Crecheling

by D. J. Butler

  Jak looked at her curiously for several long seconds. “I guess I deserve that,” he finally said. “Feels kind of grim, though.”

  “What’s grim?” she asked. She dragged herself up the lip of the sinkhole. Her arms buckled and almost gave out, but when Jak offered a hand she refused it. She threw herself onto the stone beside her drying clothes and closed her eyes, luxuriating in the heat of the slickrock.

  “That song.”

  “You know it?”

  “Doesn’t everyone?” Jak harrumphed. “Heard it since I was a little kid. Aleen used to sing it me. I think its darkness appealed to her.”

  Dyan forced herself to keep her eyes shut. “You don’t like the words, I guess.” To her surprise, Jak started singing.

  “Sally, she married a soldier,

  A captain named William Lee.

  I guess in his fashion he loved her,

  But Sally always loved me.”

  He fell silent.

  “That’s not so grim,” Dyan pointed out. “That’s just star-crossed love. Married is an old word, a pre-Cataclysm word, for a Love-Match. At least half the funvids in the System Library are about tragic romance.”

  “True.” Jak paused, and Dyan forced herself to keep her eyelids screwed shut. “And I know what married is. Goodman and goodwife. The grim part of the song is where he kills her.”

  Dyan’s heart beat so loudly, she almost didn’t hear Jak’s footsteps on the stone as he walked away.

  When she opened her eyes, the two boys stood at the spring, filling water flasks. Dyan followed the trickle of water with her gaze through spillover pools towards the canyon, and considered running for her freedom. But she had no weapons, and no tools, and she was alone. All she could really hope to accomplish was suicide. An hour or two earlier, that would have seemed like a desirable goal.

  Now, she found, she wanted to live.

  Instead she pulled on her clothing, which was dry, and beat her coat against the slickrock to force the worst of the dirt and dust out of it. Then she walked to rejoin Jak and Eirig.

  “I guess you’ll tie me up now,” she said.

  Jak nodded, but when Dyan put her hands behind her back, he hesitated. “In front of you,” he finally said.

  “Thanks.”

  They crossed more slickrock together, great whale-backs of the stuff that surged up among juniper groves and drifts of reddish sand, and to Dyan it seemed the desert would never end. But suddenly, Jak grabbed her by the back of her coat, pulling her away from a pit that yawned open at her feet.

  The cave mouth.

  Jak led the way, spear in one hand and light stick in the other, to assist the daylight that managed to trickle down and get into the shaft. He kept shining his light back behind him to illuminate Dyan’s steps. She was grateful, but didn’t mention it.

  She’d been too nice to him already, seeing that he only planned to kill her.

  “Mother!” Jak cursed.

  Dyan snapped out of her thoughts. Jak had hit the bottom, she realized, and was shining his light all around the lowest part of the cave.

  “Bat bite you?” Eirig joked.

  Jak cursed again, and slammed his palm against the cave wall, startling three bats into sudden flapping flight.

  “She’s gone!” he hissed, and he looked at Dyan. “Your friend Cheela’s disappeared!”

  ***

  Chapter Ten

  Jak stared at Dyan, and she could only shrug.

  “I don’t know where she is,” she said.

  “What did she get?” Eirig asked.

  Dyan shrugged. “What?”

  Jak ran one hand through his hair. “I left one of the bags here. I don’t remember what was in it, but no weapons. Maybe a utility knife.”

  “We should track her down,” Eirig suggested.

  Jak squinted up the shaft of the cave and grabbed Eirig by the arm. “Out the crack!” he hissed, his voice dropping to a fierce whisper.

  “You think she’s setting a trap?” Eirig followed Jak’s gaze and so did Dyan, but there was no motion in the cave mouth, no silhouettes or other signs of Cheela.

  “Wouldn’t you?” Jak asked.

  “I would,” Dyan agreed. She squatted, crouching to wedge herself into the guano-filled crack again.

  “Eirig first,” Jak ordered, and Eirig obeyed. “We’ll get her when it’s on our terms.”

  “Someone else could be waiting for us on the river,” Dyan pointed out.

  “For us?”

  “I … I mean …” she stammered, “for you.”

  Jak only arched one eyebrow at her.

  When the one-armed boy had entirely disappeared, Dyan scurried after him, dragging herself on her belly and forearms, pushing with her knees to force her body forward through sour-smelling dust and slime. It would have been much easier with her hands untied, but she had no hope that Jak was interested in freeing her. She emerged into afternoon shadow on the ledge, and Eirig pointing his spear at her.

  Jak scraped out last, coughing from the dust raised by the others’ passage. He climbed to his knees to survey the river, upstream and down.

  “Flare,” Dyan said.

  “What?” Jak was startled.

  She pointed it out. A trail of smoke drifted in gray tatters into view past the lip of the canyon above them. Moments later, a twinkling green light appeared. It sank between the canyon walls, floating steadily downward on the breeze until it splashed down in the brown water of the river and fitzzed out.

  “Probably Cheela,” Dyan said. “She must think she has us trapped, and is calling Magister Zarah and the others.”

  “Why her?” Jak pressed. He had a hard, appraising look in his eyes. “Why do you think it’s her, and not someone else? Why not an Outrider?”

  “The flare was green,” Dyan pointed out. “Only Crechelings are issued green flares, so it isn’t an Outrider, unless it’s some kind of trick. But I can’t imagine why an Outrider would be launching a Crecheling’s flare so close to us. It seems like a wild coincidence. So I think it must be Cheela. Or maybe … maybe one of the others.” She shuddered and closed her eyes, trying to block out a sudden mental image of Wayland, falling to pieces with a look of surprise on his chubby face.

  “Deek,” Jak said. “Or Shad.”

  Dyan opened her eyes and met his gaze. He looked serious and concerned. She nodded.

  “Why are you telling me this?” he asked.

  Dyan hesitated, then told the truth. “I don’t know.”

  He nodded slowly, then gestured at the river below. “Time to jump,” he said. “Eirig first.”

  “Why am I always first?” Eirig demanded. “It’s the one arm, isn’t it?” he waved his stump, the skin of which was angry and red but not bleeding. The System’s healing ointments were not only antibiotics, they also stimulated cell growth to speed healing. “You pick on me because you know I can’t stand up to you in a fist fight?”

  Jak shook his head. “I pick on you because you’re ugly.”

  He pushed Eirig in the center of his chest with one hand. The other boy, balanced at the edge of the drop, wiggled to try to avoid the shove but didn’t have enough room. Scrabbling for better purchase on the ledge with his toes, he tipped over backwards and fell into the water below with a splash.

  He came up flailing and gasping. The water at the base of the cliff was four or five feet deep, and he sloshed out to shallower stretches, glaring up at Jak. “Not funny!” he hissed, but he was grinning.

  “Shh!” Jak motioned to Dyan. “You next,” he said. “Bend your knees.”

  She stepped out into the air. She felt the sickening pull of gravity at her stomach and then she splashed into the cold water. The water that had been so harmless to Eirig was over her head, and when she kicked against the river bottom her boots sank into mud. She panicked, losing most of the air in her lungs.

  Then a splash in the water beside her knocked her sideways, and when she righted herself again, Jak had his hands i
n her coat collar and was dragging her out into the warm afternoon air.

  “Breathe!” he ordered her.

  When she had regained her footing, he let her go.

  “It’s only deep in that one spot,” he said. “Right at the base of the rock.”

  “There’s another one.” Eirig pointed at the sky, and Dyan saw a second green flare, slowly dropping. “Guess your friend got bored and fired another one.”

  “Guess again,” Jak snapped. “That’s coming from downstream. Run!”

  He dragged Dyan and threw her ahead of him, staggering through the water.

  Eirig huffed behind them. Each of the boys had saddlebags full of gear slung over his shoulder, but Jak was more fit, and Eirig’s balance seemed thrown off. Maybe by his loss of his arm, Dyan thought.

  “We could hide,” Eirig panted.

  “Not here!” Jak shot back at his friend. “She’ll be out any second!”

  Eirig looked like he might have been about to say something else, but instead he tucked his chin and ran faster.

  “Stop!”

  Dyan heard Cheela’s call and her step faltered.

  Thump!

  Something struck Eirig in the back, knocking him forward and face-first into the water.

  Jak spun and raised his hand, holding, Dyan realized, one of the monofilament bolas. She cringed away from it, remembering the mess Jak’s friend had made of himself with his unskilled attempt at a bola attack.

  Eirig foundered, and as she dragged him up by one arm she looked back. Cheela was armed with a leather sling. She had probably made it herself, Dyan guessed. Cheela raised her arm to her shoulder, swinging it around to launch a projectile—and Dyan realized that Cheela was looking at her.

  Jak plowed into Dyan from the side, knocking the air from her lungs and pounding down on top of her and Eirig. All three of them splashed into the water, and Dyan heard a whiz and the sharp crack of stone on stone as Cheela’s sling bullet smacked into a half-submerged boulder right behind the spot where she had been standing.

  Dyan rose from the water first in a fountain of mud. She grabbed at Jak with her bound hands to pull him up, but he pushed her away. “Run!” he shouted at her, and turned to face Cheela.

  Dyan looked at her Crechemate, and saw murder in the other girl’s eye.

  Not killing, not the resolution to do the necessary thing that Magister Zarah had talked about, but anger, hatred, and a desire to inflict pain. Cheela stared right past Jak. She was looking at Dyan.

  “Come on!” Eirig grabbed Dyan’s forearm and pulled her. She resisted.

  Cheela put another stone in her sling.

  Jak stared at her, raising the bola.

  Cheela whipped the stone around and launched it—

  Jak dodged, but not fast enough—

  and the stone hit him in the thigh.

  “Holy Mother!” He stumbled.

  Cheela put another stone in her sling, and Jak whirled the bola.

  “No!” Dyan cried. In her mind’s eye she saw the monofilament, flashing impossibly where she knew it must be, and she imagined it slicing Jak into ribbons. She remembered his friend spinning the bola too long, releasing it too late.

  But did she really care if Jak killed himself?

  Jak got it right. One spin around his head, just like a sling, and he released the bola in Cheela’s direction. Without waiting to see what came of his throw, he turned in Dyan’s direction and sprinted. Dyan wanted to tear herself away, but she couldn’t. Instead, she watched the bola.

  Jak’s aim was terrible. The weapon launched close enough to Cheela that she ducked, but she was in no risk. Catching herself in a crouch in knee-deep water, she turned to watch the path of the bola’s flight.

  It passed her and kept flying, and she turned to race after it.

  “Go!”

  Jak slammed into Dyan as if he wanted to tackle her. His impetus carried her along like a river current, and she lost sight of Cheela as he pushed her around the bend in the canyon. Her Crechemate knelt in the river, feeling around underwater with both hands.

  Dyan’s breath came hard, but she was surprised and impressed enough that she had to say something. “You … you missed … on purpose,” she puffed.

  Jak shook his head doggedly and didn’t slow down. “I’d have been happy …” his breath was ragged too, “to slice that … vixen in half … but I threw hard … so if I missed … at least it might buy us a little time.”

  Dyan felt profound confusion. She shut up before she said anything even more damaging, and thought furiously.

  She didn’t like Jak. He wanted to kill her, and she should escape at her first opportunity.

  On the other hand, Cheela had tried to kill her. Or had she?

  Even escape wasn’t enough anyway. Escape from Jak just left her in the position she’d been in before; Magister Zarah … the System … wanted her Blooded. It wanted her to kill someone. It wanted her to kill Jak.

  Who maybe, just maybe, had saved her life.

  She kept running.

  At the arch with the mound of boulders beneath it, Jak paused. Dyan’s heart thundered and her lungs scorched the inside of her chest, but as badly as she wanted to rest, she wanted even more to stay out of Cheela’s grasp.

  Cheela catching up would be a reckoning. It would force a decision.

  “Do you know any other escape tunnels?” she panted. “Caves, like the other one?”

  Eirig shook his head. “We were hiding,” he puffed. “We got lucky.”

  “The waterfall ahead is impassable,” Jak said. He stared sharply up into the arch. “But we can use this spot to our advantage. If your friend comes at us from one side, we can leave by the other and get past her.”

  “But she’s not alone,” Dyan objected. She wondered whose flare the other had been. She didn’t know if she was better off if it belonged to Shad or to Deek. “We saw a second flare.”

  “All the more reason to get into the arch,” Jak nodded, as if her reminder had led him to a decision. “Better to split them up by forcing them to come at us two ways at once.” He started scrambling up the rocks.

  As an afterthought, he turned to look at Dyan. But she was already following, on her own.

  The going was rough, and Jak forced a quick pace. He was more nimble than Dyan was, and when she stumbled over a boulder twice the size of her own body, two thirds of the way up the slope, he caught her by her bound wrists before she hit the ground.

  “Kind of makes you glad to be tied up, I guess?” Eirig winked at her as she recovered her balance and breath.

  Dyan didn’t answer.

  “Get in here,” Jak hissed at them, and disappeared into the high saddle of rubble and stone beneath the arch.

  Dyan followed, saw that Jak squatted low among the stones, and followed his example. Her legs trembled from the effort of running and climbing. After a moment of crouching, they gave out and she dropped onto hard sand.

  When she could breathe normally again, she turned and crept on her belly to lie beside Jak and Eirig, looking down into the loop of the river from which they’d come.

  “We just have the one bola left,” Eirig said. It sounded like a complaint.

  “Remember what happened to Yoel.”

  Eirig shrugged. “Ah, but you’re not Yoel, are you? You snapped that thing off at her friend just fine. Almost beaned her.”

  Jak shook his head. “Don’t kid yourself.” He nodded at Dyan. “They … I mean, the System does it on purpose, you know.”

  “Does what?” Dyan asked.

  “Arms its people with weapons like that. Like the bola, like the whip. Like bows.”

  Dyan shrugged. “What do you mean, good weapons?”

  Jak sighed. “I mean, weapons that are really hard to use. Weapons that can hurt the person trying to use them, if they don’t have special training.”

  Dyan was puzzled. “What do you mean? Why does the System do that then?”

  Jak looked at her a
s if unsure whether to take her question seriously. “It does that because we … we Landsmen … don’t have special training.”

  “A bow doesn’t require that much practice,” Dyan objected.

  “It does if you want to hit anything,” Jak said.

  “It also requires two hands.” Eirig grinned. “So much for my plan to become a great hunter.”

  Dyan realized that neither of the boys had a bow anyway. “What happened to my bow? To the bow you had?”

  “Broke,” Eirig said. “Chasing you down the canyon. Small price to pay.”

  “So what do we have?”

  “A bola,” Jak listed their assets. “Arrows. Flares. Medikits. Utility knives.”

  “It’s too bad you threw Cheela’s weapons into the river,” Dyan tut-tutted. “A whip and two bolas would have really come in handy right now.”

  “At the time,” Jak reminded her, “Eirig wasn’t doing very well. We couldn’t take the risk of you overpowering him and taking your weapons back.”

  “I’ve always inspired confidence in my friends,” Eirig said. “It’s a special gift.”

  “Shh.” Jak pointed.

  Around the bend in the canyon came a single horse, bearing two riders.

  “Blazes!” Dyan cursed.

  The second rider was Cheela. Sitting easy in front of her on the horse, holding the reins and scrutinizing the canyon as they rode, was Shad.

  ***

  Chapter Eleven

  Shad stopped his horse at the base of the bouldered slope below the arch and looked up. Dyan strained her ear, but when Shad turned to talk to Cheela, it was in a whisper.

  “Blazes,” Dyan grumbled.

  Cheela dismounted, and Shad urged his horse on at a trot into the bend of the canyon and toward the other side of the arch.

  Dyan watched him go for a moment, and then returned her attention to Cheela.

  Jak had found the field lens in his saddlebags and gazed through it at Cheela, spinning the dial around the outside of the lens to focus it tightly. “She looks proud of herself,” he told them.

  “She’s going to be Blooded.” Dyan didn’t really want to discuss it. She felt miserable; in a no-win situation. Cheela and Shad would rescue her easily. Jak was right, she saw now. The System armed its people with weapons that were extremely powerful and that the Landsmen couldn’t possibly use. Shad would bottle them up the far side of the arch and Cheela would climb up the near side, and Jak and Eirig had no way out. She looked around. Unless they could fly. “Cheela’s anxious to become a full Outrider.”