Finders-Seekers

by Gayle Greeno

  “Yes, that’s Vesey.”

  The dark circles under his eyes emphasized their bright blueness, and the fear that lodged there. “Then Lady help us all, because I don’t know what we can do against him. Cornered and trapped with or without the bonds!”

  And with that Towbin sprinted over and grabbed Ophar’s bridle, the resentful stallion jerking his head as he led them away. For the first time she saw Vesey’s other lieutenant, the one who had ridden beside him all day, only his back in her view. A ripple of shock and revulsion surged through her. Unbelievable! She’d shouted his name without thinking, “Georges! Georges Barbet!” as he approached and seized her by bound wrists, pressing a dirt-smeared hand along the back of her neck as he steered her forward. She’d never seen him this dirty and unkempt before—yet his face glowed with an expression of luminous exaltation—as if whatever burned so brightly within left such external concerns as cleanliness in ashes.

  She strained to talk over her shoulder as he shoved her along. “Georges, how did you get here? Have you joined Vesey? What in the merciful heavens is going on?” Wasn’t he going to speak, respond? The words died in her throat until all she could manage was “Georges? Oh, poor Parm....”

  The name made his mouth twitch in a jerky parody of a smile. “Oh, yes, Parm.” The words sounded thick, as though he’d become unused to speaking aloud, but then he began to regain a conversational cadence. “Oh, yes, poor Parm. Stupid ghatt! Not to know, not to understand that it could be greater than ever before. To flee like that when we could have attained so much more, once I’d found the way to explain things to him.” He paused, eyelids fluttering as if he dreamed, “He was the only bulwark I had at first, and we needed each other so...”

  “Well, then explain to me,” she cajoled, hating the damp touch of his hand on her neck, wanting to fling off the over-familiarity.

  “So long ago when I was a child, hearing voices, hearing voices in pain from inside, needy for help, and not knowing what I could do to help them, though I could tell what was wrong. Mum always said not to worry about the voices, that it was natural we could hear them, we were descended from eumedico stock and should be proud of our skills, tender with them to others because someday I’d learn to be a eumedico and everything would come right. Until then I should, I must keep quiet about what I could hear because people didn’t understand, and hated what they couldn’t understand—us.

  “I didn’t understand either, and it was such a relief when Parm chose me, because at least I knew where his voice was coming from and what he wanted of me. He made the other voices seem more distant.” His fingers pinched up just behind her ears. “Only the two of us in my thoughts, almost like being alone. And I didn’t want to be a eumedico—the pain, the blood, the agony. Not after all I’d heard in my mind. No, not that, being a Seeker was better.”

  “Then why change, why stop?” she gasped. “Parm ran away in sheer terror, afraid not just for his life but for his mind.”

  “But don’t you see?” Barbet sounded petulant. “We needed him with me. They wanted Oriel and Saam to experiment on, but not me and Parm, we’re too valuable for that, what with both my abilities. There are at least fifty of us who can hear voices, read minds, people at all levels of skill, and what the Seekers have relates to it somehow. The eumedicos will help us find out, they do Vesey’s bidding, must because he and the eumedico who can mindspeak make them toe the line, just as Vesey keeps the rest in line. There’s so much to learn before we reach the culmination of our abilities! And once we do, we can go forth and remake Canderis as it should be! As it was meant to be! A true sharing amongst all minds!” His voice rose. “And you’ve no idea what Vesey offers, what he does inside your brain, the feelings, the sensations! Agony at first, a ravishment, then a rapturous bliss exploding within you!”

  They had halted where he indicated, and he’d kept his hand in place, squeezing at a pressure point in her neck to force her to spin around and face him. “The sensations!” The haunted look on his face turned sexual, and his hand began a long, tantalizing slide around her neck and crept toward her breast, toyed with a button along the way. His eyes darted ferret-fast and nervy with lust as he shouted invective and instructions toward the two placids with Mahafny, his hand still in a stealthy creep. She backed a half-step, and his narrow, fine-boned face, the features now pronouncedly wizened, swung in her direction, as if just realizing her presence. With deliberation, he grasped her shoulders and molded her tight against his body, kissing her, his tongue lingering in her mouth like a slug. One hand shifted to her breast and began working it like a doorknob. She wrenched her mouth free and spat, wishing she dared do it in his face. And the most chilling thought of all was that she served only as convenient vessel since his beloved Vesey was not available.

  “Later,” he crooned. “I’ll be back later to make you understand. No, stay still while I get your hands tied in front of you. Too bad, if they stayed tied behind, it’d make it easier later.”

  It was taking a chance, but she didn’t care. “I rather think Vesey may have other plans for me, and I doubt they’re similar to yours. Should we check, do you think?” Every muscle in her body vibrated with loathing and exhaustion, but she cherished the momentary glow of triumph, warming herself on it. Not like this, not now, not ever with Georges if she could help it.

  “What he doesn’t know won’t hurt him!”

  “And you think he doesn’t know everything you do? In fact maybe you should wonder what—or who—made you act like that just now. Go ask Towbin how he got his leash tugged earlier. I daresay you know the same feeling yourself—or you will soon. And then how long before that exquisite pain and new knowledge in your brain leaches to nothingness—like those placids over there? Why should you be different? This isn’t a game of Tally-Ho with Vesey, where you count points, calculate odds, chalk it on the board.”

  He scowled, but the skin around his eyes stretched taut with apprehension. She wondered if she’d struck home at all, made him ponder what lay beyond the now, on whom the next experiment might be tried. “Later,” he mumbled, but this time it was less a threat and more a compromise to save face.

  And now she was sitting here, hands tied in front of her, wondering if it were safe to eat a piece of bedraggled cheese. Why not? After all, what were the odds? If Mahafny could eat it, so could she. She wrinkled her nose, peeled the rind with her teeth and nibbled a tiny chunk, considered spitting it out, but as its sharp taste mellowed on her tongue she decided it wasn’t really that bad.

  What she desperately craved—yet didn’t—was the opportunity to speak with Vesey, but her desire swung back and forth like a pendulum. When, not if, was the question, because she surmised that he, in his own way, longed for it as much as she. She managed another, bigger, bite of cheese, then brushed bound hands against her side pocket, relief trickling through her as she grazed the lump that meant that the misshapen medallion still lodged there. So, he hadn’t taken it from her yet, hadn’t had Towbin or Georges search her pockets to reclaim his treasure while she lay unconscious. If he’d waited this long to reclaim it, what could one night more or less matter to him? But serving as its custodian might offer her added protection against Georges.

  Her continual worry for Khar hemmed her closer and closer, the pressure of her absence routing Doyce’s other fears. She yearned to try to contact the ghatta but dared not for fear it might alert Vesey to Khar’s whereabouts, assuming she lived, was any place near. The conscious and continual restraint of an old, familiar habit wore at her heart and mind. Nor did she dare try to contact the other three ghatti, stone silent, drugged into a stupor. As if reading her thoughts—what a stupid thing to think, she berated herself, of course he was, with or without permission to mindwalk—Cloud drifted over and stood observing her.

  Almost without volition she opened her mind to receive his thoughts. Realizing the stark danger, she snapped up barriers, reeling with the protective backlash, then damped them down bit by bit a
s she regained control. The pinkish-red eyes throbbed in intensity like a pulsing, open wound, and she willed herself not to be swallowed up by them.

  Just as her defenses started to crumble and cave in, the ghatt gave a head-splitting yawn that squeezed his eyes closed, then craned his neck from side to side, regarding her with mincing little sideways glances. Interesting, she had at least forced him to yield some sort of grudging respect, whether for her or for the medallion.

  Instead of words, an image jolted her mind, an image of a white ghatt with black muzzle and feet and carnelian eyes stalking a bird. Capturing it, it began to play, tossing it, shaking it, growling through a mouthful of feathers, batting its trembling form from paw to paw, always there to thwart its pitifully elusive gestures. Finally, bored, the image ghatt stalked away, ignoring the broken, bloodied body’s anguished fluttering before its tiny heart burst.

  “Like to play,” the ghatt crooned. “Yes, such fun.” He angled his neck, preened himself. Then, almost as an afterthought, “Vesey likes to play, too.”

  The last bite of cheese lodged in her throat, its pungency melting down her gullet so that she swallowed convulsively. Oh, please, don’t let me see any images of Vesey’s play, she begged her brain. Self-control, self-control, block the conversation, end it, you have to be able to do that.

  “Oh, you can, you know.” Cloud walked away, tail waving in sinuous S-curves. He stopped, sniffed, and backed up to spray a protruding rock. “My mark. Mine. But you can’t stop him from reading you. He has been, all this time, you know. He’s had his mark on you for a long time.” He stretched his head back for a final look. “A good thing for you that you really don’t know where that stupid bitch ghatta is.” An obscene snigger and image seared her mind as she mindblocked a fraction too late.

  How could she have been hungry earlier, she wondered as she stared blankly at the uneaten bread and cheese, fighting against the rising nausea that clenched her stomach muscles tight. The bread and cheese got thrown over her shoulder, better to let some animal or bird have it—unless she’d served up unwitting bait to lure some other innocent to Cloud. Activity, walking, was what she craved, to escape in any direction, walk until she could break into a blind run, until she could fly, flee. She tried an experimental tug at the rope connecting her to one of the placids, and he turned, gave her a half-wave of greeting, a blank, bovine smile on his face. She tugged again, harder, and this time a frown marred his bland features. He ran astonished fingers over his face, as if imprinting the unfamiliarity, then waggled an admonitory finger at her, looking in surprise at his moving hand before it wandered back to his food, a plate of some sort of stew. She smelled with clarity the separate components of potatoes and carrots and beef and gravy, the last things she wanted assaulting her nose. She turned away, hunched her shoulders as if that could blockade the smell, and saw Jenret and Harrap, pinioned to their log, using it as a pillow while they spoke in undertones to each other.

  Cloud’s words replayed themselves through her mind. Ominous and yet not in the least unexpected. He didn’t need the ghatt to transmit thoughts from one human to another. Vesey could read thoughts and leave them intact, not merely snatch them away in the usual crude Gleaner fashion. Unprecedented, never done before, despite the eumedicos’ years of pretense, not to mention efforts to discover why and how it happened. A skill that the eumedicos had once had, after all, and not lost if Georges were to be believed. It was simply that those who possessed these skills were not eumedicos. Had Vesey learned by himself or had he had help? Had the fire wrought some sort of change in him?

  She sat, gnawing the back of her wrist, thinking, calculating. Depending on the skills of those who followed him, fifty were enough to hold off any army, control any country the size of Canderis, twist good intentions or bad ones. Were there others scattered through the land as well, unallied with Vesey or unaware of their powers until his clarion mindcry drew them to him? No way of knowing until it was too late. And if Vesey were sane, then she qualified as mad.

  Then, something she didn’t want to think of but had to, based on her eumedico training and on the last obscene image Cloud had taunted her with: how often would a trait like that breed true from generation to generation, or was Vesey unique? Damn the eumedicos to the furthest reaches of hell if they thought this a nice pristine experiment, able to be controlled or destroyed at their whim? Vesey was living proof of that. Microscopic slides didn’t begin to hint at the reality. Eumedicos! She glanced in Mahafny’s direction, sighed—still impossible to move close enough to share her thoughts and fears with the older woman, and she felt bereft, alone.

  A commotion in the camp’s center by the fire distracted her as a horse and rider appeared out of the night, flanked on either side by an Erakwan, one a full-grown man, the other a slight youth whom she thought was Nakum, Addawanna’s grandson. Nothing but dark center and light-fused edges since horse and rider positioned themselves between her and the fire, staring into its flaming heart.

  The neat, economical dismount, no excess motions, tweaked at Doyce’s memory, reminding her of someone, and her ears caught the rise of light, dismissive, feminine laughter. The two Erakwa drifted away, back to their forest and their own camp, and the boy—Nakum, she was right—contrived to slip past her as they left. The faintest wink in an otherwise studiously impassive face, the cupping of right hand over left arm, crooked to his chest as if he held and stroked it with his free hand. Could it be possible ... ? No, not with the Erakwa’s feelings about ghatti.

  The woman, yes, clearly a woman now that she had shifted to the other side of the campfire, greeted Vesey—always a cautious distance from any flame, she had noticed that throughout the evening—and then bent to talk with the placid who anchored Mahafny’s rope leash. He nodded, an eager head-bobbling, and rose, reaching for a torch. The two walked in Mahafny’s direction to where the eumedico dozed, unaware of visitors.

  The thrust of the lighted torch and a sharp-spoken word woke Mahafny and she clambered to her feet, ungainly for the first time Doyce had ever witnessed. Overnight she had begun showing her age and more, tired, gaunt, worried, on the raw, tattered edge of self-control. Doyce gasped as the younger woman shifted, and the torch illuminated both faces. For the face reflected Mahafny’s mirror-image, if a mirror could subtract thirty years and present a smooth, faintly supercilious expression accentuated by dark, winged eyebrows and a smooth coiffed chignon of dark hair.

  “Hello, Mother.”

  “Hello, Evelien.” From whatever scant inner resources she hoarded, Mahafny drew herself straight, reflecting her daughter’s pose, shoulders back, defiant chin-set. Her voice, when she spoke again, held no tremble of fear, and Doyce mentally applauded her. “I’d ask what brings you here, but I fear I already know.”

  “You don’t know even the half of it, Mother; you never have, even in your wildest imaginings of scientific breakthroughs and glory for the eumedicos, the glory you thought lost and gone so many long years ago.” Her voice swelled with an evangelical fervor and suppressed triumph.

  As if rousing herself from deep thought, Mahafny managed a bleak smile. “No, I daresay I don’t, but I presume you’ve come to enlighten me. Or have you come merely to gloat?”

  Evelien’s words tumbled over themselves in her eagerness. “It’s been too many years for that. I cured myself of that desire a long time ago, when I realized that I could live without caring whether or not you noticed my existence, could thrive without your approval.” She stood, challenging, clenched hands on hips, as if trying to lay old ghosts to rest.

  “But not without my love, because you’ve always had that, no matter what you thought. Because no matter what you were or what you weren’t, through no fault of your own, I’ve always loved you.”

  “Perhaps you have, Mother. You always were one to stick with outmoded fashions rather than changing with the times. With your scientific ability, your training, your mind, you could have had anything you wanted if you’d been willing
to take the final step to reach the top. You could have headed the Research Hospice here, leading the way in pure and applied research, discovering new breakthroughs. But you wouldn’t dare the final step, too human, too frail, so I did. I control and direct them all now. And I’ve learned more than you and all those dreary eumedicos on their dreary, daily rounds could ever hope to discover!”

  “I’m sure you have, but to what use have you put it?”

  Again her words crowded together with a hectic animation, as if she were seeking approval. “You’ve seen Vesey, you’ve seen and talked with him. What do you make of him—of his gift!”

  “I’d say that further research and investigation are necessary before I make a determination.” The winged brows shot upward. “Perhaps you claim his ability as well?”

  “No ... not yet, not fully.” The admission chastened Evelien. “Just glimmerings at times. It will take even more years of training before I can begin to approach his ability and power.” And her look of self-chastisement was banished by a lustful smirk, sated with self-satisfaction. “But wait until you see our children and the abilities they will have as their rightful heritage! Even now I carry his child! There’s no doubt from my studies, based so helpfully on yours, that the child will inherit that ability; the gene’s recessive. So often it’s masked. When it is, the most you can hope for is someone with Seeker abilities or the paltry empathy of a eumedico. Cousin Jared and I were sheer chance that two separate marriages managed to match recessive genes. This was planned to make the most of what Vesey and I both have.”

  “Perhaps your studies are incomplete, inconclusive. Have you thought on that? Have you ever wondered why so few of you are born? Or live to maturity? Nature often rectifies its own mistakes. Perhaps you should think on that.” No loss of control, no emotion breaking out of bounds, but Doyce watched aghast as Mahafny raised bound hands and deliberately slapped her daughter across the face. “I pray to the Lady that I not live to see the day you pervert your child’s innocent talents—if it lives.”