Since then?” A laugh without humor. “I thought I was used to Ziba popping in and out. Wait till you’re in a room and fifty Chosen appear out of the air. ’Porting’s become—” his lips curled, “—remarkably casual.”
She’d ignored the oddly quick shifts in her sense of place; she had, as her Chosen said, been too close to an explosion. But they were real. The newcomers were ’porting from room to room instead of walking! Frivolous, wasteful . . . Aryl kept her temper with an effort, concentrated on turning her bracelet around and around on her wrist. “You’d think,” she said more calmly, “some would have gone home.”
“Apparently this remains home,” with a shrug that invited her to share the irony. “But you’re right. Once in a while, someone ’ports to their former Clan. For belongings, to check on those left behind, curiosity. Whatever the reason, no one stays long.”
“Aren’t they welcome?” She’d been afraid of that. How did ‘M’hiray’ appear to ordinary Om’ray?
And when had she accepted the distinction, too?
“Welcome?” Enris looked thoughtful. “No one’s said. That’s not why, though. It’s the connection you discovered, through the M’hir.” His hand sketched a link between them. “Turns out to be stronger than the link to other Om’ray. Anyone who leaves is drawn back.”
“You tried.” He wouldn’t take another’s word for something this significant.
“Yes.” His face turned bleak. “At first, I thought it was simply the instinct to return to my Chosen—not that I had to worry about your getting up to risk yourself anytime soon.”
Aryl snorted.
“But it was different,” Enris went on. “At Sona, with the others, I felt—it was like being back in the aircar. I needed to return. Though not as strong. Nothing,” he said soberly, “could be.”
That moment, that feeling. Aryl caught her breath. Was that when Om’ray had split in two?
“It has to be,” she said aloud.
“Has to be what?”
She could see it as surely as his dear face. “Stretch a rope too far and it becomes weak. When Marcus flew us over the mountains—what if it weakened our connection to other Om’ray? Enough so this new bond took over when we fell out of the world and were about to be—” What? Lost? Was that what lay beyond the world? Nothing but minds and selves dissolving in the M’hir? Aryl forced away the terrifying image. “When we went too far,” she finished, proud of her steady voice. “Without a strong link to other Om’ray, only our connection through the M’hir could save us. And it did. By pulling us together. All of us. Here.”
His eyes lit with comprehension. “Of course. The Cloisters where we practiced ’porting. Where Oran was the Keeper.”
“The Cloisters that shared her dreams with all of Cersi.” Aryl shook her head, but it wasn’t denial. “My mother told me a Cloisters affects the binding within a Clan. Sona’s is the only one tied to the M’hir.”
“Meaning we’re tied to it?” Enris shook his head.
“I hope not. As it is, we’ll have to keep ’porting for supplies. We’ve nothing to trade with other Clans.” An abrupt, bitter laugh. “We’ll need those coats.” He hesitated. “Any chance you can tell the Oud to drain the lake?”
Aryl didn’t bother to point out that only her Chosen would think she’d remain Speaker with three older ones already vying for that position. Or that they had no idea if any Oud survived to do the repair. “If they don’t,” she told him, “we’ll have Tikitik for neighbors.”
“Tikitik?” He scrunched his face. “Wonderful. I doubt they’d let us go back to the old ways here—fire, living on the ground. Oh, no. There’ll be climbing. Next there’ll be biters. You know they prefer my skin to yours.”
He kept it light for her sake, Aryl thought. She moved to sit beside him, rested her head on his chest, and wrapped her arms around his middle. Her fingers didn’t meet. Their minds did, a deep mingling that couldn’t hide the truth.
If they were now M’hiray, not Om’ray . . . if their children would be . . .
Enris laid his hand over the swelling below her waist, spread his fingers as if to hold the small life within safe from the future, but neither of them could.
What would be the shape of their daughter’s world?
They wanted her in the Council Chamber. Haxel could have used her at Sona, gathering supplies. Husni, Aryl thought with wry amusement, would probably let her help with the interminable parches.
This was where she belonged. Aryl unhooked the blanket from the opening, letting in the warm midday sun. Only good sense, she’d told Enris, to find a quiet task that would let her body finish the recovery started by Oran.
He’d agreed without any remark about Yena durability or Yena pride. Meaning she hadn’t fooled him at all.
Asleep, the Human wasn’t peaceful. His mouth worked silently. His head rolled from side to side so she had to replace his pillows often. As for the tremble in his legs?
Understandable, for a broken mind to dream of danger and flight, Sian had told her. He’d relinquished his bedside place with reluctance. Her mother’s former heart-kin, like Yao, saw not a Stranger or a not-Om’ray, but someone in pain he couldn’t help.
Rift in the Sky Page 26