At mid-morning, that strange, bleak emptiness struck again, bleeding what little energy was left from Joanna’s soul. In her despair, she toyed with the notion of leaving Caris and his mad prisoner and seeking some way home on her own, but her saner self knew it was folly. Fear of the Regent and the memory of the cold-voiced Peelbone kept her moving. They were in the farm country then, hiding among the hedgerows and fields of standing crops, and even Joanna was aware that, during that time of gray sickliness, the hay makers they glimpsed in the meadows slacked their efforts and fell to quarreling over the whetstones and tools, while the storm clouds gathered in louring masses in the sky. The spell lasted until noon. By that time, Joanna suspected, the damage had been done. She wondered about what the effects of such a spell would be in her own world, on trigger-happy street-punks, on politicians, or on the men responsible for the thousand dull and niggling safety regulations concerning nuclear power plants and chemical waste.
Late in the day, they rested, exhausted and oppressed by the breathless heat of the coming storm, on an islet in a sluggish stream that Caris identified as the Shan. Antryg had gathered herbs from the waterside to make a poultice for the whip cut on his face and had fallen asleep between the roots of a willow tree, his head on his rolled-up coat. Caris slumped against the tree trunk beside him, leaning his face in his hands; by the time Joanna came back from the edge of the water, where she’d gone to dash a handful of it on her face, the sasennan, too, was asleep.
For a moment she stood looking at the both of them, elder and younger. Caris had to be at the end of his rope physically, she thought, studying his drawn young face in the watered-silk dappling of the willow’s green shade, to conquer his nervousness about sleeping in the open. Antryg...
Under the poultice, she could see that the whole side of Antryg’s face was a swollen and gruesome bruise. Oddly enough, though she was normally squeamish, this didn’t sicken her or make her look away. She felt only compassion for the pain he must be in, guilt that he’d taken it for her sake, and...
...And something, she told herself, that kidnapped damsels had no business feeling for the villain of the piece.
He knows more than he’s telling, she reminded herself. He’s going to Angelshand for some reason of his own. It had not escaped her that, for all his lightweight chatter, Antryg had never again mentioned the place in the hills near Kymil in which Caris had found her. He had, as Caris had pointed out, led them away from it as quickly as he could. Was that out of fear of what lurked there or simply fear of what Caris, if he investigated the place, would find?
With a sigh, Joanna walked to Caris and gently removed the pistol from his slack hand. He didn’t stir; only his breathing and the warmth of his flushed face told her he was still alive at all. Weary as she was, she couldn’t bring herself to break that sleep.
I can stay awake for a little while, anyway, she thought, sitting down cross-legged in a tangle of skirts and feeling the now-familiar agony of pins and needles through her thighs and calves. Somewhere upstream, the moving water clucked a little against the overhanging weeds and cresses of the bank. Sunlight lay like scattered pennies over her tattered blue skirt and damp, rumpled hair. She looked down again at Antryg, curled up like a child beside her, his long, straggly, gray-brown hair hanging in his eyes.
Why had he said to Digby, ...to save my world, and yours, too, I hope, from a terrible fate? What fate?
This emptiness, this vampiric draining of life?
The Industrial Revolution that was rapidly overtaking these people like a sooty and impersonal flood?
Some mad notion of his straying wits?
Or something else?
Upstream there was the sharp, startled flurry of a frightened bird, and a horse’s indignant snort.
Joanna felt her insides shrivel.
As quietly as she could, she tightened her grip on the pistol and sank to her belly, to crawl under the tangle of vines along the top of the bank. Brambles scratched her elbows and snagged her skirts and hair, and she hoped to hell she hadn’t just taken refuge in a giant thicket of poison ivy. Angling her eye to a break in the bushes, she saw him—a black-clothed sasennan bearing the crimson sunburst of the Church. He and his horse were nearly invisible in the sun-splattered shade of the opposite bank.
Behind her, she heard a man say softly, “That’s them.”
Turning her head slowly as little as she could for fear of rustling the vines that covered her, she looked back. A sasennan and another man in the close-cut gray coat of the Witchfinders emerged on foot from the green laurel thickets of the little island; the sasennan was leading two horses. As they stood for a moment looking down at the sleepers, the Witchfinder murmured, “It’s the Archmage’s sasennan. He escaped from Kymil by magic three days ago. Whatever plot is afoot, the Archmage is in it, all right. Peelbone will be pleased.”
He took a pistol from the holster on his saddle tree.
Two thoughts chased one another very quickly through Joanna’s mind: This isn’t any of my business! I was kidnapped and I don’t want to play; and immediately thereafter, cold and calm, The man in gray has only a pistol. His shoulders were broad over a slim waist. They made an ideal target as he turned to fetch something from his saddlebags. Joanna heard the jingle of chain.
You’ll have to break cover a second before you pull the trigger, she thought, as if it were something she was only reading about. Another part of her was wailing in panic, What if I miss?
The adrenaline pumping in her veins almost made her sick. Just lie here quiet and they might overlook you...
And they might not.
The sasennan walked to the bank of the stream, saying back over his shoulder, “So will his Grace.” He signaled. Joanna heard the quick splash of hooves in the stony stream bed as the mounted sasennan on the other side began to cross.
“There was a girl with him, wasn’t there?”
The heat in the thicket clung on her sweating face like glue, the green, musty smell of the brambles smothering. She felt queerly estranged from herself, aware of the five pounds of dead iron in her aching hand and ridiculously conscious that having it meant there was no excuse she could give herself later for not using it. Why does it have to be me?
She rose to her knees in the tangle of the vines, held the pistol in both hands, straightened her elbows and took long enough, as every Western she had ever read recommended, to be sure of her aim, and fired at a range of less than a dozen feet.
The kick of the gun jarred slammingly in her wrists and shoulders; the huge cloud of black smoke coughed forth from the muzzle burned in her lungs and eyes. The coppery stink of new blood exploded over the still air as the man in the gray coat was flung forward against his horse, the beast plunging in wild panic. At the same instant, Caris rolled, swinging his sword free of the scabbard, which had lain, even in sleep, under his hand, and was on the unmounted sasennan before Joanna could have sworn he was even awake.
The sasennan crossing the stream was down off his own terrified horse with trained and deadly speed. Joanna, her pistol discharged, saw him coming for her with drawn sword and knew his intent was to kill. As in a nightmare, she feinted a lunge for one tree and dove to the cover of another. The man pursued, sword upraised and bright. Her unaccustomed skirts tangled in her legs, and brambles caught her ankles as she plunged across the small clearing toward the slumped form of the Witchfinder, her heart hammering with frenzy. I must succeed—I can’t let him touch me—I must finish this.... His grabbing hand pinched the flesh of her arm, then fell away. She threw herself on the sprawled body of her first victim, thrusting it aside to fumble the pistol with its blood-sticky butt from underneath, just as the sasennan’s shadow covered her.
She swung around, rising to her knees, pistol in hands. Mottled sun seared along the downswinging arc of the sword. There wasn’t time to duck—every second of time felt queerly compressed....
She pulled the trigger. Blood spouted out onto her face as the ball p
lowed upward through the man’s body, only feet away. She flung herself aside to avoid the body as it collapsed on top of her, and fell over the Witchfinder’s body. She raised herself on one numbed arm in time to see Caris pull his dripping blade from his dead assailant’s still-standing corpse.
Start to finish, the whole fight couldn’t have taken eight seconds.
The smell of blood was everywhere. Joanna wiped at the hot, thick stream of it on her chin and felt the sticky gouts of it in her hair. Both wrists felt numbed and broken; so did some part of her within.
As a gray wave of dimness blurred her sight, she wondered detachedly which she would do first—throw up or faint.
“Joanna?” A deep voice penetrated blurrily through the grayness; strong, light hands pulled her to her feet, lifting her with effortless strength. There was the scratching slash of a passing branch against her bare arm, then the sudden coolness of river water flowing all around her.
She started to say, “What... ?” A hand pinched her nose shut and she was thrust bodily under the water, then dragged up again, gasping and dripping, her head suddenly clear.
She shoved back her soaked hair and saw Antryg standing waist-deep in the water beside her. His soaked shirt was stuck to his body, his eyes worried behind the cracked lenses of his specs. “Are you all right?”
Joanna nodded. The water had rinsed away the blood on her face and hair. She felt breathless, as if she had been awakened suddenly from sleep. Shakily, she managed a reassuring grin and asked, “Does this mean I’m now a member of the Church?”
The worry dissolved into a sparkle of humor in his eyes. Solemnly, he dipped a handful of water and dumped it over her head. Not jesting, he said softly, “I’m afraid it does mean that you’ve been baptized, Joanna. Naturally, I can’t say I’m sorry you did it—but I’m sorry that you had to.”
“It’s okay.” Her voice sounded weak and thready to her own ear.
From the bank, she heard Caris say harshly, “Come on!”
Antryg laid a gentle hand against her dripping hair, anxiously studying her face. She would have liked to hold him—to hold someone—and cry with the sudden, sick confusion in her, but the calm part of her mind knew Caris was right. The shots would have roused the whole woods. So she only nodded in answer to Antryg’s unspoken question and said, “Thank you.”
He helped her to the bank. Caris, both reloaded pistols in his belt and his sword in his hand, stood scanning the woods around him, remote and beautiful and inscrutable as ever.
It was only that night, after a nightmare day of stumbling flight and of hiding from patrols that seemed suddenly everywhere, that what had happened on the island became truly real to her. For a long time she lay awake in the half-filled hayloft where they had taken refuge, listening to the approaching rumble of thunder and the restless, gusty unevenness of the rain. Her wrists ached, but it was nothing to the hideous memory of panic and the kinetic recollection of that first jet of blood dousing her face. On television, she had casually watched hundreds of people allegedly die. None of it was anything like this.
She thought, I have killed a man, and only belatedly remembered that she had killed two.
She knew Antryg was asleep. She cringed from waking him, partly because she knew he was exhausted, partly... She did not know why, save that she had never shared grief and fear with anyone, and didn’t know how to go about it. Caris was awake, and she stifled her sobs as best she could, lest he hear.
But after a long time his voice said softly from the utter blackness, “Joanna?”
There was the crunch of hay, and its warm smell as it shifted. Then the warm, dry touch of the sasennan’s hand on her shoulder.
“Are you all right?”
That Caris would have been concerned came as a surprise to her. She sniffled, swallowed, and hoped her tears wouldn’t be apparent in her voice. “You probably think this is stupid,” she began and cursed the betraying tremor of her vocal chords. “But—how old were you, the first time you killed somebody?”
There was a long silence, filled only with darkness, rain, and the green smell of the hay.
“Fifteen,” Caris said at last. “It’s the first thing you do in training, you know. The man’s tied up. They don’t start you on criminals free to fight back until your second or third year of training. But, they say, a weapon must know the taste of blood from the first.”
“Oh,” Joanna whispered soundlessly.
She thought it was all Caris would say. It was no wonder, she thought wretchedly, that her own inarticulate scruples sounded ridiculous to that beautiful young man. But when Caris spoke again, she realized the long delay had been because the sasennan was inept with words; not wanting to hurt her, he had paused long to choose what he would say with care.
“But I had never killed a man before in a true fight—a fight for my life, one that was not in training. We’re trained to be ready for it, but... it really seldom happens.” There was another long silence. Then he said, “Do you know what the Witchfinders would have done—to me and to Antryg, and probably to you as our accomplice?”
Joanna shook her head.
Caris told her, in a wealth of clinical detail that made her almost physically sick.
“A weapon that thinks is a flawed weapon, Joanna,” he said softly. “You had to do what you did. You didn’t take two lives, you saved two, probably three—probably a lot more. I have to get Antryg alive to the Regent, not as his accomplice in some plot the Witchfinders are accusing us of, but free and on my own terms, as proof of the truth. Sometimes you can’t think too much. Only do what you need to do.”
And in those words Joanna took a certain amount of comfort, at least for as long as she remained awake.
Chapter XII
THE LOWING OF a cow woke Caris, to the clinging, tepid heat of morning. Last night’s storm had cooled the air enough to permit sleep after the killing exhaustion of the last twenty-four hours; but with the new sun, the rain was evaporating in clammy dampness which made his rough peasant clothes and coarse stockings stick to his body like an evil fairy’s garment of itches.
He lay in the hay for a few moments, looking at his two companions in flight.
He had never expected the girl Joanna to be still with them after four days. What he had seen of her world and what she had told him and Antryg during the first day’s walk to Kymil had made him doubt her abilities to keep up with them. Caris had been raised in the Way of the Sa-senna, and, from what he had seen and heard, hers was a world in which machines, like the cars and computers of which she had spoken, had taken over both the work that strengthened the body and the entertainment that sharpened the wits. She was shy and, he suspected, more used to speaking to these computers than to people; but it had surprised him that she had not panicked yesterday. If asked beforehand, he would have laid money against her having the nerve to pull the trigger.
And, he reflected ruefully, lost it.
Curled up on the hay, she looked thin and even smaller than usual. They had gotten rid of her bloodstained peasant clothing, and she looked like a little boy in her scruffy blue jeans and creased and filthy tank-top, with hay caught in her feathery blond curls. Her arms and shoulders were brown and sunburned, covered with scratches and insect bites. For all her small size, weariness had printed lines on her face that even sleep couldn’t erase, and she looked older than her age, which she had said was twenty-six, and very alone.
A little ways from her, Antryg lay with his head on his rolled-up coat. His cracked spectacles rested in the hay nearby and the strings of cheap glass beads around his throat caught slivers of hurtfully bright gold sunlight that streamed through the cracks in the barn walls. Under the unruly tousle of his hay-flecked hair, the bruises on his face already looked less swollen than they had. They were turning black; Caris had spent the last five years of his life training to be sasennan and had an intimate acquaintance with bruises; he knew they must hurt like the devil. He’d taken a swordcut on the cheek in
his first year of training and he remembered that the pain had dogged even his sleep.
And well served, too, he thought bitterly. He sat up and shook as much hay as he could out of his smock. Like the pain of a burn, his anger returned to fuel his strength. For what he has done to my grandfather—for what that disappearance did to all the mages...
Outside, the cow lowed again. Raised to the rhythms of farm and village life, Caris recognized the pain in the sound. The beast was stray, he thought, and needed to be milked. The gray deadness that had gripped the countryside yesterday morning had left its effects; not a cowman between here and Parchasten had remembered to close his gates. All afternoon and evening, they had been seeing strayed beasts in the half-cut hay meadows and standing corn. Now that he thought about it, Caris looked around the barn. The storm, he thought, would have ruined the best part of the haying. It was late enough in the summer that this barn should have been full-stocked. He frowned to himself at the recollection of something the Bishop of Kymil had said regarding farms let fall to rot.
But a cow in milk is a cow in milk, and the bread that he and Antryg had variously pocketed during the last, distant supper at the roadhouse had long since been eaten. Casting a glance behind him at the sleepers, Caris slipped his scabbarded sword into his sash, ready to draw and fight, and moved cautiously to the door.
His first glance around, as he opened it a crack, showed him that the woods onto which the barn faced were deserted. His trained mind toyed with the idea of a trap, with the cow as bait, then dismissed it. Anyone who knew they were there could simply have come in and overpowered them, exhausted as they were, or simply burned the bam over their heads.
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