Doomstalker (21 page)

Braydic shifted subject suddenly, obviously in discomfort. “You have one advantage, Marika. One major safety. You are here in Akard, which has been called The Stronghold of Ambition’s Death. None here will cut you in fear for themselves. They are without hope, these Akard silth. They are those who were kicked off the ladder, yet were deemed dangerous enough to demand lifelong exile. The enemies you are making here hate you because they fear your strength, and for less selfish reasons. Gorry dreads what you may mean to the Community’s future. Long has she claimed to snatch glimpses of far tomorrows. Since your coming her oracles have grown ever more hysterical and dark.”

Marika had assumed a jaw-on-paw attitude of rapt attention guaranteed to keep Braydic chattering. She did not mind the communicator’s ceaseless talk, for Braydic gladly swamped the willing ear with information the silth yielded only grudgingly, if at all.

“The worst danger will come when you capture their attention down south. And capture it you will, I fear. If you are half what Gorry believes. If you continue in the recalcitrant character you have shown. They will have to pay attention.” Braydic toyed with the vision screen. She seemed uneasy. “Given six or seven years unhindered, learning as fast as you have, the censure of the entire Community will be insufficient to keep you contained here.” The communicator turned away, muttering, “As strength goes.”

Marika had become accustomed to such chatter. Braydic had hinted and implied similar ideas a dozen times in a dozen different ways during their stolen moments. This time the meth was more direct, but her remarks made no more sense now than when Marika had first slipped in to visit her.

Marika was devouring books and learning some about her talent, but discovering almost nothing of the real internal workings of the Reugge sisterhood. She could not refrain from interpreting what she heard and saw in Degnan pack terms. So she often interpreted wrong.

Silth spoke the word “Community” with a reverence the Degnan reserved for the All. Yet daily life appeared to be every sister for herself, as strength goes, in a scramble that beggared those among frontier “savages.” Never did the meth of the upper Ponath imperil their packs with their struggles for dominance. But Marika suspected she was getting a shaded view. Braydic did seem to dwell morbidly upon that facet of silth life.

It did not then occur to Marika to wonder why.

She left her seat, began pottering around. Braydic’s talk made her restless and uneasy. “Distract them with other matters,” Braydic said. “You are, almost literally, fighting for your life. Guard yourself well.” Then she shifted subject again. “Though you cannot tell by looking, the thaw has begun. As you can see on the flow monitors.”

Marika joined Braydic before one of the vision screens. She was more comfortable with things than with meth. She had a flair for manipulating the keyboards, though she did not comprehend a third of what Braydic told her about how they worked. In her mind electronics was more witchcraft than was her talent. Her talent was native and accepted fact, like her vision. She did not question or examine her vision. But a machine that did the work of a brain... Pure magic.

Columns of numeral squiggles slithered up the screen. “Is it warmer in the north than it is here, Braydic?” She had sensed no weakening of winter’s grasp.

“No. Just warmer everywhere.” The communicator made a minor adjustment command to what she called an outflow valve. “I am worried. We had so much snow this winter. A sudden rise in temperature might cause a meltoff the system cannot handle.”

“Open the valves all the way. Now.”

“That would drain the reservoirs. I cannot do that. I need to maintain a certain level to have a flow sufficient to turn the generators. Else we are without power. I cannot do my work without power.”

Marika started to ask a question. A tendril of something brushed her. She jumped in a pup’s sudden startle reaction. Braydic responded with bared teeth and a snarl, an instinctual reaction when a pup was threatened. “What is it, Marika?” She seemed embarrassed by her response.

“Someone is coming. Someone silth. I have to leave.” She was not supposed to be in the communications center, exposed to its aura.

There were many things she was not supposed to do. She did them anyway. Like make sneak visits to Grauel and Barlog. The silth could not keep watch all the time. She slept so little. And the fortress’s huntresses seemed disinclined to watch her at all, or to report observed behavior that was not approved.

She suspected Grauel and Barlog were responsible, for allthey admonished her incessantly in their brief meetings. She caught occasional hints that her packmates had developed fierce reputations among Akard’s untalented population.

Marika slipped away through a passage which led to the roof and the metal tree. Up there the aura still disoriented her, though not so she was unable to slide away in the moonlight and take a place upon the northern wall, staring out at the bitter snowscape.

To her, winter did not appear to be loosening its grip.

From the edges of her eyes she seemed to see things moving. She did not turn, knowing they would not be there if she looked. Not unless she forced her talent with hammer-blow intensity.

She did not look up at the great cold sky either, though she felt it beating down upon her, calling.

Someday, she thought. Someday. If Braydic was right. Someday she would go.

Chapter Ten

I

It was a winter like the one preceding, when the doom had come to the upper Ponath. Harsh. But it began with a lie, hinting that it would be milder. After it lulled everyone, it bared its claws and slashed at the upper Ponath with storm after storm, dumping snow till drifts threatened to overtop Akard’s northern wall. Its chill breath howled without respite, and left everything encrusted with ice. For a time the Akard silth lost touch with their Reugge sisters in the south.

It was a winter like the one preceding. The nomads again came down out of the north in numbers greater than before. Many of the packs that survived the first invasion succumbed to this one — though much of the bad news did not reach Akard till after winter’s departure. Still, scores of refugees appealed for protection, and the silth took them in, though grudgingly.

Twice small bands of nomads appeared on the snowfields beyond the north wall, fields where during summer meth raised the fortress’s food crops. They examined the grim pile of stone, then moved on, not tempted. Marika chanced to be atop the wall, alone and contemplating, the second time a group appeared. She studied them as closely as she could from several hundred yards.

“They are not yet suicidal in their desperation,” she told Braydic afterward.

“The key phrase is ‘not yet,’” Braydic replied. “It will come.” The communicator was a little distracted, less inclined to be entertaining and instructive than was her custom. The ice and cold kept her in a constant battle with her equipment, and in some cases she did not possses the expertise to make repairs. “This cannot go on. There is no reason to expect the winters to get better. They had best send me a technician. Of course, they do not care if they never hear from us. They would be pleased if the ice just swallowed us.”

Marika did not believe that. Neither did Braydic, really. It was frustration talking.

“No. They will not try it yet, Marika. But they will one day. Perhaps next winter. The next at the latest. This summer will see a stronger effort to stay in the upper Ponath. We have given them little difficulty. They will be less inclined to run away. And they are becoming accustomed to being one gigantic pack. This battle for survival has eclipsed all their old bitternesses and feuds. Or so I hear when my truesister and the others gather to discuss the matter. They foresee no turns for the better. We will get no help from Maksche. And without help we will not stem the flood. There are too many tens of thousands of nomads. Even silth have limitations.”

What little news filtered in with the fugitives was uniformly grim and invariably supported Braydic’s pessimism. There was one report of nomads being spotted a hundred miles south of Akard, down the Hainlin. Braydic received some very bitter, accusing messages because of that. Akard was supposed to bestride and block the way to the south.

The communicator told Marika, “My truesister will not send anyone — not even you — hunting nomads in these storms. We are not strong. We do not have lives to waste. Come summer. Then. When there is only the enemy to beware.”

Enemy. As a group. The concept had only the vaguest possibility of expression in the common speech of the upper Ponath. Marika had had to learn the silth tongue to find it. She was not pleased with it.

Indeed, the senior and silth of Akard did nothing whatsoever to arrest the predations of the nomads. Which left Marika with severely mixed feelings.

Packs were being exterminated. Her kind of meth were being murdered daily. And though she understood why, she was upset because their guardians were doing nothing to aid them. When some pawful of refugees came in, bleeding through the snow, frostbitten, having left their pups and Wise frozen in the icy forests, she wanted to go howling through the wilderness herself, riding the black, killing ghosts, cleansing the upper Ponath of this nomad scourge.

It was in such moods that she made her best progress toward mastery of the silth magic. She had a very strong dark side.

That winter was a lonely one for her, and a time of growing self-doubt. A time when she lost purpose. Her one dream involved the stars ever obscured by the clouded skies. It seemed ever more pointless and remote in that outland under siege. When she reflected upon it seriously, she had to admit she had no slightest idea what fulfilling that dream would cost or entail.

She did not see Grauel or Barlog for months, even on the sly — which was just as well, probably, for they would have recognized her dilemma and have taken the side which stood against dreams. They were not dreamers. For wilderness huntresses maturation meant the slaying of foolish dreams.

Braydic encouraged the dreamer side, for whatever reasons she might have, but the communicator’s influence was less than she believed. Coming to terms with reality was something Marika had to accomplish almost entirely for herself.

The lessons went on. The teaching continued throughout long hours. Marika continued to learn, though her all-devouring enthusiasm began to grow blunted.

There were times when she feared she was a little mad. Like when she wondered if the absence of her nightmares of the previous year might not be the cause of her present mental disaffection.

The Degnan remained unMourned. And there were times now when she felt guilty about no longer feeling guilty about not having seen the appropriate rites performed.

It was not a good year for the wild silth pup from the upper Ponath.

II

The kagbeast leapt for Marika’s throat. She did not move. She reached inside herself, through the loophole in reality through which she saw ghosts, and saw the animal as a moving mass of muscle and pumping blood, of entrails and rude nervous system. It seemed to hang there, barely moving toward her, as she decided that it was real, not an illusion conjured by Gorry.

A month earlier she would have been so alarmed she would have frozen. And been ripped apart. Now her reaction was entirely cerebral.

She touched a spot near the kagbeast’s liver, thought fire, and watched a spark glow for a fragment of a second. The kagbeast began turning slowly while still in the air, clawing at the sudden agony in its vitals.

Marika slipped back through her loophole into real time and the real world. She stood there unmoving while the carnivore flailed through the air, missing her by scant inches. She did not bother to turn as it hit the white floor behind her, claws clacking savagely at the stone. She did not allow elation to touch her for an instant.

With Gorry directing the test, there might be more.

She was not surprised that Gorry had slipped a genuine killer into the drill. Gorry hated her and would be pleased to be rid of her in a fashion that would raise few questions among her sisters.

The old silth had warned her often enough publicly that her education could be deadly. She had made it clear that the price of failure might have to be paid at any time.

Gorry had had to explain the price of failure only once.

Marika could not sneak into Gorry’s mind the way she had Pohsit’s. But she did not need to do so. It was perfectly evident that Gorry had inherited Pohsit’s mantle of madness. Gorry scarcely bothered concealing it.

The kagbeast howled and hurled itself at Marika once more. Once again she reached through her loophole. This time she touched a point at the base of its brain. It lost its motor coordination. When it hit the floor it had no more control than a male who had stolen and drunk a gallon of ormon beer.

She considered guiding the beast to the stair leading up to the balustrade. But no. She pushed that thought aside. There would come a better time and place.

The kagbeast kept trying. Tauntingly, Marika reached through and tweaked nerve ends so that it felt it was being stung.

While she toyed with her adversary, Marika allowed a tendril of touch to drift upward to where Gorry leaned upon the balustrade. She looked at the old silth much as she had done with the kagbeast. She did not touch the silth’s mind, though. Did not alert Gorry to the true extent of her ability. That would come some time when the old silth was not alert.

Marika had waited almost two years. She could wait awhile longer to requite her torment.

Gorry’s heart was beating terribly fast. Her muscles were tense. There were other signs indicating extreme excitement and fear. Her lips were pulled back in an unconscious baring of teeth, threatening.

Marika allowed herself one brief taste of triumph.

The old one was afraid of her. She knew she had taught too well in her effort to make the teaching deadly. She knew her pupil. Knew a reckoning had to come. And feared she could not survive it even now.