My thoughts seemed to be widely shared, because arguments started up—some claiming it was not yet time, others that the omens were not certain. Songta said, “Peace, peace. I speak not of this shorttime. First the wenders must find another habitude willing to take us in.”
Moth was suddenly at my side. “Thora, could we go to Escher?” she whispered.
I tried to dampen her hopes gently. “I don’t think that would be practical, Moth. The ship isn’t large enough for everyone. But we may be able to help you scout another place to live—an old lava tube or cave, perhaps. I wish I understood why you have to leave here.”
“Because the fold rain cometh!”
“Is the fold rain like a riffle?”
“Like a great storm and conflagration of riffles! No one may survive it. Is there no fold rain on Escher?”
“Not that I know.”
Songta was speaking to the crowd. “Dagget will set out anon to seek another habitude. Have forbearance. Remember, our people have made pilgrimage before, in our mothers’ mothers’ time. We can do it again.”
This was not the encouragement everyone needed. The crowd began to break up, disconsolate and unsettled. I heard Songta call out, “Is Thora Lassiter here?”
“Here, Songta,” I said.
She came over to me and said, “If ever the Boxmasters wish to aid us, this is the time.”
“I need to go with Dagget,” I said. “He may be able to lead me to a place where I can contact my people.”
“Nay,” Dagget said, and I realized he was by Songta’s side. “Thou’rt not ready. The ways I need to wend are too dangerous.”
“My eyes will protect me,” I said.
“Uh,” he said, clearly unconvinced.
“Let me try.”
“We shall think on it,” Songta said.
But when I next went to their house to make my case, Dagget was already gone.
chapter ten
from the audio diary of thora lassiter:
Moth could not understand my frustration at Dagget’s departure. “Why can thou not go back to Escher on thine own?” she asked.
Clearly, she thought our godlike powers had no limits. “They don’t know where I am,” I explained. “I can’t tell them unless I can get to a place where the radiation can reach me. That’s how we communicate. Moth, do you know how to get to a place where there is light?”
“Aye,” she said as if I were demented. “I know how to get to Escher.”
It occurred to me that she might have stumbled onto our planetary base camp, and gotten to the ship from there. “All right. Can you lead me there?”
“Of course. They will be right glad to see thee.”
She was ready to set out then and there, but I insisted on telling Hanna, and getting some provisions for the journey. To my surprise, Hanna was unwilling to let me go. She sent Moth off on an errand so we could talk privately.
“Let not Moth lead thee astray,” she said. “She is a skillful wender, but hath not the maturity to understand what she does. Breel taught her too young. I told him not to, but she was so eager he gave in. It is one reason Songta will not speak to him.”
I didn’t want to get in the middle of a family dispute, but if Moth truly knew her way to the surface, it seemed worth the risk. “Do you think she really knows how to get to Escher?”
“Dost thou believe she hath been there?”
“Yes.”
“Then she knoweth the way. But that does not mean she can show thee safely, or go there herself without paying a price.”
“What do you mean, price?”
Hanna hesitated, and I realized the question disturbed her. “The wending hath kept her unnaturally young,” she said quietly. “It is my fault. Try as I may, I cannot bemind her as any other than the child I remember. When she returns, she falleth back into old ways.”
I knew what she was talking about. I, too, had had the experience of being frozen in time in the minds of family. After a long absence, they still thought of me as the person who had left, and their belief had a frustrating influence on my own behavior. It was one reason I had never hesitated to leave again. It was that, or remain a person I no longer was. “It’s a common problem,” I said.
“Aye, but not this bad. We were once close in age.”
This information surprised me, because I would have guessed them to be at least a decade apart, from their behavior. Perhaps, I thought, Moth had some developmental delay that Hanna blamed on herself. If she had not told me, I never would have guessed. Moth had seemed like a normal, even precocious, adolescent. But I had never seen her, so I could not guess her age. The news made me wary.
“Hanna, I’m sure it’s nothing you have done. The same thing happens among my people, but we have cures for it. Maybe we can share them someday, after I get back. In the meantime, I will be careful.”
“Thou art thine own woman,” she said. “I cannot stop thee. But if thou wish to return, come to me.”
I felt a surge of warmth toward her then, and reached out to hug her. “Thank you for everything,” I said.
Moth and I set out armed with sticks and a backpack for some food. She led me through the village and on into the coldlands, just as Dagget had done. I said nothing as our path sloped downward, farther into the cave, but as we continued I finally asked Moth if she were sure this was the right way. “I have trod this path a thousand times,” she said.
When we stopped by the shores of the underground lake to eat, I said, “I am sure Dagget led me this way.”
“Good,” she said. “If he hath led thee here, then no one can blame me for leading thee amiss, or prate of my youthful folly.”
“Are you and Hanna really close in age?” I asked her.
“Not anymore,” she said. “Hanna hath aged prematurely, from staying always in Torobe, where they spend their lives warding off the world.”
“Well, it looks like the world is coming to Torobe now.”
“Aye, that’s true.” She said it with regret, I thought.
“It’s nice to have a place to come back to, isn’t it?” I said.
“Aye,” she said, and wouldn’t reveal any more.
My conviction that we were on the path I had followed before became a certainty when I smelled the sulfuric fumes and felt the tug of apprehension. I made Moth stop. “Why have we come here?” I said. “This is not the way to the Escher. It’s the way to the place Dagget calls the Ground.”
“Aye,” Moth said in a baffled tone. “The way to Escher is through the Ground. Dost thou know another way?”
A great many things that had not been making sense to me were swirling through my head. I had assumed that Dagget had brought me here to teach a spiritual tradition. In fact, I was sure he had. But Moth seemed to be speaking not of a psychic journey, but a physical one.
“You believe you can go to the Escher through the Ground?” I said carefully.
“Aye, and to the other habitudes. We call our cordwork of habitudes the tangle; ’tis like the cordwork of Torobe.”
“Do you go in your mind, like a dream?” I pressed her.
“Nay, as I do stand here before thee,” Moth said. “That is, if someone is there to bemind me.”
I had thought I understood that word, as a synonym of “call to mind” or “think of.” Now I realized it had another meaning. “Bemind you. What does that mean?”
“Why, conjure me through from the other side. Fill my bag. What else should I call it?”
“Humor me, Moth. What if there’s no one in a habitude to bemind you?”
“I can still go there, but it is not the same. I can speak, but the sound is indistinct, as a whisper. If I touch a person, ’tis like the brush of gauze, or chill water. I can move things only as the wind does. Everything feels different.”
“But if someone beminds you, are you physically there? In your body?”
“Aye, I told you that. If you know this not, how did you come here?”
“My people wend … well, another way. We don’t use the Ground. These habitudes, the other places you go—are they nearby, or far?”
“They are all the same. There is no near or far in the Ground.”
Dagget had told me that, but I had not taken it literally. “How do the people in the other habitudes know you?”
“From meeting other wenders. We have been visiting some of these places a longtime. Not all habitudes have people, and some have people shaped unlike us, and some have people who like us not, but try to drive us out. There are places wenders have gone and never come back. We think the people there live in water or fire, or they breathe poison.”
A picture was forming in my mind of an alternative cosmography based not on the gridwork of space with its implacable light-speed limits, but of a chain of habitudes linked by aware minds through the medium of the timeless, spaceless Ground. If it were true, who knew where Torobe’s wenders might have been—in this galaxy or others far away. If the only navigational limit were consciousness and not distance, they might have been to places we had never imagined reaching.
Or was Moth’s tale all just superstition, akin to ancient fantasies of gods and immortals? “I need to see some of these habitudes,” I said.
“Not just thine own?”
“I want to see that, too. But also others. Can you show me?”
“Of course,” she said brightly, without any of the qualms Dagget had expressed.
I had to caution her that I was unskilled, and she might need to lead me. “I remember well,” she said.
We entered the still place, and I settled into the familiar meditative posture. This time, the transitional experience was entirely auditory. I heard echoes around me, but not of any earthly sound. They were, I thought, echoes of the universe. Some were majestic oscillations that would take a century to complete, and some were the piccolo notes from the springing-into-being of subatomic particles. I was washed over by the tympanies of stars, the vibrato of space, all amplified by the impossible geometries around me. It was as if I were at the intersection of a thousand corridors—some wide, some narrow, some below, some overlapping one another.
I would have lingered, but I felt Moth’s presence, tugging at me impatiently, and so I followed her. She led me through a boundary where I had the brief sensation that front and back were the same direction, and then I seemed to be standing on a beach of pregnant globes, eggs bigger than a person, on the shore of a midnight-blue sea. As I tried to move, my feet stirred the sand, and it made a twinkling sound like a comet’s tail. Beside me, Moth said a word that sounded like an upside-down pyramid, its tip balanced on the palm of my hand. I tried to answer, but the words crumbled into yellow dust. I drew near one of the translucent eggs and saw inside a nest of golden, pickle-flavored worms. I smelled a puff of cold, electric steam against my neck and raised my eyes to the horizon, but it looked like glass passing across my skin, drawing blood.
I started to panic at the incomprehensibility of it all, and had to close my eyes and flee backwards. For a moment everything was jumbled, a rain of sensations battering at me. Amid all the absurdities, I felt that one direction was calling me strongly, smelling of sage. I concentrated on that haven of familiarity, and opened my eyes into another memory of Orem.
* * *
The yellow light of the oil lamp cast dramatic shadows over the folds of fabric covering the woman who stood over me. Her face was veiled. I sat on my cot as she held the lamp to my face, studying me. I had tied a strip of fabric around my forehead to cover the scar and hold back my filthy hair, crawling with worms I had no comb to get out. My shirt was stiff and crusty with old sweat. But I sat straight, thinking, They cannot make me into something other than I am.
“I am Naorka,” she said at last. “Wife of the Great Hunter Katarka.”
“I am Thora Lassiter, emissary of the Capellan Magisterium.”
“I know what you are,” she said with a soft note of contempt. “You think you are fit to become my husband’s abindo. That is what Scarinau says.”
In the silence that followed, I could hear the buzzerbirds droning outside. I did not know what was going on here. It might be that Scarinau had betrayed me.
“Does that worry you?” I said.
“No!” Her veil puffed out with the vehemence of the word. “You come from a decadent race. You may be able to enslave your own men, but my husband is greater than that. His discipline is like steel. He knows no such thing as self-gratification.”
I knew what sort of marriage they had. He would never see or touch her. She would summon him to the women’s compound on the nights when she was fertile. When he arrived she would be covered head to toe with a sheet that had one round hole in it, and he would do what he came for through that hole. There would always be an old woman in the room, to witness. It was the only decent way to be married, on Orem.
She reached deep into the folds of her shawls and drew out a weapon. I tensed, but she turned it around and offered me the handle. “I have brought this for you to use.”
It was a drymen, a ceremonial bronze ax with a crescent-shaped blade. The lamplight glinted on the polished metal, and when I felt the edge, it was a razor-sharp inset of steel. I looked up at her, uncomprehending. “Why are you helping me?”
“He needs the power,” she said intently. “There are so many doubters around him. Betrayers. They must know he can conquer even the most powerful force in the world, the madness of Witassa. That is why he must be tested. And when he has spurned you, and hacked your body apart, he will drink in your power, and Hers, and then nothing can stop him. He will rule the whole world.”
The savagery in her voice was chilling, even in the heat of my cell.
“Has he ever had an abindo?” I asked.
Her head jerked, negative. “It is not easy to find worthy prey.” She spat out the words.
Her shawls whispered as she turned to leave, but I stood up, still holding the ax. “And if he doesn’t conquer me?”
She turned back, looking me up and down from behind her veil. There was a note of weird elation in her voice. “Then we will know he was not the man he said he was.”
Half of her wanted me to win, I was sure of it. Perhaps half of every woman on Orem.
When she was gone, I felt as if some elemental force had blown from the room, leaving me weak and shaky. I fell back onto the bed, knowing I was the wrong person in the wrong place. My stomach felt queasy at the position I was in. Witassa had manipulated me to this point: there was no way out but through the scouring sandstorm of violence. The ax felt heavy in my lap, and I suddenly understood that it was not my weapon, but his. I was the one who was supposed to die by it.
A weak laugh escaped me. I was a diplomat, for heaven’s sake. All my professional life I had been trained to negotiate, to seek compromise and reasonable solutions. And before that, I was a Vind, trained in apathi, all subtlety and indirection. What had these Oremen seen in me that made them think I was capable of something so alien as abindo? It was impossible: I did not have their killer instinct.
The night waited all around me. Even the buzzerbirds had fallen silent. “They cannot make me into something other than I am,” I said aloud, but it sounded like a last weak protest. If I stayed what I was, I would probably die in this cell. The only way to get control back was to lose myself and become something else. Someone else.
I stood up, holding the ax out. “Witassa, Shameless One, come inhabit me,” I prayed aloud. At first there was no answer, and my hand clenched around the handle, sweaty with fear. But I waited, and so suddenly I did not even notice the change, I was in motion.
I tore a strip of cloth from the mattress ticking and wrapped it twice around my waist, thrusting the ax handle through it. Then I went to the wall where I had hidden Scarinau’s gift under a piece of broken plaster. It was a brittle spore casing from some native fungus, perfectly spherical and very light. I tucked it into my sash. Scarinau had instructed me how to use it: �
�Break it in a man’s face so he inhales the spores, and it will paralyze him a little while.”
Naorka had left the door ajar, and the guard was snoring, drunk. From the angle of the moonlight I could tell that it was very late. Barefoot, I glided down the hall till the darkness hid me.
My prison was in what had once been Laocata’s compound, so I knew portions of it. It was like all Oreman compounds: grand and opulent public spaces nested in warrens of little squalid rooms where the kith lived. When I crossed a courtyard, I stopped a moment, seized with sudden emotion at the sight of stars, my home, shining out of the cool night air above the ovenlike mud-brick buildings. I had to press my hand hard over my mouth as tears sprang into my eyes. The outer gate was closed. Beyond it lay the city, where it would be easy for me to lose myself in the mazy streets. As I wavered, Witassa’s fierce voice whispered for me to turn away. My way to freedom now was to surrender my will to hers.
I knew the wing where the kithfathers’ chambers had been, and headed for it. The tunnel-like corridors of the sleeping warrens were hot and breathless. I stopped on seeing a light ahead, around a bend, and slid forward silently till I could glance around the corner. A kerosene lamp burned in a wall bracket beside a door. A guard was on duty in the hall. His weapon—an automatic gun—leaned against the wall. He crouched beside it, smoking a cigarette and listening to music on a set of headphones. He would not be able to hear me approach.
I took the spore case from my sash and balanced on my toes to make myself swift as a striking snake. Just then the soldier got up to stretch his legs, and began to pace up and down. When I heard his footsteps turn, I ducked out into the hall and rushed at his back. I hit him at a run, knocking him to the floor and breaking the spore case against his face. I had expected him to go limp, but instead his muscles went rigid, like a seizure. Working fast while he was incapacitated, I stripped off his belt to fasten his feet, then used the strap from his bandolier to secure his arms. I gagged him with his own bandana, then turned him over. He wore the face tattoo of Katarka’s bodyguards. I carefully gathered up the remains of the spore case; half of it was still left, a cup dusted with black powder. I hoped there was enough for my purpose. Leaving the guard trussed in the hallway, I crept to the door and opened it silently.
Dark Orbit Page 21
