by Eileen Wilks
She blinked. Swayed. In spite of her sudden exhaustion, accomplishment thrilled through her. She'd done it. Twice now she'd been able to reclaim the thought-bubbles she sent while in fugue. If she could take back what she sent, she could be sure of not doing lasting harm while she learned how to use her Gift.
Since her life depended on that, Kai could put up with a little exhaustion.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Cullen lay on something hard. The air smelled strange… humans, yes, several humans were nearby. One lay beside him, a quiet lump of warmth along his left side. It wasn't Cynna, though the air held her scent, too. And blood. Not fresh blood, and not much of it. The other scents… he should know some of them. Horses? Yes, but stranger scents, too…
He was very hungry.
Something creaked rhythmically. Someone spoke, but the words meant nothing. Somehow that jolted his memory back in place. Edge. He was in Edge. They'd been attacked… he'd burned so many. So many. He'd smell them burn in his dreams, he thought.
But bad dreams were an acceptable price to pay. Cynna was okay. His son was okay.
So was he, for that matter. Cullen opened his eyes.
The sky was still dark and star-blazoned. Automatically he checked the time, but what his moon-sense told him didn't add up. He felt disoriented, adrift.
He was moving. Whatever he lay on, it creaked and bounced over rough ground. He propped himself up on one elbow. He was in a large wooden cart or wagon—narrow with high sides and a gate of sorts at the back. Ruben lay crowded up beside him, apparently asleep. The blood smell came from him. His bandaged, splinted wrist lay outside the rough blanket that covered him, Cullen, and the woman on his other side—Marilyn Wright, still unconscious. She smelled ill.
He looked at them.
A green haze overlay Brooks's magic. The woman, too, wore a gauzy overlay. Healing magic. Cullen held out his arm and checked his own energy.
Thin, but all his. And wearing a sleeve. He inspected the rest of himself and saw that he was wearing a long dress of rough, undyed wool, rather like a monk's cassock or an Arab's thobe, but more narrowly fashioned. It was slit on the sides to permit a full stride. No shoes. No underwear, either, but the lack of shoes was more of a problem.
He sat up slowly.
A number of clay-colored people mounted on horses surrounded the wagon, which was pulled by… no, not horses, though the large draft animals would have looked at home pulling the Budweiser wagon. If not for the horns, that is, and the curly hair. The scent reminded him of horse. Also buffalo.
Fifteen feet ahead was another wagon drawn by a pair of the not-quite-horses. Tash rode there with one of the clay-people. Steve sat in the back of that wagon. Cullen didn't see McClosky.
Cynna was in his wagon. She sat on the bench at the front next to Wen, who was driving the wagon. He wanted to touch her. He wanted her to be back here with him. Why wasn't she?
Get a grip, Seabourne.
They were traveling on a road, he saw as he looked around. Packed earth, not paved, and rutted. It wound down from a range of low hills behind them into the grassy plain they were crossing. Ahead, the land seemed to drop off. No snow here, and the temperature was warmer—a blessing, given his lack of footwear. The riders were fanned out around the wagons. He counted sixteen, five of them women. They all looked fairly young, but that didn't mean much. So did he.
The women were as hairless as the men, which was a tad disconcerting, but not unattractive. They dressed exactly like the men, too, who all wore the same sort of loincloth Wen favored. Cullen took a moment to appreciate that.
They controlled their mounts with hackamores—bridles with a padded nose strap and no bit. Their saddles were thick leather pads with wooden stirrups, and their horses were more like ponies, sturdy and shaggy. No horns. They smelled like horses, too.
His stomach growled. His wolf had no objection to horse. "I need to eat."
"You're awake!" Cynna twisted around to beam at him.
"How long was I out?"
"Altogether? Eleven hours, if my watch is working. It might not be, given all the stray magic around here." She bent and dug around under her seat.
"More like thirteen, I think."
Her voice was muffled. "If you know, why did you ask?"
"Because it's still dark."
"Uh… yeah." Cynna straightened and tossed him something. Automatically he caught it. His mouth watered at the scent. Jerky, made from venison, not beef. He ripped off a bite while she went on, "We're in what they call Night Season. They don't have day and night the way we do."
He chewed, took another bite, and gestured for her to keep talking.
"It stays dark for three months. Lunar months, I mean—their moon acts like ours, so it's the basis for their timekeeping. After the Night Season comes the Dawning, which lasts a few sleeps. That's how they divide the time—into sleeps—since they don't have days. And after the Dawning it stays light for three months."
Cullen swallowed the last of the jerky, his hunger unappeased. "No doubt they call that the Day Season."
Her grin flickered. "Good guess. That's sorta why we're here." She tossed him another bundle, "Eat. I'll fill you in."
This bundle was wrapped in a greasy cloth. His nose told him it was bread, and so it was—dark, heavy, with bits of fruit and nuts baked in. None too fresh, but he was in no mood to be picky. He ripped off a hunk. "Start with the casualties. Marilyn Wright's in bad shape."
"Yeah." Her mouth thinned. "Head injury. They can't do much for her until we get to the City. Kryl—that's the Ekiba healer—stopped the bleeding and took down some of the swelling in the brain, but she doesn't dare try to wake her."
"Ekiba?" Cullen asked with his mouth full.
"Wen's people. They're sort of like gypsies, though they have some permanent camps, too. Fortunately we landed not too far from one of those camps. It took them a couple hours to reach us."
He swallowed. "How did Wen call them?"
"Ekiba can all mindspeak with each other. I'm not clear on just what their range is—either Wen doesn't want me to know or he doesn't know how to convert their units into ours—but it seems to be several miles. Anyway, they're like a telegraph system, passing messages along."
"Their healer set Brooks's wrist, I take it. What about his leg?" Cullen finished off the bread regretfully. He was still hungry.
"His leg didn't need setting—it was just a hairline fracture—but his wrist was a mess. She gave him this potion to knock him out because she had to cut it open to get the bones lined up right."
"Hey!" Steve called from the next wagon. "You're awake!"
"So I'm told. Brooks is drugged?" he asked Cynna, frowning. The man hadn't stirred once.
"No, that wore off a long time ago. Kryl put him in sleep—you know, like Nettie does. A healing trance."
In sleep. Nettie. Memory stirred dimly. "I woke up earlier, didn't I? I thought…" He'd thought it was Nettie tending him, chiding him for having emptied himself so badly. But Nettie, the clan's physician-shaman, was on Earth. It must have been the Ekiba healer who called him out of unconsciousness.
"When we made camp, yeah. Most of us weren't in any shape to go far, but Wen's people didn't want to linger so close to the forest, so we traveled a couple hours, then stopped to take care of the wounded and get some sleep." Cynna scowled down at him. "You scared the crap out of me, you know that? I've never seen anyone kill himself by abusing his Gift, but hey. Always a first time, right?"
"I'm alive, aren't I?" he snapped.
"You were in a damned coma!"
That startled him into silence… for a couple seconds. "Couldn't have been." Coma was not a restful state. He felt fine… aside from an ongoing wolfish interest in the horses. "Is there any more jerky?"
"Gah!" Cynna looked disgusted, but did bend and dig under the seat again.
Steve had unfastened the wooden gate at the end of his wagon. He propped it against the wagon's side so he could sit
at the rear with his legs dangling. Behind him Cullen saw a couple of wooden crates and a couple of sleeping bodies. One was orange. The other was snoring.
Amusement tugged at Cullen's lips. There was a sight—McClosky bedded down with Gan.
"Sure looked like a coma," Steve said. "You were non-responsive. I pricked your foot with my pocket knife, and it didn't twitch."
Maybe he was wrong.
Suddenly restless, Cullen stood, hitched up the skirt of his thobe—he refused to think of it as a dress—and vaulted over the side of the wagon. His knee took the impact just fine, so it had finished healing while he slept. The pebbly road wasn't kind to his bare feet as he trotted up beside Cynna, but he'd had all the sitting he could take. "You believed I was in a coma."
She hurled another chunk of jerky at him. "Why are you grinning like that? What kind of an idiot grins when he finds out he was in a coma?"
"You were worried about me."
She rolled her eyes.
Steve, lacking all social sense as he did, continued cheerfully, "Everyone thought you were done for, especially when the healer woman refused do her woo-woo stuff. Cynna was frothing at the mouth, but the woman thought she'd get trapped in the coma with you. Say, is it true you people can empty out so much of your magic you up and die?"
"Theoretically," Cullen answered absently, biting off a mouthful of salty meat. How had he emptied himself so badly? He'd been using the diamond, not his own resources. Of course, it took some energy to draw from the diamond, but not much. But he had just finished wrestling with a ley line…
"Well, that's what they believe here. The Ekiba all thought you'd die soon. Tash thought you had a chance, being lupus, but the rest of 'em didn't believe it. Didn't believe you were lupus, I mean." He snorted. "They wouldn't listen to us. We're ignorant savages, werewolves aren't real, and we should quit lying. Gan set 'em straight."
Cullen finished chewing and swallowed. "Gan did?"
"They think she can't lie, so when Cynna got her to tell them about lupi, they believed her. What's this deal about you having been in hell?"
He waved that off. "Later. I may have looked like I was in a coma, but the healer couldn't tell for sure because of my shields, so—"
"Cullen," Cynna said quietly, "your shields were down."
That, he decided, was pretty damned scary. His shields would go down only if there was nothing left for them to draw on. Cullen hade been taught that if a practitioner drained himself completely, he either burned out his Gift or died. "There goes that theory," he murmured.
"What?"
"Never mind. So Gan persuaded the healer I was lupus. I suppose the idea is that, being of the Blood, I'd gradually rebuild my magic."
"They argued about that, too," Steve said. "Can't agree on much, this bunch. You put an end to the argument by waking up."
"No, the healer woke me." His memory of that waking was as gauzy as a dream, but he remembered that much. He'd thought it was Nettie calling him back.
"You woke up on your own the first time," Steve said. "We heard you mutter something—"
"You told us to go away," Wen put in abruptly.
Cynna grinned. "That's when I figured you'd be okay. Only you went right back to sleep, and Kryl said your shields were up again, so she had to wake you the old-fashioned way—by shaking you. She made you drink something nasty-looking and did some sort of energy sharing, then you went back to sleep. You didn't wake up again until now."
That still didn't seem right, but his memory was so fuzzy he decided not to argue about it. "Is there any more jerky? Water, too, or something else to drink."
"You've had two pieces and a loaf of bread."
"Healing takes fuel."
"If you can wait a short time, we'll be at the river," Wen said. "You have a wolf's needs?"
"Somewhat." If he didn't eat when he should, he got cranky. Real cranky. The need wasn't as strong now that he had a clan again, but it didn't pay to let a wolf get too hungry. "How soon, and what happens at the river?"
"We get shipped off to the City," Cynna said. "That's what they call it, just the City. That's where out-realm traders come."
"Hostages and kidnap victims, too, I guess."
"Um, well, Bilbo explained—"
"Bilbo?"
"The gnome. I got tired of always saying 'the gnome' or 'the councilor,' so I've been calling him Bilbo. It pisses him off."
"To the gnomes," Wen said gravely, "names are of great importance. Birth-names are secret. Use-names are chosen carefully and divulged only within the family. Nicknames, as you call them, are bestowed on children by adults. By nicknaming the Councilor, Cynna accords him the status of child."
Cullen had the feeling Wen didn't mind one bit if they insulted the gnome. "So Bilbo explained things. That's lovely. When we get to this city, will Bilbo and his buddies open a gate and send us home?"
"They can't. Or won't… Don't look at me that way! I'm not swallowing everything they feed me whole, not after the way they tricked us. But Wen and Tash and all of them say it's almost impossible to open a new gate in Night Season."
Cullen was very polite. "They FedEx-ed themselves to Earth, I take it."
"Is being two types of gate, sorcerer." The gnome had decided to join the conversation. He stood behind Steve at the back of the other wagon, glaring at Cullen, "Is new gates and old gates. Magic for old gates shaped over long time, years or centuries of using. Magic of old gates holds our shaping even during Night Season. Old gates requiring much more power during Night Season, but can being used."
"We used an established gate to cross to another realm first," Wen explained. "Twelve masters went with us to open a temporary gate between Sheevah and Earth. To return—"
"To return, you needed me." Anger and humiliation made a foul mix in Cullen's mouth as the pieces fell in place. He knew why he'd been so drained, damn them. "Or some other poor's.o.b. who'd burn himself up giving you your gate. That's what you expected, wasn't it? You were the spell's final component," he said to the gnome. "The one I didn't know about. The gate was tied to you, but you couldn't power it. That was my job. What you didn't tell me was that your damned bloody spell needed my personal magic. Not just the raw magic. It ate my magic, too."
The gnome sniffed. "Such power. Such ignorance. No, sorcerer. Gate tied to me, yes. I expecting you to power spell, yes. Gate eats some of your magic, but mostly is using ley line. You not being harmed until you burning everythings in sight."
" 'Everythings' being the thirty or so creatures who wanted to eat us," Cynna put in sharply. "Including you, Bilbo."
"Enough." That was Tash, who spoke from her seat on the forward wagon without turning around. "The councilor, like most gnomes, is prideful and difficult. But he did not expect the gate to take your life, Cullen Seabourne. He expected it to consume his."
Cullen's silence lasted a few beats this time. He remembered how damned glad the gnome had been that Cullen brought up the whole ley line. He remembered, too, the pattern he'd seen in those last, wild moments as the gate opened. He'd recognized it, having built something much like it with three Rhejes—like it, but not exactly the same. But both gates had been tied to an individual who controlled them.
His gate hadn't killed anyone, but it had been powered by a node. If there hadn't been enough energy… he didn't know, dammit. "Why open a gate the hard way, away from a node?"
The gnome sniffed again. "Such as you is not for questioning Harazeed. We is building gates where we wishes."
"What he means," Cynna said, "is that he won't tell you. I've asked. I think it's because he was so bent on bringing Lily along. See, this thing they lost, it—"
Bilbo hissed. Positively, that was a hiss. "Wait for wards."
"Wards," Cullen repeated. "Not shields?"
Wen's voice was cool. "Wards are all we have, too, sorcerer. True shields, if they are even possible, would require an adept."
Cullen was getting tired of being called sorcerer. "My n
ame is Cullen. Call me that. Or Mr. Seabourne, or sir, or 'hey, you.' But not sorcerer."
"Don't sidetrack." Cynna leaned forward, speaking to the gnome. "We can't be warded every time we talk about the problem. We'll have to discuss it, ask questions, talk to people."
Bilbo erupted with a volley of words—some English, most not. Tash sighed, climbed down from her seat into the wagon bed and knelt beside him. When he paused for breath she spoke to him softly in a language Cullen didn't know.
"She is explaining to him that our secret is not so secret," Wen said quietly. "It is not widely known, til Presti, but any of those powerful enough to eavesdrop on us probably already know what has been lost. We were gone longer than we wished to be… I tried earlier to tell him this, but—" He shrugged. "We have a saying: stubborn as a gnome."
Wen looked at Cullen, his eyes dark with some intense emotion Cullen couldn't read. Wen looked human, but he wasn't. His scent was alien, more alien than the gnome's or the woman with the tusks. "Edge is a high magic realm. Do you know what that means, Mr. Cullen Seabourne?"
"Not really," Cullen admitted. "Aside from the obvious—lots of magic, so much of the technology as we have on Earth wouldn't work well here."
"Edge is very high magic, too high for most of it to sustain life consistently. Almost everyone lives along a strip of land five hundred taloni long and between fifty and a hundred taloni wide, where the level of magic is stable. This is the area around the Ka, the Sauwnosat, the Presti il To… we have many names for her, but she is life for us."
"The river," Cynna explained. "He's talking about the river we're headed for."
"Yes. The magical races have more protection from the randomness than humans, but only the Fey can venture beyond the area stabilized by the Ka."
"Not just the Fey," Cynna said.
Wen gave her a level glance. "No. A human with a strong Gift of the type you call 'sensitive' would be protected."
Cullen's heart did a funny skip thing. "So that's why you wanted Lily. She can go where you can't. But Cynna's human. So are Brooks and Steve and Marilyn Wright, and we landed well away from the river."