by Don McQuinn
The gathered hundreds cheered. Otraz writhed, the strangled whine of his breathing barely audible by then.
Moonpriest said, “Go to your dogs.”
Conway rushed to them. Disregarding the wounds on their necks where the chains had bitten into the flesh, they leapt to lick his face, delirious with joy. On examination, the cuts weren’t serious. That did little to relieve Conway’s distress. Reclaiming his weapons, he ordered the dogs to position.
A heavy hand clamped on his elbow. Whirling, Conway pulled free of the grip, belatedly recognizing Katallon. The burly chief said, “Easy. The danger’s past. I only want to talk.”
Katallon moved away from the crowd. Moonpriest was nowhere to be seen. Conway followed, then said, “What do we have to say to each other?”
The nomad chief stroked his chin, studying Conway. He gestured at where Otraz still twitched feebly. “We of Windband believe some men live in the circle of a curse, the way some wasps live in small, dark burrows. The mother wasp puts a live spider in there, and lays an egg on it. I’ve seen this with my own eyes. The egg hatches, you understand? It’s a worm. The spider’s not dead, but it can’t move. The worm eats it. Alive. We believe some men are like that wasp’s egg. They eat the life of others. Without even understanding. Death seems to stand close to you, Matt Conway. First two of my warriors. Then Otraz. And the girl.”
“Girl?”
“At the baths. The Small who massaged you. Children found her in the river. She drowned herself.”
The Moondark Saga: Book 6
The Path Of Discovery
Chapter 1
Sylah reined in Copper and gazed out over a scene that was as heartbreaking as it was spectacular. After more than a moon of furtive, frightened travel through the ravaged lands of Kos, this different vision beckoned. In the unsullied air of a perfect day, the ragged crags and peaks of the Dry extended eastward as far as she could see.
Lost in that shimmering distance was the end of her quest.
The enormity of it was appalling. Crumpled, broken land in an unending variety of grays, washed with the softest of blues and purples, rose and fell in savage obstacle to her dreams. The fierce landscape was her enemy as surely as any human. The worst of it was, it was beautiful. She quailed at the thought of traversing those sere valleys, scaling those scorching slab-sided mountains, yet was awed and drawn by their cruel splendor.
Copper’s hooves struck a clattering challenge of their own on the rocky ground of the pass. Sylah laughed. Alone, faced by terrain that daunted the hardiest, she was suddenly bursting with renewed purpose.
This place—here, now—was end and beginning.
She had allowed herself to dream of empire, of alliances and power balances. Those were not the stuff of her life. Pursuing such golden butterflies had led her away from her true goal.
She’d been tested, and proven weaker than her worst fears. She had erred. Grievously. Tee and Conway must be presumed dead. Only the One in All could know if Wal and his crew still survived on their trek north to Ola. Finding the Door wouldn’t help any of them. It wouldn’t help her overcome the remorse she knew would eat at her for the rest of her days.
But she hadn’t failed. The quest continued, the bitter lessons of adversity well learned.
Primary was her understanding of what happened to those who sought power. The search made them ruthless; the finding made them vicious. She must be aware of the danger. The Door would cloak her in power. Not like the Chair or the Harvester. Instinct told her that what she sought would entail more responsibility than privilege, more duty than liberty.
Looking into the teeth of a land that dared her to leave the cool heights and plenty of the mountains, Sylah exulted at the onrushing contest.
Again, she laughed. It was a sound of joy, of fear, of delight, of desperation. She felt she could reach out with both hands and grasp the very substance of her own life.
She was quiet by the time Tate and Dodoy drew abreast of her, followed by Lanta and the infant Jessak. Lanta was also leading the most recent goat they’d stolen to provide the milk Jessak needed. It was a rangy, long-legged beast, its black coat splotched with white. So far, it had proven to be a surprisingly enduring traveler. Two others before it had been cut loose in precipitate retreats forced by large parties of roaming raiders.
Jessak rode strapped in a basket. He was lashed to the side of Lanta’s horse for the present. The women traded him off. Every time Sylah handled him, she marveled at the tenacity of life in the tiny, helpless body. Both fists worked now, both arms appeared sound. In spite of his excessive size at birth, he seemed only slightly larger than average, further proof that his original size was more a condition than a bloodline result. And he was a good baby. If anything, he was abnormally quiet.
Nalatan, routinely assigned to rear guard, was excused from carrying the boy. Too often on their race away from the wolflike packs of Kossiars and the furious excesses of the freed slaves it had only been Nalatan’s skills that kept them alive. They teased him mercilessly about shirking his duty when it came to Jessak. He took it in flustered good nature. He was as uncomfortable dealing wi’h the infant as only a male can be, and his gratitude at being spared that job was pathetically obvious. Nevertheless, the truth underlying the jokes made him sweat.
As he rode up to join the rest, his attention was more closely directed north and west. He gestured sharply. “The Kossiar I questioned a few days back said the nomad camp was north and east of the Everchanging Lake. It’s not that faraway. The normal route from Church Home to Kos goes through that country.”
“Which way is this Church Home?” Tate asked. Her dogs were nowhere in sight. Her horse carried a nasty scar on its chest, with two lesser, better healed slashes on its rump.
Nalatan pointed north and east. Anticipating her next question, he darted a pointed glance at the baby. “We’ll have to travel fast. Distance and time aren’t as great a problem as water and horses.”
Lanta said, “What about the nomads? They’ll want to stop us.”
Nalatan’s grin was apologetic. “I was going to let that go.”
Sylah said, “You were going to ‘forget’ what the Harvester or the Chair can send after us, as well?”
“I didn’t see any point in bringing it up. Our security is speed. We must hurry.”
“They’ll be looking for us.” Dodoy was more gaunt than ever. He slumped in his saddle. “All of them. They’ll make us slaves.”
Tate worked her horse backward to be next to the boy, saying, “No one’s going to catch us, no one’s going to hurt us.”
Dodoy’s lower lip stuck out. “Sylah said she wanted to find the Door. I told her before we met him”—he pointed at Nalatan, as if accusing him of something—“there’s a river. There’s no river in the Dry. This is the wrong place. We have to go back to Gan Moondark. We were safe with him.”
The comment rankled Sylah more than she dared admit. She was as capable of fighting her way through to a goal as any man. She couldn’t use a sword or bow like them. She had to be more clever. And determined.
What must be borne, grasp.
The Door was her destiny. Hers to seek and to find.
Nalatan said, “As soon as we find a good campsite, I think you should all settle in. I’ll ride ahead and scout. If I can, I’ll get some packhorses.”
Tate said, “Is that safe? I mean, what if the nomads have penetrated this far south? Are the people who live around here friendly?”
Sylah suffered for Nalatan when she saw the way the proud, hard warrior snatched at the crumbs of Tate’s expressed concern. Pretending no more than a normal interest in the question, Nalatan answered, “I’ll be careful. I’ll be gone four days, possibly six. The people of the Dry can be very hard to find. Farther south, it’s best not to find them at all.”
Sylah asked, “They’re all hostile?”
“Always. Fortunately, they’re also poor.” Nalatan jingled a sack of Kossiar coin. “This shou
ld get us horses and water. Without coin, or something else they want, we’ll have to steal water, or fight for it.”
“Sounds like a great trip,” Tate said. “This Church Home place must be wonderful.”
“It is.” Nalatan was perfectly serious.
“We should be looking for a campsite,” Sylah said. “One can smell the heat from the Dry all the way up here. A few days to build up our strength won’t be wasted.” Having spoken, she urged Copper forward. A movement down the slope caught her eye. Tanno was patrolling ahead.
In the distance, a leopard coughed, long and loud, a noise like a huge, dull saw. Startled, Sylah searched anxiously. Leopards made no noise, usually, and anything unusual was to be feared.
Nalatan, watchful as ever, caught her momentary concern. He said, “That’s a mating call. We can be pretty sure he’s not interested in us just now.”
She forced a smile while the thought of the cat crying for a mate transformed into memories of the night on the roof with the Chair.
Mindlessness.
No matter how often she told herself that she would never have betrayed her husband, she was forced to remember that fate made the final decision, not herself. She was pushing the Chair away when it ended. If he’d used his strength, there was little she could have done.
That wasn’t betrayal, deceit.
But what did she call being there, how did she explain to herself that she deluded herself? Endangered herself and her quest?
There should have been no danger. An acid taste of guilt hung in her mouth. She clenched her teeth on it, spat it out.
Another layer of steel reinforced her resolve to succeed.
They found their way to a secluded level place, well shaded, with a clear spring only a short distance away. A welter of tracks indicated game—deer, goats, some wildcows—as well as leopard and one huge bear. The dogs stalked around the water stiff-legged, growling.
“Keep your dogs with you at night,” Nalatan warned Tate. “There’s no sense exposing them to leopards or that bear unless it’s necessary. I think you should sleep over there, against those rocks. We’ll cut logs for a lean-to, with an adjoining pen for the goat. Keep a fire going. You’ll be all right.”
“Promise?” Tate’s humor was a bit shaky.
Nalatan grinned. “When the night hunters learn the Black Lightning’s here, they’ll run for the valleys.”
She grinned back at him. “If there’s any footracing to be done, you just keep those clumsy animals out of my way, and you’ll see some speed.”
Even Dodoy found that amusing. The work of setting up camp went smoothly.
The night passed quietly. The lean-to, with its cover of the apparently indestructible cloth from Ola, provided quite adequate shelter. Nalatan slept just outside. The dogs curled up in the doorway.
The following morning, as soon as he’d completed his sun-greeting prayers, Nalatan left.
Tate moped around the spring most of the morning, irritated that she worried about him too much. At first she told herself she missed him because he was the group’s primary protection. That lie stung, and she substituted one that said it was natural to worry about such a fine friend. When she admitted why she was so afraid for him, the familiar, forbidden warmth returned. She jerked awkwardly to her feet, hurrying back to the protective comradeship of the other women.
Darkness brought worse times. Awake, when her mind sparked with forbidden imaginings, she could consciously extinguish them. Asleep, dreams came in unending, inescapable parade. She woke from them each time with a start and a small, anxious cry that brought her companions to attentive wakefulness. Tate, confused and disoriented by the reality of the dreams, could only mutter apologies and urge them to go back to sleep.
Jessak seemed to sense the tension around him. He fretted far more than usual, so that when Tate wasn’t waking the other women, the baby was.
In the morning, when her friends returned from their prayers and washup bleary-eyed and wan, Tate was all the more chagrined.
Sylah and Lanta busied themselves working on their medical kits. When Dodoy saw Tate inspecting her badly frayed and worn reins, he showed her how to cut out the damaged sections and sew in patches. That done, he wandered off to practice with his chain axe. He attacked the tree trunks as if in battle for his life. Afterward, he carefully cleaned off the resin, then oiled and sharpened the blade.
Dodoy’s preoccupation with the weapon was another source of anxiety for Tate. In her hope that he’d lead her to a place where she’d be among others who shared at least some of her ancestry, she imagined a society that probably didn’t exist. She’d pictured a happy, peaceful culture.
On the escape they passed ruined villages, burned farms. Survivors. Sick, wounded, the human wreckage of the revolt saw salvation in Sylah and Lanta. The people held up injured limbs, bared wounds, displayed their infected children. The Healers did what they could. Nalatan and herself stood guard and chafed.
Some survivors attacked. Moondancers. Tate noted early on that the group was safer from ambush when they rode near abandoned buildings. It took a few days for her to understand why. They came across a group of seventeen former slaves huddled in the burned-out shell of a luxurious estate. All were dead or dying of disease. Tate realized then that plague must follow conflict, and where man lived in greatest concentration, sickness thrived.
Tate also began to seriously wonder why Sylah and Lanta used some medical terms that should have died hundreds of years ago, while their idea of germ theory was “unseens.” Their medical knowledge was more stunted than simply deficient, as if their abilities were tailored to the tools available in their environment. Even in those areas where they were weakest, there was no attempt to invoke multiple deities or charms. Tate asked herself how their knowledge survived with near universality throughout Church, while in all other communities even the simplest arithmetic and reading were considered evil and dangerous.
Everything was so confused. This world was all violence and struggle. The idealized land of her hopes couldn’t exist, Tate knew. She had to try, nevertheless.
When the word obsession picked at her mind she rejected it. She knew her friends were all troubled by her restlessness. She wanted desperately to talk to the women about her dilemma, but how could they understand? They had no cultural or racial constraints built into their need for a mate. What could she tell two women of this world about the necessity to maintain an ethnic existence?
Over a smokeless fire of carefully selected dry branches, Sylah baked cornbread cakes and stewed the last of the dried beef. When the meal was done, she suggested they explore the surrounding area, specifically hunting for deer horns.
“Deer horns? Are you going to make buttons or something?” Tate asked.
Sylah shook her head. “We’re going to grind them up, steep them. I’ll make awakener.”
Tate decided to wait and see what that meant.
Lanta stayed in camp with Jessak and Dodoy. Tate enjoyed getting out with Sylah and the dogs. They found several partial sets of antlers. Most had been nibbled away by mice.
On their return, Sylah set everyone to work grinding horn shavings to a fine powder. Little by little, the off-white pile going into the metal pot grew. When she had enough, Sylah added water and heated the mixture almost to boiling, then set it aside.
“Why are we doing this?” Tate said. “I know mice eat the horn. We’re not going to drink that, are we?”
Lanta and Sylah both laughed. Sylah said, “The Dry’s going to be very difficult, you see? A few drops of awakener in drinking water is stimulating.”
Tate was dubious. “Stimulating? Deer horn soup?” She bent to sniff the pot. She straightened immediately, shocked. “What in the world? That’s ammonia.”
Sylah cocked her head to the side. “An odd word. How was it? Ah-mo-nya? Is that what you call it?”
Stunned, Tate shook her head. “That’s it. We call it that. Always did. Ammonia. You made it from a deer
horn. What will they think of next?”
“Next? All I can make with deer horn is awakener. Did you expect something else, too?”
Tate threw her hands in the air, turned away from the fire. “Plutonium, at least.” She whirled. “Never mind. An idle thought.” She wandered off, talking to herself.
Sylah and Lanta looked at each other, made faces expressing resignation. Then they returned to the housework of the camp.
It was Tate’s turn to feed the baby. As she held him, she admired once again the feeding device Sylah created. The container was a small ceramic bottle, which was carefully cleaned and boiled before each use. The end, tied off with rawhide, was a cone-shaped soft leather nipple. Its holes were minuscule, the size of porcupine quill-tips. Sylah insisted that the leather also be cleaned faithfully. Jessak made hard work of sucking on something so alien, but he did it. He seemed to understand he was being deprived of a normal breast, and he attacked his meals with astonishing determination, if not outright resentment. His feedings and burpings were times of fascination and involvement. Despite all the hardships and dangers of the escape, Jessak was well launched into being spoiled.
Feeding him was Tate’s most peaceful time. Her concerns about Nalatan and the power of his attraction were forgotten. Her dogs lay beside her where she sat with her back against the pole wall of their shelter. Oshu stirred, pressing harder against her mistress, and sighed, a confiding, contented sound.
Not even the dogs were aware of the massive beast above them, limping from cover to cover with a stealth unbelievable for something so large. When it raised its striped-mask face to test the scent of the group huddled in their camp, it snarled in silent grimace. It twitched its tail, the snarl diminishing in repetitive jerks.
