Changer's Moon

by Clayton, Jo;

  Tuli raised her brows but said nothing. With a challenging grin and a flirt of her hand at Rane’s warning growl, she went out.

  The big heavy door opened more easily than she expected and she almost fell down the front steps. Of course it’s cleared, she thought. Don’t be an idiot like Nilis. The norit came through, didn’t he? Pull yourself together, girl, and act like you know what you’re doing. She put her hands in her pockets and looked around as casually as she could.

  The streets had been cleared of snow sometime during the day. The clouds hung low overhead and a few flakes were drifting down, caught for a moment in the fan of light coming from the hall behind her, enough snow to speckle the dark wet stone with points of ephemeral white, promise of a heavier fall to come. She waited there for several minutes, oppressed by the cold and the silence. There was no one about as far as she could see; not even her nightsight could find what wasn’t there. If there was danger, it was hidden behind the gloomy façades fronting the narrow street. I could use Teras’s gong, she thought. Maiden bless, I wish he was here. She looked around again and went back in.

  Rane was waiting just inside the front door, tense and alert; she relaxed as soon as she saw Tuli, but shook her head when Tuli started to speak. When they were back in the stable beside that cumbersome body, she said, “Any vermin about?”

  “None that I saw.” Tuli shrugged. “Late, cold, wet, starting to snow again, who else but us’d be idiots enough to leave a warm bed?”

  “Good enough. Get his feet.”

  Tuli went shuffling along, panting under the growing weight of the dead norit’s legs. She would have sworn that they’d gained a dozen pounds since they’d started. Conscious always of what they carried, she tensed at every corner and that tired her more. The cold crept into the toes of her boots and stabbed needles into her feet; the flakes blown against her face and down her neck melted and trickled into the crevices of her body, the icy water burning like fire. The wind was a squealing blast, sometimes battering at her, sometimes circling round her like a sniffing sicamar when the buildings protected them from its full force. She wondered why the streets were clear of snow, then remembered her own wretched time in the Cymbank House of Repentance where they tried to wear her spirit away by making her scrub and rescrub a section of hallway (until she threw the dirty water over the matron in charge after she’d made disparaging remarks about her mother). She grinned at the memory and felt a bit better. She decided the Followers didn’t seem to have much imagination; they probably worked those they wanted to punish in some lesser way than flogging, making them dig up and carry off the snow. She could see herds of sullen folk tramping through the streets filling barrows of the soggy white stuff and wheeling them out in an endless line to dump them in the river. Or somewhere. After a minute, she grinned again as she thought of the Carthise having enough of this endless and futile labor, turning on the Followers and dumping them instead of snow into the river, but the cold sucked away that brief glow and she was stumbling along, miserable again.

  Her feet slipped and nearly went out from under her if she didn’t set them down carefully; once the stiffening legs she held saved her from crashing. The snow was coming down faster; Rane was little more than a shadow before her. Tuli felt herself a shade, a being without substance, a conductor of the lower levels of Shayl, ferrying unblessed dead to their torment. She walked grimly on, half-blinded, concentrating most of her will on feet she could no longer feel. Then Rane turned into a narrow alley between two large buildings, solidly black, melting into the black of the strengthening storm. The sudden cessation of the wind’s howl, the withdrawal of its numbing pressure, made her footsteps boom in her ears and her face burn as if the skin was ready to peel off the bone. She started shaking, fought to control it, but could not; it was all she could do to keep her hold on the corpse’s legs.

  Rane halted, shrugged off the sack, dropped the corpse’s shoulders, dragging the legs from Tuli’s grip, pulling her onto her knees. While the ex-meie knelt before a small heavy door and started work on the lock, Tuli crouched beside her listening to the faint clicks of the lockpicks. She wiped carefully at her nose, pulled off one of her gloves and used the knitted liner to wipe the wet from her face and neck, still shivering.

  Rane stood, waved at the black gape. “Get in,” she said. “Ramp going down. Don’t fall off it.”

  “What about him?”

  “Never mind him. Here.” She pressed a firestriker into Tuli’s hand. “See if you can get a lamp lit.”

  “Lamp?”

  “On the wall by the door at the far end.”

  The lamplight was a soft, rich amber, but there was only a fingerwidth of oil left in the reservoir. Tuli suspected they were lucky to find that much since this subterranean chamber looked as bare and deserted as the stables where they’d first come in. She watched Rane roll the corpse down the ramp, leave it sprawled at the bottom, dumping the sack beside it. Her nose was red and beginning to peel a little, her face was windburnt and strained. She came over to Tuli, cupped a hand under her chin and lifted her face to the light. “You’re a mess.”

  Tuli moved her head away. “You’re not much better. I’m all right.”

  Rane frowned at her. “I’ve got no business dragging you into this. Hal was right.” She pulled off her cap and shook the snow from it. “If I had the least sense in my head, I’d have sent you back the night we left.”

  “I wouldn’t have gone,” Tuli said flatly.

  “Dragged you then.”

  Tuli glared at her. “I won’t melt,” she said. “Or blow away. I’ve seen winter before.”

  “From a well-provisioned house with fires on every floor.” Rane touched her nose absently, quick little dabs, her eyes unfocused as if she was unaware of what she was doing. Then she shrugged. ‘It’s done.”

  “Yah. What is this place?”

  “Warehouse, part of a merchant’s home complex. Usually isn’t this empty, but I took a chance it would be. Not much trade the past few months.” She went quickly to the wall that fronted the street and began feeling along it. Tuli got to her feet and started walking about. It was appreciably warmer in this long narrow cellar, but the air had a used-up stale smell. She waved her arms about, wiggled her fingers, did a few twisting bends. Sitting down had been a mistake, she’d known it as soon as she was down, could feel her muscles seizing up as the minutes passed. She watched Rane fumbling about the wall, cursing under her breath as she sought the trigger that would let them back into the ancient dry sewerway.

  Then Rane hissed with triumph and tore the panel open. She came striding back, thrust her arm through the strap of the sack, blew Tuli along before her to the corpse and swept on to haul his shoulders up and wait impatiently for Tuli to lift the feet.

  Crawling on hands and knees they dragged the body through the long dark hole. In an odd way, Tuli found it easier hauling him where she couldn’t see him, not even with her special sight. Now there was only the stiff feel of wooden flesh wrapped in heavy wool. She could pretend it was something else she was helping to drag over the bricks. She had no idea where they were going, but plenty of confidence in Rane. Owl-eyes, Rane had called her once. Only a few months ago? So much had happened since, it seemed like several lifetimes. Moth, Rane called her now. She liked that, she liked the image, great-eyed winged creature swooping through the night, she liked the affection she heard in the way Rane said it.

  There was no light at all down here. Never in her life had she been in blackness so complete. She began tasting and sniffing at the thick black around her. Blacker than an agli’s heart, blacker than Nilis’ soul had to be. Black. Raven, ebony, obsidian, jet, sable, sooty, swart, pitchy.

  In the blackness, sounds: scuffle of hands, knees, feet, sliding whisper of the norit’s black wool robe over the bricks, pounding of blood in ears, assorted rubbings of surface against surface, the rasp of breathings.

  In the blackness, smells: wet wool and stone, wet leather, ancie
nt dust, sour-sweet taint of something recently dead, not the corpse they pulled behind them, smell of cold over all like paint, the dead smell of the cold.

  Then she saw bricks a short distance ahead. Then she saw Rane’s hand and side. The light crept up to them, shining back at them off the snow. They crawled around a bend and she could see the crossbars of the grating and the spray of snow drifted through them.

  Rane dropped the nor’s arm and crawled up to the opening. She fished in her boot for the lockpick, reached a long arm through the grating and began working on the lock. Some fumbling and grimaces later, she got to her feet, stood hunched over, brushed off her knees and tugged at the grating. It squealed and hung up on the small drift but she jerked at it, muscling it a little farther open. She frowned at the opening, twisted half-around to look at the corpse. “I suppose we can kick him through.”

  “Well, he’s getting a bit stiff.”

  Rane leaned back, reached out, tapped Tuli on her nose. “That’s a norit for you; anything to make life difficult.”

  After some awkward maneuvering, they got the body through the opening. Tuli shivered as the long sweep of the wind slammed into her as soon as she stepped out from the wall. Above the whine of the wind she could hear the tumble of the river close by, so close it startled her. She stomped freezing feet in the snow as Rane tugged the grating back into place and snapped the latch.

  The river was not yet frozen over, though plates of ice were forming along the banks, breaking off and sweeping away with the hurrying water. Rane and Tuli swung the body back and forth, then launched it into an arc out over the broad expanse of icy black snow-melt. It splashed down, sank, resurfaced; for a short while a stiff arm appeared and disappeared, the body rolling over and over as the current sucked it away.

  Rane plucked at Tuli’s sleeve, leaned down to shout in her face. “Hook onto my belt. We’ll pick up the snowshoes and get back to the macain.”

  “What about Gesda?”

  “He can take care of himself.”

  “Tell me about him.”

  Rane chuckled, “Later, Moth. When I don’t have to yell every word.” She took Tuli’s gloved hand, hooked it over her jacket’s belt and started plowing forward through the deepening snow, the sack that Gesda had given her bumping rhythmically with the shift of her shoulders.

  The stone hut was cold and stuffy at once, the windows shuttered, the heavy door shut tight. Inside, it smelled of old woman and chini in equal proportions (though the big black chini Tuli had seen before gave no sign of her presence) as if generations of both species had in some way oozed into the walls and stayed there to haunt the place with their odors. There were cured hides on the walls to break the drafts that somehow found their way through the thick stone walls and the tightly fitted shutters and the door. More hides were scattered about the floor, pelts piled on pelts so that walking across the room was an exercise in caution and balance. The old woman sat cross-legged before the fire, her face a pattern of black and red, glitters of eyeball from the drooping slits in the smudges about her eyes. Her hands were square and strong like her face, wrinkled like her face, the palms broad, the fingers so short they looked deformed, more like an animal’s paws than human hands. Tuli watched her and felt the last of the chill, physical and mental, begin to seep out of her. She glanced at Rane and saw something of the same relaxation in the ex-meie’s face. “Tell me about Roveda Gesda.”

  Rane sighed. “He calls himself a silversmith, but he’d starve if he had to live by it. He’s a thief and smuggler and, well call him an organizer. He’s got connections in Oras with the man we’re going to see there, with a number of caravan masters and certain merchants on the east coast. He and some others like him give us a lot of information from all over the world.” She yawned, twisted her head about. “Shayl, I’m tired. Hal’s part of the net, so are the others we’ll be talking to.” She smiled at Tuli. “Maybe you’ll be a part of it one day.” She turned to the old woman. “Read for us if you will, Ajjin.”

  The old woman flicked a hand at the fire. The pinch of herbs she tossed on the coals flared up, blue and green, a pungent, pleasant smell floating out into the room, trails of misty smoke drifting out to hover about them. The old woman breathed deeply three times then three times more. Her hands moved on her thighs, fingers curling to touch her thumbs. Her lips, dark, almost black, trembled, stilled, trembled again. “A changer’s moon is on us,” she said, her voice at once soft and harsh. “The land is stirring, a strange folk come with strange ways. What was will be lost in what will be. Follower and Keeper both will fade. Changer’s moon.…”

  The words echoed in Tuli’s head. Moon. Moon. Moon. Moon. Passages of change. Change. Clang-clang, chimes ringing, the world, the word, the clapper ting-tant-tang. War. War. Warooo. A howl. Churn the land. Waroo, oohwar, wrooo. Waroo. Churn the land. Destroy. Destruction. Death, rot, death and rot, the old gone, the new born from ashes, ashes and pain. Changer’s moon. New newborn thing … thing what will what will what will come? Who knows what it is, misborn or wellborn, mis or well?

  The red light shifted across the black of the wood, forming into shaplier blobs, melting into anonymity, forming again. Each time closer to the shape of something—as if something agonized to be born out of the fire. Tuli watched that struggle with a growing tension and anxiety. Now and again, for relief as much as anything else, she shifted her gaze to Rane. Who sat silent, exhaustion registered in the map of faint lines etched across her pale skin, too tired to move, too comfortable with the warmth on her face to go to the sleep she needed, too tired to see the thing that was happening before her eyes. Tuli swung her head and stared at the old woman.

  Ajjin was brooding over the fire. Whether she too saw nothing or saw the beast trotting about the coals, Tuli couldn’t tell. Beast. Small and sleek, as long as the distance between her elbow and the tip of her longest finger, translucent body with a sort of spun glass fur, red and gold. The beast leaped from the fire and went trotting about the room, pushing its nose against things, small black nose that twitched with an amazing energy in spite of the stuffy chill of the room. The old one sat staring at the coals, silent now, but Tuli thought she looked inward, not out. Her lips moved, the black hole of her mouth changed shape like a visual echo of the rhythm of the silent chant.

  Gradually the walls around the room turned to mist, melted away entirely. At first Tuli was only peripherally aware of this, then suddenly—yet at the time so smoothly she felt no shock or surprise—she wasn’t in the room at all. Somehow she floated above the mijloc, could see the whole of it, see it from many directions at once, moving points of view. It was as if she was in a great round dance, fleeting from point to point, round and round the mijloc—and others danced with her, wraiths of folk she knew, wraiths of folk she’d never seen before, dancing the round dance of Primaver. She was euphoric, then later as the dance went on and on under the dance of the moons, through moon-shadow and moon glow, across the snow-stifled land, she was afraid and not afraid, the others lifting her, cradling her, singing soundless songs to her that she sang back to them; they sang together to the land slipping away below them, they sang to the life of the land, calling to it, comforting it, rousing it and the life it bore to slip the chains laid on it, to burst free of all but the round of life itself, the round dance of birth and death and rebirth.

  The snow boiled and bubbled, white fire spitting out, birthing out animal shapes, more animals like the fireborn in the old woman’s hut. The animal shapes, eyes glowing ambergold, ruby gold, sungold, dance the round dance, exuberant, elegant, elegiac, mute voices chanting soundless song, the earth replying with sonorous bell notes to the touches of the dancing feet.

  One by one, as the spiral of the dance tightened, the animal shapes dropped away; the ghost dancers dropped away with them and sank into the land to wait. Yes, wait. That was the feel. A tension, an explosion of terrible patience. They were waiting.…

  Tuli blinked, dazed, wet her lips, stared at
the dying fire, moved her shoulders, surprised at the ache in them, and looked down to see the fireborn curled like a bit of shaped light in her lap. She moved again, her legs had gone to sleep and the biting aches and nips of twitching muscles made themselves known, moved without thinking of the beast lying in the hollow of her lap. It made no sound when she jarred it, but adjusted quietly to the new hollows it filled, lifted the pointed head and gazed at her from alert and eerily knowing gold-amber eyes.

  “What are you?” she said.

  “What?” Rane looked up. She scrubbed her hands hard across her face, straightened out her legs, drew her knees up again. “Time we were for bed.” She got to her feet, moving more laboriously than usual, stumbling as a foot caught on one of the layered pelts, catching herself with one hand pressed to the stone wall close beside her.

  Tuli reached down to touch the shadow beast. For an instant only she felt a sort of resistance, then her hand passed through it to rest on her thigh. She jerked the hand up with a sharp exclamation, startled and rather frightened. The beast’s eyes seemed to twinkle at her, its mouth opened in a cat-grin. She felt a chuckle bubble in her blood, its laughter injected into her veins. She scratched delicately behind a glassy ear and laughed again, her own laughter this time.

  Rane blinked at her. “You’re overtired, Moth, getting silly.”

  “Not me,” Tuli said. She started prodding very carefully at the red-black outline. “Ajjin, what is this? Do you know?” It cocked its head, sharp ears pricking, and grinned that curling grin at her and she grinned back, feeling giddy and very happy. It was warm and heavy and alive, no matter if her hand slipped into it like a finger poking through the skin on hot milk.