Spider Wars: Book Three of the Black Bead Chronicles (3 page)

She looked up into Connor’s
eyes, hoping against hope that he understood that. She wasn’t sure
if she understood it herself. She could tell that the cogs inside his
head were working overtime by the pained look on his scrunched up
face. It was a handsome face, she decided. Not as beautiful as Tam’s,
but rougher boned, promising much as he grew into manhood. She found
herself smiling gently at the thought of growing old with Connor.

“
What does that mean? Too
much information?” Connor asked. “You are having a hard time
sorting the data input? Good data versus useless background noise?
You gotta think like a data mining program. Just figure out what you
want to know and ignore the rest,” Connor said, nodding like an
oldpa dispensing sage advice.

Cheobawn laughed at the
crystal-brain analogy, as if a human brain could be programmed and
then ignored. It was such a boy’s way of looking at the world. If
only the problem was so simple or the solution so obvious, she
thought.

“
Maybe it is just that
simple,” she said, choking down her amusement, “Ignore the bad
and wait for the good to make itself obvious.”

“
See. You get it. You just
have to be patient.” Connor nodded like an oldpa dispensing nuggets
of old-timey wisdom.

“
What good advice,” she
said, acid dripping from every word. “Oh, wait. Isn’t that what I
said I was already doing?”

“
No,” Connor yelled in
annoyance. “You wanted to solve the problem by ignoring everything,
the good along with the bad.”

“
That’s not fair,” she
said, matching his passion with her own. “You have no …“

“
Goddess! There is that
word again,” he said, cutting her protest off half uttered. “Did
you tell anyone else about your problem? Did you ask for help? No.
You let us all go on believing you were keeping track of things. Am I
right that you have not been reading the map for weeks now?”

“
Well, yes, but …”

“
Did you think the problem
would go away if you ignored it?”

“
Sometimes that is a good
strat …“

“
Hah!” His bark cut her
off. He was obviously on a roll and not to be diverted from the point
he was trying to make. “Name me one time a problem ever went away
all by itself. You can’t. Because it never happens. You gotta face
….”

“
OK! I get it,” she
yelled. “You seem to know everything. Tell me, oh wise one, what
should I do?”

Connor opened his mouth and
then closed it again. He scrubbed his face with his hands. He blew a
couple of long, slow breaths. Finally he looked up at her.

“
I don’t think we have
any other choice. The dome can’t afford to lose anymore animals. We
need to tell Vinara that the herds in the orchard meadows are in
jeopardy. Don’t you agree?”

Vinara
stood in the center of her domain and rocked back and forth on her
heels as she solemnly considered the two children in front of her.
Cheobawn did her best to look innocently earnest despite the rising
anxiety that made her want to dance around the head drover like a
bennelk anxious to be out and running. Perhaps what she felt was not
her own anxiety. If felt suspiciously like the bennelk storm sense -
like fire running along her nerve endings. Her efforts at keeping the
psi world out of her head failed the closer she came to the bennelk,
who felt everything and now stamped nervously in their stalls.

“
The Watch Ears have given
no indication of an impending storm,” the Elder Mother said
doubtfully, her words becoming clouds in front of her face in the
bitter cold air.

“
The bennelk seem sure,”
Connor said with utter confidence. Vinara raised an eyebrow and
looked at Cheobawn.

“
Perhaps, Young Father, if
I had a more concise report from your Ear, I might be better able to
give direction about your warnings,” Vinara said.

Protocol? Just like an Elder
to make them follow the rules of protocol when dire things were
coming down the road at them. Cheobawn stamped her feet in
frustration and not a few bennelk trumpeted in sympathetic agreement,
their calls a muffled echo behind the closed doors of the barns.

“
Do not rile my animals,
Little Mother,” Vinara said evenly, her own emotions hidden deep
down inside her where no one could see. “It exhausts them before
they have stepped even one foot out of the stalls. I think you
mistake my intentions. I do not doubt that you think you know
something, but I will have it presented in a coherent manner so that
I do not look the fool when I take your case to the Fathers or the
Coven.”

Cheobawn blew out a great
puff of air, like a nervous bennelk on the verge of panic. “Their
coats get all prickly,” Cheobawn said as she tried to scratch her
ribs with her mittened hands but was stymied by the thick layers of
parka and duster, “especially when the hard cold settles down in
the deep valleys north of the Spine. They always know when the
grimstorms are coming.”

It was more complicated than
that but Cheobawn did not have the mental focus to explain the
meteorology of the Dragon Spine’s most dangerous kind of storm and
she was certain Vinara knew more than she did about the subject. The
cold was only part of the problem. Things got ugly when the winds
shifted and blew north out of Orson’s Sea - the warm, shallow ocean
a thousand leagues to the south. Heavy with moisture and drawn like a
magnet to the massive, slow spirals of cold air that slid south off
the pack ice at the northern pole, they collided above the spires of
the mountains to produce continent-sized cyclones of snow and wind
that scoured the high meadows down to bare earth and deposited
immense drifts of snow in the forests at the base of the Spine,
enough to bury even the tallest of trees in places.

Was it real or her
imagination that she thought she could smell the ocean on the still
air under the stable dome? Cheobawn chased that fancy out of her head
and tried to shut out the mind-chatter coming from the bennelk herd
as well. She wanted to be annoyed with them - thinking perhaps that
she could use her anger to shore up the walls around her mind - but
thought better of it. She could not fault them their anxiety. This
winter had been hard for Connor and her but it had been harder on the
bennelk. There was something about the grimstorms that spooked the
herd, and there had been more of them this winter than any other
winter that the Elders could remember.

Vinara wanted information
but there were secrets not even she could bring herself to speak of.
Herd Mother thought there were ice demons in the clouds. She could
not dissuade the dominant bennelk from that conviction despite all
that Cheobawn tried to tell her otherwise.

It is just the air,
Cheobawn had insisted.
It is so cold it turns dry and then it
cracks any soft tissue it touches and it is this that makes your skin
itch and the bones inside your head hurt.

The sky gods are causing
trouble in the high places on purpose and nothing good will come of
it,
Herd Mother had warned, unconvinced. The outlandishness of
that statement had so overwhelmed Cheobawn at the time that she had
not found words to counter it.

Vinara bent down and touched
Cheobawn’s cold cheek with the tip of her mittened fingers.
Cheobawn blinked, pulling herself back into the moment.

“
Herd Mother talks too
much,” Vinara said, making Cheobawn’s heart jump. Did Vinara read
minds or had she said something aloud to betray her inner thoughts?
“Shut her out for a moment, child,” the head drover continued.
“Look into my eyes and tell me what I need to know to keep this
dome alive until the spring lambs are born.”

Cheobawn felt the words
spill out of her mouth almost of their own volition. “There is a
storm hanging just behind the White Dragon like an invisible soap
bubble waiting to be popped. The sun will set and the cold air will
fall off the lip of the Escarpment, creating a vortex that will suck
the ocean winds north. You have until tomorrow afternoon, maybe
tomorrow evening at the latest. This will not be small like the other
storms. The Northern Wastes have been growing progressively colder
for the last few months and the southern latitudes are warming with
an early spring. The two forces will battle for domination of the
skies and anything that is caught in the open will die.” This was
getting to be a bad habit, this talking without any forethought, she
thought remotely. How had she let her gifts get so out of control?

Vinara grunted as she
straightened her spine and rose to her full height. It was the sound
of someone carrying an extraordinarily heavy burden. Facing north,
her eyes probed the distance but it was not the dome she was trying
to see. “So. Sending the herds to graze on the unharvested
hayfields, while clever and pragmatic, has turned into yet another
dome threatening mistake,” she muttered bitterly to herself. She
looked down at Connor and Cheobawn, her mouth suddenly gone thin in
grim determination.

“
How fast can you two get
dressed for a bennelk patrol?” the head drover asked abruptly.

“
Us?” The word was no
more than a squeak. This sudden twisty turn of events alarmed her.

“
As you said, Little
Mother, the bennelk are acting spooky. I do not know that I can
convince them to leave the stable and I think that perhaps you can
help.”

“
You don’t need us both,
do you?” Connor asked, not liking this at all. He was a mediocre
rider on his best days, finding the bennelk far too full of fits of
temper for his liking. She suspected his experiences riding to the
Meetpoint Camp two summers ago had not been a good way to initiate a
novice rider. It seemed to have forever soured him towards anything
with four legs.

Vinara sighed patiently. “An
Ear needs her Pack. Who else but you can ride at this Little Mother’s
back and keep her safe? Now be off with you and tell whoever is in
the security station on the South Gate to send out a Level Three
emergency alert on my post.”

Cheobawn and Connor
exchanged alarmed glances.

Vinara shouted at them,
shooing them off. “Go! Is that your idea of fast? We’ve got five
hours of solid daylight left and I’ve got a score of bennelk to
saddle. Move!“

Connor grabbed Cheobawn by
the hand and jerked her into motion as Vinara began bellowing orders
at the top of her voice. Her apprentices popped out of a dozen
doorways and began dashing madly about, throwing open gear lockers
and barn doors.

“
This isn’t exactly how
I imagined I would be spending my Restday,” Connor said sourly as
he pressed his palm onto the security scanner under the South Gate’s
com unit.

“
Hmm, who was it that
wanted to act the hero and not wait for the Watch report?” Cheobawn
asked as she smiled sweetly up at the camera. “Smile for Gudu.”

Connor scowled up at the
camera and made a gesture that was less than polite. Cheobawn
groaned. Being Finn’s apprentice, Gudu had long been familiar with
the personalities and their dynamics inside Blackwind Pack, having
seen them at work in the Finn’s workshop. The journeyman machinist
had a perverse sense of humor, If he thought he could goad Connor
into an emotional outburst he could very well make them stand outside
for hours while they performed acrobatic tricks for his pleasure.

“
Now, that wasn’t nice,
Blackwind pipsqueak,” Gudu said over the comunit. “Show me your
red tag.”

Cheobawn sighed. They had
come through the gate not fifteen minutes before and she was fairly
certain they had been in full view of Gudu’s cameras the whole
time, but Gudu was well within his rights to demand to see the token.

“
Just open the door,
Gudu,” Connor yelled. “We have things to do.”

“
I think you should show a
little more respect for the authority of my office, little omega,”
Gudu said with an offended sniff. “Why is Vinara shouting like
that? Have you been messing with her animals again, Little Mother?”

“
I’ll show you respect
….” Connor sputtered, insulted to the core by the reference to
his low rank in the Pack.

“
I am sorry if Connor is
being rude, Gudu, but we have just cause. Vinara says she has a level
three emergency. She wanted us to tell you that,” Cheobawn said as
she put a hand on Connors shoulder to silence him. “We have to get
in, get equipped and get back to ride with the patrol. Please open
the doors.”

“
By all that is holy. Why
didn’t you say that in the first place? Get a move on.” Gudu’s
order had not yet found its way out of the speaker before the doors
began to swing open. Cheobawn did not wait. She pressed her body
through the widening crack and dragged Connor through behind her.