For Love of Mother-Not (7 page)

The three of them, along with the sharp-eyed Brora, who had sounded the latest warning, represented the largest surviving group from the original membership. The trust of all who had perished devolved upon them, Cruachan thought. They must not fail with this boy.

And he must not fail them.

L
oneliness had never bothered Flinx before. He knew what it was, of course—the condition had been with him all his short life. In the past, he’d always been able to distance himself from its pain, but this feeling—this empty aloneness—was different from any loneliness he’d ever experienced before. It was a physical reality, stabbing at him, creating an ache in a mysterious, new part of his brain. It was different not only from his own loneliness but from the aloneness he’d occasionally sensed in others via his unpredictable Talent.

In fact, the experience was so radically new that he had nothing to compare it with. Yet it
was
loneliness; of that he was certain. Loneliness and something else equally intense and recognizable: hunger. A gnawing, persistent desire for food.

The feelings were so bright and uncomplicated that Flinx couldn’t help but wonder at their source. They beat insistently on his mind, refusing to fade away. Never before had such emotions been so open to him, so clear and strong. Normally, they would begin to fade, but these grew not weaker but stronger—and he did not have to strain to hold them at bay. They kept hammering at him until his mind finally gave in and woke him up.

Flinx rubbed at his eyes. It was pouring outside the shop, and the narrow window over the bed admitted the dim light of Moth’s multiple moons, which somehow seeped through the nearly unbroken cloud cover. Flinx had rarely seen the bright rust-red moon called Flame or its smaller companions, but he’d spent his years of study well, and he knew where the light came from.

Slipping silently from the bed, he stood up and pulled on pants and shirt. A glow light bathed the kitchen and dining area in soft yellow. Across the way, ragged snores came from the vicinity of Mother Mastiff’s bedroom. The loneliness he sensed was not hers.

The feeling persisted into wakefulness. Not a dream, then, which had been his first thought. The back of his head hurt with the strength of it, but though the actual pain was beginning to fade, the emotion was still as strong as it had been in sleep.

He did not wake Mother Mastiff as he inspected the rest of the kitchen area, the bathroom, and the single narrow closet. Quietly, he opened the front door and slipped out into the stall. The shutters were locked tight, keeping out weather and intruders alike. The familiar snoring provided a comforting background to his prowling.

Flinx had grown into a lithe young man of slightly less than average height and mildly attractive appearance. His hair was red as ever, but his dark skin now hid any suggestion of freckles. He moved with a gracefulness and silence that many of the older, more experienced marketplace thieves might have envied. Indeed, he could walk across a room paved with broken glass and metal without making a sound. It was a technique he had picked up from some of Drallar’s less reputable citizens, much to Mother Mastiff’s chagrin. All a part of his education, he had assured her. The thieves had a word for it: “skeoding,” meaning to walk like a shadow. Only Flinx’s brighter than normal hair made the professional purloiners cluck their tongues in disapproval. They would have welcomed him into their company, had he been of a mind to make thievery his profession. But Flinx would steal only if absolutely necessary, and then only from those who could afford it.

“I only want to use my ability to supplement my income,” he had told the old master who had inquired about his future intentions, “and Mother Mastiff’s, of course.”

The master had laughed, showing broken teeth. “I understand, boy. I’ve been supplementin’ my income in that manner goin’ on fifty years now.” He and his colleagues could not
believe that one who showed such skill at relieving others of their possessions would not desire to make a career of it, especially since the youth’s other prospects appeared dim.

“Yer goin’ into the Church, I suppose?” one of the other thieves had taunted him, “t’become a Counselor First?”

“I don’t think the spiritual life is for me,” Flinx had replied. They all had a good laugh at that.

As he quietly opened the lock on the outside door, he thought back to what he had learned those past few years. A wise man did not move around Drallar late at night, particularly on so wet and dark a one. But he couldn’t go back to sleep without locating the source of the feelings that battered at him. Loneliness and hunger, hunger and loneliness, filled his mind with restlessness. Who could possibly be broadcasting twin deprivations of such power?

The open doorway revealed a wall of rain. The angled street carried the water away to Drallar’s efficient underground drainage system. Flinx stood in the gap for a long moment, watching. Suddenly an intense burst of emptiness made him wince. That decided him. He could no more ignore that hot pleading than he could leave an unstamped credcard lying orphaned in the street.

“That curiosity of yours will get ye into real trouble someday, boy,” Mother Mastiff had told him on more than one occasion. “Mark me word.”

Well, he had marked her word. Marked it and filed it. He turned away from the door and skeoded back to his little room. It was early summer, and the rain outside was relatively warm. Disdaining an underjacket, he took a slickertic from its wall hook and donned it; thus suitably shielded from the rain, he made his way back to the stall, out into the street, and closed the main door softly behind him.

A few lights like hibernating will-o’-the-wisps glowed faintly from behind unshuttered shop fronts on the main avenue where the idling wealthy night-cavorted in relative safety. On the side street where Mother Mastiff plied her trade, only a rare flicker of illumination emerged from behind locked shutters and windows.

As water cascaded off his shoulders, Flinx stood there and searched his mind. Something sent him off to his right. There was a narrow gap between Mother Mastiff’s shop and that of old lady Marquin, who was on vacation in the south, and by turning sideways, he could just squeeze through.

Then he was standing in the service alleyway that ran behind the shops and a large office building. His eyes roved over a lunar landscape of uncollected garbage and refuse: old plastic packing crates, metal storage barrels, honeycomb containers for breakables, and other indifferently disposed of detritus. A couple of fleurms scurried away from his boots. Flinx watched them warily. He was not squeamish where the omnipresent fleurms were concerned, but he had a healthy respect for them. The critters were covered in a thick, silvery fur, and their little mouths were full of fine teeth. Each animal was as big around as Flinx’s thumb and as long as his forearm. They were not really worms but legless mammals that did very well in the refuse piles and composting garbage that filled the alleys of Drallar to overflowing. He had heard horror stories of old men and women who had fallen into a drunken stupor in such places—only their exposed bones remained for the finding.

Flinx, however, was not drunk. The fleurms could inflict nasty bites, but they were shy creatures, nearly blind, and greatly preferred to relinquish the right of way when given the choice.

If it was dark on the street in front of the shop, it was positively stygian in the alley. To the east, far up the straightaway, he could make out a light and hear intermittent laughter. An odd night for a party. But the glow gave him a reference point, even if it was too far off to shed any light on his search.

The continuing surge of loneliness that he felt did not come from that distant celebration, nor did it rise from the heavily shuttered and barred doorways that opened onto the alley. The emotions Flinx was absorbing came from somewhere very near.

He moved forward, picking his way between the piles of
debris, taking his time so as to give the fleurms and the red-blue carrion bugs time to scurry from his path.

All at once something struck with unexpected force at his receptive mind. The mental blow sent him to his knees. Somewhere a man was beating his wife. No unique circumstance, that, but Flinx felt it from the other side of the city. The woman was frightened and angry. She was reaching for the tiny dart gun she kept hidden in her bedroom dresser and was pointing its minuscule barrel at the man. Then it was the husband’s turn to be frightened. He was pleading with her, not in words that Flinx could hear but via an emotional avalanche that ended in an abrupt, nonverbal scream of shock. Then came the emptiness that Flinx had grown to recognize as death.

He heard laughter, not from the party up the alley but from one of the lofty crystal towers that reared above the wealthy inurbs where the traders and transspatial merchants made their homes. And there was plotting afoot; someone was going to be cheated.

Far beyond the city boundaries in the forest to the west: happiness and rejoicing, accompanied by a new liquid sensation of emergence. A baby was born.

Very near, perhaps in one of the shops on Mother Mastiff’s own street, an argument was raging. It involved accounts and falsification, waves of acrimonious resentment passing between short-term partners. Then the private grumblings of someone unknown and far away across the city center, someone plotting to kill, and kill more than one time, but plotting only—the kind of fantasizing that fills spare moments of every human brain, be it healthy or sick.

Then all the sensations were gone, all of them, the joyful and the doomed, the debaters and lovers and ineffectual dreamers. There was only the rain.

Blinking, he staggered to his feet and stood swaying unsteadily on the slope of the alley. Rain spattered off his slickertic, wove its way down the walls of the shops and the office building, to gurgle down the central drains. Flinx found himself staring blankly up the alley toward the distant point of
light that marked the location of the party. Abruptly, the emotions of everyone at the party were sharp in his mind; only now he felt no pain. There was only a calm clarity and assurance.

He could see this woman anxiously yet uncertainly trying to tempt that man, see another criticizing the furniture, still another wondering how he could possibly live through the next day, feel laughter, fear, pleasure, lust, admiration, envy: the whole gamut of human emotions. They began to surge toward him like the storm he had just weathered, threatening the pain again, threatening to overwhelm him—

STOP IT
, he ordered himself. Stop it—easy.

By careful manipulation of a piece of his mind he hadn’t even been aware existed before, he discovered he was able to control the intensity of the emotions that threatened to drown him—not all of which had been human, either. He had felt at least two that were bizarre, yet recognizable enough for him to identify. They were the feelings of a mated pair of ornithorpes. It was the first time he had sensed anything from a nonhuman.

Slowly, he found he was able to regulate the assault, to damp it down to where he could manage it, sort out the individual feelings, choose, analyze—and then they were gone as suddenly as they had struck, along with all the rest of the blaze of emotion he had sucked in from around the city.

Hesitantly, he tried to focus his mind and bring back the sensations. It was as before. Try as he might, his mind stayed empty of any feelings save his own. His own—and one other. The loneliness was still there, nagging at him. The feeling was less demanding now, almost hesitant. The hunger was there, too.

Flinx took a step forward, another, a third—and something alive quickly scuttled out of his path, shoving aside empty containers and cans, plastic and metal clinking in the damp alley. He strained to see through the dimness, wishing now that he had had the presence of mind to bring a portable light from the shop. He took a cautious step toward the pile, ready
to jump up and clear should the fleurms or whatever prove unexpectedly aggressive.

It was not a fleurm. For one thing, it was too long: nearly a meter. It was thicker, too, though not by much. He thought of the snakelike creatures that roamed the temperate forests to the south of Drallar. Some of them were poisonous. Occasionally, they and other forest predators made their way into the city under cover of rain and darkness to hunt out the small creatures that infested the urban trash heaps. It was rare, but not unheard of, that a citizen encountered such an intruder.

Flinx leaned close to the pile, and as he did so the hunger faded. Simultaneously, the feeling of loneliness intensified; the strength of it almost sent him reeling back against the shop wall. He was certain it came from the snakelike unknown.

The bump of curiosity—which Mother Mastiff was at such pains to warn him about—quickly overcame his natural caution. All he felt was amazement that such powerful mental projections could arise from so lowly a creature. Furthermore, there was no anger in the animal, no rudimentary danger signals. Only that persistent loneliness and the fleeting sense of hunger.

The creature moved again. He could see the bright, flashing red eyes even in the alley’s faint light. Not a true reptile, he was sure. A cold-blooded creature would have been reduced to lethargy by the cool night air. This thing moved too rapidly.

Flinx took a step back, away from the pile. The creature was emerging. It slithered onto the wet pavement and then did something he did not expect. Snakes were not supposed to fly.

The pleated wings were blue and pink, bright enough for him to identify even in the darkness. No, the snake-thing certainly was not lethargic, for its wings moved in a blur, giving the creature the sound and appearance of a gigantic bee. It found a place on his shoulder in a single, darting movement. Flinx felt thin, muscular coils settle almost familiarly around his shoulder. The whole thing had happened too fast for him to dodge.

But the creature’s intent was not to harm. It simply sat, resting against his warmth, and made no move to attack. The speed of the approach had paralyzed Flinx, but only for a moment. For as soon as it had settled against him, all that vast loneliness, every iota of that burning need had fled from the snake. At the same time, Flinx experienced a clarity within his own mind that he had never felt before. Whatever the creature was, wherever it had come from, it not only had the ability to make itself at home, it seemed to make its new host feel comfortable as well.