by Eileen Wilks
“José and the rest. I don’t see any pursuit, but they’re running flat out and I don’t see packs on their backs.”
Something was wrong. Rule spoke crisply. “Jason, start distributing the money. Be quick. John, put out your fire. Everyone else except the sentries, to me. We’ll wait for José and the rest, but be prepared to scatter. Danny, I’d like another twenty-four hours.”
She’d rounded the outcrop with the others, but stopped dead at that. “What? What do you mean?”
“I’d like to extend our agreement about your protection for another twenty-four hours.”
She was pale. Frightened, but not—as she put it—having a meltdown. “I—I—okay.” She came forward and held out her hand.
Solemnly he shook it. “We’ll take care of you, Danny.”
“What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know yet.” He would soon. He could hear José and the rest now. They weren’t trying to run silently. “Mike, Danny remains in your charge. Bert, I’m sorry there won’t be time for coffee. We need to get you away.” Claude would be best for that. He knew the area, knew how to fight—and just as important, when not to fight—and was damn good at traveling unseen. Rule knew that because the man had once led a Leidolf squad onto Nokolai Clanhome land and lived to tell of it.
José came pounding up the trail toward Rule, a long tail of winded men behind him. All of them were shiny with sweat. José started talking before he stopped running. “Got a call on the way here. Checked with . . . others. Summarizing. They’ve spotted . . . our watchers.”
“All of them?” Rule asked sharply.
“I think so. Two”—he stopped in front of Rule—“may have been picked up. Or shot. Mark heard shots fired to the south of him, and that’s one of the pairs not answering their phones. Another pair had state cops show up while I was talking to them—half a dozen, armed with rifles. I told them to pull back. I dumped the supplies and got here stat. Figured we could go back for them if needed.”
“You did right.” Rule scowled, thinking. Someone among his enemies was too smart for comfort. He must have guessed that Rule would send people to watch the roads. Dammit to hell. “Text the other watchers. Everyone is to leave their posts and join us here. Jason’s distributing cash—a thousand each. We’ll be splitting up. Mike, Danny, José, and Jason will stay with me. Nonfighters are to return to Clanhome. Jason—” Danny had reached him and was tugging on Rule’s arm. “A moment, Danny. Jason, when you’ve finished passing out the money, you’re in charge of getting Theo back safely to Clanhome. I want Claude—”
“Rule!” Danny said urgently.
“Not now. I want Claude with Bert.” He searched the throng behind José until he spotted the older man. “Claude, your job is to get Bert to as safe a spot as you can find. A city or small town. You’ll get extra funds. Fighters are to scatter like everyone else, but will rendezvous later. You’ll be instructed about where on your phone. If you—”
“Ruletheymaybelisteningtoyourphones!”
Danny delivered the words in a single, rapid-fire burst that took him a second to untangle. “We’re using prepaids purchased under names the government doesn’t know. They can’t have our phone numbers, so they can’t listen in.”
“They can! It’s the NSA, Rule! Collecting, storing, and sorting massive amounts of data is what they do. I wish I’d thought of it sooner, but I didn’t. I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. It’s so obvious!”
“What’s obvious?” he asked with strained patience.
“They know you’re here, so they know what cell towers are handling your phone traffic. They’d have to query all the cell towers in a twenty-mile radius because calls aren’t always routed to the nearest one. You’d think that included everyone who places a cell call in an area of about three hundred square miles, but in practice that’s reduced to about a hundred square miles because of the directional antennae. That’s still a lot of cell numbers, but they can either find out from the phone companies involved which numbers are newly activated, or they might do a sort to eliminate calls placed from numbers that have made calls in this area before you got here. That would be trickier than it sounds, but—”
“Speed it up,” he said. “Please.”
The strain of not explaining made her pant, but she managed. “It’s possible for them to find your phone numbers. I don’t know how long it would take, but if it’s possible, they’ve already done it or are in the process of doing it. Once they have the numbers—”
“They can listen in real time.” And had, it sounded like. Quickly he sorted through what he’d said over the phone—and what he hadn’t. They knew Danny was with him. He’d mentioned that. They knew about the watchers and evacuating the camp, but he hadn’t specified where Fallback Two was, so . . . shit. The squads José broke up to create the watchers wouldn’t have known where Fallback Two was. He must have told them. “José. How did you describe the location of Fallback Two when you contacted the search squads?”
“Too well,” José said grimly.
“Dammit. New plan. Everyone—”
A single short, rising whistle from the sentry. Incoming—and hostile. “Who?” Rule snapped.
“Helicopter. It’s headed straight for—oh, hell! That’s not DPS. It’s some kind of military copter.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes! It’s five or six minutes out!”
This time, Rule shouted. “Sentries, abandon posts. Everyone, don’t use your phones. Nonfighters, scatter now! Go!” Men started to peel off. “Fighters—”
“Rule!” José broke in, fast and urgent. “Mother bird!”
“No, dammit, I’m not going to—”
“You damn sure are! You’re their damn Rho, and that copter probably has machine guns! Let me do my job!”
“Bloody hell.” Rule wasn’t the only one at risk. There was Danny, whom he was sworn to protect. And everyone else. “Yes. A squad, no more. Don’t get yourself killed.”
José didn’t answer. He was too busy calling out names.
“Mother bird” was one of the basic tactics known to everyone who trained under Benedict. José would lead his squad away from Rule—and make sure they were seen. Just like a mother bird pretending to be wounded to draw the danger away from her chicks.
Rule called out names, too, even as he revised his plans. “Little John, get Bert on your back. Danny, get on Mike’s back. You’re with me. Claude, you’re point for my party. Take us roughly south, with overhead cover as much as possible. Move!”
José and the men he’d chosen were already running back down the trail. The rest scattered every which way. The second Mike and Little John had their charges securely aboard, Rule gave Claude the signal. He took off. Rule raced after him, trailed by the encumbered Mike and Little John.
Five minutes later, machine gun fire shattered the quiet of the woods into bloody shards.
THIRTY
THE brownie’s name was Shisti. Her call-name anyway.
“Fathers choose the first call-name,” she told Lily and Charles, looking down at her busy hands weaving five thin strips of leather into a complex braid. The strips were anchored by loops hooked around her toes. “That’s what the child will be called until zhe’s nine. Most of us change our call-name several times before we reach adulthood. Not so often after that.”
“The father gets to pick the baby’s call-name? Seems wrong to leave out the mother.”
Shisti’s round green eyes grew even rounder in astonishment. “But she chooses the birth name!”
“Is a birth-name like a true name?”
“No. Yes.” One of Shisti’s little hands abandoned its task to flutter in the air, then scoop it as if cupping water. “It holds together like a true name, but it is not one.”
“But it’s kept secret like a true name?”
“Of course. Only mothers know the birth name. They whisper it into the baby’s ear when zhe has three days, and when zhe has three moons, and when zhe h
as three years, and every three years after that until zhe’s an adult. Also if zhe gets sick,” she added. “Not little-sick, but bad-sick, but that doesn’t happen much. We don’t get sick all the time like you humans.” She gave Lily a pitying look.
“Zhe? Is that from your language?”
“No, it’s English. You haven’t heard it yet?”
“No.”
“You will.” She resumed her weaving.
Shisti was not the brownie Lily had followed into the woods, though her hair was the same ash brown color. She wore a single mother-braid, not three, and lacked the fine lines around her eyes Lily had seen on the other brownie. Shisti’s eyes were also a bit more widely set, her chin more pointed.
The three of them sat in what Lily thought of as the foyer near the fire curtain. Shisti had pulled off her shoes so she could anchor five thin strips of leather with her toes—she’d pulled them from a pouch at her waist—and was braiding them in a complicated pattern. Charles lay beside Lily, looking sleepy. He’d eaten. They’d both emptied their bladders, Charles by directing the stream into the fire-curtain, where it hissed into oblivion. Quite a tidy solution really, considering how difficult it would be for him to use the camping toilet. Lily was munching on the trail mix Shisti had brought. She was bloody damn sick of trail mix.
Putting together a few things the brownie had said with a great many she hadn’t, Lily was pretty sure Shisti had been serving as their waitress, delivering food and water, and chambermaid—emptying the bag in the camping toilet. She hadn’t expected them to wake up, or to be trapped here herself. Both things upset her. She refused to tell them why, or how they’d repeatedly been put to sleep, or why they’d been captured, or anything else related to their imprisonment. She’d happily answered other questions, though, once Lily abandoned the forbidden topics.
So Lily had kept her talking. Suspects and witnesses often reveal a good deal through indirect questioning. She now knew that brownies counted age based on the year they became adult rather than their birth year. By this reckoning, Shisti was twelve. She had a young son called Aire who loved to climb; she was a dada, whatever that meant (when Lily asked, she’d said, “I geesh the prelli. I also nag. I am very good with prelli and getting better at nagging”); her favorite food was chocolate, but worms were nice for snacking; and “shisti” referred to her ability to move soundlessly, a skill the little brownie was very proud of. “I have the softest feet in Home,” she’d announced. “The bear can’t hear me. The cat can’t hear me. Certainly none of you Big People can hear me.”
Lily’s headache was almost gone. She decided to try . . . but the moment she reached with that other sense, a sharp stab of pain made her wince and rub her head. Which was suddenly pounding again. “I don’t suppose you have some ibuprofen in your pouch.”
“I-bu-what?”
“It’s a painkiller.”
“What hurts?” The little brownie looked alarmed. “Is it your head? Did you hit it? Are your brains scrambled? Are you knocked silly? Will you—”
“No, none of that. I have a headache.”
Shisti clucked in sympathy. “I’ve never had a headache. I know humans get them. Why is that? They sound unpleasant.”
“Brownies don’t get headaches?”
“Not unless we hit our heads. I was knocked silly once. It hurt a lot and my words stayed tangled for hours.”
Lily ate another handful of stupid damn trail mix. “That word you used. ‘Zhe.’ What does it mean?”
“Yayo. None of your languages have a word for yayo. Isn’t that ridiculous? Elves do. Gnomes do. We do. But you don’t, so we decided to give English a word for yayo.” She paused expectantly.
“Um—thank you?”
Shisti beamed at her. “You’re welcome. Some thought it should be she-he, but all your other pronouns are only one syllable, so that would be hard to insert. Besides, she-he sounds like tickling giggles, doesn’t it? And ‘zhe’ could work for other languages, and we might want to give it to one of them, too, later on.”
“That’s planning ahead.” Conversation with brownies was always interesting. Not necessarily informative, but interesting. “So ‘zhe’ means ‘he or she’?”
“Or ‘his or hers.’” Shisti had finished her braid. Carefully she removed it from her toes and tied off that end. She held it up, admiring it—and promptly untied it and took the strands apart.
“Why did you do that? It looked pretty.”
“I need something to do, of course.” Her busy fingers were looping the strands around her toes again.
“You think you’ll be here with us for much longer?”
“I don’t know.” She paused in her task, her forehead wrinkling. “She’s not listening anymore.”
Lily resisted the urge to ask who Shisti meant. “That makes you sad.”
Brimming green eyes met hers. “We’ve tried so hard! We’re doing everything the ithnali says, but we aren’t enough. Even the great-mothers can’t get through to her now, or I wouldn’t be on this side of the fire.”
“Great-mothers?”
“Grandmothers? Or great-grandmothers. Or great-great-grandmothers. Or great-great-great-grandmothers, but we don’t have any four-greats now except for Old Talla. She can’t come because she’s busy dying.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“No, no. She’s doing splendidly.” Shisti smiled with fond appreciation. “We all knew she would.”
“Oh, ah . . . good. So this—what’s going on—it’s for mothers only?”
“Well, of course! Except for you, but you’re different because . . . uh-oh. I think I wasn’t supposed to say that.”
“Charles isn’t a mother, either,” Lily pointed out.
Shisti gave the sleepy wolf a dubious glance. “I don’t know why he can be here. No one told me, but I’m just a one-mother. I think it’s because he’s dying—”
“Wait a minute. How do you know that?”
Shisti’s big eyes rounded in astonishment. “It is obvious.”
“Can you go into more detail about why it’s obvious?”
Her face screwed up in concentration, then she shook her head. “I don’t think so.”
“But that’s why Charles can be here, even though he isn’t a mother. Because he’s dying.”
She shrugged as if she’d lost interest in the subject and looked away, her cute little face tight with worry.
Worry and adorable just didn’t look right together. Lily reminded herself that harmless little Shisti, mother of one, had helped keep her and Charles prisoners. “Cheer up. I’m sure the, uh, the great-mothers will fix things. Have some trail mix.”
“That’s for you.”
“It looks like you’ll be here awhile, and you have to eat.”
Shisti drooped all over. Her knees came up and she pillowed her head on them in the dejected posture she’d been in when Lily first saw her.
Charles stood, went to the little woman, poked her with his nose, and lay on his stomach beside her. She looked smaller than ever next to the big wolf. Shisti lifted her head. “I don’t speak wolf. What does he want?”
“I think he’s trying to comfort you. Humans often find it comforting to stroke furry animals.”
“Oh. We do, too.” She stretched out a tentative hand. “Is it all right if I pet you?”
He nodded and laid his head on his front paws.
Shisti stroked carefully. “Oh, that is nice.”
A stream of unintelligible speech in a high, piping voice erupted on the other side of the fire curtain.
Shisti called out, “No, no! They’re not—”
The fire disappeared.
“—asleep,” Shisti finished.
Lily was already on her feet. She darted forward, ducking to get through the low opening without “knocking herself silly.” Her head hurt enough as it was.
There were mage lights and brownies on the other side. Four brownies, she thought, though she didn’t pause to count
. A couple of them shrieked in surprise and one didn’t get out of the way fast enough. Lily knocked her down. There was only one direction to take so she took it, racing off down a curiously rounded tunnel with Charles right behind. Her head pounded with every footfall.
“Come back!”
“Nidilistrionamason—”
“Not him! Not him! Stop him!”
The last must have meant Charles, who pushed past her to take the lead. She let him. The tunnel was dim to her eyes, and what light there was lay behind her so that she ran always into her own shadow. No one shot at them—always a good thing. Brownies kept calling for them to come back. After about fifty feet the tunnel curved, plunging Lily into deeper murk as the rocky wall cut off the brownies’ mage lights. She stumbled, nearly falling, and had to slow so she could trail one hand along the rough wall.
It wasn’t completely dark, though. There was a glow ahead. Behind them the piping voices of the brownies drew closer. Lily trotted quickly after Charles, who’d gotten well ahead of her. Was it getting hotter in here?
Charles froze, a low growl erupting from his chest.
Oh, good, an enemy who was not a brownie. Charles didn’t growl at brownies, even when they kidnapped him. Lily wouldn’t have to worry about hurting this enemy’s feelings. If only she had some other way of hurting him—a gun, a knife, a club. Especially a gun. Her Glock. She really wanted her Glock. She kept going.
It was definitely hotter. That wasn’t her imagination. She stepped out of the tunnel a couple feet behind Charles—and stopped dead, staring.
She always had that reaction to dragons.
This rocky chamber was much larger than the one where she’d been held prisoner, with a ceiling so high she couldn’t see it. There was light, though, streaming in through an opening high in one rock wall. Sunlight, which she hadn’t seen since she was brought here. Vaguely she noted a ledge running around three sides of the chamber. Vaguely, because most of her attention was caught by the way sunlight struck fire from scales that varied from glistening ruby to garnet, its slant draping shadows around the huge body looped in lazy coils on the sandy floor of the chamber some fifteen feet below.
