“What happens if you tryif you focus on a Clayark by sight, or you sense his physical presence and then hit him as though you were hitting a Patternist?”
“What would you be hitting?”
“His head, of course.”
“I wouldn’t,” she said. “You might give the Clayark time to put a bullet through your head. The only people we can hope to kill by just mindlessly throwing our strength at them are mutes and other Patternists. With Clayarks, you have to know exactly what you’re doing, and do it just right, or you’ll get killed.”
“A Clayark wouldn’t be harmed at all if you hit him?”
“If you hit himhis headwith all your strength, he might have a seizure. But for most people, nothing.”
Teray frowned, not understanding but not wanting to question further.
“Feel the wind?” she said.
“What?”
“The wind. There’s a pretty good breeze blowing in from the ocean. There’s a lot of power in the windeven in a breeze like this. Ask Joachim.
His House uses windmills. It doesn’t usually seem like much power, though. Not until you find specific ways to use it, ways to make it work for you.”
“I understand,” he muttered.
“If I hit a Clayark as though he were a Patternist, he’d notice it about as much as you noticed the wind before I mentioned it.”
“I said I understood.”
“All right.”
It was the disease again, blocking the way. A disease that protected its carriers and killed their enemies. The disease of Clay’s Ark, brought back hundreds of years before, so the old records said, by the only starship ever to leave Earth and then return. A starship. A mute contrivance that had supposedly ended the reign of the mutes over the Earth they had sought to leave. That part of history had always held a grim fascination for Teray. His own race had been small then, scattered, disunited, a mere offshoot of the mutes. His people had been carefully bred for mental strengthbred by one of their own kind who happened to have been born with as much mental strength as he needed. One whose specialty had not been healing, teaching, creating art, or any of the ordinary talents. The Founder’s specialty had been living. He had lived for thousands of years, breeding, building the people who were to become Patternists. Finally, he had been killed by one of his own daughtersshe who first created and held a Pattern.
And meanwhile, mutes had been building a society more intricate, more mechanized, than anything that had existed since their downfall. Some Patternists refused to believe this segment of history. They said it was like believing that horses and cattle once had mechanized societies. But in Coransee’s House, Teray had seen for himself that mutes were more mechanically inclined than most Patternists. And mutes were intelligent. So much so that Teray would have enjoyed challenging themletting them have more freedom, encouraging them to use their minds and their hands for more than drudgery. Then he could find out for himself whether the inventive ability that had once made them great still existed. After all, even now it was the mutes who handled what little machinery there was in Patternist Territory. And the Clayarks, who were only physically mutated mutes, were said to use simple machinery in their settlements beyond the eastern mountains. On the western side of the mountains, however, Clayarks produced nothing but weapons and warriors. At least, that was all Patternists had ever known them to produce. Yet Teray found himself thinking about the Clayark he had talked to. The creature had known Teray’s language, at least enough to communicate. But Teray, like most Patternists, knew nothing of the language the Clayarks spoke among themselves. Patternists almost never let Clayarks get close enough to them to hear them talk. Patternists and Clayarks stared at each other across a gulf of disease and physical difference and comfortably told themselves the same lie about each other. The lie that Teray’s Clayark had tried to get away with: “Not people.”
That night another group of Clayarks drifted near them. Teray and Amber were camped on the beach, back against a hill. Amber had checked the horses over very carefully in what was to become a nightly ritual. She healed any injuries she found before they became serious, seeing to it, as she said, that they did not wind up on foot, and Clayark bait. They saved their rations and ate quail that Teray had mentally lured from one of the canyons in the hills. The Clayarks came into range behind them while they were eating.
Amber, aware of the danger the moment Teray sensed it, opened to offer him her strength. He accepted it, and used it to extend his range.
At once, he could sense the entire group of Clayarks walking toward them, moving through the hills rather than along the trail. Very shortly, those in the lead would see the two Patternists’ fire.
Swiftly Teray reviewed the technique he had learned from Amber, then he swept over them like an ocean wave. A wave of destructive power, killing.
The Clayarks had almost no time even to scatter. The group was slightly larger than the one they had met earlier. But Teray handled it in a fraction of the time he had needed to handle the first group. He handled it using less energy, since he was not required to puncture or tear anything. And since he handled it so quickly, he did not need Amber to spot potential escapees for him. There were no potential escapees.
Since he would never see them physically, he swept over them once more to see that they all were dead. There was no movement at all.
He turned to look at Amber. “Satisfied?”
She nodded gravely. “I’ll sleep better.”
“You ought to pass your methods on to the schools the one in Redhill, anyway. Save some Patternist lives.”
“Healers usually stumble across it on their own. Most nonhealers can’t learn it even with teaching. They have to either rip or puncture something, or they have to hit as though at a Patternist. My way is somewhere in between. I was afraid you wouldn’t be able to do it.”
“You didn’t act as though you were afraid.”
“Of course not. I didn’t want you to try it with the idea that you couldn’t really expect to succeed.”
He looked at her, shook his head, and smiled slightly.
“Has anyone ever tried to make a healer of you?” she asked.
“They taught me what they could in school. I don’t have much of an aptitude for it, though.”
“So a lot of nonhealers told you.”
“I don’t, really. I don’t have the fine perception for it. I miss symptoms unless they’re really obvious. Pain, profuse bleeding, no one could miss those. But little things, especially things that are caused by disease instead of injury I can’t sense them.”
She nodded. “Coransee has that problem, too, but you might not be as bad as he is. If you want to, when we get to Forsyth I’ll try teaching you a little more. I think you’re underrating yourself.”
“All right.” He hoped she was right. It would be reassuring to be able to do something better than Coransee could.
Travel grew more difficult the next day. They reached the higher mountains and found that the trail lost itself among them, “washed out, as usual,” Amber said. The sectors nearest the coast were supposed to keep it clear, but during Rayal’s long illness such work had become too dangerous. Teray and Amber walked and led their horses more than they rode.
On the third day they did no riding at all. There was no longer a beach. The waves broke against rocks and the rocky base of the mountains. They knew the canyons and highlands that they had to travel. These they had memorized. There was no chance of their getting lost. But they were losing time. Walking, scrambling over rock and brush, wondering themselves where they and the horses were finding footholds. The trek was physically wearing, but at least they encountered few Clayarks.