by Jo Clayton
*Now we won’t have to depend so much on Danny Blue. I like that, I like it a lot.*
*Agreed.*
*Why didn’t you try it before?*
*No point. Besides, if Maksim knew about it too long before we got to him, he just might figure out a way of handling it. Remember what. Ahzurdan said, this is heartland for him, I don’t doubt he can overlook most of it easy as an ordinary man looks out his window. *
*Gotcha. Do you really think Maksim is going to try tipping us into another reality?*
*Brann does. Don’t you?*
*We’ll have to keep wide awake, Jay. When I leave this reality, I want it to be my idea and I don’t want to be dumped just anywhere. I want to go home.*
*Bramble’s next quest, reading Slya’s alleged mind?*
*If we can work it. Talk to you later. She’s coming.*
Brann walked into the pale grayish light they gave off, squatted beside one of the young men. She pushed her fingers under his jaw, smiled with satisfaction when she felt the strong pulse. “Good work, Jay. How long will they be out?”
Jaril dropped and shifted, held out his hand. When Brann took it, he said, *Don’t know. I finagled a version of the stunner, haven’t done this before so it’s anybody’s guess. They could wake up in two minutes or two hours.*
*I hear. Useful. *
*More useful if nobody knows exactly what happened.*
*Nobody being Maksim umm and Danny Blue?*
*You got it. Or that Yaro can do it too, now.*
*Anything else? No? Good. We’ll tie our baby assassins up to keep them out of mischief, fix some breakfast and get an early start. From now on I suppose we can expect anything to happen. * She freed her hand. “Yaro, flit back to camp and fetch us some rope hmm?”
Yaril dropped and shifted. “Sure. Need a knife?”
“Got a knife.”
The Plain emptied before them. Boatmen brought their flatboats upriver and down into the throat of the Gap, mooring them to rocks and trees and to each other, a barrier as wide as the river and six boats deep. Land-folk poured into the hills between Silagamatys and the Plain, the greater part of them gathering about the Gap where the river ran, interposing their bodies between the threatening and the theatened. Some stayed behind. When Brann and Danny Blue came to the marshes, hidden bowmen shot at them. The changers ashed the arrows before they reached their targets. Spears tumbled end for end into the sedges when Danny Blue snapped his fingers, slingstones whipped about and flew at the slingers who plunged hastily into mucky murky swamp water.
Aware that Amortis was not going to march to war for them, that weapons would not stop the hellcat, her sorceror and her demons, the landfolk left their homes and their harvests and in an endless stream walked and rode into the hills, a stubborn angry horde determined to protect their land and their leader. It was a thing the Parastes never understood or acknowledged, the lifetie between the small brown landfolk and the land they worked, land that held layer on layer on layer of their dead, land they watered with their sweat and their blood. These grubbers, these strongbacked beasts, these self-replicating digging machines, they owned that land as those elegant educated parasites the Parastes never would, no matter how viciously and vociferously they claimed it. Much of what Settsimaksimin did after he took Cheonea linked him in the landfolk mind to the land itself and its dark primitive power. When he gave them visible tangible evidence of their ancient ownership, when he gave them deeds written in strong black ink on strong white parchment, it struck deep into their two souls. The idea of the land wound inextricably about the idea of Settsimaksimin and he became one for them with that black and fecund earth, himself huge, dark and powerful.
The land itself fought them. A miasma oozed from the earth and coiled round them when they slept; breeding nightmares in them, humming in their ears go away turn back go away turn back. Coiled round them when they rode, burning their eyes, cocooning them in stench, whispering go away turn back go away turn back. The hangfire storm was oppressive, it was hard to breathe, crooked blue lightning snapped from fingertips to just about anything they brushed against. The mules balked, balked again, exasperating. Brann because she had to jolt each one every time they did it. The ambushes kept on happening, a futile idiotic pecking that accomplished nothing except to exhaust Danny Blue who had to keep his shield ready, his senses alert. Amortis had laid a smother across the Plain, more oppressive for him than the storm; each time he had to flex his magic muscle he was working against an immense resistance. By the end of the day he was so depleted he could barely hold himself in the saddle.
The third morning on the Plain. Left in pastures unmilked, cows bawled their discomfort. Farmyard dogs barked and whined and finally sated their hunger on fowl let out to feed themselves while their owners were gone. Aside from those small noises and the sounds they made themselves, there was an eerie silence around them. The harvest waited half-gathered in the fields, the stock grazed or stood around, twitching nervously, the houses were empty, unwelcoming, no children’s laughter and shouts, no gossiping over bread ovens or laundry tubs, no voices anywhere. No more ambushes either.
Danny Blue sighed with relief when the morning passed without a stone flung at them, but the smother was still there, pressing down on him, forcing him to push back because it would have crushed him if he didn’t.
Night came finally. They stopped at a deserted farmhouse, caught two of the farmer’s chickens, cooked them in a pot on the farmer’s stove with assorted vegetables, tubers and some rice. It was a small neat house, shining copper pots hanging from black iron hooks, richly colored earthenware on handrubbed shelves, the furniture in every room was crafted with love and skill, bright blankets hung on the walls, huge oval braided rugs were spread on every floor, and it was a new house, evidence of the farmer’s prosperity. After supper three of them stretched out on leather cushions around the farmer’s hearth while the fire danced and crackled and they drank hot mulled cider from the farmer’s cellar. Jaril was flying watch overhead.
Yaril sighed with a mixture of pleasure and regret; she set her mug on her thigh, ran her free hand through her pale blond hair. “We’ll reach the hills sometime late tomorrow afternoon,” she said. “There’s a problem.”
Brann was stretched out half on a braided rug, half on Danny Blue who was leaning against an ancient chest, a pillow tucked between him and the wood. He opened heavy eyes, looked at Yaril, let his lids drop again. “How big?” he murmured.
“Oh, somewhere around ten thousand folk sitting on those hills waiting for us.”
His eyes snapped open. “What?”
“Miles of them on both sides of the river. One shout and we’ve got hundreds pressed around us, maybe thousands.”
Brann sat up, her elbow slamming into Dan’s stomach. She patted him, muttered an offhand apology, turned a thoughtful gaze on Yaril. She said nothing.
Dan crossed his ankles, rubbed the sore spot. “The river?”
“Boatmen. Flatboats. Roped together bank to bank, six rows of them, more arriving both sides. Nets strung under them. Bramble, you and Danny Blue are going to have to be very very clever unless you plan on killing lots of landfolk.”
Brann got to her feet. “Us? What about the two of yon?-She strolled to the fireplace and stood leaning against the stone mantel.
Yaril set the mug down, scratched at her thigh. “We already tried, Bramble. You know how there started to be nobody anywhere? Not long after that Jay and I saw lines and lines of landfolk moving across the Plain. Jay flew ahead to see what was happening and came back worried. We tossed ideas around all afternoon. You know what we came up with? Nothing, that’s what. It’s up to you. We quit.”
Danny Blue went downcellar and fetched another demijohn of cider. He poured it into the pot swung out from the fire, tossed in pinches of the mulling spices, stirred the mix with a longhandled wooden spoon. Brann and Yaril watched in silence until he came back to the chest that he was using as a backrest, then, whi
le the cider heated, the three of them went round and round over the difficulties that faced them.
BRANN: We could try outflanking them.
YARIL: Plan on walking then, the terrain by those hills is full of ravines and tangles of brush and unstable landslips. Mules can’t possibly handle it.
DANNY (yawning): Don’t forget Amortis; with Maksim to point her, she can snap up a few hundred bodies and drop them in front of us and do it faster than we can shift direction.
BRANN: You said she’s afraid of the changers and me.
DANNY: Sure, but she wouldn’t, have to get anywhere near you, she could do all that from Malcsim’s tower in the city.
BRANN: Shuh! There’s a thought there, though. What about you, Dan? If she can snap a couple hundred over a distance of miles, surely you can do the same with two over say a dozen yards. Enough to take you and me past them.
DANNY: Get rid of Amortis first, then sure. Otherwise, with the smother getting heavier as we get closer to the hills, just breathing is going to make me sweat.
BRANN: Then you’d better busy yourself deciding what you can do now. Yaro, what about you and Jay? How many could you stun how fast?
YARIL: Jay and I working together, um, couple dozen a minute. Listen, that won’t work, same reason it wouldn’t work going round them. With that many sitting on those hills, there’s bound to be one or two we miss who’ lets out a yell and there we are, nose-deep in landfolk. Another thing you better think about, you can’t get through them without riding up to them somewhere, announcing your interest as ’twere, and once that’s done, guess what else is going to happen. Bramble, Jay and I, we went round and round on this. Remember how the Chained God shifted you and Danny’s sires poppop back and forth across that ship? We thought about that, we thought about it so much we just about overheated our brains. We figured Amortis could do the same if she took a notion to, so you and Danny have to cross the line without getting close to it. We figured we could gnaw on that idea till we went to stone without getting anywhere. We figured we can fly across with no difficulty, it’s you and Danny here who have the problem, so it’s you and Danny who have to come up with the answer.
DANNY Roll back a sec, stun them? since when and how?
YARIL: Um, Jay took a look at your stunner, remember? He figured a way to repattern a part of his body to produce the same effect, he powered it from his internal energy stores, tested it on those baby assassins. You saw the results.
DANNY: So I did. Repatterning… mmm.
While Brann and Yaril chewed over the problem of acting without being seen to act, Danny Blue withdrew into himself to track down a wisp of an idea. Once upon a time when Daniel Akamarino was very new among the stars and still feeling around for what and who he was, he signed onto a scruffy free trader called the Herring Finn and promptly learned the-vast difference between a well-financed, superbly run passenger line and the bucket for whose engines he was suddenly responsible. And not only the engines. He was called on to repair, rebuild or construct from whatever came to hand everything the ship needed of a propulsive nature. One of those projects was a lift sled for loading cargo in places so remote they not only didn’t have starports, they very often didn’t have wheels. He’d rebuilt that thing so many times it was engraved into his brain. And with a little prodding Danny Blue found he could retrieve the patterns. From his other progenitor he culled the memory of his lessons in Reshaping, one of the earliest skills a Sorceror’s apprentice had to master. Hour on hour of practice, until he could shut his eyes and make the shape without error perceptible to the closest scrutiny which he got because Settsimaksimin was a good teacher whatever other failings he might have. There was still the problem of power. He decided to worry about that after he knew whether or not he could shape a sled. I need something to work on, he thought, something solid enough to hold Brann and me, but not too heavy.
He got to his feet and wandere-d through the house. The beds were too clumsy, besides they were mainly frame and rope with a straw paillasse for a mattress and billowing quilts. He fingered a quilt, thinking about the nip in the air once the sun went down, shook his head and wandered on. Everything that caught his eye had too many problems with it until he reached the kitchen and inspected the hard-used worktable backed into an alcove around the corner from the cooking hearth. The tabletop was a tough ivory wood scarred with thousands of shallow knifecuts, scrubbed and rubbed to a surface that felt like satin; it was around twelve centimeters thick, two meters wide and three long (from the positioning of the cuts at least eight women gathered about it when they were making meals or doing whatever else they did there). He fetched a candle, dropped into a squat and peered at the underside. Looks solid, he thought, have to test it. Hmm, those legs… if they don’t add to much weight, they might be useful, some sort of windscreen… mmm, the front four anyway, whichever end I call front… how’m I going to get this thing out where I can see what I’m doing? Ah! talking about seeing, I’m going to have to set up a shield. If I can. He rose from the squat, set the candle on the table and hitched a hip beside it, unwrapped and began to finger his anger, his resentment of the constraints laid on him, his frustration. Daniel Akamarino went where he wanted when he wanted, Ahzurdan was constrained only by his internal confusions, whatever he wanted or needed he had the power to take if some fool tried to deny him. Danny Blue was too young an entity to know much about who and what he was, but he resonated sufficiently with his progenitors to feel a bitter anger at the Chains the god had put on him. He felt the compulsion clamp down on his head when he tried to give voice to that anger; he could not do, say or even think anything that might (might!) work against the god. He knew, though he had deliberately refrained from thinking about it, that he suffered the smother without trying to fight it because it offered-or seemed to offer-an escape for him, a way he could thwart the god without having to fight the compulsion. After the landfolk shut down their ambushes, he’d ridden relaxed under it exerting himself just enough to keep from being crushed, smiling out of vague general satisfaction as the weight of the smother increased and the possibility of action diminished. He carried that satisfaction into dinner and beyond, but somewhere in the middle of the discussion, he lost it. The Hand of the God came down on him harder than the smother, find the answer, find it, no more dawdling, I’ll have no more excuses for failure, failure will not be permitted. Get through that line however you can, stomp the landfolk like ants if you have to, do whatever you have to, but bring me BinYAHtii.
He wiped the sweat off his face, beat his fist on the tabletop until it boomed, working off some of the rage that threatened to explode out of the cramping grip of the god and blow the fragile psyche of Danny Blue into dust. He might be young and wobbly on his feet, but he had a ferocious will to survive. Not as Ahzurdan, not as Daniel Akamarino. As Danny Blue the New.
“What is it? What’s wrong?”
He looked up. Brann was standing in the arch of the alcove looking worried. He opened his mouth to explain but his tongue wouldn’t move and his throat closed on him. It was forbidden to think, do or say anything against the god. His face went hot and congested as he wrestled with the ban; he felt as if he were strangling on the words that wouldn’t come out She came to him, put her hand on his arm. “Never mind,” she said, “I know.”
He slammed fist against table one last time, sighed and stood up. “Help me turn this thing over.”
Brann pushed her hair off her face, blinked at him, then began laughing. He looked up, startled. “What?”
“You wouldn’t understand. Why turn the table over?”
“Don’t want to talk about it, you know why.”
“Ah. Can the changers help?”
“No. You take that end, I’ll take this. Watch the legs. -
“Better move the candle first, unless you’re planning to burn the house down. If you want light, why not touch on the wall lamps?”
“Lamps?” He looked up. There were ten glass and copper bracket l
amps with resevoirs full of oil spaced along the walls of the alcove two meters and a half above the floor; he hadn’t noticed them because he hadn’t bothered to look higher than his head. “Do you know how irritating a woman is when she’s always right? Here.” He thrust the candle at, her. “Light the ones on your side.”
When the table was inverted and lay with its legs in the air, Danny Blue knelt on it and thumped at various portions of it to make sure the wood was solid; finished with that, he sat on his heels and looked thoughtfully at Brann. “You fed Ahzurdan, you think you can do that for me?”
She frowned at him, moved to the arch. “Yaril, I need you.”
Drifting above the clouds, Jaril spread out and out and out, shaping himself into a mile wide parabolic collector seducing into himself starlight, moonlight, gathering every erg of power he could find; Yaril was a glimmering glassy filament stretching from Jaril to Brann, feeding that power into her; Brann was a transformer kneeling beside Danny Blue, feeding that power into him as fast as he could take it.
Using Ahzurdan’s memories, Danny Blue wove a shield about them like the one Ahzurdan had thrown about the room in the Blue Seamaid; he worked more slowly and had to draw more power than Ahzurdan had, the memories were there but he was no longer completely Ahzurdan and the resonances of word and act were no longer quite true. With Brann feeding energy into him, he got the shield completed, locked it into automatic and found that he’d gained two advantages he hadn’t expected. The smother couldn’t reach him, couldn’t wear at him. And the shield once it was completed took almost no maintaining. Whistling a cheerful tune he unbuckled his sandals and kicked them across the room, grabbed hold of Brann and pulled her into the alcove, shrinking the shield until it covered only that smaller room, it’d attract less attention and he had no illusions about how irritated Maksim was going to be at losing sight of what they were doing. But it was so damn good to be working again on something as simple and elegant and altogether beautiful as lift field circuits-he felt like a sculptor who’d lost his hands in some accident or other, then had to spend an small eternity waiting for them to be regrown.
