by Jo Clayton
He laughed. It was an ugly sound, mocking and angry. “That silly bitch? Big as a dammalt with a laugh like a band saw. Always at you. Chel Dй, I have to be drunk as a dog to get it up when I do her.”
“I see. It was her gave you news about the Ard and the rest of them?”
“Oh, yeah, and wetting herself because she knows I’ll come do her when I finish the scum. She gets off on blood, nothing gets her hotter.”
“And how does she get word to you? How does she do that, Ferg?” She kept her voice soft and insinuating, slipping the words in between the rustle of the leaves and the dirt grains rattling along the road as the wind picked up strength with the waning of the day.
He snickered. “Leaves me notes, doesn’t she. Silly kueh. Games! Love post she calls it like she was some just blooded girl. Hollow in a tree down by river. Ties a bit a yellow rag on branch when she put something in hole.”
His eyelids flickered, his eyes darted side to side, a buried awareness worked the muscles of his face. Shadith stopped the questions and sang to him, a low, wordless croon like a mother singing a child to sleep. After a moment he relaxed and the smug grin twisted his mouth again. “Kueh,” he said.
“No doubt. You had a weapon. A strange looking thing.”
“Cutter,” he said after a while. “Ol’ frogface he say, point it at a stinking jelly and you got yourself one krutchin’ Summerfire tree high and mountain wide. Hoooeeeshhh!”
Shadith heard a scuffling behind her, curses. She ignored them, crooned a bit more to settle the chorek again. “Old Frogface, hmm, I think I know him, tell me what he’s like.”
“Ugly anglik. Shorter’n me but twice as wide. Skin’s like lehaum bark. Made me want to see ‘f I could peel him like them there.” He waved his bound hands at the nearest tree. He blinked at the hands, waggled them, started snickering. “Peel ‘um. ‘Ould d’t too, he come back at me. Peel ‘um. Peel…” He let his hands drop, scowled at the branches arching high above the road. “Mesuch, filthy…”
Shadith leaned closer to him, began one of the Shalla croons, drawing him back into dream with the help of the drug. “Tell me about his hands. What were they like?”
“Cursed claws, black as his stinking soul.”
“Tell me about his eyes. Was there anything odd about his eyes.”
“Stuff crawled over ‘um sometimes, made ‘um shine.”
“What did he say to you? Tell me exactly what he said to you.”
His eyelids flickered again, then closed completely, the energy drained from his voice as he droned what he’d been told about how to recharge the cutter, about the price on the heads of the University team. Toward the end of the speech he started getting agitated again and this time the crooning only seemed to exacerbate the disturbance. Words drooled from his mouth as he jerked his head back and forth and tried to pull his wrists apart, jerking so hard the tape cut into his wrists. He ignored the blood and kept jerking, as if he meant to saw off his hands and set himself free.
His face got redder and redder, his eyes glassy, his mouth hung open, working, working… until, abruptly his body spasmed, arced up from the ground, then went limp.
“He dead?”
She looked round. Danor was hunched over, his legs drawn up, his head buried in, his arms. Maorgan stood beside him. It was he who’d spoken. “I think so, but I’d better be sure. Bring me the kit, would you?”
Shadith keyed the locktights loose, rolled the comealongs up, and shoved them into a saddlebag. “You heard what he said. There’ll be dozens of others out there hungry for that gold. We’d better start pushing the caцpas as hard as we dare. We’re targets till we get over Medon Pass.”
13. Ploy and Counterploy
1
Ceam, Heruit, and his cousin Bothim squatted in the shadows under the trees at the edge of the Meklo Fen watching the Chav get off their floatcart and walk toward the swampie Porach who was sitting cross-legged on a thick mat woven from reeds, reed baskets placed around him, filled with fresh fish, herbs, nuts and the round red fruit of the bilim tree that grew deep inside the Marish.
The damp heavy breeze coming off the grass brought the snake-smell of the mesuch to Ceam. His stomach knotted and he felt himself getting hot; it didn’t seem to him he could take his eyes off that massive form with its oddly bobbly walk.
As if the mesuch could feel his gaze, the creature turned his head and stared at the group of men.
Ceam fought his eyes down and stared at the black muck he could see through the grass. After watching the techs up in the mountains, he hadn’t expected them to be so formidable and so quick to notice up close. And he hadn’t expected the smell and what it would do to him. The rage it would rouse in him. It was all he could manage to squat there with his eyes on the ground.
No more game. No more detachment. This was the Enemy. The things that had slaughtered his friends and burned the Eolt, who’d stolen his peace and his joy from him.
The smell got stronger as the mesuch inspected the fish, bit into one of the bilim fruits.
Eolt Kitsek had slid through the clouds last night to tell them the mesuch and their crawlers were back eating the hearts of the mountains. Fewer of them, though, and cautious. A roving tiogri paddling through the ash for roasted carrion set off an alarm, a squalling oogah and a firewand from the crawler singed the spots off the tiogri’s tail, though he got away alive, his only hurt a bare behind. That was briefly satisfying, making them waste supplies and their own peace on a danger that wasn’t there. No one was interested in the miners, the new target was their home fort.
Heruit moved slightly, dropped his hand on Ceam’s shoulder, squeezed. It was both a comfort and a warning. And it helped and did not help, it warmed Ceam with fellow feeling and it irritated him that the older man could read him so easily. I’m not meant to be a spy. At least, not this kind. This feels so useless, hanging about listening to that beast haggling over how many needles for needlefish.
The haggling went on and on. Ceam rocked restlessly on his heels, pulled a spear of grass, peeled it into fine strips, pulled another, then another and wondered if he could last much longer without leaping to his feet and running at the monster who was so absurdly acting like all the other merchants he’d seen from the time he was whelped. Obscene that the two of them out there should look so much alike, Porach and the mesuch. Both old. He didn’t know how he knew that, mesuch didn’t have hair to go gray and they all seemed wrinkled to him, with skin like tree bark. He was, though. Old. Temperish. Yellow cast to eyes that were still far too sharp for Ceam’s comfort.
Finally, though, the chaffering was done. Porach was tucking his goods in a c’hau cloth bag, needles and thread, a coil of cord, fine and colorless, some packets of dye. The mesuch snapped his fingers and the two younger ones came and loaded the reed baskets onto the floatwagon.
Porach got to his feet, swung the strap of the bag over his shoulder, caught up the mat, and stood rolling it into a tight cylinder as he watched the floatwagon go gliding off. When it disappeared into the trees, he pulled loose the long stick he’d thrust into the muck and came over to them, swinging the stick and moving with the peculiar long glide of a swampy, his bare feet barely bending the grass or so it seemed to Ceam.
Heruit cleared his throat.
Porach shook his head. “Not here.”
They followed him deeper into the Marish. He went back on a new path; Ceam had noticed that the two tendays he’d spent living in the Marish. Swampies almost never used the same path twice in the same day. It might have been to keep down any signs of wear, or perhaps some predator they didn’t discuss might be alerted and avoided by this. His curiosity was itching at him, but he knew better than to ask. Swampie wanted you to know something, he told you. Got snarked if you kept pushing at him and one day you’d turn around and he wasn’t there any more and you were out in the middle of the morass and didn’t know where you were and didn’t dare go anywhere because there were sofas and crogall burrows
where if you stepped in them you were dead.
Porach moved swiftly along the edge of the water, jumped onto the kneed roots of the mekek trees that grew along here, ran across the knees with a curious, irregular, tied-in gait. Ceam followed more slowly. He wasn’t used to going about in his bare feet and his soles had picked up some parasites that itched like fury and hurt when his feet slapped down on the slippery, hard wood. Behind him he could hear the sound of Heruit’s feet, the muttered curses that got louder the longer they ran. And Bothim’s panting snicker as the smaller, more limber man trotted along behind them.
Porach jumped from the roots onto the dimpled sand of a long thin island like the scar from a knife wound. He flung up a hand to stop them, then dug the end of the stick into one of the dimples, inspected the result, and jumped back onto the root. He took a whistle from inside his tunic and began blowing into it. Though it produced no sound that Ceam could hear, it made a tightness behind his eyes.
He smothered an exclamation as he saw the sand shift and shiver as something ran along beneath the surface and vanished beneath the water without giving him the least glimpse of what it looked like.
Porach slipped the stick under his arm, jumped onto the sand and ran along it. The others followed.
He led them on a winding difficult route deep into the Marish, till they reached the twinned isles where they’d been living for the past tenday. The one with their hutches on it was round and barren, thick bug-ridden grass and lichen webs crawling everywhere, a single raintree at one end. Porach’s isle was a long pointed oval with a small spring of clean water welling up between two trees into a stone basin. Porach and Meisci his wife had brought stones from outside and cement powder and had built a neat cup with knee-high walls. The stream from the spring ran through it and kept it filled and a shell lid on the top kept it clean.
Porach blew into his whistle again, this time drawing a strange echo from inside the thicket at the end of the island. A moment later Meisci came out and brought for them a long narrow board with folding legs, the portable bridge between the islands.
He’d shown them what swam in that water and Ceam got the shivers each time he got his feet wet, no matter that Porach was along and knew what he was doing.
When the bridge was settled in place, Porach turned. “You are welcome to share a sip of tea and a word or two.”
Meisci was a thin, worn-looking woman with strands of gray in her long brown hair. She was shy and half-wild, uneasy with strangers about, though when they came to visit, she knelt behind Porach for the courtesy of it and listened to the talk with curiosity enough to forget herself from time to time. She brought out her china cups, no two of them alike, and filled them with hot strong tea, added slices of ullica fruit and small rounds of unleavened bread.
Heruit emptied his cup and let Meisci take it for a refill. “I can’t see as that gets us any forwarder. Unless you got more than I heard out of that ulpioc.”
Porach’s mouth thinned and curled into a secret smile. “More’n you’d guess.”
Heruit made an exasperated sound that pretty well expressed what Ceam was feeling.
Porach’s smile widened. He played with the moment, then capitulated according to some schedule of his own. “To start with, that’s not one of the big ‘uns inside the walls, that’s what they call a Drudge. It’s him runs the mesuch drink house in Dumel Dordan that was, I picked up other trades isn’t first time he done that, easy enough to get him running on about old days. He’s an old ‘un as mesuch go. Likes to natter on about nought. He pretty pissed at techs for bringing husk to his place and stinking it up and ignoring his brew. He got a pride in his brew and it’s like they slighting him when they do that. Besides, it takes ‘um funny, he says, sometimes they just get sleepy and hit floor snoring, othertimes they like to go crazy, bust the place up. He says he can tell old hands at it, their haws come half down all time, that’s those inside eyelids they drop when they getting fire-bellied.”
He pressed his lips together again, no smile this time. His shaggy brows drew inward, a deep trench dug between them. “Couple things to worry on. Less’n a hundred of them right now, but they expecting lots more in a couple months, maybe a bit more. We could maybe wipe the hundred. When it’s thousands, I dunno. Worse, was something else ol’ Farkly said, one time he and me, we was trading brew, had to sample it like, and he gets feeling loose and one thing he says is mesuch has same problem a while back. ‘Nother world. Something on it messed up their techs. Couldn’t stop them getting at it, so they stop the world. Cracked it open like you’d stick a nut ‘tween you teeth and chomp down. Mucks get too fussed with husk smoking, could be they do the same here.”
Heruit scowled. “World’s a big nut.”
“Cha oy, but when you figure how they get here, maybe they can do it.” He supped up some tea, handed his cup to Meisci for a refill. “What I know is bits and pieces. Techs getting itchy one way ‘nother. High Mucks not paying ‘ttention to what they supposed to be doing. Like when you kick into mutmut nest and watch the itchies run round like crazy. One of ol Farkli, that’s his name, one of his bumpers, he sidle over to me couple ten days ago, wants to buy husk, I say I don’t have any, but I’ll ask round. What I think is, you can use that Drudge to get to techs over to Dordan-that-was and worm outta them what you gotta know.”
2
“You’ve come to make trouble, haven’t you.” Parlach was a broad strong woman a little younger than Deдnin, with a round face, pouty lips and pale blue eyes. Bland blue eyes, mouth falling into a meaningless smile when she finished speaking.
Deдnin looked at her a long moment. “Yes,” she said finally and waited for a response.
“Good. Think you can keep it away from the House?”
“Likely.”
“Good. What you want?”
“For the moment, information. Discreetly gathered. The inside workings of the mesuch fort.”
“Hm. Time limit?”
“No.”
“Good. I’m shamed to say I don’t have many I trust who have the brains to do that work and not get caught at it.”
“Not getting caught is more important than the information.”
“I can see that. Someone else you ought to bring m. Sifaed. She works the back room at Farkli’s lubbot. Gets more techs than we do, ours is mostly Drudges, and one of her steadies is the Chav who runs the Drudges.”
“She tied to the lubbot or does she get out?”
“After she and the other women clean the place, she’s mostly loose till noon. I could set up a meet if you want. Best not here. She goes walking round the edges of the Fen when she needs to get away from the mesuch, that’s as good a place as any. You know what she looks like?”
“No.”
“Big woman, not fat, just heavy. Taller than most. Wide shoulders, wide hips, light brown hair with a lot of red in it, fine flyaway stuff that kinks into tight curls with the least damp in the air. She was a teacher back before the mesuch came, bonded like they do with a Keteng teacher, a Denchok called Bolabel. Mesuch killed xe when they broke up the Dumel. Like they did all the Keteng they saw about.”
“I see. Yes, set up a meet two days on, tell her I’ll watch her backtrail, make sure she’s clear before I show. I’ll call her bond’s name to show her it’s me.”
“You sure you want to do that?”
“Yes. How she handles it will tell me things I need to know.”
Sifaed was grim-faced, eyes hooded, anger in the set of her shoulders as she stepped into the shadow under the trees and stood waiting for Danin to show herself.
“Bolabel,” Deдnin said quietly, then stepped from behind a tree. “How long do you have?”
“That isn’t the question. Convince me I should stay.”
“We’ve quit trying to drive them off. We’re going for the head now. Get that and the body dies.”
“How?” There was an edge to her voice. “You didn’t see what happened here when they came. You we
ren’t here. I’d remember you. All the faces are graved in my head, everyone, dead and alive. I’ve searched for a way, Chel Dй have I searched. You can’t get in there and I don’t care how big an army you can get together, you won’t even get close. They’ll kill you faster than my father mowed a hayfield.”
“So we just have to be cleverer than they are. What do you know about inside that fort?” Deдnin pulled a pad from a pocket in her shirt, took a pencil from its loop and waited.
Sifaed’s eyes went distant She moved over to the tree, lowered herself onto one of the knobby root knees and scowled at the reedy grass growing round her feet. After a short silence, she said, “One of my regulars is the Muck of the Dirtmen. That’s what they call them that grow food for the rest. Hunh! Not that they actually touch dirt, that’s for Drudges. Ragnal, his name is. Touchy. Full of resentments. You know the kind. Every time someone looks at him, he turns it into a slight. His baby brother was in an airwagon that went down. Crashed. He blames the Muck in charge of equipment, says he’s so corrupt, he’d get rid of all his workers if he could and eat their pay. He says Hunnar, that’s the High Muck of Mucks, he got this job because his wife is important, that he’s messed up a couple of other times and this is his last chance before he’s hauled home and put out to pasture. And that most of the other techish Mucks are the same sort, rejects put together because no one else will have them.”
“Hm. You said he’s a resentful man.”
“Cha oy, but he’s not the only one grumbling at the way things are run, so I suspect it’s close to true. Let’s see. The Drudges live in Dordan-that-was. Seven male, six female. Was more, but guards took four off and that was the last anyone saw of them. Inside the fort, maybe fifty guards. They go on staggered duty, fifteen at a time, two on the High Muck’s workcenter, another two on duty in his quarters. They like that duty, it’s just watching the clean Drudge do her work, then sampling the Muck’s drink stock and poking through his picture stuff. What they hate is walking the walls and punching in at the call stations. It’s boring and they can’t slack there. There’ll be one or two in the watch towers and four walking the walls. The rest off duty, or wherever the High Muck says, lately they’ve been hitting the Sleeping Grounds, bringing in Guardians. Right now, he’s got around ten of them out looking for Denchok, don’t know why, guards don’t either, they’re grumbling because it messes up the schedule. Um. Don’t know how many techs exactly, but you folks have whittled them down by at least a dozen. Four kinds, mining, med, communications, and repair. I’ve counted round thirty at Farkli’s, probably more than that. Four Mucks under Hunnar. Never see those. Um. Some support staff for day to day business the Mucks won’t mess their hands with. Borrow that pencil and pad?”
