Rift in the Races (52 page)

“Ball them up so the blood doesn’t wash out,” Black Sander told him once a fair number of the strips were properly blood-soaked. “And make sure to have some kind of cover. Over there, in the lee of that big stone.”

That was when Orli finally passed out.

When she woke, they were moving once more, back in the mainly level expanse of Kurr’s great plains. She thought they were headed mostly south, but she had the impression they were moving in a wide arc, as if they were avoiding well-traveled ground, adding miles to the route they were on, not to mention more bumps and bruises from the use of long-abandoned stretches of what barely passed for road. She had tried to gauge the direction for sure, but there were no features on this land. Only endless green as far as the eye could see and a sun above whose movements were shrouded by the gray veil of an endlessly weeping sky.

Which is why she was so consumed with the cloak now. The rain seemed as if it had filled her up entirely, as if it had seeped through every pore on every inch of her flesh, a condition made worse by having one leg bare. And the cut on her calf throbbed miserably. She checked it from time to time. She saw no signs of infection, but the wound gaped and was going to leave a wicked scar. She’d have stitched it up herself if they had let her, which they did not. She’d asked, and that was when it became absolutely clear they had no interest in talking to her anymore. She was just an animal in a cage. A cold one in need of a cloak.

And so she endured, longingly staring at the dark woolen sanctuary just out of reach, but occasionally gazing out across the plains in hopes of seeing some bit of motion. A rider on a horse, a shuttle flying in low just over a shallow rise. But when she peered through the drizzle, when she sought hopefully through the gray sheets of rain, seeking with a heart so filled with yearning and desperate need, there were never any riders there. No spacecraft came to land. Nobody came at all.

The wagon rumbled to a stop again that night, Orli so sore and stiff she could hardly move. She spent some time crying silently in the corner of the cage, but let off at the sound of Belor’s approach.

He threw the end of what looked to have been a baguette into the cage. She could see where he’d finished his last bite. The rain had already soaked the soft part out of the center of the bread. She hardly cared.

She tried to look defiant, tried to raise herself and summon some measure of dignity. This would only go on so long. Someone would find her. And then there would be hell to pay. She could imagine her father’s outrage, could see his Marines dropping out of the landing craft in their massive mechanized battle suits, semi-robotic giants charging across the plain, their whirring servomotors and their huge steel feet thundering upon the ground. They would come, and they would tear these men apart limb from limb, fling the rent pieces across the plains to sicken the wolves and twist the guts of the prairie dogs. So desperately did she crave it, she lost herself in the idea, her mouth shaping the words of the swearing Marine she could see through the battle suit’s bulletproof canopy. “Die, die, die!” the Marine shouted, and she silently echoed his battle cry, she mouthed each word, watched the faces of a whole platoon, raging and whooping into their mics, a wave of warriors who’d waited twelve long years for a fight. The carnage would be sublime!

Belor stared back at her through the bars. She was dimly aware of him watching her. He wore a curious expression in his feral little eyes where she wanted to see fear, fear for what would come, fear for the vision she had of his violent dismembering.

But none of that was there.

The last of her vision died away as his scrutiny drew her to full consciousness. She watched him watching her. No fear, certainly. But no anything. It seemed impossible to her. How could he look at her like that, so emotionless? Not the least compassion. How could anyone have become so extracted from his own humanity? She marveled at it, even as she gave up any lingering hope for fear in him or even some show of respect. It was never going to be there. No expression of sympathy or compassion. Not the least glimmer. There was only curiosity and a bit of something else in the way he looked at her. Some vestige of concern, she was sure of it. And she was correct, though this vestige was perverse.

He leaned in closer, his eyes narrowing as he studied her. It had seemed a long time to her, but for him only a few breaths. And then he finally spoke. Not to her, of course, but to his master.

“Master,” he called out. “Her lips are blue. Her face is blue too. Perhaps it’s been too long exposed for her, even warm as you say it is. They may not be quite the same specimens as us on that planet of hers. I fear she might be taking sick.”

Black Sander turned from his place at the fire and stared across the space at her. She could see from the firelight that at least one of his eyes narrowed in what might pass as interest. He stood and strode to the side of the cage, where he leaned forward to inspect her. His vision was still affected by the firelight, and he couldn’t make her out well enough in the darkness, at which he grumbled and began fumbling beneath his cloak.

A moment after, he produced from a pocket a small bit of what looked to Orli like wax, a round bit no bigger than a pearl. He spoke a word and a candle appeared in the air beside his head, the tiny flame bright and dancing lazily, as unaffected by the rain and wind as it might have been were it sitting upon a table in some cozy cabin or pleasant restaurant. The candle passed through the bars impossibly, moving right through a vertical length of iron that should have stopped it or at least broken it in half.
A ghost candle
, she thought as it closed the distance between her and Black Sander. It stopped abruptly and hovered near her face. No warmth came from it. None at all. By the time that thought occurred to her, the candle had vanished as quickly as it appeared.

“Get her to the fire. And get her the cloak.”

As she shivered before the crackle and hiss of the low fire, her knees wrapped in her arms and her body wrapped in the cloak, she couldn’t help notice that the thick wool smelled of Tytamon, which made it impossible not to cry. At least the tears were hidden by the rain.

Chapter 36

T
he wagon went off the road about an hour after they broke camp, and Black Sander took pains to work some kind of magic on the tracks where the wooden wheels cut a rut and bent down the wet grass. The signs of the wagon’s deviation from the road simply went away, the ruts vanishing and the blades of grass once again as upright as if they’d never been crushed. He chanted something else afterwards, continued as they moved along, and Orli saw that they left no tracks in their wake, no marks of their passage for anyone to find as she and her captors trudged along for another several hours.

The mud was deep, soaked through from so many days of rain. By the gauge of Belor’s curses at the horses, the team was reaching the limits of their strength. And the ground was only getting muddier with every plodding step. Finally they could go on no more. They strained in the traces, but they simply could not drag the wagon through the muck any farther. The lorry was sunk to its hubs and both animals were in it nearly to their heaving undersides.

That’s when Black Sander stopped chanting and called a halt. He ordered Belor to get Orli out of the cage.

Her aching muscles seemed to cry out silently as she straightened for the first time in uncountable days. A week? A week and a half? Two? She had no idea. Maybe more for all she knew. But her body had some sense of it, and the pain caught her so by surprise she fell to her knees, sinking several inches into mud that was dark, gray and thick. This was a sinister gray, more so than the sky above, like ash, like the lumpy soup made of a thousand cremated souls. It was the gray of death, of putrescence and rot. It stunk of methane and endless decay.

“Get up,” snapped Black Sander, grabbing a handful of her cloak and giving a violent pull. The cloak tore away rather than serving to hoist her to her feet. He swore and flung the cloak to the ground. “I said get up,” he repeated, this time grabbing a fistful of her uniform right between her shoulder blades.

At least she’d made him speak to her. That actually made her smile, a faint one, private.

He jerked her to her feet like a dog by its scruff and pushed her out in front of him. Her booted foot sunk into the mud deeper than her bare foot did, which tripped her, and she fell once more to her knees. She turned a defiant expression back over her shoulder at him. “Fuck you.”

He kicked her in the stomach so hard she went sprawling backwards in the mud. “You can go easy or you can go hard, but you will be going.”

Belor pulled her up and gave her a push. She wanted to stand up to them again. To spit at Black Sander through the rain. But she didn’t want to get kicked again. And she was so tired. Belor pushed her a second time. “Come on,” he said. “It’s not that far.” That was as close to kindness as she was going to get.

At first she had no idea where they wanted her to go, such was the delirium of cold and exhaustion that had her in its grip. She was dimly aware of it, fairly sure hypothermia was well set in, but even through the haze of her sodden thoughts, she figured out she was meant to head downstream. For, sure enough, there was what appeared to be the beginnings of just such a thing, a line of water barely continuous enough to stand out from the patchwork puddles that covered the stinking gray muck the prairie had become. It was as if the rotting contractions of the sodden plain had given birth to this lazy waterway, the effluent child of soil and rain that wandered its way east, winding around clumps of mud high enough to support a low growth of scraggly trees, solitary things, stripped of foliage and looking skeletal and lost. The mud clumps, too small to be counted islands, gave the landscape a lumpiness, as if the whole area had been beaten half to death.

She stumbled forward, making her way around and through the gooey mounds, some of them high enough to serve as support, though pressing too hard upon them proved that they would fail were she to rely too heavily on them. Even with the occasional handhold to aid with balance, her booted foot continued to sink deeper than her bare one did, and it made progress very slow. She didn’t want to complain about it, though, for she knew that would only cost her the second boot. And the mud was cold. No vestige of planetary warmth made its way up through the sludge to give even the barest comfort. There was only cold.

The three of them trudged on for so long she thought the trek would never end. Her body was so drained from the long road in the iron cage, her strength was gone. She hadn’t had enough to eat. She wasn’t starving, but she was undernourished without doubt. She felt lightheaded, and when she stumbled and thought she was about to faint, Black Sander kicked her again, this time sending her sprawling headfirst to the ground.

She lay there gasping in the mud, her face in the soft wet of it, vaguely cognizant of it squishing its way into her ear and down into the neckline of her uniform. She felt herself drifting away again, only dimly aware of the discomfort now. She watched the tiny splashes that the raindrops made as they fell into small puddles left behind by the feet of a grazing animal. That was comforting. She liked to think that some animal, some creature of nature, had been here, something free of the soulless works of men. She thought whatever it was must have been happy with the sweet greenery of a springtime meal, enjoying this place through an evolved symmetry with the land. She hoped the animal was somewhere happy right now, enjoying its free-ranging life.

“There they are,” Belor’s voice said. The words came vaguely to her through the lull that had taken her mind blissfully, if briefly, away. She heard the sound of his voice in her unplugged ear, but the words meant little. She could barely grasp at them, her mind reaching out tentatively for meaning as if trying to catch a falling leaf.
They
. “They,” he’d said. She thought she might hear servomotors whining, the hiss of hydraulic rams. The splash of the battle-suited Marines coming up the creek. Maybe that was
they
.

Or maybe it was Altin. She could see his face. He smiled at her, his pretty green eyes so full of love. He reached a hand out to touch her cheek, his fingers lean and soft. No calluses. Gentle. But capable of such power.

She woke up on a boat. She felt it rocking beneath her, heard the sound of the oars splashing on either side. She was lying in the bottom of it, face down, the rainwater pooling to a half inch deep and made filthy by the boots of men. It was a small boat, she could tell by the curve in which she lay. She could see the back of Black Sander’s cloak, the overhang of his hat. She tried to lift her head, but she was too weak. She began to cough and had the vaguest sense that she might be getting sick.

When she woke next, she was once more behind iron bars. This time, however, she was lying on a bed of filthy rags and old straw that stank of mildew. Her confines were larger, a few paces across, with bars only at the front. The other three sides were made of wood. A prison cell. There were others like it directly across from hers.

She lacked the strength, or the curiosity, to sit up and investigate, and all she could muster was a lazy gaze across the aisle. She could vaguely make out the shape of someone in the opposite cell. A sinewy, muscular form with green-hued flesh that reminded her of the creatures she’d fought during the attack on Calico Castle, the orcs. This one seemed smaller, though. Without the steel plates or leather armor, it was impossible to tell.