by S. M. Stirling, Harry Turtledove, Jody Lynn Nye, John Ringo; Michael Z. Williamson
“He knows your plan,” Grumm answered. “He knows it, and he laughs at it. He wants you—he wants the Clan of the Claw—to try to cross his lands. He has been readying himself for the fight for years. All manner of scaly monsters await you: everything from snakes on the ground to crocodiles in the rivers to the terrible hunters of the plains to countless thinking Liskash, all moving under a single controlling will: his.”
“There!” Zhanns Bostofa said. “Do you see? Do you hear? Do you smell? Only death and destruction will meet us if we set forth. You said the Scaly Ones would not be ready for us. You said it, but that did not make it true.”
He was more careful of his speech when he wasn’t holding the scepter. More careful, but maybe not careful enough. At another time, Rantan Taggah might have decided he’d bent the rules and call him out. Not now. Now there were more important things to worry about.
The talonmaster pointed a clawed forefinger at Grumm. For an instant, Rantan Taggah seemed, at least to himself, the literal embodiment of his clan. Whether anyone else felt the same way…Again, he had more important things to worry about. “You have heard what you say from Sassin himself, I gather?”
“I have,” Grumm said.
“And you know it is true because…?”
“Talonmaster, he let me—no, he made me—see through his eyes, feel through his hands.” Grumm shivered at the memory. Rantan Taggah wanted to shiver with him. Mrem were not made to be subjected to minds like that. The Liskash were too horribly different. Gathering himself, Grumm added, “He showed me the truth. I saw it as he saw it. I felt it as he felt it. If the Clan of the Claw tries to cross Sassin’s land, the scavenger birds and leatherwings will gorge themselves on our carcasses.”
“There!” Zhanns Bostofa said again. “Who knows more of what this Liskash intends than one who has seen and felt for himself?”
“What the Liskash intends is to put us in fear,” Rantan Taggah replied. “Plainly, he has done what he intends with you, at least.”
“Sometimes being afraid is sensible,” Zhanns Bostofa said. “We have to teach our kits to be careful, or none of us would live to grow up.”
“They don’t need to jump in the air at every passing shadow, though,” Rantan Taggah said. “That is what you…may be doing.” He left it there. He could have said something stronger, but he might have been wrong. Sassin might really be as strong as he claimed.
Or, no matter what Grumm had seen or felt, the Scaly One might not.
“Will you risk the clan on the strength of your whim? Will you risk our hangers-on?” Zhanns Bostofa’s wave took in the males who’d made it out of the Hollow Lands alive. “Will you risk all the Mrem on this side of the New Water? That is what we are—you said so yourself. Is your whim alone so strong?”
“Not my whim alone, by Aedonniss,” Rantan Taggah said. The other male talked too much, and gave him time to think. “Let us test poor Grumm here. Let the Dancers see if they can undo whatever magic Sassin worked against him. If they can, if the Liskash was lying, we go forward as I proposed. If not…If not, let it be as you say, Zhanns Bostofa.” The words tasted like rotten meat in the talonmaster’s mouth.
The plump black-and-white male inclined his head. “Agreed.”
Rantan Taggah would have agreed in his place, too. Zhanns Bostofa had by far the better half of the bargain. If Sassin was telling the truth, the plump male would get what he wanted, and the Clan of the Claw would stay where it was. Even if Sassin was lying, if he was a strong enough sorcerer his spell would prevail against everything the clan’s Dancers could do to oppose it. Only if he was lying and they had the power to beat down his lies would Rantan Taggah get to do what he was convinced needed doing.
Why Aedonniss had made the world so one Liskash noble had at least as much magic at the tips of his scaly fingers as a clan’s Dancers could muster all together, why Assirra hadn’t softened her divine mate so he showed the Mrem more mercy…Rantan Taggah shrugged yet again. Wonder why the gods had done what they’d undoubtedly done and you headed straight down the track to madness.
* * *
Enni Chennitats eyed Grumm with pained sympathy as the escaped slave took his place in the center of the clan’s Dancing ground. The male left with half his name exuded misery just standing there. Even with the Dancers all around him, he looked more alone than anyone else the priestess had ever seen.
He gnawed on a scrap of smoked meat. He seemed to eat all the time. If he kept it up, before too long he wouldn’t be skin and bones any more—he’d get as remarkably fat as Zhanns Bostofa. And then…And then he would be fat and miserable instead of scrawny and miserable. Maybe that was better. More likely—or so it seemed to Enni Chennitats—it was only different. Confusing better with different was likely to make a new misery.
She wondered whether Rantan Taggah’s plan to set the Clan of the Claw on its great trek was better or only different. She wanted to think it was better. Priestesses traveled from clan to clan, bringing news and sharing knowledge (males called it gossiping, but what did males know?). Like most of her sisters here on the Dancing ground, she felt trapped by being confined to a single clan. She craved the trek in a way most of the clansfolk would never understand.
Even so, it might prove a dreadful mistake. There was Grumm, who’d already spent too long under Liskash bondage. Maybe all the Mrem on this side of the New Water were doomed to slavery or death if they persisted in Rantan Taggah’s scheme. Or maybe they were doomed if they clung to these grazing grounds like a snail clinging to its rock.
If the gods were kind, the Clan of the Claw was not doomed at all. If.
The senior priestess was a brindled female named Demm Etter. She raised her hand with the same authority Rantan Taggah used in holding up the clan scepter at a warriors’ assembly. “Are we ready?” she asked. She wasn’t only brindled; she was grizzled as well. But her voice belied her years.
None of the two dozen other priestesses said no. Enni Chennitats would have been astonished if any of them had. If they weren’t prepared for what lay ahead, they would not have come to the Dancing grounds. Still, the question had to be asked. Ritual demanded it, and ritual helped forge in the Dancers the strength the Liskash had straight from Aedonniss.
Demm Etter dipped her head. The priestesses Danced in a circle around Grumm, first sunwise and then, at a signal from Demm Etter, deasil instead. They began slowly; they did not want to—did not dare to—spill out their power before it was fully formed. Grumm watched them circle. His jaws worked as he went on chewing.
At first, Enni Chennitats was aware only of the ground under the pads of her feet, of her rhythmic breathing, of her need to hold her place and to keep in time. This was not magic; this was only motion. But out of motion sprang magic. Sometimes. When magic felt like springing. When the Scaly Ones’ hot, nasty sorcery wasn’t too strong. You could only try. Trying was a magic of its own—so priestesses often said.
Sunwise. Deasil. Faster. Sunwise. Deasil. Faster yet. The world around Enni Chennitats began to blur into unreality. The Dance was the only thing that mattered. Out beyond the edge of the Dancing ground, warriors would be watching, though none would presume to set even a clawtip on the hallowed earth till the Dance was over. Enni Chennitats knew they were there. They faded from her consciousness, too. She knew how much Rantan Taggah had riding on the Dance, and how much she had herself. She knew, but she stopped caring. The Dance was what it was. It would do what it did. And then the clan would decide where to go from there, or whether to go.
At the center of the circle remained Grumm, like a mountain shrouded in fog. Excitement trickled through some small portion of Enni Chennitats that the dominant Dancing part barely noticed. That was the kind of image priestesses needed to form their spells. Now—was it hers alone, or did her fellows feel it with her?
Sunwise again. That was good. That was as it should have been. The sun burned fog away. “Let us see clearly!” Demm Etter said. “Clearly!” Enni Chennitat
s’s excitement grew. The old priestess sensed what she sensed, too, and pointed the other Dancers towards it.
And it was noon, or near enough. The sun stood high in the southern sky. What better placement for it to burn away fog?
The Dance quickened yet again. “Clearly!” Demm Etter called once more. As she Danced, she focused her gaze on poor Grumm in the same way that a cleverly ground piece of rock crystal brought the sun’s rays to a bright, hot point. The other Dancers, Enni Chennitats among them, followed her lead. Again, she might have been a talonmaster and they the band behind her.
Like a band following its talonmaster, they met resistance. No natural fog could have lingered round a mountain with such fierce sunlight turned on it. And no natural fog was this. It was thick and cold and clinging. Noxious vapors floating above a swamp might have had something of the same feel to them, but in lesser degree. This was fog fueled by malice and and hate: fueled by a Liskash noble, in other words. As Enni Chennitats fought to break through it and see what it concealed, she felt as if she were squelching through slime.
What would happen if she and the rest of the Dancers could not pierce the foul fog? Would they enslave themselves, as Grumm had been enslaved? Better to die quickly; that, at least, was clean. And better by far not to think of such things. Better to believe Demm Etter would lead them all through to victory.
“Clearly!” the senior priestess cried, her voice rising urgently. The fog writhed and seemed to spring forward to choke her. “Clearly! Clearly!”
How strong was this Sassin? Enni Chennitats knew he was dangerous, as any Liskash noble was dangerous. But could a single Scaly One beat back the combined wills of two dozen and one Dancers? She never would have thought so, never till now. But her confidence trembled.
“Once more, friends!” Demm Etter called. “We can do it!” What spurred Enni Chennitats like a pair of krelprep yoked to a chariot was that magical word, friends, and the we that followed it. She could conceive of an immensely powerful, immensely wily Liskash noble. For the life of her, though, she could not imagine such a noble with friends.
The sorcerous fog surrounding Grumm faltered all at once. It was as if the stuff were faced not with Demm Etter and her two dozen retainers and subordinates, but with twenty-five priestesses all alike, all potent. The fog could not attack every one of them at the same time, and did not know against which of them to concentrate. And so, instead, they attacked it.
Enni Chennitats yowled in triumph as it broke before their onslaught. Now she saw what Sassin had wanted Grumm to perceive, and how much of it was real, was true. Some, yes. She had hoped none would be, but that was a faint hope, and she knew as much. Sassin was a Liskash noble, and had no small store of strength in his domain. As much as he pretended? As much as he wanted the Clan of the Claw to believe? No.
Little by little, guided by Demm Etter, the Dance slowed. Enni Chennitats realized she was panting as hard as she could. Sweat dampened her nose, the palms of her hands, and the soles of her feet. Part of her wished she could sweat all over her body, though wet fur would have left her chilled more often than not.
As things chanced, she came to a stop facing Grumm. The escaped slave gravely nodded to her. “He lied to me,” he said. He sounded more…certain than he had before the Dance. He was still broken—he would always be broken—but perhaps not so badly now.
“He did,” Enni Chennitats agreed gravely.
“I will take vengeance,” Grumm declared. “I know not how, but I will.”
“May it be so,” the priestess replied. Maybe the male without a surname was bragging a little, as if to deny as much as he could of what Sassin had done to him. Maybe, though, the Dance had also given him a moment of the extraordinary clarity the two dozen and one used to pierce the mists darkening his spirit. Enni Chennitats did not know which. The power of the Dance no longer held her. She knew only what she hoped.
* * *
Sassin stopped awkwardly, in the middle of a stride. Lorssett almost ran into him from behind, which would have been a fatal breach of etiquette: literally, odds were. But the lesser Liskash was able—just barely—to check himself without touching his god and master.
“What is it?” he asked, doing his best not to sound surprised. He had to assume Sassin had some good reason for stopping. He assumed the noble had some good reason for everything he did. The alternative to assuming that was turning Mrem. Lorssett might not have been the tallest hill in the range, but he was no abomination, either.
As for Sassin, he knew exactly why he’d halted. A sudden pain transfixed him, as if someone had driven a spear through his head. He knew what that meant: knew what it had to mean. One of his spells had just spectacularly fallen into ruin.
His first thought was to wonder which of his enemies—which is to say, his neighbors—had dared to thwart his will. He wouldn’t have believe Fykahtin had the nerve. And Pergossett was hardly stronger than Sassin’s own aide: so it seemed from the Liskash noble’s jaundiced point of view, anyhow.
But the way his magic had failed didn’t feel as it should have if another of his own kind had suppressed it. Which left…For a moment, the pounding ache behind his eyes made him doubt it left anything. But if the Liskash hadn’t defeated a sorcery of his, only the Mrem could have.
His hiss made Lorssett cringe. The idea that those hairy screechers could do anything that seriously impeded his own kind disgusted him. Everything about the Mrem disgusted him, in fact. If only the coming of the New Water had left them all as prey for the scavengers of the deep!
It hadn’t. All he could do about that was deplore it. He’d tried his best to make them think twice about invading his lands. Too much to hope for, no doubt: the Mrem commonly had trouble thinking even once. But if they thought they could despoil what was his, they needed to think again.
And, if he couldn’t frighten them out of coming this way, he would have to beat them. He wished he truly were as mighty as he’d made that slave believe. That made him hiss once more, although this time only in ordinary annoyance. He’d lost a slave and got nothing in exchange—one more reason to despise the Clan of the Claw. Well, he wished them joy of the escapee. Mrem subjected to the will of a Liskash noble were never the same again afterwards.
The sound that came out of him next was more sigh than hiss. It was also an invitation for his aide to speak, and Lorssett did: “What do you require, lord?” The lesser Liskash assumed Sassin would require something, and he was right to do so.
“I think it is likely the Mrem will attack us soon—attack us with all their strength.” Sassin thought it as likely as the sun’s rise tomorrow morning, but he did not say that. It might lead Lorssett to ask embarrassing questions. Sassin did not care to admit to his underling—much less to himself—that his wizardry had gone awry.
As things were, Lorssett let out a small hiss himself: one of admiration for the noble’s sagacity. “You will fight them?” he asked.
“I will fight them,” Sassin agreed. “Am I a smerp, to run under the bushes when hunters fly overhead?” He hated smerps, partly because he hated everything hairy and partly because they really were pests. They gnawed through wood, they gnawed through bones, and sometimes they even gnawed through solid stone. Whenever they weren’t mating, they were eating. They squeezed into cracks you would have thought too narrow to hide even a mite. Their beady black eyes were remarkably ugly. And, while you could eat them, they didn’t taste good.
“You are no smerp. You are the lord here. You are the power here. You are the god here,” Lorssett declared. Pleasure trickled through Sassin; he couldn’t have put that better himself. His aide went on, “When you go to war against the furry beasts, victory is assured.”
That also pleased Sassin. But he remembered that victory was assured only after it was won. “We will need to summon all our strength to beat them,” he said. “Set that in motion at once. See to it. Use my name in all you do.”
“As you say, lord, so shall it be.” L
orssett hesitated. “So it shall be from me, I should say. But what if…certain others…do not care to follow my commands given in your name?”
He was not the only Liskash near-noble through whom Sassin ruled his domain. Very often, it suited Sassin’s purposes to leave his subordinates in doubt about which of them held the greatest part of his favor. Very often—but not today.
“Use my name,” Sassin repeated. “Tell them that, if they doubt, I will visit them mind to mind. After that, they will doubt no more, but they will not be the happier for it.” He would put the fear of their god—of himself—in them.
Lorssett recoiled half a step in fear. “As you say, so shall it be. Our archers, our spearers, our fierce beasts—all shall be in readiness before the accursed Mrem commence to move.”
“See that it is,” Sassin said. “When those hairy creatures move, they move. We cannot act like frogs and turtles and sleep through the cold season at the bottom of a pond. See to it that no one misunderstands or goes slack.”
“In your name, lord, all will be done,” Lorssett said. It was, once more, the right answer. Which meant…how much? Sassin studied his underling. Did Lorssett dream of snapping with Sassin’s teeth one day, despite his sorry lack of sorcery? If he did, he would pay for his presumption.
Again, though, not today. Today, Sassin had to arrange things so the Mrem did the paying.
* * *
The wind blew hot and dry out of the south. Rantan Taggah smelled the dust it carried. The transparent third eyelids flicked across his eyes again and again, clearing them of grit.
Get used to it, he told himself. How much dust would there be when the whole Clan of the Claw got moving? Herdbeasts, chariots, wagons, males, females? The folk at the back would be lucky if they could see the folk at the front when the whole long column started west.
