by Gayle Greeno
“Khar! There are others, others all around! Warn Mahafny, tell the others to beware! They’ve lived amongst us all the time! I can’t tell how many, but they’re there. Can’t you see them?” she pleaded, shielding her eyes from the brilliance of their staring faces, dazzled by their light, eerie ghost-images imprinted inside her lids when she closed her eyes. Gradually the lights began to wink out, fade one by one, until she could no longer remember the faces, the voices, their hopes and fears, their honorable and dishonorable intentions. It was too much to bear, and she would not, she had done her duty.
Doyce saw it all, but refused to see any more. Crumpled on the ground, she watched the trails of brilliance crisscrossing the night sky. Once she’d wished on shooting stars; now she thought on nothingness. Perhaps not so absurd. There was nothingness, that was not an impossibility, it had only been the other voice that had been impossible. After all, what was nothingness but the absence of so many things: pain, loss, anger, suffering. And the absence of love, of course. Nothingness meant never having to choose, to make a decision to love and to suffer the consequences. She grabbed at the thought with every shred of her being. So very tired ... and nothingness meant the absence of tiredness as well. Safe from so many hurts.
She could feel the ghatta trying to mindspeak her, sense her despair, her need to share, but she didn’t have the strength. “Oh, Khar,” she sighed, “let me go, please let me be free. But wait for me, beloved.” She let her eyes drift half-shut, jerked them open guiltily, then let them slide closed again and fell unconscious. Safe.
“I don’t know. It’s up to her,” Mahafny spoke more brusquely than she’d intended as she finished taking Doyce’s pulse and refolded her limp arm over her chest. “The psychic wounds were great before we even began this chase. This may prove more than her mind can handle.”
Jenret scraped a dark lock of hair off his sooty, sweat-stained forehead and pleaded, “But you can do something, can’t you? You have to, you’re a eumedico.”
“That’s perfectly correct: a eumedico, not the Lady or one of Her lesser companion disciples, only an imperfect eumedico with a will to do right but not always with the knowledge to do it.” She kept her back to where her daughter Evelien’s body was laid out. The living always counted for more than the dead. If action might help, mourning would have to wait.
“Can’t Khar reach her? Khar, please try!” He crouched by the ghatta, hand hovering above her striped flank, wondering if he dared reach beyond toward Doyce’s hand, pale against the blanket, until Rawn nudged his hand away.
Eyes wide and dark with fear, the ghatta cowered against Doyce’s side, her breathing matching the rapid, shallow breaths of her Bondmate.
His hands and arms singed and oozing with blisters from trying to rescue Vesey from the fire, Harrap tugged Jenret back from the grieving ghatta. “Khar can’t reach her unless Doyce decides she wants to be reached, you know that. Khar won’t invade her privacy. And Mahafny’s doing all she possibly can, but there are others-who need tending, too.” His face appeared naked, his eyebrows and eyelashes charred away, as if an artist had forgotten the final strokes in a portrait.
At last, the younger man turned and laid both hands on the Shepherd’s broad shoulders. “You, for one. I’m sorry. I know, but I can’t let anything more happen to her, hasn’t she suffered enough?”
“I know, and perhaps that’s why she’s withdrawn, like a wounded animal buried deep in the woods trying to escape its own pain or learn to live through it and heal. Always before she made herself go on living, but she never knew why she did, never felt she had a choice, that she chose of her own volition. She survived each time, but at what price? She’s never forgiven herself for so many things, right or wrong, you could see it in her eyes. Now look around you, there are others besides Doyce and me needing your help. The Erakwa are implacable and thorough against their enemies, and, thank the Lady, they decided we weren’t their enemies. I wonder what finally made them disloyal to Vesey?”
Jenret scowled in concentration, tried to marshal his thoughts which ranged so far away and yet focused on someone so tantalizingly near. If he could only reach her, touch her, but if Khar dared not, how could he dare? He grasped at the thread of the Shepherd’s conversation. “Were they ever loyal to him?” he said and forced himself to continue. “Or were they submissive because they feared his powers over their earth-bonds until Doyce came along? She showed them there were other ways to use mindspeech, that it was meant to seek truth, not to control or dominate what they hold sacred with the earth.”
“The Erakwa know entirely different things from what we know or think we perceive about ourselves and the world around us. Isn’t that Addawanna with Mahafny now?” Harrap asked.
The Erakwan woman was easy to recognize, and Jenret had no doubt that it was she, though he had no idea how she had arrived so swiftly. Or had she been traveling with the others all along, shadowing them through the forest? She possessed the earth-link as well, the earth-bond, though it seemed hard to believe that it still offered such incredible powers to someone so advanced in years. Did it never fade? Did they never fade? He felt a momentary wonder at the thought, but it was the other white-haired woman standing between Mahafny and Addawanna who gave him pause. Impossible, he was sure. He grabbed Harrap’s singed arm, unaware of the other’s wince and jerking motion. “That’s Swan, Swan Maclough! How did she get here? And Rolf Cardamon, and the others?”
Harrap cocked a missing eyebrow at him in puzzlement, moving beyond Jenret’s eager reach as he nursed his burned arm against his chest. “Who is Swan?”
“The Seeker General! The head of the Seekers Veritas. Your leader now as well.”
“Second in command only to our Lady,” Harrap reproved as he smiled and formed the sign of the eight-pointed star.
“What do you think, cousin? Will she live?” Swan’s close-cropped helm of white hair made the rest of her face indistinct by comparison, attracting attention away from the dark circles sunk around her eyes, the new lines carved down the sides of her mouth, between her brows. “Or more accurately, will she ever be more than a shell, far worse than one of those lackwits over there?”
The eumedico considered, assessing the still form, covered to her chin with a blanket. They needed to move her someplace warm and quiet, and soon. She was in deep shock and near ready to slip beyond that. The Hospice, she supposed, it would have to do. It loomed there, waiting for them. It had been conceived as a place of healing and hope rather than as the place of grandiose dreams and mad meddling it had become. They all needed rest and warmth, food and peace for a night, though she expected no peace for herself, not with Evelien dead. Tomorrow they could leave, or some of them at least. She knew without a doubt that she would remain—someone had to create order, sanity, take control in the wake of Evelien’s and Vesey’s deaths.
“I wish I could say.” She missed her white eumedico coat, fought to hold her hands in place, yearned for the pockets, the pockets that would hide the traitorous palsy of her hands. “Vesey never actually Gleaned her mind, I don’t believe, although he came very close until the ghatti intervened. She yielded it up ...” she rubbed her hands, searching for the right word, “... stored it away, abandoned it.... How much stress can the human mind and body endure before something snaps? It varies from person to person as you know full well, cousin. Some recover, learn, grow from the experience. Others ...” She let the thought trail off unfinished. Blast the ghatta for staring at her with those prescient amber eyes, but she had never let herself be receptive to ghatti mindspeech, and she wasn’t about to let her guard down now, no matter how the animal pleaded with her. Nor would she ask Swan what the ghatta wanted.
But Addawanna had no qualms about squatting to stroke the ghatta, talking to her with a liquid stream of rushing vowels and occasional hard consonants.
“I t’ink she heal. But wedder she be Doyce we knew before, I no sure. Wait an see, mebbe long time, mebbe not.”
Doyce shifted, sighed imperceptibly; she could hear the voices all around her, cajoling, pleading, begging to be let in, but she didn’t have to answer this time, not if she didn’t want to do so. She felt a twinge of longing at the caress of Khar’s mindvoice, but she forced it back, too life-entangling. The ghatta had Chosen, she hadn’t, and while she harbored no desire to hurt the beast—oh, Lady Bright, not to hurt anyone as she’d been hurt, deserted so many times—the ghatta would just have to wait. When she was ready to find herself, to seek out the real Doyce, she would do so, that was her choice.
Wait and see, that was all any of them could do until Doyce made her decision. Wait, and hope it would come soon.
Slumped behind the big mahogany desk, dwarfed by its size, Mahafny wondered if Evelien had ever had the same feeling when she had sat here. Somehow she doubted it. She had been up all night, rallying and chivvying cowed eumedicos, forcing them to face reality and tend to their new patients—innocent lackwits or placids, wounded by the Erakwa fire-arrows or their own panicky stumbling and bumbling in the melee. Erakwa injured by those who had fought back—a few turncoat eumedicos and novice Gleaners striving to channel their mindpowers for violent ends.
Whom to trust, whom to dismiss? Who remained loyal to Vesey and Evelien? How many would crumble, docile, at the sudden vacuum of power and who would remain a danger, smoldering resentment flaring into unexpected, unstoppable resistance from perfectly normal-looking people who harbored untapped, unskilled power in their minds? The razor’s edge was very sharp and treacherous, that she knew all too well. And it was up to her to command, to take up the responsibility that she had abdicated all too long ago.
She had told, no, ordered Swan to have the ghatti scan every living soul in the place, regardless of Seeker etiquette. No time for niceties now, and Swan had done it without a demur, knowing it was crucial to find out who might present a danger. At least they had been able to separate Gleaners from “normals,” and had instructed the ghatti to inform the Gleaners that their very lives depended on their good behavior, and that their truthfulness would be assayed.
She slid from behind the desk, from its drawers crammed with file upon file of research and experiments, and walked to the window, throwing back the shutters, looking at the ground below. A small party was gathering around a litter lashed between two horses. Jenret, Rolf, and four of Balthazar’s Guardians were to transport Doyce, still unconscious, south to Gaernett, taking her away from this place as swiftly as possible. That Jenret would not leave Doyce’s side until he had delivered her into safekeeping was clear to her, but then she knew his stubbornness, his determination, and his fears.
Addawanna and her kinsmen were somewhere near, she was sure, the Erakwan woman had gestured to the woods, the mountainous slopes, saying “Be seein’ there be strays or no,” and had faded away. Harrap, the other Seekers and Bondmates, and the rest of Balthazar’s force had pledged to remain until fresh teams of eumedicos and Seeker pairs could reach the Hospice and aid in the reorganization, the rehabilitation. That had been Swan’s suggestion and she had agreed with alacrity. Swan had seemed amazingly subdued, as if she had stared into the chasm before her feet and stepped back just in time. And for the Seekers, it had been just in time, Mahafny knew that too well.
A knock at the door and she yelled, “Enter,” as she swung around. She didn’t dare turn her back on anyone—and realized what an outmoded notion of safety that was. Still, safer to face danger even if it were unseen. Towbin Biddlecomb, Vesey’s second-in-command, took three paces into the room, stiff with discomfort. Hands grasped his shoulders from behind, clutched tightly in the fabric, knuckles white, and a peaked face peered over. A red-headed woman with milk-pale skin and eyes the color and size of copper coins stared, uneasy, ready to bolt at the first untoward gesture. To compound her surprise, the ghatt Saam followed them in, trotting to a spot where he could survey everything and everyone, and sat, head cocked in her direction.
“I’m sorry.” Towbin’s raised eyebrows indicated the ghatt. “I promised him you was safe as houses with us, but he still insisted on coming. Mayhap he has his own ... business with you.”
“I doubt that. I don’t converse with ghatti.”
Biddlecomb regarded her, rubbing his thumb over and over the side seam on his trousers. “Well, that’s for you to work out between you-like. But I ... we ... we’ve come to beg a boon of you.”
She folded her arms across her chest, tired to the bone of having to deal in favors, in personalities, in private needs when everything around her was so pressing, so fraught with potential danger. Didn’t the man realize that the whole of Canderis would have to be scoured for Gleaners or potential Gleaners, and what were they supposed to do when they found them? What would the High Conciliators and the Monitor do—condemn them all to death? Expect the eumedicos to devise an instantaneous “cure”? Discover how to integrate them into the very fabric of Canderis?
She rubbed at her brow in a vain attempt to erase the questions, but they still remained, unanswered, taunting her for solutions. The woman’s face floating over his shoulder like a disciple moon, he stood patient as stone, only the one thumb rubbing its ceaseless course across the seam. She had an ungovernable urge to slap his hand aside, stop the gesture. But Saam, front legs stretched high on Towbin’s thigh, pushed the hand aside with his head.
He looked surprised, then trapped his thumb with his fingers. “Sorry. Used to be worse. Bad habit I’ve always had since I was a little‘un. Used to pick at the seam without knowing it ’til my wife threatened to make me wear a sock over my hand.” He rubbed the ghatt’s head. “Did ye note he seemed to ken what ye were thinking?”
She countered with an explosive “phah” sound. “Stop shilly-shallying! You said you had a boon to ask me? And I’d advise you to introduce the woman lurking behind you.”
He jerked to attention again, as if old habits under Vesey died hard. Reaching for one of the hands on his shoulder, he swung the woman in front of him, nestled her protectively in his arms, whispering reassurances. “This is my wife, Yulyn. She’s a Gleaner.” Lips pressed in a white line of fear, the woman managed a terse nod, whether in acknowledgment of her name or of her description, Mahafny couldn’t decide. The woman was struggling not to flee, despite the comforting arms around her.
“You’ve no reason to trust me overmuch, that I ken,” Towbin continued, “and her even less, though you don’t know her. But I want to stay on and help out, have you help my wife. She didn’t ... we didn’t ... never meant to get caught up in something like this. We wanted help, and when the whispered word came through, we thought we had the opportunity. We didn’t know he’d try to twist and bend as bad as he was twisted and bent himself. If you trust me ... trust us ... we’ll trust you, support you best we can. My pledge on it.”
“ ’Tis my pledge she needs, Towbin,” the woman protested in a soft but determined voice, working herself free from her husband’s embrace until at last she stood alone, unprotected. A tall woman, angular, and made more so by continual stress and worry, Mahafny thought, but the pale face was luminous with resolve. “I’ve never hurt anyone wittingly, despite what he, what Vesey made me try to do. My pledge on that for the past, and for the future ... if we have one.” She started to take a step forward, entreaty clear on her face, but halted at Mahafny’s involuntary flinch. “I wouldn’t... I can’t... !” she cried. “If there’s no place for me, then please don’t hurt him!”
Towbin’s expression contorted as he tried to express in words a concept that ranged beyond his usual thoughts. “Don’t you see?” he implored. “The Shepherd Harrap would see. We’re all part of this, part of the same root, the same stock, just different branches. Don’t prune us off! You should know—the cousin of the Seeker General, the mother of Evelien, and you a eumedico yourself. As the branches are bent, so they grow. We all be part of the Lady’s scheme of things, I beg you!”
She jammed her fists into the pockets of the borrowed white lab coa
t, glad she had confiscated it from a coat rack at some point during the long night. It didn’t give her her usual confidence but it helped, reminded her who and what she was, of what she believed in, had striven to do all her life. A decision needed to be made, and she was the only one there to make it. “We all have much to learn, ways to grow for the good of everyone. I don’t know what it will take to do it, or if it can be done. But the unknown is our enemy now. There may have to be experiments, perhaps painful ones,” she warned, and saw Yulyn’s chin rise, resolute. “But I’m willing to have you both with us. If you’ll have us.”
He had pulled her hand from her pocket, was pumping it with an enthusiasm that left her trying to rescue her hand for safety’s sake. When had he crossed the room? she wondered. Had she been that adrift in her thoughts? He stopped at last, returned her hand to her with a curiously genteel gesture and fled the room. She had already seen the tears forming in his eyes. “You won’t be sorry,” his wife promised before she followed after him.
Flexing her wrist, cradling it in her other hand, she realized that the steel-blue ghatt still remained, regarding her, his mouth fractionally open as if he planned to vocalize. “Well, you’d better speak out loud, if you’re going to,” she advised him, “because I won’t have it any other way. And you know it.”
His head drooped, his eyes sought the floor as he offered a small, protesting “Meow.” At length he looked up, yellow eyes bright, beseeching, his expression akin to the one she had just viewed on Yulyn’s face. It saddened her, made her wonder what she was missing, what it would be like. Compelled by the loneliness, the misery, the wanting, she wavered, started to yield. “No, I can’t do it!” She ground out the words between her teeth, wrestling for self-control. “Not everyone has their wishes granted, including me. 1 am ... sorry. But I can’t do it. I don’t have ... Harrap’s faith to take another step into the unknown. There’s enough of that around me now and I can’t allow myself to be diverted onto other paths, not if we’re to find a solution. Perhaps you could help with that, but I can’t afford the chance of distraction, not now, not when so many others are depending on me. You do see ... don’t you?” Somehow it seemed very important that he should understand her reasons.
