"He doesn't get lost, Lissorn says it's one of his Talents." He shook his head again, violently, not in negation but to send his dreadlocks flying and drive away the biters that were crawling after the moisture in his nose, eyes, mouth. "Can you find him?"
"Keep the flies off me and I'll try. I think we'd better not talk about limits, the air has ears, remember?"
"Dio." He got to his feet. "Stretch out and give me that fan."
She lay for a moment doing nothing, just enjoying the freedom from buglegs and the coolness of the dirt, then she began considering the mechanics of this operation. She was fairly sure her Talent wouldn't operate much beyond the local horizon-unless she had a mount she was specially tuned to. Sasso? He's handy and he has a raptor's eyesight…
She felt around for the hawk. Comfortably filled with fish, lizards and hairy fliers, he was asleep in the tree that arched its fronds over the fire and concealed its glow. No. He doesn't know the terrain-if you could call it terrain, being it's mostly water and muck. Horizon, hmm, I doubt Kikun went that far anyway, once he ditched the boat he'd have to walk the glop back here. He's not lazy… he's not stupid either. Local forms will have to do the job. For lagniappe, get more data about this gunge we got to travel through.
She reached without trying to touch down, just setting the direction in her mind, getting a feel for the envelope of life about her; all that practice in the ship had honed her skills until she was sharper than she'd been any time since she acquired this body and its Talent. Ginny monster's good for something. Funny, it's hard to think about him as a monster. He's so, I don't know, so commonplace. There's nothing GRAND about him, just a little man… yeah… with some weird twists in his psyche. Forget that, Shadow, you got work to do.
She touched one of the furwings, a female. Her cheekpouches were stuffed with the bodies of insects; if archetypal patterns held true here, she was taking her catch to her nest so she could feed her offspring. It was the time of year for births… or hatchings… no, births; as far as Shadith could tell, the local warmbloods weren't mammalian, but did birth live offspring. Undeveloped. Not quite marsupials, but close. She slid deeper into the brain and looked out through furry's eyes; she didn't try to control the little creature, it was going in the right direction, that was enough for the moment. Ahlahlah, I was right, one gloppy tree is just like the next. No sign of people. Aste didn't say anything about people living in here. Hmm. Plague in the cities. I know what that means, Ginny's fingers twiddling in the stew. Plague, tsoukbaraim, it hadn't got to me, not really, what he plans for this world. Rohant said. I believed him. In my head, not my gut. Gods, it's sick-making. He's using us to make it worse. We've GOT to get away from here. Lee, do I wish you were here! You and Gray and Swardheld and anyone I could dig up. If we can just get away, maybe it'll scare him off. We've got got GOT to get away.
The furry dipped toward one of the pulpy trees; she was heading for her nest. With a mindsigh Shadith slid out of her and probed about for another mount.
She brushed past a number of wispy animal souls but nothing she cared to seize on until she sniffed out a grumbling hunger sliding along beneath her. She dropped and nudged inside the slither's brain. The beast was mostly mouth with row on row of snag teeth like a slowly revolving saw, as one set wore out another marched into place. He was sinew and gristle, six tentacles rippling powerfully, driving him through the water faster than the boat had gone. His eyes were as primitive as his teeth, but his nose was extraordinarily subtle, reading scent streams as easily as she read print. She slid more firmly into that section of the brain and for the first time began picking up traces of Kikun, scent traces lingering on the surface of the water; her excitement made the slither nervous, he jerked about briefly, then sank into the mud and sulked.
Shadith swore, calmed herself, and began soothing him. Because he was hungry and hunting and anyway had the attention span of a gnat, he forgot his pique and went back to his cruising. He darted his head to one side, caught a fish, chewed it once or twice and swallowed without a pause in the beat of his tentacles.
He kept on, snatching, chewing, swallowing; the rambling stream was a soup seething with life. Kikun's scent traces were fresher with every beat of his tentacles. Fresher and fresher-and then gone.
With some difficulty Shadith disengaged from the slither, hovered until she felt her reach melting on her, the pointthrust of her mind getting set to snap back into her body. She groped about for another mind, a land mind, nothing, nothing, then a flat warty hopper like a cowpat with legs. She slipped into him, it was like trying to squeeze into a too-tight dress; that brain barely qualified as more than a switching station. The hopper had almost no long-term memory and no more than a few concepts which were on the level of this-hurts-keep-away and thistastes-bad-leave-alone. Sense data flowed through him without lingering, his very efficient because very simple instinct-sieve separating out the few elements that meant danger or food or sex and allowing the rest to drift away unacknowledged. As she was settling in, the hopper flipped out his tongue, gathered in a lacewing, crushed it against the horny roof of his mouth and gulped it down. When the tongue was out, she quivered to a doubling in the breadth and intensity of the sense data; like many reptiloids he had scent receptors in his tongue, receptors that drew in faint traces of Kikun. . While the hopper speared and crunched more insects, she left the pointthrust in him and retreated to her own brain to sort through what she'd found and decide what to do next. Kikun walked by there. When? Can't be less than an hour. More like two. When we were starting supper. Even if he crawled it wouldn't take more than twenty minutes to run the boat this far. How long does scent linger on land after the maker passes? Wonder if Rohant knows? Should I surface and ask? No. It doesn't really matter, you don't need to know. He went past there all right. Why? He's going the wrong direction. Lost? Rohant says no. Hmp. I need another mount, I can't do anything with this creature. Looks like I come back to Sassa after all.
She snapped the pointthrust loose, reorganized herself, and slid into the hawk's brain. This wasn't just a matter of riding, she had to take control and force the bird into doing something against his will and his nature. There was another distraction that made her task doubly difficult. The Ciocan was tightly linked to his hawk, he knew where Sassa was at all times, shared his tactile sensations-rode the air with him-shared his emotions, though he couldn't look through his eyes as she did. He could feel her easing into Sassa's brain and was jealous of her Talent, that came through strongly, it was rather like being whipped with nettles-though not all that unpleasant even with the scratchiness because he liked her and seemed to want to see her as a Dyslaerin (he'd said something like that once, that she reminded him of his toerfeles, Miralys), probably because he felt himself, challenged by her and had no other way of dealing with what he felt. (Courtesy of that bastard Ginny? Oh, gods.) He was managing well enough before this touching/rubbing thing, handling the (artificially imposed?) relationship by seeing her as an out-season Dyslaerin. Trouble was, she wasn't seasonal-that screwed everything up for poor old Rohant. Dyslaera females were essentially asexual when not in heat, insatiable when in; they were sleek and powerful, tough as hard rubber and apt to vent both annoyance and passion with claws that were smaller but sharper than the males'; sex among the Dyslaera tended to be a noisy combination of wrestling match and knife duel. Shadith knew enough about them to make her wary of getting involved with a male capable of satisfying a Dyslaerin, especially an alpha…
But he was a hot pressure in the hawk, powerfully sexual-in fact, the hawk acted as an amplifier as well as a transmitter of emotion and even that short time they'd rubbed against each other left them both aroused and wanting, at the same time wary of doing anything about it; their branches of the Cousin tree had diverged too far from the trunk.