Maorgan made her some tea and scolded her into eating some dried fruit he’d cut into small pieces so they’d be easier to swallow. She needed the energy and got the fruit down, though her gorge rose at the thought of eating and her throat tried to close on her.
On the road again. Back and forth. Back and forth. Drowned in deepening green twilight and the heavy odor from the lichen, molds, and other fungi. Back and forth. Back and forth.
Late in the day, when it was almost time to stop for the night, she felt a burn at the farthest point of her reach.
“Hold it. There’s something…”
Rage/satisfaction/anticipation…
Male aura. Fior. About a kilometer on.
She slid from the saddle, walked a few steps from Brйou, set herself and swept her mindtouch in a slow arc, focusing all her attention into the touch, dragging in as much information as she could.
One man. One caцpa. No backup, just him.
With an exploding sigh, she came back to her body, started as she saw Maorgan standing beside her. “What is it?” he said.
“Ambush. One man. Angry. Must be a political.” She untied the thongs on the saddlebag and took her boots out. She sat in the middle of the road, wiped her feet with her kerchief, and began the painful process of getting the boots back on.
“What are you doing?”
“Going after him, of course. You lead the caцpas at a slow walk, I circle round behind him and nail him with the stunner.” She grunted as her heel finally dropped home, then started working the other foot into its boot.
“Shadowsong…”
She looked up. “Don’t be tedious, Maorgan. It was the truth I told you back there on the first day out, not just a story to pass the time. This is what I do, what I have done a hundred times before.” She wiggled her foot, yanked on the boot tops and seated the second heel, got to her feet and brushed herself off. “As far as I can tell-and this isn’t all that accurate, mind you-the chorek’s in a tree about half a sikkom ahead. If I’m not on the road waiting, do what you have to do.”
She waited until she heard the clip-clop of pony hooves and Maorgan’s whistled tune winding lazily past the spears of fungus. Wrinkling her nose with distaste, she began circling around to get behind the chorek, pushing her way through those spears, the pulpy stalks breaking apart and squishing under her boot heels, the smell intensifying with every step. The slimy pulp from the fungus made her bootsoles dangerously slick. She fell twice, the first time when her foot came down on one of the slimemolds while she was concentrating too hard to keeping the touch on the chorek, the second as she was trying to hurry across an open section and get to shelter.
The smell worried her and she stopped to check the wind. It was slow, sluggish-and blowing from the direction of the chorek so that was all right. Have to be careful, she thought, funny to think cracking a stink would be as big a danger as cracking a twig underfoot.
She saw him finally, a dark blot in a rope cradle about three meters up one of the trunks. He’d sunk spikes into the wood to hold the rope ends and pulled the thick loose bark out from the wood, using the curl to mask him from the road. She saw him stiffen as he heard Maorgan’s whistle. He moved slightly, brought something gray and short up from where it had been resting, sighted it on the road, and waited. Not a pellet gun. What is that?
Shadith wiped her hands on her shirt, eased the stunner from the leather sack dangling from her belt. She wiped her hands again, made a last sweep of the surround to verify he was alone, shot him.
The weapon fell with a clank onto the tall roots of the tree, rolled off toward the road. The chorek was draped over the ropes, his mouth open, eyes rolled back, the whites glistening in the murky light under the canopy.
Watching him intently to make sure no twist in his genes made him a tricky candidate for stunning, she made her way to the foot of his tree and collected the thing he’d dropped. She stood staring at it for several moments, deeply shocked. Pellet guns were one thing, in a pinch most smugglers would carry a few for trading, but energy weapons? That was big time trouble. The only time she’d seen it happen was on Avosing, and that was only because there was major value being exchanged. But one ragtag bandit on a nondescript world?
She tested the cutter on the limb of a tree close by, then used it to burn loose one end of the rope cradle, not caring a whole lot whether or not the man survived the fall.
He was limp from the stunning and not that high up. He hit the downslanting roots, rolled onto the ground, and finished the rollnot far from where she’d found the cutter. She checked his pulse, nodded, straightened his legs, then moved to the center of the road, waiting for Maorgan to show.
Maorgan looked down at the man. “Don’t know him. Where was he?”
She flicked a hand at the tree, then frowned as Danor came tottering around the ponies. The Melitoлhn’s eyes were focused on the chorek, his face was flushed, his body tense despite his weakness, there was a bulge inside his shirt that didn’t come from bandages. Where he’d got the knife or whatever it was, she didn’t know. “Danor, no.” She spoke deliberately, then put herself between the stunned man and the Ard. “We need to question him first.”
“Him?” The old man’s voice was stronger than it’d been in days. “He wouldn’t tell you the sun’s shining though you could see it for yourself.”
Shadith smiled grimly. “He won’t have a choice. I’ve got some babble juice that will no doubt kill him eventually so you can rest easy about that, but before then he’ll cough everything he knows.”
He looked at her a long moment, then nodded. “Get on with it, then.”
Maorgan crouched beside the chorek, searching through his pockets, laying out their contents on the ground beside the man. He looked up as Shadith came back, her medkit in her hand. “Nothing here to say who he is.” He flicked a finger through the meager pile, sent a luck charm rolling away, uncovered a bit of paper, passed it to her. “Someone in Dumel Minach, laying out our route and what speed we’re likely to make.”
“Confirms he’s a political, if we needed such confirmation. Here.” She handed him a tape braided from fine colorless filaments. “Wrap that round his ankles and make sure the metal bits on the end touch. You don’t need to tie it.”
He raised his brows. “Looks like it’d melt in my hand, let alone hold a grown man.”
“Try to cut it if you don’t mind dulling your blade. Don’t worry, you won’t even scratch it. Give me room to work, hm?” She took his place, strapped the chorek’s wrists with a second come-along tape. When she glanced at Maorgan, he was looking at a nick in the knifeblade.
He shrugged, wrapped the tape around the chorek’s ankles, touched the locktights. Nothing obvious happened, so he tried to take them apart and redo the seal.
Shadith chuckled. “Useful gadget, right?”
“How do you get the things off?”
“I’ve got, mm, call it a key. Otherwise, to get him out of those loops we’d have to amputate his hands and feet. Well, well, so you’re coming awake on us now.” She got to her feet and stepped back to wait for him to exhaust himself and recognize futility.
The chorek’s eyes cleared. He saw them, and his face suffused with rage; he tried to break loose, throwing his body about, but all he succeeded in doing was cut himself on the filament tapes. After a useless struggle he lay panting and glaring hate at them, especially Maorgan. “Jelly sucker, you a dead man. And all your kind a perverts.”
Shadith opened the medkit, took out the spraycopeia, clicked on the mostly illegal canister of babblers Digby had sent her on the day she’d adopted as her birthday, the day Aleytys had decanted her into this body. She set the blood sampler in the sterilizer and deposited the medkit on the road. “We’re going to ask you some questions, chorek. Now I know you think you wouldn’t tell us the time of day, but you will.” The sterilizer chimed. She took the sampler out, caught one of his hands, set the nozzle against a finger tip and triggered it. In almost the same move, she was back on her feet and he was staring at the red drop welling on his finger.