Warrior Witch

by J. D. Lakey

  chimera: an illusion created in the quantum bubble of a com-sphere

  Civil Council: a mutable body of concerned citizens, elected official, and corporate officers who meet on a regular basis and act as a liaison between the people and the governor

  click: the distance a human man can walk in an hour

  com-sphere: : A machine made of bloodstones and crystal brains attached to the inside of a large gold sphere that acts as an antenna which, in turn, acts as an extension of an Ear’s psi abilities used to communicate in real time over large distances

  com unit: a small hand-held high-frequency machine like a walkie-talkie used to keep contact with other similar machines, they are not used by the domes because the psi-predators learned early on to home-in on their signal and eat the owners

  Coven: The First Mother and all her wives, but also the name of a communion of Mothers who specialize in a particular skill set

  CPC: Central Planets Consortium, the political body that oversees the governance of all human space and collects taxes and conscripts men to wage war against the Spiders; headed by a Prince of the royal family, appointed by the CPC

  crown sac: in a bhotta, who has many sacs arrayed down its spine where it grows bloodstones, the crown sac is the apex gland located at the base of skull whose stones are the most prized because of their size, color, and the strength of their psi qualities

  crystalline brain: a computer imbedded and imprinted inside a small crystal extruded by the dome’s extruding machines; used in conjunction with the bloodstones to take advantage of their quantum entanglement; used in com-spheres

  crystal mind: the crystals used to build a crystalline brain

  Darkday: The shortest day of the year, which marks the end of one year and the beginning of the next

  Dreamwalking: using the narcotic weed called Temple smoke, the priestess and her acolytes practice distance viewing to gather intelligence about the planet

  dubeh leopard: large, black cat-like predator

  Dunauken: Lowlander city at the mouth of the Liff, sight of the original human settlement

  Ear: female member of a Pack; psi adept, responsible for the safety of a Pack. Blackwind Pack’s Ears are Cheobawn and Megan

  Ear-com: a crystalline brain developed by the forerunner Flynn meant to help Blackwind Pack stay in contact over great distances

  Eater of Worlds: the synergistic group sentience of all destructive forces in the universe, a form of sentient entropy

  Eiocha: Occonomara’s largest moon

  Elder: tribal member over the age of sixteen

  Epona: Occonomara’s smallest moon

  Escarpment: the southern boundary of tribal land known as the Highreaches measuring over 5,000 feet high, separating the Lowlanders and Highlanders, as well as the plants and animals of the planet into two different cultures and ecosystems

  Father: the honorific title of all adult males under the domes

  fenelk: horned and tusked antelope from the southern forests; largest herbivore in the Highreaches domesticated and used as beasts of burden to move goods and people between villages; principle animals in a caravan

  First Mothers: The penultimate Mother in the Dome hierarchy, responsible for all life in and around the Dome

  flutterflies: a winged insect of the forests above the Escarpment

  foray: any duty taking place outside the dome

  forerunner: the individuals sent down to the Lowlands to prepare the way for the Black Bead

  fuzzy: Small, communal-minded predator only as large as a child’s fist

  glass-spider: The space-faring Spiders who were physically modified to survive the deep cold and weightlessness of space

  grappling hook: a device with multiple hooks (known as claws or flukes) attached to a rope; it is thrown, dropped, sunk, projected, or fastened directly by hand to where at least one hook may catch and hold

  grunter: herbivore about the size of a man that lives in the high pine forests

  Ghost: a game of hide and seek played by the children of the dome in which the Ghost Master—from the safety of a random embarkation point inside the dome—convenes a group of players, gives each an item to be found and returned to that point, hands out red ribbons to be tied to the upper arm, and then sets a time limit in which the items must be returned to the point of beginning. The players must go and come back without anyone seeing them. Every person of the dome, young or old, is technically part of the chase. If someone sees you, they can call you caught and claim your ribbon. The first one back still wearing their ribbon and holding their quest object, wins

  Governor: the penultimate political head of Occonomara. The current governor is Dermot Winterglen

  heartsister: a term of endearment between the wives of a Pack

  hedge witch: a denigrating term used for all the women who serve as healers and herbalists and mid-wives in the back country of the Lowlands, where doctors and traditional medicine is hard to come by

  Hegemony: the amalgam of those who keep the Prince Regent in power; composed of the Royal family and all the power brokers from the CPC, forming a shadow government outside the normal avenues of ordinary day-to-day planet governance

  High Coven: the Coven of the High Mother

  Highlander: what the Lowlanders call the people of the domes

  High Mother: the leader of all the domes in the Highreaches, voted into office by a conclave of First Mothers from each dome. The current High Mother is Mora

  Highreaches: the land above the Escarpment as named by the dome dwellers; the land referred to as the Highlands by the Lowlanders

  High Temple: the temple where the High Coven operates

  Hunter Void: the double spiral of energy created by the bennelk to confuse the minds of predators into believing they are not there

  In-Between: the place between the here and the there which has no dimension and no time

  larder: large cupboard for storing food

  Liff: the broad river that runs from Hellsbore to Dunauken and leads up-river to Meetpoint Camp

  Little Father: the honorific title of an underage boy

  Little Maker: a system of viruses and nanotechnology used to perform DNA surgery on living hosts

  Little Mother: the honorific title of an underage girl

  long stick form: of the many sparring exercises or forms, the long stick form is the one that uses a six foot stick to mimic the shape of a spear

  Lowlands: the land below the Escarpment

  Lowlander: those humans who live in the Lowlands, the flat area below the escarpment. the descendants of the original colonists who did not rebel and go into hiding above the Escarpment. This core group was not psi adept

  Luck: the quality of ones psi and how it interacts with the world

  ma-chett: a long steel knife-like ax

  Maker of the Living Thread: master geneticist and healer of the domes; Amabel is Windfall Dome’s Maker. Responsible for the birth of all children and the genetic health of the dome

  Margai: the race of sentient, psi-linked, bipedal cats from the sector of space ravaged by the Spider War

  Master Tinkerer: a craftsman who is proficient in all things engineering related

  med-ship: an anti-grav ambulance

  Meetpoint: the camp at the base of the Escarpment where Badnite Creek falls off the world and becomes the headwaters of the Liff

  Meetpoint Captain: an inherited position passed from father to son. The captain of the boat who meets the dome people twice a year at the base of the Escarpment and who takes a profit from the trade in bloodstones, spidersilk, and other crafts exclusive to the domes

  Mother: the honorific given to all adult females of the domes

  natalmother: the Mother who volunteers to gestate an embryo. Cheobawn’s natalmother was Mora, who was also her Truemother

  Navigator: to replace the Scerron pilots, the Makers of the Living Thread designed a human fem
ale, an Ear, to guide the star ships through space and around the dimensional corners of space-time, dragging a ship across the folds of space

  nestmother: the Mother who volunteers to cohabit with a nest of children under the age of eight. Cheobawn’s nestmother is technically Mora but in truth the entire High Coven was her nestmates

  Night: the self-named black-winged lizards of the Lowlands; called Puca by the Lowlanders. they hunt at night, flying low over the River Liff using the blue iridescent tongues to lure small fish to the surface

  Occonomara: the name of the planet as named by the Lowlanders; Tearmann, according to the tribes

  Old Father Bhotta: while alive, this was the oldest living bhotta on the planet, his mind containing all the memories of the species. Upon his death, those memories were retained and recovered by Cheobawn when she tuned his bloodstones right before she sent them down the Escarpment with Samwell Wheelwright, leaving one for her own personal use; it is this bloodstone with which she communicates with all the other 46 bloodstones, one of which hangs around Samwell Wheelwright’s neck, one of which has found its way to Spider, one of which sits on the bridge of Colonel Bohea’s star cruiser, one of which sits upon an altar on the Scerron home world under continuous watch by a Scerron psi adept

  Old One: the ancient giant armored salamander that lives at the bottom of the River Liff near Dunauken

  omeh: plasteel and bloodstone necklace woven whole around the necks of every child not long after their birth, containing two patterns—one made of bloodstones for dome identification, the other embedded in the plasteel threads used to identify the unique genetic code of the wearer

  Orson’s Sea: the shallow sea that lies between the continent’s southern edge and the Ten Thousand Islands

  Pack: group formed by children, membership being a requirement of any who want to leave the dome; to Pack is to enter into a formal binding contract with a chosen few. Upon reaching majority, these ties are permanent, the members considered Husbands and Wives

  perfidy: treachery

  port:: The left side of the boat. Towards the left-hand side of the ship facing forward

  Prince Regent: the elected leader of the Hegemony, technically the leader of all human space

  psi: all skills related to extra-sensory perception using the mind’s ability to access the quantum universe

  Psi-Ops: a branch of the super-secret Sec-Ops division of the CPC military whose job is intelligence gathering using whatever means necessary

  psi-predator: any predator that uses its psi abilities to seduce the minds of its prey

  Puca: black winged-lizards with the bio-luminescent tongues; thought to be the souls of drowned sailors by Lowlanders

  Queen’s Gambit: a ploy in the game of War in which one sends a small force representing a solitary Pack to lay siege to the game piece representing the city of the opposing team. A challenge is issued, and depending on a randomized number generated by the game computer, the Alpha Ear of the Pack defeats the First Mother of the dome piece and assumes her place in the hierarchy of the city, thus changing the allegiance of the game piece

  quantum bubble: a technical term used to refer to the image created above a com-sphere that links two similar machines

  quantum universe: term that defines the reality is which all the qualities of space and time exist in an ordered harmony

  quill: Lowlander name for the small, psi-linked, spiny flying lizards coveted by the urban dwellers in Dunauken as pets but protected under the Highland Treaty signed by the CPC, the Hegemony, and the governor of Occonomara which made owning and exporting these animals illegal

  rat war: a conflict created among the rats of of the warehouse district of Dunauken when Cheobawn tried to fix their alien nature

  River Liff: the great river that is born from the snow-melt of the White Dragon mountains, flows past Windfall Dome as Badnite Creek, falls off the cliffs at Meetpoint and eventually flows south to Orson’s Sea at Dunauken

  riverman: all Lowlanders who make their living on the River Liff

  Royal Hegemony: the amalgam of an extended family of royals of which the Prince Regent-—the titular head (ie. a ceremonial position) of the Central Planets Consortium (the CPC) —is the appointed leader, this appointment originating from the combined influences of the Royal family and the power brokers behind the CPC. The Royal Hegemony sets the tone socially, culturally, ideologically and economically for the rest of the CPC civilizations thus forming a shadow government outside the normal bureaucratic avenues of ordinary day to day planetary governance.

  Scerron: tall, thin, violet-skinned alien used by the Spacers to pilot their star ships; psi adepts, they reach across space and time and drag the starships across dimensional hyperspace. Until Cheobawn began to play with her power they were the sole masters of the deep space routes Scerrons are a Second People species used by the humans as Pilots. They avoided all contact with humans until the Spider War began, Hermaphroditic clones, all identical, all female, and all sharing the singularity of their species’s super-consciousness. They hired themselves out to the humans in exchange for protection. Under the guise of following the orders of the Prince Regent, they built a containment box for a psi-adept and kidnap Cheobawn from River’s house

  Schooner: a sailing ship with two or more masts, typically with the foremast smaller than the mainmast, and having gaff-rigged lower masts

  Sendai: Craft Master, a rank among the echelons of mind-readers of the Margai people

  sister-stone: a bloodstone grown in the same animal

  sisterwife: in a Pack, all members are considered part of a marriage contract. All females call each other sisterwife

  spidersilk: the cloth made from the threads of spider webs collected by the dome dwellers from the nests of the large arthropods called spiders

  Sky-eyes: what Cheobawn calls the cameras in orbit around Occonomara and used by the Spacers to keep track of persons-of-interest on the planet

  Sky Hunter: large, winged lizard whose range covers most of the planet, retreating to the Ten Thousand Islands in winter to mate and returning to the Highreaches in the summer to follow the young hunting bhotta, symbiotically taking what the bhotta does not catch. The Sky Hunter helped Cheobawn come down the Escarpment and escape from the roof of the hospital as Dominick’s men closed in

  sloop: a one-masted sailboat with a fore-and-aft mainsail and a jib

  Spacers: a general denigrating term used by the domes and the Lowlanders when referring to those who are not native to Occonomara

  Spidersilk: the light, fine, durable, stain-resistant cloth created on the looms of the domes from the silk of large spiders, gathered in the forests above the Escarpment

  Spider: the amalgam of all the minds of the sentient, psi-linked space-faring spiders

  Spider War: the two-thousand-year-old conflict waged across time and deep space between the humans and their allies against a species of space-faring arthropod whose planet of origin was Occonomara; started when the human explorers committed genocide, systematically hunting the Spiders until none remained thus clearing the planet for colonization

  starboard: the side of a ship that is on the right when one is facing forward

  Star Woman: the synergistic group sentience of all the creative forces in the universe

  stinging-spider: one of the dozens species of spiders above the Escarpment

  swift-boat: a small inflatable dingy with a large engine designed for speed and built out of fish skin and fish air bladders

  synced bloodstone: a bloodstone born in the same animal, thus connected by quantum entanglement

  Tearmann: ‘Refuge’ in the old tongue; The name given the planet by the Domes; Occonomara, as named by the Lowlanders

  Temple Tower: the top of the temple in which the High Coven meets, Cheobawn returns to it in times of great distress

  The Admiral: What is the role of this position, who is currently in it, etc

/>   Governor: a position of authority passed from father to son reaching all the way back to the original titular head of the human colonists who arrived from the Core Planets

  Trestle table: a table top supported by trestles, an open cross-braced framework used for easy assembly and storage

  truemother: the Mother who donates the egg to create an embryo. If 85% of the DNA is still intact the birth counts as a Truebirth

  truesister: a female born of the same Mother who used her own eggs, a rare thing in the domes

  Watch: the semi-military force charged with enforcing the law of the Lowlands