Skeen's Return Read online

  They asked her no questions when they saw that she would live; they went back to their lines and nets, working with a noisy cheerfulness, a mixture of joking and song that fed strength into her as surely as the cordial did. They cooked her one of the fishes they tumbled like oily silver rain into the well of the boat and the youngest of them fed it to her bit by bit, chatting without expecting any answer, telling her about the girl who had him dying from love and exasperation because she was a darling, a pearl among pearls, but she would flirt with every cousin he had, even Jikkitoh who was too young to have any notion what girls were for. He didn’t seem unduly alarmed about her wanderings, nor upset by the distinct possibility she’d choose one of those cousins over him. There was this other girl a couple of islands over who could dance fire into the blood; he didn’t like her as well as Meromerai, but maybe that was because he didn’t know her as well. He stroked the soft silver fur on Lipitero’s arm, taking so much pleasure in the feel of it and how it changed color with the angle of light, that she could not feel insulted or ashamed at being handled and found herself seduced into an unexpected pleasure in the durability of the body that had brought her so far, a satisfaction with the shapes and textures of that body. This astonished her. She smiled at the boy. He laughed and handed her the bowl. You’re fine, he said, I expect you’d like to do this for yourself.

  She stayed with the Balayar for two weeks, gathering strength of mind and body; they were a contented folk, their lives at once simple and complex, changing yet mostly the same, repeating patterns their ancestors had repeated, the rebellious and the misfits going out on the trading ships that came from the larger islands, coming home and going out again. They found her a wonder and pleasing to have around; Balayar babies were delighted with her fur, they crawled over her knees and cuddled in her flight skins; their sleek round warm bodies comforted her and let loose her grief. The Balayar gathered about her, patting her, listening to her laments, singing wordless tenderness and understanding to her. They wanted her to stay with them and she was tempted, but after those two weeks had passed, knew she could not. She needed Ykx around her for her mind’s health, and she was honest enough to admit that she did not enjoy living with the Balayar; she missed the comforts of a Gather, the stimulation of Ykx who talked about something more than fish, sex and infants, and most of all she missed her studio and workshop and the crafting of delicate electronic gear for the use of the Gather and for her own pleasure. Sadly, but with that deep understanding of need they had always shown her, the Balayar went with her across a narrow strait to a tall island, a desert of stone and ash; she rode in the canoe that had picked her out of the sea, crewed by the same young men who brought her in. These youths made a cradle for her out of cord and climbed with her to the top of the cone (they climbed as well as they swam, reading the stone like they read water). They squatted and began singing a farewell song they’d made for her that was a mix of sadness and excitement. She hesitated, waiting for them to be done, but after a while they waved their hands at her, telling her to leave while they were singing. She felt for the wind, took hold of it and leaped into it. The sound followed her as she spiraled up and up. During the last turn, she snatched a look at them. They were dancing precariously on the lip of the cone. Down below, the little boats that had come with her were filled with Balayar waving energetically, singing. Snatches of sound came up to her as she started the long soar north and west.

  The healing that was the gift of the Balayar babies slipped away from her on that endless increasingly desperate flight across the ocean; even the Balayar cordial could not keep her blood stirred to a living heat. She retreated as she’d done before, shut off mind and let body carry her; if it wanted to live, it would get her to the Sydo Gather with life enough left to power its engines.

  Arrive she did, a ghost with flesh. For a terrible while, she existed in a half-life where turn and turn about either everything about her was unreal and she couldn’t touch it or she herself was a nightmare drifting through things that couldn’t touch her. She made everyone around her uneasy, unhappy, uncomfortable, but the Sydo Ykx would not put her out of the Gather; that was not their way.

  After an especially depressing day, she left the intricate caves of the Gather and went to the rim of the cliff above the mouth, sat where she could look out across the lake. I can’t continue like this, she thought. I should go away; they won’t make me go; I should take it on myself to go. She felt a powerful revulsion drive up through her body and knew she couldn’t make herself leave; if she left she would surely die. At the front of her head she wanted that surcease; she was a walking wound with the kind of pain no one ever got used to. At the back of her head, though, where her will was, where her body spoke, she clung with an equal determination to life.

  Sometime near dawn a cub came climbing up the scratch, went past her without seeing her and went scrambling up a clump of boulders dangerously close to the lip of the cliff. He stood teetering on the topmost rock, flapping his soft little flight skins. Chewing her lip to keep fear from spilling out, moving as silently as the ghost she’d been, she eased onto her feet and crept up behind him. He crowed with delight as the sun peeped up behind the lake, waved his arms and tottered precariously. She snatched him off the rock and cuddled him against her chest; she was trembling with relief but the cub was loudly indignant. He screamed with frustration and fought against her hold. The hot hard-rubber body, all knees and elbows, banging into her broke a hard thing inside her; she didn’t realize this at first, just kept on soothing him, cooing calmness into him. When he was quiet she took him down the scratch into the Gather. His mother was darting about searching for him, turning out the whole Gather with her cries of grief. She was very young for having a cub that age, her youth and inexperience intensifying her grief at losing her baby, her joy when Lipitero gave him to her. She bubbled with a wordless gratitude, then turned and ran away, shouting out the cub was found, he was all right, the naughty boy was found and fine.

  Lipitero watched her vanish around a curve. She touched her lips, outlined them with the tip of her finger because she was astonished to find herself smiling. The dawn outside was slipping down the mirror ways and turning the Grand Round into a bright warm soup that dripped into her veins. Yes, it felt like that as she suddenly knew with a clarity which matched the clarity of that light that the cub was her child, that the cub’s young mother was her child, that every Ykx in the Sydo Gather was her child; she was buoyantly, extravagantly, indescribably happy. The glow didn’t last, but the half-living half-dead state she’d been drifting in was gone forever—unless that monster Angelsin destroyed Skeen and with her, Sydo’s hope.

  Angelsin was talking at her, something about why she was traveling with the Company, was she a captive, that sort of thing, but Lipitero let the noise wash over her without listening to it. Skeen. Ah, Skeen, what do I do? Wake up, Skeen, do something. She slid down one of her magnifiers, sacrificing some of the light to bring the far wall closer and sharpen her focus. Twelve doors. Twelve cells cut into the stone. Twelve cells, the farther cells filled, but who was where?

  A shout. An Aggitj. Ders, poor boy, waking up alone and in a panic. The four shorthorns acting as guards gathered outside one of the cell doors, third along from the end; they yelled insults in at Ders, banged on the door. A quieter voice cut in, soothing, comforting. Domi. Yes. As usual, busy calming his nervous cousin. Two of the shorthorns starting cursing him and pounding on his door also, second from the end.

  Something was happening at the door to the sixth cell from the end, behind the backs of the guards. A dark serpent’s head came through the tray slot, then about a handspan of body; the head swayed, the tongue flickered at the, noise. A moment later the serpent oozed with smooth deceptive speed through the opening, its chin touched the cavern floor and it began gliding away, its mottled coloring so close to that of the stone Lipitero had trouble following it. More and more snake emerged.

  A spate of whistles, rapid
bursts of unintelligible speech, laughter. Lipitero whipped around. Street urchins, Angelsin’s Ants, were running from several of the side holes, the cave chamber magnifying and replicating their noise until they seemed a hundred, but when she counted them, there were only a scant dozen. As they passed her they flashed her a bouquet of gestures; though she was unfamiliar with this particular language of the hand, she was comfortably certain the signs were the most obscene in their vocabulary. She snapped thumb against midfinger, flung her hand away and up to show them her contempt. Forgetting her enhanced eyesight and the distance to the cells, she waited tense with anxiety for them to notice the serpent; she kept her head turned resolutely away from the cell, although she couldn’t resist a few rapid glances that way and a plea under her breath for Ders to keep up his clamor. When the snake’s tail flicked out, she had to stiffen herself against her relief, then duck her head to hide the smile she couldn’t stop spreading across her face.

  Ders quieted. The Funor guards milled about for another few minutes then went back to their desultory pacing in front of the cells.

  Lipitero pushed her hood back a little and watched Angelsin. The Funor woman leaned into the armrest and bent her head so one of the ragged boys could whisper in her ear. The others squatted on the rich furs spread about the foot of the great chair, waiting their turn to climb its side and whisper their reports. Lipitero risked a longer look toward the shadows beyond the line of cells; the serpent was out of sight; even with all of her lenses in place she couldn’t see anything but the forests of stalactites and stalagmites, the irregular bulges and hollows of the walls wherever they were visible. Timka had gotten herself into hiding quickly and thoroughly, though what she was going to do now.… Lipitero sighed with frustration, huddled in her robe, fingers moving restlessly over her weapons; all she could do was wait and be ready to back up Skeen or Timka when they acted. She looked from Angelsin to the cells and back. Stay alert, she told herself. She scowled at Hopflea who was prowling about the chair; he vanished behind it and apparently settled on the furs there because he didn’t appear again. Wait, she told herself, I should be good at that, I’ve done so much of it.

  Timka woke sick and sore. Automatically she shifted to cat-weasel, then to rock leaper and back to Pallah, losing the nausea and bruises along the way. “If this is what Skeen feels like, I wonder she ever.…” Drugged. We were drugged. Angelsin. Using her fingertips and the faint bleed of light from the tray slot, she explored the cell. A bare box chiseled from stone. No way out but that heavy plank door. Nothing in here but me, not even fleas. Me and a stink. Must be older than me, that stink. Annoyed, she moved to the door and dropped to her knees by the tray slot. Directly across from her, about a hundred meters off (she could see details that far away because of lamps bound onto setpoles, a double handful of them burning with vigor, placed at several different heights so there were no spots of concealing shadow) she saw a cage with a blue-violet lump inside. Lipitero. That explains some of this. Furs on the stone to the left of the cage. Hopflea crouching beside another of those giant throne chairs, Angelsin’s feet and knees, one forearm with attached hand. What a mess. A dark blur moved past the slot. She blinked, then realized there were guards pacing back and forth in front of the cells; when she listened for them, she could hear the scrape of their feet, their voices as they exchanged grunts or strings of words she couldn’t understand because the echoes mangled them too badly. All of us? No. Not Chulji. Angelsin’s reach covers South Cusp, she wouldn’t go beyond, not when she has an Ykx in her hands. Chulji’s loose. Until he comes back. Due in tomorrow night. If we haven’t got away by then, Lifefire! Pegwai? Depends on how long it’s been since supper. She sighed. It doesn’t matter, Ti. If one gets out, we all do. She drew back, sat on her heels and scowled at the tray slot. She could get her arm through it up to the shoulder. She stretched out her arm and looked thoughtfully at it. When she was a child running the forest like a wild thing, she’d handled a lot of snakes but she’d never thought of learning the serpent shape, too slow for one thing. She dropped her arm, closed her eyes and tried to remember.

  Ders began to howl. The Funor guards converged on his cell, yelling, cursing, kicking at the door. Domi called out, his voice soothing, repeating familiar words over and over as he struggled to calm his cousin. Again Timka couldn’t make out the words, but she didn’t need to. She blocked out the noise and concentrated more intensely. In her desperation, she achieved a serpent of sorts. She didn’t know how to move, even simple breathing required immense effort, but eventually she got her head up, her ribs working and crawled to the door. She managed to get her head and a bit of body through the slot, then discovered that her serpent eyes were incapable of resolving forms more than a few paces off and color was a vague memory. However the pits above those feeble eyes were giving her an astonishing amount of information about the location and distance of live bodies, their heat like a shout against the cold of the stone and her flicking tongue brought her messages of fear and anger along with the sour stench of unwashed bodies. She took a while to start processing the data pouring into her receptors, but she grew rapidly more proficient and in a short while acquired enough confidence to start wrestling herself through the slot. The snake was growing easier to handle, but she hadn’t the time to let herself sink into it and learn it thoroughly, she had to get out before the guards came back and caught her. She’d never tried such a slapdash shift and was in a state of mild panic that intensified when her mid-section, her thickest point, nearly jammed in the slot. At the same time the waves of anger, the vibrations of the shouting and blows were all decreasing in intensity, a warning that the guard could come back any minute. At the cost of burning pain and a feeling she was suffocating, she muscled herself free, then moved as quickly as she could along the stone.

  After a few seconds of awkward exhausting crawl, she hissed with disgust at her stupidity and shifted to cat-weasel, then padded rapidly toward the deep shadow beyond the end of the cells where (Lifefire be blessed!) wasp-waisted columns and stone teeth were thick as the roots of some monstrous tree, stalactites and stalagmites in grotesque and garish profusion. She slid into the shadow with a flood of relief that turned her bones to jelly, stood shivering while the clamor at the cells died away as Ders settled into a (probably temporary) calm and the shorthorns went back to their desultory pacing. When she recovered, she moved silently through the teeth and columns until she found a reasonably dry niche behind some waxy looking stalagmites; she settled herself so she could see Angelsin and her chair and beyond her the cage where Lipitero crouched. Fine, she told herself. I’m free. What now?

  Angelsin was busy with a clutch of her Ants; one by one they climbed the side of the chair, clung to the arm and whispered for several minutes in her ear. Working her shoulder muscles, her claws, in a physical expression of her satisfaction, Timka watched the exchange, the intent faces of the children. Her slither through the slot had gone unnoticed … she broke the thought as she saw Lipitero’s head turn, then twitch round again. Looking for me. Lifefire grant she’s the only one who saw something. What now? Yes, what can I do … at any minute Angelsin could finish with the Ants and send for one of the prisoners—a touch of what Skeen called Mala Fortuna and it would be Timka she called for. Timka shivered and started to panic when the Funor woman lifted her head and looked around; the lamplight turned her horns to butter ivory and the points looked dagger sharp, her arms were big around as a man’s thighs and as powerful. No sag, little fat. Lifefire!

  Hopflea wandered into sight, moving through the children crouched on the furs. He came around behind the chair (it was set about two meters from the cave wall on a natural dais that was the driest place in the chamber), reached out and flicked Angelsin’s cane into a lazy swing, then vanished around the other side. A few minutes later he was back among the children. He drifted over to the cage and stared at Lipitero. He seemed to whisper something, but the Ykx made no sign she heard him. Another moment’s fidgeting
, then he ambled off toward the cells.

  Timka went back to watching Angelsin.

  Another child had pulled himself up the rungs set into the wood and knelt on the chair arm, leaning intimately against Angelsin as he whispered; furtively he stroked her arm and shoulder as she inclined her ear, a familiarity she tolerated with monstrous maternalism. The Ants were her children whom she protected and consumed. Like the cat-weasel whose form Timka wore and knew so well. The female had a short but furious heat. At the end of it, exhausted, she snarled the males away from her and made ready her den; with her fearsome clever forepaws she scythed down swathes of grass and mouth-carried them to line the hole. Then she went on a killing spree, burying what she couldn’t eat in the dirt of the den. Her litters were born into that miasma released as she dug up and ate the putrefying meat—huge litters—fifteen, twenty, sometimes even thirty. Gradually, as the days passed, operating on some logic or trigger that no Min studying the beast had ever fathomed, she began eating her kits. One by one, she chose the discards from among the mewling squirming mass of hot fur. One by one she ate them until after a month, two kits—three at the most—were left. If two, one was always a female, one always male. If three, two would be female and the third male. Always. No matter what ratio of male to female existed in the original litter. Timka wrinkled her blunt muzzle and twitched her whiskers in a rapid flash of humor. Hopflea was Angelsin’s remnant, her cherished one. Who’d be the next in that brood? You are my chosen ones, you are my favored until you disappoint me, unless you disappoint me, be careful not to disappoint me. Walk warily but not too warily, obey me in all things, show initiative and wit, but not at my expense. Too much dependence and I will eat you up, too much independence and I will cast you out to be eaten by the wolves. Dance on the highwire, my poppets, keep me sweet with your capers and beware, the time will come when despite your pretty ways you please me no longer. A time will come when you must be ready to run or be eaten. Look about you. Are you the oldest of the Ants? Then beware, my pretty, protect yourself, my love.