Moongather (14 page)

That'll do you for a little
, she thought. She glanced at the weary beasts who were already grazing.
You later
. She trotted into the shadow under the trees, searching for down wood.

Half an hour later Dinafar sat blanket-wrapped, sipping at cha laced with pyrnroot from Serroi's weaponbelt. The fever glaze was gone from her eyes, the flush from her cheeks. She cradled the cup in her hands, her eyes on the macain busily cropping at the grass close by. “Hadn't you better tie them up, Meie?”

Serroi prodded at the skirt she was holding up to the fire. “They won't go far. Anyway, I can call them back easily enough.” She flicked a finger across her forehead, smiled as the girl's eyes widened, tossed her the skirt and followed with the ragged blouse. “Warm enough?”

“Umm …” Dinafar yawned suddenly. “You put something in the cha?”

“A healing root. Do you mind?”

“No.” Dina yawned again and fumbled at the blouse and skirt, her eyes drooping lower and lower as she pulled the clothing over her thin body, blushing repeatedly at having to bare herself. Serroi carefully looked away, made uncomfortable by the girl's embarrassment. She thought about the crowding of the Intii's hall, remembered the prudery of her parents.
Intimacy and prudery. Perhaps the second is born of the first
. When she turned back, Dinafar was slumped on the ground, snoring a little. Serroi moved around the fire and stood looking down at her.
She never complained. I wouldn't want to make that ride myself if it was my first
. She knelt beside Dina, straightened her crumpled limbs and shifted her onto the second blanket. She smoothed the long straight hair back off the girl's face then tucked the other blanket around her. “Sleep as long as you need.”

She stood and stretched, the morning light brightening around her. In the east, above the treetops, a few last shreds of dawn lingered, but they were fading rapidly. She yawned, sat watching the fire as it died to a few coals, then snuggled down on the grass, dropping into a deep sleep.

She was startled out of sleep by a hoarse yell and rough, strong hands that clamped her wrists together. She stared up into a grinning face, then was dangling in midair as he held her out at arm's length.

THE CHILD: 5

Serroi bent over the scroll, puzzling out the words; they were written in a script she'd just begun to learn and described the travels of a trader and rogue whose humor was resisting her at the moment, but whose descriptions were vivid enough to keep her interest, especially as just such a caravan was moving slowly across dun-colored sands before her in the magic mirror.

She was nine years old, several inches taller, content with her life in the tower. She wore tunic and trousers, new ones, fetched from somewhere by the Noris's invisible servants. The patterns in black and white woven into the belt were strange to her; she'd used the mirror to search the tundra for the wind-runner clan with those patterns but had never managed to find it, had grown bored with the search and finally just accepted the clothing when it was provided. There were so many other interesting places to explore by the mirror.

Suddenly aware of eyes watching her, she lifted her head and looked around. The Noris was standing silent in the doorway. She touched the mirror to blankness, rolled the parchment into a neat tight roll and replaced it in its rack. Though the rest of the room bore the imprint of her careless passage, the roll books were in meticulous order. The pens and penpoints on the table were shining clean, the sheets of paper squared in orderly piles, edges exactly parallel to the edges of the table.

The Noris smiled at this touch of order. “Come, Serroi. I need you to help me with something.”

Happiness warmed her. Almost dancing, she crossed the room to him and took his hand.

The rock flowed before them, collapsing into stairs. The tower seemed to be solid except for those cells of emptiness located through the stone like bubbles in a brick of cheese. He took her higher than she'd been before and touched open a door leading into a room she'd never seen before.

As she walked inside, a chini yearling trotted to her, sniffed at her, laid back his ears and crouched whining in front of the Noris. She'd noted that before. Wild or tame, creatures winced away from the Noris pantomiming their fear in postures of submission. Even the great sicamar crawled on his belly and yowled with fear. The Noris stepped past her and crossed to a chair. As he settled himself, she continued to stroke the chini's head and looked around.

The room was small and circular, a cylinder in stone rising high overhead, ending in a crisp blue circle of sky too far away to lessen the sense of oppression that weighed on her. Little by little her happiness slipped away. The air was too heavy in that roofless room. Her eye-spot throbbed. She turned to the Noris, a dozen unspoken questions in her eyes.

He sat in a black stone chair raised on a dais with a permanent pentacle incised in the stone around it, the lines filled with silver that shimmered in the brilliant light pouring through the roof opening.

The yearling pressed hard against her leg; she could feel him trembling. He was a tall gangling animal, his back about groin-high on her, not quite at home yet in an adult-sized body. She scratched behind his ears and smoothed her hand along his spine. Touching this strong life, she was aware again of the deadness of the tower. She was never sure that the Noris truly lived; he seemed a man like others, but sometimes she doubted it.

“Serroi.”

She stared at him, startled. There was a heavy solemnity to his voice unlike his usual cool detachment. She wondered what was coming, certainly something different. She moved to stand before him, straightening her back and shoulders.

“You've been here four years.” His eyes moved from her face to gaze blankly over her shoulder at the glass-smooth stone of the wall. “You've proved to have an unusual aptitude for learning. I am pleased to find it so.”

Serroi sucked in a breath, feeling more uneasy than ever. The things he was saying should have come from the warm, pleasant side, but they didn't, they were like the false smile he wore sometimes, said without feeling, a sop to her feelings. She knew that he had a very limited understanding of those feelings. In the past four years, she'd learned to accommodate herself to these limitations, shutting down when she could some of her stronger reactions to his actions. A year ago jealousy had scorched her. He was startled at first, then amused. She'd been in agony and it had amused him.

“You asked me once why I took you from your kin. Do you remember?”

She nodded, her eyes fixed on his face.

He held his hands out before him, palms up first, then the backs; after a minute he dropped them on the dark stone chair arms, draped them gracefully. “Hands,” he said. “My hands. They hold power; you know that.” He tapped fingers against the stone. “But there are limits. We can manipulate, transform the non-living; we're sealed away from manipulating the living. I needed a gate in that wall. You.” He settled back in his chair, smiling a little, more remote than ever, an ivory and jet image of a man. “You are my gate, Serroi.”

Apprehension and excitement swirled in Serroi until she was dizzy with them. She understood little of what the Noris was saying, but she grasped her importance in his eyes and glowed at the thought. Still, she was afraid, she didn't know why.

“Look at me, Serroi.”

She stroked the chini again, then raised her eyes to meet his. The shining black rounds grew larger and larger until she saw nothing but that blackness. She was weeping, could feel the tears dripping from her eyes and trickling down her cheeks while a terrible coldness flowed into her from the Noris, stifling all that she'd been feeling, anger and joy, love and despair, chilling her until there was nothing warm left in her, until the tears dried, until her body was unfeeling stone.

A thing crept into her body. She felt her fingers twitch, her arms move. Felt the eye-spot wake and send out its invisible fingers under pressure from the invader. Her body stirred. Sitting trapped in walls of ice, the seed of warmth that contained her essence saw and grieved as her body went awkwardly onto its knees beside the whining yearling. Her body leaned forward until her face was pressed against the chini, her brow touching the soft grey fur on the side of his head.

The chini stiffened. She felt the thing in her creep out through the eye-spot and move inside him.

The yearling moved jerkily away. She heard him whine, then growl, saw him leap high, crouch, crawl across the stone, scraping at the floor with spastic paws. He began to howl. She felt his agony. The frozen part of her watched critically while the tiny soft spot where she really lived could do nothing but mourn endlessly in darkness. Her body crouched in the middle of the room while the Noris working through her tore the chini to bits, driving him until he foamed at the mouth, dashed against the walls at full speed, bit at himself, tearing out gobbets of flesh and hair. Finally the chini yearling died under the torment, driven until his heart gave out from pain and exhaustion.

The part of the Noris working through her withdrew. She felt the cold flow out of her and couldn't move; her trust broken utterly, she felt like she was bleeding inside where no one could see it. Hardly aware of what she was doing, she lifted her arms, crossed them tight across her chest, her eyes fixed on his ivory face, begging him to reassure her, to let her love him again, to say something she could believe. He sat brooding, apparently unaware that she was in the room.

She rose shakily to her feet and moved to the body of the chini. Kneeling beside him, she touched the mutilated flesh, ran trembling fingers over the pointed ears, looked down at the mouth that hung open, the lacerated tongue lapping out over the yellow teeth, touched threads of blood congealing in long lines from the jaw.

She felt the Noris's eyes on her and got heavily to her feet. He was frowning, puzzled by the strength of her emotion. When she came over to him, he leaned forward and pushed her down until she was kneeling at his feet inside the lines of the pentacle. A WORD made the silver in the lines glow palely. Another WORD, one more complex than she'd heard before, crashed against her, struck pain from her. She moaned and huddled closer against the Noris, sick and terrified.

A grey fog gathered over the chini's battered body. It hovered a moment then began shaping itself into a likeness of the beast. Red eyes like hot blood, red tongue lolling over yellow teeth, pricking ears, a great grey body, the demon was a travesty of the living breathing beast yet she sensed that it shared some of the chini's nature, chini and demon melded into a horrible amalgam that made her stomach churn. It slunk from the diminished body and came to sniff at the silver lines of the pentagram.

Serroi cringed away from it, cowered against the chair, pushing harder into the Noris's legs while the thing paced back and forth in front of her, its stinking breath blowing into her face.

The Noris stood. A chain of shimmering silver leaped into being in midair and slapped about the demon's neck. It whined with pain and crouched submissively. With a WORD the Noris paled the pentacle's silver then turned to scowl down at Serroi. “Go to your room, Serroi. Put yourself in order.” He seemed angry as if she had somehow hurt him by her pain. He stalked from the room, one end of the silver chain in his hand, the demon trotting beside him.

Serroi looked sadly after him, then at the body of the pup. She couldn't even bury it. There was no honest living soil on this barren crag. Catching hold of the chair's arm, she pulled herself onto her feet. With a last glance at the dead beast she stumbled out of the room and trudged slowly down the stairs to her room, pulled the door shut behind her, wincing at the dull clang of metal against stone.

She stood a moment in the center of the small space looking vaguely about. Several plants were beginning to droop. She moved blindly to them, touched the wilting leaves and the splotches of brown. Abruptly she was crying. She threw herself onto her rumpled bed, her body shuddering with sobs wrenched from her.

After the evening meal, a meal she couldn't eat, she paced restlessly about the room, picking things up, setting them down again, trying desperately to forget what happened. She needed to believe that he was at least fond of her. Finally she sighed and went to see him.

He looked up and smiled at her, then turned back to the fire. She settled silently beside him. After a minute she caught his hand and rested her cheek on his cool flesh. She had to believe that he valued her, that he had some affection for her even if he didn't truly understand her. Several minutes passed like this then she looked up to find his eyes fixed on her, examining her with curiosity and some puzzlement. She held her breath, but he said nothing. She sighed and tried to forget the chini. It wouldn't happen again. It couldn't. Things would go on between them as before. She would forget and be happy again.

A week later he called her back to the cylindrical room. She saw the small grey figure with its round wrinkled face like an ugly old man and great round nocturnal eyes; she cried out and took a step back. The Noris brought her in, almost shoving her as she begged him not to do it, her hands clinging to him, tears streaming from her eyes. He used her to drive the little beast to its death, coldly testing it beyond its strength. Once again the demon blended with the animal.

After that he let her rest a week, then called her back to the chamber with another chini, using it to strengthen the first demon, welding the two natures more completely. Week after week the animals died and demons were born or made stronger. Slowly the cages in the court emptied and slowly her anguish grew. She begged the Noris to stop; he couldn't understand. it was only a successful series of experiments, what did a few lives matter, there were always more animals, they were born and died every day.