Enris said gently, “Your Chosen.”
Dead. Flat and cold and final. They’re all dead. As we’ll be if you don’t start acting like a Speaker instead of cowering here. A snap of authority. Think rocks are all they can drop? An image, terrifyingly clear, of baskets filled with what belonged to truenight, to the utter dark, to the nightmares of Yena.
The swarm.
Aryl shuddered.
“What’s wrong?” Enris demanded. He hadn’t heard?
Negotiate, young Speaker, before it’s too late.
“Aryl—”
No time to explain. Aryl looked desperately at Enris. “Protect them!” Then she slammed down her shields and began to run.
Up the ramp, jumping rocks, stepping on them. Too slow. Too slow. More screams, more CRASH.
Aryl grabbed the next light pole and swung herself atop the railing wall. Better. She hit full stride, leaping across where the wall angled back on itself as it climbed. Higher and higher. She passed heaving piles of rock hunters, doorways choked with them as too many tried to enter at once, and knew it could be worse.
The swarm hated light. That wouldn’t save anything in their path.
How high did she need to be?
Only one way to find out. Aryl kept running.
The ramp wall widened, its top becoming a dirt-filled hollow choked with vines and other growth she crushed underfoot or jumped. The air finally smelled of life. Behind her, the grind and click as rock hunters excitedly worked to reach it, piling on each other. They’d be a hazard on the way back if they succeeded.
Though, Aryl thought with sudden cheer, easy to kick off.
Enris was directly below again. She’d circled the island.
Where were the Tikitik? The mist and black stone swallowed the light from Vyna’s glows, smudged shadows, refused any long views. That much was familiar from the canopy. Her shadow ran with her along the steep buildings, doubled, disappeared, caught up again.
Aryl jumped the next sharp angle and stopped, balanced on her toes. Something was here. Something other than the rocks rolling in the shadows.
A stretch of ramp, floored in black with white lines for ornamentation. Beside it, an upward thrust of building, with an abundance of narrow, empty windows. Thin vines trailed down between. No Vyna to her inner sense. Unlike a Yena, they ran down from danger.
Poor choice, she thought absently, busy searching for what alerted her.
There. A patch of mist ahead, darker than it should be.
A darkness that shifted.
Up, then. The vines Aryl knew better than to trust, but the window openings were as good as a ladder. She took advantage of a series of glows shaped like swimmers along the lower portion of the building to reach the first line of windows, then it was a simple matter of picking those which would take her to one side of whatever shaded the mist.
From the smell emanating from the first window, this wasn’t a building normally in use. Enris had said the Vyna were more numerous once. Yena had been; its outlying bridges served empty homes. She hadn’t paid attention then. Hadn’t imagined the past mattered, or that it stretched beyond living memory.
They could, Aryl mused as she climbed, compare the numbers of children born to each Clan; such information was recorded in its Cloisters. Perhaps that had changed over time.
Marcus would be proud of this un-Om’ray notion.
Haxel would consider it a thorough waste of time.
Aryl snorted. At the moment, they’d both be right.
A louder snort answered. From above.
Slipping inside the nearest window had appeal. Aryl kept climbing.
The mist shifted around her, a warm thick breeze she’d enjoy under other circumstances. Shifted and darkened, as something leaned down through it to inspect her.
Now she did stop.
Two pairs of eyes appeared through the mist, blinking alternately. Each was larger than her head. They disappeared behind the yawning chasm of an enormous mouth, yellow-tongued, abundantly toothed. The mouth closed again. Good sign. The neck she could see beyond the long head was swollen. Recently fed.
Better still.
The head shook with a splatter of drool and lifted back into the mist. She climbed after it, passed a foot with claws that could easily span her body but presently gripped the sill of a window, then another, and another. The finely scaled legs supported a long, narrow body, covered with hairs, each tipped with a tiny sparkling drop.
Enris might have exaggerated the narrowness of Vyna’s bridges; not so the esan’s size. Haxel would want her to find out if it was edible.
Where were its wings?
Short of climbing a leg, she couldn’t see past the body, so Aryl worked her way from window to window until she found herself at the top of the building.
The sixth foot crushed one of the Vyna’s wall-top gardens. The head reappeared as she jumped from the wall to the ramp below, swinging down to regard her past its front knee.
As did other heads. They clustered here, the esans, clinging to the wall she’d climbed, standing on this ramp. More above. Like flitters roosting on a nekis, as close together as manners allowed.
There were, Aryl realized belatedly, no more splashes. Just the esans’ overlapping huffs, as if they took in her scent and rejected it.
Huffs and a muffled clinkclattergrind from over her head.
Aryl glanced at the swollen neck drooping above her. Round shapes pushed against the skin. The esan gave an irritated shake and huff. Something rattled.
Explaining how they carried the rock hunters. She was almost sympathetic.
Mist swirled around paired legs, then revealed a single figure standing by itself. Watching her.
Tikitik.
More came out of the mist, gathered in groups, stared. Something Tikitik were well equipped to do, possessing four eyes: two large, a smaller pair behind, all on mobile cones of flesh. Instead of a mouth, writhing gray protuberances moved as if tasting the air. They wore nothing but a belt to support a longknife and strips of cloth patterned in their symbols to wrap ankles and wrists. Their skin, more knobby plates than hide, was pale gray, the color of mist. No surprise. It could change, she’d seen it for herself, to match a background. For Tikitik were skulkers, hiders, loving to surprise.
When they couldn’t get something else to do the work for them.
Aryl’s fingers itched for her longknife. With an effort of will, she turned them to touch the Speaker’s Pendant instead.
Aryl?
He’d felt her reaction. She sent an image of what, or rather who, faced her. Peace, Enris. He subsided, watchful and worried.
The solitary Tikitik was different. It wore a black sash from shoulder to hip, ending in a fringe that brushed the stone pavement, and held its head higher than the rest on its long down curved neck—though not at shoulder-height. It gave a soft, guttural bark. A laugh. “Greetings, Apart-from-All.”
She didn’t need the symbols on its wristband. Using that name for her—that laugh? This was one of the Tikitik outside any faction, who wandered Cersi to gather information for its kind and, she was beginning to fear, stir trouble at whim. It might be one she’d met, or another. They were all dangerous. “Thought Traveler,” she acknowledged coolly. Courtesy first; knife if necessary. “What are you doing here?”