Not yes or no. The consequence.
Aryl felt cold. She shouldn’t be hearing this, shouldn’t be stuck between the other races. It wasn’t right or fair.
Which didn’t change the fact that she was the one standing here, responsible for the safety of those on the other side of the empty river. Or that she had a dying Oud and its machine to deal with, and truenight approaching rapidly. She eyed the Tikitik dubiously. “Is there something we can do—some way to contact its kind? Help it?”
The Tikitik barked its laugh. “The Hard Ones come to help it.”
“Hard Ones” had to mean the rock hunters rolling closer with the dusk. When she looked up the road, they pretended to be random piles of stone. Except for a small one that tumbled along until it ran into a larger and bounced back.
The Oud twitched. Because she discussed its fate with its murderer? She shuddered.
Thought Traveler kicked dirt at the Oud’s vehicle, scattering a cloud of whirr/clicks. “This will be retrieved. They value their machines more than their flesh. Remember that, little Speaker.”
Something in its tone reminded her of the other Tikitik she’d met—it had seemed to enjoy enlightening her. “What else should I know about the Oud?” she dared ask.
Disconcerting attention from four eyes, then another bark. “You amuse me, little Speaker. For that, I will tell you something more. A gift.” Its mouth protuberances writhed as if it relished the words. “The Oud cannot comprehend your fragility. They expect Om’ray to be here. That there was a time without Om’ray confounded them. You are, to them, the beings whose bones decorate the ground.”
With that, the gray Tikitik turned and ran into the shadows, its long toes soundless on the stone and snow, its longer legs covering ground with terrifying speed. Rock hunters in its path tried to roll aside with almost comic haste. She didn’t blame them.
The Oud’s limbs moved, passed a small object up the length of its body from one set to the next with agonizing slowness. Aryl thought about helping, but stayed still.
At last, the object—another small bag—was clutched in the limbs closest to those it used for speaking. “Sona…Sona…” It paused between each word as though the effort to speak was too much for it. “Take…”
Aryl took a step back.
No one would see her refuse. The rock hunters—the Tikitik’s “Hard Ones”—would crush whatever it meant her to have.
Gifts from other races brought nothing but trouble.
“Take…goodgood…go—” The limbs relaxed their hold. The little bag tumbled free, landing in unstained snow.
What was inside?
Her own curiosity, Aryl fumed to herself, was worse than the Tikitik’s. She bent and picked up the bag.
“Good.” A last shudder of limbs. “Here…Soon.”
The Oud’s body sagged beneath the weight of its fabric cloak, its limbs folding neatly together.
It was dead. Aryl tightened her fingers around the small bag. She glared past the corpse at the line of Hard Ones waiting not too far away.
So something was coming, here.
Soon—whatever that meant to an Oud.
Aryl hopped down to the riverbed, resolutely turning her back.
Behind her, the slow grind of rock.
Interlude
ENRIS STOOD IN THE TALL arched window, gazing out at Vyna, and wondered about many things.
Chief among them, his future.
The Tikitik had helped him get here. Why, he didn’t know, unless it was the creature’s cruel nature.
There was no soil here to farm, no giant stalks to climb or bear fruit. Only black rock shaped into this island and the enclosing wall that towered on all sides—or was this the hollowed inside of a mountain? When the sun penetrated the haze overhead, the black absorbed its light and cast even darker shadows into the water that lay between island and wall. Water like nothing he’d ever seen. It was warm, warm enough to produce the mist that hung above its surface most of the day and all truenight. Its smooth surface glistened with the colors of congealing metaclass="underline" purples, reds, flares of iridescent blue. He wasn’t sure if he’d have drowned falling into it, or been poisoned.
It held life. Life the Vyna hunted from wide-bottomed craft able to float on the water. There was no obvious control or mechanism pushing the craft, yet they moved with precision and sometimes speed, leaving a froth of lingering yellow bubbles behind. Platforms along the island’s shore received them when they returned; steps carved in the black rock led upward, for the sides of the island were sheer, its people perched every bit as precariously as the Yena in their canopy.
He half smiled, thinking of Yena. Aryl wouldn’t call the Vyna’s technique hunting. From what he could see, what they pulled wriggling from the water was as eager to be caught as the Vyna were to catch them.
Do you understand what you see?
His mother’s uncle, Clor sud Mendolar, had come on Passage from Amna, with fascinating stories of life on the shore of the bitter water. Though, from what he remembered, those swimmers weren’t so easily caught. “They’re catching swimmers,” he answered out loud.
Fikryya came to stand beside him and covered her ears. Hush, Enris.
“It’s you I don’t understand,” he whispered.
Vyna didn’t speak. The ones he’d met understood what he said. None replied in kind. They wanted him to use mindspeech, an intimacy he wasn’t prepared for—not without more answers.
I’m here to answer your questions.
No emotion. Fikryya’s shields were perfect. Better, he was sure, than his own. Another reason for caution.
The Vyna was his height, though so slender he could have spanned her waist with his hands. Her hair was hidden beneath a tight red-and-gold cap; its curled ends framed her face. Twists of sparkling blue fell from small knots on the cap: an illusion of hair to brush her back and shoulders.
Her face—she was Om’ray, his inner sense knew it—her face wasn’t right. Her eyes were too deeply set; the bones of her jaw too pronounced, chin thrust forward. Her skin was so pale he could see blood vessels; her lips were almost blue. The color of her shadowed eyes eluded him. Her eyebrows had been replaced by a doubled line of glittering red dots.
She wore a robe from shoulder to toe as revealing as her skin, a flow of symbols in red and gold the only disguise to parts of her body he found remarkably distracting.
As was the second thumb on each elegant hand, opposed to the first.
A Chooser. Something deep inside responded to her presence in a way he couldn’t ignore. Not that he’d rush to take her hand, if offered. She was intriguing, but…no. Not for him.
His heart thudded in his chest. Had he just proved Aryl’s belief? That he’d been exiled not because he was unable to Join, but because he could refuse?
Not that the Vyna Chooser Called to him. He supposed he was as strange to her as she was to him.
Enris coughed. “Why are you keeping me here?” “Here” being the room to which they’d brought him, in such haste he’d caught only tantalizing glimpses of his surroundings. Black rock, metal doors, windows open to the air, without covering or shutters, long boxes of stone filled with green, growing things. Vines heavy with fruit. Glows where there would be shadows.
Something about his arrival had upset them. He wasn’t surprised, but he was tired of this room, with its over-thick cushions and deep carpets. He was tired of being dirty.
Not to mention of being hungry.
“Well?”
He hadn’t moved toward her, but Fikryya flinched away, the fabric of her robe so fine it took an instant to settle against her body again. Her hands covered her ears.
Enris gestured apology. “Forgive me,” he whispered, giving her his best smile. “But I’ve come a long way. This isn’t the welcome I expected.”