The Lost Steersman (Steerswoman Series) (60 page)

Janus had not moved; Rowan became disturbed at the length of his sleep. With effort, she shook him to groggy half-awareness and convinced him more by action than words to drink. Immediately after, he weakly struggled away from her supporting arms and lay curled in upon himself, breathing deeply through teeth clenched even in sleep.

Shivering, the steerswoman sat beside him, rubbing her arms, the moths around her stilling toward darkness. Eventually she raised her head to gaze up the shaft, finally discerning far above a tiny crack of white sky. She watched it fade to gray, then black.

Demon-voice woke her; but by the time she had collected sword and talisman, it was gone. She tried to convince herself to sleep again, but found that restlessness and curiosity would not permit it. She stirred the moths for light, went toward the entrance.

The groups of case-objects she had disturbed before seemed to have been reordered. Ducking low, she entered the vestibule and, holding her talisman before her, peered outside.

Stars above; the outlines of demon dens visible at the edge across from her. She thought she discerned movement toward the entrance to the ravine, but could not be certain.

Possibly the animals’ instinctive search for an intruder had ceased; but Rowan could not negotiate the streets in darkness.

As she made her way back inside, her foot struck something that rolled away. Case-object, she thought, and was back in the main cave before recalling that she had not yet seen one round enough to roll.

She returned to it. It was a raw potato.

There were two others, and a small block of mold-encrusted cheese, in a neat pile by the entrance. Rowan carried them to the alcove at the back of the cave, carefully trimmed the mold from the cheese, halved it, placed one of the halves beside Janus’s inert form.

She said to him, “By the hospitality of a friend.”

He slept on.

She thought she would not have long to wait. She was correct.

Demon-voices outside the cave, many; then one, inside.

Rowan nodded. She drew a breath, rose.

Another voice, inside the cave. Rowan stopped. Another, and more. She grew disturbed.

After counting six, she could no longer separate individual voices.

She had planned to leave her sword and talisman behind; she changed that. Carrying both, and with her ears blocked by the glove-finger plugs, she made her way toward fluttering, shifting green light.

Seven individual demons stood in the clear area by the entrance.

This could not be good. The person controlling the demons would surely not need so many creatures at once. The steerswoman waited; the demons remained, arms waving slightly.

Then the tallest reached down and emitted a case-object. The others, all males, Rowan now realized, froze, then shifted, returned to stillness.

The green light was confusing; but Rowan studied the males and— yes, there: the speckled male she had encountered before. And the female; possibly the one from the den. It had been gray, shaded with tan in daylight; it was green shadowed with green here.

So many, and in such an awkward space: if logic had led Rowan wrong, she and Janus would die, very soon.

The steerswoman slowly moved forward, half-bent until the ceiling rose as she neared the group. At twelve feet away, she did exactly what the tiny, needle-sharp, agonizing voice of instinct told her not to do: She covered the talisman.

Lifts of startlement. One male raised its arms to spray; but another immediately interposed itself between that one and Rowan. The nervous male subsided. The demons stood, arms gently raising, lowering.

Rowan said, “I suppose you can’t actually hear me through these creatures. I’m not surprised. I couldn’t hear a person through this noise myself.” But her own voice, in her blocked ears, was loud, thick, seeming to come from the base of her skull.

Perhaps she should write; but she had nothing to write with or on. And if her mysterious friend saw only through demon senses, writing would be useless. Words on paper did not echo sound.

She ought to gesture— but both her hands were full. And she could not, yet, bring herself to set down either her weapon or her only protection, still clutched tight against her chest.

The female demon stepped forward, away from the males, and Rowan forced herself not to back off and managed by sheer will to allow the point of her sword to drop. Five feet away, the demon stopped.

The last time Rowan had stood so close to a living demon was in Alemeth. Two separate creatures; and both times she had approached so near only to drive her sword into them.

The males had shifted, spreading themselves in a line to left and right. Rowan began to dislike the configuration.

The female reached down; this close, the movement was startling, the structure of the arm so freakishly wrong that Rowan took two steps back, teeth clenched, sword again raised. The demon paused; then continued the motion and withdrew a case-object from one lower orifice. This it placed on the ground. Beyond, the males shifted again, spreading further, and two of them moved a few flat-footed steps closer.

The object was vaguely conical, tilted, covered in small bosses. Rowan regarded it blankly; then she looked up at the female, wishing deeply that she could read the face of the mind behind this creature.

The demon stood, headless, branch-armed, strange-legged; but Rowan had studied demons closely the previous day, enough to learn the patterns of body posture and some hint of emotions behind them.

The demon was waiting.

The demon
itself
was waiting, and watching her.

Not some distant controlling power; not some outside guiding force.

Rowan felt abruptly empty, as if something had left her; a noise, perhaps, a constant internal noise of which she had not been aware. Or perhaps it was her strength; for she felt, at the moment, incapable of any motion whatsoever.

The steerswoman said, weakly, “There’s no one here but us.” It was no more than a whisper. Even through the bones of her skull, she could not hear her own words.

The only human mind present was Rowan’s. She was alone, underground, with seven monsters— who were watching her and waiting.

Eventually, they stopped waiting. The female reached down— and Rowan found she was unable to retreat or even raise her weapon.

The demon picked up the case-object, passed it to the opposite side of its body, and held it out. One male took it, stood turning it over in its twiggy fingers, then carried the object away, into the recesses of the cave. From the corner of her eye, Rowan saw moth light following the male’s movements.

When it returned, the female emitted a second object, set it down.

Smaller, simpler in form. Rowan glanced at it, looked back up at the female demon, wishing for, wanting desperately a face to speak to. “I don’t understand,” she said, louder. The smallest male startled at her voice, stood jittering, arms twitching. The speckled male reached and caught one of its narrow-fingered hands in two of its own. The act calmed the smaller one. The two remained, behind the female, holding hands.

Waiting.

And for no reason she could explain, the speckled male’s action calmed Rowan as well. She looked down at the case-object again, then slipped her talisman into its kerchief at her belt, and stooped to one knee to see better.

It was a half-dome, with four blunt-pointed extrusions on top, one much longer than the others. Rowan picked it up, turned it over awkwardly, one handed; the other hand still held her weapon.

She learned nothing. She looked up. The demons still waited. With nothing else to do, Rowan set the object down again.

The males froze briefly; and she had seen that response before. But the female did not. It retrieved the case-object, which was again passed to a male, carried off into the cave.

Shuffling its feet, the female rotated its body a quarter turn and emitted a third object. The males jerked their arms in surprise.

Four inches tall, stooped and folded, one small knee up, the other on the ground; one tiny hand dangling from an arm whose elbow rested on a knee, the other hand clutching a small, straight stick—

Rowan felt the shock like a blow, found herself breathing shallowly through clenched teeth.

It was herself. Tiny, perfect, eerie; a little manikin, with the folds in the clothing, the characteristic cant of the head, all in miniature, all green in the green, shuddering light.

The hair on the left side of its head was disheveled. Dazed, Rowan reached up and smoothed her own hair. Its eyes were shadowed. Rowan did not pick it up, nor lean closer; she did not want to see, as she knew she would, her own features on its thumbnail face.

The demons waited.

“I don’t understand!” Rowan spoke helplessly, uselessly. “What does this
mean?
”

Meaning. It must mean something.

Herself. This is you.

“I can’t do as you do, I can’t make something. I have nothing to give you.” She looked at herself, at her two hands.

An object with meaning. “Here.” Quickly she pulled off her left glove, dropped it, pulled off her silver steerswoman’s ring, set it on the ground.

“There.
That
means me!”

As one, the demons threw up their arms, high.

The spray-vents were exposed. Rowan found she had risen to her feet, was standing with arms flung out to each side, and she thought: Now I will die.

No spray came.

The arms writhed, waved, thrust upward, fingers curling and uncurling, as demon bodies swayed, hands straining toward the ceiling, or perhaps the sky beyond the ceiling: all the creatures, together, caught in the throes of some overpowering demon emotion.

Rowan had seen this before in the amphitheater. It continued, long.

Then slowly, the demons subsided to stillness, but for the smallest male, still trembling in the aftermath.

Then, using a hand on the side of its body away from Rowan, the female reached down— and, Rowan assumed, produced another object. The males came closer to it.

The steerswoman could not see it from where she stood, and so, quite simply, she stepped up to and around the female. One of the males shuffled aside to make way for her.

It resembled nothing that she recognized.

She stood beside the female. The air was faintly cool around the creature and smelled, in the dank earth scent of the cave, like the great ocean. Rowan felt no fear, only utter, helpless incomprehension.

The female produced another case-object, touched it to the first; it adhered instantly. Another and another; the structure became more complex. The males reacted with lifts of surprise, gentle waves of interest; the speckled male positively jittered excitement.

The female stopped. Human and monsters stood, the one in silence, the others in what passed in them for silence, regarding the object.

Then, all at once, the males scattered like a flight of bats, off into the angles and crannies of the cave.

Rowan was alone with the female. She turned to it, feeling she ought to say something, make some sort of comment; but it would be useless. She went to retrieve her ring, but it, and the eerie manikin, were both gone.

The males were not absent long. At a dead run, one returned and placed a case-object beside the last one the female had produced. A small object, simple in form. Then another male returned, and another, each with an object of its own. The speckled male returned with apparently none, then pulled six out of its maw, squatting on the ground and using all four hands to arrange them in a neat semicircle. The other males crowded around, jockeying for a clear view, and swayed as they studied the collection, clearly impressed.

The female produced one more, also small but with a complex surface. Then it rotated itself a quarter turn, and reached down as if to emit another.

No result.

Naturally, Rowan thought; made of egg-case covering. The female demon would certainly not have an unlimited supply of the material. It must run out at some point.

And the males— they had no supply whatsoever.

Something shifted inside the steerswoman; she felt an internal drop, a moment’s vertigo, as if she were on a ship that had unexpectedly crested some great wave.

She felt she ought to be surprised; she was not. She said only, “Oh, of course.” And then, like a slowly growing light, a slowly growing joy. “Oh, of
course!
”

The female shifted its previous case-object on the ground, reached out with two other arms, and selected from among those arranged by the males. It placed the three in an arc. The demons stood, considering the arrangement.

And— Rowan turned to look— out in the low cave’s dim shifting light: hundreds, thousands of case-objects. Piles of them. Collected, sorted, according to what system or logic she did not know—

Words. Language. The demons were speaking.

Or the female was; the males could not produce the egg-case material. They could not speak, not as females did. They must use words already uttered by others— like saving a note written by a friend on the chance that someday one might wish to say the same thing oneself . . .