Part 16 (2/2)

By late afternoon, when the gloom pretended to lighten to the shades of a medium gray, they dropped into the steep cut between the Pallas Ridges. The trail there was a meter-wide ledge which ran above Pallas Cat Creek. The rain barely reached into the cut, but the shadows and cras.h.i.+ng creek kept the air dark and moist.

It took an hour to build a tiny, two-line rope bridge out of the flexan cord and metaplas pieces they carried. Then Tsia led the first two meres in a swaying, edging, hand-sliding movement along the flimsy bridge. Behind her, Kurvan slipped in the crossing, and Tsia caught his arm as it flailed out. With a cry, he countergrabbed and crushed her slender fingers. He looked into her eyes and smiled; his hand seemed to sprout claws. Instinctively, she jerked back. A surge of cold energy hit through her gate. Her lips bared in a snarl. Bowdie, behind them, cursed and lunged. He caught Kurvan's hand, and then Tsia grabbed again at the other mere's arm. Her flexor caught for an instant on Kurvan's elbow and almost snapped out from her harness. The weight of Kurvan's pack swung both her and Bowdie down. The bridge whipped wildly in a V toward the rocks. Bowdie's long legs slipped along the line. On the-far bank, the others could do nothing but watch. Then the wind gusted and Bowdie yanked hard, and Kurvan's hands scrabbled for a grip on their harnesses. Tsia's straps split; Bowdie's mottled edges unsealed. Dark objects fell away. Tsia's flexor slapped hard against her thigh. The wind, which had helped a moment before, thrust at their bodies. Kurvan looked down and saw the boiling water and ebony rocks. He jackknifed and kicked up. Then his feet regained their purchase, and Tsia and Bowdie hauled him up.

Kurvan gripped the cord of the bridge, glanced down once more, then murmured his thanks to Bowdie. He gave Tsia a dark look. She stared at him, then twisted away along the rope. Her body still s.h.i.+vered, and the power of his grip seemed to cling to her skin. There was a hunter in his body, she thought. A predator as deceptive and eager as the dark puma who watched the group from its den. High up, in caliginous shadow, the adult cat eyed Tsia and reinforced her fear of the man. Encroacher... Danger... She shuddered again, hiding the motion in the sway of the bridge. Not until she reached the bank on the other side did she relax, and only then because she moved quickly upslope, where she could turn and crouch in the lee of a tree.

She stared at her hands as if they belonged to a stranger. Had she lost all control over her gate? And this wariness-was it hers or the cat's? Her gate widened with the touch of Ruka's mind, and she twisted at his proximity. He had crossed upstream on the boulders, and now he slunk close, visible only as a trick of tawny light in the forest.

”Daya,” she whispered. She pressed her palms to her forehead and closed her eyes as tightly as she could, as if she could hold in her biogate by flesh alone. She could smell Kurvan's sweat on her fingers. There was an almost turpentinic musk to the fear in it as it mixed with the rain and sweat, and she s.h.i.+vered and drew her blunter close.

The cougar on the ridge projected more strongly, its eyes flicking from the meres below to her own predator shape in the woods. She snarled at it through her gate, and her message, even in words, was clear: Do not hunt. Don't attack. The humans here are protected.

Her lips twisted as a warning was returned: Pa.s.s through. Pa.s.s through, but do not stay. The lines of territory were marked and they would be defended.

Against the meres. Against her. Instinctive reactions and natural fear... Command: response, countered by the faith in the Landing Pact. That was what she felt. She was like a puppet. She moved, but her movements were ch.o.r.eographed; she acted to another's direction. Kurvan had smiled, and she had jerked back. As though he could have antic.i.p.ated her response, he had given her a look that seemed so full of menace, she could not help but recoil. She rubbed at her wrists with a s.h.i.+ver. His hands seemed imprinted on her arms. His biofield seemed to feed the anxiety of her gate. If he had fallen-if Bowdie had not been there...

She wiped her hands against her trousers. The hard edges of the safety cubes sc.r.a.ped against her palm. ”I feel dirty,” she whispered to Ruka. ”As if I had been used.”

Ruka turned his head to stare back, unblinking. His claws extended. Pressing through her blunter, they cut, cold and hard, through her s.h.i.+rt till they began to pierce her chest. She lifted his paws, and s.h.i.+fted her harness, and realized its edges were unsealed. Uneasily, she looked down.

The medkit and her e-wrap-both of them were gone. They had fallen away when Kurvan grabbed for her harness. ”Sleem take it,” she muttered. All the gear from her front straps was gone, including her antigrav packs. Only the raser, with its short, knifelike laser blade powered down, was still on her hip by her flexor; and her bios.h.i.+eld-but nothing else-was still in the pouch against her chest. She felt the cold in her teeth, and realized her lips were bared as she stared down at her unsealed harness. Kurvan and Bowdie, and her gear falling away...

Ruka growled, low in his throat, and Tsia's eyes gleamed. ”Had I claws like you,” she said softly, ”I would have cut, not caught, Kurvan's hand.” A chill struck her shoulders. <2 ”daya,”=”” she=”” whispered.=”” ”have=”” i=”” lost=”” my=”” mind?”=”” she=”” stared's=”” her=”” hands.=”” they=”” were=”” clutching=”” her=”” flexor,=”” and=”” she=”” didn't=”” remember=”” drawing=”” it.=”” she=”” flicked=”” her=”” wrist.=”” the=”” weapon=”” flowed=”” into=”” a=”” thin-edged=”” bar,=”” like=”” a=”” sword.=”” she=”” s.h.i.+fted=”” her=”” grip=”” and=”” snapped=”” it=”” into=”” a=”” point=”” with=”” a=”” set=”” of=”” hooks=”” along=”” a=”” long,=”” thin=”” blade.=”” the=”” hooks=”” flowed=”” smoothly=”” back=”” into=”” b.u.mps.=”” stars=”” in=”” a=”” biofield;=”” b.u.mps=”” on=”” a=”” sword...=”” she=”” flicked=”” her=”” wrist=”” and=”” the=”” flexor=”” became=”” a=”” stiff=”” tri-blade.=”” the=”” shadow=”” of=”” the=”” point=”” cast=”” a=”” faint,=”” fiamelike=”” ghost=”” on=”” her=”” trousers,=”” and=”” she=”” stared=”” at=”” it=”” for=”” a=”” moment.=”” the=”” windburn=”” from=”” the=”” storm=”” felt=”” like=”” fire=”” to=”” her=”” skin,=”” and=”” she=”” saw=”” in=”” her=”” memories=”” the=”” coal=”” cla.s.ses=”” in=”” which=”” she=”” first=”” learned=”” to=”” dance.=”” the=”” heat=”” against=”” the=”” pads=”” of=”” her=”” feet;=”” the=”” sweat=”” she=”” had=”” learned=”” to=”” call=”” at=”” will...=”” and=”” the=”” other=”” guides=”” whose=”” bodies=”” flashed=”” and=”” leaped=”” as=”” lithely=”” as=”” her=”” own.=”” faces=”” that=”” had=”” disappeared=”” with=”” time.=”” like=”” the=”” features=”” of=”” her=”” sister,=”” which=”” had=”” not=”” changed=”” in=”” her=”” memory,=”” but=”” only=”” deepened=”” and=”” aged,=”” as=”” if=”” tsia=”” had=”” acknowledged=”” the=”” years,=”” but=”” not=”” the=”” distance=”” that=”” had=”” grown=”” between=”” them.=”” firedancing...=”” the=”” guide=”” guild...=”” her=””>

She wiped her hands on her trousers and stared at Ruka as if she could imprint him even more deeply on her mind. ”Do you know,” she asked the cat in a harsh voice, ”how long I waited to have you in my head? What I have given up to touch you? And how little it takes to strip you away?”

The cougar rambled. She got slowly to her feet. She felt old inside. Not the forty-nine years that made up her life, but five hundred years or more. What good was her past, she asked herself, if she could not let it go? And what had she become, that she could no longer separate herself from the biogate in her head? The wind's rough hands tore at the bark beside her, as if daring her to do the same. She threw her head back and opened her throat. The sound came out as a bitter laugh that turned into an animal scream.

She did not answer when Wren climbed up and gestured, but she moved out of the gloom like a cat. When her feet hit the trail, she did not bother to look at the meres. Even when Nitpicker signaled for her to take the lead, she did not acknowledge the woman's motion with a word. She merely bent her head against the wind and hiked on.

Another hour on the trail turned into two; the afternoon pa.s.sed like a ghost. They forced their way through two waterfalls that blasted across the trail. The medlines of the node were no longer active- they had dropped out halfway through the day. Tsia had barely noticed. Her mind was filled with the sense of the cat and the pulse that beat in her throat, and when they came to a wall of broken rock, she pointed toward the peak. ”Shortcut,” she shouted. ”Straight up.” Halfway up across the rocks, she looked back at the meres, who followed like dolls on a string. Or lifers, she thought, like puppets with guns. She stared at her hands and wondered...

Early evening found them at a rise of basalt, where moss and lichen overgrew the stones, and gray-white trunks of a burn as old as Tsia dotted the slopes around them. The ache in the legs of the meres had turned to a numbness that they bore in silence while they cursed at the mud. When Bowdie, then Tsia took a break behind a boulder, Tsia stumbled, and Bowdie caught her arm. The heat of his biofield seemed suddenly sharp with sparks, and she stared up at his suddenly shuttered face. He tossed her his decomposition spray and returned to the group. Tsia was left by herself.

The scents that clung to the deke tube he'd tossed made her nostrils flare. She hesitated before she sprayed her fecal matter. There was something about the scent of the deke... Her brows drew together, and she lowered her head to sniff the tube. To a normal human, a deke had no odor; but to Tsia, with the senses of the cats interpreting the smell as they crawled into her mind, there was a distinct sweetness to the tube. Memory flicked at the back of her brain. Today... That morning. Another tube, and a cave...

The medkit. The salve-when they had climbed out of the lake, her neck had still been sore, even after the use of the scame. Kurvan had thrown her a salve tube out of Wren's medkit. She had opened the tube, but had not used it, and the odor... She sniffed again, then deliberately, she aimed the deke at her stool. The small pile dissolved in seconds, leaving only a darkened place on the soil.

A deke in a salve-in a medkit? ”Insane,” she whispered. One drop from a deke, and a cut would become a necrotic gash. A gash like that could result in an amputated limb. Her stomach tightened. When the cat feet padded through her head, she started. She was too close to her gate, she thought. It was clouding her mind with suspicion. Abruptly, she made her way back to the group. She tossed the deke to Bowdie without a word, but she could not help the look she shot at Wren as she stalked back to the head of the line.

Shadow turned to blackness, and fir dancers became tree demons. The darkeyes of the meres allowed them to continue into night as if it were day, but Tsia had to look through Ruka's eyes to see the placement of her feet. At ten, when they took two hours to sleep, Tsia curled up and opened the biogate, and let the cougar's mental hum lull her into dreams. Faces seemed to march through her mind, in time to the cougar's growling. First Ruka, then Wren, then Nitpicker's eyes... A hard-chiseled face floated above her, and she kissed the man before he melted into the stone that formed his own biogate... He sank into earth that cracked and cried and turned into a stream, where her sister's visage, cloudy as ice, seemed trapped beneath the surface. She reached in for her sister, but the water rippled, and it was her own face that stared out...

At midnight, they resumed their ragged march. The dark was now so thick, and the rain so blinding in the violence of the wind, that the night seemed impenetrable and solid. The sky breathed, like a G.o.d, in their faces, battering them from one side of the trail to the other while the trees broke and flew through the wind. It was a night of brutal darkness; a night that had no end.

At a switchback, she missed the trail and slipped, lengthwise, like a log down a water track, into a nest of hummers. The rodents squealed as her feet broke through the flimsy roof of the nest. Three sets of teeth snapped at her boots. Cursing beneath her breath, she yanked her legs out and climbed back to the trail, her fingers digging her holds out of the sodden earth while the wind slammed into her back.

”You remember this?” Bowdie shouted over the wind as he helped her back up to the trail.

She shook her head.

”I thought you knew this trail.”

She stared at the pale blur of his face. ”In the dark?”

He seemed to grin.

”This isn't one of the main trails, and I ran this one only twice up to here.” She pointed. ”I had to take the long route around the meadows and lakes when I was working this area before.”

There was a shriek of wood, a cras.h.i.+ng sound from ahead, and Bowdie stared into the darkness. 'Too bad your biogate won't tell you what's ahead.”

”Like a bird's-eye view of the sky?” She laughed. ”Even that wouldn't tell me much in this.”

He eyed the darkness of the woods with its black and whipping branches, then nodded shortly. He gestured for her to lead on.

They crossed the yellow-white gra.s.s quickly, then went again beneath the trees. At a fork in the trail, Tsia paused, and Wren pointed to the thin, boiling sky with a grin, as if she had lost their morning bet. She jerked her thumb east in return. The heavy blackness promised the rains that she projected. ”By dawn,” she yelled above the wind, ”you'll have your rain, and then some.”

She moved on, and the cougar paced her in the brush. With a narrowed gaze, she accepted Ruka's sight to look beyond the fork that split the trail. There was a blurred sense of trees, which bent with ponderous grace. Then she felt the wind that ruffled her fur. The left trail petered out in a box canyon, she realized. The right went on to a meadow.

”I understand,” she breathed.

Ruka's growl seemed pleased.

The images faded; the cat feet in her skull became fainter. She rubbed her fingers together. She had been able to read the felines for ten years, each year with greater sensitivity. But Ruka had just pointed out the trail to the freepick stake as clearly as Tsia did for the meres. As if the cub understood her goal. To partner with that kind of intelligence... To move through the mountains with two sets of eyes... Daya, but what had the Landing Pact given up for guides like her?

She guided the meres across a creek, then into another meadow. One creek ran beside the wide clearing; another gray line of water glinted across the expanse of two-meter tallgra.s.s. The gra.s.s flowers, tightly closed against the wind, were small gray flags, which would flare yellow after dawn. Soon the flowers would be ripe, and the wind would tear them open so that their seeds blew out like static-charged foam and clogged the branches of the shrubtrees around the meadow.

The meadow itself was like a lake, and Tsia could feel the shadows of movement beneath the puddled ground. To her left now, Ruka slunk into the meadow, but between the gloom and the gra.s.s, his body was just another motion of the wind, invisible to her eyes. Behind her, Wren, then Bowdie, then Kurvan filed through the gra.s.s. They began to fan out as the ground grew too wet to follow exactly where she stepped.

Her foot sank up to her knee, and she struggled to pull it out. Her biogate distracted her from her path. She stepped for a clump, missed it in the dark, and sank into the puddle beside it. Phosph.o.r.escence swirled like tiny sparks. It took full seconds to struggle free.

”Daya,” she muttered. The sense of life in the meadow was strong enough to make her frown. Behind her, the other meres formed a long line in the gra.s.s. The steadiness of their bodies looked odd surrounded by the whipping stalks. Wren, the closest, staggered heavily, and she moved back into knee-deep roots to give him a hand and check the settings on his pack. Neither tried to speak in the wind.

Ruka was already across, waiting, hunkered down on a rock. His golden eyes watched the meres unblinkingly. Only his ears and tail twitched as he crouched; and Tsia judged the distance between them. Where the creek between them flooded out into a small pond, the meres would have to wade--or swim in the dark, she admitted with unease. She glanced down and scowled at the water pooling between the clumps of gra.s.s, then jumped ahead again.

The earth s.h.i.+mmied beneath her and, startled, she jumped ahead to a more solid clump. Even that gra.s.s s.h.i.+vered with her weight, buckled. Ahead, the flooded gray creek grew wider, until it seemed as if the sky lay down in the meadow to sleep out the storm on the ground. Tsia grinned at the image. She put her foot down. Into nothing. And toppled forward.

Cat feet leaped abruptly in her head; someone snarled in her ear. ”Daya-” She twisted frantically before she hit the water. Her legs and hips slapped the lake with a flat splash. Her arms flung out as she grabbed at the gra.s.s. Her torso hit the edge of the mat, and she clung to that flimsy raft like a gale net spread on the sea.

For that was what she lay on, she realized. A weedis on a black sea of water. A raft of gra.s.s. There was no meadow beneath her feet-it was actually a lake. And not a temporary lake that had flooded from a simple creek, but the water that had lain, still and dammed, for years behind the ridge of earth that blocked its lower end.

Infinitely slowly, she dragged herself back up on the mat. The thin island trembled; its root system shredded beneath her weight. In her head, the cougar paced and clawed at her skull until she snapped at him to leave her alone. Easing back in a long-body crawl, she s.h.i.+fted her elbows, then hips past her footsteps where the traces of herself were left in phosph.o.r.escent, sparkling pools among the gra.s.s.

As Wren caught sight of her, he quickened his pace.

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