She smiled as she opened the case and took out the disruptor. Worms and wormholes. Maybe I’m even making sense. She pointed the business end of the thing at the Fence, a round patch that was blacker than any night she’d ever known, touched the trigger sensor.
For the longest time nothing seemed to be happening. Maybe Cerex had lied after all. She stared at the Fence and tried to ignore the coldness in her stomachs.
The flickers developed paired waves, one dipping and the other rising. The waves turned into a swirl about a circle of emptiness, a circle that grew and grew until the bottom edge dipped below the water and the emptiness was big enough to run a steamer through. The growing stopped, but the hole stayed.
She camped on the Finger and watched it, waiting for the Ptaks to notice, wondering how long it would last.
At the end of the third night it flowed together until there was no sign anything had happened. No visitors either. The disruptor was all Cerex had claimed.
Yseyl’s mouth tightened into a grim line as she checked the alignment of the peaks. When she was sure she’d reached the Wendlu Round, she eased the miniskip below the treeline, maneuvered it into a thicket of young mutha saplings, and let it settle to the ground near the decayed giant whose fall had made room for them.
With a groan of relief, she left the saddle, stood rubbing her mistreated buttocks, and muttered to the birds and the air, “Why do offworlders who know so much about everything, make something so miserably uncomfortable?”
Air and birds having no answers for her, she removed the packs strapped to the skip’s carry grid and set them on the crumbling trunk. She settled beside them and pulled off her boots, then sat wiggling her toes and enjoying the feel of the earth against her feet. It was good to be back where all the tugs on her body were familiar, where the smells and colors and textures felt right.
The Wendlu Round.
The next peak over marked the camp where she was hatched. “By Minyarna Stream I first saw light/Dancing waters blue and bright,” she sang as she kicked her heels against the trunk, her voice a breath on the breeze that rustled through the pale green mutha leaves. “By
Minyama Stream I first knew pain/My love is gone, won’t come again…”
The memories were hard ones. She forgot them when she was away from here, but when she set her feet on the Round, they were back again. Always back again.
Her Mam and Baba were killed in a rockslide while she was still in egg. Her anya went into howling grief and was kept tied to the ixis wagon after xe tried to fling xeself over a cliff. A week after Yseyl hatched, a vein burst in the pouch and nearly drowned her as the anya’s body emptied itself of blood. The Heka saved her life and ordered the anya Delelan to pouch her. Crazy Delelan whom nobody would bond with. The ixis fed xe and looked after xe, but otherwise stayed as far from xe as they could. And as far from Yseyl as they could when she emerged from the pouch.
Delelan didn’t care. Xe had xe’s voices and the ghosts that xe saw with such conviction that sometimes Yseyl thought she could see them, too. As she grew older, there were moments when she hated Crazy Delelan, blaming xe for the weirdness in her that made the other children afraid of her; they tormented her because they were afraid. They called her Crazy Yseyl. They yelled at her that she’d killed her anya. They pinched her and bit her and fought with her and stole her food and broke her things. Delelan protected her as much as xe could and loved her in xe’s odd way, comforted her when the dark closed round her, when she wondered if the taunters were right, if she were a death-dealer from the egg.
It didn’t help when her God-Gifts began manifesting themselves. When she discovered she could make people see whatever she wanted them to see, even if there was nothing there. That she could pull the shadow of shape around her and be anyone. That she could make radios play even when the batteries were dead. She didn’t say much about these Gifts, but people saw her using them and that was enough to make her seem odder, more frightening to the others. And so more isolated.
In the eighth year after her hatching, she found the caves that twisted through this mountain, hugged the secret of them to her heart, and spent hours exploring them, crawling recklessly through convoluted, cramped spaces barely larger than she was, a handlamp she’d stolen from a peddler at the Yubikha Meeting Ground shoved out ahead of her, batteries long dead but still glowing at her touch.
When the shadows from the saplings crawled across her toes, she clicked her tongue and got to her feet. “You can loll around watching grass grow when this is over, Crazy Yseyl.” She stretched, yawned, set to work organizing the packs she was going to carry up the mountain, getting them balanced properly on her back so she’d have the mobility she needed to reach where she meant to go.
Sketchily concealed by the leaves on the crooked red branches of a silha bush growing from the weathered stone, Yseyl dropped to a squat beside the boulder she used as a marker and contemplated the triangular aperture in the side of the mountain that she knew better than the lines in her own palms.
She sat very still, waiting for the web of small lives to quiet and scanning the gravel and coarse sand in front of her for sign of intruders. When she was satisfied that no one had been interfering in her business, she dropped onto her belly and wriggled into the mouth of the cave.
For a moment she thought she was going to get stuck in the right angle bend that came just before the tube widened suddenly into a large chamber, but a twist of her body and a shove of bare feet against a fold of stone pushed her around and she burst free of the tube with scraping sounds from the packs and a loud rip. She wrinkled her nose. “What I get for being lazy.”
She slipped out of the straps, eased the packs onto the floor, and got to her feet.
Sunrays dancing with dust motes poured through the cracks in the stone, painted fluttering leaf shapes on the thick gray dust that covered the floor, playing shadow games with the tracks in the dust, the three-clawed mayornayo prints, the larger sasemayo spoor, and the scuffs of her bare feet from the last time she’d been here.
On the inner side of the chamber were half a dozen holes, some hardly large enough to admit a sasemayo, the rest of varying heights. One of them was low and broad, rather like a partly open mouth.
Yseyl stretched, yawned. “Hoy-ha, ol’ fem, get your body moving. Have to get away from here by sundown.”
Her way lit by a handglow she’d bought at Marrat’s Market, she inched into the mouth hole, pushing the disruptor case.ahead of her this time. The case kept getting hung up on bulges and cracks in the floor, and several of the turns required a lot of wriggling and shoving, but she managed and some ten minutes later emerged into a second chamber.
Lumpy and echoing, a stream hardly wider than the span of a mal’s hand meandering along the back wall, it was considerably larger than the first and filled with a velvet darkness that seemed reluctant to yield to the light from the handglow. The flattest surface was that next to the entrance hole and there Yseyl had built a knee-high platform from mutha branches, binding and knotting them together with grass rope saturated in nivula sap. On this platform she’d built herself a small hutch with a three-sided storage shed. The front of the shed was closed off by a piece of heavy canvas.
Setting the disruptor case on the platform, she climbed up beside it. She untied the canvas, fetched out a box of candles from the half-a-hundred she had stored in the shed, a candelabra that had taken her fancy once in Icisel, and a blanket which she shook out and dropped beside the box. She twisted the candles into the holes and lit them, smiling as the gentle wavering light woke the shadows she called Delelan’s Ghosts.
She watched a moment, then went back for the rest of her gear.
For a while she played with her treasures, all sense of time lost in counting and caressing them, the hand-hammered gold and silver coins of the Pixa, the machine-struck coins of the Impix, a long necklace of polished turquoise and jasper beads, a bronze statue of a running boyal, a soaring celekesh carved from jet, a Fieka’s ring broach, a mosaic prayer icon that had belonged to a group of Bond Sisters, all the bits and pieces that had stuck to her fingers from the years when she’d been only a thief, before her calling came to her and she began hunting arms dealers.