By Tooth and Claw - eARC

by Mercedes Lackey

  It was not only the largest gathering, it was the most visible because it was centered on the one rise in the shoreline in the area.

  The pull was powerful. More and more warriors began drifting that way. After a few steps, the drift became a current.

  Then all of them felt a new spike driving through their minds, whose meaning was unmistakable.

  The current became a tide.

  Achia Pazik

  Part of her hated the dance, but it was exhilarating in its own way.

  Its own cruel, bloody, ravenous way. Their raft was close enough to Zilikazi’s armada for Achia Pazik to understanding what was happening over there.

  Death, dismemberment, destruction. Feeding.

  She fed herself, drawing from it the strength to continue the dance. The most savage, hideous, intoxicating dance ever designed.

  Nurat Merav should be ashamed of herself.

  Nurat Merav

  She couldn’t see what was happening, but Zuluku and Raish and Selani rushed back and forth from the rock spur to bring her constant reports.

  After a while, she thought she should probably be ashamed of herself.

  Meshwe

  The oldest and most powerful of the Krek’s tekkutu, on this day, also possessed in full measure another characteristic of great age and power.

  Ruthlessness. There would be no mercy for Zilikazi.

  He drove the lizards. Again, and again, and again, and again.

  Zilikazi

  The flagpole and its large bright banner kept Zilikazi alive for a while. Three times a lizard tried to devour him; each time, the pole and banner thwarted the attack.

  The first two lizards were distracted by the banner. The first took away half of it. The second took away the rest.

  The third lizard tried to engulf the entire pole and its jaws got stuck open.

  Not for long, of course. Not those jaws. But by the time the jaws shattered the slender pole, Zilikazi had swum off.

  He was a good swimmer, as Liskash measured these things. And he was full of fear to drive him forward.

  He was also lucky. All three attacks had pulled or driven him far outside the frenzy. He was now in the open, more than halfway to the raft that held his enemies.

  Perhaps they would accept his surrender.

  He wasn’t sure he know how to surrender.

  * * *

  It was a moot point. The lizards who arrived a few seconds later wouldn’t have accepted his surrender anyway.

  The first one to strike was a small lizard, as such creatures went; not more than fifteen feet long and weighting less than three tons. It tried to swallow him whole but missed and only got his left leg in its maw. An instant later, a second and larger lizard bit his torso and crushed his chest.

  A brief tussle followed. The first lizard swam off with the leg. The second started to engulf the rest of the body but a third lizard arrived and ripped off the other leg, the hips, and part of the abdomen.

  By then Zilikazi was dead, of course. A few pieces of him were missed by the lizards. The largest was his right arm severed just below the shoulder. Those bits and pieces drifted with the current until they came within reach of Bekezel’s tentacle mass. The Sure One scooped them up efficiently, neatly, almost daintily. Seconds later, they vanished into the huge beak.

  * * *

  Most of the rafts, and most of the warriors, made it to shore safely. Still, it had been the biggest feast in any of those lizards’ lifetimes. If they’d had bards, they would have been sinking lays about it for centuries.

  Chapter 18

  Meshwe

  “We have to have the river also,” Njekwa insisted. “We have many more people to feed than you do. We will need to fish.”

  By now, after days of negotiating, Meshwe was more than a little tired of the old priestess. She was stubborn almost beyond belief. The fact that her position was the weakest of the three negotiating parties—the biggest party, but still the weakest—just seemed to make her more recalcitrant.

  Fortunately, as had happened several times since the parlay began, the representative of the smallest of the three parties intervened with a compromise. Perhaps that was because she was also—by far—the youngest of the three chief negotiators.

  “You should pay a toll for it, then,” Achia Pazik proposed. When Njekwa glared at her, the Mrem dancer shook her head.

  “Be reasonable, Njekwa. The river has its own monsters. If the tekkutu don’t control the turtlesnakes for you, none of your fisher folk will last very long if they go out onto the river. Even the marshes are dangerous. Do you expect the tekkutu do that work for nothing?”

  Njekwa was still glaring, but the young Mrem simply met the glare with a gaze so calm it was almost serene. She had the priestess boxed in—again—and they both knew it.

  After a moment, Njekwa looked away. “I suppose that would work,” she said. The glare came back to the surface. “So long as the toll is reasonable!”

  Meshwe raised his hand in a gesture of conciliation. “Quite reasonable, I assure you.”

  It would be, too. Not much more than a token charge, in fact. Meshwe did not really care about the disposition of the river itself. It had already been agreed that the Krek would have possession of most of the island—all of it except the crest and the valley leading from it to the west that the Mrem had been given. There was more than enough arable land on the island to feed three times their number. When the time came that the Kororo numbers had swelled greater than the island could sustain, it had already been agreed that the Krek possessed everything on the mainland coast south of the great river. No one still knew yet what sort of lands lay there, but some of it was bound to be fertile.

  Besides, if the Krek decided to start fishing—which they very well might—why would they bother piddling around in the river? They had the sea at their disposal.

  Sebetwe

  That very moment, Sebetwe was contemplating the same issue. He’d noticed that the Sure Ones enjoyed shade, on those occasions when passing clouds provided it for them. It had then occurred to him that if they built a large enough vessel with a platform supported on double hulls, they could sail anywhere with an escort that no creature in the sea would think of challenging.

  They’d have to sail slowly, of course, so the Sure Ones could stay in the shade between the double hulls. Perhaps they could design the hulls with oars and banks for the rowers.

  But so what? Fishing was best done slowly.

  So he’d been told, anyway. Being a sane and sensible Liskash, Sebetwe had never fished before.

  Achia Pazik

  By the end of the day’s negotiating, Njekwa looked more sour than ever, even though she’d gotten most of what she wanted.

  Achia Pazik thought she knew the reason. After Zilikazi’s death, the nation he had welded together by sheer force of mind immediately began to disintegrate. Within two days, eight separate contending little armies had emerged, each with its own fledgling lord.

  But the largest of those armies, commanded by one of Zilikazi’s former subordinates named Mehuli, had less than five hundred warriors and the most outstanding characteristic of their new noble lord—semi-noble lord, rather, and that was being generous—was his fledgling status. His mental powers were still feeble, and might very well remain so.

  It was true that for the moment Mehuli’s powers exceeded those of any of his seven rivals, all of whom were also fledglings. But he no more considered challenging the Kororo than he would have considered challenging the tides or the sunrise. Whatever might be the nature of their mysterious tekku, the Krek had destroyed the most powerful lord Mehuli had ever known. The world’s most fearsome monsters were at their command.

  The only thing Mehuli wanted from the Kororo was a great distance. The day after he consolidated his hold over his little army, he ordered them to march back to the lands they’d come from.

  Within another two days, his seven rival armies had done the same. All of them were tr
ying to find separate routes through the mountains because none of them was yet ready to match their strength against another. The likelihood was that few of them would manage to do so, however. Most of them would have no choice but to fight over the one route they did know.

  That was their problem, however, not the Krek’s and certainly not Achia Pazik’s.

  Unlike Njekwa, she was in a very good mood. The survival of the Kororo depended on their control over the passage between the island and the mainland. So long as they—and they alone—could maintain the peculiar relationship with the Sure Ones that allowed them to keep the sea lizards at bay, they would always have an impregnable sanctuary on the island.

  But doing so also depended on maintaining their not-quite-as-peculiar relationship with the Mrem. Without the dancers, no tekkutu could hope to control even a gantrak, much less the behemoths of the sea.

  So, Meshwe had been very generous and compliant when it came to Achia Pazik’s demands. And, for her part, she’d been careful to present those demands as pleasantly phrased modest requests. The Mrem were just as dependent on the Kororo as the Kororo were on them.

  More dependent, in some ways. Scouting parties would continue to be sent into the mountains, searching for any more small splinters from Achia Pazik’s shattered tribe. Each of those parties would have a Mrem accompanying it—but only one. There simply weren’t enough Mrem to do the work on their own.

  Their numbers had reached eighty-three now, of whom eleven were dancers. (Twelve, if you counted Nurat Merav.) The valley they’d been given was more than sufficient for them. It would probably be sufficient for ten times their current number, and if they came to exceed that—which she now had every confidence they would, someday—then there were still all those mysterious lands south of the river. She and Meshwe had also already agreed that if the time came, the Mrem and the Kororo would share those lands in an equitable manner.

  And equitable it would be. They were too reliant on each other for it to be anything else. Their survival and prosperity depended on maintaining the sanctuary of the island. So long as they retained that, no lord of the lowlands—not even one more powerful than Zilikazi—could possibly threaten them.

  The position of the Old Faith, however, was quite different. On the one hand, theirs was by far the largest of the three groups. In the end, more than eight thousand of the people Zilikazi brought over the mountains had chosen to remain on the coast.

  For lack of any clear alternative, they had all accepted Njekwa as their leader. But while many of them were adherents to the Old Faith, most were not. So what would happen to them, in the end? No one knew, but Achia Pazik suspected that more and more of them would adopt the Kororo creed, as time went on. And she was quite sure that Njekwa shared the same suspicion.

  Well, that was her problem, not Achia Pazik’s.

  * * *

  Later that day, she wasn’t quite as sure.

  “What?” She was almost goggling at Chefer Kolkin. “He’s insane! Mrem can’t do that!”

  The veteran warrior shrugged. “That’s what I told the youngster. But you know Lavi Tur. He’s headstrong. And always wants to try his hand at everything.”

  Lavi Tur

  The next morning, though, the brash almost-a-warrior was feeling a rare moment of anxiety and uncertainty. Squatting on his haunches with his hands splayed on the sand, the youngster stared apprehensively at the tritti sprawled a short distance away in the little arena. For its part, the horned lizard stared off to the side. To all outward appearances it seemed oblivious to the Mrem’s presence.

  Lavi Tur looked up at Meshwe, who was observing the proceedings with cheerfully gaping jaws.

  As well he might. The old tekkutu was standing outside the enclosure.

  “Couldn't I try first with a huddu?" asked Lavi Tur plaintively. "Or maybe a mavalore?"

  Song of Petru

  XIX

  Tooth

  The Way was Lost

  Evil stood across

  His Sacred Path

  Swords were blunted

  Many despaired

  To Save us all

  He called to Death

  Join in my Feast

  Feeding a Fever

  Jody Lynn Nye

  “Come, dearest, just a little bite,” Petru pleaded, holding the piece of browned meat temptingly under Cassa Fisook’s nose. The lead Dancer of the Lailah Clan lay in a nest of cushions on a pallet in her hastily erected pavilion near an oasis at the edge of an expanse of strange desert. The clan had been forced to halt there the previous noon. Few of them could have made it much farther. Only the blessed presence of fresh, potable water had given the sick and ailing the strength to press on to this point. The encampment had become one large infirmary. Cassa’s long, slender, black-furred limbs trembled with weakness and the fever.

  Petru turned the morsel so that the sun peeking through the draped sides of the tent gleamed off it like the burnished surface of an amber pearl. “You wouldn’t want to hurt my feelings, would you? This is the most tender portion of that little desert bird, freshly killed and cooked just to savoryness. I would eat it myself, it is so good. Try just a taste.”

  The elder female’s upper lip curled a little. The scent of the meat had tickled her sensory glands with delight, but she shook her head weakly. Petru moved his hand toward her lips. From her narrow belly arose an audible gurgle. By her expression, Petru knew the sound had hurt, but he offered the food again. Cassa held up a slender forefinger in protest.

  “Thank you, cherished Petru, but I can’t. If I swallow anything, it will go straight through me.”

  “Then I despair! I thought you truly loved me,” the valet said, wrinkling his nose and allowing his magnificent sable whiskers to droop toward his shoulders. Though he was of a much lower rank than the Dancers, the shining, long black fur that covered his body made him seem to be of noble heritage. His expanse of whiskers was unequaled in the clan, and he used them expressively.

  In spite of her discomfort, Cassa chuckled.

  “Oh, I do, you big clown,” she said. “It is just that my poor body does not love me. I am aged, and I cannot throw off a fever the way that I could in my youth. I fear that Assirra calls me to her side. I will not live to see us arrive in our haven.”

  “Nonsense,” Petru said, with a dismissive wave. It was a casual gesture, but in his heart he feared she might be correct. “You just want us to go on carrying you on a litter instead of walking on your own lovely feet.”

  “If my feet could carry me, I would scamper away from this place! The air is so dry my nose is cracking.”

  Petru rummaged in his personal basket of cosmetics and unguents. At the bottom—why did things always fall to the bottom when he wanted them?—was a small, heavy alabaster jar sealed with a soft cork. Avoiding Cassa’s hands, he dabbed the herb-scented cream on the leather of her nose. Immediately, the senior Dancer stopped protesting and relaxed.

  “Ah, that is better. Assirra must show you special favor. Your lotions are always better than anything the merchants bring me.”

  “Of course! That is because I make them with love,” Petru said. He couldn’t keep the note of smugness out of his tone. He was proud of his skill at formulation. “If you will not eat this now, I will soak it in diluted wine and wrap it in a leaf to keep it for later. Shall I open the tent flaps a trifle to let more sunlight fall upon you? Would you like another cushion or two? I have your favorite wool-stuffed pillow right here.”

  “Yes, thank you, my dear Petru. You always know what I need. Then, let me rest.”

  The big valet arranged the well-loved and battered suede pillow so that Cassa could sniff the heavy oils of the padding, then pulled the nearest drape around the tent pole to let the afternoon sun touch his lady’s feet. With a sigh, she curled into a ball, wrapping her long, slim tail around her body. Petru worried that she would waste away, but rest was the third best restorative, after a cure and food.

  He heard a g
roan and a challenging hiss from the second pallet at the other side of the tent. Cleotra Mreem was having another nightmare. Petru pulled away cushion after cushion until he could uncover the Dancer’s face. Its fur was crusted with dried mucus all around the nose and mouth. With the greatest tenderness, he started to brush it away.

  Cleotra’s eyes flew open. Her glowing pupils bloomed widely in the narrow band of green, and she bared her claws. A dry tongue flicked in and out of her mouth. Petru knew she wasn’t really awake. She had a worse form of the disease than Cassa. She was younger and stronger and could manage food, but suffered fever and hallucinations as well as the choking matter running from her eyes and nose.

  “Mistress,” he said. “You have defeated the Liskash! It is dead! Victory!”

  “No,” she muttered. “There are too many of them! The clan will die! They will eat our children! We must save the kits!”

  Petru reached for the jug of water beside the bed and poured some onto the soft cloth near the washing bowl. He dabbed at her face with long, gentle strokes as if he was her mother.

  “No, mistress,” he said, in a low, calm voice that belied his own worry. “The Liskash lies at your feet. It is dead. What could withstand the power of your Dance? Assirra and Aedonnis put their strength into your leaps. It fell, shedding its blood on the ground.”

  Cleotra’s eyes widened. She writhed, clawing at the air with her talons. “Yes! I tore its guts out! I dined on its liver!”

  “Yes, yes,” Petru said. He jumped back to avoid a swipe. A patch of mucus was dried in the fur just above her left cheekbone. He flicked the flakes and pellets to the floor, and kicked dry sand over them. Cleotra caught him with a wild swing of her leg. Petru tumbled backwards and sat down hard. Dust rose around him. He cringed at the state of his fur. It would take forever to get all that sand out of his tail.