Spider Wars: Book Three of the Black Bead Chronicles (18 page)

Finally she turned to face
Mora’s office. The bloodstones whispered to each other, here,
inside this room; dozens of stones, each a part of a different family
of stones, talking to its sister-stones scattered across the width of
the continent, each stone sitting in an identical office inside an
identical dome. Alone in the dark with nothing but the bloodstones
touching her senses Cheobawn’s mind filled with the ghostly
afterimages that still lingered inside the crystal matrices. It had
been a typical day in the life of the tribes. The easternmost domes
slept and the westernmost tribes were just settling down for the
night. All seemed well in the world not yet aware or prepared for the
coming storms.

How many times had she done
this? She had lost count. This excursion into the forbidden had been
a habit, once.

The winter after she turned
seven - after Bohea and Sam had leapt off the Escarpment, willingly
and for wholly different reasons, and the High Council had forced
their own insanity on her, binding her lips from ever speaking the
truth by rewriting history - she had come here often. This was where
Mora kept Old Father Bhotta’s bloodstone, encased in its golden
shroud, a mirror bright bubble that hid the bloodstone inside a
cocoon of golden thread all leading to a brain crystal soldered to
the interior surface of the highly conductive housing. All it took
was the minute electrical currents in a human hand to trigger the
mechanism and connect it the other bloodstones.

Old Father did not sit in
the array of com-spheres set in their cradles on the cabinet behind
Mora’s desk. The Mothers, not knowing where the sisters of Old
Father’s stone had gotten to and in whose hands they now resided,
kept him in a field-damper box high on a bookshelf. Cheobawn pressed
her fingers onto the sensor plate on the wall just long enough to
turn the ceiling lights on to their lowest setting. Crossing the
room, she pulled the stepping stool out of its cubbyhole and set it
up below the array of matte black boxes. There were other boxes up
there, other stones with equally suspect provenances but Cheobawn
knew which one was Old Father’s. Last one on the left. Standing on
her toes on the top step, she slid her fingers under the cold box and
eased it off the shelf, catching it in her arms as it fell.

The box was not really cold
nor was it really black. The metal matrix forged by the Fathers in
the Iron House confused the light that touched it and sucked the
currents of electricity out of the air making it almost painful to
touch for anyone with a psi gift. Cheobawn set the box carefully on
the floor and then shook the life back into her fingers. The effects
did not last for long. They never did.

Sitting on the floor beside
the box, she used a fingernail to slide an almost invisible tab to
the side before pushing at the latch hidden underneath. The
spring-loaded lid popped open, revealing the golden orb inside.
Cheobawn did not touch it at first. She held her hands over it,
letting its energies warm to her as she cleared her mind and forced
her fear into its own black box. It had been more than a year since
she had listened last and that last time had been unpleasant.

After Sam had leapt from the
Escarpment, strapped to the Pack’s kite wing, before the Coven took
her own bloodstone away for good, she had listened to his progress,
her fingers pressed around the stone in her pocket, her mind blind to
everything but the faint echoes out of its ambient. She had listened
as Sam grew more confident in his flying skills. She heard his mind
churning, assessing his odds of survival and she had felt his dismay
as he tossed the first bloodstones out of his satchel and watched
them fall into the mist. She had ached as he ached; the throb of his
jaw, the pain of his broken nose, the bite wounds along one arm
pounding in sync with the pounding of his heart. On the long ride
back to Home Dome from Meetpoint dome, nestled in Hayrald’s arms,
atop Hayrald’s bennelk, safe at last, she could have let her own
pain and exhaustion consume her but instead she had fingered the
stone in her pocket, sending wish after wish Sam’s way; wishing to
ease his pain, wishing to keep him safe, wishing the winds under his
wing. By the time the Mother’s pried the stone from her stiff
fingers, Sam was still in the air, but twenty bloodstones lighter.

She felt oddly disquieted
without Old Father Bhotta’s stone, as if things had been left
undone and she needed to finish them. Mostly, it had bothered her,
not knowing. She was not so heartless that his death did not matter
to her. It had been Sam who had thrown himself on Garro to keep him
from killing her in the final throes of his poison wracked body. It
had been Sam who stood at her side and defied the will of Bohea and
Garro despite his own fear. It had been Sam, with no walls around his
mind, who had let her share what was perhaps more than was good for
two humans to share.

The night she found out that
Old Father Bhotta’s bloodstone had not gone into the boxes to be
secreted away in the Temple vaults with all the other forbidden
artifacts but was in fact sitting in Mora’s office, she had waited
until the dead of night to do exactly as she was doing now. She had
not had to search to find the stone then, either. Old Father Bhotta’s
ghost had met her in the hallway, coiling about her, gladness and
invitation murmuring faintly into the ambient, tugging her on. There
were no locks in the Dome, not even in Mora’s office. She had
merely closed her eyes and let Old Father lead her, guiding her
fingers to the box on the shelf. The moment Cheobawn had touched the
golden skin of the sphere an explosion of information had overloaded
her mind, blinding her. She forgot to breath, she forgot her body,
she forgot her name. She became a mote of light inside Old Father’s
matrix.

Forty-six stones. That’s
how many went off the Escarpment. She had flitted from one to the
next. Sam had scattered so many in his mad descent off the cliffs.
They lay in a great snaking line between Badnite Falls and the bean
field he had ultimately crash-landed in; they were buried in mud at
the edge of streams, drowned in ponds, smothered in bogs, lying half
submerged in hayfields and maise fields, and bathed in dappled
sunlight under the canopy of the last of the old growth forests down
below the Escarpment. She had found Sam at last, lying abed in a room
that smelled of strong soap and burning herbs that numbed his mind
and eased the aches in his body. The drugs stripped away all his
barriers and opened his mind to her, his senses becoming an extension
of her own. She forgot that she was a child sitting on the cold floor
of her Truemother’s office.

Later, it occurred to her
that perhaps she used the stones too often and that if she were not
careful the minds within the stone might supersede her own and she
would forget to come back. That first time, though, without caution
or common sense to guide her, she let go and let Sam’s mind consume
her.

She was Sam, thinking Sam’s
thoughts and in his thoughts a number flashed like a beacon in the
dark. Nine. Nine bloodstones. Nine was not a lot but put together in
one spot, they drowned out the noise of the other stones. Nine out of
the forty-six was all he had left as his strength gave out and the
wind and the kite betrayed him there at the last, gravity pulling him
down into the middle of a field to snap bones and re-injure his poor,
abused jaw. Images had tumbled about in his mind as her fingers had
convulsed around the golden sphere in her hands; images now embedded
in the matrices of the stone inside the sphere; the mind numbing
agony of crawling out of that field, flashes of a kind face bending
over him asking questions that had no coherent answers, another face
above the comforting presence of a white coat. Cheobawn had puzzled
out the reason for Sam’s relief. The white coat was the universal
uniform of a Lowlander healer; male, but a healer all the same.

Everyone kept asking
questions. Always the questions. Sam could not remember what he had
said in his delirium. Worry about that gnawed deep in his guts when
he was fully conscious. What had he told them? What lie could he
invent to calm their suspicions and keep them from reporting him to
the Guard? His immobile jaw gave him a grace period of enforced
silence but the wires holding his jaw together were set to be cut in
a few weeks and then he would have to speak. Cheobawn had hovered
there, inside Sam’s head, realizing all of a sudden that he had the
satchel with the nine stones under his pillow which seemed a very odd
place to keep them. She had been confused by his worries, not
understanding the strangeness of Lowlander customs. The worry weighed
Sam down and made his broken bones ache more, even under the numbing
effects of the healing smoke. For some reason, it worried him that
someone would take the stones from him. There was a concept in his
head that had a thousand words to describe it, words she could not
hear, but all based on the idea of someone taking what belonged to
another. She had chewed upon this particular bit of Lowlander
insanity for a bit, thinking she had misunderstood his thoughts.

Cheobawn’s confusion had
driven her out, away from the connections in the bloodstone. She had
jerked her fingers away from the sphere, wondering if insanity was
contagious, afraid to touch it after that except to gather it up
using the folds of her nightgown and roll it back into place inside
its black box.

For days after that,
Cheobawn had been haunted by the thought of Sam lying helpless and
broken while the Lowlander world moved in collusion against him. She
stayed away, too terrified to touch the stone again but thoughts of
Sam troubled her until she could barely sleep. Ten days later, in the
depths of a quiet night, compulsion won out over caution and she
found herself sitting on the floor in her nightgown cradling the Old
Father stone in her hands once more.

It was not Sam that she
heard, that time. Someone, a hunter, had stumbled upon one of the
lost stones. The intense emotions tied to that discovery overwhelmed
the entire matrix. The man’s euphoria seemed disproportionate to
the value of the thing he had pressed tightly against his heart. He
was making plans for his future, plans that seemed silly and
nonsensical. Her own giggling had broken the connection and woken her
from her fugue state.

The third time Cheobawn held
the stone, more than a week later, it was Sam’s terror that
controlled the matrix. He was no longer in the infirmary but now lay
in an airless basement with only a tiny lantern for light while he
listened to the footsteps and voices in the rooms above his head, the
satchel with the nine stones clutched tightly against his chest. Men
hunted Sam; hunted the bloodstones.

She tried to sort out the
crazy images cascading out of Sam’s mind. Secrets were only as good
as the people who kept them and someone had talked out of turn.
Strange men had come up river on the last supply barge. Hunters; some
following a rumor of bloodstones but others following the rumor of
Sam. Sam cowered in the dark and prayed with all his might to
whatever god might save him, fully convinced that the people above
his head would slit his throat and claim his stones. Cheobawn had
cried out in horror as she tossed the golden sphere away. It rolled
across the room and lodged under Mora’s desk and it had taken her
forever to gather the courage to retrieve it.

Fear kept her away after
that. Morbid curiosity drew her back. She had to know if Sam was
alive. Usually it only took a moment to feel him, to know he was
alive, to know that he and his stones were safe. The last time, four
months to the day after the death of Old Father, in the darkest part
of the year, as the dome made preparations for the celebrations of
Darknight Eve and the Coven was locked in the Temple undergoing their
rituals of purification, she held the sphere and went hunting for
Sam.

She found him, not in the
village, but standing upon the wooden deck of a river schooner,
reveling in the feel of the wind and the sun on his skin. He had only
five stones left in the purse at his waist, the others having gone as
gifts - one to the healer; one to the kind faced man who had first
found him, broken and hurt, in the field; one to the Elder of the
village that had hidden him from the hunters; and one to the Captain
and crew of the boat upon which he now stood. Five was not a lot of
bloodstones but it was enough to draw her thoughts to Sam, their
pooled power effectively blocking out the sleepy murmurings of the
other stones.

Sam was alive and well, his
bones healed. She had settled around him and eased into his
distracted mind as he studied the distant skyline. The place had a
name. Dunauken he called it, the beauty of the towers of his home
filling him with glorious relief. The city seemed naked, domeless as
it was with nothing between it and the clouds and rain. His boat
sailed for a long time past tall buildings before it came to the
docks not far from the base of the tallest towers.

She had been there, in his
mind, as the boat approached a dock full of men waiting to greet it.
She had felt his joy when he recognized his father’s face. Her own
heart had skipped a beat in harmonic communion with Sam’s when he
saw the face of the man standing at his father’s elbow: Bohea.