by D. J. Butler
Jak hesitated.
“The spears won’t seem like much of a threat to him. And if you hold the bola,” she pointed out, “he’ll think you’re just going to cut yourself in half with it, like your friend did. I know how to use it, and he thinks I’m one of you.”
“Only you’re not.” Jak’s words sounded like a question.
She looked into his eyes. “I am now. I don’t have a choice.”
Jak handed her the bola.
She stepped one pace back from Cheela, whimpering on the sand. “Give me space,” she warned the boys in a soft voice. “If I have to use this, you don’t want to be too close.”
Shad reined his horse in midstream and stared at Dyan.
“I never would have believed it,” he said. “I almost didn’t believe it, when Cheela told me.”
Dyan felt like a horrible gulf yawned at her feet, instant death and yet another forced choice. She had the bola in her hands now. She could kill Jak with it, and one-armed Eirig would be no challenge. She could tell Shad that Cheela was a liar, and she, Dyan, had been a prisoner who had now turned the tables on her captors.
She looked into Shad’s eyes, about to begin an explanation. She stopped when she saw his expression. His eyes were full of love.
And he was looking at Cheela.
She looked at Jak. He had backed away and given her the space she had asked for. Now he looked at her, and his eyes, too, were compelling. He looked trusting, and nervous. And his eyes asked a question.
“Believe it,” she said to Shad.
Eirig let out a soft sigh. She hadn’t realized he’d been holding his breath.
“What happened?” Shad wanted to know. “Are you some kind of renegade?”
“What happened,” she told him, “is that the System didn’t give me any choice.” She meant it as a defense, but when she said it she realized that it was true. And then she realized she had a chance to save other lives. “I told Jak and Eirig here what was going to happen. About the Cull. I helped them escape.”
“Of course you had a choice.” Shad shook his head impatiently. “You were Called to be a Magister. Your invitation from Buza System was to participate in the Blooding, become a full Urbane, and then teach children. It’s what you always wanted to do, and the System offered it to you. And instead you decided to attack your own kind, go outlaw.”
“The System offered me what I always thought I wanted,” Dyan agreed. “But at a terrible price. I can’t become the monster it wants me to be.”
“The monster I am?”
She said nothing.
“So what now?” Shad asked. “You kill Cheela, I kill you, the Landsies ride home to Ratsnay Station as heroes?”
“Ratsnay Station,” Jak hissed, “doesn’t know anything about this. Ratsnay Station thinks I’m being taken to live the life of luxury.”
Shad shrugged, indifferent.
“You give us the horse,” Dyan said. “And we leave you here.”
“And the weapons!” Jak added.
Shad laughed. “If I give you my weapons, you kill me.”
“And if you don’t,” Jak said, “you kill me.”
“You give him the bow,” Dyan offered, pointing at Eirig. “And the saddlebags. And the horse. You keep your whip.”
“Or else what?”
Dyan pointed at Cheela, who snarled back at her like a wild animal. “Or else I kill the blazing vixen.”
“You wouldn’t!” Cheela snapped.
Dyan stared down at her former Crechemate. Cheela’s face was contorted by hatred and pain into something terribly ugly. Hatred, pain, and something else.
Fear, Dyan thought. It felt like an accomplishment to her.
“You lied and betrayed me.” She stared at the taller girl. “You’d better believe I’d kill you.”
“She’ll die anyway,” Shad said calmly. “If you take the bags, I have no way to get help, and it’s a long way to carry her out.”
“You could make a travois and drag her.” Dyan’s own voice sounded cold to her. “But we’ll drop flares on the sand around the bend.”
“I keep the medikit.”
“Fine.”
Shad narrowed his eyes. “How do I know I can trust you?”
Dyan raised the bola over her head, finger on the mechanism that would release the weapon’s counterweight. One flick of her arm, and Cheela would be permanently out of her misery, sliced in half.
Shad threw his bow at Eirig’s feet. “Fine.” He dug the medikit out of his saddlebags, then dismounted and stepped away from the animal. He was closer to Cheela and Dyan both, his nearness reminding Dyan how tall he really was. His hand hung at his side, an instant’s grab from the handle of his whip.
“Mount up, boys,” Dyan told Jak and Eirig. She kept her eyes on Shad.
“It’s a big animal, but it won’t take us all,” Jak answered. “I’m fastest. You and Eirig ride.”
Dyan knew he was right. She backed away slowly, pivoting to the other side of the animal and mounting with one hand. She never relaxed her grip on the bola’s trigger, and Shad never took his hand away from the whip. When she had the horse’s reins in her hand, Eirig climbed up behind her, clutching a bow and spear.
Jak backed away slowly, and Dyan followed on the horse.
“You’ll die for this!” Shad called after her.
“I’m dead no matter what I do!” Dyan laughed, feeling a rush of adrenalin in her battered body. It felt like freedom. “At least this way I’m choosing!”
She kept an eye on Shad as she rode away, Jak splashing at her side in the river water. The young man with whom she had once thought she might have a Love-Match knelt over his injured companion and tended to her foot. He was still working on it when Dyan rode around the next bend in the canyon and he disappeared from sight.
“Be careful,” Jak warned. “Your other friends are still out here somewhere.”
“Deek,” she agreed, thinking that the shy, technically-oriented boy would be little threat.
“And the Magister,” he reminded her.
“At some point,” Eirig said, “even your Magister is going to have to admit that this has all just gone to blazes, and call in the Outriders.”
“I’m not sure,” Dyan mused.
As she had promised, she tossed the remaining flares they had—two of them—onto a dry bank of sand around the bend.
“So you’ve thrown in your lot with us.” Jak kicked at the sand beside the flares.
Dyan laughed to put on a show of bravado. “I’ll go it alone if I have to.”
“I still have to kill them, you know.”
“Why? If they don’t have any reason to worry about Ratsnay Station, they’ll leave the settlement alone.”
Jak groaned uncertainly. “I don’t know that for sure.”
“You could never have been sure,” Dyan pointed out. “Even if you killed them all, the System might still assume it was the settlement’s fault and wipe it out. Or it might wipe them out, just to be on the safe side.”
Jak rammed his spear into the sand and rubbed his face with his hands. “What do you suggest?”
Dyan scanned the walls of the canyon. They towered over her, immense and orange, like prison walls. She couldn’t see beyond them, even in her imagination. She pulled off her hat to wipe sweat from her forehead and discovered that its crown had been sliced completely off. It took her a moment to realize that it must have been Cheela’s thrown bola that had done it.
“What would you have done?” she asked. “Did you have a plan?”
“Kill you all,” Jak said. “And then run for the Wahai.”
“Is there any reason to do anything different?” she asked.
“The Wahai is terribly romantic, of course,” Eirig agreed. “But don’t you think the Outriders will assume we’re hiding out around Ratsnay Station?”
“And then we’re back to our original problem.” Jak’s voice was grim.
Dyan looked at the sand, scuff
ed and disturbed by Jak’s kicking. “So we tell them where we’re going,” she suggested. “We leave a trail.”
The afternoon had turned into evening and the bats were out when they reached the chimney leading to the cave.
Jak climbed up the rock with his back against one wall of the shaft and his feet against the other, and then let down rope. Dyan and Eirig climbed up—Dyan’s muscles ached like they’d never ached in all her life, no matter how hard the training or exercise the Magisters put her through—and when Eirig bent to pull up the rope, Jak stopped him.
“We need to be followed,” he said. “Remember?”
By the time they’d climbed to the top of the shaft and emerged again onto the mesa, the sun had fallen below the horizon.
“The Wahai is west,” Dyan said. She looked at the stars quickly and pointed the direction. “We should make as much distance as we can tonight.”
Jak shook his head. “We should make some distance,” he agreed. “But if we run too fast in the darkness, we’re going to find ourselves running over a two hundred foot cliff.”
They walked slowly, several miles. This time, they deliberately walked on sand as much as possible, and kicked their way through thickets of brittle shrubs, and trampled grass. After an hour or more of tramping, on a high wrinkle of rock overlooking a tumble of wrecked stone walls and an inward-leaning grove of splintered timbers that must once have been a building, Jak called a halt.
He rubbed his eyes in the moonlight. “I’m exhausted. I’ll stand the first watch, so I can sleep through the rest of the night.”
“I’m not tired at all,” Eirig yawned. “I’ll stand a watch.”
Dyan didn’t think Jak had slept at all the night before, and Eirig’s body, in addition to everything else it was going through, was using a lot of energy to heal his injury. Neither of them was in much condition to be on his feet any longer.
“Obviously,” Dyan said, “I will stand the first watch.”
Jak tended quickly to Eirig’s arm again, smearing his stump once more with antibiotic and regenerative salve. Both of them fought sagging eyelids through the process, and then curled up under microfiber blankets in the shadow of a clump of juniper trees and were quickly snoring.
Dyan settled against a low ridge of stone. A cool breeze blew against her, and she opened her coat. The chill would help keep her awake.
She rubbed her wrists, chafed where she had been tied. The skin on her face and the back of her neck scratched and felt raw, and she guessed it had been burned by the sun. She thought about using some of the salve on herself, but decided to save it for Eirig. Besides, the pain would also help keep her awake. And in her heart, she knew she deserved all the pain she was feeling, and more.
“They’re asleep,” she heard a voice in the darkness. “Good. Now we can talk.”
A black shadow detached itself from the ink of the night, and dropped its hood to reveal the lean face of Magister Zarah.
***
Chapter Thirteen
“I’m armed,” Dyan warned the Magister. “I could cut you down where you stand.”
“Then I’ll sit,” Zarah said. “If I am to die, I’d like to do it comfortably.” She settled carefully onto an arm of the same ridge of stone against which Dyan leaned.
“I could yell,” Dyan told her, “and warn the others.”
“So could I,” Zarah agreed. “And if we are to tell of all the tragic and terrible things we might do, for that matter, I could have simply killed you in the darkness before you noticed me.”
Dyan hesitated. Zarah didn’t sound like she’d come to arrest Dyan. “How can you talk about tragic and terrible things so lightly?” she asked. “Do you know what happened to Wayland?”
“He was cut in half,” she said instantly. “I was almost caught in the same trap myself, only Deek noticed the whip. Very clever.”
Dyan was silent, remembering the sudden weight of Wayland’s torso slamming into her body and the smell of his blood.
“If Cheela is to be believed, it was your doing.”
“It wasn’t,” Dyan said. She wasn’t sure she should be talking to the Magister, but she had to admit that if Zarah’s purpose in coming had just been to kill her, she could have done it before Dyan noticed a thing. “And she isn’t.”
“I know.” The moon shone on Zarah’s face where she sat, giving it a soft, silvery glow. “She’s in love with Shad, I see it. Young people do crazy things for love.”
“I thought I was in love with Shad, once. It seems like a long time ago now.”
“If ever you were in love with him,” Zarah said softly, “then, on some level, you always will be.”
Dyan bit back a sudden sob, managing to twist it into something like a cough. “Is it like that for everyone? That’s terrible.”
“Not for everyone,” Zarah said. “But it’s like that for some people, and I know you, Dyan. I’ve been watching you.”
“You’ve been my Magister for four years.”
“I’ve known you for longer than that.” Zarah chuckled. “I knew you in the nursery, when you were a chubby little thing who wouldn’t pick her feet up, so static electricity kept your hair standing nearly vertical.”
Dyan laughed, slightly. She didn’t want to wake Jak and Eirig. “I don’t remember that.”
“You wouldn’t. Do you remember that you were the most tactile child in the nursery? That you insisted on touching all the other children, all the time?”
“No.” Dyan lost herself a little in the images that Zarah was producing.
“The combination was a disaster.” Zarah slapped her own knee in silent mirth, shaking. “You’d shuffle from child to child, shocking each of them in turn.”
“That sounds like I was a mess.”
“You were a human being. The difference can be difficult to spot.”
Dyan didn’t know what to say. She felt like she was being led into a teaching moment, but the point of it still eluded her.
“You’re the kind of person who will love forever, Dyan,” Zarah said. “You’re also the kind of person who will always love easily. You have powerful empathy, the ability to know what other people are feeling, or at least to imagine what you would be feeling if you were them. It’s a wonderful thing. It can give you great insights into people. It can also lead you into great disaster, and injury.”
“I’m a human being,” Dyan countered. “The difference between a human being and a disaster can be difficult to spot.”
“You must realize that others don’t feel as you do, and don’t see as you do.”
“What do you mean?” Dyan had had many conversations with Magisters over the years, including Zarah. They were frequently one-on-one interviews, but she’d never had a conversation this intimate before. She felt a little bit invaded. Zarah seemed to want her to understand something, but Dyan still couldn’t see it.
“Take Cheela. You look at Cheela, and you see that she has feelings for Shad. How does this make you feel?”
“Betrayed.” Dyan felt tiny. She wasn’t enjoying this lesson very much.
Zarah reached over and patted her knee. “I’m sorry, Dyan. How do you feel about Cheela?”
Dyan shrugged, miserable. “Sad. It’s bad luck for me that she likes Shad, and worse luck that Shad likes her back. I guess I envy her. How’s her ankle?”
“She, on the other hand, sees you as a bug. She doesn’t care what your feelings are. She couldn’t imagine herself in your situation if she tried. If you two had traded places there on the riverbank today, she would have sliced you in half without a second thought.”
“She did try to slice me in half,” Dyan remembered.
“She doesn’t care about other people’s feelings because she can’t really see them. Shad, by the way, is more like you. If those two have a Love-Match and it ends, Shad will remember it with happiness and pain years later, and Cheela will simply move on.”
Dyan suddenly felt cold, and closed her coat. “That
seems brutal.”
Zarah shrugged. “It’s a kind of person. Cheela isn’t alone, and there are others who are similar in their small feeling for their fellow human beings, but more extreme. She lacks empathy.”
“Maybe it would be nice to be that way,” Dyan mused. “It would be nice to just forget about Shad.”
“Cheela’s lack of empathy is also a sort of gift,” Zarah said. “It will make her a good Outrider. When she is tasked with bringing in an outlaw, it won’t occur to her to wonder what the outlaw’s feelings are. If she has to be harsh with him, or take extreme measures in capturing him, it won’t bother her.”
“Capture or kill,” Dyan said sadly.
“Once the System has made sure of Cheela’s loyalties, it can use her to great effect.”
“That’s what the Blooding is, isn’t it?” Dyan asked. “It has nothing to do with the Landsmen, or maybe that’s only incidental. It’s about testing loyalty, and about hurting people in a way that makes them cooperative. Loyal. Submissive to the System.”
“The System is complex and subtle,” Zarah murmured. “Little of what it does can be reduced to single purposes. Yes, one of the purposes of the Cull is keep the Landsmen submissive. They lose their best and their brightest, the natural leaders of any rebellion. And they are in the habit of thinking that all their relationships, all their society, are subject to the consent and veto of the System. They submit.
“And also, another purpose of the Cull is to keep the Urbanes submissive. Every Urbane you have ever met …” Magister Zarah hesitated, and a secretive smile played around her lips. “Every Urbane has submitted to the Blooding. That means that every Urbane shares the secret, common guilt. Every Urbane knows he is complicit, and knows he will submit to the very last crossable line. Every Urbane knows the secret of life—that it is cheap, and easily taken. So every Urbane also submits to the System.”
“But the System is just people,” Dyan said. “We could just change it.”
Zarah was silent for a long time. “I have not come to talk with you about changing the System,” she finally said. She sighed heavily. “Do you love that boy over there?” she asked.
“Jak?”
