Warrior Witch

by J. D. Lakey

  The anti-gravs whipped around and returned fire. Unsure of the source of the weapons fire, they fired at all the ships for good measure. Sails shredded in the hail of energy bolts. Fire caught at the canvas. The silver ships made run after run, trying to beat back the aggressors.

  “Stay down!” Tam shouted as he let her go and went to help the other wounded. The river seethed around them, waves crashing over the deck, as if it meant to wash the blood away. Cheobawn’s shirt turned crimson as she crawled on her belly to where Megan lay whimpering, Alain on top of her, holding her down. Blood dripped from the lacerations on Alain’s right cheek, down his chin, to join the gore all around them.

  She wanted to shout at Alain. Why was he laying on top of Megan, his fists wrapped around her wrists while she desperately tried to break free? Then Che saw the left side of Megan’s face. A handful of splinters bristled from her right cheek. Blood ran down her brow and pooled in the hollow of her eye.

  “Hold still,” hissed Alain. “Don’t touch it.”

  “It hurts,” groaned Megan.

  Che touched her heartsister’s face, avoiding the damaged areas. “Shhh, Sister,” Che whispered in her ear. “We will take care of this.” It was hard to keep the anger out of her voice. What kind of shift in her Luck had produced this awful consequence? Whatever it was, she had failed—failed as an Ear, failed as a Black Bead, failed as a warrior-witch, failed as the All Mother.

  Anger was a pale word for what she was feeling. Che had gone cold inside, a cold so deep it bled out into the ambient and froze everything it touched. The creatures who knew her heart best grew quiet, thinking invisible thoughts. All but one. An ancient legless lizard who had retreated to the water a million years in the past and grown gills instead of lungs broke free of its muddy tomb, twisted about, and with a thrust of its great tail, rose out of the deep, headed to the surface.

  Two crewmen helped Alain carry Megan below decks while Tam grabbed Che and tried to force her down the companionway ladder behind them. Che shook his hands off her arm and headed towards the railing to wait for its appearance.

  The River Liff heaved and swelled as something huge pushed its way to the surface. An eddy formed at the apex of that mountain of water and grew until it turned into a giant whirlpool that began to suck the closest sailboats down into its vortex. As Che watched, the vortex changed and became massive gaping jaws. Three sail boats slid down the sides of that funnel into the maw of the creature that might have been called a salamander had it been a ten-thousand times smaller.

  Not content with this incredible destruction, the Old One exploding out of the river, water sheeting off its armor plated sides, Cheobawn watched in awe. She could see the resemblance between it and the bhotta in the shape of its skull and mouth and the spines that ran along its body and framed the boney plates of its head. A wind heavy with the fetid reek of mud and rot stirred the sails of the Sunbird as the animal kept rising. It looked like a piece of the river bottom had ripped itself free of the bedrock. Spines around its head and along its back were encrusted with seaweed and shellfish. What used to be limbs were no more than boney fins. Clouds of mud oozed off its back as the bottom-dwelling residents slithered clear to returned to the depths.

  The sailboats disappeared with the sound of shattering timber and the terrified screams of its crew. A few lucky men fell overboard as the ships turned into kindling, sliding off the stone-colored lips and tumbling into the river. Those who escaped certain death inside the lizard were sucked down into the turbulent water around it and did not rise to the surface again.

  The behemoth’s path of destruction did not end there. It kept rising, higher and higher, as if it meant to breach the surface and learn to fly. The Spacers, overconfident, found themselves caught in between the walls of the massive mouth as it began to close. Two anti-grav ships managed to squeeze out between the rows of teeth just before its jaws snapped closed around the other.

  There the lizard paused, gravity finally catching it. Sam’s crew scrambled for the sails, but the mountain of flesh was making its own weather and the sails could find no purchase in the stormy air.

  Then the monster began a slow-motion slide back into the water. Sam’s schooner pitched heavily to the side as the water boiled around them, threatening to suck them under as it pulled everything on the surface down into the second whirlpool it created at its passing. Bodies, crates, and equipment slid across the deck. Tam cursed, pried her loose from her place at the rail, and tossed her to Sam, who was braced in the doorway down into the hold.

  All Mother, the Old One said. Are you pleased?

  Well pleased, Cheobawn said as Sam dragged her down the companionway.

  Alain and Megan were in the galley, Megan laid out on the steel table as Cook washed her wounds and began plucking splinters from her cheek. Megan endured the ministrations stoically. Connor was busy examining Alain’s wounds. There were many curses from that end of the table, though Alain’s cuts did not seem as serious.

  Sam ran his hands down her body. “Are you hurt?”

  “It is not my blood,” Che said calmly.

  “Thank god you are safe,” Sam said, hugging her fiercely. “Cook and Carlil will see to your needs. I must see to the rescue of those who are not so lucky.

  “Why?” Tam asked coolly from the doorway. “They just tried to kill you.”

  “It is the unspoken law of the river, that we do not leave men to drown,” Sam said with a depreciating shrug.

  “That monster will eat them before that,” snorted Connor.

  Sam looked down at Che. “That was your doing.” It was an accusation.

  Che looked at him, her mind full of assassins and monster lizards, and the last thoughts of the dying. She was slow to answer.

  “No,” she said evenly, though her mind was anything but calm. “I did not ask for it nor did I expect it but I am pleased by the help it offered.” The ambient was still frozen. She was in no mood to let it to be otherwise as long as Megan suffered in silence.

  Che touched the mind of the Old One. You will make yourself ill, eating boats and such.

  After a thousand seasons, it all merges into one thing inside me, the armored lizard reassured her, although this new boat is unsettling. The river-god coughed, if one can call it that, and regurgitated the anti-grav ship, along with enough lumber to build a whole other boat. The Spacer ship wobbled drunkenly for a moment. The men inside, surprised to be alive and free, hit the controls and whisked themselves away before the monster could change its mind. The wooden flotsam began to rise slowly to the surface.

  Che watched from a thousand eyes hovering in the air above Sam’s boat. She snorted, not wanting to laugh. Laughing would break her mood. She looked up and caught Sam looking at her, puzzled. “Those who do not drown will cling to the wreckage. Two sailboats are coming. One is a pirate ship. One is Dominick’s. They are friends to each other and a friend to those whose ships were lost. They will rescue the survivors. I need to get Megan to a healer. The Spacers need no help. Of everyone out there, they are in the least need of rescuing. They will see to their own.”

  Sam considered her words for a long moment. Then he grunted and returned topside.

  In no time at all, they were underway, Sam using every trick he knew to get speed out of the Sunbird II. The anti-gravs and the sky hunters and the blue and yellow quills stayed behind to harass the ships who pursued them. For a while, more lizards died in a hail of gunfire until Che convinced them to retreat. The sky hunters knew of men with guns, knew how to avoid the deadly rain, the intentions of shooters preceding the bullets as they did. Sky hunter took the little ones and spiraled out of range. Che listened to their reports with half an Ear as she applied salve to Alain’s face.

  Cook came to her. “I have dosed the girl down. She will sleep for a bit. I could not get all the wood out of her face. Some has come too close to her eye. She needs a hospital and a surgeon. Carlil will tell Sam. Captain Sam
will call ahead and make the arrangements.”

  Che pressed her lips together and tried to control the anger that would not leave her. She had experience with Lowlander hospitals. None of it was good.

  Chapter 19

  By the time the Sunbird II docked at the Wheelwright wharf, the deck was crowded with half a dozen makeshift litters. Two of the litters held the lifeless bodies of Sam’s crew, men she knew, men she had sailed with. Che sat next to Megan’s litter in the shade of an awning made by a piece of a sail tied haphazardly to the superstructure of the boat. She had stolen a pot lid from the galley and was using it as a makeshift fan, trying to keep the flies off Megan’s face. It seemed like half her head was covered in bandages. Alain sat next to her, dozing, the right side of his face scored in a dozen places from the shrapnel. It made him look fierce.

  Kander’s airship sat on the dock along with one other that bore the green double circle—the Lowlander symbol for medical aid. He and Kirr stood at the top of the boarding ramp, waiting for them to disembark. Sam went up to talk to them. Tam followed.

  The boys returned, Kirr and Hess in tow. Tam led them over to where Che sat. A handful of people, part of Hess’s crew, followed him down to the deck of the schooner. Dressed in white jumpers with the double green circle over their hearts, that group broke apart and began ministering to the wounded. Che scowled at them and they had the good grace to look away. The eldest of them followed Kirr to bow respectfully in her direction.

  “This is my surgeon,” Kander Hess said. “Doctor Indar and his surgical team.”

  Cheobawn did not rise from her place by Megan’s side. She studiously ignored everyone else.

  “We did not ask for your help,” Tam growled.

  “I did,” Sam said. “Cook tells me there is a shard buried deep in this young lady’s face, too near the eye. If we pull it out it might lacerate the eye more. I fear it will take surgery to remove it.”

  “Surgery,” Che seethed, looking up. “I did not agree to this.”

  “Hospitals. Doctors. Special instruments. Anesthesia,” Hess explained. “You will need all of that if she expects to see out of that eye again.”

  “I know what it means,” Che snarled. “I know who sent those bullets our way. Can you guarantee our safety while my heartsister lays senseless and vulnerable? No. No hospitals.”

  Kirr was looking at her strangely. She knew she was bleeding too much of her rage across the walls of her mind by the way his ears went flat against his skull. Kirr pulled his friend behind him.

  Cook came up to beg his case again. Tam intercepted him, keeping him away from Cheobawn. Tam needed no warning as to her mood.

  “Tell me, not her,” Tam said, afraid that he would have to kill someone soon for offending his Ear. The last thing he wanted was for Cheobawn to rise to a killing edge.

  Cook looked confused and perhaps a little outraged that her Alpha treated her so poorly. Lowlanders. They insisted on treating everyone as equal. “She is in a lot of pain,” Cook said. “All I can do is dose her and keep her quiet. Mister Samwell will tell you the same thing. She needs a surgeon.”

  Che had been in a Lowlander hospital. Dominick had nearly kidnapped her from one. The memory made her angry. Another wave of rage washed through her. The sky hunters echoed her emotions in their screams. The air around her turned white with cold.

  Kirr’s nostrils had snapped shut, his eyelids and lips gone pale.

  “Calm your Ear, I beg you,” he said to Tam. The gray cat waved at the air above them where the lizards of every color screamed in outrage. “Things are going very, very wrong out in the world and she is the source.”

  Cheobawn stood. They did not deserve any explanation, but it would be easier to tell them something that would make them go away. She turned and walked away from them, her mind buried deep in the ambient. When she found what she needed, she leaped into the air and came down on the deck of another boat. A man sat in the light of the setting sun, cleaning a long rifle.

  He had just enough time to look up and open his mouth to scream before she grabbed his hand and leap away again. In the infinite nothingness of in between, she dissected his brain down to the smallest of particles, following the stink of Oud and the Prince Regent and the CPC back through time.

  When they landed on the deck in front of Kirr and Kander, she knew everything he knew and so much more. The assassin fell to his knees and vomited.

  Kander cursed softly and grabbed the long rifle from the assassin’s limp grasp, tossing it over his shoulder to Kirr.

  “What? How? Where?” the man sputtered. Kander shook him roughly by his collar to silence him.

  “This is the man who tried to kill Megan,” Cheobawn said. “You are Psi-Ops. Take what he knows from his mind. Use it however you wish, but do not stand in my way, for I mean to make this all stop.”

  Kander stared at her, not surprised in the least by her ability to disappear at will. He shoved the man behind him. Kirr caught the assassin and held him to the ground with one knee.

  “Why do you insist on playing this game?” Kander Hess growled. “Why do you rage about injustice? What is this pretense? This is what you intended all along, isn’t it? Are you angry because you miscalculated your moves? Look around. These people are dead because of you!”

  Connor and Alain drew their long knives, fully prepared to use them. Tam restrained them with a motion of his fingers.

  “If you want to live you will consider carefully what you say next, Spacer,” Tam spat out between bared teeth.

  “You think I am afraid of you, boy?” Hess snarled. “My entire life has been lived in a time of war. I have battled better than you and lived to tell the tale.”

  “I would not bet against Tam, if I were you,” Cheobawn said softly. “You would lose.” Che looked down at Megan. “You are right, of course. This was my plan and it has gone horribly awry. I was a fool and I must apologize for that. Luck goes where Luck wants to go. I thought I could outsmart the Oneverse and it has proven me to be a very sorry kind of Mother, indeed.”

  Che looked up into Kander’s eyes. “But I am the All Mother. You had one chance to prove you were worthy of our love. One. You will not get another.”

  Hess opened his mouth to keep shouting at her. Kirr put a hand out to stop his friend from committing suicide.

  The Margai looked into Che’s eyes and flinched. “Gawdgawdgawd,” Kirr moaned. “You are an open wound. The world is on fire with your rage. No good thing will come of this. We will send Dr. Indar and his team with you to wherever you take her. He can rig a clean room and supervise the surgery. We will do everything in our power to make sure your friend does not go blind. Just calm down and let us move her.”

  “No hospital,” Che said with utter finality.

  “Send the surgeon to my Father’s house,” Sam said. “We can rig up an operating room in the infirmary.”

  “Fine. Load the wounded on the med-ship,” Hess growled. He turned on his heel and stalked away. It was about as dignified as any retreat could be, being utterly defeated.

  Kirr grabbed the assassin by his belt, pulled him off the boat, and thrust him into the hands of the armed Spacers who stood guard around the airships. They took off with a high whine as Doctor Indar’s team moved the wounded into the med-ship.

  Che followed Megan’s litter into the ship, looking up to where Hess’s ship hovered over them. Hess was an honorable man. He would guard their ship until it landed at Robert’s villa.

  Sam came and talked to the pilot, giving him instructions. Then they lifted off and headed towards the bluffs. Connor had his nose pressed to the window, a child-like grin pasted to his face. Tam was smiling at him. Cheobawn wanted to smile too, but the last ride she had taken in an anti-grav ship had been the one that had taken her to the starship—and that was not a welcome memory. In this escalating conflict it was good to remember that she had not been the one who started this battle. Any remorse she felt
, she quickly squashed.

  Chapter 20

  Cheobawn leaped into the air, turned a corner and stepped into the place her heart wanted to be more than anywhere else.

  The Coven looked up from their tea cups and smiled.

  “You are late,” Amabel said.

  “What? No pleasantries?” Che asked.

  She sat down in the empty chair and curled her bare feet under her. Amabel handed her a teacup full of tea brewed exactly how she liked it, sweet and acidic. Che took a long sip and sat back with a contented sigh.

  “I miss this.”

  “How is Megan?” Brigit asked, taking the hint about pleasantries.

  “Well. Healed. The scars will fade, the doctors say. I have moved my Pack down the bluffs to River’s house. Blackwind Pack entertain themselves by helping River teach his classes.”

  “Robert Wheelwright’s house grew too uncomfortable, did it?” Sybille asked wryly. “You were an open target, living there. I trust River’s security over anything a Lowlander could provide.”

  “The Wheelwright interests are too entangled with the politics of the Lowlanders,” Che agreed with a grimace.

  Amabel snorted in amusement. Menolly smiled.

  “What? What did I say that is so amusing?”

  “The name Wheelwright is on the list of the original colonists. They came on the first ship,” Mora said. “The name was oddly familiar when you first mentioned it so I went back through the old records. They came, not as seekers for a new life, but as part of the power base used to oppress the colonists. Wheelwrights have always been in the pay of the governor.”

  Che paused at that, her tea cup suspended in mid-sip.

  “Sam is a riverman. His wealth comes from the business of moving people and things up and down the river,” Che said, a confused look on her face.

  “His wealth,” Sybille stated firmly, “comes from the belief that he is more privileged than those he deals with. That those of the privilege class are better and more deserving of all the abundance of a planet and a people.”