The Lost Steersman (Steerswoman Series) (67 page)

Everything should be bright, she thought, because it was so very hot. Heat should glow, and this heat, this heat should blaze.

“Heat,” she said. “Heat. From the sky.”

A sound from him; if it was a word, she did not understand it. Perhaps it was no word.

He moved but not far, shifted, she could not see how; but her hand was cool now, and she thought it was because he was holding it, and she hated his touch, she wanted to pull away, but she did not, because his hand was so very cool. She held on to it as a cold person holds on to a warm stone. “That’s what it’s for,” she said.

“What?”

“Heat. From the sky. From the Eastern Guidestar.” But she could not see the Guidestar anymore. Then, suddenly, she saw everything, briefly but with perfect clarity, and she thought that the cold light from her dream had arrived; but seconds later, there was a distant rumble. “It kills everything. Everything that’s there. Then we go there.”

His beautiful cold hand was on her forehead. She closed her eyes. “What are you talking about?” he said.

“Routine Bioform Clearance. Every twenty years. Kills everything. Clears the way. Then we go. But it stopped.”

“Heat . . . from a Guidestar?”

“Yes.” Something was wrong, something was very wrong. What? She could not identify it.

“Why have I never heard of this?”

“Outskirts. Over and over.” What happened over and over? She could not remember. But she said it again. “Over and over . . .”

“How can heat come from a Guidestar?”

“Magic . . .”

“Magic,” he said quietly. Then, more quietly, and after a very long time: “The wizards . . .”

Magic to save us, Rowan thought; magic to kill us.

Magic to kill demons.

Something struck her face: small, and it burned, not with heat but with cold. She made a small sound of gratitude. Another came and another; she loved them. She counted them, because it seemed the correct thing to do.

His hand moved away from her face; she opened her eyes.

He rose and stood gazing up at the sky. “I think,” he said, “that I will put that tarp up after all.”

45

S
he thought she was back in the Outskirts. She heard rattling, like redgrass, endless in the wind.

She thought she was under the tarp, and there was a sick person there with her— that would be Averryl; she and Bel were caring for him; he had been injured by a goblin; she remembered now. He had a fever, that was why it was so very warm here. But it should not be this warm. That was wrong. She tried to tell Bel, call Bel’s name. She managed to do so, but the name stood all alone in the air, and the rattling continued.

She thought she was running. Then she was not; someone was stopping her, pressing her to the earth. But she had to run, run from the killing heat from the sky. She fought.

Then she did not, but her body moved nevertheless, and the motions made no sense and she could not stop.

“Be still,” a voice said.

There was brightness, and she was thirsty and very cold. She drank but not water— something warm and salty and musty and somehow brown-smelling.

After that, she drank water.

After that, she slept.

She lay watching him for a long time before he noticed. He faced away from her, sitting by the fire, working with something she could not see. He glanced back, as if he had been doing so regularly, and noticed her regard. “I see you’re awake. Good.” He put aside his work, picked up something, brought it to her. “Can you manage more of this?”

It was a cup of sorts: a little framework of twigs, holding a scrap of cloth in a pocket. There was liquid inside.

She did not reply, but he helped her to sit, held the cup to her lips: broth, with tiny shreds of what had once been dried beef. When he let her down again, she saw that the cloth that had bound his ruined right hand was gone. He noted her glance, inspected the hand himself. “Not very pretty. I’ll have to cover it later, but for the moment, I think the air will do it good.” He studied her. “Rowan, you’re coherent at the moment, or I think you are, but you know that won’t last. And there’s not enough food here to allow us to wait to see if you’re going to live or die. So we’re going to have to move soon.”

She heard a high hum, realized she had been hearing it for some time. She groped at her belt, at the ground around her. “What do you want?” Janus asked her. She found it behind her head, wrapped in a kerchief: Tan’s last word. Rowan managed to take it out, set it down beside her, and lay back.

Janus puzzled, looked about, looked at her again, huffed a small laugh. “Your ears are ringing. From the fever. There are no demons here.”

He returned to the fire, brought something back. “Here.” A square scrap of cloth— cut from the tarp, she saw— and on it, a baked potato, smashed into pulp. “Try this, if you can.” She did not respond; but when he took a bit onto his fingers to bring to her lips, she managed to turn on one side and pull the makeshift plate closer herself. When she finished, he took the cloth scrap, cleaned it with sand, set it and the cup into the center of the tarp. A small packet joined it: the rest of the food she had cached. After a pause, he took the kerchief and talisman and tied them to his waistband. Then he rolled the tarp, tied the ends, slung it across his body. He came to her, handed her something. “Here.” A length of tanglebrush taproot, trimmed to a thick stick. He held out his hand to her.

She stared at the hand for a long time; then she gripped it, rose, and fell immediately. He caught her, nearly fell himself. She cried out at the sudden increase of pain. “Careful,” he said. Her leg had been splinted with strips of tanglebrush root and straps of cloth. “Take this.” He picked up the stick, put it in her hand as a cane. He stepped away from her experimentally; she did not fall but stood weaving dangerously. He took the moment to quickly pull on the bedroll and put her own cloak about her. The weight of it nearly felled her again.

Then he held out his left arm.

She did not respond.

He came to her side, took her slack right hand, put it around his waist, put his left arm over her shoulder, and waited. She gazed at the face so close to her own; and there seemed to her at that moment to be no thought at all in her mind.

Eventually, her fingers wound tight into the cloth of his shirt, and they went.

She could not count how many times they fell, both; he was only marginally stronger than she. Sometimes they rested long on the sand before rising again.

When the fever came back, he dragged her up past the tide line; it took a very long time. She did not remember the rest of that day, or the night, except that at some point, under stars, with the sea sounding in her ears, she ate, and drank, and drank again.

In the morning, she needed his assistance to relieve herself, which fact she found hateful beyond all description.

In the afternoon, they went on. The day was no different from the previous or the next.

She began, in slow stages between pain and dreams of fire, to notice a change. They fell less often; and this only because when she stumbled, he did not, but held her against him until she either regained her balance or collapsed completely.

And then it seemed that for a very long time, she did not move, other than in dreams. But when she woke, she found she was moving after all, and through no effort of her own. She did not know how long this continued. It might have been minutes; it might have been days.

Then they walked again, for a while; nearly half the afternoon. The sun blazed in her eyes as it descended toward a dark line at the horizon.

Janus was talking. Perhaps he had been talking for a long time. But she heard it now, and the sound made her stomach twist in hatred.

Somehow, he noticed. They paused. Then he pulled away a bit, turned to study her face. “Ah. I see you’re back. How do you feel?” She did not answer. He looked mildly disappointed. “Really, Rowan, you ought to answer my questions now— you’ve no reason not to.” Still no answer. “Well, never mind,” he said kindly. “I suppose I can understand. It’s all that you have left, really, poor thing.”

She struck him.

The blow had no force, but his face went suddenly, utterly blank, and she thought: There he is, that’s the Janus I know, better than the other one.

He stood back. He released her. She dropped to the sand.

His shadow fell on her. “Rowan,” he said in a toneless voice, “at the moment I have no reason to leave you here.” He stooped close. “Don’t give me one.”

She wept; the fact of it shocked her even more than the sound. She wept from pain, hatred, frustration, weakness.

He remained where he was, until she finished.

Then they went on.

She only spoke to him once.

They were in a windless place: a house, she thought, or a room—

It was a demon den.

Site Two.

The walls were lit by the flickers of a small fire. Just past that, at the entrance, standing guard against what voices might come in the night: Tan’s last word.

“What is it?” Rowan asked.

Janus seemed not surprised to hear her. But he shifted a bit, shifting them both. He was seated with his back against the wall, she was leaning back against him, his arms holding her in place: an embrace, but as sexless as that between a mother and child. The bedroll was a cushion beneath them, the cloak a blanket across them both.

His voice came from behind her invisibly. “A word. A cry. A warning. A curse.” He breathed once, a sound not quite a sigh. “The voice of instinct, perhaps . . .

“They’re not like us, Rowan. They don’t always think. Or instinct and thought work together in them. I don’t know how.

“But I know they can go mad. Hunger will make them mad, make them become all instinct.” He was silent a moment. “As it does with us all, I suppose . . .

“One of them must have been very, very hungry. The other— the other was sitting in the sand, and I didn’t know then why it wouldn’t fight or run.

“And the first came at it, tearing at it, to kill it and eat it.” He shifted again. “And the second fought, but it would not get up. Then it died. As it died, it said . . . that.” His voice became a whisper. “And the mad demon walked away.”

Outside, animal clicks and clatters; a rustling that paused and continued, paused and continued. She could not hear the sea.

“I know now, but I didn’t then: even a mad demon cannot disturb a cache of eggs— if it sees it. But the mother was still laying them and hadn’t made the covering, and the mad one could not see. So the mother told it. She said it completely. She said it so perfectly that a demon starving and mad with hunger could not even stay to eat her . . .

“What must it be like, to say something that completely? To say something in a way that cannot ever be denied? I wonder . . .

“I didn’t know it was a word, not then. I just saw what it did. I had been hiding. I was so very still— I’d learned that you have to stay still. I learned it, watching the others die. One by one. Burned . . .

He shifted again; they shifted together, locked. “I was starving, myself. Starving and trapped. I know I wasn’t in my right mind. I don’t think I would have done it otherwise: just walk right up to the thing and pick it up. And carry it over to the mad one . . . and see the demon walk away.

“I followed it, and it always walked away. Then I killed it.” She felt his heart beat, against her back. She felt his breath, beside her face. “I used stones. It was all I had. Then I found a stick. And I went to where the others lived. And I killed them all.

“They ran, at the end. When they saw each others’ corpses, first they ate them, then they fought each other, and then they ran, toward the sea. I caught up with them. I killed them in the sand . . .

“And when I was all done, and all the little animals came out to eat them, I thought, That’s good. That’s enough. I can die now. So I sat in the sand by the sea, and I waited to die.

“That’s when I saw the ships.”

He fell silent. Only two things moved: the fire and Rowan. She felt herself trembling, slightly but continuously.

“Twenty ships.” Silence again. Then: “Not like ours. No sails. More like huge rafts, and demons pulling and pushing them. But so many . . .

“Demons from across the sea. Demons on all the shores of the world’s great ocean. Demons enough to kill all of us, burn us to muscle and bone.

“It would happen. I could see it all, happening. And nothing I could do would stop it.

“But it came to me, their great ships passing by, their dead ones around me, and me half dead myself . . . I could hurt them. It was the only power I had. They would suffer, for what they were going to do. And keep suffering, as long as I had the power . . .

“So I couldn’t die, as I wanted to. I had to survive. But there was no food.”

She could not stop trembling. It felt like a force outside herself, entering her, more intimate than Janus’s embrace.

“I went back to where Riva was. It wasn’t demons that killed her— she’d been running, something broke under her, sent up spines.”