“Hold!” Orick called out, still standing on the bridge. “You can’t be doing that to her. This is the Swallow, come back to rebuild the Accord!” Obviously the bear hoped that his words would have some kind of influence on the Tekkar. Perhaps he even hoped that they would fall to their knees as the worthy Im giants had done.
But the Lord of the Tekkar only laughed at Orick. “Have you not heard? The Swallow is already in Moree, and she has gathered her armies. She is set to harvest this world, and the stars beyond.”
He spread his hands, waving toward the stars shining above the fortress, above the dark canyon walls, then turned to Maggie.
“This one is for you, child,” he whispered, and he dropped the Word into the hood of her cloak.
Maggie cried out, tried to struggle free of the Tekkar’s grip, but two of them viciously twisted her arms up behind her back and held her wrists, forcing her to bow down on her knees into the dirt.
Gallen was still at the far side of the bridge, his hands tied behind his back, unable to do anything but watch. Orick could not come to her rescue with the Tekkar holding him at gunpoint.
Gallen stood watching, his face a carefully controlled mask, unable to do anything for the moment. There was no movement, only the sound of the tumbling waters in the chasm far below the stone bridge, breaking the silence.
Maggie grunted, breathing hard, and waited in cold terror for the Word to attack. In a moment, she felt a sharp stabbing pain at the base of her neck, then a rapid push as the Word burrowed under the skin at the base of her skull.
She cried out, and watched Gallen through tear-filled eyes. He was standing thirty meters away from her in the edge of the darkness, and she looked across at him as if across some great gulf, and she realized that she had been looking at him this way for days. Ever since the Word had infected his skull, he’d inhabited a place she could not quite reach.
And now I’m going there, Maggie realized, and it filled her with a new thrill of hope, mingled with fear. I will share the lives he has lived, feel what he has felt. And in the end, we will no more be strangers.
But only if I renounce the Word. And so Maggie conjured an image of the dronon on Fale, and how they had tormented her, until the white hate boiling in the pit of her stomach burned away all fear, all pain.
She heard the sound of bones grinding in her skull, and she shrieked, “Gallen!” And suddenly, the world was turning, and Maggie felt herself dropping forward into the dust.
When Maggie woke, she lay for a long moment, her eyes opened to slits, and her first thought was to wonder if she were dead.
The room was dark but for a small fire, and Maggie recalled lives past, in bodies where she could see more keenly, smell through the palms of her hands, hear the rustling footsteps of mice through stone walls. In comparison, this body seemed sluggish, its senses dulled. She remembered her sense of power living as a Djudjanit under the ocean and swimming as fast as any fish, and recalled as Entreak d’Suluuth flying on hot summer thermals for days, never needing rest, and so she felt weak now in comparison. And this was the Inhuman’s first message to her, that because of her humanity, she was inferior.
She thought for a moment of times spent gazing placidly at campfires, of passionate loves lost and won over the course of a hundred lifetimes, of battles and defeat, and she saw how whole lives were often colored by emotional themes, recurring cycles of anger or despair or hopeful delusions. People were too often cramped by their own inadequacies, or made pawns in the larger affairs of men. Maggie thought back on her lives and saw them as a painter’s palette of colors, each with its own distinctive hue and texture.
And the experience made her feel rich, and buoyant and wise and old beyond the counting of years. And this was the Inhuman’s second message to her. Be grateful for what I have given you.
The lives and customs and thoughts and ideals of a hundred different people roiled around in her brain, and Maggie had learned much from the Inhuman. It was as if before there had been only a night sky, and now a vast and yawning galaxy of stars suddenly burned before her.
Almost without exception, the lives the dronon had shown her were lived by people of passion, people who loved life and wanted to continue indefinitely, and now Maggie saw how truly precious a gift it was, and she wanted to live over and over again, each time experiencing a new form. And in her mind, the Inhuman whispered, Follow me, and I will give you endless life.
And she recalled the hundred lives lived and wasted, and felt how each of those people had seen their own deaths as unfair. And the Inhuman whispered, The Tharrin-led humans are your enemies.
But as she cast back into her new memories, she also recalled thousands of nonhuman people who had been granted the rebirth. So she reconsidered the lives she had led, and recalled from each person something of the unbridled passions that might have kept them from being reborn. For Entreak d’Suluuth it may have been his contempt for the “wingless,” for another it had been complacency, for another greed.
So Maggie felt unsure as to whether the human lords had misjudged these people. Perhaps the human lords had been right to let them pass away, forgotten. And the Inhuman within her cringed at such thoughts, tried to get her to consider other arguments.
Then Maggie recalled her own captivity under the hands of the dronon, and her rage began to burn in her. A wave of confusion washed over her as the Inhuman sought to take control of her, but Maggie focused on her own memories. And she saw without a doubt that the information she’d been given was tainted, an emotional argument designed for the naive and inexperienced. Her own experiences with the dronon precluded any possibility of being drawn into their cause, and her resolve to destroy the Inhuman had not weakened. Indeed, the Inhuman’s Word had not been able to have the slightest effect in changing her view of the world, and she marveled at how Gallen had been so strongly influenced by the Word.
It seemed almost a defect in his character to have become so misguided, but she recalled Ceravanne’s warning that some people found it easier to fight the Inhuman’s Word. Indeed, the Bock had not even feared that Orick could be infected. So Maggie wondered if it were some biological difference in her that let her defeat the programming so easily.
She opened her eyes to slits and looked around. She was lying on the floor in a large room-the same room that the Tekkar had hustled Maggie and Ceravanne into when they first entered Farra Kuur. The room may have once been an inn. It was large enough for one-twenty meters on one side, thirty long, with a huge hearth on the far wall and a couple of entryways that might have led to kitchens or sleeping chambers. Maggie’s head was pillowed by the packs that Gallen, Maggie, and Ceravanne had carried.
In the far corner of the room, two Tekkar had built a fire in an ancient stone oven, and they were cooking some fry bread and beans seasoned with desert spices. The scent made Maggie hungry.
Her legs and arms were not bound, which suggested that the Tekkar believed that she would be converted when she woke-or perhaps they thought only that she would pose no threat.
Maggie looked around for the others. Two Tekkar had Gallen sitting in one corner, guns trained on him. The other Tekkar did not speak much, and then only in whispers, but they moved about the room as if in a dance, each performing his own task-cooking, packing, guarding-and Maggie noticed something odd about them: the Tekkar had set themselves up around the room so that none were really close to the others. They did not congregate. Instead, they moved about the room evenly, almost gracefully, but always chose their path so that they maximized one another’s body space. It was a distinctly nonhuman behavior.