Chapter Ten
It was a dull group of travelers that headed back into Ogre Pass on the return journey from Lamdon to Bariken. Snow fell heavily, and a nasty wind snapped at them as they rode. Even the middle hours of the day were shaded and gloomy. Sira huddled in her furs, rocking with the hruss’s movements, lost in her own thoughts.
Shen, debilitated by too much of Lamdon’s wine two nights in a row, was also withdrawn. He had not mentioned either the Magistral Committee meeting or its purpose. Alks and Mike rode ahead, and Rollie, getting little response to her occasional tries at conversation, also lapsed into silence.
They left Lamdon very early, and rode until late that day, covering half again the usual distance for a day’s travel. Darkness was closing in, and Sira’s quiru in the evening took a few extra moments. The cold reached frigid fingers inside everyone’s furs to chill any skin it touched. Sira’s lips were stiff with it, and it was difficult to play.
When the quiru bloomed above them, Mike started the cooking fire. The party relaxed with the light glowing securely about them. Alks and Shen gossiped about Lamdon and its people while Rollie prepared the keftet and boiled water for tea. Only Mike remained impassive. When Sira looked at him, her psi prickled, and she thought something must be troubling him.
As the group settled down for the night, Sira spoke to Shen. “Magister, I think this quiru may need replenishing before morning. The wind may break it down.”
In fact, the snow was falling slantwise, and the tops of the irontrees soughed and danced above their campsite.
“All right,” Shen said. “Rollie, you waken the Cantrix mid-night, then sleep.”
Rollie nodded, and propped herself on her furs to take the watch. Mike and Alks had already gone outside the quiru with the Magister to relieve themselves. Now they stepped outside for the second time that evening, ducking their heads against the icy snow.
Sira was kneeling, unrolling her bedfurs and thinking only of warmth and sleep, when her psi suddenly screamed a warning. Her nerves flared, and she dropped her bedfurs and threw up her head. Instinctively, she cried, “Rollie!”
It was too late. Even as she heard her voice ring across the quiru, she whirled toward Rollie. It seemed to her shocked senses that a fur-tipped arrow simply appeared in Rollie’s bare throat. The rider’s face went slack as she fell backward, sprawling off her furs and into the snow.
Sira turned swiftly to Shen. A second atrocity unfolded so quickly she had no time to absorb it. An arrow pierced the Magister’s furs, and a long-handled knife followed a heartbeat later. His shock of graying hair reddened as blood leaped across it. He gave a long groan, and fell to one side to lie unmoving on his bedfurs.
Sira bit off another outcry. She could see no escape for her. She could not see the assailants in the darkness, while she and Rollie and the Magister were perfectly illuminated by the warm glow of her quiru. She straightened her back where she knelt, and was still. Her own arrow, bitterly punctual, pierced her body just below her collarbone. She, too, was meant to die.
Sira knew instantly that her wound was not mortal. By instinct, just the same, she let its impetus drive her down, prostrate her like the others. The point of the arrow drove through her flesh, and dug into the freshly fallen snow. She lay still, as if her spirit had fled beyond the stars, and she waited.
Hushed, tense voices sounded from outside the quiru. The killers were coming to assure themselves that everyone within was dead. The cold would have driven them into the warmth in any case. Assuming it was Alks and Mike, how were they planning to save themselves once the quiru dissipated?
All this Sira thought in a flash, while she lay motionless. She felt little at the moment, though she knew that when her body’s reaction to the danger wore off, she would feel the pain of her wound. Shen and Rollie were already dead, their minds past her hearing. She must convince the assassins that she was, too.
She allowed herself no surprise when not two, but four people came into the quiru. She knew them all. It was Mike who came to confirm that the three victims were dead. Sira sensed him leaning over Shen, with his double wounds, and poor Rollie, who had at least died instantly. As he came toward where she herself lay, she drew a veil over her mind, the darkest she could imagine. Mike bent low for a moment, as if listening for her breath. He could not bring himself, it seemed, to touch her. She sensed, even through the veil, his inability to overcome the tabu. She also sensed his repugnance for the task he believed he had accomplished.
Sira’s breaths were as shallow as she could make them. She lay listening to the voices.
Alks and Mike crouched around the fire with the two new arrivals. Wil, Housekeeper of Bariken, was there, speaking to the two riders. Another voice joined in, a voice that shocked Sira, a voice she could hardly believe. There was no precedent for a traitorous Singer, but she was there: it was the former Cantrix, plump, sly Trude.
Sira thickened the veil over her mind. She dared not react to the double betrayal. Trude, despite her years of undisciplined living, would pick up her thoughts if she did not bury them. Sira smoothed the waves of her mind until they were as flat and opaque as the lifeless rock beneath the snow.
Wil said, “We’ll cover the bodies as soon as we’ve had a chance to get warm. This campsite is enough off the trail, I think.”
“What about their things?” Trude asked.
“Their gear stays,” Wil answered. “If the story is that they got separated in the storm, their hruss and possessions would be lost, too.”
“It’s just—” Trude’s voice dropped. “Her filla . . .”
“Everything,” Wil said flatly. “No exceptions.”
There was a silence. So deeply had Sira forced herself below conscious thought that he heard their voices as if in a dream, a slow nightmare of cold and pain and shock. She hardly noticed as Alks and Mike piled snow over her body and the others. She suppressed even the faint hope that flickered at the knowledge that her filla would be left, still tucked beneath her tunic.
Through her blanket of snow, she heard the slaughtering of the hruss that had carried her. Like herself, it was buried in snow. It seemed an unnecessary cruelty. Hruss, after all, could survive the cold on their own, though they preferred the company of people. But Sira could not risk reacting to this, either, nor allow herself to experience her own rising pain, or the deep cold of her tomb of snow. Her infrequent breaths kept a pocket open above her mouth. Otherwise, she perfectly mimicked the corpses whose grave she shared.
A few hours before dawn she heard Trude playing a filla, competently enough, apparently, to strengthen the quiru. Sira waited. Some deep level of her mind knew her body was getting dangerously cold, but she suppressed her instinctive need to move, to warm herself. She lay still through the long hours, listening, breathing, but not thinking.
At last she heard shuffling and brushing sounds as the men obliterated the traces of the campsite. Distantly, Wil asked Trude some question.
“It will be gone in two or three hours, in this wind,” Trude said. Sira knew they meant the quiru, her last hope of survival. Still, she could not react, could not feel. Her hands and feet had gone numb, and she feared frostbite. She had been feigning death for hours.
The sounds of hruss and their riders faded away from her hearing. Sira thought she would wait another hour before attempting to break through her covering of snow, but when she began to feel warmer, she knew she did not dare. All Nevyans learned as children that the illusory sensation of warmth was the first sign of freezing to death. She feared her spirit might drift away after all if she did not move.
The snow was the dry, powdery snow of the mountain passes. Her searching arm reached the air quickly. It hurt to move, but she dug in reverse, making a hole upward through the drift until she could see the remains of the quiru. Mike’s arrow, crusted with snow, ground against her bones as she struggled.
Her left arm, the side where the arrow was, caused her too much pain when she tried to use it. It took half an hour of flaking away the snow cover, a single handful at a time, until her torso, and at last her legs, were free. She was too cold to know if she was still bleeding.
Her quiru faltered around the site, inadequately strengthened by Trude. She thought she had perhaps an hour before the last shreds of it dissolved. The remnants of the fire had been covered with snow, along with all other signs of human or hruss presence.
Sira feared using her filla now. Her betrayers could not be more than an hour’s ride away, and Trude’s ears, though dulled by years of abuse in everyday House life, might still be sharp enough to hear its bright timbre at a distance. Falling snow obscured the sun, which she supposed must be well overhead. The cooling quiru would be warm enough to sustain her for a little while, and she could address the problem of her wound.
As her body began to warm again, the pain of the offending shaft sharpened and grated, and its position inhibited her movement. It had to be removed. She felt fairly strong, considering the horror of the night she had just passed, which led her to think she could not have lost too much blood.
Casting about for a way to extract the arrow, she dug in the snow until she found a long thong that had been used to tie her pack onto her saddle. Rollie had fallen closest to her, and Sira reached, shuddering, beneath her friend’s furs to take the long-handled knife from her belt. She paused a moment with her hand on Rollie’s frozen one, offering a silent prayer for her safe passage beyond the stars.
It took her some minutes of sawing on the shaft of the arrow to cut all the way through it. The movement made the wood chafe against bone and flesh, and Sira had to rest several times until the nauseating pain subsided. Perspiration trickled over her body, and she gasped for breath. When the knife finally broke through the wood, the furred flight fell at her feet, and she drew a deep breath of relief.
She tied the thong around the smallest of the nearby trees. The hardest part was to reach behind her with her right arm to try to secure the other end of the thong around the arrowhead. She tried to stretch her arm over her shoulder, then down behind her back, but pain forced her to stop short of her goal.
After some thought, she made a loop like a hruss’s noose in the thong. She turned her back to it, and wriggled, trying to catch the arrowhead in the loop. She twisted and writhed, trying to find it, gritting her teeth against the pain when the arrowhead scraped the trunk of the tree. It was like trying to thread a needle in the dark, and it seemed impossible to accomplish. When she finally succeeded, her eyes stung with tears of pain and triumph.
She pulled the little noose tight, not wanting to chance the arrowhead slipping free again. When it was as tight as she could make it, she stood for a moment, effectively lashed to the tree behind her. She calmed her breathing and her mind. The last step would take mental as well as physical strength.
When she was ready, Sira took one deep breath, tested the noose once again, then, pushing off with all her strength, sprang away from the tree.
The arrow jerked out of her body and hung by the thong, grisly and broken. Sira fell face first into the snow, sobbing with pain and the disgusting feeling of the wood yanking through her flesh. Fresh blood soaked her back, but she was too glad to be free of the arrow to care.
She rested for some time, until she noticed the air growing colder around her. Raising herself on her arms, she saw the last fragments of the quiru scattering before the wind and snow. She had to do something soon, or her efforts thus far would be wasted.
She was stranded halfway through Ogre Pass, without hruss, or food, or guide. The swirling snowstorm obscured the landmarks. A trickle of blood burned against her back.
For today, what she needed was a quiru and a chance to stanch her wound and rest. She recovered her saddlepack from beneath the snow, mentally bade farewell to Rollie and even to Shen, and began her difficult trudge through the deepening snow to find a spot where she could rest away from the fatal campsite. She did not trust this place.
The wind intensified, making it difficult to listen for hruss and riders. Her pack was not heavy, but as she slung it over her shoulder, she winced with the pain of her wound. She would walk, she decided, for one hour, then call up a quiru. When she was rested, she would think what to do, and how to get somewhere safe.
Maestra Lu was haggard from a night spent first in grief and anxiety, then a terrible confusion. When Sira had drawn the veil over her mind, her teacher had felt the loss of her thoughts as surely as if she had died. Then, when Sira began once again to think and feel, Lu’s heart fluttered with hope.
She leaned now on the doorjamb of Magister Mkel’s apartment and knocked weakly. Cathrin opened the door, and drew a sharp breath when she saw Lu. “Maestra! Why, whatever are you . . . you should have sent your Housewoman to us!”
“I am fine, Cathrin. And there was no time. Please get Mkel for me, will you?”
“Of course, of course I will.” Cathrin led Lu to a soft chair near a window. She did not touch her, but her warmth was tangible as she hovered over her. “Let me get you some tea.”
“After,” Lu said tiredly. “I must see Mkel immediately.”
Cathrin disappeared into another room. In a moment she came back with Mkel, still arranging his dark tunic, at her side. He carried his boots in his hand, and sat to pull them on.
“Something has happened to Sira,” Lu said, without preamble.
“Maestra?” He waited, one boot still in his hand.
“Last night, something happened . . . I felt it. I thought she was dead.”
Cathrin gasped, but Mkel held up his hand. “Where was she?”
“I cannot tell. Far away.”
“There was a congress at Lamdon,” Mkel said. “Possibly she was there. But that is too far for you to hear her, surely.”
Lu shrugged that off. “Something happened to her, and through the night I could not feel her at all. Then, at first light this morning, I heard her clearly for just a moment. There has been a disaster of some kind. We must send riders to Bariken.”
“But how could you hear anything so far away, Maestra?” whispered Cathrin.
Lu shook her head. “I do not question my Gift.”
“Nor do we,” Mkel said. He thrust his foot into his boot and stood. “I will dispatch riders to Bariken right away.”
“They will need a Singer, someone strong,” Lu said urgently. “And they must hurry.”
Mkel nodded, and Cathrin wrung her hands. “Now will you drink some tea, Maestra? And you must rest. You look exhausted.”
Lu leaned back in her chair, her strength ebbing suddenly. “Tea, yes. Thank you, Cathrin. I will rest when the party is on its way.”
A Housewoman brought Lu some tea and keftet while she waited for news. Mkel went straight to the great room, where the House was assembling for its morning meal. He came back soon after with two riders and a blonde itinerant.
“Maestra, of course you know Jane and Gram,” Mkel said. The two riders bowed to her. “And this—” Mkel indicated the itinerant. “This is the Singer Theo.”
Theo bowed also, and Lu inclined her head to him.
“Something is wrong at Bariken,” Mkel told the three. “The Maestra has heard something, and feels Cantrix Sira is in great danger.”
Jane and Gram nodded. The Singer Theo frowned, but was silent, waiting.
“There is no time to lose,” Maestra Lu said. Her voice scratched in her throat. “Jane, Gram, please do all you can to find her.”
“We will ride immediately,” Jane said. “To Bariken, then?”
“I do not know where she is. You will need to begin there.” She turned to the itinerant. “Singer Theo, this is of the greatest importance. Will you help us?”
His bow was as elegant as that of any Cantor. “Of course I will help, Maestra,” he replied. She found his voice resonant and reassuring. He turned to Mkel. “Magister?”
“Yes,” Mkel said. He turned to lead the riders out of the apartment. “We’ll make arrangements for provisions and mounts. And your pay, Singer.”
Lu just heard the Singer’s answer before they closed the door. “My pay can wait.”
A moment later the room was empty except for Cathrin and Lu. Lu let her head drop back and her eyes close. She felt the softness of a caeru rug fall around her. She took a deep, sighing breath, and fell asleep where she was.