Spider Wars: Book Three of the Black Bead Chronicles (20 page)

“
Of course not. This
treaty was negotiated with the full knowledge and consent of your
ruling council who dictated the terms. What is the nature of this
bombardment?”

Cheobawn’s mind reeled
once again. Mora knew. How could that be? Only the Fathers went down
to meet the river traders at Meetpoint. Yet somehow Mora had managed
to parlay with foreigners all the while pretending that things like
Lowlanders, Spacers, Scerrons, and Spiders did not exist. She tried
to follow the lies and half lies and circles of secrets nested inside
secrets but her head started aching. For some unknown reason she
found her eyes turning to the upper shelf with its array of black
boxes. Tainted stones. Bloodstones of suspect provenance. Were they
linked to things other than tribes and domes? Had Mora sent
com-spheres down the Escarpment with the intent of establishing
treaties outside of the tribal matrices? Who knew of this other than
Mora?

“
Lady,” pleaded the
Scerron, “How can I keep you safe if you will not talk to me?”

“
Help me? How can you help
me? Mora is beyond your influence and you cannot stop the Spiders,”
Cheobawn sighed as she pulled her eyes away from the dead black boxes
and met the strange eyes. “Not with cold or wind or snow. They will
come no matter what you do. Call off your ice demons.”

“
I do not understand,
Lady,” the alien said. She held her hand out towards Cheobawn.
“Give me what you know. Perhaps I can put a different name on it.”

“
You are not here,”
Cheobawn said, confused by the hand hovering before her. It looked so
real and she was very tempted to reach out and investigate.

“
No, not in physical
form,” the Scerron agreed. “Call it a symbolic gesture. Distance
has no meaning between people such as you and I. Open your mind and
try to touch my hand. It is not hard. Just follow the lines in the
bloodstone that connect you to me.”

Cheobawn looked down at the
golden sphere in her lap.

“
I supposed that makes
sense,” she said doubtfully as she placed one palm flat against the
ball and looked up at the hand hovering just above it. Cheobawn
reached out and touched the illusion with the tip of her finger.

Mora’s office disappeared.
She found herself standing in a great white room, the walls and
ceiling lost in mist, her hand resting in the palm of the violet
Scerron.

“
You are safe, Lady,”
the Scerron said, her soft fingers stroking Cheobawn’s hand. “My
name is Oud. This is a name that only exists here, in this place,
between you and me.”

“
My name is Cheobawn
Blackwind but you can call me Ch’che if you want. How is it that I
can feel your touch now? Did you move through space? Or did I?”

“
Neither, Lady,” Oud
said with a laugh. “Our physical bodies still sit where we left
them. That which you perceive as a body is merely a construct you
created around the point of consciousness you inserted into the
bloodstone matrix. It looks and feels like your physical body because
that is what is most familiar to you.”

Cheobawn reached out with
her free hand and ran her fingers over the violet skin on the alien’s
arm. It was smooth and hairless and cool to the touch.

“
Do you feel like this or
am I inventing the feel of your skin to make you more real?”

“
Clever, clever girl,”
Oud said gently. “Pretend that it is real, and perhaps it will be.”
Its fingers traced the pulse in Cheobawn’s wrist and then followed
it up to the crook of her arm. Bending down to her level, she looked
into Cheobawn’s eyes. Oud had amazing eyes. They looked like beaten
gold and glittered from within. “I need you to think about these
things you call ice demons,” she instructed. “Try to give the
memories shape and form.”

How did one explain the
catastrophe of an entire winter with mere thoughts, Cheobawn
wondered? She thought about the beginning; the first storm. The mists
in the white room shifted and the Dragon Spine appeared under a blue
sky. Cheobawn looked down at her feet. She stood next to Oud upon the
apex of the dome; a shocking violation of the village rules. A cool
wind that smelled faintly of the sea coiled around her from behind
before continuing on towards the mountains. As she watched the Spine,
a line of clouds rose up from behind them, roiling and seething in a
long ominous wall of white before spilling over the ridge line and
running like water down into the valleys, swallowing everything in
its path.

“
This was the first storm.
Eight Fathers died this day along with a sixth of the dome’s
cattle,” Cheobawn said. “Herd Mother warned me about the ice
demons but I did not understand what she was saying and I was too
afraid to tell anyone else.”

“
Show me these demons,”
Oud suggested.

Cheobawn closed her eyes and
tried to reconstruct the vision in her head; the starry night above
the frozen plain, the shadow across the stars.

She opened her eyes and
leapt off the dome, spreading her arms wide to catch the wind. She
was only slightly surprised to find she did not have arms anymore,
but great leathery wings. She was a sky hunter. Cheobawn cupped the
wind between her long fingers and beat her way north. The land
streamed underneath her, flowing impossibly fast. She looked to her
side to see another sky hunter with eyes of beaten gold flying in her
slipstream.

“
What is this form?” the
sky hunter asked.

“
Teeth with wings,”
Cheobawn said with a laugh that showed every sharp fang.

“
There are other ways to
travel inside the stone matrix,” Oud pointed out.

“
As fun as this?”
Cheobawn asked. She beat her wings hard, rising in the air until the
mountains underneath them were mere anthills.

“
No, perhaps not,” Oud
said. “You are very clever, but then, I have already told you this.
Where are we going?”

“
There,” Cheobawn said,
pointing with her snout. A darkness hung at the top of the world,
untouched by the winter sun. The currents from space writhed upon the
magnetic storm at the pole like snakes of fire and light.

In the next moment the
lights surrounded her. She squawked in surprise and dove towards the
ground only to find she was already there. Cheobawn began to
understand the rules inside the stone matrix. Seeing was the same as
going. She would have to remember that next time. She lifted her
wings to slow herself down as she dropped. Just above the ground she
let go of the air and stretched her toes towards the ice, landing
lightly. The sky hunter body was heavy and awkward on the ground. She
disliked the feel. With a shake of her head, she grew antlers and
broad two-toed feet on all four limbs that splayed flat across the
snow like snowshoes.

“
What are we now?” asked
Oud, who had a thick white ruff, red antlers, and two knife shaped
ivory tusks protruding downward to well below her chin.

“
Hmm, I think we are snow
deer,” Cheobawn said, entranced by the feel and power of the body
she now wore.

“
Why are we here?”

“
Look up,” Cheobawn
said. “It is still here.”

Cheobawn laid her antlers
alongside her neck and lifted her chin to the sky. Oud followed her
example. The shadow was different. Was this a memory or were they
back upon the frozen plain in real time? She studied the place in the
sky where the stars had ceased to shine. It was not a shadow at all,
she decided but a hole torn into the fabric of the world. The
darkness in the center of the hole was absolute and impenetrable.

“
Ah,” Oud said.

“
Do you recognize it
then?” Cheobawn asked curiously, glancing over at her companion.

“
I believe I do,” Oud
said, wonder in her voice. “It is an event horizon.”

“
Words! Words. What does
that mean,” Cheobawn said, stamping her feet in frustration.

“
Think of it as a doorway
to somewhere else,” Oud said.

“
Did you call me out of my
rest to play dress-up with this child?” Bohea asked acidly.

Cheobawn spun around at the
sound of his voice. He stood upon the frozen plain in his sparkly
metal suit, glaring at the both of them. Oud shivered, shaking the
form of the snow deer away to regain her violet skinned appearance.

“
All apologies, Colonel,”
Oud said with a bow. “I deemed your presence prudent and
necessary.”

“
Leave her alone,”
Cheobawn said hotly. “If you want to be mad, be mad at me. I asked
to see you.”

“
Ah, Lady, how you have
changed,” Bohea said dryly. “I hardly recognized you?”

Was he making fun of her?
Cheobawn tried to glare at him but her snow deer face did not seem to
know how to do such a thing. She stamped her hooves and shook her
antlers instead.

“
Very impressive. Am I
supposed to be frightened?” Bohea asked, sounding bored.

“
I would not test the
limits of her abilities in this realm, Colonel,” Oud warned softly.
“Her kind play with bloodstones like your kind play with dollies
and toy tea sets.”

Bohea considered this for a
moment and then turned back to Cheobawn, bowing slightly, his arms
spread in surrender.

“
You would not hurt me,
would you Little Mother?” Bohea asked. “You know me.”

The last thing she wanted to
do was exchange words with Bohea. He was a master of words, twisting
every utterance to his advantage and turning her brain into soft
jelly.

“
A smoke leopard almost
ate Sigrid. Star is dead. This is all your fault,” Cheobawn said
angrily as she shook away her antlers and brushed her blond curls out
of her eyes. She pointed at the sky. “Make it stop.”

Bohea let his eyes follow
her finger. He grew quite still and his face lost its perpetual
sneer.

“
A natural event, do you
think?” Bohea asked then thought of something else. “Is this real
time?”

“
I would not hazard a
guess at either question,” Oud said with a solemn shake of her
head.

A bubble of light formed in
the heart of the darkest part of the hole. It shot towards the earth
until it touched the magnetic storm whereupon it whipped away, caught
like a leaf in a rushing stream. Cheobawn followed it with her eyes
as it tumbled free far to the south above the mountains of the Waste.

Bohea said some very harsh
words, most of which she did not understand.

“
How long has this been
going on?” he snapped. “Why has no one detected this before now?
Scramble the short range fighters. Where in all the cursed universe
is Lieutenant Lystand! I want his sensor array linked to this
station, now! Move!”

Cheobawn was fairly certain
he was not yelling at either her or Oud. Bohea finally looked down,
catching Oud with a cold look.

“
How long?” Bohea asked,
“We have flown over this spot a thousand times. Tell me this is a
recent event,”

“
Unfortunately I cannot
tell you any such thing,” Oud said, sadness conveyed in every
motion of her eloquent body. “According the child, it has been
active for almost half a planetary year.”

Bohea’s curse was succinct
and fervent. “How did we miss this thing?” he asked, looking up
at it again. “You are Scerron. Nothing happens in space that you do
not know about. Why has this gone unnoticed?”

“
Ah, but this is not like
anything we have encountered before. It is hard to guard against the
unexpected. As for your patrols, I would venture to guess that the
event is only visible from the planet surface and since flying below
the atmospheric envelope is prohibited by treaty, we might never have
spotted it had we not been warned.”

Another blue ball of light
fell to earth.

“
Conjecture as to the
nature of those objects?” Bohea asked Oud.

“
They are not ships. You
would have detected the signature telltales of Spider technology the
minute it dropped into real time. They seem to be linked to the
change in the planetary weather,” Oud said. “You yourself have
remarked in my hearing that one could hide all the moons of Vass
inside these storms. Perhaps we have caught it in time.”

Another ball dropped and
whipped away. Cheobawn stared after it as it fell to earth beyond the
horizon. Bear Under the Mountain nagged for attention somewhere in
the back of her mind. Look with more than eyes, he seemed to say.