Artemis Invaded (39 page)

And what will happen to the others while I wait? Bruin wouldn't reveal if they were being tortured unless he felt that someone was in danger of being killed or maimed. He'd worry I'd act impulsively, not plan carefully enough, if I was afraid for them. No. The time for waiting is over. Kipper and I have done our best to secure protection from Alexander's control, but Artemis can offer better.

So she turned her face to the sky and spoke with all her heart and soul. “Artemis, I'm yours. Let's do whatever it is you have in mind.”

Kipper looked astonished, but Adara hardly noticed his reaction as warmth and relief flooded into her mind. Near the tips of her boots, the soft, damp duff began to erupt, rounding and swelling, as if a small, firm head was being birthed forth by the earth. Sand Shadow thumped her head against Adara's arm and emitted a querulous yowl. Adara stroked her, as much for her own reassurance as for the puma's.

Kneeling, Adara dusted off the crumbs of dirt and leaf mold, revealing a pale white sphere no larger than the hollow of her cupped hands. The air was scented with the musty, not at all unpleasant, odor of fresh fungus. Sand Shadow leaned forward to more closely inspect the sphere, the tips of her whiskers lightly stroking the firm, fleshy whiteness. As if this whisker kiss had been a signal, the sphere split into six neatly divided segments. These peeled back, creating points on a star. In the center of the star was a fat bluish-grey cone. The tip of the cone opened and a dusting of white spores drifted forth and sparkled in the air.

“An earthstar,” Kipper gasped. The boy had come soundlessly up to stand beside Adara. “The most beautiful one I've ever seen.”

Adara studied the fungus. She knew what to do. Her dreams had told her. Her heart raced, causing her to feel the slightest bit faint. She knew what to do, but could she? She imagined those tiny white dots coating the inside of her mouth, drifting deep into her lungs, carried with every breath through her soft tissues, permeating her blood and brain. As a hunter, she knew all too well how much wetness there was in a living body. In her wanderings in the wilds, she'd seen how fungi seized on wetness and turned everything they touched into mush.

Kipper looked at the earthstar, then at her. His eyes were round with wonder. “An earthstar. Don't you see? It's part of Ring's prophesy come true. ‘If the cats do not breathe in the dusty orb, if the thread does not learn that it binds tightest when it is knotted firmly into itself, if the dreamer does not wake from the visions, then even with Ring, with Bruin, with Kipper, still there will be disaster.'”

“'Cats,'” Adara repeated, astonished that her voice could sound so steady. Kipper was beginning to look frightened. He needed her confidence to steady him. “You'd better come close, Sand Shadow. Kipper's right. This is meant for us both.”

She bent closer to the earthstar, one arm around her demiurge's neck, the other arm straight, the hand braced against damp earth in which she would have sworn she felt a pulse. Artemis sent no images, but Adara had never been so aware of her in this last moment of separation. Then she bent her head forward and placed her lips against the tip of the cone.

Breathing deeply in, Adara took the spores into her mouth, drew them down into her lungs. On the exhalation, she placed her mouth against Sand Shadow's, feeling fur instead of lips, the tickle of whiskers, and the dampness of the nose leather against her cheek. She breathed out, sharing Artemis's gift with her demiurge.

Again Adara breathed in the earthstar's spores, shared them with the great cat. A third time, then she knew without knowing how that the cone was emptied. The remaining spores would dance forth, seeding Artemis into the planet that was her body, following the ordinary extraordinary design that was their nature.

At first Adara felt nothing, not even a tickle. Then, on her fourth breath, needles of ice that turned into nearly unbearable heat radiated out from the interior of her mouth and lungs, piercing every fiber of nerve, flowing forth with incredible rapidity. She became aware of her body with an intimacy she would not have believed possible: each organ, each bone, each drop of blood, knowledge increasing so that she came to see herself not an individual but as a colony creature. Then, quick as a hand turned palm up, her perspective shifted and Adara saw the planet in the same detail. Incredible amounts of information flooded into her, filling her beyond her capacity to understand.

She heard Sand Shadow screaming, raising the terrible feline keen that froze the blood of any who walked the forest. Adara realized that her own throat was making the same horrible sound, her screams blending into those of the puma, until they were of one voice as well as one mind.

Kipper was shouting, shaking her shoulders, pulling her from where she was beating her head into the earth in an effort to shake loose the horrid mass of information that threatened to drown her, to submerge her in a salt-scored weight, drowning her with waves of wetless water.

Nameless now, one of three, she surged to her feet, arms stretched to the sky in a mute plea for mercy. She no longer knew how to speak or how to separate herself from the minds intertwined with her own. Her claws sprouted forth. She brought them down to tear open her skull along the seam of the nasal cavity, seeking to make room for this terrible burden of knowledge … Pain! Then …

Peace. Pure, absolute, silence. Stillness in every limb.

She was no longer screaming, though a roughness in her throat told her she had screamed. Blood ran down her face, coursing from her nose and lips, soaking into her hair, which trailed behind her back-thrown head. Sand Shadow was gone but Adara …

She blinked. Adara. That was right. She was Adara. A few syllables, meaning almost nothing, but useful. Adara. Sand Shadow. Artemis. Names. Identities.

She had feet and was standing upon them. She felt her hands heavy at her sides with the weight of claws. Her bare toes were also clawed. Her spine felt odd, as if it had tried to sprout a tail. Blood still flowed from nose and mouth. The beginnings of claw marks scored her face where her claws had tried to tear her skull open.

“I,” she said, her voice clogged until she spat blood on the ground, “think I bit my tongue.”

Kipper stood a short distance from her, poised to run.

“You were growing fangs and fur and…” He motioned toward her hands and feet. “Claws. Sand Shadow was getting arms, longer fingers, her fur was…” He made an inarticulate gesture, indicating how the fur had flowed and changed. “It was like hair, but all down her back. You were both screaming and screaming and … Oh, Adara! What happened? Did that earthstar hold some sort of poison?”

Adara spat again. Her mouth was bleeding less. She ran a tentative tongue over her teeth, found them much as they had been but … Hadn't there been a rough spot on that one molar where she'd chipped it on a cherry pit? That roughness was gone, the tooth made new. If there had been fangs, they were gone now. She held a hand up to her nose to stanch the flow, found that the bleeding, too, had almost stopped.

“Not poison,” she said. “Protection.”

Kipper looked unconvinced.

A stream flowed close by. Steadier with every step, Adara walked over to it, knelt, dunked her head into the rushing waters. Despite the warmth of the late summer air, the water felt shockingly cold, her skin fever hot. She scrubbed at the blood matting her hair, saw the water downstream turn red, then pink. As her hands worked, her mind reached out for Sand Shadow and found her immediately.

The puma was in a tree no great distance away, up as high as she could go. Her claws pierced through the tree, anchoring her as she washed her fur with long, nervous strokes of her tongue. Every so often, she shuddered her skin or lashed her tail, assuring herself that her shape was as it should be.

Adara reached for the puma as she had since the squall of a terrified kitten and a flood of emotion had let her know that the then nameless kit was not interested in becoming food for the nasty-tempered, snaggle-toothed old male who had decided that it was a puma-eat-puma world and he was going to be the eater. He hadn't been. Adara had seen to that. His fur had lined the basket in which Sand Shadow had slept until she grew too big for it.

What had started then had been not so much a bond as a conversation, one in which even the language had needed to be invented. The bond had come later, not some mystic tie, but a relationship built from trust, shared experience, liking, love. Would what had just happened destroy trust, that first and most essential link?

“Hey,”
Adara sent, letting the puma feel her working her claws back into her fingers and toes, regaining her human shape.
“Was that fun for you?”

A sense of consideration, followed by a flood of aching joints, of temperature shift, of balance all wrong. Sand Shadow, too, had experienced some of the torrent of information. Here her puma's nature had served her better than Adara's human one. Wild animals learn young how to filter out what they don't need. The ones who don't are distracted by a bit of birdsong, miss the prowling menace, and die.

“Why did we try to become each other?”
Adara thought, then knew the answer. They had reached for each other but, in the fluid state the spores had forced upon them, the barriers between human and puma had ceased to be. Each held in their minds a sense of what the other was.
It was as if we tried to send a letter and became the addressee. Or something.

Adara remembered the sensation of knowing her body down to the tiniest level and knew that whatever Artemis had done to her had given her the capacity to reshape herself from the most basic elements up. Of course, if she didn't know precisely what it was she wanted to be …

Adara shuddered, imagining herself transformed into a wet and squishy mass somewhere between shapes. That wasn't a game she was going to play for a long time to come—if ever. So, what exactly had Artemis done?

“I made you a world at your command,”
came the answer,
“as I am a world at my command. The other will not be able to direct you because you are your own seegnur.”

“I thought you were going to take over,”
Adara said,
“that Alexander would not be able to command me because you would be commanding me.”

“What good would that do any/all of us?”
Artemis said.
“I need you to be you, not to be more me. Weren't you the one who showed me that?”

Adara remembered dreams and nightmares and conversations that had seemed not quite real later on.
“So I'm still me? Sand Shadow is still her? And you?”

A trickle of laughter, not in the least unkind.
“Still me. Still you. Still her. But also, now, still us. It is that us-ness that will grant you protection. Where we are gathered will be too crowded for another's will. Of that I feel certain.”

Adara wished she felt the same.

Interlude: Earthstar

They told me

Who I am

What I should be

Slavery glorified as destiny

Yet I see

I'm no lamb

No worker bee

This earthstar is my mutiny

 

17

No Victory Without a Defeat

Julyan stalked after the prisoners. As always, he felt deeply unsettled in the presence of the spaveks. He intensified his swagger lest anyone guess. Thus far, he hadn't been asked to try on a suit. He didn't know whether he felt insulted or relieved. Maybe the Danes hadn't asked because he was too useful as a guard. Maybe it was because they didn't know where his loyalties lay. Perhaps for both reasons. The only other reason Julyan could come up with for them not asking was that they thought he was too stupid to figure out how to operate one. That couldn't be the case, since they'd given Seamus a go.

They arrived at the arena to find Ring taking the blue spavek through its paces while Castor, Falkner, and Alexander watched and made comments. Other than the fact that he was chewing a bit faster than usual, Castor appeared uninterested. Alexander, by contrast, was nearly manic in his intensity.

“I know that Ring said the green spavek would be better for you,” Alexander was saying to Castor, “but are you certain you won't try the blue one? Of all the spaveks, it's in the best condition.”

Castor only shook his head and scratched beneath one ear. “Green and green, or not at all.”

“Green and green, then.” Siegfried sighed. “We've brought all the parts that have been cleaned up. A lot of them are green, though. Ring, is what we need for Castor here?”

Ring drifted down and landed next to the gurney Bruin had been guiding. Wordlessly, he pointed to a series of parts: helmet, shoulder pads, breast and back plate, joint guards, boots. All were of a deep shimmering green that reminded Julyan of a beetle's carapace.

“Nice,” Siegfried said appreciatively. “Green will go really well with your hair, Cas. Go ahead and put the stuff on.”

Alexander interrupted. “Not so fast. We can't be sure Ring's giving good advice.”

Falkner, who had been inspecting the green helmet—obviously interested as to whether the stylized horns that ornamented the demonic visage served any purpose—looked up, his expression sardonic. “I thought you said you had the natives firmly under control.”

Alexander flashed his teeth in what could only loosely be called a smile. “Control is one thing. Ring is another. We know he speaks in riddles. I say we hedge our bets. Have someone else put on the spavek first.”

Siegfried frowned. “Griffin's experience seems to show that these suits aren't one size fits all. Even if we test that way, how can we be sure the wearer's reaction and Castor's will be the same?”

“We don't,” Alexander admitted, “but we'll at least be certain it's functional before we risk Castor.”