The Lost Steersman (Steerswoman Series) (63 page)

His face was inches away; his hand was still in hers. She flung it away, stepped back, and back. She gasped once, said, “No.”

He watched her; he said nothing.

“No! No, tell me you didn’t!”

No answer; his face was blank.

“But, but”— and she pleaded— “you didn’t know, did you? You didn’t know they were
people
— ”

Silence. Silence, and his empty eyes.

He had known.

“Are you
insane?
”

No words.

She threw her sword down; it clanged on stone, loud. “Why?” He said something; she did not catch it. “What?”

“Payment.”

She flung out her arms. “For what?” A crypt in the wilderness. “Your shipmates? The ones who survived the wreck? Demons killed them?” Revenge, yes, that she could understand. “Oh, but, Janus, surely,” and she said, “surely
one town
was revenge enough— ”

No visible remorse, no visible shame, not even any anger; and on his face, in his eyes, not one single visible thought.

“Oh, no wonder, no wonder they came for you, hunted you.” She clutched her own arms, tight, shaking. “All those poor people . . . You’re, you’re some kind of creature, a monster from the Inner Lands! Murderer— ” Her voice cracked in her throat, painful. “I should leave you here to
die
— ”

“Why don’t you?”

She could not answer; she could not even find the answer that she was not permitted to speak. She made some sort of sound; she heard it. But even she did not know what it meant. She shut her eyes.

Three dead towns. Insects and animals, feasting on corpses. “Janus . . . why . . . ?” She opened her eyes.

He stood, green light shuddering about his head, shadows beyond and around, demon thoughts lying scattered about his feet. And at that moment, what seemed to Rowan impossible, incomprehensible, and terrifying was merely: his human shape, the thinking tilt of his head, the slight knit of his brows as, with every appearance of calm rationality, he carefully considered her question.

Then he said, in a perfectly reasonable tone of voice, “Sometimes, Rowan, one pays in advance.”

42

H
e would say no more than that; eventually, she ceased to ask.

She waited. She could do nothing else.

Tan did not return. Of the males, only the Thief visited in the night, bringing food and leaving immediately after. He did not attempt to converse.

Rowan waited.

She tried to fill her time. She wrote in her logbook, made sketches of the four demons she had named and of selected groups of case-objects. She drew the formal demon body stances she had identified:
surprise, confusion, regard an utterance, contemplate.

She searched the cave for her ring and her name. She did not find them.

She gave Janus food, when the Thief brought it, and her woolen vest, when it grew cold. And she waited.

She slept close to the entrance, so that demon-voice would wake her before Janus. She kept the talisman, kept her sword close by. A night passed, and a day, and another night.

The next morning, Rowan woke to find herself blanketed in delicate moth wings which crumbled under her touch. The entire cave floor, and all the beautiful, organized words, were covered in drifts, as if from a pale green snowfall. On the ceiling, the wingless moths were clambering, seeking each other, mating.

Rowan also drew all this. It was easy to do. The moths’ light was now bright and steady.

When demon-voice came, she checked the location of the talisman without thinking, merely reassuring herself of its presence. It was in its kerchief; she stood ready to reveal it if the demon was a stranger.

It was the Thief. He saw her, paused by the entrance, then made his way toward the groups of utterances. Rowan followed.

He did not go far; and at a nearby group of very small case-objects, he stopped, selected one, set it on the ground before her.

A canted cone, striated, with tiny projections on the point.

She spread her hands uselessly. “I don’t understand.”

The Thief replaced the object, walked toward her, and then past her.

She turned to follow him. “No, let’s try again . . .”

He stopped. She waited; and then he moved away from her so suddenly and smoothly that she checked the talisman, checked her sword, looked behind her.

The talisman was still hung at her belt, covered. Her sword was sheathed at her back. Janus was nowhere in sight.

At the entrance, the Thief paused again, then exited.

And immediately returned, approached her, paused, backed away again.

No, not backed— demons had no front or back. He was merely walking.

Rowan followed a few steps, paused. The Thief paused as well. Then, in a lovely motion as graceful as a spider’s, he swept three arms back to the far side of his body, and slowly stretched out the remaining arm toward her, fingers extended.

Rowan hesitated, then reached out her own hand. Cold, hard fingers found hers, intertwined with them, talons gently brushing her palm.

The Thief tightened his grip. He tugged.

Rowan glanced about the cave once, turned back to him. She allowed him to lead her outside.

When she returned she went directly to the back alcove, where Janus was idly sifting drifts of moth wing. “Do you want to live?”

He looked up. He was rather long replying. “Yes.”

“Then come with me. Ask no questions. Do exactly as I say.”

A pause. “All right.”

Rowan did not display the talisman when they left the cave; no other demons were present in the ravine. Nor did she when they reached the street; there were no demons in the street, nor in any street visible around the edge of the ravine.

They followed the Thief of Words. Each street he led them to was deserted.

At one intersection, he turned right; Rowan knew that the quickest exit from the city would be accomplished by turning left. She paused at the intersection, looked left, saw no one.

The Thief noticed they were not following, stopped, returned, led right again, and paused, waiting. Rowan thought.

She had her sword in her right hand, the talisman in her left, pressed against her blouse, shielded, to prevent the Thief from being driven away. She gestured to Janus with her sword hand. Wait here. She went left.

The Thief startled, then jogged after her, kicking up small clouds of dust, brushing past Janus, who shied back against a den wall, eyes wild.

Rowan displayed the talisman; the Thief fell back. She maneuvered her body to block it from him, and continued on. When she looked back, the Thief of Words had fallen in behind her, clearly nervous, from the twitching of his fingers.

Just past the curve of the street, at the next intersection: four female demons moving in a slow, searching formation. Rowan backed off until the curve hid the searchers from view, then tucked the talisman against her blouse again, and jogged back to Janus.

The Thief caught up with them, paused, and with an almost emphatic deliberation, led right again. Rowan waved Janus forward, and they followed.

They took many turns; every intersection they passed, every street they entered, was empty. At one point, the Thief stopped in the middle of a street, for no reason that Rowan could discern, and waited, long; but when they crossed yet another deserted intersection it came to Rowan that the demon, with his exquisite sense of hearing, could certainly tell when nearby streets were occupied; could likely tell in what direction those demons were moving; and quite possibly, Rowan realized with wonder, could recognize specific individuals many streets away, purely by the sound of each voice.

The search had been relaxed but not discontinued entirely, as Rowan had seen. There might be places where many searchers were concentrated; but the Thief of Words knew how to lead them out.

They passed down street after street. The emptiness grew eerie. The great city began to feel to her like the pitiful, empty dens at Site Two.

And if Janus had not been stopped, he would have rendered it exactly the same.

She glanced back at him; his eyes were wide and wary, his clothes tattered and filthy, his hair and beard wild. He seemed half a wild animal, the only touch of civilization Rowan’s own neat and sturdy steerswoman’s pack. She needed her own hands free; but she had lightened the pack as much as possible by tossing out half the clothing and by carrying the water sack herself, refilled from the discarded canteen. She had made sure Janus had no weapons.

The Thief had paused again, and now abruptly doubled back to the last intersection and chose a different street. Rowan surmised a search party nearby.

They moved, for a while outward; then, suddenly nervous, the Thief doubled them back, crisscrossed eastward, and moved more calmly and easily.

Rowan could not share his confidence; by her reckoning, the new route would bring them quite close to the center of the city.

But the streets remained empty, even when by their length and curvature Rowan knew they had come closer to the center. The Thief moved more quickly but without fear; and Rowan began to notice something. It took her some time to identify.

Her earplugs had muffled the single combined voice of the city; now she heard it again. And it seemed to be no longer everywhere but focused, directional.

When by her calculations she and her companions were merely three streets away from the center, it became clear: many, many demons, perhaps most of the city’s population, were gathered together in the amphitheater.

The Thief crossed an intersection, waited for Rowan and Janus in the middle of the next street. Rowan glanced at him, caught Janus’s eye, and with a lift of her chin directed him to go ahead. Janus’s gaze narrowed, but he complied.

Only three streets away . . .

Rowan held out the talisman, turned to face the sound, and walked forward.

She did not need to go far. Past one intersection, then up ahead between the buildings, a narrow view of the center.

Demons all down the near slope and up the opposite slope and, Rowan surmised by sound, all around, nearly elbow to elbow, like a huge grove of strange trees, branches moving gently.

Down at the bottom, on the flattened area, on the stage: Tan. She was building something.

The structure spread around and to one side, and it was nearly as tall as Tan herself. As the steerswoman watched, the demon reached down to her speaking orifice and drew forth a case-object.

A word, Rowan thought, or a sentence, a statement? How much can a demon say in one utterance?

Tan held the utterance before her briefly, and the shifting of arms told of the watchers’ attention. Then she placed it atop one section of the structure; it adhered instantly. Tan took a half-rotating step to one side, clearing the view for the audience.

Rowan watched as more than two hundred demons simultaneously entered the identical stance: the specific demon pose of Regarding-an-utterance. And then, like a smooth wave, the stance of Contemplation.

And then, waiting; waiting, Rowan saw, with interest, eagerness. Individual demons shifted for a better view.

Tan continued her work.

Tan was making, Rowan realized, not many statements, but one great statement, one single thing that grew before the eyes of the crowd, each watcher waiting for the next idea to be added to the rest, linked to the rest, made part of the whole.

Imagine it, Rowan thought: to say something and have it stand before the eyes of all, to be judged by all, as one unified expression.

So many demons— people, but no kin to her— held by words.

Is it beautiful to them? Rowan wondered. It must be, to hold them like this. Is it a song? She thought of Bel standing by a campfire in the Outskirts, tilting her face to the stars as she sang, the truth of her words riding on the beauty of her voice, riding up and out to the sky.

It must be beautiful. And it must be the truth.

And in that moment, the steerswoman felt she could not breathe for the weight of the yearning that lodged in the hollow of her throat. She wanted to stay. Even utterly uncomprehending, she wanted to remain until Tan had finished, to see completed the single great statement.

She could not stay.

She and Janus had needed a diversion to make their escape from the city. Tan was providing it.

She must leave; and suddenly she found that she could.

Only because she knew that humans would return. If not herself then some other steerswoman, someday.

Invisible, she nodded to them, to all the people, silent yet endlessly singing, and she said to them, with her lips if not her voice: We’ll be back. We’ll learn. We’ll speak to you, and we will come to know each other.

She began, carefully, to back away. She glanced over her shoulder—

Janus, directly behind her.