Silver Moons, Black Steel

by Tara K. Harper

  “He was the duty rider,” Talon said carefully.

  “And he bore a grudge.”

  “He’s never killed one of us before.”

  “And how long have you really known him?” Kilaltian bit the words out. “You’re as ignorant of him as you are of yourself.”

  “He seemed to be doing his job.”

  “Oh, aye, and a good job it was. He reached us, all right, but he said the swarm was of rasts, not skates. Told us to build a fire, to make noise, that you had been warned by the wolves. We’ve all seen the signs, son of Drovic. We believed enough to obey you. So we built the fire as fast as we could—high flames, lots of twigs. But we needed wood, and you never saw a more motionless bunch of moon-licking cowards when I told them to go out and get it. So I went. Found a log that could have held us half the night. And while I was out, they hit us. Skates,” the man spat. “Not rasts. Ebi, Strapel, Al— they’re all dead. Nortun, Ilandin—” His voice cracked hard. “Gone,” he snarled. “Every one of them torn apart while I listened to the screams.”

  “Once it had started, you couldn’t have stopped it,” Talon said softly.

  “No,” Kilaltian agreed. He stared at Talon. “But you could have.” He lunged, his weight already shifted to the balls of his feet.

  But Talon had the wolves behind his eyes, and he dodged easily around the fire. The others backed away, giving the two men room. Like dogs, they watched without moving while Kilaltian glowered and circled and Talon shifted away. The other man was fast—if his wounds slowed him down at all, it didn’t show, and as Talon’s rage had done before, Kilaltian’s fury more than made up for any weakness.

  Talon danced back as Kilaltian feinted and leaped in. “Fit is dead. We don’t have to fight. He’s already paid for his actions—”

  “He’s not dead enough until you join him, sap-blooded spawn of a gelbug—”

  Talon parried another lunge, leaping lightly back. “I will kill you if I have to,” he warned.

  “You’re confident for a man who, two months ago, couldn’t hold his own sword with two hands.” The man gestured with his blade, “For a man with a leg like that, you’ve—”

  Talon’s gaze almost flickered. Kilaltian took the instant to lunge again. Talon beat-parried hard to move inside the other man’s reach. He palm-struck Kilaltian hard in the sternum, and Kilaltian staggered back. Talon snapped, “We don’t have to do this,”

  “Talk your life away, Talon. It’s to my advantage.”

  This time, Talon didn’t bother to answer. When Kilaltian lunged in, Talon closed, and realized instantly that it had been a mistake. The blood that covered Kilaltian’s arms was not from the raider’s own wounds. The man’s knife sliced through Talon’s sleeve just above the bandage. Talon parried so narrowly that the flat of the blade slid along his skin. He jumped back, stumbled, then twisted into a side roll as Kilaltian leaped forward. A flap of cloth fluttered down behind Talon, slashed from his tunic. Kilaltian caught his balance and turned as Talon lunged back. The man parried high, trying to lead Talon into an opening. Instead, Talon actually dropped his sword and grabbed the other man’s wrist. There were wolves in his arms like a sea of energy waiting to tear through bone. Talon saw the shock in Kilaltian’s eyes as the man felt Talon’s strength. Saw the fear of comprehension. Talon head-butted the other man in the nose and pulled his knife. Bone cracked. In his grip, Kilaltian’s wrist snapped like a stick. The man’s face went chalk white, and in the instant that Talon felt the sound, he let go his block of the other man’s knife and shoved his own through the heart.

  Kilaltian’s knees collapsed. His weight came down hard in Talon’s arms. Talon let him fall free.

  For a long moment, he stared at the raider. There were no death convulsions, no gasping, no fluttering of blood. Only a lessening of life that finally ended in night.

  Talon went to one knee by the body, breathing heavily.

  For a moment, there was silence. The dancing light on the trunks of the trees, the stench of cooking flesh. Finally, Sojourn stepped forward and nudged Kilaltian’s body with his boot. “What will you tell your father?”

  Talon ran his hand through his sweat-matted hair and straightened to his feet. He stared down at the body. “He attacked, as was his right.” He looked up and met the other man’s gaze. “I killed him—as was mine.”

  Sojourn shifted uncomfortably, but nodded his agreement.

  Roc watched Talon like a wolf. “And how many others will you kill?”

  Talon gave her a long, steady look. “As many as stand in my way.”

  Rakdi’s voice was dry. “That, at least, will please your father.”

  XXXII

  Ember Dione maMarin

  Control your destiny or your fate will control you.

  —Randonnen saying

  Gamon glared through red-rimmed eyes. He could see it clearly, the purple-black line that marked the rise of the mountains. Two mesas and one canyon to go, and one deep-cut river they could not touch, and their dried-out bodies would drag out of the sandwormed desert.

  Rhom followed Gamon’s gaze with his own aching eyes. The wind was rising, chilling their day-hot skin, and he welcomed it like a lover. By dawn, they would be into Ariye. A day—no more than two—should bring them to some sort of message station or within sight of a caravan, and from there, they could take dnu again north to the Lloroi. They had angled across the desert and would arrive halfway up the county. Though Rhom appreciated the savings in distance, it had not been by choice. They had been driven north by their need for water. Rhom resisted the urge to swallow—the motion would only choke him. Instead, he lifted out his arms to catch the cold wind for a moment. By dawn, water would no longer be a consideration. And, if they didn’t sleep, if they rode straight across the mountain in their way, they could reach the Lloroi’s house in two days.

  Rhom pressed his sand-grimy fingers under his burning eyes. The wind, the sand, the heat in the day—they combined like a hellish lotion. One touch, and he burned all the more. For all that they were in shade in the day, he felt baked as a tuber in ashes.

  Gamon glanced over. Rhom nodded toward the mountains. The two men trudged ahead.

  In the lamplight, Dion turned her hands over and studied the healed wounds. Her flesh was smooth again—as smooth as it could be with the old scars on the back of one hand. She wanted to clench her hand around steel, but she knew that it was not herself but the hunter who had projected that need until it became part of herself. She unbuckled her belt and laid her weapons over her pack. She had been driven by others’ needs for so long. It was time to deal with her own.

  “Healer?” Kiyun prompted.

  She looked up. She smiled faintly in apology as she realized he had brought her a late bowl of stew from the cozar cooks. Aloof and reserved during the day, the cozar seemed to transform once the dnu stalls were assigned and the shelter was organized. Children who had remained in the wagons were let down to run and stretch their legs. Fires were started and packs moved into the passhouse.

  Like the domes of the Ancients, the passhouses were built over volcanic vents. Unlike the domes, the passhouses had been no more than bored holes when the aliens brought the plague. Their walls weren’t lit with the luminescent fungi that lined the domes’ walls and ceilings, nor did they hum with power like the truncated, skycar mountains. The outer structure of each passhouse had been built after the plague, when technology was failing and the boring tools were breaking down. Although most of the outer walls and support pillars were smooth and beautifully arched, the inner walls were hand-built of pieced wood. Only a few stone walls were used inside. Wood was warmer, both in temperature and color. In some shelters, such as the one in Shadow Pass in Randonnen, the inner pillars placed by the Ancients were carved with stories from the county. Here, they were polished like glass.

  Outside were courtyards, stone benches, and massive fire pits, the latter to allow for standing watch in summer and for providing a beacon to lag
gards. The deep flower boxes along the southern exposure still held the late blooms of white daisy and arcanthum. Dion could smell the scents even at night, when the flowers collapsed and exuded the sticky coating that protected them from the cold. At the other end of the passhouse was the message mirror for communicating with arriving trains. A few rare passhouses—two in Kiaskari and one in Nadugur—held a telescope like the domes; others made do with message mirrors. Out of habit, Kiyun checked the mirror, and found that his counterpart among the cozar was doing the same. They nodded silently to each other as they examined the mirror mounts and surface for damage before covering it again.

  Outside the door of the room assigned to them, the cozar had chalked the symbol for “guest” on the room’s message board, and Dion and the others had settled in without comment while they waited for their turn at the kitchen. The other group of three guests had bedded down in the farthest hall, which had surprised Dion at first. The three had an air about them that was cold and dangerous. She had overheard the children whispering that the three men were raiders. Dion’s hand had gone to her knife, then had fallen away. It was a child’s rumor, she told herself.

  The windows of her room showed three of the nine moons in the half-cleared sky, and Tehena balancing her stew bowl as she entered. “You’d think the Ancients would have built more of these places before kicking off,” the woman said to Kiyun’s back. She set the bowl on one of the two tables and dragged over a chair. “Last night was cold as a killer’s knife, and watching those cozar snuggle up in their wagons made me sweat with jealousy.”

  Kiyun set his own bowl down on the table and joined her. “You could always try a night in one of the Ancients’ domes.”

  Tehena snorted. “And have plague for dinner, as well as stew? Dion would love healing that out of us.” Dion’s spoon paused for an instant halfway to her lips. It had been a small hesitation, but Tehena noted it. The thin woman gave Dion a thoughtful look. It had been the mention of plague that had gotten Dion’s attention. “Healer?” the woman started. “You’ve been healing with Ovousibas for years now. Have you ever seen the plague?”

  Dion calmly finished her bite of stew. She looked at Tehena for a long moment, but the thin woman didn’t think the healer saw her. “Yes.”

  “What?” Tehena couldn’t help the ejaculation. “Moons, healer, I didn’t expect you to answer.”

  Dion shrugged and returned to her stew. Trail stew, ever-the-same stew, she thought absently. When she was home, she would do better cooking.

  “You’ve seen plague.” Kiyun turned in his chair to face her. “Was it from someone who had gone to the domes, or from using the wolves for the healing?”

  Tehena cast him a sharp, angry look. “The wolves who help Dion don’t die.”

  Dion pushed her stew aside and faced them both. “We’ve never known how the plague survives in the dome of the Ancients. It could be through the air, in the walls, carried by some tiny, unseen creature. We just don’t know. All we know is that if you go to the domes, you die of plague; and the wolves carry plague like the domes.”

  Kiyun nodded. “But you still use them to do the healing; you still risk bringing back the plague.”

  There was an unnaturally steady tone to his voice. Just as Tehena’s pale gaze showed her fear, the very neutrality of Kiyun’s voice showed just how much she was frightening him. He had faced raiders and worlags and countless trail dangers, but the thought of plague gave him chills. She tried to smile. “The plague in the wolves is triggered when they use Ovousibas. That was what the aliens taught the Ancients and wolves to do. The wolves did the actual Ovousibas, and the Ancients merely guided the wolves like a sledder driving his dogs. I don’t do that. With me, it’s not the wolves who do the Ovousibas with me as the guide. It’s the other way around. I do the Ovousibas, and the wolves guide me in the technique through their memories of the Ancients. The plague in their bodies isn’t triggered. The wolves merely make a bridge between me and the patient and show me what to do. They don’t do any actual healing.”

  “Is that what your bond with the wolves is like?”

  “No.” Her bond with Hishn was different—intimate, complex, and deep. “The Gray Ones were engineered to be em-paths, not just to offer us communication. They can make a bridge of awareness between bodies so that I can do the healing, the manipulation of the body.”

  “You’re not a telepath,” Kiyun objected.

  “No. But I am a wolfwalker, and my bond with Hishn is deep enough that I understand the added awareness they offer me of my patient.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Dion got up and began to pace the bunk room. “The wolves show me how to reach the other body, and I know enough about medicine to direct that body to heal itself. The wolves are not the active force—I am, with their direction and strength. The Gray Ones act as a shield between me and the patient, so that I don’t get sucked in too far to the pain or injury. And they give me the focus to use my own energies to direct that other body to heal itself.”

  Tehena murmured to Kiyun, “Some of the Ancients were supposed to be telepaths—it’s how they communicated with the aliens to make the original pact.”

  Dion nodded. “But we lost those people in the plague. And now, even if any of us have those mental abilities, we don’t know how to control them or strengthen them, let alone use them. Without the wolves, we would never think of those abilities as anything but instinct.”

  Kiyun spread his hands. “Then you are a telepath.”

  She gave a short laugh. “No. Moons, I wish I were. I could have saved more than a few lives with that skill in my hands. No,” she repeated. “All oldEarthers had the framework for that mental ability in their minds—it’s what our hunches are based on, how a mother knows that her child is in danger. How you know it will be this instant, not that one, in which the rock will fall. They played with it, the oldEarthers. Modified their genes until they created different . . . breeds of humans who could live on different worlds. Our eyes, our sense of direction, our ability to take in toxins . . . Our Ancients weren’t as mutated as some of the other colonists, and they never played much with our minds. We can’t focus our thoughts like telepaths, and what we have isn’t strong enough to be anything more than good luck every now and then.”

  “But you have it more than others, and you focus that through the wolves.”

  Dion shook her head and stopped pacing. “I don’t think the bond with the wolves is based on telepathy. I think the bond only allows us to develop what little sensitivity we have, to become more aware of the world around us. It’s the wolves who do the real talking, who open the door between us. The bond itself is based on something else.”

  “Love.”

  Dion looked at Tehena in surprise. The scrawny woman had never been one to speak of the softer emotions. She touched the other woman’s arm, and Tehena shrugged it off uncomfortably. “Yes, somewhat,” she agreed. “There has always been an easy dependence between men and dogs, men and wolf-dogs, and even men and wolves. But I think there is still more. The Ancients seeded this world with everything they could think of before their technology failed. Peetrees, extractors, potatoes, deer . . . They gave us every opportunity to spread out, and in eight hundred and fifty years, we have never created a new county. Why is that?” she asked thoughtfully.

  Tehena’s pale gaze grew sharp, but Kiyun looked uncomfortable. “There are the northern territories.”

  “And how many live there? Twelve thousand? Twenty?” Dion shook her head. “And why are we wolfwalkers so much less interested in history and government? Have you ever met a wolfwalker who wanted to be in politics?”

  “You spend more time in the forest than the towns. Why would you want to sit with a bunch of elders who do nothing but talk for months?”

  “I wouldn’t,” Dion said softly, “but why don’t I care what they talk about? Even if my life is in wilderness, I should still be involved in what happens to the future of my pe
ople— human or wolf. Look at me—how blind have I been? Aranur always thought about the future.”

  “Are you saying that being a wolfwalker has somehow curbed your curiosity?” Tehena said sharply. “Moonworms, Dion. I’ve seen you poke your head into a lepa’s den just to see what was inside.”

  “And that was wilderness.”

  Tehena opened her mouth, then shut it without speaking.

  Dion nodded. “I think the wolves reflect needs. Ours, theirs.” And the aliens’, for she knew that the yellow slitted eyes had always watched the packsong. “They talk, we listen, we think, and they pick it up. It’s rare—and it’s difficult—to actually project our own emotions into the pack. It’s their reception and reprojection that we pick up. Almost everyone needs a home, family, some sense of the future, so the wolves project that back to us, and we explore, but return to our homes.”

  The home, the den, the mate . . .

  Dion shook off the wolves.

  “And Ovousibas?” Kiyun asked.

  “That’s like a strong man showing a child to hammer out a sword. The man directs the hammer and provides the skill—as if his hands were wrapped around the child’s, but the child actually holds the tool and strikes. The wolves are the man; I am the child. I may hold the tool, but they show me the way. If they ever died out completely, Ovousibas would be impossible.”

  Tehena watched her. “So you could never do it without the Gray Ones.”

  “No,” she agreed.

  “You’re very certain.”

  Dion shrugged. “I may be able to focus at greater distances now, but I still need their minds to form the initial link to the body, and I need their strength or yours—” She nodded at Kiyun and Tehena. “—to help me work once I have that connection. The Ancients could do more, but they had their technology to help. I have only the wolves.”

  “Dion, this hunter you sense in the packsong . . .” Tehena hesitated. “Can he feel you clearly enough to know you do the healing?”

  Dion studied Tehena for a long moment.