Sheri Tepper - Jinian 02 - Dervish Daughter

  Sheri Tepper - Jinian 02 - Dervish Daughter

  CHAPTER ONE

  Just across the chasm from the town of Zog a bunch of wild brats with crossbows-and poisoned arrows, to add to the general sense of fun-had given us quite a run. We'd barely gotten away from them with our skins whole.

  There had been constant storm damage blocking the roads, continuous sullen clouds, and a threatening mutter of sentient-seeming thunder.

  I had a huge, aching lump on my forehead from not being quick enough ducking into the wagon during the hail storm four days before. Hail the size of goose eggs!

  Add to that the remains we kept finding along the way, more and more of them as we went farther north. Human remains, mostly, and the yellow dream crystals that had killed them.

  Throw in the fact we'd been driving two days and nights without sleep, dodging shadow, which seemed to be everywhere.

  Then season the whole horrid mess with a harsh scream as a night bird plummeted across the moonlit sky screeching, "Lovely dead meat, not even rotten yet!" I understood it as easily as though it had been shouted at me by some old dame in the underbrush. The bird's cry said "human meat," not some luckless zeller killed by a pombi's claws. I put my hand over Queynt's where they lay on the reins.

  He snapped out of his doze, immediately alert, as I reached beneath the wagon seat for my bow. "More trouble ahead," I said wearily, nocking an arrow.

  Queynt yawned, giving my bow a doubtful look. Though he had been teaching me to shoot with the stated intention of providing for the pot, my inability to hit anything smaller than a gnarlibar had become a joke. They had begun to call natural landmarks that were suitably huge a "good target for Jinian." The problem was that I couldn't shoot anything that talked to me. Oh, if someone else shot it, I could eat it, and if something came at me with unpleasant intent, I was able to kill it readily enough no matter what it was saying. Bunwits and zeller and tree rats, however, were safe from my arrows so long as they said good morning politely. I hadn't discussed this with Queynt, though I thought he suspected it.

  He glanced down, then back into the wagon where his Wizard's kit was. I knew he was considering getting out his own bow or taking time to set a protection spell, evidently deciding against it. We'd learned to trust the instincts of Yittleby and Yattleby in times of danger, and neither of the two tall krylobos pulling the wagon seemed overly disturbed. Their beaks were forward, their eyes watchful as we came around a curve at the crest of a hill, but neither of them showed any agitation.

  We came out of the jungle at the top of a long, sloping savannah, dotted with dark, crouching bushes and half-lit by a gibbous moon. I could see all the way to the bottom of the hill where the forest started again and two twinkling lanterns, amber and red, moved among the trees near the ground. That had to be Peter and Chance. They'd been riding ahead and had evidently found something, disturbing the bird at the time. Queynt clucked to the krylobos, and we began the slow descent toward the lanterns with him looking remarkably alert for such an old man.

  Vitior Vulpas Queynt is over a thousand years old.

  Everything I have learned about him indicates this is really true and not some mere bit of rodomontade. He hadn't made a special point of claiming to be that old, mind you; it simply came out as we went along. Peter and I had met him a couple of years before, or rather, he had picked us up on the road-he and his remarkable tall-wheeled wagon and the two huge birds that pulled it. He had picked us up and made use of us and we of him, all in a fit of mutual suspicion, and when it was over we found ourselves quite fond of one another. And the birds, too, of course. Krylobos are very large-tailless, as are all native creatures of this world, with plumy topknots and somewhat irascible tempers. They like me since I can talk to them, and I like them because they dislike the same things I do.

  Bathing in very cold water, for example. Or eating fruit that isn't quite ripe. They don't have teeth to set on edge, but the expression around their beaks is quite sufficient to evoke sympathy. Which is beside the point. Queynt has a fondness for fantastical dress and ornamental speech and enjoys being thought a fool. He says he learns a great deal that way. He is an explorer at heart, so he has said, and exploring is what he and Peter and Chance and I had been doing for some time. He is the only person to whom Chance has ever given unstinting admiration. So Peter says, who has known Chance far longer than I.

  This admiration is more understandable in that Vitior Vulpas Queynt and Chance much resemble each other. Both are brown, muscular men who look a little soft without being so at all. Both are jolly-appearing men who seem a little stupid and aren't. And both have quantities of common sense. As for the rest of it, Queynt is a Wizard of vast experience and education, while Chance is an ex-sailor with a fondness for gambling who was hired to bring Peter up safely and did so--more or less. Both of them have had a certain tutelary role in our lives. Peter's and mine, and truth to tell, I like them both mightily. Even on an occasion like this, when weariness made it hard to be fond of anyone.

  We approached the lanterns. A faint sweetish smell told me everything I wanted to know about it before we got there. More dream crystal deaths.

  Before we ever started on this trip-after the Battle of the Bones on the Wastes of Bleer it was, when we were all remarkably glad merely to be alive-I had known about dream crystals. My un-mother (the woman who bore me but did not conceive me, if that makes sense) had had at least one. It had led her into ruin and ended, I supposed, by killing her. My much hated enemy, Porvius Bloster, had had one, and it had done him no good at all except to make him exceed his limitations and bring destruction upon his Demesne. Even girls at school had had dream crystals, assortments of them, like candies. I had known what they were in a casual way, known enough to stay away from them and mistrust those who used them, but it was not until this trip that I had seen them in general use. Misuse. Whatever. It was not until this trip I had seen them killing people by the dozens. There, that's plain enough.

  The current situation was a case in point. It was another of those pathetic encampments we had seen entirely too many of during the past season. One couldn't dignify the structures even as huts. They were the kind of shelter a bored child might build in a few careless moments; a few branches leaned against a fallen tree-its trunk loaded with epiphytes and fogged by a dense cloud of ghost moths-and a circle of rocks rimming a pool of ash. And the corpses.

  Three of them this time; man, woman, and baby. Starved to death, from the look of them, and with food all round for the picking or digging-furry, thick-skinned pocket-bushes full of edible nuts, a northern thrilp bush-smaller fruit, and sweeter than the southern variety-table roots just beside the tiny stream.

  "Hell," I said to Queynt, disgusted. "I suppose they've got those yellow crystals in their mouths, like all the rest."

  Half-right. In the lantern light we could see the male corpse had one on a thong around his neck; the female had one in her mouth, having sucked herself to death on it. Their bodies were still warm. The baby was cold, probably dead of dehydration after screaming his lungs out for several days trying to tell someone he was hungry and thirsty and wet. Chance and Peter were dismounted by the corpses.

  Peter gave me a troubled look, knowing I'd be upset by the baby. Chance eased his wide belt and mused, "I suppose we could dig them in, though there seems little sense to bother."

  At first we'd stopped to bury the human dead along the road, but they had become more and more numerous as we came farther north. There had soon been too many to bury, but it still bothered me to let the babies lie. "I'll bury the baby," I said in a voice that sounded angry even to me. "Let the o
thers alone."

  Queynt shook his head, but he didn't argue. All the babies reminded me of one I'd taken care of in a class back in Xammer. The one in Xammer had the same baffled look when he fell asleep that many of the dead babies did, as though it had all been too much for him and he was glad to be out of it. I wrapped this one in our last towel, reminding myself to buy towels the next time we got to any place civilized-if there were any place civilized in these northlands. I'd used up our supply burying babies and children.

  Queynt said, "Jinian, if you're going to go on like this, I'll lay in a supply of shrouds. It would be cheaper than good toweling."

  I flushed, getting on with the half-druggled grave I was digging with the shovel we used for latrine ditches.

  "I know it doesn't make sense, Queynt, but otherwise I get bad dreams." He already knew that; we'd discussed it before.

  "There's a city somewhere ahead," said Peter, trying to change the subject. "I can hear it."

  It wasn't surprising. He had Shifted himself a pair of ears which stood out like batwings on either side of his head. Probably hadn't even realized he was doing it. I turned away to hide the expression on my face-he did look silly-only to see Queynt touching his tongue to the crystal the dead man had had around his neck.

  Even though Queynt had told us over and over he was immune, seeing him do that made me shudder. I was going to find out about that alleged immunity sooner or later, but so far he hadn't explained it. Now he saw me shiver and shook his head at me.

  "We have to know, girl!"

  Well, he was right. We did have to know. Those louts outside Zog had had crystals hanging around their necks, too. Reddish ones. Queynt hadn't had a chance to taste one of those, but then he hadn't needed to. It was evident what dreams of violence and rapine they were breeding in the brats. Along with everything else, they had been chanting a litany to Storm Grower while they tried to kill us. We'd been hunting Storm Grower for some seasons now, and hearing the name in this context made the hunt seem even more ominous than we'd already decided it was.

  Queynt nodded at me about this yellow crystal, telling me it was like the others we'd found beside the dead bodies along the road. Anyone touching it to his tongue would be utterly at peace, in a place of perfect contentment with no hunger, no thirst, no desires.

  Someone sucking a crystal like that wouldn't hear a baby crying or the sound of their own stomach screaming for food. Someone sucking on that dream would lie there and die. And there were hundreds along the road who had done just that-families, singletons, even whole mounted troops, dead on the ground with the horses still saddled and wandering. We'd found one pile of small furry things which Queynt believed were Shadowpeople, though the carrion birds had left little enough to identify. All with yellow crystals in their mouths, their hands, or on thongs around their necks.

  We hadn't found a single one on anyone still living.

  When the grave was filled in, I pulled myself up on the wagon seat again. Queynt nodded sympathetically as we started off into the gray light of early dawn.

  "Someone's getting rid of excess population," he mumbled. "Dribs and drabs of it."

  "What I can't figure out is how and why certain ones are so all of a sudden excess! We've found dead Gamesmen and dead pawns, young and old, male and female. All with these same damn yellow things. The crystals are all alike, same color, same size. Someone has to be making them!"

  "You've mentioned that before, Jinian. Several times, as I recall." He sighed, yawned, scratched himself. "You know, girl," he drawled, going into one of his ponderous perorations, "though we may conjecture until we have worn imagination to shreds, theorize until our brains are numb with it, baffle our knowledge with mystery and our logic with the futility of it all, until we find out where they're coming from, anything we guess is only hot air and worth about as much." He fell into a brooding silence as we rattled on with the krylobos talking nonsense to one another and Peter and Chance riding just ahead. So we had ridden, league on league, hundreds and hundreds of them, ever since leaving the lands of the True Game. Some days it seemed we'd been riding like this forever.

  I could see Peter's animated profile from time to time as he turned to speak to Chance. His face was bronze from the sun. He'd grown up, too, in the last few seasons. The bones in his cheeks and jaw were bold, no longer child-like, and there was a strong breadth to his forehead. It was his mouth that got to me, though, the way his upper lip curved down in the center, a funny little dip, as though someone had pinched it. Every time I saw that, I wanted to touch it with my tongue. Like a sweet. No. Not like a sweet. Well, I needed comforting, and seeing him there within reach, within touching distance, made me want to yell or run or go hide in the wagon.

  Sometimes I wished that the way I felt about Peter was an illness. If it were an illness, a Healer could cure it. As it was, it went on all the time with no hope of a cure. Every morning when the early light made sensuous wraiths of the mists, every evening when the dusk ghosts crept into erotic tangles around the foliage (see, even my language was getting lubricious), I found myself thinking unhelpful thoughts that made me blush and breathe as though I'd been running. I furnished every grove with likely spots for dalliance, and lately I'd taken to crossing off every day that passed, counting the ones that remained until the season my oath of celibacy would be done.

  Queynt had been watching me; I caught his kindly stare and blushed. "Troubled about your oath?" he asked me sympathetically.

  He caught me unaware. One of the things that bothered me about Queynt was his habit of knowing what I was thinking. He wasn't a Demon. He had no business just knowing that way. "Yes." I turned red again. It wasn't any of his business, and yet... "By the Hundred Devils and all their pointy ears, Queynt, I can't understand the sense of it. They said it was to let me study the art without distractions, but I'm not studying the art! I'm traveling. Trying to keep my skin whole. Trying to locate Dream Miner and Storm Grower and find out why they want me dead. Praying Peter keeps on being fond of me at least until the oath runs out. Celibacy doesn't seem to make a lot of sense!"

  "Oh," he said mildly, "it does, you know. If you examine it. For example, you've been doing summons, haven't you?"

  Well, I had, of course. A few. I might have called up an occasional water dweller to provide a fish dinner. Or maybe a few flood-chucks, just to help us get through some timber piles on the road. I admitted as much, wondering what he was getting at.

  "Well, if you've been doing summons, have you ever stopped to think what an unconsidered pregnancy might do to the practice of the art?"

  An unconsidered pregnancy-or even a considered one-was about the furthest thing from my mind at the moment. But this was something not one of the dams had mentioned to me, not even the midwife, Tess Tinder-my-hand, who would have been the logical one to do so. My jaw dropped and I gave him an idiot look.

  "Well, let's say you're pregnant and you summon up something obstreperous in the way of a water dweller. Then you go through the constraints and dismissal, but the water dweller considers the child in your belly was part of the summons. That child has neither constrained nor dismissed. So, time comes you give birth to something that looks rather more like a fish than you might think appropriate. Recent research would indicate a good many of the magical races are the results of just such Wize-ardly accidents."

  "Mermaids? Dryads?"

  "Among others, and not the most strange, either. Have you ever called up a deep dweller?"

  I had heard them laugh a few times during bridge magic but had never called them. Murzy had told me to be careful, very careful, with them. I shook my head again.

  "I have. Pesky, mischievous creatures, but more than half-manlike, for all that. If it weren't for their fangy mouths, you'd think them children. I shouldn't wonder if that race came from some magical accident during pregnancy. Not that deep dwellers are common."

  All of which was something to think about. I snapped my mouth shut and thought about it
. I'd never really understood the reason for the oath--three years of celibacy (virginity in my case) sworn when I was just fifteen. I'd done it, of course, because they wouldn't let me be in the seven otherwise, and if I weren't in the seven, I couldn't go on studying the art.

  At that time, the art was just about all I had to care about except for the seven old dams themselves. Well, six and me.

  So, I took the oath, and got initiated, and learned some fascinating things, all a good bit of time before Peter came along. When he did come along, however, the oath began to feel like a suit of tight armor. There was it, all hard and smooth outside, and there was me, all sweaty and passionate inside. And that's the way this trip had gone, with me being hard and cold half the time and hiding in the wagon the rest of the time, afraid of what might happen if I came out. I didn't wonder that Queynt could see it. No one could have missed it.

  Peter came galloping back, head down, looking thoroughly tired and irritable. "More trees down. A real swath cut up ahead. We'll need to find a way around. No possible way of getting through it."

  When we arrived at the tumble, it was obvious he was right. Seven or eight really big trees, fallen into a kind of jackstraw mess, their branches all tangled together. Lesser trees were fallen in the forest, the whole making a deadfall that we could have scrambled through if we'd had a few extra hours with nothing better to do and hadn't minded leaving the wagon behind.