by J. D. Lakey
But of all the faces in his mind, of all the companions who loved him and who he loved back in kind, Sparkly Man and Scar Face were not there. The boy did not know the other two well enough to love them but he knew them well enough not to trust them with his life.
What a very odd Pack they made.
“My name is Samwell. My friends call me Sam. What’s yours?” he asked softly as she quieted and settled against his shoulder.”
“Megan calls me Ch’che,” she said.
“Ch’che. I like that. Megan. Is that your mom?”
Cheobawn mouthed the word. Mom. Mom. Mommommom. Ah, Mother.
“Megan is my Packsister. Mora is my truemother,” Cheobawn said, unable to lie with his mind inside her own. Why would she lie to such a clever and brave boy? It was he who came up with the plan to climb the cliff face, fearlessly hunting out strangers to join his Pack, foolishly trusting his life to those who did not love him.
“Are they close by, Mora and Megan?”
“No,” she said hesitantly. Close was such a relative term.
“Why are you out here all by yourself in the middle of the night, Ch’che?”
“I ran away when everyone was asleep.”
“Did you? That was very brave. Won’t they come looking for you?”
“Mmm,” she nodded. “In the morning, perhaps, if Tam can find my tracks. But Sybille will bring the Fathers by midday and then there will be nowhere I can run that they cannot follow.”
“If they catch you, will they punish you for running away?” he asked. He sounded concerned. She lifted her head to meet his eyes for the first time. They were pale, their color uncertain in the flickering light but she thought they might be amber.
“I will be alright,” Cheobawn with a grimace. “I am used to it.” She was fairly certain that she would be spending the rest of the summer and well into autumn on restricted duty doing the smelliest jobs possible under the dome.
She sighed resignedly at that thought. Sam’s arms shifted around her, becoming less a cage and more a protective shield. She caught an image of a young Sam, wild and hard to tame. An emotion flashed sharp and unpleasant in the ambient. She built a small ward and pushed it outside of herself to just beyond the limits of her skin, and the pain receded to a dull ache. His Fathers were as strict as her own. He understood punishment, though his punishment had hurt more than hers. She relaxed a little more, comforted by his sympathy.
Sam carried her out of the trees and across the clearing. She shied away from the sight of the eviscerated Old Father Bhotta, the proximity to the bloodstones inside him disturbingly painful. Sam noticed her discomfort and hurried past. He set her down by the bonfire, near the log on which the Sparkly Man sat. The metal weapon lay near at hand. She stared at its ominous hollow mouth, wide eyed, trying hard to not be afraid.
“This is Colonel Bohea. Be a good girl and tell him what you told me.”
Cheobawn pulled her eyes away from the weapon to find the oldpa studying her with cold, calculating eyes. Sam tried to move away but she clung to him, hooking her fists into the strange fabric of his blouse, refusing to let him leave.
Up close, Sparkly Man, now Colonel Bohea, was not as old as his hair made him look. Or perhaps his lack of wrinkles and the suppleness of his skin was the lie. His eyes were black, two bottomless pools that wanted to suck you down and hold you until your flesh was stripped away from your bones. Cheobawn flinched. Not even Amabel made her feel this naked and exposed. Her eyes slid away to watch his sparkly clothes instead.
The fabric looked like woven metal. It covered all of him, from just under his ears to the ends of his toes. It even covered his hands like perfectly fitted gloves. She wondered if the Lowlanders had a Maker who could rewrite the code of a spider that it might spin metal instead of silk. She resisted the urge to reach out and touch it to see if it was cold like metal or warm like silk, sure that Sparkly Man would not tolerate such familiarly.
She started to play a game called Lowlander or Star Man. Scar Face was a Star Man. Sam was surely a Lowlander. He tasted too familiar and could easily be mistaken as one of Bear’s children. It was too soon to tell about this Father named Colonel Bohea. Everything about his energy signature was oddly disjointed and she did not know enough about Lowlanders to tell if man in the sparkly suit was an anomaly or just normal.
Sam gave up trying to pry her hands free from his clothes.
“This is Ch’che. She is a runaway. They will come looking for her. We have until noon tomorrow before her keepers find us, she says.”
Scar Face stomped up, out of breath, waving her knife in the air. Cheobawn put the boy’s body between Scar Face and herself then peeked out again, trying to see the color of his lips. It was hard to tell, in the dance of the bonfire flames, if they had started changing color yet.
“Ask her about this, Colonel. I think she was going to kill us while we slept so’s she could make off with our gear.”
Colonel. She silently rolled the word around on her tongue. It sounded less like a name and more like an honorific, like Father.
The one named Bohea took the knife, studying it for a moment before looking up to pin her with those eyes again.
“Is this your knife or did you steal it?” he asked softly.
She was convinced that those eyes could detect any lie she might tell.
“It is the tribe’s knife,” she said, this being both precise and true.
“Aha, she stole it. Gutter snipes are the same everywhere, even on this planet.” Scar Face crowed, pleased with himself for guessing right. Bohea frowned. Cheobawn wondered what kind of animal a gutter snipe was.
“Do you know how to use this?” Bohea asked, drawing her attention away from the dying man.
“Not very well,” she admitted. All things were relative. She knew how to kill with a knife but had yet to take the classes that would mark her as an adept.
“What, exactly, were you planning to do with this knife?” Bohea asked pointedly.
Cheobawn puzzled over that odd question. What did anyone do with a knife? It hung on your belt until it came time to use it.
“It is a tool. It cuts things.” she ventured tentatively.
“Hah, what did I tell you,” snorted Scar Face. “Why were you spying on us, little thief?” The last came out as a threatening growl. Eater of Worlds whispered excitedly on the edges of her mind, echoing Scar Face’s voice. It remembered all the deaths of all the worlds it had eaten, the litany sliding past her mind laden with an almost sensual pleasure. She shuddered and buried her face against the solid muscle of the boy’s side.
“I think she saw Garro gnawing on that liver. She thinks he is going to eat her. Keep him off her, OK?” the boy said, his voice hard, his anger bleeding out into the air around him.
“Why don’t you go finish cooking up that meat, Sergeant. We can take it with us when we move out in the morning,” Bohea said. There was no threat or emotion in his voice but Scar Face, whose name might have been Garro Sergeant or Sergeant Garro, clamped his lips together and move away. She suspected Sergeant was also an honorific like Colonel. To be safe, she decided to mimic Sam’s way of calling him. She watched Garro move back to the gaping hole in Old Father’s belly to continue sawing away at the organs inside. She wondered if the toxins could be absorbed through the skin and filed the thought under things she needed to study next time she had access to her learning console.
Sam tapped the top of her head.
“Hey, never mind him. We won’t let him hurt you. Why were you watching us?”
She looked up at him and frowned a little. That was a very good question. The truth was, she did not yet know why she was here. She couldn’t say that out loud, of course. Such a non-answer never pleased any Elder and she was not willing to find out how Bohea felt about it. Perhaps if she knew the answer to her own question it might help her answer so many others. Why were they here?
She sighed. If they had all the time in the world, she could
play the question game until it wound its way to the heart of all their truths. But she did not. The mountain was in motion. Time was her enemy. She needed to warn them and chose the mind that was the most open to her touch. She pressed an image into Sam’s mind, hoping it might fill in the gap between her words. It was just a little nudge, with a simple image. The process was not unlike Herd Mother teaching her how to ward.
“Your noise fills the forest,” she said. “It has drawn everything that can hear, making them hungry. They wait, out there, beyond the light of your fire, intent on eating what you do not consume. Duff pig, with more courage than brains, was only one of many. The smarter ones know that time is on their side and are willing to wait.”
“Noise? We are too noisy?” Sam smiled, amused by her words, for some reason. “But you mean more than the sounds we make, don’t you? Killing the lizard has attracted scavengers.”
She nodded encouragingly. It surprised her, how easy that had been, placing a thought into his unshielded mind. “They can hear with more than ears and smell with more than noses,” she confirmed.
“What is she talking about?” Bohea asked sharply.
“She says the woods are full of animals drawn to the kill,” Sam said.
“That’s not what she said. What was all the nonsense about noise?” the older man insisted. Sam sighed and shrugged, as if what he believed and what he was about to say were not the same thing and that his words carried no more value than the sound it took to make them.
“It is one of the legends about the Highlands.” Sam shook his head, embarrassed by something. “They say that the women are all witches, kept as slaves for the pleasure and use of the men. The myths can have no basis in fact, of course, because no one has seen a female Highlander for over a thousand years and the Highland men who come down to trade are loathe to talk about them. It is more likely, as with all primitive hunter-gatherer societies where survival enforces strict gender roles that the women are chattel left at home to take care of the babies.”
“Spare us the university lecture, school boy,” Garro said, coming around the shoulder of Old Father Bhotta, wiping his bloody hands on his pants. “Is she a witch or not? Hey, how much you think a witch will bring us, down in the world? Sounds like the Highland scum have her trained up right proper, so’s we won’t have to teach her much more so’s she can earn her living on her back. We could auction her off to the highest bidder and actually have some hope in hell of coming out in the black on this god-forsaken mission.”
“Keep your hands off her!” Sam snarled. “She is not for sale. She did not run away from one cage to be thrown in another.”
“You think you can stop me, boy?” Garro growled.
“By all the Gods! Quiet the both of you!” shouted Bohea. Garro grinned slyly at the boy and then sauntered away. Sam pressed his lips together, his rage tinting the ambient red.
“I want an answer,” the older man insisted, the look in his eyes deadly serious, his voice pitched to carry no further than the limits of the fire circle. “Is she a witch or not?”
Chapter Nineteen
Bohea stared at the boy, his face inscrutable.
“It’s a simple question,” he repeated. “Is she a witch?”
Sam looked away, afraid of what the older man might see in his eyes.
“I don’t know,” Sam said sullenly, obviously not liking being pressed. “The Highland men believe all their women are magical in some way. It would be expected, living up here in the wilderness, that they would develop a hyper-awareness of the natural world. Or maybe it is just the magical thinking of untrained minds. If you did not know how babies were conceived, giving birth would seem like a miracle.”
Bohea squatted down in front of her and stabbed at Cheobawn with those hard, black eyes. She tightened her grip on Sam’s shirt.
“Perhaps you can give me a straight answer. Are you a witch, little thief?” he asked softly. She thought to say yes but she stopped herself, puzzled by something. She did not think the word meant the same thing in his mind as it did in hers. It filled the ambient with shards of emotion that threatened to slice her no matter what she said. This explained her confusion. The more she listened to their Lowlander words, the more she became convinced they did not speak the same language at all. Everything she had said so far had sunk into a quicksand trap of convoluted meanings in their minds, disappearing under the muck of confusion without so much as a ripple. She swallowed her frustration and tried again.
“You have no walls around your minds,” she said, trying to explain by starting with simple concepts.
“Do you read my thoughts then?” he asked, his voice almost a purr. Bohea suddenly felt far more deadly than his Packmate, Garro. Her heart skipped a beat and started racing again. “Tell me what I am thinking.”
She shook her head quickly, denying whatever it was he was accusing her of.
“I hear hearts not minds. You bleed into the ambient,” she whispered, desperate for him to understand. “Sam is easy to hear. Garro is …“ she tried to find the right words, “Garro is full of hunger and very little else. You are cold and … like the darkness between the stars.”
Bohea lifted his nose and stared at her from under half closed lids, not denying her accusation. Star Man, she decided. He turned his eyes towards Sam. “For a primitive, she knows too much about deep space. How do you account for that, boy?”
“You can’t believe her, surely,” laughed Sam nervously. “It is merely trickery, like the back alley fortune tellers, trained to repeat generalities and make them sound like truth.”
Cheobawn looked up into his face, confused by his betrayal. He did not truly believe what he was saying but the words still hurt.
“So, little witch,” purred Bohea. “What are we supposed to do with you? If I slit your throat and left you for the scavengers, would your people go home and leave us in peace?”
Sam cursed, pulling her roughly away, shoving her behind him.
“Stop it! Wait, wait,” he said, his voice tight with desperation. “Garro is right. She is worth more than all our lives put together. I can find a buyer for her among my people but she must be alive and whole.”
“More lies, rich boy?” Bohea asked, rising to his feet. “Why do I get the feeling I can’t trust you?”
Sam’s ambient became streaked with caution and fear. Bohea was a man to be feared, that much was apparent, but he had killed other things besides Old Father Bhotta and a small duff pig to convince Sam of that. Sam had unspeakable things hidden in his mind. Cheobawn did not pry deeper.
“No, I am telling the truth,” Sam said, his words racing themselves out of his mouth, hoping to keep Bohea from his throat. “She would be like an ace up the sleeve. No. More than that. She would be like the omega tile in a game of Stones, turning all the other tiles on the board into your own. She would tip the scale in the games of power played on the highest levels. Market it right, put the word out in the right circles, and people will gut each other to get an invitation to the auction. She wouldn’t even have to really be a witch. Bringing her down out of the Highlands, people would believe it, no matter what, and you would still have the power to mess with their minds. My father would help. He knows …“ Sam rattled on.
Cheobawn let go of Sam. The things coming out his ambient were painful and unpleasant to witness. She needed a little distance. She sidled away and found a smooth spot on the nearby log. Crawling on top of it, she sat down. She needed to think. She needed to sort out all the confusing things she only half understood. She watched Bohea as he stood listening to Sam, his arms crossed over his chest.
Sam had started out thinking he was Alpha of this Pack but somehow the Bohea had usurped his position. Had he done it through sheer force of will? For some reason, Bohea reminded Cheobawn of Mora. Perhaps it was the clever way he manipulated his Pack of two, herding them so that they were always going in the direction he wanted. Garro and Sam were like two horribly mismatched fenelk, trying to p
ull a wagon every which way but down the middle of the trail. Understanding his motives a little better, she lost some of her fear. She was not afraid of dangerous and powerful things, having been raised inside the Coven’s hard heart.
Was this why she was here? To serve Bohea’s needs? Did Bohea need an Ear? Bear and Star Woman circled the bonfire, restless but silent, their anticipation quivering in the air like an impending thunderstorm. Neither seemed willing to reveal more than they already had. She wrinkled her nose at them and looked back at the man with the strange sparkly skin.
“Will you take me with you, then?” she asked Bohea curiously. “I could become your apprentice. You could teach me the way of the loud weapons. I could learn to grow cold inside so that I might wield them as you do.”
Sam choked back a curse, his dismay bleeding into the ambient. She had wounded his heart though she was not really sure how.
“Why would I do that?” Bohea asked after a long, considered pause.
“It would be fair exchange. I would learn and you would be safe, protected from anything that might want to harm you.”
“I have no use for mewling children,” the Star Man said.
“Test me. Give me back my knife. I will show you that I know how to fight,” Cheobawn said, jumping to her feet. She said it casually, calmly, meeting the suspicion in those black eyes with innocent intent.
Bohea smiled a smile that did not quite reach into those cold eyes.
“You can’t … you cannot think to take her off-planet,” Sam protested looking frantically between the two of them. “She belongs here, on this planet, with her own kind.”
