Spider Wars: Book Three of the Black Bead Chronicles (22 page)

“
Oh, that,” Cheobawn
said. “I had forgotten I told him that.”

“
Oh that
? Is it a
lie, then?” her Truemother asked, only the slight rise of her brows
betraying her annoyance.

“
No, no,” Cheobawn said,
the memory of her emotional outburst bringing an embarrassed grimace
to her face. “It was true when I said it.”

“
But now it is not? What
has changed?”

“
I took care of it,”
Cheobawn said with an insolent shrug.

“
Did you?” Mora said,
her eyes narrowing. “By what right?”

“
Right?” Cheobawn asked,
half to herself. She suddenly remembered the hot words exchanged
between Connor and Hayrald only a few hours earlier. “By right of
omission, I guess. You and all the other Elders look the other way
when it comes to Blackwind’s business. Can you blame us if we have
become self-directed?”

Mora considered her
silently, a hard glint behind her eyes. Cheobawn waited for the anger
and the harsh words but they did not come.

“
I know of these Spiders
you talk of,” Mora said after a long moment, again startling
Cheobawn with her sudden redirection of the conversation.

“
Do you?” Cheobawn asked
carefully, wishing for just a moment that she might peek into Mora’s
mind and scry out the secrets she kept there. “Do you know that
they have opened up a doorway into this world so that they might seed
the earth with their young? Bohea knows now. He will put a stop to it
for us. You can thank him next time you talk to him.”

“
Be careful who you side
with in this conflict. All is not as it first seems. Spider’s story
is written in the books of the Chronicles of the World,” Mora said,
resting her head on the back of her chair, her eyes half closed. “It
is required reading for every First Mother. I had forgotten about
them until that day you came back from Meetpoint Camp filled with
words and thoughts only foreign minds could know.”

“
What?” The word was no
more than a sigh from between her lips. Why was her Truemother taking
this moment to reveal the secrets of her office? What was the point?
Nothing Mora said was without purpose. “What does it say in your
forbidden books, First Mother?” Cheobawn asked.

“
Dare I tell you?” her
Truemother mused. “As you said, you have learned to be self
reliant, without need of the counsel of those of us with more years
and more experience. But I will tell you this freely so that you
might see the foreigners for what they are. Men like your Colonel
Bohea and your Sam, they burned this world with fire and poison,
sterilizing the earth of all life except that which offered no threat
so that their kind might light and take root. The Spiders wanted just
a bit of hot sand to birth their young from time to time but there
was no profit to be had from it so they died by the millions leaving
an empty and barren sea.”

“
If this is true then
where were the domes?” Cheobawn asked, her mind barely able to
grasp the scope of such destruction. “Why didn’t we stop them? We
think we are better than the Lowlanders yet we sit in silent judgment
while they stumble about in their madness.”

“
I bless the sacrifice of
so many creatures every day for without them the Mothers would still
be in bondage and the Domes above the Escarpment would not exist,”
Mora held up her hand to heaven. “Blessed is the will of the
goddess,” she intoned.

“
I don’t understand,”
Cheobawn pleaded, irritated that her Truemother would hide behind her
religious faith.

“
The very first Mothers,
they heard the screams of the dying in the ambient and it woke them
to their purpose.”

“
Purpose, Mother?”
Cheobawn dared asked, hoping against hope that Mora would forget
herself and keep talking.

“
Ah,” Mora moaned softly
“There are words expunged from the tongues of the tribes. I will
not repeat them, for they are vile. I will not taint your innocence.
In the end it will be your only weapon.”

Cheobawn choked on her
outrage. Did other Mothers do this to their daughters; leave them
naked in the dark with no direction and no way to find what was true?
It took Cheobawn a few moments before she had her emotions under
control enough to speak.

“
Dare you not?” Cheobawn
seethed, “I have killed Brathum and his men and Star lies in the
belly of a starving smoke leopard. How much more monstrous could my
burden become by knowing the truth?”

“
Hubris, my dear child,”
Mora snorted, “makes for swollen heads. You are not the center of
the world. Your emotions have subverted your logic. Did you think
that a dome full of Mothers could not tell Brathum that what he did
was not without risks? He knew, as did we all, that the dome would
not survive the long winter without the herds. It was decided his
life would be a fair exchange for the possibility of saving even a
few more animals. Nothing you could have said would have changed
Brathum’s fate. He gave his life so others could live just as
Sigrid’s mount did. Ask your bennelk friends if they resent Star’s
death. Perhaps you will listen to their counsel since you refuse to
hear mine.”

Cheobawn looked away,
appalled and confused. Had the decision to send the patrol out been
made in such cold blood, then? She shuddered at that thought.

“
But you cannot deny that
I sent Old Father Bhotta’s bloodstones down into the Lowlands.
Bohea delivered one to the Spiders. It is their machine that has
turned the weather bitter, causing so much damage not just to us but
to every dome. How is Brathum’s death not tangled with that act?”

“
Do we curse the knife
after it has flown, because it found the target at which it was
aimed?” Mora said with a small shrug.

“
What?” Cheobawn asked,
confused. Why was Mora quoting a teaching parable about not using
stinger nests for target practice? She shook her head, having no
patience for its paradoxical lessons.

“
Never mind,” Mora said.
“Get it out of your head that you have caused any of this. Ten
thousand years of human appetites have brought us to this shore and
your one tiny life will not appease their monstrous hungers. There is
no shame in being who you are nor should there be guilt for doing
what comes to you as natural as breathing.”

Cheobawn looked up and met
her Truemother’s eyes. It was so odd, hearing that affirmation from
Mora’s lips for the first time in her life. Was Mora becoming
sentimental and soft-hearted all of a sudden?

“
You are not angry with
me,” Cheobawn asked, “for using the bloodstone?”

“
I am angry that you did
not ask and I am hurt that you have seen fit to keep me in the dark
about affairs that concern all of us. Have you sworn half the dome to
secrecy? Am I the last to know?”

“
It is my secret, mine to
keep from those who would be harmed in the knowing,” Cheobawn said,
choosing every word with utmost care, knowing Mora would use them as
weapons against her if she could.

“
Am I a mewling infant, in
your mind?” Mora snorted in amusement. “You like your secrets.
They make you feel special. It is Tam’s only complaint about you.”

“
He never …” Cheobawn
said, choking on the image of Tam talking about her to Mora without
her knowledge. True or not, it hurt her to the center of her being.
In their battle of words, Mora had scored a fatal hit. Cheobawn
clenched her teeth and shook her head, refusing to betray her pain.
“I will not believe that he said that.”

“
You forget,” Mora said
with a cruel smile, “that the Fathers are a closed rank when it
comes to dealing with the peculiarities of their Ears. You would be
surprised what is said in the privacy of the Fathers House.”

“
And Hayrald comes running
to your side to tell you everything, I suppose,” said Cheobawn
sullenly. “Does it make you feel powerful, knowing you have made
him your toady?”

Cheobawn regretted saying it
the minute the words fell out of her mouth. Mora’s reaction was
instantaneous and violent. The First Mother stood up so fast her
chair tipped and crashed to the floor.

“
Be silent, you ignorant
child!” Mora shouted, slamming her fists down upon the top of her
desk. Cheobawn jumped and then backed away as the air in the room
turned cold with Mora’s displeasure. “You are a fool if you think
any of my Husbands are less than honorable. Do not ever say that
again. If you hurt Hayrald with your cruel words I will exile you to
the ends of the world and you can figure out who loves you amongst
strangers. Get out of my sight!”

An abyss of knowing opened
up at Cheobawn’s feet. Mora meant this. Every word. Cheobawn turned
and fled, truly terrified of her Truemother’s anger for the first
time in her life.

She ran down the hall,
across the foyer, out the door, and down the staircase to the garden
path that led to the plaza, barely aware of where her feet were
taking her. What had possessed her to say that to Mora? It was as if
the air between them filled with insanity whenever they were in the
same room and both of them breathed in its toxic vapors making them
say terrible, hurtful things to each other. She needed to put
distance between herself and that insanity.

As Cheobawn raced towards
the central fountain, she let slip her ties to her home. The room at
the top of Mora’s house was no longer her safe haven now though she
had lived there all her life. It had always been the place to go
where she might hide from the world and lick her wounds because she
could trust that Mora stood guard; her own personal fire-breathing
dragon standing sentinel at the gate of the keep. No more. The dragon
had turned her fire inward and seared the small and fragile things
that lived there. She could feel the connections to her younger self
breaking one by one. It came into her mind all of a sudden that she
wished never to see that room again, nor wished to touch any of the
detritus that had accumulated there. The girl who cherished the
boxes, baskets, and bins of toys and puzzles and pebbles and insect
wings that lined the shelves, the girl who had covered her walls with
drawings of flowers and mountains and animals, that girl was gone,
burned away, burned to ash in a fire of Mora’s making.

Cheobawn stumbled to a halt
in the shadows of a battalion of warriors, the blank faced game
pieces staring back at her, stern in their disapproval. Mora had won,
at long last, she realized. She had become something hard edged and
strange, just as Mora intended and the little girl who loved without
reservation was dead. That thought tore something inside her. She
sank to the chalk covered stones, shoved her fist into her mouth, and
wept hard, silent tears.

Cheobawn’s grief raged
like a grimstorm through her heart. She could not stop the sobs or
the tears or the pain that seemed to want to rip her in two. She
wanted to blast her pain out into the ambient and burn the minds of
everyone around her so that they might taste a bit of what they had
done to her. She resisted this insanity. Instead she buried her psi
in the stones under her feet, reaching down past the roots of the
mountains to the core the earth. When Bear Under the Mountain moaned
in protest, Cheobawn threw her head back and buried the chaos of her
heart in the star studded darkness of Star Woman’s skirt, snuffing
her pain out in the cold aloof comfort of infinite life.

The tears stopped. The storm
died, spent. Cheobawn sniffed and pulled the hem of her silk
undershirt out from under her leather riding jacket. She used it to
clean her face and dry her eyes as she considered her next move.
There were few options. Well, only one, really. She would have to
move into Blackwind’s dorm room. She would use Megan’s bunk until
the rest of the Pack returned from the Temple in a month’s time.
Mora could protest all she wanted but short of locking her in that
third story room and removing any means of making a rope, the Coven
could not keep her there.

To be honest, Cheobawn
doubted Mora would call her home. She shuddered as she imagined how
unpleasant the Coven’s private dinners and high teas would be with
Mora and her glowering at each other over the tops of their teacups.
If Mora were wise she would spare all of them that ordeal, and Mora
was no fool.

Cheobawn stood up, wondering
where Connor had gotten to, when a flicker in the corner of her eye
pulled her attention to the game pieces around her. It was the
impression of motion where there should have been stillness that drew
her eye. The plaza was empty. Wait. There. It came again. A flare of
light, an undulation in the spectrum, causing the battalions of blank
faced warriors to blanch, their blind masks taking on expressions of
doom. The hairs on the back of her neck stood on end.