Under Cover of Darkness

by Julie E. Czerneda

  “I’ll find them,” she muttered, unwilling to quit for the whine of a haunted conscience. “I swear by my willing oath to the order, no innocents will die in our war zone!”

  Yet more likely these savage, inimical hermits would lurk in concealment like wraiths, laughing as she blundered about, grumbling and circling thorn plants. The image raised a bark of grim laughter. Bad odds were her business. She’d handle these stubborn reclusives with the ball-busting self-assurance that always had landed her back on her uncertain feet.

  The gusts strengthened. Pelted by whipped gravel, Jessian reached the sheltered cleft of the rim rocks before she became buffeted to a standstill. Despite tired calves and an ache in her chest, brought on by clogged air and exertion, she chose not to camp. The fissure cut the brunt of the elements, and every lost minute mattered. She could sleep well enough through the heat of the day. The gale shrieked above the narrow, slot canyons, raking off dust like fine powder. Whipped into gyres, the fine particles built charge, flinging off static electricity.

  Jessian pushed forward under flickering storm light. She tested each step, and listened, as well, trained senses enhanced through her talent.

  No warning foreran the jolting fall, as the hardpack gave way underneath her. Ripped off balance, she plunged downward, stung by tumbling gravel, until she slammed into a hidden crevice. Lodged in the cleft, knocked breathless, with one ankle twisted to agony, she spat inhaled grit. Her first thought was the button on the locator beacon, strapped to the wrist pinned beneath her. She wrestled to move, but could not shift position. Her shoulders stayed wedged. Fear was not an option. Forced to survey the extent of her setback, she noticed the woven lattice of plant fiber, burst through by her passing weight.

  She had not come to grief, except by design. Worse, the scale of this trap was too large to be fashioned for Scathac’s undersized game animals. The desert tribes had defended their ground, despite all her specialized skills.

  Jessian cursed. Still dazed with shock, she measured her difficulty. Bodies dropped into a crack in the earth might be lost, but not due to the practice of lethal magic. Since the reclusive hunters who had darted armed troops were unlikely to rescue their victims, she was left with a straightforward predicament she’d have to solve on her own.

  Her presumption proved flawed. A wave of sucking dizziness swept her. Too late, she fought back, as her mind became clouded. Hazed out of her senses, she slipped into dreams that spun her under as if she were drowning. . . .

  The veil ripped away with no ripple of warning. Jessian wakened, awash in harsh sunlight. The lancing pain of too much sudden brilliance bedazzled her eyes and fevered her brain. She lay on her back. Her limbs were strapped straight, arms pulled overhead and tied at the wrists with rough twine. Around her, robed head to foot in black cloth, stood a band of lean warriors. Each carried a blow tube and quiver of vaned darts. Dark eyes set into creased, weathered faces watched her in expressionless quiet.

  Jessian licked her parched lips. Tried a neutral phrase in their dialect.

  No one answered. The ring of fixated stares never blinked. Jessian languished, clammy with sweat, and pressed to gasping tears by the strain on her swollen ankle. Handpicked WorldFleet officer, and sisterhood dedicate, she refused to succumb to faint nerves. Human principles mattered! Barbaric or not, these creatures had children and wives. Their innocent families relied upon her to secure their endangered future.

  “Hear me,” she pleaded, then talked herself hoarse. When her voice failed her, she labored in broken sentences, forced to a rasping whisper. She kept on until the cruel exposure whirled her to senseless prostration.

  She did not hear, when the eldest man standing vigil broke his enduring silence. “She did not shout with anger,” he pronounced with soft calm.

  Across the circle, another man added, “She did not accuse.”

  “Or threaten us with reprisals,” a third ventured. He mused, touched thoughtful, “Perhaps she’s not like the others, deaf of mind and without a true heart.”

  “She can’t walk,” said a last one in musical sorrow. “Set her free, she might suffer worse injury.”

  The last spokesman bowed his hooded head. “Dead or living, if we let her go, surely others will come to bedevil us in her place.”

  Communion between them arrived at a thought, sealed into harmonious conclusion: on the chance that she might be a person of substance, she must be taken within sacred grounds, and tested for Mother Dark’s wisdom.

  Jessian did not feel the release of the tight cords. She stayed oblivious, as tribal hands raised her. Bundled into a borrowed robe, she stayed unconscious throughout the winding ascent that bore her deep into the mountains.

  Sheltered within a closed cranny of rock, Jessian remained a prisoner. She was given strange food, and adequate water, but never a moment of privacy. Always, an escort of dartmen stood watch. However she begged or raged in frustration, her captors did not deign to answer. The days crept, without respite. Still, their sharp eyes tracked her every small move. They never relented through each passing hour, even for the embarrassment of bodily necessity. Worse, if she even dared think of escape, the men hissed through their teeth in sharp warning.

  They were reading her mind.

  Punched to shock by that surprise revelation, Jessian strained the fraught limits of her sisterhood’s clandestine training. Soon enough, her innate talent confirmed: she sensed the thrusting, delicate tendrils of the tribesmen’s listening awareness. If their invasive touch was unsettling, she snatched bitter comfort in irony. Unwavering, she had never abandoned the merciful purpose that brought her. Trapped and alone, racked by fear and uncertainty, she recognized that these warriors had grasped the gist of her desperate talk. Understanding peeped through their stony masks, when they thought her attention turned elsewhere.

  Yet the fact a new weapon doomed their remote world failed to move their granite indifference. However she exhorted, Jessian failed to raise any human concern.

  “I promise, by my sworn oath to the sisterhood, you won’t be thrown over to WorldFleet’s agenda!” Yet even that vow of protection evoked no stir in response.

  Despair settled on her, as the seventh day dawned, shining azure light through the rock chinks.

  “I don’t understand,” she accosted her impassive captors, still bent on her senseless imprisonment. “I offer the power to send you away. Save your people. Why should you hold out? At least give your children the life they can’t have, if you force them to mass immolation!”

  They had seen their last sunrise. Past nightfall, Scathac would be nothing more than a blast cloud of cinders and smoke. Now, even her resource at WorldFleet command could not launch a ninth-hour extraction. Jessian wept. She must bow to defeat. Abandon the tribes to their queer, rigid stubbornness, and try to break out on her own. If she engaged her talents, diverted her guards for a moment, a strategic bonfire set as a beacon might summon her personal rescue.

  Yet the instant she focused, and shaped her projection, one of the warriors strode forward and clasped his tough hands at each side of her face.

  She heard the lilt of his tribal language spoken for the first time. “Foolish savage!”

  Her thread of intent was snatched clean away. With the ease of a toy pried from a toddler, her inborn abilities were knotted tight and then lashed to a dizzying rush of expansion. . . .

  Time ran through her like water. As though from great height, she saw herself in distant miniature, set free from the caves in the mountains. Limping, exhausted, she labored down the ravine, back into open terrain. There, she watched herself punch the distress codes through her locator, which inexplicably had been returned. Yet no pod descended. Her WorldFleet superiors had deserted her, wholly absorbed by the pending chain of disaster. Abandoned, forlorn, she perched on a parapet, until Scathac’s sere landscape dissolved in white flame. . . .

  Her scream of horror never emerged. Whirled back into herself, Jessian heard nothing, felt noth
ing. Lost to sensation, she drifted until an incisive call shattered the darkness.

  “Teidwar’sha, outsider! Attend us!”

  The summoning lifted her back into daylight. The hour was morning. Scathac was still whole. Seized by the grip of a living awareness, Jessian lay on her back on rough stone, staring up at the face of a crone.

  The creature’s muslin veils were turned back. She wore a fringed headdress of bright, patterned yarns, and her seamed wrists jangled with fetishes. While Jessian languished, too muddled to react, the ancient cupped a slender hand at her brow, and demanded, “Why are you here?”

  Beyond words, the charged accusation unfolded: that to tribal mores, her kind were the ones whose values were sorrowfully lacking. Shock strangled Jessian’s chance to respond. The uncanny force of the old woman’s Seeing lanced into her mind, and stripped off her mask of hypocrisy. She posed as WorldFleet’s agent, despite an oath of compassion, sworn to the order in secret.

  In a whirling juxtaposition of scenes, the remembered past became present: an impassioned sisterhood senior entreated the novice initiates: “PanTac’s trade factions chase greed without mercy, and unreconciled war threatens the roots of all civilized culture. As diplomacy fails, no recourse remains but our works of humanitarian intervention.”

  Shame followed, hot and immediate. Remorseful tears followed. All towering pride had been sorely misplaced. Seen through the offended eyes of the crone, the rigid outlook of Jessian’s convictions showed irremediable flaws. If WorldFleet’s armed force, and PanTac’s corrupt tyranny trafficked in exploitation, the sisterhood’s meddling was ugly, blind arrogance. Through empathic vision, Jessian experienced the pain caused by the coarse thoughts of outsiders. She grasped why the tribes needed strict isolation. Exposure brought harm to the web of communion that nourished their innermost being.

  What demeaning presumption dared deny this reclusive people the right to determine their fate for themselves? The adults would not integrate, but sicken and die, with their orphaned young left to sink into madness, ripped apart by extreme sensitivity.

  “I’m sorry,” gasped Jessian. “So sorry.” Yet her honest guilt did nothing to right an intrusion, whose ends must unseat human dignity.

  The crone arose with an herb-scented rustle of skirts. Her vehemence carried a powerful presence as she raised withered palms to the warriors. “Who speaks for this woman, whose loyalties are scattered as wantonly as the winds?”

  And like rustling leaves, a soft voice responded. “She has not harmed, or killed.”

  Another one argued, “Not tried to entreat us with wickedness.”

  “By her heart, she stood firm for what she believed was our children’s future survival.”

  The crone lowered her hands. “I have heard. I have seen. If she is judged worthy, who among you will rise to stand surety?”

  The warrior who had touched her, and spoken before, stepped forth from his circle of peers. “Biedar tribe must back her integrity, since my hand wrought the snare that entrapped her.”

  A handclap from the crone sealed his pledge. “Then on Biedar’s grand oath, let the spiral of Mother Dark’s mystery embrace her.”

  Dry fingers brushed Jessian’s feverish skin. More words reached her ears, clear as jewels. “Sleep. Rest and dream. In due time you will be released to return to your own.”

  “Too late,” she murmured. The sun must go down—but the coils of tribal magic noosed tight, enfolding her into vision. . . .

  As though from deep space, she gazed down once more on the mottled, brown sphere that was Scathac. The desolate hues no longer seemed drab, but possessed of a surreal beauty; as though all colors lay in the essence of form, veiled as the notes in a symphony. Then, to Jessian’s horror as witness, a miniscule, metal object arced past and plunged toward the central sun. The casing that cradled the weapon was tiny. A mere fleck, to bear ruin beyond the pale of all former human achievement.

  Her being cried out!

  The explosion would strike all bright harmony blind, as the disrupted star hurled its concussive shock ripping outward. Her sight became dazzled blind upon impact.

  And song unfurled, pealing out through the thundering instant of death, and a shimmering pause that was silence.

  Somewhere, unseen, a crone spoke a word, and a circle of warriors responded. Together, they spun mighty webs of strange magic, wrought from the music of intelligent matter, and the sovereignty of their human will. Jessian felt their working touch her core self. Included, drawn in, she was pulled into the heart of their vortex. To their making, she offered her steel determination: the courage that had impelled her to risk all she had for belief, that an innocent people were jeopardized. She lent the fierce character that had sent her, alone, across Scathac’s savage terrain. Yet where her life-trained talent knew nothing more than projected illusion set to deceive, these wild tribefolk wrought direct conjury.

  Force answered.

  The world split!

  The vast pattern of the dream’s vision doubled. At one with the masterful strength of the tribes, Jessian beheld two realities, present, writ across the blast of a wanton annihilation. In one, Scathac’s surface was wasted to ash. In the second, the planet spun on, captured inside a majestic symmetry. The moment suspended, as an undaunted, fierce people steered their home world within the gravitational embrace of an untrammeled, whole sun.

  Then all brilliance faded, and blackness returned, infused with a pristine serenity. . . .

  Jessian roused with a startled cry, snapped back to wakened awareness. She lay in the mountain cranny, alone. The reclusive tribefolk had left her. Scattered above the rock cleft, she saw stars, burning untouched against darkness. Her gear lay nearby: rations, tent, emergency flares, and the wristband with her locator beacon. She sat up, her shocked talent soothed by the peculiar awareness that the crone’s cavalier handling had not left her stranded and desolate. Scathac still held her own people: the miners, never informed of their peril, had also been kept alive. The WorldFleet base and its outpost were gone. But the workers, abandoned by PanTac to die, had been gathered up by the tribes’ mighty act of reweaving.

  In their innocence, those men would not grasp the titanic event that had happened. Their eventual rescue would pose an anomaly, since all ranked personnel, warned of impending doom, had been lost, torn apart in a blaze of destruction.

  Except Jessian, who now contained an experience beyond individual cognizance. She knew, beyond reason, the tribefolk had withdrawn, pushed deeper in hiding than ever before. Yet their web of living awareness remained, now an inseparable part of her. Thrumming within, she still sensed a current of power to outmatch all of Kincaid’s rogue research; an echoing thunder of magic to diminish forever her sisterhood’s pathetic tinkering.

  Trembling, afraid, she addressed the night quiet, reshaped by a newfound humility. “I promise to leave your lands and your people to abide with your secrets in solitude.”

  She would keep her word. Even against the inevitable debriefing incited by Scathac’s irrational survival; and though willful silence must break her order’s sworn oath, even cost her good name under risk of a WorldFleet court martial.

  Deep in her mind, she sensed the reply, and the burden beyond her life trust. “Reveal anything that you’ve inherited through our crafting, and Biedar tribe must pursue your kind for that knowledge, unto the ending of time.”

  Through her combined career as an established professional novelist and her background in the trade as a cover artist, Janny Wurts has immersed herself in a lifelong ambition: to create a seamless interface between words and pictures that explores imaginative realms beyond the world we know. She has authored seventeen books, a hardbound collection of short stories, and made numerous contributions to fantasy and science fiction anthologies. Her novels and stories have been translated worldwide, with most editions in the U.S. and abroad bearing her own jacket and interior art.

  Recent releases include a standalone fantasy, To Ride
Hell’s Chasm, and the latest volume in her “Wars of Light and Shadow” series, Traitor’s Knot.

  She lives in Florida with a husband, three horses, four cats, and all manner of wild things parading through the back yard.

  THE EXILE’S PATH

  Jihane Noskateb

  Twenty-two young men and women had chosen the Exiles’ path, along with Elza Ragon. They had sworn together, on the ancestral fire, three vows.

  I will never betray the trust, the name, the shelter of my family had been the first, and the easiest. They had grown up together, learned together how special, how precious their family was, discovered together the pride and love that came with it. Stepping now into duty had felt like a reward.

  I will never forget, I will never remember. That one had made no sense, then, but they had accepted it.

  The last was the strangest, and most important: By my choices and life, I will help bridge humanity’s differences, lest anyone has to find peace in exile ever again.

  They had thought they were just words, but they swore with all their heart.

  Then, Grandmother started telling them a tale. The tale of their origins.

  Elza

  When I came back to work, on Monday morning, nothing had changed. The cheerful, “Hello Elizabeth!” of my coworkers, the bright colors on the walls, even the pile of work Magyd had left on my chair with an ephemeral soft-screen note: “Enjoy!”—everything was as it had been.