by Jaine Fenn
“Well, she was beautiful.” Rhia wasn’t sure of that, having little to judge against, but in this case a little lie was permissible. “But frail too. My first memory of her is one of my earliest memories. We were sitting in the villa gardens. It was a dry year, so I must have been about four years old. She made lace, did you know that? I wanted to see, and she tipped the cushion towards me, and smiled…” Rhia had never spoken about this to anyone. Homely memories welled up from some deep bright place where they had sat, unexamined, for years. She recalled what she could of the mother Etyan had never met, and told him about her. He listened without interruption.
When Lekem cleared his throat apologetically and held out two bowls of stew, she stopped and focused on Etyan’s face. She found his expression hard to read. But she thought she saw grief for what was lost, much as she felt herself at that moment.
After the meal, Rhia searched for some way to restart the conversation. They had gone straight from mundane fripperies to an emotionally difficult subject they had been avoiding for years, but still had not tackled the current issue.
Before she could speak, Etyan said, “I need time to think things through, Ree. Get some perspective.”
“Of course.” What else could she say? And she had other business, matters of the mind to distract her from the raw pain of her suddenly exposed heart. “Do you want to be alone?”
“I… yes, I think I do.”
“I’ll leave you be, then.” She stood up.
“Where are you going?”
“To speak to the skykin seer.”
“Really?” Etyan looked confused, and a little disdainful – what Rhia thought of as his unable to grasp my eccentric sister’s odd obsessions face. They had slipped back onto old ground already. “Why?”
“Because she knows some amazing things.” That came out wrong. Disdain for his disdain would not help. “If you need me, just wave, or come over. I’d rather talk to you.” Another small but necessary lie.
Chapter 45
The following night they camped up on the plateau, which put them in the vicinity of the House of the Ancients. Rhia considered asking Yrif if she could spare an escort to look for it, though the thought of meeting another nightwing made her shudder. But she needed to be available for Etyan, in case he felt ready to talk.
Tonight’s skies were the clearest she had seen in weeks, and before she went to talk to the seer she decided to spend a while observing the heavens.
The Matriarch had already risen. When she knelt down to balance her sightglass on the wagon’s central wheel she found the star was still gibbous. And there was another small star close to it again, in the same position as before; no, a little farther out. Quite a coincidence, considering the Stray was in a different part of the sky this time.
She looked down as something pricked her leg, then yelped. A glowing blue sphere the size and texture of a cat’s hairball was stuck to her bare shin. She brushed it off, making her hand tingle, then looked up to see another half dozen, rolling in on the wind.
“Everyone inside.”
She recognized Yrif’s voice, and backed out from under the wagon. Skykin were guiding the shadowkin into the passenger wagon; the experienced travellers took it in their stride, muttering about how dinner would be late tonight. Some skykin set about crushing the glowing balls with bone blades or bare feet. They must be blowballs. Not a serious danger but they could sting bare flesh; shadowkin flesh anyway. When a small one came to rest just in front of her Rhia paused and stamped on it; it gave off a whiff like rotten wood. She scraped her boot off on the wagon steps to dislodge the garish filaments and went inside.
After a short while Preut, watching from the doorway, announced that the swarm had passed. The shadowkin emerged from the wagon. The ground was spattered with blowball remnants. Etyan swung the cloak off his shoulders to cover the mess, sitting on one edge, leaving enough room for her.
As Rhia settled next to him she said, “You’re looking better.” Other than his skin, which remained raw and flaky, he appeared healthy enough now. Perhaps whatever oddness Yrif had scented on him was also fading, as the seer had made no further comment.
“I feel pretty good.” He looked past her to where Lekem crouched on the bare ground. “We’d like to speak alone now, please.”
Lekem nodded and stood. Rhia stayed silent, letting her brother lead the conversation, relieved he finally was.
Etyan sighed and said, “I don’t want to go back.”
Rhia resisted the urge to point out that, given they travelled with the caravan, he didn’t have much choice. She certainly was not going to mention the possibility that the duke would send men to meet them at the waystation. Instead she asked, “Why not?”
“The life I had… it’s not what I want.”
Again Rhia bit her tongue. Talk of duty and obligation would drive him away. “So do you want to return to Zekt?”
“I… The eparch’s amazing. It’s like he sees into you, sees what you really are. And he doesn’t judge. He wants everyone to find their own path. He helped me give up the kreb, and start to look at my life, think about where I was heading.”
That Etyan had kicked a bad habit was good news. That he might start taking personal responsibility was even better. If only she could get him to come home willingly too. “I heard him preach while I was in Zekt. I was impressed.”
“You were at the priory? When?”
“We visited on a restday to, ah, see what the setup was.”
“You and your ‘guards’? How did you know where I was?”
“The duke has his spies.” There was no point denying it.
Etyan pressed his lips together.
“Is that what you want?” she asked, when it became obvious he wasn’t going to say any more. “A religious life, in Zekt?” She kept her voice gentle, taking care not to express her considerable scepticism at the idea of her feckless little brother taking holy vows.
He stared ahead and whispered. “I don’t know.”
After the meal Rhia asked him if he wanted to come and meet the seer, both in case it helped him, and because she wanted to know what the seer made of the “change” she had referred to. But he shook his head, and fixed his gaze on the flames.
Light rain set in overnight. The next day Rhia took advantage of the flat terrain to get out her papers. Her fellow travellers stared at this unexpected behaviour. Lekem did a passable impression of his absent captain when he cleared his throat disapprovingly; Etyan looked on in amusement. She ignored them all. She wanted to get down her notes from the previous few nights’ conversations with the seer while their talk was still fresh in her mind.
Some of the seer’s information supported what Rhia already knew. For example, Yrif confirmed that skykin children were sent to crèches because they were born into a place too hot and bright for them, needing milk the mother could no longer produce. Abandoning them was an act of kindness, not cruelty; as Yrif put it, “To keep them is to kill them.”
They also spoke of subjects not covered by the enquirers’ writings, such as personal decoration. The skykin did not enhance or ornament their bodies; such clothes as they wore were purely functional, covering their delicate parts, protecting themselves from their environment, carrying items of use. When Rhia asked why this was, Yrif asked her, in return, whether she wore her mask for others or for herself. Rhia thought for a while, then said, “Both, I think.”
“Yet you never see yourself.”
This was not entirely true; one of Alharet’s most treasured possessions was a mirror of beaten bronze, which she had let Rhia use. But she knew what the seer meant. “No, but people can recognize me by it. So though I wear it in part to save their feelings when they see my scars, my mask is also part of my identity.” She thought for a moment. “Ah, I see. You do not need such external trappings to know each other, nor such individualistic habits to know yourself, because of your animuses.”
“Quite so.”
R
hia knew better than to ask how the skykin knew each other without physical signifiers; another case of describing colour to a blind man. “Yet you decorate your rhinobeasts with studs and plaits and suchlike. Is it because they have no animus, so are not so easy to identify?”
“In part. But it is also self-expression, done for our own amusement.”
“Ah!” Rhia had read discussions of whether the skykin had art; the consensus was that they did not. “So you… indulge your artistic drive in this way?”
“Those who wish to, yes. Some interests and urges can be retained from the human part of the symbiote–”
“The what? Symbiote?”
Yrif brushed a long-fingered hand across her bare chest. “This. What was once shadowkin. Any who retain such desires after bonding may express them by personalizing things in their lives that matter to them, such as animal companions, or parting-gifts.”
“Yes, you mentioned those…”
And Yrif went on to explain this intimate skykin custom, which no enquirer had ever written about.
Rhia also asked whether it was true skykin did not take a daily siesta. Yrif confirmed this, and Rhia asked whether needing less sleep was another benefit conferred by the animus. Given she often spent much of the night up on her observation platform, she usually took a siesta at home. Father, on the other hand, had disliked breaking up his day with a nap when he was deep in a project; however, if he did not rest, he found he was less productive the next day.
“Perhaps,” Yrif had said. “Certainly we feel no need to sleep during daylight hours. We sleep when we do, and wake when we do, because that is what the world tells us.”
Rhia had been brought up to believe the shadowkin were the true descendants of the Children of the First, and the skykin were degenerates. Surely those with the most right to the world would be those most in tune with its natural rhythms? It was a disturbing thought, challenging a fundamental tenet of shadowkin existence.
Other conversations openly contradicted accepted knowledge.
One of these was about the Harbinger. Rhia had assumed that the lack of reference to the hopefully-soon-to-return “bearded star” in her older papers was down to chance, that there did not happen to be any such writings in the collection she had inherited – after all, even the best parchment degenerated over time. She had assumed that, like every other heavenly body, the Harbinger had always been present, albeit intermittently. But assumption was a symptom of a lazy mind. The seer – or rather her animus – recalled a time before the “nightflower”, as the skykin poetically described it, had graced the sky for a few months every three or four shadowkin generations.
Rhia was used to uncritically devouring the wisdom of the natural enquirers but perhaps she put too much faith in words written by men she would never meet.
The caravan reached the head of the pass in late afternoon, by which time the rain beat solidly on the wagon roof. When the caravan stopped for the beasts to be unhitched she put her papers back into her satchel. As they started off again her thoughts returned to the star which appeared so close to the Matriarch. She must observe again tonight, if the rain abated and if that part of the sky was not hidden by the ravine walls.
A shout came from outside. Rhia frowned at the interruption to her thoughts.
The next shout was closer, and clear enough to make out the words.
“Hold, or pay the price!”
Chapter 46
Dej hurtled down the slope, mud and rocks sliding away from her as she half ran, half fell towards the caravan.
“I said, hold, or pay the price!”
The wagons lurched to a halt at Cal’s third cry. Dej stopped ankle deep in muck, breathing hard, and drew her knife.
Around her the other clanless were emerging from their positions. The ambush site had been picked with care: on the flat the caravan could outrun the clanless but on the slope, the wagons were vulnerable.
She had a good view of the three skykin sitting up front of the lead wagon. These “true” skykin weren’t so different to the clanless when viewed through what she now thought of as her “old” vision. But her other senses picked up an additional aspect to their being, a vibrant sense of connection the clanless lacked.
The skykin in the middle of the three stood up, then looked down at Cal and the half-dozen warriors flanking him. With the rhinobeasts hitched at the back of the wagon to act as brakes, there was nothing except height between them. The woman had an air of easy authority.
For a while no one spoke. Dej shifted, trying to keep a stable footing in the mud.
Finally, the skykin leader said, “The luggage is in this wagon.” Beside her, the other two skykin stood too, ready to jump down.
Cal shook his head. “We don’t want shadowkin gear.”
Dej started; when Lih had told her they were attacking a shadowkin caravan she’d assumed it was to get the shadowkin food they needed.
“Are you here for one of our beasts, then?”
“No,” said Cal, “we’re not here to steal from you.”
“Then why have you disrupted our journey?”
“We want one of your passengers.”
The skykin considered for a moment. “The clans accept that sometimes your people will rob us. But assaulting those we convey breaks our covenant with the shadowkin nations. This is a grave crime.”
“We don’t want to assault him, just return him to Zekt, where he belongs.”
That made sense, given the direction their outcast guide had come from.
When the skykin leader didn’t respond, Cal continued, “We outnumber you three to one. If we cut the traces on your beasts the wagons will crash and none of the shadowkin will survive. Let us have this boy and the rest of your passengers can continue on their way.”
The silence stretched. Dej blinked water out of her eyes. The rain was getting harder.
Finally, the skykin pointed at Cal. “This will be remembered,” she said.
Cal threw up a hand as though to say he didn’t much care, then pointed to Jeg and Vas. “Come with me you two.” Leaving four warriors armed with bolas and throwing clubs to cover the skykin at the front he walked round the wagon. As he passed Dej’s position he nodded at her. “You too.” She tagged along behind. Her position with the clanless, such as it was, hung by a thread. Or as Lih had put it: Given the choice I’d throw you out but Cal wants to give you another chance to prove yourself – or fuck up again.
Cal walked upslope to the passenger wagon. A dozen clanless surrounded the two rhinobeasts attached to the back of it, though at a safe distance; the animals shifted in the traces, and their musk was strong. Dej tensed as she, Cal, and the two warriors ducked between the animals. The door in the back of the wagon was closed. Vas looked to Cal, who nodded. He wrenched it open.
Cries of surprise and consternation came from inside. Vas and Jeg brandished batons and swords in the doorway as Cal shouted, “Stay calm and you’ll all be fine.”
The shouts died down. The two warriors went first, then Cal. When she followed him, she was briefly overwhelmed by the dark stink of stale sweat and sudden fear. As her senses adjusted, vague figures in the dim interior resolved into shadowkin; half wore light, loose clothing and had dark hair; the rest looked like the staff at the crèche, with paler hair and brighter, tighter-fitting clothing.
The shadowkin pressed themselves back, staring in wide-eyed terror at the intruders.
“I am looking,” said Cal, “for a young man named Etyan. Is he here?”
The shadowkin’s eyes darted, looking to each other in fear and confusion. None of them spoke.
Cal strode up to the nearest young man, one of those with dark hair, and asked softly, “Are you Etyan?”
The youth and his older companion both shook their heads, not quite in time, the older man murmuring, “No, no. We don’t know any Etyan.” His companion’s glance darted away, across the wagon. Cal spotted this, and turned. There were three people over that side who D
ej would describe as young men: one who sat rigid next to an old man and a pair who sat together, next to a woman who had something wrong with her face. The first was of the dark-haired shadowkin, the other two were fair-haired, one lightly built, one well muscled enough to put up a fight.
Cal strode across the wagon to the dark-haired young man. “So, are you Etyan?” he asked. He kept his question low and calm.
“No, I’m not.” The young man’s voice came out as a high squeak.
Cal nodded and turned to the pair of young men. Before he could speak the larger one stood, hand going to his waist. He was fast, and managed to draw his dagger, but the clanless were faster. Vas swept in with a heavy slash, knocking the dagger away. Jeg’s staff connected with his wrist and the man staggered back. She followed up with a brutal jab to his chest which floored him.
Pandemonium erupted. Shadowkin leapt to their feet, or cowered back, crying and begging.
“Quiet!” roared Cal. “Calm down!”
His shout filled the wagon. People sat, hands out in surrender. Vas and Jeg stood back to back, covering the assembled shadowkin with raised weapons. Dej brandished her knife and tried to look threatening.
Cal leant down to the man on the floor and said, “I really hope that the answer to the question I’m about to ask you is “No”. Are you Etyan?”
“Last take you,” gasped the man.
Cal gestured to Dej. “If he tries anything, stab him.” Dej came over, though her training hadn’t covered situations like this. Cal put a foot on the man’s shoulder then bent over him. “I’ll ask again: are you Etyan?”
The man closed his eyes. “Yes. I am.”
“Did you know we can smell lies?” asked Cal conversationally. He stepped over the wounded man to face the other young man. This one had a rash on his face and a smell at once unnerving and intriguing. “Are you Etyan?”
The woman next to the boy said, “Leave us alone. You have no right to disrupt our journey.” She wore a tanned leather mask over the left-hand side of her face.
