Finders-Seekers

by Gayle Greeno

  With butterfly softness, Harrap brushed a strand of silver hair from Mahafny’s set face. “Lady bless and keep those around Her,” he comforted, broadening the sweep of his gaze and benediction to include Evelien as well.

  Mahafny stirred, then looked unseeingly at her hands folded tightly in her lap. “I confess I fear that She may bless and keep those She shouldn’t and forget those She should, Harrap.”

  “If you have done a procedure ten times over ten, then you have faith in the results, faith in the outcome. Grant the Lady that much faith, for She has more than ten times ten to Her credit than we can ever envision.”

  “Eumedicos make poor believers, but thank you, Harrap. I’ll try.”

  Unexpected cups of strong, hot cha were thrust into their hands, the squat mugs vaporish and cloyingly rich with the scent of sweet amber honey and rum. As one - they lifted them to their faces and inhaled the headiness of it. Motioning them to hold, Jenret sniffed and took a small sip, swishing the liquid around in his mouth, then swallowing with slow concentration. Doubtful, he sniffed again. “Not drugged, I don’t think. Mahafny, what’s your opinion?”

  She, too, swirled the contents, looking for telltale hints of undissolved crystals or powder, then inhaled the aroma and tasted a minute amount.

  Towbin spoke from behind her. “Safe, on whatever honor you’ll account me. The normal libation at the completion of a long and arduous journey. I made them myself.”

  Jenret and Mahafny raised their mugs in ironic salute and then drank as one. Doyce and Harrap followed suit, but more circumspectly because of the heat.

  “Honor doesn’t require that you scald your tongue to show your trust.” Towbin pretended to cool his own tongue by fanning a hand in front of his open mouth. “At any rate, I figured you all deserved them for having made it this far. Too bad we didn’t meet in kinder days.” He sketched a minimal salute in Doyce’s direction with his own cup, then turned toward Vesey, ready to resume his duties.

  The hot rum coursed through her veins, she could map its route by the blessed heat following in its wake. She savored the light-headedness, the burning face, didn’t care in the least, gulped at the mug again. Ah, so good! The faces around her looked almost expansive and happy, as the others relaxed as well.

  Then the voice slid into her mind, as seductively appealing as the rum’s intoxicating warmth, but with an after-chill that left her stone sober, heart racing to flee or fight and with the wounding knowledge that she was capable of neither.

  “Doyce,” it insisted, “come now, it’s time. Don’t make me ask again.”

  She stumbled upright, the others adrift in their own solitary enjoyment as she groped her way outside their tight, private cluster. Her knee jostled Jenret, laughing at last and draining his mug, head thrown back and eyes closed, lashes long against his cheek. A part of her sensed that he made a belated, blind grab at her leg, but it came too late. She marched toward the central fire as Vesey had commanded.

  “Well, well, you came after all. I was beginning to get very angry.” He spoke aloud now, the words precisely articulated, each word distinct and with a carrying tone that encompassed the entire circle, binding it more tightly despite its will. “A little public humiliation now, rather than a strictly private one, don’t you think?”,

  He paced back and forth in front of the fire but never too near it, the darting flames outlining his dark figure with a nimbus of orange-gold, an aura of cobalt blue. She noted now as she had before how he always kept a careful, more than respectful distance from any flame, near but not too near, simultaneously drawn to it and repelled by it.

  He read her mind. “I was born of the fire. It fathered me more than your Varon, that putative father of mine, ever did. A hard birthing but a true one, for it made me Me. My mother would have approved of the fact that it wasn’t an easy birth. Pain makes you learn quickly.”

  She stood there, feet apart, hands thrust deep in pockets to disguise her trembling. The medallion slid away from her questing fingers but still remained her captive.

  “How did you escape?” she whispered. “Nothing could have lived through that fire. I tried to force my way through to find you, even after I knew in my heart that Varon and Briony were dead. I still kept trying to find you. Others tried as well.” The crackling of the fire snapped obscenely loud and laughing in her ears, overpowering, smothering her words.

  “I know. You have a sense of honor and duty—for whatever that’s worth.” His tone gentled her, almost caressing. “And perhaps that’s why I’ve waited this long to make you repay your other debts to me.”

  She tried again. “How did you survive?” It seemed important to understand the how, even if not the why.

  “Neighbors came from all around, remember? Moths to the flame, singeing themselves to try to save you and your poor, precious loved ones. But there were two, their names aren’t important now, and one still lives in the old town, who were distantly related to my mother and me. They had her powers as well, though only a touch of them, but that power allowed them to focus on me and find me.” He stopped short, shoulders hunched in remembered pain, then whirled to face her again.

  “Do you have any inkling of what it’s like to lie there, the very floor searing your face, your shoulder, your side, a pain so fierce your flesh shudders and tries to crawl away despite the fact your body can’t move? And the flames cackling and screaming and fighting amongst themselves like wolves tearing at each other, leaving the victor to rip the sweetest, tenderest morsel from the live, quivering flesh of the downed animal. Each individual hair on your head rises and dances before it dies, shriveling in the heat, the fire scything it closer and closer to your head.

  “Do you have any idea? I doubt it.” He moved toward her, closer and closer, then stopped short several lengths away. A tiny torch glowed in each eye, and the image perplexed her because Vesey stood with his back to the fire, impossible for his eyes to reflect it.

  “I was lucky, lucky.” The fused, clawed hand shook in front of her nose, emphasizing his words. “There was the thinnest margin of time. For some reason the spot where I writhed on the floor was a fraction cooler than the rest of the inferno. Who know why? At any rate, it gave my friends just enough time to trace my mindcries and pull me out, though they, too, were burned. Anyone who saw us probably thought I was some blackened, smoldering blanket, some rescued but unusable relic from another life.

  “They spirited me to a Hospice two days’ ride away. I begged them to take me as far away as they could. The ride was agony. They rigged a sling, a hammock, in the back of the wagon-bed and there wasn’t a patch of my flesh that wasn’t blistered and oozing, crusted with char. Luckily my mouth was too swollen to cry out in pain.” The bad hand came back, stroking the scarred mouth corner.

  “I was a curiosity to the eumedicos there. They’d never seen anyone that badly burned live. And when, in my delirium, they discovered I was a Gleaner, they realized they had an opportunity such as they’d never had before. A chance to experiment and discover just what it was that made mindspeech humanly possible—if they could control me long enough to keep me from snatching the very ideas out of their heads and destroying them.”

  “That’s when they brought you here, then?” Doyce gestured up toward the distant bulk of the Hospice, now a pale gray scar against the charcoal bulk of the mountain and the looming night, the long-set sun done with the delicate tintings which had decorated the building before.

  His “Yes” floated out in a long, exhaled breath. “It was a long journey and by then I had healed enough so that I could scream in pain at every jolt and jounce, and at every dreaded stopover when they picked and peeled and scraped away the dead flesh to find the new underneath.”

  “Debriding, it’s called,” she corrected without thinking. And despite herself, despite knowing what the boy had become, she empathized with the long-lost child who had endured pain beyond enduring.

  “Thank you.” He made a sardonic half-bow.
“Actual experience yields to superior medical terminology.” Then his face flashed to a passionate seriousness as his nubbed fingers indicated the distant gray walls. “But I found something very special there. Not just the healing of my flesh and the training of my mind, because still—to most of them—I was a curiosity, a golden chance to chart the unknown. And they thought that what they could chart they could control. They played with me and I played with them. They know better now, much, much better.

  “But there was someone else there, someone else like me, whose mind reached out as groping and unsure as mine had been before the fire.”

  “Evelien.” She supplied the name although no response was necessary.

  “Do you know what it’s like to share a mind? Do you have any idea?” He stopped short before the fire. “Of course you do, how silly of me. It’s just that so few understand. But a Seeker, even with the imperfect mind-blending the ghatti allow, knows far more than the common folk ever will of this gift.

  “That, of course, is why we’ve been so interested in Seekers and ghatti over the past few years. Your gifts parallel but aren’t identical to ours. They offer us a new way to discover and experiment as to how this ability works, is transmitted, whether it can be replicated in just anyone or if you have to be born to it as we are. You’re our little laboratory rats, now that we’ve experimented as much as we can on some of our own less ‘worthy,’ less tractable members, not to mention an array of ‘normal’ minds. The Erakwa proved fascinating but a dead end. Naturally, Evelien and I are far too valuable for the more, shall we say, radical experiments and dissections.” She could detect no irony in his words and his passionate seriousness left her terrified.

  “Stealing Cloud before he was weaned was another step. And a superlative stroke of fate, because surely had he lived any longer he would have been destroyed because he carried the seeds of evil, as you so quaintly put it. The mother ghatta and her Bond tracked us for days until we put them out of their misery. She would have destroyed Cloud, so it was only fair.”

  “Have you learned much from all your experiments?” The words left a lingering distaste in her mouth.

  He looked back at her earnestly, the tiny fires in each eye still flickering. “Oh, enough, very nearly enough. But, of course, we shall learn even more now that you’re here. A shame about Khar’pern, that would have made it perfect. But at least now we have the Shepherd plus Parm and Barbet as well as Saam, and even after all this time there’s much to learn from slide sections, cell comparisons. If only we’d had him earlier when both brains could have been fresh....”

  Oriel, he was speaking of Oriel! Oriel, whose brain Vesey and Evelien had literally snatched, spied on, dissected and labeled and analyzed, as if the dead tissues could reveal what they needed to know about who and what Oriel was—friend, lover, a Seeker who sought so true. The tears willed themselves to slide down her face of their own accord, the rest of her statue-still, marble-cold.

  “Ah. How insensitive of me. To rekindle old memories like that. Rekindle, what an interesting term regarding fire.”

  She pulled a hand free from her pocket to wipe her eyes and realized she clutched the medallion in her fist—a hot coal that she wanted to throw as far away from her as she could.

  “It’s time now, Doyce, it’s time,” Vesey crooned, just as he had crooned to Briony. “I’ve been so patient and waited this long, told you my story, but now it’s time.” His voice boomed hard and commanding. “I want it now, Doyce, the medallion. Give it to me, it’s mine and I need it as a focus for the ultimate control and transmittal of my powers. That’s why Mother gave it to me, though she didn’t know how she’d carried tradition down through so many years. To her it was precious but still a medallion. I can see more than that, I can feel its power crying out to me, felt it increasing each time I invaded your dreams. I’ve grown into my powers now and so has it. Give it to me, now!”

  Despite her overwhelming desire only moments earlier to rid herself of it, she perversely clutched it tighter, holding her clenched fist against her chest and protecting it with her other hand. The dark shapes around the perimeter of the circle were frozen, faces showing white and shadowed, mutable in the firelight. She could see Mahafny’s and Jenret’s and Harrap’s faces since they sat closer, but she couldn’t read them, or somehow couldn’t spare the effort to do so.

  “No,” she responded, and then, surprised by the tenderness in her voice, spoke again. “No, I will not.”

  “Doyce, Doyce. I’ve spent enough time over this. I’ve asked politely when I simply could have taken what is mine. Or I could have Cloud do it, or Evelien, if you prefer. There’s always your poor, lost soul, your fallen angel, Barbet.” The words mist-runed the cold night air, and she shivered, remembering the white ghatt’s lascivious thoughts, a vision that held a deeper meaning of an obscene relationship between Vesey and her. He glided into her thoughts smoothly. “Evelien would love to have the opportunity—she’s still jealous of you, a trait I’ll have to wean her from. She may have to learn how to share.”

  Should she give it to him? It was his, after all. How long had she unwittingly carried this poisonous thing? Her hand started out from her chest and she stopped it with an act of will, even though her hand throbbed and smoldered as if the medallion would escape by burning through the palm of her hand and out the other side. She bit her inner cheek for a counteracting pain and realized now the force the Erakwan had battled in trying to disobey Vesey’s instructions. But he had managed to maintain his dignity.

  She roared her defiant answer. “No!” And knew that they no longer spoke aloud but conversed in mindspeech, a deadly dueling intimacy with no weapons in sight in front of an uncomprehending audience.

  The first sensation sparkled like hundreds of tiny, colored paper lanterns bursting into flame, one by one, flickering throughout her neural system, brighter and crueler and even more colorful in their succeeding heat and nearness. (Violet pulsation) “I (indigo) will (blue) have (green) it (yellow) now, (orange) Doyce, (red) now!” Then a pinwheeling explosion of white heat melding all colors into one, followed by blessed blackness, the absolute absence of color and action.

  “No,” she droned persistently, drawing the blackness across her like a cloak. “You will not have it.”

  Every thought within her felt buffeted, tossed and hurled high into the air, picked through, examined and discarded, as if a tornado whirled inside her head. She fought back, clinging to one tiny thought, then painstakingly grabbing another to join it and share her weight, as if her face pressed tight against the side of a cliff, fingers and toes scrabbling for any minute crack or crevice to gain a hold. And as she found one, another rough grip met her desperately questing thought, then another, until she stabilized, her mind holding firm against the sucking force that threatened to toss her and her thoughts high into the air and let them fall to the ground, limp and broken.

  “Yet again, Doyce, with this unpleasantness? Why struggle to retain something you have no claim to?”

  “No claim, ” she agreed, “but neither do you. Not for the use you’d make of it. ”

  “Fine, as you choose. Less subtlety then, less artistry, but more pain. As you will it, then.”

  The anticipation slammed worse than any pain Vesey could visit on her, she told herself, steeling herself for the next bout and clenching her fingers ever tighter around the medallion. How long could this go on? (Eternally, her mind answered back.) And what worth to it when she knew that he would be the ultimate victor? (Are you enjoying the pain? her mind asked.) Why balk him with this foolishness? (Because that is exactly what he wants me to think, to feel, to fear.) Could she bargain? (No, it’s beyond that.) Too late. (Let him snatch every thought, every hope, every piece of sentience from me and leave the empty husk. That’s the only way he’ll win!)

  “Exactly my thought, my stubborn one. Or exactly your thoughts, to be precise. After all, you’ve been supplying me with them for such a long time now. I’ve co
me to thirst for them. ”

  Parched, parched, every drop of moisture flowing out of her body, striking the ground, sizzling and dancing water droplets on a cast iron griddle. Parched, a thirst that would know no surcease, would never end, while flesh blistered and cracked open, oozing precious droplets of moisture. Burning, burning, locked in burning, hair flying out, each strand alive and stretching free, floating in the inferno, riding the heat waves as a spider clutches its ever-lengthening anchor thread as it floats to a new location on an errant breeze. Eyeballs crystallized diamond-bright from the heat and the pressure of a thousand, thousand, thousand centuries of searing pain.

  Parched, parched. And the empty husk, the empty shell of Doyce withers, crackling, and starts to burst into flame, edges searing, the flame quickening and catching deeper and deeper, ravaging toward the core of her being.

  Her hands dropped nervelessly to her sides, fingers starting to unclench. Her body swayed back and forth as if pounded by a pelting storm. The medallion began its slide from her fingers.

  Then movement, motion. Her eyes registered the disruption, movement counter to the pattern of the flames. Strange that she should bother to notice, let alone recognize. The young Erakwan boy, Nakum—that was his name?—running, but hampered by some sort of burden. And as he darted by with an earsplitting yelp of warning, he heaved the bundle as hard as he could in her direction.

  She threw up her arms protectively, ready to ward off whatever was flying toward her. Her hand clenched again on the medallion; it hindered her, but she refused to let go. And then she heard it.

  “Com-ing!”

  Khar’s body unfurled itself from the folds of blanket wrapping, and Doyce heard the loud, inchoate scream of joy tearing from her throat as she desperately tried to estimate the ghatta’s trajectory and catch her. The ghatta slammed into her chest with a satisfying thud that expelled the air from her lungs and she wrapped her arms around her.